SIGGRAPH is a conference where GPU manufacturers announce new versions of professional graphics cards designed for the visual effects industry and high-end virtual reality content producers in architectural visualization and engineering. NVIDIA announced two new Pascal-architecture cards including the Quadro P6000 with a 24GB frame buffer and a staggering 3820 CUDA cores, as well as the Quadro P5000 card with 2560 cores and 16GB frame buffer.
I had a chance to catch up with the Bob Pette, who is the general manager of the ProVis business unit at NVIDIA where he talked to me about their new Quadro GPUs, VR-related software announcements, and updates to their physically-based Iray renderer. NVIDIA is moving towards being able to do live interactive ray tracing, but they’re not there yet since it’s still a very computationally-intense process. They were showing some demos of being able to change stationary camera position with a photorealistic-rendered room with the option to chose between four different lighting conditions.
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Bob also talks about their the parallel-processing capabilities for these NVIDIA GPUs are enabling a lot of innovation within the deep learning and machine learning fields. He sees a trend of software tools starting to think about how to leverage the GPU processing in order to add artificial intelligence features within content creation software. For example, Bob sees that the perceptual capabilities of machine learning techniques that leverage the GPU might be able to help optimize ray tracing algorithms in reaching a “good enough” visual threshold, and to be able to detect ray tracing errors. He also acknowledged that the computational demands for training neural networks are still high enough that he sees that they’ll be primarily trained through cloud-based computing with supplementary local GPU updates and tuning.
There are still a lot of open problems to solve before we see live, interactive ray tracing. But what’s clear is that NVIDIA’s GPU technologies are at the center of catalyzing the current groundswell of virtual reality technologies and machine learning innovations.
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Music: Fatality & Summer Trip
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So I want to talk about this concept of transfer learning before I dive into today's episode. The idea is basically this. So in the world of artificial intelligence, there's AlphaGo, which was able to beat one of the world's best players in Go. However, this AlphaGo cannot play chess or all the things that it was able to learn is not transferable to other domains. And so it's narrow AI and not artificial general intelligence. And so we kind of face the same thing with training applications within VR, because whether or not we do some specific task in VR, we don't really know whether or not it's going to be transferable into other domains. And so that's essentially what the company Cerevrum is trying to solve within their two games of Cerebrum, which is a brain training game, as well as Speech Center VR, which is an application that allows you to give speeches in front of these virtual rooms. And by doing that, they're hoping that it's going to transfer over to help you give speeches in real life. So that's what we'll be covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. But first, a quick word from our sponsor. This is a paid sponsored ad by the Intel Core i7 processor. You might be asking, what's the CPU have to do with VR? Well, it processes all the game logic and multiplayer data, physics simulation and spatialized audio. It also calculates the positional tracking, which is only going to increase as more and more objects are tracked. It also runs all of your other PC apps that you may be running when you're within a virtualized desktop environment. And there's probably a lot of other things that it'll do in VR that we don't even know about yet. So Intel asked me to share my process, which is that I decided to future-proof my PC by selecting the Intel Core i7 processor. So this interview with Natasha Flotsky and Olga Pesche happened at the Rothenburg Founder Field Day that happened on May 16th, 2016 at AT&T Park in San Francisco. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:15.562] Natasha Floksy: Hello, my name is Natasha Flotsky. I'm a CEO of 3Brew Corporation. So we improve cognitive and emotional intelligence in VR.
[00:02:24.373] Olga Peshe: My name is Olga Pesche, I'm the CAO of the company. So what we're doing here is we try to improve cognitive and emotional cognition of people and intellect of people. And we do it through our two products. So one of them is the Siri Room game. It's a brain training game in VR where we took a new approach to brain training because we integrated cognitive tasks into games that are actually fun to play. And the second product, it's called the Speech Center VR. It's a public speaking simulator, but it's also an educational platform to improve communication skills.
[00:03:00.679] Kent Bye: So let's start with the Speech Center VR, because that's something that's in the App Store. So there's a number of different rooms that you can go and talk a bit about some of the design goals of what you want people to try to experience when they go into Speech Center VR.
