Here’s my interview with Jason Marsh, CEO and Founder of Flow Immersive, that was conducted on Tuesday, October 16, 2018 at Virtual Reality Strategy Conference in San Francisco, CA. This is part 1 of 3 of my conversations with Marsh, you can see part 2 from 2019 here and part 3 from 2025 here. 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 structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the features of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my series of looking at AWE past and present, today's interview is with Jason Marsh. Actually, it's a three-part series with Jason and Foil Immersive. And so I first came across Jason at GDC in 2018, and then I was able to meet up with him at the Virtual Reality Strategy Conference in 2018. And then again, the following year at the Virtual Reality Strategy Conference in 2019, I ran into him a number of different times over the years, and then also ran into him again here at Augmented World Expo 2025. And I had all these unpublished interviews and conversations with Jason. And so I wanted to record another one, but also release all this archive of unpublished interviews that I've had with Jason over the years. tracing the evolution of flow immersive. So Jason's working in WebXR. And so trying to find ways to use these JavaScript D3 visualizations and adapting them in different ways. And so through these series of conversations, you'll see the evolution from the different platforms that were really hot at the time from like, like Oculus Go and Quest, and then also augmented reality and magic leap. And then this latest demo that he was showing here at augmented world expo 2025 was actually on the X real platform. So this kind of more glasses form factor where you could, whip it out from his coat pocket and show me a demo wherever I was at. So I was able to see his latest demos and all these demos over the years. And what's interesting to me as I go through this series of interviews with Jason Marsh is that there's ways that some of these experiences stick in my mind. And so the conversations that I had with him a year later in 2019, I'm coming back to some of the different demos that I'm seeing. And As we're encoding our memories, having this kind of spatialization of the data allows us to have deeper access to not only seeing what's salient with these patterns of data, but to see how they're moving over time and having what Jason calls data stories. And so turning this storytelling ethos into showing the modulation of these points that are kind of fluctuating through space and time as you're immersed within the environment. And it's just a really powerful technology. And I think he's been finding this. different customers and very much a bootstrapped type of effort over the years. And so it's always interesting to catch up with Jason. I'm also glad that I'm finally able to release these series of interviews and marking it with episode 1600 to dig into this three-part series of Jason Marsh and Flow Immersive. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Jason happened on Tuesday, October 18th, 2018 at the Virtual Reality Strategy Conference in San Francisco, California. So with that, let's go ahead and
[00:02:52.268] Jason Marsh: Hello, my name is Jason Marsh, and I'm the CEO and founder of Flow Immersive. And we are focused specifically on the enterprise with a WebVR set of tools. We're a SaaS software company, so we do custom work, but we also have a tool called the Flow Editor, which enables anyone to build information experiences in VR.
[00:03:15.168] Kent Bye: Great. Yeah, so you just had a chance to show me a demo of this, and it's super impressive. I mean, just the amount of information and data visualization and the seamless workflow that you have, being able to upload a spreadsheet and to very quickly visualize the data in many different ways and seamlessly share it out. Maybe you could talk about what you see as the workflow or the use cases where people are going to start to be using your tool here.
[00:03:39.780] Jason Marsh: Yeah, I think learning and development is a key beachhead for us, especially in the corporate space where there's actually dollars that can be applied to this. It's a little harder to find those dollars in higher ed and the rest of the education space, although we do think we'll be getting some exciting interest in that space for what we're doing as well. I think if I just step back a little bit, and let me describe this phrase we use. We call it everyday VR. And that goes straight to your kind comments about the workflow. So everyday VR says that we shouldn't be spending $100,000 to build a VR presentation. We shouldn't be accepting that, you know, you're going to get throughput of maybe 50 people a day in a Vive headset in a trade show environment. That the ROI for that kind of situation is broken. And the VR industry needs to understand that. We've focused on mobile VR from the very beginning. The Gear VR has been our key device. Now we've switched to the Oculus Go. And of course, we're excited about the Oculus Quest when that comes out. But folks need to be able to get into an experience, just maybe a two to five minute experience. By folks, I mean VP level, enterprise, executives, salespeople, sales targets, the people that need the information today. They need to be able to get into it in just a few moments, experience this visual representation of their data, of their core communication messaging. and have it stick. So on some level, what we're doing is saying with everyday VR, we've got an authoring tool that enables you to actually create a presentation. I actually did that with you. It took about three minutes to create a presentation before it was live and published to anywhere in the world on the web. So you've got to change that workflow. And then you've got to be able to just hand it to someone, have it be understandable, controllable, and just work. We had the opportunity to be in a room with 25 executives a couple of weeks ago and managed to put all 25 through a VR experience using six Oculus Go headsets in 30 minutes. Now, that could be that that's a normal thing, but that seemed like that was pretty unusual, pretty different than the standard VR workflow. And so when we talk about everyday VR, that's where we're really heading with that.
