Read
Anouncer:
Today on Building the Open Metaverse.
Simon Che de Boer:
Essentially a team of two can now produce an experience once a week, essentially, which means we can get a lot more… Long story short we can get a lot more VR content into headsets and in the virtual production at a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost and of considerable better quality with what currently stands out there.
Anouncer:
Welcome to Building the Open Metaverse where technology experts discuss how the community is building the open metaverse together, hosted by Patrick Cozzi from Cesium and Marc Petit from Epic Games.
Marc Petit:
All right. Hello, everybody. Welcome to the show, Building the Open Metaverse podcast where technologists share their insight on how the community is building the metaverse together. Hello, I’m Marc Petit from Epic Games. My cohost is Patrick Cozzi from Cesium, he’s not here with us today, but I’ll try to ask the technical questions on his behalf. And today we’re talking about an important topic for the metaverse, which is virtual reality technology that’s been closely associated with the metaverse, for good or for bad, we’re going to talk about this maybe. So we invited two experts in the domain to share their perspectives. So, first up is Joanna Popper, Global Head of Virtual Reality at HP. Welcome to the show, Joanna.
Joanna Popper:
Great to be here, Marc. Thanks for the invite.
Marc Petit:
Yeah, we’re so happy to have you with us. And we also have with us today from the far, far side of the world, Simon Che de Boer, Founder and Chief Visual Officer of realityvirtual in New Zealand. Simon is both a creative and a technologist. He’s created the most beautiful content I ever seen in VR, I have to admit when I discovered the Homestead back in 2018, it’s been a shock for me. I was not expecting photo realistic VR. And so we’re super happy to have you with us Simon.
Simon Che de Boer:
Thank you for having me.
Marc Petit:
All right. I’ll start with Joanna, so you’ve been very involved in the XR community for a long time, actually. So please tell us in your own words, who you are and what has been your journey to the metaverse.
Joanna Popper:
Hi everyone. My name is Joanna Popper. I am the global head of VR Go-To-Market at HP. I’ve been at HP a little over four years now, and it’s been a great, great journey. Prior to HP, my background is in both media and tech. I was at NBCUniversal, leading marketing for one of the brands there for quite a long time. And then I was up in Silicon Valley, leading media and marketing at Singularity University, which is an organization that trains leaders on the future of technology, such as AR, VR, blockchain, AI, robotics, and others.
Joanna Popper:
And so, at HP we’ve launched at this point, four different headsets, three different backpacks and a couple of different really interesting software packages. And then in addition to that, I’ve also been the executive producer on some really exciting award-winning XR projects, such as Breonna’s Garden, Finding Pandora X, and then I have some other ones coming up as well. So I love the XR community. It’s a community, a group of people who are dreamers, idealists, working towards creating an exciting and better future, a combination of people with strong technical abilities, as well as strong creative sensibilities and business ideas. And it’s just a pleasure to be part of this community.
Marc Petit:
So dreamer and idealist. Simon, what do you think about that? So please tell us about your background and your journey to the metaverse.
Simon Che de Boer:
Yeah. Wow. Yeah, not very interesting past in regards to how we got into a product, any of this, maybe about eight years ago, I was actually pretty much was drummer and a singer in a band. So it was kind of like when life gives you lemons, you make lemonade, and essentially way back in 2014, I just started tinkering with photogrammetry. And I think I got my hands on the first Oculus headset, Kickstarter, and start tinkering that. And from that point onwards just started breaking things essentially, and working out how to go for this idea of ultra photorealism.
Simon Che de Boer:
So the whole initial purpose was really just to kind of create a slice of life, a moment in time. And from there, because I had not been classically trained, I kind of delved into areas that were kind of considered unorthodox and pushing the limits without really ever realizing it was such a thing. From that point onwards, finally got to an island here in New Zealand, started traveling the world and did a number of locations like Nefertari, Queen Nefertari and Tutankhamun. And yeah, such works as the Homestead and yes, but that’s about it. So we’ve kind of been more focused recently on software as a service and processes, and really heightening in that domain and trying to create tools and power tools for people to actually be able to use for mass content creation. Yeah.
Marc Petit:
So Joanna, HP has released the Reverb G2, which is a fantastic headset, by the way I use one for sim racing and virtual racing and it’s actually unbelievably comfortable and I can race for hours on. And so it’s a great progress. So is this progress of the hardware translating into adoption and how we’re seeing… Are you selling a lot of those headsets? How is the current state of the market and demands for VR?
