Virtual Reality, AR, Art, Music, Comedy, Live Theater and NFTs: Finn Staber + Jon explore Experience

Guest: Whenever I look at the NFT community, I see an amazing opportunity for people to grow and Interconnect with the XR community as well because with those VR headsets or AR smart glasses of the future a lot of the utility is going to be visualization and so visualization of art of virtual galleries which we're building heavily and then the notion of developing more web AR and web XR Web 3D connectivity content. That's what we've been heavily involved in is doing a lot of this AR content evolving from the typical you know, app-driven content into web AR which allows you to just scan a QR code or click on a link in social media and you're in the experience.

Unknown: In this episode of Building the Metaverse with Jon Radoff, John sits down with Finn Staber.

Guest: Finn has launched multiple successful tech companies and has developed award-winning video games, interactive educational content, digital marketing experiences and cyber security solutions. He is the founder of Chicken Waffle and co-founder of Wave XR and failed to render. Let's jump into this fireside chat.

Jon Radoff: All right, we're going to be talking about virtual reality today. We're going to talk about augmented reality. We're going to talk about some of the new experiences in the Metaverse that go beyond games, but we'll actually start with games because that's actually one of the really awesome things that's already happening and we'll take it from there. Maybe we'll even get into blockchain and NFTs and all kinds of stuff, but I wanted to bring on Finn Staber to talk to us about all his work in this space. Because all those things I just listed, it's hard to find a person who has done all the things that he has done, AR, VR, blockchain stuff, web-based stuff.

Unknown: So, Finn, welcome to Building the Metaverse.

Guest: Thanks for having me. It's an honor.

Jon Radoff: Finn, let's start a little bit with a bit of a history lesson because VR is one of those technologies that goes back to the 90s. It used to be the running joke. VR was almost like fusion reactors. It's that technology that always felt like a few years away, but never was. Now, we know that's not the case anymore. There's like consumer-friendly VR devices. But how did you get into this? When did you first start working with VR and kind of take us through the journey of yourself, but also how has this industry changed and the technology changed over time?

Guest: Well, I mean, thinking back that far, the era of the virtual boy and some of these, the VFX1 and things like this, I remember trying my first virtual reality experience was this. I think it was called the Edge in a mall back in the 90s where it suspended you in a hang glider, virtual hang glider that you played in the video. It was just a video basically playing with parallax stereoscopic lenses. And you could control your height with the bar so you were leaning on like a hang glider thing. And they had a smell tower that would spray ocean mist or winter evergreen cedar in your face. And as you flew over the tree line and stuff.

Jon Radoff: It's like when I go to Shrub's Life, I feel like I'm in the end of that.

Guest: It was intriguing, especially for a young person to kind of get into it back then. But then, you know, fast forwarding back in the army, I got to try one of the military prototypes for virtual reality. I think it was running at like five frames a second. And some horrible tank simulation experience. And then moving on and on with AR and VR kind of collectively, I think actually one of the things that spawned my curiosity for this immersive style of gaming was the razor hydra controllers. They were these, you know, they're quarter detached controllers that you could put your hands into. And I was working on an MMO at the time, the shadow of the avatar. And so we were, so I prototyped it and being able to have your hands and cast spells on the screen and stuff. And that was, you know, intriguing and that kind of aligned well right at the time of the Oculus Kickstarter coming out, which I was a backer on. And you know, got one of the early pieces and, you know, hosted game jams and you know, started just prototyping content with, you know, the community. And that really what you were talking about.

Unknown: Like so Oculus when was the Kickstarter 2012, I think 2013.

Guest: And yeah, and so, but even before that, you know, augmented reality started up in the kind of, I wouldn't say mainstream, but for developers that were into unity, I've been noodling with unity since unity two. And, you know, helped put a lot of the early stuff into the asset store and, you know, used to do the unified wiki contributor, which was basically just a wiki of free content that the developers would make and share. And that turned into the unity asset store and kind of this developer community and very heavily involved in augmented reality writing stuff with Vuforia and helping that white paper and early SDK form with example scenes and other augmented reality stuff with SLAM and, you know, native native, native programming and stuff. And so, trying to, you know, since then, I've tried to take the approach of when we evolve a tool set or API, I'll share it out with the community. I'll send it up to the, you know, to the larger companies that are building the hardware or the software technology and just try to share, try to open it up. You know, if we build an API or a tool set that helps to improve the developers process, you know, that's always been kind of our ethos is to push it back up and share it out, you know, and try to, you know, rising tide lifts all ships kind of thing. And so, that's been our approach from the beginning. And so, moving in from AR through the, you know, early, 20 teens, you know, the 2012, you did a lot of cool AR games and little experiments and stuff like that. And then in 2013, like I said, started doing game jams 2015 was whenever the 3D printed vibe came out. The Oculus DK2 was the first that allowed six doffs of six degrees of freedom. And, but the 3D printed vibe started being sent out to, you know, key developers innovating and developing on stuff. And so, HTC Vive actually paid for a lot of these, you know, valve prototypes to be shipped out and they partnered with Razer who did an amazing job pushing like, you know, game VR ready computers out to the public. I mean, which were very expensive. I mean, it's still very expensive, but at the time, you know, $3,000 minimum for the kind of laptop that could perform this stuff. And so those two companies in unison Razer and HTC Vive. And of course, valve pushing the years of R&D and hardware development are crucial to what we see now as the VR market. So, I mean, it's not going to be the forward leading consumer ready solution, but we owe it to them as a collective from development standpoint of seeding those early development studios with the content and the hardware and the capability and the, you know, developer outreach to get a lot of this stuff done. So, look back at like 2016, there was a lot of early investments on VR, a lot of VCs jumping on board, pushing and funding, sometimes goods, sometimes frivolously, you know. And which evolved into 2017, 2018, some of that early funding drying up because some of the decisions made by VC, you know, consultants wasn't necessarily coming through. And so, some of that dialed back, but then we started seeing, especially last year and this year, a lot of that coming back forward as you said what has changed.

