with Facebook and meta announcing new initiatives to integrate generative AI tools into its applications as well as layoffs within its metaverse teams it appears as if their interest in the metaverse is fading is it time to declare the metaverse dead and buried we'll explore this topic next on today in Tech today in Tech I'm Keith Shaw joining me on today's show are two experts on the happenings of the metaverse Dan Roberts is the editor-in-chief of decrypt.com and one of the hosts of its GM podcasts also joining me is make Mike Mason he's the global head of Technology at thoughtworks at canadian-based technology consultant C welcome gentlemen thanks for having me you already waved yeah all right uh let's just kind of just start us off here uh Dan is the metaverse dead yes or no it's not dead but I'm not convinced it was ever Fully Alive yet so can't be dead when it didn't yet get off the ground I think okay Mike what do you think is the metaverse dead yes or no I think it's not dead but it also depends on what you mean when you say the metaverse and that's part of the problem here yeah and I and I I will agree with that in terms of I think the umbrella term as metaverse which then turned into some sort of Big Blob of everybody wanted to jump in and use their technology for that it's it's you know that's probably going to go away as we focus on those individual Technologies uh Mike you wrote a blog post that discussed uh sort of the the three pillars of what maybe people are considering parts of the metaverse you you want to go over like those three categories because I think that'll help kind of frame what we mean when we talk about metaverse sure thing and I think a lot of people what they mean when they when they talk about metaverse is is they mean kind of the future of the internet and how things are going to evolve and it depends what your vision is for the future of the internet what you think might be in the metabus so the the first kind of metaverse is is what I'd call Zuckerberg's embodied internet so that's the Ready Player one uh you know everything's 3D High Fidelity immersive experiences uh avatars in your living room you know Holograms in your living room all that kind of kind of stuff that's the first one the next uh possible interpretation is the web 3's ownership economy uh where you've got an internet where anybody can transfer things of value to each other uh peer-to-peer transfers kind of crypto uh nfts all of that kind of underlying stuff and the thinking there is that really for people to get involved in these virtual words worlds there needs to be kind of a medium of Exchange in a a reason to to get involved in it and then the third competing uh vision for for The Meta versus what I would call the industrial metaverse so that's kind of commercial applications where you're doing things like digital twins You're Building you know a a virtual representation of your factory uh and then working on that in a virtual sense of of course lots of factories are automated these days and run by software and so if you're able to simulate all of that then potentially you can do useful work within uh you know a 3D simulated environment and then transfer that into the real world in that industrial context yeah and and Dan do you do you agree with sort of those three pillars or are there some others that that we might add to that definition yeah I think I think that's a useful um you know parsing but I also think I've heard people make the case that a number of things we already use technically are the metaverse you know when you're on social media you know you're you're living your life as your online identity and there's something appealing and alluring about that much simpler definition the idea that any place in which you are living as your online identity or Persona which we all have you know maybe you think I'm exactly the same on Twitter as I am in real life but even so especially in the crypto and web free world you know where where we exist and what we cover decrypt a lot of people are anons they're pseudonymous so any place that you are your online self even if it's not a visual Avatar the way we think you know Ready Player One technically maybe that's the metaverse um you know I recently uh hosted Neil Stevenson on our podcast who wrote snow crash and coined the term metaverse he basically said that as soon as someone talks about either multiple meta verses um or a metaverse as if well there's this metaverse and then there's this other metaverse he said that's when he knows that they don't know what they're talking about right and I'm not saying I necessarily agree but but it would be a lot simpler if we just agree there's one metaverse the way there is one internet right right we don't talk about multiple internets or unless we're making a joke calling that the interwebs um yes if you think back to if if you think back to how we got the internet it actually was the connection of networks it's the internet work of smaller networks right and I think that's that whole thing are we going to have one metaverse or competing metaverses part of this is also because there's so much money involved in you know potentially winning here right like so you've got meta you've got Google you've got Apple they're all looking to build something um and they they all are acting like it's kind of a winner take all scenario right and I think the internet is probably the last time the the you know the Geeks