Last week BigscreenVR announced that they raised $3 million dollars for their “social utility” VR application. BigscreenVR gives you access to your computer screen in VR, which is a deceptively simple idea but one that is unlocking new ways of working on your computer and enabling collaborative social environments that range from virtual 2D video game LAN parties to productive work meetings.
I had a chance to catch up with founder Darshan Shankar at Oculus Connect 3 last October to talk about his founding story, and how he’s designed BigscreenVR with privacy in mind through encrypted peer-to-peer networking technology that he developed. It’s a formula that seems to be working since he reports that “power users spend 20–30 hours each week in Bigscreen, making it one of the most widely used “killer apps” in the industry.” Those are astounding numbers for any social VR application, and the key to Bigscreen’s success is that they’ve been providing a more immersive and social experience of 2D content ranging from games to movies.
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The latest release of Bigscreen VR enables you to have up to three monitors in VR, which can provide a much BETTER experience of working on your computer than in real life. You can stream Netflix or YouTube on a giant movie screen while playing a video game, designing an electrical circuit, browsing Reddit, or creating a 3D model in Maya. You can basically do anything that you can do on your computer screen. The limited resolution for comfortably reading text is the biggest constraint, but there are plenty of other tasks that people have found are more enjoyable in VR than in real life. It’s not just the immersive nature, improved focus, and unlocking the spatial thinking potential of your brain, but you can do it with friends.
Adding a social dimension to computing in a private way is one of the keys to Bigscreen’s success. You can use Bigscreen alone and by yourself without anyone else. You can create a private room using peer-to-peer technology such that what you’re actually doing in Bigscreen isn’t even being passed through any servers on Bigscreen’s side. And if you want to have a public cafe experience and connect with hardcore VR enthusiasts from around the world, then create a public room and see who comes through. It’s a wide range of people looking to do everything from connect socially and casually to recreating the cafe experience of increased focus that can come from working in public spaces away from the private context of your home.
Taking that all into account and based upon my own direct experiences of using Bigscreen over the last couple of weeks I can say that Bigscreen VR is definitely the leading contended to becoming one of the first killer applications of VR. It’s a social utility that connects you to friends, family, romantic and business partners, as well as complete strangers who spend a consider amount of time living in the early days of the metaverse.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So on today's episode, I'm going to be covering what I think is the most significant social VR experience that's out there today, and that's big screen VR. Now, the reason why I say that is because I think that the numbers and the ratings and the engagement that big screen VR has been seeing is far surpassing any other experience that's out there. And I think part of the reason is because it's enabling people to have a better experience of being able to watch and consume a lot of different 2D content. So a lot of people going into big screen VR, watching a movie or playing a video game, but being able to do it with other people. And it's encouraging a lot of social interactions and really amplifying some of the unique affordances of virtual reality. So I had a chance to catch up with the founder of BigScreenVR, that's Darshan Shankar, at Oculus Connect 3. And so there's been a couple of things that happened in the last week that I think make it worth digging up this interview and airing it is that, first of all, BigScreenVR raised a $3 million round from Andresen Horowitz. And they also released a new feature within BigScreenVR that allows you to pull in multiple screens. So you can have up to three screens within BigScreenVR now, which is quite an incredible experience if you haven't had a chance to try that out yet. So we'll get to hear some of the underlying philosophy of BigScreenVR and how Darshan's trying to create a social utility on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. Today's episode is brought to you by the Voices of VR Patreon campaign. The Voices of VR podcast started as a passion project, but now it's my livelihood. And so if you're enjoying the content on the Voices of VR podcast, then consider it a service to you and the wider community and send me a tip. Just a couple of dollars a month makes a huge difference, especially if everybody contributes. So donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So this interview with Darshan happened at Oculus Connect 3, which is happening in San Jose from October 5th to 7th, 2016. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:31.591] Darshan Shankar: I'm Darshan, I'm the CEO and founder of a small company called Big Screen. We make a virtual reality application that lets you use your computer in VR, optionally with your friends and colleagues. So you see your entire computer, your desktop, any applications running on your computer in VR on, as the name alludes, a big screen, completely customizable. in virtual worlds from a space environment, to an apartment, to a campfire, anywhere where you want. It's hard to explain in words, you have to try it out, but it's kind of like a social operating system, kind of a Skype for VR, kind of a thing that just lets you use your computer in VR with friends.
[00:03:06.861] Kent Bye: Yeah, I remember just a few weeks after you had launched, I had a chance to try it out. You're kind of sitting on a couch, and it kind of feels like you're sitting next to people at either a LAN party or just co-working with some other people. And so for you, how did this idea originate? How did this come about?
