Tom Ffiske publishes the Immersive Wire Newsletter, and on February 2, 2022 he announced the release of his latest book called The Metaverse: A Professional Guide, which is available on Amazon. The metaverse has certainly seen an increase of attention ranging from Facebook rebranding itself to Meta to Microsoft and the Enterprise Metaverse to the hype around cryptocurrencies where collections of *.jpg image NFTs are trying to stake claim to the metaverse buzzword. He describes his book as “An honest, no-bullshit outlook of the metaverse and its development, from someone who has seen both the good and the bad.”
Ffiske’s book is a quick read, and a high-level overview of how the VR and AR immersive industry could start to play a part within this larger paradigm shift into spatial computing. Ffiske himself has a background in public relations and marketing, and so this work builds upon the coverage of the XR industry that he’s been doing on his newsletter with some quotes and commentary from XR professionals sprinkled throughout his book. He doesn’t dig much into the nuances of the more lower-level aspects of the Metaverse such as network architectures, open standards around interoperability, or avatar representations. It’s mostly focused on a wide range of applications across a variety of different industry verticals and contexts. One experience I had when reading the book was feeling like it was jumping in between a broad range of different contexts, and so it left me with a feeling of trying to paint a mosaic of the XR industry, which is still expansive and a bit sprawling. He provides a good foundation of by surveying some of the bigger players and news over the past couple of years, and so it’s great primer to either refresh your memory or to understand the landscape a bit better if you’re just entering into the XR industry.
I had a chance to read through the book, and then unpack it a bit with Ffiske on January 31, 2022 where we did a bit of a high-level overview of some of the major points, what was included, what wasn’t included, who he was trying to reach with this project, and how he makes sense of the evolving landscape of the Metaverse.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So in today's episode, I'm going to be covering a new book that just came out by Tom Fiske. It's called The Metaverse, A Professional Guide. Tom himself is from public relations and advertising background, and so he's been writing a newsletter called The Immersive Wire, which has been really focusing on the virtual and augmented reality applications in the XR industry at large. And so, he wanted to try to cut through a lot of the hyperbole and the rhetoric and to see, okay, what is grounded and what's actually happening and what is something that is just more hype. So, in his book, The Metaverse Professional Guide, he starts to try to lay out a landscape of how he starts to make sense of the metaverse. So, that's what we're covering on today's episode of The Voices of ER Podcast. So, this interview with Tom happened on Monday, January 31st, 2021. So, with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:02.420] Tom Ffiske: My name is Tom Fiske. I am the editor of The Immersive Wire, which is a twice weekly newsletter that covers the immersive space. And I've basically been following the immersive scene since 2016. So not as long as many other of my other friends, but the way I got into it was a meetup called the Augmenting Reality Meetup in London. And I wore a VR headset and I was the role of Pac-Man as Ghost were hunting me in a maze from first person. And I feel like for a lot of people, the first entry wasn't gaming. But then you discover very quickly that it goes much, much wider than that. I ran a blog called Virtual Perceptions for a few years. That spawned a newsletter called The Immersive Wire since early 2020. And that newsletter of itself got a lot bigger because it was just the way that it delivered content. I got into my groove when it came to my writing as well. So over the last two years, I've been writing a sequel to my book, The Immersive Reality Revolution, which primarily focused on immersive technologies. And I was going to write a sequel to it called The Immersive Reality Revelation, or an ongoing pun when it comes to Hamilton, which is too complex for me to go into for this VR podcast. But Ever since the Metaverse discussions burgeoned in 2021, there was a natural fit in the conversations when it comes to exploring immersive technologies in the Metaverse. The thesis of my argument is when the Metaverse does come up, it's going to be very difficult to know what it's going to look like, and I'm sure we'll discuss this in the podcast. But I do have a sense that virtual augmented reality technology is going to have some sort of foundational element to it. So the book's an exploration of that. And as you write yourself, Kent, it's very, very meandery. I explore a lot of different ideas in this book, which bounce all over the place. And it comes from talking to a lot of really interesting people. And I truly, truly, truly stand on the shoulders of giants when it comes to my writing. Whatever I do, whatever I say, I'm merely channeling people far more talented than I am doing and letting people know about it. And it's been great to talk to all these great professionals who are truly building the future. And I hope this book does justice to the work which others are doing.
[00:03:16.814] Kent Bye: Yeah. Well, before we start to dive into the book that you're going to be releasing here, I guess on February 2nd, maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.
[00:03:26.063] Tom Ffiske: Yeah. So I work in public relations primarily. So I specialize with technology companies. So I work currently in an agency called Three Monkey Xena as an account director. And my portfolio consists of technology companies. And within that fold, I've always been fascinated by how companies are seen and perceived. So the way reality kind of like folds in on itself, we talk about perception and what's true and what's not. I've seen this across in multiple different ways where people just kind of manifest their own destiny in their own way. And I do think that good communications has a role to play when it comes to manifesting what you want, as well as clearly articulating what you want to do. And I've been fascinated by immersive technologies within this context because, I mean, you must have had the same, Kent. It's just been quite vague sometimes, hasn't it? When you try to explain to, in the case of my mum, what the metaverse is, it's quite difficult to do because you have to go through so many hoops. And even in the earlier days, we were just talking about virtual reality, trying to describe to someone the feeling of presence we have in VR. And all these philosophical ideas that come birth from VR, which you really well articulated over the years, it's very difficult to convey clearly sometimes. And that role of communications is one of the reasons why I've been interested in immersive technologies to begin with. And I also, interestingly, within an academic context as well, just my background when I was a university student, I've been a historian because I love stories. And I like, I kind of bring it all together, channeling and following the path of everything that goes forward as well.
[00:05:02.525] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I think that's the interesting thing about just reading your approach of this book of the Metaversa Professional Guide is that there's a lot of ways in which that you're trying to wrap your mind around, you know, how to tell the story of what this immersive industry is, where it's coming out of, where it's at now and where it's going into the future. And so I guess a lot of this is probably grounded in your practice of writing a weekly newsletter of The Immersive Wire, and maybe you could give a bit more context as to your process of how you wrote this book, just because there seems to be different topics that you're covering, but also getting quotes from people to contextualize things. I don't know if that was in the process of doing your normal newsletter, or if this was something you did specifically for this book in terms of like trying to lay out a broader context above and beyond what you're already doing with your newsletter. So maybe you could just give a bit more context as to your process of how you put this together when you're writing this.
