welcome to rise reimagining our future brought to you by ican in today's episode holograms past present and future we hope to inspire thought creativity and action by exploring exciting advancements in future technologies my name is laura lewis and i'll be your guide through this discussion of thought and innovation across the globe so get ready to dive deep into the minds of some of today's most innovative thinkers my guest in the studio today is i can co-founder and chief technology officer taylor scott taylor is a true visionary and oversees the company's initiatives for creating holographic solutions for consumer business and other industrial applications taylor's diverse background spans a broad range of disciplines that includes holographic technology biochemical engineering organic chemistry electronics engineering and artificial intelligence he resides in san diego california as well as austin texas we're so fortunate to have him with us today welcome to the program taylor thank you i'm happy to be here i mean you just flew in from somewhere yeah you're all over the place everywhere i know it's so great and i love that you're that you live here in austin texas where we're recording this as well as san diego um but you live a very exciting life and today we're going to be talking about some really interesting and exciting things that really piques my interest greatly um because this this is our first broadcast our first podcast of rise reimagining our future brought to you by eiken and you're the one of the cto and one of the co-founders founders of i can can you go ahead and explain to our listeners our viewers uh what is icon and how it came to be i love it uh well i can start it as sort of an obsession of mine um to create a new virtual experience that just had never been done before for me it was in 100 intentionally just to make video games so i could play things like legend of zelda because i was obsessed with them in a in a new visually stimulating way and it was right at the time when we we started liking when vr was just getting its legs but it wasn't quite there yet and merged you know realities was was a really great concept that had like was starting to grow its legs but but definitely was was struggling to get on the scene and so we found a really unique way of creating these these light images they're really powerful really stimulating and then fortunately i met joe and uh joe and i really dug down into the ability to create sort of a universe inside this environment you know it's very easy to create something that's visually stimulating but to let somebody create their own content for it it was a really a big passion for us and so that's what icon is really focused on is not just creating a new visual experience but creating your new visual experience and you're talking about joe ward yes joe ward my co-founder your co-founder what was joe's background again when you guys converged so we called joe the old telecom guy so he was an old salesman that would uh it was focused on phone systems and technology and and definitely incredibly talented on the sales side and it was funny because you have joe who's who's uh i mean i call him the old man but really he's you know in his 60s um and then you had me a wide-eyed 24 year old but we just worked incredibly well together and still do you know after years together and managed to amass a team of incredibly talented people everything from the contract manufacturing side to the design side um that he's really been able to pull together and create sort of a seamless structure in icon yeah so and a little bit more about iken then you guys are working on a variety of things what are you working on currently yeah so we have some really unique systems so at the heart of what icon is working on is a passion for new visual experiences so one of the things that we have there is a new type of lens foil system that lets us sustain optical light in space so essentially we can project light onto a surface and sustain it even if you're out in a very harsh environment and we even build test devices to see just how hard we can push the projection systems to see if it's you know what's the limits of this and it's really impressive and so one is the actual projection capability of experiencing it the other is is even the ability to generate scans or volumetric scans just with your smartphone so if you have an object that's precious to you or you think is really cool you can actually just wave your phone around it in a unique way generate an actual scan of it and then project that in the hologram forever so you can literally create a living twin of anything that you have and with that we also have again this is the mobile phone form factor for the the overall system we also have larger systems that refer to as the arc um really powerful again higher computation we're able to get into those really advanced rendering systems really beautiful experiences that is less mobile but equally as powerful and when you're talking about beautiful experiences you're talking about beautiful visual experiences exactly with the holograms exactly but it's the icons way and we'll get into that let's go ahead and talk about holograms first what is a hologram and let's talk about the history and when do they show up in this world love it it's i love the subject of holograms because it's so different for each individual um the the physics definition is really stale when it comes to what the average user would be thinking about i mean i remember as a child collecting obsessively collecting pokemon cards and they were holographic they had that sheen to them or they had a dimensional thing um and technically you think about it like that is projecting like you can view sometimes you could view like images from different angles but that is in no way what the average person considers to be a hologram and you think about when you go to a stage show or like when you would see the resurrection of dead celebrities and things like that i mean the the foundation of that technology is back in the 17th century um that you that they'll find at disneyland things like that and so it's been around for quite a long time in that context and while that's technically not the hologram that people consider it's as