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Demystifying the conversations we're already here at RRE and with our portfolio companies. In each episode, your hosts, Will Porteous and Raju Rishi will dive deeply into topics that are shaping the future, from satellite technology to digital health, to venture investing, and much more.
Will: So, I want to be able to put this on and meet a friend somewhere, like, in a forest in Norway and have that shared experience.
Jason: You want to be on a fjord.
Will: Yeah, I want to be on a fjord.
Jason: You want fjords. I’m going to have a lot more fjords in my life.
Will: Welcome to RRE POV—
Raju: —a show in which we record the conversations we’re already having amongst ourselves—
Jason: —our entrepreneurs, and industry leaders for you to listen in on.
Jason: Yeah, welcome to the RRE POV pod. You’re talking to three people who got the Apple Vision Pro in the last few days. We’re going to discuss our initial impressions, this isn’t going to be the MKBHD review, this is just going to be kind of a practical view of, yeah, our initial experience is—whether or not it changes our, kind of, perspective on the state of VR and AR—that has been moving for quite some time now. But now we have a brand-new entrant. So yeah, I’ll kick it over to you guys. What were your initial thoughts on the Apple Vision Pro?
Raju: Yeah. I’ll kick it off with my thoughts, and then I would love to hear both of yours as well. First of all, I’m going to caveat this. This is, like, gen 0.5. I would basically say we’ve got an initial product which I think is going to eventually be just mind-blowing, but it definitely has pros and cons, from my perspective. And so, you know, pros, I’ll just throw out there, like, media, unbelievable; resolution, it was immersive, you can size it. So, if you wanted to watch a movie on this product, you know, and you had limited space, but you wanted the resolution of, like, an IMAX theater, you can get it, which I loved.
The product, also, as most people are probably aware, it does eye tracking, so instead of a mouse to sort of move you from one, you know, area of a website, or you know, just you’re navigating a page, it just tracks your eyes brilliantly. So, I love that. And you know, it kind of had an anywhere feel, like you could use it in any room and it kind of gave you, like, this notion of no limitations, right? But I thought it had some big cons. So, let me just stop with the pros. Let me get your pros. Let me get your two guys’ pros—
Will: Sure—
Raju: —on this thing.
Will: I mean, I think the pixel density is this incredible engineering achievement from Apple, and that enables a richer experience than almost any medium I’ve ever been in, and certainly the completely immersive nature of it, it has a really different, almost emotional experience. And it left me thinking a lot about how this new platform is going to be part of our lives, and frankly, how it’s—when interesting things are happening there, they’re going to be so intense that they take us away from a lot of real-world experience. And so, I could see the kind of extraordinary engagement potential that it has, and that, to me, was inspiring. It’s a pretty blank slate, though [laugh] and isn’t that comfortable after a while. So, I strongly agree with that, kind of, 0.5 sentiment.
Jason: [laugh] I think the only bad thing about this product—because we can all see how it’s going to get better—is the comfort and the weight. That’s the only thing holding it back. I think the rest will get better with time. I’m less talking about the resolution of the individual screens because when you’re in a fully digital environment, fully immersed, it is, like, impeccable. When you’re looking through the pass-through, you’re still looking through cameras, and cameras require a lot of physics, they’re very—you know, they have to be really small cameras, you don’t have these massive apertures to let in a ton of light, even any type of camera is going to have motion blur, which is difficult to kind of replicate what your eye has when it has motion blur. We still have motion blur, but it’s different than the way that a kind of video pass-through is currently rendered.
And so, when I’m—you know, I, you know, put out some tweets about this—I think that was, like, if I didn’t nitpick, it’s, you know, I’d love a little bit more field-of-view, and I love a little bit more resolution, but the rest of the experience is pretty incredible. If it were as light as a pair of glasses, I think the rest of the, kind of, complaints go away really quickly.
Raju: So, you’d loved it.
Jason: Oh, yeah. Have you guys attached to your computer yet?
Raju: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jason: Like, looked at your Mac?
Raju: Listen, I agree with you. I mean, it was just a completely different user interface and user experience that I’ve had with any other product, right? I mean, I’ve got the Meta Quest, the latest one, you know, I’ve got the Ray-Bans, and I’ve tried—you know, I have the HTC Vive. I’ve tried all sorts of mixed-reality devices, augmented pass-through modes. This one was, you know, far better in terms of raw capabilities than any of the other ones. No question about it.
And I could see this being a device that changes both, you know, usage at a business level, as well as, you know, sort of, a personal consumer level, and an individual level. So, I could see that. But that being all said, right, there’s a few use cases that I didn’t love, right? Like, I have a big family. I wanted to use the guest mode. Guest mode is a pain in the butt [laugh] on this product.
