I was invited to cover the VR Intelligence Conference that debuted in San Francisco on November 9-10, 2015. It was a smaller but very focused gathering of decision-makers from a wide range of different industries, and they’re holding a European VR Intelligence Conference in London on May 12-13, 2016. I had a chance to catch up with conference organizer Pete Carkeek to hear about some of the industry analysis highlights from the panel discussions, how the VR Intelligence conference came about, and where they’re going in the future.
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I was able to interview a lot of analysts, venture capitalists, and executives that I don’t easily bump into at other conferences. Here’s my top 10 favorite interviews from the VR Intelligence conference:
- Predicting the Future of VR & AR with Gartner’s Brian Blau
- Violent Video Games & Ratings: Protecting the Frontiers of VR with ESA
- Creating Meaning & Saving the World with CCP & Virtual Reality
- Going Beyond Gaming & Entertainment with Clay Park VR’s Shauna Heller
- Tim Sweeney on Three Major Modes of VR Gameplay
- Lessons from Casual Mobile Games with Presence Capital’s Amitt Mahajan
- Google Venture’s Investment Strategy & Outlook for Virtual Reality
- Building the Metaverse with janusVR
- Richard Marks on the Evolution of Sony’s PlayStation VR
- Signia Venture Partners on 8i Volumetric Capture, Photorealism, and Presence
The VR Intelligence Conference has also published many of the talks on their YouTube channel, and one of my favorite talks was Jesse Schell’s 40 predictions of VR & AR from 2016 to 2025:
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. Today I talk to Pete Karkeek of the VR Intelligence Conference, which debuted in San Francisco last year in November. Now, I was invited to attend this conference as press, and I was happy to do that because the price point was well over $1,000. And it turns out the intention of this conference was to get a lot of high-level executives and decision makers there to hear about industry trends within virtual reality. And so the audience ranged from people who were just getting into VR to people who had been tracking it pretty closely. So events like this for me are less about the presentations and panels that were happening and more about the people that were there and were available to talk to. I was able to get a lot of really interesting interviews with people like the CEO of CCP and Gartner Research and a number of different venture capitalists. If you're interested in some of those interviews, I'd go back to the archives into November and December where a lot of those were debuting. So in today's interview with Pete, I'm kind of trying to get a sense of like, why did this conference come about? Who are you? Where are you coming from? And you know, how did you get all these kind of high level executives together at this conference? So there's actually a couple of conferences that are coming up. If you are in the VR community and you want to attend something, the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference and Expo is happening in a couple of weeks on April 27th to 29th in the San Jose Convention Center. If you're in the Bay Area and into VR, it's a great place to go and really tap into the grassroots of virtual reality community. And I'm actually going to be speaking there. So if you are going to be attending, then be sure to, right after the keynote on Thursday, go over and check out my talk on the highlights from 400 Voices of VR podcast interviews, where I'll be trying to, best I can in 20 minutes, paint a landscape of virtual reality and some of the biggest takeaways and highlights from this podcast series, which you are listening to right now. Also, the VR Intelligence Conference in Europe is happening in London on May 12th and 13th of this year. So if you are intrigued by Pete and his vision, then be sure to check that out. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:36.588] Pete Carkeek: My name's Pete Carkeek. I'm the founder of VR Intelligence. We're part of a slightly larger events-led group that operates in multiple verticals, anything from renewable energy right through to pharmaceuticals. We look at industries that disrupt, and VR has obviously come on our radar. We've been traditionally quite heavy in video gaming, so this has been yielded from our video game sector. But as it's grown, we've seen that actually VR relates to a lot of consumer facing industries. So the broad focus of this event is on consumer entertainment, inclusive of gaming, but also sports and film and other entertainment brackets.
[00:03:17.931] Kent Bye: Right. And so this is the first year of the VR intelligence conference. And it seems like you're able to get a lot of really high profile people from both the development side, the hardware side, the investment side. So, you know, what was the genesis to bring everybody together and have this conference?