Joanna Popper:
Current state of the market is growing a lot. And so great to hear that you’re enjoying your HP Reverb G2 for racing. Both flight sim, as well as racing sim are big markets for us. So the HP Reverb G2, for those who don’t know it, is a high quality headset made in collaboration with HP, Valve, and Microsoft. It has very high resolution, 2160 x 2160 per eye, as well as fantastic audio. It’s very comfortable on your head and it’s all at an accessible price.
Joanna Popper:
And so we’re seeing strong pickup among gamers, and as Marc, you just mentioned, as well as different types of location based entertainment venues like Raw Thrills or Dreamscape, Zero Latency. And then we also seen people use that headset for enterprise use cases like learning and development and training and education. And then we have another headset called the HP Reverb G2 Omnicept Edition, which actually won the VR Awards Headset of the Year at the end of last year. And that headset builds on the same base and then adds to it face camera, eye tracking pupillometry, and heart rate sensor. And we’re seeing that used for research and for educational purposes. But overall, you’ll see the market is growing significantly, very strong year over year.
Marc Petit:
And that’s more in the enterprise or hobbies space and the general consumer space, or where would you see the growth?
Joanna Popper:
It’s growing in both sides. In both sides it’s growing.
Marc Petit:
And so what’s next? I mean, we’ve seen the current stages of the hardware. Is there any breakthrough around the corner? I mean, if you look at your crystal ball, what is the next thing that’s going to take the adoption to the next level?
Joanna Popper:
Well, Marc, you know very well, we don’t do roadmaps, right? Nothing that we haven’t announced. So, anything I say is just sort of in general. We did just announce a new software product, which is designed to make it easier for large organizations and enterprises to scale, we’ve seen that was a big pain point. And they were even sending jump drives around to scale, particularly for their all-in-one headsets. And so we recently announced the ExtendXR software package that’s targeted to our enterprises that want to scale. And that is actually… And we’re partnering, you can use that across Pico, all-in-one headsets, as well as HTC Vive, Focus 3 all-in-one headsets.
Joanna Popper:
So that’s something that we’re seeing as these projects move from proof of concepts into wanting to actually scale for organizations, they need different software and different usability. And so, we’re jumping in with that product today. We’ve also seen the interest in bio analytics, that I mentioned earlier with Omnicept, we see there’s going to be a lot more growth on that side. And then we continue to look at what’s happening on the AR side as well with video. And I think there’s probably some exciting things to come on that side as well.
Marc Petit:
Yeah. In terms of resolution, I mean, I think we’re there. I mean, with the current resolution, I mean, we can always use more and more is more, but I think it’s… I was surprised by the level of comfort and it is good. So Simon, you have a chance here as a VR pioneer, you’ve been doing it since 2014. So what do you need from the hardware guys?
Simon Che de Boer:
Oh, geez. Yeah. So one, I really did myself a disservice by positioning myself in VR, I mean that in the nicest possible way, we are a VFX R and D real time company who just happens to be bloody good at VR. So VR always ended up being really the best way to showcase what we’re doing in regards to presence and experience and all that kind of jazz. I mean, the headsets are getting… The hardware’s always going to be catching up. We’re always really focusing on content that would actually be the test of time, the work that we’re doing way back in 2016, 2017, arguably still stands now, it was the headset that we were waiting to catch up on. So now with foveated rendering, which is a massive… It gives us that much more GPU to play with. So, that’s really useful.
Simon Che de Boer:
I’ve been playing… Sorry, this is a conflict of interest, but I’ve been playing with the Pimax 6K or something right now. So it’s been a bit of fun to a degree field of view. Field of view, in my opinion, super important. Obviously eye tracking is super important, especially with foveated, resolutions pretty much, once you get above 4K per eye, you’re doing pretty good. Form factor is important, I obviously personally don’t really care if it’s independent or not as long as the grunt is there. Yeah. I mean, it’s struggling down. I mean, some of the stuff that we’re seeing with many LED displays for example, is that’s really exciting me because HDR is so important. I can’t stress enough. I don’t want to be wearing that headset and squinting, so I’d say HDR is important in many ways. It’s like having above 90 frames per second refresh rate or above. Yeah. I mean, the hardware’s going to get there eventually. The most important thing right now, arguably, is how do we get good content into that hardware?
Marc Petit:
Yeah. Well, let’s talk about content creation. Simon, with you and so you are an expert in photogrammetry, started very early and you have invented new ways of simplifying the photogrammetry process with your DPBR technology. Can you explain a few words what’s the problems you’re trying to solve with DPBR?
