Building the Foundation of The Spatial Web, with VERSES founder Gabriel Rene

The web page is
a deceptively simple invention, but its creation — and more
importantly, its cross-programmability — made the World Wide Web the
technological powerhouse it has become. Gabriel Rene founded VERSES
to encourage similar similar developments in spacial computing.

Alan: Today’s guest is Gabriel
Rene, an architect and founder of The VERSES Foundation. He’s a
technologist, entrepreneur, researcher, media and music producer,
whose 25-year career in the technology, telecom and entertainment
industry has granted him the knowledge and experience to consistently
invent unique business verticals, and to navigate the novel
challenges of the emerging global digital entertainment, marketing,
e-com, mobile and spatial technology markets. aAs a deep technology
pioneer, mobile executive, and corporate strategist, Gabriel has
built multiple innovative technology companies, developed
groundbreaking enterprise and consumer software, and forged strategic
partnerships with multiple Fortune 50 companies. Rene has worked with
— and advised some of — the world’s largest brands, spanning media
conglomerates, telcos, media manufacturers, mobile manufacturers,
governments, and major brands. As a C-level executive founder, he has
demonstrated unique leadership, strategic and operational
capabilities in growing businesses from zero to $25-million in annual
revenues. As an advisor and board member, he has helped multiple
startups and founders navigate their way to success. Gabriel serves
as the executive director of the VERSES Foundation, an organization
at the intersection of Block Chain, Virtual Reality, and Artificial
Intelligence technologies designed to power Web 3.0 and dedicated to
the interoperable adoption of spatial technologies across every major
industry. As the founder and executive director of VERSES, the Global
Advisory Board Member and co-chair of the AR Cloud Committee, and a
founding member of the Open AR Cloud. With that, I want to welcome
Gabriel Rene. Thank you for joining us on the show.

Gabriel: Thank you, Alan. It’s a
pleasure to be here.

Alan: Where can people find you
online if they want to look into it?

Gabriel: Well, if it’s me
personally, you can find me @GabrielRene at LinkedIn, and you can
also find me on Twitter under the same name. And then with VERSES,
you can go to VERSES.io to get all the latest information on us.

Alan: So let’s unpack this. Tell
me what you’re doing at VERSES right now, and I want to get the full
understanding of what is VERSES, and why it’s important for people
listening.

Gabriel: So I guess the first
place to start is way back in 1990 or so. There was a young, talented
researcher by the name of Tim Berners-Lee, who was working at the
CERN Institute, and he was developing a new set of technologies which
have come to be known as the World Wide Web protocols. So those are
all the HTTP, which was hypertext transfer protocol, and HTML, which
is a hypertext markup language. That, combined with a browser, which
he developed as an open source standard, and on top of the domain
structure that had been pre-existing — which we’d been using from
the email era of .coms and .edu, .org, etc. — he created this you
URL format, which essentially made pages programmable, gave us the
ability to link content on those pages, and the ability to network
those pages. This, of course, became the World Wide Web.

The majority of our technologies and
power and advantages and capability today, whether in business or
personal lives, in public or private sector, come from the benefits
of these core protocols that enable the network. But it’s
fundamentally a network of pages and text and media. And now, with
the dawn of new interfaces th

The web page is
a deceptively simple invention, but its creation — and more
importantly, its cross-programmability — made the World Wide Web the
technological powerhouse it has become. Gabriel Rene founded VERSES
to encourage similar similar developments in spacial computing.

Alan: Today’s guest is Gabriel
Rene, an architect and founder of The VERSES Foundation. He’s a
technologist, entrepreneur, researcher, media and music producer,
whose 25-year career in the technology, telecom and entertainment
industry has granted him the knowledge and experience to consistently
invent unique business verticals, and to navigate the novel
challenges of the emerging global digital entertainment, marketing,
e-com, mobile and spatial technology markets. aAs a deep technology
pioneer, mobile executive, and corporate strategist, Gabriel has
built multiple innovative technology companies, developed
groundbreaking enterprise and consumer software, and forged strategic
partnerships with multiple Fortune 50 companies. Rene has worked with
— and advised some of — the world’s largest brands, spanning media
conglomerates, telcos, media manufacturers, mobile manufacturers,
governments, and major brands. As a C-level executive founder, he has
demonstrated unique leadership, strategic and operational
capabilities in growing businesses from zero to $25-million in annual
revenues. As an advisor and board member, he has helped multiple
startups and founders navigate their way to success. Gabriel serves
as the executive director of the VERSES Foundation, an organization
at the intersection of Block Chain, Virtual Reality, and Artificial
Intelligence technologies designed to power Web 3.0 and dedicated to
the interoperable adoption of spatial technologies across every major
industry. As the founder and executive director of VERSES, the Global
Advisory Board Member and co-chair of the AR Cloud Committee, and a
founding member of the Open AR Cloud. With that, I want to welcome
Gabriel Rene. Thank you for joining us on the show.

