The most significant VR announcement from CES 2017 was the Vive Tracker, which is a modular lighthouse tracked “puck” attachment that will enable users to track additional objects within VR experiences. It has the potential to drive a lot of new innovative applications and gameplay for consumers, to kickstart a lot more mixed reality livestreams, but also grow the overall VR ecosystem as there will be more high-end B2B applications, advertising campaigns, and VR arcade peripherals.
I had a chance to catch up with HTC’s Dan O’Brien, who is the general manager of America, Europe, Middle East, and Africa. We talked about HTC’s emphasis of growing the ecosystem in 2017 with this new Vive Tracker, and what type of applications he expects that it will enable. We also talk about some of the privacy implications of virtual reality, and more about HTC’s approach of minimizing, anonymizing, and protecting any private data that is collected. There are amazing new opportunities for application developers to learn more about individual consumers than ever before, but with that power comes a responsibility to be conscientious enough to not record and store more identifiable information than is necessary.
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O’Brien used to be the Global Director of Compliance and Consumer Privacy & Security for HTC, and so privacy is near and dear to his heart. He says that privacy has been an important priority for HTC from the beginning since they’ve had an privacy engineering team working to anonymize, minimize, and protect any customer information that’s captured.
O’Brien says that there’s three different layers of security including the operating system, the driver software that runs the VR hardware, and finally the application developers. There are privacy considerations at each layer, and it’s up to each application developer to decide what information to capture and keep from their users. Once eye tracking becomes an essential part of the higher-end VR systems, then the fidelity of available insights will be both vast and powerful. O’Brien says:
I sit in talks sometimes where I’m the one saying to the publishers, ‘Hey, you’re going to be able to have a one-for-one relationship with a consumer that you’ve never had before with VR. You’re going to be able to learn so much more about what they like, what they dislike, whether that ad worked, whether they were interested in that product. You’re going to be able to learn so much more about your consumer if you’re doing the right things. It’s no longer going to be about clickthroughs. You’re going to know if they actually looked at it, and picked it up and interacted with it.’ But on the flip side of that is ‘How much of that information should you be grabbing? And what should you be holding onto? Then once you hold it, and once you draw that information in, how well are you protecting it?’
Whether it’s the developer of applications, hardware, peripherals, or the operating system O’Brien says that “Some people take too much information. They really don’t need to have all of that.” He’s calling for VR hardware and software developers to be very conscientious about what information they’re collecting and how well it’s being protected, especially since the Federal Trade Commission has the power to fine companies, but also to stop companies from selling or importing their products.
He says that consumer privacy is a contract that fosters trust with consumers, and that it’s a relationship that is directly connected to their brand and whether or not consumers will recommend their product to others. But privacy is also about protecting sensitive consumer information from hostile hacks or a potentially overreaching government.
Throughout 2017, there will be more dialog between government regulators and virtual reality companies to explore the potentials and risks. Virtual reality has the potential to enable so many amazing new capabilities, but also a lot of new risks from collecting and protecting sensitive biometric data. O’Brien says, “It’s a balance because you don’t want regulation that stops innovation. You don’t want too many rules that stops just what’s getting started to really flourish into what it could be, what it should be, and even what it will be.” He says that there’s already a lot of existing consumer protections for mobile phones and gaming software that be built upon, and that it’s more of a strategy of incremental improvement rather that needing to building something entirely new.
HTC and others will continue to sit down with government regulators throughout 2017 to explain critical concepts, existing approaches to protecting information, as well as contextualizing software concepts like heat maps that have additional implications when they’re applied to virtual reality.
There have also been a lot of larger trends within the tech industry that have been moving towards surveillance-based business models that correlate all of your Internet activity into a singular identity, and I’ll be continuing to explore some of the privacy implications of virtual reality in future interviews.
