>> Announcer: From the Fairmont Hotel in the heart of Silicon Valley, it's The Cube. Covering when IOT met AI, the intelligence of things. Brought to you by Western Digital. >> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Rick here with The Cube. We're in downtown San Jose at the Fairmont Hotel at a little show called when IOT Met AI, the Intelligence of Things. Talking about big data, IOT, AI and how those things are all coming together with virtual reality, artificial intelligence, augmented reality, all the fun buzz words, but this is where it's actually happening and we're real excited to have a pioneer in this space. He's Jack McCauley. He was a co-founder at Occulus VR, now spending his time at UC Berkeley as an innovator in residence. Jack welcome. >> Thank you. >> So you've been watching this thing evolve, obviously Occulus, way out front in kind of the VR space and I think augmented a reality in some ways is even more exciting than just kind of pure virtual reality. >> Right. >> So what do you think as you see this thing develop from the early days when you first sat down and started putting this all together? >> Well, I come from a gaming background. That's what I did for 30 years. I worked in video game development, particularly in hardware and things, console hardware. >> That's right, you did the Guitar Hero. >> Guitar Hero. Yeah, that's right. >> We got that one at home. >> I built their guitars and designed and built their guitars for Activision. And when were part of Red Octane, which is a studio. I primarily worked in the studio, not the headquarters, but I did some of the IP work with them too, so, to your question, you know when you produce a product and put it on the market, you never really know how it's going to do. >> Jeff: Right. >> So we make, we made two developer kits, put them out there and they exceeded our expectations and that was very good. It means that there is a market for VR, there is. We produce a consumer version and sales are not what we expected for that particular product. That was designated towards PC gamers and hopefully console games. But what has done well is the mobile stuff has exceeded everyone's mildest expectations. I heard numbers, Gear VR, which is Occulus designed product for me, sold 7 million of those. That's a smash hit. Now, worldwide for phone mounted VR goggles, it's about 20 million and that's just in two years, so that's really intriguing. So, what has happened is it's shifted away from an expensive PC based rig with $700 or whatever it costs, plus $1,500 for the computer to something that costs $50 and you just stick your cell phone in it and that's what people, it doesn't give you the best experience, but that's what has sold and so if I were doing a start-up right now, I would not be working on PC stuff, I'd be working on mobile stuff. >> Jeff: Right. >> And the next thing I think, which will play out of this is, and I think you mentioned it prior to the interview, is the 360 cameras and Google has announced a camera that they're going to come out and it's for their VR 180 initiative, which allows you to see 180 video in stereo with a cell phone strapped to your face. And that's very intriguing. There's a couple of companies out there working on similar products. Lucid Cam, which is a start-up company here has a 180 camera that's very, very good and they have one coming out that's in 4K. They just launched their product. So to answer your question, it looks like what is going to happen is for VR, is that it's a cell phone strapped to your face and a camera somewhere else that you can view and experience. A concert. Imagine taking it to a sporting event where 5,000 people can view your video, 10,000 from your seat. That's very intriguing. >> Yeah, it's interesting I had my first kind of experience just not even 360 or live view, but I did a periscope from the YouTube concert here at Levi Stadium a couple of months ago, just to try it out, I'd never really done it and it was fascinating to watch the engagement of people on that application who had either seen them the prior week in Seattle or were anticipating them coming to the Rose Bowl, I think, you know, within a couple of days, and to have an interaction just based on my little, you know, mobile phone, I was able to find a rail so I had a pretty steady vantage point, but it was a fascinating, different way to experience media, as well as engagement, as well as kind of a crowd interaction beyond the people that happened to be kind of standing in a circle. >> You, what's intriguing about VR 180 is that anybody can film the concert and put the video on YouTube or stream it through their phone. And formerly it would require a $10,000 camera, a stereo camera set up professionally, but can you imagine though that a crowd, you know, sourced sort of thing where the media is sourced by the crowd and anyone can watch it with a mobile phone. That's what's happening, I think, and with Google's announcement, it even that reinforces my opinion anyways that that is where the market will be. It's live events, sporting events. >> Right, it's an experience, right? It all comes back to kind of experience. People are so much more experience drive these days than I think thing driven from everything from buying cars versus taking a new Uber and seeing it over and over and over again. People want the experience, but not necessarily, as the CEO of Zura said, the straps and straddles of ownership, let me have the fun, I don't necessarily want to own it. But I think the other thing that gets less talked about, get your opinion, is really the kind of combination of virtual reality plus the real world, augmented reality. We see the industrial internet of things all the time where, you know, you go take a walk on that factory before you put your goggles on and not only do you see what you see that's actually in front of you, but now you can start to see, it's almost like a heads up display, certain characteristics of the machinery and this and that are now driven from the database side back into the goggles, but now the richness of your observation has completely changed. >> Yes, and in some ways when you think of what Google did with Google Glass, not as well as we had liked. >> But for a first attempt. >> Yeah. They're way ahead of their time and there will come a time when, you know, Snap has their specs, right? Have you seen those? It's not augmented reality, but, there will come a time when you can probably have a manacle on your face and see the kinds of things you need to see if your driving a car for instance that, I mean, a heads up display or a projector projecting right into your retina. So, and, so I think that's the main thing for augmented reality. Will people, I mean, your Pokemon Go, that's kind of a AR game in a way. You look through your cell phone and the character stays fixed on the table or wherever you're looking for it. I mean that uses a mobile device to do that and I can imagine other applications that use a mobile device to do that and I'm aware of people working on things like that right now. >> So do you think that the breakthrough on the mobile versus the PC-based system was just good enough? In being able to just experience that so easily, you know, I mean, Google gave out hundreds and hundreds of thousands of the cardboard boxes, so wow. >> Yeah. Well, it didn't mean that Gear VR didn't move into the market, it did. You know, it did anyways, but to answer your question about AR, you know, I think that, you know, without having good locals, I mean the problem with wearing the Google Glass and the Google cardboard and Gear VR is it kind of makes you sick a little bit and nobody's working on the localization part. Like how to get rid of the nausea effect. I watched a video that was filmed with Lucid Cam at the Pride Parade in San Francisco and I put it on and somebody was moving with the crowd and I just felt nauseous, so that problem probably probably is one I would attempt to attack if I were going to build a company or something like that right now. >> But I wonder too, how much of that is kind of getting used to the format because people when they first put them on for sure, there's like, ah, but you know, if you settle in a little bit and our eyes are pretty forgiving, you get used to things pretty quickly. Your mind can get accustomed to it to a certain degree, but even I get nauseous and I don't get nauseous very easily. >> Okay, so you're title should just be tinkerer. I looked at your Twitter handle. You're building all kinds of fun stuff in your not a garage, but your big giant lab and you're working at Berkeley. What are some of the things that you can share that you see coming down the road that people aren't necessary thinking about that's going to take some of these technologies to the next level. >> I got one for you. So you've heard of autonomous vehicles, right? >> Jeff: Yep, yep. >> And you've heard of Hollow Lens, right. Hollow Lens is an augmented reality device you put on your had and it's got built in localization and it creates what's, it's uses what's know as SLAM or S-L-A-M to build a mesh of the world around you. And with that mesh, the next guy that comes into that virtual world that you mapped will be away ahead. In other words, the map will already exists and he'll modify upon that and the mesh always gets updated. Can you imagine getting that into a self-driving vehicle just for safety's sake, mapping out the road ahead of you, the vehicle ahead of you has already mapped the road for you and you're adding to the mesh and adjusting the mesh, so I think that that's, you know, as far as Hollow Lens is concerned and their localization system, that's going to be really relevant to self-driving cars. Now whether or not it'll be Microsoft's SLAM or somebody else's, I think that that's probably the best, that's the good thing that came out of Hollow Lens and that will bleed into the self-driving car market. It's a big data crunching number and in Jobs, he was actually looking at this a long time ago, like what can we do with self-driving vehicles and I think he had banned the idea because he realized he had a huge computing and data problem. That was 10 years ago. Things have changed. But I think that that's the thing that will possibly come out of, you know, this AR stuff is that localization is just going to be transported to other areas of technology and self-driving cars and so forth. >> I just love autonomous vehicles because everything gets distilled and applied into that application, which is a great application for people to see and understand it's so tangible. >> Yeah, it may change the way we think about cars and we may just not ever own a car. >> I think absolutely. The car industry, it's ownership, it's usage, it's frequency of usage, how they're used. It's not a steel cage anymore for safety as the crash rates go down significantly. I think there's a lot of changes. >> Yeah, you buy a car and it sits for 20 hours a day. >> Right. >> Unutilized. >> All right. Well, Jack I hope maybe I get a chance to come out and check out your lab one time because you're making all kinds of cool stuff. When's that car going to be done? >> I took it upon myself to remodel a house the same time I was doing that, but the car is moving ahead. In September I think I can get it started. Get the engine running and get the power train up and running. Right now I'm working on the electronics and we have an interesting feature on that car that we're going to do an announcement on later. >> Okay, we'll look out for that. We'll keep watching the Twitter. All right, thanks for taking a few minutes. All right, let's check with Cauley. I'm Jeff Rick. You're watching The Cube from When IOT Met AI, the Intelligence of Things in San Jose. We'll be right back after this short break. Thanks for watching. (technological jingle)

>>The cube presents HPE discover 2022 brought to you by HPE. >>Okay. We're back to wrap up HPE discover 2022. The Cube's continuous coverage is day three. John furrier, Dave ante. We had a business friend that we met during the pandemic. A really interesting gentleman, norm Ette. He's the director of global technical marketing at Hewlett Packard enterprise, a real innovator norm. Great to see you. Thanks for making time for coming on >>The cube, gentlemen. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that. You're giving me the opportunity to bring it home. Yeah. You know, if I'm only gonna get one shot at it, it might as well be >>The last we always, we always like to bring the energy in the last segment because you know, the cube, we grind it out for three days. I mean, it's just such a great content injection. And so we love to wrap it up, especially with someone like yourself who can really help us convey the themes, but even more so when we look around here this entire ecosystem, you and your team built this. And so take us through that. >>Well, we did, you know, and it takes a village. You know, we have the core team, HPE global technical marketing, uh, which is my team. And then of course we're partnered with other parts of the, our marketing organizations on different pieces, different aspects. And then we have a tremendous team of vendors that we work with on a regular basis. Companies such as, you know, F two B and ivory and others that, you know, really kind of pitch in. And they're, they're kind of my, I call 'em my flex force. You know, we also have another group called promote live and we bring all these people together. And, and in addition, all the vendors, we have something like 380 employees that come from all different parts of the organization to, to land in Las Vegas, to man, these booths and staff, these, uh, staff, these exhibits. >>And so for one week, we get to really work as a, as a, a team, as a family, you know, there's no organizational borders, so to speak, you know, you know, we're a big company, everybody has, you know, different objectives and different things that they're focused on, but we get a chance to all get together and work as one, one team. And so that, that the people aspect is what's so exciting, I think this week. And I think I even saw some of your broadcast earlier. So I think it kind of, it kind of came through as well. Just the joy of, of being together, you know? Sure. Human beings <laugh> >>And, and H HP's got a new spring and its step, which so much focus brought to the table from Antonio and, you know, the team is the lining. >>Yeah, we do. And that's, you know, when you go, when we start talking about the design and you know, one of the things that, you know, we work on this months ahead of time. Yeah. Right. And so it's kinda like a spinning top, you know, we, we, we keep, we, we keep spinning that thing tightening up and then this week you put it on the table and just let it go. Yeah. Right. But it's that whole multi-month process of, of, of twisting that top around and getting it going and right at the middle and right at the centerpiece. And, uh, the core design principle and an ask from, uh, Antonio is that we make sure that we major on HPE, uh, GreenLake edge to cloud platform that, you know, it, it's a, obviously you've been talking about it all week. Yeah. Uh, we've been talking about it all week. It's a big focus of our company. And so right at the very center, we have our HPE GreenLake edge to cloud platform demonstration, and then everything in the showcase then radiates from that centerpiece, uh, you know, right, right. At, right at the nexus of all the activities. So the experience starts there and propagates its >>Way. Well, I wanna get into some of the themes and the set pieces you have here. Um, you are in technical marketing and this platform is a tech play. So it's not so much just solutions that you're enabling the theme this year is very much technical marketing. So there's edge, especially cloud data and edge is the big themes security's baked in throughout the whole set, right as well. And that messaging, but it's technical marketing right now. We had, you know, platform play uett packer is a platform. Google packer enterprise is a >>Platform. It is, and it's a, it is a, it's a software platform. Um, you, it, it really completes a cloud strategy. And when you really think about it, I, again, I know some of these numbers have been floating around. Um, but, uh, you know, 70% of all data is still staying OnPrem for good reasons, you know, and then 30% of it can be out there in the public cloud. Uh, so what you kind of have is an incomplete cloud strategy, if you will. And what's happened is that organizations have gotten spoiled a little bit by the cloud experience. Mm-hmm <affirmative> right. That, you know, I, you know, your, your dev teams say go, Hey, I just, I wanna work in a Azure. I wanna work in AWS. I love how I go through this process. Why can't I do that with my on-prem stuff? Why, you know, why, you know, I want that kind of experience. So it organizations are really being challenged about how to create that, that kind of service and that experience to their customers because expectations are not because >>Data ha it has to be inclusive. It can't be exclusive to just one part of the organization. >>Yeah. And so how did you, how did that impact obviously, cause GreenLake was coming together, you know, you got the multiple months in advance planning for this big event, right. A lot of lot work goes into it. What was some of the impact to the execution of this event, um, that you can share in terms of the set pieces? Some of the displays was there was there, I won't say radical cause it's not radical. It looks, it turned out great. But what are some of the popular things happening here? What worked, what resonated with customers and what was different from, from, uh, that GreenLake enabled you to do differently? >>Well, I mean, first the first thing is that we, we kind of had a high touch experience at that center point, right. That nexus, the hub of the activity, the GreenLake edge to club platform, uh, demonstration. And it started with us just kind of, you know, having the strategy about first of all, if you sh, if you guys show this and I know, I think maybe you have, when you enter in, we've got like this big aha moment, right. And that aha moment is that platform right in the center, surrounded with wonderful visuals above, below, you know, behind, uh, all around it. But we, we, we had to think about, okay, now I'm staring at this thing. What am I, how am I gonna experience it? So, uh, when I say a high touch experience, we start with a, what I call a platform generalist that would greet you up front, engage in the conversation, you know, so realize that, you know, Dave is a network operations director, he's got some keen interests. >>He has some sort of peripheral idea about what the, uh, HPE GreenLake edge cloud platform is about, but what can it really do for him? You know, what can do, what can he use? How can he use it? So we start at that level of conversation, you know, socialize the core services, the attributes, you know, the, the technology that is actually enabling it. And then as we've identified in our conversation that you're a network geek, you know, and you want to understand, you've heard about Aruba, you know, how's Aruba central play into that. How do the networking services play into that? And so for then we take that, that, that big leap and go up two steps up onto the platform. And we go over to the network specialist, what I, what I'm calling a platform specialist, uh, who understands all the things about the platform, but then is peaked in networking. And we have that conversation and you see how the Aruba customer can benefit by this evolution, uh, and how the different platform services combine to give a holistic experience across a company. And so when I'm an it ops director, and I'm trying to service my network, guys, my storage guys, my compute guys, my external cloud services guys, that this is an environment that I can, so you >>Have an experience where they come in, they can easily move to a point quickly in the display, on the platform >>And it's tailored for them. Exactly. Right. Exactly. That's the exactly. Right. And so if I transition over to you, you know, and you're my, you know, you're my specialist, you know, you're not saying, Hey, Dave, what brings you here today? What are you today? <laugh>, you know, I, I mean, you're prequalified, it's a prequalified conversation. We jump into it. And then that specialist is armed with knowledge as to where, okay, this guy is really interested in switching technology and switches as well. Well, that's demo five 12. Mm-hmm <affirmative>, you know, let me have one of my colleagues take you over there. So then you're, you're escorted over to demo five 12 to go to the next level or perhaps, and this has happened throughout the week that people want to take a test drive of the environment. And so we have the HPE GreenLake living lab, and we have a, a test drive environment right there. >>And so we bring you right to that test drive, where you can, you know, kick the tires yourself, you fire up a live environment. We have a series of exercises that you're taken through. And, uh, I think I've just checked with one of my colleagues where like, well over, you know, well, over 1100 experiences of people doing that here. And that lab has 25 seats, but also externally. Yeah. So right off of hpe.com, that same test drive experience that we're