of the world gave all of humanity something uh you know without a price tag attached to it because now everybody knows how much money there is to be made right and so everybody's competing and kind of building these things that are almost like Walled Garden experiences they're looking to like own the next metaverse platform um looking to kind of kind of kind of win in that race personally I think it's going to be a little bit like we've seen with a mobile phone platforms like there's lots of them that sprung up but then things settle down to one or two major platforms and then of course you've got to talk about you know what's how do you do interoperability between metaverses I definitely don't want to one don't want to say that Neil Stevenson's wrong because I'm a huge fan of his and uh snow crash uh awesome book as I was growing up reading that yeah um but yeah I think I think in many ways we could have competing metabus yeah well and and the the idea of the money to be made is really fascinating to me because the jury's still out in a sense on whether there is a lot of money to be made you know we ran a headline that uh ended up being a pretty viral story months and months ago uh when things were kind of peaking and frothy and people were buying digital land and the headline was someone just paid 450 000 to be Snoop Dogg's neighbor in the metaverse so it was either in sandbox or decentraland one of those two you know blockchain-based metaverse worlds and I thought that looks like dumb money to me yeah you know is that is that really going to be valuable in 10 years maybe I'll be wrong well especially since there's like multiple multiple Virtual Worlds that you could do that in right you know virtual real estate it just it just and a big question is is that 450 actual thousand dollars of of real money or is that other tokens that somebody got from somewhere that appreciated and inflated over time in in what some people would would argue is a bit of a crypto scam uh you know what is that real money or not and and so that's that's part of the question the other thing is uh next to Snoop Dogg in a virtual world what does next to actually mean like are there going to be rules in the metaverse about how the physics of the place operate can I can I buy a tiny plot of land next to Snoop Dogg but you know make it like uh the Tardis in Doctor Who so when you go into it it's actually much bigger than than it first appeared to be what are the rules of these virtual spaces that will make an investment like that value and I'm picturing the Sims like if I'm Snoop I don't want some random person to just be able to come over all the time when I'm hanging in my metaverse house but you know even as we just discuss these things it just sounds kind of silly to me and I'm not saying that for the entire metaverse but I will say um I as it currently stands I'm not very interested in hanging out in these Realms you know so something's going to have to change you X wise dramatically to appeal to me to get me to either sign into one of these Realms or strap on the headphones whatever it is the goggles yeah I think a lot of people would say that that this is waiting for its Apple moment right like people keep saying when when are the Apple goggles coming out when are the Apple goggles coming out because every time Apple has moved into a a space they've released something that is that is new Innovative changes the rules around how you interact with that right like the the iPhone uh wasn't wasn't just an iPod and a browser slapped together it was it was something entirely new the Apple UI guidelines for how you write an app on iOS we're actually formative for anyone who is building any kind of app and so like I would argue the the one of the things that that we are waiting for and that will be significantly formative is when if and when an apple headset comes out and all of the associated guidance that they give without because they never produce something unless it's actually useful usable it's it's you know it's moving the Paradigm forward yeah do you think that the the metaverse in order to become you know instead of just wearing the goggles do you think that like it needs to feel more you know more like than just a game so do we need to have the haptics and the the feedbacks and maybe even smells and things like that or is that just you're just adding layers to something that that maybe people don't want anyway because they don't want to feel like they're trapped like in in snow crash for example like people started having full body suits and you know Ready Player One the guy had like you know all of the latest things or is it just that like people just don't want might not want to do that I mean we all remember second life right like that was kind of yeah and like it was cool for a while and then people started and then you're like well now you can fly and now you can have unicorn wings and I'll keep it safe for work but other things that that happened too that sort of just put the death knell on it I mean Keith these are the the key questions it's really about who are your constituents right it's Case by case some people who are Gamers whose interest in the metaverse is gaming which the sort of birth of the new metaverse is leading with gaming right I suspect they would want all the things a chair that has feedback and rumbles you know just like when you're playing a console game I'm dating myself but you know I