The third annual Silicon Virtual Reality Conference happened from April 27 to 29, and I had a chance catch up with Road to VR co-founder and executive editor Ben Lang to cover some of the big highlights and takeaways this year. Ben talks about highlights his keynote, what makes VR unique, social experiences vs. multiplayer games, what he’s most looking forward to, as well as some predictions about the future. Will VR ever get good enough that people would want to spend more time in virtual worlds than in the real world? Tune in to hear what we think.
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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 Ben Lang, who is the executive editor and co-founder of Road to VR. So I got a chance to catch up with Ben at the end of the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference and Expo, which is in its third year this year. And this is a bit of a yearly tradition where I have a chat with Ben to kind of recap some of the highlights from the conference, as well as look at some of the overall trends of what's happening within the virtual reality industry. So Ben gave a keynote at SVR, where he was also talking a bit about what are some of the unique things that VR has to add to experiences in gaming. And so we cover some of that, as well as some general speculation about where this is all going and what can we expect in the future. So we'll be covering that in today's episode. But first, a word from our sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by the Virtual World Society. The Virtual World Society was started by Tom Furness, and their goal is to become the Peace Corps of VR. They want to transform living rooms into classrooms, and so they're in the process of trying to recruit potential subscribers, as well as content creators who are interested in creating educational experiences that help solve the world's problems and help make the world a better place. So if you're interested, go to virtualworldsociety.org to sign up and get more information. So, this interview was conducted at Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference. It was actually my last interview out of a total of about 25 interviews and about 13 and a half hours worth of coverage that I was able to capture at the conference this year. So Ben and I sat down in the hallway outside of the volunteer room at SVR and it was just on the second level overlooking a lot of treetops as we were talking about the potential utopian or dystopian futures of VR. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:13.723] Ben Lang: My name is Ben Lang. I'm the co-founder and executive editor of RoadToVR.com. We are the leading publication for the virtual reality industry since 2011.
[00:02:23.340] Kent Bye: Great, so we are at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference and Expo 2016. This is actually the third conference. Two years ago was the first ever, and I think at every conference that we've had since then, I've had a chance to sit down with you and unpack what just happened. So, what were some of your highlights here?
[00:02:42.044] Ben Lang: Let's see, where to begin? One of the first things that I saw and wrote about here was something called Spherica, which is kind of a content production company for 360 film, but one unique thing that they were showing was a hardware stabilized 360 degree camera rig. So, for most people creating 360 film content, well, if you're doing it for VR, you pretty much don't move the camera. You might cut between static camera points, but you want to keep the camera still as possible because that's how you make comfortable 360 video right now, or VR video. And these guys have created this hardware stabilization platform that keeps the camera extremely stable on the horizon. And keeping the horizon level with the user's real feeling of where the horizon should be is really, really important for keeping them comfortable in virtual reality. And so what this platform allows them to do is to mount the camera on a drone or on a rover or a dolly and then move the camera without fear of even the subtle shakes, even if you're trying to hold it very still or roll it on a steady track, even subtle shaking will tilt the horizon ever so much and cause discomfort. So their platform is designed to eliminate that. And they have a three-motor gimbal, which basically lets the camera be pretty stable within a pretty wide range of degrees, and works pretty well. And so what that really means is, what they're saying is that they can move their camera in video VR productions, they can move it with a lot more comfort than you could otherwise. I need to see more of it to really know if that's 100% true all the time. But from what I did see, a couple different clips mounted on drones, felt perfectly comfortable as the camera was moving along. So pretty cool thing there. And I'm kind of surprised that I have not seen that sort of stabilization before. I feel like it should be kind of obvious that you want to do that.
[00:04:38.900] Kent Bye: Yeah, and to me, you know, there's been kind of different phases of the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference. The first one was just a lot of emerging startups and indie developers. And I think that we've seen them again and again at these conferences. Last year, it felt like a big explosion of just going from one year to the next was like a more than doubling of size and scope. This year felt more closer to the previous year in terms of the number of exhibitors and the size of the audience than it did from the first year to the second. My sense is that there's a little bit of a settling in into the identity of Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference. Because, you know, there's GDC, there's the kind of broadcasting NAB, there's Sundance, Tribeca for film, there's these different big conferences and events that are happening over the course of the year. And so I think it's a little bit of like non-gaming, non-entertainment focus. Maybe some 360 video, hardware and technology, but kind of an interesting mix where I don't really know how quite to characterize who the audience is and also who the exhibitors are. It feels like it's a networking event for me. So there's always amazing people for me here to talk to. But in terms of where it's been in the past and where it's going in the future, what do you have a sense of what you've seen here to try to characterize what is happening here?
