Go XR or Go Extinct, with Super Ventures' Ori Inbar

XR for Business

English - October 11, 2019 09:38 - ★★★★★ - 12 ratings
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Previous Episode: The Age of Smart Information is Now, with Microsoft Garage Envisioneer Mike Pell

Next Episode: Bringing the XR World Together at the VR/AR Global Summit, with Executive Director Anne-Marie Enns

Regular listeners have heard plenty
of stories from Alan's numerous adventures at Augmented World Expo.
In today's episode, we go to the source of all those tales, with
AWE's co-founder and executive producer, Ori Inbar -- just ahead of
this year's summit.

Alan: Welcome to the XR for
Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. I am super excited to
have our next guest today, Ori Inbar. He's a world leading expert in
the field of augmented reality industry, and he has devoted the past
decade to fostering the AR ecosystem as an entrepreneur, advisor, and
investor. He's the founder and managing partner for Super Ventures
and the CEO of AugmentedReality.org, a nonprofit that produces
Augmented World Expo, the top industry conference for AR since 2010.
To learn more about what he's doing, you can visit
augmentedreality.org and awexr.com or superventures.com.

Ori, welcome to the show, my friend.

Ori: Thank you, Alan. It's
awesome to be here.

Alan: It's so exciting to have
you. I've been waiting for this episode for so long and I just can't
wait to get right in. Maybe can you just give us your first AR
experience, and how did you get into this? You know, I watched your
2019 keynote from AWE again, and put on these these welding glasses
that you had back in 2009. You've been doing this for ten years
without any reduction in passion. And how did you get involved? Like,
what was that precipitating moment for you?

Ori: So for me, after the
startup I was working for was acquired by SFP -- and I spent seven
years there -- decided to leave and go back to my roots in startup.
And then I realized that my kids are always stuck in front of a
screen, computer screen or playing video games. And on one hand, it
felt like we cannot really change the future. But I was trying to
look for a way for kids -- and adults -- to kind of interact with the
real world, like we did as kids. But by adding some of the things
that attract kids and adults to computers and to video games and to
social media and kind of merge it into reality. And at that time, I
thought I kind of invented something new. But then upon some
research, I realized there's a term for it, it's called augmented
reality, it's been around for many decades. But it was hidden in labs
in a few places around the world. So the mission immediately became
to find a way to bring it to the mainstream, to the masses. And then
the iPhone was announced and it felt like finally we have an ideal
device to deliver augmented reality to everyone, because they already
have it in their pockets. Of course, from there the path was very
long and arduous and still is. But I think we're starting to see some
of the fruits in the last couple of years where a bunch of new
applications -- whether it's for enterprise or for consumers -- are
hitting the market and are actually showing value. So it seems like
we're definitely on the path to making it mainstream.

Alan: My first AWE was three
years ago and I remember it was amazing to me, because I went to
Silicon Valley VR meet-up or SVVR, and it was mainly VR. And then I
went to AWE and it was a lot of augmented reality, and glasses, and
there was companies there making glasses that looked like aliens had
built them. And it felt really clunky. I almost had this feeling like
this is really cool, I can see where it's going, but it's not quite
there. And it's it's just not ready for the real world, in my
opinion. But you go back this year and everything is actually,
Porsche’s using this and Lockheed Martin is using it. Huge
companies not only are done with their pilot phase, but they're
rolling it out at scale. So what do you think has happened in the
last three years to take it from a cottage industry to something
that's in the billions of dollars?

Ori: Actually, if you take it
bac

Ori, welcome to the show, my friend.

Ori: Thank you, Alan. It's
awesome to be here.

Ori: Actually, if you take it
back 10 years to 2010, when we did our first AWE, you had a lot of
passionate people in the room. But we were talking about vision and
concepts and ideas, not so much about actual products. And over the
years, you started to see more and more products hitting the market
and customers starting to use it in in ways that improve their
businesses. So that was kind of a very slow process leading us to
where we are today. And I think you're right, in the last few years,
we've seen significant maturity of both the products, whether it's
smart glasses or tools that are available, not just on glasses, but
also on mobile devices. But more importantly, we started to see
enterprises adopting it and showing significant ROI associated with
implementing AR in their businesses. And that has kind of been
driving the kind of acceleration of the adoption among enterprises in
a slew of use cases in practically every industry you can think of.
So I think that that's definitely a phenomenon that we're seeing in
the last few years and it's reflected at the AWE. First from the
number and maturity of the companies, deploying-- I mean, delivering
products and showcasing it on the expo floor. But more interesting is
the fact that attendees are much more educated about what AR can do.
They come to the show to actually buy software and hardware because
they really understand the need and understand what it can do, at
least to a certain degree. And that's kind of a whole new era for
where the industry is with AR and VR.