Gabriel: Thank you, Alan. It’s a
pleasure to be here.

Alan: Where can people find you
online if they want to look into it?

Gabriel: Well, if it’s me
personally, you can find me @GabrielRene at LinkedIn, and you can
also find me on Twitter under the same name. And then with VERSES,
you can go to VERSES.io to get all the latest information on us.

Alan: So let’s unpack this. Tell
me what you’re doing at VERSES right now, and I want to get the full
understanding of what is VERSES, and why it’s important for people
listening.

Gabriel: So I guess the first
place to start is way back in 1990 or so. There was a young, talented
researcher by the name of Tim Berners-Lee, who was working at the
CERN Institute, and he was developing a new set of technologies which
have come to be known as the World Wide Web protocols. So those are
all the HTTP, which was hypertext transfer protocol, and HTML, which
is a hypertext markup language. That, combined with a browser, which
he developed as an open source standard, and on top of the domain
structure that had been pre-existing — which we’d been using from
the email era of .coms and .edu, .org, etc. — he created this you
URL format, which essentially made pages programmable, gave us the
ability to link content on those pages, and the ability to network
those pages. This, of course, became the World Wide Web.

The majority of our technologies and
power and advantages and capability today, whether in business or
personal lives, in public or private sector, come from the benefits
of these core protocols that enable the network. But it’s
fundamentally a network of pages and text and media. And now, with
the dawn of new interfaces that come with XR technologies —
particularly augmented reality for the real world, or more for the
physical world, and VR more for a digital world — we need a new set
of protocols that enable us to essentially, instead of creating web
pages, create web spaces; a programming language for spaces, if you
will. We need a way to connect those spaces, so we can teleport
objects, content, and information between them, much like we do with
links and media content today on the web, which we call hyperspace
transfer protocol, or HSTP. Our nonprofit Foundation is developing
and maintaining these open source spatial domain and protocol
standards, and using them to connect all of the various emerging
technologies that we feel are part of this Web 3.0 architecture,
which we call the spatial web.

Alan: All right. So… you used
a lot of terminology there. Let’s break it down for people. What
would a use case be for a business to use the spatial web?

Gabriel: It’s it’s one of the
hardest questions to ask, because–

Alan: I’m full of the hard
questions, my friend. This is not a podcast for amateurs; you are a
professional in the space. If anybody can explain it, I have faith in
you, my friend.

Gabriel: Well, if we’re talking
about XR for business, let’s talk about the long term value of XR as
opposed to the value today. We’ll certainly circle back around and
talk about the practicalities, the importance of certain applications
today, but let’s talk about the long term benefits.

Alan: Love it.

Gabriel: So, when we think about
spatial technologies as they relate to business, just like the web
technologies of today or the Internet technology we’ve been using for
a while, they give us the advantage of something we call network
effects. Network effects are the ability to connect to other parties,
whether that’s inside our organizations or outside of our
organizations; across many different spheres. The power of those
communication technologies come by virtue of a protocol, and
protocols are basically just a recipe — or format — for coming up
with some sort of structure for how parties can communicate. So, the
idea that spatial computing itself is a new form of computer; at one
point, we used to drive horses and carriages around, and then the
emergence of the automobile came about. But the roads were still mud
and dirt roads. So it’s really difficult to actually get from Point A
to Point B with a car. When the ability to create standardized cement
and asphalt roads emerged, that sort of format and standard for that
enabled cars to then navigate between Point A and Point B very, very
quickly.