Simon Che de Boer:
Yeah. So DPBR in conjunction with the new retopology methods we’re using. So when we did a project like Nefertari or Tutankhamun, or the Homestead, we, even back in 2018, were considered just doing it relatively fast compared to the rest of industry. The rest of industry, you’d have like three to six months, big team, big budget. We did Nefertari in six weeks of two guys, and I won’t even mention the budget because I’ll be doing myself a disservice, but let’s just say, we hacked in this very house right here now I’m sitting in. So the problem is photogrammetry, to get from photogrammetry to point cloud to the actual product, let’s say in Unreal Engine, the biggest process is actually to read topology in between actually getting that point cloud and making it manageable, making it efficient, make it better run because VR is extremely demanding in regards to optimization as is virtual studio production.
Simon Che de Boer:
So the biggest issue is we can spend a week on a project, but the other five weeks of that six week period is spent on one guy pushing pixels, having to optimize that point cloud and get it running in real time. So DPBR is really useful for generating normal maps or details where details are missing. It’s generally purpose of both photogrammetry, but also for texture creation in itself. But what we’ve realized is, quite frankly, the retopology is the big issue and that’s issue that everyone understands. We kind of missed the mark a little bit with DPBR in regards to what it offers the public. But we realize plugging that into the retopology process is what is really going to our saving grace.
Simon Che de Boer:
And so where you’d spend six weeks on a project doing something, dealing with that massive amount of point cloud, the retopology component we’re currently achieving about 12 to 14 hours of extensive GPU, CPU compute to do that pretty much overnight and do it much better than the current process, because… I hope this is not too geeky. And just please do interrupt me if I start ranting too much. But essentially…
Joanna Popper:
I was just going to say, maybe you want to define some of the terms. I don’t know who’s in the audience, if they know all the terms that you’re saying, but you…
Simon Che de Boer:
Yeah, sorry. That always happens to me. Okay. So when we’re doing photogrammetry, we are left with immense amounts of point cloud data. And essentially the machines can’t optimize that data in one hit. And you definitely cannot run it easily in real time. I mean, Nanite’s gone a long way in regards to dealing with large point clouds or large amounts of data, but we are talking about billions and billions of point clouds here. So from something like Nefertari, we gathered approximately 24 billion points of data. And it’s just impossible to actually get… Well, it’s very difficult to get that down. So the way people currently do it, and this is geeky, is we have to do a process of decimating to get it down to something like 60 or 80 million, which we can then manage in products like ZBrush or Meshmixer, or these other kind of products that a lot of artists use.
Simon Che de Boer:
The problem is, is you’re going from that, let’s just say 4 billion down to that 60 million just so you can actually manage and work with it. And as a result, we’re actually losing a lot of the detail we really strive to get in the first place. And so forget about DPBR for a second, but the whole thing is how do you get that massive amount of point cloud data and get a manageable version of it as close to the original as possible, essentially deriving where the points of detail are important. And that’s what we’ve really been pushing. It’s the cleanup process. It’s the retopology meaning the re-sculpting processes, the noise removal processes.
Simon Che de Boer:
With photogrammetry data, there’s also a lot of inconsistency. So when you scan a scene, how you take the photos, some areas are going to be more detailed than others, just because of the nature of how you take the photos, even if the camera’s slightly leaning, it will create a kind of a gradient of density. Now, these are things that you just want to fix because when you’re actually in the VR experience with this, you don’t want to be seeing different, varying levels of texel density or quality. And so what we’ve done is essentially we’ve got this process that tackles it at its raw element and will actually retain all the detail evenly and contextually consistently both in texture and in retopology, beating the point clouds.
Simon Che de Boer:
And so this is extreme, one, it makes environments that much easier, we’re not spending weeks and weeks and weeks waiting for our retopology artists to get it together, right? And as a result, there’s so many benefits of this. One, it’s the reduced cost, essentially a team of two can now be produce an experience once a week, essentially, which means we can get a lot more… Long story short, we can get a lot more VR content into headsets and in the virtual production at a fraction of the time, at a fraction of the cost and of considerable better quality for what currently stands out there.
Marc Petit:
That is amazing and much needed because we’re seeing in virtual production, just fun thing creating the content to put on the wall to do VR scouting, you wonder why scanning the locations you just should have to continue or do pick ups of the movie in virtual production. We’re still a far cry from being able to achieve that because those techniques are not mature. So, do you think we’re getting there?
Simon Che de Boer:
Well, I can say the retopology component is solved. I can save at hands down and I can say the DPBR stuff, we pretty much did a year ago. We just need to rehash that into our current process. So, the problem with DPBR is we spend most of our time trying to deal with AWS front end and user experience stuff. And the actual core technology itself have been running for the last few years. There are some components that are kind of difficult with delighting, we really do need to embed that directly into the PG or photogrammetry software itself, to some extent, because otherwise you’re doing a very inefficient process of having to use the raw photographs to process them, and that’s just time consuming and it makes no sense. But we’ll essentially make a… It’ll be a tap. So we’ll provide essentially an API for third party applications to use for that component.