Jon Radoff: That's kind of what I want to get to like in the here and now because it seems like a lot has changed in the last couple of years. The customer has changed. Yeah. The customer's changed.

Unknown: The idea has changed.

Guest: You know, early on it was, do you have a Vive or an Oculus Rift, right? And that went for a while and then, you know, the Quest came out, the Vive Focus came out, the Quest 2 came out. Now, Vive Focus 3, which is phenomenal. And the Vive Flow, which is another, you know, in the worksets that they're doing. The consumer ready headset, if you want to call it that, the consumer product of a VR headset. I feel is just now reaching the market when you try on a Focus 3 or if you try on a Quest 2, you start to really feel that user experience that feels like it's a consumer ready product rather than previously. It took some tech setup and it took some features that felt like essentially a dev kit. You know, if you ever get a dev kit from a hardware company, you typically have to do a lot of stuff on the back end. You have to noodle with drivers, get on the forum, figure out why it's not working, all these different things. And not to say that the Vive or early Oculus did that a lot, but there was just, you know, with Windows updating and, you know, OEM drivers and all these things you had to really dig in to get your stuff to work sometimes. And that also kind of helped what we were doing because being active in the development community and VR community kind of helped us grow into that situation. We, you know, we kind of aligned with these companies, put on big shows and big demos with their hardware. And then that helped us grow internally as well on the different companies that I've been involved with in VR. And, you know, that's just, it's a, I've always tried to live my life as under the ethos if you have the opportunity to help, then you have the responsibility to help. And so with the developers, circles and communities typically get a lot of questions of like, oh, why is this not working? And the people that are experimenting and noodling with the hardware are the ones that can answer that questions, those questions. And then collectively, when those teams, when those individuals come together and form teams, you start getting some of this really cool, compelling content coming out. And so I would say to answer your question, I'd say it's a combination of the hardware being more consumer ready in the user experience of starting it up and getting it on, as well as some of the, you know, more leading developers being able to finally, you know, release their, their long-built, you know, quality content that's being developed over the past few years by key developers. And that content then becomes very compelling. It also allows for more licensing opportunities for big IP to come into the space, which then, therefore, allows the big IP holders to spend more money on marketing. They're in line, you know, creating that cyclical kind of circle for the consumers to be attracted to the, to the platform. It's different for different people. Artistic people seeing them create content and, and express themselves with tilt brush or quill or some of these others are, it's phenomenal. The kind of content that you see coming out of that is so creative and, and it opens a door to somebody that might not have ever seen themselves as a, as a digital creative. And there were, you know, traditional artists and tilt brush speaks to them, seeing, you know, maybe elderly people playing or using like Google Earth VR, which is essentially, you know, Google Earth, which we've seen. But when you put in VR, you are, it's like you're in a helicopter and you're hovering around and you get to go to these different places and see things, doing these things, you know, I was also co-founder of Wave, which is a music performance experience and seeing people transport themselves into a concert in this back in, you know, we started and actually, thanksgiving weekend of, of, of 2015. So that's six years ago this weekend was whenever we built the prototype and thought of it. And, you know, fast forwarding that experience through people, you know, that the early VR beta had the ability to bring people's tilt brush worlds into, into the experience and share and collaborate. So it allowed these, you know, traditional artists that might not have seen themselves as 3D artists to create virtual worlds and, and, and event spaces and stuff and then DJ inside of them and stuff. And it was just really cool to see the community grow. Fast forwarding to more current stuff, all space, you know, is, I mean, that's both one of the early ones and the current leader in events. The event aggregation and moderation tools make it, you know, very, very strong for putting on these, you know, social experiences. And so being able to be in those experiences, being able to attend, you know, virtual concerts or especially like the comedy shows that, that our partners are doing is, it's so, it's so great, right? It's so transformative. You're sitting at home on a Friday night, but you're in a comedy club and you don't think that you're in VR. You're laughing around people around you watching a comedian up on stage. That's what you do if you go to a real comedy club. And so that's one of the things that feels very transformative because you're doing essentially what you do in real life if you're in that situation. And when you take off the headset after an hour, you feel like, I just walked in immediately from a comedy club and I didn't have to kennel my dog, I, you know, the drinks were cheaper because I got them out of my fridge, you know. And I think that's, that's an interesting way of connecting, especially in today's era of, you know, the pandemic still running rampant in many areas and, and people, you know, being more closed in with their lives than they used to be. This, you know, VR really allows a transformative social connection that people can get that visceral relief out of their brain of being around other people communicating, connecting, meeting new people, networking for their industry, doing biz dev in like virtual conferences and stuff. And that's what this industry specifically needs. It needs the social connection. It needs the networking. It needs the biz dev of one-on-ones and things like clubhouse and, you know, virtual reality. I see them melding, right? Like discord, clubhouse, social VR, I say fast forward a year from now, two years from now, it's all going to be melding because with our smart glasses and lightweight wearables that everybody's going to have, it's just going to be second nature just to jump in and connect with people.