Jason: Well, guest mode across iOS or any Mac, honestly, for the longest time. You should have—the iPad should have multiple accounts where you can just say, great, this is the account login to that.
Raju: Yeah, but I can do it for you, and you can watch it. This is so personalized, it’s got to, like—you don’t have to learn anything with an iPad. If I give you an iPad, you can still use my games. If I give you this product, it has to learn your eyes. It has to go through all sorts of function, and I understand why. It just should have a demo mode for some simple stuff, like, movies so you can, you know, show your kids and your friends that come over in less than five minutes, right? It should be ten seconds, and you can see some cool features, you know? That kind of thing.
Jason: It is kind of a one time thing, though. I’m not going to, like, ding them for—you know, like, once you get it set up, it’s like great, you know, then you’re kind of done. It’s like the—and we’re passing it around right now because we’re one of the, you know, small number of people who [laugh] actually went on bought them, so a lot of people want to try them but didn’t want to buy them for various reasons. But I definitely get you. I think even on an iPad, I think there’s still a great use case that you don’t have to teach them the new interface, but, like, Patty should have her own—when she picks up an iPad that’s, like, the Rishi family iPad, she should tap on Patty, open it up, and it should have all of her apps, and all of her stuff, and the photos. And they’ve just never built it. Like, people have wanted this for forever. They’ve never built it. It’s terrible on Macs, it’s terrible on the phone.
Will: Well, but how many iPads do you have in your house, Raju Rishi?
Raju: Yeah, got, like, six or seven? I mean, it’s—
Will: Exactly.
Raju: —exactly. Exactly. Well, the other thing I didn’t like—and you guys probably don’t care as much—but low lighting, right? So, I sleep in the same bed, and you know, I can put the AirPods in—because audio is pretty loud, right? You know, everybody can hear your audio, but you put in your AirPods, that’s fine. But she’s trying to sleep, I’m trying to watch a movie. And you know, the lights are off in the room. It can’t see anything. Like, he can’t see my fingers.
Jason: Well, that’s when you go into the digital environment. Because you’re not trying to walk around. If you’re lying in bed, you’re not trying to walk around. You just g—like, you turn the digital crown, and all of a sudden, your entire environment is just Yosemite, or whatever you turn it into.
Raju: Oh, I get that. But the lights in the room are off, and it can’t detect my fingers, dude [laugh]. So, it needs—like, they need infrared. Like for a $4,000 product, it should have infrared, right? It should be able to detect my finger—just little things like that, right? There’s going to be s—environments—and then the battery pack. I thought the battery pack was just, like, this weird, you know, function. I understand, right? You don’t want to add weight to the headset, and you have to have an external battery pack, but it was just not Apple-like, to me, just a bunch of wires hanging out all over the place. If you look at the ads, they discreetly omit the battery pack from any of the ads. You never see it anywhere.
Jason: But my experience, like, my experience is that, like, I also forget about the battery pack. I just put it in my pocket, and now I’m, like, in a new environment. Like, it does just disappear. Like, you don’t—like you can walk—
Raju: I’m not disagreeing with you. You know, over time, it becomes—it just didn’t feel like an Apple hardware product.
Jason: Yeah.
Raju: Because everything else I’ve ever encountered, it’s been so you know, sort of seamless, I guess. And this was just, like, this attachment, you know? I’m not trying to knock it. That’s not a big one, I think the low lighting situation is a real problem. If you want to interact with the headset, in a low lighting scenario, it’s really, really hard, and they got to fix that.
Will: Part of what you’re pointing out is that there’s just a lot to get used to as we take this product and try and use it in a totally untethered way, given that it’s, you know, it’s on your face. I don’t have a lot of experience on the Meta platforms, for instance, Raju, so when I stack up all the things that I had to start getting used to, kind of, the gesture activity, the eye tracking, this is going to be a really breakthrough, new medium for a lot of people. I found, you know, just getting comfortable with that to be a pretty significant hurdle. And I think that a lot of people, it will open the platform experience to an AR/VR platform experience to a new audience without question, and that’s going to really expand the conversation about what’s possible and what people are going to do with these. So, I think there’s no question that this is moving us forward in a material way, and will also get better. After I was wearing it last night, I went upstairs and I looked at my face, and I just looked, like, I’d been beaten [laugh]. Like, I had deep grooves, like, around my eyes [laugh], and around my nose just from the sheer weight of it.
Jason: It’s like the ski goggles thing, yeah [laugh].
Will: That’s not going to be for everyone. But—
Raju: Yeah. I get it.
Jason: No, definitely.