[00:03:23.702] Darshan Shankar: Yeah, so I've spent the past six or seven years just working on low-level networking technologies. My engineering expertise is on the networking side, and I've worked on a lot of real-time, peer-to-peer technologies before this for years. So right before, I've been tinkering with the DK1, the DK2 for years now, so played with it back in, what, 2012? But back then, I worked on, in 2013, right before I started BigStream, I was working on a teleconferencing product using my kind of peer-to-peer networking skills and my real-time networking skills, the engineering skills I had to build a hardware device for teleconferencing, for kind of sharing your desktop on a laptop in a conference room to the TV in the conference room wirelessly without having to plug in a bunch of cords. Funnily enough, that's exactly what Big Screen does now, but it's entirely in software and it's over the internet with other people. So the roots of Big Screen kind of start by thinking about collaboration, telecollaboration, teleconferencing, and kind of all the networking expertise that I've built up over the years and applying that kind of mentality and the problem set to VR. I'd spent several years building startups, so my approach into VR wasn't to build games, it wasn't to build content, it was to build something useful. So when you take that skill set and that years of expertise in teleconferencing or networking and low-level engineering, when you apply that to VR, you start to think, well, how am I going to work in VR? How am I going to use my computer in VR? How am I going to achieve that minority port style productivity experience in VR? Like, what can I do with this? Not for games and entertainment, but how am I going to spend 10 hours a day in a few years using a VR AR headset to do my day-to-day computing, whether it's work or watching YouTube or whatever it is. What's that going to look like? And we start to approach that problem. This is 2014, coming up on really two years working on this. The end result is a product that lets you use your computer in VR, kind of exactly the way you would in the real world. And then you start to add these kind of collaboration elements to it, because that's what VR enables that's completely impossible in the real world. Right now, when you use something like Skype, you can see the other person, but you typically don't make eye contact. Everybody's looking down. You're never really looking at the other person. You can never see the hand gestures, or the body language, or the intonation, or the emotions of the other person. When you're doing screen sharing or something on Skype, you can see the screen, but you can't see the person. You can't point at the screen and have the other person do it. That's why we're so productive in the real world. That's why collaboration works in the real world. That's why we still use offices. The internet has not replaced the office, but maybe virtual reality can. I think the point more is for virtual reality to enhance our productivity and to allow us to have a more productive, collaborative, environment because we can now show exactly all of that. You can see the body language. You can see a person's hand movements. You can see how their head's moving. You can tell when a person is agreeing with you just by the way their head nods, by their just subtle body language cues. You can hear them. You can positionally hear them in a way that's much better than just listening to Skype over headphones. So you can really understand how does that person feel. And when you start to add hand controllers and delete motion and Oculus Touch and the Vive, You can actually point to parts on a person's screen. You can actually see what line of code or pixel on this Photoshop document. What is this person talking about? Are they criticizing and trying to collaborate on this? Which part of this thing that we're working on are they talking about? You get all sorts of information like that for your productivity that is just completely inaccessible using traditional 2D screen-based tools like Skype. So the approach into VR, to answer your question in a long way, the approach there is to think long-term about where we should be in 10 years, like how am I going to work 10 hours a day in here, as well as what is really possible today that is just not possible without it. So right now, today, what is possible that's so much better than the existing world? Sure, the headset resolution's not so great, so you're not gonna use this for 10 hours a day, but right now, you can work in here and actually feel more collaborative, feel more productive. Not just feel, be more productive. It's incredibly productive to sit side by side and just see what's on the other person's screen and say, oh, right there, there's the bug, there's the bug in your code, right there, right? But you can't point, you can't say right there. How do you communicate that vital piece of information with a tool like Skype? That's what's really powerful with VR and really powerful with something like big screen today. So it's kind of this long-winded story of working on low-level networking, working on teleconferencing, working on collaboration, and that leading to productivity tools and building something that's much better today than what is possible without VR, with this long-term vision of getting to the point where we work, live, and hang out, and collaborate, and just entertain ourselves in virtual reality.
[00:07:59.595] Kent Bye: Yeah, the thing that I think was really striking about what you've done so far with big screen is that you've released it, but it seems like you've been updating it pretty regularly doing rapid iterations and really listening to the feedback and having a lot of interactions with your community. I was really struck with the first time I saw a demo is just being able to actually do user testing, you know, within the product. So the product is actually enabling you to user test your own product, which I think is a great way for you to really be in tune with what people are actually doing and what they need and what they want. And you're able to then prioritize that in terms of what they want and need. And so from that, since you've initially launched, what type of feedback have you heard and what type of things have you then put back into the product?