Obviously, this transformed things,
like our mail service and our messaging service; our postal service.
The basis for protocols — whether they’re roads for cars, whether
they’re are cables for electricity, whether it’s the Internet and web
protocols that we use today — create an effect where we’re able to
network and communicate with each other at scale. So specifically, as
it relates to augmented and virtual reality content; today, there is
no ability for you to send me an augmented reality object — let’s
say an architectural diagram. You and I cannot collaborate with it
from two different parts of the world in VR without being in the same
app. Furthermore, we can’t then teleport it to, say, the boss’s
corner office of his twenty-third-floor building in New York. Because
there is no spatial address for that location. So what you need to be
able to do is, for any form of network, you need to have a standard
for an address, whether that’s a home address, whether it’s a
telephone number, or radio number, or what we call web addresses. We
create spatial addresses that suddenly allow you to teleport objects
and information. Now, the other thing that’s critically important
is–

Alan: Just, sorry, just to
interject for one second. This isn’t just an address of a street.
This is three dimensional.

Gabriel: Correct.

Alan: So this could be a space
in the air.

Gabriel: Yeah. So, imagine a
spatial coordinate. That would be a three-dimensional point in space.
If I want to get to a building, I can follow the roads and it can get
me from Point A to Point B, but it’s essentially a two dimensional
map that I’m using. If I want to get something to someone in a
particular location in space, I don’t have a digital address for
that. And so part of what VERSES does is it makes that address
available, and then makes it so that a physical building or location
can be part of what we would call a “spatial domain,” and a
spatial domain is just like a web domain today. If you have control
over that domain, then you get to control the rights and permissions
within that space, as it relates to digital content, digital
information, and even robotics and other IoT devices.

Alan: Everybody would have to
buy into this.

Gabriel: That’s correct. The
ultimate value here is, how do you create standard methodology and
format for interactions in space, whether it’s for a human or for a
robot? And then how do you create rights and permissions that can
become standardized with respect to how content can be accessed in a
space as opposed to a page.

Alan: I just want to give people
a picture of this. This actually came up in a conversation around the
legal aspects of augmented reality and how Burger King recently did a
marketing campaign where you could take your phone and point their
app at McDonald’s or the competitor ad, and it would catch on fire in
AR and then give you a coupon or something. But then the legal
question came of, well, who owns the digital space around that
billboard, or around that poster?

Gabriel: Yeah.

Alan: This is exactly what
you’re talking about; being able to identify digital space in three
dimensions, and apply it or assign it to somebody.

Gabriel: Yeah, exactly. So,
there’s two levels. One is kind of around rights and permissions and
policy around what we might call spatial content. But again, imagine
spatial content is really digital information in space; information
of what a drone can do, or an automated vehicle or a robot, is
actually also information in space. So, you can control the flight
path of drones, or where automated cars can and cannot park, or
whether charges need to occur if they go from Point A to Point B. The
same functionality enables a user to not just have a
permissions-based restrictions, but really, what they’re supposed to
do. The ability to have field workers across any industry —
construction, warehouses, logistics, etc. — actually follow digital
information as, like, arrows in space that might route them. For
example, in a warehouse, instead of a pick-and-pack worker looking at
a nine-digit code on their screen and trying to find that box in
space, you can actually just have a marker right on the box itself.
They can look through an iPhone — which uses ARKit now — or a Magic
Leap headset, or a Microsoft Hololens headset or the other smart
glasses that’ll be coming, and that worker now can just follow that
arrow right to that location, pick that object, and move it from
Point A to Point B from, let’s say, the pick-and-pack area to the
dock, and then registering that interaction back into the warehouse
management system. But interestingly enough, it also allows you to
walk into a retail location, be identified spatially, pick up a 7Up
can, and walk out of the location and have it trigger and
transaction. This same functionality enables all kinds of different
use cases.

Alan: Indeed; this is some deep
stuff, here. This really will impact everything we do.

Gabriel: Yes, in the same way
that the web technologies really transformed our world. I mean, you
could look at it as the power of computing on one level — spatial
computing — but on the other level, you need to look at the power of
networks, which would be spatial networking. So in one sense, we
often tend to look through the lens of computers. We go back and we
look at the PC Revolution, which was incredibly powerful. But it
really wasn’t until those became connected to other networks, like
the World Wide Web or like the Internet, that we got these network
effects, where we add value to each other by virtue of our our
ability to communicate and share. That’s where we are right now.

Spatial computing is just creating the
PCs of this spatial web era. But in order to get a spatial web, we
need a way to have a spatial network protocol, much like the World
Wide Web protocols or the Internet protocols that are designed for
three dimensional space, that are designed with the sort of rights
and permissions that deal with privacy and security issues that we’re
lacking in Web 2.0, that will then get us the most benefit from the
Internet of Things. And from AI, and edge computing and spatial
transactions and all these other wonderful sci-fi functions that we’d
like to have.