[00:03:13.533] Olga Peshe: Sure. So first of all, we see it as an educational system where we not only want to give people a chance to practice public speaking in different locations, although we have a bunch of them, we want really to improve the understanding of the goal, why they're speaking or why they're presenting this or that. We want to enhance their skills of how to present better, how to catch audience attention, of how to structure presentations in a better way. And we feel that VR has the potential, you know, to really give people a chance to do that, to practice public speaking like they never did before. For example, if you try your presentation practicing your pitch, standing on a rope between two skyscrapers. How cool is that? Yeah, or if you're in a forest that is burning, you know, like you practice delivering your speech at a stressful situation. So we designed all of these really unbelievable experiences and locations that you can't really do anywhere except for VR.
[00:04:14.331] Kent Bye: Yeah, the thing that I really noticed and was really striking to me was how standing in each of these rooms evoked different types of feelings of the type of speech that I would deliver, but also how I would deliver it. And so maybe you could describe some of the different types of contexts that you're creating in different rooms in order to evoke these different feelings for people as they're giving these different types of speeches.
[00:04:37.095] Olga Peshe: Sure, so one of the type of speech that obviously everybody needs to practice is giving a presentation and it can be any presentation and you can practice it in any locations. For example, we have a standard room office where you can practice convincing your boss of increasing your salary, for example. You can do another thing, you can practice for an interview. So practice being confident in front of, let's say, a McKinsey interviewer while you're being interviewed for the job. And if you're practicing, let's say, at a TED room, you're preparing for a TED conference, you're seeing a bunch of human-like avatars who actually react to what you're saying and how we do that. If you turn your back on them, if you don't make good eye contact, they start coughing, they start texting on their mobiles. But if you do make a good eye contact and if you speak engagingly, they actually, you know, start clapping and they can ask you a bunch of questions. So it's not only an educational system what we're trying to do here, It's a communicational platform. So you can actually invite real users to your presentation. You can talk about whatever on the world you want in whichever room or like location. It can be on the beach. It can be on the surface of Mars. It can be just in a bar, but it's all in unity. And you can actually take the questions from the audience. You can organize meetups. You can organize different events. So we're trying to take communications to a whole new level because we believe that VR has that incredible potential. Or, like one of my favorite things, we have the location, it's a press room in the White House, so you can actually pretend you are the president, right? So you can address the nation, and why the hell not?
[00:06:17.631] Kent Bye: And so, tell me a bit about your design process, of what types of design goals that you were really trying to do with each of these different rooms.
[00:06:24.974] Natasha Floksy: So we would like to create new quality of VR, for mobile VR especially, because a lot of applications for social looks terrible, but we would like to create something new. We work so hard with any details, because details can create the whole thing surround. Right now we have 20 different rooms. I can't say that it's rooms, it's more environments. You can walk around them. Why details is important? Because, for example, you will see a lamp or you will see details you should understand that it's like a real you should be immersive in this location. I think in our goal for team especially for designer team that creates something which people will not only like that would like to spend time and this location. This is very important for B2C, so for customers which would like to buy it on Oculus Store and update it. For example, right now it will be 20, then I think we should sell another environment because people would like to have experience every time. In our team it's around designers which created models, two designers which created chairs and animations. And I think animations is a very important part of any social community in VR. For example, right now we have 37 different animations. It's like emoji in VR. And also we've got animations around you. For example, you can buy for yourself a cat and cat will follow you everywhere. Also, for example, if we speak about B2C, I think if people will create their own avatar, maybe for free, because every time you would like to change something, but then if you would like to have four avatars, you should buy. So we should create monetization here, because the markets are small right now, and we understand that people sometimes think twice to buy something. We would like to be sure that people would like to buy it. We want to force them to do that. Team's goals are to create good quality of VR.
[00:08:25.528] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I had a chance to take a look at some of your avatar previews that looked quite nice. I mean, I think a lot of the VR aesthetic has been fairly generic and not very distinct art style. So, talk a bit about the art style that you're really trying to go for.
[00:08:42.002] Natasha Floksy: So, you know, just my education was Master of Arts. So eight years I worked like a chief creative officer for my company and I was co-founder as well. But in last year I changed my mind to be a CEO, but art still be in me. And when we worked with Cerebrum Game and I started to work with low-poly graphics, for me it was a new experience. I never do that, so right now I should imagine how low-poly, middle-poly graphics will work in VR. And if I see a lot of triangles around me, I can appreciate that. So we tried to create a good quality of 3D graphics. and then good quality. For any application it's very important to have your own avatar. I think it's very important for people to buy their own avatar because all people would like to be unique and especially we created four super unique persons. aliens, mummies, robots and secrets, avatars. So I have no idea how many avatars people really would like to have because this market is only starting to grow up and nobody knows how they will develop. So we'll see. My general idea is that you can customize everything like in Sims. So you can change hair, you can change your color of eyes, you can choose your nationality. Because, I don't know, it's just cool. You can change your dress or you can use, for example, a man instead of a woman. So, I think it's cool.
