The final AI-related piece this year was THE LAST PRACTICE, which I unfortunately have not had a chance to see yet because there were a number of technical glitches that prevented me from seeing it on site. I did however have a chance to remotely catch up with director Phil McCarty to talk more about the story and mechanics of the experience. Part of the synopsis says, “In a world beset with algorithmic careers and generative push-button-creativity in the name of “AI”, what is the role of art, and inspiration any more?” After a number of monologues from virtual band members, then you are asked to create a mash-up song from different genres by choosing different album covers. McCarty may be making some critical reflections on AI within his story, but he’s also simultaneously a big user of AI tools to facilitate his own creative process in producing this piece. We talk about this paradox in our conversation, but also his journey into the XR industry as a writer, musician, filmmaker, and as a writer on WHAT IF…? – AN IMMERSIVE STORY (previously covered in episodes #1391 & #1437).
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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 structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing on my series of looking at different stories that are being featured at South by Southwest 2025, today's episode is with a piece called The Last Practice, and it's continuing on this theme around artificial intelligence that I've been doing over the last two or three episodes. So the last practice was actually the one experience that eluded me throughout South by Southwest. Despite my best efforts to try to see it, it just didn't work out. So there also happened to be a lot of glitches that the director, Phil McCarty, was navigating. And we talk about this often. throughout the course of our conversation, it ended up being that there was a couple of things where when you're strumming guitar on Apple Vision Pro, then that same pinch gesture, people were accidentally like closing themselves out of the experience, which took them a while to figure out. And then the other thing was that there seemingly was maybe some like overheating issues that were happening so that the first, second or third time would be fine. But after a certain point, the whole experience would start to degrade. And So it was a little hectic to try to sync up with him at the festival, but I did want to follow up with him just to get a sense of his journey into the space, as well as, you know, what the experience was. In the synopsis, it says, in a world beset with algorithmic careers and generative push-button creativity in the name of, quote, AI, what is the role of art and inspiration anymore? So it sounds like you're going through a number of these different monologues for different band members and having these different discussions around like the nature of algorithms and AI and creativity, push button creativity. And then at some point you start to put together a song of your own based upon different album covers and you have your own kind of mashup of music. Paradoxically, in some ways, Philip may be on one hand critiquing different aspects of AI and its impact on creativity. But in the process of producing this piece, he actually highly leveraged AI on a number of different fronts. And so we we talk about this kind of paradox of the push button creativity versus the ways that AI is actually unlocking certain creative opportunities for him in the process of creating this piece. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Phil happened on Tuesday, March 25th, 2025 at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:38.486] Phil McCarty: Okay. Hi. Yeah. My name is Phil McCarty. I am the co-producer, co-writer of The Last Practice, which is an XR experience for the Vision Pro that had its world premiere at South by Southwest.
[00:02:50.216] Kent Bye: Great. And maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into the space. Yeah, absolutely. How long an answer do you want for this? Just as much as you want to share.
[00:02:58.821] Phil McCarty: All right. I'm going to set a 25 minute timer. Let's go. So I grew up in Gainesville, Florida, which is like just in the kind of like danger zone of Orlando, Florida. So like all the theme parks and stuff were there. Because I was thinking, I've listened to your podcast enough to know that this question was coming. And I was like trying to imagine like, what are my seminal experiences in immersive experiences? And I remembered, I've got three and two of them come from living in Gainesville, Florida, where when I was growing up, you could go to Disney World and it was like a $35 ticket, right? Like it was just a thing you would go do just because you were bored on a Saturday and your friends could drive down. But I was much younger. And in 1990, they had this great ride, which is the ET ride. I don't know if you've done it or before at Epcot, where as you would walk in, guest person kind of like ask your name and type in a keyboard. You didn't think anything of it. Like, sure, sure. My name's Phil. And you'd go on a little ride and you'd see ET and you'd ride the bikes and whatever. And on the way out of the ride, ET would turn to you and say, bye, Phil. And as a little kid, that was mind blowing. It was just a crazy, I probably don't have a single memory from that year, except for the moment that E.T. said bye to me by name on the way out the ride. And I feel like that's my closest, earliest kind of like immersive experience, like moment that I can think of is E.T. saying bye to me. That's number one. Number two, also a Disney moment. A couple of years later, Disney had this ride and this ride is super fun. It's a hilarious story to me. Apparently at some point, Michael Eisner's kid was like, I think the rides are too soft and they're kind of lame. They're kind of small park, small world-ish. So they had this idea to make something a little more like adult and mature. And they made this ride called Alien Encounter. Did you ever go on that by any chance? No.
[00:04:42.011] Kent Bye: Did Space Mountain. That's the only thing I can remember from... Were you scared when you did Space Mountain?
[00:04:45.652] Phil McCarty: I cried the first time. When I was a little, little kid, I didn't want to go. I cried to get out of it.
[00:04:49.654] Kent Bye: I think my mom got motion sick and vomited afterwards, so that's what I remember.
[00:04:54.136] Phil McCarty: That's formative. That's a formative experience. So they had this great alien encounter. And the way it works is you sit in a chair and a little kind of like theatrical experience would happen in front of you. But they had all these kind of like immersive things. Like they had little brushes under the seat that could touch your ankles. They had like water droplets that could, you know, like heat and all these kind of like what we now think of as kind of like physical components to location-based entertainment. It was like back in the 90s at Disney World they were doing this. But this ride was very much like a horror ride. It was horrific. And at one point, a monster ate someone. And you felt like the internet now says water. But my memory of it is you felt blood spotlets on your forehead from the alien biting someone. And when you go on a ride, there's fun screaming on a roller coaster. Like, yeah. In this ride, you hear horror screaming. People are like, ah! They're terrified. And you can go on the internet now and watch videos of it. And it is like a horrific experience. But for me as like a teenager at the time, I thought this was, this was like, again, the first time you'd ever been in a thing where like you're having environmental effects. Now that's like table stakes for rides, but it was like a crazy thing for me. It's number two. The third one, I would say there's a couple that are tied, but I'm sure you're familiar with The Void. I did The Void in the late 2000s-ish. I think these three experiences for me are pretty important. personally, because I have a terrible memory, but I have clear memories of each of these three things. I remember E.T. saying bye to me. I remember the alien blood slash water ripping on me. And I remember being a stormtrooper with my three friends in Disney World. And I think I really like the idea that this technology can be used to give people kind of like new experiences, but new shared experiences that couldn't exist otherwise. And so I think those are my Yeah, if I had to guess, that's the, those are the emotional touchstones that push me into the space. That's experientially. And then as far as like being a developer, you know, I bought my first DK in 2013. And then I got a DK2 in 2014. And I got a Vive in 2016. You know, I'm one of these people that did the Tuscany demo and the blue and, you know. I feel like there's a group of us that have had the same kind of like this cohort of experiences that we're all sort of like marching down. So the ones that keep you on the track to spending way too much of your time and money traveling and doing these things. So that's how I got there.
