The Pain of Empty Space, with SpatialFirst Co-Founder Emily Olman

XR for Business

English - October 21, 2019 05:29 - 36 minutes - 33.4 MB - ★★★★★ - 12 ratings
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Previous Episode: Mass VR and Squeaky Floors, with PwC's Jeremy Dalton

Next Episode: The YouTube of 3D Models, with Sketchfab CEO Alban Denoyel

Thanks to the power of computer
technology, you can browse the contents of a book you might like to
buy online, without ever touching a physical copy of it until it’s
already been bought and delivered. Wouldn’t it be neat if you could
do that, but with real estate that doesn’t even exist yet? Recent
Auggie winner Emily Olman thinks so, and she drops by to tell Alan
all about how volumetric capture and photogrammetry will make that
possible.

Alan: Welcome to the XR for
Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is a
great friend of mine, Emily Olman, CEO and co-founder of
SpatialFirst, a prop tech startup and creators of PlaceTime, a mobile
immersive property visualization application bringing spatial
computing to real estate. Prior to this, Emily founded Hopscotch
Interactive, a 3D VR marketing service company, to accelerate the
adoption of new media and technology for property marketing using
reality capture. She spent her career monetizing new media and
developing new business models for Frontier Technologies. With a
background in media sales, business, and property marketing, she
believes that spatial interfaces will unlock properties’ full
potential. Emily is a regular speaker on immersive real estate
technology, both in the US and abroad. She’s just finished serving as
the VR/AR Association’s San Francisco chapter co-president from 2016
to 2019. Yes, she’s got mad skills.

Emily, welcome to the show!

Emily: Hi! Thank you, Alan.

Alan: Thanks so much for joining
me. It’s been a long time since we saw each other, I think was at
AWE.

Emily: Yeah, it’s been a little
bit, but it’s great to be chatting with you.

Alan: Amazing. How’s everything
going?

Emily: Well, it’s great. And
it’s been busy. And I feel like we are just heading into the most
exciting time of the year. Things sometimes have their natural ebb
and flow, in the summer months, for instance. But I think as we get
towards the end of 2019, I think there’s some really exciting things
that are gonna be happening.

Alan: So tell us, tell us what’s
been going on with you. You were the co-president of the San
Francisco chapter, which is one of the big chapters of the VR/AR
Association. And you’ve seen this industry come from nothing to where
it is today, and it’s really starting to take off. So maybe just give
us kind of a brief history of how you got into this industry, and
where you’ve seen it come from?

Emily: That’s a great segue into
my perspective on the industry. I was fortunate to be running the San
Francisco chapter of the VR/AR Association for a few years with Mike
Boland. And we really got to see the industry start to go through
many different shifts. But I would definitely also say that we got to
where we are today because we really are standing on the shoulders of
giants. And so the work that folks have been doing for decades in
immersive technologies and virtual reality has really led to what’s
enabled me to move from my passion for reality capture into creating
a new interface and to be involved with very emerging technologies
such as spatial computing. What’s kept me busy is having a startup.
We started this company, SpatialFirst, about two years ago and have
been working hard ever since to really make something unique that
addresses the future of spatial computing for real estate.

Alan: So when you say spatial
computing for real estate. Walk us through what that means and why
it’s important.

Emily: As we know, when we are
looking at spatial computing, this notion of we know exactly where a
digital piece of con

Emily, welcome to the show!

Emily: Hi! Thank you, Alan.

Alan: Thanks so much for joining
me. It’s been a long time since we saw each other, I think was at
AWE.

Emily: Yeah, it’s been a little
bit, but it’s great to be chatting with you.

Alan: Amazing. How’s everything
going?

Alan: So when you say spatial
computing for real estate. Walk us through what that means and why
it’s important.

