Tech Brew Ride Home - (Bonus) Friday 04.02 Twitter Space

Episode Date: April 3, 2021

We didn’t go as long as last time because after about 45 minutes, somehow no one could hear me, even though I was the space commissar, or whatever they term it. Anyway, as you’ll hear, we ended up talking about that big AR story with Microsoft and the HoloLens and the Pentagon. Robert Scoble, who has been on this beat for years showed up serendipitously, to give us some schooling in the space. Enjoy… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Welcome to another weekend bonus episode of the Tech Meme Right Home. I'm Brian McCullough. Here is last night's Twitter space. We didn't get to go as long as we usually do because after about 45 minutes, somehow no one could hear me, even though I was the space commissar, commandant, whatever you want to call it. Anyway, as you'll hear, we ended up talking about that big AR story with Microsoft and the HoloLens and the Pentagon, and Robert Scoble, who has been on this beat for, for years showed up serendipitously to give us some schooling in the space. Enjoy.

Chris, do you want to pretend like this has been a well-oiled machine? Yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. All right, here we go. Welcome to the TechMe Ride Home Experience for Friday, April 2nd. Today we are reviewing a bunch of tech headlines, figuring out what's going on, what's interesting, putting these things into context, understanding the wild changing world around us. and going in deeper into some of the topics that Brian has talked about on his podcast.

And so I think today we are going to continue our experiment. We are actually on Twitter spaces today. We are not on Clubhouse. I'm trying a bunch of things out as this experiment continues. And today specifically we are, I think, not going to use clips. We're going to use the real Brian McCullough reading segments live. And so how do you want to start? Where do you want to start?

I think you want to start with Microsoft, right? Which is... It's like the Star Trekers thing. Microsoft and AR? Okay. Yeah. Awesome. Yeah, that one. Yeah, okay.

Essentially, this broke yesterday, and what I called it was the biggest news in the history of the AR industry. which is not saying much since the AR industry is relatively young. But this is like a big bang moment because in one deal, an industry can be validated. And so the headlines would be Microsoft signed a contract with the Pentagon to create 120,000 custom HoloLens AR headsets for the U.S. Army. And that deal could be worth as much as $21.88 billion over 10 years. The point that I made on the show was think of all of those moonshots that Google has been investing in, and this is not me being snarky. In one fell swoop, Microsoft has essentially completely earned its money back from a moonshot that no one was paying attention to.

I mean, people were, but this is a hardware moonshot. This is essentially, if People have been thinking about AR and VR as the next big thing. To the tune of $20 billion, Microsoft is like, this is, by the way, a thing now. So, you know, this follows, of course, the deals that Microsoft has done with the Pentagon in terms of their cloud computing stuff. But I'm saying, I'm comparing it to the moonshots of Google. I'm comparing it to what Amazon has done with AWS. the sudden, Amazon out of left field, or I'm sorry, Microsoft out of left field, has this whole Pentagon arm of its business that, depending on how you term it in terms of years or something,

is worth, what, $30 billion? So, dialing back from the Pentagon angle of it, it's just the idea that out of nowhere, the AR-V-R space, in my opinion, has suddenly been validated. I wouldn't say out of nowhere. I would say that the stuff has been coming around for quite a while. And we've been sort of waiting for that moment. I mean, obviously, Zuck has put a lot of emphasis on VR, AR, the Metaverse, and so on. I don't know that we thought that the U.S. government and specifically, like, the military was going to be the actor that would get into the space in such a big way.

But, of course, the military doesn't really do anything unless, like, it really does it, you know, given how large and just how global all its operations are. And so it is interesting, of course, like, I can't separate this from what's been going on in, like, the cloud battle, you know, whether it's, you know, Amazon getting together with, like, the government and, like, that whole big contract and the rest, just government is moving heavily towards these big cloud providers, which I think is a really interesting deviation from where it feels like the government has been historically. Like, so this sort of is a tacit admission that, you know, the government increasingly needs consumer, you know, driven, you know, products, and it can't develop them alone. You know what I mean? Like, it feels like, I don't know, you would probably be a better person to talk about this in terms of the historical context, both of Silicon Valley and the military, and in terms of like North and Drummond and the other, like,

you know, big military contractors of yesteryear. You know, like that was sort of metal and steel and, you know, bolts and, you know, stuff like that. This is the digital era. And so now those government contracts are much more made of bits than atoms. And so this type of movement, I think, is just, I don't know, it does feel like a bit of a sea change in terms of where, I mean, Silicon Valley consumer tech has been with regards to a willingness to work with the government. Yeah, see, I'm going to pull back from that because that's not what is interesting to me at the moment. I mean, we can come back to that.

The idea of Amazon working with the military because that is controversy, Amazon, I keep Microsoft. It is controversial even within Microsoft, especially within Google, et cetera, et cetera. Well, I was talking about the Jedi contract. Right, right. A $10 billion contract that was signed in October of 2019. Correct. But also this is essentially putting visors on top of troops and making them more effective at killing. So actually, I didn't mention that in the piece this week, but there are hints that people aren't liking this contract either.

I'm going to put that aside. now. Yep. Because, and we can come back to this, but I think that, you know, listen, American technology companies creating things for the U.S. military is not something that is without precedent, and I don't think should be controversial in certain situations. What's more interesting to me, if, if, and you all have been listening on the show, especially over the last three months, we've been trying to poke at what is happening next

with ARNVR, is this the moment where it's going to break through? I think that if I had been a VC three or five years ago, my thesis would have been this idea that, you know how the the shorthand for who is a white collar, or a blue collar worker is a hard hat? I would posit that 10 to 20 years from now, a sort of shorthand for who is someone that works not in front of a screen or behind a keyboard will be someone that wears a visor. And I've said this on the show before about how I think 10 years from now, every construction site, you will see all of the people working on construction sites wearing visors. everyone that's in the military that's in the police, they will be wearing these AR visors. And this is the first sort of, you know, a big bang moment of that. And like, it's a contract for 120,000 units. Believe me, if this is at all successful. Like, this is why I'm saying that this is sort of Microsoft's AWS moment, because they could have, a hundred billion dollar business within five years doing just this.