Jon Radoff: That was awesome. So that was just a whirlwind of stuff. And by the way, if you're listening to this in the audio only podcast version, this is one of those cases where you probably want to check out the YouTube version of this video because we're going to show you a lot of this stuff. Now, frankly, getting the full experience, you actually have to do it in VR, but you'll get a better taste of it looking at some of these videos. I love some of the music stuff you just referred to. I think of music as one of the really compelling opportunities around VR and AR and immersion. In fact, in a recent episode we had Lucas Wilson on who's done a lot of space with, you know, has done a lot of work with really major artists who are entering VR, really, really compelling stuff happening in that area. So I'll go give some of my things that I think are cool. I think supernatural VR is a really cool experience. So especially, you know, you brought up the pandemic, like during the pandemic when no one can get into a gym. And now you can go and travel to the surface of Mars in VR and do a beat saber like thing, but it's not, it's more than beat saber. You're lunging around your squatting. You're doing real exercise. Like I feel, I'm reasonably fit, but I, but I get a workout in supernatural VR for sure. And then you add to that, like the social, the competitive components, the leaderboards, the fact that they've got the trainers who are constantly adding new content, like they really checked a lot of the boxes for education, fitness, socialization. So I think that's a really cool one. You were talking about some of the creative platforms. I think gravity sketch is a really cool product as well, because it gives you a very unique art experience in VR, because you're actually sculpting things. And that is something that's really hard to capture for me. I'm not, I'm a kind of an artist, I design games and stuff and storytelling in the past, but I'm not a visual artist. But for me, I was able to go in and sort of do sculpting and it's, it's, it's really neat. I think people are going to have some new creative experiences that they've never had before in there. To me, that's actually what this whole space is about. It's like, elevate the creativity of everybody is one of the opportunities. So you've worked on some games though. Let's start with games because games is like the, you know, one of the first applications people had in mind. And I think initially people were like, oh, it's going to be like call of duty, but in VR. And it turns out those aren't exactly the kinds of games that ended up being super popular. So you've worked on several games at this point. Like we can talk about baby hands. I, I wore my Viking shirt today because we're going to talk about Valhalla. Tell us about some of those games. And again, we're, we're going to run some video here so everyone can see what these games are like. Sure. There's the 2D version in a video version of VR.