Alan: Sounds like a very, very
good use case for the block chain.

Gabriel: It is. In the Internet
of Things sort of industry 4.0 narrative, which Deloitte and McKinsey
and Gartner and Accenture and others are really promoting as this key
era of digital transformation for all businesses. They refer to
something called a digital twin. Are you familiar with this term?

Alan: Actually, I am. We
actually had the head of VR for Shell on today, and we were talking
about digital twins of oil rigs; how it will create a digital twin in
order to test, what if we have to replace this big piece of
machinery? They create a digital twin, and they’ll remove it
digitally and say, “oh, okay, well, it fits coming out, but the
new one going in is going to hit these pipes.” Doing that
digitally, allowed them to pre-visualize that. That was one of the
use cases that came up today in the conversation. So, maybe you can
unpack it a bit.

Gabriel: Digital twin is
essentially a three-dimensional visualization of a physical world
thing or location, and may contain the processes involved in it. For
example, the most traditional use is you have a number of sensors on
something, let’s say an engine in a car. Those sensors, then, are
giving you information about temperature and speed and potentially
the amount of fluids. And right now we look at like a dashboard or
sort of dials and numbers. A digital twin of that would actually just
show the engine. We’d see that information projected into the engine:
“Oh, the engine’s getting hot, but it’s one particular area
that’s getting hot. In fact, it’s one part that’s getting hot.”
Now that lets you as the owner, or even a third party, be able to
access that information, whether it’s in a test environment inside of
Toyota, or if it’s in a maintenance capacity. Suddenly you’ve got
this three-dimensional visualization that you can think of as a real
time soft copy of a physical thing. Not to go too far out, but with
these concepts of the AR Cloud where you have a digital twin of
everything and everyone in the world — where you’ve got essentially
a real time soft copy of the world in three-dimensions, right? Sort
of a three-dimensional mesh of everything, or as Charlie Fink likes
to say, “painting the world with data.” The problem about
thinking of it through this lens of visualization or projection
technologies only, is that it turns out a lot of really important
information is tied to our physical environment.

For example, that engine. The question
really becomes, “am I looking at the right engine or is this the
copy?” The data associated with the identity of that part: is it
accurate? And who should have permissions, or the ability to access
that information? Who can move it? Who can update it? Who can share
it? Block chain becomes a very powerful — or, let’s call it
distributed ledger technologies, which includes block chain, but also
includes several other approaches to what we call a trusted data
layer for the spatial web — it becomes a real requirement in certain
cases where you want to have proof that the history of the
information associated with that digital twin has a unique,
verifiable I.D., all of the behaviors and activities around it can be
permissioned and rights can be associated with it, and even
transactions can be attached to it using crypto currencies or other
form of digital payments. Block chains takes digital twins and turns
them into smart twins; they become smart assets and digital twins
sort of merging together. Now you’ve got verifiable data, and this
becomes very critical when we start to look at industrial
environments or high-transactional environments. We want to rely on
those data sets. And it also allows them to be shareable. Now you’ve
got a single source of truth for the data around this
three-dimensional object.

Alan: Very interesting. If we’re
looking at these digital twins of things in the world, for example —
and I make this comment when I do speaking engagements — that every
single thing in the world is going to need a digital version of it.
Like, everything. From a pair shoes, to a coffeemaker, to everything.
Everything will have a 3D version of it. One of the things that we’ve
been working on is content management, or digital asset management
system, for retailers to deal with the fact that every product that
they sell is going to need to be shown in 3D. So, how do you impress
upon people that this is coming in? And what are the timelines around
this? Is this something that’s 20 years out, or is this something
that — I know from my theories, but I would love to hear your idea
of when do you think this is going to be something that every company
needs?

Gabriel: Well, I would say that
right now, if you’re a company that deals with the physical activity
of people moving objects in three dimensional space, whether this is
in a warehouse, whether this is in a retail environment, whether this
is a supply chain, you can begin — and should begin — using these
technologies immediately. The test that we’ve been doing here in Los
Angeles in some local warehouses, where we’re able to create these
spatial workflows, tasking and routing functionality, practically
doubles the amount of time it takes for even a seasoned to
pick-and-pack worker to be able to do X number of picks in a given
day. That’s with holding a phone with one hand. So, as we begin to
work with Magic Leap and Hololens and some of these others, and
you’re able to do hands-free, and the headsets become able to be worn
for longer periods, et cetera, et cetera, we expect that to increase
over time. But right now, today, those kinds of advantages exist.
There are other companies, you know, working on spatial
visualization.