Emily: As we know, when we are
looking at spatial computing, this notion of we know exactly where a
digital piece of content or a digital element is in the real world.
There’s this notion of being able to connect the physical and the
digital space. Whether that means that the whole world is mapped to
it as X, Y, Z coordinates. And we agree upon what that map will look
like. And therefore, we can access and engage with content in a new
way, with either a wearable device or with a mobile device initially.
That’s sort of the premise for what we’re building, which is that,
OK, content is going to be organized in a different way. It’s going
to be organized spatially. And one of the best ways that we can
engage with content spatially is when we are thinking about it in
relationship to the place that we are. So whether that’s your home,
whether it’s your office, whether it’s you at an airport, wherever
you are, organizing content spatially really means that you’re going
to be able to access that based on where you are. So we have come at
it from this approach of what– we have the tools — with augmented
reality — to view the information and to get content onto a mobile
device, or onto a wearable. But what is the interface for that? What
does that look like? How does it actually come together so that we
can use it and it can be part of our everyday experience?

Alan: Have you read the book The
Age of Smart Information?

Emily: No, I haven’t. Is that a
knowledge gap? [laughs]

Alan: Oh my god.

Emily: Sorry.

Alan: So in the book– I was
very lucky to have the
author on the show earlier today. And the book’s called The Age
of Smart Information: How Artificial Intelligence and Spatial
Computing Will Transform the Way We Communicate Forever.

Emily: Uh-huh.

Alan: And I mean, it’s a must
read for anybody in this industry. It’s by Mike Pell and he works
with the Microsoft Garage. They’re constantly inventing new stuff.
And to listen to you talk about how we’re going to have spatial
computing for real estate, and be able to see properties that don’t
exist, and to also be able to work within those parameters. It’s
simply amazing.

Emily: I’ll definitely check out
that book. What brought me to this early on was my interest in
reality capture because I started doing 3D scanning, using the
Matterport technology, which is– for those of you who don’t know,
it’s a camera that uses lenses, but then also has infrared scanning,
which enables it to sort of create — with a point cloud — a 3D
model of a space. But then we can use that actually as sort of this
initial, if you will, like a digital twin of a property, of a place
that’s already been built. That potential for 3D scanning, for
creating new maps and new understanding of spaces, and to be able to
use that for virtual reality going in and out of spaces where you
would otherwise not be able to travel to really became a passion of
mine. And then I began to explore all of the other ways that people
are doing this, whether they use photogrammetry, other types of laser
scanning. I was very, very fascinated by what we could do once we had
a digital twin.

Alan: So what *can* we do with
it?

Emily: So one of the things that
frustrated me in the beginning about using this technology just to
sort of scan one place — like a house, for instance — was that “OK,
well, I’ve got this home and that’s awesome. And I love my 3D model.”
And you can go on to anything from Sketchfab to millions of
Matterport models or other types of photogrammetry. And you can see
like they’re these amazing 3D objects. But what was so challenging
for me was like, wait, but I want to understand it in the context of
its location. I want to know what does this have to do with the
property in the surroundings? It’s almost like when you’re a VR
enthusiast, you know, you kind of think of the possibilities of like,
“Well, what if this were part of a bigger world, or what if I
could add content to this, or I could interact with it?” And
those are the things that really began to take shape for me as the
real opportunity, because obviously as like one of the largest asset
classes, real estate has a tremendous amount of value. But it also
has been slow to adopt new technology. And so when I came at this
from the perspective of digital twin creating a 3D experience, and
that’s where I came in touch with my co-founders of SpatialFirst,
because we all really saw this as an opportunity for enterprise, to
not only create storytelling, but also to index and to understand
content within the context of where it’s located. I hope that makes
sense. [laughs]

Alan: Yeah. I mean, if you’re
going to build a building in downtown Berlin, it’s going to be a
little different than downtown San Francisco.

Emily: Yes, that’s exactly
right.

Alan: The interactions between
people and those buildings are gonna be different as well.

Emily: Yeah. And think about the
thing that we want to always be able to do is to enable decision
making. And I love this sort of going back to more like a sales
metaphor. It’s like enabling distance selling. And that’s one of
those things that was always sort of the thing we always wanted to be
able to do, it’s like the promise of Amazon is like we’ll sell
something that nobody has to touch. Like, they don’t have to touch a
book to know that they want to buy the book, right? And so how do we
learn from some of these other types of experiences and purchases and
decision making? Can we do that with property? Can we do that with
the real world? Can we apply those kinds of things to property
marketing and then — eventually — to property management? Those are
some of the things that really have gotten us excited as we’ve gone
on this journey.