Raju: So, let me ask a couple of questions, then. What would you want? Like, if you could snap your fingers, and you’d have a new capability or a refined capability on the device, what would you—I’m going to let Jason go first, and then you can go, Will, next. What would you want in a product?
Jason: Aside from obviously the comfort things, I want a collaborative experience with other people with Vision Pro. I want to be able to watch a movie and have the same shared experience with another person. Like, so my quick use case was, I don’t have a display at home; I just work on my laptop, and we don’t have a TV or projector or anything. And this is, like, the perfect device where I can set up a work environment at home with a huge display, and sit in a ergonomical fashion—because when you’re on a laptop, you tend to be hunched forward, and the keys are down. And I want that, to be able to sit up straight, have a big view, and kind of have my own command center, which I can do, which is fantastic.
And then, you know, the TV stuff and the wo—you know, [Misha’s 00:10:50] not helping me with my work [laugh] on a daily basis, and so he doesn’t need to see the screens, but you know, if we want to watch a movie together, like, if this were an incredibly expensive way for us to not buy a TV and be able to bring a massive IMAX theater, everywhere we go, I want to watch that with her. And obviously with the, you know, the price tag that’s on it today, you know, that would be a pretty hefty purchase of a v1 product. But in the future, I think those shared spaces are going to be what bring this even more into the home, right, where maybe you literally don’t buy a TV in the future or a display in the future because you can just have it. I mean, I was watching—I had the Vision Pro, I was getting ready for bed, I had, you know, F1 YouTube video going and I was like, oh, wait. I can just walk over, brush my teeth, carry the window, like, the TV into my bathroom, and I just put it up on the wall. And it’s like, it just hangs there.
And I’m like brushing my teeth, watching this YouTube [laugh] video, and I’m like, “This is crazy.” It just went from, you know, an IMAX theater size screen down to, like, a little thing hovering next to my mirror, and you know, I can get a text message, look up, see what that is speak really quickly into that, close that out. And you know, you do have to get used to some of the gestures, but once you are, you can also really ergonomically consume media, right, where, you know, people set up their TVs at, like, the wrong height sometimes where we have to, like, look down or, like, way up. This one is, like, ultimately adjustable. You can just lean back, have stuff, you know, floating at, like, a 45 degree, or, like, right, above you, and have this amazing—like, the whole world is your canvas now. And so anyways, I had a few of those experiences beyond the obvious, like, 3D ones. The meditation app was amazing, the dinosaur stuff felt so real. I don’t know if you guys watched any of the, like, new Apple format.
Raju: I watched the whole thing. I think I watched them all twice. It was so cool.
Jason: Yeah. And you’re, like, yes, this is a net-new thing. Like I’m looking at, like, dinosaurs in front of me, or like, looking at me breathing.
Raju: And the thing is I have the Meta Quest, and there’s experiences like that there, but not, like, this. The quality was mind-blowing. Okay, Will, so I’m going to ask you. Like, what’s one thing you would love to have, like, if you could snap your fingers, like, today as a feature or function… something.
Will: So, I think the crucial experience, actually, the crucial unlock is going to be shared experiences with other people. There’s a lot that’s been written about Apple’s view that the product experience is an individual experience, and Meta’s view that the product experience, that is generically the experience of their products is meant to be a social experience. And when I thought about what I most wanted to do when I first put this on, and particularly when I was experiencing, kind of, these rich, immersive experiences, I wanted to share them with other people, just like we’re sharing, like, a recollection of seeing the dinosaur right here. So, I want to be able to put this on and meet a friend somewhere, like, in a forest in Norway and have that shared experience.
Jason: You want to be on a fjord.
Will: Yeah, I want to be on a fjord.
Jason: You want fjords. I’m going to have a lot more fjords in my life.
Will: Right, you are. And the point is, I want to walk that terrain with someone else and share the experience of walking in that terrain. And, you know, social media and Instagram in particular has unlocked a lot of fantasy about other parts of the world. I know more about the Faroe Islands because of Instagram than I ever would have known two or three years ago. And I want to visit there, but I really want to visit there with other people that I’m close to, wearing the Vision Pro. So, I care a lot about that sort of experience. And just as a sort of sub-note on this when I was doing the face capture stuff last night, which a lot of people have written about and, you know, I ended up with basically a steel rod through my head because of the lighting at the—
Raju: Oh, but that I—that—that I’m looking it right now. You’ve got a steel rod right there.
Will: You’re not the first person to tell me that.
