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The editor of The Immersive Wire dispels some common misconceptions about AR/VR, explains why most of us are wrong about the metaverse, and details how an interview with Carol Baskin helped highlight a big problem with the state of AR/VR technology today.
Show Notes
The Immersive Wire is an essential read, a twice-weekly analysis of the latest news in AR/VR and the metaverse. For those of you who don’t know the newsletter, here’s an elevator pitch: If you’re struggling to keep up with developments in the AR/VR space, or you’re feeling tired of the same old venture-backed marketing hype, The Immersive Wire is your solution.
The man behind the newsletter, Tom Ffiske, is a thought leader with a uniquely high-level view of the industry. When we caught up with him recently, we discussed common misconceptions about AR/VR, why most of us are wrong about the metaverse, and how an interview with Carol Baskin helped highlight a necessary truth — and a big problem — with the state of AR/VR technology today.
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Creators & Guests
What is The Spatial Reality Podcast?
We host one on one interviews exploring the businesses and individuals that are defining the applications of spatial computing. We aim to show you how spatial computing can change your business and your life—not a decade from now, not in a few years, but today.
Welcome to the Spatial Reality Podcast, your resource for authentic conversations about spatial computing technologies. I'm Sean Higgins, your host. Every few weeks I'll share a new in-depth interview with a leader in spatial computing. I'm casting my net wide trying to find experts who can help us understand how this technology is going to change and is already changing a huge variety of.
My goal is to offer hype free information about spatial computing. For these first three episodes, I pulled recordings from my most popular interviews from the last year. These recordings were made so I could publish text interviews on the website, and that means we used Google to record not ideal.
Still, I think it's worth sharing these so you can enjoy the insights that our guests have to offer. Enjoy it and keep an eye out for more podcasts coming very soon.
The immersive wire is an essential read, a twice weekly analysis of the latest news in ar vr in the Metaverse. For those of you who don't know the newsletter, here's an elevator pitch. If you're struggling to keep up with developments in the ar vr space, or you're feeling tired of the same adventure backed marketing hype, the immersive wire is your solution.
The man behind the newsletter, Tom Fisk, is a thought leader with a uniquely high level view of the. When I caught up with him, we discussed the common misconceptions about AR and vr, why most of us are wrong about the Metaverse, and how an interview with Carol Baskin of all people helped highlight a necessary truth and a big problem with the state of AR vr technology today.
Enjoy.
Does the term spatial computing mean anything specific to you? I use it as, uh, within the UN umbrella of immersive technologies. You need spatial computing in order to help immerse people in it. Good example is Matterport, because they're company who captures spaces. I think that kind of spatial stuff is gonna be really important for the future because of course, You're gonna be building out and going from there.
Now, I should probably say Matt is a client of mine in my full-time role while I work as account director. So I'm using them as an example cause I'm quite familiar with the area. Beyond that, there are a lot of other companies who are work in the area who do some really cool things, and I think special computing fits under this metaverse.
You can either create things and the creator led economy is fascinating. That's worth a whole episode in of itself, as well as realistic capture as well, which does have its own place because realistic capture will be important for services in the future. But we also need to sort of the fundamentals about what this meta versus even going to be.
There's no consensus, and I don't think anyone's being polite. I think there's a lot of people who talk about, who don't know what they're talking about. They think, Oh, the metaverse, that's NFTs, right? I think, Oh, they're metaverse. That's what Facebook's doing. Right. There's a lot of confusion in the area, which is understandable, but one thing at a time, you're concerned with spatial computing technology in so far as it enables immersive technologies.
Would you say generally your focus these days is on the metaverse, or is there a broader, A broader focus? I've seen a lot of info in the metaverse and so it has been like a very recent big focus, but I always try to see it within the PRIs of virtual augmented reality. Cause I think those will be the fundamental, I believe, along down the line, potentially decentralized networks as well.
We'll see, I'm an immersive technology professional first. By no means am I like a crypto person. Second. Yeah. If I work, then like I'll have stories coming in my ears when it comes to it. Right. It sounds like, as you say, virtual and augmented reality are these fundamental, fundamental technologies. Why do you think that and what, what do you imagine them becoming in the future?
Like why are these the meaningful technologies rather than all? The NFTs and distributed weds and whatnot. Uh, when it comes to most technologies, it's more fundamental because it's the organic next step when it comes to our connected experience online. With the internet, we have, we can access information whenever we want, but on when it comes to experiences online, the next evolution is instead of an internet of information, will have internet experie.
