Video Gamers Podcast - The Future of Mixed Reality: with Mixrift CEO Bobby Voicu - Gaming Podcast

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

Gaming host John sits down with serial entrepreneur Bobby Voicu, CEO and founder of MixRift, one of Europe’s most exciting MR (mixed reality) gaming startups. They dive into why virtual and mixed reality still haven’t gone mainstream, what makes casual MR video games a smart bet, and how new tech might revolutionize accessibility, therapy, and the future of play. From why VR gaming still isn’t in every home, to whether we’re anywhere close to “full-dive” immersion, it’s a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at building the future of interactive video games. All the gaming insight you need, each and every week from the Video Gamers Podcast! FOLLOW MixRift: Website - https://www.mixrift.com/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/mixriftgames/?hl=en Thanks to our MYTHIC Supporters: Redletter, Disratory, Ol’ Jake, Gaius, and Phelps Connect with the show: Support us on Patreon: patreon.com/videogamerspod Join our Gaming Community: https://discord.gg/Dsx2rgEEbz Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/videogamerspod/  Follow us on X: https://twitter.com/VideoGamersPod  Subscribe to us on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@VideoGamersPod?sub_confirmation=1    Visit us on the web:https://videogamerspod.com/ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Grouchy. I hate the radio. Quiet. There's something important to tell you. I have no idea what he just said. And smurf-est. That's how it's done, boys! Smurfs. Hello fellow gamers and welcome to the Video Gamers Podcast. Movies like The Matrix and Ready Player One have long promised full immersive virtual reality. And although there have been some great advances in technology, we still seem to be far away from the greater population adopting the use of VR and mixed reality.

Today we are going to talk to a company who is looking to bridge that gap and get us all closer to the next level of human machine interface and game. But first, some introductions are in order. I am your host, John, and joining me today, we have a veteran entrepreneur, Bobby Voicu, which I hopefully pronounced that correctly, the driving force behind a company called Mixed Rift, which is Europe's most exciting mixed reality startup. Bobby, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me, Joe. Thank you for having

me. It's actually pretty exciting to talk about everything you told me. Well, and it's very timely for us. We had a little bit of preamble before the show started here, but we had just done an episode on AI and its influence in gaming. And I feel like there's a lot of parallels between VR and mixed reality and AI. And I'm assuming this is going to integrate somewhere into your delivery of product as well. But right out of the gate, Bobby, I got to ask you, why do you think VR isn't everywhere yet? Let me ask you, why do you think VR isn't everywhere yet?

Let me ask you something else. Why do you think flying cars aren't everywhere yet? Well, I think with flying cars, there's a lot of practical considerations like infrastructure in the airways and then also safety. You would have to make the product very safe to be, I mean, people would physically be in danger. What I'm trying to say is that we've had

flying cars and literature for what, 200 years or something like that. And we have like full VR in literature. I mean, Ready Player One was maybe 80s, early 90s, the book, I'm saying, not the movie. So most, we have like 30, 40 years of dreaming about the technology until we get there. So if we're looking at the consideration, I mean, I understand the differences between having a flying car and VR, but on the other hand, the writers will always dream of technology long time before it appeared. Like it is the way it is. Now, trying not to do a cop out and not answer your question.

I feel that- We will accept no cop outs, sir. Yeah, yeah. I feel that we're actually, it may be a contrarian opinion, but I don't think we're ever gonna get like deep VR have like deep VR in as a mainstream consumer product, let's say. Really interesting. What do you think the limiting factor is?

So just full transparency, I am the type of person that would love that opportunity. Like I would love the opportunity to be able to completely plug in and immerse in a alternate reality that's indistinguishable from this. And I feel like, you know, just where I've seen AI as a consumer, where I've seen AI come and where it is today, VR, where it's come from, and you know, bro, I played Virtual Boy on Nintendo where it was just all red and gave you headaches

like 30 years ago. And now I can get little headsets at home that do a pretty darn good convincing job of immersion. I thought this maybe was just a few years over the horizon. I would love to hear why you think it's maybe not a possibility. I'm not saying it's not a possibility. I'm not seeing it becoming a mainstream product. We will probably have something like that. But at least the way I see things, I may be wrong.