[00:07:25.680] Kent Bye: And I noticed that you were also involved in the project What If with Marvel. Maybe you could just kind of describe your overall journey into starting to create some of these different immersive experiences and how you came across working on that.
[00:07:37.951] Phil McCarty: Yeah, absolutely. So I originally moved to Los Angeles. Los Angeles, not Los Angeles. It's like Los Angeles is like a town that's almost like LA, but not quite Los Angeles. I moved to Los Angeles to make movies, make films. And during the course of that process, I made a short film, an adaptation of a book by David Sedaris. And that went to a bunch of film festivals. I actually, off of that, I kind of like wheedled my way into an introduction to the CTO of then Oculus VR and met with him like immediately after the decay and like told him I wanted to make, you know, I made the short film about David Sedaris. I want to make films. He was like, cool, let's talk. And we chatted for, you know, an hour. It was super interesting. But that film also kind of landed. on the desk of the person at Marvel who was kind of in charge of a lot of like the theme parks and that sort of thing. And I think they, now everything is kind of like post NDA, but you know, I signed so many thick stacks of documents. I'm still like half scared of what I can and can't say. You spoke with it for sure. But I will say there was a period of time where we were working on a thing and we didn't know what that thing was. It was just the device. We're writing stories for the device. And then eventually that device We learned which device it was. And yeah, so he needed someone to like help him. And he had my writing partner, David Dong. We all kind of like the three of us worked on this experience, which was super... I'll try not to use the word super too much, but it's appropriate for Marvel things, right? It was super... interesting and exciting and challenging because it's kind of the opposite of our most recent experience because it's a lot of dealing with stakeholders and making sure Captain America doesn't say something too racy or crazy and like trying to balance all of those. Like the difficulty of that experience wasn't so much that just like, well, what is Thanos going to say here? It's learning how to both balance those industry stakeholders within the company, without the company, and everyone's needs. The people that own the show have a need. The people at Disney have a need. The people at Marvel have a need. And that was actually the challenge of that experience more so than the writing, I would say. But yeah, does that answer that question?
[00:09:45.028] Kent Bye: Yeah. And I guess because you were involved in writing, do you have a background in writing?
[00:09:49.306] Phil McCarty: Yeah. I mean, so, you know, I moved to LA to write screenplays. But before that, I went to the University of Virginia and got a degree in English literature and, you know, took a lot of composition classes and that sort of thing. So writing is a thing that I think I do relatively well. So, yeah. Yeah.
[00:10:07.443] Kent Bye: Okay. And were you working as a contractor? Were you working with Marvel? I'm just trying to get a sense of your trajectory as you're working on all these things. If you were brought in as an independent writer, or if you were already a part of something that was happening at Marvel?
[00:10:21.061] Phil McCarty: Yeah, yeah. We were brought in independently. We were not writing for Marvel before this experience took place. And then we were brought in to work on this experience. And writing is sort of like an understatement on some level. There was a year and a half of like development before we even put pen to paper. So that's a lot of like talking about interactives and like, what are some reasonable things people can do with the device, with their hands? And, you know, trying to take that as a creative producer, I guess, would be a closer description of like what we were doing for the first couple of years.
[00:10:49.301] Kent Bye: Okay. And is there any other projects that you worked on after what if, or is the last practice really kind of the next project that you were involved in?
[00:10:56.324] Phil McCarty: Yeah. We rolled, right. So we got, so what if, you know, kind of had its Venice debut and we rolled directly out of that into the last practice essentially.
[00:11:06.389] Kent Bye: Okay. Okay. And so, yeah, maybe just give a bit more context for the last practice and where you began with this project.
[00:11:12.852] Phil McCarty: Okay. Absolutely. How long an answer can I give on this? This is a, this is a meaty one.
[00:11:18.581] Kent Bye: Yeah, as long as you want. Yeah, I mean, I haven't had a chance to see it, so I know little to nothing about it.
[00:11:23.384] Phil McCarty: Oh, just imagine it's the best thing you've ever experienced in your life and you're probably in the... So the last practice. So I have a long history of being a musician. I was in bands for like the better part of a decade of my life. When I first moved to LA in order to like offset my screenwriting aspirations, I was working for a music producer, a guy I won't name, but he wrote... If I were a boy and Big Girls Don't Cry, I was there when John Legend wrote All of Me. It was like him and I in the studio and every musician that were famous for the last 10, 15 years went through his studio while I was there. So both as a musician and as a songwriter, I have a love for music and musical creativity. And this recent kind of like influx of push button creativity, like a lot of the apps that allow you to like press a button and a song comes out. I just, I felt the need to sort of, and not that anyone cares what I do or say, but personally, I felt the need to sort of like say, okay, hold on. This is great, everyone. But I think there's more to why music exists. And I thought it might be interesting to sort of create or craft an experience that could let a person whose only experience of music might have been consumption or push button creativity, have like a sampler of what it feels like to make a song and collaborate with people, whether it's real or virtual. And just like to get like a little hint of that experience, if that makes sense.
[00:12:53.567] Kent Bye: Yeah. Yeah. And so, I mean, I haven't seen the experience. And so is the idea that you've had all these embodied experiences of you working with songwriters and being in the act of creating. And so maybe you could just describe what the experience is in terms of what the overall story and the journey is, but also the context, the world building, and just describe as much as you can as to what the journey that you're taking people on.