Alan: It's so interesting you
say that because for the last three years, I feel like we had to
start every presentation with, "OK, hat is the difference
between AR and VR? And how do you know--" It was like Basics
101. And now the conversations, you can bypass all that and go
straight to, "Hey, this is how it's gonna make or save you
money." And you know, it was-- those answers weren't there three
years ago from my standpoint, we were presenting this to everybody
and it was like, "Yeah, so, I'm not really sure how much it's
going to cost. And yeah, nobody's really done it before. So we're not
sure if this is going to actually work." But I think we've moved
out of the phase of "Can we make it work?" to "OK, it
works. What can we do with it?" to "We know what to do with
it. We have real ROI numbers. How do we scale it?" So what do
you think is next, in the next three years then?

Ori: Well, I think FOMO is
actually starting to play a role, where you see some of the more
advanced enterprises adopting it and showcasing how it's improving
their businesses, and that kind of registers with everybody else in
the industry that, you know, if they are not going to start adopting
it at his thinking about how to adopt it, then they may be falling
behind. And it was kind of last year at AWE, our motto was "go
XR or go extinct" because it felt like if you're gonna ignore it
as something that is only going to happen in the future, you may be
left behind, because it takes time really to understand how it's
going to improve their business, how to adopt it, how to deploy it.
It's definitely a whole new kind of computing platform. So people
need to prepare for that. And the sooner the better. So, again, I
think that the fear of your competitors becoming better than you --
and also to a certain degree with consumers, once they see how AR
makes certain people better at things they do in their life, whether
it's just how they play games, or how they play sports, or maybe how
they they fix something in their home -- that will kind of trigger
other people to say, "Hey, I need to have that too. Otherwise, I
will be falling behind." And that's kind of a big driver of the
adoption right now.

Alan: You know, what I find
interesting about that, Ori, is that companies are sharing their
internal ROI measurements. I've never seen it where an industry is so
collaborative. And that may be because it's just early and the
money's not flowing, the VCs haven't really pushed the envelope of
what's possible. But I think there's just this feeling of
collaboration. Everybody I talked to is willing to share their
pitfalls, their challenges, what they can do better so that everybody
improves exponentially. And I think maybe that's just a factor of
exponential growth in general. The fact that all these technologies
are moving so fast, everybody needs to help to just keep up with it
all. But it seems like the XR, virtual/augmented/reality space is
very collaborative. And, you know, it's almost like someone it's like
a family. When I went to AWE, I felt like I was coming home to a
family of people that understood me. You go through your daily life,
you say, "hey, you know, try this VR, try this AR" and
people are "like, yeah, that's cool, whatever." And but
when you go to AWE, everybody understands that they see where it's
going, they see the future. How did you-- I guess at AWE, you built
that community from the ground up, and how how do you see that moving
forward as companies start to put money into this, big money? Do you
see this collaboration continuing?

Ori: I do. First of all, I agree
that unlike previous waves in other industries, I'm seeing more
collaboration in this industry than in others. I still hear a lot of
startups that are doing some amazing implementations with certain
enterprises, but these enterprises are still keeping it as a
confidential achievement and not sharing it. So it still happens, but
not as much as maybe in other technologies or other industries. And
you could probably attribute it to the fact that it's relatively
early, but maybe there's something else there. Because you know what?
When I started AWE, it was really just to find a venue where we can
meet likeminded people that also think about AR and are passionate
about it. And because at that time it was very lonely developing AR.
There were maybe a couple dozen companies around the world. Nobody
understood what they were doing. So it was great to come to a venue
and be able to meet people that think like you and really help
inspire each other. And over the years, obviously, more and more
people got to know about it.