Raju: One of the beauties—I mean, everybody’s got attributes; that’s one of your attributes, Will. I agree I’m going to give my one or two features, but I’m such, like, a simpleton. I agree with you guys on the shared experiences. Like, no question about that. I wanted my wife to try it, like, immediately, and my kids to try it. It just took too long to get them set up, so we kind of defaulted to not doing anything, which is why I’m talking—
But the two features I would love to have, like, yesterday, one is infrared so it can see my fingers while I’m, like, in the dark. Because I’m one of those, like, Glenn Close, Fatal Attraction guys who just turn the lights on and off all the time, and I don’t want any degradation of experience while I turn the lights off—
Jason: It’s the Allegory of the Cave.
Will: Exactly. Out there in the cave. Yeah, exactly. I’m in a cave, I’m in my basement, someplace with no lights, you know, where my wife just, like, penalty box, no lights for you, and I would love 1Password support. Like, 1Password. Please give me 1Password.
Jason: You can do it. Download 1Password. There’s—all the iPad apps are still there. So, it’s like, “Oh, there’s no content.” It’s like, I have ChatGPT, I’ve got my to-do list things, I’ve got, like, all these—1Password, you sign in like a normal thing.
Raju: I downloaded regular apps. I didn’t know 1Password was in there. Okay, fine.
Jason: 1Password has an iPad app. If it has an iPad app, and they didn’t elect to not have it included in the Apple Vision Pro—
Raju: I see. I see.
Jason: So, I have it now set up, and you can set it up as your default password thing as well. And then it just uses your eyes.
Raju: I’m going to do that. Because I looked for—I searched for different iPad application and didn’t have it, so I think that might be one that they rejected. So, I’ll do that. So, great. That’s good. So, now I’m going to shift gears a little bit here on this one. Which one of your portfolio companies do you think is going to benefit from this product?
Will: Well, I’ll mean quite obviously, our guys at Wave XR who’ve pioneered the virtual concert category are going to benefit from this. I mean, people need stuff to do in these virtual environments, and going to a concert where you and all your friends are on the front row, and the artists are rendered, or a version of the artist is rendered in a way that is incredibly detailed, but also exploits the medium, and you and your avatar or some version of it captured through this platform are they’re kind of in real life, so to speak, that technology’s far along, and Vision Pro is going to be a huge catalyst for the sector.
Raju: Fantastic. All right. Do you want me to go, or do you want—do you have one, Jason? Do you have one?
Jason: Well, parallel domain, obviously, is synthetic data that generate 3D environments. You know, you can imagine an editor where you’re looking at various assets that are being rendered in front of you, looking at the environment, you’re debugging, you know, a simulation of a crash of a car between things in some world, and then you could actually, like, go in and manipulate the world, look at each one of the things, gain perspectives, change things in that environment. I could see that even for, like, Ready, you know? There’s a lot of simulation-ready robotics—
Raju: Tell our listeners what Ready does.
Jason: You know, there’s about 35 different major robotic arm manufacturers, and that also, unfortunately, means there are 35 proprietary languages that you need to code those robots. So, they’re like drivers, just as much as, like, the old drivers for printers where each new printer, you got to download the driver. And that creates a major barrier for adoption in automating new tasks because you have a highly specialized, skilled person who needs to come in, and typically they’re programming the robot at the robot, not, like, from a desk elsewhere. And so, what ready has done is created kind of a universal driver where they can interface with ABB, and KUKA, Yaskawa, on down the list. And now all of a sudden, you can build these templates how you want a six-degree-of-freedom robot arm—which is kind of a standard robot arm—how you want it to move in the environment.
What they need to do when they’re implementing this at, you know, larger-scale deployments, you have to also understand what does that environment look like. And so, you know, we’ve partnered with Nvidia, they’ve got, you know, the Omniverse, and we can render those robotic arms in situ, basically, in this 3D setup. But then actually automating that and going in and tweaking it and tune it, they do have a nice interface where you can just kind of drag things around, but imagine setting up, like, actually standing in that environment, and being able to manipulate the robot in 3D space, just with your fingers.
Raju: And you stole my thunder because I was going to say that, too. No, I wasn’t going to say that.
Jason: [laugh].
Raju: I was going to—actually, I’ve got a third portfolio company of ours, it’s called imgix. For our listeners… they accelerate the internet. Basically if you’ve got a website or a mobile app that has got a lot of images, videos, GIFs in it—[pronouncing as jifs], [pronouncing as gifs], both—it makes it faster, right, like, can be 10x faster. And you know, the biggest use cases are retailers. When you go to a retailer website or mobile app, you want those images to be fast because people are just really, really fickle, and if it takes a second to download something, they’ll just go off the site.
So, you know, like, you know, Zillow, or you know, Realtor.com, or Nordstrom, or things like that, even Facebook, you know, to those degrees, user-generated content has a lot of imagery, videos, and, you know, imgix makes it just download and execute faster and render faster. And, you know, they’re doing some interesting things with AI—just as an aside—which lets you, you know, as a retailer, change the background automated, using generative AI. It’s going to be really cool. We got a product coming out. I shouldn’t talk about it, but I just did. So, we’re going to have this generative AI stuff.
