Our interview with Matt Rowell and Thomas Hayden, the co-founders of 360 Labs starts at exactly 44:00!
CES is over! It's a big time for VR and VR Video, with a host of new headsets to bring immersive video to more people than ever. Get ready to explore the thrilling intersection of 360 video, dome-based experiences, and the promise of Wi-Fi 7 for VR tech that could trim latency down to nearly invisible threads. This episode promises to be a journey through the evolution of VR design, where style meets functionality in a dance that aims to outfit the masses with sleek, lifestyle-friendly headsets, all without sacrificing an ounce of immersive bliss.
As we navigate the pulsating world of virtual concerts, witness how Blackpink, Alison Wonderland, Doja Cat, and the VR180 team at Red Rocks are setting the stage for the future of VR events with their top-notch production. With our first guests Matt Rowell and Thomas Hayden, the co-founders of 360 Labs out of Portland, OR joining us, get the inside scoop on the craft of creating immersive video content and the hurdles of bringing such innovative experiences to the hungry eyes of viewers worldwide. We even cast a critical eye on the Visor by Immersed and the Snapdragon XR2 plus Gen2 chipset, heralding a new era where tech meets trend.
But that's not all – we're also peering into the looking glass of the Apple Vision Pro's debut, casting a discerning glance at its potential to transform productivity in the Apple ecosystem. Plus, we'll debate the practicality and design choices of the latest AR glasses and 3D TVs unveiled around CES. So, buckle up for a ride into the dynamic, ever-shifting landscape of immersive content, where we're saving a front-row seat for you to experience the power and presence of virtual reality.
As usual, show notes here: Stereoscope Podcast Notes #3
Our interview with Matt Rowell and Thomas Hayden, the co-founders of 360 Labs starts at exactly 44:00!
CES is over! It's a big time for VR and VR Video, with a host of new headsets to bring immersive video to more people than ever. Get ready to explore the thrilling intersection of 360 video, dome-based experiences, and the promise of Wi-Fi 7 for VR tech that could trim latency down to nearly invisible threads. This episode promises to be a journey through the evolution of VR design, where style meets functionality in a dance that aims to outfit the masses with sleek, lifestyle-friendly headsets, all without sacrificing an ounce of immersive bliss.
As we navigate the pulsating world of virtual concerts, witness how Blackpink, Alison Wonderland, Doja Cat, and the VR180 team at Red Rocks are setting the stage for the future of VR events with their top-notch production. With our first guests Matt Rowell and Thomas Hayden, the co-founders of 360 Labs out of Portland, OR joining us, get the inside scoop on the craft of creating immersive video content and the hurdles of bringing such innovative experiences to the hungry eyes of viewers worldwide. We even cast a critical eye on the Visor by Immersed and the Snapdragon XR2 plus Gen2 chipset, heralding a new era where tech meets trend.
But that's not all – we're also peering into the looking glass of the Apple Vision Pro's debut, casting a discerning glance at its potential to transform productivity in the Apple ecosystem. Plus, we'll debate the practicality and design choices of the latest AR glasses and 3D TVs unveiled around CES. So, buckle up for a ride into the dynamic, ever-shifting landscape of immersive content, where we're saving a front-row seat for you to experience the power and presence of virtual reality.
As usual, show notes here: Stereoscope Podcast Notes #3
Hey, what's up guys? Welcome to the Stereo Scope Podcast. This is number three. I'm Byron, got Anthony and we got something special for you. Today. We spoke with Matt and Thomas from 360 Labs. That'll be at the end of the episode, but we're gonna do the new stuff right now.
Speaker 1:It seems like there's a lot going on right now CES when we're shooting. This is day two of the actual CES event, not just preview, and there is so much going on. So the first thing we have is Amazon is working with some immersive content creators on an in-person immersive event. So it's gonna be from the guys at Arts District Studios, brooklyn and Vortex Emergence, and the reason I think this is interesting is because those are both immersive content creators. The Arts District Studios, people are it's like an in, it's like a compound in Brooklyn, but the other one is Vortex Emergence. They're a dome-based video production company and that stuff is getting so big right now, especially with a sphere, and a lot of the people who make 360 videos are the people who are creating content for that medium. I think it's really interesting that Amazon is making this connection right now, because we have acquaintances that develop this 360 content and it's good to see that they're getting a place to display that stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as we've talked about many times, distribution is such a pain in our industry, such a huge part of it, so any new avenue to put that content out is great.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I really want to see what that looks like. It's an in-person event. I wonder if and sometimes that stuff gets ends up being used in other mediums we might be able to see some of the stuff that they put out online. Yeah, here's some of the immersive stuff. This is a video that they shot some New York content creators of the space in Brooklyn, and then this is some of the Vortex Emergence. How do you feel about these immersive video, the dome experience stuff have you seen any of that type of stuff?
Speaker 2:Not really Not anything modern Not since we talked about this a little bit in the interview that we did. Both grew up going to Omnimax type experiences. For me it was in Fort Worth Texas, so that was my first dome experience, which I loved. My earliest immersive experience was that. So I think it's cool and it's interesting because it's about the only way to do immersive content as a group Unless you all have headsets in different places or whatever. I think keeping a social aspect of going to a movie, theater or whatever, I think it's cool, it looks cool, people are going and, like I've always said, whatever pushes the whole idea of immersive content forward is great. While it isn't spatial slash, 3d slash, whatever stupid term you want to use, it's still cool. It's still part of that. So I think the more we break the old media paradigm, the better.
Speaker 1:I will say. The one thing that sort of annoys me about some of these things is that it always seems like it's tied to some sort of corporate media push. This is only happening because Amazon is trying to promote Wheel of Time Sure.
Speaker 2:But remember. Tv shows 100 years ago, or not even 100 years ago, are like brought to you by Lucky.
Speaker 1:Stripes? Absolutely true.
Speaker 2:And it was so heavily integrated. So it is part of the just capitalism baby.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, move on. It's the sad reality of it. So this one, this next one, is actually pretty relevant for everybody in the industry. So there was a big announcement at CES it was actually the day it was on Monday Wi-Fi 7 launches promising near zero latency for wireless VR. So this is a big one. It's not immediately relevant to the video industry, the immersive video industry, but it has a knock-on effect that I think is huge for the industry.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I was going to say. It's probably not fair to say that it's promising anything for VR. It's just Wi-Fi 7. But looking at what Wi-Fi 7 can do could, like you said, have some really interesting knock-on effects into the VR industry, because of what we're looking at right here, where you can pipe different bits of data through different bands yeah, isolate bands for different purposes, and that's cool.
Speaker 1:I think this has the opportunity to really change the way that people use VR headsets. I mean, standalone seems to be the thing right now, but if you want to drive much higher fidelity experiences, I think PC-based VR is always going to be around, because people are always going to want to push the boundaries of what those headsets are capable of doing. And I think especially since I had a thought yesterday that the Valve Deckard is something that we haven't seen yet. Right, We've heard rumors about it.
Speaker 1:It's heavily leaked yeah everybody knows that it exists, but we don't really know anything about it, other than at some point there were two separate devices, so the last thing that I read was that at one point it was both a set-top box like a console sort of like the Steam Boxes from 2013, 2014, and the headset portion, and that they will work together in tandem to have a consoleized PC-VR experience with a headset that streams instantly. It feels to me like Valve has known that Wi-Fi 7 is coming and possibly is waiting to announce, based on the standards for Wi-Fi 7. I mean, this is all purely speculation.
Speaker 3:I have to put that out there, but it seems like the two things are inextricably linked.
Speaker 1:So I really do think that the headsets getting smaller is so relevant to the industry. I mean, so many people their issues with the headsets is the comfort, the weight, yeah, and I think the Quest 3 seems to be a big game changer, all like we're going to talk about this later. But there's so many new headsets being announced and there's AR, there's VR, but one thing I've noticed from the existing headset makers is the people that have been doing it for a while is that they're all slimming them down. Or the people who work in the VR industry, like immersed, the immersed visor. That thing is small and it's sleek. The only exception to this and it's sort of like there's it's hard to everything that we're going to be talking about today and for the next couple months sort of is in this black hole of surrounding, which is the Apple Vision Pro. Right, the Apple Vision Pro. So the Apple has not been in the VR space in any real capacity up until now.
Speaker 2:Well, don't say VR, you know? Yeah, exactly. And what did they do?
Speaker 1:They made their headset as big and as bulky as it looks that you can.
Speaker 2:I wouldn't necessarily call it big and bulky, but it is absolutely going to be heavy. It is metal and glass.
Speaker 2:Oh, it looks pretty bulky to me but it's metal and glass, but it is. I mean, you have to admit it's the best looking headset. Yeah, how much that matters is one of those things that I find really interesting, because I think a big hurdle to people consuming this content, I feel like in the way that it's supposed to be consumed, which is in headset, is the idea of wearing a headset. Like people don't want to wear things, so maybe making it cooler on the outside is important, so you have the personas and whatnot, the outside thing. But yeah, from a comfort perspective, I mean we're already seeing with the Quest 3, which is much lighter, benefits greatly from having like a battery head strap on to sort of balance. Well wait, it's actually not much lighter.