[00:06:00.589] Ben Lang: Yeah, I feel a lot like you do that this is the networking here is incredibly valuable. It's been that way since the beginning. When you go to some bigger conferences that are more generalized, you know, you have big companies that are spending some of their marketing budget on, you know, let's go to that conference. We'll send a couple of booth people and they'll demo the products. You know, it's basically a marketing thing for them. Here, you're seeing companies where 90% of the people that you're talking to are founders, or they're engineers, or they're programmers that are working directly on the product. You're speaking directly with them to understand where they're going. These are young companies that are doing innovative things and trying things that are difficult. And yeah, getting to chat with those people directly, you're not just seeing their product, you're going to see their product and you're going to pick their brains. And that's always been like such a strength of the conference here. And it's why I absolutely love it. And I've actually really enjoy the fact that what we're seeing here on the expo floor this year is like a whole bunch of startup level companies doing new stuff that we haven't seen before. You know, I can go to GDC and CES and these other places and see, OK, here's somebody making content for the same headsets I've seen. It's just a different kind of game. That would be like if I went to an Apple conference and saw like, OK, there's a new app, there's a new app, there's a new app. That's like a mature kind of thing. And I've always been excited about the bleeding edge of everything. And so here I'm seeing a bunch of companies that I have never even heard of before and seen some really cool stuff from them. Spherica, for instance, I had not heard of them until here. And here they are and they have this impressive solution. They're doing something new. They're not just sending whoever on a marketing budget to go try to market their product. They're trying to get it out there and tell people that it exists and that there's something neat here and unique that they're doing. And so, yeah, for me it's been all about that.
[00:07:45.612] Kent Bye: And so what were some of the other big things that you saw on that scale in terms of things that you discovered that were new or things that you saw in terms of technology that they were demonstrating that you haven't really seen before?
[00:07:56.178] Ben Lang: Yeah, one of those things was a pretty interesting new approach for an all-in-one VR headset. So there's a company called Pico VR, and they are creating an Android-based all-in-one headset. So, you know, kind of like your VR, but instead of plugging a phone in, all the hardware is there on board. Except what they're doing differently is that they have a tethered controller So you have a wire that comes out of the headset and connects to your controller and you think well, why would you do that? Well, what they're doing is they're putting the bulk of the battery and the processor inside the controller Because you're gonna want a controller anyway, if you're not using hand tracking like your VR for instance, you know many times you're gonna want that controller if you're gonna do serious gaming and So they're just saying, OK, if people are going to have a controller most of the time, anyway, let's get the stuff out of the headset. Let's get the guts out of the headset and the stuff that we can just send over a wire. Put that in the controller so then you don't have this heavy battery hanging off your face and processor hanging off your face when all you really need up there is the display and the lenses, essentially. And so I thought that was a really unique idea. It's what you would call cardboard quality VR, which at this point, for people who are new, that's not a compliment. But the thing that excites me is that the form factor is neat, and if and when Google works more on their VR pipeline for Android, a product like that could go from just being a neat idea to a pretty darn compelling product if it gets enabled by Android improving its VR capability.
[00:09:20.358] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I had a chance to check out Project Alice, which is from the Noidome, which they do the perception neuron mocap suit. And they had kind of like OptiTrack cameras, but they had a really interesting kind of mix between having five people in a shared VR experience. They had mobile markers they were putting on a basketball and a stool and a garbage can. So they started to have these mixed reality experiences with five people in them. And they had these other OptiTrack controllers, where if you cover up the balls of an OptiTrack controller, it'll lose tracking. But they have their other IMUs that are sensor fusion into that. And so they've kind of created this higher-end solution to be able to start to do higher-end motion capture, but also do enterprise group collaborative things. And so that was probably in terms of the level of impressive technology that I saw, because That was probably up near the top because of just being able to add mixed reality to have a real basketball, to have a stool, and to have it in VR but also see it and touch it and touch it all over and it kind of match where I expect it to be. Now, I'm not seeing my hands and I'm not seeing my body, but I'm just sort of seeing these objects and seeing it as a disembodied entity.
[00:10:35.733] Ben Lang: Yeah, so I wanted to kind of clarify for the listeners about what we mean when we're saying mixed reality in this conversation, because a lot of the term mixed reality people will be familiar with. Steam and some of their developers have done some really cool mixed reality videos where you see the player inside the virtual space. It's like, that's one definition of mixed reality. But what we're talking about with Project Alice, I got to see it too, very cool. is that a lot of the objects that you're interacting with in their environment initially are their virtual objects. You can't actually feel them, they're not actually there. But later on, toward the end of the demonstration, they had objects that had sensors on them, like a stool and a basketball, that were both present in real life in the real world, and the exact same model also existed in the virtual world. So we saw the virtual object, like the basketball for instance, and when we reached our hand out to touch it, there was actually a basketball in the exact same spot in the real world. So a different definition of mixed reality, but one that was incredibly cool. So yeah, Project Alice did two really interesting things, which was social with five people in one shared space. and that mixed reality aspect where it's already very intuitive when you have motion controls in VR and you can reach out and grab virtual objects and move them around and it's twice as intuitive when the object is real so the way that you're grabbing it is just like you would grab that with your real hand and then you can hand it to a person and they can physically take it or you can throw it to them and they can physically catch it. It's a little trippy when you don't see your hands, that makes it harder, you only see your floating controller. But the concepts were there, which was really interesting. And yeah, really powerful. You can see all the experience really was, was hey look, this is neat, play around with some stuff. You can imagine experiences like, you know, The Void and some of these out-of-home attraction places are doing these things where they're taking platforms like that and then building content on top of them. You can tell like social and some real props in there for your mixed reality stuff. It's gonna make incredibly cool experiences. It does generally require a much more complicated setup, which is why things like The Void and this Project Alice would be much more appropriate for out-of-home sort of entertainment. It's not something that you could really set up feasibly in your home, at least not in a very universal way.
