The a16z Show - A New Era of VR: From the Court to the Classroom

Episode Date: October 13, 2023

As VR technology inches forward, completely new experiences loom on the horizon.In today’s episode, we expose listeners to the very real-world use cases already present on these devices, from fitness to education.First up is Gym Class VR, one of the top-rated apps on the Quest. Cofounder, Paul Katsen, shows us how to dribble and dunk in the metaverse, but more importantly, discusses the social impact of VR, the technological prerequisites to get there, and the role of AI as we progress.Following on is a founder on a mission to revolutionize education. Anurupa Ganguly from Prisms VR, explores how virtual reality has the potential to close the gap – one where 70% of US 8th graders are not proficient in foundational math.Head over to our YouTube channel to see two a16z Podcast firsts: a full interview in VR, and host Steph slam dunking on an NBA court. Topics Covered: 00:00 - The current state of VR03:38 - How do you build the #1 VR app?05:56 - How will VR become an everyday activity?07:37 - The social and the technical arc of VR11:47 - Untapped opportunities in VR13:24 - Integrating AI into VR17:09 - Prisms VR20:10 - Why it’s critical to fix America’s math problem21:12 - Why put VR in classrooms now?23:23 - The successes of VR in the classroom26:03 - Stats from the impact report27:44 - Other curriculums could benefit from VR 31:04 - Opportunities for AI in VRResources:Find Paul on Twitter: https://twitter.com/pavtalkLearn more about Gym Class: https://www.gymclassvr.comFind Gym Class in Meta Quest: https://www.meta.com/experiences/3661420607275144/Find Anurupa on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/anurupa-ganguly-92790379Learn more about Prisms VR: https://www.prismsvr.comStay Updated: Find a16z on Twitter: https://twitter.com/a16zFind a16z on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/a16zSubscribe on your favorite podcast app: https://a16z.simplecast.com/Follow our host: https://twitter.com/stephsmithioPlease note that 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. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that 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. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hello, hello, hello. Welcome back to the A16C podcast. This is your host, DeF Smith. And look, we are always trying to experiment here. And this week is no different. In the past, we've taken you straight to the people building top AI models or even into self-driving cars. But today we take you into the Metaverse, or whatever you want to call it. Because today we take you into an episode that was fully recorded in virtual reality. We actually recorded this episode. in anticipation of Meta Connect, which was around a week ago, where Meta announced a bunch of things, from releasing their first mixed-reality headset to AI-powered smart glasses. Plus, a pretty incredible podcast recording, where Mark Zuckerberg joined Lex Friedman in the Metaverse, using new, hyper-realistic VR avatars. And like many of you, I listened to that full episode,

where one line stood out in particular. We're kind of sitting in a dark room, which is familiar for your podcast, But I think part of the vision for this over time is not just having this be like a video call. I mean, that's fine. It's cool. It feels like it's immersive. But you can do a video call on your phone. The thing that you can do in the metaverse that is different from what you can do on a phone is like doing stuff where you're physically there together and participating in things together. And we could play games like this.

I couldn't agree more. As this technology evolves, there are going to be so many new experiences that are unique to mix. or virtual reality, things that cannot be done on a phone and that benefit from that extra dimension. So we wanted to give you a glimpse of these very real world's experiences that actually already exist on many of these devices. In particular, this episode will show you two examples. The first is with Jim Class VR, one of the top rated applications on the quest, where I actually get to hop into VR with one of their co-founders, Paul Katzen. Now Paul was a great teacher. He taught me to play basketball in virtual reality, which means I dribbled, I did a layup, I even dunked for the first time.

And of course, you can't really get the full sentiment when you're listening only on audio. So if you do want to catch the full video, including my attempt to dunk, you can head on over to our YouTube channel. But we'll play you a quick sneak peek. People's movements and physics, it's all synced in real times. If you kind of walk up close and then just kind of give it that shooting motion, wow. There we go. First shot. First shot. That is actually kind of rare. After my VR basketball demo, Paul and I sat down at the beach, again in VR, to chat about the implications of this technology, including the social judgment, the technological requirements,

and of course, how AI plays a role. Make sure to keep tuning in past Paul and I's interview, because we also talk to another founder who's trying to disrupt education with VR, another very real example about how this technology is being deployed today. As a reminder, 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. Please note that A16Z and its affiliates may also maintain investments in the companies discussed in this podcast.