visually stimulating as that sort of experience so it's funny that the people's definition has actually changed with pop culture so really star wars kind of changed the concept of a hologram that princess leia floating in space so people automatically have latched on to that's the hologram that we want and it's quite funny because you think about it it's contrary to the the rather limiting definition of a hologram so eiken is really passionate about not viewing it from such a scientific standpoint but instead looking at the user psychology what do people want from an experience standpoint that would be really engaging and powerful and again there's so many different versions of that whether it's glasses and goggles based systems where it's a freestanding system whether it's you know trying to create multi multiple prismatic light systems but at the end of the day ikea wants to create a foundation where every user has access to a simplified system that they can understand immediately and create content for right okay so i like to look at this as a consumer and i'm a sci-fi person too so i love the experience of seeing a hologram experiencing hologram i can tell you like i don't know maybe 30 years ago there was a movie theater in my hometown that had this hologram art when you walked in it was you know you were going to go see a movie but right smack in the middle of the lobby was an elevated platform and there was this really cool hologram in the middle of it and it was a stop factor ooh this is amazing so and it gives me honestly i get goosebumps when i when i talk about it because it does stimulate something and i want to get there about our brains and everything in a little bit but just in general about how holograms fascinate people what is why is that why does it give us that um that excitement or that experience that we have that feels like like i'm getting goosebumps when i talk about holograms i i'm the exact same way it's it's uh it's that wonderment factor um and there's some really unique studies on the neuropsychology of individuals who respond to new visual stimuli we get this statement all the time constantly like why do we need vr i hear that all the time why do we need holograms why do we need devices like this and it's such a funny concept when you think about it because the truth is why do you need an ipad why do you need a tablet size form factor for a personal computer you don't you have a computer you have a phone you can still pretty much do everything possible in that in the world that you need to without having a tablet but people love tablets because it's a new way of experiencing something and there's been a lot of tests done on the effect of novelty in the brain it's fantastic specifically in the dopamine response of people who engage in new experiences humans genuinely need to have novelty because it gives them that sense of wonderment and that one pushes the brain to have to process more data more information so it's literally pushing you to improve your brain and at the same time it's releasing pleasure you're actually enjoying it and your brain is technically enjoying a new experience so vr do you need vr no but that moment where you go wow is so good for your brain holograms are the exact same way when you see that hologram when when we would do stage show projections and and and have people dancing on stages there is you could physically see mouths open and see people go wow and that moment that of wonderment is so critical for humans we have to continue to strive for that even studies in rats where rats would automatically even though they had been in a maze that they knew a route would automatically want to explore routes that they hadn't seen before before going back and finishing mazes so even in rats they they automatically seek out novelty and new environments so as a result and i am sort of a nerd i got a science background i love all this stuff that's why i love talking to you is that we're talking about dopamine neurotransmitters gives us a rush people have dopamine highs just in anticipation of a cup of coffee yeah uh also dopamine gets people in trouble with addictions but it's a natural thing that happens in our brain chemistry and i and i find it really fascinating that holograms do that to us and that really explains that um the feeling that i was just having with you know like the reflecting upon when i would see the hologram or even in movies where holograms and movies which comes to my next question you know generally how holograms are used today uh let's say for consumers how are they used today for consumers let's talk about that in general we i mean i know as a consumer i'm like yeah a hologram in a movie i'm there but that kind of thing and then i want to talk about how else are they being used yeah i mean you think about from the sci-fi movies they're used to express that futuristic vibe in a practical sense today you know they're used in entertainment so performances they're also used a lot in advertising there's a lot of new visual systems they're starting to get to the point where you can have really cool head-mounted gaming systems and you know cool experiences um which is quite fascinating for us at aiken we really want to push toward a new visual style of holograms to where that people haven't had access to at all major stopping points with what we're doing now with holograms is either they're they're way too big and you really don't have access to it for more than two minutes and i'll never forget it when i would see people's faces on the first five rows when we would do test objects with the holograms and you'd see people actually like crying at times where they would get incredibly emotional over the system two minutes and 30 seconds later they would have zero access to anything like that even though that moment was so emotional for them they couldn't take it home and never experiencing anything like ever experienced anything like it because it's it's a an instant in time because it's a small it's a small space but it's a big device and the the content has to be curated so long and so perfectly for that system because it's so hard to generate it and so i would look at that now and that's was really what started the experience side for me of the reason