[00:12:48.917] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you know, as I am covering this conference for the third year, I'm just sort of seeing what emerges and who I end up talking to. I ended up talking a lot deeper to specific people rather than going and cover everything. One of the things I was just kind of thinking about is like, I really wonder like, which one of these companies are here that are going to like, either be here forever in a long haul. It seems like high fidelity is a good shot of being around for a long time. AltSpace, I think, is gonna be making some interesting plays in terms of they have funding, they seem to be continually rapidly iterating. I'd love to see that as they're continuing to grow and evolve. Of course, they're gonna be going against other companies such as Facebook and Project Sensar of Linden Lab. And so, social is gonna be a big thing. But yeah, just from your perspective, from last year, for example, we had Otoy that was here, now they got acquired, they weren't even showing here, so there's gonna be companies that may be here and they get acquired and then we don't see them at these community events anymore because they kind of go on lockdown. And so from your perspective, do you have a sense of which of these either verticals or companies may break out and become one of these big companies that this may have been the beginning?
[00:14:01.843] Ben Lang: Yeah, I think you're dead on. One of these social guys is going to emerge as kind of the de facto social world that we can go to. And it'll be interesting to see exactly how that plays out because while they are providing frameworks, it's weird because it's almost like a lot of the games and other individualized content that we're seeing, like those are individual apps, but you can't experience them with other people unless the game happens to be multiplayer. And then you have these social worlds that are potentially really interesting, but then there's a disconnect between those social worlds and these cool app-based experiences. Like, there needs to be a way, I think, to somehow bridge that gap. And it's difficult because the games work best in these complicated engines where you can't necessarily cram a thousand people into the same experience, where the social worlds, we want to be able to have that breadth of social connectivity. And so finding a way to link these things together, I find to be one of the most important parts. You know, yeah, maybe bullet train can't support 10 people inside, but maybe you can support two. And maybe me and you are chatting in one of these social platforms and say, Hey, you want to play bullet train? Like we shouldn't have to close down the app and take off our headset and go back to our desktop, launch bullet train, and then do a whole different system of connecting on a friend's list. We should be able to be in VR and talk and say, hey, you want to do that? And then somehow say, yeah, let's do it and launch directly into it. And then when we come back out, pop back out to our social virtual world. I think that's just an incredibly, it's something we know we want, but achieving it is very complicated right now. And I think we're, I'm kind of waiting to see somebody emerge that helps encompass that. I think like you said, so like Altspace, High Fidelity, you know, Altspace, I'm really impressed with the way that they are iterating and growing and listening to usership and trying to figure out how their product really works. I think when anybody starts a business, a business should generally address a problem. You know, it's a solution for somebody, for your customers. And everybody, when they start a business, they see the market and people's lives as a puzzle and they say, oh, there's a missing puzzle piece there. I can fit a business in there. But when they start, their idea of the shape of the puzzle piece, which is how they start their company and what they think they're addressing, you end up finding out that your idea of the shape of the puzzle piece was not quite accurate. If it is, you're very lucky. You find out that it changes a lot, and you have to adapt to make the piece fit in the end. You might have been close, but you're still going to need to do changing and do a lot of learning. to get the piece to fit right and so the companies that do that well are the ones that succeed in the long term even if they don't just have some smash hit that is instantly something people wanted and you know I think Altspace has done a good job with that. They're doing kind of what I was just talking about for finding a way to pull people into VR easily but from the real world. So what they're doing now is they have an app which will, it's just on your Android phone, and you can say, I can say, hey Kent, let's chat in alt space. And with the app, I just press a button to make a new room. I send you the link. You click on the link on your end and it says, put your phone in Gear VR. You put it in and then we're in the same room together. And it's like, so we've just gotten sucked in, you know, we've gotten pulled out of the real world and popped into a virtual space together. the more seamlessly that that can happen between people, and then not just from the real world to the virtual world, but from one virtual world to another virtual world, the more spontaneous it's going to be to actually use VR. And I think that's a big challenge we're looking at right now. Unless the thing in VR is just incredibly awesome, you need to convince the person to put on the headset. And that takes a little bit more of convincing than to get someone to launch Facebook on their phone takes very little convincing. They see a notification, they click on it, they're in, they're out, bam. The notification wasn't that exciting, but it was so easy to get to that they did it anyway. If they had to put on a hat to read their notification and the hat was in the drawer, they'd be much less likely to read those notifications unless they knew they were going to be amazing. So just basically more seamlessness, more fluidity in getting people in and out of VR, whether it's from the real world and into virtual or from one virtual world to another. I think this is going to be a big, big challenge that we need to address over the coming year as the headsets are really launching and getting out to people.
[00:18:08.816] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that between the different social spaces are going to be a little bit of different philosophies in terms of like the open source philosophy versus the closed versus maybe ones optimized for mobile, maybe ones for room scale. And so I feel like that may be part of it as well. Yeah, and also just analytics in terms of tracking different data and improving the experience in that way. There seem to be a number of different analytics companies here. Did you get to check any of them out and see if there's any ones that you think kind of have like enough of a viable product to be able to move forward in the analytics space?