Speaker 1:It's only supposedly without the facial interface and the headband. It's actually only seven grams lighter than the Quest 2.
Speaker 2:What I'm saying compared to the Quest, compared to the Apple Vision Pro.
Speaker 1:Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, much, much lighter. That's all I'm saying.
Speaker 2:So this is one of those things I think is interesting that even though the Quest is much lighter, it's greatly from having that sort of balance of a battery on the back, and which is an interesting thing with the Apple headset, because it has to have an external battery and it goes in your pocket and so you have all this weight on the front Baffling. So again, but it looks cooler to not have it and that's an interesting. I think there is something to the vanity of people.
Speaker 1:And that's why I still think that wireless PCVR is always going to be a thing. I think it's. There's just a certain subset of the community that really likes the ability to push. I mean you can't run Half Life Alyx on it, right, not yet. I mean, yeah, you know mobile chips, those are getting powerful. I mean eventually, in in like five years, I'm guessing, you'll be able to run Half Life Alyx natively on a headset. But currently, yeah, no, yeah.
Speaker 2:So it's an interesting thing and in some ways, the Vision Pro is, even though it's a standalone device. A lot of what they showed off is like using your laptop, using it as a weird, like floating laptop display for your MacBook. It's like strapping.
Speaker 1:It's like strapping an iPad to your face.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but like blurring these lines of what is it used for and like it being an extension of your main machine, apple taking the different approach of it being to standalone things and using a Wi-Fi connection to pipe that over, or, you know, just using the horsepower of a proper gaming PC. But then Apple would have to get into more graphics processing stuff, which you know, they've been so allergic, they can do they're also.
Speaker 1:They've been so allergic to games for such a long time.
Speaker 2:Well on that platform, but on Apple devices like the iPad and iPhone, they're really getting into it. They're leveraging it. They have Apple Arcade now.
Speaker 1:Well, and they also. They just launched you can play Resident Evil 4 Remake and Resident Evil Village on your on the new iPhone 15 Pro. Mind you, there are issues with it. But and also they also launched the ability to port PC games to directly to Mac OS using the game porting toolkit. That's it. It seems like they've seen the writing on the wall that they need to claw back some market share for games because they've been just so left in the dust by. Yeah, are the places All right? So the next piece that we have is more.
Speaker 1:So in the last episode, we talked about all these VR concerts that were coming out. A lot of them have since come out and I watched a couple of them. So these are medical Owners can soon watch Alice in Wonderland, Zoo and more headline Red Rocks in VR. So what it looks like is that. So this is Blackpink. This is South Korean band. They're huge. I watched this. This is not the Red Rock stuff. This was shot in a giant venue. It was not in 3D, but it was really good. It was really dynamic. It was VR 180. The camera placements were really good and the performances and the it was just really impressive and you could tell that the people who were shooting it had a much better understanding of how to shoot a VR concert than We've seen in the past and because of how dynamic the light show was, it didn't really feel like you needed the depth there. It's the first VR concert that I've seen. That was impressive even without stereo.
Speaker 2:Right.
Speaker 1:And I think that's interesting. It's not what I was expecting. I also watched Alice in Wonderland in VR and that one is at Red Rocks and it looks like they have an entire team on site that is dedicated to these performances. I also saw that and that one was really good. I've heard Alice in Wonderland before. She's like an EDM artist Good stuff. I'm not super an EDM, but I do appreciate it. I used to be into French house music back in the 2000s. Still pay attention to the industry from time to time. It sort of got away from the type of EDM that I like, but honestly, the Alice in the Red Rocks crew they are knocking it out of the park. They did some really really high quality, good depth, excellent framing. If you're a fan of Alice in Wonderland, you should absolutely go watch those concerts because they're really really good. They are incredibly high quality and they're exactly the type of stuff that I want to see in VR. That's how VR concerts should be done, is the way that they're doing it at Red Rocks Really good stuff.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's good to finally happen.
Speaker 1:The other thing that and it's this video that we're looking at right now is they announced Doja Cat is getting a VR concert. We literally announced this yesterday. Doja Cat is huge. She's one of the biggest performers in the world. She's a Grammy winner. I mean, she's won so many awards at this point, it's fucking crazy. I'm interested to see who does this. I hope it's not the Blackpink, Despite the fact that the Blackpink team. It was a good video I really wanna see this was in depth. I really wanna see this in stereo, but apart from that, this is huge. This is the type of thing that we need to see. We need these huge artists with like global reach to be able to really capture those audiences.
Speaker 2:To get to the point where they are not just it's not just making contact for people who have headsets. It's content that makes people wanna go get a head.
Speaker 1:This is a destination. This is a destination thing. This is a reason for people to get headsets, this is a reason to bring people into VR, and I think there are certain other video platforms that could really do from bringing in people from the outside by doing this type of strategy. I don't know if they have the budget for it, but hey, it's in your best interest. Yeah, so these were produced by a couple different. So apparently, the Blackpink was produced by the Diamond Brothers and the Red Rock shows were produced by Dorsey Pictures, which is a much bigger video production company that usually does like Discovery Channel stuff. It looks like they're most likely based out of the Pacific Northwest, but, yeah, good stuff, really liked it. Oh, and I have to say that the 3D versions are only available on MediQuest TV. All of these you can watch in venues, but on venues they're only in 2D, like we said last week. All right, so moving on.
Speaker 1:So this is the stuff, that more CES stuff, and this stuff is definitely relevant for us and for the video industry because it's standalone. Headsets, I think, are the largest medium for watching Like market segment, yeah, yeah, for watching immersive video, and so Qualcomm and Snapdragon have announced their Snapdragon XR2 plus Gen2. Very confusing naming conventions. So this is effectively a faster version of the XR2 Gen2, which is in the Quest 3. And so they announced that it's going to be in the new Samsung and Google headset, the Visor by Immersed, which I really like the look of the Visor. Have you seen it? I think so. Yeah, it's not this one.
Speaker 3:Oh, here it is?
Speaker 1:This is the Immersed headset. I think the look of it is really cool.
Speaker 2:We'll see it here in a second it looks a little bit more like I think I was just looking at it.
Speaker 1:There it is. It's pretty, it's pretty it looks like what you would have thought of your headsets. Look like in the 80s you know?
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, because they also just looks like 80s sunglasses, like what a wrestler would wear. I appreciate that.
Speaker 1:At least you know. And the reason why I think this look is so good is because it looks futuristic and it doesn't just look like a big blobby brown thing on your head, you know? Yeah, I mean, I guess well, and that's.
Speaker 2:I think that's what's interesting, because it's like I don't know that I care that much, like you know, it's really just how comfortable is it? I mean, I think for, but I think for the larger market, like we talked about a minute ago, like you know, there's the way people look. It's I mean let's. I think that's one of the main reasons why Google Glass never took off is because you look crazy wearing it, you know.
Speaker 1:Yeah, they do look sort of weird. So the XR2 plus Gen2 has some pretty impressive specs, like they're saying a support for 4.3K display resolution per eye at 90 frames per second. That is absolutely huge. I mean, it seems like a Snapdragon is really trying to do like a shot across the bow for the Apple M1 and M3 processors, because those things are beasts and to push that many pixels at that refresh rate you have to have an absolute beast of a processor. And the other thing is that they're showing these this reference headset for.
Speaker 1:So the big difference is that this thing can handle up to 12 cameras, and so the Apple Vision Pro has, you know, I think, eight cameras on it. Yeah, I can't quite remember. Yeah, it's got so many cameras on it. That's why the color passers so much higher quality and their hand tracking tech, because really, when it comes down to it, to be able to have that type of fidelity, you need to be able to really see into places that you can't usually. Occlusion is a really big problem with hand tracking and with mixed reality, and so having that many cameras really allows you to minimize occlusion in the best possible way, yeah, but I feel like it's not just the number of cameras, it's the amount of processing behind it and the quality of the cameras, and that's why that thing is $3,500 versus $5,000.
Speaker 2:Exactly.
Speaker 1:And so the other thing is that, like there was a secret company that was not released and when this announcement came out, there was another company that was withheld, and we have since learned that that was Sony and their new mixed reality headset, which was a pretty big bomb that dropped on Tuesday at their keynote. And I'm sure a lot of people are. I personally think it's a little bit of a. I was actually pretty shocked because I was not expecting. It seems like the PSVR and the PSVR2 have sort of been after thoughts for Sony and currently doesn't seem like they're doing very well specifically with PSVR2. So this was actually a surprise to me because I didn't think it was. Vr was really in Priority for Sony Priority, and it doesn't.