[00:08:43.247] Darshan Shankar: Yeah, so it's really interesting how there's three kind of ways of using big screen. The second you put the headset on and launch big screen, you're in single player. You see your computer in front of you, and you can instantly do anything that you can do on your computer today on a big screen. The second way is to use it in a private room with friends or colleagues that you invite into your room. And the third way is to use it completely in public with random internet strangers. Just make a room, and anybody can join in. So with the first way, it's very hard to get insight into those users, because there's no way for us to jump into your single-player experience. And there's no way for us to jump into your private experience either. That's completely private, completely encrypted. It doesn't even go through our server, so we don't even know what you're doing in there. And the same thing is true with public rooms, but at least in a public room, if you make one, we can jump in and ask you, like, how's your experience been? We can do that kind of user testing, that user research, and get intimate feedback directly with a user. We can just talk right to them. And that's led to some really interesting insights. So one of the most popular user requests was for the ability to stream. Right now, we stream your entire desktop. We stream your microphone audio so when you speak, other people hear you positionally, spatialized in the world around you. And we stream kind of your headset movements and attach an avatar to it. So you can tell when a person is looking right at you when you're making eye contact. You can tell whether a person is looking off in the distance because they're thinking or where they're looking. The fourth thing that people were requesting for was to stream audio from the desktop itself. And that's important for use cases like movie watching, or listening to music together, or just watching a YouTube clip together. Because a lot of people were like, hey, there's this really funny YouTube clip. But you can't hear the audio. So that was the biggest user request in the first few months. It took us about two, three months. We knew we needed to add that, but we wanted to ship the product first, get it out there, get users, and get feedback, and iterate on it. But immediately after, in about two, three months, we implemented that feature. And now it's extremely popular. Probably about half the public rooms utilize that feature just to share YouTube clips, or movies, or any sort of auditory sound that's coming from your computer. It could be something very simple. But that's a core part of sharing what you do on your computer with your colleagues or with your friends. That was probably the biggest feature that we learned by interacting directly with our community. But there's a ton of stuff. One of the really surprising things that we noticed with BigScreen is tech support. The Vive and the Rift VR headsets are notoriously difficult to get set up on your computer, especially if you're not used to Windows or not used to drivers and GPUs and all of that junk. So getting all of that set up is difficult, and oftentimes people will come into big screen and maybe their microphone isn't set up, but you're sitting next to another person. They've already set it up. They understand big screen. So they look over to you. They're like, oh, you don't have your audio set up. And they just walk you through. And they say, hey, OK, click that icon over there. OK, scroll up. Oh, that one. Oh, can you hear me now? There you go. Now it works, right? So that kind of like side-by-side tech support, that kind of helping the community and helping the users around you kind of figure things out and set things up, that's been pretty incredible to watch. Because that's only possible in something like big screen. Because you can see their entire computer. And you can tell them exactly what they need to do to get their headset set up.
[00:11:42.733] Kent Bye: Yeah, when I first saw it, it seemed like there was a couple of different use cases that people were using it. It seemed like there was a lot of gamers who were just going in and playing their 2D games next to each other. But also, you were kind of using it as a co-working way. Instead of going to a cafe, you would jump into Big Screen and start to work. What are sort of the big demographics and use cases that you've seen kind of emerge now that Big Screen's been out for about five months or so?