Simon Che de Boer:
But the retopology, which is in my opinion has been… It was funny. It wasn’t even something we were really… I mean, we’d been aware of the problem for years, but it was actually just something we pretty much tackled over the summer. Then me and one of my guys here in New Zealand, he’s intermediate level Python and Blender and a bit of masking tape and cable ties, we’re able to hack something together. That’s actually working really, really well. And this is over the summer of just going to a few dance parties and raves. So it’s been a good New Zealand summer. It’s been productive and fun.
Marc Petit:
Well, I encourage, if you have a VR headset, the Homestead is still on Steam, it’s in VR, it’s free. I think if you want to experience photorealistic VR from many moons ago, high quality and the perspective of that being available to everybody is actually very, very compelling. So Joanna, let’s talk about another project that I know you care passionately about is Breonna’s Garden. So what can you tell us about this?
Joanna Popper:
Sure. Yeah. Thanks for asking about that. So I had the opportunity to be an executive producer on Breonna’s Garden, which is a project created by Lady PheOnix and Sutu in collaboration with Breonna Taylor’s family. And so, for those of you who don’t know, Lady PheOnix is a renowned NFT curator and an art curator, as well as an XR creator, and Sutu is also very well known VR and AR and also now NFT creator. And so basically, Lady PheOnix saw what was happening with Breonna Taylor in and wanted to do something to help specifically the family. And even more specifically, her sister. Her sister had lived with Breonna. And so when Breonna was taken from her, was killed by the police. She lost you her heart as well as her home.
Joanna Popper:
And so Lady PheOnix reached out and developed a relationship with the family over the course of many months, which resulted in this project that we premiered at Tribeca last year, an augmented reality project called Breonna’s Garden. And it was done in collaboration with Metastage and Microsoft. We did the volumetric capture with them and it was just a really meaningful and beautiful project to continue the family’s goal of having people continue to say Breonna Taylor’s name and survive in their search for justice, we then took that to Art Basel and premiered it there. So, we had the opportunity basically to have Breonna’s Garden seen at the height of the film festival world at Tribeca, and then the height of the art and even crypto world with the way the Art Basel was this year.
Joanna Popper:
And then we continued working on it and created a VR version, which we just premiered at South by Southwest. And it actually has photogrammetry. We took the opportunity together with Greg Downing, went to Louisville and did photogrammetry of the family’s house where they have what they called the Breonna room. And we had volumetric captures of Breonna’s mother, Ms. Tamika Palmer, her sister Ju’Niyah Palmer, and her partner who, she was going to marry, Kenny Walker. And so you have three different rooms, it’s all built inside Altspace. And so we really worked very, very closely with Microsoft, with BRC, BRC was actually the one that created the worlds to be able to, for the first time, put that type of photogrammetry and volumetric capture inside Altspace.
Joanna Popper:
And this project has won a ton of awards. It’s gotten a lot of media. For me, what’s most moving and impactful is after Ju’Niyah Palmer, Breonna’s sister saw the project, she said that it made her feel like she was with… When she goes into the garden, Breonna’s Garden, she feels like she’s with her sister again. And for me, that is the power and the responsibility of all the work we do in the metaverse, it’s the power and the ability of the technology and the storytelling to reconnect two sisters. One of whom who’s no longer here with us. And for me, that’s why I do this work that I can do a project that gives such huge impact to a family and have that ripple effect on many others around the world.
Marc Petit:
It’s interesting. It’s also reminds us CARNE y ARENA from Inarritu, where there was a very, very nice innovation in storytelling, as well as a politically loaded topic and got an Oscar, the once in a generation Oscar that’s give to a new piece of technology. So, yeah, very powerful medium. So from a content perspective, Simon, how far away from creating a metaverse that’s indistinguishable from the reality that we can navigate in VR? I mean, do you see us having critical massive technologies now?
Simon Che de Boer:
Yeah, I struggle to say that word, just a tad. We were talking about slices of Life, moments in time, but many years ago, I guess, with digital twins and that kind of stuff. I mean, we’re pretty close, I mean, if not there already, in some respects, it’s more just able to be able to provide those tools to a much larger audience. And so, we’d been toying around with RGBD volumetric stuff some years ago, since you’re just hacking a bunch of connects together and doing a bunch of signal processing to allow parties that you do, that kind of work, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love Christina Heller’s work in Metastage, is absolutely fantastic, but it’s a little unobtainable to the vast majority of content creators.