doing here. People can launch at home. And so we got in this morning, there were like four guys logged in from New Zealand, you know, doing exercises, which is pretty neat. So, so when you ask me the question, what are the design considerations, uh, that HPE GreenLake that we baked in and thought through it's again, that, Hey, it's a, it's a big thing. Yeah. It's a big, it's an experience. Let's start with you just digesting the, you know, the comp basic concepts. Then let's talk about your persona and how it directly maps to what you can do. And then if you want to get deeper, you know, we have the solutions that we design behind it, solution demos, and, and if you wanna drive it, let you know, buckle up. Let's >>Go. Yeah, you get right to a spot, multiple monitors, great experience, high touch. Um, that's awesome. I gotta ask you another question. Cause you've been, you know, pre pandemic, you've been doing a lot of this technical marketing and events and then virtual hit right now. We're back face to face, right? It's clear, Dave and I were just talking about our, on our opening day, year on day. One, people love to see each other back. Every event we've been to face to face. People are energized to a level. We didn't even see. What are you seeing here in terms of performance? Obviously, you got sales people here, you got executives here, you got customers right. Face to face, right. >>Doing belly to belly, >>Belly to belly, as Dave says, that's a positive, what's it like, explain what it's like. >>Well, I mean, you don't, you never know what you got until it's gone, right? >>Yeah. >>You, and so people didn't really realize that, Hey, we really needed to have this kind of touch and this, this kind of activity. And it was funny because people be before the pandemic, there was also a push to do a lot of virtual stuff, you know, economies of scale. Yeah. You know, some of that stuff works. Teams are making decisions, but then it all goes away and people realize how valuable, you know, just the conversations were, you know, meeting >>Somebody, relationships, meeting >>Somebody for a coffee, you know, talking through different bumping into colleagues than that. You haven't seen for years, or you worked with somebody and now they're doing this. And then you realize you have some sort of synergy with each other and you know, you can still help each other. And just the, just, you know, just the discovery <laugh> of being at discover, you know, and running into these different types of things. So, uh, well >>You think about it norm, you know, we, we've done plenty of stuff virtually we have, but I think we've talked maybe four times this week. Yeah. You've seen you here walking around the hallways. We saw you last night, right? Yeah. You just, that just wouldn't happen in your little virtual >>World. Yeah. I mean, not at all. And during that virtual era, and I think we'll look back on that and we're still gonna do virtual stuff >>Course, and we're learning, >>It's got value, but I just want to thank you guys for just being the cube and the whole team, you know, Frank, everybody just tremendous partners through that because you can still look at that content that we produced together last year and it's still relevant. We're still sharing it. It still has impact. We, we point, you know, we tell people, Hey, here's call to action. You're leaving. Discover by the way, there's these three or four pieces out on the cube that really go with, go at this topic. >>Right. That GreenLake event we did last year was phenomenal. >>It was, it was, and it was a partnership with you guys. And I, I, you know, I, I speak on, on behalf of many of my colleagues here at HPE, we just wanna thank the cube for all the support, creativity, uh, and how we got through that >>All together. We we'll back at you because norm you were a real innovator when John and I first met you, we were like, Hey, this guy, actually, he's gonna, he's gonna push us to some new levels. Technical >>Marketing know >>That's our, our team marketing. Like our team was a little nervous, a lot nervous actually, because you know, you do, you are not only demanding, but you're super creative. Well, thank you. And so you, you helped us, you know, up, up our game. >>Yeah. Thanks a lot. Yeah. You know, Frank was getting, Hey, Frank, Dave, can you guys do this? You >>Know, so yeah, we were on the background. >>I mean, but we were, we were growing and surviving and thriving together and getting through it, but what's coming out. The other side now is a new format. You mentioned virtual. That's not going away. Hybrid is a steady state for all of us. Even the cube. Yeah. So the new protocols and the new standards are emerging. And I think the newness of it scares people also like how do you do it? Um, who, whose role is it to take the virtual and digital? So this whole new set of experiences still coming out. Yeah. What's your vision? How do you see this? Cause we're face to face clearly is what everyone wants from school kids to adults. Right. We want face to face. Right. How does digital fit in? >>Well, I mean, that's, that's a, that's a really tricky question. I'll give you a, a, I'll kind of back into the answer a little bit. Um, you guys can see this, right, right behind us. We had this whole backdrop here, greetings from the edge of virtual reality experience. Well, we built that. We built that during the COVID era, so we could have experiences with people remotely. Right. Uh, and we used it for our executive summit, you know, last year for the virtual discovery, we shipped those Oculus headsets to everybody. They, everybody jumped into it. And so I was sitting there being a host, you know, with four CTOs that were scattered all over the world. So we were in cyberspace together. Right. And so of course being good, uh, you know, good business people we realized, Hey, this is pretty fun. So let's dust it off and bring it out here for the more general public. >>So again, it was like a 200 person, you know, uh, executive level experience and all of that, but it had tremendous value, different types of experiences. I recommend you try it if you ever have the opportunity. Um, so that's a way that we start emerging virtual reality and digital experiences to try to keep that human connection, but now we're using it again. And everybody's in these little pod rooms, six of them together. So they're having this experience in cyberspace and they're having it physically. Yeah. And so I think some, and everyone's enjoying being together and still in cyber space together. So I think when we start to build assets and we start to look at different types of things and experiences, we gotta think, we, we gotta think through that now. Right. You know, how is this, how is this investment or this, this experience, how's it gonna translate, you know, outside of these four walls, right. And how can we use it outside of these four walls, uh, and create, you know, a more engaging experience. So that's a little bit of a backing into that answer, but I think I'm, I'm, >>It's emerging. It's >>Important. Well, I'm saying it more as an example of us thinking through and trying to leverage. Yeah. >>I love it though. I mean, you always, you've always been struck me as a visionary and I, I loved that answer and I can just see, it's just gonna progress by the end of the decade. This is gonna become right. Uh, a a, you know, a normal sort of practice, and we're gonna bring people in from the outside and interacting. I love what you were saying about, yeah. Even though we're here physically, we're actually creating a virtual world within this physical pod. We are. Where can people discover more about that? About, about, about the shows, the content that >>Was here? Well on hpe.com, you can just launch into discover. We have a tremendous amount of content that's been recorded, keynote sponsor sessions, the cube they're dialed in all kinds of different pieces of assets that we've done. Um, I'll plug just another couple of things just to, again, to talk about the connectivity of things that we're doing. So one of the projects that I lead, uh, I am very proud to lead is HPE space born and our space born computer space, born computer two, flying a most powerful machine, uh, computer to ever fly in space. Uh, we've been up there for a year. We've done 24 different experiments over the year to, for the benefit of the entire scientific community. Um, also, you know, doing things for the ISS national lab in NASA, our partners up there, but what we've got is we've built a scale replica of the Columbus module, right? So this is, you know, this is a 28 by 12 foot module. Hey, we're bringing her home seriously. >>They're gonna pull the plugs. They're gonna pull the >>Plug on me soon. Right. So anyway, so we have that module built, right? And this is, uh, we work with a Hollywood production company. We've had it before, but you know, we we've customized it. We have a live link to the ISS station in there. And, and so we're talking about everything that we're doing there, but also in this virtual reality experience, we have you going on a space walk, right. And so we've, we've captured that as well. So we've, we're tying this physical and virtual experience together. Uh, and, uh, so it's a fun project. So you can check that >>Out. We did exit scale together during the pandemic, and that's when I first really got into to space point. It was awesome to see frontier announced actually breaking through the exo scale barrier. We, we were on the cusp, but we, we now see it breaking through. So, yeah. Congratulations on that. Thank you >>Very much. And, you know, a couple, you know, just couple other things that we're doing, that's pretty exciting. I don't, I don't wanna give away all my tricks, uh, but you know, we've organized our demonstrations through the customer lenses. So we have these customer journeys that we see people that are using our technology, you know, so I'm, I'm not talking about the storage business unit or, you know, the networking business unit, but how are our customers really trying to, you know, advance AI and machine learning, for example, how are they actually trying to, you know, protect their data? You know, the different things, the business issues, the business issues. Yeah. And so we've organized our demos through that, and we have these, these pods and then satellites, and you, you, you give you walk through that whole thing and it's addressing different aspects of that. >>Um, and then another thing that we've done is we have tours here, uh, as well, where, cuz there's so much content that people can take tours and you know, 1400 people have taken those tours. Uh, you know, and these are guided tours, headsets, curated, big numbers, designated places to go. And we see big traffic the first day or so and by design. And so we hit the highlights and then they decide how to use their valuable time later in the showcase about what they want to deep dive on. And so that's been a tremendous success for >>Us. Well norm thanks for bringing us on the tour of discover. Yeah. Well and really, you know, sharing that with our audience and you've been an awesome partner. And as you say, a great innovator, hope I can't wait to see what's next. All right. >>You so much. Hey, thanks for letting me on here guys. Welcome to our pleasure. I'm somebody I made. You're a Cub >>Alumni alumni. You're alumni. Welcome to alumni. So >>Guys great. Our week. That's a wrap on on day three, uh, Dave Valant day, John furrier for Lisa Martin. Don't forget to go to Silicon angle.com where we've got all the news, all the interviews that we've done this week, get written up and posted on Silicon angle.com. The cube.net I publish every week. Uh, my breaking analysis on, on, on wikibon.com. It's on a podcast. So check that out. Thanks to everybody. Thanks for the crew. Everybody back at the office. Really appreciate it. Great job. And we'll see you next time. All right.

>> From theCUBE Studios in Palo Alto in Boston, bringing you data-driven insights from theCUBE and ETR. This is "Breaking Analysis" with Dave Vellante. >> When Facebook changed its name to Meta last fall, it catalyzed a chain reaction throughout the tech industry. Software firms, gaming companies, chip makers, device manufacturers, and others have joined in hype machine. Now, it's easy to dismiss the metaverse as futuristic hyperbole, but do we really believe that tapping on a smartphone, or staring at a screen, or two-dimensional Zoom meetings are the future of how we work, play, and communicate? As the internet itself proved to be larger than we ever imagined, it's very possible, and even quite likely that the combination of massive processing power, cheap storage, AI, blockchains, crypto, sensors, AR, VR, brain interfaces, and other emerging technologies will combine to create new and unimaginable consumer experiences, and massive wealth for creators of the metaverse. Hello, and welcome to this week's Wiki Bond Cube Insights, powered by ETR. In this "Breaking Analysis" we welcome in cyber expert, hacker gamer, NFT expert, and founder of ORE System, Nick Donarski. Nick, welcome, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you, sir, glad to be here. >> Yeah, okay, so today we're going to traverse two parallel paths, one that took Nick from security expert and PenTester to NFTs, tokens, and the metaverse. And we'll simultaneously explore the complicated world of cybersecurity in the enterprise, and how the blockchain, crypto, and NFTs will provide key underpinnings for digital ownership in the metaverse. We're going to talk a little bit about blockchain, and crypto, and get things started there, and some of the realities and misconceptions, and how innovations in those worlds have led to the NFT craze. We'll look at what's really going on in NFTs and why they're important as both a technology and societal trend. Then, we're going to dig into the tech and try to explain why and how blockchain and NFTs are going to lay the foundation for the metaverse. And, finally, who's going to build the metaverse. And how long is it going to take? All right, Nick, let's start with you. Tell us a little bit about your background, your career. You started as a hacker at a really, really young age, and then got deep into cyber as a PenTester. You did some pretty crazy stuff. You have some great stories about sneaking into buildings. You weren't just doing it all remote. Tell us about yourself. >> Yeah, so I mean, really, I started a long time ago. My dad was really the foray into technology. I wrote my first program on an Apple IIe in BASIC in 1989. So, I like to say I was born on the internet, if you will. But, yeah, in high school at 16, I incorporated my first company, did just tech support for parents and teachers. And then in 2000 I transitioned really into security and focused there ever since. I joined Rapid7 and after they picked up Medis boy, I joined HP. I was one of their founding members of Shadowlabs and really have been part of the information security and the cyber community all throughout, whether it's training at various different conferences or talking. My biggest thing and my most awesome moments as various things of being broken into, is really when I get to actually work with somebody that's coming up in the industry and who's new and actually has that light bulb moment of really kind of understanding of technology, understanding an idea, or getting it when it comes to that kind of stuff. >> Yeah, and when you think about what's going on in crypto and NFTs and okay, now the metaverse it's you get to see some of the most innovative people. Now I want to first share a little bit of data on enterprise security and maybe Nick get you to comment. We've reported over the past several years on the complexity in the security business and the numerous vendor choices that SecOps Pros face. And this chart really tells that story in the cybersecurity space. It's an X,Y graph. We've shown it many times from the ETR surveys where the vertical axis, it's a measure of spending momentum called net score. And the horizontal axis is market share, which represents each company's presence in the data set, and a couple of points stand out. First, it's really crowded. In that red dotted line that you see there, that's 40%, above that line on the net score axis, marks highly elevated spending momentum. Now, let's just zoom in a bit and I've cut the data by those companies that have more than a hundred responses in the survey. And you can see here on this next chart, it's still very crowded, but a few call-outs are noteworthy. First companies like SentinelOne, Elastic, Tanium, Datadog, Netskope and Darktrace. They were all above that 40% line in the previous chart, but they've fallen off. They still have actually a decent presence in the survey over 60 responses, but under that hundred. And you can see Auth0 now Okta, big $7 billion acquisition. They got the highest net score CrowdStrike's up there, Okta classic they're kind of enterprise business, and Zscaler and others above that line. You see Palo Alto Networks and Microsoft very impressive because they're both big and they're above that elevated spending velocity. So Nick, kind of a long-winded intro, but it was a little bit off topic, but I wanted to start here because this is the life of a SecOps pro. They lack the talent in a capacity to keep bad guys fully at bay. And so they have to keep throwing tooling at the problem, which adds to the complexity and as a PenTester and hacker, this chaos and complexity means cash for the bad guys. Doesn't it? >> Absolutely. You know, the more systems that these organizations find to integrate into the systems, means that there's more components, more dollars and cents as far as the amount of time and the engineers that need to actually be responsible for these tools. There's a lot of reasons that, the more, I guess, hands in the cookie jar, if you will, when it comes to the security architecture, the more links that are, or avenues for attack built into the system. And really one of the biggest things that organizations face is being able to have engineers that are qualified and technical enough to be able to support that architecture as well, 'cause buying it from a vendor and deploying it, putting it onto a shelf is good, but if it's not tuned properly, or if it's not connected properly, that security tool can just hold up more avenues of attack for you. >> Right, okay, thank you. Now, let's get into the meat of the discussion for today and talk a little bit about blockchain and crypto for a bit. I saw sub stack post the other day, and it was ripping Matt Damon for pedaling crypto on TV ads and how crypto is just this big pyramid scheme. And it's all about allowing criminals to be anonymous and it's ransomware and drug trafficking. And yes, there are definitely scams and you got to be careful and lots of dangers out there, but these are common criticisms in the mainstream press, that overlooked the fact by the way that IPO's and specs are just as much of a pyramid scheme. Now, I'm not saying there shouldn't be more regulation, there should, but Bitcoin was born out of the 2008 financial crisis, cryptocurrency, and you think about, it's really the confluence of software engineering, cryptography and game theory. And there's some really powerful innovation being created by the blockchain community. Crypto and blockchain are really at the heart of a new decentralized platform being built out. And where today, you got a few, large internet companies. They control the protocols and the platform. Now the aspiration of people like yourself, is to create new value opportunities. And there are many more chances for the little guys and girls to get in on the ground floor and blockchain technology underpins all this. So Nick, what's your take, what are some of the biggest misconceptions around blockchain and crypto? And do you even pair those two in the same context? What are your thoughts? >> So, I mean, really, we like to separate ourselves and say that we are a blockchain company, as opposed to necessarily saying(indistinct) anything like that. We leverage those tools. We leverage cryptocurrencies, we leverage NFTs and those types of things within there, but blockchain is a technology, which is the underlying piece, is something that can be used and utilized in a very large number of different organizations out there. So, cryptocurrency and a lot of that negative context comes with a fear of something new, without having that regulation in place, without having the rules in place. And we were a big proponent of, we want the regulation, right? We want to do right. We want to do it by the rules. We want to do it under the context of, this is what should be done. And we also want to help write those rules as well, because a lot of the lawmakers, a lot of the lobbyists and things, they have a certain aspect or a certain goal of when they're trying to get these things. Our goal is simplicity. We want the ability for the normal average person to be able to interact with crypto, interact with NFTs, interact with the blockchain. And basically by saying, blockchain in quotes, it's very ambiguous 'cause there's many different things that blockchain can be, the easiest way, right? The easiest way to understand blockchain is simply a distributed database. That's really the core of what blockchain is. It's a record keeping mechanism that allows