a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: Virtual Reality v Augmented Reality, and What's Next

Episode Date: January 27, 2015

Virtual reality (VR) -- and augmented reality (AR) -- seem to be everywhere these days, showing up in demos and offerings from the world's biggest gadget makers to the Hollywood, gaming, and media crowds. But what's the difference between VR and AR? Is one better suited for work vs. play? What happens when you are building experiences -- and an entirely new visual grammar -- from scratch ... will we actually need standards next? a16z's Chris Dixon and Wired Entertainment's Peter Rubin discuss all this and more on this episode of the a16z Podcast. The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates. Certain information contained in here has been obtained from third-party sources, including from portfolio companies of funds managed by a16z. While taken from sources believed to be reliable, a16z has not independently verified such information and makes no representations about the enduring accuracy of the information or its appropriateness for a given situation. This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only, and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investors or prospective investors, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund and should be read in their entirety.) Any investments or portfolio companies mentioned, referred to, or described are not representative of all investments in vehicles managed by a16z, and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar characteristics or results. A list of investments made by funds managed by Andreessen Horowitz (excluding investments and certain publicly traded cryptocurrencies/ digital assets for which the issuer has not provided permission for a16z to disclose publicly) is available at https://a16z.com/investments/. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Past performance is not indicative of future results. The content speaks only as of the date indicated. Any projections, estimates, forecasts, targets, prospects, and/or opinions expressed in these materials are subject to change without notice and may differ or be contrary to opinions expressed by others. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information.

The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Hi, it's Chris Dixon. This is the A16Z podcast. I'm here with Peter Rubin from Wired Magazine, who has spent a lot of time studying virtual reality and augmented reality. So we're going to talk about that today. One of my favorite topics. So, Peter, thanks for being here. What, what, let's just, like, the broad landscape, like, what's going on now? So there's obviously Oculus, Microsoft's HoloLens, Magic Leap. Like, what's your impression of what's happening? Well, right now it seems like last year and continuing into this year, it's, what's interesting about it is there have always been kind of these tertiary players in the market

and, like, smaller companies. But what's happening now is the Titans are kind of by proxy drawing these lines in the sand. So Facebook kind of cited with VR for Oculus. Microsoft made it to bet with augmented reality, and we can talk more about that difference. And then Google went from kind of one mode of AR thinking with Google Glass to not necessarily scrapping that, but they're rethinking what they're doing there internally. And instead, you know, last year there was that half a billion dollars that went to Magic Leap, which is kind of an AR startup based in South Florida. So we don't know what Amazon is doing. We know that Apple is filing some patents and hiring VR engineers.

so there's certainly a lot of motion in the space. Sony. Sony's got Project Morpheus for kind of the console-specific play. So how do you think about VR versus AR? Like, what are the different? First of all, like which do you think will happen sooner? You know, however optimistic are you about each? What are the different use cases?

I was, you know, it's interesting. I think people saw a usable case of AR first, popularly speaking, when Nintendo 3DS came out. That was kind of a really low-fi. version. And it gave people a sense of what was possible. It felt like the games that came with it with the cards. Those were really cool. But there wasn't a ton of follow-up as far as I remember. And I think this is the case with a lot of what Nintendo does. Developers don't necessarily take advantage of the functionality. It's all first-party Nintendo stuff. Right. So they had these

cool cards that came with the 3DS that when you looked through, the 3DS had kind of this front-facing camera and it would bring characters to life out of the table. It was. It was. The 3-D effect, too. It was surprisingly. Yeah, it was really, really well done. And so I think that AR was almost in the ether just a little bit earlier. And certainly, you know, Oculus caught fire. And you know the story well in 2012. So we've had a couple of years now to get used to it. But after, you know, I've spent a lot of time, you know, with a bunch of different companies talking about this and thinking about this. And VR is going to be, well, is first to market already. I mean, with the Samsung Gear VR that came out in December, we have a consumer product for sale. That is a big, that's a big leap to make.