[00:12:07.910] Darshan Shankar: Sure, so in 2014 the entire purpose of this was more about productivity and collaboration. It's been that way from day one. But 99% of people that own a VR headset are coming in expecting games, are gamers that want to be entertained. And our marketing right now, the product is general purpose, you can do whatever you want with big screen, but the product is marketed towards gamers for a very specific reason because that 99% of users that are gamers, they come in expecting to play games, expecting to be entertained. So even though the start of the company back in 2014, it was all about productivity, it's all about collaboration, and the long term is really about getting us to that utopian vision of using your computer for productivity, using a headset, a VR headset for that. Right now, our marketing is exclusively focused on gaming and entertainment. So the vast majority of our users today use us to play video games by themselves on a massive screen. Because VR has a content problem where there's only a hundred games out there and they're all two to three hours long. There's not that much long-term VR content that keeps you coming back week after week, day after day, that sucks you in, that you play for thousands and thousands of hours. But gamers have a library of content that they already love. Their favorite Steam games, whether it's Dota or Counter-Strike or Rocket League. And all of a sudden, they can now use their new VR headset to get a completely new gaming experience that is way better than they can get than on their 24-inch computer screen. Right? Because now you can have a screen that's any size. You can be in a different world when you want to play your video games. You don't have to be bothered by your roommate that's making noise. You're just transported to different reality. So it's definitely a lot of gaming because that's just so powerful. Gamers come in, buy a VR headset, and now they can play their favorite non-VR games in VR. But the second use case that's really popular right now is also movie watching, whether it's YouTube or Twitch or Netflix or HBO. There's an infinite amount of 2D content, and we now provide, just like for video games, a better way to experience that content on these massive screens in a IMAX theater, in a home theater, where the light just kind of envelops you, like all around you, just immerses you in a way that's not really possible with physical small displays or projector screens. So we make that movie-watching experience significantly better. Those are the two probably most common use cases. But, despite marketing just for gaming, despite just marketing for movie watching, whether it's by yourself or with your friends in big screen, People that are gamers or people that enjoy watching movies, they typically have jobs, they have other interests. And with an application like Big Screen, where we let you do anything, you can use your computer. So people very naturally will watch a movie for an hour and then think, let me just check my email, let me get a bit of work done. So they alt-tab, they start to do that. And then they get distracted with Reddit, and then they come back to Reddit, and then they start watching YouTube. So it's like an endless cycle, it's just computing. So what do people do with Big Screen? They use their computer. The vast majority of gamers today use VR. So the vast majority of our users play video games in big screen, or they watch movies in big screen.
[00:15:07.135] Kent Bye: So it sounds like there's a bit of productivity, but people also, I think when I went in, people were kind of browsing Reddit forums together. But for you, what are some other surprising moments or stories that you have from what people ended up doing in big screen?
[00:15:22.813] Darshan Shankar: One of the most surprising use cases, in the context of collaboration, is 3D modeling. So, a 3D artist friend of mine, he pulled up Maya on his computer, he lives thousands of miles away from me, and he pulled up a 3D model that he was working on, he'd spent thousands of hours on it, just kind of like for a game that he's working on, and just went through and sat right next to him as he explained the artwork that he's been building, walking through the level design that he's working on, walking through his game and his project. That side-by-side collaboration is so much like what it would be like in the real world if we were just sitting right next to each other. That's not a game, that's not an app, that's not Skype. It's hard to describe what that's like, but that's collaboration, right? That was surprising, because I had approached this from more of a, let's just build a collaboration tool, a general purpose tool. But to see something like Maya be used in a very productive and collaborative manner We didn't do any native integration to make Maya social, to make Maya collaborative. We didn't build some sort of plug-in or like low-level thing. We just made the entire computer collaborative, the entire computer social. That was pretty interesting. It's been really cool to watch people hop on big screen every single night with the same set of friends. And each night it's, hey, we're going to watch this. And the next night it's like the second episode of that, or the third episode, the fourth episode. After a week, it's like they're on the 10th episode of that thing. So every single night, it's been very interesting to see people come back day after day after day to hang out with their friends. Because really, what we've created is a living room. We've now made it so easy for you to invite your buddies, wherever they are in the world, into your living room and to do whatever you do in the living room. Maybe it's Reddit, maybe it's YouTube, maybe it's a movie, whatever it is, right? We've created that living room experience. And it's pretty incredible that it's possible with a VR headset today.
[00:17:04.131] Kent Bye: Yeah, one thing that I thought was really striking is that you're all facing computers and so then the conversation tends to revolve around whatever's on the screen. Have you experimented with having other orientations where maybe they're sitting in a circle and they could look at each other and then have one single screen and different arrangements of people that I think would invoke different interactions?
[00:17:25.498] Darshan Shankar: So, so far, almost every single big screen environment has four people sitting in a row on a couch or a seat of some sort. And we've been experimenting a bit and plan on releasing more environments in the near future that are not sitting on just couches, potentially sitting at desks, sitting at workstations, sitting at a table facing each other. We have one environment today, which is kind of a kitchen table. You're in a really nice high-end kitchen and everybody's facing each other. And that's actually quite good for these collaborative and kind of face-to-face interactions, where the screen is just a side thing. Your primary purpose is to make eye contact and have that face-to-face conversation. And we plan on experimenting more with that. One of the things we recently introduced was a split-screen mode, which If everybody broadcasts to a kind of big shared screen, the entire screen kind of splits up into quadrants, so you could see everybody's screen right in front of you on this massive screen. It's a throwback to the old days of gaming, where you'd invite your buddies over to your Xbox or gaming console, and you'd all plug in your controllers and play together on this tiny 20-inch screen on this 20-inch TV, and it'd be split up in quadrants and you'd all be playing together. You could cheat by seeing where your buddy's hiding, or you could play together and have that kind of collaborative experience. So those are some things that we've been trying that are working out really well, which are not just purely a screen right in front of you, but shared screens, split screens, and potentially these more face-to-face or workstation-type environments. just that allow different types of human behavior. And our inspiration for all of this is the real world. We don't really have to invent new methods of human communication or human behavior. Really, what we're trying to do here is to find what do people like to do in the real world? What are the use cases? What are the behaviors? What are the patterns and interactions that people do in the real world? And how do we make them possible in big screen?