Here’s a promo video of one of the Vive Tracker applications by DotDotDash, and was presented at HTC’s demo area at CES
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
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. So I was just at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas roaming around a lot of the different showroom floors looking for some of the latest virtual reality innovations. What I found is that a lot of the most exciting virtual reality technologies were not actually being shown on the showroom floor. They were showing in the private area of HTC. HTC actually announced that they were releasing a Vive tracker which allows people to essentially attach this unit onto either a peripheral or other objects and be able to have it as a fully tracked object within a virtual reality experience. So this is going to both expand a lot of existing games that are out there through mixed reality content or being able to add multiplayer interactions with mobile phones, but it's also going to create entirely new gameplay within VR experiences as peripheral creators are going to be able to just have this attachment to be able to add on to the peripheral. So I think this is probably the most significant announcement that came out of CES this year in terms of growing the overall VR ecosystem. So I had a chance to catch up with Dan O'Brien, who is the general manager of HTC in the areas of America, Europe, Middle East, and Africa. So we talk about the new HTC Tracker and how that's going to impact the VR ecosystem, but we also dive into some of the privacy implications of virtual reality and some of the ethics and responsibilities of both HTC as well as the operating system and application developers. So, that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by the Voices of VR Patreon campaign. The Voices of VR podcast started as a passion project, but now it's my livelihood. And so if you're enjoying the content on the Voices of VR podcast, then consider it a service to you in the wider community and send me a tip. Just a couple of dollars a month makes a huge difference, especially if everybody contributes. So donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So this interview with Dan O'Brien happened concurrently to the CES show happening in Las Vegas from January 5th to 8th, 2017. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:35.083] Dan OBrien: My name is Dan O'Brien. I am the GM for HTC Vive for the US and EMEA.
[00:02:40.787] Kent Bye: So maybe tell me a bit about what you're announcing here at CES.
[00:02:44.008] Dan OBrien: So CES has been a great show for us. We talked a little bit about 16 being a great kickoff year, 17 really being a vision year for us to grow our ecosystem. And so what we're doing with announcing new products here is around growing our ecosystem. The first one is the Vive Tracker. It looks like a puck. A lot of people are calling it a puck. But it's basically a tracked module that works with the SteamVR tracking, just like our controllers and our headset does. And you can attach it to basically any object that you would like, or a developer can attach it to anything that they would like and actually make that attract object. So we have here in the booth about eight different examples of it, from gloves to guns and swords, fire hoses, cameras, a lot of different types of experiences. We're also using it on our new mixed reality bay here as well, so we're using that for the camera application. And so it has a really simple and easy attachments, modules on the bottom of it for developers to be able to put it on things. And it's got about a six hour battery life. So we're excited about it. We're going to be giving away a thousand of these to the developer community just to get things rolling, get it started. And then we'll make it available to consumers in Q2 and we'll start ranging it with retailers. And this really becomes like a central ecosystem piece where a lot of other peripherals and accessories and solutions can use it. and can be sold with the Vive and used with the Vive in your VR experience.
[00:04:07.662] Kent Bye: Yeah, so back in August of 2016, you first announced that you're opening up the royalty-free lighthouse tracking for any number of companies to come get trained and then start to build their own input devices. And so, there's a number of people that have been working on specific tracking technologies, but then you came out and decided to create more of a standardized general purpose solution. I know a number of people that had gotten trained were like, okay, well, instead of trying to roll our own, we'll just use this. So maybe you could talk a bit about that decision for HEC to create your own standardized version and then what those other people that are getting trained, what they might be doing that this puck can't do, or the Vive tracker can't do.
[00:04:46.643] Dan OBrien: That's OK. A lot of people are going to have a hard time not calling it a puck. But in general, we think it's a compliment to have both solutions because now we're really showing that we're very wide open about this and making it as widely available to developers across the board that want to use either solution or both. So there are developers that are going to go do that Synapse, SteamVR tracking, training, and because it's more applicable to the solutions that they want to do, they want to actually track their own object that's very specific to them, whether it's a flight controller, or a car seat, or, gosh, there's any number of things that you could specifically do. Like, you're not going to take one of these trackers and put it on a football. It's just going to be very awkward flying through the air. And so there are things where I think it's absolutely appropriate that it's its own tracked object. And then that also requires a level of engineering expertise and knowledge and development time because the tracker wasn't like an overnight thing. We just decided to make that. It took a long time to design another object that actually can have the optimal positions and the sensor angle to actually be hit by the SteamVR tracking lasers to have the appropriate amount of tracking accuracy. So there's a level of engineering knowledge that goes into doing all these things and there's some companies that will go down that path. and make their own tracked objects, and they have the time, the resources, the funding to go develop that. And we're super supportive of that, because that's going to make some pretty incredible applications. Whereas with this, it was really about also creating something that cut down the time and engineering and resources. for a lot of accessory partners that don't have that ability to go in and do that all on their own. And I'm sure that will get easier as the years go on, but for now we wanted to widen the ecosystem of partners that we could work with that could create peripherals. And many of our developers have told us, overwhelmingly, this has cut months out of their development cycle, not like days or weeks. So this is saving them a lot of time and energy and cost to actually get their product ranged and make it available for consumers. So I think it's a great compliment to have both scenarios. And we're super supportive of developers doing both or one or the other. And yeah, it's great.