[00:06:08.493] Kent Bye: Well, the thing that was really striking to me was that one of the demos that you showed was just a map and the world's population. And you showed a size of a sphere, but also in height, the relative to all the different cities in the world, like which cities have the most population. And it's very clear just by looking at it how huge a lot of the cities in China are versus the rest of the world. But it just allowed me to draw this connection between that geography and where these huge amounts of people are living. And to then see that vertically as a flat map on the bottom and you see how tall it is, it's like walking through a landscape or an architecture of the populations of the world. But then to also flip it and to see it over the map, it also was just helpful to say, okay, well, these are where these cities are located. And this could be an opportunity for me to go into Google Earth VR and maybe look at and see what's happening. But you have a very quick, like, photosphere that's pulling in stuff from the open web through Google Earth. and being able to have these open web surfaces and draw in data as well. And so you have this geolocated data, but have these spatial relationships that are giving you a much more of a deeper embodied cognition or just an intuitive understanding as to how that data is related to physical space. So I feel like I have a memory of that now that gives me a sense of where people are at in the world. So maybe you could just talk about some of the either the science behind that or some of what you were trying to go for and trying to translate data into architecture.
[00:07:36.798] Jason Marsh: Fascinating. Your description is really great. One of the things that I think that I want to start with is just understand that the kind of experiences that we're building don't look like a traditional VR experience, right? We're focused on the world's symbolic information. If you think about 30 million PowerPoints are delivered every day, according to Microsoft. Well, what's in them? What can VR bring to that environment to help that information stick? Because frankly, we forget PowerPoint. It's just straight brain science goes to the fact that our visual cortex has to process a flat surface and try to find the meaning in it. And until you've got meaning, it's not going to get down to the parts of your brain where it's going to stick. Where in VR, which is activating your hippocampus, which gives you your spatial awareness, and it also is a key regulator of your long-term memory. So, literally, you've got cells, memory cells and place cells intertwined in and around your hippocampus. And in VR, we activate that spatial memory. That is a key differentiator between communicating in VR versus with PowerPoint. But the brain science doesn't need to stop there. What you're describing with what we call Flow Cities, which is kind of our standard demo that we like to show because it makes so many points about what we're doing and why it's different than a lot of traditional media. So what you are seeing there is a situation where you've got spreadsheet, a five column spreadsheet of 10,000 cities and each city is a dot and we arrange the dots in a variety of ways during the presentation. You have control over which way you would like to see them. One of them is a scatter plot. Latitude and longitude are on the floor and the population is on the Y direction going up. With 10,000 cities that's all you need. You don't need the underlying map because you clearly see the shape of the continents. then we can rearrange those dots and literally ripple animate them into a column chart. And in that column chart, now that you've described that a dot is a city, when you see the stack of dots, it's understandable right away that, oh, this country has a lot more cities than that country, and then each dot is sized by population, and it's intuitive understanding. which isn't true of a typical column chart. A typical column chart, you have to trick your brain into figuring out what a rectangle means.
[00:10:04.887] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's almost like this seamless context shift from seeing it in one context where you're able to associate that this dot is a city that's in this location, and then you could literally watch it animate and where it ends up in the column chart. But my brain, it took a couple of times, I think the second time, second or third time, I kind of figured out, oh, this is what's happening here, and it could start to watch the data flows and have in my mind this transition for, okay, this is the context of what this data means and what it represents. And I almost don't even need to look at the column labels because I could just see the colors as well as how it's animated to get more of an intuitive sense of that.
[00:10:39.557] Jason Marsh: There's certain things like even just looking at a column that towers above you in VR is such a different experience than a flat screen experience at arm's length. And our customers are very, even that simple example is striking. But even beyond that, it sticks in a different way in your memory.
[00:10:58.664] Kent Bye: Well, I noticed that going from one data set to the next, whatever you're looking at is right in front of you. And there may be something above you that you've already looked at. And then down below is the data that's yet to come. And so you have this ability, like flipping through a PowerPoint slide, go from one slide to the next. But in this case, you still have the context of that previous information that's right above you. So if you need to look at it again, you're seeing it from a different angle, but yet I mean, imagine that there's going to be ways to still have access to it. Maybe instead of it going straight up, you could have it hover over your head so you can look up and it's right above you and you could still have access to lots of data. And speaking of that, you can just surround yourself in the data so you can just put it all around you. Because in the presentation I saw, I think you probably have a little bit of a graceful degradation so that if you wanted to show this in a 2D screen, you could and be able to show it. And then once people see that, then they're going to be able to go into VR and have an immersive experience of it to have an activation of that even more. So, yeah, that was just some of my thoughts from looking at it.
[00:12:00.587] Jason Marsh: We call ourselves a communication company first. If you notice my first introduction to the company, I didn't say we're a VR company. We're a communication company that happens to use VR when the target audience has a headset. But everything we do, because it's on the web, works in every browser and is designed to also be a powerful engaging experience on a flat screen.
[00:12:25.273] Kent Bye: Yeah, and once you publish it to the open web, then you have a QR code that then you could send it to people. How are you imagining that people could be able to use the ability to share these quickly through the QR codes?
