I interviewed Ian Hamilton, Editor at UploadVR.com, at Meta Connect 2024. Here’s the article about the twin sisters who play Walkabout Mini Golf VR together that Hamilton references. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the future of special computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing our coverage of MetaConnect 2024, today's episode is an epic conversation that I had with Ian Hamilton. He's an editor of UploadVR.com. So this was the end of day one. We were at Wave XR's party. They were basically showing some VR demos. They're going to be coming back into VR with a beta that's coming out on October 17th. And I asked Ian if he wanted to share some of his thoughts and reflections on all the different news that was happening there at MetConnect and also just reflect on the state of the XR industry. So we ended up having like a two hour conversation and, you know, dive into all sorts of different topics. There's a lot of excitement around AR and AR glasses and the different prototypes that were being shown. But at the same time, I think Ian and to a certain degree myself are still a bit more excited around what's happening with VR just because VR is here. It's proven there's so many different aspects. applications of virtual reality. From my perspective, I feel like there's going to be a whole spectrum of different contexts and use cases where I think like AR is going to be mostly used outside and the context for on the go, creating new interfaces for when you're out and about in the world. And when you're at home, you're likely going to be more willing to go into a fully immersed type of experience. Perhaps at some point in form factor of glasses, you'll be able to do both. But at this point, the technology stacks are so different that you're really choosing whether or not you're more a center of gravity of VR or more of center of gravity of AR. For me personally, I still haven't changed my name from the voices of VR podcast. I cover AR stuff and XR stuff, mixed reality, all the things, all the Rs, as it were. But I'm still mostly more interested in what's happening with virtual reality. And I think Ian is kind of in that same boat and is in some ways defending the honor of virtual reality in the context of this conversation. While at the same time, I try to push back when I can to say, well, it's still a spectrum and that there are going to be use cases for where AR goes in the future. There's also a number of different strands in this conversation around ethics and trying to report on emerging technologies and how do you start to understand the algorithmic influence for some of these technology companies for how they're shaping a future of our reality. When you go to these events, there's this reflection of all these different announcements that are being made, but yet, from my perspective, there's always these gaps between the rhetoric of what they're saying up on stage and some of their behaviors. And so what I try to do on the Voices of VR podcast is create an oral history context for people to share freely about some of their deepest thoughts and concerns around things that are either exciting them or bring them fear in what's happening within the context of the future of this industry. And I think in this conversation, we really kind of dig into both the potentialities of the promises, but also some of the perils as well for where XR is at and where it's going to be going here in the future. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Ian happened on Wednesday, September 25th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:14.286] Ian Hamilton: My name is Ian Hamilton. I'm an editor with UploadVR.com. I've been covering VR since before Oculus started its Kickstarter.
[00:03:23.853] Kent Bye: Maybe you could give it more context about your background and your journey into the space.
[00:03:28.460] Ian Hamilton: I was always interested in space. Star Trek was my childhood TV show in the holodeck. Transporters, going to strange new worlds was always my model in my mind of the future I wanted to see for everyone. They had Geordi LaForge, the blind man on the ship, as the engineer and can see better than everyone. And it made a lot of sense to me as the future we should all work for. And so when I saw the Rift DK2 and those guys outlined for me the wide field of view and the tracking and all of it being within arm's reach, I was going back to my editors saying, I need to write more. And they were all rolling their eyes at me for a little while. And the satisfaction I felt when... The satisfaction and the pit in my stomach was a very strange feeling to feel when 2014 rolled around and Facebook bought them because it's like... an instantaneous realization that the future you've imagined and went out on a limb for is actually going to happen and here we are a decade later on from that and I haven't been proven wrong yet.
[00:04:34.608] Kent Bye: Nice. So we're here at MetaConnect 2024, and I know we've crossed paths in the industry. You were covering VR before, even the Oculus Kickstarter, and I got into the whole scene in like 2014. So it's been a decade for me, but 12 years for yourself, even maybe longer, 12, 13 years. So we're here at MetaConnect. Love to hear some of your first thoughts of your vibe check for some of your experiences today and some of the announcements.
[00:04:58.530] Ian Hamilton: So I was talking to the PR people and it was funny to joke with them that the VR PR people, the VR public relations people at Meta are now the senior, mature part of the business now. That's the elder, most real part of their business. They're making millions of headsets. They're selling millions of headsets. They're making hundreds of millions of dollars for developers. I don't know who thinks it's not going to be a business anymore. It seems like it's mostly jaded people who have old information about this market. So three weeks ago my niece was in the US Open as a junior, Alanis Hamilton, great tennis player, and I took the Apple Vision Pro to the US Open and I kept it in my bag until just the right moment and I pulled it out and filmed one of her points in the US Open from the stands using my Vision Pro. And then I took my headset back and waited two days for them to finish their tournament. And then my brother came over and I showed him his daughter playing a point in the US Open. And it was instantaneous. Like, wow. You hear the wow instant out of their mouth. And this is someone I gave demos to for years. He had a PSVR 1 and they just didn't use it, right? They toyed with it sometimes, but I don't think it really had any attach, any reason to come back to it. And so here's me showing my brother, yeah, the future of media. And then he immediately goes into Apple Immersive Video. And the hysterical thing about it was he's like, you know what would be amazing? If Apple Immersive Video was at the Super Bowl and he's looking through my menu system and there's the Super Bowl video is the next one. And he clicks on it and he's just like, oh, my God, I went to the Super Bowl. And his eyes are opening to the possibility. And then tonight I get a message from him about the Orion glass. He's like, do you have any of these? And I'm like, thanks, bro. Thanks for going right to my heart. Because I didn't see the Orion glasses here.
[00:07:05.089] Kent Bye: It was a big pain for myself to not see it either. It feels like as journalists, you kind of want to see the new thing, and you, myself, and Ben Lang were not on the short list. It feels very frustrating. And when people ask me what my day was like, well, I was like, well, the one thing I wanted to see, I couldn't see it.
[00:07:21.694] Ian Hamilton: Yeah. I mean, that's ultimately it. So I did my best to try to get that demo. They had no spots in the lineup for me. You know, I don't think they want VR people to say that the field of view is smaller than... The field of view of the AR headset is smaller than... It's one thing to read the spec on paper, but it's another to have all your VR enthusiasts look at it and go, you know, VR is better. VR is so much better with that extra field of view. And so they didn't have a whole lot of that today. I don't know. I'm theorizing on... They had other people on that schedule, and I don't want to... I'll see it eventually. They mentioned they might bring it to New York, where I live, and so I hope to see it very soon. I saw Spectacles, the latest Spectacles, two weeks ago, and I think their field of view was around 45. It's like 46 degrees, yeah. And I'll repeat it on your podcast here, Kent, because I've repeated it to Meta, I've repeated it to Niantic, I've repeated it to Snapchat. I want everyone to know this. I believe there's a very, very big idea in the idea of having a virtual pet follow you around everywhere. If you think about it as an abstraction of all the personal information that you leave with your phone everywhere, your location, all that stuff, you could embed it in the creature as a representation of all that data. And you could surface all that data. So the Spectacles demo was Niantic's Peridot. And the Peridot was a small creature about the size of a Pikachu, and it stands over on the ground about six feet away from you, and it's fully there. It's not cut off. You look at it, you can move your head around, and it's still fully framed. I want my entire operating system in AR to pull out of that pet because I don't want floating windows next to people's heads telling me their age, gender. I don't want a Facebook profile floating around a person's head. What I want to see is the behavior that they've trained into another creature. When I'm walking around New York, walking around anywhere, I notice the puppies and the cats wherever I am. I walk in through Central Park with my Ray-Ban glasses and I film people walking a cat. That's wildly cool, right? Walking around New York and I see a person with four lizards on their back. What? And they're dressed like dragons. That's the coolest thing. I know so much about that person's personality just by looking at the four dragons he has on his back, right? There's so much expression you can do through a virtual pet. And it also abstracts, it separates all the discomfort we have with that idea, right? Like you could change out your pet at any time. It's like a fresh start, like an avatar change in VR. You can try out different pets. So the thing about the Snapchat demo that was so eyeopening was here's this limited field of view of less than 50 diagonally, and I'm still getting a piece of content that's perfectly framed inside the glasses. And when I look away from the pet, I get little dots that arc in such a way that I know where the pet is in my room without even looking at it. I basically get an arrow to where my pet is. And the pet is trained by the software to walk over to wherever I'm looking at any given moment after a few seconds. So you have, like, if you remember the, I think it was a Neko cat in Fantastic Contraption, that little cat that followed you around and passed gas as it was floating through the air at you. That was a wildly cool UI idea back in 2016 from the people who made Fantastic Contraption. And that idea needs to come back in AR. And the thing about it is I don't want anything else out of AR. You can't do immersive games without augmenting the environment, without taking a person to another place. So until you get over 90 or whatever the field of view is to really make a person feel like they're there, and even then you still got the periphery that is not going to be augmented whatsoever. So like, I'm not convinced that immersive gaming is ever going to be a thing in AR. I'm convinced that all-day companions will be. And so that's wild to think of just how different the platforms can be. Even though they're fundamentally the same technologies underneath, the