[00:07:16.643] Kent Bye: I think it actually solves one of the biggest problems with peripherals, which is that, you know, it's a big investment to be able to buy all these things that maybe have one application or a couple applications and you essentially be to the side and never used, you know, like a sort of a rock band guitar type of scenario. It's very specific. And that haptics are great, but yet it's only a single use, but yet with this modular approach you're able to essentially make the value of buying one of these Vive trackers so high because there's just so many different diverse use cases from putting it on top of a camera to do mixed reality or putting on any number of these different peripherals that lowers the price point for a lot of those peripherals, but actually gives a lot of passive haptic feedback that can increase the sense of presence to the very specific application you have, which I think is something that's getting that level of touch and that haptics that is so important to that level of presence. It's going to allow a lot of different companies to just put out something that's affordable and people are going to have the Vive Tracker to be able to add on to it, but it's just going to, I think, create this explosion of different possibilities of different gameplay as well as interactions.
[00:08:25.917] Dan OBrien: Yeah, I agree. I think we're getting an overwhelmingly positive response from developers right now about this. They all want to find out how quickly they can get a tracker themselves. But you're hitting on a lot of key points, right, of why we did this. You know, we looked at it not only from a developer solution, but from a retail solution. all the way down to the consumer. We wanted to create that singular piece that a retailer knew then, okay, I just need to get this tracker. And then I have a whole other portfolio of things that work with the tracker that I can range and I can put on the pegs and now I have an ecosystem at retail. for retailers, and that's really good for them. They want that as a business model. That's part of the value chain of VR, making the ocean of VR actually healthy. And then the same for consumers. At the end of it, I said this a little bit earlier in the week, where consumers, developers, and retailers, the people that are going to help us actually sell these things, they need to know and be confident that they're buying into an ecosystem that's growing and expanding. They don't want to buy into something that's closed and it's not going to grow. They want to see everything around that core thing actually grow. And that's as a strategy really why we approached the tracker the way that we did. And I think it does then drive all the way down to that consumer level where they're now taking this one object and they're plugging it into the three things that they have in their living room to play with it. you know, this V Arsenal gun, you know, and then taking it off and putting it on a wand or putting it on the palette that has all the paint colors on it. So it's just, for us, it was really a way for us to kind of create a central piece that could create an ecosystem around it.
[00:10:11.278] Kent Bye: Well, also it's able to take existing games that you're able to add something onto it, whether it's a multiplayer, you know, there's an experience here where you're able to essentially add a mobile phone into a peripheral gun that's commercial off-the-shelf, and you essentially make a single-player Vive game into a multiplayer, and so there's just all these different use cases of already having the content that's there and not requiring people to do specific content development for it. And I imagine that there's going to be, on the other side, specific use cases that people want to do that may be bringing your hands into the game or bringing your feet into the game where the weight distribution of the Vive tracker may actually be a presence breaker because of how it actually feels in your body. It just may feel awkward and uncanny and take you out of the experience and hard to ignore. I can imagine if you're holding something, that's going to perhaps make it a little bit easier to have that weight distribution. But can you talk a bit about some of the other applications that you've seen in terms of people that are going to have to do this custom design approach rather than the Vive tracker because of those weight distribution issues?