Alan: So who’s your typical
customer? If you’re out there promoting SpatialFirst, who is the
first customer for SpatialFirst?

Emily: So SpatialFirst has an
app that we have in private beta now on iOS and it’s called
PlaceTime. Our first customer is a large global asset manager. They
have about 40 billion in assets under management and they’re testing
this out with one of their marquee properties in Oakland, California.
The use case that we’re going after is class A commercial office
space to support a broker, also to support a landlord and to support
a tenant in the leasing process. It’s very niche and it’s very
specific to commercial real estate. But again, it’s sort of like the
tip of the spear for us. We’re trying to really deeply understand the
things that we can do to enable and to shorten the time that it takes
for properties to be leased.

Alan: All right. So walk me
through what that looks like from the standpoint of the customer and
then the end user.

Emily: From the standpoint of
the customer: if the customer is a broke, the broker is inevitably
going to be trying to lease some commercial office space. And
commercial office space is interesting because most of the time, if
it’s brand new and it’s very slick and it’s been redone and it’s like
perfect, then there’s not much necessarily that we can add to it,
except for the virtual staging and then the content describing
everything about the place. That’s great. But we’ve really seen that
the user that is getting a lot of value out of this is somebody who
has a space that maybe isn’t finished yet, is what they call shell
and core. So it hasn’t had a full fit-out yet, a full tenant fit-out.
And so people have a very difficult time visualizing things. And so
we say this all the time. We say, well, “empty space is
painful.” We use this metaphor of pain because it’s like for the
broker, they just want to transact and close that space as quickly as
possible and to get a tenant in there and to lease it up. But the
tenant is having a hard time visualizing what it’s going to look
like. With the PlaceTime application we can take a hypothetical 3D
model, put that into our app, put that into a 3D map of the world,
and then we can both remotely and in situ tour them of what the space
will become and what it will look like.

Alan: So is this using tablets,
or headsets, or VR, or…?

Emily: This is tablet. So this
is best experienced right now on an iPad and then eventually also
iPhone. But we’re initially supporting the iPad use case. It’s a
bigger screen. It’s still something that most brokers already have
and are able to tour with and are able to show. And and it’s really
just sort of puts all of that property information into your pocket
and gives you access, as the broker, to all of those different apps
and all the information that you need to get while you’re on tour. We
talked to and interviewed dozens of brokers as we were building this.
And one of the things that they all complained about was like, OK,
number one, it’s fiercely competitive. So they always want to have an
advantage over their competition. Number two, there’s just so much
information that they have to stay on top of about each property. And
remember, they’re touring like three to five properties a day. That
means that they’re just always on the go and they’re always reaching
for like, where’s the floor plan? Where’s all the information? And
it’s just spread out across a Dropbox and email and you name it. And
time is money. We’re trying to make that communication much, much
better.

Alan: So are you overlaying the
architectural renderings of a proposed finished — let’s say it’s a
lobby, for example — here’s a proposed finished lobby. You hold up
your iPad and I’m able to wave it around and see what the finished
reception area would look like.

Emily: Yes, absolutely. So–

Alan: Is it locked to the real
world?

Emily: It’s not locked to the
real world. It can be calibrated. So we have created– currently in
the app, we have a sort of a in between phase on the tech roadmap
where we’re able to do a calibration that lines it up to the real
world. But we don’t have the re-localization — which you’re talking
about — just yet. But we’re definitely researching that and we want
to get that in there. And we think that it’s going to take probably a
few different integrations for different use cases to get that
re-localization piece in there. But a lot of that tech we talk about,
it is still coming out of the lab, so we will be among the first to
use it, but we don’t have it in there yet.

Alan: I mean, we’re still early
days for this technology. So you’re rolling this out. How are you
importing the design files? Is it from CAD? Is it from BIM? Do you
have a converter? How are people getting their renderings into it, so
that they can use this?