[00:19:13.306] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think the concept that comes to mind is this idea of embodied cognition, which is that our thinking doesn't just happen in our brains, it happens throughout our entire body. But not only our entire body, but also our entire environment. And so, depending on the environment that we're in, it actually changes our way of thinking. And so, being able to go into these different environments, I could imagine, could potentially start to evoke different ways of thinking and different ways of collaborating and I also think about a lot of ways that creatives work and collaborate with each other is in a office room with a whiteboard to be able to actually express their thinking and ideas onto this board that they can all then look at. Have you thought about either whiteboards or this connection between the environment and what that does to people and how they think?
[00:20:00.725] Darshan Shankar: Definitely. So there's two points there. The first point you're trying to make is the impact that the environment has on the conversation and the people and their emotions and how that facilitates a different type of conversation. The second point you're trying to make is about what we're discussing here is collaboration and whiteboards and different use cases and different environments that are tailored for very specific use case like a whiteboard collaboration or a conference room. We are definitely exploring a lot of, we've been calling them native applications, where you might be inside of a whiteboard and we can save that entire whiteboard to a disk and you can load up what the whiteboard was like from a few weeks ago. Those are native applications compared to the desktop that we show you, which is kind of a legacy application. It's showing you all of the 2D content that exists purely on a screen. And now we're kind of moving in the direction of adding applications that can augment your productivity or augment your Hangout and your collaboration session, whether it's whiteboards or even notepads where you can just like put sticky notes around to kind of track your project. There are all sorts of different directions that we'll definitely be exploring over the coming years because the long-term purpose of this is just to make your computer experience either more productive or more entertaining. And something like a whiteboard is a very interesting area to explore in the future. In terms of environments, something that we noticed about a year ago while we were still kind of in beta testing and putting it out there, we had a version of BigScreen which was just programmer. I'm a programmer. I can't make great environments. It was just programmer art. And when the user tested it, it was like, yeah, that's cool. I saw my desktop. There's some fun stuff I could do. The next week I put in a completely new environment, very high-end art, it was super realistic, it was very comfortable and a very neutral, great environment for you to just spend hours in. The user feedback was instantly different. It was like, wow, I want to be in here. It was like exploring the curtains and kind of feeling, oh, I'm sitting on a couch, this feels really comfortable. When you do those things, you open up different use cases, you make people feel comfortable, you guide people to do certain things, and set kind of the stage and the context for behavior, for activities and use cases. And that's why the current primary BigScreen environment is a very neutral apartment. It's a realistic, high-end apartment. Because you can do anything in an apartment. You can play video games, you can work. It isn't just one use case or the other. And that's why the primary big screen environment is not a conference room. Because you wouldn't want to spend 10 hours a day in a conference room playing video games. It just doesn't feel right. It doesn't make sense. And similarly, you wouldn't want to be underwater with fish floating around you while you're trying to have a serious conversation about productivity, about your business, and move things along. So our plan is to just have a lot of different environments that cater to these different use cases, each that kind of encourage you to do different things or allow you to focus on things. One thing we did notice about environments is if you have a lot of distracting things in the environments, like we have a billowing curtain in our apartment. It's great because it catches the user's attention and it just feels normal. It's like, oh yeah, of course, the doors are open. The wind's blowing in. It feels calm. It feels cool. You have a greater sense of presence. But when you are trying to have a meeting, and you're trying to be focused, that curtain that's constantly billowing, it's a distraction. And it gets in the way. And you're starting to think, could someone just close the door? But this is VR. There's no real door. It's just software. So that's how environment design has to fit the use case that you're designing for. And in the long run, we'll have a lot more of those.
[00:23:25.040] Kent Bye: Great. So what's next for big screen? What are some of the big things that are coming up for you?