[00:10:18.792] Olga Peshe: I think people should like that. Yeah, just again about giving people the opportunity to try something new in VR, to be someone new, you know. We're just pitching the idea to a couple of investors the other day and they were laughing and saying, hey, I've always been dreaming of being, you know, a red-haired lady, so you guys are giving me this opportunity. So that's why I guess we spend so much time, you know, making sure every detail of the avatar is there. And you also asked about other details, you know, like the design things, and Natasha mentioned it, that, for example, when you are in the Japanese garden, it's location for both practicing your speech, but also for relaxing after your practice and for meditation. So you can even see how the leaves are falling from that amazing tree. Or if you're practicing your president's speech, you can customize and you can be president of every nation by customizing the flag. So these are the small details that we do put a lot of attention to and we think the audience might appreciate that as well because it adds up to the immersion effect.
[00:11:20.913] Kent Bye: Yeah. The other thing about the environment is that there's the concept of embodied cognition, which the way that you think is very highly impacted by your environment. And so you're kind of externalizing your talking by how you're taking in your context and where you're at. So have you taken into consideration some of the concepts of embodied cognition?
[00:11:40.065] Olga Peshe: We tried to do it in our other project, which is called Serirum Game, and it's a brain training game in VR, and we took a totally new approach to brain training in this, because we combined virtual reality, unique style, and that's what you're asking about. I wouldn't be able to explain how we did it, just try it, you know, like once you're inside this In NUMA world, it's a world of gods and powerful spirits, and you try to win their favor. You understand that the cognitive tasks that you have to do inside the game, they're so much fun. On the one hand, you forget it has the potential to make you smarter, and then the whole environment makes you think out of the box, and we try to make sure we have it. and also a very important milestone for us with this project. We just finished our research and we validated its effectiveness. So basically what we did, we proved the three-room game is effective in improving cognition, memory, attention, general IQ a bit. And how we did it, we had a two-month research. We had 100 subjects. It's college students around 18 years old and we measured their cognitive abilities before they started playing the game. And then we divided them in three groups. One group was playing in VR. They played every day for 30 minutes. Another group was playing on iPad. And the third, the control group, didn't play, obviously. And then after two months of playing every day, we measured the cognitive skills, same tests, same eight testing methodics once again, and we compared the results before and after. And we're super excited to see that we actually got five positive results in five out of eight tests, meaning that we are effective. And what was even more exciting for us is that the group who played in VR did better, scored higher test results than the other group who was playing on iPad. And for us, it means that we started proving the incredible power of VR for learning and improving, and that's what's most important for us.
[00:13:37.291] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think the thing that I get really excited about virtual reality is that there is the potential to go into VR and to become better, a better human being or better cognitive skills or better speaker. So what specifically were you able to show? I mean, within this transferable cognitive improvement, what specifically did this study show? Doing this in VR gave what result?
[00:14:01.057] Olga Peshe: So basically we trained five cognitive skills inside the game. Memory, attention span, visual memory, general IQ and what we're trying to understand is that whether playing three cognitive tasks that we have in the game at the moment Each cognitive task is linked to a specific cognitive ability inside your head. So in playing one cognitive task, for example, in order to protect your planet from an alien attack, you have to perform a certain cognitive task and to strike back, sort of, and it's connected with your memory. Another task is connected with attention. So there is a bunch of aliens coming and like trying to attack you. at the same time, and you have to deal with that. So each cognitive task is connected with a specific cognitive ability, and so by trying, you know, to see how those subjects, our kids, scored in each of the games, we sort of like proved whether this cognitive task works or whether the other doesn't. We plan to continue the research so this was like the first milestone and we're doing right now same kind of research but on school kids and then we believe that the game might have the potential to help people with different psychological disorders and we plan to have a study on that in the fall and then we also plan to see how we can offer the sportsmen to you know do their brain training game because We are now thinking that it might improve their reaction, but it's still to be proved. So we're thinking a lot of bunch different directions, and we're looking for partners to continue the research. So if any of you folks listening want to contribute to awesome research, give us a call.