Alan: One of the things I saw at
AWE — actually, I think it was two years ago — was a company that
helped pick-and-pack workers to better stack and pack a pallet. And
it sounds very trivial, but you consider; pallets go in the back of
trucks, and if they’re not completely full, you’re wasting a lot of
volume space. And if they’re not packed efficiently… nobody’s going
to unpack a pallet just to make sure that, you know, an extra box
could fit on there. But if you could look at the pallet and see
digitally where the best angle of the boxes or items would be to
maximize that space, we could save a lot of transportation costs.

Gabriel: This is exactly what
you were just talking about earlier with the digital twin… was it
an oil plant or oil rig.

Alan: Yeah, an oil rig.

Gabriel: Yeah. So they were
running a simulation inside of a digital twin of, “we want to
move this object from here to here. What’s easiest path, or how will
it fit?” It’s the exact same spatial question as, “where
should these boxes go and in what order?” It’s really the
gamification of reality. The difference in that case is, you’re
projecting that information into the physical world and using it as a
way to actually fulfill the workflow or the activity, which is really
profound, when you realize the implications of this across any
physical activity.

Alan: It’s crazy that this can
be used for moving a $100-million manufacturing machine–.

Gabriel: That’s right.

Alan: –or a $10 box. And the
value is still there, because there’s a value across every single
part of the enterprise.

Gabriel: That’s right. And
what’s also fascinating is that this reduces error rates to near
zero, because — provided your data is accurate — there is just no
excuse for picking the wrong box. Right? I think Ori Inbar has made
some suggestions about the benefits of the AR Cloud as adding
trillions of dollars to the global economy over the next several
decades. I actually think he’s wrong. I think he’s off by a
significant exponential margin, because when you start to add the
benefits and the functionality of those activities, and then you
start to make those activities themselves transactional, it’s
probably an entirely new era. You know, we did go from 10-trillion
dollars in the 1950s global GDP — about when digital transformation
started — to nearly 100-trillion now, in about 70 years. You can see
over the next two or three decades, there is a likelihood of even an
accelerated, exponential growth of GDP. Of course, I think a lot of
us would like to see global markers for health beyond mere economic
numbers, but that certainly would help.

Alan: It would be great if we
could — I explained to you my mission, to inspire and educate future
leaders to think in a socially, economically and
environmentally-sustainable way. It’s taken me decades to articulate
that one specific mission, because businesses are measured by one
measure only, and that’s profitability. We need to start thinking
about, how do we compensate businesses for the social, environmental
and economic aspects of their business? And in equal thirds, because
without the environmental sustainability, we’re all going to die
anyway. And if we don’t have the social responsibility of it, then
what’s the point of creating these efficiencies if it’s just going to
make people be unemployed, and we have no economy, nobody can spend
any money anyway? So, we really have to think of all three together,
and we need to — I don’t know how — but we need to somehow change
the way we measure the value of companies. And I think, yeah… I
don’t know how to get there yet, but I think it’s true education of
the next generations, in my opinion.

Gabriel: Oh, that is clearly a
critical part, and thank you, for your dedication to that aspect of
it, Alan. You know, it’s hard to ignore that today is Earth Day. As
we sit here, we’re faced with an existential threat that a certain
proportion of the population is able to acknowledge, and another
portion is simply ignoring. And sadly, too few of our leaders fall
into that second camp. You said a sentence that we use a lot at
VERSES, which is kind of a famous quote from Peter Drucker, which is
that we can’t manage what we can’t measure. So the power of spatial
computing technologies is that we begin to measure — I want to make
a quick statement here. Sometimes when I say spatial, I don’t mean
just XR. IoT is providing spatial information. All of the–

Alan: Spacial audio; being able
to walk down the street and have audio cues guide you. It can be
sent.