Let me, yeah, let me understand when you say a AWS style business. Okay, not not a cloud business. I'm saying just about size. A size and also a side business that most people didn't think was going to be so big. Remember, I'm again, sorry, I apologize if people aren't following me on this. I'm thinking of when investors and other people realized, oh my God, not only is Amity on killing it in e-commerce and exploding and going to become the thing that sells everything. But also, they have this other business.

Yeah. Okay. So to build on, because I get the general drift, I think of where you're heading with this in terms of this being a large business. Yes. My question then for you would be whether you see this as being something that will expand into adjacent spaces once this military contract essentially valid. Yes, a thousand percent.

Okay. So the tech, and then it also, given the size of the order, also lowers the cost. of these products, right? Yes. It just skews, or not skews, rather, but just like volume of production. And then it also creates probably momentum around building software and technology

or integrations. I don't know if it's all powered by Azure or what they're back. Yes, and think of how much it can play into Azure. Right. Sure. Yeah, totally. 100%. Well, just in terms of like, you know, the cloud contract and where this, you know, computing is going to go, right? The fact that

what's interesting is that we're looking at the nexus of the users of this technology connected to a cloud where a lot of the processing is going on. And so the HoloLens is essentially what Snap and Spectacles is trying to do, where it's trying to create or wrap up the locus of connection to a user through an interface, which it wholly owns. And Facebook is trying to do that with Oculus, but didn't go in the direction of the military.

It went in the direction of gaming. It went in the direction of consumer. Consumer, yes, gaming. But like, even in consumer, they're sort of, you know, kind of like watching a movie in VR, I guess, and there's like a few other applications like that, but it's mostly consumer gaming, and it feels like that hasn't been like a major hit. Whereas in this case, you know, if you deploy HoloLens to, you know, tens of thousands

of soldiers, suddenly you've got that out in the field and you've got a user base, and you've got a bunch of opportunity space, I guess, for people to design more HoloLens-driven applications for it. So I agree with you also in terms of what you're saying in the HoloLens showing up in more and more industrial applications, for sure. Okay. And then I guess the question that I would ask, the final question for you, is whether it's the HoloLens specifically as a visor,

or whether it's just heads-up displays more generally, and that the form factor will start out perhaps as a visor, and then over time, you know, will end up as, you know, glasses, or then contact lenses. It'll eventually be glasses. It'll eventually be glasses. It'll eventually be brain implants. But,

as Daniel Rubino's tweet that I read today is, it doesn't matter right now because, you know, even if Apple is likely going to nail consumer eventually for AR, Microsoft has a massive headstart right now that this is, you know, a screaming siren that represents. So we're talking about, like, if you look at the picture in the linked piece in the show notes, like this looks like a workable cool thing. So right, the, the, what we're all trying to work towards is something that is as light as normal eyeglasses. But the, the picture of the

HoloLens that has been, I can't remember the term that they're talking about, but has been modified for the U.S. Army's use, that is a completely usable device for a soldier in the field. And then, so if this is something that bears out and over the next three to five years is completely usable for soldiers in the field, you're thinking, okay, well, yeah, that could be used at, you know, it's being used in factories right now. So, like, if you're someone working on the assembly line and you're like, I don't know how to make this widget go into this thing. In real time, you can see, you know, schematics that make you do things like that. That's not the, and use case. The next use case is in hospitals, nurses, operating rooms, things like that, schools.

Like, I'm, again, I'm going to come back to the analogy that if the shorthand for someone that is in a blue-collar job is the hard hat, what if in 10 years, 15 years, the analogy for, if you're a knowledge worker, you work behind a screen and a keyboard, you're one thing. But if you're someone, someone that works out in the real world, you're a visor user, or you're some version of that where it's this sort of, yeah, yeah, you sit behind a keyboard versus I'm out there in the real world using this sort of stuff. It's almost more dynamic. And so if we're talking about how much technology has changed knowledge work, again, I've made this point so many times on the show, I can't stress to you the ways that in a construction site, things like drones and

AR headsets and things like that are going to completely transform real world stuff with technology. Totally agree. And by the way, I pinned it to a tweet to the space, so you can actually take a look at what this thing looks like. It is, I don't know, it's, it's sort of like a proto squitty from like the Matrix, you know, with like all the different like eyeballs. It definitely kind of feels like that thing. But I agree. Like, it's definitely going to be the case where people are augmenting their capabilities using all sorts of artificial intelligence.

And the, the HoloLens just becomes a very visible signifier or signal of someone who is in that metaversean space where they're sort of connected to the real world and also, like, operating, yeah, like in the real. So I think that's, that is super interesting. What, like, do you, I guess, one question, given that we talked about this in the past a little bit, like in terms of the impact on the workforce, do you think that this also then means that where previously you have like a platoon of, you know, soldiers needing to go and do stuff and you have different people

with different expertise? It's funny, actually, I just, I read recently that they just discontinued Cortana, but, you know, regardless, can you imagine if someone has like a Cortana, you know, or several different characters that are in their HoloLens and are providing them with, you know, expertise and information as though it was another, you know, set of soldiers that were experts or specialists. Well, I mean, listen. I just like, dispense with them. But I mean, and again, I am no expert in the military and have no background in this. But I would, I would imagine that the immediate situation is the equivalent to the drone operators that are working from Missouri or whatever, things like that. So like you could have, you send a platoon out

into the field, you have people somewhere else in front of a bunch of screens, watching all of the huds, the heads-up displays, and are in their ear telling them what to do. This is being, you know, augmented by, you know, the networking and the cloud computing of that Microsoft is obviously going to tie into all this stuff. And so it's kind of the dream, not to get too history had on you, but, you know, like, you know, the, the general at the top of the hill looking through a spyglass and being like, I can't see what's happening because there's too much smoke or whatever. Like, you know, it'll be more of that sort of. I mean, like, combine this with like, you know, LiDAR with like, you know, satellite stuff.