remember when Rumble pad was a new thing and the thing would Shake um maybe it's haptic love maybe it's the headset but then there's regular folks and if I'm the the regular folk type what's going to bring me in I don't want to do all that gaming stuff there has to be some kind of cool draw and I I think Neil put it well in our interview he said he really doesn't think the future is going to involve goggles now that's not to say there isn't a market for some folks to buy that headset you know uh Mike you mentioned the Apple headset which is highly anticipated I'm not super bullish on it because Oculus hasn't you know gone mainstream none of those things have gone mainstream but there are going to need to be multiple experiences right uh Keith you mentioned Half-Life I think of even Animal Crossing which is a lot more recent that to me was a metaverse experience I mean people were doing all these cool things time was moving differently I remember a great story at the peak of the pandemic where someone in the new Animal Crossing had established like a Federal Reserve Bank of Animal Crossing and it was giving out you know it was adjusting the inflation rate I know that was genius that to me is a a metaverse realm and that would be more interesting to me than strapping on the headset and flying or having lasers and samurai swords yeah I think my I think go ahead go ahead and then I'm gonna make a joke the use cases um I think they're actually going to be driven by the commercial and Industrial world because there there's there's a utility to it right like if I can walk around a manufacturing plant uh with augmented reality glasses and see little green check marks on everything that's working and a big flashing warning sign on something that is that is potentially become dangerous in in my industrial context that's actually really useful and I think that's actually where kind of the Apple stuff and all the other um uh headsets are going to go is that in the first case people are going to spend thousands of dollars on these things because it reduces costs in a design or manufacturing process and it's going to filter down from there part of all of this as well is the the cost of the headsets right like it you know the quest is like north of 400 that the pro versions uh uh 1500 bucks or you know they've reduced the price now but it's still a thousand dollars that's a lot for for anyone to pay um and if you think about it kind of uh these things are sort of gaming consoles that you stick on your face um that's that's a lot of money to choose to spend on um a you know a gaming thing that that blocks you off from the the rest of the the household yeah I like how it it became a thing where it was valuable for work in in manufacturing and and I'm going to give you an example of training I was at a trade show last year and they were this company was using software that could actually teach you how to do something via you know you put on the headset and then you're watching it and and then you can build something and then after you watch sort of where to put the pieces they're like okay now do it again and it was like boom boom boom and I could actually assemble something really quickly as an example of how to use it for training I I think the mistake that a lot of people made is by calling it the industrial metaverse like as it's as if it's something that's connected to this other thing they should have just called it the work averse or the the which is a horrible horrible idea but um you know sort of like not connected to this goofy VR world of Mark zuckerbergs because I think also the big mistake they made was then trying to say that people were going to use these for conference calls and and video meetings and why would they why would it be more appealing to do the call as your you know cartoonish Avatar wasn't there even a meta ad briefly that he said watch this or it was a video on social and he entered a meeting room and someone was a whale and someone else was like an alien okay I mean yeah yeah I I think I I will say though you know there is research that says us like interacting with each other on 2D displays actually requires a ton of effort on the part of the human brain to like interpret um a picture of somebody as a person and then to interact with them so you know we all talk about Zoom fatigue because we're on Zoom all day and all that kind of stuff there's actually physiological effects of that and it you know potentially there are times when maybe you can take a break from that and and do some sort of a VR meeting um I've done a few VR meetings like I would say it's very early days clunky the headsets are too heavy you know all of that kind of stuff it's kind of early adopter problems but I could see it being useful you know to to to be able to make that connection with my colleagues uh the thought works for the company I work for we're a highly kind of socially connected organization and I would say like the pandemic hurt us in our connections to one another because we were so used to you know um being able to spend in-person time and do all of the the things kind of between the meeting that are important I guess there's a question as to whether these virtual conference tools will enable any of those kinds of things like the conversation at the water cooler or the bar after the main meeting or whatever because it certainly with zoom when the meeting finishes everybody's like happy to log off and oh