[00:12:37.630] Jason Marsh: I think the core thing is just to reduce the friction as much as possible for your communication medium. In the learning and development space, imagine that you've got some people in a room looking at a flat screen. Maybe they're on their own laptops, also looking at a flat screen. Some people in that room could be in an AR or VR headset. You've got remote learners experiencing the same space and fully immersed in that space, maybe at home with an Oculus Go. If in a learning and development environment, it's not unrealistic to spend $200 to send to a new employee to have them experience their learning in a way that sticks. Look at the Walmart example where they purchased 17,000 Oculus Go's, right? The price point and ease of use is at that point now where these things make sense. And then you've got an experience where you've got the presenter who walks people through a series of steps and everyone comes along. But at the same time, people can look left, right. They can look up and down. They can see where they've been, where they're going, which gives each bit of information context. And then on the next step is to free them, free the participants to explore on their own. And really, every piece we've done is, even though it's a series of steps, it's fully interactive. Let me describe a piece we did for Davos this last year for Cisco Corporate Social Responsibility. It was about the digital readiness of countries around the world. And I guess it's probably six steps, but because you're looking You're in the middle of the globe looking at the digital readiness of these countries, and across the front is a scatterplot showing how that score was calculated, particularly that there's seven components, basic needs, technological infrastructure, business support, those kinds of things. And so with that experience, because it was shown about 200 times at Davos in small group format, to world leaders, to economic leaders of the world. At any time, they could say, what about Mali? What about my country? What about Kazakhstan? And click, and immediately the data shows that representation. At the same time, you've still got a linear presentation. So do that with PowerPoint. Create a system where each slide is a fully interactive, engaging experience, yet still walks you through a data story and tells your core message. And I think that's where we see the future of presentations going. The days of sitting and watching PowerPoint and being bored out of your mind and not remembering it, that's got to change. There's just too much information in the world for us to be able to have that make sense in the modern world.
[00:15:15.143] Kent Bye: Well, we're in a bit of a hybrid phase right now where the people that are coming to these meetings aren't bringing their own VR headset. And so they're being provided, and then they have to either watch a presentation and then maybe go look at the data. And then that may set almost like a memory palace for them that creates an architecture for their memory to be able to have something to latch onto that really goes directly into their long-term memory. But then you're in the process of going back and looking at the 2D screen. And so I'm just trying to figure out what you see would be the optimal workflow. If you were to design everything and have people have the best learning experience, what would you do?
[00:15:49.750] Jason Marsh: We're all waiting for the day when everybody is walking around with an AR headset that's fully connected and we can share all our information and content seamlessly because it's already essentially built into people's everyday experience. It's very important that we do something real today. And we haven't even focused on HoloLens or Magic Leap, although I would love to have the time and energy and money to do that, because our end customers, they've got a meeting this afternoon. They've got a meeting next week or next month. They don't have time to mess with experimental architecture that's buggy and the setup times are challenging and effectively unusable in an enterprise environment. So we're very excited for the long term, but what's the core need today? And it's better communication and communication that sticks. And so that's, in a way, it's practical. Practical to the point of boring, and when it's boring is when it gets interesting.
[00:16:47.079] Kent Bye: Well, let's say you had 30 people come to see a presentation that you're about to give. Do you think it's more effective to, right off the bat, give them a VR experience? Or are you going to try to contextualize and tell the story? Because if you only have six headsets for 30 people, you have to go through one at a time. But you can do it in a half hour. So there's maybe a demo time at the beginning. Or do you find it's more effective for you to give a presentation overview on a flat screen or some sort of spatialized representation on a flat screen and then put them in the VR so that then they can have the direct experience and then now all of a sudden they could, like if you were to sort of design that workflow, what have you found to be the most effective?
[00:17:22.288] Jason Marsh: So doing, and this is the example I gave earlier, was a 15 minute presentation from the stage that actually described the results of the data analysis that needed to be understood. And then we wanted to use the VR experience to give them a feeling of the content that goes beyond the intellectual analysis. I certainly think that given larger budgets and time, what you would want to do is show them something related but different. in the VR headsets, right? Not the exact same content. But I guess I can't stress this enough. If we use brain science to design this presentation in an optimal way, we can let you get that experience on your own and just let it lie by itself. Story is so vital to everything we do, but sometimes just being in this architectural space, you will start to tell your own story. Here's the example I like to give. So Google Earth, if it's not the first thing to do, it's probably the second thing everybody does is they go find their house. they see themselves in the presentation and they tell themselves a story. Literally, when they take off the headset, they come out and said, I saw my house and here's where I went and here's what I did. They already are engaged in that story. That's one of the beauties and power of 360 video is these empathetic stories. What if instead of just producing a 360 video, Instead, you start to see that that is one anecdote. And you step out of that anecdote and you see the data all around it and see that this is one data point. I had an example of an organization that was working on a child marriage video. And it's a 360 experience. But it's a real challenge to overcome this feeling of white knight saviorism. right who are we to come into some in this case developing country and say you really shouldn't be marrying off your children at 13 years of age you're wearing off your girls at 13 years of age if you only tell the story through a video it's very hard to overcome that but when you step out of that video and see oh well this applies to all these different countries and is even you know in certain communities in the western world then you get that bigger context for that anecdote and vice versa if you've got a data set It can be very statistical and hard to find the meaning in it. But what if you can step into a dot? And now you can either have a 360 video or a 360 photo or something that gives that dot a whole different meaning. Now you're connecting both the heart and the mind and providing a much deeper information experience than either one on its own.