Simon Che de Boer:
And so I’m very much interested probably because of my background being a musician in a band and not getting my effort checks essentially for radio play. I’ve always had this kind of like, in-the-trenches mentality where I just want to make it as accessible to as many indie studios and independents as quite frankly possible. And so I don’t think we’ll have this true idea of a true digital twin/metaverse until all and every content creator has the ability to essentially be able to deliver this to everyone else on relatively equal playing field.
Simon Che de Boer:
And so, what we refer to as artist price management via digital ledger, I think they’re called NFTs now. I think we were talking about it some years back, but better late than never, the rest of the world is catching up, which is good to see. And it’s good time to have been speaking of this subject matter for quite some time. When we were in Egypt, I was speaking a lot about Aleppo and all that back in 2017, 2018, I was quite vocal about that and how important it is to, as hard as this is to say, how important it is to show the cost of war. And so the last few months personally has been extremely difficult because we have a lot of people on the ground. And a lot of people who are actually literally in some very difficult positions right now. I’ve had a few very rough nights as a result, some of our best guys. So yeah, we got to make this accessible and we got to make it fast.
Simon Che de Boer:
And we can’t be doing these one year turnarounds. It has to become like a medium as similar as independent press is. And so that’s really, really where we want to go with this and it can be warts and all right now, it doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to happen and happen fast. Yeah. I guess that’s where I feel it kind of needs to be. Just as a side note, we had been working with some big parties… Just I’ll pass on that one. You can edit that one out. I’m not going to talk about those guys. It wasn’t a good ending, so yeah. Let’s just say I’ve definitely got something.
Joanna Popper:
You’re a big tease here on Marc’s podcast!
Simon Che de Boer:
Yeah. Yeah. I’ve just been careful. I’m being very careful. Yeah. I mean, I finally get to leave the country. I don’t want to get sued! (laughs)
Marc Petit:
I hear you, but the democratization and the empowerment of the creators, and as you know, that’s something that independently the podcast have a job. And I feel that my day job is to do exactly what you’re talking about, which is democratizing content through libraries and technologies. And I think it’s very important. And I think, one thing we do in this podcast is try to celebrate the fact that in our industry, we’re very open community. We like open standards, and I think this openness is a vector of a… It really helps the commoditization and the democratization. And I think we have to kind of congratulate the VR guys to coming together and create OpenXR, which creates an API that allows the headset manufacturer to compete without creating those walled gardens. So Joanna, where next can we take the standardization of the XR industry?
Joanna Popper:
Yeah. I mean, as far as HP is concerned, we are very much about the open ecosystem. We’re very much about democratization, as you say, closing digital device is something that’s incredibly important to us as a company, overall, we have a lot of initiatives around education and around other areas. In terms of where we go with it, I think that we’ve seen that there’s a lot of, already, there’s a lot of closed ecosystems out there and we expect more to come.
Joanna Popper:
But as far as our point of view on that, we believe in the open ecosystem, we believe in partnering and creating environments that are stronger together. And that benefit that benefit all of us not jus specific companies. And so that’s sort of the way that we think about it from the point of view of values and how we want to run our business. And our business model kind of goes with that as well, that we sell you a product and that’s the product, right? That’s the exchange, that’s the product. And that’s our business model.
Simon Che de Boer:
Yeah, no strings attached. I mean, headsets, really the headsets are just like different kinds of TVs, I guess. And they really shouldn’t… I really respect that as a developer, not having to be tied to, and doing this crazy little dance, it can be exhausting and OpenXR has simply been the best thing since slice bread as a developer in regards to just actually get content working on multiple platforms fast as possible. So it is absolutely the best move.
Marc Petit:
So Simon, with… And you touched base a little bit on it. One of the promises, the metaverse is the point of a very, very strong creator’s economy around digital goods. And you’ve been a pioneer there as well. So, I mean, we talked about the democratization of tools, but what else do we need to actually empower people like you to make a living out of their beautiful content and really scale that, so that… Mr. Zuckerberg himself said that digital goods is a potential trillion dollar economy. So how do we, as an industry, how do we rally to make this happen in an open and fair way?
Simon Che de Boer:
Well, I mean, I can talk from the being on the ground in regards to the photogrammetry component is probably my best avenue into this conversation. As we’ve been saying for years, we’ve asked price management, essentially the idea is ask price management digital ledger. You need people on the ground to essentially ascertain the data, the photographs themselves, it’s very difficult in many cases get to these locations, right? So if the individual who’s running around with his phone or DSL camera has a motor, not motor, but has… There’s a value add proposition to it, essentially, every photograph you take, if that location that is processed at that point is used for, let’s say, a virtual studio production or educational facility, or anything museology, for example, the individual artists, in this case photographer, is essentially given royalty very similar to when you get radio play.