why the use cases are so limited is because no one was evolving that technology no one was evolving it with the consumer in mind rather than the experience in mind and so that's why i can is is really pushing forward first one with games we do want to give people the ability to experience games but we didn't want to just give people the ex you know the experience of cool gaming even though that's all i want to do and we thought about the one thing that would really improve the emotional experience and the emotional connectivity of people and its social media and the ability to tag on to existing social media connections emotional connections with your family with your friends and then bump that up with living holograms from the content that you already have on your phone that's a way of taking a system that's built to make you feel more emotion and then taking things that you're already emotionally attached to and just improving them so we see that as being an area that people really haven't been able to conquer i mean we think about with a head mounted system it's really hard you got you got a visor on so it's really hard when you say head mounted system so that's where we can really dive in head mounted system when you talk about vr virtual reality uh usually is that headset or the goggle experience how is iken doing holography differently then yeah so and that's why we're so excited when we're now in our alpha and our beta testing seeing people's responses to it it's literally a small attachment that you plug onto your phone that's portable collapses open and literally connects to your phone's entire rendering environment so anything that lives on your phone can be projected and translated so we have a unique artificial intelligence that knows what you you know what you want to put into the hologram and also knows what perception you you really want to gain out of it so instead of just being a static environment where it's content that's been made for a hologram at this point it's actually edited and translated every frame to to match your perception of the hologram but it's so portable you could literally walk to starbucks from your house and be in a holographic conversation consistently and be able to maintain that optical field and be able to project yourself into someone else's hologram at the same time i know that you're talking about specifically about the device for consumers and i'm extraordinarily excited about it i cannot wait to get my hands on it and what i heard you just say was is that you know you could do video you can be live video and a hologram you can use static images that you can pull up maybe a memory of somebody and even have more of an experience with them so that is um what you guys are rolling out is my understanding of what you just said how about using holograms in other ways in other areas and other industries that you i know that you've done some things with the department of defense or some other business things on the horizon i'm not sure if you're allowed to talk about that but holistically about eichen and holograms what's the sweet i guess love it so the suite is really a flexible environment that any developer can be working in and immediately if they have a concept that they want to see in the hologram all i have to do is put it together like they would for a normal environment whether it's a pc whether it's a phone ios android what have you and we'll automatically convert it so for example one of the things that we're currently working on is the ability to look at ct scans and medical scans inside of the arc so it's a large scale system and again it's it's it's really attuned to the user's perception so if you have users with the arc and they're trying to identify within space so understand spatially what's going on say in a neurological scan it's a completely different environment you can actually put your hands into the arc and a holographic representation is made and be able to take things apart and actually edit and move things so it's a whole new way of experiencing things the benefit to that is again with novelty and wonderment causes your brain to release dopamine and it also causes you to increase your focus so we refer to it as emotional engagement per frame so everything from architecture design education systems medical systems we can actually quantify that your retinas are looking at the hologram more than the 2d screen that you're used to because the eyes are always looking for novelty and it's interesting we did a test with a child recently very young infant child um and again with the rise you have the phone here and then you have the holographic space and we thought what would happen if we took the exact same visual footage and it was just light fireworks that were going off and we played the same fireworks on the phone and then we played the same set of fireworks and the rise and 98 of the time the children was fixated on the hologram even though it doesn't have a lot of experience with phones it's an infant and it was interesting to see the fixation of the eyes as if it was easier to digest the hologram so that novelty is really appealing even to children's brains and so it shows that if you were to take that to a very serious thing like diagnosing something on a medical scan or being able to understand something mechanically or even having more focus in an education system it improves that even more so it's nothing but beneficial it's a great teaching tool exactly yeah to be able to get in there and really engage in there i had i've heard uh how people try to train with holograms in a vr environment and the limitations there what are the limitations if you're using headset and all that other stuff versus what the icon arc is which by the way for explaining to our listeners what what the arc is you say it's a larger like a big screen projection i can't even describe it because i've seen it how would you first of all let's talk about describing you know what the icon arc looks like because you know you mentioned eye tracking and that kind of thing so and you've talked about the smaller device but if in a larger one as a teaching tool versus something that's cumbersome like sticking on the headset and everything else what's the difference so again the cool