games and apps and stuff that are going to work in the see-through AR glasses that have a limited field of view are going to be markedly different than the ones that you can go do in a VR headset. The VR ones are just going to get wider field of view, higher resolution. The pass-through is going to get better. And how does the AR stuff keep up with that? So it's like, yeah, the Snapchat Glasses, If you think about Ash Ketchum leaving his mom's home and going off on a journey through forests and woods and on strange boats, I did that journey in the 90s as a kid. And I fantasized about being that person, right? That kid that goes out on his pokey journey hunting things. And we don't live in that world, right? We live in a world where we're programmed to fear each other by the television. for good reason, right? But we are moving to a place of technology where there are cameras everywhere, there are trackers everywhere. How many air tags do you have on your person? We're moving into an area where being on track and being truly private, the meaning of that is changing. And it's wild to think that as much as we are scared of losing that privacy, there's also a sense of safety that comes with it. So like cameras everywhere is where we're going. What do we lose by having that? It's happening It's weird to have been on this journey with you, Kent, knowing this was coming the entire time. And it's here, there's cameras everywhere, and we don't see the ways that they're affecting us. We can't tell what choices are being taken away from us by the decisions that are being made on a server outside of our view. And at the same time, it's magic, right? We're doing magic all the time. Our lives are getting better in many ways, even though we're missing things that we had a few years ago. It's hard. It's hard to be on this journey of just incessant cameras and the cameras changing. If you see the camera, you never forget it's there. Your behavior changes in a very subtle way when you know you're being recorded. And we're all being recorded in very subtle ways. And we're all being told that it's not as serious as it is. that the detail that they're getting out of us isn't as detailed as it is. And it's like, so we do this show, so we do two shows a week now at Upload VR. I do a games cast, we do a VR download. And I go in front of these people on a weekly basis and I try to balance my excitement for my fear. And it's jarring for me, it's jarring for my audience to go on this journey with me of like, Maybe Ash Ketchum could actually go on his pokey journey in about five years and not be scared of getting kidnapped. Maybe Ash Ketchum could go on his journey and not be, you know, he's got his safety, he's got his pokey decks, he's got his cell phone, he's got his tracker. All those things, and he's got his Pikachu, right? Like, we're not too far away from that future being real in some places, of that level of safety being possible. Like, there's gated communities where kids roam free like they used to in the 50s. Or like they used to say that they did in the 50s. I don't know if they actually did, right? And, yeah, so... I'm so excited for the future of this technology and the things it will bring people. At the same time, I'm trying to put labels and ideas and concepts in people's minds that help them realize all the bad things are coming with the good things. VRChat is not a safe place for children. Rec Room is not a safe place for children. You go on there with voice chat, you're not safe as a child. And I'm saying that as a journalist who doesn't say that in a lot of places. Like, I haven't said that. I have to be balanced and objective. But like, we took the playgrounds away from children And then we gave them digital playgrounds with adults role-playing as children. And that's not okay. And how do I balance that with the excitement for the new game that's coming out, right? Drones are killing people from head-mounted displays in certain parts of the world right now. That's upsetting. To know that the same fundamental technology that is bringing all this joy to so many people is also killing people. And you can argue that FPV Viewer is not a VR headset, but I mean, I saw a lot of people driving drones in their quests over the last three weeks as soon as they added HDMI Link in. It's the same technology, it just took meta-unlocking the keys. And they held onto those keys for a really long time. You know, like, I'm the only one saying this. Kent, how many people do you talk to who haven't said this to you about the similarity between FPV viewers and VR headsets?
[00:17:27.496] Kent Bye: I think you might have been the first that I've heard brought up that specific comparison, yeah.
[00:17:32.418] Ian Hamilton: I mean, you've got a portable head-mounted display that can show you a giant screen with a lot of detail and a lot of resolution, and you don't have to truck around a big LCD screen. That is a very useful tool for a lot of scenarios. And one of them is being on a plane and not having to pull out your laptop. You can have a giant screen floating above the seats in front of you, just like Apple put in its advertisement. Another one is to pilot a drone and have it detonate on impact. I mean, that's just one avenue for these headsets to be used. Yeah. I think of the future all the time, and I don't want to have left them worse off than the world I was left with. And I'm sure that's true of everyone at these conferences. I'm sure that's true of everyone in the executive branch at Meta. I'm sure it's true of everyone in the executive suite at Apple. But the bad always comes with the good, and we knew that going in. but I need to have mainstream media look at this with a real level head and say, look at Meta and don't let them stomp on you with the fact that they understand technology better than you. I'm sick of it. I'm sick of it. Stop letting Meta trounce you and convince you of the way society should function because you don't understand how technology works. Don't let your kids go on the internet without explaining to them how the internet works. It's the same idea, right? The lack of education out there and the lack of understanding of just how dramatic the shift is, how big it is, it's lagging reality in a really fundamental, scary way. And I'm not going to debate terminology here over AR, VR, XR, which type of display is going to win long term. I'm trying to reframe this a little bit in terms that people actually understand. It doesn't matter what type of display. It's a head-mounted display that's more portable than a TV, more portable than a laptop, more portable than any other device you've got, and the screen is bigger than any other device you've got. There's serious advantages to that in every place. And like... Yeah, how many podcast episodes do you have, Kent?
[00:20:07.201] Kent Bye: That I've published is 1,467 at this point, but I've got another 1,000 that I haven't even published.
[00:20:12.648] Ian Hamilton: So 2,000 podcasts, and I'm drawing that line between VR headsets and FPV viewers. I'm trying to get you to see they're the same technology, and they're doing the same things. And they're tools, just like any other tool, right? They're gonna be used by bad people, they're gonna be used by good people. But I need people to stop, to stop like, Stop using branding to talk about what's actually happening here. Children are playing in digital playgrounds because the real playgrounds were shut down and abandoned. And they're playing with people they don't know in platforms that don't have the resources to protect them. And these headsets are the most private viewers you could ever have. You can watch, like, it's such a relief. So I gave you the scary stuff, right? But on my way to this conference, I spent eight hours on a bus working the way I've always wanted to work. I pulled up three windows around me. I pulled up a vertical browser window where I had a story that I wrote 1,600 words on. And the vertical window was like a giant vertical widescreen display right in front of me. And it was fantastic. It was wonderful. He's in the Quest 3, right? It was a Quest 3, and... I pulled up my iTunes playlist on my phone because I had my phone in VR with me for the first time in a really long time and I got the vibes I want from the playlist. Then I tuned out the real world so I'm not distracted by anything out there. And I thought about what I wanted to think about, right? I wanted to think about what is this? What is the advantage of this? And, gosh, I mean, think about the children that have grown up in an era where iPhones had to notify you what's happening in 60 different apps. Like, what does that do to a brain to have to track what's happening in 60 different apps, to have... friends in one app and friends in a different app and flip back and forth between them and get notifications 24-7 about them. Here is a device that lets me tune out all of that. I can start fresh in a universe of one. A universe for one. And that's beautiful. It's fantastic. Anytime that the world gets too much, gets too scary, there is a place I can go to to be alone with my thoughts. And I stop the notifications. I stop the people from walking into the room and distracting me. That's portable focus. It's consumerized vibes. That's magic. And it's powerful and it's beautiful and nobody has experienced it because the platforms wouldn't let them until Meta got its shit together this year and got up on that stage and said, we're sorry for the shifting platform that you've been working on. Now it's solid. Now you're ready. I mean, talk to the mixed reality devs out there and see how ready Meta's platform feels. Kent, so 2000 podcasts, and I'm one of the first people to draw this comparison between FPV viewers and VR headsets. Should I have done it earlier, Kent? What do I need to do? How do I reach more people with the message that you were wrong about VR, it's happening, and it's not going away, and you need to buckle up and prepare your family for the change that's happening? educate them, learn what it's about, cast the headset view so your kid isn't going into headset alone, you know, play with them. Mini golf, golf, fishing, those are all activities you can do as a family in VR and they're magic. You don't have to go spend an hour with the fishing tackle, you don't have to drive an hour to the mini golf course, and you don't have to, any of you, have to interact with strangers. You can do it entirely privately and you can have wonderful moments in VR. And that's the message I need to get across to the people out there, right? Those public lobbies that everyone is getting pushed into. Maybe someone will figure out how to set those up as safety and stop the screaming and make that a really great experience all around. But until then, turn on the casting, go in there with your family, stay private. And there's a lot of people doing that. They don't make buzz on the internet. They aren't leaving the comments. They aren't the people who are playing the shooters who are leaving the comments and being trolls with their hatred for whatever change has happened to a game. There's a quiet majority out there of people who are just enjoying their VR headsets privately with their families. and i want more of those people there's going to be more of those people in very very soon and we all need to help them understand like we need to make those people understand you're doing great keep it up let's build more tools for them let's build more apps for them and we're going to see like i've already seen it there's already such magic happening There's already these magical moments happening in families. I talked to two twin sisters this year. Did you read that story, Kent? I'm trying to remember. What was it about? Two twin sisters who play walkabout together.
[00:25:43.116] Kent Bye: No, I haven't, no.