[00:05:55.317] Tom Ffiske: My process is very much drawing from the work I've already done for my newsletter, but it's been expanding. There's a lot of ideas that came up in my newsletter over the year, which are warranted to be put into this book and then to be expanded upon over time. So the book is a hodgepodge of ideas, which I've already explored in the newsletter, but taken to a greater extent and explored further and expanded upon. with quotes of people I've spoken to over the years, as well as other ideas which I've been exploring too. So it's very much directly taken. And then other elements where I wrote a dedicated chapter that I think warranted further exploration. For example, there's a whole chapter called Metaseismic Influence in the Immersive Space, which were explored, not critically, but just laying the facts on how meta has such a presence when it comes to exploring over the metaverse or immersive technologies. And that has an impact all across the board when it comes to all the work that we do. And that will run to a dedicated chapter, which is where I just wrote about the topic. And then the other pieces where they appeared first in my newsletter, such as my argument about NFTs, but tweaked ever so slightly because the feedback of those pieces, I got some feedback on them. So on the NFT one, for example, it was initially very anti-NFT. Then the version which I'm going to be publishing is less anti-NFT, but I'm still super dubious about them. So it's become more of a nuanced argument, exploring it.
[00:07:22.697] Kent Bye: Well, maybe we should start with how you start to wrap your mind around this concept of the metaverse, because this book is called The Metaverse, a Professional Guide. And so in some ways, you're trying to create a onboarding for folks to be able to wrap their mind around the metaverse. So how do you personally think about this concept of the metaverse?
[00:07:40.043] Tom Ffiske: I come across so many different good definitions. The problem with it is I don't think anyone really knows what it's going to look like. Even with the big tech companies, there's no consensus. We have a company like Apple who publicly is not really talking about the metaverse. It's so weird. There was a Reuters article recently saying that they want to explore the AR metaverse, which just wasn't true. They didn't use the word metaverse once. So we've got Apple who's not really mentioning it. We've got Microsoft who's much more open about it now, very recently from last week. where basically the argument is they want to explore it as the expansion of the internet, where it's going to be more different types of experiences coming together. They also believe there'll be separate metaverses as well, which are more divided. And then we've got meta, who believes there'll be one large interoperable one down the line, where we're just going to be going towards one large ecosystem where everything connects together. So out of the bat, we've got several different definitions where the linguistic definition of it is being argued across multiple companies. My perspective, based on everything I've read, is I see it more as an Internet of Experiences, where it's a seamless way for people to connect with each other and to experience new things. That form could take either an AR overlay of the real world, which gives context-rich information, or it could be something even more immersive, where you connect and hop around worlds immersively. It's very difficult to tell because we're still building what the future is going to look like, and the solution is going to be one which is going to be one which people want. And I'm sorry to sound so vague on it, but I am going to use one example because I think it's a very key example for this. So in 1900s Germany, a chocolatier created postcards on how they see the year 2000. And they showed images of houses which are being pulled on train tracks. They showed images of wooden flying machines. They showed images of people riding eels for races. It showed solo machines, whether you have a little pedalo and just going over waters. And it just struck me that how we see the future is very much influenced by the technology of the day. And that's exactly what's happening among the metaverse, where we see the metaverse as an evolution of the internet, when it could very much be something which is so blindingly different that we can't really formulate it with today's language. That's what it's going to look like. And that's why I'm very careful about making hard assertions, because we're still building something we can't quite see yet.
[00:10:09.687] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah. And I guess the way I think about the metaverse, the simplest way I can put it is like going from 2D to 3D and going from something that's abstracted through text and images and videos and more about you being embodied into these virtual worlds. And with that comes different qualities of presence of active presence, mental and social presence, emotional presence, embodied and environmental presence. And with those qualities of presence, then it's catalyzing these paradigm shifts across all these domains of human experience and all these industry verticals, just like the internet and the world wide web had pervaded into our lives and transformed business across all these different industry verticals. Just the same, there's this same type of paradigm shift that can happen in embodied computing and spatial computing. and that there's different layers on that stack. And I think that Matthew Ball started to lay out that stack. And I think there's things that are missing there in terms of ethics and culture, but I do think that there's an economic layer and whether or not there's going to be cryptocurrencies or NFTs, you sort of discuss that in a way that is, like you said, somewhat skeptical, but also Tony Precy has said there's seven rules for the metaverse. One of his rules is that it's an expansion of the internet, that it's a network that's open, it's interoperable, which I think is all key aspects of what I conceive of what the metaverse will aspire to be. But at the same time, he says it's hardware independent, meaning that there may be many different ways for people to access these spatialized virtual worlds, even through your phone, or it's not necessarily tied to virtual reality or augmented reality or brain computer interfaces or whatever it ends up being. And I think that's true, that it'll probably be like a responsive design of the existing web, but have another spatial component. But that's in order to get to the full embodied aspect, I do think there may be a connection there to VR and AR. And as I read through your book, I think that's probably a similar conclusion because there is quite a lot of focus of virtual and augmented reality within your book that reflects that as a intuition that whatever the metaverse ends up being, that there will be a pretty distinct connection to these XR technologies.
[00:12:10.122] Tom Ffiske: I think so too. And my thoughts parallel yours as well. And I really like your description of how this is such a leap. And it is a real leap, isn't it? It's a different way of thinking about interactions too. That's such a complex idea to get across. But I feel like we're aligned when it comes to immersive technologies to being the underpinning factor as well. That's the impression I have.
[00:12:34.111] Kent Bye: Yeah. And as I read through your book, I guess one of the experiences I had is that you're kind of jumping between different contexts to get a sense of what these new media are. And I, I guess the question I have for you is like, who's the intended audience for this book that you're writing for?