thing about vr and i love vr personally however i'm very sensitive to it my eyes i i will immediately get headaches or i get nauseous so i i was waiting for years for vr to come out and then it took you know some time and i wasn't able to really enjoy it now you know great strides have been made so i can really enjoy those immersive experiences but it's completely encompassing it's overwhelming to the senses and not always in a bad way in a really cool way even just the loading screen of of the oculus is incredibly powerful but what was interesting is in actual testing of educational environments the response from some people was that retention of information was actually lower in the vr environment than it was and even just a stale static somebody just a talking head informing you of information and was because the first 30 minutes of the lecture was them going because it was so overwhelmed by just the new immersive environment yeah so there's a limit when it comes to over immersion and under immersion the arc is a way of us to create enough space on the hologram to where even your peripheral is covered so it's imagine if your computer monitor was was was essentially just flipped up into a holographic device so it's small can fit on your table has its own computational system so it has its own operating system is able to do all sorts of things with that you're able to create everything from gaming systems to education systems to communication systems the beauty of that is it's immersive it's powerful it also it knows what you're trying to see so you can look around objects and look inside objects you can move in and out of the hologram but at the same time you can easily look away and write notes and then jump back in and then look away write notes and jump back in so it's a new way of learning something without the detriment of having to completely immerse yourself and you know you can't really take off vr headsets and and write something you can't really um see the instructor so it loses the human element because the human instructor is now either a little bit of a creepy avatar or it's a person with a giant headset that's that's being recorded so there's there's some issues there and that comes from the cumbersome nature of having head mounted systems unfortunately we're now evolving in technology to the point where computation is getting better so we can do more things in a small amount of space so now they can get smaller and smaller and smaller and the other side is power management now we're able to fit more power in a much smaller space that's really the key to getting to that idealized solution if you just have a pair of glasses on your head and you're able to see this whole new world but that's years away to have that really comfortable non-cumbersome system and in the meantime there's so much room for new experiences but when new experiences come out like for example even volumetric displays there's a litany of volumetric displays that have been brought out mobile phones different um refractive indices changes where you can move a device and see the 3d environment in space and i love it because the response from the consumer has been that is so cool and then 20 seconds later it goes on a desk and they never look at it again unless they're like a designer or somebody that's really invested in it and the reason for that is people think that volumetric is the same as a hologram and it's it's just not to people and technically you know it is if you're going by the physics definition it's showing light and showing a world in three dimensions but to just have it be volumetric is in no way what the average person wants we did a lot of testing with viometric systems and the user would literally sit there and go oh that's so cool and immediately regulate it to be just like a mobile phone so all this work goes into these systems and it's not quite what they want they need that beauty and novelty and that's we're able to provide with the arc is immersion plus novelty you've talked about volumetric holography a bit here and there can you please define what a volumetric hologram is to someone who has never heard of it before so volumetric is is an interesting word when it comes to hologram because hologram means it's it's a surface that is projecting light in multiple directions so you think about it if you move left you move right you can see it volumetric is the exact same thing so it's sort of a repetition of the concept of a volumetric hologram it's like volumetric screen or it's a hologram but what's funny is nobody really considers the fact that volumetric is consistently being created to where you have a screen and it has a very heavy computational process behind it the current systems that exist today it's multiple rendering cameras in one environment and it's putting it out and changing the refractive index really beautiful i mean especially when it comes to art pieces or temporary immersive pieces where it's a whole wall and you walk up to it it's just really cool the issue is when it comes to a consumer using that as an appendage so we we refer to it as an appendage but if you think about your phone your phone went the iphone went from a really cool thing to have to if you don't have an iphone you cannot exist today you just you just can't you have to either have an iphone or some sort of phone or have a friend that has one that's fully charged that you can utilize for necessity volumetric really isn't that volumetric is beautiful it's powerful and it does create improved experiences but what we found in our studies at ican is we always try to understand why something isn't working in the marketplace today before we jump to building something and so when when it comes to people's responses to a volumetric system is they love it i mean love at first sight and then immediately boredom because novelty is incredibly fast fading okay because they can't generate really fast rapid content they can't use it like like like an appendage um you think about your mobile phone you're able to go through a hundred apps a minute i mean you jump through constant information right on instagram you know you don't stay on one image for very long you're able to consistently jump through and enjoy new experiences some people are