Guest: Sure, sure. Yeah, I'd be happy to, you know, like I said, early, one of my, one of my earlier things that I did at on Shroud of the Avatar, which is the spiritual successor to the Ultima series, right? Ultima online. We did a big kickstarter and became one of the biggest kick starters. A lot of success there. Still running strong with an amazing community of of backers and players and guilds and just phenomenal amount of user generated content. But that was one of the first, that was probably the first professional title that I implemented VR into. We never released it as onto, you know, out to the public because especially at the time it was, you know, Oculus DK1 kickstarter backers. We're the only people that had VR, you know, and, and it just didn't make sense to push all that stuff up there only to have to, only to allow it to become legacy very quickly. But it, my position there was VFX lead slash programmer slash designer, you know, wizard behind the curtain kind of person. I did a lot of the Easter eggs and just worked with world builders and just, you know, helped grow the team and worked with just a phenomenal list, you know, phenomenal amount of people that allowed for a lot of creative freedom. And that, that kind of, you know, really grease the wheel, so to speak for where I wanted to go, you know, running the Austin Unity Meetup group and the ARVR tools and tech Meetup group that I formed. We had a lot of people in the community that were very interested in this coming together, met my co-founder of the wave at a, you know, one of these events, Aaron Limke, who reached out to me like I was saying on, on Thanksgiving weekend while, or the weekend before and, and we brainstormed while I was, you know, walking a trail or something about what could be done with music creation. Because both of us have a live performance background, you know, growing up in Austin, there's a lot of live music here. And both of our parents were musicians and, you know, we both performed live on a lot of stages and stuff. And so we kind of started brainstorming like what could be possible with synchronization and quantizing and, you know, DJ kind of equipment, but bring that into a spatial VR kind of feel. And so we got together and built this like 3D sequencer, which was like a really cool way of like, you know, doing step sequencing in VR and a virtual 3D Pharamon, which you could move around your hands and create bit crunching and the Pharamon kind of audio. And then it would cause audio reactive visuals up. And it was just a really interesting experience, you know. And so we debuted that one, I think in January of 2016, the first time we showed it publicly and people just went nuts. I mean, they were everybody was like, this is the future and just freaking out on, we were both of us around stage performing in VR, you know, and everybody was just, you know, kind of blown away. And it was a lot of fun, you know, I think in 2016 we went to 26 different conferences with, you know, doing after parties collaborated with Google on there, helping them build the audio reactive brushes for tilt brush. And just, you know, helped kinemotic form and which you built audio trip, which is like kind of like beat saber but dancing. So it's like, it's like, it's like choreographed dancing, phenomenal workout and just a lot of fun too because it gets you moving, gets you feeling like you got rhythm even when you might not have some. And it's just a lot of fun. Those kind of games that get your heart rate up, get you pumped, get you moving, get you into it. I love those, you know what I mean? Because even though you can't maybe play him for much more than 20, 30 minutes before you're just, you know, exhausted. That's really good. That's good for your heart. That's good for your mind. And so I've been heavily intrigued about those kind of things like seeing people that otherwise wouldn't be dancing on a dance floor, a lot of game developers and people in the gaming, you know, game players were nerds, right? We don't sometimes go onto the dance floor and let loose and go dancing around but I would see these people jump into virtual reality in the wave and they start pumping the air and dancing around and getting crazy, you know, and loving it and they would express that. I mean, they would just say this is the most transformative experience I've ever done. And so we experimented with ideas go lower there in 2016 came up with a bunch of different things, raised a crazy amount of funding. In 2016, I found myself having the same meetings or different meetings but I've had meetings with the same people in different cities around the US because of these different virtual reality conferences. And so I think the next team was fraught with so many conferences that had virtual reality components to them. And we were the ones that had like 32 VR headsets and we were showing up to all these different places and working with other developers and getting other developers, you know, setup with R&D, you know, with razor hardware and five prototypes and stuff. So that collaboration just kind of wheeled together to form like I was meeting with the cats from HTC five studios and Warner Brothers and helping broker the deal for, you know, the Ready Player One, a library of content and also working with, you know, wave full time and working my full time job at Porta Larium on MMO. So I was doing about 120 to 130 hours a week of work plus traveling, like I said, 26 conferences. It was a lot more for a game developer. Yeah, it really wasn't too much more than what I would always be doing, you know, anyway, but it was interesting because I kept on having the meetings with the same people. And so the way I'd find like, well, where do you want to go to brunch tomorrow? I would ask people like, well, what's the best chicken of waffles in Boston or Seattle or, you know, Vegas or wherever. And what I found was is that if a place has good chicken of waffles, then everything else on the menus awesome and they usually have a vegetarian option. And if they have bad chicken of waffles, they're probably making all kinds of bad decisions with their restaurant. You shouldn't even go. And so it became like this staple of quality, you know, and so as I was preparing to form a new studio, I had a spreadsheet of nerdy names to come up with a new studio for. And I was giving an analogy of the kind of new studio that I wanted to create because I'd seen so many of these VR studios take funding or getting acquired and kind of ruined the flavor of the studio, you know, the best developers would then leave because they didn't want to work for a conglomerate or they didn't want to change the ethos of the company. And so this creative atmosphere would essentially get spoiled. And so I was talking over a plate of chicken of waffles. I said, you know, so I want to create this new studio, say, call chicken waffle and the developers will work for chicken waffle and we can grow and have flat harrykey and a really cool creative environment. And if we want to create content under holding companies called box of napkins or salt and pepper or fork and knife, then if you know some large company like Google or whoever wants to come in and acquire the IP, they can buy box of napkins and never change the flavor of my chicken of waffles. And as just a goofy joke, the more I thought of it, you know, it's like, I keep on thinking of this chicken waffles and they're like, that's really good. And so just kind of hooked and as it started as a joke and ended up being the perfect avant-garde name for the kind of creative freedom environment that we try to run with our teams and stuff. And so, yeah, it's been really cool. That helped us in 2017 with all the, like I said, all the connectivity and all the people forming. We had been hiring for Wave, but we're hiring for music creators and all these people reaching out to me and that amazing character control programmers or combat programmers or AI programmers. And I was like, wow, you're not really who we're looking for, but I'd love to work with you. You know, these industry veterans and so forming chicken waffle kind of had this perfect storm opportunity to just kind of ramp up and jump right into a big project. Unfortunately, the Wizards of the West Coast IP got lost by Warner Brothers. So if you notice there was no Dungeons and Dragons in the Ready Player One movie, but that was the experience that we were doing, which was this awesome, you know, Dungeons and Dragons VR experience that unfortunately is never to see the life. As many cool VR experiences from 2016 and 2017 are, but yeah, so we just kind of, you know, hit the ground running. Have been since made, I think 70 experiences for third party clients and partners like Sony and adult swim and Comedy Central and Tesla and Mercedes and Disney and Marvel and Pixar. You name it. We've done a lot of different stuff, both in AR and VR and then a handful of our own original IP that we, you know, that we feel is compelling and as one small words. And then so now fast forward to today, we've just announced the Indie XR creator fund, which is dedicated to publishing and partnering, collaborating with innovative creators and people building, you know, immersive XR experiences or game of art. And we just really see the value of partnering and collaborating with, you know, people in this circle because it's almost impossible to hire people in this circle because the people that you need to hire too busy doing their own things. And the best way to align people is to collaborate on what they're already doing, provide the steam that they need. And as a publisher, we've seen some success. We're already working with five really amazing partners and our, our, our goal is 15 over the next two years. So that's kind of been interesting to grow that grow that portfolio and kind of expand chicken waffle as to not just a development studio, but a publishing partner for creative Indies. And I think that's just a really healthy thing that the industry needs is more support for Indies because the Indies are the ones that are agile enough to create the most compelling content and essentially set the standard for the future of this space, both in AR and VR.