[00:18:42.934] Ben Lang: Yeah, there's a couple in this space now and they're all doing somewhat different things. Right now, it does feel a little bit like we still need user bases across the different platforms to establish themselves before it'll be clear. Like, if you're doing analytics, you want one overall solution. You don't want three different analytics platform because one supports Gear VR and one supports, you know, yada yada. You know, I think anyone doing analytics wants to be as cross-platform as possible. And, importantly, I think the most useful thing for an analytics company to do is to give actionable information. So, like, just knowing the numbers is one thing, but helping people interpret and understand the more complicated things is difficult unless you're, like, hiring a data scientist to, like, dig through and say, well, why are these numbers this way? And so I think anyone focusing on analytics right now needs to understand like it should be their job to figure out what the relationship is between the numbers and the actual behavior. And then how do we help our customers, I'm speaking our as the analytics company, how do we help our customers understand what to do with that and why it's useful to them. And so I'm waiting for the company to say, not just, here, look, we give you these numbers. Look, we track these things. But why is that useful? Give me a use case that shows that someone took this information, did something with it, and benefited themselves by it. That's the compelling case for analytics.
[00:20:04.588] Kent Bye: And you also had a chance to give a keynote here to the entire crowd of SVVR. So what type of things were you trying to communicate there?
[00:20:13.313] Ben Lang: Sure, it wasn't particularly long. I'll just jump through it real quick. So in summary, I was saying, you know, it's amazing that these headsets are launching. They're very incredible. There's some really cool experiences you can have. But I think that when I look at the VR industry today, I see a lot of existing paradigms that still need to be worked on and worked out until we're really developing truly something that is completely unique for VR compared to just adapting other things that have come before. Because the things that are truly unique are going to be the best things for the platform. I draw a parallel between, like, when filmed camera came out, one of the first things people did was point them at a theater production because, like, that's how stories were told and that kind of entertainment level they were told as a theater production. So put a camera there, film it, and then watch it on a television screen. Like, that makes sense, right? Or at least that did make sense. But now we see that actually creating for the medium of a television screen or a movie screen, it's a whole different industry. It's a completely different thing than theater production. And also an interesting point is that theater production didn't go away. Theater production is still alive and well. It's just a completely different medium. And so it took, you know, 10, 20, 30 years, and still it continues to develop the film, movie, TV, media. It's on a different evolutionary course, basically, compared to just the early days of pointing a camera at a theater production. So it's like VR is doing that right now. Right now, we're at the equivalent point, in many cases, where we're taking the camera and pointing at the theater production. we're taking the VR camera and pointing it at games, or we're taking the VR camera and pointing it at traditional film. We need to keep moving away so that we're not so restricted to how we think about the things before. And it takes time, like it's not going to happen overnight. And so one thing I was trying to say is, you know, what are a couple practical places that I think developers and content creators need to start exploring in terms of design specifically for the VR medium? And those were social, which almost sounds obvious, but it's like there's a lot of games out there that just automatically become more fun when you have two people in them. And if you're a developer working on a game or an app in VR, and it doesn't already have multiplayer functionality, just like see what happens, like find a way to plug somebody else in there, see how it changes what's going on. I think it will be more fun if nothing else, and it could just make it a better product in general. And also a footnote there is that all the headsets, Gear VR, PSVR, HTC Vive, and Oculus Rift, and probably a number of other smaller ones, all have microphones on board. And if some people remember back to the early Xbox Live days, Microsoft's Xbox online service, Back then, when the service first launched, you couldn't actually buy an access card to get on there unless you also bought a microphone. And that meant that every single user on there had a microphone and everybody was talking all the time. And now, eventually they stopped doing that. Now people don't even sometimes wear their headset. and it's really reduced experience from knowing that every user can speak to each other. But that is the case right now in VR. I think if you're a developer who is not taking advantage of that microphone in some way, it's like, figure out how to do that, because that's a nice little bonus for you. And then quickly, after Social talked about Virtual goods are gonna be massive. We know virtual economies exist second life even something like Eve Valkyrie these things that these are Multi-million dollar virtual economies. They're not multi-million dollar like fake dollars the multi-million dollar real dollars when you do the conversion and And something like Second Life, there's a clear demand that people want to be able to buy virtual goods to make themselves look cool or have something in their virtual home. Because when you get immersed in a world like that, it becomes important to you. The more immersive the space and the more socially connected it is, and the more time you spend in it, the more important it becomes. And when any world, virtual or not, is important to you, you now want to be able to change it in ways that you like. And I buy a piece of furniture. I already have a sofa, but I'm going to replace the sofa with a better looking one, because I want to. I want a better looking sofa. It's not functionally changing my life, but I'm spending money to do it. People are going to do the exact same thing in virtual worlds. As those virtual worlds become more important, something like where you might say, looking from the outside, oh, why would anyone ever buy a virtual sofa? Well, for the exact same reasons that, you know, we do in real life. Because beyond the function, there's other kind of intangible things about it. So, virtual goods, virtual economy, almost no one's talking about them. They're going to be important and it's going to be a gigantic, massive virtual industry. And we need to figure out how to make that work. And then, multi-modal experiences. Things like, you have, like, we're always talking about the differences between seated, standing, and room-scale gameplay. but almost nobody is using those across a single experience. So I'm thinking of a game or an experience where, let's say you're Elite Dangerous, you're flying around in a spaceship dogfighting in the cockpit. You're physically sitting in a seat using your joysticks and having a fun time flying around fighting people. But then why can't I stand up, if I have a room skill system, why can't I then stand up out of my chair, walk around behind it, go into the cargo hold, and have a whole different experience there, where I'm physically manipulating virtual objects. Maybe, you know, my inventory is back there. Maybe I have to load the missiles, you know, into the missile launcher after I have a big battle. There's just like all this other different gameplay that we can build in. And then when I have everything loaded up in the back and I've replaced the power cores and flushed the axle drives and whatever, I go back and I sit down in my cockpit and I see the cockpit in the game and I go and I sit down in my real seat and I'm back to the cockpit experience. So I want to see more of that. I think those are the kind of things that you do when you're taking true advantage of virtual reality as a medium that you can't do in anything else.
