Tony Parisi is the Head of AR & VR strategy at Unity so he has an insider’s perspective of not only where the VR and AR industry is today, but some hints as to what xR is going to look like by 2025. Parisi had a fireside chat with HTC Viveport president Rikard Steiber at Greenlight Strategy’s Virtual Reality Strategy conference in 2025 where they made some predictions about the future of immersive technology, and what they expect to see by 2025. I had a chance to talk with Parisi about his predictions, but also talk about the current state of the union for VR and AR. He says that VR and AR are still doubling and that all of the major players are still committed, and so it’s an exponential growth that is still before the hockey stick curve of rapid acceleration. So VR is still yet to cross the chasm into the mainstream, but Parisi says that it’s just a matter of time and that all indicators is that VR and AR are still quite strong and growing. We also talk about VR and the open web, whether or not we’ll still see apps in AR in 2025, and the tradeoffs between backwards compatibility and innovative new features and functionality.
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Parisi mentions a Holographic capture system that hadn’t been released yet, and he was referring to Microsoft’s Mixed Reality Capture:
Thank you! Oh I was referring to Microsoft's "Mixed Reality Capture," which is doing a great job of capturing people that can then go into real time applications e.g. in Unity. That isn't streamable yet; I was looking forward 5-10 years
— TonyParisi.eth (@auradeluxe) March 2, 2018
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye and welcome to the Voices of VR Podcast. So one of the big questions within the virtual reality community is when are things going to cross the chasm into going into the mainstream or at least being at the scale and volume such that these independent creators can be able to make a viable living off of working in VR development. So there's actually very few people and entities within the VR industry that have access to the full data. Even if you're a headset manufacturer, you just have what you have for your data. You have the game developers who have some cross-section, but then again, that's limited to people who are interested in that genre of games. But then there's people like Unity, as well as Unreal Engine, who I think they have more comprehensive data and information than perhaps a lot of the other analysts that are out there that are trying to piecemeal a lot of this stuff together and make prognostications about the future. So I had a chance to talk to Tony Pricy. He's the head of XR strategy at Unity. And one of the things that Tony says is that all is not well, but all is good. We're kind of in this phase of the trough of disillusionment and it's slowly growing. But one of the things that Tony says is that it's an exponential curve for these technology adoption curves and that it's continuing to grow and that all the major players are continuing to invest and grow in this medium because Once a medium exists, it's never going to go away. So I had a chance to talk to Tony about both his vision about where the VR industry is at, as well as what he believes that virtual reality and augmented reality is going to look like in the year 2025. So we cover all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Tony happened at Greenlight's Virtual Reality Strategy Conference on Wednesday, October 25th, 2017 in San Francisco, California. So, with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:00.223] Tony Parisi: I'm Tony Parisi, head of VR and AR strategy at Unity Technologies. I was here this morning to give a talk. Actually, it was a fireside chat with Rickard Stieber, who's the president of Viveport and SVP of VR for HTC Vive. A great guy, and he and I have shared a stage before, but we never actually did a talk together. It was really wonderful. We just sort of went back and forth. The talk was themed VR 2025. So we both kind of laid out a vision for what is going to happen with immersive technology eight years from now. It was great. Rickard went first with his vision. We rooted the whole thing in, you know, reality today and then sort of worked forward to this vision. But we kicked the thing off with this idea of, you know, what's the world going to look like and what's immersive computers role in 2025. And it was great. Rickard started and kind of talked about changes in infrastructure that are going to happen. You know, the device is getting smaller, a lot of the computing power, say, going into the cloud, so you have an untethered VR device that's just a display, and a lot of the computation can happen out in the cloud or on a device that's disconnected from it, which is fascinating to think about. Rickard called it the death and rebirth of the smartphone. In other words, we're still going to be making calls, we're still going to be watching movies, we're still going to be texting each other, but it may not be in a device that looks like a phone in eight years. The VR and AR types of devices will supplant the phone as the communications device, but there will still be a brain somewhere. Maybe it's disconnected and local and near you like a tablet or a PC. Maybe a lot of it's happening out in the cloud. So I thought that was a brilliant vision. I largely agreed with it. And then I immediately played off it. And this is me being me. I came in kind of unscripted. I had a bunch of stuff prepared, but I went off script immediately and played off. And I am going to read you the story. I wrote this little story afterwards, but I was extemporizing at the point. And here we go. It's 2025. My son hops into an Uber headed for his university, his master's program in robotics design. A car that was designed completely in virtual reality, no physical prototype. It was manufactured in a factory that was designed in VR and assembled using processes visualized in VR by workers trained in VR simulation. A car that lives in a network of millions of self-driving vehicles monitored by network operators using a metareality dashboard. To pass the time, Lucian checks his social feed via a beautifully rendered AR display that transforms the mostly empty cabin interior of that car into an interface to his digital life. Then he calls up a Twitch feed to check in on the latest vSports tournaments and ultimately settles in to binge season 10 of Friends because he's feeling retro today. All of this is called up using a voice interface and explored with a combination of hand gestures and eye tracking. Lucian's TV watching is interrupted by an incoming call. It's his mother Marina reminding him to eat. After a quick volumetric conversation with mom, he browses for food choices on Amazon and redeems his blockchain-based coupons to pay for his lunch. which is waiting for him when he arrives at school. Now, I made that all up on the spot, and that's, you know, cool, whatever, yay me. But the thing is, that is all based on stuff that's actually happening today. Auto manufacturers are currently, the big ones, currently experimenting with designing cars in VR to get rid of the physical prototypes. I don't know if you know how this works today, but they still make cars by starting with a clay physical prototype. Each one of those