[00:12:47.674] Tom Ffiske: So I organized this as such as a funnel where the absolute entry for this book is for people who are curious about the metaverse. So if you've seen the word around the world or anyone on the internet and you're curious what it is, here's a little professional guide to help you top level. I then have an intro chapter, which is designed for newbies. As in, if you're new to VR, if you're new to AR, if you're new to the metaverse, this initial chapter will get you on the same level. And I try to make it as concise as I can. I do find that conciseness is such a good way of delivering good info, if you can word it right. And this is a very tight initial chapter just to get you into the world of the immersive spaces. And this is a chapter where I dedicated my time because this is from five years of me trying to work out myself, trying to work out a way myself to articulate it. It then unfolds from there like an umbrella where you can hop around if you want to, based on what you're interested in. If you're interested in art, dive from there. If you're interested in deeper in the metaverse, go from there. I know there's a few people who are interested in NFTs and the metaverse. There's a chapter for you there too. You can then hop a little bit if you wanted to. And yeah, so think of it as like a funnel where it just gets more and more complicated as you go down it, but hopefully by then you're onboarded over time too.
[00:14:10.052] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. And you mentioned earlier that your chapter on Metta was not taking a critical take. You're sort of establishing the facts of Metta's influences and their benefits. And I'm curious, like the quotes that you chose to feature within that piece was almost like Andrew Bosworth defending why people were so surprised. But as I was reading it, I was like, he's not really explaining why people are upset at Metta at all. for what the downsides of some of that were. And so I'm just curious to have you maybe elaborate on why you were taking such a, either a neutral, I mean, I can understand that there's certainly a lot of positive benefits, but also didn't feel like there's an accurate representation for why people are upset at a company like Meta.
[00:14:49.933] Tom Ffiske: So if you're going to read my book to get a critique of Meta, I feel like there's plenty of other online sources out there which will be critical of the company regardless. And I think there are other people out there who are more articulate than I for people who are critiquing Meta's use of personal data. My role is to simply outline what Meta's been doing as factually as I can, as well as some of the ways in which they support creators as well. And because, like it or not, they are one of the most biggest contributors to the area which we're working in. They've launched a fund of $50 million to explore the Metaverse and the interoperable standards, for example. And I feel that there's plenty of other books which explore surveillance capitalism, for example, and exploring how people are using personal data. I just think that in this particular area, Meta's doing something slightly different with different principles. And I think that's being underwritten about. And I think it's good to explore what they're doing too. That's not to say that we shouldn't be holding them to account. Of course, we're holding them to account. And that's why I point out little bits and pieces within that chapter as well on within the master space, things to be looking into. I just think that there's plenty of writing critiques of something, and I think there's more space for being constructive and building on what they're doing.
[00:16:09.017] Kent Bye: Yeah, I guess if I were to articulate my take on Meta is I do agree that they've been investing billions of dollars into the space and that the acquisition of Oculus by Facebook for two to $3 billion, however much it ended up being in the end, it was reported at 2 billion at a time, and I think later it came out, it was more than that. But that was an indicator for the larger industry for this, that is gonna be a thing. And of all the other companies that are out there, Meta has continued to double down and invest the most money and produce the best products. And I think the challenge from what I see is at least two or three prongs, which is that they do have a bit of a focus on gaming, which is in some ways reinforcing their potential anti-competitive behaviors where they're not necessarily looking at other industries and maybe deliberately suppressing those industries that they want to potentially compete in. And I do think that the questions around data and what happens to this biometric and physiological data is probably the biggest open question with the future of the metaverse. And what is probably needed is some form of either neuro rights and human rights or federal privacy laws. So I guess that was just sort of things that I was missing from even just giving a call out, Hey, like we need a better approach to privacy because the way that this data is going to be moved forward is actually one of the biggest existential risks of us sleepwalking into some sort of big brother dystopia.
[00:17:26.065] Tom Ffiske: No, I agree with that. And it does feel like as though we're building a future without necessarily having the foundations in place. Why don't we have a thing you just listed? Why not just have a general awareness of having X and Y baked in early and then build from there? But then you can make the counter argument that you first need to build something first and then put some principles on top of it. So I can see the argument where you just need some sort of firm basis and then we can put them on top. But in any case, this is why we're having conversations now, because it's good to have these conversations now, get people thinking and to basically build a safer future for everyone, which I feel will caveat from what XLA will be saying as well.
[00:18:05.708] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's different, I mean, not to belabor the point, but the counter argument to that is from like Dr. Anita Allen, who would say that maybe privacy is like organs where there's laws that prevent us from selling our organs. And so do we need more paternalistic approaches for some of these issues around privacy? Because maybe we're treating it in such a libertarian way, treat it as our data that we're able to buy, sell and trade, and maybe mortgage our privacy. And what does that mean for democracy? And what does that mean for our future? If we're going to be moving into this place where you're just allowing people to treat this as data of their own, when there may be larger things that maybe we shouldn't be allowing people to buy, sell and trade their biometric and physiological data because the level of intimacy that comes from that. So I feel like there's deeper questions there that still need to be sorted out when it comes to the neural rights or what are rights identity or right to mental privacy or right to agency and our ability to take intentional actions without being unduly influences by these companies that will have an amazing amount of data. So I guess the lack of critique, I was upset because it's like, just voice what is there, because I feel like there's issues that still need to be settled out for the entire industry as we move forward. And for me, that's like kind of the biggest existential risk.
[00:19:21.712] Tom Ffiske: I'm really interested by your libertarian argument on data privacy. What was the name of the, is there a particular book I can read so I can learn more about that counter-argument? Because I've not come across that before and it sounds fascinating.
[00:19:32.398] Kent Bye: There was a debate that happened a number of years ago at the University of Pennsylvania between Dr. Anita Allen, Helen Isabalm, and Adam Moore. And Adam Moore was on the side of the libertarian side, but he was saying, rather than just like buy, sell, and trade in adhesion contracts that treat it more like copyright, where you could revoke your access to that data. So it's a data we own, but we have more agency over owning our data, which is, I guess, a thing that comes up a lot within folks to not just give away this data, but that you have more ownership over it. Ellen Niesenbaum talks about how the contextual integrity of how privacy is a lot about the appropriate flows of information that are dependent upon the context. And then Dr. Anita Allen is someone who takes much more of a human rights approach and a lot of her work was used to help inform the GDPR. So there's a lot of ways in which that GDPR is a reflection of seeing privacy as like more of a human right, that you have these fundamental rights that you have control over. But, you know, she in some ways has more of a paternalistic approach saying that, you know, there could be aspects where we just need to draw a hard line of saying that, you know, we shouldn't just allow people to have agency over their their data because of the risks that outweigh the benefits that you could have. And that's where the contextual integrity approach would be like, there's some medical context where you have that information, but yet if you're having consumer products have access to this medical grade information, then what are the implications when there's no fiducial responsibility within our current legal structure to be able to draw lines between leaking out medical information as an example and selling that to the highest bidder, which could be insurance companies. So there are a lot of debates, I think, that are still playing out over a lot of this stuff.