faster at that than others exactly especially the children [Laughter] um and so that's the really the the difference between volumetric and what we define as a hologram so we define it as a perceptive volumetric hologram so um we can take a single rendering environment and we can make what what is perceived as volume but from 2d imagery which means we don't have to go into a rendering environment and fiddle with all these little knobs and tweaks and then export it and then put it in a rendering environment and then let you plug into it but again for us the big passion that we've noticed people want is not volume they really don't care about it um they want to see glowing light in space it's always the same thing blowing light in space it's all people want to do i'm in yeah exactly for me i mean you think about those stations that you see it's just glowing light in space but people absolutely love it it takes them back to princess leia it takes them back to their childhood disneyland all those really cool experiences so we started with the foundation of what are these systems missing and they're missing that ethereal it's in your environment it's new and then on top of that we added volumetric as the secondary feature and even when we test our system it's fascinating people's response they love the volume and then they immediately put on the table and just enjoy it like a visual system of floating light in space the volume is always of less importance than the visual stimulation of seeing something move from the phone and float up into this ethereal world hmm that's really interesting can you give me an example of that like what would they want to look at yes we refer to it as interplay it's we go through some really fun systems that i can but one of the things that you can do is is actually physically touch the phone and people don't realize that when you look at the the system but there's actually a touch screen in front of the visual system so as you touch objects and you swipe them up and you can think about games that require that swiping motion they will literally float up and be translated into the environment and you can actually touch the actual hologram from your perceptive angle and bring it back down into the phone so everything from gaming systems to communications being able to write a text and then swipe it up and send it away you have that dopamine that you get from from the beauty of something that's new added with the emotion of experiencing something in that space and then being able to do that over and over with different media it's it really is taking something that's new something that's impressive and then making it and making it something that you can completely control so you talked about emotional engagement and i know you guys have done studies with emotional engagement that's really pretty much what you're referring to as well right emotional engagement is that uh what about emotional engagement and your brain and can you explain a little bit about that so we yeah eepf emotional engagement per frame it's a metric that we use to measure the amount of attention that is we call it unfocused attention so it's not the because there's quite a few types of attention sustained attention you know split attention it's very interesting when you when you go into the psychology of it we were more focused on the the unfocused uh attention which is not when you're like trying to study a textbook and your your eyes are piercing and you're trying to focus on something but the you're in more of a static space like social media you're just sort of enjoying the moment where do your eyes focus and there's a lot of metrics that they do now of like watching where you look when you go to a website right and we do that both on each you know systems both on the flat screen as well as the holographic screen but our real goal is to measure the the s the sort of flexible comfortable focus that you put into the hologram and the metric is really interesting because it's significantly higher in the hologram to where people will actually ignore important things on the phone to look at to linger and look at something that's occurring in the hologram because it's more enjoyable and it's easier to focus on because it's so much more stimulating and so you think about the impact that that has on one your emotional experiences communicating with somebody i mean we're all now i think pretty used to zoom people now complain you get the zoom fatigue of just seeing somebody there sure and now being able to transform that so now the emotional engagement makes it easier to be talking to somebody in that holographic space for longer i think about advertising as well the value of you know i know for me now it's when that little timer is going five four three it could not go faster for me now it needs to go significantly faster for me but if you put it into that space that's so much more appealing even just increasing that by one second is of such value from an advertisement perspective from a communication perspective and so being able to increase that that's what that metric is able to define and emotional engagement you're talking about feelings and emotions and even when you refer to the baby looking at the hologram and more so than something else it brings to my mind about the natural physiology of our brains and our desire for change like you said that there's a natural desire for rats to go along a maze and you know because they want that they want stimulation and that goes hand-in-hand with growing neural pathways right so experiencing holograms with your emotional engagement we also know i mean i'm going to speculate because you know i'm a brain expert all of a sudden but anyways so that our brains are actually could be could be growing from this right our new neural pathways our experiences because that's the way it works right it's interesting there's there was a really unique study that i that i enjoyed um it was the fact that people who changed the position of furniture in their offices and living spaces had statistically more focus and attention to creativity because their brain had to consistently adapt to a new environment the brain is not meant to be stagnant you see what happens when people become exceptionally