Gabriel: That’s right. And even
the ability to just do an Amazon Go-like transaction is actually a
spatial transaction. So, spacial is the trend of the entire industry
4.0 era. I mean, you can even see the term as it relates to edge
compute or ubiquitous AI, or decentralized distributed computing
blocking. Obviously, the spatial computing aspect of XR. But but the
important part I’d like to note is that as we’re using all of those
technologies, now we’re able to measure in reliable ways where we can
trust the data, what’s taking place in the world. So whether you
start to look at mining facilities and doing Lidar scans of mining
facilities, and able to then have that information be available,
shareable, even the information that will come from the apps of the
future become our appliances. Right?

Alan: I got to stop you for one
second, because you mentioned mining, and we’ve worked with some of
the biggest mining companies in the world. Michelle Ash used to be
the head of innovation for Barrick Gold. And in one of her talks —
this is one of the reasons why we started working with them — she
mentioned something about the accuracy of being able to take the
measurements; so, they drill down and they take core samples. Within
a very good margin, they know how much gold is in a certain area of
land. She mentioned, maybe in the near future, being able to just
know that information and visualize it in spatial computing ways to
show investors, here’s where the gold is; the safest place to store
that gold is in the ground. So, let’s not dig one ton of rock out for
every gram of gold, and let’s focus on keeping it where it is — it’s
safe there, we know where it is when we need it — but really, does
the world — as humanity — do we as people need more gold dug out of
the ground?

The answer is no, we don’t. We have
tons and tons of gold sitting in storage lockers that can be used for
industrial applications, or jewelry or whatever. We don’t need to dig
more out. If we can fundamentally use spatial computing and spatial
visualization for investing in things that we don’t actually need to
dig out of the ground, I thought that was a really unique way to
position it.

Gabriel: Absolutely. Who did you
say that you spoke with? Was that at Barrick?

Alan: Yeah, Barrick Gold.
Michelle Ash.

Gabriel: I don’t know if it was
Michelle, but I was speaking at an event last year that XPRIZE and
Peter Diamandis was doing with Deloitte. I spoke to someone from
Barrick about the exact same thing.

Alan: That would’ve been
Michelle for sure.

Gabriel: Yeah. Michelle Ash, is
that it?

Alan: Yep.

Gabriel: But what’s fascinating
about that is, the other thing that you need there is you really then
need distributed ledger technology to validate the numbers. The goal.

Alan: Yep.

Gabriel: But there’s kind of two
levels of validation there. Show me the spatial thing; show me where
exactly we’re talking about. Then give me the data and way that I
know has been tampered with. So, you can see that the two together
become really powerful ways of rethinking about what we extract, how
we extract it, and how we use it. And over time, as we begin to use
personal IoT sensors and wearables, everything that we are doing
becomes tracked, so the ability to now manage the world in an
entirely different way — whether it’s our businesses or our lives or
our ecological resources — becomes possible, but only because we
begin to spatially network all these technologies, not because
they’re computers by themselves.

Alan: Interesting. Yeah, I think
it’s going to open up incredible possibilities. Right now, mining
companies, for example, they have a formula. If they know that if
they dig a certain amount of rock out based on their studies, they’ll
get a certain amount of gold. But at what point does recycling gold
from old electronics actually become more cost-effective than digging
it out of rock? At what point can we start to really look at what
we’ve already extracted, and how do we recycle that? And I think if
you can track the materials down to that level — like, we got this
much gold out of recycling from recycled electronics versus digging
it into the ground — and that goes into the full score of the
environmental score of a company making those electronics? That’s
what you’re talking about, right?

Gabriel: What we’d like to know
is that that data’s both accurate and can be relied upon; it can’t be
tampered with. And then it also makes it shareable, but it also makes
that data itself monetizeable.

Alan: Ah.

Gabriel: So now you can create
data marketplaces, and actually incentivize people to then share that
information. This is a lot of these sort of open data formats, or
things that are happening. Like, here in Los Angeles, there’s an
entire open data open map project that’s in partnership with Esri,
which is one of our partners, that is allowing all this public
information to be presentable and usable and remixable and able to be
analyzed by the public. And as we start to think about the entire
planet as a single ecosystem, which clearly it is, but we haven’t
been thinking of it that way very well.

Alan: No, we still think in
terms of countries for some reason.

Gabriel: Well, I think, you
know, it’s that… yeah. Nation states and platforms are the same
thing, and today’s platforms and larger than some of our nation
states. So it is now time to come to the realization that these are
single ecosystems, and ecosystems trade. They trade carbon, they
trade nitrogen, they trade air, they trade water. This is how nature
naturally works. I think we’ve just gotten to the point now where our
technologies are able to digitally do what nature’s been doing for
billions of years.