Simon Che de Boer:
So, and this is where the ask for price management through digital ledger comes in. Essentially it is kind of NFT-ish, but basically what this means to us is, well, for pretty much everyone is that you’ve got people all around the world, essentially crowdsourcing starter, because there’s some level of gain that they can personally get from us. They could get some passive income essentially, but on top of that, the studios and people who are distributing the content also get a value add because we get really good content. So imagine if you’re a studio, you need that alleyway in Taipei, for example, instead of flying 20 people down there to actually get it, you could just have a bunch of people on the ground, essentially ascertain that data and having it ready for the studio.
Simon Che de Boer:
So when the studio even goes off and uses that environment, the individual gets some frigging pocket money. So it’s the way to go. The biggest issue has been at this current point is the processing and the retopology, if you simplify that, essentially, you dissolve much of the middle man process, and it becomes far more ascertainable to everyone. So the individuals can essentially… And so we are doing this with DPBR to some degree of textures, but we always plan for that texture concept of the marketplace to literally just go from texture, to object, to environment. And we still very much plan to do that. Where RV comes in or where we come in, I mean, yeah, I’m sure we’ll get a percentage or two, two but we are not really… I have a thing, once you hit above 75K there’s been shown time and time again, that anything above that, happiness is pretty much guaranteed. For me, it’s not about that. I just want to get back out and actually see the world again, to be honest. Yeah.
Marc Petit:
So I want to call out that, I like that you say distributed ledger because I think, we need the technology to support that secondary participation of artists or their content, the derivative work, the value created from derivative work is paid properly. But for me personally, it doesn’t translate to use some technology that you can’t regulate or that are designed to be unregulated and uncontrolled and to a level of decentralization that makes it relatively from my perspective in practical, in real life. So, I do agree with you that we need those things, but it does not equate to using the blockchain for example. I think we have yet to find methods of implementing those features, those smart contracts that are compatible with the way we want to run the modern society. But that’s an opinion. I’m not supposed to give opinions, but I just want to call this out because I had this conversation many, many times.
Simon Che de Boer:
Yeah, I’ll just weigh in quickly on that. So, when we were talking about artist price management, there is one thing, especially in the cultural sector, you have to consider very, very greatly. And obviously working extensively here in New Zealand, Aotearoa with indigenous Māori and Iwi, it’s a bit of a crass saying, but you don’t want [inadudible]. And so there is a real situation where ascertaining the data of these photographs, the individual artists, or photographer that’s taking them, in our view does have the right to say what use cases it has, a bit like different versions of creative commons.
Simon Che de Boer:
And so we do want to protect that because we have seen massive and I’m not going to name names because everyone knows I could. We’ve seen pretty horrendous exploitation of indigenous cultures. We were frigging furious over here recently because of certain entities. And we just have to make sure that that’s not the case, there needs to be a level of protection. We want to open it, but within reason, you don’t want to be offending anyone or using something for a wrong use case scenario. So, that is also rather important.
Marc Petit:
So Joanna, I don’t want to put you on the spot, but as you’ve been in the XR community for so long, how do you look at the amount of noise around NFTs and all of those… I don’t know how to call them. Those technologies and those trends?
Joanna Popper:
You are putting me on the spot and you just gave your opinion, which you said you’re not supposed to. So you have some illicit parts of the podcast here.
Marc Petit:
Oh, it’s just between friends, nobody is listening. Don’t worry about it.
Joanna Popper:
Just between friends here. I have a bunch of things to say about this topic. So number one, I think it’s a very, I would say it’s quite controversial and particularly among gamers and a deep VR community, they seem to be very, very displeased, to use one word, about what’s happening in the crypto world. Right? I find it very interesting sort of the reaction from the gaming slash or lots of gaming, of course, there’s plenty of gaming people that have jumped in full force with play to earn and crypto gaming. But there’s pretty strong, some sort of anti-blockchain, anti-crypto sentiment, or specifically anti-crypto, maybe not anti-blockchain overall and anti-NFT sentiment there.
Joanna Popper:
On the other hand, I’ve seen some very positive sentiment among artists, artists who, particularly, who are able to monetize their work and find value for their work in ways that they may have been struggling to do in the past, or have not been able to do in the past, which I think is, certainly I’m supportive of and positive about. And so I think the redux of that position is quite interesting. Like those two very different points of view on the technology and the use of the technology. I’ve read some articles that say it’s because gamers already feel sort of nickel and dimed with so much in-app purchases and that’s potentially why having them feel that way.
