a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Oculus and the (Mind-Blowing) Reality of Virtual Reality

Episode Date: March 28, 2014

Up until now virtual reality has been a disappointment for all those people pining for their own personal holodeck. But advances in the components required to create a truly immersive digital 3D experience have finally broken through much of what has been holding virtual reality back. As a consequence, Oculus VR is building something that is nothing short of a new medium. Andreessen Horowitz’s Chris Dixon, Balaji Srinivasan and Gil Shafir discuss the present and future potential of virtual reality. Take heart, the holodeck can’t be far away now.

Hi, this is Chris Dixon. This is the A16Z podcast. I'm here today with my colleagues Bologi Shrinivasin and Gil Shafir. Today we're going to talk about virtual reality and Oculus. I guess the first question is, you know, this is one of these things, kind of like mobile computing, which has been sort of people have tried to do for, you know, 20 plus years. there was a company, for example, called Go Computing in the early 90s, which tried to do kind of an early version of the iPad. It didn't really work, and then eventually the iPad came along. There were people that tried to do virtual reality before and didn't work, and then Oculus came along. Why is this, you know, what sort of came together to make it happen now?

I think with virtual reality, it's something that you can't do a poor job with because you've got a screen close to your face. it's really easy to get motion sick and really small problems in the experience can really destroy it for users. So there had to be a number of advancements, I think, for it to really work. On the display side, high-resolution screens with faster refresh rates, and then a lot of the components that go into cell phones like the accelerometers and other inertial... And just the speed of graphics chips. Like one of the key ideas with virtual reality, right, is the motion to photon latency,

So the move your head, how quickly does screen get updated? And so every one of those parts in between that, there has to be incredibly well optimized. Right. But even without the screen technology, even you could potentially render wireframes fast enough for an interesting experience. But even that would get people sick without kind of faster. Yeah, it's sort of, it's some variant of like the uncanny valley or something where it's like if you graft it out, like until you get over some threshold, it's sort of, it's a terrible experience because you can get motions. sickness. And I think that happens some with the first dev kit because it wasn't quite there. But once you kind of hit over that threshold, suddenly it goes from like this kind of gadget

into this feeling of presence, which is like you're actually transported to some other place. Yeah, it's a really interesting experience where we mentioned all these things that if they're slightly off can destroy the experience, but yet when all the things like refresh rates and positional tracking work together at that level where they don't cause any problems, it has become a really magical experience. It's also not an uncommon kind of phenomenon in technology. Like people talk about a convergence device 10 years before you had the iPhone. And, you know, second life, Repali Hep, Third Life, or Second Life 2.0 or something like that now.

So I think another iteration on the things that have happened, like, five, ten years later, is pretty frequent. It seems that pretty much everything talked about in science fiction eventually happens. It's just a question of when. Yeah. So in five years, I think we're all believers. this is going to be a pervasive, widespread technology. A lot of people think of it as just being about gaming. I don't think we think that at all.

What are some of the things that you think people are using VR for? So one application I'm pretty interested in is telepresence. So, you know, if you imagine in maybe three, five years, they've already got sort of demo units like this set up. But you've got Oculus on your head, and you've got something like the thalamic, myosensitive armbands on your wrist so that you can, or your forearms, so it can detect your forearm position. You've got a 3D treadmill underneath you. You've got also an array of connects in front of you to detect facial expressions and body motions and so on and so forth.

You now have a very sensitive apparatus to determine your body's confirmation, and now you can use that to, for example, control, say, one of these Google robots, these humanoid robots, which they've recently acquired, on the other side of the world. you can move it around and you can send telemetry back. And so you can tour the pyramids for free, right? You know, you just boom, SSH into this remote robot and walk it around and you can do tours. And so I think that's going to be a very interesting kind of application. You can also, the other interesting thing is, and people are talking about this with virtuality, is you can pre-record the tour, have the three-dimensional, like, so you go to the Taj Mahal, you have the whole thing perfectly then rendered in virtual reality, and then there's no reason to have to do it synchronously.