And I believe fundamental to that would be augmented reality and virtual reality. And I think I'll just go in two different ways for virtual reality. I think it's just because it's just really cool and if you try it yourself, Yeah, you can see there's a lot of potential into it. It's just that it's been hampered by its costs of creating content and hardware, and then we got augmented reality.
I think there's a lot of potential within a metaverse where it's an overlay of our common. The mapping technology's being created by Meta and Niantic, and the idea that you can have an overlay with contextual information or the potential playing games is astonishingly cool. I could see a device that'll come out in the world, which will be as intuitive as a mobile phone, but something that you use potentially with glasses, potentially.
Yeah. Um, like there'll be a lot of friction before reach that point. There'll be years. That's a longer term thing. Do you see a general c. In any sense among these companies about what the best uses of these technologies are. Enterprise is where the money is at at the moment. So even like smaller places like HTC are seeing some good profit from going for enterprise use cases, training and soft skills, hard skills, learning, all that good stuff.
Yeah, so there's lots of companies, folks in the area cause that is a very easy way of getting those profit margins. Will continue getting the more difficult it gets right down to art festivals where the margins are nonexistent but still important and like really amazing stuff that comes out. So I think areas where like it's profitable, it's obviously gonna be enterprise, I have a soft spot for meditative experiences.
I think they're really cool. Personal link too. And Iris, which I think people have got the wrong end of the. It's hard to say. I wouldn't even necessarily say there's a wrong way of using vr. I think there's just ways in which it's smaller and not as necessary. I think. I think travel's a good example. You don't need a VR headset for like travel experiences.
Not yet. The technology's not there and like, why do I need to put a VR headset to see a 360 image of a location? Right. And if I go to augmented reality, great for marketing. Amazing for marketing because you've got, you can track everything. So like the trackables, so important that's all. Seen it being used in great little, uh, soft skills training sessions as well.
Scan a post in a factory. You can learn a skill you need for just in time training. That's as well. And ways which I've seen, which just don't work as well, is if it's just like a really finicky video game where the AR doesn't contribute to the core of the game. Then it's pointless. You might as well just be tapping away and playing Candy Crush.
You don't need augmented reality for certain types of experiences. So it sounds like maybe this is one of the stumbling blocks right now. People are so hyped up about these technologies that they're using them in ways where it's not totally necessary. Yeah. I mean they're experimenting and it's important to experiment and they may well be that there might be like an incredible AR game that'll go in absolutely soar.
And before you say, Oh yeah, do you, what about Pokemon Go? Didn't that do super well? The was very quiet about how many people actually use the AR function. Cause remember you can like just not use it. You can turn it off. Yeah, they've been very quiet about that. So I wonder, The game wasn't popular cuz of the ar.
The game was popular because of Pokemon and I think we both know that. Sure. Looking at your newsletter, like what's your, if your newsletter is a point of view on all of this stuff, what is it? I'm just cautiously optimistic. I'm when the newsletter exists to support companies who are like fast, smarter than I, who's like building the future.
Use, This is my way of just saying to everyone, Look at these people, Look at what they're doing. There are, there's some amazing stuff coming out and I do put a no bit of analysis for certain news stories, and I do have an opinion. So I published a book called The Metaverse Professional Guide, which is, that's where I put my opinions in for best and right.
The perspective I have is all a, All discussions in the matter verse presently is pointless. This is something which is gonna be far along in the future. We can't know what is going to look like cause we're seeing it through the prison of the 2020s. Try asking someone the 1990s to see the two thousands.
They'll be seeing the two thousands in the prison. What they experience in the 19 hundreds is impossible. And three, I do things. The next natural evolution of like how people connect this. Is this a question of. I believe there'll be augmented reality. I might be wrong. So we'll find, We're saying this is so far out in the future.
It's interesting because I talk to people who are, who it seems that they believe that it, It's coming soon. I'll give you like Meta has a 15 year plan for the Metaverse and Metas. Also probably the company investing the most in Metaverse technologies, publicly known anyway. I would lean towards the Billionaire Fang company who says it's gonna take a long time, rather than a startup who's trying to get some venture capital.