you to reference that. And the beauty of it, is that it's quote unquote immutable. You can't edit that data. So, especially when we're talking about blockchain, being underlying for technologies in the future, things like security, where you have logging, you have keeping, whether you're talking about sales, where you may have to have multiple different locations (indistinct) users from different locations around the globe. It creates a central repository that provides distribution and security in the way that you're ensuring your data, ensuring the validation of where that data exists when it was created. Those types of things that blockchain really is. If you go to the historical, right, the very early on Bitcoin absolutely was made to have a way of not having to deal with the fed. That was the core functionality of the initial crypto. And then you had a lot of the illicit trades, those black markets that jumped onto it because of what it could do. The maturity of the technology though, of where we are now versus say back in 97 is a much different world of blockchain, and there's a much different world of cryptocurrency. You still have to be careful because with any fed, you're still going to have that FUD that goes out there and sells that fear, uncertainty and doubt, which spurs a lot of those types of scams, and a lot of those things that target end users that we face as security professionals today. You still get mailers that go out, looking for people to give their social security number over during tax time. Snail mail is considered a very ancient technology, but it still works. You still get a portion of the population that falls for those tricks, fishing, whatever it might be. It's all about trying to make sure that you have fear about what is that change. And I think that as we move forward, and move into the future, the simpler and the more comfortable these types of technologies become, the easier it is to utilize and indoctrinate normal users, to be able to use these things. >> You know, I want to ask you about that, Nick, because you mentioned immutability, there's a lot of misconceptions about that. I had somebody tell me one time, "Blockchain's Bs," and they say, "Well, oh, hold on a second. They say, oh, they say it's a mutable, but you can hack Coinbase, whatever it is." So I guess a couple of things, one is that the killer app for blockchain became money. And so we learned a lot through that. And you had Bitcoin and it really wasn't programmable through its interface. And then Ethereum comes out. I know, you know a lot about Ether and you have solidity, which is a lot simpler, but it ain't JavaScript, which is ubiquitous. And so now you have a lot of potential for the initial ICO's and probably still the ones today, the white papers, a lot of security flaws in there. I'm sure you can talk to that, but maybe you can help square that circle about immutability and security. I've mentioned game theory before, it's harder to hack Bitcoin and the Bitcoin blockchain than it is to mine. So that's why people mine, but maybe you could add some context to that. >> Yeah, you know it goes to just about any technology out there. Now, when you're talking about blockchain specifically, the majority of the attacks happen with the applications and the smart contracts that are actually running on the blockchain, as opposed to necessarily the blockchain itself. And like you said, the impact for whether that's loss of revenue or loss of tokens or whatever it is, in most cases that results from something that was a phishing attack, you gave up your credentials, somebody said, paste your private key in here, and you win a cookie or whatever it might be, but those are still the fundamental pieces. When you're talking about various different networks out there, depending on the blockchain, depends on how much the overall security really is. The more distributed it is, and the more stable it is as the network goes, the better or the more stable any of the code is going to be. The underlying architecture of any system is the key to success when it comes to the overall security. So the blockchain itself is immutable, in the case that the owner are ones have to be trusted. If you look at distributed networks, something like Ethereum or Bitcoin, where you have those proof of work systems, that disperses that information at a much more remote location, So the more disperse that information is, the less likely it is to be able to be impacted by one small instance. If you look at like the DAO Hack, or if you look at a lot of the other vulnerabilities that exist on the blockchain, it's more about the code. And like you said, solidity being as new as it is, it's not JavaScript. The industry is very early and very infantile, as far as the developers that are skilled in doing this. And with that just comes the inexperience and the lack of information that you don't learn until JavaScript is 10 or 12 years old. >> And the last thing I'll say about this topic, and we'll move on to NFTs, but NFTs relate is that, again, I said earlier that the big internet giants have pretty much co-opted the platform. You know, if you wanted to invest in Linux in the early days, there was no way to do that. You maybe have to wait until red hat came up with its IPO and there's your pyramid scheme folks. But with crypto it, which is again, as Nick was explaining underpinning is the blockchain, you can actually participate in early projects. Now you got to be careful 'cause there are a lot of scams and many of them are going to blow out if not most of them, but there are some, gems out there, because as Nick was describing, you've got this decentralized platform that causes scaling issues or performance issues, and people are solving those problems, essentially building out a new internet. But I want to get into NFTs, because it's sort of the next big thing here before we get into the metaverse, what Nick, why should people pay attention to NFTs? Why do they matter? Are they really an important trend? And what are the societal and technological impacts that you see in this space? >> Yeah, I mean, NFTs are a very new technology and ultimately it's just another entry on the blockchain. It's just another piece of data in the database. But how it's leveraged in the grand scheme of how we, as users see it, it can be the classic idea of an NFT is just the art, or as good as the poster on your wall. But in the case of some of the new applications, is where are you actually get that utility function. Now, in the case of say video games, video games and gamers in general, already utilize digital items. They already utilize digital points. As in the case of like Call of Duty points, those are just different versions of digital currencies. You know, World of Warcraft Gold, I like to affectionately say, was the very first cryptocurrency. There was a Harvard course taught on the economy of WOW, there was a black market where you could trade your end game gold for Fiat currencies. And there's even places around the world that you can purchase real world items and stay at hotels for World of Warcraft Gold. So the adoption of blockchain just simply gives a more stable and a more diverse technology for those same types of systems. You're going to see that carry over into shipping and logistics, where you need to have data that is single repository for being able to have multiple locations, multiple shippers from multiple global efforts out there that need to have access to that data. But in the current context, it's either sitting on a shipping log, it's sitting on somebody's desk. All of those types of paper transactions can be leveraged as NFTs on the blockchain. It's just simply that representation. And once you break the idea of this is just a piece of art, or this is a cryptocurrency, you get into a world where you can apply that NFT technology to a lot more things than I think most people think of today. >> Yeah, and of course you mentioned art a couple of times when people sold as digital art for whatever, it was 60, 65 million, 69 million, that caught a lot of people's attention, but you're seeing, I mean, there's virtually infinite number of applications for this. One of the Washington wizards, tokenized portions of his contract, maybe he was creating a new bond, that's really interesting use cases and opportunities, and that kind of segues into the latest, hot topic, which is the metaverse. And you've said yourself that blockchain and NFTs are the foundation of the metaverse, they're foundational elements. So first, what is the metaverse to you and where do blockchain and NFTs, fit in? >> Sure, so, I mean, I affectionately refer to the metaverse just a VR and essentially, we've been playing virtual reality games and all the rest for a long time. And VR has really kind of been out there for a long time. So most people's interpretation or idea of what the metaverse is, is a virtual reality version of yourself and this right, that idea of once it becomes yourself, is where things like NFT items, where blockchain and digital currencies are going to come in, because if you have a manufacturer, so you take on an organization like Nike, and they want to put their shoes into the metaverse because we, as humans, want to individualize ourselves. We go out and we want to have that one of one shoe or that, t-shirt or whatever it is, we're going to want to represent that same type of individuality in our virtual self. So NFTs, crypto and all of those digital currencies, like I was saying that we've known as gamers are going to play that very similar role inside of the metaverse. >> Yeah. Okay. So basically you're going to take your physical world into the metaverse. You're going to be able to, as you just mentioned, acquire things- I loved your WOW example. And so let's stay on this for a bit, if we may, of course, Facebook spawned a lot of speculation and discussion about the concept of the metaverse and really, as you pointed out, it's not new. You talked about why second life, really started in 2003, and it's still around today. It's small, I read recently, it's creators coming back into the company and books were written in the early 90s that used the term metaverse. But Nick, talk about how you see this evolving, what role you hope to play with your company and your community in the future, and who builds the metaverse, when is it going to be here? >> Yeah, so, I mean, right now, and we actually just got back from CES last week. And the Metaverse is a very big buzzword. You're going to see a lot of integration of what people are calling, quote unquote, the metaverse. And there was organizations that were showing virtual office space, virtual malls, virtual concerts, and those types of experiences. And the one thing right now that I don't think that a lot of organizations have grasp is how to make one metaverse. There's no real player one, if you will always this yet, There's a lot of organizations that are creating their version of the metaverse, which then again, just like every other software and game vendor out there has their version of cryptocurrency and their version of NFTs. You're going to see it start to pop up, especially as Oculus is going to come down in price, especially as you get new technologies, like some of the VR glasses that look more augmented reality and look more like regular glasses that you're wearing, things like that, the easier that those technologies become as in adopting into our normal lifestyle, as far as like looks and feels, the faster that stuff's going to actually come out to the world. But when it comes to like, what we're doing is we believe that the metaverse should actually span multiple different blockchains, multiple different segments, if you will. So what ORE system is doing, is we're actually building the underlying architecture and technologies for developers to bring their metaverse too. You can leverage the ORE Systems NFTs, where we like to call our utility NFTs as an in-game item in one game, or you can take it over and it could be a t-shirt in another game. The ability for having that cross support within the ecosystem is what really no one has grasp on yet. Most of the organizations out there are using a very classic business model. Get the user in the game, make them spend their money in the game, make all their game stuff as only good in their game. And that's where the developer has you, they have you in their bubble. Our goal, and what we like to affectionately say is, we want to bring white collar tools and technology to blue collar folks, We want to make it simple. We want to make it off the shelf, and we want to make it a less cost prohibitive, faster, and cheaper to actually get out to all the users. We do it by supporting the technology. That's our angle. If you support the technology and you support the platform, you can build a community that will build all of the metaverse around them. >> Well, and so this is interesting because, if you think about some of the big names, we've Microsoft is talking about it, obviously we mentioned Facebook. They have essentially walled gardens. Now, yeah, okay, I could take Tik Tok and pump it into Instagram is fine, but they're really siloed off. And what you're saying is in the metaverse, you should be able to buy a pair of sneakers in one location and then bring it to another one. >> Absolutely, that's exactly it. >> And so my original kind of investment in attractiveness, if you will, to crypto, was that, the little guy can get an early, but I worry that some of these walled gardens, these big internet giants are going to try to co-op this. So I think what you're doing is right on, and I think it's aligned with the objectives of consumers and the users who don't want to be forced in to a pen. They want to be able to live freely. And that's really what you're trying to do. >> That's exactly it. You know, when you buy an item, say a Skin in Fortnite or Skin in Call of Duty, it's only good in that game. And not even in the franchise, it's only good in that version of the game. In the case of what we want to do is, you can not only have that carry over and your character. So say you buy a really cool shirt, and you've got that in your Call of Duty or in our case, we're really Osiris Protocol, which is our proof of concept video game to show that this all thing actually works, but you can actually go in and you can get a gun in Osiris Protocol. And if we release, Osiris Protocol two, you'll be able to take that to Osiris Protocol two. Now the benefit of that is, is you're going to be the only one in the next version with that item, if you haven't sold it or traded it or whatever else. So we don't lock you into a game. We don't lock you into a specific application. You own that, you can trade that freely with other users. You can sell that on the open market. We're embracing what used to be considered the black market. I don't understand why a lot of video games, we're always against the skins and mods and all the rest. For me as a gamer and coming up, through the many, many years of various different Call of Duties and everything in my time, I wish I could still have some this year. I still have a World of Warcraft account. I wasn't on, Vanilla, Burning Crusade was my foray, but I still have a character. If you look at it that way, if I had that wild character and that gear was NFTs, in theory, I could actually pass that onto my kid who could carry on that character. And it would actually increase in value because they're NFT back then. And then if needed, you could trade those on the open market and all the rest. It just makes gaming a much different thing. >> I love it. All right, Nick, hey, we're out of time, but I got to say, Nick Donarski, thanks so much for coming on the program today, sharing your insights and really good luck to you and building out your technology platform and your community. >> Thank you, sir, it's been an absolute pleasure. >> And thank you for watching. Remember, all these episodes are available as podcasts, just search "Breaking Analysis Podcast", and you'll find them. I publish pretty much every week on siliconangle.com and wikibond.com. And you can reach me @dvellante on Twitter or comment on my LinkedIn posts. You can always email me david.vellante@siliconangle.com. And don't forget, check out etr.plus for all the survey data. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE Insights, powered by ETR, happy 2022 be well, and we'll see you next time. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Hello and welcome to this CUBE conversation here presenting the "AWS Startup Showcase: "New Breakthroughs in DevOps, Data Analytics "and Cloud Management Tools" featuring Opsani for the cloud management and migration track here today, I'm your host John Furrier. Today, we're joined by Patrick Conte, Chief Commercial Officer, Opsani. Thanks for coming on. Appreciate you coming on. Future of AI operations. >> Thanks, John. Great to be here. Appreciate being with you. >> So congratulations on all your success being showcased here as part of the Startups Showcase, future of AI operations. You've got the cloud scale happening. A lot of new transitions in this quote digital transformation as cloud scales goes next generation. DevOps revolution as Emily Freeman pointed out in her keynote. What's the problem statement that you guys are focused on? Obviously, AI involves a lot of automation. I can imagine there's a data problem in there somewhere. What's the core problem that you guys are focused on? >> Yeah, it's interesting because there are a lot of companies that focus on trying to help other companies optimize what they're doing in the cloud, whether it's cost or whether it's performance or something else. We felt very strongly that AI was the way to do that. I've got a slide prepared, and maybe we can take a quick look at that, and that'll talk about the three elements or dimensions of the problem. So we think about cloud services and the challenge of delivering cloud services. You've really got three things that customers are trying to solve for. They're trying to solve for performance, they're trying to solve for the best performance, and, ultimately, scalability. I mean, applications are growing really quickly especially in this current timeframe with cloud services and whatnot. They're trying to keep costs under control because certainly, it can get way out of control in the cloud since you don't own the infrastructure, and more importantly than anything else which is why it's at the bottom sort of at the foundation of all this, is they want their applications to be a really a good experience for their customers. So our customer's customer is actually who we're trying to solve this problem for. So what we've done is we've built a platform that uses AI and machine learning to optimize, meaning tune, all of the key parameters of a cloud application. So those are things like the CPU usage, the memory usage, the number of replicas in a Kubernetes or container environment, those kinds of things. It seems like it would be simple just to grab some values and plug 'em in, but it's not. It's actually the combination of them has to be right. Otherwise, you get delays or faults or other problems with the application. >> Andrew, if you can bring that slide back up for a second. I want to just ask one quick question on the problem statement. You got expenditures, performance, customer experience kind of on the sides there. Do you see this tip a certain way depending upon use cases? I mean, is there one thing that jumps out at you, Patrick, from your customer's customer's standpoint? Obviously, customer experience is the outcome. That's the app, whatever. That's whatever we got going on there. >> Sure. >> But is there patterns 'cause you can have good performance, but then budget overruns. Or all of them could be failing. Talk about this dynamic with this triangle. >> Well, without AI, without machine learning, you can solve for one of these, only one, right? So if you want to solve for performance like you said, your costs may overrun, and you're probably not going to have control of the customer experience. If you want to solve for one of the others, you're going to have to sacrifice the other two. With machine learning though, we can actually balance that, and it isn't a perfect balance, and the question you asked is really a great one. Sometimes, you want to over-correct on something. Sometimes, scalability is more important than cost, but what we're going to do because of our machine learning capability, we're going to always make sure that you're never spending more than you should spend, so we're always going to make sure that you have the best cost for whatever the performance and reliability factors that you you want to have are. >> Yeah, I can imagine. Some people leave services on. Happened to us one time. An intern left one of the services on, and like where did that bill come from? So kind of looked back, we had to kind of fix that. There's a ton of action, but I got to ask you, what are customers looking for with you guys? I mean, as they look at Opsani, what you guys are offering, what's different than what other people might be proposing with optimization solutions? >> Sure. Well, why don't we bring up the second slide, and this'll illustrate some of the differences, and we can talk through some of this stuff as well. So really, the area that we play in is called