I mean, I don't know. WUR is like, well, well, and then the other thing is, but one of the things that I don't know, I even said this in the piece is that you put those cameras on there so you can target using the headset, right? So let's say you shoot a rocket launcherer. And not only that, you know, you've got bullets now that can sort of, well, drones, or you have bullets now that can do that sort of thing that that movie. Remember that movie where they could make the bullets go around corners? Okay, that exists now? Like, that sort of munitions, that is real now. So if you had that headset and you, like, you know, use the camera on the headset to target a specific thing,

like, so you can have that level of whatever, you know. What other countries have? I mean, I was listening to Tim Ferriss's podcast where you did the interview with Blasie, Shrinivossi. And Blasji is basically talking about the future of, you know, militaries and wars. And eventually we get to a place for, like, the humans kind of like sit back at home and sort of like e-sports. And just like you have like your drones and like your mecca warriors. Right.

That's that old movie of like the battlebots or what was that from the late 80s, early 90s, yeah. They might have been battlebots. They were fighting over Alaska. I remember that the robots, we lost and we lost. Alaska to the Russians, I think it was. Interesting. We can take Sarah Palin, too. But anyways, like, I just, yeah, it's all put

the same, I guess, movement in some directions. It's interesting. I'm reading, so the guy that posted the blog post from Microsoft, actually is a Microsoftian, Asopi, I guess. He's been there for 20 years. And actually, I mean, Scoble was, you know, once at Microsoft as well. But it's sort of interesting to imagine tracking your career,

starting, he worked on Visual Studio all the way back in 2001. and now has sort of come up all the way through the Microsoftian ranks. He spent six years working on Xbox. So isn't that interesting? I mean, it's not, you know, like, it's sort of like tag, what was it, the wagging the dog thing, the tail wagging the dog, where essentially you have war, which was simulated in games, and then the games got so much better at war than now they're using games to design war.

Well, and to what degree, what was the Xbox thing where you could track your movements? I never remember the name of that thing. Oh, connect. Connect. Like, to what degree is connect? Something that led into all of these things, yeah. 100%. Yeah.

Okay. Well, all right. So, obviously, this is a big deal. From a money perspective, from a business perspective, from just a tech and culture perspective. So it kind of, like, crosses all the keys and dots all the eyes, I guess. So, all right. What else we got?

What else we're talking about here? You pick it. Okay. Well. And if you want to bring someone up, let me know. go right ahead. Okay, does that work this way? I forget with spaces.

Let's see if I tap someone. It says, it says, I don't, no, I think you're the moderator, so I think you're the one has to do that. Scoble wants to talk. I've invited, I've invited Scoboble. Scobble's going crazy with his emoji over there. Something's not working. Invite to speak, invite to speak.

There you go. Amen. What's going on? Yeah. So you guys are talking about the military. You know, when you go and study the military, a lot of it is supply chain. Yeah, yeah. Right.

And if you go on an aircraft carrier, there's 4,000 people on an aircraft care. They're all 18, 19 years old. And they do their job for two or three years. and then they get turned back to us and somebody takes their job. So the buy behind this hall I'm saying is a lot of simulation to train people for different situations. It's not about getting you on the battlefield so much, although I'm sure that's going to be a part of it. But it's to train you on how to do your job. And you're absolutely right.

Well, you know, when I was on the aircraft carrier, the Nimitz, there was two boats hooked up to us sailing alongside of us. And they were, they strung cables between these two boats, and they were feeding us, sending big pallets of food and mail and resupply parts and bombs, everything, right? And so you started looking at the 4,000 people. very few people are actually involved in shooting a gun or flying a plane or something. Most of those people are keeping the machine running and or supplying everybody who is running the war machine. And all of those people need training. I mean, if you're going to train somebody on how to fix a helicopter or fix a jet engine on an F-18 or something like that, you've got to do it fast and do it well.

So you're saying that the HoloLens in this case is actually being used. used more for training purposes. Yeah. And that's what the government simulation is really aimed at because we're we're having to train kids to run this machine and put it in a bunch of situations without a lot of times having the situations to train them on, right? So you have to have a simulator where you simulate like what is going, what do you do if the thing is hit by a bond? right? Or an attack by something. The next generation level of that is that, okay, you're talking about training and that makes a ton of sense.

But the next step would be if these are devices that also have sensors and things like that. So I'm going to bring it back to the construction site. So someone's working on a bridge and they have the headset on and the headset detects like, you know, this cable is weak or whatever. And so here's what you need to do to check this bolt and that sort of thing. So it's not just training. It's also these are sensors in real time in the place that can detect what is happening. And then if you have AI, that's the third order effect of that, which is like, I can give you advice on what to do right now as shit is going down, as the fire is breaking out, that sort of thing.

Yes. Do you know Trimble, the construction company Trimble? They're already using the robot dogs from Boston Dynamics on construction sites. and they're already putting hollow lenses on construction workers. Most of what they're doing first is understanding the site and looking for safety problems and also looking for a path for a robot to deliver a pile of wood or something. We're going so far to find the obvious analogy of a use case here. Put this on firefighters.

And so a firefighter goes into a five-floor walk-up here in Brooklyn. And when they're going in, it has been loaded into the... their visor what the floor plan of this apartment is. And they've got sensors on it that says where the heat is coming from. They're able to see infrared overlaid across their field of vision. They've got people in their heads telling them, by the way, we can hear, we can see what you see. We're telling you, go left, go right. We think that there's a, there's a baby in this room to your right. Like, this is all of these things where it's like, this is sci-fi stuff being made real. Yes. Well, I mean, what's also interesting, and by the way, for folks who are listening, I am putting the links that things are being mentioned pinned the space. So if you want to like check out some of the stuff, I did take this and tremble. And they've got, you know, spot on the spot going out in the world. What I want to, Brian, like, bring to your attention is how you're like kind of using the concept of like an operator as in like the human version of the operator in matrix.

when actually that operator was an AI. And so the fact that you're like sort of reeling back to a human that's like interpreting imagery, I think actually is not thinking far enough. No, you're right. You're right. Computer vision algorithms are going to be telling you lots of things that you can't see with your, you know, human eyeballs, but that your LiDAR or that your sensors or whatever are going to be relaying to you on the field.