[00:25:51.542] Kent Bye: Yeah, for me, this conference marked an opportunity for me to do a talk, trying to synthesize 400 Voices of VR interviews in 20 minutes. And I had to take a step back and say, how the hell do I actually do this in a way that makes sense? And so it forced me to come up with a framework that talks about the human experience of virtual reality and that there are other different dimensions of identity and presence as opposed to empathy and partnership and storytelling. There's a polar opposite from self to other and from home to public we have home and family up to career. Entertainment's huge. On the other side is social experiences. Education and virtual resources was one of them as well. communication, early education, higher education, travel, spirituality, death, I think is gonna be a whole realm that is gonna be particularly well suited to explore in VR, medicine in general, and as well as, you know, this polarity relationship between technology and imagination and our subconscious. And what I mean by that is that sometimes when I'm doing interviews, I just really start to dive deep into the weeds, and I think, like, why is this important, or why am I so compelled to figure that out? And I think what that does is that the more that you understand the technology, the more that it opens up your imagination to be able to unlock your creative potential and to knowing what these tools are providing. It's like opening up new vessels into our creativity and our imagination. You know, when you take a step back, it's something that you do a lot of in terms of just diving deep into the technology and what's the capability. And so given that, what type of things do you now want to do in VR?
[00:27:29.432] Ben Lang: Man, that's a broad question. Everything and anything. Like I said, social has a very special place in my heart because right now there's kind of this divide between social and multiplayer. Like, yes, there are some multiplayer games out there, but as soon as you, like, that means multiplayer is like, what? In VR right now, multiplayer is like two people or like ten people or five people, Project Alice, at like the most at one time, really. Whereas like when we think of like social, like that should be like a lot of people at once. But there's this divide between if we're making a game that also happens to be multiplayer versus if we're making a social experience which also happens to be a game. It's like we need to align those things where we can have, like I said, some way either to get in and out of these things or just have like why can't we have a social world that also has an incredibly compelling game component inside of it. rather than having them be these separate, totally separate things. But yeah, it's just like, I think the social aspect makes virtual reality more believable, because, I was thinking about this recently, there was this Mars experience that this company did, where they made this really hyper-accurate recreation of a portion of Mars that you can go explore in virtual reality, and it's really incredibly cool. But when I'm in there alone and I see things, make observations, I'm kind of just stuck thinking about them by myself and just pinging around my own brain. And I have a certain level of creativity, but I think as we know, a diversity of thought is what leads to innovation in many cases. And just being able to have a friend there to say, hey, look at that. I wonder how that happened. I wonder how that rock got there. I wonder how Mars formed. And have them say, yeah, maybe it was like this. And I say, oh, wow, that's interesting. Maybe it was like that. Sharing information in that space. Now we're observing that world, and the world, and we're talking about that world, and we're forming information in our head about that world that would not have otherwise come if I didn't have the option to have that other person there. It's like it's more real because someone else is experiencing it, but then their experience is also influencing my brain's memory and thought of that space. They're giving me information that I wouldn't have about that world, and that almost makes that world more real, because that's what we do in real life. We make observations, and we discuss, and yeah. So I think social is just so powerful, even when you don't even, it doesn't even need to be a game. It's just, here's Mars. This is not a game, really, or at least in the state that I saw it wasn't. I'm not trying to detract from that experience. I'm just saying if it was just Mars and all you could do was look, it suddenly gets twice as good just by adding another person because you can have discussions like that. Not to mention, if you do make it a game and do have lots of cool interactivity, that's like a whole different level of awesome. But just having someone else there and being able to discuss with them makes the world more real, I think.
[00:30:08.977] Kent Bye: So right now, this is really the first virtual reality conference that has happened after the official consumer launch of VR. And so, you know, it's been a long journey. You started way early, even before the Oculus Kickstarter. And so where are we at in the story of VR? And how would you describe that?