[00:13:17.751] Phil McCarty: Sure. So the journey of the last practice works like this. You put on the headset and if you are on day one of South by Southwest and you are the fourth person in the headset, it overheats and crashes and everything goes poorly. However, if you were the first person to put it on and the experience, it works flawlessly. And what happens is a studio space emerges around you and a drummer appears and he kind of like interacts with you and engages with you and says, Hey, Thanks for showing up. Our last guitarist quit. We're kind of last minute. We're glad you could fill in. We're a really good band, I promise. We're not flaky. And, you know, we're all super professional and just, you know, can you show me a few songs you can play? So I should say that our intention with this experience was to like sort of experiment. We're like, all right, well, what if you, no, God, what if, not what if, what if, but like, we'll use a different phrase. Perhaps, perhaps it might be engaging if people could like watch a, We thought, are people go to theater and they watch people just talk on stage? I wonder if people will sit in an XR experience and just watch people talk and be sort of engaged by that. It turns out in our case, that is not so much what happens. But I think a lot of that, this is going to be a winding answer. I apologize in advance. I think a lot of that is, What I learned is that it's helpful for us not to just write an experience with the understanding of how people will approach it in our test lab, right? Like we would bring people in, put on the headset and say, go through it and tell us what you thought and what you felt. It's a very calm stage, comfortable, nurturing, sort of like quiet environment. So people were more inclined to engage with the narrative and because they were sort of expected to. we didn't take into consideration at South by Southwest. It's a very different experience. Like people, they've waited, they've traveled to Austin. They're there from Brazil for some reason. Like everyone was a Brazilian that I met. So they're all, all of Brazil is there in the ballroom and they're, you know, they wait till 11 o'clock in the morning and the doors open and everything sprints to your booth. And they're like trying to figure out how to scan the code. And they're like, yes. And it's like, it's like, it's like Disney world, but without aliens and blood. And then there's just, it's just like that experience is happening. And they put on your headset, and you're like, oh, I'm on a headset. Great. And this was a throwaway thing we added to the experience at the very last second. We thought, oh, what if you could hold your hands in a certain way, and an AR guitar appears, and you can play the guitar during the musical component. such a neat idea, such a horrible thing to give people up front, because the second you give someone an AR guitar, that's what they want to do. They don't care what the drummer is saying. Like the drummer can, you know, set himself, you know, a blaze, but you know, the strumming of the guitar. So we just, there were a lot of people that would just pick up the guitar and they're just playing the guitar. And I, you know, you kind of like wanted to prod them and say, Hey, you know, the drummer's talking to you. He has a few things to say. And they're like, strum, strum, strum, strum, you know, this is your trip, do what you want with it. So the drummer comes on and you basically watch a one-act play about a band that's on the cusp of breaking up. And then a music producer comes in and the music producer is supposed to be the focal point for what is quote unquote wrong with algorithmic art and pushback creativity. And he says a bunch of funny things that some people heard, but not everyone, about the role of art and using click farms to rank and all this kind of stuff. And so the band... They feel like giving up. They feel like quitting. And at that moment, you get to step in and help re-inspire them. And the way that works is a number of record albums kind of appear in the space. And each record album represents a different style of music. So there's like Bob Marley and Daft Punk and Trent Reznor and whatever, right? So what you can do then, you can grab an album and give it basically to different band members. And depending on which album you give which band member, they will play in that style of music, right? So you can give the reggae album to the drummer and he will play a reggae. You can give the Daft Punk to the bassist and she will play kind of like a Daft Punky bass line. And then after you've kind of assigned each person their style of music, the band starts to jam and play a song. And the lead singer sings a song, which is sort of inspired by the conversation that has taken place up to that point. So the lyrics are very like pointed in that regard. The rehearsal space disappears and gets replaced by a large kind of outdoor crowd experience, right? Like you're on stage at a venue and you get to play your AR guitar that people have been playing this entire time. But we'll pretend they had restraint and they're playing their AR guitar. And, you know, they're on stage jamming in front of people and then the song ends. And the rehearsal space returns and the lead singer kind of like has a closing word with you where she says, you know, a lot of people will kind of tell you, a lot of smart people are going to say a lot of not so smart things about what we do here. You know, this isn't always fun, but it's always worth it, essentially. Kind of like, it's my little love letter to creativity on some level, right? And yeah, that's the arc of the experience for the most part.
[00:18:19.844] Kent Bye: Okay. And so, and looking at your installation, I know that you had a lot of those albums that were in the actual physical installation at South by Southwest. And so when you're selecting the music, is that a mixed reality component or is this all in VR? Is it mixed reality? Is it VR? Like just kind of give me a sense.
[00:18:36.175] Phil McCarty: Yeah, that's a great question. So we weren't sure how the installation was going to work. So we didn't want to bank on being able to actually map. It was the thing we'd hoped for initially to kind of use object tracking to use. We wanted to do a lot of, In Curtis Sickman, the guy who worked on The Void, he has a great book called Hyperreality. And he talks about some of these things. And we thought, oh, it would be great to magically give people the impression that these real album covers are kind of now moving forward. And you can kind of like do an object replacement and hide them. So you get the impression that the real album you saw is now floating towards you so you can pick. But we thought with the unknown variables of not knowing about the space and the lighting and how object tracking might work in that environment, we did not do that. We just chose VR. There was another super fun component to it, which really played well in the initial testing, which we just struck again for uncertainty reasons. Also from the Curtis Hickman book, there's a cool moment where you can open the door inside the space, right? And there's a portal effect essentially where you can like see outside into another space. And we linked that using just a kind of an open source API that allows you to connect with like an outlet. And that outlet was connected to a fan. So you'd open the door, we'd play a wind sound, and then the fan would blow on you physically in the headset. So people would get this experience of like, oh, the wind from outside, I can physically feel it on my face. And like... It's almost like a parlor trick, right? Like, it's just like, okay, all right, I get it. If yeah, I win. But like the smile on people's faces when they actually had a physical, tangible thing that kind of like married this otherwise virtual experience, which is really, I don't know. It was just neat to see, you know, again, going back to ET, it's just neat to see people kind of like unlock that little like childlike awe thing, which I guess, I don't know. You tell me how... To what extent, here's a question for you. You always ask other people, I'm going to ask you a question. What are the, I realize I feel like I'm leading the question a little bit, like what are a couple of the emotions you feel like are most often effectively elicited by this technology in your personal experience?
[00:20:46.016] Kent Bye: Hmm. Yeah, well, I think if it's a really well-told story, then there's all sorts of emotions that can come up. Awe is obviously one that if people are using the affordances of the medium in a way that is truly new and innovative and beyond what a lot of people have seen. I've been in VR for long enough that I find it sometimes harder for me to experience the sense of awe just because I've seen so much. But there's still... no doubt the capability of taking me into the surreal worlds that are beyond anything I could ever imagine or think of myself. And so it's certainly one that's still there. You know, there can be fear. People are afraid of heights or afraid of other things. And so the little bit of uncomfortableness Yeah. And those are the main ones. I mean, there's certain other social dynamics and other ways that I look at other qualities of presence of, you know, agency and embodiment and environment and the way that the story is constructed and just other different qualities of presence beyond just emotion. But yeah, if I were to try to guess some of the most popular ones that those would be the top of the list.