And what also I think is interesting in terms of enabling interesting things is one, you know, the rollout of like 5G. And secondly, the development. on-device like AI and chips that are specifically designed for either low, you know, battery intensiveness or I guess, but still being able to, you know, run, you know, machine learning algorithms or whatever on the stuff that you're seeing and that the sensors are actually deriving meaning from. So Spot is a good example of that where there's not really a human inside of all those sensors are associated with it, whereas what the HoloLens is really about is the merger

and the augmentation of human capability. I mean, if you go all the way, all the way back to the mother-all demos way back in the 60s with, oh my God, Anglbart. Anglebart. Thank you. Exactly, right? Like, where he showed a lot of these technologies, the whole concept was to augment human intellect. And so after 50, 60 years, we're finally getting to a place where there is this collaboration that's happening between artificial intelligence and the human capabilities that are being brought out into the world.

And as opposed to, and I don't know, I've just been hearing more and more people talk about how the phone is obviously not going to be the final end-all, be-all, you know, form factor of our computing experience. There will be a generation, I think, you know, up to your point, that grows up either in a gaming context or in a semi-VR context or an augmented reality context where they want to be out in the world interacting with things as they are, but then having layers of information on top of those things. And that's also why I thought the Snapchat Speckles thing is also interesting. they are now pivoting more towards, it seems like, at least in their May release of the next gen of their spectacles, focusing more on the developer community and building experiences on top of that, as opposed to going to the consumer where the consumer is just not quite ready yet. Well, not only that, Scoble, I want to jump in real quick. And please stay on. Please stay on. We're not getting out the stage. You're talking about my, you're talking about this is rural, man. Well, I also, I'm going to specifically mention the long read about what we're talking about.

what Facebook's long-range vision for AR and VR is, Chris? I don't know if you heard today's show. But let me just quote from this real quick, and then I'm going to, Robert, I'll kick it over to you. But they call it the Big Kahuna, which is the ultimate end dream is a map. This is Facebook's AR, VR, VR vision. Imagine that the Glass is computer vision, and I'm quoting from Wired here, Imagine that the glasses computer vision capabilities, which by then will be generations past those used by the quest, can see the world the way you do and utilize an unobtrusive but powerful assistant that can do things like reduce background noise in your earbuds or translate signs and languages. That's something that doesn't get you off your phone.

It replaces all of your devices. Why have a TV when the glasses can display whatever you want, wherever you'd like? End quote. Yep. Let me see. This is, okay. I'm going to share a link to that article. from wire.

Absolutely true. And do you want to talk about Apple? Go right ahead. Yes, please. I interrupted, so please go. No, no. It's real interesting. Snap is coming this year with glasses with screens, right, to do Agnary Reality.

And Apple is going to announce a device, and it's aimed at the living room. And it'll be real interesting to compare it with the HoloLens. Because the HoloLens biases the wearers, uh, vision onto the real world you're actually seeing through the optic to the real world to the analog real world which is real important if you're shooting a gun or putting your your hands in a band saw right or a dangerous job operating a band saw perhaps but yeah yeah you want to see the real world right so you don't cut off your fingers the real finger that for all yeah the apple device is going to be passed through so if the device is off

if the battery dies, for instance, you can't see the real world at all, and you can't hear the real world. It covers your ears as well, from what I hear. So that will be biased towards TV, because the screams that Apple's going to choose for their visor are going to be something like an 8K Sony chip, right, on both eyes. And it's going to be very high in contrast, and it's going to be very high in contrast, and it's going to be very, very high in brightness and very high in colored quality, right? It's going to be beautiful to look at. I mean, it sounds a lot like what Magic Leap was promising to offer. But Magic Leap was also augmented, wasn't it?

Yeah, Magic Leap was biasing to seeing the real world because they thought that people would want to wear it while walking around or shooting, right? They wanted to go after the military contract too, right? They lost because Microsoft has a lot of advantages. The Apple device is going to blow away the million dollar TV in the back of the Apple store when you put it on. And that's why Apple is going to grab the consumer. Because if you're going to work in this thing while sitting down at a Starbucks or at your office chair, you're going to want that device.

You're not going to want the HoloLens because the HoloLens biases towards seeing the real world. Who cares about the real world in my office? I don't care about what the real world looks like. I care about the virtual world that I'm building things for or answering my email. So that's why Gene Munster's never going to get his Apple TV is what you're saying. But we're going to get the better. We're about to get mind-blowing TV. Unity showed me the TV that's coming next year on this Apple device.

And you get a virtualized 2D screen that's like an IMAX theater. It's like shit, man, just that. Oh, entirely. But listen, by the way, I'm a, I'm a little bit. to interrupt because, Chris, I think we got to get better at this. Robert Scoble is speaking. We need to introduce the people that we bring on stage. I wrote two books on this stuff. Yeah, yeah. So, Robert, the last time there was a C-E-S, the thing, the best AR thing that I saw was from a company called N-R-E-A-L. And 100-1-1-1-1. That's all their device was,

on, it was like, you're in your living room and you can be with your entire family and you're watching your TV over here to your right in your field of view. You're watching on your left. You have the Instagram feed scrolling or whatever. But meanwhile, all of you can be in the same room and watching different screens of TV. And so I believe they're still only Android base, but whatever. But like that was that was their entire. Yeah. Apple is not. never first. Never. Even the Apple 2 wasn't the first PC, right? So I want to talk about a little bit more about this in terms of like where these companies are sort of aligning themselves for the future. Because one of the things that I think, I don't know, when I think about Apple strategy, to me,

they kind of have like a field of like, I don't know, like it's like a warm cocoon that you kind of live within. And it's much more integrated. And it's like a long-term vision for the things that you will occupy your space with. And so. To me, like when I think about the cancellation of the large home pod, like that fits into a movement towards like spatial audio as a very personalized like private experience as opposed to owning the living room. And so when it comes to augmented reality or rather virtual reality as the near term solution, I feel like Apple will spend five to six years building out their virtual reality like solution or product, which also builds on their privacy story because it's a very personal experience. First of all, we have to define what we mean by VR because VR that is in Oculus Quest is going to be obliterated, the Facebook device, is going to be obliterated by the 3D mixed reality version that Apple is going to bring. That's going to bring this joint 2D screen and volumetric to your eyes in a way that Unreal can't do because they don't have the 8K chips, right? Unreal is running optics again that you see through to the real world and they're shitty.