[00:11:13.853] Dan OBrien: Yeah, I think that's a really, really good point. I was actually really surprised to see that we actually had two different glove partners here showing their gloves with the tracker so quickly because I did think, you know, initially that it would feel awkward that I would have this weight piece here and that would just feel unnatural because my arm's not that heavy in that point. And I thought, you know, I would love to see more of the gloves go down the SteamVR synapse tracking space, where it's a neoprene glove that really doesn't feel like there's anything on there, right? And because that glove is tracked just like your controller, you actually know the whole dimensions of your arm, right? And you can actually track all the way up to the shoulder, because we know from, you know, natural movement in your arms and your elbows, and as you turn things, you can actually track that. So I think in general, I would love to see more of those things happen that way. But, you know, I thought about the feet piece and I was like, I really don't want to see the jester feet, you know, with these things hanging off the toes. But somebody might do that and I don't want to tell a developer that they shouldn't do something like that. If they want to try that and they want to use the tracker to track somebody's feet, that's... Go for it. Let us know how it goes. Test it with consumers. Test it with other developers. Tell us if you like it or not." But I also thought about it and I was like, well, maybe you could do something that's actually essential where you're putting on track socks or something like that, and that feeds to the tracker which is somewhere else on your body like your belt. Then it doesn't feel unnatural because it's just this very light thing that you don't really feel from a weight distribution that might be on your belt or something like that. So I think in that general sense, that would be pretty cool. But I think there's definitely going to be a lot of applications that just should go get that training, go create a tracked object on your own. There's a lot of applications that should do that. But the baseball bat here with Trinity VR, it's one of my favorite things. I mean, it was made for professional baseball players. I think I've been reading a lot of blogs and seeing a lot of feedback this week where people are like, I'm going to crush my living room and everything in it. I was like, well, this wasn't designed for the living room. This was designed for professional baseball players to go up against an actual professional pitcher, right? And you're going to go train on the pitches that he throws and you're going to learn what percentage of sliders he throws and fastballs and when he's in this inning, you know, he throws this many curveballs and he throws this many. So you're going to be able to train at a very applicable statistical layer how that pitcher is going to act at different innings. or against a batter like you. You're a left-handed batter. You sit at this point in the box. You're typically an outside swinger. You go for high balls. You go for this. Batters are going to be able to actually start training against pitchers using a professional application like that. And when you take the weight of that tracker and just put it on the end of that bat, you don't even feel it.
[00:14:05.104] Kent Bye: Yeah, it feels like there's going to be a couple of phases here with this first phase is likely going to be a stopgap for some of these glove-like solutions so that, you know, I kind of see like this three-pronged approach of virtual reality right now where the technology has been coming up to a certain point and then the content has to catch up where the technology is and then the audience has to buy both the technology and the content and then There's this feedback loop between the technology, the developers, and the audience, where you kind of have to incrementally move things forward. And being here at CES, frankly, there's a lot of technology that could be compelling, but then the back of my mind is like, yeah, but is there content? Is there an audience? Is this going to go anywhere? And if those answers are no, then it's essentially dead in the water. And so some of these gloves, you have to actually maybe put that on the arm as an interim phase before they can actually develop the content that's compelling enough for people to want this more elegant solution to have their fingers into these different interactions. And that in this also first phase, I also see a lot of B2B applications that people have budgets and training applications and the very specific marketing applications, people with big budgets. And that at some point in the phase two, that'll be the next generation where people are actually Consumers are demanding it if they've had a chance to experience in different ways So I kind of see that there's this phased approach of rolling out this technology But matching the content that's out there with the technology is kind of where I see now that there's this new technology Now the content has to catch up with it and see what people do with it
[00:15:37.832] Dan OBrien: Yeah, that's absolutely right. And I think we're trying to approach the VR business in the ecosystem very thoughtfully. In 16, we launched what we very strongly believe is the best VR experience. We wanted people to have the best possible VR experience, that promise of VR, putting them at the center of it, putting them all around it, building a lot of compelling experiences, putting as much developer hardware out there to the developer community as possible. And now we're over a thousand pieces of content, right? And so that's really worked well for us. But now going into 17, it is this very thoughtful method now of, okay, let's make developers more successful. Let's bring more developers in. Let's bring more accessories and peripherals. Let's bring more partners in. let's widen the ecosystem instead of just stretching the technology and trying to uprev displays and uprev headsets and tech specs. 17 really needs to be about concreting the future of VR and making sure that We've established it, it's here to stay, and that it's healthy, and that it's growing from a very strong base. And so as a strategy for us, for the Vive, is to now grow the ecosystem in 17 and grow the base even further. And that's through not only the hardware and peripherals and things like using the tracker, That's why we're going this ecosystem path. The tracker was very thoughtful in the timing. We're in a really good place with great content and we have really great content coming in 17. We have great partners coming in 17. We're excited about But now we're also seeing what we've also been focusing on is widening the content breadth to the health, to the medical, and to the enterprise, and getting into the education space. And we've been not just trying to stay just only focused on one of those areas. We've been trying to work with a wide breadth of these types of customers in these verticals, getting them more exposed to how this is going to be applicable to them, how it impacts their industry. how it benefits them. And it's not at all for us to say that we're defocusing from games or consumers and trying to focus on an enterprise. It's that we're actually trying to grow out the volume of different applications for it and show a wider audience how this is going to affect them and how it's going to be positive for them.
