#1488: Nima Zeighami on Delivering WebXR Content with Infinite Reality’s Ethereal Engine Acquisition

I interviewed Nima Zeighami, VP of Product at Infinite Reality, at Meta Connect 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.

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Music: Fatality

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 spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my coverage of MetaConnect 2024, today's episode is with Nima Zagami, who is the VP of Product at Infinite Reality. So I had a chance to run into Nima and do a very quick and brief 10-minute interview with him at the very end of my time at the campus of MetaConnect. Then after this, we went off to the Silicon Valley virtual reality meetup where Nima was actually in charge of that for a number of years and actually stepping down. He's going off into Japan. But we had a chance to talk about Infinite Reality, which actually acquired the ethereal engine, which I actually did an interview with Liam Broja last year at MetaConnect. So you can go back to episode 1310. Ethereal Engine as an open source WebXR pipeline for Apple Vision Pro and beyond, where I had a chance to talk to the co-founder and CEO of Ethereal Engine, Liam Broza. So it was a very quick and brief interview. So we really only had time to really dive into some of what's happening there at Infinite Realities. But I know that Nima has some other cool things that he's doing, not only with SVVR over the years, but also like he's always been a commentator on all things of what's happening in the XR industry. So I recommend following him on social platforms like X or LinkedIn, just to hear a little bit more of his thoughts of what's happening with XR technologies. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Nima happened on Thursday, September 26th, 2024 at MetaConnect in Menlo Park, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.

[00:01:46.238] Nima Zeighami: My name is Nima Zegami, and I've been in XR for over a decade now. Currently, I'm the vice president of product at Infinite Reality.

[00:01:54.124] Kent Bye: Great. So maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into space.

[00:01:58.849] Nima Zeighami: So I've loved VR since I was young. I was really into .hack was where I really got started, loving that concept of HMDs and existing in virtual worlds. Code Lyoko was definitely part of my childhood. And as I got older, I always thought it would be magical, but I didn't think VR would exist within our lifetimes. When I was 18, I started working at the Apple store, and nearby there was a Sony style store, and Sony launched some pretty popular HMDs at the time, the HMZ series, which seemed pretty incredible, but of course had the low FOV. And then once Palmer came out and announced the Rift with the groundbreaking high FOV, which kind of solved the core issue with every HMD before it, I got really excited about that. I was studying psychology in school and computer science, and I ended up dropping out to start a VR company called VR Sports. We worked on a game called Smack It Ball. While I was working on that, I ended up doing some technology consulting for small businesses. I ended up doing VR consulting for different companies. I ended up working for Epson on the Muverio smart glasses. So I was kind of doing both those things for a little while. Smacked Ball didn't really work out. We launched on Steam, didn't really succeed, didn't go anywhere. Epson was a great time, but they ended up shutting down the whole developer evangelism division that I was in. So after that, I worked at Within, which I was at. I was the main PM for Wonderscope and worked on the mobile Within apps for various platforms. Really loved my time at Within, one of the best companies ever. And then I worked at Leia for the last six years, and Infinite Reality for the last three months. And while I was at Leia, I continued doing VR things, did a bunch of hackathons, as well as run Silicon Valley VR with my co-organizers. MARK MANDELBACHER- Great. And so what does Infinite Reality do? Infinite Reality is a pretty complicated company. It has a lot of different coals and a lot of different fires. It acquired the Drone Racing League, so competitive drone racing is one of the things it does. It's working on data centers. It's building a lot of different things. But my org is the flagship product, which is called Infinite Reality Studio. What we do is we build a next generation game engine and website builder that requires no downloads, and you can build any experience you want in the browser. And then when you publish it, it's fully hosted, and a link will allow you to play it on any device, whether it's a phone, tablet, laptop, desktop, or even XR headset. Single experience scales automatically everywhere with no installations needed.

[00:04:05.459] Kent Bye: Is this a WebXR-based experience, or how is it actually able to do that?

[00:04:09.471] Nima Zeighami: Yeah, so we do support WebXR. We have it turned off currently, but we've had WebXR experiences released in the past using the engine. It is going to be a core focus of ours in Q1 next year. Right now, we're focusing on getting the core of the engine really good so people can build a huge variety of experiences with it. We're working on e-commerce experiences with the Shopify API. Right now, we have the ability to load anything from Shopify and let you buy it in an immersive setting so you have a 3D model that you can interact with with your avatar and then make a purchase directly through Shopify system all within your browser. So, yeah.