Speaker 2:It's clearly not aimed at consumers, but does feel like a little bit of a slap in the face of those who did buy PSVR2. Yeah, exactly Because it's so much better specs-wise anyway.
Speaker 1:It's so much better specs-wise and, mind you, they haven't released a lot, but it's very clear that they're going for sort of the the same market or not market, but the same tier, the same tier of capability, as the Apple Vision Pro. I'm really excited to see what that device ends up being. We'll see. I mean, we'll talk about it more later, but this new chipset is gonna be a huge, huge thing for the industry, and I think I was actually surprised when the XR2 Gen2 launched, because I actually thought it was gonna be a little bit faster than it actually is. Don't get me wrong.
Speaker 1:The Quest 3 is really incredibly powerful, but it wasn't quite as powerful as I thought it was gonna be. But this explains it, because they had something else in their back pocket. Yeah, yeah, all right, let's see what we've got. Oh, and this is this was the announcement of the Google and Qualcomm headset, and this, the Google Qualcomm thing is really interesting because they both got out of the VR market about five years ago with the VR VR and the death of Daydream, and now they're partnering, despite the fact that they were antagonists at the time. We'll see.
Speaker 2:It's a fun space, especially when I feel like this is a real long-term market and or segment or whatever. You have to really be looking into the future and invest into it, and most tech companies are like if I don't see the data right now, then we're out.
Speaker 3:It's dead, it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:So they're constantly jumping in and out of things because, like they, nobody has a God. I hate to say it this way, but nobody has a vision for the future. It's like, if it's not. I mean, and this kind of permeates like this is infected Hollywood now too. It's why we have remake after remake and sequel after sequel, I feel like the only.
Speaker 1:I feel like Meta does have a vision for the future, though you know.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, that's fair.
Speaker 1:That's fair yeah.
Speaker 2:Bosworth, only was Bosworth and his.
Speaker 1:Ray-Ban-esque AR glasses that he like dropped out of nowhere in a bomb last month, you know saying that they're working on a glasses form factor AR VR device. Yeah, that is. That is going to be at the same quality as the Apple Vision Pro. That's crazy to me. Yeah, he also said that it may never see the light of day because they're too expensive to produce. Yeah, Like.
Speaker 2:And I'd have to go back and look up this quote. Maybe I shouldn't even bother saying it, but like something along the lines of like this is the most complicated piece of tech in this sort of genre ever created by humans, like it's just such a lofty thing. But there's also some really I don't know, it's some really interesting stuff.
Speaker 1:I mean, I would love to see what that looks like though, because I mean, that's sort of been the dream of what these things are, you know, like we're going to get into it at the very end, but just an absolute cavalcade of new headsets bursting onto the market, and they're all sort of iterating and going in a slightly different road from each other, which is exciting to see. The last time this happened, really, it felt like when the Windows Mixed Reality headsets were released back in like 2017, 2018.
Speaker 2:Well, before that, right, Because I mean we bought. I bought mine in like 2018 and it was old by then.
Speaker 1:It was old, so it was like 2016, I think, is when they were released, and so there were all these new headsets coming out, and then Windows Mixed Reality slowly died and then was finally killed last month.
Speaker 2:Yeah, exactly, they lost interest in it or whatever, and I feel like we haven't got any this amount of new headsets since then.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it's a very interesting time. Yeah, okay, so the next one is a pretty big one. It's. We finally have a release date for the Apple Vision Pro. It is February 2nd. Pre-orders go live January 19th at 5 am Pacific Standard Time. Fuck, it really seems like it's a long time coming, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I guess I mean I don't know. At the same time it feels like I don't know. It's I mean it's trial and schedule. It's only been what?
Speaker 1:nine months, or something like that, since they announced it, yeah, but they've been working on it for well six years, yeah, I mean, from what I heard, the leaks are that the headset was supposed to be released two years ago.
Speaker 2:I mean I can see that, based on the high amount of tech that's in it, I mean like blowing everybody out of the water.
Speaker 1:It still has M1s in it. It was supposed to the M1 and the R1. Like it was supposed to come out when those were new. New, yeah, yeah. So I mean, there was a lot. So Apple made the announcement on Monday, or was it Sunday, I don't remember. Anyways, doesn't matter, and there was a lot in there, so so announce every second. Oh, this is great. In the announcement page they said Vision Pro also introduces Apple immersive video, a remarkable new entertainment format pioneered by Apple, that puts users inside the action with 180 degree three-dimensional 8K recordings captured with spatial audio.
Speaker 1:Hmm, that sounds remarkably similar to what we're doing right now Similar to what we're literally doing right now, and have been, and have been. So yeah, pioneer Apple didn't pioneer shit, it's a little bit of a stretch.
Speaker 2:You can put it together if you say, okay, well, because they bought, was it NextVR?
Speaker 1:NextVR yeah.
Speaker 2:Several years ago, and in that way, nextvr was a pioneer in this format.
Speaker 1:And that pioneer is doing a lot of work, though.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but stretching the truth as much as possible, that's epic. How?
Speaker 1:it's done together. Also, we have yet to see any of that content that they so-called have pioneered. Yeah, they haven't. I mean, supposedly they've demoed it at their the events. The events, but they haven't released any footage of that stuff online, Like I have not seen any proof that this stuff exists other than the people that have demoed it. So, Apple, whatever your release strategy is for this, you're not hyping it up enough by showing us any of what it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but I do think it's unfortunately all a part of their plan, because the entertainment factor is the secondary use of this device. It is a productivity device and it is, like you said, an iPad's sharp to your face. It's designed to just be another device in the ecosystem, to just marry you more and more into the wall of garden. That's part of it. As I've started playing with spatial video on the iPhone which more on that to come I can see thoroughly that that's where they're going for it. It's mostly about capturing your own memories and reliving them and then eventually this content library will come. But, just like when the iPhone came out, there was no App Store, there were no games. Yeah, it did like eight things. So I think we're on a similar thing, obviously slightly accentuated by their already working on it, because obviously you can't just overnight release videos. But yeah, I don't think that's the big push for them at all.
Speaker 1:Yeah, supposedly they're barring developers from using the term any term other than spatial.
Speaker 2:Right VR AR MR.
Speaker 1:write out Doesn't matter get out of here. We don't watch it.
Speaker 2:Old language, yeah, which I mean and again, I'm also not like, while that sounds dumb and frustrating, I'm also okay with it because I think they probably have tested this stuff out and I know when I talk to people. I have a neighbor I've talked about VR videos several times and every time he goes what's that? Again, what's a VR? So I kind of get it because at least the word spatial gives you some context about what it is right.
Speaker 1:Well, there just doesn't know anything about it. They're calling their games right. They're calling their games spatial games. Sure, okay, that's fine. I guess I understand why they're doing it, but it seems draconian and it seems like Apple. What they are constantly trying to do is pretending like they invented the wheel. You know and as somebody who we've talked about, this is not in the Apple ecosystem, the only reason I have any desire to be in the Apple ecosystem is because of that stupid stereo camera on the. I felt like I'm 15 pro.
Speaker 1:It's like I won't say spatial, like give me any other device with, like I would even buy this lamp on, just because I want that and I don't want an iPhone. Just you know, resistance is futile, we'll see, we'll see.
Speaker 2:My feeling is like I don't care, you know, like whatever it takes to get the device in people's hands and get it into the mainstream and get people looking for video and looking for content, I don't care what they call it, you know, if that's what works and I mean we've got a long history of, like the geeky techs like we are don't have our finger on the pulse of the mainstream.
Speaker 1:Hey, was would say different, you know.
Speaker 2:Well, but like was it was, but was jobs without was and was without jobs would be, would not be Apple right, like you need the technical and then you need that bridge between like here's this cool thing. Let me tell you why this is what you need in your life. Like that's that was jobs and as much as we can dog on their ecosystem and the walled garden, all that stuff, it's working.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so it also says here that they have a new headstrap. That's so there's going to be two separate head straps that are going to be coming in the box with this thing, which I think is really interesting. It's sort of the exact opposite of what meta does. Yeah, which is what is the least effective headstrap that you would immediately want to throw away.
Speaker 1:Yeah, though, despite the fact that these look very beautiful, they look over engineered to not do the thing that they're designed to do. We were talking about this. We talked about it in the podcast, we talked about it a little bit earlier. This is going to be uncomfortable as fuck without a counterweight, straight up calling it now. I mean, I've also heard a lot of people talking about this that the leaks are, that it is incredibly heavy.
Speaker 2:Yeah, cause I don't believe they demoed originally in the announcement this one with the no, this is no. They announced that recently make sense because like, that's a lot looks like a lot of weight.
Speaker 1:It looks like a lot of weight, yeah and as somebody who is used, that I have at least five different head straps between my quest to my quest three, and if you don't have the right head strap, it is. It's a. It's a situation where your desire to use the device is minimized and it's a barrier for entry. It's friction. It allows you to not be able to put yourself into the device in the way that is comfortable, and I and for device that, like Apple, definitely intends you to use for hours at a time.