And then certainly, I think that more of the technical problems have been solved for virtual reality rather than augmented reality. And just to- Well, specifically, I think to me, at least the big bottleneck with AR is to do it well, for most applications, you're going to need very good machine vision. Right. Right. Because you're going to, you don't want, if you have the real world there. You want to have the virtual overlay interact with the real world. And to do that, you have to understand the real world. And to do that, my understanding from the technologist is that to do that in a very low latency kind of real-time way is far beyond the current capabilities. Whereas VR, it works, basically. Like, if you've tried Crescent Bay, like, it's working,

right? Yeah, it's definitely working. And certainly, you know, I haven't used magically. I've used a number of different kind of not quite consumer-ready AR technologies, but what I understand from people who have experienced magic leap and what they're working on there is it's going to take half a billion dollars to make this real to realize this and so while they have kind of these prototype experiences there's so much more to do and there's so many more problems to be solved and I think you're absolutely right it's it's kind of exponentially more complex to layer artifice over the world that you actually see whereas with with VR you have kind of the luxury of being able to pre-render everything that a person might see, at least in a CGI scenario, in a gaming scenario

or something. And especially with, and that whole, the other thing, too, I think is the tool chain, kind of like the unity and unreal and all the different things you do to build VR, has already been built up pretty, it's just a pretty powerful tools for the gaming world. That's a great point. All the talent and everything else. It's just sort of, like, as soon as they get excited, it's, you can shift it over pretty quickly. Oh, yeah. That's, that's very true. And certainly since, it was last March that the Facebook acquisition happened, but since then the quantum leap that happened at Oculus was all of a sudden with that backing, they'd had multiple rounds of funding, as you will know, but after they had this

vote of confidence from someone who clearly isn't going anywhere, all of a sudden the talent started coming. Like they had this very Spartan mentality. Like we need 300 people who are the absolute best of what they do, and they just keep poaching and keep poaching and keep adding new people. And just today, you know, we're recording. this on a Monday, and at Sundance this morning, they announced that Oculus Story Studio, which is this venture to develop CGI filmmaking, and they got Edward Sachi, and they got Sashka

unselled from Pixar. So they're getting pretty incredible talent, even outside the gaming space. Gaming was where they started, and so they were able to lay a lot of groundwork, and certainly with Unreal and Unity streamlining that process. The question now is, for me at least, what's going to happen in the realm of live action video because there's so many problems that need to be solved there. I'd be curious if you think it's right. My sort of framework for it is VR will be more about play

because it's a fully invented world. I personally think it'll be less, I think games will be big, but I think it'll be a lot of like what's happening with the Hollywood stuff, kind of quote experiences. But they're completely new worlds, right? Whereas once you've introduced like,

once I'm looking AR, I'm looking at my office, like generally that is, you know, is more for a work context, right? you're overlaying information, you're, you know, Googling, magically Googling everything you see, right? I think, so that's kind of my broad. No, I think that's true. And certainly after the wired story about HoloLens came out last week,

I saw a couple tweets of yours, and I think you nailed it there. I think I was debating with Startup, like a fictional Twitter character. I think that was you in Startup L. Jackson, right? There were worse people to... I think I have to reflect on my life when I am spending my afternoon to be with an imaginary person but worse people to debate with

but I think you're right I think the enterprise applications for AR are the kind of driving thing right now and certainly even players that aren't Google and aren't Magic Leap and aren't Microsoft recognize this

there are companies that their entire kind of raise on debt is working on this instructional overlay and certainly that's what our writer Jesse Hempel saw when she got hands on with the HoloLens, you know, up at Microsoft. And you're right. I think absolutely that there is this, there's a recreational bent to VR, which isn't to say

we're not going to have productivity suites in there. And you're not going to be able to teleconference and you're not going to be able to have kind of in, you're going to have a virtual desktop display when resolution catches up to this. And we'll be able to kind of overhaul what we think of as workspace. But for the most part, I think that that is a very easy divergence point of the two technologies. So do we know, does Microsoft, they're going to pursue some kind of gaming thing with the HoloLens? It's part of their Xbox group, right? It's hard to say because since Nadella came in and took over from Balmer, I think it's possible that the original roadmap has changed. And in 2012, I think there was a kind of internal roadmap that leaked. And part of that