Joanna Popper:
So it’s a pretty interesting thing for me. What I wouldn’t say though is… And I also find it interesting that the different communities kind of look at what the metaverse is and what Web3 is from such a different point of view, right? Or a different starting point and that in my mind, it will be this… And we could certainly slice it very thinly and say, no, this is the difference between the metaverse and this is the difference with Web3. They’re not the same thing. And often though they’re often used in an interchangeable way, but I think all of us here know that we are absolutely going towards a 3D future. I think we all agree with that. Right? And the way we will enter, our computing will be 3D, whether it’s in a headset or not in a headset, but that’s the direction. Right?
Joanna Popper:
And so for me, there’s sort of four foundational technology building blocks. One is spatial computing, which is not as I just said, limited to only AR and VR. And that’s how we’ll interface. Two is game engine, such as the great company you work for, Marc. And that will be how the content will be built, right? At three, are the virtual worlds where we will gather and come together. And some of them today are like Fortnite, and then some of them are in VR and some of them have a blockchain part to it. But we’ll continue to gather in these virtual worlds and into the future. Right? But that blockchain will be like a commerce engine that does drive a lot of what happens in the future.
Joanna Popper:
I do believe that will occur and that the environmental aspects will have gotten worked out, many of them, but some of that is already starting, but they’ll have gotten worked out. I don’t know where all the regulation and everything will end up, we’ll see. But I do believe that those are like the four foundational building blocks in terms of technology, as we move into this next wave of computing. So, that’s what I’ll say. And yes, I do have some NFTs, if that’s your follow up question. I particularly support female BIPOC creators. And then I have a couple of my friends as well, but for me, it’s like a way that I get to continue to support artists, which is something I greatly believe in. So, I’m happy to support artists in many different ways.
Simon Che de Boer:
I feel like I have to clarify just a little, I’ve got a lot of friends who are in crypto and blockchain, and I do enjoy sleeping on their couches when I go to LA. So, yeah. I mean, I’m not anti… The technology in itself is fantastic. Just to be clear, I do believe in digital ledgers and blockchain and the rest of it, and these contracts and whatnot, it’s just some of the speculation just bothers me a little. That’s kind of where it really comes down to. I want art for art sake, value for value sake. When you print 20,000 monkeys, it does grind the gears a little, but maybe I’m just a bit old fashioned.
Simon Che de Boer:
I mostly focus on the real world in some respects and then these cultural sites and whatnot. So, yeah, I do… As someone who loves art for art sake, I don’t… Just not a big fan of hype train. And by no means is all that hype train. There’s a lot of good artists making good money from this. And that is super important. So just to clarify, I’m not anti-
Joanna Popper:
Let me say, there’s interesting projects that have utility too, like projects that are providing some value or that are interesting as well.
Simon Che de Boer:
Exactly, exactly. There’s been many cases.
Joanna Popper:
I do think this is the direction we’re heading. So I think that I’ll be interested to see how, as these worlds continue to come together.
Marc Petit:
And I absolutely-
Joanna Popper:
From the sort of different points of view today.
Marc Petit:
… really enjoyed artists being able to live from their art. And I think that’s been the positive side of some of that NFT craziness. All right. Well, look, it’s a fascinating topic. Thanks. I usually don’t talk about crypto on the podcast, but today I felt safe to do this with you guys. So, it’s a topic we’ve kind of stayed away from. So usually we conclude by asking the same two questions. The first question that we ask is, now that we’ve gone through this conversation, is there any topic that we should have talked about and that give us ideas for other conversations? So maybe Simon, you start first with this one, any anything we should have talked about and we didn’t talk about?
Simon Che de Boer:
I got to be honest. I’m so deep in the trenches right now on Devon. My brain is just fully thinking right now about the Python code that’s sitting behind us. So really, I think iterating on VR for good content, allowing another tool for people to actually really experience the greater world. I think that’s really my biggest thing right now. It does pain me somewhat there over the last few years that we couldn’t get ahead of development as fast as we would’ve liked, because we generally feel like we could have really done a lot for, just to put it nicely, people’s mental health. There was so much potential to allow… I mean, coming from New Zealand where we had some of the strictest lockdowns ever, I would not wish that upon my worst enemy.