But it's still-- I think up until even
now, it sometimes feels lonely to develop in AR, because still very
few people that are developing it and really have a deep
understanding of the technology. But I think they know there's
something about this technology that is about really making us better
at anything we do, in work and life. And maybe that's something that
is driving people to collaborate more, because they feel like we have
an opportunity here to bring humanity to the next level and improve
how we do everything, and maybe even combat some of the threats that
are facing humanity these days in a way that was not possible before.
So I think that's another contributor, especially when we think about
e-commerce and the whole idea of "try it before you buy" or
just "try before you do", right? I mean, in many cases, you
can simulate things with AR that you're not able to do with a regular
website or any other application. And that ability to try things
before you do them -- or maybe even get help while you do those
things, as opposed to just watching YouTube videos that instruct you
how to do certain things -- that adds kind of a level of support to
two people that we've never seen before. And maybe again, that's one
of the other contributors to the collaborative nature of what we're
seeing in the industry.

Alan: It's interesting. I would
say almost every single person that I've interviewed has an
altruistic side to it. They want to see this technology used for
good. I think that's one thing that is just really pervasive in this
industry, is that everybody understands the risks of it as well. I
think there's an inherent risk of collecting eye tracking data, and
positional head tracking data, and more data about individuals.
There's a risk there, but I think everybody's very well aware of the
risks and they're really adamant about protecting humanity from those
risks while using the tools to create great things. We have so many
environmental, social, monetary aspects to our world that are not the
best they could be. There are big challenges and virtual and
augmented reality hold the promise of exponential education. And I
think if we can harness that, we can educate the next generations to
solve the world's biggest problems. What do you think about that?

Ori: Also, Ray Kurzweil likes to
say that every technology brings promise or peril. And it's really up
to us to decide on how we use technology. Anything from cease fire
kind of qualifies to in that quote. So it's really up to us. And when
I say "us" it's everyone in the industry, it's the
technologists, it's the creators, it's the developers, it's people
that adopt it. I totally agree that it provides an opportunity for
exponential education. If you think about what's really unique about
AR and VR or spatial computing, it's really about getting away from
the unnatural way we interacted with computers in the past 40 or 50
years, which was on a two dimensional screen with a two dimensional
input device, the mouse and the keyboard. And now we're getting back
to technology which enables us to interact with the world and with
information the way we did in the million years before the 2D
computing that we know of today existed. And the fact that it's more
natural to us, I think, also allows us to to learn much better
because we learn better in 3D. We learn better when we interact with
things. We learn better when people are involved in the education
than if you just read it on a two dimensional screen.

So that by itself, I think, could give
a significant leap forward in how people learn, and how knowledge is
on one hand captured and also disseminated. And that's one of the
areas that I'm most passionate about in the AR space, which is how do
we use this technology to capture knowledge that is currently being
held in people's brains, and communicate it in a way that is beyond
just a book or beyond just even a YouTube video in a way that we can
actually experience it in anything we do. And then also capture that
knowledge and then be able to disseminate it to everyone on Earth.
WildAid, they tried to do a certain thing. Again, it could be work or
it could be just your day to day life kind of thing. So, yeah,
exponential education is probably one of the biggest promises of this
technology.

Alan: It's interesting you
mentioned capturing that that information. I think I was at PTC's
LiveWorx this year and their Expert Capture system is really low
tech. When you when you think of all of the technologies we have with
Hololens and Magic Leap and we have all these amazing technologies
for spatial computing. And they took something so simple as a pair of
glasses with a camera on them to capture the person's view of doing
something with it. Maybe it's fixing a machine, maybe it's working on
a tractor. Doesn't matter, but it's able to capture key snippets of
that information from an expert and then show it to the next person
with just a heads up display. And you look at RealWear, they just
raised $80-million and it's not really AR. It's more a lens that
shows you a computer screen that's maybe three feet from your face
and allows you to kind of see videos and text and PDFs. But that
ability, to be able to capture that knowledge and disseminate it
quickly through a platform is really revolutionary. And I think we're
only scratching the surface of what's possible there. What
technologies that you've seen that are maybe in the early stages or
betas or just kind of under the radar, what technologies really do
you think will push learning forward?

Ori: So I have to start with
maybe a somewhat controversial statement, which is I think the tech
we have today is good enough.

Alan: [chuckles] I agree.