Speaker 2:Again, demoing, like the idea of like, editing a video in this is in VR with your life.
Speaker 1:This is a quest one mistake and this is a quest one mistake You're not gonna spend eight hours. This is something that meta like has already dealt with years ago and and it's just so frustrating to see Apple make these mistakes straight out of the game, mistakes that the rest of the industry has already learned from but it is Apple's.
Speaker 2:This is basically a Prototype, like in a lot of ways it is a market test. It's a lot of different things. I mean this is clearly not the device meant for the masses.
Speaker 1:This is the HoloLens I mean. But mass market or met or mass produced, yeah or at least consumer facing. Yeah, yeah because it's.
Speaker 2:I don't think it's gonna be any mass about this. I mean, obviously the price is gonna be supposedly they're making less than 500,000 with them.
Speaker 1:And here's I will all. Here's one thing I will make a prediction that, despite the fact that they're making 500,000 and it cost $3,500, this thing is gonna be sold out Immediately.
Speaker 2:Agree and for the next year. Yeah, yeah, and I mean honestly. If I had the money that, I would absolutely buy. There would be no question about it.
Speaker 1:I've definitely thought about it. I'm gonna do a demo of it. I'm gonna go, I'm gonna sign up for a demo. Go in, we should go together. They made a little as pretty a camera. Yeah, the in about a year. So it's gonna sell out for a year, maybe year and a half, sort of like the. Remember when the we first came out, they had stock issues and it was perpetually sold out for the first year and a half. It's gonna be the switch. It's gonna be exactly the same situation and then in year and a half, when they launched the new one, it's gonna be 30% cheaper and it'll be a moderate success.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it does make me wonder like Would it only be 30% cheaper? Are they already working on the thousand dollar version? Because I feel like anything above that we could never call it mass market. But I don't know.
Speaker 1:I think what we're gonna see, you know in the next year how this thing sells and and maybe we'll get Two different priced versions coming out at the same time. Could be like a, like the what's the? The little iPhone, the se, yeah, yeah, launching at the same time as the, the like mid tiered one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, you got the Apple, so we have the Apple vision pros. I'm able to do the Apple vision, the Apple vision se, yeah.
Speaker 1:What last this?
Speaker 2:is a great commercial, you have to Admit. This is fantastic, it is good, and they probably spent who knows how much licensing these clips.
Speaker 1:Well, and it really goes to show you. I think they're doing sort of like the Tesla model, where it's like most people won't have access to this at first. Right, it's three, five hundred dollars. It's way out of anybody's budget. That isn't a billionaire or a millionaire, but they still want it. Yeah. Yeah, they're gonna know somebody, one of their friends is gonna have it. It'll be like VR when it first came out. Is that only your friends, friends, friend had it, you know, and you'd be like you go over to the house and you're like, oh, is that sad to be her headset.
Speaker 2:You know you have an Atari.
Speaker 1:Yeah exactly and Hmm. So supposedly they have Optical inserts that are coming out for it that are hundred forty nine dollars, starting at a hundred forty nine.
Speaker 2:It's actually cheaper than I thought it would be yeah, I don't yeah in ninety nine bucks for the readers and there's ice optics, yeah, which means they're super high quality. So yeah, I know this is like speculation, because I know it's releasing with 256 gigs, which is, you know, not enough.
Speaker 1:But also enough for what they're marketing it for.
Speaker 2:I think that is a comical amount of storage, but I mean the first three, five hundred dollars, but the quest three is 128 gigs and they probably sold more of those than any other.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and for a device though actually the 512 gigabyte version has been sold out everywhere.
Speaker 2:They might be less. I have to look at those numbers. But my point is I think for what they're Marketing, this thing towards 256 is fine because it is think about it as a an iPhone or an iPad. Your content's gonna live on iCloud your photos and everything like that. All the spatial videos are gonna be streamed from iCloud and or, you know, possibly cashed on the device. 256 is totally fine to get started in something that they're not intending you to put videos on it. They're not telling you put games on it and they're not telling you to like most of it's gonna be streamed.
Speaker 1:Maybe that's all just for devices or games. They do say that it is the most complex device They've ever.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean I to me it's. It's priced reasonably for what it is, which is the most amazing bleeding edge tech that we're just out right now. As far as the way you use it and the interface, I really do want to do it a little bit.
Speaker 1:I mean, really do want to see what it looks like.
Speaker 2:So I think for something that's that bleeding edge. It is what it is and I think they're aware of it. I don't think they're making any money on it either.
Speaker 1:Yeah, apple, invite us to your next event. Yeah, all right, moving on to our, our last stage here, this is this is sort of the the scramble to talk about all the various headsets that came out. So, yeah, just real quick. There were a bunch of headsets Released or announced at CES. Some of them came out a couple days before CES, but they're all in the same window.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we've got the TCL radio X2 light air. Good Lord, worst name of our worst naming convention ever. So these are interesting because these are technically full color, 3d stereoscopic capable. Yeah, ar glasses. So I feel like radio X2 light features binocular, full color micro led technology capable of displaying 3d content at 1500 nits to eye at a resolution of 640 by 480 pixels. Specs include the Qualcomm Snapdragon air one gen processor, which came out at the same time as the XR2, and 4 gigabytes of RAM, 32 gigabytes of storage, 12 megapixel camera capable of capturing 1080p video at 30 frames per second, bluetooth, 5.3, wi-fi 6e which is important and three mics, two speakers, accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, magnometer and touch that is so much tech.
Speaker 2:Does a lot of tech in a really nerdy pair of glasses? Does it come with tape already wrapped around there? I mean, it's really impressive and also terrible, looking all at the same time like I don't even know how to feel.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, the biggest but it is cool at the same thing is that the. Did you hear that the one Super unimpressive spec hidden in that very impressive list of specs was 640 by 480, a Display resolution that was standard in 2004, yeah, so so what that amounts to is it's gonna be about this big in your field of vision. That's it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so like that makes sense for a car. It does, it does, and it's better than actually.
Speaker 1:I think it's less than Google Glass, because I think Google Glass is taller but just as wide. Yeah, I think it was like 800 by 600 or something. Yeah, I mean, I'm still really interested in these because this form factor is the form factor that I think everybody sort of In their minds I is pining for. That's what the Bosworth, like God tier AR glasses are gonna look like. But this is, this is definitely more functional than the AR glasses that we've had previously. Yeah, I just really like that. People are just Seeing what works. You know, yeah, and there will be people that that buy these. I mean, when the next they're competitive. One of the competitors, x-real air, who used to be called, or X real used to be called, and real they changed their name recently. Supposedly they sold They've already sold 600,000 pairs of of AR glasses. So this next one, the X real air to ultra.
Speaker 1:These have similarly the crazy good specs. They also have stereo cameras on them. They can generate a 3d mesh of your room in addition to scene meshing, so and Hand tracking, spatial anchors and arbitrary 2d image, 2d image tracking. The previous device cannot do that. This, these are real AR glasses. This is like. This is like you can watch movies, but it also has a limited field of view. But this has a much bigger floating screen because this uses Up her like a reflected projector. So there's OLEDs in this, in this part right here.
Speaker 1:Yeah and then it reflects on to the screen so it makes it much bigger in your, in your, your effective field of view. So it looks like you have this giant screen that's floating in front of you and so, like Tracked objects, can move around in here. But it's still only about this big all. So Anytime you turn your head away from that field of view, anything that that spatial anchor is gone. Yeah, you have to be looking at it for it to be there, which I think is interesting. But the fact that they've already sold so many of these is impressive. I think they understand their market, some segmentation.
Speaker 1:I also have to be clear here. This device requires a Samsung Galaxy 22 or 23, so it's doing off-board processing on the phone and it is a tether device, so it plugs into the little Thing here and it's called like NB or something like that. I think that's interesting. I think it's one of the best ways to do this is, if you're gonna do all the processing off-board, just make them super late. I mean, I Sort of feel like it's what Apple was going for but didn't do. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 2:I mean Maybe I don't think it was what the Apple is going for.
Speaker 1:I mean just because well, they had their cancelled air glasses, they they had prototypes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean okay, yeah, if it was something else, not not for the AVP, because it's supposedly it's why Johnny I've left, left yeah, was that he wanted something more in line with this.
Speaker 1:Okay, so next, and this was what we were talking about earlier, I'm gonna skip the mega next super late, and that's I don't think it's relevant enough. We're just gonna go into the the Sony headset. So so, the Sony headset we talked about a little bit before. It's 4k OLED displays and it's mainly a Creativity device. I think that's super interesting. We'll picture this dude. Oh yeah, here it is. Yeah, it's got an incredible design.