[00:21:48.649] Phil McCarty: Yeah, that's interesting. That's interesting. All was clear when I was sort of like leaning towards, but fear is another good one. And that sort of, in my mind, creates like this constellation of emotions that don't really, you know, movies used to do that for us. But I think in the way that you are a very seasoned VR experiencer, if that's a word, Everyone is a very experienced movie watcher. So it's harder for people to have their awe stoked in movies. Fear, you know, jump scares and stuff always kind of works. But even the kind of fear you experience and awe you experience in a movie, it's always like there's a layer between it, right? Like the artifice and the wall between that experience is very clear. Whereas in VRXR, that awe and fear, it's closer to the bone, closer to the nerve, right? Yeah. And I think you're kind of like creating a constellation where the emotions that this medium allows you to feel are maybe those are the emotions that are sort of like closer to like your, I don't know, maybe people just don't get a chance to feel those things on a day-to-day or week-to-week or year-to-year basis in that way. And so maybe that's like a use case for it. And you're like, you're going to feel like a kid again, I guess. That's kind of where I was going with that.
[00:22:54.976] Kent Bye: Mm-hmm. Yeah, and in terms of other things that look at quality character, context, and story, in this specific experience, it sounds like you're exploring the context of creativity and creative expression, but also in a professional context. I don't know to what degree of success this fictional band is experiencing, but it sounds like just from listening to the experience, there's the opportunity to step into that people who are in a creative profession and to kind of reflect on the current state of the world these days, the push button creativity, which, you know, these days we have a lot of AI that is influencing the discussion around all different levels of creativity and I noticed that you had a tweet where you said that, you know, this experience wouldn't be possible without your own use of cloud and anthropic AI. And so just curious to hear some of your reflections on the deeper dynamics of the different influence of technology and creativity and this kind of double edged sword of AI potentially enabling all sorts of new forms of creativity, but also sometimes leading to this type of push button creativity that is also more the downside.
[00:24:03.581] Phil McCarty: Yeah. So I'm going to do the beauty pageant thing or stall by restating the question a little bit as I try to compose my thoughts. So just to recap, essentially, you want to my thoughts on the kind of double edged sword of AI as both a benefit to creativity and, you know, the death of essentially. Correct. Yes. Okay. For me, I do like the idea that it is tempting to think that it is a complicated decision or a complicated situation, but actually in my mind, I will take a slightly more controversial take. It's actually not that complicated for me. I think that there are very clear cases where like, oh, this is AI that is enabling you and it is like, letting you do a thing that you wanted to do is taking your initiative and your idea and your motivation and your ambition. And it is like adding a jet pack to that. And there are cases where it is, again, like the push button creativity. It is just popping out of thin air without, I think it didn't need you to be there for this to exist, right? Obviously, that's a spectrum. So I guess the gray area in the middle is like where that gets interesting. Like, okay, so where is it not that clear cut? I just personally haven't bumped into a lot of situations where it is difficult for me personally to say, okay, this is AI being harnessed for good and, you know, a tool. And this is AI that is, you know, just... stealing other people's art to create things. And so, so yeah, so I, you know, on surface, there is a, an extent to which the piece is, you know, using AI to criticize AI, but it's not, I don't think it's that straightforward. I think it is using AI for good, like, like anything, right? Like any, most technologies can be used either for good or for bad. And I think that AI is clearly one of those things. Yeah. That sort of answer the question.
[00:25:56.708] Kent Bye: Yeah. I'm wondering if you would be willing to elaborate a little bit on specifically how you were using AI. Because it sounded like in that tweet, you were kind of alluding to how the last practice probably wouldn't even exist without your ability to use some of these different AI tools.
[00:26:10.495] Phil McCarty: Oh, my gosh. Yeah, yeah. I'm happy to. This is another one of those ones where I'm like, well, how much do you want to hear? Because it's all over the project. So I'm not a Swift developer. And we early on decided to use Swift for this project for so many reasons. But there's not a Stack Overflow body of knowledge for Swift projects, for Vision OS Swift projects, because there's just not that many of them. So for a lot of the things we ran into, we had to kind of like plop Apple demo projects and that sort of thing into a cloud context window. So we could say, hey, how do we do this? How do we do this? How do we do this? Again, for me as a non-Swift developer, I have a software tech background, but not that language level. So in the timeframe we had, Claude was invaluable. And like, here's a very techie, but like a specific example. So of just a random Claude saving the day kind of anecdote. At one point, we're going to use blend shapes for the animation of the characters speaking, right? We, Unreal Live Link, we're going to put people in front of camera while they're recording their lines so we can use their facial performances. in the experience. I'm sort of over-explaining this for you. You know this better than most people I've heard you talk about blend shapes on Real Life Link a dozen times. But in case anyone listening, like my mom will listen to this podcast and she doesn't know what blend shapes are, kid. She doesn't know. So mom, blend shapes are a way to basically animate a person's face using kind of like a concrete set of negative one-to-one values for different muscles. Yeah. Right? So you might say an eyelid is open at one and closed at zero, and then you can set that number over time to animate the eyelid opening and closing. So we use the Unreal Live Link app to record all of our characters' facial expressions while they're recording their dialogue. But in some instances, we did it all in one take. So the data on the phone was like massive. It was like a one or two or three gigabyte file. And we couldn't get it off the phone. Like the LiveLink app would crash or the thing that transferred was corrupted and we simply could not get it. And we're like, oh no, what are we going to do? How are we going to get this like facial animation to work? Around the same time, when NVIDIA was releasing, like February 24th, I remember the day because I had it in my calendar for a long time, they were releasing their A2F, their audio-to-face blend shape AI tool where you could upload audio and receive blend shapes. So we're like, okay, great, we'll just use that. We'll take our performance from the actors that were trapped on phones and we'll upload it to NVIDIA and receive back blend shapes. Great. So we did that. A couple of problems there, but we won't go into those. We got their blend shapes back and it turned out that the blend shape format that NVIDIA was using did not mirror the blend shape format in our character scenes, right? And, you know, they're both, it's just a text file of CSV data. And I was like, oh God, I know I can probably massage this so that one format is the other. But like we were days away and I have 30,000 other things to do. I do not have the time to do this. And then I was like, oh, you know what? For the nthousandth time, I bet Claude can do this. So Claude, so I dropped the target BlendShape file into Claude, along with the BlendShape file that was coming from NVIDIA, and said, hey, Claude, can you write me a Python script that can convert one to the other? And 10 seconds later, it was there. And I could just press a button, and my BlendShapes were now magically converted from the NVIDIA format to the Live Link format. And like that kind of thing is just, it's such a powerful, useful thing. And it just, in 30 seconds, I have something that would have taken me hours to manually create, you know what I mean? I know Python, but I'm not, I can't do that in 10 seconds. So like little micro tools like that are super powerful. And again, that's, I think that's to answer your question earlier, to re-answer your earlier question. That's an example of, I had to know enough about kind of like CSV files. As a non-technical person, that use of the tool would not have been available to me. But as a somewhat technical person who can make a lot of mistakes, that was available. And it was just, now Cloud was just bridging that manual ability gap or the time gap. Like I have the ability, but not the time. And Cloud was able to connect those things for me in a way that couldn't have been done, you know, pre-Cloud, if that makes sense. So that's, but there were lots of instances like that where like, oh, Claude, how do we do this? Claude, how do we do this? We need a little tool that'll just do this. And it was just, yeah, wonderful.