[00:20:07.350] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of the things that I say again and again is that we're moving from the information age to the experiential age. And as an experiential journalist, I find that I am running up against some old ways of thinking about how to give demos or to talk about things. Like I think there's been a training in which that you try to tell people the story before I have the experience. And I constantly have to be like, no, no, no, just show me the demo. Give me the least amount of information that I need to understand what's happening. Let me have an experience and then let's talk about it because I have this experience of having so much of a richer understanding of that content after I have the experience because I've done lots of VR. sense what's new or what's different and then get a sense of what you're doing that's trying to contextualize it. So there's a bit of literacy that I have with the virtual reality as a medium that allows me to do that, but also because I'm a journalist talking about it, I also don't want to talk about it before I experience it and then ruin the interview or at least ruin it in the sense of take the air out of the interview from talking about stuff that we could talk about on air. But I feel like even at Magic Leap conference, there is this ethic of spending over two hours in the demo keynote showing all of the demos where, you know, the way that they had the demos optimized, you know, it would have been so much better if people could have actually experienced a lot of those demos. Whereas, you know, maybe people saw one or two and I was trying to see all of them, but I only saw like nine out of the 16 or 20. And that I feel like I missed out of what those other things were. And I saw the video, but it's not the same as actually being able to engage with it. So I feel like as time goes on, we're going to have this a bit of like, OK, everybody, here's the data demos that you maybe check it out before you come to the meeting. have the experience of it. And then when we all get together, we can really focus on unpacking it and people will have their own experience of the meaning. But the deeper story can come in more of a, I guess, a collaborative conversation rather than something that's dictated by one person looking at it.
[00:22:04.057] Jason Marsh: Absolutely key to that point. What if, as a salesperson, you walk into a room and you say, let's not talk. Try this for two minutes. And two minutes is a good number. People will put a headset up to their face for two minutes because if they don't feel like it's going to be this huge commitment. So being able to say that, even though it becomes interactive and they end up spending five. Now you set that down. and go back to that human conversation where you can look into each other's eyes. But both parties now have the same mental image of an information architecture. Maybe it's a diagram. Maybe it's a exploding view of a certain widget. Now they've got that shared experience. And the rest of the conversation You've solved a whole bunch of core issues. Credibility, right? You've solved credibility. You've provided a sense of the unexpected because of the dramatic nature of what you've just seen. And maybe it has to do with the awe and wonder of the data or whatever it is. People are only going to walk away with a single idea anyway after an hour meeting. Why not have it be that one idea? Maybe you still need to do some of the PowerPoint, maybe not. Maybe now that you've got this shared model, mental model, now you can just have the rest of the human conversation and build the trust to get that sale. That's a different workflow than the traditional setup of Vive and make a huge deal about the VR experience and talk about it for 20 minutes and then you actually go see the experience and without that context it would kind of be meaningless. We have to fix that, that's the problem.
[00:23:31.817] Kent Bye: Well, you say that you can only take away one idea, and I think that may be true, but maybe we could take away a lot more experiences that are visceral, because the way that our hippocampus and our place cells and our memory cells and long-term memory work, I feel like that when I go and do demos at these different conferences, I'll be able to see a demo, and then maybe later in the day or a week or maybe months later, I'll still be able to recall aspects of that experience to be able to then talk about it with the creator. And I've done that so many times. And I think that the more that I do that, there's this cultivation of being really present in what's happening in an experience. But if it is experiential and it's addressing this multimodal experience that is going in through many different channels in your body, sonification, I think, is going to be a huge thing. Haptics is going to be also a huge thing with both of these things so that you can find new ways as you're looking around, you're getting more and more channels of information through like your body, which is like this GPU, this parallel processing of all this data and information. And then on top of that, if you're able to add stories within the context of that experience, I think it's going to take it even to the next level. So that's all kind of like an interactive, dynamic, nonlinear narrative.
[00:24:39.026] Jason Marsh: Right. We can really wax eloquently and philosophically about what we're actually accomplishing, right? Because our vision is not just that you can upload a spreadsheet and then we drop in some images and whatever, but to be able to share that multi-user and suck in immediately the world's content, the web's content. I think the core inspiration maybe long term, a long time ago for the company comes from William Gibson. So a lot of us have forgotten the original definition of cyberspace. And this is a neuromancer. And now that I'm going to quote it, someone's going to look it up. I'm not going to quote it well. But it's essentially the world's information flows laid out in a grid around us like city lights receding. And when people see what we're doing, that's the closest way to describe it than reproducing the real world. A lot of really good stuff about reproducing the real world, don't get me wrong, but there's this whole other world of symbolic information, which is absolutely core to being human. And we start to, another one of our demos is we can take the whole of Hamlet, 180,000 characters, and put it in 3D space simultaneously and have it run smoothly on a phone, and the edge of every piece of text is absolutely crisp. It's actually a pretty cool set of technology that we built to do this. But as you start to experience this text architecture, the words floating in space around you become concrete. There's some aspect that your brain says, oh, that's a thing now. in a very different way than if you put a background behind it, or you see it on a wall. And you can walk around it, you can look at it, and it moves, and it spins, and it animates, and now ideas become shareable and meaningful in a way that a lot of us have forgotten. You know, a word is worth a thousand pictures. just as well as a picture's worth a thousand words. And so where we end up with this medium and where some of the artists and designers and really high-level professional presentation creators, storytellers of our time, are starting to play with what we're doing and where they're going to take it, that gets really exciting to me. And I don't even know where that is. And that's where the magic happens.