was you saw people wearing these AR glasses, and they meant it to be part of the Xbox Entertainment Group. I think that's changed. We'd heard about it, because when we invested in Oculus, whatever it was a year and a half ago, we were sort of analyzing the competitors, and it heard a bunch of rumors about that, but had heard it was a gaming,

it heard it was very good, by the way, like the best out there outside of Oculus. I think that's true. I mean, as different as the two are, but I think that it may have started that way, but I would imagine that with what they're doing with every device stuff and what they're trying to do with Windows 10, I would imagine that HoloLens is going to be a more integral part of that

than it was originally intended to be. So I would be surprised if they weren't trying to leverage their enterprise world. And then Google, do we have any sense beyond like the cardboard stuff? And, you know, is there like going to be a serious effort, Magic Leap? Well, I mean, so cardboard is the kind of lowest of the low end of the VR solutions. but with Magic Leap, the way they talk about it, not the way Google talks about it, but the way Magic Leap talks about it

is they see it as this magical intersection of the two. And I think that we're probably, and actually going to move to this point where one device is going to be able to handle both, whether that's fully contained VR or switch, you know, on some continuum to an AR overlay. But I think that the way, I think that the two are different. I mean, cardboard came out of that 20% time thing

and they handed it out to developers at I.O. and they were like, see what you can do. And so street view is cool. And people are doing some interesting things for such a kind of low processor solution. But I think that what Google sees in Magic Leap is something that's a lot more transformative than that. So what do you think?

So what's your prediction for the next couple of years in terms of, you know, Oculus comes out? Like, will it be a gaming device? Well, it's going to be an entertainment device, right? I think we both know that. And I think that while they position themselves as gaming first, I think they're going to come out at the gate with a lot of non-gaming entertainment things, just like the Samsung Gear VR had.

You know, they commissioned a lot of 360-degree video. They commissioned a lot of other experiences. And certainly there are companies now that are cracking streaming VR experiences. So I think that we're looking at kind of a media viewer and a streaming viewer and a gaming device. So, you know, the developer community working in Oculus, even outside the kind of AAA houses that have their secret projects, the development community has been so fanatical and the pipeline is so robust that there are already so many games that you can play just for a dev kit. I mean, Elite Dangerous. Have you played, like, Blaze Rush, for example? I haven't played Blaze Rush.

So I was playing a whole weekend. I haven't went home. And what's really surprised me is, and Lucky's Tale. Have you seen Lucky Stale? Oh, yeah. Yeah, Lucky Sale is phenomenal. So Blaze Rush and LuckyTale, I think, are the two best games. so far on the Oculus.

And what is surprising is they're both third person. And they're not the flashiest first person kind of. Now, now, and like, Leight Dangerous is cool. I guess the, I mean, so I want to hesitate here because until you have incredibly good, you know, like the top AAA game designers build stuff, I don't want to overgeneralize. And like, have you seen the Crescent Bay demo? Yeah, yeah. Like the part where you're like in the street with the robots.

Oh, showdown that epic. With the slow motion bullets. Like that's when you see that, you're like, okay, those are the gears. that's like years of war team. Like once you see like the pros make stuff, you're like, okay, maybe I have to reconsider. Right. Because prior to seeing that,

I was like, first person's not going to work as well. Then I saw that. I'm like, okay, maybe now that I see the pros do it. But the thing about Blaze Rush, though, is a very boring game, no offense to the Blazers if it's not Oculus. Like, I played it on the screen. It's just like a cars,

it's like you're watching cars from a third person go around the track. First person, it is amazing. Like, I literally played it for six hours this weekend. Like, the missiles, like, things are blowing up. And you by the way that we have the stereo headphones. And like, the missiles like flying past your head. and, like, guys are, like, blowing up, and it's just, like, and that's only one player. If you get two players, like, it's really engaging, and there's no, like, nausea or anything

else or, like, weirdness. Well, the game design question, I think that if it's going to be first person, it either has to be slowed drastically to what kind of fast-switch games are, or you have to give the person a stable, you have to give the player a stable environment, like a car chassis, right? That changes everything, because all of a sudden you have this frame. Car games are pretty good, yeah. Or space, like, elite dangers. Exactly, because you're surrounded by something that's not going out.