Because there's a lot of hype in the Metaverse stuff at the moment. And of course if you, there are people just strapping on Web three or Metaverse in marketing decks to get that venture of money and. Gotta be careful. John, to your second point, when you talk about our difficulty imagining what this is going to look like, a lot of the people I talked to, we look back at various developments and computing history, they say, Here's what happened when we were developing the DUI for desktop computers.
We've been through this sort of thing a few times. We imagine this is how it works given that sort of thing, why? What don't we know or what don't we know that we don't? First let's to hardware and software. Hardware. We don't know how we're even gonna access it. Personal computers are way too good. So easy to use a computer and access whatever you want on it.
It needs to be an amazing device to replace that if it is replaceable at all. Cause equally you can have a sub, a SubD device that's good in its own way that work very much can turn into, um, so there's hardware and you can't really be good that because that's gonna be based on how the metals gonna be set up on the software side.
So now it's good to software the other side and on software there needs to be open protocols that everyone agrees to. Similar to how the internet is based on a type of code, where there's agreements, there's interoperability. We can all connect together. That's what the supposed be built on and go from there.
A great example is email. Like there are protocols, so the emails can actually communicate with each other. So we can actually send emails or receive emails. There's absolutely no way we email will be as like, Today as it is now, if it were for those open post calls, could you imagine they would be wall gardens of emails?
It would be terrible, right? So an equivalent of that from the matter versus what we need and that is being discussed and like we're getting there, which makes me happy. Talking about getting there, how is this happening for consortiums of companies, for instance, that talk about home IOT devices running on the same protocols?
Is this one of the things that maybe we've learned about from past mistakes, having devices that don't talk to each other? Do people, Are people recognizing that this is necessary for everybody? If it's gonna work for anybody? I certainly hope we don't have a Android and iOS situation where there are some things which are blocked between each other.
I hope not. Yeah. But we'll see. It's worth noting actually. It's just other companies, different perspectives of its growth. So Microsoft is adamant, there'll be multiple metaverse. . So all the messaging is there'll be multiple metaverses, which like will just hang around and coexist. While Facebook believes there'll be one singular Metaverse 48 yacht Club believes there'll be one metaverse where they can make a ton of money.
there's lot, there's lots of different perspectives on it. What do you think? Is there gonna be one metaverse or are you cautiously optimistic that there will be. I think there'll be two types. I think the ones we've seen today called micro metaverses, they're like, they're effectively virtual worlds. Uh, and like an example of micro metaverse would be second life VR chats decent and build micro metaverses.
They exist within their own bubble and can't talk to each other. Now the vision that Facebook has and the one which. I think will also come out, but far away in the future is the macro metaverse where, where things can talk amongst each other, where you can like trade, you can surf around and do anything.
The internet, as I said earlier, instead of internet of information, is the internet of experiences. So you connects together, you can experience the things. I think one of my favorite parts of the newsletter, I like the little interviews that you. Have you taken anything away from these interviews that maybe you weren't expecting to?
What's the most surprising, meaningful answer that you've gotten to one of the questions that you've asked? An interviewee. I don't have a particular example, but of interviews I've done, I think the one, there's a thread where like being brave and just doing it. Mm-hmm. seems to be like a key operative in our industry.
If you have an idea, It doesn't like it could have been done before, but if you have only you're passionate about, just do it and build it. And that's the impression I had for all the interviews, which I do. But I think they're really good and interesting. The one that stands out purely because of like, I didn't realize she's so invested, was Carol Va.
Yes. She was really interesting to talk to. Really interesting. So interesting to hear someone who didn't know much about VR and ar who then just went into it and then just said throughout the process. Does not make it easy to learn because it just seems such a nebulous and very closed off thing. Which, which you are thinking to heart because yes, it can be really closed up and it's very difficult to get in.
Is it part of the way that technology companies work? Is this gonna be a major stumbling block? I think it's skills. They don't know. People don't even know where to begin with skills. They don't know they need to learn through js. They don't need, they dunno. They need to learn unity. They dunno. They need to learn.
Maybe a platform like Zappo or a four, they dunno where to start. There are some great courses out there to which dip into it and help, but there's a lot of demand for like special computing skills at the moment. And I think that gap between people knowing and where to begin and then doing work. It's golf, which is current bridges are being built.