[00:18:09.453] Kent Bye: Great. And maybe you could expand a little bit as what you see is happening in the enterprise or medical or education space. And I'm just curious to hear different trends that you may be seeing already.
[00:18:20.473] Dan OBrien: Well, I think what we're seeing in the US and Western markets, we have partners like GE getting involved. We have partners with Intel, with Autodesk, with Dassault. But yeah, we have a lot of partners that are thinking about it from an engineering standpoint. The automotive industry, I don't know an automotive company that's not using Vive right now for design decisions, collaboration decisions. engineering decisions, you know, the backside of it, not just the front-end showroom, but actually applicable use cases inside the business. You know, mock-ups for a car can cost upwards of $300 million, probably more in some cases, where you're creating multiples of mock-ups of non-working cars just to make design decisions. You can do that in VR. a $1,200 BE version of the Vive kit, 10 of those is still a big savings, right, from the design decision of making all these mock-ups. You know, we have Salesforce with their Cities project, and how, right now, the city of New York, the city of Boston, they're using these applications initially for making decisions around how the city's operating and do they have traffic lights out and they can visualize and see what's actually happening inside the city. And the Vive headset works with that. We have a lot of medical partners. I think we had three or four surgeons just walking around the Vive booth with their applications this week at CES. And we have everything from very advanced surgeon prep of using actual tools that you use in surgery for. It is meant for surgeons, not for general consumers. We have other applications here where you're actually just a consumer learning about how a stint would be put in or looking at the different components of your own body of like this is your nervous system, this is your muscular system. This is your beating heart and these are the valves and you can introduce a disease to that organ and see how that affects it. I saw how asthma affects lungs this week. It was not pretty, but I got a different appreciation for what is actually happening there. And so I think there's going to be a lot of applications that fall between education and enterprise use that really crosses over. It's pretty compelling stuff. Mindshow on the entertainment side, it was a whole new method for like entertaining yourself where you were playing both characters and you're the monster and then you're the other guy and you're creating your own comedic scene or your own drama scene. But it's you, it's yourself. I did it last night for the second time and I decided to go much more raw comedic path with it. Glad nobody's gonna see that. But it was pretty funny. I had a lot of people going for it pretty good. So, I think, you know, just in general, you'll continue to see us really stick with, you know, the entertainment, the education, the enterprise, and the health and wellness space. You'll see us continue to talk about these pillars. And, you know, one of the advantages that we have is we have such an amazing partner with Valve and Steam and their relationship with the gaming community and all the innovation that's happening in this space on the gaming side. These two companies, our two companies working together to kind of bring all these different experiences to market. I mean it's just a really great partnership that we're able to actually attack the verticals in the industry in such a compelling way and address the different markets.
[00:21:55.458] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'd be really curious to hear whatever you can say about where this dialogue between government regulation in terms of privacy expectations of what type of information could be captured and gathered and stored from immersive virtual reality experiences, whether it's your attention or gaze or whatever you're interested in, emotional states, you know, there's a lot of personal information I think is a lot more intimate than things that you type into a keyboard. So I'm just curious to hear where you see that processes of both educating the government but also having the government be kind of a watchdog to the privacy interests of citizens.