[00:30:43.792] Kent Bye: Okay. Well, you alluded to a little bit that there were some technical glitches and issues that you were facing in the display of the last practice, which like you said, if I was the first person, I would be able to see it. I was not the first person on the press day. I was later in the day. And so by that time you had already faced some of these overheating issues. Maybe you could take me to the moment when you realized that something was going on and what you were able to discern as to what was happening there in terms of if it was okay to show for one person, but if they were showing it for like seven hours a day, at some point it starts to break down and overheat.
[00:31:17.529] Phil McCarty: Yeah. So the way we kind of diagnosed that problem, whenever you're getting consistent feedback from people, like this is failing the same way for everyone consistently. Like, okay, we know exactly what this is. This is when I do X, Y happens. Well, the problem we were having is we would, you know, we kind of watch every person through the experience and like knew exactly where they were and what they were doing. And if we were close enough, you could kind of hear in the scene what moment they were at. Yeah. And, you know, our first run through is like, this is great. Everything's, we went through it. This is wonderful. Everything's, you know, playing smoothly. And then as the day would go on, we would hear bugs that were like completely just had never been experienced. And they were weird bugs. Like a person would say something like the door, right? For a moment, the door was where I expected it to be, but then it was 10 feet in the air. And I'm like, well, I have no idea what that means. You know, and it's just, that's, it's the worst feeling where you're like, when someone's like, oh, this is, it's a known thing. You're like, okay, great. I know that buck. Or they'd say, yeah, the drummer's face just melted away. We're like, what is it? What are you talking about? So, yeah. After a while, we realized that, oh, you know, we would swap out the other headset. We had two headsets and, you know, that would go for a while. And then that person would start experiencing. And then it was only later that we realized, oh, it's not something fundamental to the project itself. It's literally after a certain number of experiences and iterations through, the experience would start to essentially decay, right? And a lot of that was because of the way we were using blend shapes and a bunch of other not interesting things. So that was like one technical problem. And I'll share this other one just because I think if you are doing an Apple Vision Pro experience, you need to hear this. This is not a bug, but it is a... So we had a number of people go through the experience. And again, we give them a guitar and they just strum, strum, strum, strum. They're so happy to strum. And then shortly for a lot of people, they would say, hey, it just crashed on me. I don't know why it crashed. And we're like trying to figure out why it's crashing. The problem with giving people a strumming UX is that the gesture, you can't see it on camera, I am making a kind of strum thing and part of the strumming hand gesture is the exact same gesture on the Vision Pro that people use to bring up the context menu. So people were strumming, but they were literally playing themselves out of the experience by making the pinch gesture. And then shortly thereafter, touching the menu button. It took us, I'm embarrassed how long it took us to figure that out. So like, why is our experience, like we would go back through it. You know, it's not crashing for me. It's not crashing for me. It's not crashing for me. Next person goes through, it's crashing for them, quote unquote crashing. And it was just, now I've since learned that there may be a way to disable that. But again, it was just a... That set us back in a way that is embarrassing to think about now. But yeah, I can see that you can't see Kent's face. He's about to ask me a question. I'm so excited to hear what he's going to say. Yeah.
[00:34:06.102] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, it sounds like that there was a number of different things. Sometimes that they were kind of accumulating from the degradation of the experience because of some sort of overheating that were difficult to identify some explainable caches that at the moment were unexplainable crashes, but maybe just the fact that you're making strumming and people were crashing out. Can you just describe a little bit about what your week was like, just in terms of trying to debug all these things, you know, either during the day or in evenings, it sounds like it was a pretty intense week.
[00:34:36.557] Phil McCarty: Yeah. Yeah. Gosh, I have to like fight the desire to either be in my instincts. You're like, I should be self-deprecating. I should make a joke. I'm going to bypass both of those and go with just factual. It was a, it was a challenging week. I learned a lot. Yeah. So, you know, I was, first of all, we were jet lagged. Part of my team is based here in Portugal. So we had just flown and my laptop broke on the flight over, the screen broke. And I was going to use that for a lot of things. And that was a little bit problematic, but luckily the Vision Pro lets you kind of mirror things. And so I was able to sort of like save the day with the device to an extent, but I don't like being in it for 12 hours a day. Sorry, that's, so what was the week like? Yeah. It was just, it was a 40, the first 48 hours, I didn't sleep at all because there, you know, there were a couple other developers on the project, but they weren't on the ground with me. So it was sort of the pressure on me to sort of solve that while also kind of like reconnecting with a lot of people that, you know, and like from other experiences, like Steven Butchko was there from Ferryman and I hadn't seen him since Venice and like, Oh, I want to see him say hi to Steven, but also I need to fix this experience because if we don't, Blake's going to be very disappointed and not that Blake would ever share that. Oh, for people that don't know, Blake is the director of South by Southwest immersive and does not, and it's super great guy. And I just, I see him smile so much. I would hate to see him not smile and it'd be my fault. Right. So I was like, Oh God, I don't want to disappoint Blake. And so all of that's in your mind on your friends are there and you're building the booth and there's all the stimulus and there's, you know, a million questions and, Can't buy who you've listened to hours of your life is like, hey, can I come by and do the experience? You're like, no, you can't. And so it was a, I feel like this is not the path of the response you were looking for. You asked me, what was my week like on the ground?
[00:36:34.885] Kent Bye: From my distance, you know, cause you had a very unique, almost like nightmare scenario type of things that were going down. And so, yeah, just any other way that you kind of make sense of what was going on and just, it sounds like it was a very intense experience.