prototypes cost them millions of dollars for each new car. And, you know, making changes to it is time-consuming and expensive. So auto manufacturers are already experimenting with, say, the HoloLens to augment the physical prototype, not replace it just yet, but augment it so that you can see it in different colors, You can see the accessories like a rack on top of it or different tires. But that's just the first step in a process toward which they're going to move to replace that physical prototype. And they are also visualizing the factories so that they can understand assembly procedures and understand where to put the equipment that they use to assemble it in the factory for the best ergonomics, for the best process for assembling it, and then they're doing assembly training with that. If you go down the line of all the things I cited, these are all happening in some sort of experimental, early pilot form today. And now you imagine if we do have these self-driving cars in a few years, they're going to need something to do in there. You're no longer going to have a driver, so you've got more room in the cabin, or you're going to reconfigure the cabin. and you as the rider aren't driving it, so what are you going to do? I mean, I know I check my Twitter a hundred times a day and the average Uber ride home in ten minutes, as it is, but imagine that those car cabins are going to have an in-car entertainment center. that's already happening. It's going to start with flat screens. But as these other trends that Rickard was talking about move forward and we get to smaller devices, 5G networking that can deliver immersive content, those interfaces will become immersive. It's probably not a Vive in a car, it's probably more like some glasses with holographic display, but you're going to be able to do really rich stuff in there. And you imagine that starts maybe as entertainment content, but before long it is the social feed. It's e-commerce, it's shopping, it's making a Yelp reservation as you're on route somewhere. It's doing all those things in XR in a self-driving car. So that's just 2025 and that's just cars. Imagine what else is going to be happening in eight years. So that's what we talked about today and from where I'm feeling, You know, if you know me and my history of all this, as a futurist, I get about a 20% success rate, which is probably, I don't know, maybe that's just as good as anyone else. And I pride myself on being wrong, you know, 80% of the time with this stuff, but this does not seem that far-fetched to me.
[00:07:35.852] Kent Bye: Yeah, I've actually been naming 2025 as the time at which we have kind of mass ubiquity within the virtual and augmented reality in terms of that it's at a certain scale that you have the ability to be able to have more wider distribution of some of these different content. To me, I think that some of the stuff that you're talking about may not be until like 2045 with in terms of like the larger shifts that have to happen in terms of like self-driving cars and kind of like changing out that fleet. I think that that's going to be larger shifts that may take longer time. The thing that I like to think about is one, the productivity implications of VR, but also the level of degree at which we are becoming more present as human beings and connected to each other. because I feel like there's a bit of like, I've just been talking a lot about how I see technology as a mirror of where we're at and that there's a lot of ways in which we look at something like harassment behaviors on Twitter or Facebook and it's a little bit like it's the worst parts of ourselves and that we have to kind of dig deep and evolve ourselves as human beings in order to really actually have the cultural and ethical and moral responsibility to be able to actually handle the technology and there's a lot of stuff within virtual reality and augmented reality that I think has the potential to make us actually more connected as human beings. And so with your sort of vision of the future, it's very much still kind of like watching entertainment and sort of dissociated in terms of going off into these other realms. I actually think that there's going to be potential where you're having these virtual teleconference interactions with other people where you kind of feel like you're hanging out with people and you actually feel more connected to other human beings rather than sort of in this kind of isolated technological silo. I feel like that's where we're at now, but that VR actually has the potential to kind of break us out of that stasis and get us into these more ecstatic states of connectivity and being more grounded as humans.
[00:09:22.893] Tony Parisi: A, 2025 or 2045. We could maybe split the difference and say 2035. I do think that some things are going to happen faster than we think, like they always do. But you may be right that some of the changes, just, you know, the social, the economic, the government layers and everything else involved to make that reality happen may just take longer than even the technology advances, so I'm with you on that. When it comes to what you were saying about social interaction, I don't think that vision you just spun is really at odds with the one I was talking about, because in fact, there could be a social scenario happening in that same self-driving car. There's no reason you couldn't have that teleconference and be connected in the ways you're talking about. You know it's funny you and I offline talk about a lot of these things right now with everything going on in the world and the tech world. Technology is value neutral as we've acknowledged many times in the past but it does seem to be value accelerating as well. The good and the bad seem to be happening a lot mediated and fostered by new technologies like this. I do love the vision that with the right set of technologies in XR we could be brought together closer I've been skeptical about a lot of aspects of that for years because of really technological and design limitations around initial early and ongoing attempts to do virtual worlds and social worlds. A lot of this centered in my mind around the inefficacy, I think, of cartoon avatars, all the design challenges with that, the uncanny valley issues you run into. We're getting past the technology infrastructure issues to do social virtual worlds. We can deliver a lot of good stuff in real time. with a lot of people participating all at once. But it's these design challenges that I really think have been holding us back. I'm starting to take a different view only because I'm seeing now some holographic capture technology that goes beyond the stuff we've seen in public. I can't really talk about it yet, but by the time this podcast comes out, folks will probably know what I'm talking about. There have been major advances in holographic capture. to the point where by that 2025 timeframe, I don't believe it's unreasonable to have really good volume capture of people delivered into teleconference type and social settings that are streamed in real time, that are high quality enough. And when we get to that point, then we have a real social environment as well. I honestly don't think the future of social interaction will be through cartoon interfaces like we've been seeing for the last 25 years.