Speaker 2:I mean, you can really see Sony's don't design language, really really yeah, it's funny cuz like this is where aesthetics are interesting, because to me this is horrendous really, I think it looks great.
Speaker 1:I don't know. At least it has a design language.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is. It could be worse. I mean, it looks like it's a built-in battery, something in the back. Yeah, the controller looks exceedingly fragile. Yeah, but yeah.
Speaker 1:I don't know well. In this it's a mixed rally device that's designed for content creators to be able to shape. Use this little ring thing to Sort of it's specifically for 3d modelers.
Speaker 2:Yeah it's like I don't know about content creators so much, but like people working probably in the automotive industries.
Speaker 1:Well, it's also. You can see. There's not. There's no Light blockers on the side.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's it's designed to be flipped up.
Speaker 1:I'm like, just sit there so you can, so you have a sense of where you are in space, because if they're using, if they're using, a 4k OLED displays, those can get really bright. If they're using pancakes, though, that's gonna kill a lot of light. So we'll see. I don't know. I'm excited for where this ends up going. We talked about a little bit before, but yeah, so I do have one last little bonus topic, and it's really just sort of a fun thing 3d TVs are back, baby, maybe, maybe, but yeah, probably we'll see. It's actually. It's just, it's just a prototype. They didn't announce any actual Just release plans for it, but supposedly it's designed to be used with steam VR that they've created, created, they've worked with steam to create a steam VR driver so you can play VR games, or at least you can play games in 3d. Yeah, and a lot of that. I've actually been waiting for something to do this. I'm just really glad it's 37 inches. It's designed for to be a PC monitor, but you know, 37 inches of TV size, yeah, I'm really excited.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it could be interesting. I'm also skeptical, but I'm very because I don't. I still don't know about the viability. I mean, even watching a 3d movie in heads that feels weird sometimes because it's this 3d in a 3d environment, like it doesn't quite, like there's something about it popping out and there's this weird. You got to try not to pay attention to the edges, you know yeah screen. So it's interesting, but I'm also not I don't hate the idea, because this supposed to use his camera stays to change the perspective Depending on where you are and all that good, that's what.
Speaker 1:You can't barely see them, but they're right there. Yeah, all right, and we should like. We're out of time, yeah, but this is a good episode. I'm excited for you guys to see Matt and Thomas from 360 labs. You'll be seeing that in just a couple minutes. Hey, what's up guys? We're now in the interview segment. We have our first guests on the podcast, which is really special for us. We're really excited about that. We've got Matt and Thomas from 360 labs. What's? Up guys, how you doing I'm doing great.
Speaker 4:Glad to be here Really well. Glad to be your first guest. I'm Thomas, I'm Matt.
Speaker 1:Really really glad you guys could join us today. I think we're just gonna launch into this because we've got a lot of questions and there's a lot of stuff we want to talk about. So, first off, how did you guys get into video period?
Speaker 3:So for me it was probably about 20 years ago. I used to use the old Canon DV Consumer cameras just as a hobbyist. I played airsoft. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that. It's a bunch of nerdy people with camo and shooting each other running around in the forest.
Speaker 1:Videos for that.
Speaker 3:So I did a lot of that and I started to use like Windows Movie Maker and of course it was horrible. So I had to learn Premiere and kind of went through that natural progression, ended up getting a Canon GL2 and Just kind of fell in love with that and but I didn't really kind of get into it professionally Until I started doing some e-learning stuff for a web agency that I worked for. I was actually a web developer, that was my day job, cool.
Speaker 4:I Go back 20 years as well, but have almost zero experience in standard video. So I've been doing immersive video for 20 years. Wow, lucky enough to be one of the first people on earth with a 360 camera. And what camera was that? The Dodeca 2300 or 2360, and before that, the Dodeca 2000 Were proprietary cameras.
Speaker 4:I had number five off the assembly line, had it in the state of Alaska, where we're as early as 2005, you said in Alaska in a way yeah, as I was studying was actually a company that was based here in Portland, and it was that company that moved me to Portland then 17 years ago To start on the Google Street View project, which was a super secret road trip that I was launched on for over a year of my life With driving around with a 360 camera. So you were you were one of the first Google Street drivers.
Speaker 1:I was the first five Google Street.
Speaker 4:View. Wow, that's awesome. 2005 so when Google Street View launched in 2007, there were five cities that it launched with and my teams had done four of them. Only Google had done. Google had only done San Francisco and we had done the rest.
Speaker 1:Wow, that's incredible. I remember I remember when all that stuff rolled out it seemed like Kind of mad Voodoo like it seemed completely. I mean that's one of the most impressive like technical achievements.
Speaker 4:We did not know what Google would do with what we were shooting. But what we were sending them was video and we had no idea what the user interface would look like or that they were taking still images only. But what I had was my day job of driving up and down streets every day. I did out today a BW Beetle in traffic. It went great appreciation for what cops and taxi drivers do every day. But then on the weekends I had access to this magic camera to go film fun things in whatever city I was in, and that's where I really fell in love with the whole process.
Speaker 2:Wow, that's interesting, yeah.
Speaker 1:So what did I have so many questions? How, what was the workflow like with that? I?
Speaker 4:mean we had an amazing camera as a local inventor was the founder of the immersive media company named David McCutcheon, who's still here in Portland and still inventing and tinkering and doing incredible work. He had been doing it since the mid 90s is when he got started. He got started, but his seed money came from him winning Jeopardy. He reminded me of it in an email this week. I had forgotten that. That is so like wow.
Speaker 1:Hey, the 90s were a wild time and he was a.
Speaker 4:VFX guy out of LA who had moved up to Portland to start this company and he really saw the vision for the future. He had a VR headset from Vuzix and one before that years before the show Vuzix I haven't. I've been in the mid 90s and he was making some of the first immersive movies that were digital video. Well, he even started with racks of VCRs so he was putting it on tape and putting it together. But by the time I got involved he had a pretty robust system, still VGA quality, individual sensors, but there were 12. There were 11 of them on a ball, a spherical, Not unlike the one behind me, but it had 11.
Speaker 1:That's the Insta360 Pro 2, right.
Speaker 4:And he had a software that would stitch it together and they were all synced. They had Global Shutter. The stitching process was pretty elegant and it was a really robust camera system. I got to do a lot of great things with that, taking it to Alaska filming bears and humpback whales, and we took it into some really rugged environments and really put it through its paces and captured. Some of that footage actually became the first 360 narrative content on the internet back in 2008 with Flash 8 coming out, and we actually had a player to show someone Before that. Literally, the workflow is here's a 500 gig hard drive that has your content on it. Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Sign the invoice here. Wow, delivery is a lot different now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it is coming along with it Sometimes it's not that different.
Speaker 1:Now, Matt, how did you get into immersive video?
Speaker 3:So I got into it because of him. So I became a Google trusted photographer when they launched the program where you could do kind of like Street View indoors and I had never taken a panorama before, but I was a photographer and I had photography studios and I was like a mention.
Speaker 3:I was doing video at my workplace at Digital Agency and a friend of mine said I was looking at Street View the other day and I walked into this local dye bar and I was surprised that I could walk right through the door and I thought what the hell is this?
Speaker 1:What dye?
Speaker 3:bar was that he clicked the link to learn more and he was like Matt, there's one guy in Portland who's doing this and it was him. So he's like you should apply and you should try this, because I was trying to get away from web development and do more photography and video work and, sure enough, that was Thomas, the first guy that did that. And Google called me and set me up as well, and we were the first two trust photographers here in Portland and my monopoly was over. Yeah, so we met and decided that we have a few beers and kind of talk about how do we collaborate, work together, and he showed me a 360 video on a laptop and I had just learned how to shoot regular 360 stills and when I was like you can do video with this, and it was like I couldn't believe it and I was like, if we start a business, we need to sell that. That is what we need to do, and that was, I think, 2013. And we launched our company in 2014. We're coming up on our 10-year anniversary next May.
Speaker 2:Oh wow, Congrats. Yeah, that's it.
Speaker 4:Just to go back quickly to the tech we were using to create 360 video at that point. Shortly after the Great Recession, or during the Great Recession, immersion Media folded and I lost access to the magic camera that I had already for five years at that point. So there was a bit of doldrums around that. But then GoPro's got half the size, from GoPro 1 to Euro 1 to the Euro 2. And we started tinkering with some colleagues of mine here in Portland with jamming those things together into a cubicle design and we were using photo stitching software in batches to stitch video frames together. So we were able to create, to go from $150,000 camera to one I could get for $2,400 at Best Buy, which really changed everything. And then 3D printed mounts came for the GoPro's after that and stitching software came after that and Matt and I knew that we had something we could do. So quickly we could actually make content.
Speaker 4:So, we had quite a role of content that we had already created, from December to remember 2013. Here with a whole group of great bands that we shot on stage at the Crystal Ballroom.