When you actually look at a video on those, I have a hollow lens upstairs, right? When you look at the virtual thing on a hollow lens, the image is really, really shitty. It doesn't matter to a soldier who's getting, who all of a sudden has new capabilities or to training or surgery, right? but for me and you, we're not going to use a haulence. Well, I want to say something a little bit different but related, because I'm on the Unreal site right now, and I pin the tweet to the space, you know, for folks who want to check it out.

If you go under there, I think I'm under the Nebula tab, you know, they sort of like kind of show you what it would roughly look like, you know, to move away from a fixed screen, you know, where you're doing your typical work to one that is a virtual screen that sort of lives, you know, in between wherever your head is, you know, your physical head, head to your body and then like the wall and sort of sits in between now the thing that i find kind of just bullshit about this it's like trying to port your existing android app experience

to this two-dimensional surface that lives again between you and the wall and i just i don't know i have a very hard time imagining that apple will accept that apple is going to want to re-conceptualize the concept of software uh basically in that environment and that's what apple can do and so it feels like so many things that apple is doing whether it's you know and and this is one thing that we wanted to bring up today was the Apple Arcade and then what's going to happen at WWDC this year. And in general, where is Apple going when it comes to just applications and software? Apple's going to announce this before WWDC, right? By the time we go to WDC, we're going to know what the headset is.

We're going to know what the new 3D map of the entire world is. We're going to know about the feature set of the headset, like the noise cancelling that's going to be next level in it. We're going to know what the speaker driver is. So we're going to know that it's... I'm a badass, right? There was a really good, let me see, I think it was Mac Rumors that had something about the mixed reality headset. Yeah, okay. So I'm going to, this was on March 18th.

So this was covered recently. One of the things that I wanted to do when I didn't get around to doing it, and let me tweet this right now, was to essentially show how the design language of the mixed reality headset actually tracks very closely to the AirPods. or whatever they call it. Which is what I'm talking to you on by, by the way. Oh, you're on them right now. Yeah. They're very important product. They actually think they work.

Yeah. They're a very important. I think it shows a new philosophy at Apple, which is, say more. Which is when you add AI to a product, can you radically improve it? And the answer is yes. And what aspects of AI are you actually referring to? For instance, if I was standing outside and somebody started a lawnmower up where I was on a call, the other person said, I heard the lawnmower start up and now it's gone.

So, yeah, it's the smart kind of noise cancellation. I see. Yes. And there's nine microphones on this thing. And at Microsoft, I met a guy who built an array microphone, which is four microphones in a box that a computer controls. And he said, one of the really cool things about array microphones is if you know where the sound, is coming from in 3D space. Like if the computer knew where you're mouthless.

To a direction on noise cancellation? Yes. And so the microphones are going to be able to do some really sick noise is some really sick transfer mode, right? Because I wore this thing at Christmas dinner. Nobody was offended. No. Like, oh, just rob it.

Exactly. He's trying out a new thing and wants to play with it. But I kept it on the whole dinner. and within 10 minutes, it was like I wasn't wearing a headset. Nobody cared anymore. And I was hearing the real world. But was I really hearing the real world? No, I was not.

I'm hearing what Apple wants me to hear. The nine microphones are picking up the conversation. Processing is happening and it's shoving it in my ear. If the device, if I switch the button, like there's a button on the front and I switch off the transparency mode and go into noise canceling mode, I can't hear anybody. Right. So one of the things that is important about this, again, again, I think this is like a really

interesting and useful conversation, especially starting, you know, with the HoloLens and, you know, like the military stuff is that augmented reality really is about augmenting all of the streams of input and senses that we have. You know, we don't really have anything that can simulate smell yet, although smell of vision, you know, is coming out. Yeah, there's some. There's hard to make. Yeah.

But what I'm saying more is that we tend to think about augmented reality purely as being a visual experience as opposed to one that is possibly also auditory. And so when it comes to social audio, which is a large trend, obviously, we're participating in right now, that also becomes a layer on which you can add in, whether it's like notifications or additional just layer information onto that stream and do it from a directional perspective. So the better the quality of your audio is, and spatial audio is a part of that, as you said, adding AI layered information to that, adding directional noise cancellation becomes really interesting. These are all new capabilities and facilities for software designers, product designers to take

advantage of in the products they're designing. The one last thing I would say about this, you know, when you were talking about wearing the AirPods Pro Max on, I don't even know, but like, you know, at dinner, right, you got this like huge honking headset on. To me, that actually is a greater status symbol, not just from the, the jewelry perspective, but like that you're kind of not really available for communication. I know like you would maybe push back on that because, you know, you were wearing it and you had transancy mode and essentially there's mics and the mics are beaming in the audio from

outside of it. But like to me as a social signifier, they communicate a different presence than wearing like just your AirPods. To me, your AirPods are going out of the world and I'm sort of, you know, maybe I even just wear one air pod or something like that. And that sort of indicates that I'm partially available for conversation or discussion. Whereas yeah, wearing the max i'm in my entertainment receptive mode and that you tell everyone around me especially once i get these you know mixed reality goggles on that i'm totally don't even talk to me for like you know until i come out of this you know people figure out the rules really quickly you know how do how do we get scobbles attention when he's on the couch watching it's watching tv you know

yeah they figure it out pretty quickly you know um yeah but anyways there's a new consumer device coming and Apple is going to own the living room and then we're going to see where else things lay after that. And you're positing that they're going to announce, because there have been rumors of an April event coming, they're going to announce before WWDC, you think. Yeah, because they have to show the developers this device and they have to show the developers, the tooling and the OS, and they have to get the developers building things for it for when it's viable, right? Because it won't be viable until next year, first half, and next year sometime. Right. So it's not even going to hit this, this holiday season,

like the December holiday season. Oh, I'm not expecting it. I've heard, I've heard some rumors that some piece of this might ship, but that it might actually be two pieces, the headphone and a visor, right? And there's a possibility that they release a headphone this year and then the visor comes next year, but I don't know. I, I, And there's too many leaks from inside Apple. There's too many prototypes to know really which way they're going until Tim Cook calls me in. He ain't going to do that. I'm not on Tim Cook's short list of, hey, got to tell them what's actually up.