[00:21:08.298] Tom Ffiske: I'm just imagining in the moment a hypothetical where you have a metaverse and then maybe an insurance company in the metaverse. Would that insurance company therefore hold some of your biometric data if you get injured? Something just inspired me, sorry. But that's really an interesting little perspective and I need to do some more reading myself in the area because I think that's definitely one which should be explored further.
[00:21:32.983] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, maybe let's dive into some of these other chapters that you have, because I think that, you know, another big aspect of these discussions are augmented reality glasses, AR glasses, and just be curious to hear your take of, you know, this is something that is happening in the context of these AR filters, the companies like Snap and TikTok and Instagram and Niantic to some extent using augmented reality for Pokemon Go. So we have some early experiences of augmented reality, mostly in the case of these expressions of your personal identity or in the context of a location-based game with Pokemon Go. But what's your hot take when it comes to AR glasses?
[00:22:11.108] Tom Ffiske: Hot take. Well, I mean, people are fixating on it because they like the idea of it more than the actual facts behind it. They like the idea of having a virtual layer of the real world, which they can either interact with or build on or have new types of experiences or to connect with people. And on paper, I'm with you, it is very cool. It's strange, to an extent, to talk about the potentials of something where we really haven't seen much proof, or we haven't seen much hardware behind it. We've seen Snap Spectacles, which are very cool, and we've got Niantic, which are developing their own hardware, which could be amazing, based on their software is astonishing, with Lightsail, and I really can't wait to see what they do with that. And we've got Meta, who's building live maps, just live maps of the world, which is also going to be really cool to see, too. There's all these companies doing these cool things. I just want to wait until they all come together before reworking on where else to go build from, because building on the nebulousness of hypotheticals is all well and interesting and fascinating. I mean, this is what we're doing now with metaverse discussions at the moment. I just wish we had slightly further guidance on why people want to use them, what could it be used for, what the hardware's going to look like, and whether they've worked out the thermal issues as well, because no one wants glasses that'll burn their face off. So hopefully that technological barrier can be fixed up as well. But my counterpoint to myself is the progress in the area has been done amazingly. I visited in Oxford a company called Wave Optics, which created the wave guides for their lenses, and they do some incredible stuff. Their actual image quality is so crisp, I can't describe it. And a little bit later after I visited them, they were bought by Snap, I assume because they wanted to fill up their supply chain on my key components for building my glasses. I think it was like $500 million or something. The point is, that's fascinating. And the Wave Optics were clearly ahead of what they were doing. And I was just very fortunate enough to actually see a little bit of their work. And I'm hopeful. I want to see more progression. And I'm sure everyone else who's listening to the podcast can agree with me on that.
[00:24:22.430] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'm wondering if you've had a chance to try out some of these different types of air glasses, whether it's Magic Leap or Vuzex or Snap Spectacles or Microsoft's HoloLens 1 or 2 or Google Glass. If you've had a chance to try out some of these pieces of hardware, you know, we're probably gonna be hearing from a lot more of these consumer grade glasses that are coming out over the next couple of years, whether from Meta or from Apple, and what your initial take on the direct experience of some of these glasses are.
[00:24:52.510] Tom Ffiske: Yeah, so my personal experience with these glasses, they're really cool. I tried out with Magic Leap, the David Attenborough dinosaurs one, where you're like in a room, you get to see little dinos all around. So well done and tracked really well too. And I saw a workplace one in relation to HoloLens, which I thought was really impressive. So in part, if you design an experience super well, these kind of solo experiences work wonderfully. And it's really cool to have that pass through so you can see these objects in the real world. I just want to pin down on use cases, such as with engineering, experience is super helpful. So obviously for things like that, that already has a use case. That's why these contracts are just so expensive being sold, because it works. On the consumer grade side, I do have suspicion that when there's a live maps of sorts where it connects the world together, I do have a suspicion that consumer grade glasses are going to fly. So long as they are cheap enough as well, but they'll fly and be able to connect people together once there's an interaction with the real world. I do think cost is so important though. So I ran some analysis on sales of VR headsets in the UK, and I found that there was a period where the Oculus Go was really outselling the Oculus Quest, even though in that year, the Quest had more hype than the Go because of its standalone nature. And the main factor to it was just price. It was just so much more cheap. And that's why people were just buying them in the flying off the shelves, the Ghosts, compared to the Quests, because it just came down to the fact it was just cheaper. And I do think that that's going to be exactly the same with AR glasses, where the cheaper it is, it's an elastic demand curve. The cheaper it is, the more the demand is going to fly. And I appreciate there's so many different elements that come into this when it comes to the costs of products. I'm not an analyst. I'm not going to predict and say, oh yeah, these classes, these specs are going to be worth X amount. But what I am saying is that once we reach a point where they are cheap enough, we're going to see exponential growth.
[00:26:56.528] Kent Bye: Yeah, having had a chance to attend the Microsoft Build for a number of years and seeing some of the enterprise applications for augmented reality, I feel like that there's a lot of compelling use cases for when it comes to frontline workers and being able to either do remote assist or being able to be in a context under which that it really helps people do their jobs. And, you know, the high price of the enterprise from anywhere from $2,000 to $3,000 for some of those glasses makes sense in that context. The same time though, when I've seen some of these experiences that it's such a small window into the world, even the Snap Spectacles is like just a such a small window, but because it's mobile and portable and a half hour battery, maybe that'll be something that'll catalyze new different types of experiences with developers that are kind of tinkering around with it. But what really blew me away at the latest Augmented World Expo was Tilt 5. And just to see how much of a use case where you're really at a tabletop and not really roaming around in the world, but you're able to have a very fixed context and really focusing and nailing one use case of gaming and tabletop gaming specifically. But Jerry Ellsworth and the approach for Tilt 5 team is to take this glasses that are shooting out light beams and then having retroreflective material that then reflects back to me was the most compelling from an experiential perspective, the most compelling AR experience that I've seen so far, there wasn't a mention in here. So I don't know if he had a chance to try out till five, but I feel like that is actually probably going to be one of the bigger catalysts over the next couple of years when it comes to trying to prototype just like the Oculus with the DK one was. really flooding the market and having an ability for people from lots of different backgrounds to have access that was affordable to be able to tinker around with what's possible with virtual reality as a medium. I think Tilt 5 is going to start with games, but there's going to make it available for other people to maybe experiment with other fixed location contexts that may make sense for what the experience is going to be. Yeah, I'm not sure if you've had a chance to try out Tilt 5.