But I actually think retail experience and home-buying experience is going to massively change with this product. I think you’re going to be walking into a house that you might buy and never ever actually visit it in real life, and that’s imgix’s customer. You know, like, Chris Zacharias, the CEO, just bought three of these, right [laugh]? He’s like, “I guarantee you, the Apple Vision Pro will create new media types that will be important for retail, for user-generated content, for”—and he and imgix—and us—are going to just be at the cornerstone of that. So, I think it’s going to be mind-blowing.
Will: I think you’re right. You know, the cheap drones have really changed the exterior of the real estate business, so being able to see the kind of neighborhood and situation of a property before you go and look at it, but this is next-level for the interior experience [crosstalk 00:21:24].
Raju: Absolutely. Absolutely. I’m just telling you, like, you’re going to try on stuff, right? You’re going to try on a coat at, you know, sort of Nordstrom, or you’re going to try on a coat—
Jason: Yeah, you’re looking at a virtual mirror.
Raju: Yeah, dude.
Jason: It’s rendered on you.
Raju: It’s going to be mind-blowing.
Will: You’re going to put all that coat before we go walking in the forest in Norway.
Raju: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. But—
Jason: [laugh] [crosstalk 00:21:44].
Raju: Here’s the thing, Will, it’s going to be slow, [laugh] right? It’s going to take a lot of time to download content that’s created in this mode, and so you’re going to need a company, like, imgix to speed it up. And that’s what they do. They just speed it up.
Will: That’s a great point, Raju. There’s going to ne—we need a whole ecosystem around this media the way we needed a whole ecosystem around e-commerce 25 years ago.
Raju: So, I used to give this talk at Bell Labs, which is, every generation… generational gap of bandwidth, just speed with which you could download it would get consumed in minutes by new media types. So, what we’re dealing with right now, it’s like—you know, and right now, when you had just basically text, the bandwidth that we have available today, in any format is ridiculously faster than text, right? Like, you can download stuff in a fraction of a second. And then you move to images as a medium type, and you sort of say, okay, we got bogged down, so another generation of bandwidth got created. And then you had video. And so, holographic images, whether it’s holographic, augmented reality, or virtual reality, the amount of content, the resol— a high resolution mode is going to require a step function in bandwidth.
Will: I feel like you’re trying to sell me some new network here.
Raju: I am. I am. Do you want to ship[ed to home or the office?
Will: [laugh] I feel like I’m a foreign telco, and you’ve come to sell me equipment.
Raju: Listen, I did that in a prior life, but I think I can still get a commission. I think coul—I did very well in it—I think I still get a commission, so I have, like, a… soft switch, I guess you could call it. A virtual soft switch. I mean, I could ship it to your home, I know where the home address is, I can ship it to work. I mean, whatever you prefer. It’s a big box. It’s a lot, a lot of Nvidia chips and stuff in it.
Will: Every home looks like a proverbial network operation center in your eyes, I can tell.
Raju: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Everybody’s a customer. Everybody’s a potential customer.
Will: Particularly with Vision Pros sitting on the other side of the network. Yeah.
Jason: Yeah. The rendering pipeline, though, I mean, there’s going to be the obviously, like, the Matterport-style, kind of, 3D capture, or poly cam—there’s a number of them out there—that, you know, effectively, like, looks at the world, and maps, kind of pixels to voxels, right? Pixels with the color of the pixel to a 3D space. And that’s what you’re doing; you’re kind of capturing it. And there’s, you know, all these pipelines to clean it up and make sure there aren’t artifacts, and that pipeline is continuing to get better.
You know, at the same time, you know, all of the Unreal Engine 5 breakthroughs—I don’t know if you guys have—you know, this was, you know, a couple of years ago now, but their ability to dynamically render, you know, these were like 11 billion polygon models. And they’re not rendering all 11 billion polygons at a time. They’re rendering it based on the resolution that’s required from the existing viewport, and so as you go up, it’s way more intense, and as you walk away—and I think those pipelines are also going to continue to move this technology forward and the capabilities because even though those do require GPUs, they can be shared among both the server side and, kind of, a local rendering. And you can imagine those pipelines getting really, really good pretty quickly. And I’ve been shocked. Have you guys done the F1 Model?
Raju: I did the [F-U 00:25:14] model the other day.
Jason: [laugh] It’s a different—it’s a different—
Raju: Different model? Oh, okay. Never mind. Okay. F1. Let’s go there.
