Morris May is the CEO of Specular Theory and he talks about transitioning into making virtual reality experiences coming from the Hollywood special effects industry. The toolchain is very similar, and he’s excited to be able to start to exploring new ways of telling stories with this new immersive medium.
He does see that there will be a bit of a gold rush into VR, and that it’s still very early in figuring how the best way to tell interactive stories in VR. He sees that a lot of the initial experiences will be more like watching a movie experience, but expects that this will evolve to be a lot more interactive by triggering actions from where you’re looking or even looking at biometric data like your heartrate as a passive input to alter your VR experience.
Morris says that he’s getting interested from producers of the horror film genre to do VR experiences because they have a lot of experience in creating first-person perspective narratives.
He also predicts that VR will change almost every industry over the next 5 years, and that it’s impossible to predict every creative application that people will think of.
Specular Theory is a digital agency specializing in creating VR experiences for clients, but they’re doing some of their own R&D and game prototype development like with their Rift Park VR experience where you’re righting different amusement park rides, but you can dial it down if it’s too intense.
Overall, Morris is excited to be able to provide an experience of awe to others like he experienced when he first saw Star Wars. He’s looking forward to exploring the new ways of telling stories and immersing people within another world.
TOPICS
- 0:00 – Intro. Coming from Hollywood special effects
- 0:45 – Hollywood experience
- 1:07 – Transitioning from Hollywood to VR. Inspired by Star Wars and wanted to share excitement to other people. Got desensitized to special effects, but VR storytelling potential is huge and exciting. Presence and feeling like you’re there
- 2:21 – Differences in storytelling in interactive VR. Figuring it out. Doing pure game engine and hybrid of capture. Working with horror film genre director who use first-person perspective. 1st TV show was a recorded video show, and first VR experiences are very much like movies
- 3:42 – Creating spaces and environments for people to explore. Guiding people through a scene in open world is a challenge. Technological challenges force telling stories from one perspective
- 5:30 – Immersive theater like Sleep No More and seeing what other audience members paying attention to. Looping interactive narrative. Most social platform. You’ll be in the movie with the friends and take cues from other people within the film.
- 6:51 – The Life of Pi special effects shop won an Oscar, but went out of business. Love making content, but not always the best businessmen and creates a challenging work environment. Whether special effects shops will move from movies to VR. Work for hire business model vs making your own content. Opens new realms of possibilities for new streams of revenue and telling sties
- 8:36 A bit of gold rush time and migrating into VR. Whether special effects shops will migrate from film to VR
- 9:46 – Offshoring of special effects in Hollywood
- 10:08 – What do you want to experience. First-person narrative. Made Rift Park experience where you can dial back the experience if it’s too intense. Working on horror experiences and being able to trigger things by where you look or your heart rate
- 11:28 – Using biometric feedback to alter a VR experience
- 11:41 – VR starts with gaming. Capturing and sharing a theater experience. Name any industry that won’t be completely transformed by virtual reality. Watching Indianapolis 500 from within the car. Presence where you immersed in another world. Education will be huge in VR. Judging the OCVR Educational Hackathon. Getting a sense of scale that you can’t get elsewhere.
- 14:10 – Haptics and getting a massage in VR. Restaurants
- 15:00 – Internet and Mobile cell phone industry and how much it’s changed society. Impossible to predict how VR will be used
- 15:55 – Being a digital agency and creating some of their own content and doing some R&D.
- 16:34 – Toolchain from Hollywood being applied to VR. Using game engines. Use same modeling, rendering and compositing films. Same post-production process. Everything is much harder, but essential same tools.
- 17:22 – Motion capture with a Kinect and do simple modeling. Special effects industry has made a lot of innovations that will be applied to VR
- 18:18 – Using Kinects for motion capture. Keeping it simple. Tons of energy to do a LIDAR scan in Hollywood.
- 19:33 – Using a Kinect for motion captures. Maya character generator and then drive that character in Motion Builder and use Zigfu ZDK for Unity. using characterize and eventually export to FBX and import into any game engine
- 21:14 – How it works? No one really knows. But it does skeletal tracking and will map a skeleton onto your movements. No perfect, but cheap and can’t com pain
- 22:10 – Telling stories with VR and want to help immerse people in new ways and telling stories.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:11.916] Morris May: My name is Morris May and I'm the CEO and founder of a company called Specular Theory and we create virtual reality content basically. So after working in Hollywood for literally about 20 years, about three years ago we switched to doing augmented reality and then as the Rift came, as you can see, it's totally evolved and it's engrossed us in a way that we never even imagined possible. So now we're just Rift fanatics and virtual reality fanatics and that's kind of our primary focus now is telling stories and creating technology and just full-force 24-7 virtual reality.