[00:26:55.694] Kent Bye: Well, I know that as a journalist who has done over a thousand interviews in the VR and AR space, but yet I've only published 700 of those. And so I have over 300 that I've recorded. And so I'm recording them faster than I can post-produce them. I would love to be able to create this distributed memory palace system to be able to upload my content, audio, have other people help clean it up, and then also like chop it up into either soundbites or segments so that each interview has a number of different nodes that contain a certain amount of information that could be tagged with metadata but people could go in there and potentially like record what they think about it and then they have these little memory bubbles but that memory bubble of what they think about it is stored locally on their machines so you have this distributed web system where they're able to use my architecture of my interviews as their own memory palace but be able to put that into their own memory palace and have this distributed memory palace system where that other people could opt and share choose to share different dimensions of their memory palace with other people if they want to collaborate on different stuff but Trying to come up with those architectures of that distributed memory policy is something that I think a lot about just for my podcast because I feel like I'm producing content faster than what can be delivered on a linear RSS feed for anybody to reasonably keep up with it. It's getting to the point where if you're interested in certain topics, then maybe you would go to the WebVR section of just dropping 15 or 30 podcasts to get digested in a certain way. And you're able to potentially hone in and go in to find whatever the latest information is. But just having this vision of what does it look like to have a distributed memory palace? And what is the architecture? What's it look like? And what's the experience?
[00:28:29.347] Jason Marsh: We've played a lot with force-directed graphs, so that one example is looking at tweets, looking at the Twittersphere. I actually have an old data set I like to show, which was four minutes of the election. And just capturing four minutes about the election two years ago, you can immediately see this huge clumping of data. It's like, what is this? It's ugly. Why are all these tweets right on top of each other in this 3D space? It's because it's bots. It's just retweeting the same tweet. And then you look, you know, there's this mass of tweets around Trump and related topics. And then way off in the far distance, this tiny little thing about Hillary. The level of energy on Twitter, to be clear, about Trump versus Hillary, at least in this random data set, is dramatic. So, when you're describing this metaverse of information, I would submit to you that it's the connections, it's the threads between these different interviews and this knowledge space that you're creating that would make the whole thing navigable and more meaningful. And to bring it back down to earth just a little bit, that's really where we're heading with the corporate learning development. In an organization, you've got a vast amount of knowledge that's stored in PowerPoints, that's stored in your learning systems. How can you navigate through that in a totally powerful, mind-blowing, but also just effective, practical way? As crazy as it is to say, oh, we're in this stunning space we're filled with awe and wonder because the world's information is at our fingertips and we have the sense of mastery and control because we can get right at it, that Iron Man effect. That's great, but it also has to deliver the actual information you need when you need it and be practical as well. So it's very interesting. I love the way you're describing this informational metaverse.
[00:30:23.939] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, I think that what you're pointing out is the relationships is part of the reason why I'm hugely inspired by Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy, which he makes the same argument that things are in relationship to each other as patterns of relationship that as you go deeper and deeper down, it just becomes patterns of relationship of energy to each other. but also Carlo Rovelli's relational quantum mechanics interpretation, but also his order of time books that also talks about like we have this conceptualization of this Newtonian like flow of time that's just going forward. But every point in space actually has different time because it's different gravity. And so it's like this concept of like what is even your body having different experiences of time. You have this paradigm shift from the way that we think of in a very Cartesian and flat way of just this uniform Newtonian but this concept of the things being relationship to each other, I think is a primary metaphor that as we move forward, it's gonna be like, a lot of people when I was doing my interviews, I wasn't doing intros or outros for a long time, and people found that my contextualization in the beginning and then my takeaways were the things that they were finding the most valuable. Well, what's awaits for me to have the entire interview? And then maybe my value rather than editing is to add whatever I'm taking away from each nugget. And then other people being able to do that as well. And I think that you have this sort of almost like the formalization of this postmodern, like what is your interpretation of the meaning of this and having this plurality of all these different meanings and how do you navigate that? Are there things that actually have what people think about what the meaning of something is? And like, Is there a way to start to look at what is the shared history? What is the shared context that we have? As we become more and more polarized, I think there's going to be potential tools to be able to use the virtual reality technology with these layers of information and ability to be able to share our context and meaning at a very granular level that we're going to be able to potentially overcome and find common ground amongst people of things that we agree on, but also find some of the differences that we can debate.