[00:25:44.156] Ian Hamilton: So these are two twin sisters. They're in their 50s, I think. Tonda and Rhonda. And the head of PR for Walkabout Mini Golf put me in contact with these twins. And I contacted them and one of the sisters lost her husband of 20 plus years of a really long relationship. And she was devastated and depressed and her family put a headset on her head. And she went through things like table tennis, and then she found Walkabout Mini Golf, and she bought four or five headsets for her family or something like that. A whole squad of Quest IIs out there. And Tonda and Rhonda, these two twins, go and play every Walkabout mini golf course together. They go and just explore. They look around. Then they play 18 holes. Then they go and search for the hidden balls. Then they go to the hard course, and they play that one through. Then they go in the treasure hunt, where you go and follow all the clues to a treasure, which is an unlockable item in the game. You get a club and add it to your collection. Here's to 50-something people who are embarrassed to call themselves gamers. Like, I'm trying to use the word gamer on them, and they're like, what? That's funny. We're not gamers. And, like, you are gamers. that's the beauty of it right like here's this label that has a negative connotation for a lot of people and it doesn't have to be and it isn't when you use it that way and here's these people that have gone through every course and listening i've called it a safe space today because the twins called it a safe space one of those twins she lost her husband and then she found moments of solace with family inside virtual reality. And they're a time zone apart from each other. They're both working jobs. One works at a hospital. One works at a school. And yet, they both bought the long USB-C cords that we only associate with hardcore VR users so that they ensure that they never run out of power, right? This is the quiet majority. They are out there. They are not the people playing shooters. Like, they are... Quiet, going and exploring every course, downloading, paying for every DLC course, and having the most delightful time that is safe. No one bugs them. And that's why I keep doing what I'm doing despite the negativity because I want to let more people know there's magic here. If you go dig for it... I talked about a lot here. This is stressful.
[00:28:26.021] Kent Bye: Well, there's a lot of threads for sure. One thing that I wanted to share just from my own journey of looking at these different ethical and moral dilemmas. So I started the podcast May 19th, 2014. I went to the SVVR expo and conference, and I did 46 interviews within those two days and the kickstart of the Voices of VR. And then after like five years of doing hundreds of interviews, I just kept hearing like the promises and parallels of XR, of a whole spectrum of the landscape of different things that people were bringing up. Privacy's been a big one for me for a long, long time. So in 2019, I did a series of different panel discussions and talks that led up to a talk that I gave at the Greenlight Strategy Conference. It was a talk on the XR ethics manifesto that I did. It was basically trying to aggregate the whole landscape of all these dilemmas. And then from there, that catalyzed the IEEE to then start the IEEE Global Initiative on the Ethics of Extended Reality, which was like a two and a half year program that I was a part of during the pandemic where we were writing 14 different white papers, basically trying to map out these ethical and moral dilemmas for each of these different industry verticals. And then I went to beginning of 2023, Brenton Heller had an existing law and extended reality conference at the Cyber Policy Center at Stanford. And at that conference, it was sort of like, well, what kind of new laws do we need to really impact what's happening in XR? And I think at this point, and I still think this is true, that privacy is probably the biggest thing that we need, laws passed around. But then some of these other ethical moral dilemmas, there's like Lawrence Lessig has a framework where he says like, well, some of them are going to be handled by cultural, like what the community is able to do. Some are going to be handled by the economics of like market competition. Some laws are going to be needed in order to handle some of these things. And then there's the technological architecture in the code. So how can you actually design software and systems to actually like handle some of these different issues? Then it culminated with a talk that I gave at South by Southwest, which was of all the different people I talked to, thousands of people now, all the different promises that we can see, the hopes and dreams of aspirations for this is going. But also on the other side, there's all the perils for where this could go in the future and go down a really dark path. And in that talk at South by Southwest, I tried to map out all the different promises and perils. So when I hear you talk about some of these things, I feel like, OK, do we need new laws? And then I'm kind of left with at this point, like, OK, I've mapped that out. Like privacy needs to be handled by having new privacy laws. The EU has been like ahead of the game with GDPR and the US is like 5, 10, 15, 20 or 30 years behind what's happening in the EU. At least with the EU, they have the AI Act and they have different tiers of harm so that if there was decisions made by AI that was going to bring harm, they'd say, this is illegal. We're going to eliminate that. So I feel like something like the AI Act with this hierarchy of harm that is trying to create these classes of experiences that should be regulated by the EU, that the EU is actually driving some of these things. So at least when I hear these different types of new things that I hadn't heard before, I start to look at it through this lens and I feel like, okay, do we need new laws? And honestly, there's been a part of me that feels like I've been shouting in the void for a long time around all these issues and that I realized by spending two and a half years in the pandemic of working on the IEEE Global Initiative on Ethics of Extended Reality meeting every month, facilitating this process that my skill is actually an oral history where I talk to people and it's not around creating the policies or trying to aggregate support for some of these things so I kind of took a step back from some of the ethical stuff and now I spent a lot of my time talking to artists and creators and makers and journalists like yourself to surface things and then these types of things come up honestly it feels like a moving train that is not going to stop. Like, we do need to have new privacy laws, but there's the calling bridge dilemma, which is essentially like, you don't want to regulate too early, you stop innovation. If you regulate too late, then the genie's out of the bottle. So there's actually a very small window for when you can regulate, for it's not too early. And it's not too late. It's basically the Goldilocks zone that because all the companies are moving fast and breaking things, then that window of opportunity for legislation is actually like very small. And so because of that, and because of all the current political situation, I've become resigned to just like I don't know. I wouldn't say given up, but it hasn't been the major focus of my coverage and what I'm focusing on because I feel like I can just talk to the artists and the creators and the makers and hear their dreams and aspirations. But these other aspects, I've sort of done a lot of that work and it's out there, it's published, but it didn't necessarily get much traction or movement or it didn't seem like it was shifting anything. So I was just like, okay, well, I'm going to keep doing this other thing, which is just talking to people to document stuff as it goes along. And as people like yourself bring stuff up, we put it on the public record. But yeah, I don't know. That's kind of where I'm at with everything.
[00:33:19.736] Ian Hamilton: Yeah. So I think about the term activist journalist a lot. What does that mean? What is an activist journalist? I got to try to be as objective as possible as many times as I can. I'm still human and I still live in the United States of America so that I've got viewpoints that are embedded into those things. And I try to step outside of them. And we've got a global team that tries to step outside of those viewpoints as often as possible to see from other perspectives. And, you know, most news that you see out there is about the past and VR is about the future. And that's not a normal type of journal. Those aren't normal articles to write. That's not the same type of journalism as the rest of it. And what it means is you've got enormous amounts of power in a place like Meta to, they would use the term educate. Another term would be indoctrinate. Press, journalists, educators, children, they have immense power to teach. But isn't it always going to be framed as they need to be teaching us? Isn't it always going to be framed as they are the teachers and the arbiters of the way things go? And I don't talk to a lot of politicians because I imagine they're even worse than the politicians that work at these companies, right? They're not going to play fair in how they talk about this technology and be as balanced as we need to because of the lack of education out there, right? How many parents just, I mean, think about it. Like, I don't want to guilt the parents who are working two jobs and spent every last dollar to get their kids a $200 VR headset on sale. Then they went to work and their kid went into VR chat or rec room and became an a-hole because they're screaming at other kids. Or maybe they got hurt because they went on there. I feel for the parent a little bit in that scenario because that is our society, overworked and pulled away from watching your children. We don't have a society that's structured in a way that lets parents spend time with their children in fun ways. Both school, impart knowledge and have fun time with them. The parents are supposed to work, the kids are supposed to play and go to school and learn. And also we're taking away their playgrounds during pandemics. And we're telling them that it's unsafe to go talk to other children. They could get COVID and die if they go and play with another child. It's such a tragic, different time in people's lives. To try to give kids a full, rich life that is full of more things than we had when we were kids and doesn't have any of the downsides. We're all trying our best together, but I get this increasing feeling that the lack of education over how technology works. If you're a parent with a VR headset in the home, you need to know how to use it. You should know how to use it. And it's not just a kid's toy. It isn't just for children. It's for adults too. And you don't repeat the mistakes of the cell phone with VR headset. You're embodied when you're in there. Everything is more personal. And so if you thought it was dangerous to let your kid on the Internet, now you're going to let your kid on the Internet and be embodied? like how do i frame this enough times to enough places like i'm not going to go legislate i'm not going to go talk to the politicians because education is the solution in my mind like we need to have town halls where all the parents come in and learn how the vr headset functions learn how to cast the view that's needed way way way more than we're getting it right now and then i need people to just Shut up about the idea that VR is not a thing. It's a thing. It's here. It has major benefits over traditional screens. And if you just get over yourself, like going back to my like most news is about the past. We're writing about the future. Everyone has a theory about the future. Everyone has an idea of how it should go. But, I mean, you don't have the billions of dollars to make it happen. You haven't been paying attention to what Mark Zuckerberg has been telling you. You haven't been paying attention to what Michael Abrash has been telling you, that the future is headsets and glasses. Maybe you should start listening to these people and what they're telling you, as well as recognizing how it benefits them individually, right? I'll freely admit, I remember this interaction with a young journalist when I was at the Orange County Register and she wanted to know, like, what does she need to do to, like, succeed? How does she get to where I am? And I'm like, I don't know. And the only thing I heard back when I was in college was specialize in something. Here came VR, and everything clicked into my head. I went and talked to Stanford, I talked to USC, and they're like, yeah, I think they got it. And I'm like, all right, let's see. And for 10 years, they were right. For more than 10 years, they were right. And here we still have, like, your listeners are so invested in this debate over, is it AR glasses or VR glasses? Like, what's the terminology we use? Stop! It's over. VR won. It's here. It's here. Or XR. No. No, Kent. VR is here. VR headsets are fantastic. They're wide field of view. And we will have the AR headsets soon. Next five to ten years, they'll get the wide field of view. They'll get battery worked out. Mark Zuckerberg just showed his North Star up there on stage. And like, I appreciate your effort to brand it as XR, but... That doesn't help my brother understand that they're going to sell tens of tens of millions of VR headsets. VR headsets. Headsets that block out the world and when they run out of power, blindfold you.