AIOps, and that's sort of a new area, if you will, over the last few years, and really what it means is applying intelligence to your cloud operations, and those cloud operations could be development operations, or they could be production operations. And what this slide is really representing is in the upper slide, that's sort of the way customers experience their DevOps model today. Somebody says we need an application or we need a feature, the developers pull down something from get. They hack an early version of it. They run through some tests. They size it whatever way they know that it won't fail, and then they throw it over to the SREs to try to tune it before they shove it out into production, but nobody really sizes it properly. It's not optimized, and so it's not tuned either. When it goes into production, it's just the first combination of settings that work. So what happens is undoubtedly, there's some type of a problem, a fault or a delay, or you push new code, or there's a change in traffic. Something happens, and then, you've got to figure out what the heck. So what happens then is you use your tools. First thing you do is you over-provision everything. That's what everybody does, they over-provision and try to soak up the problem. But that doesn't solve it because now, your costs are going crazy. You've got to go back and find out and try as best you can to get root cause. You go back to the tests, and you're trying to find something in the test phase that might be an indicator. Eventually your developers have to hack a hot fix, and the conveyor belt sort of keeps on going. We've tested this model on every single customer that we've spoken to, and they've all said this is what they experience on a day-to-day basis. Now, if we can go back to the side, let's talk about the second part which is what we do and what makes us different. So on the bottom of this slide, you'll see it's really a shift-left model. What we do is we plug in in the production phase, and as I mentioned earlier, what we're doing is we're tuning all those cloud parameters. We're tuning the CPU, the memory, the Replicas, all those kinds of things. We're tuning them all in concert, and we're doing it at machine speed, so that's how the customer gets the best performance, the best reliability at the best cost. That's the way we're able to achieve that is because we're iterating this thing in machine speed, but there's one other place where we plug in and we help the whole concept of AIOps and DevOps, and that is we can plug in in the test phase as well. And so if you think about it, the DevOps guy can actually not have to over-provision before he throws it over to the SREs. He can actually optimize and find the right size of the application before he sends it through to the SREs, and what this does is collapses the timeframe because it means the SREs don't have to hunt for a working set of parameters. They get one from the DevOps guys when they send it over, and this is how the future of AIOps is being really affected by optimization and what we call autonomous optimization which means that it's happening without humans having to press a button on it. >> John: Andrew, bring that slide back up. I want to just ask another question. Tuning in concert thing is very interesting to me. So how does that work? Are you telegraphing information to the developer from the autonomous workload tuning engine piece? I mean, how does the developer know the right knobs or where does it get that provisioning information? I see the performance lag. I see where you're solving that problem. >> Sure. >> How does that work? >> Yeah, so actually, if we go to the next slide, I'll show you exactly how it works. Okay, so this slide represents the architecture of a typical application environment that we would find ourselves in, and inside the dotted line is the customer's application namespace. That's where the app is. And so, it's got a bunch of pods. It's got a horizontal pod. It's got something for replication, probably an HPA. And so, what we do is we install inside that namespace two small instances. One is a tuning pod which some people call a canary, and that tuning pod joins the rest of the pods, but it's not part of the application. It's actually separate, but it gets the same traffic. We also install somebody we call Servo which is basically an action engine. What Servo does is Servo takes the metrics from whatever the metric system is is collecting all those different settings and whatnot from the working application. It could be something like Prometheus. It could be an Envoy Sidecar, or more likely, it's something like AppDynamics, or we can even collect metrics off of Nginx which is at the front of the service. We can plug into anywhere where those metrics are. We can pull the metrics forward. Once we see the metrics, we send them to our backend. The Opsani SaaS service is our machine learning backend. That's where all the magic happens, and what happens then is that service sees the settings, sends a recommendation to Servo, Servo sends it to the tuning pod, and we tune until we find optimal. And so, that iteration typically takes about 20 steps. It depends on how big the application is and whatnot, how fast those steps take. It could be anywhere from seconds to minutes to 10 to 20 minutes per step, but typically within about 20 steps, we can find optimal, and then we'll come back and we'll say, "Here's optimal, and do you want to "promote this to production," and the customer says, "Yes, I want to promote it to production "because I'm saving a lot of money or because I've gotten "better performance or better reliability." Then, all he has to do is press a button, and all that stuff gets sent right to the production pods, and all of those settings get put into production, and now he's now he's actually saving the money. So that's basically how it works. >> It's kind of like when I want to go to the beach, I look at the weather.com, I check the forecast, and I decide whether I want to go or not. You're getting the data, so you're getting a good look at the information, and then putting that into a policy standpoint. I get that, makes total sense. Can I ask you, if you don't mind, expanding on the performance and reliability and the cost advantage? You mentioned cost. How is that impacting? Give us an example of some performance impact, reliability, and cost impacts. >> Well, let's talk about what those things mean because like a lot of people might have different ideas about what they think those mean. So from a cost standpoint, we're talking about cloud spend ultimately, but it's represented by the settings themselves, so I'm not talking about what deal you cut with AWS or Azure or Google. I'm talking about whatever deal you cut, we're going to save you 30, 50, 70% off of that. So it doesn't really matter what cost you negotiated. What we're talking about is right-sizing the settings for CPU and memory, Replica. Could be Java. It could be garbage collection, time ratios, or heap sizes or things like that. Those are all the kinds of things that we can tune. The thing is most of those settings have an unlimited number of values, and this is why machine learning is important because, if you think about it, even if they only had eight settings or eight values per setting, now you're talking about literally billions of combinations. So to find optimal, you've got to have machine speed to be able to do it, and you have to iterate very, very quickly to make it happen. So that's basically the thing, and that's really one of the things that makes us different from anybody else, and if you put that last slide back up, the architecture slide, for just a second, there's a couple of key words at the bottom of it that I want to want to focus on, continuous. So continuous really means that we're on all the time. We're not plug us in one time, make a change, and then walk away. We're actually always measuring and adjusting, and the reason why this is important is in the modern DevOps world, your traffic level is going to change. You're going to push new code. Things are going to happen that are going to change the basic nature of the software, and you have to be able to tune for those changes. So continuous is very important. Second thing is autonomous. This is designed to take pressure off of the SREs. It's not designed to replace them, but to take the pressure off of them having to check pager all the time and run in and make adjustments, or try to divine or find an adjustment that might be very, very difficult for them to do so. So we're doing it for them, and that scale means that we can solve this for, let's say, one big monolithic application, or we can solve it for literally hundreds of applications and thousands of microservices that make up those applications and tune them all at the same time. So the same platform can be used for all of those. You originally asked about the parameters and the settings. Did I answer the question there? >> You totally did. I mean, the tuning in concert. You mentioned early as a key point. I mean, you're basically tuning the engine. It's not so much negotiating a purchase SaaS discount. It's essentially cost overruns by the engine, either over burning or heating or whatever you want to call it. I mean, basically inefficiency. You're tuning the core engine. >> Exactly so. So the cost thing is I mentioned is due to right-sizing the settings and the number of Replicas. The performance is typically measured via latency, and the reliability is typically measured via error rates. And there's some other measures as well. We have a whole list of them that are in the application itself, but those are the kinds of things that we look for as results. When we do our tuning, we look for reducing error rates, or we look for holding error rates at zero, for example, even if we improve the performance or we improve the cost. So we're looking for the best result, the best combination result, and then a customer can decide if they want to do so to actually over-correct on something. We have the whole concept of guard rail, so if performance is the most important thing, or maybe some customers, cost is the most important thing, they can actually say, "Well, give us the best cost, "and give us the best performance and the best reliability, "but at this cost," and we can then use that as a service-level objective and tune around it. >> Yeah, it reminds me back in the old days when you had filtering white lists of black lists of addresses that can go through, say, a firewall or a device. You have billions of combinations now with machine learning. It's essentially scaling the same concept to unbelievable. These guardrails are now in place, and that's super cool and I think really relevant call-out point, Patrick, to kind of highlight that. At this kind of scale, you need machine learning, you need the AI to essentially identify quickly the patterns or combinations that are actually happening so a human doesn't have to waste their time that can be filled by basically a bot at that point. >> So John, there's just one other thing I want to mention around this, and that is one of the things that makes us different from other companies that do optimization. Basically, every other company in the optimization space creates a static recommendation, basically their recommendation engines, and what you get out of that is, let's say it's a manifest of changes, and you hand that to the SREs, and they put it into effect. Well, the fact of the matter is is that the traffic could have changed then. It could have spiked up, or it could have dropped below normal. You could have introduced a new feature or some other code change, and at that point in time, you've already instituted these changes. They may be completely out of date. That's why the continuous nature of what we do is important and different. >> It's funny, even the language that we're using here: network, garbage collection. I mean, you're talking about tuning an engine, am operating system. You're talking about stuff that's moving up the stack to the application layer, hence this new kind of eliminating of these kind of siloed waterfall, as you pointed out in your second slide, is kind of one integrated kind of operating environment. So when you have that or think about the data coming in, and you have to think about the automation just like self-correcting, error-correcting, tuning, garbage collection. These are words that we've kind of kicking around, but at the end of the day, it's an operating system. >> Well in the old days of automobiles, which I remember cause I'm I'm an old guy, if you wanted to tune your engine, you would probably rebuild your carburetor and turn some dials to get the air-oxygen-gas mix right. You'd re-gap your spark plugs. You'd probably make sure your points were right. There'd be four or five key things that you would do. You couldn't do them at the same time unless you had a magic wand. So we're the magic wand that basically, or in modern world, we're sort of that thing you plug in that tunes everything at once within that engine which is all now electronically controlled. So that's the big differences as you think about what we used to do manually, and now, can be done with automation. It can be done much, much faster without humans having to get their fingernails greasy, let's say. >> And I think the dynamic versus static is an interesting point. I want to bring up the SRE which has become a role that's becoming very prominent in the DevOps kind of plus world that's happening. You're seeing this new revolution. The role of the SRE is not just to be there to hold down and do the manual configuration. They had a scale. They're a developer, too. So I think this notion of offloading the SRE from doing manual tasks is another big, important point. Can you just react to that and share more about why the SRE role is so important and why automating that away through when you guys have is important? >> The SRE role is becoming more and more important, just as you said, and the reason is because somebody has to get that application ready for production. The DevOps guys don't do it. That's not their job. Their job is to get the code finished and send it through, and the SREs then have to make sure that that code will work, so they have to find a set of settings that will actually work in production. Once they find that set of settings, the first one they find that works, they'll push it through. It's not optimized at that point in time because they don't have time to try to find optimal, and if you think about it, the difference between a machine learning backend and an army of SREs that work 24-by-seven, we're talking about being able to do the work of many, many SREs that never get tired, that never need to go play video games, to unstress or whatever. We're working all the time. We're always measuring, adjusting. A lot of the companies we talked to do a once-a-month adjustment on their software. So they put an application out, and then they send in their SREs once a month to try to tune the application, and maybe they're using some of these other tools, or maybe they're using just their smarts, but they'll do that once a month. Well, gosh, they've pushed code probably four times during the month, and they probably had a bunch of different spikes and drops in traffic and other things that have happened. So we just want to help them spend their time on making sure that the application is ready for production. Want to make sure that all the other parts of the application are where they should be, and let us worry about tuning CPU, memory, Replica, job instances, and things like that so that they can work on making sure that application gets out and that it can scale, which is really important for them, for their companies to make money is for the apps to scale. >> Well, that's a great insight, Patrick. You mentioned you have a lot of great customers, and certainly if you have your customer base are early adopters, pioneers, and grow big companies because they have DevOps. They know that they're seeing a DevOps engineer and an SRE. Some of the other enterprises that are transforming think the DevOps engineer is the SRE person 'cause they're having to get transformed. So you guys are at the high end and getting now the new enterprises as they come on board to cloud scale. You have a huge uptake in Kubernetes, starting to see the standardization of microservices. People are getting it, so I got to ask you can you give us some examples of your customers, how they're organized, some case studies, who uses you guys, and why they love you? >> Sure. Well, let's bring up the next slide. We've got some customer examples here, and your viewers, our viewers, can probably figure out who these guys are. I can't tell them, but if they go on our website, they can sort of put two and two together, but the first one there is a major financial application SaaS provider, and in this particular case, they were having problems that they couldn't diagnose within the stack. Ultimately, they had to apply automation to it, and what we were able to do for them was give them a huge jump in reliability which was actually the biggest problem that they were having. We gave them 5,000 hours back a month in terms of the application. They were they're having pager duty alerts going off all the time. We actually gave them better performance. We gave them a 10% performance boost, and we dropped their cloud spend for that application by 72%. So in fact, it was an 80-plus % price performance or cost performance improvement that we gave them, and essentially, we helped them tune the entire stack. This was a hybrid environment, so this included VMs as well as more modern architecture. Today, I would say the overwhelming majority of our customers have moved off of the VMs and are in a containerized environment, and even more to the point, Kubernetes which we find just a very, very high percentage of our customers have moved to. So most of the work we're doing today with new customers is around that, and if we look at the second and third examples here, those are examples of that. In the second example, that's a company that develops websites. It's one of the big ones out in the marketplace that, let's say, if you were starting a new business and you wanted a website, they would develop that website for you. So their internal infrastructure is all brand new stuff. It's all Kubernetes, and what we were able to do for them is they were actually getting decent performance. We held their performance at their SLO. We achieved a 100% error-free scenario for them at runtime, and we dropped their cost by 80%. So for them, they needed us to hold-serve, if you will, on performance and reliability and get their costs under control because everything in that, that's a cloud native company. Everything there is cloud cost. So the interesting thing is it took us nine steps because nine of our iterations to actually get to optimal. So it was very, very quick, and there was no integration required. In the first case, we actually had to do a custom integration for an underlying platform that was used for CICD, but with the- >> John: Because of the hybrid, right? >> Patrick: Sorry? >> John: Because it was hybrid, right? >> Patrick: Yes, because it was hybrid, exactly. But within the second one, we just plugged right in, and we were able to tune the Kubernetes environment just as I showed in that architecture slide, and then the third one is one of the leading application performance monitoring companies on the market. They have a bunch of their own internal applications and those use a lot of cloud spend. They're actually running Kubernetes on top of VMs, but we don't have to worry about the VM layer. We just worry about the Kubernetes layer for them, and what we did for them was we gave them a 48% performance improvement in terms of latency and throughput. We dropped their error rates by 90% which is pretty substantial to say the least, and we gave them a 50% cost delta from where they had been. So this is the perfect example of actually being able to deliver on all three things which you can't always do. It has to be, sort of all applications are not created equal. This was one where we were able to actually deliver on all three of the key objectives. We were able to set them up in about 25 minutes from the time we got started, no extra integration, and needless to say, it was a big, happy moment for the developers to be able to go back to their bosses and say, "Hey, we have better performance, "better reliability. "Oh, by the way, we saved you half." >> So depending on the stack situation, you got VMs and Kubernetes on the one side, cloud-native, all Kubernetes, that's dream scenario obviously. Not many people like that. All the new stuff's going cloud-native, so that's ideal, and then the mixed ones, Kubernetes, but no VMs, right? >> Yeah, exactly. So Kubernetes with no VMs, no problem. Kubernetes on top of VMs, no problem, but we don't manage the VMs. We don't manage the underlay at all, in fact. And the other thing is we don't have to go back to the slide, but I think everybody will remember the slide that had the architecture, and on one side was our cloud instance. The only data that's going between the application and our cloud instance are the settings, so there's never any data. There's never any customer data, nothing for PCI, nothing for HIPPA, nothing for