[00:32:18.297] Jason Marsh: I call it the tyranny of the frame. Okay, so we've put our symbolic information on flat surfaces with a frame. Every book, every screen, we've always had this frame. And what that means is that everything that we're talking about, we need to limit the context of it. But in a VR space, or a full 3D space, You can have those threads. Maybe it's just a thin little line going off into space that you may not even know really where it goes, but you know that there's more there. There's another side to the argument, to your point about the myopic view of modern society, modern politics, certainly in the United States, maybe globally, to see that everything is connected. And not just have it be an intellectual experience that you need to apply to the flat screens you're seeing, but actually show those connections in real time. That's where you completely change your experience of any piece of information. It's an exciting new level of how to give us superpowers, how to see relationships that we haven't seen before. And it's also absolutely practical. As philosophical and as crazy as it sounds, I think that these ideas are absolutely practical.
[00:33:31.738] Kent Bye: Well, the fact that you can upload any spreadsheet into your system here and start to look at it, you have the ability to have geolocated data that has GPS information. So the demos you showed me were showing me geolocated information when it comes to cities at very large scale, the global scale. But if I wanted to look at data that was overlaid in, say, San Francisco or Portland, Oregon or Indianapolis, would I be able to upload a data set with GPS and then be able to overlay a map to see how that data was being expressed?
[00:34:02.102] Jason Marsh: Yeah, we support all the maps that are typical in the data visualization system called D3. And it's a very prevalent JavaScript framework for doing data visualization. So it's easy to extend to different maps. But I would just also encourage you to think about the timeline view. So timelines are actually fascinating. They're exponential. When you get down to the, even if you're looking at the decade view and you step into the year and then you step into the month view, but way off in the distance you can see, oh, there's still that decade view. Maybe it's behind me because I walked through it as I went down to another level of detail. The sense of context and the sense of scale and bigness of a decade and what can happen in a decade is so different than what can happen in a month. And then you keep going all the way down to the millisecond or back all the way out to millennial view. That's where you see relationships. And then all of a sudden, as you just described, you're looking at this data across a timeline and you spin it and now you're looking at it on a geo view. Or maybe you start to use one of your three dimensions off of your map to give you a sense of the time of the data as opposed to just seeing the place. And you can do that simultaneously. And traditionally on a flat screen, data visualization has said 3D is a problem. It's very hard to wrap your brain around what does the third dimension mean when you're looking at a flat screen. With Parallax and with your three-dimensional experience, you can see what's in front of what's outside and you can spin it around and even just moving your head a little bit, all of these things start to give that lots of meaning. One of the things I also just want to kind of come back to is that we still see what we're doing as data storytelling as a communication tool as opposed to a straight data visualization application. And that's a business decision. We think that the world needs to communicate better and it's a core need. and there's some really great people doing really pure data visualization. We're more interested in how all of that data connects to our daily lives and to our daily sales processes and what the enterprise needs to get done.
[00:36:10.186] Kent Bye: Well, how do you think that being able to look at all this data in this special context, how has it changed your memory?
[00:36:17.935] Jason Marsh: Instead of my own, let me tell you an anecdote of someone else. So I was at a small conference, an event, big enough that we had name badges and that I didn't know very many people in the room. And this gal comes up, her name is Emily, and so we met and she tried the Flow Cities demo that we've kind of been describing. and spent five minutes together, and she's like, oh wow, that's great, and then she left, and then nine months later, I was at another conference, and I actually happened to be talking to an investor type that I wanted to impress, and she walks up, and I didn't let her say anything. I said, Emily, I know who you are because you've got a badge on. We talked nine months ago, right? You saw a demo, and she said yes. And we haven't talked since, and we have no other communication outside of that. And she said yes. I said, can you tell this gentleman what you experienced in the headset nine months ago? And she absolutely nailed it. She told me what city she went to, how the data moved around, the whole thing. Right. It's not just the novelty effect. This actually uses your brain in a different way. And you're describing about seeing thousands of VR presentations and how well you can remember those. So I don't know if it's scientifically accurate, but my experience as I think about this every day and see what I remember and what I forget, I believe that there's really only two things that we remember. It's emotion and space. And all the rest of our visuals that we might remember is because it touched us emotionally or because we were able to put it into enough context that it related to enough of the rest of our lives or prior experience that we might remember it. I would add meaning in there. Symbolic meaning, I think, is a huge part as well. Well, the symbolic meaning would stick because it has an emotional connection to—because it comes down to emotion— And we're so focused on our aural experience of audio and whether that sticks. And we're so focused on our visual experience. But the aural experience of storytelling sticks because it touches our emotions. Right. And because we can see ourselves in the story and a story, a good story sticks because everyone experiences at a different level and fills in the gaps so that it has that meaning to them, which is not true of necessarily non-story information. So to me, I think learning what i remember and how i navigate through my daily life i'm amazed how much it comes down to those two things emotion and spatial stickiness and i'm really looking forward to the scientific community to prove me wrong or to enhance what we're saying and we are trying to do some of that research myself but it's been an interesting journey
[00:39:04.011] Kent Bye: Yeah, I'd say that's also true from my experience, but I do feel like that there is a certain amount of like an overall architecture of systems of meaning of philosophies and worldviews that also create an overall memory palace architecture that you have.