[00:39:49.511] Kent Bye: I just want to jump in just because I feel like I was just at the Snap Summit and the Lens Fest, and so I had a chance to see the As Devlin experience, which is basically like 12 people in a similar shared experience, which was difficult to show to people like yourself in New York City. I don't even know if they had that available, but essentially it was 12 people in the same shared reality experience in AR glasses. And I feel like One of the things that Snap did in their keynote was basically shit all over VR and say, you know, a lot of false myths of saying that VR is isolating. And so my pushback speaking to people at Snap was like, look, this is a spectrum of virtual reality and augmented reality that actually there's more in common than different. And the Qualcomm chips that Snap is using wouldn't exist without VR. So I feel like there are going to be different use cases, a different context where it is a spectrum. To have this debate where VR is going to be the ultimate winner, the final, you know, I don't necessarily believe that. I feel like there's, for different people, they're going to have predisposition for having one over the other. And there's going to be different use cases and different contexts where it makes more sense.
[00:40:55.895] Ian Hamilton: How many of your hours do you spend indoors versus outdoors?
[00:40:59.540] Kent Bye: Well, for me, I'm a hermit, so I never go outside. I take walks, but it's mostly indoors. But for some people that I talk to, they want to create outdoor specific experiences for spectacles, for Niantic and, you know.
[00:41:12.355] Ian Hamilton: Yeah, I mean, that's my question. How many hours a day do you spend in your house indoors versus how many hours a day do you spend outside in sunlight? Sunglasses are sunglasses for a reason. They block out the sun because it bothers you. You take those off when you go indoors and you put on your VR headset and you have a million screens. That's the math I keep coming back to. The weather's getting worse. The drones are coming out in numbers. You know, there's plenty of places in the world where you need to be indoors for a variety of reasons. COVID made us all spend a lot of time indoors. How much did COVID alone change the percentage of hours that the average human spends indoors on an average day, that single event? That's the math in my head, right? I can't go check the Census Bureau or, you know, there's no store of data I can go and say. This is the average number of hours. You know, a person spends 16 hours awake. The average is, what, 12 hours indoors, four hours outdoors. Let's say it's that. That's just picking it out of a brain and guessing. There's no definitive source on that. I can't go find out who has that info. But that's the way we need to think about the 21st century. In what countries do most people spend most of their time outdoors? Is that where AR is going to be big and it's going to be expensive?
[00:42:35.594] Kent Bye: Well, just a data point that Anshul Sog said that there was an article in the Wall Street Journal that was quoting IDC saying that there had been around 700,000 Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses that have sold so far. And so you look at it as a device that is not VR. It's, if anything, arguably more of a wearable that has like AI and some first person point of view type of things that feel like a little bit more on the path towards AR. But that's a device that tends to actually have some momentum that is replacing earbuds. It's actually more comfortable to listen to audio. It's got hands-free ability to take photos. And most people that use them are out in the world when they're using it rather than in their home. So I feel like there are use cases and context for when AR is going to be more world scale and more out in the world. And that's something like the Ray-Ban made of smart glasses seems to be something that has some market momentum where people that are not in the XR industry or even know what the difference between VR and AR is, is something that people seem like they're actually getting some utility out of it.
[00:43:39.068] Ian Hamilton: So you talked about the Snapchat comments on sort of the isolating stuff. And I mean, of course, the company is going to say that that doesn't have any VR department at all. You know, Michael Abrash is the head researcher at Meta. And I went face to face with him a couple of years ago. And I have a little video on UploadVR.com where I cornered him and said, Some people get confused about AR glasses and VR headsets. Are we going to have both in the future? And he's like, thanks for asking that question. Yes, we're going to have both. And he has a nice little nuanced explanation on that video of how we'll have both. But you got to extrapolate from we'll have both into what that really means. Because like that thing I'm talking about, about everyone having that theory about the future, right? We're all humans and we've all had to deal with the last 30 years of technology upending our lives. And it's left us in this state that we've all got like we're all a little jaded. We all hate the technology a little bit, even though we love it. But it all makes us think we've got the right idea about the future. And Abrash saying headsets and glasses is a bold statement from Meta about what they need to be the future of personal computing in order for them to compete with Apple. So he went and looked at the future. He went and analyzed all of the data of what's usable and social acceptance. And yes, there's use cases for AR glasses. But the thing I have to always wonder is, are we still going to see more VR headsets? Like it seems so absurd, but as work starts to change, if we can get over this work from home hump, this ridiculous thing that executives are doing where they're like telling people to go back to their office. If we can get to this situation where some forward looking executives look at their team, they pick out the 10 best performers on the team. who are saying that, I'm not coming back. You can't make me. I moved to Florida. I set up my house in Florida, and I'm not coming back to Texas, as an example, right? And they tell their bosses that, and the boss has to go, wow, that guy brought in $10 million for us last year. We can't let him go. All right, how about you spend... 10 hours a week in office hours in a VR headset. That's all you got to do. You got to show up to the office and the office is in VR for 10 hours per week. Would you do it? I think a fair number of people who are in this dilemma of work from home would take that deal, right? 10 hours a week in VR. And then when you do those 10 hours, all your coworkers can come find you face to face in VR. And the thing about the socially isolating bullshit that's out there, right, it isn't, right? So last week I had a source come and meet me and walk about mini golf in my office and I had my window floating up my story, my article I was writing up in front of me. I have my keyboard out in front of me and the source is in front of me exactly like you're in front of me right now, Kent. and the source gave me quotes that I typed directly into the browser window. You're meeting in VR? I'm meeting them in VR, and I'm asking them questions about his game, and he's saying things to me, and I'm typing them in as a journalist. And it was one-to-one, this interaction you and I are having. I couldn't see the facial expressions on his face. I couldn't see his full body movements. But he felt as on point. When you come talk to a journalist, you kind of got to be on point, right? You can't be talking shit. You can't be making stuff up on the fly. And so he's treating me like a journalist face-to-face. It's a very obvious way of talking to me. And I'm not explaining it right. Even in the low-poly world of Walkabout Mini Golf, even with the full lack of body tracking... I got everything out of that interaction that I would have gotten if I had gone to his city and knocked on his door and asked him the same questions. And that's really hard to convey that he would not have given me those answers. He would not have spoken to me that directly if he didn't feel the same sort of like intimidation of talking to a journalist that comes with coming to meet me face-to-face. You could have sent me a text message, you could have sent me an email, could have sent me a press release. All those things, pre-prepared comments, it's not the same as a face-to-face, off-the-cuff interaction. And the quotes I put in that article you go and see them getting retweeted and discussed. You see what he said to me striking a chord in the industry because what the dude said to me wasn't rehearsed. It was as real as this is to you and me, right? I didn't rehearse any of this. I'm going to go back and listen to it later and be like, God, I sound like an idiot because we go on tangents. We have weird ideas. We make mistakes. And none of that happens in the pre-written internet, right? Like the internet where you let the AI draft it for you first, right? And that's the internet a lot of these people are trying to push us to, like, oh, go prepare with an AI before you actually go meet someone face-to-face. Okay, but why do you need that social training in the first place, right? Like why didn't you socially, yeah, I, um... I don't know. I think I told you before, I want my children to have a lot of choices, a lot of freedom. My kid, my oldest kid wants to be involved in movies and Hollywood. And I talk to them all the time about AI. And as a teenager, she's scared of it. She looks at the artists out there and admires them and their work and wonders whether the AI is going to replace them. And at the same time, we see every company out there making deals with AI companies to just march it along, make it a tool, because it allows them to do it cheaper, faster, and more. And we all know that on the other side of that, there's a new structure of a team. that consists of maybe fewer people, maybe more people. I don't know yet. But they're all going to be using some level of AI tools just to produce a different type of movie. And I don't know. I want to make sure people feel as excited about this technology as I do while not losing them on the scary stuff. I lose them all on the scary stuff. They turn off their brains. They don't want to hear about the misuse. Is that part of why they let their kids go play Fortnite and not play with them? Like, you want to go watch TV and hear about the bad news on TV rather than go just get lost in a game? Like, that's beautiful, getting lost in a game. That's a wonderful form of escapism, but like... We got to come back and find the common ground. The teenagers connecting online are the same as the adults connecting online, that we're all being molded by this technology in real time. And we have to have real conversations about like proper use, safety, I put the game pads in people's hands and have them throw them away because they don't know how to use controllers. And like, okay, you can go shut off and be your hermit in your house all alone and shut your internet off. Good for you. But that's not how we're all going to live this century. We all have to work together to find some common ground here. I often think about China and what's the platform to connect the people in that country to the people outside of that country. We see a lot of VR companies finding ways to put their games inside of China, but they have to wall off that community from the rest of the world. They have to give that community to the government of China as a firewall from the rest of us. But I just watched on stage as Mark Zuckerberg promised live translation from one language to another so that we can connect. The Andrew Bosworth screed of why Facebook is so good back in the day, he did that blog post that explained, we connect people. Okay, but how do you reach