And I'm going to tell you what are the signs that I see that might make my assumption wrong? But I feel that at least for now, people are not necessarily looking to escape their reality, maybe to improve their reality, not so much escape their reality, you know? And the other thing is, I feel that there's a reason, and I'm going to compare a little bit, I'm going to go on a tangent a little bit between mobile gaming and PC gaming or even console gaming. So console gaming, it requires an effort from you to carve some time in your life to go and play a console game. You need to go in front of the computer, you need to stay on the couch, you need to two billion people playing games on

mobile phones. Mobile. Rather than on console. The experience is easier. It becomes and it can be integrated into your life in the spots where there's space for it. When you're on the train, or on the bus, waiting for 15 minutes at the doctor, right? I mean, I'm a gamer. I've been a gamer all my life. I don't know a moment in my life where I didn't play video games, because I played my first video games when I was five, five and a half on

Spectrums or clones. I'm from Romania so basically we had Russian or Eastern European clones. Russian clones of like a Nintendo or yeah. Yeah, no, for Spectrums. I didn't see a clone of a Nintendo until after the fall of communism. So when I was 12 then so basically I got like seven, eight years there. So I'm a gamer. I've always been a gamer. I have, I mean just looking here, I have a PC just for gaming. I have a Legion Go there. I have a Legion Go there, I have a MetaQuest there, I have a Vision Pro there, you know. So just, obviously I have the Mac, which on which by the way, I play a lot of games through Nvidia GeForce, GeForce Now. So I play a lot.

I... I love that, by the way. I mean, the fact that a project like this is coming from somebody who's like a fan first and an entrepreneur second means a lot to me. I've played my whole life and I don't see myself saying, look, yeah, as an experiment or from time to time, sure. But I don't see the mass of players saying, oh, I'm gonna put aside two, three, four hours to play a game through a system

that takes me completely out of my life. So- You know, you have a good point there. I think that even if you just follow like the way that people consume media in general, it's not just games, but like if you look follow the way that people consume media in general, it's not just games, but if you look at social media, so we produce shorts out of these longer form interviews that we do, and there is a sharp cutoff in viewership if a clip is under 30 seconds,

under one minute, and over a minute. Under 30 seconds, usually really really high engagement high viewership under a minute still pretty high but the difference between 59 seconds and 61 seconds is astronomical and So I totally understand what you're saying mobile gaming people can pick it up They pay the attention to their phone for a couple of seconds at a time and they put it down They it takes very little effort to engage, boot up, shut down, et cetera. And it's far more to get ready and put your headset on and deep

dive into something. But I wanted to ask you about that directly, is that I am seeing further integrations into wearables, for instance. So like Google Lens, like the glasses that have heads up displays, for the lack of a better word, built into them, where you could adapt that into sort of short form gaming. Is that something that you see? These are two different things, because I'm betting the entire mixrift is built on the bet that the most consumption products for this will be glasses,

in a form or another. But again, why don't we have the Ready Player One experience? This is where we started from, and this is why I think we're not gonna have that. On the other hand, having a form of XR, let's call it, right? Having a form of AR, MR, VR, through glasses, which will become a mass consumption product. Yeah, I believe I'm betting the company on this. This is why I entered the space because so let me, let me give you a little bit of a context here and maybe if I'm going too fast, too quick,

let me know. But I'm dumb. I'll let you know. Yeah. So, so the thing is, if I ask you, what is the biggest gaming platform in the world? Well, I mean, based on this conversation, I'd have to say mobile or something. But the thing is, most people usually think of PlayStation, maybe Xbox, Nintendo Switch.

Or a PC or something like that, yeah. The thing is, the biggest gaming platforms in the world are in order, mobile and then PC gaming, and then consoles. So the biggest gaming platforms in the world are actually computing platforms. They're not dedicated gaming platforms. And it's my belief that the third computing platform is going to be some kind of mixed reality spatial computing device, which will probably take the form

of glasses at some point. And I feel that that's when we're going to get a mass consumption product where we're gonna be able to do immersive experiences but they're not gonna be fully immersive. I don't think, I don't, I think you're gonna have immersive experience, you're gonna put your glasses and all of a sudden a dragon will jump on your table and then you're going to start playing with it in some form or another. And I think that that will happen and you will decide if you want to be, if you want to have pass through and see the environment, if you want to have

full VR because whatever reason you have for that. But I don't think you're going to go so ready player one at any point. I'm not saying we're not gonna have the technology, I think we will at some point, but it's not gonna be a mass consumption product. On the other hand, and this is where I may be wrong, what we've noticed, and you can see in games like Gorilla Tag, Animal Company on VR, the alpha generation of players, like kids up to maybe 15 years of age, they're using these games as social experiences

more than actually the gaming experience. If we're going that way, this may become maybe that metaverse that Zuckerberg is talking about. It may be so this new generation of players that finds it more comfortable to meet in virtual environments and have fun there and be social there rather than in real life for whatever reason that happens, they may change that and they may create the opportunity for such a product to become more mass consumption in the future. I don't see it right now, though. This is something that I'm not seeing right now.

Yeah, that's fair enough. I have to thank you again for your time here. It's so cool to talk to people who are actually industry experts on this, people who are putting literally their money where their mouth is and you know, staking their reputation on on things like this. So I that brings up a few questions for me. You mentioned that this is a a path to mass adoption might be through this sort of social experience. So MixRift, I did quite a bit of studying on your company. The niche that it looks like you're primarily focusing on

is, I don't wanna say if mapping is the correct word, but imposing virtual elements or gaming elements onto, into reality. So less VR, more augmented reality, mixed reality. Is that correct? Yeah, yeah. And so if what we're talking about is perhaps a, you know, path to mass adoption is the social experience.