Ori: To do a lot. I mean, it's
really about-- now it's about creators really leveraging the tools
that we have, the devices that we have -- which in most cases, it's
going to be a smartphone or tablet, not even glasses -- and build
applications that leverage the special capabilities of this medium
and have people -- again -- become better at anything they do. Yes,
of course we have a lot of things that we still need to develop and
improve, but the basic foundation is there. But if you think about
what else can you do? How can it really accelerate things? It's
something that I started talking about a couple years ago. It's
called the AR cloud. And that's a software layer that basically
creates a digital copy of the real world and allows developers,
creators to place content in a permanent, in a persistent and
sharable way on the real world. So that if I see certain content in a
certain place and I come back tomorrow -- or maybe someone else is
trying to access it with a different device -- they will see the same
content, the same kind of interaction that I have.

And that's something that visionaries
in AR have been talking about for at least a decade. But now we're
actually starting to see the initial implementations of that
technology, whether it's from small startups like 6D.ai, but also
companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple are starting to show their
first steps towards the AR cloud, kind of providing persistent
information on the real world, things that-- Minecraft Earth, which
is a really cool game currently in beta, is doing already that, it
allows you to place something that you've created, that you've mined
in Minecraft anywhere in the world and allow other people to come and
interact with it in a similar ways. So that's already in the works.
It's not science fiction anymore. Of course, you know, we have to do
a lot to scale this technology and make it available to everyone and
on all devices and kind of iron some of the kinks. But it's
definitely getting there. And I think that's going to be a huge--
that's going to make a huge difference in the proliferation of this
technology, because once many people can collaborate and interact
with AR, it will provide kind of an exponential growth to the number
of people using it and the frequency in which to use it.

Alan: With the Kronos Group
announcing the OpenXR standards now, I think it's going to become
easier and easier for people to build on this. The hope has always
been can we build this on Web? I had a client this morning call and
say, "Hey, we want an application, but it has to be running on
Web." And what they want to do is not possible right now on
Web, but we're getting there and being able to push content out once
and have it work on any device, regardless of whether it's -- like
you said -- an iPhone, or an iPad, or Android device, or VR headset,
or an AR headset. I think having that ability to push it at once and
have it work everywhere and be persistent is amazing. I think Magic
Leap calls it the Magicverse. Was it Kevin Kelly who wrote a whole
article on the Mirror World?

Ori: Yeah.

Alan: Being able to create a
digital version of the real world. And I think I said four years ago,
I actually think it was-- it was either at AWE or SVVR. If I was
Google and Apple, I would make some sort of Pokémon Go game that
took you inside and made you kind of chase these things up and down
the walls, and while they 3D map the whole interior space of
everywhere. But you can imagine, as this technology progresses
quickly, a few years ago, we had Tango phones that had depth sensing
cameras, now that went away and then all of a sudden the depth
sensing cameras are back on the new Samsung phone. So I think the
phones will have depth sensing cameras on them, being able to capture
the real world, and put it into context, and overlay data on it. It's
a huge feat and it's got to be done by one of the big players, like
all of the big players, really. It's a massive undertaking.

Ori: I mean, you mentioned the
big players and we have this interesting dynamic in prepping. You
know, in any new wave of technology where you have startups kind of
leading the innovation and then later on the big players jump in. I
think what we're seeing now is that with the kind of stagnation of
the growth of mobile computing, smartphones, all the big players are
starving or kind of really trying hard to find the next wave and to
see kind of the next growth opportunities and many of them see it in
AR and VR. So if you look at the investments done by Google,
Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and a bunch of other, Lenovo,
Valve[?]. In this field, it's it's billions and billions and billions
of dollars. And that's definitely showing to everyone to the startups
on one hand, to investors on the other hand, and of course, to
customers that this is not a fad. This is not something that will
pass and everyone is really getting into it and investing a lot in
it. And standards are a big part of it. Like you said, I've been in
involving standards around AR for over 10 years now and in the
beginning with some great ideas on how to enable that, because
everybody knows that standards help accelerate the adoption and kind
of remove a lot of the friction. But many people felt it's kind of
early at that stage. You know, 2010, 2011, and it's going to be up to
the big players to jump in, and in some cases provide their own
standard that becomes kind of a de facto standard.

Alan: USDZ, anyone?