[00:00:43.275] Kent Bye: And so what were you specifically doing in Hollywood?
[00:00:46.953] Morris May: I did visual effects, I worked on a couple of what they call tentpole films, or like Spider-Man, movies like Happy Feet, films like that, doing visual effects as a technical director, and then later as a CG supervisor, kind of overseeing and building and designing that technology to tell stories. So making sure that you have the technology in place to help directors and filmmakers tell visual stories.
[00:01:07.170] Kent Bye: And so it seems like virtual reality is really made for people who have been doing these type of special effects in Hollywood. Maybe talk about that transition from doing that for the film context and moving into more of an interactive virtual reality experience context.
[00:01:22.090] Morris May: Yes, yes. Thank God that happened. It's been an amazing wild ride because, you know, I really started doing visual effects, of course, like a lot of people in my age, you know, you saw Star Wars and you were just so involved by it and so enveloped you and so amazed that you just had to pass that excitement on to other people. You want to share that feeling that it gave me to other people. And that's how you want to became sort of a visual effects artist. create things but as time went by you know we just I mean I saw virtual reality maybe 20 years ago but as time went by we got sensitized toward movies and they're still amazing experiences but what's happening in VR now is so exciting and so amazing from a storytelling point of view and you know the idea that you can make someone literally cry or be so scared or so involved in a story by completely enveloping them and you know what we call obviously in virtual reality presence, you know, you're in another location, you really feel you're there and you really feel you're involved in the story. So it's just a great time to do all the things that I've been doing over again in a new medium. So it's just an amazingly exciting time.
[00:02:21.320] Kent Bye: So talk a bit about that in terms of what do you see as some of the differences in storytelling from 2D films versus doing this now in an interactive virtual reality environment.
[00:02:30.225] Morris May: To tell you the truth, we're figuring that out. That's the whole big challenge, is how do you tell that story? I mean, I would ask you that question. We've done experience where we create things with game engines and we do a little bit of hybrid of both, so filming things with game engines and also live action. But some of the great storytellers that we've worked with are actually, believe it or not, from the horror genre. So we're with a guy named Casey Lasala, who's a producer-director in Hollywood, and he has a great vision of telling a story from the first person. So a lot of that comes from the horror genre. But just the idea that as you move through space, you're not cutting over people's shoulders, but you're just inside their head. It's just a whole new way of telling stories. I wish I could answer exactly what that answer will be, but I do love to give the analogy, and I love to tell this analogy is that, you know, what was the first television show, right? Do you remember what the actual first television show was? A video recorded radio show was the very first television show. And a lot of the virtual reality experiences you'll see now, what are they? They're a movie. in virtual reality, which is not what it eventually will be. It'll eventually morph into something much more. And only time will tell. It's a new way to tell stories and create content. And how that unfolds, we're going to see.
[00:03:41.505] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I've heard that as well, in terms of anytime there's a new communications medium, the default is to take what worked in the previous medium and port it over one-to-one, like Opera on radio, or when the internet came online, newspapers were treated like a paper newspaper. So, I do think there are some pretty compelling components of first-person perspective, and there's not as many cuts, and you have to figure out how to direct attention. but having a sense of presence in another world, to me, one of the big components is creating spaces and environments that, you know, as a director, you're focusing attention with the frame, but in a fully immersive creation, you're really creating an entire environment and a whole world that people can explore. So, I don't know if you've started to do that or what experience you've had with doing that.
[00:04:26.783] Morris May: Exactly, that's exactly what we started to do. And it's interesting, it's almost, there's almost too many possibilities in a way. You know, if you can go anywhere and do anything and touch anything, then you're really a game. And games tell incredible stories and that's amazing to see how that unfolds. But to move through a scene and guide people through a different stance is a whole different kind of strategy and that's just really a matter of the story that you're trying to tell. The other interesting thing is that as of now, we are a little bit confined to the technology obviously, right? recreate the entire world and run around in it in photorealism yet. I mean, we'll see that technology develop, but we see that parallel that we saw in the very beginning of visual effects. So it's really difficult to do a lot of this work. So how are we going to do that? I even liken it occasionally to an iMac. So now we're shooting things with, you know, 14 cameras and syncing them all up. you know, how many locations are you going to have? How many places are you going to put that camera? It becomes a big undertaking. It's almost like the first days of IMAX. So that forces you to tell a story from maybe just one perspective and not move all over. So at the end of the day, it'll be story driven, but also who has the technology to kind of help tell those stories.