[00:30:26.503] Ben Lang: I think we're extremely early. So in my keynote, I was saying this phrase, year of VR keeps getting thrown around a lot. A lot of big media publications, now the headsets are out there saying, this is going to be the year of VR. And I guess what that tends to mean is, this is the year where it goes big. But I think that that might be setting people up for a false sense of hype. Because if people are calling this the year of VR, when I don't think this year is going to be the year where VR is at its most growth, not by a long shot. I think there's so much more to come. And if people, you know, your average consumer who doesn't use VR, if they see, oh, I've read five publications, you know, that said, called this the year of VR. And then it's 2018 and VR is still getting hot and heating up and growing. And they're going to buy, someone says, buy a headset. And they're like, no, they said it was the year of VR in 2016. And that obviously didn't go anywhere. I think it's setting up a false expectation. Because really, it would be like calling the first launch of smartphones the year of smartphones. But the year of smartphones really didn't come until we had the iPhone and Android launching. And that was like 5 to 10 years after smartphones started launching, right? And nobody would have looked back and said, when the first BlackBerry hit the market, that was the year of smartphones. No, not even close. Like maybe that was a start of smartphones in a specific niche business category. But the year of VR comes when it becomes applicable and accessible to a majority of people's lives. Like, I think about this, like, the BlackBerry before the iPhone launch, let's say, used to be the dominant smartphone in that market. And it was a good product, and it fit in that niche. But, like, my grandma had absolutely no use, not a single use in her whole life where she might think, oh, I want to get a BlackBerry. Like, no, just didn't even intersect with her life. And then the iPhone came out and completely changed what, you know, iPhone and modern smartphones came out and completely changed who that product applied to, and now my grandma does own an iPhone, and she uses it, and that was of her own volition, saying, I think that product now applies to my life. So I don't think this is the year of VR. I think that the year of VR is the year where we see kind of the very most growth, and that is still a couple years away. We still need to get way more broad in how many people that the technology applies to and is useful in their life. It is the year of VR in the sense that if you're a gamer you can go out and buy a headset and you'll be able to play awesome games. But I think the technology as a whole applies also. At the end of my keynote I was saying I think VR is not a subset of gaming. Gaming is a subset of virtual reality. We still need to grow that VR bubble to encompass everything else and that's going to take some time. So right now a lot of people are designing as if it's a subset of gaming but it's really not. It just applies to so many more broader industries and we need to make all that happen just like the smartphone was a subset of business. It was a business tool and yet it has now grown to encompass just thousands of other things and used for so many more things. So I think VR just has so many years to go not just in terms of those applications but also technologically speaking. I think that we're going to continue to improve the technology until it gives us a experience that is indistinguishable from real life and we know that that's possible because we know that our dreams can give us incredibly vivid experiences and so like we know that physiologically speaking it's possible to give the brain certain inputs that create even the sensation of touch or heat or you know basically every sensation that we can sense If we can manipulate the brain the right way, we can create a reality that is perfect, feasibly. And we're at the very most basic part of doing that with today's virtual reality. We're putting screens in front of our eyes to trick our eyes. We're putting speakers around our ears to trick our ears. that technology is going to take to get to the perfect matrix-like level of virtual reality is going to take 100 years or more, I think. But I think we're going to keep doing it. I think we're going to keep developing along that curve, and we're going to keep wanting to make it better because we know it's possible. And once we have it perfect, suddenly, I've said before, I think perfect virtual reality is the closest thing that we have to a heaven in real life, right? So it's like if you can have perfect virtual reality, you can do anything. You can rewrite the laws of physics. You can create anything you want. You can be anything you want. It's like your limitations become literally only your imagination if you can master virtual reality in the sense of getting it to a matrix level.
[00:34:47.357] Kent Bye: Yeah, I actually looked specifically at the past in order to look into the future and Jesse Schell said, you know, hey, the Game Boy is the gaming unit that kind of led to a lot of the user interface innovations of kind of proving out that people would be willing to do that, first of all, but what are the kind of UI that works? And so that kind of fed into the next branch of the mobile phones. And so that was in 1989, 27 years ago. And so I kind of see a nine year cycle of these big innovations that happen. And so it's actually around, like, 1998-99 when the BlackBerry launched, that was like the first iteration of like a big consumer launch of a device where people were able to kind of escape into another reality, you know, they call them CrackBerries. And then 2007 was the launch of the iPhone, nine years later. And so if you go back and consider like the planting of a seed in the winter of 1989, and then it's being sprouted with the stem is just coming up with the BlackBerry and coming into full bloom with the iPhone, something that is so kind of mind-blowing in terms of it's changing so many different dimensions of how we relate to mobile technology. And nine years later, then we have the launch of virtual reality, which is like this next iteration of like the harvest of starting from the Game Boy, going to the BlackBerry, to the iPhone, and then all the screen technologies and all the mobile phone technologies that we're feeding into this VR. And right now we have this confluence of all these other new things that are kind of just emerging in a new way with artificial intelligence and distributed networks of Bitcoin and being able to have blockchain distributed authority and All these different things that I see, in some ways, the AI economy potentially breaking down. A real challenge to the political and economic structures in terms of how we're going to deal with all these jobs that are just going to be completely evaporated when we have self-driving cars. AI kind of on this path towards kind of eliminating a lot of different foundations of technology. So it's kind of like this breakdown into this like new phase in nine years, I'd say, like, I'm like, that's what I'm wondering, like, okay, in nine years, is this when we have AR eyeglasses that we're able to start wearing? And then, you know, and so in the long history of VR, we're about, you know, from 1968, that's about 50 years and, When now we're kind of launching into the, I see that as like the seeds of VR being first planted all the way back in 68 with Ivan Sutherland's Sword of Damocles. And now with this consumer launch, it's kind of like that same element of that first stem just coming up and we're not seeing it in full bloom. It's going to be another, I think, 50 or 60 years until we really see the beginnings of the holodeck, you know, maybe another 50 or 60 years after that, we're able to really just completely, with nanobot technology, manufacture anything that we want in our minds. And that first paper that Ivan Sutherland made in 1965, The Ultimate Display, where he basically said, you know, a bullet would be able to kill you and you'd feel the chair. And it's like you're being able to actually construct the reality. So that's where I came to and have been talking about to different people. So it's really interesting for you to kind of bring that up as well.