For more details, including a link to our investments, please see A16c.com slash description. Thank you. Hey. Good to see you at the beach. I know. Yeah, and then people typically go in the gazebo and that's where they hang out. Okay. Should we go over and have a chat?

Talk about the future VR. This is so cool. This is the first time. I can say that for sure that an A16Z podcast has been done in VR. So let's draw this line in the sand. I hope we'll do many more. Let's do it. That sounds great.

First thing I want to ask after doing that for the first time is just, you mentioned that it's one of the most popular Quest apps currently. What goes into that? Why do you think people are coming back? Because there are so many apps that kind of fail or people try once. And then, you know, there's also a suite of apps that people have just never heard of. Yep. I mean, I think there's kind of two things.

One, like when we first launched it, you know, there was very little in the experience. Like, you couldn't even actually move around or dribble a ball. But our hypothesis was like if you had a shared interest in basketball with other folks, and we can put you in an environment with eight other people where you could hear them. They're all kind of going through the same experience. They would want to come back. And that actually ended up happening. We made a post on Reddit and there's like a few hundred people that tried it out.

And all of a sudden they were in a Discord being like, how can't I move around yet? Why can't I drivel? They were asking for a lot of things related to basketball. But they were coming back just to chat with people and hang out with someone who might be in another country. But they share this common interest. And so that's definitely one of the biggest drivers. within VR today, like, you know, most of the top 10, 13, 15, most played VR apps on the quest, they're social. It's ways to share experiences of the people from around the world in a really immersive and expressive way.

You know, there's no other technology outside of VR today that gets you as close to expressing yourself like you would in real life. It's not all the way there, but it's close, and that allows for way more interesting social interactions. Yeah, it almost sounds like social is effectively the killer app that we've been looking for with VR. And I mean, even on Zoom, I'm constantly thinking about the fact that like this cannot be the end state, like this box that we have like floating heads. Like that cannot be the best that we get to in terms of communication and digital social interaction. And so you're saying that basically this is a step ahead. But I'd love for you to speak to where we are in that trajectory of VR because, I mean, I think it has to. take in a while, and I think a lot of people think we're still in this trough of disillusionment.

And so I guess first, would you say that we're still there? And then also, what will it take, really, for VR to be the everyday household activity or not even activity, right? Something that just integrates into your daily life, the way that an iPhone might or the way that, you know, your computer and watching Netflix might. Over the long term, I think the expectations that people have are these headsets, VR-A-R headsets, are going to replace a smartphone, and they're going to be something you always have on. It creates, you know, digital layers on top of your everyday world that all

a sudden makes everything, you know, digital and it brings the internet everywhere. And I think over the long run, something like that is going to be inevitable, but there's all these steps along the way to get there. And the way to kind of, you know, replace a smartphone isn't to just kind of build, you know, a device that's great for gaming. It's a device that has value to you in all parts of your life so that you might want to, you know, use it in all parts of your life. So I think, you know, The way to get there is all of these different use cases that bring you back wanting to use this device. Just like with a smartphone, you have an app for your camera, you have an app for navigation, all of these things that might have required special hardware before it became an app.

And I think with these headsets, what we're turning into apps are experiences. So things like hanging out under a gazebo with someone from a few thousand miles away, you're downloading an NBA basketball court to your house. You're not downloading a camera. You're downloading a whole experience. And so I think the big idea is like there's going to be an app for all of your experience. Maybe we can speak a little bit to two other things that maybe relate to the arc of VR. One is the social side and one is the technical side.

And I think in both lanes, there's somewhat of pushback in terms of like socially. Just tell me what you're seeing. Like are people already adhering to this and saying this is wonderful or are their parents who are like, no, take that thing off, like go hang out in the quote-unquote real world. You know, if someone's, you know, taking VR very seriously, let's say, and they're setting up some cones and doing some drills, and we have people that are running coaching clinics. Oh, really? Folks are all over the world.