[00:04:40.063] Kent Bye: And so is this something that you helped co-found, or was it already existing? Maybe give a bit more context for how Infinite Reality came about.

[00:04:46.127] Nima Zeighami: Yeah, so Infinite Reality is a kind of a startup conglomerate of a variety of companies that have been acquired over five or six years. The core tech that I'm working on was actually from Ethereal Engine, which is Liam Brose's company, that got acquired for $84 million earlier this year. And basically one of the first hires he wanted after his company got acquired was he was like, we want Nima to come run product. So I'm vice president product working on the studio, and I'm just laser focused on making a really, really great creation experience for people with very little traditional coding skills. We want it to be very drag and drop. We're looking at using LMS to allow you to kind of just describe scenes and have it procedurally generate. We have R&D teams who have shown us great procedural generation already, and we're just trying to productize all these things and give all these tools to people to make it really accessible and potentially touch a billion lives with virtual worlds in the coming decade.

[00:05:37.641] Kent Bye: Yeah, it was just last year at MetaConnect where I talked to Lee Ambrosa right over there, just 30 feet away from here, about the Ethereum engine. And so I was a bit surprised that it got acquired for $84 million. Where did that money come from?

[00:05:49.761] Nima Zeighami: Yeah, so it's pretty complicated, and I actually don't know all the answers to that. But ultimately, the founders of the company have done a really, really great job convincing various parties in different parts of the world about the vision of the company. And the company keeps executing on really cool ideas like this one. Right now, we have a closed beta for the engine, but the engine works. I've done demos of it here at Connecton. have blown people away just by pulling out my laptop and building and publishing a world right there for them so they can experience and play with it and i think showing investors things like that makes them understand the vision and want to put money into it and at some point it seemed like the technology the company was working on wasn't achieving that vision that they promised so they bought liam's company because ethereal engine was the closest to that and now ethereal engine is our flagship product it's now the infinite reality studio and that's what we're building

[00:06:37.170] Kent Bye: OK, and so what are some of the different examples of projects or products that you've been able to generate with the Infinite Reality Engine?

[00:06:43.894] Nima Zeighami: Yeah, so besides the core e-commerce experience that is like a virtual store, which allows you to go to Shopify and it's obviously a demo. We're not really selling stuff yet. We're going to have partners coming out in the next month or two, which are going to be real websites built with Infinite Reality Studio that do all these things. I've built a bunch of different prototypes. I built a platforming game. One of my hobbies is doing 3D Gaussian splats and I splat all the sandwiches that I eat. And so I made a haul of sandwiches, which is just an export of all of the different sandwiches I've eaten over the last couple of years. And that's a pretty great experience, because you're just running around with your friends, and you could talk about the sandwich. Like, oh, I had this sandwich when I was on this trip. And that sandwich was really good. I remember how good the pepperoni on that meatball sub tasted. So yeah, just a lot of little demos. As far as full flagship experiences, we are gunning up to build a showcase experience right now for our 1.0 release, which is hopefully coming by the end of the year. That one should be pretty interesting, and I think it'll probably be the most comprehensive thing when it finally comes out. As of now, we're just building out the tooling. Nothing in production has been really, since the acquisition has been made. The prior best thing that I would say was a volumetric concert that was done on Ethereal Engine and a WebXR putt-putt game that's fully multiplayer that was built on Ethereal Engine.

[00:07:54.500] Kent Bye: OK, so when I think about something like the infinite reality engine, I think of a game engine and the model of a game engine. And then I also think about some of what you're doing is sort of like a content management system type of stuff, like CMS. But it still feels more game engine-y than CMS-y. So yeah, just curious to hear where that ground is, if you still think it is an ability to give people an immersive experience, and then how you expect people to actually use it.