[00:36:48.581] Phil McCarty: It was intense. It was intense, but ultimately it was great. On some level, you know, kind of, they say that the only way you can like learn and grow is from discomfort and having to experience that first day of just being down, like just, you're just out for the press demo day was kind of brutal, but then the kind of like relief of getting the back up and running was great. And then as the heating things were sorted and the animation things were rolled back enough to get people kind of through the experience and the people on the, like the last day, there was a girl came up and gave a testimony about the experience. She just wanted to tell me, she's like, where can I get the song? I love the song. And I'm like, what? And she's like, yeah. And she's like, does a little thing. She was like, during the song, I was just singing and playing, you know, you know, she's loved the song so much, the song that she made. again, because the lyrics are hard-coded, but the musical component of the song is kind of downstream of your choices. So to ride that rollercoaster of, oh my God, this thing isn't going to work. I don't know why it's breaking to the end of the rollercoaster where a couple of people are telling me how much they liked the song they made. We got to really experience that, like the full, not the circle of life, but like the realm of human experience, you know, it got to the lows and highs of that were really in its own way satisfying. And there's also an extent to which like, Yeah, it's just, it's a crash course in learning so many things. Oh, we should have double headsets. We should cycle them in and out. We should learn to give people as much interactive upfront or not at all. We should be aware of the environment when bringing people into the experience. So like, are they sitting in a quiet room by themselves before they turn this thing on? Or are they in the circus of the ballroom before they turn this thing on and being aware of that? you know, those are just top of mind from this conversation, but you know, I wrote down a list of probably 30 or 40 things that there was no other way to learn and experience some of these things short of going through it. So it was, you know, that sort of like crash course in learning about both the Vision Pro, Swift, festivals, booth, organization, interacting with people, talking about, you know, learning how to talk about the device, learning, watching how people's instincts in a headset, like there's something to doing it by yourself. And there's something to watching 40 or 50 people go through that, that you can't get that knowledge any other way. And there's also something nice to, for us in seeing people go through a throttled, a heavily throttled version of the experience and still enjoy it and going, okay, you know, there is, People aren't grading it against your idea of what it should be. They're grading it against their regular life. And maybe in their regular life, they don't get a lot of AR guitars. So, you know, that was what the week was like on some level. You know, it's the goal of it for me on some level is I think people are like deeply, deeply musical in a way that doesn't get captured or expressed a lot. Like I'm going to embarrass you a little bit here. So like, for example, humor me on this. Do you play any instruments or are you a musician at all?
[00:39:47.194] Kent Bye: I played the clarinet for seven years in middle school and high school. And I played piano for a while, but, and I love music, but I'm not actively making or creating music, but it's something I'm definitely deeply interested in.
[00:40:00.097] Phil McCarty: What music do you listen to, just out of curiosity? What's the song that you have on your guilty pleasure right now?
[00:40:05.723] Kent Bye: Well, there's Drolo, and Art of Change was being featured very close to where you were located. It's an amazing album that I saw at Venice at the Art of Change, and then I've been listening to it on repeat. But I think Tycho. I like shoegaze type of music. Right on. I like Roman Rapix, Pivots is another one that I enjoy. He's also in XR Space, but Tycho and Erlich Schnauss and I might say Drolo. Drolo is currently, I've been listening to things on repeat. I'm not familiar with that. All right, Drolo. How do you spell that? D-R-O-E-L-O-E, Drolo, I think. The Art of Change, if you look it up, it's on Bandcamp. Highly recommend that as an album.
[00:40:45.256] Phil McCarty: Okay. So I'll check that out. Okay. So back to embarrassing you a little bit. So are you, you played piano and clarinet. You're familiar with like the musical scale and Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do, right? And like the intervals I have noticed in your podcast that when you say your name up top, you say your name in a perfect sixth almost every time. Really? Yes. For people that don't know, the musical scale works like this. It's do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. If you break that out, there are eight notes. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight. One, six. And so you consistently say, hi, this is can't buy. And it is the one sixth interval when you say your name every time. Interesting. And I love that because it is just, I think it's, that is the song in your heart when you say your name, like you can't help yourself. And now you're self-conscious about it.
[00:41:38.276] Kent Bye: Maybe, maybe you'll think about it. Well, I'm just thinking that if it was a fifth, that would be much better than a six. Don't you think?
[00:41:43.340] Phil McCarty: I don't know. I feel like now it's, I mean, that is, it is a quote unquote, more harmonious interval, but I think sometimes you do hit the fifth. It's never the seventh. It's never came by. It's never there. You never like, Oh, come on, resolve it. Can't resolve it. Please help us. But you hit that six and I'm like, oh, that's how he hears his name for himself. And that's great. And I think that that's everywhere in everyone's life. People say certain things, they have certain phrases and they use certain musical notes. And I think there's a CEO, her name is Kakul Srivastava. She's the CEO of Splice. And she very frequently talks about the fact that music creation tools have been locked for like 30, 40 years, essentially in these like dolls, these like logic enabled and whatever, which I have a ton of musician friends that will never use one of those things because it's intimidating. And I feel like part of the hope for this experience anyway was to give people a version of musical creativity and expression that does not require them to necessarily have played an instrument for years and does not require them to learn the 80 million knobs and dials in Logic or Ableton. and allows them to sort of like be musical, follow their taste and interest and get to have a musical moment that comes from themselves, which I think the push button creativity stuff doesn't have. And, you know, another goal for this project, I think a later final version of this will be multiplayer, right? So like, There'll be a bunch of people in a room, not a bunch, but like a couple people will be like a bass player and a guitarist. The final vision is for you to like have made a song with a stranger and like the two of you on stage playing a song. I think that that's, cause that's, you know, that's a, you mentioned collaboration early on. I think that was actually probably another thing that happened during the week is that all of these things, good and bad, are more satisfying with other people. Like going through this like rough week, but your team's there with you is great. And then like having things work out and your team's there to succeed with you is great. And a lot of, I think what helps self-effacing creators on some level is to collaborate with other people so that it's not all them one way or the other for good or bad. And I think, you know, there was a hope. There is a hope to give people a little taste of that, like what it means to like not have to rely solely on your own creative spark to bring something into fruition because that's liberating and it's more satisfying in my personal opinion.
[00:44:05.461] Kent Bye: Very cool. Yeah. It kind of reminds me of the experience of Electronauts within VR, which is kind of designed to try to like allow you to do very simple actions, but still have like a creative musical experience. I haven't tried that one. It's worth checking out. I did want to ask a follow-on question on this mechanic of choosing the albums. By the way, I was a huge fan of Nine Inch Nails and still am. Oh, great. So I would probably choose the Trent Reznor, you know, whatever like option for baseline or drums. But so you're choosing a number of different bands. Can you just get a sense of if that's something that you had to compose, like the music for each of those? Or like, how do you ensure that they even go together? Or is it just kind of a mishmash where it just was... independent enough that it would still like be in the same key and not clash too much. And yeah, I'm just curious how you would, you were going through the process of creating this kind of mashup of different musical styles.