GDPR or any of those things. So no personal data, no health data. Nothing is passing back and forth. Just the settings of the containers. >> Patrick, while I got you here 'cause you're such a great, insightful guest, thank you for coming on and showcasing your company. Kubernetes real quick. How prevalent is this mainstream trend is because you're seeing such great examples of performance improvements. SLAs being met, SLOs being met. How real is Kubernetes for the mainstream enterprise as they're starting to use containers to tip their legacy and get into the cloud-native and certainly hybrid and soon to be multi-cloud environment? >> Yeah, I would not say it's dominant yet. Of container environments, I would say it's dominant now, but for all environments, it's not. I think the larger legacy companies are still going through that digital transformation, and so what we do is we catch them at that transformation point, and we can help them develop because as we remember from the AIOps slide, we can plug in at that test level and help them sort of pre-optimize as they're coming through. So we can actually help them be more efficient as they're transforming. The other side of it is the cloud-native companies. So you've got the legacy companies, brick and mortar, who are desperately trying to move to digitization. Then, you've got the ones that are born in the cloud. Most of them aren't on VMs at all. Most of them are on containers right from the get-go, but you do have some in the middle who have started to make a transition, and what they've done is they've taken their native VM environment and they've put Kubernetes on top of it so that way, they don't have to scuttle everything underneath it. >> Great. >> So I would say it's mixed at this point. >> Great business model, helping customers today, and being a bridge to the future. Real quick, what licensing models, how to buy, promotions you have for Amazon Web Services customers? How do people get involved? How do you guys charge? >> The product is licensed as a service, and the typical service is an annual. We license it by application, so let's just say you have an application, and it has 10 microservices. That would be a standard application. We'd have an annual cost for optimizing that application over the course of the year. We have a large application pack, if you will, for let's say applications of 20 services, something like that, and then we also have a platform, what we call Opsani platform, and that is for environments where the customer might have hundreds of applications and-or thousands of services, and we can plug into their deployment platform, something like a harness or Spinnaker or Jenkins or something like that, or we can plug into their their cloud Kubernetes orchestrator, and then we can actually discover the apps and optimize them. So we've got environments for both single apps and for many, many apps, and with the same platform. And yes, thanks for reminding me. We do have a promotion for for our AWS viewers. If you reference this presentation, and you look at the URL there which is opsani.com/awsstartupshowcase, can't forget that, you will, number one, get a free trial of our software. If you optimize one of your own applications, we're going to give you an Oculus set of goggles, the augmented reality goggles. And we have one other promotion for your viewers and for our joint customers here, and that is if you buy an annual license, you're going to get actually 15 months. So that's what we're putting on the table. It's actually a pretty good deal. The Oculus isn't contingent. That's a promotion. It's contingent on you actually optimizing one of your own services. So it's not a synthetic app. It's got to be one of your own apps, but that's what we've got on the table here, and I think it's a pretty good deal, and I hope your guys take us up on it. >> All right, great. Get Oculus Rift for optimizing one of your apps and 15 months for the price of 12. Patrick, thank you for coming on and sharing the future of AIOps with you guys. Great product, bridge to the future, solving a lot of problems. A lot of use cases there. Congratulations on your success. Thanks for coming on. >> Thank you so much. This has been excellent, and I really appreciate it. >> Hey, thanks for sharing. I'm John Furrier, your host with theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>>okay. >>Just about a year ago, governments around the world forced shutdowns of their respective economies. We've never seen anything like it. Central banks took immediate action and effective monetary policy like none we've ever seen before. They dropped interest rates to near zero, injected a huge amount of cash into the system, and they fueled this liquidity boom to support those individuals and businesses that were in greatest need. Banks were overwhelmed with the volume of paperwork, for instance, small business P, P P loans and other things. Home buying boomed as mortgage rates hit all time lows for several weeks in the spring, it was complete chaos, but the tech industry stepped up and accommodated work from home. Cloud infrastructure was spun up instantly as access to data centers was really restricted, and Saas companies became a fundamental staple of not only keeping the lights on but helping customers thrive in the face of a pandemic. Automation became a >>mandate >>as humans, they couldn't possibly keep up with the tidal wave of demand, a document overload that was hitting the system. Now, one of the companies that was there to help financial firms in particular, get through the knothole was Oculus, a company that focuses on intelligent automation to deploy the power of machines to allow humans to focus on what they do best. Hello, everyone. And welcome to this cube conversation. My name is Dave Volonte, and we're profiling the most interesting SAS startups that are reimagining how we work. And with me is Sam Bobbly, the co founder and CEO of Oculus. Sam, welcome to the Cube. First time. >>Hey, Dave. Thanks so much for having me excited to have the conversation. >>Yeah, me too. So, listen, I know you've told the story of a zillion times, but I want a community here. How and why did you start the company >>for sure. So when I was in college, I was having a conversation with my dad. Uh, he was telling me about a meeting he just had with his elder law attorney. And the other law attorney was complaining about having to review hundreds or thousands of pages of financial documents for every long term care Medicaid application. When you apply for Medicaid coverage to enter a nursing home, you're required to submit 60 months of financials along with your application. And traditionally the elder law attorney or a nursing home would review those documents literally page by page, line by line to find high value transactions, transfers and other financial trends. And when I heard about this, it just it didn't make sense to me. I said, You know why? In this day and age isn't there? Why isn't there a technology solution that can ingest the documents and spit out a digital report replacing the cumbersome manual page by page review? So it really just started as a research project, trying to learn more about optical character recognition, which is the technology of transforming images into text. And, you know, as we kind of kicked around different products in the market, we we realized that there was an opportunity to build a unique platform that could ingest documents of any format quality and produce perfectly accurate results. And that was the genesis behind what ultimately became Oculus. >>You were a young man at this time. How old were you at that time? >>I was 22 when we started >>so fearless. And, uh, now my friend Eddie Mitchell started a company about 20 years ago. We hacked together a >>Dell >>system and this camera. It was all about the modern operating room in the future, and he showed it to a doctor and and it was just a prototype, she said. How much? He said 10 grand. She wrote a check right there. You have a similar story? How did you see the company? >>So we we we do have a pretty similar experience. You know, Our our concept was we want to get perfect results the customer every time. So if a customer sends us a clean bank statement from Chase or a blurry cell phone image with someone's thumb in the picture from a community bank in Maine, and it's rotated sideways or upside down like we want to give consistent, perfectly active results every single time. And you know, our our view was to completely solve the business problem. So the very first version of the software that we built, we had a rudimentary machine process to extract 60 or 70% of the data, and then we had a little tool built on the back end, where literally, me, myself and some of our early employees would clean up the data output, make sure it's perfect and then return When we couldn't submit, we'd returned to the customer accurate data that could be used at the time for for a Medicaid decision. And what happened is, while we were in our beta period, customers fell in love with the product. They felt it was magical and really just superior from an accuracy standpoint to anything they had ever tested before. And And one of our beta testers said to us, uh, where do I submit credit card information? So at that time, I turned to my colleagues and I said, I think we're ready to I think we're ready. Start charging for this thing and and roll it out for prime time. >>When I was researching the company, I learned that you leveraged. At least some of the idea came from the capture, and I never knew this, But the capture that we all hate came from Google where they write, they had at one point you could maybe you still can. You can go online. You can read books and have to It's just scanned. You can't even read the stuff half the time. So they were putting the capture in front of us, quite brilliant to try to solve for those those those white spaces that they didn't know. So So how did you learn from that? Was there an A P I that you could plug into Google's data set, or did you do your own? What was that? How did that all work? >>The the concept of humans in the loop is super powerful, right? So when we first started, we recognize that OCR and machine data capture couldn't do the job completely. OCR, generally speaking, can process financial documents with roughly 80 to 85% accuracy plus or minus machines, particularly struggled with semi structured and unstructured documents where the format is unpredictable as well as lower quality images. So pretty early on, we recognized that we needed human intervention in the process in order to achieve perfect accuracy every single time, and also to create training data to constantly teach our machine learning models to get smarter and drive additional automation. So, as I mentioned, the very first version was myself and other employees verifying the data on our own. But as we started thinking about how to scale this up and, you know, take on millions and millions of documents, we needed to, uh, you know, learn how to better parallelized task and really build the system for for efficiency and for scanning. So we we we learned about the Google Books Initiative and their ability to leverage capture technology and a distributed workforce to verify pieces of information that their systems couldn't automatically read from books. And we took a lot of those learnings into building our human in the loop infrastructure. And, you know, a way to think about our our product is it's the marriage of machines and humans that makes us unique. As much of the heavy lifting as we can do with machines we do. But whatever we can't do automatically, we slice into smaller tasks and intelligently route those tasks to humans to perform verification. We then layer in algorithmic checks to make sure our humans did the review correctly. The customer gets perfect results, and that same perfect output is used in a feedback loop to train our machine learning models to get smarter and smarter, which dynamically improves the product on an ongoing basis. And, you know, the folks at Google were we're onto this pretty early with the capture technology, and we were following in their footsteps with our own unique take on it, but specifically applying it to financial documents. >>I mean on the Cube. We know a lot about this because we were looking at transcriptions of video all the time, and it just keeps getting better and better and better in our systems. Get smarter and smarter, smarter. So we're sort of closing that gap between what humans can can do and machines can't. And I would expect that you're seeing the same thing. I mean, you think there's always going to be kind of humans in the loop in terms of the quality or is that gap going to be, you know, six nines in the, you know, near near term. >>I think it's gonna take a while to get rid of all the edge cases. You know, you mentioned the PPB program like we've been on the back end processing P p P loans for some of the leading players, like Cross River Bank, blue Vine, Square Capital and others. And you know, what we've seen during the ppb process is just a a wide variety of different documents and inputs, Uh, and a lot of difficult to read documents that are, you know, very challenging to automate. So I think we will, you know, incrementally continue to automate more and more of the process. But the value of having humans plus machines is much more powerful than just having machines alone or just having humans alone. And as it relates to the end customer, our our goal is to do as much of the mundane work as possible to free our customer up to do the more cerebral analysis. So in a lending context and and for the record, you know, our our biggest market opportunity is in the limbic space. Despite the fact that we started with medicating attorneys, we quickly pivoted and realized that our technology was super valuable to to lenders to help them automate the underwriting process. And our our thesis is, if we can take out all of the necessary evils like document review and allow underwriters to focus on the actual analysis of financial health, it's a win win win and creates a really fantastic, complementary relationship between us and our customers. >>Yes, I want to ask you about the pivot to financial services. You said you started well, you have the inspiration from elder law because Jimmy McGill. Okay. Saul Goodman breaking bad. You got started. An elder law. But then you made the pivot to financial services. Really pretty early on. You had really good, great product market fit, but you kind of went for it. I get early twenties. You know, you didn't have a big family at the time. I didn't have a lot of a lot of risks. So you went for it, right? But talk about that pivot because a lot of companies wouldn't do that. They get comfortable and just, you know, stay where they're at. But you made that >>call. It was a big risk, for sure. I mean, look, the product was working. We launched the paid version of our product in 2016. Pretty quickly were onboarding dozens of accountants and attorneys, you know, doing Medicaid work. Um, in mid to late 2016, we got introduced to a large small business lender in New York City called strategic funding Source. They've since renamed them their company Capital as the current name, but we met with the CEO and the head of product and showed them a demo of the technology. And they said, You know, quote unquote, we've been looking for this for years. We've been looking for something exactly like this for years, and we said back to them about how many pages of financial documents to review every single month. They pointed out to a bullpen of dozens of people sitting there tearing through bank statements, page by page, line by line. And they said, You know, it's hundreds of thousands. My eyes almost fell out of my head. I couldn't believe the volume, and it was much bigger than what the, you know, single accountants or attorneys were doing. Uh, so we made the strategic decision to pivot at that time and focus on FINTECH. Lenders continue to tailor the product and build additional features for the fintech lending space. And and, you know, lending in general had the perfect mix of short sale cycle and high average customer value that allowed a company like ours to scale and ramp our revenue quite quite quickly. Um, and then the other thing that happened is kind of as we were getting deeper and deeper into the space, the fintech space as a whole started growing massive. So we we kind of had the perfect storm of product market fit, plus the market growing that allowed us to really ramp significantly grow revenue. And, uh, you know, despite the fact that it was the risk it was, it was totally right. Decision to to focus the business on financial services >>much bigger Tam. And you could subjectively measure it by the size of the stack of papers. Um, how how does this relate to our p A. As you know, the R p. A hot space. You probably get this question a lot, and it sounds like there are some similarities with software bots. What's the similarity? What's the difference? >>Good question. It's It's totally a synergistic offering, right? So rrp a companies like UI path and automation anywhere they typically provide a horizontal toolkit to allow you know, banks and lenders to automate much of the mundane work like, for example, collecting information from emails or doing onboarding for a new employee. Or, you know, different types of tasks that a manual worker would have done but could be automated with relatively simple code. Um, what happens in our p a. Workflows is they get hung up on tasks that can't be completely automated. So, for example, a robot might be, uh, trying to complete an intend lending flow. But when a bank statement is submitted as part of that flow, the robot can't parse it. So what they do instead, is they routed to an underwriter who performs a manual analysis, keys information into a back office system that the bank is using and that information then gets handed back to a robot and continues the automation flow. What we do is we plug the gaps that used to be manual so a robot can pass US documents like bank statements or pay stubs or tax stops. We run our unique human in the loop process. We return structure Jason output directly to a robot, and it continues into the, you know, to the next step of the flow. And, you know, in in summary, the combination of robotic process automation and human in the loop, which is what we're doing, creates true and and automated flows rather than R P. A mite by itself might get you 80% of the way there. >>So do you have, like, software integrations or partnerships with those companies. How are you integrating with them? >>We do. We have software integrations with both UI path and automation anywhere in our core fintech lending business. R P A isn't as prevalent, but we are now expanding beyond fintech lenders into mortgage lending and traditional banks. And we're also expanding use cases, right? Like historically small business lending was the core of our business. More recently, we've moved into consumer auto mortgage, additional asset classes. And as we've gotten deeper with financial institutions, we've seen even more opportunity to partner and coexist with broader r p a player's >>Yeah, great. I mean, I was just staring at their s one. I guess it was came up Monday. Half over half a billion dollars in a are are they're actually cash flow positive as you iPad. So we're going to see we're going to see them hit the public market shortly. Um, hang on, folks. Uh, now it's okay. So this is you sell a sas, right? A SAS service. Even though there's that human in the loop, that's all part of the service. How do you How do you price? >>So usage based model. So we we kind of try to model are themselves nerve. A massive company is super powerful. We apply that same concept document processing, so it's a usage based model. Customers will pay us either per application per document or per page, and if they want to subscribe for, you know, one document per month or millions of documents per month, it's up to them. And we're able to flex up and flex down to meet the supply and demand. Um and that that concept that scalability and flexibility was particularly powerful in the P P P program, right? P P. P. Was kind of a very unique situation in the sense that lenders weren't able to predict the amount of loans they needed to process in normal lending. A small business lender can tell you Hey, we expect to get roughly 10,000 applications in the month of April with P P p. They could tell us, Hey, we're going to send out 200,000 marketing emails and we expect 30% of people might reply, but we really don't have any idea, right? So what happened is the big banks ended up hiring without exaggeration. Thousands of temporary employees to come in and review documents and kind of scrambled to do this in a work from home setting during the pandemic. Whereas Cross River, they took a technology first approach. They implemented our A P I in the back end, and it enabled them to instantly scale up their resources. And the result of that is Cross River ended up becoming a top three pp, a top three p p. P lender nationally, outperforming many of the big banks with a super efficient and fast document review process. Because we were able to help them on the back end with the automation. >>That's awesome. I love the pricing model you mentioned. You mentioned