Ori: That's exactly right. So I
think that we're now literally in 2018, 2019, the big players are
kind of putting their weight behind those standards. And by the way,
there's not just one standard, there's a whole set of standards that
are necessary for this new wave of computing. And many of them are
driven by the big players, others by associations like the OpenAR
cloud, which is working on standards around AR cloud that we
mentioned before, and is kind of harnessing some of the big players
to join that as well. You know, around Web technologies for AR and
VR, WebXR, that's another huge thing, which I think is almost
entering the mainstream at this point, and that will be a huge game
changer because if you don't need to develop-- oh, I'm sorry, to
download an app or a special application and you can just share a
link that will get you into an AR experience or a VR experience,
that's going to remove a lot of the current friction that we've seen
in getting more people to try it. And it's happening right now. So
that's really nice to see.

Alan: It's amazing. And I think
this morning I interviewed the head of XR for Verizon, TJ Vitolo, and
he was mentioning how the next wave of this is going to come when 5G
unlocks cloud and edge computing, when we can offload some of the
rendering power and some of the compute power to the cloud. They're
working on sub 20 millisecond round trip transfer speeds. And if you
think about that, that shouldn't affect your vestibular system at
all. You could wear glasses. You could-- your glasses can understand
the world around you by using infrared cloud mapping, put it up to
the cloud and then have information real time come down,
contextualized information to the world around you. I think that's
gonna be amazing. And Apple introduced their occlusion system with
ARKit where you can put an object, a digital object on a table and
wave your hand in front of it, and it knows that your hand is in
front of it rather than behind it. And I mean, that's just mind
boggling, because we need to have those. You don't think about it
until you start to do an AR demo on a phone and then somebody walks
in front of your demo. And then all of a sudden that piece of
furniture that you were looking at looks tiny instead of real size
because somebody walked in front of it. But the fact that they're
able to figure out the occlusion from a single camera is quite
impressive. And I think -- if I'm not mistaken -- I think that's what
Vrvana was working on, before they were acquired by Apple back a
couple years ago. But you can see where all these startups that were
acquired by the big companies are starting to pop up as
infrastructure for the future of spatial computing.

Ori: Absolutely. I mean, you
mentioned 5G, and when you kind of go back to my comment on the need
to find the next growth opportunities. For the big carriers, that's
that's a huge issue. And that's why they came up with 5G, which is
really promising to speed up our access to information and provide
almost unlimited bandwidth of data.

Alan: You know what he suggested
today? He said you'll be able to download the entire seasons in
seconds. Crazy.

Ori: Yeah. And that's that's
cool for those of us who watch or streaming or video. But I think
what they're really looking for something beyond that, because that's
that's fun, that's great. But how does it really enable new things
that were not possible before? And I think very quickly they realized
that AR and VR are their best horses to ride on, to kind of drive the
need for 5G. And we've seen Verizon AT&T, also Valve[?] and
others spending a lot of energy in showing how 5G can make AR and VR
much better. And it does. And it's kind of interesting because up
until now, many startups in this industry were competing on how well
they can-- or how fast they can process computer vision and machine
learning on their device.

Alan: [chuckles] How can you
compress things to make it faster?

Ori: Exactly. And this will
completely turn things around. All the sudden, you're not going to be
able-- you're not going to need to compute everything on your device.
You'll be able to do a lot of it in the cloud and just in an instant
share it with with as many devices as needed. And so that's kind of
changing some of the things that startups are competing on, and where
are you seeing some companies putting more emphasis on doing things
in the cloud, with the anticipation that very soon it's not going to
matter whether you do it on the cloud or on the device.

Alan: So you run, or you're a
managing founder of Super Ventures. Let's talk about some of the
investments that you guys have made at Super Ventures. Because you
have an eye on this industry that is really quite unique because
you've seen it from the very infancy right to where it is today. What
are the things you're investing in?

Ori: So Super Ventures, just
quickly, is a fund that is focused on investing in early stage AR
companies and some VR companies, because, of course, there's some
shared infrastructure, talents and skills between AR and VR. But
there are-- our engine, our focus is really on the AR side. And when
we started in 2016, it was probably the first fund dedicated to
investing in areas of AR. So it was kind of up to us to prove that
there is a need for such a fund. And the results were pretty amazing.
I mean, we got a couple of thousand of companies reaching out to us
and kind of looking for investments because they saw us as the smart
money. There's a lot of interest, a lot of hype around AR and VR, but
very little knowledge among investors about what is the best
technology, where it's going, how do you understand what are the most
likely to happen business models, and so on. And we've been living
and breathing that for a decade. So many investors also came to us
for advice on that and for insights into how we see that evolving.