You can do it asynchronously. You can just go, and anytime you want, do VR tourism. That's right. I think that'll actually be a big app. Yeah, and in this case, like, the kind of app that I was thinking of, it would, so you could do it synchronously, which I'd call, like, remote reality. And then you could do it asynchronously, which should be, like, an experiential or, like, a virtual reality thing. And it's almost, like, dual to, like, a Google Glass 2.0, where Oculus would play it back,

and then a Google Glass 2.0 might record it. And another thing related to that are sporting and musical events. So, you know, whatever your favorite band is playing, your favorite sports team, I've seen companies building orb-like giant camera things where you can put them there and then you record the whole thing and then as you turn your head it's as if you're there

because it's all the different the whole scene has been rendered. I think if you look at what people are doing right now in their leisure time, it'll tell you a lot about what people will likely be doing with VR if people are watching sports if they're watching movies

virtual reality just provides a much better medium to actually experience those. I agree. I think also one of the things I don't know about you Gil but in using VR lately I've come to believe that games like shooters are actually going to be far

too intense because it's like being there so imagine you're actually there and you feel like whoa that guy's shooting at me so I've actually come to be kind of somewhat bearish on some of the more game I mean at least the games as they exist today on the Xbox for example you know Titan fall like you're going to have a heart attack if you have like a giant

Titan coming at you. Oculus will reduce violence and video games. Well, no, I think it will. I think actually, like, driving might be intense enough. And I also think, like, remember the demos where you're, like, sitting on a beach and it's like a three-dimensional photo, which, like, three-dimensional photos have always been disappointed. So I'm, like, panoramic photos, like, on your iPhone.

Like, what's the point? Because you're viewing it back on an iPhone. 3D TVs are a gimmick, and they don't really work. In this case, when you've actually recorded the true 3D and you're seeing in true 3D, going and sitting on a beach in Italy or something for half an hour after I get home from work and like you want to get home from work, I had a long day, I'm going to have a beer and I'm going to sit in the beach in Italy. Like that's kind of a good experience as opposed to running around shooting people.

Yeah, I think these, they're just so amazingly compelling experiences that certainly things like relaxation or meditation are actually very interesting non-game use cases. I also like the member, one other thing I'll mention about the experiences is like I don't think you've ever, no one has ever experienced true digital 3D. now concluded until VR because 3D movies, you know, you're watching the movie and it's like regular stuff and then suddenly like the thing comes at you and it's like a gimmick, right? Like I hate 3D movies.

Like in these demos with VR, like the sense of scale, I have never experienced like seeing you're like flying through space and there's a giant obelisk or whatever. The only time I've ever experienced in my life is like in New York City looking up at a skyscraper. Yeah, I've never been afraid that something in a 3D movie was going to come out and hit me in the head. But I found myself in some of those demos ducking

as cubes who are rotating towards me. Yeah. So regarding 3D photos also, like, you know, the destiny of every piece of hardware is ultimately to integrate with a mobile phone or many of them. And, you know, it connects. We've started to see some of these mobile phones

that become basically 3D scanners. And so that becomes something... I think within two years for phones, almost all smartphones will be able to take to 3D imaging. Exactly. And so then, like, you know, you can talk about experiencing those moments again because you 3D scan the room

and then you can wander around it inocular. this like, you know, almost like these, you know, kind of TV shows where the psychic warps back into somebody's heads and they walk around the scene or something like that, right? I think we're also like, I think about, like, do you ever see that famous photo where I think it was like in whatever, 1905 or whenever the first films were 15 or whatever the first films were coming at? And there's a photo where the train's coming at people. Or the Lemire brothers.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And everyone's like ducking because no one had seen this, no one never seen a train coming at you before, right? And like, didn't know how to react. And now, of course, we understand the language of like there's a language now for filmmaking and there's a language for watching films and the interesting thing with VR is we haven't yet discovered those languages right and so people are going to realize oh you know you can't do shooting and running or this but you can do this and like what works and what doesn't I think it's going to be I think it's going to be a really exciting time to be either game whatever you're going to call it a VR maker which is like maybe game developers are probably filmmakers it's actually very fitting that that oculus is in

LA it's like this is a new film medium there's going to be a really interesting period there where people are sort of constructing that language, which took decades in the case of film. Yeah, and that's interesting, actually, because even, like, almost a passive game where you'd sort of be walked around within the game without being too interactive could be kind of interesting because that'd be, like, a film.