Well, if kids who are using this as a social experience have different like physical homes that they're operating out of, how are you able to integrate those two concepts? Like, how are you able to take kids who, you know, kid one might live in a mansion, kid two might live in an apartment and have them engage in this social experience where they're both shooting zombies or building something or whatever the case is. This is something we're learning. So first of all, MixRift as a company

is built around fast prototyping and learning as quickly as possible. And because the space is so new, we don't really know what the native experience will be in a few years from now. I mean, if you think about it, the only native thing that I can think of in VRMR, in XR in general, is the movement mechanic in Gorilla Tag, which is basically it's native to the environment. You cannot do the same type of movement with controllers and moving your hands on a

mobile phone or on a PC or a console or something like that. So in my opinion, so Mixed Rift is built around, let's test a lot of different assumptions and see what works. And this is kind of the reason why we also have what is fundamentally simple game mechanics, because we need to be able to test things quite fast. If you're trying to build a story-driven game where you need a lot of environments, a lot of things to tell a story, and it takes you two or three years, your speed of learning and adoption is pretty slow. So basically, by doing this, we're learning of things that may work or not.

And to answer specifically your question, we were at some point, we were testing a prototype where you basically break out the game Arkanoid, where you have bricks and you break them. And we had a game where you're playing with somebody else, each in your own room, right? And you basically fight with basketball balls, which you throw to the other room and you're protecting your wall where you have the bricks from the other person. And in order for us to be able to do that, you were fundamentally as a player,

you were able to map your own room. So no matter how basically how big or small the room was, you had the possibility of mapping that. So it didn't matter that you lived in a big deposit, let's say like a warehouse, where you had a lot of space. You could map it for a smaller space and just play it that way. There's still things that we're learning there.

So I have to say, I admire this business model so much. I come from a business background as well. I'm an entrepreneur, but in a totally different space. We did home services and heating and air conditioning. There's a concept that's worked really well for us, which was try a lot of things and keep what works. And I think what has been a big, probably sink for VR especially, is that this new technology came out

and as software was being developed, lots and lots of money went to develop these games, these experiences without really understanding what people were going to gravitate towards. And so you have these, you have these, you know, masterful experiences, masterful VR experiences like Half-Life Alex, which is, you know, arguably, probably not even arguably, I think most the consensus is that's probably the best VR experience that exists. And then you have other

examples like there's a game that came out recently called The Midnight Walk, which you could immediately tell that the production costs on this were astronomically high. They made claymation puppets of everything and all of this in. Yeah, they made all these physical assets, which they then had to scan in and animate. And you could tell that this was designed to be a VR experience. But I think the fact that somebody probably did projections

and said, hey guys, we're not gonna make a return on investment unless we go console. And so they went broad console and it's just, for me was a very hollow experience playing it that way without VR. And so you end up with a game that's like kind of not either. It's like not VR or like a console ready game. So I think if I could paraphrase,

Mixed Rift's strategy is to create fun, engaging, lower cost, lower risk experiences that not only provide value to your customers, but also help you learn about what may be more solvent, more, you know, a safer, I shouldn't say safer, but a more solvent future for more immersive experiences. Is that kind of more or less what you're going for? It's pretty great. It's pretty good. I'm going to ask, I'm going to look at the video after that and I'm going to take this

to define our company's ethos after that. But there's also something else in the mix here. I think if we make a parallel with mobile gaming, I think this XR gaming experience right now is like a few years before the iPhone. So right now, even let's say we learn how to do one thing and it's really good and it works and all of a sudden the hardware changes. We don't know like the iPhone what it did, it basically standardized the hardware. You know, you have a glass screen where you can put things on the iPhone.

You have touchscreen controllers and basically you can go from there. Everybody followed the first iPhone. You know, until then you had like things like Nokia Engage. I don't know if you remember that Nokia phone that was made like in the shape of a controller, which was thought of being a gaming device and stuff like that. Or the sidekick. Yeah. Several similar sort of devices. So you had this experience and all of a sudden the iPhone comes in 2007.