China? How do you reach outside of authoritarian regimes or a regime that doesn't let people speak openly about any subject? How do you connect those people to the outside world? I don't hear you talking about that much, Mr. Zuckerberg. And I want to talk about that. It always falls flat when I think about those. It's always... We want to be as free as the law allows us to do. And that's a double-sided coin where it's like morality and what the law does are not always the same and they're very frequently in very separate places. And like, you can't get your stuff manufactured in China and also offer the Chinese people an open platform on which to share all of their thoughts and ideas, apparently. Like, it's not the same group allowing that. That's the one I think of. Earlier this year, I set up a SteamVR home while I was doing all my experiments with all the different platforms, and I left my SteamVR home open overnight, and it felt so delightful to go back to that home from 2016 that was still there. I had a Russian pop into the room and I had some American pop into the room and the Russian is doodling in space and drawing beautiful little creatures. And he did a little frowny face and he's like, I don't speak English. And he still drew something for the other people in the room. We still had a magical little interaction. Those moments are the moments that breathe life into me. And like you really legitimately are connecting people across borders. in ways that you're letting those people see lives that they could not see otherwise. And I want to know what it's like to live inside China. I don't necessarily want to go live there, but I do want to know what it's like for the people that are living there to get by. And VR is one way to reach them. And which platform is going to allow it? I don't see it. I don't see any of them allowing it. And so like, are any of them really good? Like when you rip it apart like this way, like you start seeing the business, you start seeing why they're doing it, like they're doing it to make money. Obviously, right? But they pretend it's about all these other things. And I'm tired of that. I'm tired of that misleading story. Like, going back to my, like... I needed to find a specialization for me as a journalist that would survive the round after round of layoffs that was coming for newspapers and give me a base to start on from which to get a crew of people together and say like, okay, let's, I mean, that's what I'm doing day in and day out where I'm trying to like push back at all these forces. SEO, search engine optimization, is a force that shapes humanity. It's shaping humanity. What the fuck? Why is humanity being shaped by the keywords we need to put in a headline? Why did we allow that to happen? Why did we let tens of thousands of jobs go bye-bye or get made based on that, right? It's cheaper, faster, quicker, right? And everyone wants to go like it's always been. You can feel it in the level of knowledge out there amongst people that like, It's the dumbing down is extraordinary. So I've got this team, I've got people in London, people elsewhere, and it's magical on a day in day out basis to see their views, to hear how the laws are different, where they're from, to hear the difference in terminology. And as soon as I can hire someone in China who I trust, I will hire someone in China who I trust to give me that view from inside that place. As soon as I can get inside Russia and hire that correspondent who can tell me what it's like in Russia and not be influenced by the government, I will hire that person. But I don't have that budget. The SEO gods aren't allowing that. And yet I have this team that I tell, follow your heart, follow the facts, and see where they lead you. Write from the passionate place in your heart and it will come across to readers. Like that's true of all of your listeners in any region business, right? Like it's true of any art and journalism can be an art if done right. We write about the future and there are the most powerful forces in our lives competing to shape that future. And I'm not an activist. I'm an observer and a seeker of truth. And the truth that I keep finding is people want to make money off of human behavior. And it's going to bite us in the ass in various ways that we don't see until after it hurts. I remember talking to Mark Bolas at USC a long, long time ago, and he really framed a lot of this for me, that society self-corrects. You know, whatever the downsides are, we'll fix them. We'll get there. And like, yes, okay. But we could see some of this stuff coming. And yet we still let the business models, like I go and talk to Meta and why did you lower it from 13 to 10? The age limit for getting people into headsets. They don't really have a good answer. They don't really explain it well. I think the real answer is it's because that's who the parents are buying the headsets for. That's who's using the headsets most often. And so they had to, right? And that's from their perspective because it fits with the type of product that they're building, the type of social connections they're hoping to forge over the next decade. I don't know. It's... We have to find ways to reach the parents out there with more than fear, you know, like real tangible reasons why they need to go do this. Go download Rear VR Fishing. Go download Walkabout Minigolf. Download a game like Dimensional Double Shift, which requires a room code, just like the others, to go and share a private room with someone you know. Get two headsets for your family, not just one. Cast from the headset so you can see what the person's doing. Involve yourself in their life, and it doesn't have to be a solitary experience. Try Akron, Attack of the Squirrel, where you can play the game on a mobile phone with the person in VR headset. I don't think that one's going to stick with you, but games like Walkabout Mini Golf will stick with you. They will offer places for you to come back to. And when you go and spend those times fishing or golfing, you start going full circle to that, yeah, that was the way people spent their free time in the 20th century, wasn't it? And it doesn't have to go away. We can still go do the physical fishing. I mean, Pencil. Go download Pencil. Gosh. You can teach your kid how to draw. You can go learn to draw. If you've spent your entire life as not an artist, you can go download pencil on a Quest 3 right now, turn your controller into a paperweight by putting it on the piece of paper, and then grab your number two pencil and sketch out a real piece of art on that piece of paper. and you'll take the headset off and look at this thing that came out on this piece of paper and go did that come from virtual reality is this real because like it breaks your brain to realize that i just produced this and i spent my whole life thinking i wasn't an artist Uh-oh. Oh. Oh, did I just convince you that VR headsets are legit? Did I just convince you that anything that you want to learn to do in the real world, you can do more quickly by learning to do it in a VR headset? Uh-oh. Maybe your preconceptions were wrong. Did I preach too much? Am I an activist journalist? Did I lose my journalist badge over this conversation? Kent?
[01:00:43.928] Kent Bye: As I have been listening to all the different things you're bringing up, it reminds me of coming to these events at Meta and having Meta get on stage and give their vision of the future. There's things that I get excited about, and then there's things that hit me in the gut, like, ooh, that sounds scary, just how much... All in, Meta's gone into AI, creating AI chatbots and generative art that feels like any other company that has created AI stuff. And like, what's it mean to have Meta say that it's an open platform, but yet at the same time rename all the apps to be Meta Horizon to then like put their own Meta Horizon worlds on top. What's that mean for the third party developers? So there's there's a lot of rhetoric that, yes, I can get behind all the open source, all the like openness and connection, all the things that they're saying. But yet I feel like there's always this gap in the behaviors and what they're actually doing that gives me this unease and I feel like my process for dealing with that is having conversations like this with people like yourself, with other people in the industry and like you yourself are a parent and so all the things that you're paying attention to with being a parent and all those considerations but also all the shade that Snap was throwing at VR and you're kind of like defending the honor of VR but also in some ways potentially falling in that same type of polarity thinking that we have so much in our world today and trying to find the nuance of the paradox of holding the two truths of how they could both be true. As Carl Jung has phrased, holding the tension the opposite until the reconciling third comes forth. So for me, I'm in a place of openness in terms of like, I still call myself the voices of VR. I still have not called myself voices of XR, voices of AR. For me, VR is way more interesting, and I agree with a lot of those points. But also, I feel like AR is going to be a whole other thing that's going to be other people's thing. That's going to be their sweet spot. I met a lot of them at... the Snap Summit, people who are developing AR lenses. AR lenses are more about self-expression and people who are doing outdoor stuff that's more aspirational. It's like all these dreams. I feel like the Snap Spectacles is like this DK1 moment for AR that is... Magic Leap went for that too.
[01:02:55.754] Ian Hamilton: Magic Leap did a LeapCon in 2018 where that was the vibe they were going for and that failed in the most spectacular fashion.
[01:03:02.798] Kent Bye: Did Magic Leap have 300 million daily active users of AR? that's that's fair um but then so they have an ecosystem they have a social network app so they have 850 million users and also they have ai that's legit they have a developer because they have some of the most passionate creators that i've met in the entire industry so i feel like it's a different context you can't just look at what magic leap did and port their strategy because magic leap was their own beast of all the decisions they made but i feel like there's a dialectic between to what point is it dreams and aspirations and maybe a little bit of delusion versus what is actual and like to what degree is it going to actually take root. So I feel like what's possible and what's actual is like this key dialectic that we're dealing with, not only with Snapchat, but for many different aspects of the industry.
[01:03:50.343] Ian Hamilton: Magic Leap's owned by Saudi Arabia. What use does Saudi Arabia have for AR?
[01:03:55.708] Kent Bye: I mean, they were just trying to invest and have the numbers go up. I mean, I think that's, you know, it could be as simple as that. They want to take all the extra money they have and invest it in emerging technologies, but whatever Magic Leap is doing, they're not even making HMDs anymore, so I don't even know what they're doing, but, you know, they're going to find some way to get value out of their IP, but I don't see them as a serious player when it comes to, like, what's going to happen with, I mean, maybe their IP will end up in a place that ends up having an impact. But as of right now, it feels like with a snap, with their dev kit, at least is the most viable thing that developers can get their hands on and actually start to actively prototype and build the future of what AR could be. And so for whatever Magic Leap is doing, I feel like they're kind of out of the picture in a lot of ways.
[01:04:36.114] Ian Hamilton: So we debate this internally, and I'm going to go, I'll try not to make this about terminology, but virtual reality is a place. It's a place to go to. And you don't do that in AR glasses, and you never will.