[00:23:30.298] Darshan Shankar: So BigScreen is really two parts. We call ourselves a social utility. So the two parts are social and utility. And everything we do for the next five to ten years will be to either improve the social or to improve the utility or really both. On the social side, we recently released an update that allowed for custom avatars to customize your hair, to customize your eyes, your skin color, your gender, just about everything. to have millions of different customizations to allow you to express who you are. One thing we added there was pseudo eye tracking to allow you to communicate kind of where you're looking at. Because we can make guesses, like if there's a person in front of you, their head is in front of you, you're probably going to be looking at the person's head. If there's a monitor in front of you, you're probably looking at the monitor. And we make guesses based on the way the head's moving about where you're likely to be looking at next with realistic blinking and kind of the saccadic movement of the eye, the way it works in the real world, the way the physical human eye works, we try to mimic that in VR. So next, it's improving a lot of that. It's simple things like adding hats, but even more complex things like adding more interactions using the touch and the vibe. to grab objects, to move more objects, to express yourself in different ways. So here's an example. If you're watching an eSports game or an NBA basketball game or whatever it is, you might want to have those foam fingers that you could buy at a theater so that you can express your excitement for the game. You might want that foam finger to have the name of your favorite player or favorite team. Those kinds of ways of expressing yourself while in VR are going to greatly amplify your ability to socialize and hang out with your friends. And simple things like being able to punch a friend and have animations when the punching occurs, to be able to share and throw objects at your friends, or play little minigames like some Jenga blocks on the table in front of you. Those kinds of fun social interactions to encourage the social functionality, that's next. But beyond that, there's a lot of things we can do in social to improve collaboration as well. Simple things like having a whiteboard marker that you can just draw in 3D space with, just communicate ideas really effectively. We already have a laser pointer, which is really great for social collaboration because you can now point to a specific line of code or point to a part of a Word document where you're like, could you move that paragraph up over here? You can communicate that. But we can do so much more by adding these interactable objects or hand controls and tools to allow you to communicate and be more social, whether it's for entertainment or productivity. On the utility side of big screen, there's a lot of room and a lot of ideas we have there. One of the key things there is mobile. We do plan on going to the Gear VR and Daydream and future mobile headsets over the next year. But to dig in deeper, there's a lot of user feedback we've received about what they want to make their computing experience better. One of the most common requests is to have more monitors. Whether it's physical monitors, if you have two, three, four monitors around you, to be able to see all of them. Or virtual monitors. Do you really need to have five monitors physically in front of you? Or could we just make them in software and make the operating system think that there are many monitors around you? So kind of moving in that direction of like allowing you to be more productive and collaborative in ways that are potentially impossible in the real world. So using the multi-monitor example, it's incredibly difficult and really impossible to have two monitors side by side without a bezel right kind of in between. which means when you have content that's kind of like between the two screens, you'll see that bezel and it doesn't quite work and it's a bit distracting. In VR, when we do all of this in software, we can completely get rid of that. We can have completely bezel-less computing experiences, which is really great for enveloping yourself with all sorts of kind of, you have code in front of you, you have a web browser and documentation, you have your Photoshop or whatever you'd use for your day-to-day computing. We can amplify that by having a lot more of your applications running around you. That's one thing, but the other thing is also to move beyond the applications that are currently running on your computer. We can start to have apps of our own, and the whiteboard was just one of them. There are many other apps we'll definitely be exploring, potentially as simple as having Spotify be a radio, a physical kind of 3D object in front of you. Not physical literally, but a grabbable, interactable object in 3D space around you. and you can play with that and position it and control Spotify from a 3D object or Netflix and YouTube. Being able to say that TV screen that's on this virtual wall, have Netflix run on that while I do whatever I'm doing on my actual computer in front of me. It's kind of recreating again that living room experience where you might have a TV and the TV is running something kind of in the background. It's running Game of Thrones or whatever content on there while you're actually working or dealing with emails or you're doing your day-to-day computing. Creating that kind of second screen, that multi-screen experience is an interesting area for us to explore. So that's a long way of answering, but we're working on both. We're working on the social. We're going to make it more collaborative, more social, more enjoyable to hang out, and more productive to work with your colleagues, as well as improving the actual utility of the product so that it's more useful for you to use. It's more productive. It's more enjoyable for you to play your games in there.
[00:28:25.871] Kent Bye: Hayden, share with me an interesting story of how you ended up getting some funding through investors through Bigscreen. I don't know if you want to tell that story.