[00:03:34.998] Pete Carkeek: Sure, so like I said before we've been active in the video games industry for the last five years and we've built very good relationships, very good connections in that space. So that enabled us to get some of the higher profile speakers for this event fairly easily and the way events work is once you get a good few people on board everyone clamors to be involved basically. So that's what's happened with this one. What surprised me is the rate at which this is going and the enormous interest that's in it from not just the gaming crowd, but all consumer entertainment, brands, advertising. It's going pretty ballistic. I've worked in any number of emerging tech industries and this probably tops them all, beats mobile 10 years ago for me. in terms of the hype that's around it, and in terms of the interest and the money that's flowing into it.
[00:04:30.824] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's kind of amazing to think about how much mobile technologies have changed, especially since the iPhone's introduction in 2007, but it goes back even before that. But maybe you can talk a bit about that, your experience of the parallels and how VR is different there.
[00:04:45.690] Pete Carkeek: Sure, for me, yeah, I mean, mobile back in the day was nothing like mobile is now. And like you say, the iPhone was a game changer for me. Kind of came from nowhere, really. And I think we'll see similar with VR. I think the market will settle and there'll be two or three kind of key HMDs that kind of make the gains, early doors. And then someone, possibly Apple, will come in and effectively change the game completely. So I think it's going to follow that same or similar hype curve to mobile. Whether it'll go slower, quicker, is anyone's guess really. But certainly, as I think someone said in one of the talks yesterday, the hype is bigger for VR than it was for mobile back then. And I think that's largely because virtually every tech player under the sun, anyone from Google through obviously HTC, Samsung, anyone you can name, is involved on either the manufacture side or on the content side. So it's super exciting.
[00:05:48.422] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the interesting slides that was shown here by Tim Merrill was showing how like virtual reality has the potential to disrupt the television and console video gaming, like working on 2D screens and that way, but also that augmented reality has the potential to disrupt both the tablet and mobile phone market. So it seems like potentially as VR and AR potentially they'll converge, maybe they won't, but It's a technology that down the road has the potential to kind of replace how we use our tablets and our phones right now.
[00:06:21.375] Pete Carkeek: Absolutely, yeah, 100%. I mean, tablets and phones are pretty ubiquitous these days. Everyone's got at least one phone and at least one tablet, or every household, certainly in the UK, and I think it's the same here in the US. So there's a massive opportunity for the VR content developers to effectively use the ubiquity of those devices, coupled with the headsets and other peripherals, to really develop true immersive virtual reality experiences.
[00:06:53.210] Kent Bye: And as you were curating the lineup of speakers and presentations here, what were some of the things that you were trying to address in terms of the big open questions or topics that you felt would be interesting to people?
[00:07:04.174] Pete Carkeek: I think there's just such an open book at the moment that we kind of had to go visionary with it really. We had to almost leave the topic areas and the subject areas to the speakers because they're so entrenched in the industry that for us to dictate an agenda wasn't really going to work. It's so early stage and there's so much going on. that actually the guys who you've seen on the agenda the last couple of days were the best ones to curate the agenda. Obviously we looked at kind of broad theme topics, so really we were looking at the content provision and the device manufacturer challenges and opportunities. as well as, obviously, the usual kind of market growth forecasts, etc. But fundamentally, I think the agenda that we've seen in the last couple of days has been quite different to the agenda that we ended up with on paper. And I think that's indicative of the industry right now. I think that there's tangents that people go on. We've seen it on stage today. I've seen it in conversations around the expo floor. People aren't necessarily sticking on one particular line of thinking. And I think that, like I say, that's indicative of the early stage in the technology and the fact that no one's really got all the answers. There is no silver bullet. There are huge roadblocks ahead, both from the device side, from the content side, and from, as Mike from ESA was talking about this morning, from the public relations and potential regulatory standpoints. I think that's something that we haven't covered massively at this show, but that's going to become ever more important when the consumer launches are done over the next few months.
[00:08:39.231] Kent Bye: What's been some of the big takeaways or piece of information that you heard that really stuck with you?