[01:04:51.302] Kent Bye: There's always a, so from my framework, there's environmental presence, what Mel Slater calls the place illusion, that makes you believe that you're in a place, but the place that happens in AR is the physical reality that you're in. So you still have a sense of embodiment and in a place. With As Devlin, they were able to create modulations on that where it's still you're in the center of gravity of a place where as Devlin you're in a geodesic dome but they're able to create augmentations to that place so I feel like in terms of Slater he would call that the place illusion where your brain gets tricked that you're in the world but the AR you're just in the physical reality and you have all the different augmentation that's happening so for me it's a spectrum of to what degree do you have the world around you is it the virtual or is it physical
[01:05:33.123] Ian Hamilton: Yeah, I mean, you're going straight to the philosophy, but I need to go... I'm not going to go to the terminology, but I need to go to the technology and talk about 110 degrees field of view, 100 degrees field of view stretching out to 130 or 140 degrees field of view. Or maybe it goes beyond that, right? That's a place I go to in a VR headset. There's research that shows where you start feeling that sense of presence. And show me the AR glasses that cross above the field of view of a VR headset and really convince me of that, Kent. Like, I don't... We didn't do the Es Devlin experience, so that was the best I've seen. Es Devlin was in New York, and she had a whole floor at the... I'm talking about Es Devlin's council experience that was shown at the Snap Spectacles.
[01:06:24.797] Kent Bye: That specific installation that had 12 people in AR.
[01:06:27.495] Ian Hamilton: Yeah, so I didn't get to do that experience, but I talked to her briefly. I asked her a question at the end of her presentation she had and I asked her, Because she's so big on building places for people, and it was so fascinating to hear her entire speech. But virtual space is different from physical space. The rules we have here that we've all learned don't apply. You've spent so much time talking to philosophers, Kent, you're derailing me. I'm not going to let you derail me here. VR technology takes me to a place. I go to a place, I go to thousands of places, and I can bring people to that place. If I put on see-through glasses, I'm still here, right? And you can layer on whatever you want, I'm still here. And it's fundamentally like, how do I convey to people that going to another place is a superpower that everyone's going to want in different ways? And like, we've barely even begun to figure out what you can do with that superpower of bubble universes wherever you want like think about the kids in the backseat watching the dvd player right they've got a dvd player and two screens the thing probably cost a thousand bucks 800 bucks to install two screens on the back of each chair have a dvd player in the middle there you could now do that with two vr headsets and a single source you could run two hdmi cables to the two kids in the back seat from a single source and they're both watching the same movie along with virtual reality layered on top of that. And it's fantastic. The screen will be bigger than the little 10 inch screen that's on the back of the seat. And the ability to do that was unlocked a month ago. You could do it technically in 2016 with the big PC, but Meta had to spend a decade building this platform in order to unlock that for people again. And we have yet to barely even begin to discuss that. Yes, AR is cool, but it is still so far out. how many tens of millions, hundreds of millions of people buy first-person viewers, VR headsets, all manner of VR-based HMDs in the next five years before the field of view of AR even gets to 90. That will be before field of view of AR glasses even gets to 90. So you get these situations like Snapchat that it's really hard to separate their philosophy from the product. It feels like they need AR to work for their business model. But if you go and look at what Meta has done, they took a more holistic approach to this question of what kinds of devices will we need in the future? And so you see this trifecta of a wristband, glasses, and headset. You combine those three things, wristband, glasses, and headset, you have everything you need to be connected 24-7 to anyone in your life that you need to reach. you have on your wrist the ability to send private messages to anyone. You can navigate your menu and according to Meta's long-term aspirations start like actually sending messages through your arm to your hand that are recognized by the wristband. So you've got Meta that has spent an extraordinary amount of time and money and they put Abrash, Michael Abrash there to decide what is our long-term product lines look like and like I'm still a little skeptical of the AR glasses. Not because I don't think that they'll be... Like, I believe they will be compelling and they are compelling. But I still question whether VR is going to be more compelling. And the mixed reality that you layer on on top of it. You know, like... gosh, Meta closed down the varifocal optic. You know, they said that this isn't the product we can ship anytime soon. So they stopped adding varifocal stuff. They stopped looking at wider field of view. There's all those things that they're looking at, wider field of view, high dynamic range. faster frame rates, all those things that need to improve to make you feel like you're there that much more. And you're telling me that they can't ship a varifocal VR headset with a wider field of view than a Quest 3 with codec avatars and face tracking and eye tracking? you know, all the doodads, spatial video capture on the outside. You're telling me that they can't do all that for less than the AR glasses they just showed in front of that audience? You got the head of that company saying that these are prohibitively expensive, the most advanced technology we've ever devised as a species. How is he calculating the math on it? Is he taking $10 billion a year for 10 years, $100 billion, dividing it by 100 units? And then like, is that why it's so expensive to build? Like, I know you invested a lot. Anyways, I'm losing my train of thought there that Bosworth told me that 90% of the cost of what they showed that 70-degree field of view was to deliver the 70-degree field of view. What that says to me is that, yeah, 70 is their North Star, but it's very likely that they're going to go back from that when they actually ship AR glasses. When they actually ship a consumer product, it's going to be somewhere less than 70. That's because they have to cut costs. And what kills me about that is, so if you imagine that those AR glasses are, to Meta's model, too prohibitively expensive to ship. Let's imagine them as $3,000. Let's imagine them as $3,500, right? The same price as an Apple Vision Pro. Meta won't ship those. Apple might. But like, I want a $7,000 VR headset that has all the bells and whistles. Apple put all the bells and whistles it could manage into a product, and it arrived at $3,500. That's the cheapest product that Apple saw as its starting point for the future. They're going to try to come down from $3,500, but I think they can also go up from $3,500, right? Imagine a $5,000 VR headset that you use for 10 years. It's possible. They could make it. It could happen. And you could have a workhorse machine that, I mean, exchanging your car for a VR headset is not absurd. It is not absurd. Is that what you did? It is what I did. i mean i'm living in new york so i don't need a car that's the big one but i mean i don't want to drive anymore i took the waymo down in la i took the self-driving car and everyone is scared of the self-driving car one minute in a self-driving car and your fear goes away and what's left in its place is what am i going to do now in this car that's driving me somewhere you're going to go in a vr headset When the Google PR person who handled Daydream left, I told them to let me know that they were going to Waymo. I told them, I'll see you soon, because we're going to go full circle there. You're going to have onboard entertainment in a car, should be a VR headset. And everyone's like, oh, don't you get sick? No, I get sick all the time in VR. I don't get sick when I do that, because it's that good. I tune out the real world. I go to VR. The real world is only there in a very dull, vague way, barely visible. It's almost like it's behind a curtain, right? I've got the real world out there behind a curtain.
[01:14:18.936] Kent Bye: You're also on a highway driving straight. If you were taking a lot of turns, you might have gotten a little bit more motion sick. At least I would. If I was on a curvy road, it would make me sick.
[01:14:26.557] Ian Hamilton: I mean, I did the first part of that trip through Los Angeles before going over the grapevine, but you're right. Still, it's more comfortable to me than using stick locomotion for an hour. So I mean, I did eight hours. I won't last 45 minutes in Boneworks doing stick locomotion. So forget that. Those people that are trying to like, what about those problems? You need to restructure where you are on that one because it's phenomenal to use a VR headset in a car in the latest versions of these travel modes. There's some bugs still, but they'll iron it out two or three versions from now, and it'll be even more fantastic than it is now. Yeah, my kids want to drive cars, but they're probably not going to drive cars. And that feels bad for them. We're also going to have Autobots, right? We're going to have cars that drive us. And that's phenomenal. And so, like, I hope that my kid can, I mean, think about the things that opens. Like, start reframing. Let's stop. Stop reframing our conversations around red versus blue, Republican versus Democrat. Let's realize that self-driving cars are going to happen. Let's realize that VR headsets are here and they're already a commonplace thing. And now let's begin the conversation from, okay, how do we make sure the self-driving cars stop pumping gas into the air? How do we stop the emissions? Let's talk about the laws to encourage electric vehicles being the only cars that can self-drive. Is that a Republican position I just gave? Is that a Democratic position I just gave? don't know if that's a position i'm just throwing out an idea here i have i have no no i don't care throw out you know toss that idea out this is how i work this is how my brain works i think out ideas toss them out throw them away but here's the idea why shouldn't all self-driving cars be restricted to only being electric okay if you start pursuing that line of thinking of outlawing gas-powered self-driving cars. I have no idea, I haven't paid attention. Maybe this is already the path, right? But if you start going down that path, then you start incentivizing the entire country, the entire world, to build the electric grid to support the cars to make a 40 hour drive from Los Angeles to New York where the entire time you're just sleeping and playing VR. How amazing does that sound? You don't got to spend the flight over cramped. You spend 30 bucks on this trip across the country and your car parks at a couple of supercharger stations on the way. And yeah, it's like a train trip in the olden days, but you're in a VR headset the entire time. You're stopping to look at the places you stop off at. Just let the 20th century go. It's dead. It died. All the paradigms and the people, the things that were true in the 20th century are not true here. Now, let's start building on what we have here, which is self-driving cars, electric vehicles, VR headsets. How do we encourage all of those things to play together? How do we have an electric grid that supports solar and wind and nuclear power without people stopping it, right? And how do we have all of those things produce enough power to power all the electric cars around everywhere? You know, there is a future where we can all have a sustainable, free world that gives us a climate, you know, we don't get worse weather every year, right? We don't get worse insects coming around because of the weather. You know, the catastrophic decline can go back. we don't have to be doom and gloom about it. At the same time, let's be real about the technology here and the way it's being used and the ways we want to encourage it to be used. I want VR headsets to be used for education. I want people to train to do things that are dangerous and save lives. So firefighting, you can learn to be a firefighter with a hundreds of pound weight in your hand. You can simulate an actual fire hose spraying out of your hands with a VR headset with the right hardware giving you all of that tension. And you can have a nursing workforce. Imagine having a hundred times more nurses in America with maybe two times more doctors, okay? So imagine something like that, okay? And all of the nurses have Ray-Ban smart glasses on them to receive expert calls from the right doctor anywhere in the world at any moment. So at any given moment, the nurse that's examining you and has her hands on your body can call in a doctor into her eyes and say, hey doc, can you look at this with me? What do you see here? And the doc says, can you show me it a little bit different? And the doc asks you a question, right? Think about what that does, right? Think about the math, right? 100,000 more nurses or whatever it is. Suddenly you can fan out nurses into the rural areas and send them out into the world to go find the people that need the help because they can't get to the hospital, right? And they're getting help from the doctors Or in England, the best doctor in England is phoning in on the glasses to help the person that's in rural Arkansas. That's the future we can achieve. I am not a politician. I am not running for office. I do not want to run for office. And these are not real ideas. These are off-the-cuff bullshit. But where are the people who are actually doing these things? Who are the people who are actually like, who can we vote for who is going to be able to change this conversation enough to like, let's be real here about what our technology needs are, how to actually push this country and these people in the right direction. You know, you could tomorrow put VR headsets in a lot of schools and give them the pencil app. That's an early access app. They just released that thing. And it's already better art education than most art education you can get in most public schools just by tracing a piece of paper. And like that's saying something about our public education system, right? That's saying something about the system we built for ourselves. You hear all these negative people looking at this history as like it's rotting. Everything is getting worse. I don't buy it. I don't believe it. Yes, it's changing. It's different, but that doesn't mean it has to move on without you, and it doesn't mean it has to, like... Yeah, like, I want all these things. Who are the politicians I can interview who are actually going to push these ideas through, of shifting us in the right direction of... It shouldn't be meta only funding.