[00:39:17.275] Jason Marsh: What you just said is you're creating an architecture of meaning, right? That's your hippocampus. That's spatial memory.
[00:39:25.256] Kent Bye: Yeah, yeah, but also using different ways of following how, you know, like Jungian concept of synchronicity, so looking and seeing what omens are, and so you're associating meaning in that, yes, there could be an emotion there, but it could also be, I think, part of your either desire or your will, your curiosity, your sense of... desire and I think that there's different dimensions of that that also like your intention and your desire your final cause you know Aristotle had four causes one was the final causation which is your intention one was the formal causation which is the overall mathematical structures of the underlying blueprint of reality that could be some sort of mysterious interface between mathematical objects and reality then there's material cause and efficient cause and so like you're kind of getting into causation I think when you're talking about memory. And so a large extent, the reductive materialist perspective has ignored the influence of desire and intention and final cause as well as the formal cause. There's this kind of an embedded within the philosophy of science that mathematics is there, but, you know, Quine and Putman would argue that, you know, there is this ontological reality to mathematical structures that we should give a little bit more credit to, but I think it goes back to Aristotle and those four different causations. It's like, if there's a table, the final cause is for you to eat on it. The formal causation is the blueprint that created the table. The material cause is the, the material cause is the actual materials that's created it, and the efficient cause is the emotional labor or the work of the Worker that is creating it and so there's different ways that are aspects of constructing reality But that for me I go back to Aristotle and say like it's not just emotion in space But there's other dimensions as well that are also playing in there that have to do with intention have to do with like formal causation and mathematical structures and other unseen aspects of the universal transcendent aspects of reality
[00:41:15.991] Jason Marsh: i hear what you're saying even i just heard an interview with elon musk where he said you know it's our limbic system that's making our decisions the limbic system is more in control than we think it is and you're describing causes and desires and sense of personal identification personal identity right i'm going to argue that that's the stuff that connects us to our limbic system
[00:41:38.709] Kent Bye: Well, there's Daniel Kinnaman who did Think Fast and Think Slow and really looking at these two different aspects of really our brain and our heart when it comes down to it. But I look at it as the four elements of the fire and air element of the active presence and mental and social presence. And then the body and the emotions is the aspect of the body that's receiving. And that's the embodied presence of the earth element and the emotional presence of the water element. So I do think that there's like embodied cognition. Like we don't just think with our brains, we think with our entire body. So we think in spatial metaphors that are embodied. So I think we'll have to look at the cognitive science to say there's actually an embodied aspect, an emotional aspect, a mental aspect, a social aspect, as well as an aspect of intention, desire, and will.
[00:42:22.961] Jason Marsh: Wow. I'm a little out of my league, obviously, talking to you about the philosophical side of this. And maybe that's to a fault, because as an engineer, I'm so focused on just making it work. having an experience that I can show up and hand a headset to someone and it just works, right? And so you're talking about really important ideas and I love them but I'm not sure I can add anything, add as much to that to the community as much as this idea of it just works, it fits into the daily workflow of the target audience and that enterprise needs it because if they don't understand the complexity of modern life, They're not going to be able to sell. They're not going to be able to solve their problems. And how can we solve those problems day to day? So I love where you're going, but I'm going to be a little bit of an engineer and go a little bit practical on you.
[00:43:24.161] Kent Bye: Well, I'd say that there is this tension between theory and practice of the platonic ideal forms and the Aristotelian pragmatism of what's actually practical. And I think that there's been a dialectic between Plato and Aristotle for the last 2,500 years, and that part of my role as a journalist and philosopher is to have the direct experiences, to have the empirical things that I can draw upon, but try to find these deeper patterns. And so I've been thinking a lot about memory palaces and memory and the neuroscience of all this and talking to lots of people. And talking to Michael Casale of Stryver, I think they're on the front lines of working with Walmart and bringing a lot of these technologies and finding that from talking to neuroscientists, this principle of embodied cognition is such a key element that we think with our bodies and our brains are not computers, our whole bodies are like processing this information and that there is an emotional component that I do agree with you that that storytelling component is such a key part of, you know, when I went to Google Earth VR, I would go back to places where I had like these peak emotional experiences in my hometown and I found myself almost like mapping the emotional architecture of my childhood And I was able to take a 15,000 foot view of my entire youth, of where these places were and how they were related spatially. But going to each of those allowed me to reflect on those different aspects of my emotional memory. But anybody who goes into Google Earth VR, inevitably within the first, 10 or 15 minutes, they'll want to go back to somewhere that they recognize. They want to go back to a place that they call home or a place that they spent time in that's meaningful to them and brings back this sense of nostalgia. And from just what I've seen of people going into Google Earth VR, from my own direct experience, is that you go there, you see the rough architecture of a space, and it just puts you right back there in all those memories.