Radil G is pretty good. Have you tried a radial G like that. No, yeah. It's like a kind of a racing one. It's good. I think that we're going to see, for first person, it's going to be a lot of exploration games. I think, you know, Jonathan Blow, who made Braid, has been working on this game The Witness for a long time. And it's a throwback to Mist and puzzle games like that. But he's, it was not originally meant for VR, but he's working on it to play in the Rift.

And I think that first person, you're going to need to slow things down. That's what made that epic demo and Crescent Base so compelling. As they slowed it way down, it was bullet time. You could kind of move through it at your leisure and what John, Carmack has said in some tweets recently is he thinks it might be best if you just take control over yaw kind of left to right swivel away from the player um not left to right swivel left to right strafing um actual movement uh on a more like you're on rails kind of like old you know like dragons layer games exactly exactly like have a few key decision points yep and i and what some other people

are doing is rather than letting you uh you know if you're using an x back an xbox controller you can think of as a PlayStation one if that's your preferred console is if you're using that that right thumbstick to swivel on the neck of the player some designers are using the shoulder buttons instead to click this and you'll instantaneously swivel 90 degrees and what that does is it takes the world doesn't spin around you and as much as as as used to as you can be for first of uh to first person experiences having the entire 360 degree sphere that you're living in move around you is uh it's a profoundly disorienting thing. And so while I think you're right, I think we're going to have great first-person experiences, they need to be in the hands of people who have done some really,

really deep thinking about what works and what does it. Yeah. And we mentioned Lucky's Tale, which is amazing. And like, that's one where I don't think it's publicly available right now. I'm not sure. It's sort of a Nintendo-esque, like, Mario World-esque kind of thing. There may be a demo available on Samsung. The thing about that is, like, you bring, and I've done this, you bring non-gamers over and they try it. And like, it has the kind of one- of like the original Nintendo or something. Everyone loves it. It's not a hardcore gamer experience.

That was my first, that was my first reaction to it as well. I saw it. I guess it was last year at E3, they brought it. And I was like, yeah, third person, we'll see. And I put it on and it takes you back.

It is as kind of cartoonishly brilliant as those early Nintendo games. The first time you played Mario, the difference is they've done some such good thinking about camera control and how to root a, to ground a person in this game world without moving them around.

You can control what you see, but it's done at such kind of gentle speeds that you're never going to get uncomfortable. It feels like Nintendo, like they should, Nintendo should be all over this. Like, if they, I don't know. I mean, they need something. They need a hook.

And this, when you see Lucky's Tale, like this is how, you know, imagine like Super Smash Brothers and how awesome it would be. Oh my God. I mean, look, Nintendo made their play with NFC, you know, the near field stuff with Amibos, which were kind of popular among dedicated gamers, but we've seen for well over a decade now, they take three or four years to

move on a technology that's already changing the landscape. So, you know, if that's the direction they go, and Miyamoto has certainly cautioned us against thinking that they're doing this. I think they want to see how it plays out. They're so cautious about that stuff, and they're so reserved that it wouldn't surprise me if they go that way. AR didn't really pan out for them. But yeah, they've got the IP to really make that worthwhile. What's so exciting to me now, like actually Paul Bettner, who's Lucky Tail,

this came from him. He said, it's like, he says it's like the beginning of film when, you know, the Lumera brothers, like the train's coming at them

and everyone thinks it's actually coming at them or, or he, the example he gave is before they had the notion of an establishing shot in film,

you know, establishing shot is like when you show the building outside and then you show before that they would, if you watch like the old Charlie Chaplin movies

that you should have like 10 minutes of just people going in and out of Grand Central State. Like they didn't understand how the, They didn't understand, like, the neuroscience, so to speak, of how the brain interprets film and creates a reality, right? And I think we're at that, that's what Paul, this is, I'm quoting Paul