[00:22:34.152] Dan OBrien: You know, privacy is so critical and so important. It's actually pretty near and dear to my heart. I've done this in my career in the past and I understand the importance of it. And not only for general consumers and protecting their information, but for the company and protecting your brand and doing the right things to protect your brand. You know, there's a lot of facets to privacy that you have to be very careful of and you don't do it just to protect your brand, you do it to protect your customer and it's the right thing to do. But yeah, there's a lot of information. You know, I sit in talks sometimes where I'm the one saying to the publishers, like, hey, you're going to be able to have a one-for-one relationship with a consumer that you've never had before with VR. You're going to be able to learn so much more about what they like, what they dislike, whether that ad worked, whether they were interested in that product. You're going to be able to learn so much more about your consumer if you're doing the right things. It's no longer going to be about click-throughs. You're going to know if they actually looked at it and picked it up, interacted with it. But on the flip side of that is how much of that information should you be grabbing and what should you be holding on to? And then once you hold it, and once you draw that information in, how well are you protecting it? And that's really, really critical because now you have an OS layer of security. You have a hardware partner level of security and what software they put in. And then you have the application layer and all the developers and what their software putting in. So you have three different groups inside of this ecosystem and world that might be pulling data about that consumer. and you really have to be conscientious. We have a dedicated privacy engineering team inside of HTC that their sole job is to protect personal information in phones and any of our connected services products and in our VR products. So we're extremely sensitive to making sure that any user data is immediately anonymized. It is protected. We're doing the best things that we can to protect user information. and only taking the things that you may or may not need. Some people take too much information. They really don't need to have all of that. Whether you're the developer side or the hardware guy, the peripheral guy or the OS, you really have to be conscious of the information you should be taking and then how well you're protecting that.
[00:25:02.746] Kent Bye: Is there any other implications of HTC being a foreign company versus other virtual reality companies here based out of the United States? Because I know, you know, there might be an FTC order that is auditing the company for 20 to 30 years, but yet they may decide to externalize that cost and take the fine, pay the fine, and then continue to had ethics that may not be what the law is requiring for privacy. But for HCC, if you get a similar thing, is it higher risk that you may be cut off from being able to import your product into the United States?
[00:25:36.476] Dan OBrien: Well, you know, I don't want to speak for lawyers or government, you know, but I think whether you're manufacturing your products in a foreign destination or country or internal, you're all up to the same risks, right? If you do something bad with personal information or something happens, where consumer information becomes leaked, the FTC is going to come knocking. It doesn't matter where your company is based. If it's a product in the U.S. and you leak user information, usually somebody from the FTC is going to knock on your door and ask you a little more than how you're doing. So I think in general they have the ability though to not only find companies, they have the ability to stop companies from selling their products and importing their products. And so, you know, when you think about it, you know, privacy and the impacts of doing it, you know, I look at it and say, hey, the contract I have and the trust that I have with my consumer is number one, right? Like I can never, ever break that trust. And I need to be extremely protective of that with my customer because that's my brand and that's my relationship with them and whether or not they're going to recommend my product to other people. And so that's extremely important, first and foremost. And then, you know, if you find yourself in a situation where, you know, there was a gap or something from a privacy perspective, you know, the government and the FTC has a lot of levers to ensure you don't get to proliferate that issue or that product inside of the country. And so those are things, as a business, and as a company, you have to take very, very seriously and never take for granted, because it will stop you.
[00:27:23.899] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that's a challenge, is that with this new emergent technology, there's a lot of utopian futures and a lot of dystopian futures. And if we have a government that is calling the internet a series of tubes, you know, kind of like a misunderstanding of the basics of what technology is already there, and yet we're talking about the next generation of a new paradigm of computing. what does the education process to the government to be able to tell them the cost and benefits because I feel like there's always amazing new possibilities, but also terrible dystopian futures and it's this balance of educating everybody both the consumers as well as the government and the regulators of that balance and I feel like that's a process that is likely going to unfold here in the future.