[00:45:12.739] Jason Marsh: Fascinating. And imagine if we could also translate the time component on top of that. And in some ways, that's what you're doing when you step back to the house you grew up in or the ball field where you hit your first home run or whatever those places are. See, I'm struck. I'm seeing the whole world as an information space now, right? And I'm struck that that story that you would tell when you got there, there's a way to capture that information for your grandchildren. And now you're starting to say, oh, we're not just looking at photos. We're looking at hearing story bits. We're seeing everything in relationship to each other. whether it's geolocated or time-based or conceptual-based or, you know, certain topics or even emotion, you know, if you want to start categorizing emotions and see how that works or, I guess, smells or whatever, and as well as kinetic awareness of your body and how your body was feeling at that time, all of those things do tie into this embodied cognition. I want to be able to play in that space. I want to be able to explore that. In some way, maybe that's the human logging, what's the phrase I'm looking for, where people log everything about their experience and want to be able to go back to it over time. But I think that there's so many practical applications just today in education for people to see better context, better awareness. Let me give you just another quick example. I actually started a Montessori school, a K-8 charter Montessori school. I took two years out of my high tech career to do that and very exciting and I learned a whole bunch about some of these same principles that I'm applying now to VR, to understanding information. One of the things that you do in a Montessori school is on the wall up at the edge of the ceiling, you put a timeline. Sometimes you put two timelines, a geographical timeline and a human history timeline. And you start each lesson by saying, okay, class, where are we? And what that does is it gets every student now has a filing system to place the information. What if that finding system, you could say that finding system for you was Google Earth, or there's lots of different ways to do it, but we're talking straight brain science. We're building more connections, and when you've got connections, you've got more meaning, and when you've got more meaning, you've got more memory, and then suddenly you can start to build new connections on top of that. So some of these very, really exciting psychological principles come down to just how you function day to day and how can we change that in a way that's better and help the world understand each other better. And so I think that's really where I come back to this. I start to... I look at the street. I look at traffic and go, okay, each one of those is a dot and it's moving this way. And what if I rewound and fast forward it and seeing the world's information flows below me? And then how do we find a way to keep that alive in VR and AR today when the industry is – it's not – all up in the sky, you know, we're not seeing, as an industry, we're not seeing massive successes as a whole. And so how do we bring that down into something that is really powerful for our day-to-day lives, usable, and it's great to be able to understand some of the really big principles that you're describing when we do that, to apply it to the everyday.
[00:48:40.556] Kent Bye: Yeah, so for you, what are some of the either biggest open problems that you're trying to solve or biggest open questions that you're trying to answer?
[00:48:47.898] Jason Marsh: One of the biggest problems I'm trying to solve is the lack of ROI for producing VR in the enterprise. And I think learning development has a really core use case. And there's a whole world of learning and development that goes beyond the, I'm going to call it the root level worker, right? The experiential training that is going on at a Walmart is for the associates to do very practical things. And that's great. And there's really good VR training for surgeons and for operating expensive, dangerous equipment. There's a whole another level of the information age worker that also needs to understand their world and understand relationships, and that's much more symbolic space. So that's where we play and our uniqueness in the space. That's one of the big things that we're trying to solve. And the other is just building reliable business models. We didn't take any venture capital money. As a VR company that's been around for two and a half years, that's pretty unusual. And we've gotten a little bit of angel money, but we've also been funded by our customers. So what works today while we're waiting for the VR winter to be over? but works today in a way that absolutely provides value, like I say, ROI. What are the KPIs, the key indicators that are going to help you understand whether what you're doing has value? How do you test it? How do you, again, make it practical? The other thing that I think we're solving is this blend between the flat web and VR. I think that understanding that you can communicate effectively in both mediums and that everything you do should work powerfully in both mediums. Of course, I believe VR is going to touch your hippocampus in a different way, but there's a whole bunch of other brain science techniques that really need to be applied to flat screens. being able to understand that multi-user that we can share this information together and that we can play with the information independently and say oh Joe come look at this one look at what I did and that whole experience of communication is so different than the flat screen slide where today so I think those are some of the key problems I'm trying to solve and ultimately it's creating business value
[00:51:06.855] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:51:15.502] Jason Marsh: Oh, I think we've actually talked about that with seeing the world's data information, the world's information flows around us and having those two feelings, the awe and wonder, where you can see that things are very much bigger than yourself. And then the mastery of control to see that, yeah, you're in control of it. wow, that's where things get really exciting. Being able to share that real time with people without the negative human factors of VR or overcoming those as much as possible. And obviously AR is kind of the dream to solve that. But yeah, I think we've been talking about my big vision the whole time because that's the only thing I want to talk about.
[00:51:55.586] Kent Bye: Great. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the VR community?
[00:51:59.804] Jason Marsh: Oh, I just think that 1,000 interviews and 700 posts for what you're doing is just amazing. And you should be very proud of what you've provided to the whole VR community. It's really exciting.
[00:52:11.579] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. So thank you. Thank you. Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