[00:08:17.611] Nima Zeighami: Yeah, that's a really great question. I think ultimately we're trying to provide an end-to-end solution so it's not just the game engine. We also have a massive asset library of various different styles of asset that people can use to build their experiences that all click together like Lego blocks. We have a CMS which allows you to publish different worlds and scenes and they can be on separate domains if you'd like. They can be on the same one and switch between them if you'd like. You can set the size of the world. We have full video chat, audio chat, screen sharing. All of this is managed by our hosting system, but the engine itself is fully open source. So if you want to go build with it without using our tools, you can go do that. If you want to build with our tools and export it and then host it yourself without us, you can do that too. We're giving everyone as much flexibility as possible because we think that being able to build an open toolset for building virtual worlds that are multiplayer and as easy to use as possible is one of the most important things that we could do right now in technology. And so we're really excited about making it accessible.

[00:09:16.448] Kent Bye: What was it about Infinite Reality that made you want to go work there?

[00:09:19.881] Nima Zeighami: Yeah, I've known Liam and Jarek and Josh and the team working on Infinite Reality for quite a while. I mean, I've known Liam for probably eight years now. And I've always said, man, the web is cool, but you guys, it's not ready. The web is cool, but it's not ready. WebXR is definitely not ready. Native apps are just so much better. And I started seeing more and more experiences where I was like, I didn't realize this was a web experience. Like this looks just as good as a native experience. Wow. WebXR is coming to Vision Pro. Wow. Like all these things kind of together and WebGPU and Wasm. It seems like there is an inflection point where I'm betting that within a year or two, web is going to be really, really compelling to the point that a lot of people are going to want to build stuff on web rather rather than traditional tool chains building native apps on devices like the Quest. And I think Meta is doing that too. I went to a PWA workshop earlier today. They're betting big on progressive web apps running WebXR to be a core app type on their store. And they are treating them the same way that they're treating all other applications. And I think companies like Meta are only making that bet because they see the same thing that we see, which is that's the direction things are going.

[00:10:30.794] Kent Bye: Yeah, they were saying over 50% or 60% of all the people were using some sort of browser-based experience. Certainly, there's lots of stuff like looking up stuff, but also browser-based productivity tools. And so yeah, it just seems like the uptick of how many people are using the web and having an open ecosystem, yeah, it's just great to have more and more systems that are out there that are able to do that. Yeah, it seems like there's been a lot of promise. And from my perspective, the Progressive Web Apps should just be a button that you push and then you just have it. But I guess they have their same processes to put it through all the store process and everything else. So hopefully they'll get there at some point. But there seem to be whole sections on the developer keynote, especially talking about the web. So yeah, it seems like you're kind of at the right place and the right time with everything.

[00:11:10.612] Nima Zeighami: Yeah, thanks. I mean, one of the main things I got from the workshop is that I would really like us to work with them on their tool chain. They're using bubble wrap to package up progressive web apps for their store. And they have a signature file with a manifest that you need to be able to have matched up between your website and the PWA for it to be on their store. But we'd love to make it really easy to build stuff with our engine and then ship it to the Metastore. We would love to be part of that tool chain because right now we don't think there's anything that makes it super easy to make multiplayer WebXR experiences. And I think But Infinite Reality Studio is that solution. I'm really excited about where this is all going.

[00:11:42.711] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable?

[00:11:49.901] Nima Zeighami: I think that XR technologies are going to connect us and evolve us into a greater being. And that's what I'm really excited about is seeing what can humans become when we're augmented with a better bandwidth system for looking up information and better ways to connect with each other. I really think life is just going to get significantly better once we all build towards that future together.

[00:12:15.600] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid or any final thoughts you have for the rest of the immersive community?

[00:12:20.942] Nima Zeighami: I think that everyone is working on really cool stuff, and I can't wait to hear all about it. I love listening to Voice of VR, and it was a really great pleasure having this interview with you, Kent.

[00:12:30.584] Kent Bye: Yeah, and have fun going off to the SVVR that's happening here just now. And also, yeah, I just always appreciate seeing all your different commentary on social media and your different stuff that you've been posting on Gaussian Splats. I think you have a very interesting take of what's happening in the industry, and looking forward to having a chance to dive into much more other things here in the future but for right now i'm really excited around the spiritual successor to the ethereal engine in what's now infinite reality and hear more around like what's happening at the web so yeah thanks again for joining me to help break it all down thank you 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 five or ten dollars 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.

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