[00:11:53.516] Kent Bye: Yeah, and another thing is just by 2025, the thing that I think about is how a lot of what virtual reality and augmented reality is introducing into computing is the body. And what does it mean to be embodied in a new way, as well as being active in a way. And so I know LLVR was doing a lot of work with like trying to imagine the workplace in the future and it looked a lot more like a yoga studio with mats on the ground and you're rolling around. I find that when I'm at a conference and I'm walking around and I'm talking to people I get into like these deep flow states and when I sit in front of a computer and have to like sit there and just like work on stuff I like it's like the worst in terms of like distraction and really actually being able to be productive and I feel like there's something that is going to come with these head-mounted augmented reality displays where you're actually actively moving, maybe even being deeply connected in a nature environment, but yet being able to kind of be in more of a conversation, just like you're in conversation with Rikert today and you spun this story of the future that we're talking about now, you know, that walking around and actually, you know, talking and being engaged with the world, but not sort of isolated into like these cubical kind of mindset that we have this new capability of bringing computing to be more spatial, but more active and more embodied in a new way.
[00:13:10.679] Tony Parisi: I think we're going to have a lot of both. The solitary computing experience has its place. For example, I think most of the listeners of this podcast will fire it up and go work at their desk and listen to it while they're doing their other things. And they'll give it 98% of their auditory attention.
[00:13:27.703] Kent Bye: I think most people actually listen to it in a car while they're doing chores. It's usually, they're usually doing something else while they're listening, yeah.
[00:13:33.586] Tony Parisi: But they've got that whole band of information coming in auditory where they can really focus on that and do their other things. Send a few emails, whatever they happen to be doing, or, you know, compile something of their programmer, or, you know, like you said, the laundry. And I don't think that's going to change and that's essentially a solitary activity and there's nothing wrong with that. And I think there'll be plenty of solitary AR and VR mediated computing activities, entertainment, we talked about a lot of those. But there will be social ones and the more these technologies can get out of the way in terms of the form factor, the more they can be mobile, the more they can incorporate our entire bodies. the more you can do what, like the kind of things that Unity Lab's been experimenting with and blogging about where you can turn a simple business card into an AR interface that's got more information in it. You can bring all the screens around you wherever you are, including in having conversations and sharing information together that's holographic, and you bring this magical stuff in front of us. I think those are all going to be part of fostering better, meaningful, physical, social interactions as well. So between telepresence and this idea of bringing things in through AR, I think there's plenty that's going to be social. I don't think we're going to totally go into a plugged-in VR matrix. I mean, I don't think that's ever going to happen. God help us if it does, but I don't think it is.
[00:14:48.520] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, part of the dilemma that I see in projecting out to the future of 2025, we can all kind of see that it's going to reach some level of being a lot larger than it is now. I don't know if it's going to be mass ubiquity by 2025 or it might be until 2045, until it gets to really at the level of mass ubiquity that we really want to see it. That's something that I just don't know how the pace at which it's going to really accelerate to that point.
[00:15:10.248] Tony Parisi: But that will be for your 5000th podcast, right? Yeah. Check in then. 10,000 by then.
[00:15:19.111] Kent Bye: But I think the deeper point about that is just that right now you just recently wrote up a little bit of a state of the union of what's happening in the VR and AR industry in terms of where we're at now. We just had a lot of the major technology companies announce a lot of phone-based AR, whether it's from Apple with the ARKit and Google with the ARCore. So there's a lot of like phone-based AR that's coming and almost like kind of being on the front lines of reaching that mass scale of getting into people's hands and starting to experiment with it and just going to a number of the different developer conferences I know both at Samsung and Google, they both had this kind of internet of things, ambient computing, like bringing conversational interfaces, having screens go away, having interactive experiences with technology rather than something that's mediated through you looking at a visual interface. And so I feel like that's a part of the movement towards getting away from screens and having these more immersive experiences with technology. But I'm just curious to hear from you in terms of like where you see the augmented in virtual reality Ecosystem is that right now from you know? You're inside you from unity and kind of how you see things progressing from this write-up that you did recently
[00:16:28.778] Tony Parisi: Yeah, so I kind of like to say right now, 2017, with XR, all is not well, but it's all good. In the sense that the anticipated trough of disillusionment, gap of disappointment, like my boss John Riccitello calls it, is here upon us for VR. Growth hasn't happened as much as some people had hoped. A lot of that was overhyped by a combination of industry investors and then media getting on it and believing all the most optimistic projections about everything, forgetting the tried and true fact that Most of these technology adoption cycles follow an exponential curve. They start really slowly, they pick up steam, and then they go up like a rocket. And we're still on the front end of that curve. No one should or could expect linear growth. And yet, here we are in a place where we don't have linear growth. The bloom is off the rose. Folks are worried, oh, you know, it's not happening fast enough. And that could result in a lot of people being put off. not investing in VR, not investing in new hardware. I mean, the worst that would happen is, you know, the hardware and infrastructure makers and the tool makers like Unity and everybody steps off the pedal because it didn't happen fast enough. Thankfully, that's not happening. All the hardware manufacturers are doubling down. They see the future potential of this still. Folks making content are making wiser investments. They're making maybe more measured ones. So some growth has slowed down, some froth has slowed down, but there's still a lot of activity happening. At the same time that that's all going on, there has been a shift toward phone-based augmented reality that's coming from Apple and Google with ARKit and ARCore respectively. For folks in consumer, making AR games or entertainment experiences, or doing brand marketing types of experiences, which we're seeing a lot of happening in Unity, because of the lure of scale. We're talking about instead of being able to reach generously about 10 million high-functioning VR headsets between mobile and desktop and console, now half a billion headsets being projected next year because it works in many of the phones we already have in our pockets or just the next generation right around the corner.