Jon Radoff: So let's talk about where this industry goes from here. I think what's interesting about what you described is that so much of it isn't like games, which is what everyone thought that it would be initially so much of it is actually very social in orientation. There's more artistry and art making and creativity happening here. So when I think of what the meta versus to me, the meta versus the next generation of the internet, but it's built around real time activity and games is sort of the original use case for real time, but increasingly it's social activity and connecting with people and personal expression. And it feels like that's why VR and metaverse kind of get associated a lot of the time. I don't personally require VR for the metaverse. I think metaverse kind of on any screen. It could even be as you were talking about earlier, like it could be clubhouse because I'm there, I'm present, I'm in an audio system, but I feel like I'm present with people.

Unknown: And then of course that's just entirely social. So what's happening in the space, what are some of the interesting social pieces of it and and what are some of those social experiences in in VR. Actually, I'll just point out one that I've used because this is actually an interesting comparison. If you go to rec room.

Jon Radoff: And you so rec room is available on phones on screens and in VR and it's really interesting to go in and try it like on a screen and run around the world and do stuff and then compare that same experience in VR because what I find in it is that suddenly, like different parts of my brain take over, like I don't want to be jumping up and down on someone like I might do in world of work craft. And suddenly I'm like respecting people's space and things like that. So there's something primal about being in that embodied experience where it surrounds you. And it feels like that's part of the opportunity for the socialization of this, which is much more of that social moral machinery kicks in and it does feel qualitatively different than anything else you're going to do outside of VR.

Guest: Where you're talking to that. Yeah, I mean, we are social creatures, right? We have evolved, you know, from a, you know, early tribal mentality into the civilization that we live in today and we are, we are products of the socialization of everything that we've experienced in our lifetime to today. I mean, yesterday made you who you are today, but so did 10 years ago and so did the beginning of your life. And so if we think about like the social aspect of VR as how important that that can be on somebody, it can really change your outlook, not just in not just in VR, but like, for instance, clubhouse is a perfect example of you connect with other humans and you hear people from around the world in their viewpoints and their demographic differences or their, you know, their, you know, their opinions, their knowledge, their share, their connectivity, you're now, you know, through a simple conversation can really become to know somebody and become somebody's friend or get a good aspect of who they are personally. And that's what human connections all about and it's a huge aspect in the, you know, in the digital industry for Biz Dev and connectivity and who do you want to work with and what are the opportunities and things like that. And so yeah, I see, I see, you know, the clubhouse since the beginning of it, the way people talk to each other or talk over each other sometimes, the way people give each other space or moderate a conversation, all these things never happened in face to face communication or even IRC or any of these other social rooms. This is an evolution of human connectivity and communication and which has been very interesting and virtual reality social experiences are also, I see it as an evolution of human connectivity and communication. We put on the virtual CES last year for 2020 with everything being closed, I'm sorry, 2021. So 2021 is almost already last year. And so, you know, in January of this year we put on this huge virtual CES experience and it was phenomenal. We had almost 5,000 people, you know, in these we had a week long of events and, you know, panels and discussions and so chicken wealth will build a virtual conference hall that felt like you were at the Sands or something in CES in Vegas, which overlooked the Vegas skyline. And then we had these speaker halls that you can go in and see keynotes or panels of different, you know, amounts of speakers with their podiums and, you know, talking heads as their avatars. And especially since we made it feel like Vegas, I had hundreds of people reach out and say, or just comment, like it felt, it feels like I went to, I got to go to CES, like I got the same experience, I got to go to CES. And then even more so, my myself as well as a lot of people gave the feedback of, this was the most, this was the best bus dev I've ever had at a conference because people are in front of their computers or have their phone in their hand while they're talking to in VR and they're able to connect with, in LinkedIn in the middle of a conversation, in real world, in IRL, I, in real life, you're not able to, I mean, some people do just look down at their phone and like connect with you and have a site. And have a sidebar, write an email while you're, while you're in the middle of a conversation or a conference or something like that. And so I had hundreds of bus dev connections during the virtual conference and it felt like I was at CES, there was trade show booths and stuff. And we're doing another, we're doing it again this next year with Dreamland XR. And then the, you know, we did the Sundance Film Festival which had over 4,000 people, we did the Super Bowl which we had a virtual tailgating experience and like a Bud Light stage and a Bud Light Brewery beer garden and, you know, a Red Bull trailer and a photo op area where you could put on the helmet and pads of, you know, your favorite team and take photos on a, on a steppin' repeat kind of backdrop. And just, you know, all kinds of like immersive stuff to like watch the, and, and, but we built it making it feel like you were in the parking lot outside the stadium of the actual Super Bowl there in Tampa. And so people like thousands, and it's almost 5,000 people that came in and watched the Super Bowl and the half time show and stuff together in a social thing and, and people were like, this is the best tailgating experience I've ever, like, better than any real tailgating experience. And, and then we did the Microsoft Ignite lobby which was really cool. People bringing in, you know, a bunch of people that weren't traditional VR gamers. And then we did Pride XR which was a virtual reality Pride Parade experience that we built for Pride which is a, or Inter Pride which is the company that puts on these Pride Parades around the world. So we built a city block like a little central park New York style with floats that I did that signified each major city that puts on a Pride Parade and people could jump in during the month of, you know, Pride Month and, and, and jump around onto the floats and have meetups and all these different things. And then just, you know, a slew of other things like the, I think the comedy show specifically that I mentioned earlier failed to render comedy. That one is maybe the most transformative of all things because we do music and comedy. So we have failed to render music and failed to render comedy. And we do us a podcast and other really cool stuff that I built the worlds for. But the, you know, the music and the comedy are so transformative because you're doing what you would do at a real show. You're standing in the audience around people enjoying what's going on on stage. That's what you do at a real music event. You're standing in, you know, you're being in the audience laughing collectively at a professional comedian on stage. That's what you do in a real comedy club. So you're getting that actual tangible effect of feeling like you were there. And the funny thing is is the next day after one of these shows after a big show like we've done big shows with some major artists or, and some big comedians and stuff. The funny thing is a day or two after the show, it feels the same in your memory as having gone to a comedy club or having gone to a music show. Yeah, you have a memory of a tangible memory of, and that's as humans, that's what makes us who we are. That's that's the way we identify things and our, our memory is spatial. So that's one of the very intriguing pieces about VR is that your memory goes back to having done something. And we've seen that in training and education of like if you put people through a video for safety training, you know, 70% of the people are going to have a first time fail on the test of actually doing it. Did they do it in the right procedures? Did they follow all the guidelines? Did they know where to go when in the fire bell rang? If you do it in virtual reality, people just know they've already done it. You can have them do it 10 times and it's not as exhausting as making everybody walk back into this room and walk back over to this side of the job site and then practice a fire drill to go and evacuate the oil rig or whatever you're training them to do. They can know tangibly in their memory what to do whenever there's a big fire breakout. They just know to run this direction jump right here, link it and slide off. And those kind of things are our, you know, muscle memory and human intrinsic learning and stuff like that. And I think that's very intriguing, especially as we move forward to driving the price down and having more utility aspects coming into XR smart glasses and wearable technology.