Alan: Yeah, it’s… it’s so
vast, and it’s so hard for people to wrap their heads around. So
let’s take it back to what people can do now to leverage these
technologies in their current business. Because, we’ve talked way out
there on how spatial computing is going to allow Internet of Things
sensors to provide real-time data in a reliable manner that will
really allow all businesses to reduce their carbon footprints, their
impact socially and environmentally, but also their bottom line.
Their economics.

Gabriel: While increasing
profit.

Alan: At the end of the day,
until we change how we measure companies, they’re measured based on
profit. I’ve had so many different interviews on this podcast, and
the one major one that comes out every single time is training. You
cannot dispute the fact that virtual and augmented reality training
makes good business sense. What are some of the other use cases
outside of that?

Gabriel: Well, I actually think
the number one use case, which we’ll see emerge over the next decade
— which I think is roughly the timeline for transition from mobile
to spatial; not a complete conversion, but rather the dominant
interface, and that’s not that long period of time, especially in the
enterprise space — the number one thing will actually be spatial
workflow management. So the real problem we have just from a
practical day-to-day business challenge is that most businesses are
operational, meaning that they have physical activities that take
place; in a field, in an office, in a building, in a logistics
capacity. Right now, those, you can train people in VR, which is
wonderful to be able to do that.

We’ve seen some wonderful work coming
out around the Hololens 2, which looks at like scale, you’ll be able
to have sort of the ability to have that training be on the object
itself, because you can project the information onto that piece of
equipment itself. “You push this button, then pull this lever,
then…” and so you go from this sort of virtual environment,
which is 100 percent safe, to then like an environment where they’re
actually interfacing with the physical object by projecting the
digital twin onto it and then walking through a series of steps.
That’s wonderful. That’s super powerful.

Alan: I got to stop you because
I learned something in my last podcast. The company, a AR-Experts,
they were building digital twins and overlaying them on top of
physical objects, and then creating the digital overlay. They
realized that most people that are actually working on this would
prefer not to have the whole physical or digital overlay on top; just
the information they need on top of it, which is interesting because
they were making a full, beautiful, replicated digital twin of the
object and overlaying it on top of that. But they’re like, “we
can’t see the real one; take that thing out of the way.”

Gabriel: I think that, for the
time being, a lot of the challenges will be around the UX. We don’t
know what the optimal UX is in three-dimensional space with regard to
physical things. And I think people like, you know, Timoni West and
others at Unity are doing great work around exploring what those
spatial digital interactions and user experiences really need to be
over time. I mean, if we look back at the history of digital maps —
MapQuest days — used to give us the entire list of 20 turns, and
you have to keep going back, figure out which turn you’re supposed to
be on, find the number, not crash, then okay, now I make a right turn
in 250 yards. Then with Google Maps, it gives us a better option,
where we can see the path. But even then, what’s most useful is
actually the audio, because it just gives you what you need when you
need it. And spatial will probably have to do something very similar.
I don’t need to know the next five steps or the next four objects.
Just give me the next one and then the next one. And the thing is
that in the world of video games, we figured all this out. We just
haven’t been able to apply it to the world. But when we do, I believe
that we’re going to see just enormous efficiency gains, improvement,
retention, and the profit margins are just going to go through the
roof.

The interesting challenge there is that
as we’re augmenting humans with this digital information — these new
sort of spatial workflows and tasking — it does also pave the road
to robotic automation. So there is a number of questions that come up
around, how humans and robots work together in the same spaces? What
happens when automation replaces humans? And obviously, there are
larger ethical and economic and regulatory considerations that have
to happen around all of this. But as a business, immediately, you can
start to see advantages. And my argument is get out there and start
making mistakes first. The ones that learn from these mistakes are
going to be the ones that dominate in the next decade. For example,
in the warehouse space, we’re projecting a 45 percent profit margin
increase from the ability to do spatial workflow picking at scale.
And I can tell you right now that that is a competitive logistics
industry. And if you’re not keeping up with technology, with the
spatial transformation, you’re likely to be unable to compete in the
next decade.

Alan: That’s a pretty bold
statement.

Gabriel: Well, we’re testing it
live. We’re seeing it every day right now.