[00:45:01.931] Phil McCarty: Yeah, I work closely with our musical producer, Darina Maximova from Ukraine, Slava Ukraini to my Ukrainian friends and listeners. And The idea was to put it on rails enough that the song would always more or less be sonically in key. So there is a set chord progression, right? There's A minor, F, G for the verse, C minor, F, A minor, G for the chorus, and then the pre-chorus is a variation of that. So we've got like the four horsemen of pop for chords, right? Like every song is this. So the idea was we took a bunch of samples, again, using Splice, shout out to Splice, So that each sample, so for example, like with the rhythmic instruments, it's easy, right? Drums can play under anything. But if you chose, for example, the Trent Reznor inspired bass line, we made sure to use loops that played that chord progression. So no matter what, if you chose the bass player from the Trent Reznor inspired bass player playing those chords and the Johnny Cash inspired guitarist playing those chords, it would still sonically match. Now, whether it would work stylistically or not, we just decided it was okay to let people make a mess, right? Like that's part of the fun of it, right? Like maybe just make something that sounds sonically crazy, right? And actually, I think more often than not, as long as the chords and tempo... Oh, it was locked to a certain tempo, right? So every song is at 107 beats per minute. And that's just so that we didn't have to deal with like, all right, if you pick a drum beat that's 107, we have to like then have samples and that kind of thing. So if everything's the same tempo, same key, same chord progression, then the only real... It limited the chaos that would come out of it. But even then... we found that the top line, the melody, the lyrics kind of like held it together, no matter how weird it got underneath. And people, I think you'll find that like non-musicians, especially are very forgiving of what comes out musically. Like they're, you know, they don't necessarily, it's kind of like me at a, at a restaurant. Like I could eat something like, Oh, this tastes pretty good to me. And like my friend who has a refined palate, like this is trash. There's too much. I'm like, I don't know. You know, it's not a thing that I have built for myself. So yeah. So it was, it was fine. That's a good, that's a great question. Yeah.
[00:47:08.513] Kent Bye: Very cool. Well, I guess as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential of all these emerging technologies with XR and AI and immersive storytelling and music might be and what it all might be able to enable.
[00:47:23.881] Phil McCarty: Oh, you know, I didn't know you were going to ask that question. I did not have a moment to think about my answer, but I'll off the cuff it. I, okay. So I, I, oh, this allows me to soapbox a little bit. Am I allowed to soapbox about the Vision Pro? Okay, sweet.
[00:47:37.819] Kent Bye: Sure.
[00:47:39.180] Phil McCarty: I'm pretty bullish on the Vision Pro for certain use cases. And I've noticed that, and you would know this better than anyone, so please let me know. I have a question for you. I feel like the bulk of criticism of the Vision Pro has been, it's so heavy, it's so expensive. And I'm like, okay, these things are true. And I'm pretty sure Apple was aware of the price point and weight when they released it. My gut instinct is that Apple knows exactly what they're doing because most of the people that are making that criticism are doing it from their MacBooks with their AirPods in their head and their Apple Watches. They're like, I don't think this company knows what they're doing. My hunch is that they know that the final form factor is kind of glasses or glass adjacent. And they probably are anticipating that the glass deliverable form factor will have the power set or functionality of this Vision Pro. So, when you release a developer kit, you want developers to have the tools necessary to use your actual final hardware form factor. Does that make sense? It's like if you give a lightweight Nimble Vision Pro now, developers are going to optimize around this underpowered glass device further down the road, if that makes sense. So, I think that it's... Yeah, I don't think they should have done anything different. And similarly with controllers, I don't think you're going to walk around the street with controllers all the time with your glasses. So why release controllers up front if your intention is for it to be this everyday wearable glasses piece? So again, I feel like, oh, I haven't heard people say this, but I'm sure you've talked to everyone. Are people saying this? I'm only hearing the loudest, squeakiest noises about the weight and heavy and, you know, FOV.
[00:49:21.109] Kent Bye: Yeah, I mean, I think my take on Apple is that they've been super secretive and that that has been to their detriment because they haven't always been able to get feedback on some of these things. And they've also prioritized aesthetics over comfort. Like everything they did looks great, but it actually feels terrible. And so I think that when you're an XR, you actually want it to be the opposite. But I think they've made some choices that I question in terms of that, which I think it speaks to maybe this larger issue of not having existing feedback loops outside of their own compartmentalized way that they do business. So I have a little bit of a different take from my experience of Apple and different complaints that kind of boil down to like their secrecy is the thing that has been a detriment to their innovation rather than helping them. because it's still new and emerging. And I think the more that they can be open and experimental and iterative. And so it's really a device that's marketed as a consumer device. I mean, in terms of having the flywheel of innovation, they seem to be continuing to push forward on the Apple immersive video, which I think has been really great. But Yeah, I think there's a lot of other things in terms of having a lot of retention in these devices that speak to some of these other bigger issues that hopefully they'll be listening to a lot of the feedback that they're receiving and adapt and improve over time. So that's kind of my take. I have a little bit more of a contrarian take in terms of like that it could still be a lot better, even just for my own use, that it is heavy and it's uncomfortable for using for long periods of time out of the box for sure.
[00:50:53.049] Phil McCarty: Yeah, no, I can absolutely see that. Interesting. Yeah, I do. I feel like they're marketing it as a consumer device because they have to, but I do feel like their heart is that this is a dev kit. Releasing it at WWDC and not during one of their primary keynotes and stuff. It feels like they're like, if consumers buy it, great, but... That's not their North Star, but maybe.
[00:51:18.059] Kent Bye: It's honestly hard for me to know whether or not their internal metrics are seeing that it's going in the right direction and successful and they're going to continue. I think it, you know, I believe in the medium. It's just hard for me to know with all of what I could see as these potential missteps of their design decisions that they did. I'm glad they shipped it. I'm glad it exists and doesn't exist, but it's not a perfect advice. And I hope it just kind of speaks to their commitment to the medium and long-term, but we'll see.
[00:51:44.757] Phil McCarty: Agreed. It's interesting how they've created this new gravity for form factor. Did you see the new, the Chinese vision pro knockoff that came out today?