Amazon. Is that the cloud you use or >>we do Our Our product is hosted in AWS and we, you know, take a lot of learnings from them from a business model and and positioning point of view. >>Yeah, and and I'm thrilled to hear you say I mean, I think a lot of forward thinking startups are doing the consumption model. I mean, you certainly see that with companies like snowflake and data dog and stripe. I mean, I think that that SAS model of okay, we're gonna lock you into a one year, two year, three year term. Sorry if if you get acquired, you're stuck with some, you know, stranded licenses. That's your problem. I think that, you know, you really thought that out. Well, um, you mentioned you're sort of expanding your your your total available market now, looking at at new markets, what are some of the big trends that you want to ride over the coming decade as you scale your company? >>The biggest one for us is mortgage automation. You know, the kind of the one of fintech small business and consumer loans were optimized, and we went from a place where, uh, you know, you would deal with a loan officer and have an in person transaction to modern day. You can get a loan from small business. If you're a small business, you can get a loan from PayPal online effectively instantly. If you're a consumer, you can get a loan from Sofia or lending club super smooth digital experience and really revolutionized the way that you know, the market thinks about financial products. I think the next wave of that is mortgage, and that's what we're focused on. Uh, you know, mortgage is a massive market in the sense of thousands of lenders. The average application contains a couple 100 pages worth of financial documents, and the pain points of the back end of the mortgage process were really accentuated. During covid, right refi Valium went way up and mortgage lenders were forced to process that volume in a work from home setting. So what happened is mortgage lenders were struggling with the concept of sending personally identifiable financial information to underwriters who aren't working in an office there, working at home and, you know, kids running around a million things going on. And it's just more difficult to manage than ever before. Um, and you know, as as the the volume kind of normalized debate and mortgage lenders thought about their own future of automation, I think there was just clear recognition across the board that these these mortgage lenders needed to learn from some of the fintech and really focus on automating the back office peace and you know, to your point earlier about business model, what we think about is translating cost that used to be a fixed cost and turning them into a variable costs So now, instead of worrying about having to match supply and demand and hire or fire people, depending on the volume that's coming in on any given month, a mortgage lender can instantly flex up, reflects down and have a super fast, accurate process to handle the darks. Um, and you know, we're seeing just awesome traction in the market with that with the mortgage space and we're excited to push >>forward there. That's great. Thank you. I mean you, Sam. You describe the chaos that work from home. The financial industry is very overly officious. If you know it's very security conscious. How do you handle security? Maybe you could comment on that. How you think about that? >>Sure. I mean, we we take a compliance first approach. We built the product from the ground up with compliance in mind, knowing that we were selling into financial institutions. We have a sock to type one and type two certification, which is, you know, an industry standard. All of our our verification happens with the Oculus employees. So there's no third parties involved in our process whatsoever. Um and then lastly, But perhaps most importantly, our product in and of itself is innately, um, you know, innately drives compliance. So every data point that we process from a financial document, we not only return the data, we return an exact bounding box coordinates of where that data field appeared on the original source so that that audit trail lives with the loan throughout its life cycle. What we saw prior to Oculus is a mortgage would go through an underwriting process. They make a decision, and then that loan might be sold downstream and a diligence firm as to come in. And they don't have the resources to review all the loans. So they review 15% of the loan tape and then they say, you know, they give a rating and what we do is we proactively tackle that by creating a a perfect audit trail upon origination that can live with the loan throughout its life cycle and that that process and that traceability has been super valuable to our mortgage and banking partners. >>So you can ensure the providence there. So let me end just by talking about the company a little bit. So you incubated you nailed the product market fit the and you pivoted and re nailed the product market fit. And like a lot of companies in your position, I would imagine you saw your growth come from just having a great product. You know, initially, word gets around, but then you got a scale. Uh, maybe you could talk a little bit about how how you did that. How you're doing that. You know where your hiring how you're hiring, what your philosophy is on on scaling. >>Sure. Look, I think the key for us is just surrounding ourselves with the right people. You know, the right mentors, advisors and investors to help us really take the business to the next level. Uh, you know, we had no pride of authorship. We're building this and recognize that there are a lot of people out there who have been there, done that and can really guide us and show us the way. I know you had interviewed Marc Roberge on on the show previously. Formerly the C r. O of hubspot. Mark was someone that we you know, we we read his book and had taken sales advice from him from an early age. And over the over time, we got him a little bit more familiar with the company. And and ultimately, Mark and his partner, J Po at Stage two Capital ended up investing in Oculus and really helping us understand how to build the right go to market engine. Um, as the company got bigger, we took on investments from really reputable firms in the financial services space. So our largest investors are okay, H C F T fintech collective and and QED investors. Uh, you know, QED was was founded by Nigel Morris, who is the co founder of Capital One. They backed Sophia and Prosper and a lot of big fintech lenders and, you know, bringing the collective expertise from the fintech sector as well as you know, from a sales and go to market strategy. Point of view created the right mix of ingredients for us to to really ramp up significantly. Uh, we had an awesome run over the years. We were pretty recently recognized by magazine as the number one fastest growing fintech company. And, you know, as the momentum is increased and the market conditions have been very favorable to us, we we just want to double down and expand. Mortgage is the biggest area of opportunity for us. And what we're seeking from a hiring perspective is, you know, go to market sales account executive type resources on the mortgage side as well as you know, deeper products expertise both on the mortgage side as well as with machine learning our product. Because we have the human in the loop piece, we create massive amounts of training data on a daily basis. So it's a, I think, a really exciting place for cutting edge machine learning developers to come and and innovate. >>What can you share with our audience about, you know, your company, any metrics and whatever you're comfortable with, how much money you've raised on my head count? If you want to get some companies comfortable giving a r r others on. But what what do you What can you share with us? >>Sure. Um, you know, we we've raised about 50 million in venture capital. We have grown from one to north of 20 million in revenue in the in the last three years. So particularly since you know, 2017, 2018 is what we really started to see. The growth take off, uh, company size. We have about 800 to 900 employees globally. Now we have about 200 corporate employees who perform the, you know, the the day to day functions of Oculus. And then we have a long tail of about 600 or so verifiers who perform data verification and quality control work again, Speaking to the human in the loop piece of the bottle. Uh, we're, you know, we're focused on expanding beyond the fintech customer base, where we serve customers like plaid PayPal lending club so fi square, etcetera into the mortgage space and ultimately into the traditional banking space where you know, the problems, frankly, are extremely similar. Just on a much larger scale. >>San Bobbly. Congratulations on all the success. You You've got a great road ahead. I really appreciate you coming on the Cube, >>Dave. Thanks so much. It's been a great chat. Look forward to keeping in touch. >>Alright, Did our pleasure. Thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Volonte for the Cube. We'll see you next time

>> Live from San Francisco, it's theCUBE! Covering IBM Think 2019, brought to you by IBM. >> Welcome back to intermittently sunny San Francisco, this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. We're here at day four at IBM Think. My name is Dave Vellante. I am here with Stu Miniman. John Furrier is also here. Wall to wall coverage Stu. The second Think, first big show really of the year at Moscone. The new Moscone, Armando Ortiz is here. He is the vice president and partner from Mobile & Extended Reality Leader at IBM iX. An interesting part of IBM that you may not know about. Armando, welcome to theCUBE, thanks for coming on. >> Thanks for having me. >> So tell us a little bit about iX. >> So IBM iX is a part of IBM services. We focus on user experiences, whether it's a consumer experience or an employee experience. And the we look at user experience it really kind of sticks together and allow you to unlock the value of all the technology investments that companies are making. >> So, you guys are not making headsets, or are you? >> No we don't make hardware, we just put hardware to work. >> So talk a little bit about the sort of state of whether its augmented reality or extended reality. Lay out the terminology for us if you would. >> Sure, sure. As part of the role I have I lead our mobile practice as well as the extended reality practice and this kind of all related together. We use the term extended reality to kind of encompass all of the different technologies along that spectrum from augmented reality to mixed reality to virtual reality. Of course there are a lot of technologies whether it's the glasses on your face like the wearables or it's in your hand as a lot of mobile platforms today like Apple's ARKit and Google's ARCore allow you to have AR experienced within your mobile apps. >> Yeah, I wonder if you can expand a little bit on that? We're all ready for the role out of 5G and that's going, holds the promise at least for a lot more band width and a lot more applications and that's one of the lynch pins we understand kind of make your world more of a reality. When do we see that role out? What devices are going to happen? You got a preview of the next iPhone for us? >> I certainly don't have a preview of the next iPhone, even though I do lead the Apple partnership for us in North America, the Apple IBM partnership. When you look at 5G, obviously some of the use cases for extended reality in enterprise are around field services and 5G will have an amazing impact on the ability. Not only because of the band width but also the low latency that you have for 5G. So we're excited to see that role out in the different markets around the world and you know the pilots and things that are starting this year. There are going to be a lot of great devices and I think for handsets all the way to the wearables. It'll really allow us to put more use cases on these devices. >> Can you walk us through some of those use cases? Any specific customer examples you have that may make our audience understand a little bit more what's really available today. Sure, I mean in the XR space or in the extended reality space there's a lot that we learned through what we've done in mobile for years. I mean, even our Apple partnership for the past five years and things we've done across the 16 industries we work on. But the initial sort of wave one use cases that we're really seeing today kind of follow along these categories of work related use cases that are like in field services, training related use cases that go all the way from virtual reality immersive training like teaching someone how to do something in a dangerous situation where you want to simulate that. All the way to on the job sort of training and step-by-step guidance that you can get with AR. Step one attach the cable here. Step two, check this over here. Those kind of use cases and then into use cases related to shopping and retail. If you look at what augmented reality is going to do for shopping and retail allow people to assess sort of fit and purpose of something they want to buy. Does it fit in my home? Does it fit in my life? And then also even in the stores as people in retail sort of navigate a store they can use AR to help understand. Add all that metadata to the in store experience that we're gotten used to in our online experiences. And the last broad category we sort of call it share ideas or sharing of ideas, which kind of expands the game from collaboration to even having AR brochures and augmented realty tools to help people understand a product or a service that you're offering. Imagine that we can just kind of expand a piece of equipment here on the table, walk through it and help understand how that piece of equipment is going to help your business. >> You're giving me flashbacks. I remember IBM had a huge initiative in like Second Life and it was like come build an island and we're going to do recruiting and things like that. So, tell us why this generation is, going to be better for business and not have everyone put some money in and have it stolen by you know. >> Not as goofy. >> It's funny you should ask that, the Second Life topic actually came up with someone I was speaking to yesterday. It's come up before. I think there is a significant difference between what Second Life was trying to be and what extended reality is going to be and it already is. I mean when you look at extended reality today, I think one important thing to think about this is not future tech, this is not some sort of dream of sort of Ready Player One type of situation. But more, it's looking at real enterprise use cases that are already driving a value; time savings on inspections, productivity enhancements for people assembling, consistency and increase safety. All the key performance indicators and value drivers we have for mobile. So there's a real path to business value and the uses are much clearer than it might have been in the days of Second Life. >> Less mistakes, less rework. Armando, what kind of infrastructure would a consumer need? You gave the example of retail for instance, what kind of infrastructure would I need? Am I just, is it just my mobile home? Am I going to wear headsets, what does that look like? >> So when we talk about extended reality, we tend to keep one foot in today and one foot in the future cause its changing so fast. When you talk about retail there is a sale associate side of things that might be helping you decide an automotive. Maybe you're looking at configuring a car right in front of you or in a retail store maybe you're looking to look at a piece of furniture or something that's not on the show room floor. Now those experiences can start today with tablets and iPhones and other devices. But we see also as well devices that people be wearing wearables that are available today and that trend moving that glass kind of from your hand to your face is going to be something that is really going to be accelerated. >> So, this is maybe how a piece of clothing will fit or what a couch might look like in a particular room, is that right? >> Yeah. >> And you would envision that people will purchase this infrastructure for a variety of uses. Not only to see how things look but maybe there's gaming. So it's a multi-use kind of environment or not necessarily? Is it more specialized to use it? >> No absolutely, it's important, it's a good thing that you brought up sort of gaming as well. Because, obviously we all know that gaming has been kind of at the fore front for virtual reality but when you look at gaming and entertainment those are also going to include many use cases. When we look at the enterprise side we're kind of focused on those other wave one use cases. But I also expect in the sort of share ideas category I spoke of marketing and sales activities will also include AR experienced to help people understand the product or service that you're positioning. >> What's the state of adoption? We always joke about google glass. Remember the movie The Jerk with the Opti-Grab and the guy was cross-eyed? So that didn't take off but what's the state of hardware and hardware adoption today? >> So I think what's unique about this technology and what's happening now, the technology we already all have in our hands on our mobile phones is already there and that's where you're going to see it happen first. I think the numbers by next year are like 3.4 billion phones will have an AR capability so the technology is already with us. The next sort of technology set that we're talking about is getting to the wearables and of course we see things today in the VR space that's much more available in the consumer side, things like the oculus go. In the enterprise space you also have headsets from many manufacturers that maybe grew up doing things in the military that are now more commercially available. Things like someone trying to repair something that needs to be hand free. We're seeing those technologies readily available in the enterprise. >> Tell about how AI fits into this new world? >> That's a great question. If you think about it its really kind of a really great combination. You take XR, extended reality, so whether its AR or VR and you add AI to it you can kind of give AI the ability to kind of enter the 3D space. So as you think about AI solutions that we had in the mobile world where you might be using AI to solve a problem, diagnose a problem, visual diagnostics, acoustic detection AI can kind of give sort of super powers to an employee. At the same time we see that the experiences that we have in the extended reality space get really enhanced because you now have the ability to democratize expertize with AI. You take all of the expertize of your organization and that one technician whose only been there for 10 days now has the power of your entire collective knowledge. >> What about privacy? Anytime you hear some of these and I think about you can have wearables out there, there is concern about you know with facial recognition is going to be everywhere my privacy is going to be invaded. What's IBM positioning? Where does that fit in this whole environment? >> Of course we take privacy very seriously. When we talk about our AI and Watson you know your data is your data. If you look at some of the things, I mean, you'll make decisions, enterprises will make decisions on the same way they do with mobile devices. Is it okay to have a camera in this environment? And if I do have a camera in this environment, what's my cloud strategy and where am I going to host this data to make sure that I have not just privacy but also IP concerns, considered? All of the same things we've learned in the mobile world are going to apply to this and it'll get even a little more important as you think of the different types of sensors that are required to make these experiences happen. >> I wonder if you could help us understand about the pre-requisites to do things like technician actually trouble shooting a problem. Many of us have seen, we put on the glasses you walk around a show floor and you look at a new system or something and its really very cool. You can look inside and inspect the different layers. What has to be done, I'm inferring from what you're saying that a technician would be able to inspect live, real time a device and identify problems on that device. So what has be done? It has to be instrumented? It has to have cameras installed? What does the infrastructure build out look like? >> Sure, when you look at. Lets take the technician scenario for a moment and unpack that. When you look at that there are a couple of things that are already happening like a lot of major pieces of equipment are instrumented. So you have the internet of things data, sort of the data streams coming off of that. How do you make that available to that technician in the moment, sort of the vital signs of that piece of equipment that you might be operating on? So, having all that information like temperature and all the things from an IOT perspective, that's one angle of it. The other side of it really is when you think of failure of equipment usually at some point there's a situation that technician may not have encountered before but maybe someone else has. Maybe you've already had a bunch of closed tickets on that three years ago. So having all that information available and using