[00:08:44.736] Pete Carkeek: I think some of the unit predictions are pretty interesting. I think there was a general consensus yesterday from a number of different speakers that was quite interesting because there was no collusion there at all. None of those speakers, as far as I know, had spoken to one another about their predictions and they weren't far off each other. They really weren't. And I think that's quite interesting as a kind of crowdsource issue. When I've seen emerging tech arise before, what you often see is the great and the good kind of doing the forecasts. And if you take the mean average, you end up somewhere where the actual market reality is. So I think some of the figures thrown around yesterday were probably there or thereabouts. Time will tell.
[00:09:28.624] Kent Bye: What were some of those numbers? I didn't quite see every presentation, just for our listeners.
[00:09:32.888] Pete Carkeek: Sure. I can't remember the exact numbers, but they were talking, if you're talking kind of end of 2016 through end of 2020, they were talking about maybe 8 to 10 million units by end of 2016, and then up to 100 million by 2020, I think were the figures that were there or thereabouts.
[00:09:55.748] Kent Bye: Yeah, kind of like, I know Jesse Schell was saying that it would be kind of like a doubling at each year.
[00:10:00.752] Pete Carkeek: Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I think is reasonably realistic. He had some very useful, very interesting kind of metrics for pulling those figures out, where he was essentially taking kind of PlayStation owners and saying if Sony can't get 10% of them to buy into headset, then they're doing something wrong, you know? Yeah.
[00:10:20.150] Kent Bye: So yeah, what were some of the other people that you were surprised or excited to have speak here at the conference?
[00:10:25.932] Pete Carkeek: Sure. I thought Tom Furness this morning was great. He's obviously a legend who's been in VR since it wasn't even VR, really. So he's one of the real pioneers. And I thought some of the stuff that he was talking about was truly inspiring. Same with Hilma from CCP Games yesterday. I think what struck me about both those guys is they They really see the potential of VR to be a force for good, a real force for good, that doesn't necessarily get limited by money or games or other potentially slightly negative influences. I just think that they see the power of the technology to really change the way people operate, essentially. Much as, I mean, going back to the original point about mobile, No one would have forecast the ubiquity of smartphones before the iPhone came out and no one would have forecast the processing power and what you can do and how reliant you become on your mobile these days. So it'll be interesting if we have this conversation again in 10 years time. Will we have seen the same with VR? Will VR be on our heads, in our pockets, wherever it might be, the whole time? Will we not be able to live without it? Will our kids not be able to live without it? How's it going to go? It's super interesting.
[00:11:42.258] Kent Bye: Yeah, and the other interesting thing is that a lot of people were saying that the potential market for augmented reality is going to be so much larger than virtual reality.
[00:11:49.958] Pete Carkeek: Yeah, I mean I'm less experienced and have less knowledge about the AR market, but certainly from what I've seen and what I've heard, and what I think personally, I think AR probably has got more broad appeal, essentially. And I can certainly see myself engaging with augmented reality easier than I can see myself engaging with virtual reality all the time, if you see what I mean. I think it's a more natural kind of way of consuming content. if that doesn't sound a bit odd when you've got kind of bugs crawling up your walls and stuff but it's less fantastical I suppose and I think there'll be some amazing applications with AR that really bring real life to life if that makes sense and really enhance the way we view real life whereas I think with virtual it necessarily you're kind of stepping into a virtual world so it's different from the real world I thought what Graham was talking about from Magic Leap yesterday about mixed is an interesting one because me being fairly non-techie, I can't quite understand the difference between mixed and augmented. But I think the demo that he showed on screen yesterday was absolutely mind-blowing, you know, where you can actually engage with the photons in the real world. So you're in the real world, but the virtual world has kind of come to you in the real world. That's crazy.
[00:13:14.749] Kent Bye: Yeah, what were some of the other big points that came out of Magic Leap? I know they've been kind of in a stealth period.