here, but we're at that period now with VR, right? So people are just figuring out what, and it's going to be really, really interesting. Do you know Chris Milk? Oh, yeah. I was just about to bring him up because, yeah. His stuff he's working on is fascinating and doing music videos. Did you try the Beck thing? I tried the Beck thing. And actually, you know, it's funny that you say, the Lumier brothers just one of the one of the experiences that he has at Sundance right now is this kind of abstract take on the the train coming

the train pulling into the station was the one that freaked out all the French audiences in like 1890s when they first saw it but we're at the dawn of this new visual grammar right filmmakers are trying to figure this out because no one's had to we've been viewing movies through a frame for so long that we have no idea how to approach these

and then even beyond that beyond the logic of like establishing shots and, like you said, how people's brains interpret signals, if you're in a sphere of reality and you can look anywhere and action is going to unfold quite possibly in a different zone of that screen, what's going to cue you to be looking at the thing that's narratively most important to the movie experience? And, you know, there's some, I've seen some really interesting kind of papers and thinking from some groups who are trying to, at least for rendered movies, for CGI stuff, trying to create.

almost like a new code where zones will be highlighted in little, kind of very subtle chimes. To control the attention. Yeah, to control the attention. Just because we, you know, when you're sitting in an IMAX theater, there's one thing you're going to be looking at. And even if you're looking at the upper left corner of the screen, something needs to happen at the lower right,

you're going to know about it. This is very different. Something can happen behind you. And I think that, you know, Oculus's move to pursue directional audio was a really smart one to make it an integrated part of, of their consumer solution because we got so used to putting on headphones just stereo headphones or maybe even surround sound

to play games in VR but you're going to need something that's a half turn past that. You're going to need something that's truly calibrated to that environment. Have you seen how Chris Milk does his recordings? No. He actually has a plastic human head

with ears all around it because so it turns out like the reason that you know a sound is behind you is your brain is trained to know that when it hits like the shape of your ear will alter the sound and so your brain knows if it if the sounds a certain way it's to the right of you it sounds a different way it's behind you because of the shape of your ear so the only way to properly record 3D sound is to have basically a head with a bunch of ears and then as you turn this is and as you turn then the the the sound turns appropriately that's

the way you trick your brain so that's fascinating so I have a question for you actually you know I've been thinking a lot about this and, you know, there are a lot of players entering the space, and I think that Oculus is happy about this, and there's room for everyone, but we have this spectrum that's emerged now, right? You have kind of low-end devices like Google Cardboard or any clamshell device that will let you basically plug a smartphone

in if it doesn't have any onboard processing. And then you have kind of Samsung Gear VR, which is a little bit between the two. It has a little bit of onboard work that's being done, and then you have kind of full standalone peripheral that works with a dedicated computer. We're going to, I would imagine we're going to need standards at some point, right? We're going to need something that is kind of certified VR.

You know, last week I was at this event in Miami, and I ended up meeting the guy who started the meant-to-be-seen forums, which was this message board for 3D and later VR, which is where Palmer and Carmack first connected. So he and I were talking, and he kind of made me see the light about this. he said, you know, what is going to stop someone from claiming that a product is VR? Just because you can put on goggles, right? Because there's still a lot of consumer products out there that are basically just hanging a screen in front of your eyes and aren't delivering that transport of experience. I think it's a great. So I think, to me, one of the big open questions is how good does a VR have to be for people

to embrace it, right? So I think if you talk to like Brendan and Oculus, he's got a very, very high bar, arguably too high. Like he doesn't think, like to me, Crescent Bay, you know, is clearly, a, you know, it's ready to go. And, you know, he's still, like, wants to, you know, he still wants to make it better. He's got a very, very high bar. Other people I talk to, I think Chris Milk is one, think we're all old people who grew up on, in the era of what he calls rectangle fetishism, back when people stare at rectangles on the wall. And those people, I know, rectangle

fetishists. So the rectangle fetishists believe that, you know, you've been so trained not to see this, but when, like, the six-year, you put a Samsung thing on a six-year-old and they don't, you know, They're off to the races. It's like all, you know, it's like they don't need much better. And of course, they'll watch their movies in a virtual movie theater with their Samsung on. So they're sort of like what you might call like the VR maximalist view of like Brendan and the minimalist. And I don't know the answer. I mean, I think I tend to, my instinct is more on the Brennan side.