So that was kind of a great proof point
that there is a need for a specialized fund like ours. The other
thing is. You know what? What are you focused on, right? I mean,
what's the thesis? And here we kind of looked at the entire industry
because it's a relatively small sector. We couldn't narrow it even
further. So we look at companies all over the world. Anything kind of
pre-series A[?] is in our-- is kind of part of what we're looking at,
including first money in, in many cases. And the types of companies
are from hardware to software, from tools to applications, from
enterprise to consumers, really across the board. Although we-- a lot
of the companies that pitched actual games, that's something that we
were kind of staying away from, just because it's so hard to predict
the success of a game. And I know that because my first company, AR
company Augmento, was really building AR games. And it was-- you
could say it was pretty early at the time. Back in 2008, 2009. But
it's still hard to predict how a game will be accepted by the
audience. So not as much on games, more on tools, on enabling tools.

And there when you look at what are
kind of the new things that we need in spatial computing? It's a
completely new set of things, but a lot of them have roots in
previous waves. So starting with infrastructure, the AR cloud, the
ability to scan the world, to be able to create a point cloud that
allows you to place content on it. There is a whole category of
software tools and [garbled] that will be needed to really support
that new infrastructure. So that's kind of a big area of focus for
us. Another thing is interacting with the computer. First, perceiving
the world is a big thing. Because we don't have a screen, mouse, and
a keyboard anymore. You have-- so what's going to replace those? And
here there's, of course, dozens of startups, hundreds of startups
that are trying to create those new interaction devices, whether it's
voice based, whether it's gesture based, gaze tracking, brain
interaction, all these kind of things. So we're kind of looking at
all these types of interactions.

And then once you have that
infrastructure in place in the interaction, how do you build content
for that new world? You're not going to use the traditional tools
that we've all used for 2D computing. There's is need for new kind of
tools, whether it's to create content, to capture content from the
real world and make it available in AR. How do you enable
prototyping? How do you enable development for non-programmers? So
kind of world building is another big area of ours. And then there's
the AR that is probably gonna be the most important for the adoption
of AR and VR in the future. And that is about communication and
collaboration. So how do we provide what we call "shared
presence," that we can interact with people all over the world
but feel like we're in the same room looking at the same thing in
real time. It has some roots in conferencing technologies, but it's
really taking it to a whole new level. And I think if you look at the
top twenty domains on the Web, on the Internet today, the majority of
them are all about communication and collaboration. So it's probably
a good guess that this is what will drive AR and VR in the future as
well. The last category is around giving superpowers to people or
upgrading our intelligence. And that's where you see a lot of
applications as well as technologies that are kind of trying to
address that. And that's an opportunity to invest in solutions or
applications that target specific industries and can really take
employees or consumers to a whole new level. So these are kind of
what we call the "moonshots" or the special areas that are
really unique to spatial computing that we're looking at investing.

Alan: One of the things that I
see as a disconnect between investors currently and what's going to
be needed: content. You know, somebody has to make this content. And
until companies can make it themselves, which these platforms in
theory should enable customers to build it themselves. But in
practicality, that's not what we're seeing. We're seeing that content
studios are becoming the only companies that are making a lot of
money right now in this industry. And they're starting to get bought
up. Riot got bought by Verizon. Deloitte just bought a studio. And I
think the content development is going to be one of those key parts
that in other technologies is often overlooked as you're not
investible. But we're already seeing small wins with these, and I
understand the VC model trying to aim for the unicorn companies. But
I think there's a lot of money to be made on these smaller studios
and developers that are making content and there's tons of them
popping up around. But of the thousands of them that are popping up,
there's gonna be ones that make their way to the top, like Fishermen
Labs, for example, is doing an amazing job, just making Snapchat
filters for people. And that's-- I can see their path to being
acquired by Snapchat and to do it internally because they're
profitable, they're making money. What are your thoughts on content
providers?