[00:05:33.839] Kent Bye: Yeah, and the other thing that I threw out there, just in terms of kind of a paradigm shift, would be something like Sleep No More, where you have literally 20 stories happening in 100 different rooms, and, you know, it's up to the people running through this immersive experience to follow what they find interesting. But there's an exploration and discovery component, but there's also a serendipity component of seeing somebody run by and having 40 other people following that action, you're gonna get a sense of like, oh, that may be someone important, I'm gonna go track that. So I foresee a lot of experiences where you're gonna go through it once and you're gonna be really confused. You're gonna need to talk to somebody to kind of help figure out what was happening, but then you're able to then experience it again or have it from a different perspective. And so having that looping, interactive narrative.
[00:06:20.887] Morris May: That's the whole other thing of it. Imagine you enveloped in the metaverse. Now all of a sudden you're telling a story but you're seeing the story with your friends. I love the comments about it is literally a new platform. It'll be the most social medium of all our time. We can't argue that. So not only will you go to the movies and sit there and watch a screen, but you'll be in the movie with your friend and you'll move through it just exactly like you pointed out. You'll watch how other people interact and you'll learn your cues from different people that are in the story with you. So that's a whole nother giant egg to crack, as you can say.
[00:06:50.889] Kent Bye: Well, I think within Hollywood, and maybe you could kind of speak to the general trend that's been happening in terms of, you know, Life of Pi, you have a special effects agency that worked on that film, won an Oscar, and then goes out of business, and the director doesn't even thank them during the ceremony. And so you have this sense of the special effects agencies kind of being pushed out to the fringes. And so How do you see that has been playing out and whether or not you'll see a lot of these special effects shops kind of ditching Hollywood and moving into this next thing of virtual reality?
[00:07:22.170] Morris May: Yeah, I could talk about that for probably an hour and a half, that whole scenario, but that's a really complicated problem. And part of it is, of course, you know, we're content creators. We love to make content. We're not business people. So a lot of times you're just so driven by taking things to the next level and pushing things farther than they've ever been pushed. And the studios keep pushing and we keep delivering and then all of a sudden it creates this not really a friendly business environment that I can buy with the tax credits, the whole nother, I won't talk the whole podcast about that, but what's a great thing is when you create content and you own that contract and you can sell it and then that becomes profitable. So the work for hire business model is a totally different one than creating content. And what's so amazing is, particularly with Oculus Rift and the game environment now, it's getting so easy to make content, and it's such an incredible thing, that will open up a whole new world of opportunity. It's kind of like, I think of it as, I tend to just see things on the brighter side of things, but I tend to think of, Let's say when cable came out, all of a sudden there were 300 channels, and oh, the movie industry's going to go away, or something's going to be replaced by something else. It's, look, this technology is here. It's going to be here tomorrow. And it opens up a whole new realm of possibilities to anyone that may have not done really well in the visual effects business. It's going to have incredible opportunities to make great things that are going to have a whole new streams of revenue and whole new ways to tell stories and involve people that are going to be really exciting.
[00:08:36.755] Kent Bye: Well, do you foresee a mass exodus of special effects shops moving away from the film medium and moving more into this next big thing, which could be, instead of work for hire, they could create something that they could get recurring money from over time?
[00:08:51.496] Morris May: Yeah, I mean, I think there'll definitely be a little bit of a gold rush time, just like when the iPhone came out, this is a new platform and people will be making content for it. I mean, look at your, you know more than I do, your podcast is any new thing comes out and it's downloaded a thousand times, everybody's talking about it. So we are really in need of that content and movie visual effects are going to be the people like myself, we're going to be able to make that content quickly and efficiently. So that definitely will happen. I just think that we see a lot of business shifting overseas, but if you watch a visual effects film now, and don't get me wrong, times are a little bit tough in the visual effects industry, but when I started working in visual effects, there was 20, 30 visual effects in a movie. Now you have 2,000 shots minimum, and everything is digital. The sets are changed, and that'll continue to evolve. even though some of the work will shift overseas and there'll be hard times, the amount of work will continue to go through the roof and people will continue to make amazing things. So that's the kind of the positive side of things.