[01:21:34.791] Kent Bye: There's a XR association that is basically the consortium of all of the big VR companies that have offices in DC and helping to push all these things. So they've been talking about these very things in terms of how the government starts to support and sustain these different types of projects.
[01:21:53.155] Ian Hamilton: I don't know. Yeah, it's funny. I imagine your listeners... This is a continuation. Go listen to my previous podcast with Kent because... When he asks me to talk, I talk because I admire the oral history project here. I thought about doing it myself, right? Like journalism and oral history or even the study of humans, like it's anthropology. It's not that different what we all do. And we're living in a time when the railroads of the future are being written. This is oil barons and railroad barons' territory. They're building the foundation of the future. And we don't have to let them bowl us over and tell us the way it needs to be. We can shape this. We can have some wins and elect politicians who understand technology. elect politicians who understand technology. I won't run for office. If you want me to go interview 10 politicians and give them the quiz of whether they actually understand technology, I'd like that vetting process. That's what we need because I don't know how we get out of this with the politicians we have being this disconnected. It's giving Meta the same power to shape their world for us. I mean, you saw how, if any one of your podcast listeners watched the interviews that Zuckerberg did before Congress, you saw how disconnected they are from what's going on in the real world and how politically motivated it is from this place of red and blue, right? Who gives a shit? Stop it. Stop. Stop. It's not helping anyone, red versus blue. What matters is technology is changing our lives, and it's going to continue changing our lives. And we have to find ways of pointing it in the best directions, the most usable directions, the most effective directions. And education, simulation, and bringing expertise to remote places is going to be fantastic in so many ways. Let's support it.
[01:24:12.369] Kent Bye: Well, and we certainly covered a lot of ground, and I always like to ask a final question around what you think the ultimate potential of all these spatial computing, VR, AR, however, let's just say VR, since you're kind of defending the honor of VR throughout the course of this conversation. So let's stick with what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable?
[01:24:34.281] Ian Hamilton: So my dad died in 2018 and I was right when VR was having a lull. And as he was dying, I recorded a whole bunch of audio of him telling stories about the old days of living in the 50s and 60s and all the shenanigans he got up to and asking him all the questions I had in my head. And I haven't listened to the audio a single time. And part of the reason I haven't listened to the audio a single time is because it's not automatically transcribed for me. And it's also not automatically indexed for me. So I can't find the exact story that my dad shared about that one thing. that one time, right? In Star Trek The Next Generation, there's an episode where Wesley Crusher is delivered a holo-disc or something from his dad, who's dead, and Wesley goes to the holodeck and puts in the program, and he goes in, and it's an empty holodeck with just his dad standing right before him, and his dad explains, hey, son, I want you to see me as I am right now. This is me right as I'm shipping off to some mission, like maybe Starfleet or something, and I want you to see me now as I am doing this. I have probably six terabytes of data on my personal hard drives of tens of thousands of photos I've taken over the last 15 years. I've got probably 400 gigabytes just in audio alone or something like that. I don't know. I'm forgetting the numbers of interviews that were off the record back then, but now they're getting transcribed and collated and they're ready to be indexed by Apple Intelligence in my data store. And there's a very real possibility that generational knowledge doesn't have to go away. You know, you can imagine your lost loved ones in your head, what they would say to you in your situation. But that's not going to be the same as that trained data store, right? Whatever it was, 11 terabytes or whatever I have of personal data around me. photos, videos, audio transcriptions, all the questions I asked in every one of those interviews. It's such a window into who I am. And the only model we have in our heads for that is the Black Mirror episode where the guy is grown in the bathtub and he's not a real person. You know, that's the model in our head for how this is going to play out. But there's a very real sense that like we can live on in a way that we didn't expect beyond the days that we actually lived in VR. It's a very far off thought that is unformed for me. It's like a vague idea, but like, you think about those data stores of 11 terabytes of generated data that I've done in this world, right? And that's not even considering my GPS data that is stored by someone else. my path through this world and all the places I've been and the things I've seen. You know, you see these tools that have just been rolled out from other companies trying this like a wearable AI thing that's an always-on sensor trying to analyze the world for you. You know, there's a very real chance that I could feed all of that audio of my dad into a tool and it can try to bring my dad back for a little while and give me a sense of what answer the AI would give me. but like that is the scariest idea to imagine right now, right? Like the black mirror model is in our head, but I just gave you the Wesley Crusher example, right? That's the model in my head that's a cool idea. So is there a future where my kids hear me after I die? Is there a future where I can advise them in using my data store, using my 11 terabytes of personal data to let me live on for them after I'm gone and give them advice into the years beyond? That's what I wonder about, I think about, right? And how does virtual reality play in that, right? Like that's the place you can go to to talk to people. Maybe it's on your phone, maybe it's a voice, but if you want to see me embodied, it's going to be in a VR headset after I'm gone. I gave you the negative answers in the past because I was scared. I talked about control. I talked about propaganda. Now I want to change the conversation to, this is what's happening right now. Stop arguing about it, whether it's going to happen or not. Let's talk about what's happening and how we can benefit from it the most. If that future did exist where I live on past my days or some semblance of me is able to offer real advice after I'm gone, Is there only one of me? Is there a million of me? Who has control over my visage? Is it my kids? Is it Meta? Is it the government? That's some far-out thoughts, right? But I just described how it's happening at the beginning of this, right? Apple intelligence is about to drop, and that's exactly what they're going for, is making a sense of your data store, your personal data cloud. And there's plenty of people that have that personal data cloud because they don't want Google to go and do that. They don't want Meta to go and do that because they know full well that those guys are not going... It's like the scene in Tron Legacy where the evil program copies the main guy, Flynn. So there's a scene where he gets Flynn's disc and he's like, he holds the disc, he looks at it, he goes, got it. And it's the disc that's the store of all of that man is, right? Everything he was is stored in that disc. And it took one second for the robot to go, I got my copy. You know, you go back. You've got your copy. That's your data. It's yours. Secretly, you know, like, I got my copy. Like, I've got everything I need out of your data. I don't need your data anymore. And I admire all the people out there that have kept their personal data out of those stores because of their recognition that, like, as soon as they get what they need out of you you're a dead husk to them you look at what meta is doing with um yeah there's so many tangents yeah ultimate i think about the digital heaven idea right now right like how do we live on the future is going to be so different and i i'm tired of looking back at the 20th century and saying things were better then they were shitty then They weren't that rose-colored glasses that you've got on in your memory. The 20th century was shit. And if you think about the 21st century and what the 9-11 hijackers did at the beginning of this century, they learned on a simulator. And we've got... simulators today that are a million fold cheaper and a million fold better and it's only going to go further from here and like we just need smarter conversations and I don't think they're happening on the internet right now right like I'm gonna be posting this conversation on the internet so we'll do that I hope you do I hope you delete some of my rambling at least I apologize for the rambling it's Kent is a very philosophical person. And I'm not going to debate the nature of reality with you right now, Kent. But I wanted to do respect to the fact that my perspective is small. I'm one person in many. But I have talked to a great number of people. And the patterns I see in the people that I talk to is... Fear of the future and a longing for the past and trying to make sense of it all. So many people just trying to make sense of it all and they're looking for guidance. And the only guidance they're getting is from meta. And that's not who you should be getting your guidance from. This for-profit enterprise, Zuck up there saying Zuck or nothing. That's what his t-shirt apparently translated to. I didn't verify it myself, so correct me if I'm wrong. But he stood up there in his shirt and said Zucker nothing on his shirt to the entire audience. And like, do you think Mark Zuckerberg is like you? Do you think his life is anything like yours? Do you think he's had to deal with the risks you've had to deal with, the life you've had to deal with? And you're letting that man set the rules for you? You're letting him educate you about how this technology is going to work? Don't, don't, don't, don't. We've got other places we can go learn about this and other forums than facebook.com, meta.com, the metaverse in order to discussion. You've got actual town halls. You've got places you can go and discuss this with the people you need to. And we need smarter politicians who actually understand this. So, yeah, Kent, I hope you delete some of the tangents. But I only have my own audience in my head, and I've got them complaining about these tangents in my head because they've done it recently. And I understand it. but it's you can only take a person so far along on this journey in the hour long you give me in this podcast right like you can only get them to see so much of the picture like you've done an enormous public service with this with your podcast and the people you reach with it and i i hope you reach a lot more people in the future because a lot more people need to remember what you've got kept on those podcasts. You have a history of people laying down the railroads of the 21st century, and they're all going to give back, right? As soon as they get to the end of their lives, it's all going to come back into foundations. all this public good, but they're going to