Speaker 3:So when, which was hilarious because the bands and the promoters and the agents had no idea what we were doing. So we were filming bands like Portugal, the man and Phoenix and Lord, and we'd tell them about the camera and they would just be like yeah sure, whatever, and we'd shoot with it and then later they're like wait, that's video. What so after the fact, we still had the footage.
Speaker 4:Meanwhile there's a cube of blinking lights on the front of the stage.
Speaker 1:We've had a very similar experience.
Speaker 4:And also the kids in the front row were like oh wow, that's just on me all night.
Speaker 1:All night long, yeah.
Speaker 4:A good case for VR1A.
Speaker 1:So I guess when you were, I had an experience when I was younger that I was always interested in 3D movies and IMAX and that type of thing. Did you guys have a similar experience when you were younger? I feel like a lot of immersive filmmakers, creators, have a certain sort of similar experience.
Speaker 4:It took a lot of recall but where I think my initial fascination was when I was seven years old and I went to Disneyland and I experienced the Circle Vision Theater that was designed by Walt Disney in New by Works in 1954 and ran for 40 years at Disney Parks. It was sort of a sidebar attraction, but there was an amazing 360 film in an amazing 360 theater that made you feel like you were visiting China, and that came back when I met David McCutcheon. He reminded me this was his inspiration for it. And then, of course, the general idea of virtual reality had always been there and goes back a long way before that.
Speaker 4:Before the current iteration, there was the dream of the 90s, was alive and cordially so that whole idea. It's the kind of thing that, fundamentally, when I first saw it again, I was 30 years old in a log cabin in Alaska and I went oh my god, that's cool. There's no way that's not cool and there's no way the world doesn't love that. And I think that's an experience that's been now had by thousands of 360 creators around the world, that we know somewhere in our lizard brain that this is fundamentally cool and it's important and it's going to be around for a long time, and we've only just begun.
Speaker 1:I feel like you mentioned Disneyland. I remember going to Captain EO and then they turned it into Honey. I Shrunk the Kids 3D. But also what you were talking about with Soren over California. They still have that because that's in a dome. I think it's in a dome experience and that's just an iterative thing. On Circle Vision, I remember I had a ViewMaster as a kid the ViewMaster I was obsessed with the ViewMaster. Those are just still photos, but they were 3D.
Speaker 4:It did import them Really, first marketed in Portland, oregon, the ViewMaster, sadly with some Nazi connections from like the first.
Speaker 1:Oh, dear God.
Speaker 4:You know there's a dark part of every history. But yeah, when you go back, portland has a wonderful immersive media history.
Speaker 1:I'm really figuring that out. There's so many, I've realized, on DOVR. I'm going through and I'm seeing all these videos with the St John Bridge and I'm like wait, how many of us are there in the city?
Speaker 4:You can search the Library of Congress for stereograms or stereographs that were shot here in the 1860s and 1870s by some of the first photographers that ever had a 3D camera system, and there's some great history there. They were the images that inspired the first National Park in Yellowstone when they were taken by the first rail roads back to DC and shown to members of Congress and to the president.
Speaker 2:Wow, fascinating.
Speaker 1:What about you, Matt? Did you have any experiences with any of these types of things as a kid? I?
Speaker 3:think for me, growing up in Oregon, I always liked to do nature photography and that was kind of why I wanted to take pictures and kind of why I wanted to pursue that as a hobby and later as a profession. So with immersive filmmaking or immersive photos, I can re-experience something that I've actually seen. I can go back there to that point and try and relive it. And the first time I did that in a headset even though it was just a cheap kind of janky phone holder headset, I just fell in love with it and that's how I wanted to shoot, from in on out.
Speaker 1:It does seem like a lot of people gravitate towards that type of content in immersive media. It's incredibly powerful, especially when it's done really, really well. I mean there's a reason why it's so popular. Some of the first videos I ever experienced were that and I mean, the first time you see a really good one, it takes your breath away. I'm going to take a right turn and go into a little bit more of industry stuff now. So CES is right now. There's been a lot of pretty big news, nothing earth-shattering, Considering it's only Wednesday.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know exactly right, Given that there are all these new headsets out. It feels like there's a new headset being announced every three to six months.
Speaker 4:You're going to stand here. Here comes Apple.
Speaker 1:Yeah, exactly when do you see the immersive video slash VR industry heading.
Speaker 3:Well, I really hope that eventually we'll start to see more Hollywood level content and more investment in the content creation, because right now it just seems like everyone's like you know, throw out some cameras, put up a platform and scale, scale, scale. Everyone get out there and shoot, but a lot of it is just stuff that's not really worth watching. And I think if we take the time to really create content and it's like it's high end content, it's featuring, you know, actors we know, and it's featuring like franchises we know, that's going to be the kind of thing that people are going to talk about and say wow, I loaded up my Quest 3 and I watched this awesome movie and everyone's going to like that and they're going to talk about it, just like they talk about some of the popular games that are out there.
Speaker 3:But we really haven't had that moment with immersive media. But I think that with the headsets getting better, we're getting closer to doing that yeah. I mean.
Speaker 4:I remember being blown away when I saw the first Star Wars 360 piece. Yeah, right, and it was a magical moment, you know I mean for me. I've been doing this for so long as it suddenly I'm in a Star Wars piece, you know was that the one of the ILM X Labs things?
Speaker 1:It was.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and so they had done the games. But you know, a lot of Discovery Channel had a VR lab or you know, the New York Times was producing the daily 360s and there just wasn't the distribution at that time and so a lot of them felt like they got burned on the medium. It doesn't. You know, I think, judge the medium a little too harshly, considering there was no way to watch the stuff that right, there just weren't that many. It's certainly not the way it's supposed to be watched at this point, which is with a VR headset. So YouTube going 360 was a huge step forward, going 3D 360 even farther. Facebook, of course, after that coming on board and really accelerating the whole thing, throwing gasoline on a fire, which was incredible investment through Oculus. But the way it continues to move forward is simply having that audience and from what we can tell, you know, it seems to be growing about as fast as TV. But unfortunately we don't compare anything to the growth of TV anymore. We compare it to the growth of the iPhone.
Speaker 4:So nothing can ever live up to that Right and what we're getting towards. I love that your questions refer to mainstream. You know it's been 20 years of a lot of us in the industry thinking mainstream is next week, right, it's any day. Now it's got to happen. It's going to happen.
Speaker 1:It really does feel like that it has to.
Speaker 4:The inevitability is there, it's just. Can we take enough further steps forward and survive the short, the two steps back on our way towards mainstream? And it's very much coming. I think, the fact that people enjoy it. That's the key thing. We look at not so much our views, but duration, how long people are staying in the headset and, more importantly, where are those viewers coming from. You know YouTube viewers count, of course, but do they count as much as the ones that are coming from the headset, the ones that the YouTube viewers that we know are watching in YouTube VR as opposed to looking at it on their phones?
Speaker 4:And we see the balance rates, you know, changing dramatically between those two experiences as well. So you know that, I think, is the future, and also things like the sphere right, I track the word immersive right. My company, my first company involved with this, was immersive media company and you know they considered changing the name when I was in the marketing department because everyone thought immersive meant underwater.
Speaker 4:You know today everything is an immersive experience, right, An immersive experience at the museum, an immersive experience at the theater. And you know, everybody wants an immersive experience. And it's only, you know, when you take a headset out to nine out of 10 people who've never seen this before, they put it on, and it doesn't matter if they're six years old or 60, they go wow and they can't really believe. They know that they've been kind of waiting for it for a long time.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I, it really does seem that I so agree with the need for high quality content. It feels fundamental to the industry. I think one of our biggest frustrations is that there it doesn't seem to be that there are places funding this content that about five, six years ago there were Right, and I remember seeing stuff directed by like Ang Lee and that type of thing, and some of it was good, some of it was not so good.
Speaker 1:You, can't make your audience sick, exactly, exactly and I think. But I feel like a lot of creators have learned from those experiences what you can and can't do. But then all of the investment dried up and I feel like it's slowly trying to slowly trying to trickle back in. I think Apple is a huge part of that. They're funding their own stuff. They are a video company, so they have the ability to really understand where to put that money. I think Google made one of the biggest boneheaded decisions by dropping the Daydream platform, because now they're trying to race back in and the market is before that. Yeah, it's so frustrating.
Speaker 3:We had a lot of investment and a lot of hype, but we had a tiny fraction of the audience that we have right now.
Speaker 4:Right.
Speaker 3:Now that we have people with headsets, it's just like they can't be bothered, and I'm over here thinking, oh my God, there's probably like 50 million people that are using headsets on a regular basis, and Google and YouTube are just like man.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it's, and it used to be that that the YouTube VR app was a fantastic way to watch that content, but ever since they they nuked anything above 4k it. You know your videos look like not as good as they could. Yeah, exactly, exactly, and this, actually this goes really well into my next question, which is what are the fundamental differences in telling a story in an immersive format versus flat?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think a really big one is just asking yourself whether or not an experience needs to be immersive or why is it immersive, especially when it comes to 360.