Emily: We are basically agnostic
to whatever types of files people have. And so they send it to us and
then we are able to convert it into the 3D model, from whether it’s a
2D schematic, or if they have the 3D they can send it to us as well.
Ultimately, it has to get into a glTF file, which is a file format
that most architects and most folks aren’t so used to. But it’s
really optimized for us and what we’re building in. But yeah, we’re
getting those files ultimately into glTF.

Alan: But you’re able to take
that in from CAD or BIM or anything?

Emily: Uh-huh. Exactly.

Alan: Amazing. Amazing. So did
you guys have to build that infrastructure to do that?

Emily: No, we didn’t build the
infrastructure to do that. We’re working with partners to do that.
But it’s certainly something that we think that these processes are
going to just get infinitely easier as we progress. As the number of
assets that we’ve worked with increases, we’re going to be able to
solve for all of those things. And then again, it’s not just that’s
for the hypothetical stuff and for stuff that has not been built yet.
When you’re talking about reality capture, when you’re talking about
showing something that already exists, that’s another area that I’ve
spent a lot of time working on, 3D scanning and capture. We mostly
use the Matterport scans for that, but again, I’m very excited by
photogrammetry. So for instance, doing very large outdoor modelling
of large spaces outdoors. It’s certainly not limited to interiors,
and that’s really the idea. I mean, when I met my co-founder Bart
Denny, he’d been working at a company called World3D and that was
literally the genesis of our building SpatialFirst and then meeting
our third co-founder, Joe Boyle was like, “OK, we want to put
the interior maps in the exterior maps together.” So in whatever
way we can do that to be agnostic, yes, we’d like to be able to
accept everything, but certainly we do have preferred workflow.

Alan: So you’ve built this
platform. Who is your ideal customer? You’ve talked about class A
commercial office space is your first. What’s the five year roadmap
and the ideal customers? Because at the end of the day, this podcast
is literally about driving value for those customers. And so how can
we get this tool, this PlaceTime into the hands of as many brokers
and dealers as possible so that they can leverage this? Because it
sounds like it gives them a distinctive advantage.

Emily: Yeah, I mean, five years
out, we hope that it’ll be used far beyond the real estate use case.
But I think initially anybody who has a portfolio of properties and
needs to communicate better between other stakeholders. So one of the
things that we have used as a way to describe this to people, it’s
sort of a military term is to say, well, you need to have your common
operating picture. Which is something you can pull up, like you would
if you were a military general, you pull up your common operating
picture. And you have this sort of overview of everything that you
need to think about in a certain physical location. We have built
that with the PlaceTime application. So if you have multiple
properties in your portfolio, it could be everything from industrial
properties, at some point it could be residential. Although I have
opinions about why that would be easy and also hard. It could be used
for retail or malls or a lot of other use cases. But for the thing
that is unique about commercial real estate is that there’s this
thing about these buildings right now, right? So we have IoT that is
coming into a lot of discussions and people are saying, “Well,
we’re going to have smart buildings.”

And I think the counter argument to
that is like, “Well, you have connected buildings, you have
buildings that have a lot of connectivity in them.” But the
potential of what you can do if you had an actual interface to get
at, for instance, if you wanted to share with somebody, a new
employee. Well, here’s where everything is on your floor, here’s your
special guide to working in this space. Or for the delivery person,
here’s how you enter into the space, here’s the loading dock, here’s
the map, here’s the information. We really want to enable landlords
to be able to have this best map of their property. That’s where we
really are putting a lot of our focus right now is thinking of these
use cases because we know that leasing is just sort of the beginning
or even development, then followed by leasing and sales. But then the
people that work and live in those properties can also benefit from
having this spatial map — or what we like to call spatial utility —
of the property. Basically meaning anybody who comes in and is
engaging with that property or visits that property will have the
best map, depending on who they are and what they need to do while
they’re there.

Alan: Personalized information.

Emily: Personalized information
and secure information. I think that’s another thing that’s really
important for us. You know, we really feel like we’ve seen a lot of
this dark side to data and privacy and we feel like that the landlord
really should have this ability to control who gets information
within their property. It’s their property. So I would say that
that’s my personal philosophy as well as in terms of like the
residential sphere and wanting to be able to give those tools to
people so that they feel like they have control.