[00:28:34.664] Darshan Shankar: Since Bigscreen lets you present to a big screen and have a productive collaborative conversation, In the context of fundraising and investors, it's often two people sitting in a room just watching a presentation on a screen. And Big Screen allows that to happen, so it was pretty cool in the fundraising process for an investor to just jump in and get that pitch experience that you would get in a boardroom in a VC's office, but entirely in VR, entirely in software. And that has a twofold benefit. You get to understand the product and its use cases right inside the product. You get to understand what's the vision of the product and where it's going and why this company needs to exist and why you should fund the company within the product, which is certainly a cool experience that helps with fundraising.
[00:29:20.980] Kent Bye: One question that comes up a number of times as you were talking are what are the IP issues with streaming music or streaming HBO, Netflix over to other people? What type of issues do you have to deal with there?
[00:29:33.165] Darshan Shankar: So at the end of the day, we're building general purpose software that doesn't touch the computer itself. So we don't know what the content is running on your screen. It's just we've built a screen sharing tool. So it's like Skype in that sense. Skype has screen sharing and people do watch YouTube and Netflix and interact with friends or even long distance relationships over Skype. So in that sense, we're built very much the same as that, but in VR. And it's unclear if there's really any difference at that level, because none of what happens on your computers goes through our servers. We don't really have servers. It's all a completely encrypted, completely private, peer-to-peer technology. which means that we don't even know what you're doing on your computer. And there's no way for us to know because it's not going through us. So I'll give you the opposite example of Skype, which is something like Twitch or YouTube, where you would not want people to be broadcasting to the entire world IP that's owned by someone like Netflix or Disney. I mean, that's piracy. that you're just broadcasting and illegally sharing and streaming illegal content. Big screen, however, is a very intimate experience. It's much more like Skype. And just like Skype, there's four people in a room. You're not streaming illegal content to the world. Instead, with big screen, you're just screen sharing with a few friends. You're in a room, just like how you would in a living room. screen share to the Chromecast that's on your TV. So in that sense, all we're enabling here is a general purpose technology like Skype that allows you to screen share with your friends.
[00:31:05.988] Kent Bye: Awesome. And finally, what do you think is kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:31:14.280] Darshan Shankar: I've touched on that a little bit, and I think my approach into all of this hasn't been about games, it hasn't been about the metaverse, and I haven't even used the word metaverse so far. And I guess that kind of leads to our culture as a company, which is that our goal isn't to build the metaverse, it isn't to build a social network with a billion users in here. The way we look at VR is that it has the power to change the way we use our computers. It's the next computing medium. It's definitely a medium, it's the next medium, but it's also the next computing medium. So, the ultimate potential for VR, from our perspective, is that it's how we will use our computers in five to ten years. The laptop that you buy in a few years doesn't really need a 13-inch screen that's hard to use and constrictive and restrictive and just, there's so little you can do with it. Why not just have a laptop without a screen and use a lightweight pair of sunglasses or a VR headset to do your day-to-day computing? So our ultimate vision for VR and the way we see things going, there's going to be plenty of entertainment content, content that we haven't even thought of today. It's going to be great for games. It's going to be great for movie watching and VR films. But it's also going to be great for your day-to-day computing, everything from your email to Reddit to YouTube to whatever you do with your computer today. VR is drastically going to change that in the next few years.
[00:32:33.819] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:32:35.263] Darshan Shankar: Sure. Nice to meet you, man.
[00:32:37.105] Kent Bye: So that was Darshan Shankar. He's the founder of BigScreenVR. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, I didn't know before this interview that BigScreenVR was built upon this peer-to-peer networking technology. So none of the stuff that's happening through BigScreen is actually going through any of these centralized servers of BigScreenVR. But it's actually a very elegant implementation, and it just works. I think it's probably one of the best social VR experiences that I've been able to have. So there's a number of different social VR experiences that are out there. I love VRChat and AltspaceVR in terms of being able to freely move around a space and have this sense of active and embodied presence within a virtual reality experience. But the downside to that is that it creates this additional amount of social anxiety of going into a space and just having a bunch of people randomly moving around that it's actually very difficult to strike up an in-depth and meaningful conversation when the other person can just randomly disappear at any moment. The fact that you have constrained movement within your embodied and active presence within big screen VR, I think actually amplifies the amount of social presence that you have by going into big screen VR and sitting either next to somebody or across from somebody. It just creates a better and more in-depth social interaction. And so I've had some of the best interactions that I've had in any social VR experience in big screen VR because of that. But not only that, but that you're able to use your computer screen as a way of expressing your identity and being able to work on different things. So I've been actually kind of popping in and out of big screen VR over the last number of weeks and just going into these public rooms and seeing a wide range of people working on different things. And everything from just watching YouTube videos, playing video games, but also just working on different things, whether it's a Maya project or designing circuits. there's a couple of things that are happening when you go into big screen. First of all, you're just