[00:18:35.178] Kent Bye: You say headsets, you just mean phone-based AR.
[00:18:36.919] Tony Parisi: I said headsets, but I meant handsets. Yeah, so phone-based AR. And so these work with the devices we have in our pocket, and the lure of that scale is bringing a lot of people to develop in AR. It's shifting a lot of focus toward AR. I believe that's a near-term phenomenon. And it's not necessarily a bad one, because it does two things. It keeps some people in business making this content and working on the design problems around AR, because it's different. You have to design for something that, you know, a phone's a magic window into this virtual experience. I hold my phone up, and I'm going to be tired of doing that in a minute. So I've got to design something that captures people's attention in, like, one-minute nuggets, right? And then, I mean, they might do more than one of them in an experience, but they're going to lower their arm, they're going to do it again in another part of the room. And it's all good. We're learning how to design for that. And it's going to bring immersive 3D content into everyone's hands. So it's going to educate the marketplace and consumers will become increasingly accustomed to seeing magical creatures in their physical world. And that's just going to create more and more of an appetite for immersive content. So from that standpoint, it's all good. And while that's all happening, New generations of VR hardware that are becoming untethered and smaller and lighter are coming on the market. We've heard announcements from Microsoft and all their partners with their mixed reality headsets. We've got new generations coming from Oculus with the Oculus Go and their standalone thing they announced, as well as HTC working on a standalone now.
[00:20:05.132] Kent Bye: And Samsung sort of alluded that there may be... Samsung has hinted and teased.
[00:20:09.213] Tony Parisi: So I think we're going to see that will be Gen 2. So we're past from Year 1 to Year 2 now of commercial VR. And I think those things are all happening and they're going to be good. While this is all going on, there's also a lot of enterprise deployment around VR to solve business problems, some of which I described already just for the auto industry. There's plenty of use cases like that. Companies getting paid to solve real business problems. hardware that is affordable in those settings, the tether not being as much of an issue if you're doing a simulation to train somebody and they don't need to move around too much, the affordability of a HoloLens or Meta in the AR space, it's just not an issue. A few thousand dollars for a headset like that if you can save lives by training people on equipment or improve productivity by designing a car faster and better. All good. So those are all happening in parallel. So a few years down the line, heading toward 2025, a few years down the line, I think we're going to get to a point where we're going to see the next wave of adoption of XR. And we'll really now, by then, a few years down the line, two, three years down the line, I think we'll see the signposts and really understand and be able to make a judgment about where we are. And with any luck, God willing, and from my point of view being in this industry, hopefully we're on that upward slope. Slope of enlightenment, getting out of the gap of disappointment, however you want to characterize it.
[00:21:29.997] Kent Bye: Yeah, and talking to different people who are looking at the enterprise market and also coming from more of, I guess, the WebVR as well as the X3D ecosystem, one of the concerns with some of the companies that are working with spatial content is that they want to have a format and a platform that they can archive and know that they're going to be able to have access to it in 5 to 10, 20 years from now. And obviously with your work in VRML, some people still have some scenes in VRML that they still have access to and have ability to read. But with Unity, I know that I've had an experience where I created in Unity, and even a year or two later, it was like the generations of the phones had changed. It was hard for it even to still work. So I know that you've come from a lot of the open web world and that you're thinking about these things. But in terms of archiving content, is it a matter of using something like GLTF that's going to have that ability to archive things? Or is Unity thinking about how are you going to be able to export in a way that is either meets some sort of ISO standard or is able to export to WebVR in an open format to be able to have access to the data that you have the ability to have native code to be able to run in the performance of right now with Unity as well as Unreal. You have an ability to create native applications that are far superior than anything else that's out there. However, there's an issue of the archivability in the data. I'm just curious to hear what Unity is doing to address that.