And it's, if you see that on TikTok, the most common comment is like, just go outside. Or like, why don't you just do that in real life? You'll get better at the sport. And the funny part is, we don't see that as much for someone playing a console basketball basketball game or a console sports game or on mobile. That's kind of like what gets me excited isn't that, you know, VR and these technologies are going to be replacing everyday life. Like we're already spending most of our lives on our phones, playing games on TV, watching

content on TV. And those are just such like the humanity and the expressiveness and how social those moments are are just so much worse than if you, you know, got off the couch and instead of learning a bunch of controller combinations to get better at, you know, a basketball game, you're actually moving. And all of a sudden, that can also expand the sport and make you feel a lot more fulfilled, less lonely. You're connecting with people on a much deeper level. So I just see VR and these technologies is a way to level up these really kind of like, you know, low impact digital experiences that we're getting used to and make them feel a lot more like real life and a lot more personal.

Maybe we can jump to the technical aspect because there's been, you know, the Apple Vision Pro has the announcement has come out. Soon we're going to hear from meta in terms of MetaConnect and what they're doing next. Tell us a little bit more about what you see on the horizon technically. And if you see any important unlocks, that would allow us to have just, you know, much better experiences and allow more people to want to participate. Yeah. So I think there's technologies that move the ball forward on use cases that we already know work in VR and AR. So new devices, especially like new VR devices like, you know, the next quest and we're going to see a lot more.

They could do a lot more in terms of performance and the resources that they give a game. So like, for instance, like Quest 2, it's incredible. Like we could run an NBA court. Like we got crowds, like all of that kind of stuff. But it's running on an old smartphone chip. And the fact that any of this is running sometimes kind of blows my mind. We've got like customizable avatars. We have people that can hop in and connect with each other and sync that physics in real time.

The next devices will just allow us to create more immersive experiences. We'll have more resources to create larger environments, like bigger worlds, like have more people in these worlds, you know, have much more content around. Like you could imagine like a car driving by and all this kind of stuff that you expect from maybe console experiences, will be able to start leveling up these spaces, make them more social, make them more immersive. So every new device basically allows us to get more resources to create better experiences.

But where things get really interesting is some of the new use cases. So even for us, if you have a device where you can see your surrounding environment and maybe the hand tracking is much better, maybe it has real-time object detection, all of a sudden, like you could put your controllers down and you could have an interactive experience with a real basketball. And you can start tracking how many shots you've made. You could do dribbling drills.

You could have a coach that's animated in front of you that we're trying to match your motion to them. So all of a sudden that unlocks a training use case, which is like a really big market and a deeper fitness use case. So I think piece by piece we'll just see, you know, these new devices unlocking very valuable use cases that I think it'll give you more reasons to use the device every day and start to have it really be a replacement for the smartphone as well. Maybe you could speak to some of those opportunities.

I mean, you're obviously working hard on gym class, and it's going well. It's one of the top-rated apps in the Quest Store. But what else do you think is just like an untapped opportunity given, let's say, the next three to five years of technical advancements that you see coming? You know, with a social technology like this, there's a lot of, you know, companies and meta's doing this. They're kind of going after, how do I build kind of like this big platform of open worlds where everyone can create whatever they want? And maybe that'll lead to this metaverse. But I think the best way to go about it, and this is kind of like the dimension that we're going about it, and it's like, we're focused on one interest, which is basketball right now. And that's the reason why you download.

And then you stay for the people and the relationships you're making and kind of like the back and forth interactions that you get. And so I think the biggest opportunity to folks is like, pick an interest and create the like the simulation experience where people can really go in and really dive deep into it and make friends around. that interest and make it as realistic as possible so it feels like you're having that experience. And from there, you know, you could expand to so many different things or just focus on that interest and you're kind of building almost like a digital online representation of all the things that happen within that interest in real life. Like with basketball, you know, fashion culture and people, you know, people want new shoes in here and new clothes and all that stuff. All of those things start to become opportunities for you digitally.

And so I think that's a big area and really just picking something specific and making it great. And making social, there's just kind of like endless opportunity there within space. Let's end off on a question that I feel like I have to ask in this era. But where does AI come into all this? Like I feel like people think AI and VR are two separate things. But to me, as you were talking there about the different problems to be solved and the worlds to be built, that AI has to be part of this. Like, how are you thinking about that new technology integrating with what you're building?