Alan: I know. That’s why I said
it’s a bold statement. I didn’t dispute it! I’ve seen it all. We’re
doing the test, too, and it’s like, training alone is in the order of
50 to 75 percent better training retention rates, and like near zero
error rates when you’re using real-time AR. So when you’re saying a
45 percent increase in productivity and profit, it sounds ridiculous.
Like, if you take any enterprise and say, “we’re going to
increase your profits by 4 percent,” they would bend over
backwards.

Gabriel: Yeah.

Alan: When you say, “well,
here’s a solution that’s going to increase by 45 percent,” they
don’t even… they can’t even fathom it.

Gabriel: Yes. I think that for
the next couple years, we’re going to see the sort of stutter effects
of businesses trying to figure out when to invest, when to begin
testing, what to do. And the headsets are kind of working okay. The
software is pretty good. The integrations into their traditional
systems are just beginning to exist — that’s some of the work we’re
doing now. But it is not easy to get on board. The on ramp is not
great. And the argument — the business case — is kind of there. But
the ability to realize it feels a little ephemeral. But I believe
that, shortly thereafter, we’re going to see the thing hit a knee and
start to skyrocket, as more and more use cases come to light and more
and more companies start to gain benefits. We’ve seen this before. We
saw it with the Web. We saw it with the power of a Web page. “Why
would I want a Web page? We’re in the phone book; promoting in the
newspaper.” And then we saw the same thing happen again with
social. “Why do I as a business, need to talk to my customers?
Well, this makes no sense. We’ve got a customer service team. I don’t
need Twitter. I don’t need a Facebook page.” And we saw it again
with mobile. “Why do I have to reformat my site so that it’s
smaller? No one’s going to look,” and what have it.

Every company that began to drive and
acclimate to that new atmosphere of digital transformation became the
winners. And Facebook figured out quickly that they needed to be
mobile first. And that’s one of the reasons they dominated. Spatial
is just the next step; it’s the logical step. It’s where billions of
dollars and interface value are being invested. So, it’s really just
up to your listeners today to work with companies like MetaVRse and
VERSES and others to try to figure out what those early pilots are.
Get out there, break a couple eggs, and figure out how to make
spacial web scramble.

Alan: I love it. Make some
scrambled eggs. I love it! Oh, man. Is there anything else? We’ve
talked about a lot here. I always ask this question: What problem in
the world do you want to see solved using XR and spatial web?

Gabriel: Well, we believe that
we are standing at a fork in the road — a generational fork in the
road — and that this generation, in effect, has one of the most
amazing challenges in the history of the species. And it really comes
down to, we are facing existential-level threats with climate change,
the depletion of our environmental resources, the devastation of both
the plant and animal kingdoms, our coral reefs. I mean, today is
Earth Day. These are things we think about for maybe a day, and then
we go back to all of the behaviors that are continuing [the
problems]. The result of which occurred because of our rapid growth
in the industrial era, through our inventions and technologies. We
need to now look forward and take this option for a second path,
which isn’t the end of the species, but is a — for the first time —
the ability to have a civilization 5.0; a global civilization that
works together, that starts to treat the resources of the planet as a
single ecosystem.

And these technologies at scale have
come with risks. We’re looking at 50 billion cameras out here in the
next decade or so. There’ll be a billion drones. There’ll be AI
embedded into everything. Sensors picking up levels of mood tracking
and facial recognition and pupil dilation, and all kinds of personal
and private information. We could make far worse mistakes than we’ve
made for the last hundred and fifty years with these powerful
exponential technologies. So the choice that we really have, and the
choice that we’ve founded VERSES to help support, is to use these
technologies — this sort of digital tidal wave — to solve the
physical, rising tide of planetary devastation, in order to not just
solve the problems of the last 150 years, but to paint a new picture
of a future that isn’t just a Black Mirror future, but is a white
mirror future; where we are taking care of our planet and each other,
where we’re all benefiting from the network effects of economies that
are more equitable, and that we maintain our privacy and security and
trust at scale.

I want a really cool sci-fi future that
doesn’t look like the dystopian sci-fi novels and stories and films
that we’re used to, and I think we need to start talking about what
that future looks like. So, we’re incredibly grateful to people like
you and others in the space that are having these conversations, and
starting to pick apart these stories, so that we can tell these
stories to each other. Because, frankly, that’s the kind of world
that we’d like to build.

Alan: Well, what else can we
say? Gabriel, thank you so much for joining me on the show.

Gabriel: It’s been an honor,
Alan. Thank you very much.