[00:22:57.618] Tony Parisi: That's a mouthful. That's a deep, deep topic. Let's unpack it a little bit from the point of view of archival of content. I will just say, just to be fair to native technologies, which do suffer from this way more than web, you can't run a 1999 website in most browsers today. So, there are all kinds of backward compatibility issues with web-based content and applications because those formats have changed over the years. Now, the rate of change is much slower. The level of incompatibility is much lower, right? It's much more backward compatible, but there's still many issues there. So, just to be fair and put that out there. But I think what we're really talking about is we need to try to not conflate two concerns, I think. And one concern is archival of content, like you said. And that's really about media formats, something like a GLTF, a file format that is portable between different 3D tools, not locked into one system like a Maya. and it's about transportability of that content. So you make it, you export out of Maya, that's awesome. I could bring it into another tool, but guess what? I could share it online to any number of growing services that can just immediately visualize it on the web or in VR, like Sketchfab. So that is happening, and I'm really proud of the work that I did and a handful of us did to design that. It was originally born out of just needing any kind of content pipeline that was repeatable and reliable for WebGL. Because people were inventing a new pipeline for every project. It was absurd. And they'd export OBJ files out of Blender, and then call the guy across the hall and say, OK, here's the transform, here's where the thing was located in 3Space, and they'd type the coordinates into a text editor. Absurd, right? So we sort of got through that and fixed that pipeline problem. And then Oculus discovered we were fixing that pipeline problem, said, hey, we want to do that for VR as well, because we had two engineers working on it internally. Why do we need to do that? So they teamed up with us, and then a handful of other big companies. Microsoft is doing a lot with it. They've got GLTF brought into PowerPoint now. So you can create interactive presentations with 3D models. Amazing. So that all was born out initially out of just trying to solve a pipeline problem, but what emerged from that, and we kind of knew it would because the same thing happened with JPEG or other data formats for visual content, is that it could then have a life beyond a tool chain and be out there and be shared in applications. And so then we have services like Sketchfab. So that's amazing. And that's just really the content. And I'm putting that in quotes because content is a slippery thing to define. And then there's what you do with the content and how you bring it into an application where engines like Unity or web-based libraries like Three.js would be used to then bring it to life, handle the interactions, maybe go out and do an e-commerce load of a page based on what you're doing on the web. Or in Unity's case, maybe add some gameplay to that GLTF. And those are really hard to turn into a future-proof archival set of behaviors and interactions for the ages. And I think they always will be, because we're always going to want to do new things with that same piece of content. So we can kind of separate our thinking on those concerns and think about WebVR separately from GLTF, the content format. I think that's helpful. Now, in the case of WebVR, and I think you leaned into this or segued into it talking about enterprise, it's very interesting because there are a lot of enterprise use cases for, hey, I made this model, I made some cool interactive application, I don't want to have to fly my GM exec into the Experience Center to share it with them in the Vive. I really just want to shoot them a preview of this right now. Web technology can help with that. You can do that in apps, but there's more for, you know, an app that's installed on a tablet. And a lot of people are using Unity to do that right now because it's so cross-platform. They can publish to all these different devices and platforms. But it'd be even better if you could just share a link. Or if you're a Technicolor or a Framestore or any one of those production houses working for a client, God, what are you going to do? Send them an app install and have them use one of those test flight to have to go try it? Or are you going to send them a Vive prepackaged so they can see it with the content pre-installed? No, you'd love to just shoot them a link. So there are many, many use cases for being able to instantly share in a business-to-business setting as well as a consumer setting. And so we will see We'll see those things happen. There's a lot of movement and work happening in WebVR. No one's stopping there. Oculus has doubled down their commitment to that. Google's got it in their Daydream Chrome VR browser. Samsung's still working on it hard in Samsung Internet. The desktop platforms, I think, will follow. It's being led by mobile. Kind of, again, about the scale issue and wanting to hit more users first. And I think, ironically, I guess it's just not ironically, maybe I'll just say tragically, you'll allow me this, indulge me, that 23 years after I got started on doing a 3D web project that WebVR is still catching up to the native platforms. But it's not for lack of trying. I think everybody, including the folks with native technologies like Unity, see the benefits and acknowledge it. We're really, I think, just getting down to nuts and bolts of development priorities, use cases, taking things to market. and it's going to have its day. With any luck in my lifetime.
[00:28:03.331] Kent Bye: Well, I think that, you know, when I talked to Clay before and then afterwards, I did an interview with Matt Meissinks from Superventures, but both looking at augmented reality in the future and that what I see is that in a lot of ways I see the application metaphor going away and that it's going to be much more of like kind of ambient computing where it's going to be contextual, where in some ways I see like you walking around in either the outside reality or within a context of a space, then that becomes the operating system under which the spatial computing is going to happen. So it becomes much more about the location where you're at rather than a specific application that you're bringing up, if you know what I mean. And to me That sounds like much more like the open web than something like an application context. And so it seems like we're kind of moving into this realm where if we have this 3D spatial computing that's being driven by where you're physically located on Earth, then that makes me question, well, how is Unity going to, if you see that writing on the wall, that sort of dissolving of an app, and kind of something that's going to be distributed more over the web, does that mean that the Unity is going to potentially evolve to the point of being able to export to WebVR to seamlessly be able to get into that time when these apps just go away?
[00:29:23.796] Tony Parisi: First off, amen to the vision. I don't know how we get to a ubiquitous computing infrastructure with apps. I just can't see it. It won't have enough fluidity. What we're talking about with this vision of an XR infrastructure, metaverse, whatever you want to call it, that needs to be seamless and instant access to absolutely everything. I also will say now I get to drop a buzzword bomb in a future where the blockchain is everywhere. Why do you need an app store anymore? You can track every piece of content, every interaction and everything and monetize it as you see fit, right? Depending on what the business model is. Why would you need an app store to package and monetize that stuff? Now, I can't speak to specifically what Unity wants to do with any of this stuff or is thinking about with any of this stuff. There's a lot of deep conversations, a lot of deep thinking. Like I said, our Unity Labs folks are already experimenting with contextual computing of the type you were talking about. I can't go beyond that right now or I'd have to, you know... kill myself, and then you, and then all your listeners, and I'm not gonna do that. That's really dark. Not in that order, yeah, sorry, sorry, that was dark, you know. But, yeah, but there's a lot of deep thinking going on, and I think a lot of people believe that just, it's inevitable, it has to be true, or we'll just never get to the fluid experience that we're envisioning.
[00:30:36.437] Kent Bye: Great, well, so, for you, what's kind of next for what the big problems or questions that you are hearing from the industry, and what Unity's doing to kind of answer those problems?