[00:28:07.862] Dan OBrien: Yeah, it is a balance because you don't want regulation that stops innovation, right? And you don't want too many rules that will stop what's just getting started to really flourish into what it could be or what it should be and really what it will be. We need to definitely sit down with regulators and with different government groups and talk about and have that discussion about what is there and how is it actually being used and what is a heat map? Those have existed for a long time, but now that information can be used to track a gaze control and understand what people are actually interested in. So there's a lot of even existing technologies that a lot of government officials and regulatory parties may or may not be aware of that now has a higher impact because of VR and the intimacy of it and that one-for-one relationship of that consumer with you know, with the content. So, there's a lot of things I think we should just, we should sit down, we should talk about it, we should make sure people are making the right decisions and that they're, you know, choosing the right path and they're putting the right protections in place for their software and for the consumer data that they're dragging down and making sure it's protected. I mean, there's a lot of things though as an existing practice from how we operate whether it's in phones or whether it's in games, in high-end PC games, that there's a lot of things that are already there as a base, and we should grow from that base and not look at it as a whole new thing of, oh my gosh, this is all happening and we have no idea. It's really an increment of what's actually happening. So I think that we can just grow and understand it a little bit further in more detail than thinking we have to reinvent the wheel.
[00:29:53.202] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:29:59.972] Dan OBrien: Oh my goodness. Oh, the vision question. You know, I think in general, I want to see all these verticals grow. But if you're just asking me, I really want to put a stamp on education and not breaking it, but actually bringing a whole other layer of education tools. to anything from K through 12 to higher education and the collegiate layer where we're bringing a lot of new tools to the capabilities of different learning styles and learning methods, you know, from developmental education, you know, and kids that might just be like visual learners, right? And kids that really have like auditory processing challenges where they just can't handle a lecture and absorb that information in that way, and it's just not the way their brain's been wired. And there's no rhyme or reason why it was wired that way, but we have another tool, right? And we have VR. And I really want to see that grow into something pretty amazing. But we think of it as, how much good can we do with VR? What can we do? Can we change the world with this? And I think we can. I just think our job is stay as open as possible to the developer community and actually give them the tools to allow that to happen. Because it may not come from HTC. It may come from a developer team that we're working with, and that would be pretty amazing.
[00:31:28.542] Kent Bye: Awesome. Anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:31:31.504] Dan OBrien: Yeah, we never talked about the headstrap. The real meat of this conversation. You know, we released the new headstrap, which is super comfortable. I hope people enjoy it. It's all about ease and convenience. We're really happy to have launched it. We think people will really like it. But a lot more people will get exposed to it in Q2. And then we're really excited about TP-Cast, our wireless partner. I think they got a huge award from The Verge this morning about their solution. And so we're really excited to see in 2017 that wireless VR and removing that tether is actually going to be a consumable option for consumers. I think there's going to be quite a few. options out there by the end of this year of the ability to use your Vive wirelessly. I'm pretty excited about that.
[00:32:20.288] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. So that was Dan O'Brien. He's the general manager of HTC for America, Europe, Middle East and Africa. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, I think that the HTC Tracker is the most significant announcement to come out of CES this year. And that's because I think it's going to not only grow the ecosystem for room scale VR with the HTC Vive, but I think it's also going to expand it into doing completely new types of interactions that we haven't even seen before. So at a minimum, you're going to be able to enable mixed reality experiences by putting one of these trackers on top of a camera. But I think it's going to also do some really interesting social things. Probably one of the more interesting demos that I saw in the Vive press area was Master of Shapes. They're able to put a Vive tracker onto this gun peripheral and attach a mobile phone. So you have one person in VR and then multiple people that are not in VR being able to use their phone as a window into the virtual experience where you could have these co-op player experiences. And I think the other thing is that a lot of these Vive trackers are going to actually be attached to peripherals that are going to be too expensive for the consumer market at first, but it's going to really enable all sorts of really interesting VR arcade experiences. The other point that I wanted to make with these Vive trackers is that It's more of an active transmission rather than a passive transmission. So at some point Dan said it probably wouldn't be too feasible to attach one of these to a football because it essentially needs to be able to broadcast the signal back and have battery power and all these other things in order to do that. It's not like OptiTrack where you're able to put these passive trackers, basically stickers, onto these different objects and then bring them to a VR experience. Anything that you do track, you're going to have to be able to give power to that signal and then be able to actually transmit it back to the headset. So