[00:15:50.759] Kent Bye: And so it seems like when you're in these the speech center when I did the demo I'm speaking to like an empty room and I kind of want to actually have some people there because I don't feel any stress or pressure when I'm talking to a bunch of chairs and so what are the types of things that you're gonna do in terms of populating these rooms with people have it kind of believable eye contact and not think that they're zombies, but they kind of have this impression that they're either something beyond AI zombies, but actual humans perhaps, but also this sense of presence of a crowd.
[00:16:23.094] Olga Peshe: Right, so in those bunch of locations that we have right now, we'll have the crowd looking at us and reacting to whatever we see, if we make the eye contact. I mean, when we're excited about that, one way we're thinking of how to enrich that experience is to try to do the AI, actually, the artificial intelligence. It's just wild dreams so far, but wouldn't it be awesome If, for example, you sit down practicing for a job interview, maybe to somebody from McKinsey, as I mentioned earlier, and he actually understands what you're saying and he reacts in a way, you know, he asks you tough questions and he actually behaves like a human. So we believe that AI has this capability. So we're now looking into ways of using AI APs and we're trying to contact the Watson IBM team and we've started talking with them. So that's an opportunity and that's an incredible step for the future. If we make it happen, if we sort of like integrate the AI technologies in Speech Center, I think it will be pretty win-win situation for everybody.
[00:17:33.558] Kent Bye: Yeah, that'd be really cool to be able to get questions asked about your speech by IBM's Watson. And so in terms of speaker notes, do you have plans to allow people to show presentations and upload speaker notes? Because a lot of times when people are giving a talk, they may have a little bit of a cheat sheet of text.
[00:17:51.573] Olga Peshe: Yeah, actually the way it's planned right now, you can upload your presentation on your phone and then you can practice giving and delivering your presentation in Gear VR, because we currently work with mobile VR, with Gear VR. And there are a bunch of available templates inside the application that I can also practice on. And we try to make them fun and entertaining and they're in different topics. As for the speaker notes, yes, there is such a possibility. So basically, when you give a talk, let's say, on a Mars surface about how to fight HIV AIDS in the next couple of years, you have your notes available to the public so the audience sees it and everybody can ask question and you can choose whether you would like to take the questions while you talk or after you talk and there are some pretty cool UI you know like how you take the questions and it's super immersive and we'll have more and more features available to enrich the public experience and we actually plan to turn it into a communication platform besides educational platform, although the educational component is super important to us. As you said, I mean, you always ask your last question about the ultimate potential, right? And that's why, I mean, we have a definite question to it. VR can totally enrich everybody. It can improve people. And that's what we're trying to do. It can make them better.
[00:19:14.386] Kent Bye: Well the thing that was really striking to me when I was in your experience was that I just thought like wow this would be perfect for a social VR experience but like kind of like a Toastmasters type of event where people get together and just give each other speeches and just really noticing how the room setup really drives the type of social interactions that are there and that there is a very different distinct set of different types of talks and speeches that people give, ranging from a wedding toast or a pitch in an office or, you know, in front of the White House, the press corps. So a lot of range of different contexts that you have. So yeah, I'm just curious, like, where you see that going in terms of, like, cultivating this ethic of, like, the virtual Toastmasters.
[00:19:56.620] Olga Peshe: Right, actually it's very cool that you mentioned Toastmasters because they were on our radar for quite a lot of time right now and we will be looking for more partners like them to use our products, to give us feedback, to see what the experts think, right? And also an exciting plan for the future is to turn our platform into sort of like Uber, meaning that we plan to connect users from all over the world who want to improve their public speaking to public speaking professionals, so to public speaking coaches. And by saying that I mean that it will be able to buy one hour of coaching with a real-time coach within our platform where you and the coach can practice in any location and he can give feedback in real time, improving your skills or your gestures, your body language. And that's not possible in other media as well. I mean, it's possible inside the room with a real coach, you know, in real life, but it's not possible in Skype, for example. But inside VR, inside different locations, he'll be able to track it. So we decrease the costs of public speaking education, hopefully as well.