Okay, let's say. A serial entrepreneur and I have an idea for an augmented reality product, or I run a factory and I wanna start using this technology. I mean, how do you see these bridges being built? Maybe it's my bias as a communications professional coming through. I think if there's a way for these people to access good quality information on what to do easily, right.
I think that's a sweet spot, and I think that will really, really, Are there any myths or misunderstandings about these technologies that you see repeated a lot that you think are potentially damaging or a stumbling block to the people understanding the technology or working with it? There's a, there's a whole bunch of people in the UK who tried to via cardboard VR headsets and they thought they tried vr and that was, that's really, that was really damaging.
when it comes to repetition of vr, we now have millions of people who think they did vr, but what they did was a 360 YouTube experience. From my perspective, when I was receiving like articles and reports on vr, there were, um, companies who conflated virtual reality with 360 videos, which damaged statistics on the number of people you've tried to vr.
That was really bad, and I think that was probably the most damaging thing that happened in the. And when it comes to augment reality, I don't think that's just a misconception. I just think people, and I do actually think there's actually more and more interest over time, but it's compar. It's not exponential.
It's just going up but not exponentially up. Does that make any any sense? Yeah, I think I understand what you're saying. Virtual reality seems like it potentially. Explode at some point. Whereas, Yeah, I actually disagree. Like I was actually thinking about this myself. I read AAR's Exponential and a wonderful book on exponential technologies.
I was like thinking about is is virtual reality and exponential technology, can it go up straight up? And I'm not convinced, like this is some fundamental issues with vr. The moment it's expensive at the moment. Like the content's not. The reason to put on every day is not there safer fitness. I'm not convinced and convinced it'll go up in my popularity.
I just don't think it will go up exponentially. I've heard a lot of people argue that the effective experience of using virtual reality is so much more powerful than augmented reality, particularly the augmented reality. We've had access to that if people actually have the chance to use. Then it's going to be a much more, for lack of a better way to put it, magical experience.
No, it's true. Which is why location based experiences are so important for that. It's a fundamental barrier of adoption that like you, it is very cool but it's very difficult to try out. It's why VR iks actually really like important and partially while they still sold off funding as well. Cause it is helpful.
But yeah, it's going quickly from there. Do you think that augmented reality is an exponential te. Yes, so AR is already expon because it can be used if it's web based, it can be used by billions of phones. So the actual like reach is there. It's a question of when people actually use it, and I think that because it's so easy to do, so easy to make, so easy to deploy.
And the benefits are there. Statistically, I think it will grow quicker and quicker. I have no doubt. Do you think this might actually be in its own way sort of a problem for a future development of augmented reality technology if we're all able to access it through our phones, but most people who develop the technology, a 2D interfaces of fundamental stumbling block.
No, I think it's, um, we'll see how ar glasses develops over time. I try to be careful about analyzing AR glasses cause there's so little information out there or few like things that tap into my vision or what it is. It's a mixture of hardware and software, you know, And I think the hardware companies know the need to build the hardware before the software comes.
They know it. They're make, They're making it bet in the future. And I think it's a safe, oh, I say a safe bet. I think it's a bet where taking all factors into account, it's a sensible one. . Right. I think that's a, That's probably a good way to put it. In addition to say people trying the technologies, people having access to legitimate, honest information about it.
Are there any other things that need to happen in order for. Virtual reality or augmented reality to, to really start to grow in the way people imagine it will. Like cost is the main factor. In the uk there was a point where there were like multiple VR headsets and the one that outsold the clearly better one, the oks go outsold the OS Quest OG model.
One was clearly then the other. The quest is better than the go in every way, but the go just outsold it. And the reason why is just, it was so cheap. It's, it's a very price elastic market. The cheaper you are, the more you sell regardless of quality. So I do think that the biggest thing to address is cost.
Make the cheap. So it sounds like it needs to be so cheap that it could be everywhere without a second thought about expense. It can't be like, like a mobile phone in the moment because you use a mobile phone for absolutely everything and VR can't do that. So what you have to do instead is make it cheap.
So it can be do, it's one good thing and directly.
Thanks for listening to today's podcast. Check the episode notes for links to the books, reports, articles, and other media we discussed. Today. You can find more episodes of spatial reality in your usual podcast spots. Leave us a review if you enjoy today's interview. And so, you know, I'm always looking for more experts to talk.
So hit me up on LinkedIn if there's anybody you'd love to hear from. See you next episode.