Then in 2008, you have the App Store, then in 2009 or 2010 you have in-app purchases, and all of a sudden what gaming meant all of a sudden changed. So I feel that right now us going against a specific experience would be... We would have to forget something like Meta Orion prototype. You know, like you have all of a sudden you have mixed reality glasses. We don't see them as devices in the market yet, but we've seen the prototypes last year at Metaconnect, or you can see input devices. Like at the same event last year, they showed those bracelets,

which they basically, they could read whatever happens here and they could understand your fingers. Yeah, not only that, but they could understand, like they would see you did do that and that's scrolling. Oh wow, interesting. So yeah, so you could like the vision pro has all those things, all those cameras that see your hands even if you're keeping them down. But those bracelets can, you can keep your hands in the back or in the pocket and do things on your devices,

on your glasses. So all of a sudden, you don't need those expensive cameras, you don't need a lot of processing power, you don't need all of this. So if you have an experience that's only for controllers, all of a sudden you're missing on all this user interface experience, because you're building a game for three years from now. And we as a company, we're a small company, we're eight people, we can't afford that. We just can't afford that. can't afford that. We just can't afford that.

I know. Yeah, that that is such an interesting take. You know, what that all I see from that is people who are already like ADD by nature sitting in in conferences and meetings, like what their glasses on and their hands under the table playing Galaga while like while the conference is going on. So you mentioned this is a small company. I'm so curious. What's the origin story here? How did you get, how did you start this up? I mean, I know you're a serial entrepreneur, but like why, what gap did you see in the market? Why'd you start this thing?

So I'm going to go a little bit earlier than this. So in 2012, I started another gaming company. In 2010, I realized I want to create games. I was an online entrepreneur, I had an online and a crazy person. You're a crazy person is what you're saying. It didn't seem crazy at the time. That's what a crazy person would say. Yeah, probably. So yeah, true. But look, it actually made a lot of sense.

We, me and my cousin, we had a car blog, which was pretty big. It was like recognized by Forbes as one of the biggest top 10 car blogs in the world. And we were having a problem monetizing the game, the site. I mean ads and stuff. But we are, and I, it was the age of text based strategy games, like Mafia Wars or stuff like that. Right. So, so I looked at this and I said, why don't we combine Need for Speed and Mafia Wars and we make a text-based racing game. That's so cool. So we made the prototype and actually we used Twitter so you could only find opponents with

Twitter at the time. It was quite interesting. I didn't realize the time. It was quite interesting. I didn't realize the potential. Now with the experience I have now, I would have made that thing really, really big, I think. But I didn't realize it. So then I went to another component, which was a little bit more graphical. You could like remember in Need for Speed when you can go to your garage and change like the decals on the car and the colors and stuff. So I wanted to do that and I hired a small two people team to do that for me. I'm not a developer, I used to develop but I'm not that good. They came, we tried to do that, it didn't work. And then at some point,

and you know, a lot of serendipity happening, we got invited to a startup accelerator in Dublin. And I got there with these two guys, we created a company called Maven Hut, and we started to do, we started to bring classic games to the social world. So basically we took Solitaire at that point. It was our first game and we made it one versus one. And we built a company on the back of that game,

started in 2012. We built a company of about 40 people at some point, 40 million downloads across Facebook, Canvas and mobile. We sold the company in 2016. In 2015, we got the money in 2016. Was selling the company a happy day for you or a sad day? It's it's it's difficult to say it was a happy day in terms of financials. It was a sad day because I realized after that, this is your baby. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But on the other hand, it was life changing, life changing money. It was, yeah. I mean, whenever I experienced selling my company to it was, you know, financially a great windfall,

but there was like, oh my, this has been my, my, my passion project for the last decade. And oh, gosh, hopefully they take care of it. And I'm looking back. It's also something else. Oh gosh, hopefully they take care of it. I'm looking back, it's also something else. We sold right before the explosion of mobile. So it's like the cost of opportunity feels bigger. So look, there's a company called Peak in Turkey that sold to Zynga for 1.5 billion at some point to Zynga. I think so.

When we sold, I think our games and our audience was bigger than them because they were quite, we were an Irish company, but the main development office was in Romania. They were in Istanbul. We were following what they were doing. I'm not saying that we would have done the same thing, but probably a little bit better than it was. Yeah, but you could just as easily say the opposite could happen. I mean, you'll drive yourself nuts thinking about that way as an entrepreneur.

But you know, you're an entrepreneur. You're always, I mean, as an entrepreneur, you would never start the company if you wouldn't think that would never start the company if you wouldn't think that you're the one that's biased. For sure. And I, again, I have to say that I admire somebody with this mindset taking on this sort of challenge that you are in mixed reality is that I think for a company to be successful,

you have to have somebody driving it that is able to briefly celebrate the wins, but be mostly concerned about, man, I could have done this 5% better. I could have done this 10, whatever I did yesterday isn't good enough. I'm gonna do better tomorrow. And like, it's terrible.

It's terrible to live with, honestly, but it's like, it's just this It's terrible to live with, honestly, but but it's like, it's just this hole inside of you that you can never fill. One of my investors, one of my investors, whenever we meet, he's like, so how's everything going? And I'm like, Yeah, well, I'm pissed that this doesn't work. And this doesn't work. And he's like, but things going well. And I'm like, yeah, they're going well, but look, this is what I'm focused on. I mean, and he's like, you're always pissed. This is something.