[00:30:46.327] Tony Parisi: So Unity is in an interesting spot as a business. It's a really, I'd say it's an enviable position really. We started by investing about three years ago heavily in all the VR hardware. And that has really created a windfall for us which goes well beyond VR gaming and entertainment. A company woke up a few years ago and looked around and saw that folks were building everything for XR using our stuff. And we were the predominant platform for creating it. And here we are with a thriving business in game development content creation with Unity Pro R software, a mobile advertising platform and network that is the largest independent one in the world behind Facebook and Google. Billions of gameplays going on, powered by our software and collecting analytics data against that. That is a massive thing and that analytics data goes to our developers to help them optimize monetization and gameplay and user satisfaction and retention. That playbook where we went really deep into gaming, we're now taking that and including the 3D technology that's at the center of this all, doing really good real-time 3D computing and across all the XR devices. We're now taking that to other industries because of what's been happening organically in the automotive industry, in architecture, in brand creative, in broadcasting, in film. Folks are using our stuff in all these different industries. We're taking a hard look at those analytically. We have a planning team that analyzes all this stuff and looks at it, sort of bottoms up, kind of hard nose. We have product folks talking to people in all those industries, there's business development activity going on and we're looking at all this and we're actually engaging with several industries now to provide much more deep solutions because the state of affairs today is you've got, I don't know, a handful, a dozen, a few dozen folks in an auto manufacturer They've been working in VR and these high-end systems using these really closed tools for years, these super expensive things. Consumer VR comes along, they start a little VR innovation lab. They hire game programmers. The game programmers are like, well, I know Unity. And they start working in Unity, they prototype something. And it quickly gets some really great results. And then they get to the point where it's like, how are we going to take all our CAD model data out of one of these big packages, get it into Unity, and then make it into an interactive application? They've been solving those problems themselves. Soon they're not going to have to. We're going to give them more tools to be able to do that. We're going to give them workflow and rendering and things that suit their needs for the variety of industries I've already cited. So that's an amazing growth opportunity for our company. We go from being a platform for game development to a platform for XR development across many, many industries. And so, we're all super excited about that. I mean, at the end of the day, that's why I was hired. You know me, I don't have a deep background in gaming. I've tinkered, I've been gaming in Jason. I come from 3D visualization, and that's one of the reasons the company hired me is to, like, help us figure all this other stuff out. I mean, it was that vague when it started, but it's become more disciplined and thoughtful as I've gotten into it, and we have a you know, Legion, a team of lots of people working on this across the entire organization to try and take us to that next step.
[00:33:55.332] Kent Bye: Yeah, and as we transition into a virtual world and virtual economies, I feel like the existing kind of advertising paradigms are kind of woefully outdated for what is actually going to be effective or really work in VR. Maybe there's going to be billboards and virtual billboards and stuff and we'll still have that, but to me there's a potential to kind of just completely reinvent the wheel in terms of just doing something completely different and maybe even create a system that's a little bit more equitable in terms of like allowing everybody to become participants and creators within this virtual economy so that it's a little bit more of a flow of value with multiple different cryptocurrencies, complementary currencies. And so is this something that Unity is also trying to like figure out what the new economic model of these virtual worlds are or is that something that's sort of beyond the scope of what you're looking at?
[00:34:46.115] Tony Parisi: We certainly keep an eye on all this stuff, but we're going to follow the thought leaders and the other innovators in this area as these economies shape up. We're already working in VR and AR advertising, and that format is already different, but it's still an app in the sense that it's a short-form experience that is promoting some form of content or product to an end user that happens in some moment between the thing they're doing and the next thing they're going to be doing. So the way we do that now in mobile ads is it's a video takeover between game levels. And then if you click through and install, and it's a game publisher trying to get you to buy their game or install their game within someone else's game. If you go through, you click, you install, developer gets paid, we get paid a cut of that. Our developers get paid more than us, which is great. I mean, off that transaction, they make more money than we do selling them our software, which is a great thing. You know, we're in the middle of this wonderful ecosystem. That's the state of mobile advertising today inside games. how advertising is going to play out inside VR, we're at the pilot phase. We did a pilot with Lionsgate for the Jigsaw horror movie that's coming out in a couple of weeks. So, you opt in. to a room you then have to escape. Else really bad things will happen. And that's in pilot phase right now. It's running in Samsung Internet on the Gear VR. It's running inside Nanite Fulcrum by Spiraloid for the Oculus Rift. The good thing is it runs great in the Gear VR because you're actually trapped in a chair. You're not moving around. And then when you do to get out, you get to teleport, right? And it works great in the gear interface. That's just the beginning, right? In augmented reality, what are those form factors going to look like? Some branded character dancing on a table. I mean, with phone-based right now, it's so simple, right? It has to be simple interactions. We're experimenting with those. But this vision of the future that we've been exploring in this chat today, it's highly likely that brand advertising and brand creative will take on completely different forms. This is just, you know, early days of what we're experimenting with. And it's probably going to be thoughtful, it's going to be lighter touch, it's probably going to be in some ways more insidious. I don't believe it's going to go away. There's no medium that's been invented so far that has not been touched by advertising. And I think that's going to continue to be true. Now, on the point of a more egalitarian society and a more evenly distributed economy, I believe that's all happening from the rising tide. It always has been. I mean, that's the arc of history in a sense. But to go meta, I also think that it will not be complete anarchy or complete egalitarian because that just creates a vacuum that ultimately results in oligarchy or democratic republic. I mean, that's just sort of political science, right? And so I think we'll probably have more egalitarianism, a more evenly distributed economy that's fostered and encouraged by this. But I think there'll be plenty of centralization and plenty of hubs and plenty of big players in that future as well that I doubt.