Alan: When you look at these
technologies as a whole, what is your long term vision for how these
technologies are going to impact us? I’m looking at your video here
of of SpatialFirst, and it’s really mind-blowing, the amount of
information that you can provide to somebody just looking at a
property. But it’s early days. People haven’t adopted it. Now, do you
think this technology is going to be adopted quickly or what do you
think is gonna be the driver of adoption? What we’ve seen in other
industries is that once one company does it, sees amazing results,
then everybody starts to jump on board. Is that what you’re expecting
from your side of things?

Emily: I think that as an early
stage startup, the best thing that could happen for us is to have
highly visible use cases where we’re able to show things in a market
where we have high vacancy rates. So anytime you get vacancy in any
kind of downtown or city above, let’s say 7 percent, up to 12
percent, even higher. That’s where it’s very difficult for these
brokers to differentiate and for properties to differentiate
themselves. Now, if in five years time, you know and you can trust a
building that has been enabled by SpatialFirst, that allows you to
have some sense of expectation of, “well, this property will–
this property does this, which all these other properties don’t do.”
I think that as a brand, I think that as an experience, the long term
vision is to say, “this is a better way to organize our
information. This is a better way to communicate with people.”
We would like to see that become something that is used widely. The
speed at which it will be taken up, it just sort of depends on how
quickly we can get from the pilot phase into greater deployment. So
deploying deeper into somebody’s portfolio and the benefit of working
with commercial real estate is like, well, there’s a lot of
consolidation. There’s thousands of landlords, but there’s quite a
few that own the majority of commercial properties. And so being able
to have partnerships with those companies will enable us to do that
faster.

Alan: Interesting that you say
that, because I was just listening– or watching a video by Mike
Boland from ARtillery, he’s one of the mentors for XR Ignite. And the
whole interview was about escaping pilot purgatory.

Emily: It is purgatory. It
really is. But it’s great. I think as a early stage company, to have
the trust and the access to a property, these are hundreds of
thousands of square feet, they’re millions of dollars in revenue
every year, they’re worth millions. I just think that we don’t want
to take that for granted. But we also need to move quickly out of the
pilot stage into the next phase. That’s when we get to do the
exciting stuff, like really get the deep learning on KPIs and ROI and
all the things that’ll help people make those buying decisions,
right?

Alan: That “Roy” guy. He
always gets in the way.

Emily: [laughs] “That Roy
guy.” I know. What’s his deal?

Alan: He’s everywhere. Everybody
keeps asking about this Roy guy. I’m like, “I don’t know any
Roy.”

Emily: Yeah, I know, I know.

Alan: We have to focus on the
ROI, because it really– when we started in this technology — and
you know it as well as I do — you’d pitch a company and they’d say,
“Who’s done it, how much does it cost, and what was the
results?” And you’re like, “Nobody, a lot, and we have no
idea.”

Emily: Yeah, I think actually
it’s funny, because my– it’s not– for me, it’s like not getting out
of the not just the pilot phase, but also the studio mentality. I
think that’s important. Studios are incredible places, there’re very
talented people that work at studios. But if we ever want to see XR
scale, we have to build scalable businesses around XR. So that means
products that are scalable, that means services that feed into
platforms that are scalable, that means a business ecosystem that
will enable others to benefit from it. So we have to elevate the
game, you know what I mean? And that’s where enterprise has always
been the thing for me, where I’ve said, “Look, there’s a lot at
stake because they have the most to gain, but they have the most to
lose if they don’t get started.” I mean, I so value all these
companies that — and we saw a lot of them over the last few years —
jump into the game and we need more of that. We need those leaps of
faith by companies to try this and to work with us, because I think
that the industry needs to move away from the one-offs and to move
into real scalability.

Alan: I couldn’t agree more.
Building something once for a company, not only is it prohibitive in
the long run, but it just becomes ridiculously expensive because
every time you build something, you’re building from scratch. And
it’s part of the reason why we started XR Ignite, was to leverage
these platforms and products. But also the content developers and
content studios and individual developers who’re making great
technology, maybe they’re making great content, but they don’t have a
way to leverage it and sell it to more than one customer.