[00:21:07.309] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:21:14.112] Natasha Floksy: You know, it's a very difficult question because we have no idea how it's really work for our mind. But we fully understand that VR will be part of our future. I mean, just for all people should have motion display in the next five or 10 years, because you can use it for yourself. to make yourself better or you can use it for example if you have a stress or you want to improve yourself or for example you can go into school but you really would like to have experience to normal education I think you can use it. I think in 360 degree videos will be very important part as well in VR Because it's cool. I mean, just maybe streaming of lessons could be very helpful. I just think VR will help people a lot. For me, it's like my future. I know how I can help people and I prefer to do that as I can. My goal here is just to create a social and educational platform, like a new ecosystem. I'm not sure that it will be more important than games, because a lot of people would like to have fun every time, and for them it's like meditation as well, and I think like 80% of the market could be games. So I don't want to follow it. That's why we decided to create a rhythm game. So this is something new. Yes, it's not like a usual game, of course. But if it will help people, for example, to win new challenges in their life, why not? So they can try to use that. Or, for example, if they would like to meet someone new, like maybe date, why can't it be like a Tinder or Taboo in VR? Why not? So this is our future and I hope people could be better than they are right now.
[00:23:05.125] Olga Peshe: Kent, I honestly don't know the question to the answer but I know and I can share one thing why I personally started my career in VR because before that I was involved in a totally different field. I just sat down there one day after watching a couple of videos or just thinking that I want to be able to explain to my kid when I have one how to use all of this virtual reality technology because in my understanding and from how I see it, it's inevitable. And I want to be a cool mom explaining to my kid what's all around and you know sharing with him or her that hey when we were growing up we didn't have it and how lucky you are and be learning with him or her using all of that again. But also, I mean, we're just watching the play The Nether a couple of months ago at the San Francisco Playhouse. And we strongly recommend to all VR enthusiasts to go see it. Because it raises some tough questions as well. Because we are all very excited about the future here, right? We believe in its immersive and incredible power. But also, it is dangerous in a way. And sometime in the team we discuss it internally. But I guess unless we try it, we can't really find out. So let's better be prepared. Let's educate ourselves about it to maybe be prepared for any danger that it might hold as well. But I mean, overall, we're very optimistic.
[00:24:30.583] Kent Bye: And what was the display that you saw that people should check out? And what was the main takeaway that you got from it?
[00:24:36.874] Olga Peshe: One, that it's inevitable. As I said earlier, that's like all the people were using it. So it kind of made my conviction that it's going to take over the world or like it's going to be the new medium even stronger. And the main takeaway is it's up to you how you choose to use this or that media. So it's still very important, like the education that you get, the values that your family gives you, those are the keys. And how you use the new media will very much depend on your internal convictions. So still, this media is there, but how it's going to be used depends on you only. So give to your kids, give to each other something that you believe in strongly, not to be sort of overwhelmed by the opportunities that it can open. I'm not going to spoil the play because I want everybody to see it, but that's sort of my takeaway that I left the play with.
[00:25:33.686] Kent Bye: What was the name of the play again?
[00:25:35.348] Olga Peshe: The Nether, San Francisco Playhouse.
[00:25:39.231] Kent Bye: Anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:25:42.172] Natasha Floksy: I hope that people will like VR in the future and it will be developed very quickly. And I hope they never will forget in their real life and spend time with friends or family. So this is like, come on, you can use it, but don't forget about real life.
[00:26:00.952] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:26:02.253] Olga Peshe: Thank you, Kent. Thanks, Kent. Keep rocking.
[00:26:07.141] Kent Bye: So that was Natashka Flutsky and Olga Pesche of Cerevrum VR and they are creating a couple of educational applications including Cerevrum VR as well as Speech Center VR. So I have a number of different takeaways from this interview is that first of all I did an interview with Aldous Spallonis back in episode 138. He was collaborating with Natasha with Cerevrum VR but has since parted ways but In that interview that I did with him in episode 138, he talked about this challenge of whether or not VR was going to be able to demonstrate transfer learning. In other words, if you're doing these brain training exercises in VR, are you just getting better at these specific brain training exercises? Or are they actually going to demonstrate that they have some sort of transfer learning that's going to be applicable to be able to actually train your brain and increase your memory or do other cognitive tasks better had you not gone through some of these brain training exercises? And so it sounds like some of the preliminary research that Cerevirum has been doing has some positive and encouraging results towards this goal of actually demonstrating transfer learning. And I think this is really super exciting for virtual reality in a lot of different ways because games like this you can go into VR and come out being better at specific tasks. So, looking at Speech Center VR, I had a chance to download it and check it out, and what it essentially is doing that I think is really important is that it's giving you a variety of different rooms and contexts in order to give a speech. And so, in some of the previous interviews that I've done about this concept of embodied cognition, this idea of embodied cognition is that our thinking doesn't just happen within our brains and in our mind, but we're actually using our entire body to do