stagnant oftentimes depression follows yes because the brain doesn't have the same chemical reception that it needs at that time and that's just furniture being able to have that as a metric much less watching the eyes of somebody increase when they're looking at something really visually stimulating and that's why vr so cool you really get that wow moment but for us we wanted to take that wow moment and then attach it to human connection that's why we're so focused on the social aspect because if you can increase that that response to it's helping your brain it's actually making you a better person it's helping you think and then it's helping your relationships it's helping you with your loved ones it's helping you experience beautiful things there's really nothing more important to me that i can think of yeah i love it i really do you know let's go back to the discussion about oculus headsets ar vr xr first of all ar what is it vr what is it xr what is it those can you explain that love it so vr completely immersive experience the the you know you you enter the the zone and you hear the one you're in that white that white room virtual reality exactly so cool it definitely has it's its market has its has its place ar is an interesting one because so much has been poured into ar and that's where you'll have essentially a camera view that's put on a screen and you'll overlay an image or an animation pokemon go something like that so much has gone behind the research and development into that space and it consistently is viewed more as a novelty because a lot of things that stop it from from being a really powerful experience right now one which i loved was um i asked a group of of uh of people why they didn't use the ar feature more on amazon and they said because my arms are too tired uh which i thought was hilarious and you're talking about when they say show this in in your yeah when you scan the room and then you tap on an object and you pop it down and they just say my arms get too tired i don't want to and i found that so funny because it really is cool you can actually see the size and it's a beautiful tool but that being locked into a frame is very inconducive for comfortability xr is the sort of the merging of those worlds so you take the ar but you you blend it with the real photons that are coming at you from the environment sort of that that metaverse that we talk about where there's a holographic universe that you can go into and either see it merged and blended with your genuine reality or you know in vr you would enter a completely new expression of it and experience new things and they each have really cool places the thing about xr it requires a lot of visual um creation a lot of right now digital twinning is really at the forefront of that being able to create scans of things and go into these spaces it requires a lot of data and a lot of computation in a very short amount of time with a very small amount of battery that you you know can have on these these systems and we're getting to the point where it's becoming more and more feasible which is so exciting it's why it's on everybody's mind right now having that that metaverse environment the reason why the rise is really different it's technically xr because we're projecting light in space and it's it's interfering with the photons and the environment so it literally is the perception of something that's jumped into your reality okay the difference is it requires so much less processor load that you can make all the content yourself i mean you can literally download something from the internet put it into our application and the ai does everything for you in seconds to be able to render that in the environment with touch control with the ability to send it back with a z-axis depth and hollow the volumetric perception and so we see it as being a stepping stone so we're adding this volumetric scanning capability we're adding the ability to immediately perceive it in your space so what we see is why wait to saturate the metaverse with all this really cool content for you know xr glasses to finally get to where we need them to be when we can literally start creating and experiencing all of these things now with a new system that literally takes all that data from your phone and translates whatever you want i also think it's a distraction in general just have a physical device on your head definitely that changes your balance a little bit right a lot of right so and also i know some people when they experience uh that type of thing which i did when i i had some tour of some inside of some building and it was like this amazing experience but i got nauseous very so you're not going to have that with you you don't get nauseous at all with this system it's it's the same comfortability of looking at a normal screen just incredibly powerful i i remember attempting to play a game and i loved the game so much i'm so into it that i i had it on for like two hours and when i took that thing off my eyes were incredibly irritated for two or three days just because i was so sucked into it that i completely forgot that i blinking is important and so with systems like this it's so natural to the environment that it becomes a part of it so you don't have that staring at something because it's so it's so overwhelming and so it's so uh overwhelming to the senses it's it's a convenient system that is improving your senses okay the metaverse what is what is the metaverse you just referenced it but and i know i can as part of that now uh and everybody's heard about facebook is now meta you know branding decision of course um but can you describe what the metaverse is so i think of it as like the evolved internet you know we've seen movies we've seen the ready player one movies the there's a lot of novels that it's kind of based on back in the day of the ability to enter into a new reality that is blended very realistically with this one so you can either enter in a completely new reality and have new experiences or blend new experiences in this reality it's really beautiful when you think about it i mean there's nothing stopping us from creating a a world around the world which is really exciting it's just a matter of time really the ability to capture data we've had the ability