Emily: Yeah.

Alan: Let’s say, for example,
you make training and– in your example, you make a real estate
training simulator, where here’s a bunch of different buildings, you
got to look at the different features or identify the different
features, something like that. Well, just because you made it for one
company, it’s probably valuable to all of the companies in that
field. And by making it available to everybody, it decreases the
costs for everybody, first of all, the first person up front has to
pay for it, and really accelerates the technology for the whole
industry. And one of the things that we thought of with XR Ignite
was, how do we then make a marketplace for not only the platforms and
products, but also the content? Because once the content’s made, once
you make a warehouse, for example, in a warehouse for training, a
warehouse is a warehouse. How big do you want the warehouse, whatever
you want, you can just scale it. But once it’s designed, you can
scale it infinitely for multiple customers. And if you look at a lot
of the XR studios out there, they’ve got a real estate thing, and
then they’ve got a retail thing, and then they’ve got a training
thing. And it’s like– and we’re guilty of it as well. We’ve done a
bit of everything in the market to kind of understand it. And I think
that’s where the industry was. And I think where we’re going now is,
“OK, I built this one thing. Let’s try to sell it 100 times.”

Emily: That’s right. And go with
your winners. That’s the thing is, like all of those learnings are
crucial. And we were at a moment in time over the last few years,
continuously at a moment in time. [laughs] Which is ironic as we
discuss reality. You know, it’s like the thing is that those
experiences that were created, maybe they weren’t something that we
could resell, but we learned a ton from them. And the studios, I
think that what I heard from clients over the last several months is
sort of this notion of like, “Well, it’s really expensive.”
And if you get into building things for folks that cost the order of
magnitude of like hundreds of thousands of dollars or millions of
dollars, you know, that’s like early days VR, right? Where it’s
millions of dollars to do VR. And now we’ve seen the prices come down
on the hardware. And so since we know that software is scalable, I
think we’re at the right time to build those scalable experiences.
And so I get very excited about creating something that a lot of
people can plug into and that they can use. And so the marketplace, I
think, is the right way to frame it, because there’s infinite
business out there. But folks just don’t know how to engage. And I
don’t think that the creators are, for instance, able to get those
inroads because they’re all trying to do it independently. They’re
all trying to sell in independently. So you need to kind of also like
get a bit of a movement going from these creators to be able to sell
what they’ve got.

Alan: So I’m going to insert a
commercial here for XR Ignite. [music] If you’re a creator,
developer, or a studio, or product developer in AR, VR, or AI, go to
XRignite.com, sign up for the community hub, and that’s exactly what
we’re doing, is bringing everybody together so that we can all work
as a unified front to help push this technology forward.

End commercial. [music ends abruptly]

Emily: [laughs]

Alan: I mean, it just kind of
lends itself so perfectly. You’re like, “We need this.” I’m
like, “Yes, we do.”

Emily: It’s true, we do need
that. And it’s hard, because I see things that I think are really
going to help people. And I want them to do that. I think that we’ve
gotten a little bit– we had this feeling of like an XR/VR winter
couple years ago. And I feel like we’re really out of that. And it–
was it you? I feel like– I don’t know if it was you, but somebody
said the other day, it’s like, “Well, the tourists are gone.”
You know, that was the good thing about having a little bit of
contraction in VR. And I liked that. I was like, “Oh, good!
That’s great!” That means that the folks that are in it now,
they’ve gone through these learnings. And it’s not their first rodeo.
And we’re really going to get some great stuff happening. And it’s
been two years now since ARKit and ARCore came out. And I think it
takes about 18 to 24 months to see these amazing applications really
come to market. So that’s why when I at started at the beginning of
this talk, I said, “Well, gosh, I really think that 2019 still
has a lot in store.” And so I’m bullish on what we’re going to
see over the next few months, not just entry– not entry level. I
don’t want to diminish the efforts. I just want to see– and I think
we’re going to see some more sophisticated things coming to market.