So let me go in back to the story and bring it into mixture. So basically when we sold the company, we had some people hired as obviously and two of the guys that we brought in, as one of them was, I think, the third employee, and another became, at some point, the CTO of the company, we kept in touch.

And in 2023, at the end of the year, after MetaQuest 3 Meta Quest 3 launched, he sent me a message and said, you need to check the Quest 3. And I said, I hate VR, I always get motion sickness, I'm not gonna do it. Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that too. Yeah, I get motion sickness, it is the way it is.

And he said, yeah, but try it because it has passed through and mixed reality, so you should test it. And then I got it. I put it on. There's a game, a default game on the MetaQuest called the First Encounters. And the first time I've seen, I was in my office, in my own room, sitting on my own chair and all of a sudden my ceiling cracked and a piece of the ceiling dropped at my legs

and I jumped back because of that. And that's when I had basically my second big epiphany. The first one was seeing the browser on the iPhone, the first time. This was the second one. And I said, this is it. Yeah, and I sent a message to him back and I said, this is interesting. Let me think a little bit about it.

Initially, I said, look, I would finance you if you I would help you raise some money if you want to do it. But after a week of understanding what it is, I was like, yeah, we're going to do this together. Let's get Andre, which is our which is our CTO. Let's get him in. And it was interesting because I entered the call with the CTO and I said, man, do you know anything about VR mixed reality? And he like extends his hand to the left and he brings a Quest 3 in front of me saying,

for the last two weeks I've been trying to understand what I can do with this thing. With this thing. So good. with this thing. And I'm like, yeah. And like three weeks later, we started the company. I went to, because I had the experience of selling a gaming company,

I basically went to my previous connections in terms of investors or potential investors. And by the end of February, basically we had the investment. We had the deal, the handshake deal, and it took us another three months to get the money in, but we had the deal in place. So yeah you know, we talked about these experiences that are sort of easier to access. They're more impulsive, like they're more impulsive, casual, easier to access, easier to pick up, put down lower commitment. And we had that experience from the previous company, just to be clear. Okay, so it was built on a foundation of something that you had already been doing.

Yeah, we've been doing this prototype learning thing in the previous company. And because all three of us, the founders of Mixed Rip, worked together in the previous company, it made sense for us. So with that background then, I mean, it's great, obviously, that you're working with partners that you worked with before. Partnership is so important in an endeavor like this. Where did you guys land on,

like, how do we start? How do we pilot this thing? Like, what was the first, the game that you were, you know, looking to sort of launch to get a proof of concept? This is basically David's, my, one of my co-founders, uh, part. So I'm on the business side of things. He's more product and Andre is more the technical guy.

So basically he, it's interesting because when he got the first, uh, headset, he was telling me that the first three nights he didn't sleep thinking of what he could do. So in my opinion it was a combination of what we can do, what can be fun and what would be interesting to do. So this is how we got to the concept for Hellhorde. You know and it's funny because it started from those fake ads on on the mobile games it started from those fake ads on the mobile games, you know, those fake ads with words coming, you know? And then when you get in there, it's Candy Crush.

Yeah, or something, yeah. And he said, I would like to make that game for mixed reality and see how it works. And it worked much better than we expected, frankly. Yeah, so like, if you were to ask me, you know somebody who was not in in your space You know other than as a fan and as a consumer What type of? Product I would launch something like this. It would be very close to hell horde, you know something that is sort of like

engaging action packs, you know, there's is sort of like engaging, action packed, you know, there's kind of like a horror, scary element to it. And you don't need to learn the mechanics, which is really important. Right. It's intuitive. My wife and I actually talk about this all the time. She's got a huge barrier of entry for most games in that like it takes time to, to really feel comfortable with the controller or certainly gaming

with the keyboard and mouse. That's something that Nintendo has historically done really well with their like party games is it's like, it's easy to figure out what you're supposed to do. And your games, your platform seems to be built on a similar concept where it's like, you don't need to learn this complex matrix of controls and hotkeys and stuff like you you know how to play this yeah intuitively yeah you know look hell horde stretch your hands forward and press some buttons

like a gun you've seen it in the movies if you've never had handled a gun battle or is the slingshot experience, basically. It's the pool experience. You pull something, you release it, it goes forward. It's just that simple. You don't need to relearn mechanics. You don't need to understand how to get into the game. It's just there.

The moment you put your headset, you launch the game, you go and also from the moment you launch the game to the moment you're playing, the distance is so small. You basically press one, maybe two buttons and you're in the game. You're feeling the experience, that's it. Yeah, which is what you need. I wanna tie a couple of concepts together for you.