Jon Radoff: Smart glasses, you said it. So let's talk about augmented reality. Like first of the technology today is big and heavy and it's not quite there. It sort of feels like VR from before VR started getting good. At least that's kind of been where it's been so far. I mean, I think the the wayfarers the the Facebook Rayban partnership. That's not AR, but it shows you what the form factor really needs to be for a lot of people to get it in my opinion. It's got to be super lightweight. It's kind of. It's got to be cool looking the battery. Yeah, it has to be normal. But let's talk about the applications of this. So let's just dream a moment about like a future where AR really is in that form factor. I'm curious how you think that'll change things and how is it already changing it with what we've got. I know you're doing work with like art. You're going to be at art basil. There's a lot going on in the space. Like there's so many areas of this that are just completely new for human experience.

Unknown: Yeah, I mean, and AR has been a very, you know, it's been a transformative moving target. You know, it started out doing a lot of, you know, at based AR Pokemon go style stuff.

Guest: You know, I consulted for an I antic on Pokemon go and and, you know, have been very heavily involved in smart glasses technology did a lot of the content and SDK you develop a SDK for Epson, Mavario, which was a few years ago. These smart glasses and they went heavily towards utility and had some games to and then just a handful of others. You know, the moving fast forwarding to let's say two years ago, whenever you could grab your hand, get your hands on a, on a HoloLens or a magic leap. Those were the first dev kits that really unlocked a lot of the features that are available and will be available in skunk works of the future. Be it, you know, augmented reality driven through hand tracking content, yeah, hand tracking utility. Having your hands in front of you and being able to have projected AR panels or information or utility, that greatly improves not just the immersion, but the utility aspect of what we need to do in our daily lives, what workers or safety professionals or people on the oil pipeline or whatever. I see AR glasses proliferating into everyone's face.

Jon Radoff: Yeah, and also just get rid of all the other screens we've got we can just have a whole round in front of it. We won't have home feeders and computer screens and phone screens. We'll just have edge nodes that feed us data and content.

Guest: Yeah, and I think a rear facing camera on your on your watch and you'll face yourself and you'll be able to hollow, portate your persona back to the other person standing in front of you and they'll be holding your hand up like this. And so their face will be floating there in front of you as a point cloud holographic representation. I think that's only a couple years away. You mentioned the form factor. That's a very important piece if you're going to reach mass audience and the cool factor is this cool. Well, I mean, I'm seeing mullets coming back in style. So I don't know how normal and cool. The important of fads are, you know, if you look at the snap spectacles three that they look like they they're cool. I mean, they're they're not like normal glasses granted, but they do look like something you'd see in Blade Runner, which is I mean, if you look around at some people at the mall, you they also look like they could be off the Blade Runner set. You know what I mean? And you know, and the you know, we're in where and what look like jinkos and you know, having chains hanging off their wallet and multi colored rainbow mullet and just really amazing fads in fashion coming back. So I could see things as long as they're lightweight and durable and easily developed for maybe being a stretch off of what the typical norm is. But your point of having, you know, Ray band looking to I wear Ray bands, that's the kind of glasses I wear, these are the glasses I wear, right? And so. I'm a guy that's the kind of glasses I walk away. You know, I mean, it's it's the kind that I don't wear Oakleys because they don't fit on my face, not because Oakleys are ugly. They fit they look awesome on some people's face. Just not me. And so I like Ray bands and I like the form factor of those kind of glasses. And so I think as we get more of the micro technology, microprocessors, advancements in data streaming, that's going to be the key component to getting some of these lightweight headsets.