yeah oh yeah whatever I have a zoom meeting I'm like uh and it's done I'm like oh I could breathe again or you know scratch my head and things like that or or not worry that my dogs are going to start barking and and destroying the meeting um I want to get back to another question about the why why did these companies decide that we needed a metaverse or we needed the future of the internet like why couldn't we just take the existing internet and just add to it and just still call it the internet is it just because of money I I think first of all there was like a frenzied land grab you know it felt to me like there was a moment and I'd already say it's passing that is not to say it's dead but the era of those big centralized Tech Giants doing a land grab uh it sort of had its moment and that's why we're seeing meta back away although I also don't think they're completely backing away I mean they have to throw a little bit of good money after bad now because they fully committed and changed the name of the company yeah which was inane but um I would chalk it up to like you know a a fomo moment which is also what happened with crypto you know in the pandemic we saw crypto go nuts because suddenly um the retail investor revolution had happened you know the GameStop stuff on Reddit all of this was related to me there was you know a two-year period where money went mad and people started looking for alternate Investments and I think that's when these companies caught the bug of well we've already got the the web one internet what's the next thing and we know they're always trying to um you know skate to where the puck will be instead of where it is right now although in meta's case I think it did a very poor job of it they're chasing AI I mean they're they're doing the exact same thing with AI that I think they did with the metaverse well it does feel like tnai stuff now is is that's the next big thing that everyone's all chasing um but Mike Mike you were saying that like could this actually then sort of be integrated into a metaversian uh I just can't believe I used that word um concept could you could you take the some of these AI tools and then go oh this is what we needed all along and this is what's going to make the metaverse finally happen because I know you said you had some thoughts on that yeah I do I I think there's a couple of things happening first of all let's not underestimate metas uh you know tens of billions of dollars invested in Virtual and augmented reality Tech uh I there was a interview last year where Reid Hastings was the CEO of Netflix said everybody should be saying thank you to Mark Zuckerberg for the investment that he's made in VR Tech and driving it Forward because this is serious engineering right like it actually takes time you know you to to produce stuff that you can strap onto your face comfortably and and that is doing the right things with the Optics is significant engineering investment um so I I think it's important to to acknowledge how far some of these things have come in terms of like increasing uh pixel density on the displays uh lightweight um uh you know lightweight overall headsets um increasing Graphics Fidelity all of those kinds of things but if you think about um the AI Revolution that seems to be happening which is great because everybody has been worried that there's going to be an AI winter and I think uh you know as of as of December January we've decided there's no AI window yeah um actually artificial general intelligence is coming which I don't believe but you know um this stuff is this stuff is genuinely amazing and a significant leap forwards and um some of the stuff you can do with uh giving a prompt getting an image generated there's now Tech that you can use that goes beyond that so you can give a prompt get a 2D image and then extrapolate to actually a 3D environment it's not a particularly good one there's kind of low Fidelity and there's some there's some problems with it but it is amazing that you can now use generative AI to make a 3D scene based on a prompt okay so that kind of thing could help us generate a lot of the content that we need for the metaverse to be compelling because that comes back to the question of like why would I spend hours in you know with with the stuff strapped to my face I've it's got to be compelling content I've got to be either you know doing a job doing my doing my work and being being productive or I've got to be getting serious entertainment value from it and real quick I think Mike's under something that you know with with the comment earlier about industrial use or touring a factory and that kind of thing it's very unsexy isn't it it's very dry but if we're being realistic that's probably what will be the biggest area you know we're focusing too much but everyone does it when you talk about the metaverse on regular folks individuals consumers it's going to be like for work purposes or I'd make it even worse or in my mind even worse uh corporate it'll be like corporate use cases uh so maybe you and your friends won't end up jumping in there and that's okay it can become a high value uh outlet for corporate Pro services without uh you needing to meet up with all your friends in in a virtual bar and I think like if you if you think about the other thing that's happening here which is the evolution of like human machine interaction right so we've been talking about like the visual stuff so so strapping goggles