I think you need to make it really, really good. Especially people are going to use it for six hours or something. And, you know, and like the D.K. too, I love it. But there's a screen door effect. Oh, yeah. There's the field of view, you know, the refresh rate. there's issues, right? So I tend to think that, and therefore, you know, as you can't really impose standards to say everyone has to make something just as awesome as Oculus who's spending billions of dollars, right? So if you're a maximalist, it's hard to imagine standards emerging

anytime soon because it's going to be, you know, a constant horse race. It'd be like, it'd be like back in the PC era in the 90s saying everyone has to have a top tier Pentium, like it's not realistic, right? So that's a big question to me. It's like, what will, like, how much of this is just that we grew up in the non-VR era? and expect the standards to be very high, how much is... You know, the other thing is interesting is, right, like people talk about simulator sickness, and I think up until two years ago,

everyone thought that had to do... People we talked to when we invested in Oculus, they also had to do with the latency, right? The latency in between your... It's motion to photon, your head moves, and then your eye gets updated, right? And then it turns out basically the Oculus has now solved that. Like, it's low enough, it's whatever it is, 10 milliseconds, it doesn't matter.

And yet you still... And you generally don't get sick, but like you still get like if a zombie jumps out from the right side of your you know from from behind you you get scared and potentially if enough of that happens you get sick so I think we've moved beyond the point where the sickness comes from technical issues it now comes from the fact that you your body feels like you're in a different world oh yeah and people can do things to you in that world that have a strong emotional impact on you right so we sort of move beyond to my mind the technical into the sort of the like you talk about standards I think there's going to be more like

standards like you can't have zombies just jump out on people. Oh yeah. That's almost like that's like you know, whatever the federal department that regulates VRs. You know what I mean? It's the may cause seizures of VR gaming. To me there's two, so to answer your question, there's two levels, right? There's the technical level of what do you need minimally to

convince people and not have simulator sickness. And then there's what is the rules of the content in that world? Because your body, it's a different feeling than what's seeing something on the screen. Game design, best practice is going to be a huge part of this. And I think one of the, the, the best things to come out of Epic's kind of close partnership with Oculus throughout their entire

development process is they're really up there at the front lines figuring out what works and what doesn't. They created, you know, the vast majority of those early demos through DK1, DK2. And like you said, they did that kind of piece of resistance on Crescent Bay. And so they, and, you know, every AAA studio has them and is working with it. But there are going to be, I think, maybe categories. And we see this now. If you put on your Samsung and you go to the store,

you see most people will be comfortable. Uncomfortable for some. Uncomfortable for many. And it's this very squishy scale. But it's based on how dynamic is the action, how much does your perspective move

around the world. And I think that that actually maybe is a clue to how we're going to see this evolve. Is there, maybe there's just going to be a scale of probably not one to ten, but I would imagine it's on a G through NC17 type of hierarchy, right?

Where only the most battle-hardened, you know, call-of-duty heads will be able to handle something. And, you know, I'm a big believer in the idea that those experiences should be available to those who want them. Should a studio be willing to invest in that? I think like the 12-year-old is going to be like turn it up. Turn it up. Yeah, turn it off.

Faster, more violent. Think about the kids playing like those. But yeah, you think about those kind of. Yeah, think about the kind of the sniper montage as you see of kids running around a call of duty map no scoping everyone and doing a 360 turn in between and it's dizzying to watch in YouTube imagine playing and that's how they're going to want to do it but like you's like turn it up make it more it more it's terrifying it's going to be awesome um so on the on the developer side so we have you know if you go on the the reddit forums or an oculus share there's tons of kind of indie

excitement um i think oculus has a few partnerships but you know what are you seeing in terms of like the, you know, is why, I guess the question I have is why isn't, you know, EA and Activision and all these guys, you know, going heavy into it? Or do you think they will at some point? I think they are. I think they have. I think that, you know, I think that there's some value maybe in, for a studio, at least in waiting for those specs to get a little more firmly entrenched. I don't know if Crescent. Do you think just the specs, the input, things like that? Yeah, I think, I think, the risk, the market risk. I think, I think a lot of people like a lot of prospective employees were swayed by the acquisition last year. I think that, you know,