Yeah, well, when I think about AI, I think a lot of what it does is help you create more content and experiences and personalized content experiences at scale, especially with games and social media. And, you know, on our team, for instance, like, yeah, we are, you know, we're building, you know, for moderation, there's systems that we have there. You know, we have a lot of the standard things like recommendations that we're building. And we also, you know, our art team, for instance, uses, you know, generative AI for concepting and kind of designing things before they build them. So I think right now, at least our team, you know, for the past year, has been in that phase of starting to move, like, you know, existing use cases as well as, you know, as we're seeing new generative tools to be able to move, you know, certain parts of the art, you know, workflow and engineering workflow to those tools. VR, though, is really, really interesting because, one, you know, you could imagine being able to create endless content.

Like if you think, you know, 100 years in this technology develops, it really becomes something of like an experience machine. In some ways, if you're hopping on and you're like, whatever experience you want, you'll be able to have it. And maybe it's with real people or maybe it's with, you know, ML agents that are kind of like bots that come up to you. All of those things are ML problems. And it's, again, very personalized. That's what you often want. You want a bot to be able to respond to you, to move and kind of respond to a scenario, to say something that makes sense.

All of those become really, really interesting problems to solve within a 3D space, expanding content and things that you can do. And then where things get really interesting is really motion. And that's where we're focused on in the short term. Like the way that you move, imagine kind of like your dribble move or kind of like your crossover. If you could somehow capture that and then you maybe control that over, mobile and start to move like you and behave like you. Those are things that are really big opportunities, I think, in terms of where VR is

going to head. In the short term, I think it's all going to be about how VR connects to mobile, whether through content or gameplay. And that's where I think Apple is in a really great spot. And in the long term, I think, you know, you'll imagine endless personalized content that, you know, you want to figure out how to, you know, go swimming or go fishing in a crazy part of the world. Now there's an app for that.

And you could even progress. you could get better. You know, you could kind of discover incredible things and those experiences. Absolutely. Even the note on AI, it seems like right now you haven't gotten the avatars to, like, move, like the facial expressions, the mouth moving.

I saw this thing on Twitter recently where, you know, you could record a video. It would translate it into another language. And then it would also modify your mouth movements with AI to match the new language. So it looked like you were really speaking French or German. And I can imagine. And that's like an immediate implementation to your point of just making everything look more real, to make everything feel more intuitive.

Like if I do these movements, the relationship between like what I'm doing and what the quest is picking up, it's just more intuitive. So I'm really excited for that, Paul. This has been awesome. I think I'm going to have to go practice, by the way, and then I'll see you back on the court. Let's do it. Let's hop back on the court. All right. I hope you enjoyed that interview, which again was recorded.

fully in VR. That's also why you heard all those seagulls because that was part of the game. But now let's pivot to a completely different story in application of VR, together with Prisms VR founder Anna Rupa Ganguly. Now, instead of using the extra dimension to sing some hoops, Anna Rupa is using it to teach children mathematics. And that was after she had her aha moment that one of the best indicators of math proficiency was spatial reasoning. So why not use spatial software. Plus, I think many of you will be just as surprised as I was by this statistic. Today, about 70% of U.S. 8th graders are not proficient in foundational math. Let's kick things off with the beginning. Prisms VR, you are a solo founder. You're doing this

alone. How did this all begin? Thanks so much for having me. So Prisms was very much born out of my lived experiences as a teacher and a district leader. After a decade of teaching and leading math instruction across Boston and New York, I became convicted that we don't have the tools to close the learning gaps at scale. You may know this, but today about 70% of U.S. 8th graders are not proficient in foundational math. I did not know that. That's a stat. It's a stat. And though it dropped eight percentage points pre-pendemic, you're looking at 60% of U.S. eighth graders were not proficient. And despite billions of dollars going into this problem, the numbers were static. And so as I began to kind of look more deeply into why this was happening, I discovered that the top