on and being in a visual space but there's a lot of other interaction mechanisms that are also evolving so um speech recognition has gotten really really good yeah um natural language processing these you know the chat TPT talks just like a real person actually talks like a little bit too convincingly like that that friend of yours who knows everything about everything that's kind of how Chad GPT appears to me but there's also things like haptics right like so yeah touch and and gesture recognition uh we've done some work with an auto manufacturer who is looking to use haptics in the car so that rather than actually touching you know a knob on the dashboard to change the volume you just kind of hold your hand up and make a gesture in the right spot on the dash and that's changing the volume and when you do that kind of research you can also yeah like look at somebody's eyeballs and figure out how much time are they spending looking at the road while using this new style of interaction that we're trying to create for them so if you broaden the whole thing out to human machine interaction there's actually that could be very relevant to everybody yeah and and Mike something that you brought up in terms of adding the the prompts to the sort of the metaverse and or the the or like the VR stuff that got me thinking is like does that mean we could actually get closer to this idea of the Holodeck from Star Trek where you could go into a room with your headset on and then say generate a a castle uh put a thrown over to the left um you know build some some nights over to the right and then all of a sudden boom it happens because it's you're again you're generating content ideas and then having it show up in a virtual world it's a lot easier to do that than sort of like either draw something that's going to be a FL well it made mine it might not be as easy as a 2D image but could that then that's almost like an early Holodeck I'm starting to think is that that's fantastic I think how do you paint in that could you give me like uh I only need 50 billion how much money should I ask like maybe that's what Zuckerberg should do like I never understood why they wanted to buy Oculus in the first place but you do make sure they didn't know what to do with it yeah yeah like well I think I think I think I I gotta say I think Ready Player one gives us some clue like so if you why did Facebook Rebrand to meta and what it what have they been trying to do um if you listen to their earnings calls they're actually like unhappy with Apple for the restrictions that apple have put into iOS which like inhibits their ability to uh mine people's data and advertise to them right so that is actually like slowing down um Facebook's Revenue stream and what they wanted to do with all of this uh metaverse stuff is build that next platform for connecting people and being a social platform so they wanted to you know they wanted to um control that and actually in one of their early releases uh they had the they put in um the ability to pay creators you know so people could like sell stuff on the on the platform and their cart was 50 right like I and they're complaining about the Apple store right I'm like okay your car is 50 and you're trying to earn the next uh platform here for human interaction yeah could you be a little bit more subtle about this right like I'm immediately reminded of the bad guy in Ready Player one where he's saying you know we think we can sell 70 of a useless visual uh uh screen without inducing seizures you know and I'm like this this seems awfully familiar to me yeah does that mean like you know could could we get a different like either a tech evangelist or some other celebrity that's not Mark Zuckerberg or not sort of the the Facebook face to sort of maybe kind of kick-start it and or boost it or and again I don't I'm not suggesting you know Elon Musk or anybody like that but it should be Keanu yeah well he tried that with yeah and and didn't he didn't he invest in cyberpunk 2077 and then that just tanks right that game something yeah he did a great AMA recently talking about um basically everything on Reddit but someone asked if the Matrix is real and he said yes no yes but I mean it's funny you guys you talked about the Holodeck I mean I I think of Minority Report which um was the movie that has really stuck with me over the years I always go back to it and there's a scene where um he he's been given new eyeballs and he walks into the Gap and it says Mr Yamamoto welcome back how did those v-neck t-shirts work out and you know we're sort of basically there because of those Amazon ghost stories where you can just walk in get your stuff and walk out because it finds your phone somehow and scans it and that's it no checkout and I don't know that that's metaverse but it's not not metaverse City you know it's I mean all these things are sort of interconnected the idea I mean I use Clear at the airport I don't care privacy wise yeah the convenience is very worth it yeah you scan your eyes boom you skip everyone and all these things I feel like are converging uh if they create conveniences in our lives yeah and it's like something that we didn't talk about which is which is the data and privacy and potential downsides here right like because you know it's it's one thing to to track everything I click on on the internet with like you know cookie tracking and stuff like that it's a whole level of of difference in