So one question that I have about this strategically, right, like is also about Apple Silicon. Like, again, you put all these things kind of in a series of steps. And it just feels like it's a very, you know, this is like, the 15, 20-year plan for Apple products. And you need each one of these things to line up in order to enable the next step to happen and for there to be credibility. Not only that. The M1, a third of it is neural network, right?

This is a technique that didn't exist 10 years ago. I was the first one to see Siri, right? And Siri was the first AI system to get released to consumers, right? And it didn't exist 11 years ago. And now it's a third of the chip on the Macintosh. is a neural network. So if you have this device on, there's ultra wideband chip in it. There's an AI chip in it or several. And it can see the other Macs around you or an Apple TV device, right? A box that has the M1 chip in it that can send your glasses data at seven megabits per second

or faster, way faster in some cases. And what's really cool is each of those things and by the way your AirPod Max headphone case has one of these chips in it your phone has one of these chips in it is the transmission radio in ultra wideband

encodes the 3D the location of that antenna in 3D space to each other so now why would I do that well if I'm trying to get an IMAX theater virtualized screen in front of me

I don't want that thing to unlock from the real world at all. I want it to sit on the floor and just be locked. So when I move my head around, it feels like the real world, right? Feels like a real screen. Well, in some ways, this has been previewed for so long because of AR kit. Oh, yes. Out there, right? Well, nobody's using ultra-wide band yet.

Sure. But all of a sudden, if you have five ultra-wide band devices in your house and you're probably going to have more, those are little signifiers to the system to help build the room lock for the headset, right? And Siri is then going to know where your iPod case is, right? Hey, Siri, where did I leave my AirPod Mac pros? Oh, they're upstairs on the table upstairs. I'll take you there.

I'll put a blue line on it, right? And on the ground and take you there or something like that. So and that's coming, right? They're bringing that that's what the tags are for. That's why they're putting these chipped in. And then they bought a company called Spaces, which did you ever go to Oakridge Mall in Play Spaces? It was a store in the Oak Ridge Mall here in Silicon Valley. I did not, but I saw lots of photos.

I did. I took my family there. Yeah. And it was a multi-party, they call it VR, B, a VR location-based, entertainment. So you got to go to a store, put on a suit, grab a gun. It was like sandbox spaces did that too, right? Yes, same idea. And look the Boyd, there was several of these companies competing for shopping mall kind of things. Spaces, you shot guns, a virtual gun with your family and you can shoot things and shoot each other. It was multi-party VR. I mean, it was a preview of the

Hollins basically. I mean, you know. Well, it was in VR and it was very staged. So you really, your mind blind. This is also like to it. We're like the full body like kind of not armoured to say, but like the full compression suit, right? Where it would. Yeah, yeah.

Ready Player 1 and you feel it. Different, different haptics on your, the gun itself is a $10,000 gun with haptic. So as you shoot the gun, it's recoiling, right? So it feels real. And you're hanging out with your. family you could see your family right um and you can shoot them too you can you can it gets really dark really fast but you could you could all of a sudden they buy that company what why does apple buy that

company for the multi-party VR so and the pipeline the system that ran it because there was a system that ran that behind the scenes yep right and apple's going to put that into these devices so i'm i'm I'm already planning on buying four of them because I know that we're going to be watching TV or playing games or listening to music or reading book or, you know, whatever else. All the playing virtual monopoly on our coffee table is coming, right? Something like that. Or we could do this call and have a blackjack game instead of just a phone call, right? Or a ping pong. Virtual ping pong is coming.

Right. So another startup showed me Dungeons and Dragons so we could all get together and be nerds. You know? It's definitely going to be the nerds out there first. So 2021 is the year that we finally get Pong in mixed reality space. You heard it here first. Skowl's going to get now. Yeah.

Next year. Next year. Next year. Next year. Next year, you're going to want one of these devices for sure. All right. Let me reset a little bit just so we can catch everyone up. So we've been talking for a little bit here.

This is the tech meme ride home experience where Brian and I find some sort of, social audio platform and we go a little bit deeper in the stories that are happening. Today, obviously we've gone super deep on the AR mixed reality space, but I do feel like it was a bit overdue. And as Brian pointed out, this is a whole new massive shift given this deal that Microsoft has gotten with the DOD. And obviously there's a bunch of other consumer applications where Apple and Snap and Facebook are moving into. So it is super relevant, I think, to think about where this stuff is going next. But by the way, everything in Silicon Valley started as military. everything.

There is no technology that is not touched by the military. True. I mean, the internet, the HDTV was invented by a military lab, right? VR was developed in 1965 by Thomas Furness and Sutherland and others for the military. Yep, yep.

And so, Siri was designed for the military, right? So you start tearing apart your phone, most of it came. and GPS. Some what, somewhat from the military. Wi-Fi. Yeah.

Yeah. Everything, right? Everything. Everything. So, yeah. So, yeah, so the complaining, I don't want my technology to be used by the military is like, do you not know what the business is of Microsoft and how much they sell to the military? I mean, go to a war room down in Ellis, Nell's Air Force Base in Las Vegas.

It's all Windows boxes. Yep. Right? Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. all machines running the drones right so Microsoft makes a lot of money off of that and they try to

keep it a little quiet because it's not good for PR but it's the reality of this how the world works well let's okay so so so I want to get to at least one other story today and this is a story about how people I'll leave you and let you guys continue I just wanted to wave my hand and get involved because you were no this super helpful I totally appreciate your your your background and your experience. 100%. Setting a bunch of the stuff straight. 100%.