[00:37:43.313] Kent Bye: Yeah, I just hope that we, maybe there's new models of monetizing attention or things that, I think there's a, it comes down to a sense of values in terms of like, yang and yen currencies, where there's a competition and cooperation, and I think that everything is so biased towards competition right now, but, you know, just having more cooperative, alternative currencies, complementary currencies, negative interest rate currencies, or cryptocurrencies, and even if there's ways to kind of monetize as you're paying attention to something, maybe that is generating. I know like, you know, Otoy, for example, is doing something like the render token. So just by rendering scenes you are able to use your physical resources to be able to contribute to something larger. And so I feel like there's a lot of things that are unknown. But yeah, that's just something that I feel like VR has an opportunity to kind of create a future that we actually want to live in rather than something that is just amplifying, like you said, that the technology is neutral. It's just sort of like an amplifier to the current status quo. So I just, I see like this is a kind of a transition into a new realm where we have the opportunity to do something that's just completely different.
[00:38:46.682] Tony Parisi: And I'm with you on that. It might have started and really gotten kicked off by gamer bros and traditional Twitch entertainment concepts. But most of us believe the potential is far more than that. And with these other technologies coming online and the social change happening in the world around us, I believe a lot of that's going to be taking place. I can't wait to see where it goes.
[00:39:08.710] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:39:16.253] Tony Parisi: Oh my god, don't you ask me this every time? I do, and I remember what you said last time. You remember what I said last time? I'll probably answer it differently every time. Definitely a technology for bringing us together. Through empathy, but also just through better connectedness. I mean, I always think that. I mean, for me, I have my guiding light, my north star that always guides me in a vision of the future, which is it's the future Wikipedia. It's the future where we're going to navigate space together. It's going to be how we get all our information in a connected way that's going to hopefully bring us closer together. That was different. Oh, no, really? All right, we should go back.
[00:39:53.822] Kent Bye: No, what you said last time was that the creative, like, I think there's been a thread of, like, really believing in the power of creative VR and Tilt Brush, and kind of empowering the artists and the creatives to actually find new ways of communicating.
[00:40:05.168] Tony Parisi: That's good, too. I still believe that. But I'll stick with this one for now.
[00:40:09.870] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Tony.
[00:40:11.891] Tony Parisi: Oh, it was my pleasure, Ken, always.
[00:40:14.435] Kent Bye: So that was Tony Parisi. He's the head of XR Strategy at Unity. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that, first of all, I think that understanding technology diffusion as well as technology adoption curves and what it feels like for an exponential curve as you're growing. Like right now, we are before that hockey stick jump of exponential growth. And so it's a little bit of like, when is this sort of switch going to get turned on and when is it going to just be like everywhere? And so anybody who's like been dedicated to virtual reality since, you know, the beginning of whenever you got into it. It can be a little frustrating to be in the middle of it and to be in that growth period that maybe does have this doubling effect. And the doubling at the beginning is like pretty slow, but eventually it kind of crosses that chasm and just kind of explodes. If you look at what happened with VRChat, I think it's a little bit of like this surprising growth that is some indicator as to what may be happening in the overall industry. It's like, I don't think anybody would have predicted that VRChat would kind of go through this big growth spurt. And it's kind of leveling off at a number of different concurrent users per day, but at the peak it was like 20,000 concurrent users per day, and now it's just like at 6,000. Now that's not everybody that is in VRChat is in virtual reality. They're using it on a 2D screen. But yet, the more time that they spend in what is essentially like a metaverse-like environment, the more of an incentive it has for them to be able to be like, no, actually I want to be completely immersed. I want to be able to actually use my hands. Because there is actually a tier that happens that when you're in VRChat, you can use your full fidelity of expression, and then if you don't have that, you're kind of like, well, I can only just kind of stand here like a statue and not be able to really add my body language into it. And I think that that is one driver of people actually getting into virtual reality. But overall, I'd say that the video game industry is only one small slice of what's happening in the overall VR ecosystem. And if you're only looking at what's happening in the gaming industry, then you're missing the full picture of what's happening within virtual reality. And I think that was one of the other things that Tony was talking about, is that overall in the VR enterprise markets, there's all sorts of really super compelling applications of virtual reality, especially if you're doing anything with designing 3D objects, which there's a whole number of different companies that are doing that, including car manufacturers, as well as architecture, engineering, design, but there's also for sales and marketing. I hear a lot of both for virtual reality and augmented reality. There's this level of being able to do spatial storytelling with high-end luxury objects, whether it's the ARCore app that Porsche just came out with or airline companies that are going to trade shows and they're trying to show the full features of some of their huge airliner jets. So there's different things that are happening with an enterprise market where it's just an incredible, compelling use case. And what Tony said is that once there is a new communication medium, and there's new affordances with that medium, it's never going to go away. And so people who are declaring that VR is dead or AR is dead, I think is not really looking at both history, it's what's happening in the past, but also the different applications that are going out in all of these different enterprise markets, which honestly is really difficult sometimes to see what's happening because sometimes the people who are actually doing these really compelling use cases aren't actually out there advertising it because it's a bit of a competitive advantage and so you're not going to have much insight as to what's happening. And so, you know, getting to this vision of 2025, I personally think that there's going to be a lot more mass ubiquity when it comes to both virtual reality and augmented reality, and that you can start to see it a lot more with what's happening with augmented reality. And I think there's going to be a really interesting interface between VR and AR in that they're going to both be using the same production pipelines, the technology stacks, and the more that people are creating AR content, the easier it is for them to do VR content, and that there's going to be a layer of overlaying 3D objects within an actual world within the context of a augmented reality app but that those same assets are going to be easy to pull