Unknown: Like I said, if you if you look at where HoloLens and Magic Leap already are, that technology on a lightweight framework would already be ready for mass market.

Guest: Now it's a narrow field of view. It's a it's a bit of a of a pain to develop for, but not really, you know, the new Microsoft mixed reality toolkit updates are phenomenal. The hand tracking is magic. The HoloLens 2 is like you're wearing Merlin's hat on your head. You know what I mean? I mean, it is it is absolutely cool, but it does look like a bisected fighter pilots helmet, you know, that you're wearing a little bit. And so it's hard to walk around and not have everybody stare at you, but that's okay to sometimes. And so like with the HoloLens 2, one of the things that we built and shared with again, like, you know, the notion of open source sharing in the developer tools and stuff like that was we built for Google Tango, which was an early spatial mapping and an AR camera device back in 2016. I think was the year of Tango and maybe 2017, but I think it was 2016 and we got discontinued, but it had this really intriguing point cloud generation system and basically the early form of what then Microsoft created with the area description files, which allow you to map point cloud data of the room and map that out and then place objects in there, place sounds, place interactive components. So therefore whenever you go back into that space, those items come back, when it recognizes where you are, they come back and we built a wrapper that allows those air description files to be shared between multiple headsets, which is now growing and growing. And I think the key component for smart glasses and like things like wearable technology to proliferate HTC Vive just announced the golden headset, which is allows one headset to map out a space. And then all any other headset on the same network to be able to be shared. So you have direct calibration where I can look over and see your avatar standing where you are in a multiplayer experience without the need to have some call of, you know, lengthy calibration process, which information from multiple viewpoints is huge, like that's a metaphor for art things, social things, location based entertainment and arena stuff. That's a big thing that we've been building lately. Those kind of things are also like you mentioned with Recroom, Love Recroom worked on the big event that you put on in Recroom, built one of the spaces for that. And Love Recroom from the beginning know those cats very well and they're, you know, really cool positive energy kind of company doing really amazing things. And I think that's one of the companies that specifically is helping identify people that don't have VR as wanting VR. Like we don't, that's what mixed reality does to these videos of people, you know, playing virtual reality. And you can see what they're doing be it beat Saber or new game or Viking game shadow of Alhalla has a lot of mixed reality opportunities for cutting apart zombies and orcs and stuff in mixed reality. And that allows people to see what they're missing and I keep component to the social with Recroom people logging in with mobile or logging in with a PC that's still able to play the games, but they see other people dancing around or doing things in VR and ducking and stuff that that makes them want VR. And I think that's a key component to how we're going to grow this industry in this marketplace is educating people on what they're missing, right? And as we end of course driving the price point down and the user experience up and opening up to developers, I think the, you know, the practices for curating a strict marketplace on this developer hardware and not paying attention to what Indies need is the wrong way of going about it. I think the important thing is to actually the opposite add steam in the sales of Indies because Indies are the ones like I said that are agile enough to innovate and create new standards for this industry and it's going to be, you know, it's crucial. We've already seen that it's crucial for this industry to exist on the shoulders of Indies, not on the shoulders of giants. And so if you look at all the content coming out from the larger competitor, the bigger studios, they're all their experiences. So we could actually identify all the content that they're doing in there as this other Indie title, but with a bigger IP. And so we need to, you know, as collectively promote, you know, identifying Indies content, you know, helping Indies get on the, on the, on the store and stuff like that. That's very important for the industry.

Jon Radoff: Yeah, I mean, listen, we're all creators like there's billions of people in this world and I would like to see this opened up to anybody anywhere to be able to create in this space. So there's a few threads from what you were just covering. There was the social aspects. There's AR in terms of how that'll transform your experience of the world. There was art. I'm going to bring in yet another thread that I promised I would weigh in the beginning, which is blockchain, Web 3, NFTs. I think it's actually relevant as another piece that can bring a lot of this together. I'm seeing a future where maybe I'm wearing my AR headset and I'm walking around my house and there's art and sculpture in my house, for example, that I acquired from an artist and it's part of my home. Maybe I'm wearing virtual fashions. I am expressing myself in a certain way in terms of not only how I appear in like VR, but how I go out into the world and present myself to other people. Those, those are just sort of some, I think maybe one of the more, some of the more basic aspects of this. I'm curious what you think of either those or what would you add to it?