[00:37:57.420] Ben Lang: Yeah, I think it is a it's just an incredible time to be alive. And it's also very interesting, like you talk about the challenges we're facing. It almost feels like technology is developing so fast that like we're not even sure where it's going to go. We're not even sure where we want it to go or where it should go. And a long time ago, that was never a thing. It was like development happened so slowly that It just kind of slowly integrated itself into our lives. Technology now is like, it's moving so fast that we can't even necessarily project where it's going to go. My big thing is that, to me, I see technology generally just thinking like, what is development? Development is, what is development, what is technology? Technology is creating anything that saves us time, basically. So that the next guy can use that tool to save time to do another thing that would have been previously impractical. And it's just that on top of itself over and over and over. It's like, well, okay, to hunt animals we used to have to make a bone arrow, and that took a lot of time, and then kill the thing, and then cook the thing, and that took a lot of time. A lot of our time was spent gathering food. As we, you know, developed agriculture, we stopped needing to spend so much time gathering food. We created a more efficient way to have it there for us. So we had to start spending less time doing that, more time doing other things that would have previously been impractical because of our time constraints. Now I flew across the country to come speak to you, previously would have been impractical before airplanes. I save all the time that I get to do other things. So it's like we're building all this stuff on top, we're saving all this time, but for me it's like what's the end goal? What's the time we're saving for? Because a lot, oftentimes it feels like we're saving all this time through our technological development. to just do more work. And like for me, I think we should not just be trying to do more work and be more productive. I think we should try to live more life. You know what I mean? Like we take all those gains in efficiency and say, all right, now how do we continue to do more work on top of those gains? Like let's take those gains so I can do the amount of work that I was doing in two hours instead of eight hours and then use the rest of that time saved to just enjoy my life more. It's like we have this human tendency, it seems, to like develop and just want to be efficient and just And more, more, more, and faster, and faster, and faster, and more productivity. It might be a cultural thing that we need to change and say, hey, why don't we apply some of these incredible new technologies to just letting us have more life together that's enjoyable and relaxing and wonderful. And you pointed to issues with AI unemployment, robot unemployment, and driverless cars. and we don't know what's going to happen if these things unfold overnight, VR might end up being a big answer to those things, where I don't think it's totally impractical a long time in the future to see a Matrix-like scenario where this will be voluntary, it's not going to be the whole robots overtaking thing, but I see a future where if VR is good enough, people will pay to lay down in some tube and have their bodily functions taken care of while they experience anything in their imagination and for their whole life if they want. Why wouldn't you do that, right? It sounds dystopic, I think, to some people, but assuming that that reality and the experience you can have in there is as good as real life, it has now more potential than real life because it's virtual and it's unlimited by your imagination. And why not do that? I don't think it's totally impractical to think there will be people that choose to do that over living in the real world. AI is great and robots are great and we don't need to do a whole lot of physical stuff. I hope we don't take those gains and say, how do we be more efficient now? I hope we take those gains and say, how do we live better lives that are more pleasant and make important changes that are not just technological but are maybe philosophical.
[00:41:31.703] Kent Bye: Yeah, I personally am not going to be one of those who volunteer or choose to be in a tube. I think that there's just so much amazing things in real life. So I do think there is going to be this choice of embedding technology into your body, like actually putting sensors into your body. And I think that there's going to be a choice that people make. And so, yeah.
[00:41:50.143] Ben Lang: Quick irrelevant point that I've thought about on that. I think that cyber augmentation. What's the word? I want cyborg ism, you know combining technology with biology I think that that's going to come as a response to people wanting to keep their jobs from robots So if you think about somebody works in a warehouse who has to lift boxes all day They might be get feasibly replaced by a robot who can lift more weight more easily and they might say well screw you robots You can't take my job I'm gonna go get an exoskeleton and I'm gonna wear that and keep my job because I'll be able to lift as much as the robot and I think that cyborgism, there's a word that I want there, but the adding of technology to our bodies and our biology I think will be driven in a large way by competition for jobs and things against technology actually.
[00:42:35.055] Kent Bye: Well, I think that right now you have all these Uber drivers driving around and they're essentially training the AI that's going to put them out of work. So their AI is all about putting huge data sets of real data. And so we have the humans right now that are training the AI that's going to make their job irrelevant. I think in the forklift example, it's not like they're not going to be able to compete. So one really interesting point that Philip Rosedale made is that virtual reality may actually be a leveling field for us to interact with AI. And what he meant by that is that on the one hand, we're safe from AI in VR, but on the other hand is that the robots are safe from us. And so there's a bit of VR being the meeting ground for where we meet AI, because a robot could kill you, or you could kill a robot. But in VR, you can have an interaction, but it's a safe place, which I thought was a really interesting point that he made.