Jason: So, they have—I forget what it’s called; I can look it up, but it’s one of their demos. One of the amazing things on the Apple Vision Pro it is properly tethered in 3D space. Like, these things don’t move at all. If you’ve used AR before, and things kind of jiggle in space, like, the Apple Vision Pro somehow has gotten just spatial lock. And so, once something’s kind of sitting in your space—they’re also, I’m pretty sure, doing some estimation of the light sources that are in your current environment, and then using those as part of the render engine.
And so, you know, back to your point a little bit, I’m sitting there, Misha is in the room, and I, like, plunked down an F1 car in my apartment.
Raju: As one does.
Jason: And I’m an F1 fan. I’ve never s—[laugh] I’ve never sat in an F1 car, and I’m like, wait, wait, wait, wait. So, this is a hundred percent scale. So, this is exactly as big as this car would be. It is much larger than I expected, and then I was like, “Wait. I can sit in the cockpit.”
So, I walk over—because they added it in the Halo, and now I can actually sit where Valtteri Bottas sits, in the last year’s version of Alfa Romeo—which is this 3D thing—rendered with my lighting. And I’m sitting on the floor in this cockpit. I can put my hands out and, like, you know, quote-unquote, “Touch” the steering wheel and look out and see, like—you know, the drivers have complained that the wheels have gotten bigger and so it reduces their field of view. I’m sitting in the cockpit in the exact space where they are, and you’re like—
Raju: And then you realize, right behind you, there are people honking at you, right? There’s, like, a taxi cab behind you, and—[laugh].
Jason: [laugh] yeah.
Raju: Oh man.
Jason: Misha’s like, “What are you doing sitting on the floor?” And I’m like—
Raju: I know.
Will: [laugh].
Jason: —“Don’t bother me.” I’m doing the F1 thing.
Raju: Yeah, don’t ask questions. Now, you should do that next time, like, without the headset, and then, I mean, like, just say, “I’m just visualizing it. I’m just visualizing it”—
Jason: Yeah, just visualizing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Me and Valtteri.
Raju: Do we have, like, other topics we want to cover? Otherwise, I’m going to move to Gatling gun.
Jason: I think I have two other things. One is the memories… experience. I don’t know if you guys have done that yet. Which was mind-blowing, and available today. And I don’t want to forget about the Her, kind of, video game as well. So, let’s move back to that. You can now, even on your iPhone, you can capture in spatial video.
Raju: Oh, yeah. I played with spatial video. Dude, I was inside my dog’s head in spatial video. I was—literally, I was like, I want to see—I took a, like, a spatial video of my dog, and then I was like, what do I think he’s thinking? So, I went inside his head. And it really just was dark. So—
Jason: [laugh] Fantastic. And it was just more food.
Will: [laugh].
Raju: Yeah.
Jason: More treats.
Raju: Yeah.
Jason: Frisbee.
Raju: Lick. Play.
Jason: [laugh] Yeah, but if you guys have watched Blade Runner 2049, and the lady in the room who was creating the memories for the replicants, it’s the closest thing we’re going to get, like, in the near term, to reliving an actual moment of your life. It has this kind of like ethereal—it, kind of, like blurs around you a little bit. And I’m not joking, like, all future memories that I have with, like, future children, et cetera, I want to have those videos captured in that format because it does—there is a presence, and it is a beautiful thing. You can kind of like—it’s not fully 3D, but you feel like you’re reliving a moment, like, properly reliving it.
Raju: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, no, you’re right. Because of the context, man. Like, I’m telling you, like, the picture I took of my dog, when I moved around him, it was uncanny. It was uncanny how realistic my dog was in front of me. It wasn’t a two-dimensional flat file of my dog. It was—I mean, and you’re right, like, memories-wise, take a pi—I took a picture of my entire family, by the way, I just went around, I took videos, I took pictures, and then I went into the spatial, you know, imagery, and I kind of walked around them. It was just a really cool way of—
Jason: It’s amazing.
Raju: Reliving that.
Jason: You know, obviously taking it from the Vision Pro, you’ll look, like, a dork and all this stuff.
Raju: Jason. Have you seen me without the Vision Pro? Also, dork [laugh].
Will: [laugh].
Jason: [laugh] fair enough. Fair enough. Yeah, we got a lot of dorks on this call. I think that was something where it’s like, it’s clear this is the future of computing. This technology, this format, as it gets more comfortable, as more developers bring new experiences, I mean, Steve Jobs was asked—you know, they had Steve Jobs and Bill Gates on stage a few years after the iPhone, and it was like, “What does Windows phone do, and what does the iPhone do?” And they asked both.