Speaker 3:In many cases there's there's not a reason to have it, and a lot of times people will just shoot something and put it in VR and just say, well, it's VR, so that makes it cool, but they don't really think about you know, why is this story important? Why does it need to be immersive? And they don't consider how does this tie to a location or a feeling or a culture or something that you can fully immerse yourself in and feel like you've had that experience? They just try to replicate things they've seen in traditional media and just cram it into this format and expect it to work out. And then they get surprised when no one's watching it. But it's just because it's a different style, it's a different way of experiencing something, and even a lot of the cameras and tools we have don't really address how to make that content correctly in that way, because we're just we're still thinking about a studio, we're still thinking about stuff like that.
Speaker 3:But it should be real life, it should be real experiences, and when you tell a director well, you don't get to direct the audience's point of view anymore.
Speaker 1:They could be looking anywhere.
Speaker 4:That is, you know, game changing or game ending. In a lot of situations Matt's talking about, you know the choices that are made in the production. I think back to the Olympics and watching Sean White do his last snowboarding run on the halfpipe and the VR cameras in the pit with the other photographers. It was a great view of the photographers' pit and Con White went like, yeah, it was gone. You know, where I wanted to be was at the end of the run without the snowboarding. Don't even show me that. Just show me Sean White, and I want to be with him when he sees his scores. I want to feel the crowd. I want to feel what it's like to be Sean White. That's why I got in VR and I'm not watching the broadcast.
Speaker 4:One of the best experiences I ever saw was the debates between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in 2016. The crowd was not being shown in the debate on CNN, but on the CNN VR feed, which was also there. I don't care if I'm seeing the facial expression on Bernie's face. I get the feeling of the room. I feel like I'm in the room and, yeah, I know it's Anderson Cooper because I can see his white hair shining over there.
Speaker 4:Yes, I'm farther away, but I can get the general sense of the energy in the room and the answers to each question Much more than the audio feed was given me from the television.
Speaker 1:So you're talking about presence then, yeah, exactly Right.
Speaker 4:It's all about the presence and you know there's so many opportunities and missed opportunities, but that's how we're learning through all of these processes. It's great when they jump back in because the audience is there.
Speaker 4:They will come back in, they will be doing this sort of stuff and you know, what it takes is small creators like us and like you guys continue to push the medium forward, because when John sucked all the investment out of the room with $63 million of Google and Disney money and then couldn't decide if they wanted to be a camera company, a media platform or production studio competing with everyone they're trying to sell cameras to, that was the kind of thing that ended up in disappointment and, if you know, if we raise an army of photographers and videographers, as my kids call me, a virtual ographer out, in the world we're going to get that great content.
Speaker 4:We're going to get those great stories from what's happening in real life and for me immersive content comes down to whenever the location is part of the story, Then that is a great answer to the question why do it in 360 or why do it in immersive?
Speaker 3:in general. Well then, how you shoot it and how you assemble it is also really important too. It's a very different art form understanding visual cues that are going to draw the eye or make someone turn their head, and then, when they turn their head and you cut to something else, what's going to be in front of their face? You have to understand that as well. And then spatial audio can also be that thing that cues people in and makes them, and that goes back again to platform limitations and hurdles and problems. Spatial audio is a big one that should work ubiquitously everywhere, but it doesn't, and it would change so much if it did, especially with directors who are concerned about well, how am I going to allow people to follow the story? Well, those audio cues can do that. Most visual cues can do that, but it's a. It's a different way of thinking when you're shooting versus, you know, shooting with a standard camera.
Speaker 1:Do you guys have a sound engineer?
Speaker 3:We do. We work with a local guy. His name is Cory Crawford and we've worked with him for like probably seven years now. He was just getting into spatial audio and contacted us and just said I see, you guys do immersive video and I really want to jump into this. And ever since that first project we've just we've had him on every single one. So he's a field engineer as well as a sound designer and mixer, so he's kind of jumped headfirst into all of that.
Speaker 1:And we put that poor guy in some buff spot. I could only imagine.
Speaker 2:I actually worked with him back in November. I worked with him on like a regular 2D shoot in November. Yeah, because I remember looking up to you guys. I was like hey, I know, cory.
Speaker 4:It's always a disappointment if we can't bring Cory on a trip.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Because it really does seem to me that you need a dedicated sound engineer for spatial audio because there are so many, like you said, platform limitations. You never know if you have to be using ambisonic or some other format that you know which order. Yeah, I mean, I really like binaural because it's just stereo and it's hard to mess it up, but ambisonic is also really powerful and in the right use case, I think we're okay. So actually that brings us right into the next one what are the biggest hurdles to producing immersive video?
Speaker 4:What are the pain points? Oh, geez. This question I realized is pretty broad, but sometimes it's flies that are attracted to camera lenses, that's a big one Really. All the outdoor work that we do. We were in Brazil this time last year or beginning of the year last year, and we had several shots ruined because, man, they, you know insects that wanted to join the camera. Fish and ice look like eyeballs.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's interesting. But then for me to what we talked about with the platforms. It's just, it's hard to get good distribution and, as a content creator, it's hard to get the content discovered and it's very. It's frustrating to see that, like you know, we talked about YouTube. But the same thing with Facebook. For example, like if I publish a new piece on MetaQuest Studio and I share it on Facebook, which it's both the same company same platform penalize me for sharing an external link to Oculuscom where my content lives.
Speaker 3:Or I can also put like a picture and then try to say look in the comments. But no one's going to do that right. So like, why is there not a simple way for me to say watching your MetaQuest?
Speaker 4:Yeah, these bars.
Speaker 3:Exactly, and just stuff like that would make it so much easier. And then back to the YouTube, you know being limited to 4k and just you know, it just frustrates me that it's not easier to give people that great experience, because back when the hype was crazy in 2015, 2016, they were pushing it like crazy but people were watching it in cardboard and they were just having a horrible experience. And now that we have great headsets, I really just want people to feel like I did back then when I watched it in the Samsung Gear VR and it was a great experience. You know, like the first time I watched something from Felix and Paul, I was just like, oh my God, this is amazing. But everyone can have that experience.
Speaker 3:But most people back in 2015, unfortunately, didn't. You know, someone strapped them into a roller coaster in a Google cardboard, the phone was falling out and they were like, okay, this is terrible and that was it. They were done. But I think that you know we need to redeem ourselves and come back and say, look, now the hardware is better, the video quality is better, we have what we need now, but we need the support of the platforms major social media platforms, players like Facebook and Google to step back in and help make that immersive media a great user experience.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's very frustrating Because even just a few years ago I was talking to like an Amazon video guy and he was like VR video is dead, like 360 is dead, and I'm like okay, that's a hot take.
Speaker 1:Discovery is a huge.
Speaker 4:As it has been called, dead many times, many times.
Speaker 1:Discovery is a huge fundamental problem with the industry. That's part of the reason why we started the podcast is because we wanted to be able to highlight the great work that we see happening throughout the industry, and so that's featuring videos, bringing on creators, because I feel like so much good work is just being lost to time, because the eyes aren't, the audiences don't know how to find it Right.
Speaker 2:So and where the whole thing isn't always taken seriously, like I still see a VR getting compared to 3D TVs, right, and the sort of failure, like everybody's, there's this expectation that's eventually just going to die off. Hey, but 3D.
Speaker 1:TVs are back, baby. Well, that's an interesting thing, but yeah.
Speaker 4:When I started in marketing at Immersive Media Company, I was told never use the term virtual reality. It was the dream of the 90s and it's dead. It's the death nail of marketing and you know, no one wants to hear that. It immediately makes me think. And then you know, look at the last eight years and XR, mr, the confusion for me over.
Speaker 4:Branding of this medium has really been disappointing, and I think it really held us back quite a bit too. You know there's one format competing against another format. You know, okay, 360 is here, but it's not good enough. It has to be 3D, 360. Oh, and now? That's terrible. Let's do VR 180. That's the way of the future. And now we're back to oh, but we can't work with avatars in a 3D environment. Both the content and the avatars can't both be 3D. So when we watch a film that was made in high quality 3D, like COVID-19 from Gary does in venues and MediQuest Horizon, it's a standard VR or 180 and not even 3D.
Speaker 1:At that point, Well, yeah, I mean on the podcast the Blackpink, the MediQuest performance. If you watch it in venues it's flat, but on MediQuest TV it's in 3D.
Speaker 4:Right, because nothing in venues where there are avatars with you can be 3D, because it breaks your brain to have 3D avatars and CG walking around in front of 3D.
Speaker 1:Though I did notice, actually, that there is a place in venues where they have 3D with avatars it's the aquarium. The aquarium is 3D and it's the only video that I've seen that's 3D.