And you could have a continuum between that versus a very highly interactive game, just like the experience of being in 3D, so that might be one of the first things that's done. It's going to be, like, you know, those, like, performance art plays they have in New York where you're like, you get to walk around the play as they're doing it or something.

Exactly, yeah. I guess how movies are going to be used to be like, you're in the scene and like, oh, where were you when that happened? I was actually right by the guy who's... Right, you can watch the movie over and over again from different positions and, you know, learn all the intricate details of what's going on in a scenario. So let's talk about, like, business use cases for VR, like... Training, for sure. I mean, any, you know, for surgery, for example, if you're a mechanic, any kind of training of... Firefighters or cops or whatever, like...

Yeah. I think any kind of training environment, especially one that has some degree of risk, like construction, for example, right? You can even simulate, here's what would happen, and this would be bad, like, if this girder falls on you, and here's a good thing. And in fact, this is actually related to some, you know, neuroscientific theories about how consciousness evolved, right? Like, imagine you're a hunter-gatherer and you're, you know, running through the jungle and there's a saber-tooth tiger that's chasing you, right? Having some awareness of yourself, whether you're large or small, will tell you whether or not you can duck under that, you know, piece of lumber. in front that's fallen or not, right? So there's some reason to have a model of yourself in your head because you can simulate whether

you die going this route or not. And so kind of in the same way, Oculus as a training device can let us die a thousand times in virtual reality so that we don't die in real life. So I think it can de-risk situation. So that's kind of interesting. I also think, you know, why do you still travel in business? Like, for the most part, it involves before people exchange large sums of money, like for sales or investment, they like to look the other person in the eye and have an emotional

connection, right? That's a great, a large proportion of business travel is around that emotional connection that goes with dealmaking. And I think, you know, with this, I also think with, even without VR, with super high-res, you know, modern video conferencing where you can make eye contact and things, but I think also VR enhances it, you can basically replace business travel. Yeah, and so I think the key technical thing for that is going to be recording with very high resolution, the eyes and kind of emotions around the face and so on and so forth.

So you'd need like two directional cameras and stuff. Well, yeah, because also if you're wearing goggles, the form factor is going to get dramatically different. They'll probably end up looking like regular glasses at some point. Oh, interesting. Okay. Yeah, I mean, just, well, just like all like the same way, all the cost, cost and performance and form factor curves of all, you know, hardware technology. They'll eventually shrink. Yeah, even the connect is getting into a mobile phone phone factor. But, yeah, once you can record the faces confirmations and then transmit that, then yes, then it does replace business meetings. It replaces, in fact, all kinds of meetings.

I mean, I had a Twitter post the other day where basically, or a tweet, where I kind of was talking about, I think people do not appreciate the scale of online crowds, right? Like, what is 100,000 people? 100,000 people is Michigan Stadium packed, right? It's an enormous number of people. So, you know, when you say like a blog post has had 100,000 views, the people who are watching that also don't really have a sense of it. They see a counter, but they don't get a sense of the scale. And so I think a very interesting application is also going to be for Oculus like any large Reddit thread or something like that. You'll have new kinds of online fora, which give you the sense of what a popular event it is, right?

You can be in a massive stadium and actually see all these other people. And you can even combine some of the offline and online. Imagine kind of having that visual of seeing the stadium, but then you also have like a search box. and you can type in your interests, and you're teleported within the stadium to people who are kind of like you nearby, and then you can kind of talk to them or whatever. You see chat bubbles appear over their heads.

So you can imagine you'll have to iterate on the experiences there, but I think, like, stadium or, like, forum-type applications that use Oculus will also be very interesting.