eliminating all the different distractions that you have, and you're able to actually focus better when you're in an immersive environment. You know, there's been some other VR companies that have tried to accomplish this. You know, Envelop VR is a good example, where they were trying to create this productivity VR application, but they weren't necessarily focusing on the social application from the very beginning. And that's the difference of what big screen has been doing, is that they're doing this kind of productivity application of being able to go into VR and just if you don't want to hang out with other people, you can just stay there in your own private room and do whatever you want. You can watch a movie or you can invite your friends to have a private experience or you can have this kind of cafe experience if you want to work in public and do this co-working experience. You can invite other people in and just kind of have these casual conversations. And in big screen VR, there are just this wide range of people who are at the edge of being in VR all the time. Darshan wrote a blog post saying that they've got about 150,000 different users that are using big screen VR and that some of the power users are using it up to 20 to 30 hours a week. Just think about that, 20 to 30 hours in a virtual reality experience. And Darshan's saying that it's actually probably one of the first killer apps of VR because you're able to have a better experience of the 2D content that's out there. We're kind of in this golden age of content right now. There's just so many great and amazing TV shows. And that if you can go into big screen VR and have it feel like you're actually watching that content in a way that feels much more immersive, watching it on the big screen. But not only that, be able to invite your friends and have them watch it with you. Or to be able to play some of your favorite 2D video games and just have a better and more immersive experience of that. Be able to have a screen that's much larger than you're able to actually have in real life. And now that there's multiple monitors, you're able to kind of have a Netflix screen off in the periphery or on the big movie theater and be able to work on something and concentrate on doing some actual work. So I think that having a social utility where they've been focusing really on amplifying a lot of the interactions and having hand-tracked controllers, having avatars, being able to express your identity in different ways. So having the social interactions and the constrained movement, that's really dialed in. But also really focusing on the utility and actually being able to do productive work within virtual reality. I'm in the process of writing a book on the ultimate potential of virtual reality, and I have been experimenting with writing some of that book within big screen VR. And it's helped me to really focus and get into more of a flow state. There are some downsides with the resolution not quite being as high as I want it to be just yet, but I think that's going to be coming in the future. But I think there's going to be some use cases where some of the tasks that you're doing, you can just completely block out all the distractions and start to do a lot of productive work and have access to your computer screen within a virtual environment. So some of the things that are coming in terms of having native applications and being able to actually use the unique affordances of volumetric computing. Right now, I think it's just mostly giving you access to your 2D computer screen, but there's all sorts of different things that you can start to do once you have access to immersive computing. So it sounds like that big screen VR is actually probably one of the best collaborative tools that are out there just because you can start to replicate a business meeting in virtual reality such that you're able to have access to a computer screen, give a presentation, and have people there listening and to have a social interaction that feels close enough to be able to replicate the collaborative process that would otherwise require everybody getting into the same physical location. I think the dream for a lot of people is to eventually get rid of the need to fly all across the country just to have a face-to-face meeting. Now Alex Schwartz of Alchemy Labs has said that for their purposes of doing creative collaboration, there's all sorts of subtle body language with the facial expressions and body movements that Virtual reality may not actually be at the point for them to be able to do the type of creative collaborations that they need to do to be able to create video game experiences. But for other people who may not need to have that level of fidelity of facial expressions, I think that big screen VR is already serving that need. Darshan said that they were able to actually do a lot of pitches for their company within the context of big screen VR, to have some of these investors just be able to sit down and watch Darshan kind of walk through the slide deck and give a presentation. So you really get the sense that Darshan's eating his own dog food and be able to really use the platform and the virtual reality and to really explore what's possible when it comes to collaboration with other people in VR. So I personally think that big screen VR is one of the most significant applications that are out there just because the level of engagement is just super high. I mean, the reviews and the love that the users of big screen VR have is more than any other experience that I've seen so far. Just hop in and start to talk to people about it. And you'll hear just how useful this tool has been for them to really unlock the potential of VR to be able to do all sorts of different things within big screen. And the extent of what is actually happening in big screen is not completely known just because these private rooms that are happening with these private encryptions, it's actually very difficult to really see all the things that are happening within big screen VR. So as big screen starts to come to more mobile applications and include more and more immersive applications and be able to customize your own environments, I'm just really excited to see where this specific platform goes just because it has probably one of the strongest foundations and user engagements of any of the other applications that are out there right now. So that's all that I have for today. I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends and become a donor. Just a few dollars a month makes a huge difference. So donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