cognitive processing to kind of navigate that unstructured data, that will let you navigate that. Voice will be part of this interface as well. I think voice is an important part because you're going to be hands free and you're going to be having a dialogue with Watson, let's say to help diagnose a problem. >> How about healthcare? It's not something we've really talked about a lot. Just in terms of applications, whether its for the operating room of the future, remote guidance from doctor, training. Do you see those kind of use cases emerging? >> Yeah absolutely, all the way from training through execution of surgery and other things. This is where the 5G topic really comes into play because low latency is really required if you're talking about surgery and things like that. >> Give me a few minutes. >> You get that round trip of that signal going back and forth. I think when you think about the VR side of things for training is immensely powerful. The AR side for during execution of procedures will also be powerful as well and it comes back to that general theme od democratizing expertize. One expert that's physically on this part of the world can serve many people that need their services around the world. >> It sounds like there are a lot of uncertainties in terms of how this is going to evolve. First of all od the a fair statement? Given that, not withstanding that can you give us a sense of expectations for how it will evolve and the adoption levels that you expect over the next two to five years. >> Five years is a long horizon for this technology. >> Too long, too long perhaps so what's more fair, 18 months? >> Lets talk more immediate. I think when you look at, there may be some uncertainty in terms of which use cases will drive the most value but there are already many use cases that companies are probably sharing information out. Like some companies, especially inspection use cases, you know there is a company that published 96% savings on time because really you are using AR to document. Okay inspect this point, this point, this point, this point. Assembly use cases, diagnostics with AI and AR are working together. All of these are already happening, so what I think is going to happen is enterprises are going to be able to more and more easily justify the spend to make these investments because the RY is rapid. Just like the RY in mobile was rapid for enterprise, the RY in XR will be extremely rapid. >> Armando for people who didn't come to IBM Think, give them a little taste of what they missed from an iX stand point. Some of the conversations that you've been having. >> Yeah, when we look at, I mean iX across the IBM Think we've had a lot of conversations and a lot of sessions around how experience is really driving the business value and also around marketing technologies and marketing services and all of the things that relate to experience on the consumer side and the employee side. We're really enjoyed some great show casing of our client stories and the works we've done. Everything from mobile to commerce to marketing platforms to sales floors across everything we do in the IBM services part that we're in. >> How long has this been around? >> IBM iX? >> Yeah. >> IBM iX has been a part of IBM originally since the 96 Olympics in Atlanta. I've been with IBM about 25 years and this space is kind of like really evolved in terms of the position of user experience and design. IBM has become really a design focused company and you look at enterprise design thinking in everything we do so this is really a part of our business that's really become focal point as companies start thinking more about design. >> Wow, it's been a long time but it's certainly not mature but it's a revenue generating business obviously. >> Yeah and a very high growth part of the company. >> Awesome, well Armando thanks so much for sharing this part of IBM that's not well known. Really exciting futures and I really appreciate you coming on theCUBE. >> Thank you very much, I appreciate being here. >> Alright, keep it right there everyone. Stu and I will be back. Day four, IBM Think, we're at Moscone. Stop by, we're at Moscone North. I'm Dave Vellante, Stu Miniman and John Furrier is here. We'll be right back, you're watching theCUBE. (techno music)

why from Los Angeles it's the cube covering III 2018 what do you buy silicon angled media hey welcome back everybody Jeff Rick here with the keyword III and LA Convention Center 68,000 people this is ooh it's our first time here we're really excited to be here but the guy to my left has been here for a number of years and we're excited to have monies John EEMA he is the global head of gaming creator for Facebook Tom great to see you great great to be here thanks so first off just kind of impressions of the show 68,000 people that's been awesome and also I don't know if you checked out all the different like booths and stuff around here but it's just been nuts and stuff and I'm really proud about booth that we have behind us was the gaming booth that we've created so inside this booth we got Instagram which is behind me as well as oculus for VR then we've got a stage where it has a crater you can go on there and livestream to Facebook which is cool right so I know Facebook's been pushing a lot of live streaming just coming for general events and different different things but I haven't heard so much about it within the focus of gaming and that's really your yeah yeah yeah so in January we announced the gaming creator pilot program okay just basically our way of sending a signal to the industry that we're gonna invest in games right so we've done two things is one from the product side we built this new thing we call the gaming destination to where you as a viewer or a fan can go there and consume content right to go to FB Gigi calm you can see like you're famous streamer as well as like whether it's like vodka and that type of thing on the second side of the is making it easier for creators to make a living on Facebook so we've been building monetization products as well it's really just working hand-in-hand on them to figure out what are the best products that they need to succeed on our platform right so we've got some of the top streamers like Stone Mountain in darkness and list goes on and on and on and this is globally - so right now Facebook sits in a pretty unique position because obviously you have to base the basic platform which is giant I don't know what the current publisher amount of people 2.2 billion users how many 2.2 billion Wow like a third of the way of the entire world a little bit more basically then also you have a lot of other brands I know everybody thinks of oculus and Facebook is obviously really play into the VR space yeah you've got Instagram you've got a bunch of other prints not just oculus so you're able to leverage it yeah so at Facebook we give just like you're saying we've got oculus for VR we've got Instagram we also have whatsapp which is a communication app that's right we have messenger as well so we've got like a family of sweet apps which is cool and we know just from like a creative perspective that they probably use maybe one or all right so how do we leverage that to make it easier for them to do the things that they love to do right right and how does how do those map back into gaming is it different type of distribution is a different type of way to contact people when you're writing people how do you integrate all these different platforms into kind of a single experience from the streaming person yeah so if you talk about like with oculus right you can play games on there you can also stream for that which is cool we know gamers on Instagram like to post you know gaming content whether it's like pictures of that type of thing so yeah that concert there and then like you know if you're looking like messenger on whatsapp you know if you're a gamer you probably use that to communicate with your friends hey let's play overwatch let's play fortnight or that type of thing same right so you guys obviously Facebook is big into date everybody knows that you guys use day the big data's taken over the whole world but it's a pretty interesting tool that you can use to change it the experience yeah help the experience so how are you using you know kind of data and big bandwidth and big store big compute to deliver a better gaming experience to the fans yeah so we're very strategic with our approach we want to make sure that it's right for the creators you know as we know you know how we position that is just basically working hand and hand and hand with devs as well as traders really figure out one of the best ways that we can make them bigger on our platform we know from our creator standpoint the biggest thing that they complain about is hey I want to grow right like I've been streaming for X amount of years I'm creating content how do I grow the cool thing with Facebook as you know when you consume content is usually through news feed right or if one of your friends shares that content so we've seen a lot of creators come on board and have really early sick sick sick success with that in terms of like sharing content or asking their you know they're fans when they're on the stream like hey you know I'm live right now share this content with your friends right then they get an exposure right which helps them grow so there's all these different ways that we can help them we're still learning right well you know we just launched in January but we got a long way to go but we're seeing a lot of trajectories it's just going up which is great so that's a big platform so yeah so that's it kind of what are some of your priorities if we come back a year from now and talk what are some of your priorities for the next 12 months to help Jesus thing yeah so right now you know we've rolled out stars which is like one form of monetization which is essentially like Tippi oK we've also got subscriptions so you can subscribe to a creator so we're rolling that out soon like in the Alpha stages right now you know you'll see the program containing to roll out more globally as well and then with FB GGG our gaming destinations only gonna get you to start seeing more content in and there as well right you also see us working with Antrim and Pape and I'm sorry an arc oculus more as well so you know we just got a lot of things that were up to but it's exciting keep you busy very much all right all right we'll we'll keep an eye on it and look forward to catching up a year from today awesome okay thank you all right he's drawing on Jeff you're watching the queue from e3 in Los Angeles thanks for watching thanks [Music]

>> [Announcer] Live from Los Angeles, it's The Cube, covering E3 2018. Brought to you by Silicon Angle Media. >> Hey, welcome back here, we're ready, Jeff Frick here with the Cube. We're at the Los Angeles Convention Center at E3, it's amazing. It's like 68,000 people. They're in every single hall, they're out in the streets, they're in the hotels, they're at LA Live, they're all over the place, for really the biggest gaming conference I think in the world, and we're excited to have our next guest, he's Dana Jan, he's a design director for Ready at Dawn, and you just introduced a new game, right? Great to see ya. >> Thank you very much for having me. Yes, that's true. We just announced Echo Combat last year in October, and today we're showing off on the floor. >> Private beta still or are you going to public beta you said soon? >> Yeah, we just had a closed beta actually. We're moving into open beta, and that's gonna be June 21st. >> Right, pretty amazing though, you guys have not been around that long, and this is already your third game. >> Well, the studio's been around for a while, so we've been making games for a long time. This is actually kind of a new foray for us though going into VR. We released a game called Lone Echo last year, and Echo Arena was a multi-player mode that we also launched simultaneously with Lone Echo, so yeah, this game is new and fresh, but it's, we've been developing VR now for a little over two years. >> Right, so from a design perspective in the VR space, what is some of the special considerations you have to be thinking about, either challenges and opportunities? >> Yeah, I mean some of the challenges are obviously, performance is a big deal for us. The game has to run at 90 frames per second on Oculus per eye, so that's rendering essentially like two different-- >> [Jeff] 90 frames per eye? >> Yeah, it's really fast. You have to render 90 frames per second, otherwise it gets really uncomfortable for the user, so we optimize a lot of our experiences. And it's even like, some of the ideas that we have, we have to figure out how to make them viable at that frame rate. And we have a lot of high-fidelity body movement going on in Lone Echo, Echo Arena, and now Echo Combat. We do a lot of IK work to kind of represent a full body avatar that honors essentially head, hands, and because our game takes place in zero G, we have this floating body that has to convincingly flow behind you wherever you go. >> [Jeff] Right >> Yeah, it's actually, it's a pretty big challenge for us as both designers, developers, and just on a technical standpoint to get all that to kind of harmoniously work together. >> Right, so other thing, just in terms of the game play inside VR, 'cause the other thing is right, you don't necessarily control which direction they're looking. I mean, how do you kind of direct the player to where you want them to look, and where you want them to participate? >> That's a great question. Actually, so part of the beauty of VR, is we try to do some of that like you would for a conventional game, trying to use lighting, trying to basically design environments with things, cues, details that would maybe help people along, but ultimately you're as free as you are, just like right now you and I, we can look all over the place. >> [Jeff] Right. >> We don't really want to restrict that. Part of the beauty of VR is that ultimate freedom. If you wanna of kind of go, look in that little corner underneath you for the whole game, you really can, and we try to as much as possible make that something that's beneficial too. We try to code every little bit of our world with something that's interesting to find, discover, so. >> Right, right. >> Yeah, it's freedom of movement, freedom of wherever you wanna be, whatever you wanna do. >> Right, so we're doing this as part of the Western Digital data makes possible program, and really as we get closer and closer to infinite store, infinite compute, infinite networking, you just said you've got designs, and you've got ideas that even today you can't necessarily put into place. So as you look forward for the opportunities when all these things are basically gonna be close to infinite, at close to zero cost, what are some of the things that excite you? Where do you see kind of using that power to do a better job, or different job in your storytelling? >> Yeah, I mean the horsepower that you need to run these kind of games is actually pretty staggering. We compute a lot of stuff on the GPUs, the CPUs, we have a lot of physics-oriented things in the game because VR is really big into like letting you kind of touch everything, and manipulate stuff, and it doesn't feel like you're really somewhere, you don't feel present unless you can actually interact with the environments. And for that we have to basically create tons, and tons, and tons of objects, we have physics constraints and things that are costly for the computation cycles. And then there's like memory issues. We have streaming that we have to kind of get better at. These worlds are very large, and so to store the things that you're gonna see and do, takes a lot of actual hard drive space, and the speed at which we can load and unload things, is a critical factor in terms of unlocking the freedom of your experience. >> Right, so when you get more horsepower, a new processor comes out, and you get more memory, whatever, I mean do you already have stuff keyed up where you want to use that? Is it more a realistic nature of the graphics, is it speed, I mean what are some of the priorities that you would immediately apply if you had some more horsepower tomorrow? >> Yeah, certainly I mean there are things that we absolutely know about like there's texture resolution, there's like I said, there's physics objects, there are just things that we end up going, that's too costly to do, we're gonna have to maybe stop doing that or cut back on it, or scope back. We do look at creating settings and things where our users who actually have more high-end machines, to actually turn that stuff back on, but I think every time we kind of go into another design kind of exercise and sort of looking at what do we want to do in VR, I think we're surprised at what does it take to actually accomplish it. And so I'm not sure I know right now fully what we're gonna start getting into and what kind of hardware that might require, but every day's just a different challenge, and that's part of the excitement of working in VR. >> Right, right and I was gonna say and also obviously the trade-offs. I mean you could go bananas on the texture, but at some point is it the law of diminishing returns in terms of the storytelling, in terms of the experience 'cause you can't optimize across all the potential variables. >> Yeah, no, you have to pick and choose, and you're right, like basically we look at what are our goals, what are we trying to get out of this experience, what do we want the user to really get out of it? And then we have to compromise. We have to make some of those smart choices. But I do think at some point, we'll have to make less compromises as the technology gets better, and certainly things like resolution, if the headsets have higher resolution then it makes sense to put more resolution into the textures because now you can actually see it, and so we kind of hit that synergy where both of those are unlocked, it'll never be infinite obviously, but to where they're more in sync with each other, maybe we can make that compromise now, but maybe in the future we won't. >> Yeah, the headset's a whole 'nother bucket of technology. >> It is yeah. >> That you guys have to account. >> But they're awesome I mean, yeah we're doing, I think it's really impressive to me how far we've come with the headset technology. And I think in the next few years, we're just gonna see even crazier advances. So I'm really excited about that. >> Not just slap on the phone in the cardboard box, like a couple years ago. Here's your VR box. >> I know, right? That's not that long ago if you think about it really. >> All right, Dana, well give a shout out, what's the date for the public beta so people know where to go and how to get involved. >> Yeah, our open beta's gonna be starting June 21st. They can sign up on oculus.com. And yeah, we're looking forward to people getting in there and seeing what their impressions are, and taking the feedback. >> All right, well, Dana, thanks for taking a few minutes and stopping by. >> Great, thank you very much. >> All right, he's Dana, and I'm Jeff. You're watching The Cube from E3 at the LA Convention Center. Thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Announcer: Live from the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, it's The Cube, covering DevNet Create 2018. Brought to you by Cisco. >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. We're here live with The Cube in Mountain View, California for exclusive coverage of Cisco DevNet Create. I'm John Furrier with my co-host today, Lauren Cooney. Our next guest is Mandy Whaley, who's the Director of Developer Experience at Cisco DevNet, been on multiple times. She's also the key person here in the DevNet community on the Cisco side, putting all of this together with Susie Wee and the team. Great to have you back. >> Thank you! >> You look fabulous. >> Really excited to be here. >> Great job on the stage today. I want to just quickly get the news out there. You've got some new things going on here at this event that's new, but building on top of what you guys did at the inaugural event. >> Yes, yes! So one of the new things that we added this year is called Camp Create, and the idea with it was, we wanted to have a builder track for our people that wanted to come and actually code the whole time that they were here. We put together a specific sort of experience for them. And it's not a hackathon, but it has hackathon elements. We started with six use cases that we outlined originally, gave them all the technology here on site, so they're actually using location services from the wireless network here. We've got collaboration equipment, we've got things from the Google partnership we brought in. And these six teams all picked a use case, and they're building furiously, and they're going to present their final demos tomorrow. One of the teams is even doing like an Oculus Rift kind of thing that'll be cool. >> That's great, so how much time do these folks have? >> So, they started this morning at 8, and they're finishing tomorrow at 3. >> So, will they stay up all night? >> They, many of them, are thinking to stay up all night. >> That's awesome. >> So let's just get this, the numbers, so Camp Create is six teams of five people, over six use cases? >> Six different use cases, >> Over two days. >> Two days, that's