Guest: I'm imagining your son walking out of the kitchen with a big rainbow mullet, you know what I mean? And augmented reality, mohawk or mullet or something like, they might have a mullet. If it can just be AR and I don't have to live with it, then you know, now you're talking. You know, and I think the digital fashion is a huge industry. It's a full industry that's going to open up and proliferate into real fashion. I think that moving into the roaring 20s as we're entering, I think that we're going to look back in the 30s and 40s and see a huge, it's an art revolution, if you will. Every art revolution throughout human history has essentially been spawned by human tribulation in society. And we just saw a pretty heavy tribulation over the past two years of closures and arguments and, you know, manipulation and stuff like that. And so, you know, if we fast forward and see this as what will it look like as a past, right? A lot of the reasons that art revolutions have happened in the past were people of wealth, people of resource invested into creative content, be it paintings and sculptors in the past, and with their wealth to legitimify their wealth, to speak to the common people, to be involved in the community that they felt separated from. To boast the art, to just validate themselves. It's not a bad thing either to validate yourself as human nature, right? And so be it that you are the creator or that you are the collector. And so being a collector becomes popular during art revolutions. And that's what drives all the other artists in the creator community to start creating art in that style. And then if you look back to any other stylized art revolution in the past, it usually involved proceeding from some king or rich collector, boasting some certain type of art which caused the entire community to start making art in that way. And now we're seeing this digital art revolution where blockchain and NFT art creation has allowed creators to rise up and create content that provides real resource to themselves and their family and their community. And I think that that's a very interesting thing, especially for the notion of underrepresented people in our society and our collective civilization. There are certain areas in this world where the local legislation doesn't represent the people that are under it. That's just a reality in this, not just today's, it's unfortunately been cyclical throughout human history. That a lot of people are underrepresented. And especially if you look at somewhere like BFE Utah or East Compton or the middle of Bangladesh or Uganda or you name it. Pick an underrepresented area that doesn't have the ability to, for a 17 year old artist to get into a gala style museum or an art gallery that allows them to sell thousands of dollars worth of art and support themselves and their family and their future, that's typical. I've heard so many people over the past year say, I'm pursuing my life as an artist. I'm actually making money and paying bills and actually making more being a creative than I ever felt I could even with a career. And that's very intriguing from a son of an artist and being seeing firsthand what it took to be a professional painter and muralist. My mom is still an amazing artist. But I saw the way art was treated and paid for and critiqued and things. And so as a studio head, I also feel it's very important to provide the positive affirmation to artists and the equal opportunity for a voice to an artist in design and systems and things like that. And so whenever I look at the NFT community, I see an amazing opportunity for people to grow and interconnect with the XR community as well because with those VR headsets or AR smart glasses of the future, a lot of the utility is going to be visualization. Visualization of art of virtual galleries, which we're building heavily. And then the notion of developing more web AR and web XR web 3D connectivity content. That's what we've been heavily involved in is doing a lot of this AR content, evolving from the typical you know app driven content into web AR, which allows you to just scan a QR code or click on the link in social media and you're in the experience. And so we've been building a lot of that content. Art Basel is a huge event next week that we have murals around art basil activated. We're doing augmented reality scavenger hunts where if you unlock, if you scan the, if you complete the scavenger hunt, then you unlock an NFT and pull up and all these other kind of really interesting collaborative efforts towards, you know, essentially it's making the world in a better place in many ways. If you look at the, at the wealth distribution of the NFT marketplace, typical wealth distribution in human society is about 1% if not much less.

Unknown: Well, distribution of the top, you know, of the, I think it was something like 89% of the wealth being transferred in the NFT marketplace is amongst 20% of the wallets.

Guest: That means that the upper, that the majority of the money is still an upper class. That's, that's how money works unfortunately with resources. However, the distribution of less than 1% instead to 20% is an indicator that there's a way bigger opportunity for distribution of wealth and resources to, to creative people that otherwise would have a hard time even supporting themselves as a professional artist, have a real opportunity. You're seeing people making real money, real money sometimes on, on, on their artwork, on their creative passion, on their lifestyle as an artist and their, you know, they're connected into the community and stuff. And that's just, I don't know, for me, it's very intriguing, very exciting and it's also a whole new way of, of measuring ownership. So in the digital realm with these fashion items or the experience, you know, and, and the ownership of content or user-generated content into, into an existing system, those, I think as we see the utility, continue to open up for blockchain access and NFTs as a collectible, tradable ownership identifier. It opens up all kinds of interesting things for the future of MMOs, collective things, puzzle games, unlockable things, geocaching, wearables, all these things, you know.

Jon Radoff: So, wow, so this, this has been a mind-blowing conversation. If, if you're listening or watching this and your mind isn't blown yet about all these things that you're going to be able to do that, that actually are already happening. Like we're not talking about some ready player one version of the future 10 years from now. Like this stuff is literally happening right now. The metaverse is being built in real time. It's about real time. It's about art, yeah, entertainment, games, music, social connection, personal expression. I think it's about, it's all about the most important things for us as humans. It's about how we connect to each other emotionally, socially, how we express ourselves. So, this has been a tremendous conversation, Finn. Thank you for sharing everything about VR and AR and blockchain stuff that you've been involved in. Definitely check out, Chicken Waffle will put a link down in the show notes so that you can find Finn and some of the work he's done. And by the way, if you enjoy conversations like this, please do subscribe down below because this is the kind of conversations we are having. If this is your first time in here, you're super welcome. Thanks for listening to this. Listen to some of the other stuff that we've got. We're going to keep having conversations with people who are really building the metaverse and creating this future for all of us. So, Finn, thanks so much for taking part in this. This has been super fun.

Guest: Thanks for everything you do, too. This is an amazing honor to be involved in building the metaverse.

Unknown: Cool. All right. Thanks everybody.