hoard it and try to wield as much power as they can until then. These are powerful people with a lot of resources and you don't need to be having them shape your life for you. You have some agency here. I want more agency. I think about that word all the time now. There's a long time that I realized the word agency is an example of a word that is beyond a lot of people. A lot of people don't understand what agency means. They don't have any concept of it. They don't talk about it. They don't talk about video games or how agency works in video games. Think about that. If there's a lot of people out there that have no concept of agency, how are they going through life? Yes, they have agency. Yes, they're able to affect the world around them, but they have no concept of like who takes it away from them and how. They don't think about that. They don't think about how, you know, that's the privilege of our lives, of the various statuses that we don't even realize is like, We can do more than we realize to give agency to the people around us. There's power in protests. There's power in hurting corporations with boycotts. You can say no, and you can say no in numbers to what they're doing, and they do respond. They are hurt. And I just hope people do it out there more and, like, I'm open to ideas. Reach out to me on ideas for how we can educate more people, how we can all team up and not let the out-of-touch politicians and too powerful corporations tell us this is the way it needs to be. That's what's interesting with a lot of things like Snap and Pokemon Go and Niantic. Those companies are operating outside of some of the pressures of these mega corporations. They're still smaller companies, even though Snap isn't. It's a big company. There's still some chance of them operating solely in the interests of their users. As soon as you get to a company that's meta-sized, it's always what's best for our users and meta. And that always comes with compromises that we don't always see. So ian at uploadvr.com, ian at ianhamilton.net if you want to reach out to me personally. I'm always, it's funny, you've got a real nice, you've got the real me here, Kent. I mean, I'm speaking straight from my heart about things that I don't understand. And I'm sure your readers nodded along with me. Or your listeners nodded along with me during some of this. Confused by some of this. Not following along. The words we use are changing. How we use them are changing. The words don't mean the same things to everyone. And... Gosh. Come meet me in VR and we'll have a nice real conversation about this. We'll hash this out and figure out... I'll have my private co... My office is in VR going forward. I'm shutting... I'm this close to shutting down all the notifications on my phone and shifting, because every phone call I receive is spam. Every other text message I get is spam. Every other email I receive is from a subscription I didn't sign up for. Why am I using all these platforms? All the fraudsters have overwhelmed them all. And I want to go to a place where only the people who have good ideas for the future are ready to talk to me. So come find me in VR. I'll see you there.
[01:38:40.085] Kent Bye: Awesome. And thanks so much for taking the time to share a lot of your candid, raw thoughts of, you know, being in these environments and talking to all these people, seeing all these announcements kind of brings that out in both you and myself as I sort of reflect on the nature of all the reality and also what's happening with these companies. For me, with my podcast, a big part of my philosophy is the multiplicity of the different perspectives, like a pluralistic approach of really trying to create an open space to hear all the different perspectives. And so there's never anybody that I completely agree with or completely disagree with. There's always going to be some sort of intersection. And so for me, I'm just trying to capture these moments and these perspectives, these reflections. I guess one aspect of what's happening with meta, they feel like they're skipping past different enterprise aspects of organically growing and supercharging where VR is at. So I'm actually kind of the opposite of just like, I'm okay with VR growing at its own organic pace when it's ready for people to experience it. I don't feel an urgency that people need to experience it. I feel like whenever it crosses their path, when they need it, is fine. And that I'm okay with things going a little bit slower if it also means that it's not having it be completely dominated and controlled by one company. So there's sort of a tension where I totally understand what you're saying with the magic of power, what VR can do. But I also feel like I'm OK with things going slow at this point of looking at the industry. So there's a long conversation. It's been lots of different points. But if that's sort of one of my concluding thoughts, I feel like I'm more in this Zen space of accepting things where they're at. It's going to grow however fast it's going to go. And that I feel like there's a certain part where I'd want to, like, argue and debate and describe people all why they should be concerned about it. But I feel like the thing that is the most convincing is when people have their own direct embodied experience with it for whatever context it is that allows them to have an experience that really resonates. And that's the key. having the right time the right moment and the right experience for people to kind of really understand the affordances of medium and to see the broader scope of where it's at and for my part I'm just trying to bear witness to what I find compelling and interesting and talking to the artists talking to creators see what I can see in the industry especially immersive storytelling in particular but also just trying to share these conversations and sometimes people will listen and whatever is being said is really going to resonate so I know that I just have an intuitive gut feeling with trying to be at these places and talk to people at the right moment. And I feel like we're able to capture a lot of those different thoughts for where you're thinking about all those things.
[01:41:14.924] Ian Hamilton: The internet is a filter. between us. And when you get to these events, you remove that filter and you get to go back to the old way. And you get to see people for what they are. You get to see them. They get to see you. You get to check in on them and their whole journey, right? And you get so inspired and overwhelmed at events like this with so many different ideas And it's beautiful to see all the different perspectives, to check in with people. And, yeah, I love these events, and I love seeing the perspectives and bearing witness to all this. But it's... You don't get a lot of opportunities to do that online. And Meta is trying to make the case that that's their platform. And I mean, I don't know. I don't know how we get all of the benefits of this face-to-face interaction with none of the downsides of the filtered internet, of the shaped internet, the internet that's shaped for you behind the scenes that you never see. Yeah, the targeted ads, you know, the prices that change before you even saw them, right? The prices that got more expensive for you because you're a more valuable customer than the person standing right next door to you. Yeah, I always think about the ideas of like unions and coalitions and how those form to affect real change. I've seen you try to, you've tried to do some of this, Kent, with your groups that you've formed and I wish the ideas of these conferences led to more action. So the one time I went face to face with Mark Zuckerberg, I was in a group of journalists and he asked the first question of the journalists. That's not the way it should be. Mark Zuckerberg should not be quizzing the journalists on what they thought of his hardware. And it's very clear he's polling the room, right? And it's always data gathering in every realm. And that's such a backward situation. They're doing the educating, right? So the scales are tipped and we've got all these individuals with good ideas out there that are just... They only get little forms like this. They don't get a form with hundreds of thousands of people really listening and educating them. The Mr. Rogers of the world, the Mr. Science on TV teaching the basics of all this stuff. We don't have it for technology. And we also don't have the forms where we really educate lots and lots of people. Like, who's the guy that does all the tech reviews that just got... MKBHD. Marquez. I mean, he put out that wallpaper app and immediately gave opportunity to a whole bunch of people to rip them apart. Where this guy just built an entire brand, a very popular brand, around him speaking frank to people. Millions and millions of people. And then he tries to release a product and everyone is like, where did the guy go that just speaks frank to me? You're trying to sell me something now. People need more of those people who speak frank to very large numbers. I've tried to be humble here with this conversation. I am not an expert. I don't know what the future is going to hold. I'm a very big believer in VR. Because for 10 years now, it has pushed through. 12 years now, it's pushed through in an incredible way. And as much as I said earlier in this podcast about all those benefits of simulation, I'm willing to go toss it all out the window tomorrow. We could smash all the VR headsets worldwide. You could outlaw them if you really wanted to be a horrible country. But VR is still not going to go away. Those headsets are still going to be in some homes. Like the Pandora's box is there on these headsets. They are out and you can't round them all up, even if you outlawed them. So like it's a tide to me. the people who said that this was going to happen have been proven right. And I'm still ready for them to be proven wrong at any moment. But the evidence pile is too big for me to say anymore. It's not going to happen. It's too big for me to say, like, you shouldn't be worried about this. You need to be worried about this yesterday. And you need to be calling your politicians and voting people in who understand Thank you, Kent, for the time. Thank you for talking to me. Thank you for what you do. Thank you to your listeners and do good. Help the world. Let's leave this in a let's get our Star Trek world where everyone has a place.
[01:46:14.955] Kent Bye: Awesome. Yeah. Thanks so much for joining me and sharing all your deep thoughts around where things are at now and where they could go in the future. So thanks again. Thank you, Kent. Thanks again for listening to the Voices of VR podcast, and I would like to invite you to join me on my Patreon. I've been doing the Voices of VR for over 10 years, and it's always been a little bit more of like a weird art project. I think of myself as like a knowledge artist, so I'm much more of an artist than a business person. But at the end of the day, I need to make this more of a sustainable venture. Just $5 or $10 a month would make a really big difference. I'm trying to reach $2,000 a month or $3,000 a month right now. I'm at $1,000 a month, which means that's my primary income. And I just need to get it to a sustainable level just to even continue this oral history art project that I've been doing for the last decade. And if you find value in it, then please do consider joining me on the Patreon at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