[00:28:51.658] Tom Ffiske: I haven't, but I absolutely agree with you that when you design experience to a T, that's when you get, like, interest, which sounds like that's what happened in this case, too. And I've seen this across with other HoloLens projects, too, where if you just redesigned something perfectly for that particular use case, it soars.
[00:29:10.572] Kent Bye: Yeah, I, you know, I've gone to a lot of the film festivals since like 2016. And just even from a narrative perspective, there've been maybe one or two AR projects a year. And sometimes there's none. A lot of years there haven't been any. And so in terms of storytelling and immersive storytelling, virtual reality has been really pushing the edge, but there were some pieces even like this year, like seven grams, I thought was a particularly well-told story of fortune previously, but probably the biggest innovations that I see happening in the AR space are probably happening with the AR lenses that are coming from like Snap or Instagram or TikTok, you know, where I feel like from a consumer perspective of having real benefits more around identity expression and other ways. But I feel like in terms of marketing and marketing campaigns, that's where most of the energy is going just because of the cell phones are so popular that for me, I guess I'm I've been focusing so much on VR that I'm I'm also somewhat more skeptical about how these AR glasses are going to take off and whether or not They're going to land with consumers in a way that like, I could see an application in VR, like big screen, where you're able to get access to lots of different screens, expand your screen real estate. And I imagine something like that in AR would be amazing. But you know, like Jerry Ellsworth was telling me that. you can only bend light so fast, which means that there's a limit for how much you can use waveguide technologies without having multiple waveguide technologies, that the field of view is just gonna be pretty constrained by the limits of how fast light can move. So I feel like there's gonna be some fundamental limitations for the field of view when it comes to AR that I question whether or not from a consumer perspective, those experiences are gonna be compelling enough for them to have the AR glasses that really take off.
[00:30:52.896] Tom Ffiske: Yeah. So that's actually the aspect which I'm worried, not worried per se, but I'm observing. We just need good enough experiences to pair with the hardware. But then again, you need to build the hardware for the software to follow. So you need to build this hardware first and then let people experiment with it, which I feel Snap's done a very good job of, and to build that compelling content which we'll be able to deliver too. And on your points on the speed of light being a fundamental barrier, that's wild. And that's a great little nugget, which I want to stuff in my brain for long term. I love that the actual speed of light itself is a barrier for development.
[00:31:29.768] Kent Bye: Yeah, just the way that Jerry's approaching with Tilt 5 is counteracting that by using retroreflective materials that are overcoming the limits of the speed of light in some ways. And so, yeah, her approach is just really interesting and worth considering when it comes to the future of these, especially AR. But I wanted to move into kind of the more future of like the products and what you see is like having traction. Cause you have a few chapters in here just talking about the future of business, but also just looking at some of the use cases of training in particular and exercise. And, you know, I guess, how do you start to wrap your mind around the things that have momentum when it comes to different industry verticals that help you understand where the medium of virtual reality is going in the future?
[00:32:12.181] Tom Ffiske: Very big question. Is there a particular area you want me to focus on? Do you want to focus more on enterprise, arts, gaming, social connectivity, philosophically? Was there an area which you kind of want me to gravitate towards?
[00:32:26.572] Kent Bye: Well, I think in your book, you kind of jump in between them seamlessly. Maybe the things that are jumping into your mind, you can kind of like just riff on some of these different areas. Cause I do think that each of those have different things that are taking off in different ways, but maybe let's start with the enterprise market.
[00:32:42.151] Tom Ffiske: Sure. I'll start with Enterprise and Flower from there. So on Enterprise, that's going to be the one that's initial, and it's going to expand really quickly initially, purely because it's got the money behind it, and it's got all the use cases and examples, and it's so solid as an area. And so naturally, it's going to expand quite organically, at least from a VR and AR perspective. because it's provable and their company specialized in it, and they're doing really good at it too. And very similar to the cloud industry, even though it's growing quickly, there's still plenty of space to catch up on, similar with cloud services. So we're going to see more and more and more companies using most technologies, just part of their training, as part of their work, as far as what they do, purely because it's getting cheaper and cheaper and more accessible and more accessible for more and more companies to hire people to help build them. So we'll just keep expanding from there. And so that's going to be the first area. And then once that flow of money comes in and infrastructure comes in, then we're going to see more artistic endeavours kind of flourish because that infrastructure is there, which I'm really looking forward to. I loved going to events like London Film Festival, Raindance Immersive in the UK, Venice Film Festival. I did not go last year, regrettably, but I heard some really good things about it. And that's the kind of stuff where it's good to have that flavour, it's good to have that little perspective. And I love them. And even with games as well. Yes, I am interested in gaming because I'm a nerd. But on the other hand, I'm interested to see how the uniqueness of the technology of the future is going to connect together for a new type of social experience. We saw recently the launch of Zenith, which is an MMO in the VR, and it's doing really well. It's really soaring to the top of Steam charts, and people are reviewing it. It's incredible how, as an MMO, it's really fun to play and to move around and socialize. And I want to follow Zenith closely, because I think this is a precursor. And I think Zenith is going to be a really interesting case study example of immersive technologies, how they'll build out. In regards to the metaverse, because I know the whole point of the book is that these are the underpinning technologies of the metaverse. I do think the metaverse will have a fundamental social aspect to it, which will bring people together. It's just a question of how. Is it going to be an overlay of realities or AR glasses? or is it going to be closed in virtual reality where we're just hopping around worlds? Because it can be either. It could be either one of them. With all my time reading up on this, and I'm sure with you as well, Ken, from just exploring the area too, it's going to be very difficult to say now what it's going to look like. We don't even know if it's even going to look like that. For the people of the year 2000s, working out what the year 2100 is going to look like, how difficult is that going to predict? I do think that there will be a fundamental social element, which is one of the areas which will be late in the development, but one which obviously a lot of people are interested in.