So clearly MixRift, or I should say, apparently, I won't say clearly, it appears that what you're focused on primarily right now is gaming. You mentioned that you had had two sort of technological epiphanies. One was, of course,

this mixed reality experience that you had with the MetaQuest 3. then the other one was I think you said the iPhone? Browser. The browser and the iPhone. Yeah. So one of our community members, Jigglepuff, actually had a question that ties into this perfectly where he's asking why aren't we using stuff like this at work right now? Like with a headset or glasses or something along those lines, and that technology kind of exists already. You basically have like limitless,

easily accessible desktop space, and we have an interface that works. You mentioned that there's like, not only do you have just the sort of gesture based systems that already work, but now we've got these risks things that you were talking about that read your tendons or whatever. How far away are we from seeing this sort of technology at in a regular workplace? And is that something that MixRift is, you know, interested in pursuing?

Oh, first of all, we're not interested in this or gaming or on the other part of the question why we don't see it more in the working environment. I think we're starting to see if you looked at last year's report for Apple they said at some point that most vision pros were actually sold to companies. You know, so interesting. Yeah. So if you're looking at it, they, they had, because obviously,

unfortunately, I think, unfortunately, because I think it affected the space a lot, unfortunately, the device wasn't as successful as maybe they thought they would be, but so this is why in their last report, they're, they like underlined this adoption in the enterprise space. So they're saying something there. I was in the on learn how to weld with the MetaQuest, like courses for welding with the MetaQuest. Yes, we actually had similar in the HVAC space. There are technical programs where you learn how to diagnose and repair an air conditioner, for instance, with VR. Yeah, so we're

starting to see something there. I feel that's also, look, I mean this is an employer problem obviously, but when they can see your monitor, they can see if you're working or not as long as you're in the office. The moment I'm putting and giving you a headset, if I don't trust you at work, I'm not gonna trust to give you, I'm not gonna trust you to give you a headset where you can do whatever the hell you want. Obviously we're a mostly remote company.

I'm saying mostly because we have an office in Bucharest where they can, the team meets one day a week, right? Yeah, to collaborate, to get somebody to, yeah. To get to know each other. I obviously, if I don't trust the people in the team, it's like, yeah, well, what can you do? They have their headsets, they can do whatever they want. I feel, at least for me, the reason why I don't use a headset instead of the monitor

in front of me is that I feel that the resolution is not as good. Even on the Vision Pro. And also I have some problems with the ISO that probably is not the best. But even then I feel that the resolution is not as good. Yeah, and that's one of the more common complaints with VR interface as it stands right now. As you get that sort of like chicken coop effect where you're actually seeing the pixels. In gaming is not that important because you can mask it through the thing, but when I'm reading an email I want those letters to be as sharp as possible. And the other hand is, come on man, they're uncomfortable. I mean have you have you

used a vision pro for more than an hour an hour and a half you're gonna get it's heavy it's like I you need to go to the gym to basically increase your your neck muscles to be able to keep that head that thing on your head for more than two hours. Holland Kane and more are all taking part and you can watch every match for free on the zone starting on June 14th and Running until July 13 sign up now at the zone comm slash FIFA. That's da ZN comm slash FIFA Yeah, that's that's funny If you follow that to its logical and you're gonna you're gonna get a bunch of very like anemic looking dude with gigantic Yeah

That's what I have one more question for you. And then I'd like to get this back to gaming and mixed rift specifically, but one of our, one of our other members, this kind of follows along the same question with the workplace. Are you aware of this app Jake from our community asks, are you aware of any therapeutic or accessibility applications for mixed reality in like either physical therapy or mental health

or anything like that? Is any of that? I know they happen. We had, so one of our advisors came to me at some point and I said, look, I know this company that does games for like mental health and stuff like that. And they were curious about doing some things with us. Unfortunately, we're not a third party developer, so we don't develop things for other people. But it's obviously there's an interest there

but the biggest interest in my opinion and that's something I witnessed firsthand is In fitness in fitness so physical therapy and stuff like that from what I know what I found out fitness is one of the bigger categories on the meta quest. You know, this combination of gamified fitness. And I actually have a newsletter for XR gamers. And I asked people on that newsletter, first of all, I was curious about the age of the people who are using it. And there were a lot of older people, let more they're going to be used for something like that.

Because we've been testing a prototype where you know Whack-a-Mole, right? Oh, yeah. We've tested a prototype where you can, if you look on my LinkedIn account, actually, I put a video of it, where you have the moles coming up from your real walls and you jump and you hit them in different things. And it can become like a fitness program where you basically do a little bit of jumping, a little bit of stepping down, you know, like it can be a light session of fitness. Cardio, yeah. Yeah. Right. And I think as you were sort of mentioning before, the more that items like, you know, the glasses, that kind of thing,

standard wearables that have these features built into them. You'll be, you'll probably see quite a large uptick in this sort of gamified fitness where people go, look, it's casual. I happen to be waiting at the bus stop. There's nobody around. I got 20 minutes. Let's get a little gaming workout in. Yeah. And also because, and this is, because it's mixed reality, you're not worried you're gonna hit something in your room.