If you want to stick around too, that's fine. Yeah. As well. Yeah, please stay. Yeah. But I like talking about business models and money, right? I mean, Microsoft obviously is sort of, you know, on one, I don't know, one end of the spectrum.

But in terms of, I don't know, my experience as a consumer, Microsoft is one, you know, one realm. One company that we haven't talked about today is Google. And the thing that I actually wanted to bring up actually relates to Apple. But all of this, I guess, where I want to go with this conversation is about what's going to be coming down the pipe very shortly, I believe, in iOS 145, which of course is the addition of the advertising anti-tracking technologies. Removing the IDFA and also Apple moving more aggressively and starting to restrict apps that have any kind of fingerprinting technology in them where they're using SDKs like Adjust or other SDKs. that allow people to, or developers, to fingerprint devices, protections that Apple is building in. And I thought this was very interesting because there was another story

that also came out around how Snapchat has, or at least have been experimenting with what's called probabilistic tracking methods. In other words, using different identifiers within a device, you know, basically your battery level or, you know, the, I don't know, like the date offset or something. Or like, you know, obviously location is very useful. But a bunch of other, just, information that your device makes available to app developers because, you know, it's useful. But if you track those things and you track their changes over time, you can get a pretty

clear idea about who someone is, especially as they go from one app to another, or if they click on an ad, it can be useful for attribution. So we're already seeing those tensions, you know, I think emerging about how people are trying to get around some of the restrictions that Apple's going to be, you know, launching soon. And so I'm very interested to see, you know, how this shakes out from the advertising perspective. And I think Apple is being so nasty about it because, one, they've identified a customer that is really freaked out by privacy. But when this augmented reality product comes, it's going to really study you at a deep level or potentially could study you because it has the ability to see everything in your house and catalog it in 3D space. Right.

And you know what is happening in computer VIT. computer vision to see a Coke can in front of your mazola corn oil. And if you're wearing such a device and it's ingesting everything about you, it knows you at a much deeper level than anything does today. I think this is part of the question that I'm trying to get to, which is what is Apple's ultimate goal and business here? And to what degree are they providing either controls and the ability to kind of opt out from tracking or is it just it just more the devil you know than a bunch of other kind of data brokers and other folks,

you know, we're getting into the space. Let me, let me interrupt. This to me and Brian and I have talked about this. It sort of feels like this is the start of a new kind of internet world war between the giants. Yeah. Especially when it comes to money, right, there's like the cloud business on the one hand, the AWS and so forth and, you know, serving those customers. But then there's the advertising side, which is Facebook, which is Google, which, you know, Apple is kind of like in between. have some of their own ads, but they don't really promote that as much. You know, there's Bing ads, but that's not really the Microsoft's bread and butter.

And so these changes are super significant. Let me, let me jump in here because I've been trying to get. We're building a privacy temple is what I call it. You used to call it a wall garden, but they're putting all your private information inside this temple and keeping people away from it or companies away from it, like Facebook that has an advertising business mall, like you said. and they're doing that to make sure that Apple is a very trusted brand. And this comes up in my research with people.

I keep hearing the word trust. I trust Apple. I don't trust Facebook because I hear this over and over and over again. Let me, I want to get. That trust, right? An Apple device is going to be $3,000. Right. Can I get, can I get Steve?

For having the best experience, the best visual, the best audio, but also the most trust. that nothing freaky is going to happen because it's on your face, right, with cameras and with all sorts of sensors watching your mouth and watching your eyes and watching your hands, right? As soon's going to know a lot about you that computing doesn't yet know. And there's a lot of trust to give a company. And then Facebook's going to come along and say, hey, we're a thousand bucks cheaper. We do more because we're more open. When you listen on Spotify, everybody knows what song you're listening to, and that's cool.

but it means a more open system that advertisers get to put shit next to, and therefore we have a different agreement with people. I want to see if I could bring Steve. I was looking on the other day with, sorry. Oh, who is that? Steve. Yes, Steve, I've been trying to bring you up. Sorry.

Yeah, hey, Steve from Macromers. I just want to jump in and say, I just really like what we were roofed on the other day, Scope and bring this up in the context. sense of, you know, with Apple owning content with Apple TV Plus, it makes a lot of sense in this VR world. They can you know

push directors towards supporting these new experiences. And I remember when they did the vertical video thing of like, hey, here's what you can do with the vertical video. And I was really impressed with that. But that didn't seem to go too far, but it's kind of inkling of how Apple can push forward now that they

have studios in-house per se. Say more about that? you say the studios in house and what was this vertical video thing? Yeah, I want to say like last fall or so, they shared a video and it was just kind of like action sequences. And it was just, you know, built for the phone. Vertical video was really hot. I guess last, you know, CES before last, you know, we had TVs that rotated to vertical orientation. But I was just kind of curious about, you know, it used to be 3D was the big thing.

And it was about, okay, how do we teach directors to use 3D? And I just wonder if there's something there, a complete speculation, but with Apple being closely tied to Hollywood Studios, with Apple TV Plus content, could they help teach directors very quickly how to make content for VR? Yes. And they're going to come out with tooling, and their partners are going to come out with tooling.

Unity and Adobe and others will have new kinds of developer tools to build 3D environments. The real holdback is, we need something to sell 10 million units to get Hollywood really interested in financially, you know, doing these new kinds of media properties. And I think Apple's going to get there really quick. But I mean, it feels like to this point, like, isn't it possible that, and especially with like, you know, whether it's Apple TV Plus or just in general, the shift to streaming, the idea would be that you can charge each individual more for each.

Last few guys, I don't know where, I don't know if anybody, can hear me. I can't hear anybody else. I'm going to leave and come back. I just, uh, also heard you guys talking about Spotify a little bit and both podcast scenario and privacy wise. Um, I think that's interesting as that space seems to be heating up with, it looks like, uh, with the latest betas that Apple, you know, was changing the verbiage around, uh, from subscribing to podcast, following. And then also, um, they have a profile tab on there that looks like it has space for. or managing subscriptions within the podcast app, like paid subscriptions.