[00:35:42.316] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I feel like the training aspect, which I think you talk about in the book a little bit, is one of the ones that is so compelling in terms of, you know, when they compare like a written test or, you know, filling circles, and that's a lot different than being embedded into a virtual context where you have to actually make the embodied movements, but be in the emotional intensity of this immersion of that context in that situation and have to make a snap judgment decision and take action. So I do feel like that the medium of VR is particularly well suited for different training applications. And so And I think actually in the wake of the pandemic, for me, my method used to be to go to these different events and conferences and to just have the experiences out there and be able to talk to different creators. But in the absence of that in the pandemic, which is yet another chapter that you have in your book, it's sort of forced everybody to kind of change the way in which that they're even keeping up the speed of what's happening in the industry. But yeah, I'd love to hear ways that you keep up to speed and kind of sift through the signal and noise. I know you have another chapter of keeping up the state as to what's happening in the industry and your own method of taking in either original reporting or looking at other people's work and kind of sifting through it and making sense of what's happening in the larger industry.
[00:36:50.210] Tom Ffiske: So my method is I receive emails. So within my email inbox, I received PR emails from companies who are doing some cool things and want to keep me updated. So I add that to my newsletter. I do follow Twitter and I do follow LinkedIn. But the problem I have a lot is the volume of things I see on Twitter and LinkedIn, even after all this time, I've not worked out a perfect way of just making sure I collect all the interesting elements and put them together. I need to work out a good workflow for that. And also defend them as well, because there's a lot of people doing some things which I don't think are congrusive to good for the metaverse, which I just don't include, but it's just ones which I just want to make sure that I pass on the quality. I think one hard line I have when it comes to content is NFTs. And that's not to say that NFTs can't be part of metaverse discussions. When they are, I do include them. And there's a lot of people who are chasing the money on them. And I just don't think they're substantial enough when it comes to discussions for it to be worth mentioning. My advice to anyone is to follow people you trust. If there's someone who you trust, who knows doing the hard work for you, then please follow them. So I include, Kent, I did include you in my book as a trusted person, for example. I included Think, I included Organix, I included InsideXR, I included following certain Twitter people like Kavya Perlman, for example. I just think that when you have a sector that's getting louder and louder and where good information can be sparse, if you find someone who you trust, please follow them and treat their words carefully, basically. Use your head. That's what I'm saying. Make sure you put some critical thinking in what you do.
[00:38:28.487] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think what was interesting for me to read through this book is contrasting to my own method, which tends to be much more phenomenologically driven in terms of like having experiences and then talking about those experiences with the creators. And that's changed the tenor of my coverage over the last couple of years, just because it's harder to always have a direct experience of what's happening in the enterprise space. But I do think that there's still a lot of really interesting stuff that's happening within the context of training. And I think medical XR is another one that I didn't see much mention of in this book at all. And so I'm just curious how you kind of make sense of the medical XR as an industry vertical, because I actually think that's alongside with training, that's probably the industry that has the most momentum. However, there's probably also other aspects of Meta's own decisions for how they've decided to roll out their technology with deprecating their enterprise offerings in some ways, which I think is kind of a quiet decision that's happened over the last couple of years that has not only impacted the larger diffusion of XR within enterprise context, because it's essentially falling underneath Meta's privacy policies and the problems that a lot of companies have with that has actually in some ways stifled a lot of enterprise adoption, I think. to some extent, it's hard to really quantify that. But the fact that they're deprecating their enterprise offerings on top of the medical XR, which I think that my sense at least is that MED as a company is deliberately avoiding having any confusion by regulators that their medical device to follow the regulations when it comes to medical data. So I feel like there's different ways of metazone policies around their data collection that is either putting off these entire industry verticals or making it more difficult for the advancement of these different companies that I think have been emerging. But yeah, I'm just curious if you have any take on what's happening in the medical XR space.
[00:40:14.364] Tom Ffiske: You raise a fair point because I didn't actually explore much in the book at all about that. And I think it's partially because of my personal interests, where I think I narrowed my focus. There's also because I feel like I couldn't contribute more to that particular area of discussion compared to the others. I think my understanding of medical XR is it's doing some cool stuff and it's helping improve healthcare, so why not? So that's my general area, and I might follow it a little bit more closely in the future. And also there's the aspect where, maybe I'm slightly biased, but in the UK, what we're finding when it comes to healthcare is politically were more focused on the fact that there's funding concerns of the NHS. That experience which I've seen, what I've seen in the news, is changing the way I see innovation as well. This actually bleeds into the other areas I did not really look into is education, broadly speaking, education in schools. The opinion which I have is that I feel that schools should be better funded and have the funds to give children paper and pencils. sort that first, and then you can explore doing virtual reality training. And I know there's people just going, oh no, but you need to have this innovation. You need to invest into virtual reality and really help a very small group of children really immerse themselves in their learning material. And I'm like, fine, we've got some wider issues in this country at the moment. And I feel that the funds could be better invested elsewhere just to make sure everyone is on the same page. So I do think there are areas in VR where it's nice to have, but I think there should be different focuses. This is why I'm more okay with enterprise VR, because obviously if you're a company which has the money to help level up the employees, it's a good thing to invest into the area. I don't know. Does that make any sense? I appreciate that's quite a political point on my side.