Because you're seeing what's in your room. Unless you want to. Well. I mean. I mean. I mean, what can I say? But yeah, you're not gonna hit your dog. Look, I can't imagine your ever,

or your child going to hit your dog. Look, I can't imagine your ever or your, or your child going around. I never don't put, don't put thoughts into people's head, bro. I can't imagine that. Look, I have a small dog and it's actually because at some point he saw me playing the, the, the breakout prototype. I, I told you about. And basically because I was doing this weird movements, he started barking and basically coming at me

because he didn't know what would happen. And I don't want to hit him by mistake when I was doing that thing. So I'm happy I could see that he was barking, stopping and saying, hey, what's up and whatever So so I feel that yeah, we're gonna see More usage but again, it was so early in in these devices even if we've had a version of Virtual reality devices for the last I don't 20, 25 years or something like that.

I think we're still early in the life of what these immersive devices can offer for us in the next 10, 15, 20 years from now. So bringing things back to the present then and your current opportunity, what is MixRift doing right now that you're particularly excited about? I'm actually pretty excited about the social element of it. It's something that we learned by doing.

We realized how important the social element allowing the players to interact with each other outside of the game space. Like again, going back to Gorilla Tag, if you enter the game, you'll see that most people don't necessarily play the game. They're just there hanging out, talking. Yeah. Yeah, sort of like Roblox in that kind of way. It's the same generation of players in Roblox, probably in Roblox even a little bit older, but it's kind of the same generation that's looking for,

you know the concept of third space? That the first space is your home, the second space is your home. The second space is your work or school and the third space, which is a some, some kind of a social and mental problem, you know, that that that third space that used to be the shopping mall or a coffee shop or whatever based on the based on based on your age. Yeah, I don't I don't want to see 12 year old kid

hanging around in a pub for too long. So. Maybe it's probably good. So I feel that these kinds of experience can become that third space more than they can be on a PC or on a mobile phone, it's even less than that. Because you have your own avatar, you can address it the way you want, it shows more of you because it is more of you.

Because you move your hands and the avatar moves their hands. You move your head, the avatar moves their head. So it's more of an extension of you. I'm not, look, I don't want, I'm not a futurologist or a psychologist to say what that will happen, what that will mean for the future generations. But I feel that we're going that way, nevertheless. Yeah, and we spoke to a author slash psychologist recently by the name of Jamie Madigan, who he's written several books, but he specializes in sort of the psychology of gaming.

And he, you know, I'm paraphrasing here, but he mentioned that game-related relationships or relationships that are either founded in or fostered by gaming are no less valid than experiences in real life. They're just different in some fundamental ways, some which are really positive actually, in that like, so as you mentioned before, there's sort of a casual element to it not everyone has time to go drive down to the Coffee shop or the playground or the park or whatever everyone Presumably would have it a far more convenient time popping on their glasses and engaging in this virtual shared space

so there's a convenience factor and then also there is this concept that there's a very low barrier of entry to engage in conversation, you know, and also a very low barrier of exit. So these are friendships that can be based around this shared interest in this virtual space, whatever this space is, and you can very easily potentially strike up conversations that lead into something more meaningful. Or if those aren't great relationships right out of the bay, you know, you just leave the forum and you join another one and join another lobby and meet some other people. So to do things about us, if I can, if I First of all, the relationships don't have the social signals of how much money you have,

how you look and stuff like that. So it makes them a little bit frictionless, more frictionless. And the other thing is we've seen that happen during COVID. You know, all of a sudden, you know, all those games like, oh, man, I have, so obviously, Call of Duty Warzone that exploded because of that. And then it's all the game on Nintendo with the islands. Yes, Animal Crossing. Animal Crossing, man. All of a sudden, you have all these experiences, especially like on Call of Duty,

obviously it's a common shared experience with your friends and everything, but in Animal Crossing, where people would go on somebody else's island and have an experience that's basically an experience that they couldn't have in real life, not only because maybe that person is on another continent, but you weren't allowed to get out of the house. Yep, and it's interesting

because the type of activities that you're in, it comes all back to this this social engagement thing that you were talking about with roblox and with gorilla tag where it's like That the main purpose of this is for people to be able to get together and there are gamified elements But this is just a great way for people to be able to connect, which ultimately is one of the finest virtues of being a human to begin with. And it's so cool to talk to somebody who is in the industry of making that a reality, a more accessible reality for people.

Very cool. Let's hope we help it in the right way and in the right direction. Okay. So, Bobby, we are getting a little long here. I wanted to ask you a few quick rapid fire questions here. So number one, what is your favorite gaming franchise of all time? I thought about it a little bit. so I don't play sports games. So all of a sudden we remove all the FIFA's, Madden and whatever couple games. Yeah, NBA or whatever.