And Bill Gates predicts, like, all these things that didn’t come true, and Steve Jobs just says, “I don’t know. I don’t know. Five years from now, what does the iPhone have on it? I’m not quite sure, but you know, what I do know is that there are tons of developers out there, super excited with this new interaction model and the capabilities that we have on the phone. We’re going to make the phone so much better in all of these dimensions, but it’s really going to be the developer ecosystem, both existing big companies, and brand-new experiences that I can’t really imagine right now.”
And, you know, as this becomes more mature, it gets more comfortable, it scales up, you can really imagine brand-new experiences that weren’t—maybe they were possible, but not at this fidelity, not at this—you know, the memories was a great example of something where I was like, I’ve done not as much VR and AR as you have, Raju, but you know, I’ve been in multiple headsets, and had some really cool experiences, but there is a threshold. Just as much as we had touchscreens before capacitive touch, but capacitive touch just transformed that medium, I think this is kind of a similar, kind of, amazing canvas to paint on that, you know, we’re painting with Windows and little things, I’m moving my desktop around, and that’s, like, the cool initial version. That’s a little bit of, like, the faster horse. But we’re going to have, like, the car of this experience, which is, I’m not even quite sure what that looks like. We can come up with cool theories, but holy cow.
Raju: It tickles you a little bit.
Jason: You got to tickle attachment? Is there a tickle attachment?
Raju: [laugh] No, I didn’t—you didn’t have that button on yours? I had a button. You know, it’s fantastic. It’s a massage button, too. It’s fantastic. Wait, different product. Different product. But what—what I—it’s funny how a bunch of real estate on this thing, like, an entire button is dedicated toward photos and videos, right? Like, to me that was like a prominent, prominent—like, it was so noticeable.
Because everything is general purpose in Apple devices typically, right? As in general purpose, like, programmable. You can put anything you want. And then you got this one button at the very top that’s just, like, photos, and videos. And of course, like, you know, I touch everything. Like, you don’t need to train me. I’m going to screw around with this to the point where I’m—I’m taking pictures of everything. And I just said to myself, like, it would be an entirely—like, you know, in today’s world, like, I take pictures of a lot of things that I want to use for business purposes, but not three-dimensional stuff, right? Like, whiteboards, right? And it’s like, but now you’re thinking, like, man, I could take a picture of a design, you know, exercise going on, or a video of a design exercise, and see things from a different perspective or, you know, visualize people’s mannerisms or body language in a different way because you can actually get closer to them, in slightly closer—
Jason: I videotaped—I was like, I’m going to give Misha a hug, just because it was going to be a cool thing. You know, and it was like, from my perspective. And I, you know, put Misha in, it’s like, this is me giving you a hug. It’s an amazing experience.
Raju: Agreed, agreed. Go, what’s your second point? What’s your second point? You had another one.
Jason: GenAI plus spatial. You’re going to have these characters. Imagine—you know, in Her. You remember, he’s playing a video game with a little tiny guy who’s, like, swearing at him. And he’s using his hands just like you use in Apple Vision Pro, and he’s talking to this guy, and it’s part of a video game. Like, this plus characters, things you can talk to, interact with, you know, all of a sudden, all of these amazing advances in technology, all kind of breaking at the same time, are going to mix and combine, again, and kind of like this Steve Jobs, ‘I’m not quite sure where it’s going to go, but I do know it’s exciting.’
Raju: I definitely can see that. I can definitely—
Jason: That’s, that’s next level.
Raju: Just like you can take a photo of somebody and remember them, or a video of a scene and see it from different angles, you can imagine a scenario where that becomes interactive with a generative AI engine. So, I agree.
Jason: Yeah, you just have, like, a virtual pet that’s in your home.
Raju: Oh, dude, I have so many virtual pets. It’s just so—yeah it’s just like [laugh]—okay, I’m going to move to Gatling gun, just in the interest of time here. And you guys can both answer. I’m going to start with Apple-oriented because, you know, it’s an Apple, and it’s a mixed-reality stuff. So, the first set of questions is just Apple-oriented. The best iPod skinny: the Shuffle or the Nano?
Will: [laugh].
Jason: I’m going to say Shuffle because I want a little more control.
Will: I was Nano and it was so useful. I think I had half a dozen of them.
Raju: Yeah. I’m going to go with Nano, too, just because it had the screen. Just a tiny little screen.
Jason: Oh, I’m thinking—sorry. I got them, I got them inverted, the little tiny—it has a rectangle and a screen? Yeah—
Raju: Yeah.
Jason: That’s the one that I had.
Raju: Yeah.
Jason: There was one that was, like, a little clip-on thing, which didn’t have—
Raju: That was a Shuffle.
Jason: Yeah, I couldn’t do that.
Raju: That was a Shuffle.