[00:43:27.320] Ben Lang: I think that's incredibly interesting, especially just de-sci-fying it a little bit. Just imagine talking to somebody that hates you and just would literally kill you if you were in the same room together, but you can have a human conversation and interaction with them safely through virtual reality. That's incredibly interesting. Think about terrorism being just such a hot issue right now. Imagine being able to sit down with a terrorist and speak with them and understand them, where they might say, well, I'd actually kill you if you were standing here, because that's what my beliefs dictate. That is potentially amazing. That, I actually think, will be world changing in terms of enabling that to happen, whereas you'd normally never go near each other, right? These are people that would normally never come in contact, and yet there will be foreseeably in the near future, we could make that happen easily. And that's that whole empathy in VR thing, but for another time, maybe.
[00:44:15.952] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential of VR and what it might be able to enable?
[00:44:21.107] Ben Lang: Well, yes, I think kind of was building up to how we get there. But yeah, it's like so if a lot of the gains that we're making in productivity put all these people out of the job, we have to figure out what do they do. And if the answer is not more work and more productivity somewhere, the question is, what are those people going to do? And if we have this perfect virtual reality that we've developed, well, hey, that sounds like there's lots of new cultural ground that does not just have to be work that people can explore in because It's like at a certain point, potentially all or many of the tasks that we need to do to ensure our basic survival needs can be met by robots and AI. So then it frees us to, like I really hope we don't just say, oh great, now it frees us to do all this new work in VR. I hope it frees us to do all this new incredible creativity and socializing and interacting and figuring out what the human race is good for and what should we do with ourselves. and answering those questions, whereas right now maybe it's just easy to not answer them because we're so busy trying to be more productive and not, you know, trying to ensure our needs are met rather than understanding why are we here and what should we do together.
[00:45:27.869] Kent Bye: All right, well, thanks for going down the rabbit hole with me, Ben.
[00:45:32.572] Ben Lang: It was fun. Let's do it again sometime.
[00:45:35.043] Kent Bye: So that was Ben Ling, the co-founder and executive editor of Road to VR, and just a few quick takeaways there. First of all, interesting to hear some of the things that Ben was talking about in terms of the things that he wants to see more of VR, that is having more social experiences. taking in consideration virtual goods and how we're working with those, as well as multi-modal experiences where you may start to do a little bit more of mixing sit-down with room scale. And multi-modal also usually refers to adding more senses, so as well as more touch and other type of haptic feedback as well, which I think will continue to make VR a unique medium. So another thing that just really sticks out to me is that the little exchange that we had about whether or not VR will ever really get so good that we would rather become these matrix like beings that are choosing to basically ignore what's happening in the real life and just exist within a virtual world. So to me, that's more of a dystopian future, although we'll see. I mean, who knows? I may be surprised, but I have a sense that there's going to be so much connection to real reality that I hope that things don't get that bad that I would actually want to completely leave my real life and just live an entirely virtual life. So one of the big takeaways I think from the SCVRCon that I just had is that going at the underlying operating system level of our society, which is our political, economic, and legal systems, is that there's going to be some issues that the technology is just going to be operating within that context. And really, The technology is agnostic, but it's going to be kind of pointing out some other basic limitations for how far we could take the technology. You start to think about issues of privacy and issues of a certain class of jobs that are going to be replaced by artificial intelligence robots, and what does that mean for the overall economy? There's going to be a lot of really interesting things that are changing, and they're going to be changing, I think, relatively quickly. I think faster than a lot of people are going to be really prepared to respond to. And so that's something that I covered in a number of different other interviews as well. And we'll be kind of unpacking that dimension. Another interesting point that was kind of subtly made by Ben is that, you know, virtual reality has a certain amount of commitment that you need to make before you actually hop in. For example, he's talking about if you're getting a link and to jump into a VR experience, then it has to be worth it for you to really essentially drop everything else that you're doing. And this is a point that was made to me by Brad Herman, which if you think about films, and films are kind of a ritual that we go through where we deliberately shut down our phones, we don't want to be interrupted, and we just go and have the experience of watching a movie. And I think that VR is going to be a lot more like going out to see a play or seeing a movie than it is kind of hopping into a casual experience. It's also kind of like the difference between texting and a phone call. A phone call is a lot more of a commitment to engaging your full attention to a conversation than it is if you were to just text back and forth. And so virtual reality as a medium actually is a very highly engaged medium where it's actually going to be really difficult for you to have split attention within these different experiences. So if you're there, you're really there and engaged and immersed into these worlds. And so taking that into consideration, you have to really provide an experience that people actually do want to shut out the rest of the world to go in and experience. And so with that, I just want to send a quick shout out to Road to VR, which I have been syndicating my Voices of VR podcast there since episode 200. So over 150 episodes now that are also broadcast as news articles on Road to VR. So if you are a listener to the Voices of VR and don't know about Road to VR, then go ahead and check it out. And they've got lots of great coverage of what's happening in the VR industry, both in the gaming space, entertainment space, as well as beyond into the non-gaming and non-entertainment as well. So check them out at roadtovr.com. And I also wanted to just send a shout out to all of my listeners and Patreon supporters that I got to meet face-to-face at the Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference. It was great to chat with a lot of people who listen to my voice every day. And I'll be releasing my talk that I did at ASA VR as a podcast, as well as a video here this week, where you can kind of hear the framework that I talked a little bit about in this podcast and expanding on the human experience of VR, which is a little bit of how I'm starting to think about how I'm covering the virtual reality space. And yeah, if you do enjoy this podcast and want to help me continue to travel and give you all this coverage, then please do consider becoming a contributor at patreon.com slash voices of VR.