Alan: I agree. I think it’s–
we’ve gotten past the phase of kitschy stuff and now we’re into real
ROI driven solutions. And I think that’s exciting. That’s not to say
that there aren’t more kitschy and cool things coming because with
Facebook, SparkAR and Snapchat’s Lens Studio, I think there’s going
to be a lot more individuals that are going to be creating awesome
stuff.

Emily: Yeah.

Alan: YouTube just introduced,
this week, their lipstick try-on and or their virtual try-on within
the YouTube app. This is coming, and by opening it up to creators of
all shapes and sizes, it’s democratizing the creation of the content,
which is really exciting. A year ago, if somebody had said, “Hey,
we want a face filter for trying on sunglasses,” it would have
been $50,000, minimum. And now you could do it on SparkAR for
nothing.

Emily: Yeah.

Alan: That’s really pushing
things forward. It’s exciting.

Emily: Yeah. And along those
same lines, I think that the cost of capturing reality is going to
also start to come down significantly, because we’re going to have
these amazing depth sensing technologies in our– we have them
already, but have these depth sensing technologies on our mobile
devices. So I think about.

Alan: Like Tango? We had it five
years ago.

Emily: We had that five years
ago. And I still love my Phab 2. I mean, there’s things that, it’s
like– [laughs]

Alan: I’ll buy it off you, I’ve
been looking for one.

Emily: Oh my gosh! OK, alright,
we’ll make a deal.

Alan: It’s either by the Phab 2
or just by the new Samsung S10.

Emily: Uh, no– oh, yeah!

Alan: Samsung Note has infrared
camera on it.

Emily: I think you were posting
about that. I have to check that out. I haven’t seen it yet, but
that– but wasn’t it like– you’re not– you were like, “I’m not
sponsored by them! But I love this!”

Alan: It looked so good. Oh,
man. Yeah, I would buy that phone. Honestly, it’s a thousand dollar
phone. I think being able to do depth sensing and then capturing like
you talked about capturing reality. Well, imagine you’re a small
retailer on Amazon and Amazon moves to 3D. How do you get all your
products into 3D? Well, the new Samsung phone, you literally just
kind of walk around the product and it turns it into a 3D model for
you.

Emily: That’s right. And again,
I feel like it’s a lot like, people say, “Well, photography is
totally commoditized and all these things are commoditized.” But
I don’t think so. I think that there’s so many infinite numbers of
new skills, and just having the understanding of how those things
work, that this is going to open up a lot of opportunity for people
to be part of the creation and to be part of — like you said —
democratizing how things are made. And when we talk about how do we
get people to understand the value or have for them to see what is
the value of 3D, what is the value of spatial computing? It’s a
little bit like virtual reality. It’s like you can tell them about it
as much as you want, but until they’ve experienced it, I just don’t
think that they get it. So that’s why I’ve spent a lot more time
recently going out into my vertical, going out and meeting with
people that are not the regular XR folks, although I love that
community deeply and and I’m very committed to it. I feel like it’s
almost like it’s really my job to educate people and to share with
them what this is, because when they see it, they get. And that’s
really, truly the magic.

Alan: It’s so true. It’s one of
those “you have to see it to believe it.”

Emily: Absolutely.

Alan: Well, on that note, I’m
going to ask you one last question here. What problem in the world do
you want to see solved using XR technologies?

Emily: So there’s so many
problems that we can solve using XR technologies. I hope that when we
look at our lives in five years, that we feel like we have a better
relationship with technology, rather than one that is perhaps a
little bit more skeptical these days due to security and due to
privacy concerns. And I hope that XR and all of these XR technologies
can be the thing that actually makes us feel like we’re more in
control and that we’re more able to have the relationship to
technology that we want. I’m hoping that we become a positive
influence in the world.

Alan: Well, thank you, Emily,
for your positive outlook in this beautiful technology. And thank you
for pushing forward.

Emily: Yeah. And also XR Ignite,
really excited about that. And so excited for what you’re doing,
Alan. Thank you for all the hard work that you do.

Alan: I appreciate it. Thank you
so much. So if you want to learn more about Emily and SpatialFirst,
you can visit spatialfirst.com.
And yeah. Thank you so much, Emily. I’m looking forward to seeing you
in person again.

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