Speaker 4:I have jumped back in there with my kids.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I noticed it and I was like, oh my God, I thought I was going crazy for a second and I was trying to check to make sure that it was a video and it was almost. It's definitely a video, but it's the only thing that I've seen. I mean Meta. I feel like a lot of these problems are. Meta is the 900 pound gorilla in the room and I feel like right now, we're sort of at the whim of whatever their decisions are and the film industry is hyper focused on quality and thank God for it, right.
Speaker 4:But Silicon Valley has a lot of ADD going around. So one thing is popular for one week and then they move to the next week and it's all about the data right. And the data reflects today Doesn't necessarily predict into the future as well as they think it does. So what we have to rely on is that fundamental gut feeling of nine out of 10 people. I show this to.
Speaker 4:They get very cool and they like it and they want more. And when you make a six minute film and show it to a room full of kids and VR headsets and they're all clamoring for they wanna watch all 12 of the videos you have on that headset and they don't care what the content is. They don't care what it is, they just want more of it. Sure, show me a documentary from the beef industry. I used to be a cowboy for a minute. They came for the race car, but now they're going into tree hugging and the list of whatever various content that you happen to have on there to show them, because they just want more. And they've got the time and their mom's standing there going when is this gonna be over? And then the kid says, no, mom, you have to try this too. That was an experience we had at EarthX back in 2019 with the last booth. I think that we actually manned for pre-pandemic.
Speaker 4:And it was an exceptional experience that just renews your faith day after day when you have the opportunity to see it. I think that the immersive industry in general missed our magic moment with the pandemic because the whole world was just too busy trying to start living in video conferencing mode.
Speaker 4:We were all in breath, we were in, we were baking bread. There was a lot of baking bread and shooting home 360 videos. That is the other production I do every day is film my family life in 360 all day, every day, all the time, all the birthdays, all the moments, all the Christmas mornings. Because that's the retirement plan, that's the. I'm going back because I can relive this stuff. The most important moments of my life will be in the can and I will have that. I have so much stuff I've never stitched from that stuff, just waiting for the days and when the kids are gone and the house is quiet and I have a little more time on my hands. But I have all this content and thankfully AI is going to be up resigning it for me and it's going to be the magic to come is really exciting what we can do with all of that. So never stop shooting and never toss anything.
Speaker 1:I think it's interesting because you mentioned kids and I feel like they're going to grow up with immersive media. I included. Yes, to that both half and they're going to have I feel like they're going to have expectations for this type of stuff that we see as a lark, or some people may see as a lark, but it's going to be fundamental for them and they're growing up.
Speaker 4:They're already building communities and building worlds in Minecraft, absolutely. They're doing it in Horizon and you go into Roblox, the majority of the population won. I'm going battle on the daily with raging six year olds who are living in an immersive world where their friends are there, they're able to talk with them, meeting people from all over the world. I'm playing with kids from Africa. I'm playing with kids from Japan.
Speaker 3:It's spectacular. Even immersive video, though doesn't always have to be games for kids, and my six year old checked out the space explorers and he was on the internet at the space station. He was immediately glued to it and he watched it for probably like a 20 minute episode and I had to tell him okay, we got to go do something else, cause he just kept on watching.
Speaker 1:I find there's a lot of space nerds who are into immersive media because, I mean, the ISS documentary is one of the most incredible things I've ever seen.
Speaker 4:There's a camera on the international space station.
Speaker 1:It's really. I mean the overview effect is real and the feeling that I mean we've got that up there, the feeling that you get from seeing that this is real, it's not fake, we're on this orb floating through space, is.
Speaker 4:For me seeing the sun as a white star out there, not the yellow star. I'm accustomed to yeah, and being like is that a color correction problem? Or is it like, no, no, right, and that light is so very different on the inside?
Speaker 1:It's amazing.
Speaker 4:You know, and when my kids saw it, she's got all the mission stickers on her bedroom wall. And when she turned around and saw those same mission stickers on the international space station.
Speaker 4:She felt like she was there and she felt very much like if she made the right choices, she could be there in real life, that she could be one of those people. And she saw a different future, viscerally, more than just watching a movie, so much more than just watching the movie, no matter how well that story is told inside the frame. It could not do what that piece did for my kid.
Speaker 1:I feel like I have. I've had dreams about things that I've experienced in immersive media, and I haven't dreamed about media since I don't know. I was like a child Star Wars or Star Trek but now I've had dreams about being on ISS or being on Mars. That could be because for all mankind, but anyways. So, talking about the next generation, what advice would you have for the next generation of immersive video creators?
Speaker 4:I think I already hit on that go ahead.
Speaker 3:Well, I think I always like to tell people just watch the content. If you're going to want to shoot immersive video, you have to experience it. You have to spend time in your headset, go to places like YouTube, vr, metatv, dovr, and watch as much stuff as you can, cause that's how you learn what works and what doesn't work, what you like, you get an idea, you start to experience those things and they inspire you to go out and shoot those things yourself. A lot of people, I think, just want to get quick views and they're like well, what if I do this? But like, really research it and jump in all the way and find something that inspires you and makes you excited to want to shoot your own experiences.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I think I touched on it a little bit, always be shooting, never throw anything away, never know what it's going to have value to you in the future. And a different value it might have been that day with that friend that isn't here with you anymore. That kind of thing that life throws you curveballs right. But beyond that I think you've you know it would also be to live your life in real life to find that thing that you, that story you want to tell right, that story that touches you. For me it was Raph, guiding and taking people out to the loneliness and seeing what was left of the loneliness and trying to bring that experience to people digitally.
Speaker 4:But it might be the experience of family, it might be the experience of your city and your neighborhood and your community and what's going on around you. The great thing about 360 is that, specifically, 360 is that it's a camera that's always rolling, so you never know what you're going to get. Is there any wedding in the world that's not worth bringing a 360 camera on? Not a $200?
Speaker 1:Yeah, why not when grandma craps that joke Just to see all the crazy stuff that happens on the ancillary.
Speaker 4:Exactly, it's the shot Right. You don't have to worry about pointing the camera. When the whale breaches, you know the chances of a camera actually being pointed in that direction are very slim. So you know it's everything that you do has a great reason to just bring one of these pocket cameras along, and I think that athletes are obviously finding that, with the ubiquity of how great it is to post social media shorts and whatnot coming from there, instead of a GoPro having the Insta360 on the helmet that goes a long way, and we all have our own adventures right, and they're all important to someone, and we all have communities.
Speaker 4:I think that's what the internet saw us over the last 30 years, and 360 is that thing that helps you translate the whole experience in one way or another. It works as a regular camera, but it gets even more than and that's the beauty of it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, well, it looks like guys we're running up on our. Yeah, we got five minutes, but yeah, five minutes. Is there anything you guys wanna sort of throw out there, anything you guys wanna talk about real quick in the next five minutes? A scramble?
Speaker 4:Well, we're working on a project we might put it out there. We lent a camera to an old climber and a raft guiding buddy of mine and a bunch of him and a bunch of friends took it up the big wall at Yosemite in El Capitan and put it together a sort of a long format piece about their climb as sort of the next outdoor adventure piece that we'll be releasing. And that's a lot of fun. I'm about to show it to those guys in a 360 degree conference 360 video conference tool that we love to use, called Avitour.
Speaker 4:That is like a conference call, except everyone has the ability to click and drag and look around inside the content that you're looking at. You can join via headset, via desktop, via your mobile device, and if that's an astounding leap forward, that I think is gonna be a lot of fun and useful in education and virtual tourism going forward.
Speaker 4:So those are a couple of things that we've got going on. I can't wait to just take a bunch of these crazy climber dudes back up into it, and one of them is gonna be patching in via Starlink from Baja, and these are guys that do that stuff still. So getting them together into a virtual environment to relive a different adventure as a group should be a very exciting afternoon for me this weekend.
Speaker 1:Awesome, yeah, so thanks so much for being with us. This is great. I mean, this is exactly the type of stuff that we wanna talk about. You guys were excellent first guests. I think exactly what we were looking for, anthony.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, I like what he said. I'd love to do this again sometime. We should follow up at some point and see where things are at with you guys.
Speaker 4:Absolutely, let's meet together in real life down here in Portland someplace, and there's a rather large growing community of immersive creators in this city specifically, and for good reason. We can do this together. We can grow it up from the ground up and start pushing people with decision making and bigger checkbooks than we have to make more content. And I think that we have the opportunity here and I have since the beginning to create a hub of media development in this city specifically with this type of content and onward and forward.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I definitely feel like Portland is always on the cusp of becoming the next big media city. It comes in waves, but I feel like we're on an uptrend again.
Speaker 4:So it's all about what kind of surfboard you got.
Speaker 1:Right, all right, thanks so much guys. Thanks, guys, we'll see you around.
Speaker 4:Yeah, thanks, thanks guys, thanks very much.