I think I love Uncharted. Great games. Yeah, great games. And if you think I have more dual experience with it, but I feel that Assassin's Creed is actually quite an interesting franchise. And I mean, I know people love to hate Ubisoft and everything, but I feel that Assassin's Creed and if you think about it, the Prince of Persia games, which were basically the precursors of this, I feel that I had a lot of fun with those games.

So these are my favorites basically. Yeah, and I think that what the Assassin's Creed games do extremely well is they give you the opportunity to live. It's almost like the holodeck principle in Star Trek where you've got an avatar of yourself and now you can experience what it may be like to, you know, be in whatever, Victorian England or feudal Japan or whatever the cases. And there's a quite a, quite a bit of interactivity and wonderful world building at a minimum. You have to be able to, you have to give those games that, that,

that I love, look, I love, I love sailing. I, I, I, I'm going sailing from time to time around Greece and I love Odyssey. Like, it's one of the only games I've platinumed because I love that and the world building. And by the way, talking about VR, I wanted to experience Assassin's Creed Nexus. I wanted to experience the move of killing somebody with a hidden blade. Unfortunately, after an hour I got motion sickness and I had to stop. But actually that was an interesting experience for a fan of the franchise.

Yeah. So that's actually a perfect segue into the next question that I was going to ask you is one of the prevailing concerns that I've heard with VR, of course, is this motion sickness. We've got one of the other hosts on this show, Ryan, is that dude, he is a man's man. The guy is built like a tank. He is an MMA fighter. He is a hunter. He smokes meat for a living.

He works with his hands. He is a man's man. And he has a hard time with VR experiences because he gets motion sickness. He can't fish because he gets seasickness. Is something that Mixed Rift is working on, or I should say is one of the things that you find to be a positive virtue of this

mixed reality, augmented reality slant that there is a reduced incidence of seasickness, motion sickness. I don't know anybody that has seasickness from mixed reality. Even people that normally get seasickness from, and by the way, I sail, but I get seasickness on a boat. So it's a love-hate relationship there.

Yeah, I know. So just so you get it, so you understand, I'm powering through a lot of the VR experiences because I know it from that. Because the love is just slightly stronger than the hate. Yeah, yeah, yeah, but at some point, trust me, the hate overtakes everything. But I've never heard of, genuinely, I've never heard of anybody saying that they

get motion sickness from, from any type of mixed reality, augmented reality type of experience where they can see their environment. That I've never heard of it. That in itself is a, is a huge selling point for me and for probably many of our listeners is that they can enjoy sort of the best of both worlds here. Bobby, one last question for you. I'm a very food focused individual. You mentioned you're Romanian. If I were to go to Romania and order authentic Romanian food, what is the best thing that I can order? And there's two things, two things. Okay.

Something called Mitch, which in translation would be little, which is kind of, um, something made with miss meat, but either is a specific combination, which is in Romania and that part of the world, I've seen it in other countries, a version of it. And another thing is kind of a minced meat with rice in cabbage rolls and eaten with cream, like the cream from the... Like a yogurt?

Yeah, and a Version a Romanian version of polenta that's I'm telling you these are the two things that whenever I don't live in Romania By the way, so whenever I go there in the first few days I go to restaurants to eat these two things because I miss them a lot and I can't find them in Most of the work. I love it. I'm gonna have to get you to send me They're kind of heavy but oh you're speaking my leg the heavier the better for me man, that's awesome Bobby dude. Thank you so much for joining us man. Thank you for inviting me. Oh, absolutely Where can people learn more about mixed rifts your journey and and follow follow this awesome

This awesome adventure you're on here. Look mixrift mixrift on mixrift.com On the quest store you can find hell horde, Fractured and Battle Orb, which are our games. Hellhorde and Battle Orb are free games within our purchases, so you can play for free. You can go there. Fractured is our only premium game, but it's not that expensive. You can play that as well. It's basically a puzzle game and also if you If you look for makes drift

Online basically you find all the information you want if you look for Bobby boy online you find my socials. So yeah Awesome, what we exist online Yes, you do we will include links in our episode description here so people can easily follow you, find you. And for anybody listening, firstly, thank you for taking the opportunity to listen to Video Gamers Podcast. We know you've got a lot of choices out there. Thank you for the time. If you've enjoyed this episode, please, please, please take a moment to follow us on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, wherever you're listening to us.

Leave us five stars. It goes such a long way for an independent show like us. And if you'd like to take your support a step further, we have a Patreon page that is also linked in our episode description. A lot of cool perks that come along with that, including unedited raw versions of these interviews so you can get the preamble and the postamble from me and Bobby talking more candidly about stuff going on here. That is going to do it for us this episode, everybody. Thank you very much for your time, and until next time, happy gaming.

Bye, guys. Happy gaming! Bye guys!