that. but not only our entire body, but also our context and the rooms and situations that we're in. And so I think there's actually a connection between being in a space and practicing in some similar space for us to actually cue different triggers within our memory. So as I was trying out this application, this demo, for the very first time back in May, when I first saw it, I was just really struck for the different contexts and what kind of things that was invoking within me as I was in these different spaces. And given the same content, I think I would deliver that content differently depending on what context I was in. And so I think that this speech center VR is starting to do that with a very clear design aesthetic that they have with trying to create these kind of realistic feeling rooms. I think another thing that Subarivrum is actually doing that's worth pointing out is that their avatars are some of the best that I've seen in social VR so far. Lots of different options to be able to select your avatar. I just wish you had an opportunity to kind of see yourself in a mirror or appreciate it a little bit more because you're kind of a disembodied ghost once you get actually into VR and you can't really see yourself at all. Or there's no ways of actually seeing your body. And so I did get a chance to take a presentation that I just gave this past week talking about presence within VR. And so I had a number of different keynote slides that I turned into a PDF and I uploaded it onto my phone into their presentations folder. And I was able to actually pull it up and kind of scroll through the different slides and present it to these virtual classrooms as well as this virtual theater. So I think there's a lot of work still yet to be done in terms of, you know, things that I would want, for example, having like a monitor in front of me where I could actually see the slides that we're presenting on the screen rather than having to turn around, as well as perhaps a little bit better realistic behaviors within the avatars that whenever you start to record yourself you can record what you're saying and then the audience starts to kind of fidget around and move around but they're not giving necessarily realistic eye contact or looking at you and there's kind of some uncanny valley-ness to those animations that are in there right now but All that can be worked out. And I think overall they've done a really interesting job of trying to create a model where you're able to go and practice speaking different talks, but also perhaps kind of like these different meetup spaces and things where there's actually people teaching and lessons that are going on. I think whenever you can start to connect the environment with the content that's actually being spoken, I think that's going to be a benefit. They have a number of different environments that I think are novel and interesting. For example, you can give a speech within a burning forest and that's part of their environments that you have to do an in-app purchase in order to get access to. You have some free rooms, but then there's some other kind of more elaborate different scenarios that you have to purchase. But taking an example of this burning forest, their idea is to try to put you within a stressful situation and to see if you can still give a speech. And it's an interesting idea, but I'm not quite sure if practicing within a virtual burning forest is actually going to transfer over to making a better speech. I don't know, people can kind of play around with that and see what their own personal reactions are. But just in thinking in terms of the embodied cognition principles, you kind of want to make some sort of resonant match between being in a situation that's going to be similar to what you're actually going to be presenting in. For example, they have kind of a classroom where you're in front of a bunch of students. And I think, you know, if you're a teacher and you're trying to practice something, then that could actually be some good practice. And so they just launched a speech center VR last week and they have a number of different courses and trainings that are going to be happening. So it seems like they're going to be pairing up with, you know, kind of speech oriented courses and curriculum to be able to actually go into these rooms and hear somebody actually give you a speech. since it is the Gear VR it's just kind of your head moving around and I think eventually you're going to want to have like your full body and I was really wanting to kind of record my full body giving a speech within the Vive and be able to watch myself but when you do a recording right now it's just kind of like a disembodied ghost you can't even actually see your avatar or your head movements or anything But again, this is all stuff that in the future they could start to expand out. And they had mentioned in the interview that they want to eventually have like kind of coaching sessions where you could record yourself and then get some feedback from a professional. It was kind of interesting to be able to at least record myself within this context because I did find myself kind of being simulated standing up and talking to a crowd. And I think for the next speech that I have to really prepare for, I might dump it in and to actually run through it a few times. The workflow is a little heavy handed in terms of having to export your PDF and then download that PDF directly onto the phone. And, you know, if you have the time and bandwidth to be able to do that, then it's a great opportunity to get some practice sessions in there. But a lot of times I can be working on a presentation up to the very last moment. So it doesn't make it as easy to do some rapid iterations and changes since it's kind of written off to a pretty static PDF format. But overall, I'm excited to see where these types of educational experiences end up going and yeah, encourage people to check it out. And it seems like there's a bit of a social dimension as well. There's some different meetup rooms and you can kind of have a different experience of kind of hanging out into different contexts and kind of see how the room impacts the different types of discussions or meetings that people have. So that's all that I have for today. I just wanted to thank you for listening. And if you enjoyed the podcast, then please tell your friends and leave a review on iTunes and become a donor to my Patreon at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