indicators of success in post-secondary STEM are number one, your ability to rotate 3D objects in your mind and maintain perspective. It's what you roughly call spatial reasoning. The second indicator of success is your ability to abstract. And all that means is being able to go from like physical human experiences and describe language notation and build mathematical models, not from text on a page, not from word problems, but from your life experiences. So I kind of looked at those two things going, huh, we learn spatially and we learn by abstracting up from our day-to-day lives. We have not found a way to scale either of these methodologies. So Prism was born to scale these two key competencies and hopefully fundamentally and radically and quickly close the achievement

gap in math and science. Right. Is this widely understood? Because I mean, you said this was discovered in 1970. Yeah. Why haven't we seen this translate into the classroom before? Well, there are a couple things there. It's been widely understood in the research. community. And I think the last few decades in education reform has seen a huge lack of translation of what the research has shown to actual tools and solutions. That's been primarily dictated by the tech. So so far, computing devices have mainly been on 2D screens. And we were digitizing learning mechanisms that were possible using the computational devices we had. And now with the advent of spatial computers and mobile VR and XR technologies, we now finally have the natural interfaces

where we can scale learning with your body, using six degrees of freedom, using a multitude of tactile tools before jumping to an equation which is very abstract. Why is this critical to turn around? Let's talk about that. If we are seeing math scores stagnant or declining, why do you feel like this is so important for us to turn around? I think that math education has been under attack for a long time of why do kids need to learn algebra? Why do kids need to know percent and ratios? And just let's set the record straight.

Bob Moses had shared this during the civil rights movement. Algebra 1 is a civil rights issue of our time. I'm a math ed person. So from my perspective, it's essential. Not only is it tied to salaries over time and earnings over time, it's, of course, tied to just the types of jobs that you have access to. You don't do well in Algebra 1. You are not taking chemistry, physics, biology.

If you are not succeeding in chemistry, physics, biology, you are not going on to the applied mathematics or the medical sciences. So you are just kind of cut off from a very large swath of jobs and our arts. economy. Yeah, and pretty early. And very early on, yeah, because students take algebra one at the eighth grade level. Yes. So then you get tracked at the high school level. And, you know, grade seven to 12 is when you are training for whatever you're going to kind of contribute to and apply for in your senior year of high school. So let's jump back to the why now. It does feel like we're at an inflection point. I feel like what was a week or two ago, Apple released their Vision Pro or at least, you know, showed the world what was coming.

And it does feel like maybe, maybe we're at an inflection point with VR. But tell me more about how maybe we're at the right time where this technology can really change things. So with the release of mobile VR, which is this idea that you don't need to be connected with an umbilical cord to a bulky piece of hardware. In its previous generation, it was really hard. Like every kid had to have this big laptop connected to their headset. They couldn't move around. Computational abilities were pretty limited. Yeah.

Movement tracking, hand tracking. All of that just made it very clunky and frankly uncomfortable. So that was never going to scale. And so with just all the work that's been done for the first time, VR is comfortable. It's safe. There's a psychological safety that's now come with all of the work that's been done around UI and accessibility. And then I would say with respect to Apple's announcement, what they've now done is taken a lot of the standard text interfaces and UI that we are so comfortable with using our iPhones, using our laptops, and made it spatialized. It's mixed reality where we are able to kind of be in our physical space and use a multitude of.

interfaces in a spatialized environment, which I think is just critical to getting a lot of people very quickly using the medium. So I'm now able to kind of like control my level of immersion. So if I want to be in VR, fully immersed, focused, shut the world out and be in a new space, I can do that and I can turn my dial and then move to augmented, come back to my space, move to MR, where I can kind of have my face time up and be in my living room. So I think that the power of now is the seamlessness through which we can more. move through the different modalities, whereas before VR was more niche because it was VR or bust. It felt very binary, right? Headset or no headset? Then even when we talk about spatial computing,

it was this paradigm of like, is it going to be AR or is it going to be VR? And it feels like what you're pointing towards is it's not binary. There's a spectrum and, you know, for different applications you're going to use one or the other. Right now, Prisms is in VR. So you're fully immersed, if I understand that correctly. And you have developed this application, and it's in schools already, right? So kids are using this. What are you seeing in terms of whether it is actually changing that data point that we were seeing before about math comprehension, math reasoning, is this spatial paradigm that we are now in changing that equation? The short answer is yes. We launched to schools in fall 2021. In that time, with a very small team, we're already across about