Ori: We definitely look at the
content providers as a kind of a key sector that will kind of define
the future of the adoption of AR and VR. You know, I said that the
tech is good enough and it's really the time for creators to get in.
And that's still true. But it's still, we need to develop a really
good app or great content in AR. It's not as easy as creating a
mobile or social app today. It requires really deep understanding of
this new medium, how it's different, how it's-- You can not just
copy-paste a mobile app into an AR app and hope for the best, that's
definitely not going to work. So what I'm seeing is that people that
have been trying to build apps or creating experiences for years are
the ones that really tend to get it, because they've tried different
things, they've seen what works, what users like, what kind of breaks
the model. And they seem to build the best content. So I think unlike
other cases where a new company can come in and in six months build
an MVP for a social app or a mobile app, it's not the case with AR.

And that's where we look for people
that have tried things, because you need to not just understand this
new medium, but in many cases design and develop in a completely new
user experience. That's where the reinvention is happening right now.
And it's not just the user experience, also the business models where
things are changing. So, many companies are still trying to do things
like SAS models or things that are kind of proven and investors like
to invest in once they see the metrics hitting. And I think many of
these models will still be relevant. But it's up to us, the companies
developing in this industry to look for how to adapt those business
models so that they fit in this new environment, because it's not
about searching an app in the app store anymore. It's not about
clicking on the link and getting to another link. It's really about
experiencing things in the real world or in the virtual world. And so
how do you get people there? How do they behave in that world and how
do you get their attention? It's a whole set of new questions that
we're just now starting to scratch the surface on.

Alan: Absolutely. Well, my
friend, we could talk about this all day, every day and never really
finish what we set out to talk about. What problem in the world do
you want to see solved using XR technologies?

Ori: I'll have two answers for
that. The first one is the big problem that is trying to solve is
awareness and adoption. Meaning, although we're seeing almost like a
third of all mobile users have seen some AR experiences -- which is
already amazing -- but it's one of those technologies that until you
see it, until you experience it, you don't really understand the
benefits of it. So kind of-- so one of the big challenges is kind of
how do you get it in front of more people so that they try it, and
they get it, and then they want more of it. So kind of solving the
problem of awareness and adoption are huge. What can XR, or AR and VR
solve, let's say on a on a global level? [garbled] the top five
biggest threats that are facing humanity right now. One is the
growing population and the fact that we see migration and people
losing their jobs and finding it hard to get upskilled for new jobs.
I think in that area XR and especially AR can help a lot with
especially in the upskilling of employees and in allowing them to be
productive anywhere they are. I think that could be probably a huge
area of help for the future of humanity on this earth. And then
there's, of course, healthcare, global warming or climate change,
that I think once you visualize things to allow people to better
understand the impact of what's happening can see the future of how
the world is going to look like in 20 or 50 years from now and kind
of trigger them to take action much, much sooner than before. So--

Alan: It's kind of a terrifying
thought, to be honest.

Ori: Which part?

Alan: Looking out 20 to 50 years
in the future. If we don't course correct.

Ori: I'll give you a simple
example. And these are apps that are already available today in some
some locations. You want to see what does it mean, a five inch of
oceans rising. Where would-- I live in New York, and I actually can
look at-- look around in the streets and see where the water would
go. And that's really terrifying. And that's exactly the purpose of
that visualization.

Alan: Was that the one done
with-- on the Hololens in Times Square? There was a Hololens exhibit
where they showed what it would be like if sea water rose by five--
was it five feet or five inches? It was crazy. And all of Times
Square was underwater by like 10 feet.

Ori: That's right.

Alan: Terrifying.

Ori: Exactly. And once you see
that, I think you cannot really think about it as a theoretical
problem, it becomes real and and people are bound to take action once
they see it.

Alan: Chris Milk said it "VR
can be the ultimate empathy machine" and AR is an extension of
the real world connected with the digital world and being able to
show us the future and help us course correct. I think we can use
these technologies -- if harnessed properly -- to create the next
generation's thought patterns around instead of "What job do I
want to get?" or "What party do I want to go to?"
"What challenge in the world do I want to take on?" "How
do I give back to humanity?" We have the power of technology to
deliver that message and create those habits and create that mindset
in the next generations, which should set us on the right course for
humanity.

Ori: I like that mission.

Alan: Me too. I hope I can
fulfill it. And that's the hard part. Ori, I want to thank you so
much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to join me today.
If anybody wants to learn more about the work that Ori and his team
are doing, you can visit augmentedreality.org, awexr.com or
superventures.com. Ori, thank you again.

Ori: Thank you, Alan. It's been
a pleasure.