intimacy if you're tracking my eyeballs through a 3D experience and figuring out what am I looking at what's what's actually interesting to me like what's what's my facial expression while I'm using one of these metaverse experiences so I think there is a a topic of conversation there about how do we protect people from companies misusing the data how do we inform people properly you know that whole thing is is a can of worms and certainly hasn't been solved yeah and what I say is you know it's too late to put privacy toothpaste back in the tube you know unpopular opinion but if it makes my daily life easier all good I'll sign up for whatever I mean at this point Google and apple already know every single thing about me it's way too late to try to have privacy online but have you know do they know whether or not you're going to commit a crime in the future like right right they haven't figured that out yet right I hope the data privacy thing is always is always fascinating me too because um I was all in on the idea of sort of Chip implants in my head uh because again that was like early cyberpunk too he was like you would have like an audio jack and you just kind of plug it in your head or plug it in the back kind of like what the Matrix or Matrix did and then you would be you would be able to access all the information out in the world and and get all this stuff and as a teenager when I'm reading this stuff I'm like that is so cool I really really want that but then the other day so you know so now 30 years later someone asked me that and I was like no I don't think I want a chip in my brain or my or even in my wrist or anything like that because because again I just don't want the the other people out there to to know that kind of stuff about me but I do think Keanu would would make a great kind of spokesman for the metaverse and maybe this Holodeck idea is you know should I should I contact him and and see what we're gonna get out of there anybody know him no um I hear he's a really nice guy yeah um in terms of the uh Dan in terms of the currency sort of aspect to it um did did a lot of the stuff that's been going on with crypto and nfts did like because it's always it always feels like there's bad news on that front um does that slow down sort of the adoption and the enthusiasm around it so it's interesting I mean it depends on whom you ask I I recently came back from nft Paris um and it was an incredible conference I mean they had 10 000 people in this huge building facing the Eiffel Tower you could not have walked around this event and felt like crypto and nfts are dead it did not feel like a bear Market conference um and the key and and Mike was onto something earlier with the idea of you know companies getting in uh tons of big consumer Brands and luxury Brands were on hand and they've gone from just rhetoric to actual launches of things you know they're doing nft drops they're offering um digital items that are tied to physical items and I think there's definitely something there uh where metaverse comes into it is you know everyone is used to the idea of in-game items whether it's a skin a sword a weapon an accessory a hat whatever and so you know why is it such a leap for so many gamers to understand the idea of nfts I mean just stop using the acronym nft if that's the top toxic part but all we're talking about is the next evolution of in-game digital items but recorded on blockchain so that there's permanence there there's provenance so I do think there's something there now um I keep going back to my Neil chat but there's another interesting thing he said which is you know he's he's a fan of the open metaverse same with um yatsu as a huge metaverse investor from Anna mocha Brands another big figure in this space they all say we want an open metaverse not the closed wild Gardens of Facebook and others yeah of course Zuckerberg would say oh we're not trying to do closed matter verse but say there won't continue to be games their own realm because no one is saying that you should be able to bring an item for some game that has a totally different visual aesthetic into another game I mean that's why game designers build these beautiful worlds no one's I think no one is trying to ruin those but there is going to be an interoperable future that involves items that you can take from place to place and I think those will be nfts and will that just be the currency then as well or is it is it something other than just the currency well I also think you know we're going to get away from this jargon like what people should understand yeah nfts are just tokens just like ethereum and other cryptocurrencies are tokens now the difference with a non-fungible is each one is unique and different but I think we're just going to call everything a token so there will be some places where the currency is an actual well-known cryptocurrency maybe it's eth and you have to pay an eth that's a token maybe it's having a certain nft that's a token as a member pass you know you can only get into this space uh I interviewed it at nft Paris the web 3 lead at uh Playboy they're gonna launch a digital Playboy Mansion which I think is genius they're calling it The Meta mansion and it'll be open to all but if you own Playboy's separate nft then you get special access into another area of the meta Mansion I think we're going to see more um use cases like that and I think the nfts with utility like you just said hey if you if