to store it we have and now it's just a matter of nailing the experience and so as we continue to build it nailing how people engage with the metaverse is just as important as the content that we put into it yeah and i see it being really powerful especially from emotional connection standpoint and i remember playing second life when it was i mean years ago when i was younger and it was incredibly enjoyable just because it was like you entered into this world and you could kind of escape for a moment and everyone needs that that level of escape at times and you know everybody gets it in different ways some people it's just reading coffee and reading the drinking coffee and reading the newspaper they get that escape moment and for me it was it was that being able to enter into a virtual world and sort of experience my own experiences there knowing that it was a completely different realm and you could go back to it when you wanted to um and so that's that's really what we see for the metaverse now and it's i think it's powerful everything from being able to take old photos of your family like old polaroid photos is what we we were recently testing and to take your mobile phone and to be able to just wave it around the object and create that metaverse object to where if you put the rise down on the table or the arc you could actually see it placed on the table and click on it and have it come up as like a living holographic record of that polaroid which is so cool very cool and it's permanent you you that data is not lost so which means that in 300 years time your great great great grandchildren will be able to literally look at a living polaroid from 19 you know 35 or whatever isn't that amazing it's beautiful yeah and of course you know like with the internet it's going to require responsibility so it's going to require control and we have to be careful how we use it but it really stands to massively improve people's emotional lives yeah so the future of holograms what's it all going to look like in 50 years i love that it's i love that question because it could go in a lot of different directions i mean we have we are we are full steam ahead when it comes to ar lenses xr lenses i i think there there's not a company on the planet in technology that is not keeping tabs on it and or investing heavily in it or designing and researching it so that's definitely going to be the first step there's quite a lot of physics testing that's being done on our side as well as you know in on the university level as far as being able to sustain optical light volumetrically that princess leia style yeah the question is when we have the power supply and the computers to do it when do we have the physical space to be able to maintain that in a safe environment and it's going to take some work but it is by no means far-fetched to think that it is by no means far-fetched to think that it's a possibility within the next 50 to 100 years to be able to have that genuine hologram there and in the meantime we're going to need a lot of content to display in it and so we can start creating that now and you're looking for people to help you do that exactly developers to because you already have the toolkit exactly right so now now we're looking for developers that are really interested in taking you know aaa experience and making it a triple a experience that nobody could possibly have had before because the system hasn't existed in this flexible state ever and on the other side we're looking for people just just normal people that are not developers that just want to experience something beautiful right to get the rise and to be able to upload their content and to socialize and share their i mean you think about it and i loved it instagram when it first came on the scene all i got was pictures of people's lasagna and cobb salads but but i enjoyed it like oh yeah my friend's eating lunch i we want that in a hologram we want to be able to actually see that lasagna on a table in my environment and be like that does look good yeah it's the upgrade to the lasagna shot right right so what about shopping exactly being able to look at something you know almost like it's really there or or even i would imagine like video conferencing in a in a room where everybody else is a hologram right i mean that's to me an amazing idea yeah and it's it's it can be overwhelming when you really think about it because we've limited the amount of time and effort it takes to create the content so now you you know you you try to ponder all the verticals and it's it's dizzying yes the greater question is what can't you improve and that happens all the time whenever we're in conversations with our partners developer partners and it's you know well what can't we do with this and the answer is always you tell us because it's it's a new visual way of taking what you already have and just making it better think of how much you do on a daily basis that's all based on visuals everything from writing your emails to to reading your text messages to looking through your data on the internet it's visual is such a key part of our learning experiences and our communication so we look forward to seeing how it's going to evolve everything yeah the possibilities seem to be as endless absolutely well anything else you'd like to talk about taylor i think we covered it i think we got it pretty well all right well thanks so very much for being here i always love listening to you talk about all this and to be uh such an incredible visionary that you are here you are talking about um this incredible metaverse universe that we're going to have in the very near future with eiken leading the charge it's exciting next time we'll do this on a hologram let's do it i'm there all right thanks so much thank you this has been ryze reimagining our future thank you for making it possible for us to explore future technologies together rise reimagining our future is presented by icon if you enjoyed this show today please join us next time and share this episode with your own network of future forward thinkers check out icon online at icaninc.com or ikininc.com and remember to like share and follow iken on instagram facebook youtube and linkedin this is laura lewis for icon until next time you
2022-01-19