160 school systems across 30 states. And so when I think about the greatest value that our students have shared with us is relevancy. When you get to immerse yourself, like leave the four walls and go to the Himalayas in India to build new elementary schools that create shaded regions as an architect, they're able to fully build an identity, which you cannot just by kind of looking at things in a highly abstract way because you aren't doing it. It's not with your body. So that's like the first thing that people have shared with me around just the value of pure VR. The second kind of big value that our communities are sharing with us is the ability to physically derive these math equations that meant nothing. Why is equal to MX plus B? Where did it come

from? Kids have no idea where it came from. So what this is kind of culminated into is WestEd is our research partner. We've conducted two big studies with them. One was a feasibility at scale study. That showed a couple things. One double digit growth outcomes on algebra one proficiencies, which we just talked about is an important problem to tackle head on. But what was even more compelling? in that study, Stephanie was teachers at skill were saying, this topic takes me four weeks to teach, my kids got it in one. Wow. So we drilled in on that.

We're like, well, why? Yeah. And they kept saying, well, we just saw it. Because we saw it. We couldn't unsee it. That was something kids said very often. So that drove into our randomized control trial where we set up a control group and treatment group.

That was across about 30 sides. It was a much larger study. And that showed 11% growth between control and treatment on algebra proficiencies on end-of-unit assessments. And whether we like it or not, future opportunity is still governed by standardized assessments. So we can't take that moral high ground of, you know, progressive methods, like problem-based learning. Yes, we do all that. But we also have to deliver outcomes for kids. Yes.

Which is why that's the line that our solution has tread around we are here to not only expose students to real-world issues in the world, build identities as architects and designers and builders and microbiologists. So they can make that choice to. contribute to those fields in university, but also we're going to get you past those tests in a far more efficient and enduring manners, though you don't end up hating it because God knows, you know, just test preparation turns off so many children from math and science. Especially math. Oh my gosh, I loved math, but I just remember being in high school and so many kids had just, yeah, it was like a binary decision like, oh, I'm not succeeding in math. So like, as we talked about, that world was just completely shut off from possibility. And so just to, just to,

to ground things. You said you're seeing an 11% improvement. So that's after how much time. And then also just remind me, how much were we seeing those scores sliding up until now? Yeah. So at the middle school level, math scores drop three to four times how much literacy score drops. So you don't hear Americans walking around saying, I can't read. But you have a mass epidemic of people walking around saying, like, I don't know how to calculate the tip. That's a percent. Right. And that's a great six standard. And so I say that because, yes, it's been under like real duress for quite some time. And so an 11% increase for a first generation deeper technology product is pretty unprecedented, which is why our research partner was so excited. We're now putting in a larger,

full-year study. You asked about the time of the study. This was studied from September through March. Teachers implemented multiple units, linear function, systems, and exponential functions. So now what we want to do is though this was technically a year-long study, we want to actually get more methodical about it and do a full year-round study where teachers do every single module and we do the end of year proficiency test, whereas in this one we were doing unit-wise proficiency tests where we would test exponential functions, linear functions, which is over course of a seven-week unit study. Well, I mean, I agree with you.

I'd love to see the data for a year, but one of the reasons I was asking that is because it's pretty incredible that you're seeing that level of gain in that short period of time. So it sounds like you're focused on math, current. But I'd love to get an understanding of whether you do think this can extrapolate to other fields or if you do think that the spatial nature of VR is uniquely suited to adapt to math and maybe some forms of science. So all of biology, chemistry, physics, it's the same idea, Stephanie. You experience something in the world. And then through a problem that you believe is important to solve, where if we solve it, the value will accrue to the public and communities and human beings stand to benefit, you learn math and science. you experience something, and then you methodize and model it.

So it's the same pedagogy. We've gotten a lot of requests from our schools for the humanities. So we are starting productions for English and the social sciences. So, for example, so much of creative writing and essays, like we've been doing a lot of prototyping around putting kids on a colony in Mars. They've never been. They don't know what that feels like. They don't know what that looks like.