you have this nft if you own this nft you can get access to this thing and you know these days we're even seeing that with uh you know Discord memberships for example or you know early access to to creators content and stuff like that I think that's that's like a reasonable use of nfts the downside comes when people go I'm gonna buy the Playboy nft because I think they're only going to issue 10 000 of them and it's going to go up in value and I'm speculating and that's what has happened yeah exactly that's exactly what's happened right away from yeah and that's when it's not a good look right and starts to bring you back to kind of the sour downsides of that I also think though that um metaverse interop is not it's not clear where we're going to land with that because again back to the gaming example if uh blizzard created a metaverse with multiple experiences in it that I could move between using you know blizzard created assets and all that kind of stuff but I couldn't go anywhere other than the blizzard metaverse I actually think a lot of Gamers would be like I really like blizzard properties there's plenty of stuff for me to do there I'm happy within this you know this Walled Garden metaverse that that is that is just that one if you look to China um the consortia there are creating kind of private blockchains between you know three or four fairly large companies and then doing interop that way so it's not fully open fully public um but you're starting to see some of it so I don't know where that's going to go it's also going to be this this uh people petitioning for and working for Open Standards versus the big money uh you know companies who would who are secretly not so secretly trying to create wall Gardens for themselves yeah I I still don't get the idea of this metaverse in terms of the separate worlds that then could connect you and why why a user would necessarily need or want to go from one Universe to the other so like if I'm in you know I've got a character in fortnite for example and I've got a bunch of the Marvel skins and and all those things um but if I wanted to go then move to Diablo where I've got another character or Roblox or anything like that like why do I need to why do I mean other than I would have to recreate that Avatar or that or that character like it would be nice to just take that and then sort of transfer it over I get the same name I get the same skills or I don't know and then and then go to school with the same kind of look and feel the irony is as I understand and I'm not a gamer those are the few examples of Worlds that are um looser and don't have as much of a unified aesthetic in other words the fact that you can have a fortnight team with IP from all these different franchises you know you can have Iron Man playing with um a Smurf right I don't know if you can have a Smurf but so I hear I know you can have Iron Man I haven't seen the Smurf ones yet but right like Minecraft Roblox and fortnite I think are games where they don't appear to care as much about you know as opposed to I mentioned Animal Crossing before that has a beautiful very distinct look and if you you know paraded into the Animal Crossing world as Iron Man it would be ridiculous so I think some are already well suited to allowing um porousness more than other games are okay and I wanted to bring up another one other thing because this is when you talked about the whole walking into the Amazon ghost store that made me think of um there was that movie uh did you guys see free Guy where it was sort of an in-game Universe it was Ryan Reynolds but again same kind of thing he's walking around with the glasses on and he's being able to pick up different things in the world and then activated superpowers and things like that that's another sort of image that is always on this augmented reality side um do you think maybe augmented reality with the right equipment might might have a better shot than sort of the full-on bodysuit VR world Dan you're smiling I'm gonna ask you first well just real quick as soon as people mention AR to me and maybe this will be the rest of my life I think of the Snapchat hot dog do you guys remember briefly when Snapchat was was hot back in the day although as I hear it's come back now with with the kids but uh Snapchat rolled out a dancing hot dog and it was AR so you could Point your phone to something and then make a video and the hot dog would be dancing on your desk or dancing on your computer or on someone's face and um there was an earnings call where Snapchat was touting like how its usage had gone up it's daily active because people were excited about the AR hot dog then it's stock tanked because it did a lot wrong but I still think I I haven't yet seen maybe Yelp is an exception Yelp uh briefly had an AR feature or maybe it still does where you're trying to figure out where a certain restaurant is and it shows you on the map and it pops up and it looks a little different than just Google Maps but for the most part I'm a real skeptic on on you know actual uses in my day daily life of AR and VR yeah and and Mike I'm going to get to you in a second I think the the AR usage use case for me that would be wonderful would be is have I'm in a city and I'm in my hotel I'm at a city I haven't been around before and I want to go get some tacos and if I had something and I don't want to use my phone I want to have it like you know something that I could see in my glasses where