[00:42:12.165] Kent Bye: Yeah, no, I agree with the education aspect in terms of like even Google expeditions, which was Google's foray into augmented reality as an education that was shuttered at some point. And so, yeah, that was in some ways the most robust implementation. I think higher education with training, um, there's a lot of applications of VR that makes sense because there's a revenue streams for corporations to be able to train people, but for primary school education that's underappreciated, underfunded, and there's probably a lot of use cases for how that's going to be used in the long term. But yeah, the ways in which that there's adoption of any emerging technologies within education, they're kind of the lack of funds and which in some ways is a reflection of our values of a culture of not really investing in that. But I can understand that. I think the affordances of storytelling and how to even communicate information and knowledge representation, everything is still in flux. And I think we'll probably see more of that be fleshed out on WebXR and more things for the transition into Unity Unreal Engine into more of the web-based stuff, we're likely to see more educational type of experiences in that context first beyond having these individual applications. But the other thing I'd say just about the medical XR in terms of why I find it interesting and important to track is because I think that there's in some ways, an onboarding for some of the different physiological and biometric markers that are used in a medical context, eventually getting into a consumer context, whether that's eye tracking, whether that's like the control lab style EMG, which is being able to detect your motor neurons firing and being able to have new human computer interactions, I think is going to be coming from this next wave of augmented reality. So when I think about the future of both VR and AR, I'm thinking about it moving beyond the mouse and keyboard into these more spatial input, either hand tracking or body tracking or having EMG trackers. So all of that, I think, is going to provide new paradigms of human-computer interaction. It's almost like sci-fi, being able to think about moving your fingers and using that as an input device. So that on top of like brain control interfaces, BCIs, the intersection between those two with things like Project Gilea from Valve slash OpenBCI is going to be interesting to track those movements. Cause I do think that those things that are starting from a medical context are going to eventually be embedded into these XR platforms. And that is going to serve as a baseline for what the affordances of the medium are going to be. And when you get those all integrated into it as more and more of these biometric and physiological detectors, then that's going to close the gap between the types of embodiment that we have in physical reality versus what type of virtual representations we can have within these virtual contexts.
[00:44:56.598] Tom Ffiske: great thoughts on the changing interaction levels, but this progress still needs to be made. I believe the latest control labs experiment they say did, I think my understanding is they can read certain phrases or certain directions, but it's not more complex than that at the moment. I know that's what they're researching, but once we do have a non-invasive way of reading minds for directions. I think it'll be really interesting to see how people use that for certain applications. And also user sentiment too. Imagine we're on a headset, you'd be able to input what you want to do in your head. And I know there's going to be lots of people going like, they're going to be unsure, but we'll see. And by everything you say, I completely agree with. I think this paradigm shift with immersive tech is fascinating. But that's why we're talking, right? That's why you run a podcast on this and that's why I wrote a book on it. We both find it interesting and we just basically just chart what we're seeing.
[00:45:52.223] Kent Bye: Yeah. I wanted to touch, the last section I want to touch on was the last chapter you have, which is in some ways kind of looking for both the application of immersive technologies in a marketing context, but also just, you know, keeping up to speed and building community and getting the word out about experiences you may have created and the different communication platforms that are out there and the ones that you find the best for your own experiments that you've been doing in the context of someone who's in the realm of public relations and marketing. So I'd love to hear just some reflections on the marketing context and public relations, and not only from getting a message out, but also using the medium itself to be able to potentially start to get your message out.
[00:46:32.968] Tom Ffiske: let's start with getting the message out there. I don't know if you found this, Kent, but there's a lot of bollocks out there. And there's a lot of bollocks out there because there's a lot of people who saw the Metaverse as a burgeoning area, want to hop into it. They put the word of their marketing materials in the press releases, chucking out there and see what happens. And then suddenly there's a whole bunch of VR companies who now suddenly say, oh, you've been working in the Metaverse the entire time. Who knew? And I'm not going to say I've been innocent of this as well. I did change my book to focus more on the metaphors because they naturally fit with advanced technologies too. I am saying there's a lot of other companies who do something very similar, and it's really cluttering the amount of good information out there, is what I'm trying to say. So, if I were to advise on how you're going to market your technologies now, within the context of Metaverse discussions, I believe what I said was, number one, get your key messaging absolutely perfect. Make sure you know exactly what you're talking about when it comes to the Metaverse, and make sure you convey that clearly. I'd also argue that sometimes you don't need to use the word metaverse to clearly convey an idea. Because if you said, for example, a private way for you to talk to friends and family in a private space, that is more clear in your intentions as a company than a metaverse of people where you can chill. It's just clearer, right? So you just need to be careful about how you word yourself. And you've also got to make sure that we do contribute to arguments. It's substantial. You need to be self-aware of what the current stage of discussions are. Don't say that you're building a medical metaverse or a telco metaverse, which I saw from time to time. You're just building a private world, aren't you? But you just changed the name slightly. So be careful. But then in regards to the second part of the question, it was like marketing within immersive technologies, wasn't it? So, the way I would look into it is, I've seen some great things with augmented reality. I used to work for a company called Zapper, which is an augmented reality studio. And the things they've done is incredible. And it's really cool to be a part of that. And there's other companies as well doing some cool things, such as 8th Wall, which is a really cool thing in America. We've got Blipar, who came back and is doing some really well as well. They appeared in an episode of The Apprentice in the UK recently. So, good on them. And I think when it comes to AR, it's going to be... That's a really, really interesting area when it comes to marketing because you can track what people are doing on it privately, obviously. You just know the levels of engagement, how long people spend on it. And it's a nice component of an integrated campaign, which helps brings it all together. It's a component as part of a whole. And I think that's really exciting. I'm more cynical about using VR for location-based activations because the cost of building and deploying might not mesh up with the number of people that should be able to experience it. So the return on investment is more dubious. But for AR, oh my God, absolutely. I want to really look closely at
[00:49:46.319] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual augmented reality might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:49:54.432] Tom Ffiske: Oh my God, such a wide ranging question. ultimate potential for VR is having haptics, which is so good that you can feel all sorts of different ways safely, obviously. So having a very seamless way to enter an immersive world and to feel things such as the grip of a sword or feeling flames from your fingertips or the physicality of touching a virtual keyboard, that's going to be incredible. And the better the haptics become, the better life will be. Then you've got augmented reality where I do genuinely feel like the end case is AR glasses. It's just a question of what type they'll be, how good they'll be, whether there'll be live maps around the world. There's so many question marks, it's very difficult to really pin down for AR, but holistically, generally speaking, I think the good end point would be just a seamless way and cost-efficient way to put overlay around the world, which you can interact with. But this is so far flung. engineers who are working really hard at the moment building that. And all we can do is simply just talk about the great work other people are doing, just pointing them, just go, man, that's really neat. Let's talk about it.