into a virtual world that's going to be able to completely cut out the context of the real world but be much more immersive when it comes to transporting you to another realm. So I was actually pretty skeptical about the ads. I don't like ads on the 2D web. And I think that the ads have been so aggressive and just annoying that I'm just like so frustrated as to that as a model. I do think that the model of going to subscription models or other recurring subscription model is going to be something that's out there. But after going to the virtual reality strategy conference and talking to a couple of people, especially after this conversation with Tony, I really changed my mind in terms of like, ads are just going to be a part of this reality within virtual reality and that hopefully they'll find good ways to do it especially if there's like context switches by which you know you're loading a level or something that's a perfect time to see an ad. Right now it's very difficult to do dynamic loading of content and so there's so many different applications that if you're kind of switching levels or going into like another world within VRChat or within Sansar We have this loading screen, and I think that is a good opportunity that if something is being served from an ad, then that could be something that you're looking at while there's nothing else going on, rather than staring out into a blank screen, at least you might have something that's interesting. So I think that is going to be something that is going to be a reality of virtual reality and I just hope that it's done with tact and care and that we don't sort of get exploded out into this crazy, you know, environment that feels hostile a lot of times when you're trying to actually just look at the information and there's all these things that are kind of hijacking your attention in a different way. So I do also think that there's going to be new blockchain enabled economies of attention that are out there as well. But those are still so early days that they're not viable for people to actually make a living off of yet. And so that still is going to take some time. But I think by 2025, we're going to see a lot more of these alternative blockchain enabled economies that are out there. And finally, it was interesting to talk to Tony about the future of how is Unity going to deal with archivability and backwards compatibility. So Tony was making the differentiation between the actual content, the 3D objects, which is the GLTF standard that he helped create and form. And then there's the actual layer of logic on top of that. And that's what Unity is doing. And that's what something like A-Frame would be doing in terms of that layer of JavaScript. So Unity as a whole breaks backwards compatibility pretty regularly. I think that's just the nature of in order to be on the cutting edge, you have to be less concerned about archivability because a lot of these experiences are for gamers. Then, you know, they just kind of have to update their code in some ways and just having access to the latest features. the downside is that the backwards compatibility is something that is a lot harder to do and so that was part of the reason why I was asking about that because some of these enterprise companies like the navy or these big entities who want to make sure that if you're going to be adding a layer of logic on top of these 3d worlds then you want to make sure that you don't have to like keep updating that every year and you want to be able to kind of do it once and make sure that it's there That's part of the reason, in fact, why WebVR hasn't fully launched yet is because they didn't want to launch something that they would have to essentially update for the next 20 to 50 years. It's kind of a half-baked spec with the first versions of WebVR, and they're kind of waiting for it to get really solidified so that they can really ensure that once people start building things on top of it, then they're not going to have to worry about that backwards compatibility. And so I expect at some point in 2018 that WebVR will ship their full version and that they will start to actually build things that are able to take into account that backwards compatibility. And so I'm going to be really curious to see how Unity starts to interface with the more web VR worlds. I know that Vlad Vesovich, who used to be at Mozilla, he's been working on various stuff there and And Tony himself was one of the co-creators of VRML back in the day. And so he's obviously somebody who thinks about the open web. And if he's in charge of the XR strategy, then I expect that at some point they're going to come out with some solution that enables you to export from Unity and to put stuff onto the web in a way that allows you to send a link to somebody so they can check something out quickly without having to download an app. So I do think that by 2025 we are not going to see a lot of apps and that the apps is sort of an artifact of this era of being able to deliver a binary package with all this information both for video games as well as for phones. But if you go back to the very first release of the iPhone I think that Steve Jobs wanted to see the web kind of catch up to be able to do the performance of what you could do in a native app and that there's all these ways of jailbreaking the iPhone to be able to actually create their native apps. And I think that at some point there was a decision that was made at Apple that kind of went back on that vision of, you know, hoping that everything would be on the open web and that the web standards would be able to catch up. But I think there's this sort of tension between the closed walled gardens of what you can do in a native app versus openness of the web with open standards and that there's this tension between the closed centralized systems and the open decentralized systems and that sometimes the closed systems can actually push innovation faster but that at some point once things go decentralized then there's this kind of exponential curve where things kind of very quickly either match with parity and so that's I think what's been happening with both the Virtual reality is that everything that's been done from the binaries of both Unreal Engine and Unity have been far superior than anything else you can see anywhere else on the web, but that as the WebVR gets launched and that it's, you know, solid and is able to do backwards compatibility, then there's, I think, there's going to be this explosion, especially when it comes to non-gaming, non-entertainment applications of information visualization and basically everything else other than the entertainment realm. But it sounds like that Unity is also doing a lot of CAD integrations and other stuff as well in order to be able to deal with the pipeline with these other architecture engineering and design and construction that they use a completely different 3D asset production pipeline than that. Unity hasn't really been great for doing that. It's really been built for game developers. And so that sounds like that they've been really trying to amp up a lot of those tool sets so that they can more seamlessly create these immersive experiences. But it does sound like that Unity is going to be on the forefront of creating a lot of these different applications in the future, and I look forward to seeing how this interface between the open web and Unity evolves over time. And I expect to see something about that probably within the next year or two, for sure. Definitely by 2025. So that's all that I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. 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