I type in the restaurant and it gives me the walking direction with like giant arrows virtual arrows on the ground so that I'm not walking around because I've tried that with my phone and I just look really stupid and that's what Google Glass was supposed to do right right and then and then Robert scoble ruined it all by wearing them in the shower but you know well and and Google Glass didn't die it went Enterprise right and so on FedEx like equipped all of their drivers with with like Enterprise Google Glass which was helping them find packages in the back of the truck quicker and suddenly you've got an actual you know again it's a commercial use case though right like it's not the consumer use case but you could imagine that the investment that goes into making uh AR glasses for industrial applications will eventually trickle down and US consumers would be able to get a lightweight enough pair of glasses something that I'd find incredibly useful for AR is remembering people's names like if my AR glasses can like facial recognition the person I'm talking to and remind me who they are um that would actually be really helpful in both sort of Social and professional contexts um if I'm in a shoe store right I'd actually love my AR glasses to gray out all the stuff on the wall where I whether they don't have my shoe size right right like that would be a fantastically useful use case but the no you know we can't get that right now because because no the hardware is too expensive to assume that someone's got it uh Mike I want to ask you another question now you deal with a lot of sort of corporate and Enterprise clients are they souring on on sort of the metaverse or are they just focusing sort of on that possible industrial usage simulation digital twin that type of things are they or were they never even interested in that whole VR stuff anyway I so I think everybody has everybody has a department of innovation where somebody should be paying attention to these kinds of things yeah so we do get a lot of queries about this kind of stuff and our advice has always been uh for organizations to stay close enough to it that when and if it takes off that they've got some experience and they understand how some of these things work I think considering how you want to represent your brand in these new mediums is really important so what do you want your do you want your brand to be next to Snoop Dogg in in the metaverse right like that's a that's a question for you if you're building a chat bot what kind of what kind of chatbot is it what is what's the voice like yeah is it friendly or formal you know like what what kinds of is is it male or female you know like how does it present itself uh so like thinking about what your brand does when it comes to this new interaction Tech that's kind of a lot of the stuff that that we advise clients on and the general advice is to stay close enough that that it's still wait and see but don't don't get surprised by it um but probably also don't go out and hire a bunch of unity developers right now um because it's a bit early for them right and and Dan kind of final question uh where did do you see sort of this happening with in the future within the next couple of years I mean is it gonna is is it sort of that whole uh Gartner curve of innovation where we're now in that little trough of disillusionment and then someone will figure out a good way to and we'll we'll be still talking about this in a couple years yeah it's man it's really hard to see the future but I remember interviewing someone years ago about Oculus and they were acknowledging that all previous um VR headsets hadn't really worked and here's why uh and it still definitely hasn't gone mainstream and it was supposed to go mainstream long ago but they said it will it will and that was about Oculus and I haven't seen the sales numbers I know there are people who enjoy it I went to a party maybe two years ago someone had one we all played around with it but just anecdotally it seems fair to me to say that it still ain't mainstream you know far from it now that's just specifically the headset so when you talk about the next five ten years I really don't know I'm a skeptic but I think people will continue building because so much money has been put in uh that you know you can't just abandon it just because it hasn't caught on overnight right um but I think Mike was on to something that it's going to be companies that drive this which again is sort of uh boring and unsexy and disappointing to say but um there are going to be use cases that maybe pop up that are more like B2B and enterprisey and behind the scenes to the point where probably in 10 years someone could say exactly what I'm saying seems like it's not mainstream but actually they just don't realize that there are lots of Corporations really using it and spending on it right right so yeah Innovative Technologies are cool until the corporations get to it and then they make the money off of it but it's really boring right yeah yeah all right guys so that's all the time we've got so uh thanks thanks again for for joining us on the show uh great topic and and I can't wait to talk to you guys about it again sometime excuse thanks all right and uh also don't forget to like this video subscribe to our Channel and add any comments that you have below join us every week for new episodes of today in Tech have a great day and we'll see you next time foreign
2023-03-18