[00:51:02.122] Kent Bye: Great. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:51:08.307] Tom Ffiske: I guess what I want to say is Don't be disheartened. I think there's a lot of people who are cynical about things like the metaverse, not as much as they were cynical about VR or they were cynical about AR. You're always going to have cynics. But if you find something that really chimes with your soul, you're going to enjoy it. And if you find a way to just enjoy it for the sake of the thing rather than the destination, you're going to have a happier time. See life as a process, not destination. And if you find a way of work or a passion where the act of doing is joyful, you are going to have a happier life than wanting to just reach X pillar or Y pillar. That's my advice. So if you found it, cling on to it. That's really important. That's your creative outlet. Just keep at it. you haven't found me yet, I recommend just doing something completely different. Go into your local city, do something you wouldn't even think about doing. In my case, it would probably be go to a knitting club just for one session. And the only reason I say that is because doing something completely different unlocks something in you where you think, oh, there's a little connection and there's something that could work here. And it gets you out of that bubble and makes you really reinvigorate what's your brain and really get you thinking about your passion again. So yeah, I hope Much like the book, its wife said it was quite rambly, but I hope that's helpful.
[00:52:33.573] Kent Bye: So the Metaverse, a professional guide comes out on February 2nd. Where's the best place for people to get a hold of this?
[00:52:39.835] Tom Ffiske: It would be on Amazon. So if you go into Amazon, just type in the Metaverse, a professional guide, you could find it. You can also find on my website, theimmersivewire.com. Audience for it is anyone listening. It's a great little overview. It's also very nice, very concise and very small. So it's a good bathroom read if you want to read it in the bath. There's also good for people who are just entering Metaverse discussions too. I hope you get the sentiment from listening to me that I'm quite a chatty person who is very curious about everything, and that's really reflected in my book. So if anything that I've said is interesting, by all means, read it too. And also if you turn to a certain page, you'll see Kent as well. So big plus.
[00:53:19.639] Kent Bye: Yeah, I enjoyed reading through it and contrasting to my own method of keeping up to date of what's happening on Twitter. I don't write a newsletter. I do my podcast. And so it tends to be focused on who I'm having conversations with. So there's a lot of stuff in here that has happened that I've been aware of, but it's nice to see it all written out in terms of there's a Kierkegaard quote that I've been drawn to lately, where it says life can only be understood looking backwards, but has to be lived forwards. And I feel like part of the process of telling the story of the industry of this immersive XR industry, whatever the metaverse ends up being, is to look back into what's happened in the past and what's led up us to this point. And that will help to contextualize us moving into the future. And I feel like that's In part, what you've been able to do is take your own slice of your own experience of doing the Immersive Wire newsletter and your own experiences with these different companies and what you find compelling, not compelling within the industry and your slice of trying to tell the story of where things have been and where you think things might be going.
[00:54:18.271] Tom Ffiske: Yeah. And I'm thankful I was able to talk about these topics further. It's great seeing you and yeah, and I hope to continue exploring these topics more into the future as well. And. Yes, keep on with the ride and go from there.
[00:54:31.452] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much. Take care, everyone. So that was Tom Fiske. He's the editor of Immersive Wire Newsletter, and he just has a new book that came out this past week called The Metaverse, A Professional Guide. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, I think the book is good for people that are just getting into the XR industry, just to give a mapping of a lot of the different news that's happening over the last number of years. Also, just trying to get a sense of what's grounded and what's not grounded. I appreciate the skepticism that Tom brings into certain things like NFTs and cryptocurrencies. I think he's rightly challenging and questioning and remaining a little bit skeptical around. But overall, I think this book is focusing on the virtual and augmented reality applications. I mean, the metaverse has all other aspects when it comes to identity and avatar representations and certain aspects of the economy and the network infrastructure and architecture. It's essentially an extension of the Internet, adding another spatial layer to it and all layers of interoperability. It's not getting into the technical nuances of all those lower-level aspects of the stack. It's more higher up on the stack in terms of the actual experience of this spatial computing. He's trying to, the best he can, map out how he starts to make sense of the ecosystem. It's a good overview. I think there's a lot of stuff that I was aware of as I'm reading through, but it's always good to just do a recapping of some of the major news and different figures. I think it's also helpful that he's pulling different quotes from people from within the industry, because that always helps ground it and give some professional insights. Like he said, he's synthesizing all this stuff based upon all these different sources and email newsletters. I think those quotes help to provide additional context to a lot of these things. Also, as I read a book like this, I'm also contrasting it to how I cover the XR industry. It's very interesting because for me, I'm tracking what's happening on Twitter and sending out tweets, but also doing conversations. Lately, my conversations have been more focused around my direct embodied experiences rather than trying to absolutely comprehensively cover everything that's happening in the XR industry. At some point, it becomes so large that I have to start to focus in on certain aspects and segments. But in terms of these big companies and these big moves, This is a year that we might start to see some announcements when it comes to augmented reality glasses. Based upon what I've already seen from Augmented World Expo, I'm really curious to see what some of those use cases are going to be for those early use cases for some of these AR glasses, and if they're going to be paired up with a phone, with Apple. You know, something like Tilt 5, like I said, has something that is really fully immersed into an experience that feels like, okay, this is really starting to tap into the magic of what AR could potentially do when you're co-present with other people and playing a tabletop game. But a lot of the other different types of applications that I've seen, that hasn't been anything that's gotten me super excited to even want to buy some of these glasses to wear them around. There's going to be very specific use cases. And people who already bought things like Google Glass, of course, they're going to be super into whatever the next smart glasses or AR glasses are going to be. But for me, I guess my center of gravity still is within the VR realm. And so certainly tracking what's happening in AR. But he's got some useful reflections within the book as well. Different aspects of the pandemic and the impact of the pandemic and how that started to shift things. Certainly the art and immersive stories, he touches on that a little bit. That's been a big focus of what I've been excited about, as well, in terms of the medium. There's certainly other aspects of the enterprise and training. The medical aspects, I think, is going to be a key part of understanding the future of human-computer interaction. Not a lot that was mentioned here, but I do think things like the EMG control labs, these whole new paradigms of human-computer interfaces, are going to be a pretty significant part of the future of XR. When I start to think about the future of the metaverse, I also am thinking about those things. And yeah, I mean, there's also other aspects of when I think about the metaverse, I think about interoperability and WebXR and OpenXR and not a lot of details that are discussed in this book. And yeah, like I said, it jumps around to lots of different contexts and any specific chapter. It's kind of moving around to just try to paint a mosaic for all the different things that are happening within the XR industry. Yeah. So if you listen to the conversation, want to get a little bit more details, then certainly pick up the book and read yourself or pass along to someone who's also just trying to get ramped up into what's happening within the immersive industry. So, that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a list-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