[00:13:18.852] Pete Carkeek: Sure, so off the top of my head, Graham was talking about the need for the market to essentially get its ducks in a row, I think, and make sure that the headsets and the content that was being provided was good enough for those people who are having their first VR, AR mixed experience. to wow about it basically because you only get one chance to get a first impression and I think that's from the creative standpoint which was where he sits in Magic Leap I think that's what he's massively trying to do is to make sure they don't release too early and that they get everything almost perfect or as perfect as it can be with the technology development as it is to make sure that those first Consumer media other experiences of the technology are mind-blowing And so what's the next for the the company that's you know putting on the VR intelligence?
[00:14:15.362] Kent Bye: Is it another conference next year or is there more information and intelligence that's coming out of this that then you're using to create other products or Apply it to different consulting
[00:14:25.465] Pete Carkeek: Sure. We're primarily an events company. That's where the lion's share of our revenue sits and the lion's share of our energy sits, essentially. So we'll stick with the events for the time being, but we will be distributing content. We've got so much content from this show, video, audio, presentation slides, plenty of people on the ground writing awesome stories. So there'll be enough content for us to drip feed out to the community, essentially. But we won't look to make money on that, essentially. We'll look to just build the community through that. And then with regard to events, had some interesting conversations about Asia, so potentially something in Beijing. Definitely something or more than one thing in California next year. Europe, possibly. It's going to demand a good few conversations with a good few folks that we were in touch with before or that we've made connection with here to really understand where those opportunities lie.
[00:15:19.081] Kent Bye: And if you were to kind of articulate the mission statement or intention of this gathering in terms of perhaps the target demographic that you're going after, they come here, where are they going to get out of it?
[00:15:29.470] Pete Carkeek: Sure. So we pride ourselves on getting senior level folks together essentially. We have done in all the verticals that we operate and like I say I've been responsible for the video game side and what we look to get is those real decision makers, those real executives that have the opportunity to drive technologies and industries forward and facilitate gatherings of them to enable them to share knowledge, do business and make the right connections. So, from my perspective, the mission statement of this event was to bring together the most senior and most pioneering VR executives from across gaming, across consumer-facing entertainment, be that sports, be that music, be that brands and advertising, or be that film and TV, and to bring them together to effectively get them to chew the fat on where the challenges are, where the roadblocks are, but more importantly where the opportunities are and how they're going to realize them.
[00:16:28.798] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what that might be able to enable?
[00:16:36.867] Pete Carkeek: That's the holy grail question really. I wouldn't back myself to answer that one because no one on stage has been able to quite answer that one. I think it's an open book. As we say in the UK, I'm not sure if you say it here, the world is our oyster with VR essentially. It can do anything. It really depends on how smart and how creative the developers are and whether their HMDs or other devices can match that creativity and take it to the consumer in a real way. OK, great. Thank you.
[00:17:08.830] Kent Bye: Thank you. So that was Pete Karkeek of the VR Intelligence Conference, which debuted in San Francisco last November. And some of the takeaways for me were that just that the VR industry is really growing at a rate that is kind of exceeding what anybody else has seen before. I think that was a big thing that I heard, that VR is something that's uniquely different. This is something that is interesting to a much larger cross-section of people. And it's really like a new immersive computing platform that has applications across all different domains of knowledge and discipline and life, really. So, yeah, the VR Intelligence, again, is a conference that is really aimed towards higher level executives and decision makers. And, you know, my impression from the conference was that this is a great place for people who work at companies that have large budgets that are getting into VR and they need to come back with numbers to justify back to the other decision makers within their company. They have all sorts of charts and predictions and all the PowerPoint presentations were shared and all the talks were shared so that you can kind of go back and feed up the chain of command to show people what's actually happening from the market from these different analysts to be able to make the decisions to get the budgets to continue to grow and expand virtual reality. So if you don't have thousands of dollars to travel across the country and go to all these different conferences to listen to the talks or talk to the people in the hallways, then there's something you can do, which is support my Patreon and you can pay me to go and I'll go there and I'll talk to the people and I'll bring back all the wisdom and knowledge and feed it back to the community for free. But if you want to help sustain that vision, then please do consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash voices of VR.