And they come out and they write because now your imagination has opened up. For the social sciences, it feels a bit more obvious, like really taking folks to the seat of these key moments in history and learning about the perspective. and the series of events that happened. And again, those visceral, visual remembrances are so powerful versus, like, dates and terms that you very, very quickly forget, which is why across the subject matter, not just in math, there's a lot of reteaching that happens. So what's happening is we have a very inefficient educational system because kids are constantly reviewing and relearning what they learned two weeks ago. Yeah. And that is what prisms is trying to diminish.

I always joke, algebra one is going to go from a year-long course to a two-month course. because it's just stuck with so much inefficiencies right now, more worksheets and more drill and kill. The drill and kill, you're not going to need to do as much if you get what a linear function is. If you actually understand it. Oh my gosh, this conversation is just reminding me of my education. I think back to literally the calculus test that I would have

and, you know, the things that you're explaining that I'm imagining now in VR, like, you're swinging down a zip line and you're going at this speed. And that was described on a piece of paper, you know, in a paragraph. And then I had to draw out what was happening in this 2D plane with my pencil and paper. And so I guess what I'm getting at is that I think, and let me know if you disagree, like the idea of what we were doing in the past pen and paper is just going to seem so outdated. It's going to seem almost silly to a degree that we didn't extrapolate that to the 3D world now that we have it. Yeah.

You know, I taught a lot of students with IEPs and different disabilities when I was a teacher. And I would look at some of these IPs. And it would say things like, well, the student needs to be. visualize. And I would be like, that kid and everybody else. The student needs to, they have ADHD, needs to move around. No, people need to move. We haven't evolved out of moving. So where my mind went to when you were talking was things that have been handicaps, things that people have kind of internalized. It's like, this is a problem with me. We're going to now normalize those. And opening up all these modalities, yes, there are still some people that learn through paper

pencil. But let me tell you, it's not the vast majority. It's about 10 to 12 percent of the population. I learned tradition that I was fine. But I am not the majority. majority of our students are not doing well. The health of math class is not good. My creatives, my athletes, people that look at the world in a fundamentally different way, using their senses, they've been shut out. So what this is going to do is just create an amazing kind of access point for more people as we open up the modalities. Amazing. It feels like there are probably many problems to be solved, jobs to be done within the education space overall.

And since you only have so much time, you're building this company as a solo founder. I'd just love to hear if there are any other gaps that you see that you'd love to see other founders address or tackle, whether it has to do with spatial computing or otherwise. Yeah, I think that it's something that already numerous founders are working on. The jury's out on exactly kind of how those technologies will land. But the biggest area for focus for us in the next chapter is going to be the use of AI. So right now our characters in our environment, you have characters you're interacting, they're not intelligent. And so the way that it works is we have an authored system. So whenever kids get stuck, they're able to go get help.

There is a feedback mechanism for teachers, but the real kind of powerful end game for educational technologies is being able to not just be in spatialized environments, but have the right intelligence for students to get feedback and support at critical moments of struggle. We began to kind of work with numerous GPT integrations, and we fast realized that when you're not thoughtful about the cognitive framework that sits upon that and get to what is a root, like when kids struggle, they don't just need to get the answer on something. they're struggling because they have a lack of confidence. And the emotional support that AI needs to provide is kind of at the heart of whether

AI is going to be effective in education or not. And every great teacher knows that it's not access to knowledge that kids are missing. It's access to experiences, confidence, mindset, and belief in themselves. And until AI can solve that more human problem, I just don't think you're going to see the kind of impact that we want to see. And so I think that's like probably one of the biggest open questions in at Tech today is a utilization of AI in a human. main and meaningful way. And so if I wasn't doing this, I'd be doing that. That's what you'd be

focused on. But just FYI, I'm going to build that next to the part of the Prisms world. So excited to see what happens next with Prisms. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Thank you for joining us. All right. If you made it this far, thank you so much for listening. And we really hope this gives you a glimpse of two areas where VR is not some imaginary hypothetical technology. Instead, it's one that's already impacting very real world applications in fitness and education. And if you have other examples of where mixed reality is really shaking things up, let us know at Podpitches at A16Z.com. Plus, if you haven't already, don't forget to check out our YouTube channel

where you can see Paul and I's interview in full, in VR, plus my attempt to dunk. As always, thank you so much for listening, and we'll see you next time.