[00:09:46.348] Kent Bye: Oh, so there's even a whole offshoring of special effects is what I hear you saying is that it's moving out of Hollywood and going to where the labor is a lot cheaper?
[00:09:53.605] Morris May: A lot of it is that, yeah, you do see that happening. That is a recurring theme. So a lot of companies are opening up in Vancouver and opening up overseas-type locations, and that's just a labor issue. And yeah, that's a whole other 30-minute podcast we could discuss.
[00:10:08.544] Kent Bye: Well, what are some of the things that you want to experience within virtual reality?
[00:10:12.962] Morris May: You know, we're approaching it from both a story and technology point. So we pick a story, a first-person narrative, and then we try to tell that story. And we create whatever technology that we need to tell that story. You know, one of the demos we just made is a simple ride park theme. So you go through and you ride about 14 different rides. I love the idea of being able to teleport in time to different locations and different experiences at a flip of a switch. So that's something we're experiencing. We love the idea of making things that are so intense that you can't handle it. but yet being able to dial that back to a point that it's enjoyable to everyone. Freshman, you mentioned that some of these things make you a little nauseous. Well, the experience that we made was you can choose the ride and you can choose how intense that ride is and the speed of that ride. So we also convey that into storytelling. So we work on, let's say we work on a horror film or a horror thing, we can actually, according to your actions and the way you behave, dictate that story to how intense it is and how you emotionally react to it, things like. even tying yourself up to a heart rate monitor and watching that reaction and triggering those things. What did you look at? So we can look at, not only can you trigger things with a game engine by where you look, but we can tell where you looked and then adjust the story to that. So it's all kinds of like loops of things. Only things happen when you look at a certain direction. It gets so deep and confusing that it's challenging.
[00:11:25.626] Kent Bye: Wow. So you're actually doing some biometric feedback of heart rate and using that as a trigger, as a dial in the intensity of the experience.
[00:11:35.935] Morris May: Yes, was I supposed to mention that? Yes, yes, we are, we are, yes.
[00:11:39.256] Kent Bye: Okay. Wow. So at this gathering here, you're talking about all the ways that virtual reality is going to change, you know, everything from film to entertainment to business. And what are some of the main points that you're going to be making in that presentation to this crowd at Immersion 2014?
[00:11:56.986] Morris May: Well, you know, it starts obviously with games and with entertainment and storytelling, but it's also interesting, you know, Jeff talked about, you know, he's making a theater experience and he used the Rift to visualize that theater experience. Well, guess what? Now you can download that theater experience at home and you don't have to go to the theater. So those kind of things are completely new business endeavors that are incredibly exciting. I mean, look, you wouldn't have Facebook buying this thing if it wasn't going to be that big, if it wasn't going to change our entire way of interacting with ourselves. I like to ask the question of you, name any industry and you'll see it completely transformed in the next five years as part of virtual reality. I mean, name one. I mean, someone threw out restaurant, which stumped me a little bit at the beginning. But I mean, think about, you know, sporting event you have. Obviously, you can, as many people have said, you can sit courtside and watch the Lakers slammed on things. You know, imagine you're watching the Indianapolis 500. Well, you hit a button and you're in the car. Well, sure, we have GoPro cameras, but when you're in the car and you look to your right and you see Emerson Fittipaldi coming on your left, and you're riding along with your favorite driver, like that's a level of fan involvement that we've never seen before. And that, I think, drives the whole thing is the absence of presence. When you really feel you're there, when you're that emotionally involved, education I could talk about for three hours. I mean, you can look at textbooks until you're blue in the face about the size of Mars and the size of the earth, but until you put a rift on and you're sitting on the face of the earth and you look over your left shoulder and you see that you're the size of a pin compared to the size of the sun, that will trigger you into really understanding things in every way before. I recently judged the hackathon and what's fascinating about that is literally in Three days you had students build virtual reality content. I tried each one, I judged one, I picked a winner. Each of them was amazing. Each of them was an incredible learning experience. So the typing game, you know, you were so involved in it because you had the headset on, you couldn't see your hand, so you were forced to type. There was one where a pyramid, and you flew into the pyramid. But since the pyramid was built to scale, and you literally traveled down into the center of the pyramid, just by being in that environment, you've got a sense for that scale in a way that you can't convey with traditional education. So that's going to be a complete game changer. Pick any industry, and it's going to change. It's exciting.