Jason: I’m too control oriented.
Raju: Yeah, I didn’t like the Shuffle, but I loved the Nano. Because just—
Jason: Yeah, sorry. I got them backwards. The Nano was amazing.
Raju: Fine. That’s a three for three on that one. Okay. Best Apple TV show. And this one’s For all Mankind or Ted Lasso.
Jason: Severance.
Raju: Severance. Threw another one in there. What about you, Will?
Jason: I did.
Will: I love Ted Lasso.
Raju: I’m with Ted Lasso. Okay. So, we got, like, a write-in candidate for this one which was Severance, and then Ted Lasso for Will and I. Okay, next—
Will: Men of a Certain Age.
Raju: Yeah, I know. I know. She’s young whippersnappers, you know? They’re like, just sever my brain. I just want to live my work life and private life separately.
Jason: Right [laugh], yeah.
Raju: So, all right. Best actual apple. Delicious, or Macintosh?
Will: The Golden Delicious? Oh, a hundred percent Golden Delicious. Yeah.
Jason: Golden Delicious, yeah.
Raju: Oh, I’m going to go with Macintosh. I’m going to go with Macintosh. I love the little sourness, you know? It’s a little—just a little bit sour.
Will: Yeah, but that Golden Delicious is a much friendlier Apple. As long as it’s ripe. If it’s—
Raju: I don’t know. I mean, like—
Will: —the littlest bit overripe, you don’t want it. It’s mealy.
Raju: I had one that was not friendly at all. I mean, it was like yelling, it was just annoyed. I was—“Don’t bite me.” And I was just, like, I’m going to take this Mac—
Will: Don’t be mealy.
Raju: —yeah, Macintosh. Okay. All right, so that’s good. Now, I’m going to move to sort of the AR/VR side of things. And I just have, like, one question on that, really, which is best mixed-reality movie: Ready Player One or Total Recall.
Will: I like that you’re taking us back to Total Recall. I have to give it the nod.
Raju: By the way, there’s a new Total Recall, just so you know. Like, there’s two of them. Like, there’s the Schwarzenegger one, but now there’s a newer one. But that’s okay.
Jason: I just rewatched The Shining with Misha—she hadn’t seen it—which is referenced heavily in Ready Player One. I’m going to have to give the nod. It was fun. It was just fun. I’ve seen Total Recall, loved it, but yeah, I quite enjoyed Ready Player One, both the book, and they did a pretty good job with the movie, too. I was—
Raju: I kind of love both, but I’m going to give Total Recall. I mean, just that entire red blob coming out of Schwarzenegger’s nose. I mean, geez, that was just, like—I mean, that scene. And Kuato. Kuato, come on. All right. That’s all I got. Anybody else want to, you know, chime in, or say anything?
Jason: You know, just to kind of wrap it up, I think just generally, like, this is clearly a v1, you know, and I think I’m… it depends on where you find yourself on the adoption curve and how much you want to compromise. Because there’s tons of compromises in the product, but I think it’s all in service of creating, like, a new magical experience that I—there are moments of wow in there that aren’t passing; they’re permanent. And I’m really excited about that platform and how it works its way into a variety of different industries, from the industrial robotic applications to having a robot pet dog that lives at your home that you can talk to. I think there’s just tons of potential here, and I’m excited that, you know, we have a number of companies that are kind of pushing towards this future. Because we need—you know, it takes a lot of investment to move these things forward, and we’ve got a lot of big companies pushing. Yeah.
Raju: We are on the cusp of something. I mean, listen, augmented reality and virtual reality have been around for a long time, with a lot of, sort of, conjecture. I think this is the one product that is, in its first iteration, showing us some of the possibilities of where we’re going to be in a few years, and I’m super, super excited about it. I think it’s going to really revolutionize a lot of stuff that we’re not even thinking about today. Industries, like, you know, listen, internet, and now we have Amazon, right, and distribution for retail is entirely different.
I’m telling you home shopping is going to be entirely different, clothing shopping is going to be entirely different, watching movies is going to be very different. It’s going to be collaborating—like, Zoom calls are going to be—it’s going to be cool. And I’m just—I mean, we’re all really lucky to be living in an era where we can, you know, sort of innovate at this rate.
Jason: Yea, peek into the future. Yeah.
Raju: Yeah. So anyway, thanks to listeners here.
Jason: Way to wrap it up.
Raju: Yeah, absolutely. All right. Very cool.
Will: Thank you for listening to RRE POV.
Raju: You can keep up with the latest on the podcast at @RRE on Twitter—or shall I say X—
Jason: —or rre.com, and on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts—
Raju: —or wherever fine podcasts are distributed. We’ll see you next time.