it's interesting, you know, like, you say that because, you know, we live in a different world where startups are, like, the game world is different than the, than the venture capital startup world. And it's funny because we, like, for example, Michael Abersh, we try, I actually flew up to Seattle a couple weeks before the Facebook acquisition, because we were trying to recruit him for so long. And then once Facebook happened, I think it was the day after, literally. And so in the game world, you're right. Like, they don't believe. leave in kind of startup equity as much and like Facebook coming in with like cold a hard cash.

That's real to them. Made a big big difference in the helper world. But also I mean that the way the gaming ecosystem has changed is there's this huge middle ground that used to exist and no longer does, right? So you have all these really small, vibrant indie games and then on the other end of the spectrum, you have the, it's the very indie and the very big. Very indie and very big. So what I don't think we're going to see in the early years are very big.

We're not going to see destiny done for VR. We're not going to see EA buy-in at a $100 million level. I think what we are going to see quite possibly is obviously the proliferation of indie games that are made for it, just because that's what's happening now. But I think that we may see a slight return of this idea of the double A game, these things that used to exist. You know, there were a lot of games that maybe they were $10 cheaper than the big games you would buy, but they were a full-fledged, really polished game experience. And I think that you can spend $10 million on.

something, $20 million on something without the risk of going all in on the next Assassin's Creed being VR. You know, you don't have to do that. I think people underestimate the size of the, for example, the Steam PC gaming community. Oh my God, it's massive. And those are the obvious early adopters for VR. And the games that are so huge on Steam are games that are just a grain of sand to the console gamer, things like Kentucky Root Zero and, you know, even the telltale game stuff. It's just there's a really, solid foundation for smaller games and that's what those are going to be uniquely well suited i think to to vr in general so uh sundaens just happened yeah i think did you write an article we's i'm editing stuff i've a couple of letters there you guys had some articles about i thought about um about this and apparently vr was was uh one of the hot topics yeah well it's all taking place for the most part within the new frontiers program which is kind of the more experimental thing so there are i think there may be seven things that were built for VR, everything from cardboard to Samsung to the DK2. And then obviously, as we mentioned, the Oculus Story Studio announcement came out

and Chris Milk's announcement that he's working with Annapurna Pictures to this company Verse, which is basically a distribution platform that he's making for VR filmmakers, and then he's got other prongs of that as well. And Aperna is also working with Vice, and Vice News put together this really cool VR experience of being at the millions march. The police brutality marches in NYC this past fall. They brought a set up there. And, you know, this is so dependent on people solving the live action capture. And there are a lot of ways that it can go wrong. I mean, there's a lot of companies like John is one, right? John is one. These cool 3D cameras. Next VR is another. Samsung has already announced that they're, they're,

going to have a kind of a camera capture tool for people. Some people are just making their own array of reds kind of around a pole. Frame store is exploring some really cool things they're doing with video. And so there are a lot of people in the space. But I think the way it's looking right now is a lot of that is just going to stay proprietary. I don't think we're going to find an all-in-one solution. Do you think we'll see like a big investment from Hollywood? Oh yeah. I think we already I think we already are. I mean, I think that every time a big developer tries it, they're blown away. I mean, from Alfonso Quaron to Cronenberg, and like I said, that now that Pixar people are working on CGI movies with them, we're already seeing that.

They've had people, you know, Oculus has had, I'm going to forget his name while I'm on the spot, but they had a Hollywood liaison for about a year now, and those fruits are certainly paying off. What we saw very early was studios getting in to VR. for ancillary marketing purposes. You had the interstellar thing. You had the Game of Thrones thing. You had the Pacific Rim thing. And I think that the potential of those was borne out really quickly.

I think now they're starting to crack those narrative questions that lead to an actual film experience. All right, awesome. Well, thanks a lot for being here. Thanks for having me and Chris.