that I think is one limitation that I'll be interested to see what other types of solutions are able to even be created. Like, for example, I'm wondering if we're going to actually see a suit that you can track your whole body with these different markers within a lighthouse scenario, or if these body suits are going to be moving more towards the optical track solutions that is kind of the industry standard within Hollywood using technologies like OptiTrack. The other point that I wanted to expand on a little bit about the feet is that Dan kind of dismissed the idea of doing gameplay with the feet, and tracking your feet is a little bit less about doing the gameplay, and it's more about invoking the virtual body ownership illusion. In order to invoke the virtual body ownership illusion, you have to actually track your limbs to the point where it feels like it's actually your body within VR. and I've had the chance to be able to do that once back at Sundance last year and it is an amazing feeling to actually have your feet tracked and to be able to be able to walk around and look at your virtual body and to kind of have your mind trick that it's your actual body. We haven't really been able to do that yet mostly because most of our controllers that we're holding are in our hands and in order to really do the inverse kinematics to fully extrapolate the body. You need a point that's closer to your elbow. And so some of the people that were there at the HTC area were telling me that if you actually move up the Vive tracker closer to your elbow, then you can get a much, much more accurate inverse kinematic expression of your body. But you also need your feet. And I think tracking your feet could make a huge difference to actually make you feel like you have your whole body in the experience. And so we don't know the exact price point of these trackers yet, but I imagine it's going to be on the same order of an existing Vive hand-tracked controller, maybe a little bit less expensive. But essentially, it's likely going to be outside of the price point for most people to be able to start to track their full body. Perhaps it'll be one of the solutions that's completely integrated that we'll see. So I'm still curious to see over the next year in 2017 what type of solutions that need to go the custom route that couldn't necessarily use this Vive tracker. And I just wanted to expand on the issue of privacy and some of the points that Dan was making. First of all, he's making the distinction that there's a number of different layers. There's the actual hardware layer, there's the operating system layer, there's the application layer. So there's all these different layers where there's different parties that are going to be having all sorts of really intimate personal information that is being collected. Once you get eye tracking into the equation, then you start to be able to detect not only what people are looking at, but be able to discern whether or not they're interested in it. And one of the things that Dan is saying is that it's kind of going to be up to a lot of the application developers to decide how much of that information that they're collecting and storing in databases, first of all, but also whether or not it's going to be anonymized or going to be connected to your personal identity. So there's all sorts of different security implications there, being that the internet generally right now is a hostile environment. So what are the implications if some of this information is compromised? There could be privacy implications. But also, do you need to actually collect it and hold on to it? Or is this just part of the overall tech industry's movement towards this surveillance business models of collecting and storing all sorts of independent information? From a privacy perspective, there's a couple of things. One is that it's a bit of an open question as to how much of these natural movements of your body, your eyes, could be proven to be personally identifiable. I know that Kana Rusumano from OpenBCI is saying that EEGs actually have a digital fingerprint that is essentially impossible to anonymize, that your brain has such a unique signature that you may not actually be able to disconnect it from your identity. So is that possible to do with how you move your eyes or how you move your body or all those things connected to each other? Is it possible that we have a biometric fingerprint that could be identifiable even if they try to anonymize it? So that's one dimension that I think is yet to be proven explicitly, but it's a thing to think about. If that does end up being the case, then what are the implications of having all this stored biometric information in a database that could be tied back to your identity? And the other thing is that I'm going to have an interview with Sarah Downing, who has a legal background specializing in privacy, And we're going to be talking about some of the larger technological trends in these surveillance business models and some of the larger ethics that are involved within both capturing and storing information that is tied back to your personal identity. She actually makes a claim that virtual reality in the metaverse may actually be one of the last bastions of privacy. given the way that both augmented reality technologies are going, and it could kind of end up like the Black Mirror episode of Nosedive, where you're going around and objectively rating other people on a five-star system. That type of technology being more pervasive into our wide world is just going to have the potential to erode our levels of privacy and overall lower the levels of authentic communication, because we're not going to have that freedom of expression that comes with privacy. So some more really vital conversations about privacy to come later this week on the Voices of VR podcast. So stay tuned for that. So that's all that I have for today. I wanted to just thank you for joining me on the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends and become a donor to the Patreon. Just a few dollars a month makes a huge difference. So go to patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