[00:14:07.568] Kent Bye: Yeah, the things that come to mind of things that I think are not quite there yet would be something like going to Burning Man, where you have all these people and all these sort of the visual spectacle, but more along the lines of creativity brought into physical manifestation, where there's all senses and sight and touch, smell and feeling. And I think the other component is touch and haptics is a long way away as well. So anything where there's getting a massage, for example, I don't think I would One, to get a massage in virtual reality. I would prefer to go to an actual massage or going to a yoga class or exercise. There's components of exercise that could be changed. But anything that's really physical or embodied that involves other people, I think, is going to be a while.
[00:14:48.412] Morris May: Getting your own massage is still a little too bit George Jetson for us right now. But yeah, well said. Absolutely. Restaurants stump me a little bit. But pick an industry. And you can see that how that's going to, when you can involve someone in this level, it's going to really be exciting to see how that changes.
[00:15:02.057] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think it's we're still in the very early phases as well and I do see it as you know in the scope of the internet and of the scope of the mobile cell phone industry and the thing I ask people all the time is think back to 20 years ago before the internet was really exploded and that 10 years ago before mobile cell phones and try to predict all the things that would come at that. I think we're at that point where we can start to see maybe a little bit, but there's things that we can't even imagine.
[00:15:27.632] Morris May: You hit the nail on the head. That's one of my favorite topics. Listen, you can put 10 of the smartest people in the world in a room and talk about what this will be five years from now, and you haven't thought of everything. It's just not possible. The technology is moving so fast. People are so creative. I think we mentioned that we talked to a science company about doing science things. We talked for a week about all the possibilities and we had a meeting and they brought up 20 things we hadn't thought about. So yeah, that's one of the exciting parts about it.
[00:15:52.794] Kent Bye: And so are you gonna be creating your own experiences or is this shop that you've created, is this gonna be like a digital agency where you're doing contracts and work for hire for other people to build these types of virtual reality experiences then?
[00:16:04.960] Morris May: Exactly, we're a digital agency. We build things for clients, exactly, yep. We do a little bit of our own content and we have quite a bit of R&D undertaking always to try to figure out, you know, things that don't exist in the market. Hopefully people will be making soon for us and we'll be using, but basically we're a digital agency. We only create technology where we see where it doesn't exist. So a client says, hey, you know, I want to be there in real time and I want to tweet and have that fly in from out of frame and a game engine pick up a gun and we have to kind of take all the existing technologies, put them together to help them tell that story. But yes, a digital agency.
[00:16:34.447] Kent Bye: And so with your background coming from Hollywood special effects, what are some of the tools that you're using in your job before that you're able to continue over to VR in terms of what specifically you're doing?
[00:16:46.774] Morris May: Well, that's interesting. That's why I love this so much is that it is a mixture of all those things. I mean, the game engine, we started using game engines a couple of years ago when we were doing augmented reality. So, you know, the game engine is a little bit new to me. As far as the same technology, we use the same modeling tools, the same rendering tools, the same compositing tools. So a lot of that stuff absolutely completely carries over. You know, as far as filming things too, the way we approach post-production is the same way we shoot a stereo film and just instead of two cameras, now we have seven or 14, depending on what we're trying to do. So enormous amounts of overlap there. Of course, everything's 10 times as hard now and there's more ins and outs and avenues to explore, but essentially a lot of the tools are the same.
[00:17:22.995] Kent Bye: And have you been involved in motion capture in previous jobs and how that kind of fits into what you're going to be doing with VR?
[00:17:30.561] Morris May: Oh absolutely that was amazing. That's part of the amazing advantage we have of that is we did a lot of motion capture on the movie Happy Feet and of course I taught a class in K'nex hacking so we've got multiple K'nex all over the place and you know just to be able to stand in front of a camera wave your arms and legs and see yourself as an avatar moving around is amazingly powerful and then we of course can use K'nex to do simple models and recreate things back and forth so That is the motion capture part and the scanning part of it does come directly from Hollywood. In fact, I actually gave a talk at MITEI a while back about how, you know, that's why I don't get in the bandwagon of how bad the visual effects industry is. There's so much opportunity and the technology that we developed in the visual effects industry is incredibly important in technology and virtual reality moving forward. So you can see here what other people are doing in that field. It's very exciting.
[00:18:15.627] Kent Bye: Well, I think there's other things like Pryo VR and other things like Miximo and being able to do facial animations. And so the motion capture systems that used to be out of the price range for a lot of people are being much more affordable. So what type of things are you using to be able to actually do these types of motion captures in your context as a digital agency?