[00:51:51.307] Kent Bye: I saw that it was, people were demoing it at CES, but I haven't had a chance to try it out or anything like that.
[00:51:58.228] Phil McCarty: You look at it, if someone sent you the image and said, hey, they released the Vision Pro 2, you'd be like, oh, neat, Apple made some adjustments. But we're back to your question. So I think the future of the technology and where it can all go, I do suspect that, like I did Tang and Chao, for your head, you had them on the podcast. I did his experience as well. And he was one of my favorite ones in Venice as well. In that experience, it's 30 people in a Quest Pro. That would cost you, I don't know, $10,000 to put together. You can't put 30 people in Vision Pros. That'll cost you $100,000. I think that each of these headsets are, you know, they're eking out spaces and use cases, right? Like there's large-scale installation will never be Vision Pros because the cost barrier is too high. I think Vision has an incredible hardware advantage in their, we didn't even talk about this, their photon-to-photon latency. I think that their metric for that is like, I think it's like 12 or 11 milliseconds. And all the other top of the line headsets are like 30 or 40. And I don't think anyone's ever going to meaningfully close that gap. And I remember in an early, what's his name? Michael Abrash from Steam. One of his early talks, he talks about how important that particular metric is for presence and reality. And I think that my hunch is that because of that hardware advantage for Apple, the Vision Pro will always be the go-to device for experiences that need that kind of immersion and that kind of presence and that kind of realism. And I think that there will be a space for the quests and for whatever happens with Android XR and all these. I think my hunch is it's like burger joints, right? Like McDonald's isn't the only one. There are different burger joints and they all have different jobs that they serve, but That's my kind of like very coarse view of the hardware ecosystem. As far as the utilization of the technology as an end goal, I think as a person that's coming from screenwriting and has learned the hard way that like a lot of the screenwriting moves are not kind of a one-to-one because you don't have control over the viewer's gaze and you don't have a lot of those moves. I think that, like we talked about in this call, a lot of the emotions that you can experience trigger with this device, whether it's awe, whether it's fear. I think an emotional expression platform, it's emotional experience platform, it's unparalleled. I think people will continue to play with those things. Another early thing that people described it as, is an empathy device. I think as a tool to put you in another person's skin and have them share their lived experience, Novels kind of halfway get you there by sharing someone's interior reality. I think the virtual reality and mixed reality and XR, I think these tools, I think that's, you know, everyone else is like, well, what's the thing you can do in this that you can't do in another medium? And I think that that's a thing that... we've only begun to see like what that is like and what that feels like. And I think that that's, I think, sorry, I'm half trying to decide if I should open this other can of worms conversationally, but I realized we're running up against time. So that's why I'm kind of stammering while you were politely looking. You're like, Phil, say something. Yeah, so I think that empathy and emotional experiences are kind of like what you can do in this medium that you can't do in others. And, of course, all the incredible, like, educational capabilities. Like, oh, there are a million classes I took in high school that I would absolutely take a different way if the, you know, and everyone knows this, right? Like, telling me about the pyramids is one thing. Taking me to the pyramids is a totally different thing. I think education and training, I think all of those. Oh, this is a clever way. I sound like such a Vision OS fanboy. I could say as many bad things about the device as I could. Good. But I will say. I do get the hunch that that's kind of, as much as Apple seems to dislike games and gaming, I think it's because they want this to be a spatial computing device for heftier, beefier use cases and not because they want people to play whatever the Vision Pro equivalent of Candy Crush is. I think that that's kind of their MO there. But anyway, so that's my sort of rambling answer to that question. Here's the thing. I don't think you did this before. Do you agree or disagree? Did I say anything that was even disagreeable or was that all kind of milquetoast?
[00:56:05.034] Kent Bye: No, I mean, I think it's nothing that I disagree with. No, for sure. And as I was listening and there's a broad range of different types of answers that people give and people usually pick like one contextual domain to focus on and you covered like multiple contextual domains. So I think that just speaks to how broad your perspective is of how you're thinking about this as a medium. And, uh, Yeah. So I know you've got another call to hop onto, but I just wanted to thank you for taking the time to kind of chat around this experience. Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to try it out yet. Hopefully I'll get a chance at some point to go through it. And it just wasn't meant to be, it wasn't in our stars to try it out at South by despite our best efforts to make it happen. So yeah, just really appreciate you taking the time to be able to share a little bit more about your process and experience and, uh, Yeah, I'm glad that it was overall a positive experience rather than the worst nightmare you can imagine. It sounds like there was a lot of good learnings that would be impossible to do otherwise. And yeah, and I look forward to checking it out and seeing wherever you take your creative expression in the medium here in the future. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down.
[00:57:10.023] Phil McCarty: Thanks so much for having me, Kent. And thanks so much for your recontextualization of my answer was such a masterpiece of like, you know, dressing up. Thank you. Yes, my interests are very broad and it shows my, the broadness of which I'm enjoying and appreciating the medium. That is, I need to take a lesson. I need to, yeah, nice. Well done, sir. Um, yes. Thank you so much for all of your hard work you do as an archivist for this medium. And I, it is so neat to kind of like have like one little voice in this thing, which is going to be like the body of work that, that, that, yeah, you're, what you're doing is so crazy and amazing. And thank you for doing it, um, with such consistency and such patience and knowledge. I hear you talk to people that are in such varied world, you know, Sorry, my phone's ringing. It's probably my writing partner hassling me. Different skill sets in different corners of this world. And you're able to talk fluently across all these domains. And it is so nice for us as listeners. So thank you so much for that.
[00:58:11.038] Kent Bye: Yes, thank you. All right. And thanks again. And we'll see you in the metaverse or at the next festival. Sounds great. Thanks, Kate. See ya. Bye-bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And there is a lot that's happening in the world today. And the one place that I find solace is in stories, whether that's a great movie, a documentary, or immersive storytelling. And I love going to these different conferences and festivals and seeing all the different work and talking to all the different artists and sharing that with the community. Because I think there's just so much to be learned from listening to someone's process to hear about what they want to tell a story about. And even if you don't have a chance to see it, just to have the opportunity to hear about a project that you might have missed or to learn about it. And so this is a part of my own creative process of capturing these stories and sharing it with a larger community. And if you find that valuable and want to sustain this oral history project that I've been doing for the last decade, then please do consider supporting me on Patreon at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Every amount does indeed help sustain the work that I'm doing here, even if it's just $5 a month. That goes a long way for allowing me to continue to make these trips and to ensure that I can see as much of the work as I can and to talk to as many of the artists as I can and to share that with the larger community. So you can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