So I think that's going to be an interesting place. And just today I was digging through their Spotify's code, looking for stuff about the cold clubhouse-style interface with locker room. They just made an acquisition. They don't have a thing in the code yet. I did find something else interesting with the, it's really weird device, car thing is what they call it. And it's like a little dashboard that basically is kind of like a phone display in your car

for maybe directions and, you know, switching between music and everything else. But I think the bigger thing in there is just more Spotify's push with direction with podcast and having paid podcast. And they had a little snippet in there about like, you know, you have to pay for this episode or pay to listen to this particular show, which was weird to me because normally I would have expected them to push their Netflix model of, you know, buy once and consume everything you want instead of paying for a single. shows content. I just wonder if you had any thoughts there. I don't, but it sounds rational. There's some things that you just want to dive in and consume a single interview on a podcast, right?

Yeah, it is weird to me, though, because, yeah, I do agree, like, it seems like, you know, Spotify definitely isn't as private or privacy conscious as Apple, and yet, you know, being allowed to not only pay, like, you know, all in for music, but a one-off a la carte for podcast is interesting, but I still don't like their model where it's kind of like, I don't consider them a big podcast player, right? Because what does it, like, if you agree to, like, put your podcast on Spotify and they host it and everything else, so you give up a lot of rights, and you can't just put in any URL. So it's not technically a podcast player. It's a player that plays some podcast. I don't, I don't know what happened to Brian.

We've been having spaces problems. I got kicked out just a few minutes. ago and it sounds like Chris and Brian might have just come back in. All right there, there we go. Okay, hello? You got me? Yep. Okay. Wow, that was weird. I don't know if you guys heard me when I was in space. I was like literally talking to myself for like two minutes. One weird thing about the, that's weird. One weird thing about the whole Microsoft deal is I wonder if there's going to be newer hardware than the HoloLens deal because I play with it a little bit and it seemed very much

like a slower experience where you're very narrowed in on that narrow field of view and just does not seem like something that a soldier would use to me in the sense of they're moving around all the time and you have to have a lot of awareness right with a situation on awareness so I wonder if they're going to be advancements there from what I hear they're working on it

So I don't know when. I would expect a new haulence every two or three years for a bit and maybe even faster eventually. It's going to totally depend on the competitive landscape. What is the tech also? I mean, because Field of View is one of these things that is a differentiator, but the Microsoft field of view seems a little bit restricted relative to others. They're using an M-BIS laser projector that's scanning. light onto the back of your eye.

And this is the problem. They've decided to optimize the device to see the real world, not the virtual layer. Apple's going to go the completely other way and say, we're going to show you something that seems like the real world. That's a depiction of the

real world. But everything you see is going to be virtual, and therefore we can control everything and make it badass. Right. And the optics are different because you're looking at a chip that can be spread out where with a HoloLens you're having to put like through

several pieces of glass or plastic with lots of tiny little structures that are reflecting light into your eye and it's really hard to do that well right now there's been several people who talked about the physics challenges

of optics and I've seen several from Israel that are coming along and giving you you know, 70 degree field of view, which is still not as good as a VR machine that gives you 100 degrees field of view. And 500 nits, which is really dim, right? And it takes some light away from the real world. So it's not perfect.

It's not a good situation for a lot of consumer kind of usage yet. And we'll see how fast we can get consumer glasses that actually are amazing, right? they're not here yet. They're close. Yeah, I guess the difference is like Apple's rumored tech right is they have eye tracking. So you don't have to have as much, you know, CPU horsepower to drive that because they can see where you're looking at and only resolve, you know, to find detail images in that area.

That's a small book. That's called foviated rendering. And the principle there is your human eye can only see detail. where you're actually staring like I'm looking at a Coke can right now everything else is blurry to your brain your brain is filling in a lot of detail around that sharp center so what these what these companies are doing and why it costs $40 billion to build this stuff how much they look 40 trillion billion Apple is spending 40 billion and Facebook is spending tens of billions right yeah yeah but they know how the eye works and how the brain works and they're going to to fool you in thinking that screen is badass, right? Because they only need to make the place where you're actually looking have a lot of polygons or a lot of detail. And that saves the GPU and the battery and the heat generation and all that. Totally. By the way, if anybody wants to raise

their hand, I think Brian still is a host. He doesn't seem to be able to speak. Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Anoise speaker in his stead. So it will probably be another 10 minutes or so. Yeah, I got to take off my family's bugging me to go for a clock. They're like tapping on the forehead. Pretty much. Keep coming over and going, yeah, what are you talking about again? There you go. Well, Skobl, it's been great having up here and hearing from you. It's good to hear

for you. It's been quite a while, I think, since the last talk. It's going to be a fun year. There's so much coming in the next year from all sorts of different places. So it's going to be a real interesting year to. to see this new technology come out and be used by different people for different things. Totally. Yeah. And Brian also wants to send his gratitude for your presence here today. Thanks.

No problem. Thank you. Thanks for having me out. Right on, man. All right. I'll jump out. So thanks. Cool.

And yeah, we'll probably see some sort of announcement, certainly by WWDC in June. Great. We will watch for that. Definitely. 11. and blow him. See it. Cool.

All right. Later. Well, I'm not seeing any of their hands right now, from what I can tell. So, you know, given that my co-host is off in space someplace as I was briefly, I think I'm going to bring this room to a close for today, but this is actually super deep and super great. I really appreciate this. Just a reminder, this is the tech meme, Rhynam experience.

And what we do is try to find some day and some social audio platform, and we come together and talk about the day's stories or the week's stories, depending on how long it's been, and we go a little bit deeper than what Brian is able to do on the TechMeme Ride Home podcast. So with that, we will probably be at least the good parts, maybe extracting elements of this conversation and posting this to the TechName experience. And Brian has texting me, so we still have our medium of communication here, that he is sorry for the technical difficulties. Though if you were here at the beginning of the show, you realize that we are trying to figure this up as we go. And so, but nonetheless, we had a great time and a great conversation.

So thanks, everybody, and enjoy your weekend. Thanks for going to hosting, Chris. Thanks, Brian.