[00:18:35.604] Morris May: Well that's the funny thing is I do have access to some of these higher systems but honestly we're using Kinects. Like we're doing things that's the simplest ground roots way to do things and you know having that background how the high-end systems work and the low-end system works give us a little bit advantage in that. But we just use yeah I mean just standard Kinects. You know the tools are available to us online now. You mentioned Maximo and You know, Unity, just these kinds of being able to filter motion capture data online, you know, alias character builder. I mean, we would kind of worked on, you know, X-Men. We scanned Hugh Jackson. I mean, oh, you know, the amount of time and energy it takes to do LIDAR scans and laser and cleanup. For that particular industry, it has to look exactly like him, so it's a very difficult undertaking. But if you're building a virtual reality world and you want to have characters walking around, I mean, you can open up Alias Character Builder online, as you know, and download a character, rig it, change it around, morph between different characters. And the workflow now and the amount of work you can do has just expanded so much.
[00:19:31.552] Kent Bye: It's very exciting. So how do you take a first-generation Kinect and take that output and wire it into rigging of a character in 3D? What are some of the tools you need to be able to do that?
[00:19:43.011] Morris May: It's actually embarrassingly more simple than you would think. Like I say, you can download an actual rigged character inside of Maya. So the Maya character generator will literally download a character that comes with a skeleton built into it. And that skeleton being a biped is actually a standardized type thing. You can load that into MotionBuilder and actually drive it from the Kinect and drive it in real time. So it actually acknowledges that, as you know, Kinect isn't doing point cloud data, but it's just looking at skeletal recognition. So it looks, you know, you hold a T-pose, it says, where are your arms and legs? Map this to that eye environment. God, I just taught an entire class on this. There's so many ways to do it. You can actually go into Unity. You can download a program called Zigfoo, and you can literally motion capture yourself in Unity in real time and save that data out. So the fact that these things are all standardized, a standardized character, if you bring it to something like MotionBuilder, which is, you know, the very expensive alias version of it that's designed for filtering motion capture data, we can do something that's called characterize, and that will not necessarily make random joints, but it acknowledges these are arms, these are legs, and here's how to parent it on. You can load a series of other programs to capture that with Kinects. Something like iPie will capture in the data a depth camera, give you a point cloud, you can load in a motion builder, output in FBX, and from FBX you can go to any game engine, any rendering software. I just did a big class on that, so it was probably more elaborate than you wanted, but it's amazingly easy to do. And in your living room, you can do 10 or 30 characters. You just do a bunch of takes, throw them on a bunch of characters, move them around, and you've got your own metaverse in your living room.
[00:21:13.003] Kent Bye: Wow, yeah, that's awesome. I hadn't heard of that Kinect-based solution. I've just heard of, you know, things like Mixamo with the webcam, you know, prior VR doing motion capture, but it sounds like it's inverse kinematics pointing certain, you know, where your hand is and then kind of figuring out the rest, or is it actually doing each of the joints as well?
[00:21:30.725] Morris May: You know, nobody knows exactly, exactly how it works, but it's not a point cloud data. So if you think of a traditional motion capture, you've got the little dorky balls all over you and just kind of connecting the dots. This is, you know, you stand in a T pose, it recognizes that you're a skeleton and then it tries to solve that skeleton. So it knows. that you're a person and tries to fit a depth image to a skeleton of a person. So you couldn't motion capture a dog or anything else. It's just design. So that kind of gives you a sense. It's kind of an AI solution. It says, well, there's a person standing in front of me and it looks something like this. So I'm going to do the best I can to match that pose. And it's not perfect. You get little bits of error and things, but it is for $200 in your living room. I can't complain.
[00:22:09.866] Kent Bye: Wow. And so what is it that gets you the most excited for what you see as the potential for virtuality and where this could go?
[00:22:17.739] Morris May: It all goes back to the very beginnings, you know, telling stories. And like I said, the bar keeps raising. So the response that I had from seeing the first Star Wars, I wanted people to experience that like I did, just be completely blown away. And you can walk around here. The Rift Arcade is right over there. Put that headset on, and you are completely taken to another world and blown away, you know, if you haven't seen it before. Just that ability to really immerse people in a way that's never been done before is so exciting for me.
[00:22:44.869] Kent Bye: Great. Well, thank you so much.
[00:22:46.546] Morris May: No, thank you. I love your show. Thanks so much.