Simon Che de Boer:
And if there’s anything we can do exiting this pandemic and hopefully becoming endemic, is really just give people a bit of breath of fresh air. We need to really start just putting out content for people’s mental wellbeing and for the sake of just giving somewhere someone a nice place to go. Yeah. So that’s really something I really want to hammer, just cut all the red tape and just allow people to experience for experience sake.
Marc Petit:
Joanna, anything we should have talked about today?
Joanna Popper:
I want to double down on that, there’s so many and actually interestingly at HP, they just announced a 90 day of wellness because of the recognition that employees and… It’s been a hard few years. And so, wanting to make sure that our teams and our people are all really taking care of our mental health, our financial wellbeing, our emotional wellbeing. So, that’s something that’s top of mind. And as I mentioned with Breonna’s Garden project, that’s what that project’s about. Breonna was an EMT. She wanted to be a nurse. And so the intention, all the intention of that project is around healing and continue to spread that word of healing. And so, if anyone listening would like to get involved with that project in some way, we’re going to go to Louisville as our next stop as a wellness festival, we would love to have you or your companies involved. There’s lots of different types of partnerships and sponsors and stuff that we’re looking for.
Joanna Popper:
So we would love that. And for me, I truly believe… I work out in VR, right? I do supernatural as my workout. Right? And I do meditation in VR. I do trip. And I’m good friends with people at both of those companies. So certainly plugging my friends companies, right? But I see the positive, that there’s so many different ways that VR can be such a positive impact and have a positive result in your life in terms of the ability to connect, to create, to collaborate, to learn with other people, whether it’s social or whether it’s just giving you that moment of going into another world and having that beautiful experience.
Joanna Popper:
And so, in the beginning, you said you hadn’t really talked about VR on this podcast yet, or then sometimes you talked about it negatively. I heard this rumor about that. I had listened to some of the podcasts, but there’s so much beauty and possibility in this tech, as well as in many others, and combined with gorgeous storytelling and imagination and creativity. It can be used for good, in so many ways. So just encourage people, put your VR headset back on, jump back into some of these amazing productions and content experiences.
Marc Petit:
I would add if you had tried three years ago, try again, because experience is very different and so much better. So, Joanna, the last question is, is there anybody you want to give a shout-out to today?
Joanna Popper:
I want to give a shout out to you, Marc, for inviting us. Thank you for inviting us. I really appreciate it. And I want to give them shout out to my good friend Raffaella Camera, who’s on your team. I think she’s amazing. And I’m so happy that she’s doing so well over with you all at Unreal Engine.
Marc Petit:
Thank you.
Marc Petit:
I’ll send her the message. So thank you. Simon, anybody you want to give a shout-out to today?
Simon Che de Boer:
Yeah. Yeah. Callaghan Innovation here in New Zealand, it’s kind of the entrepreneurial government department. They really helped us with some frigging rough times, New Zealand Film Commission. Obviously you guys, and NVIDIA, Rick Champagne, I’m going to steal his name one day. That guy’s lovely. Yeah, no. There’s probably too many to mention. I’ll give them a big hug when I see them in person. So, that’ll be it. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, as I said, once we streamline this, we’ll be pushing content massively. So this is the last note. I know you probably can’t edit this in, but just a side note, once we automate this process, the more we can actually get government entities and NGOs and museology scene to actually open up real data sets without so much red tape.
Simon Che de Boer:
Because that has been our biggest issue. We’ve been stuck on this island for two years, trying to ascertain just any data. And it has been next to impossible because of bureaucracy. So I think the best thing for the industry going forward would be some kind of universal shared revenue model where people are far more giving of these historical sites. Because one thing that did amaze me over the last two years was that there was literally next to no digital twin stuff coming out and you would’ve thought that would’ve been the time for it to happen. So, that was a side note. I don’t know how you’re going to slide that in!
Marc Petit:
On that note… And on that note- (laughter)
Simon Che de Boer:
No, sorry.
Marc Petit:
I have to give the point. I mean we send the Sketchfab platform a lot of cultural heritage and I think…
Simon Che de Boer:
Yeah. Well Sketchfab is a fine example of doing it pretty well.
Marc Petit:
There is no money. There is no economic, there is no financial model around it. And I think I hear you that content should be shared and the institutions that take care of it, should see some form of financial value. So, it was fantastic to have both of you on the show again, Patrick was with us in spirit. Thank you so much. I think you gave a good overview of a number of topics, including VR, but not limited to VR. So it was great. Thank you. Thank you very much, Joanna. Thank you Simon. Thank you. And thank you to our audience, we get great guests like you so it’s easy, we get good feedback. And to our listeners, keep on telling us what you like, what you don’t like, what you want to hear. And we’re right there for you. Thank you very much, everybody.