right. >> So they have to pick a use case, or they have to do all six? >> They are each picking, each team picks a use case. >> One use case. And codes away as a team. >> Yes. And they can, there is parameters in the use case, but there's also a lot of room for creativity to add to it. So we're interested to see how those come together. And we started, this is our first year. We had a waiting list of people who were wanting to get into Camp Create. So we plan to grow it next year, and we thought maybe have 12 teams on the six use cases, and then have the two teams face off on who has the best solution, so that could be fun. >> Camp Create madness. You got to do a qualifying round. >> Oh, yeah, a whole, yeah. >> You know, down the road, you'll have brackets. >> John's going to be a judge. >> That'd be great! >> I want to work with you on this, I love the idea. Camp Create, check it out. Congrats, I love the formula. >> Thank you. >> It creates competitiveness with collaboration, makes it fun, but that's part of your program here, fun, as well. >> That's right. We definitely want to have fun. So we wanted this DevNet Create to be a lot about community connections that form, and you generally have an easier time doing that when you're having fun. So a lot of hands on, a lot of time for community members to connect. >> Oh yeah, the Tech Talks are back, right? >> The Tech Talks are back. >> What's the topics this week in Tech Talks? >> So, we've got topics ranging from DevOps practices and patterns to IoT and blockchain and we have a lot even around developer experience and API experience, which I'm super excited about. And then we have all the hands-on workshops, where you can actually go and sit and code and get hands-on with many open source projects, with different platforms from our partners, all kinds of stuff. >> That's great. Yeah, there's also a big emphasis on the microservices and Kubernetes because of the Google partnership that we brought in this year. >> Is that weaved in to Istio stuff? >> Yes. >> Has that weaved in, and where has that kind of made its way into the workshops, mini-hacks and things you got going on? >> It's in pretty much all of them, so one of the things we've been excited about is our Istio sandbox. So our DevNet sandbox, where developers can try out all kinds of different platforms, we have an Istio one that's, it's set up and it has some rails on it, some use cases, so it's easy for people who, maybe, aren't familiar with Istio to really try it out. So we have some challenges here around that, and then definitely a lot of workshops that are covering different cloud native topics. >> Well, you guys do a great job. This is the second event. Last year was phenomenal. DevNet and the booth at Cisco Live in Barcelona was great. We'll be at Cisco Live in Orlando. What's it like now, internally at Cisco, because the Cisco Developer Program, I mean, I've watched it from the a kernel of a handful, one person, to two people to three people, and then, all of a sudden, internal politics says, "We're a routing company, we're a networking company," So now Cisco has evolved itself into a full-blown, almost a half a million, billion people, I mean half a million people, I'm thinking about Facebook scale, but half a million people, almost, in the DevNet community. >> Right. >> And you've got the Create, which is now the cloud native, how's it going, what's the team look like, what are you guys excited about? >> It's going great. The team has been growing, but growing thoughtfully and intentionally in how we want to grow it. The community has been amazing, because we really have been working hard to bring together these two audiences. Our networking and infrastructure developers, who are moving into DevOps, doing more automation, starting to use APIs, and then connecting them with the application developers, who work in the enterprise, and really working to get that conversation together and show, kind of, the value of Cisco to both of them. And we've seen growth in both, this conference, it's more about the application developers, and that is a big growing part of it. >> I got to say, I've seen a natural progression between network engineers, network developers with cloud, because anyone who's done any kind of configuration or provisioning of anything-- >> That's right. >> knows, can go to the cloud instantly. It's like, oh my God. And then you got containers, a concept that's well understood by network engineers, and they write software. So not a lot of learning, I mean, some learning language, but it's not a big leap. >> It's not a big leap, and it's such a technically proficient group of people anyway who are fast learners, and so it's definitely an easy way forward for them. And then, what we try to do is, our Edge Compute, for instance, that's deploy a docker container, so developers already know how to do that, it's using tools they're familiar with, so trying to connect that from both sides. >> It's like a fish taking to water, I mean, it's not that hard. Just jump right in. So, okay, now the cloud native really gets exciting when you talk about what Kubernetes is enabling. Because now you're a true DevOps world, where the people who don't want to touch the network at all still need to have some enablement where in that world, it's like, "Hey, I'm coding away on my apps, "that's all I care about. "I don't want to get down in the weeds under the hood "on provisioning stuff," or any kind of programmability. Where's that kick in? Where's that cross-connect? >> Yeah, so you definitely, for the groups that do want to work at that level, you want to enable that for sure, and get all the acceleration you can, and then, like our guest speaker from Google this morning said, he was like, HyperCloud is real, and it's also hard, and there's challenges, and so I think the Google partnership with Cisco and Cisco DevNet is to really work through those challenges, make it real and find the ways through those challenges. So we're trying to bring, again, kind of those two worlds together. >> Where are those connection points with the Google relationship? Is it Istio? Is it Kubernetes? >> Istio is part of it, Kubernetes, there's use cases for connecting on from, to cloud services, and then connecting cloud applications to on-prem things, so it's really about enabling all of those different use cases. >> And those best practices that these developers cross-environment need to actually deliver these applications to the cloud or pull them back on-prem. That's right, and how do they learn, maybe, the piece that they don't already know, whichever side of that equation they're coming from. So some of our DevNet audience, we started doing Containers 101. Like, if you don't know about containers, here's how you learn it. Get started with Istio, so connecting those dots. >> Well, Mandy, great to see you. Congratulations, Camp Create. >> Thank you, yeah! >> I want to get in, put a team together. >> Okay, we're doing the bracket year and all that. >> No, we do a whole qualifying. >> Yes, definitely! >> just Northern California, Southern California, >> Regional. >> and then bring the best of the best for a face-off cage match. >> Are you going to plan it? That's great. >> Yeah, of course, I'm in. >> You plan it next year. >> He can plan it, I'll judge. >> Awesome, perfect, thank you! >> I love anything to do with camping, but, appreciate it, thanks for coming on. >> Absolutely! >> Thank you. >> We're bringing you all the action here at DevNet Create here in Silicon Valley, Mountain View, California. Be right back with more after this short break. >> Mandy: Thanks so much!

(click) >> Hey welcome back everybody, Jeff Frick here with the Cube we're at the Accenture Technology Vision event 2018. The actual report comes out in a couple of days. We're here at the preview event. A couple hundred people in downtown San Francisco. A lot of demos of AR and VR downstairs. It's really a center kind of highlighting the top trends that they've surveyed their community and we're excited to be here to be joined by one of the experts. He's Tony Parisi, on the Cube a long time ago we looked at 2013 amazing. He's the global head of AR and VR for Unity technology. Tony great to see you again. >> Good to see you. >> So uh, so you've been on this AR VR virtual reality thing for a while. Amazing development in this space. >> I've been working in the field for a couple decades now in one form or another and it's just been great to see with the resurgence of virtual reality. And we had experiments 20 years ago trying to turn this into a consumer ready technology. Really wasn't ready yet. With the advent of oculus and some of these other technologies, we've seen something that a consumer could afford that enterprises can afford in large numbers. You know, some thousand dollar piece of hardware connected to a personal computer that's a few thousand dollars that can drive amazing VR experiences. These same kind of immersion techniques brought into a phone where you can take a smartphone and just look through it like a magic window into this extended reality where you're seeing 3D graphics that persist in the environment around you. And these are all working toward the future where we're going to have all this 3D amazingness. Digital magic in front of us. And it's just incredible to see how far we've come in all these years and how it's just about to be both consumer ready and be deployed into businesses for all kinds of different productivity opportunities. >> Yeah it's interesting >> Amazing - that a center role them all up into one. They went with the extended reality. Cause there's a lot of confusion, is it augmented reality, virtual reality you know, how much of it is virtual stuff overlayed to reality, how much reality is brought back into the virtual space. But at the end of the day it's a lot of blending. It's going to depend on the application. >> Definitely depends on the application. If you just take marketing terms and put them aside because everyone's got their own talking about this and agreed there's a little bit of confusion right now. If you just look at the common element, it is 3D graphics. It is graphics that represent objects, environments, places, people in a way that's much more realistic. It's much more intuitive for an enuser to grasp that touches us in our brains, in a place that a flat screen doesn't so that we remember it better, or learn it more effectively. That's what all of these different techniques have in common. So, you know, call it what you want. Accenture's rolling forward with all of that. My company Unity's supplying the core technology to power all of that across 30 platforms and you look at the whole industry. Game platforms, which is where we were born. And now in the VR and AR it's you know, a dozen platforms at least that look like they could be viable. The common element for anybody who's developing is that it's 3D graphics and they're going to make investments in certain kinds of software, certain kinds of application design and techniques and knowledge that's going to transfer among all of these different kinds of hardware platforms. Because we know at the end of the day there'll be a handful there will be 3 or 4 that end up dominating just like in any other part of the computer industry with any other digital technology. So, you know we're moment because it's so early where the technology um, we don't know how to talk about it yet. But I think if you look back, probably the same thing was true of mobile and the PC at the time if you were in the middle of it. - Right >> People call it the PC, or they called it the internet, or they called it the web, or then they called it mobile or a smartphone. You know, there's just all these terms for it but that, you know, that'll be in the the rear view mirror in a couple years. And we'll just all take this for granted as, oh there's 3D stuff now in front of us. Or there's a 3D place I go into in a VR headset. >> Yeah even we were at Baobab Studios last week and, you know, even in entertainment right? Early early television replicated just a stage right? And early movies replicated just a stage before they figured out what they could do with the medium. Same thing here and it's interestingly common, how much is interactive kind of game-like. How much of it's narrative storytelling like a movie. And he's like, don't think of it that way. It's a completely different medium with a completely different opportunity to tell stories, to do things in a completely different way. >> One hundred percent. That team at Baobab is amazing. They use Unity a lot to create their experiences. And they're the first to tell you, we don't quite know what it's going to look like in a few years. We're trying lot's of things, we are going to start from some, you know touchstones, some places we already know. Game design, linear storytelling. But this is a different beast and we don't know what we're going to get. Baobab is a great example of a company that's not afraid to experiment. They're going to try and put you, I mean, what they do is they make Pixar kind of quality, high production value animated content like a Pixar movie but you're in it in VR. You can look all around, you can see the entire action unfolding around you. And more than that, they've made you a part of the story. They make you a character. Usually a secondary character. So the whole burden is not on you as the viewer to have to figure this story out. But someone who can help the story along so you feel fully involved. And if you play that forward, if you think about where that's going to go in a few years, we may be the folks who are making the stories up. I mean, it starts with just kind of being a secondary character, but as we learn this as users, as we learn how to do this, we may start making the stories up and being a much more active part of it. But, somehow still having that sweet spot where we're giving the director and the content creator the final say in sort of how this world is being created. Uh, Brett Letter the famous director did Lawnmower Man if you know his work in a 90s work in a movie about VR. He's back in the world here also doing VR again. And he likens this to world building. He thinks VR creation for entertainment is much more like creating a Disney theme park. A world that you can inhabit and be part of and have fun for hours, days at a time versus telling one story from start to finish. So I mean, think about it what's going to happen in the next couple years. It's mind blowing where this could go. And we really don't know, none of us could predict. >> So you're deep into it Tony. I wonder if you could share a story of maybe some applications that you're seeing in production or kind of in development. Where people are not thinking, you know, men like me obviously we know entertainment, we know games, we know some of the industrial stuff like walking a shop floor and seeing the RPMs of a machine. But what are some of the applications that we don't know that you see coming down the pipe. >> Well if you just think about take one industry, like the auto industry. Right? I think you can imagine like you said if you're somewhat versed in this. The idea that you could use virtual reality to design a car instead of what they do today which is they use some 3D design packages but they still build a physical prototype of the car out of clay and, you know, companywide a Ford, or a Volkswagon, or a company like that will spend millions for every new car building these physical prototypes. They want to replace that with purely digital and virtual processes at some point which is going to save them a heck of a lot of time and money and materials cost. Right? But now you just take that one example and you take that car design and do the entire life cycle of that car to when it's assembled, manufactured, you can train people in VR how to do that. When it's getting rolled out onto a show floor, to people who are selling it. All the way to when that car is a self driving car that you put somebody into and they get in the cabin of that thing and the cabin because there's no driver in there, you now have a lot of room in there. Right? It's an entertainment center. So these kind of augmented and virtual reality technologies could potentially touch every phase in the lifecycle of not just the development, but the deployment, and the ongoing operation of a motor vehicle as we know it. So that's going to radically transform things sometime in the next 5 to 10 years. >> Alright Tony I'm going to let you go, the party's underway. We got the autonomous robots are playing in the band. In 5 years from now we can't wait 5 years because I don't even know what's going to be here. >> I hope we do this again. >> It'll be crazy different. - Well in advance of 5 years from now. >> So thanks for talking with me a few minutes. Tony Parisi, Jeff Rick, you're watching the Cube from the Accenture Technology Vision 2018. Thanks for watching. (upbeat digital music)

>> Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frich here with theCUBE. We're at the Accenture Technology Vision 2018 event at the San Francisco mini gallery. Really loud, they got autonomous jazz players in the back, but we're excited to be here with Paul Daugherty. He's the chief technology and innovation officer for Accenture, and he's running this whole thing. Paul great to see you again. >> Great to be here and great to have you here at this event. It's a big event for us to talk about what we see happening with technology and where it's all going, and what it means for individuals and businesses, so it's going to be a fun night. >> So you did the survey last year we were here, really cool event. You did it again in 2018. What are some of the highlights? What are some of the things that jumped out to you a year later? >> I think the highlight and the real core of the vision team that we have this year is around what we the intelligent enterprise unleashed. Intelligent enterprise unleashed, and we're talking about is a fundamental different role that companies need to play as their thinking about the next evolution of the products and services they're offering to their customers. And one thing we talk about is the fact that technology isn't just a peripheral or something people use. Technology is core to the human experience. >> Jeff: Right. >> And how you and I work and how we live our lives and how every person does. And what that means is that companies have to think differently about the way they engage with customers, the way they build their technology. Because the trust you build with the consumers and workers and others using technology is fundamental to getting the right to deliver these profound, intrinsic services that people are demanding and that companies are providing. So it's really pivot point I think in terms of thinking about how companies provide technology. >> It's really interesting. It's bifurcation 'cause on one hand, you want software defined data automation as much as you can. On the other hand, people have an opportunity now through social media and all these channels to have a direct engagement with the company that they never had before. Combine that with the fact that most of your interaction, most of the time is through some type of technology interface whether it's a mobile app or a chat bot or whatever. So it's an interesting polarization of the way people engage with companies. >> Yeah, it really is and if you think about it. You look at it right now, and the average kid spends about eight and a half hours in front of a screen. They're immersed and engaged whether it's their phone or TV. They're immersed to the screen. You and I, you look at the average population. I would say that we touch our phones over 2600 times a day. >> Jeff: 2600? >> 2600. >> Oh that's scary. >> The phone has become part of our life. >> Right. >> The first thing people check when they wake up in the morning, probably. For most people, and that's only with the device that's been around for 10 years. Think about what's going to happen as we have ubiquitous voice communication, natural language understanding, extended reality interfaces to connect people in more rich interfaces. And that's this next generation of experience that we're moving toward. >> Yeah, it's interesting, you said extend the reality, which is one of your five topics for later this evening. >> Right. >> It's funny 'cause everyone's talking about augment reality, mixed reality, artificial reality. >> Right. >> And you've really rolled it up into one that it's a new way to blend data and intelligence. You talk about space with the reality that we're in right now. >> Yeah, exactly. We came up with the term extended reality because we believe it's about extending the experience of the individual and providing access to virtual reality, mixed reality, augmented reality, just your base interface, other types of technologies. And really the power of extended reality is it's the end of distance, is what we call it. The end of distance. So it's the end of distance to people. The end of distance to information. The end of distance to experiences. You can access what you want and the experience you want, when you want to use it. For example, Walmart for Black Friday last year used Oculus and mixed reality to give their store managers a simulation of what could happen on Black Fridays. So that they were better prepared to handle the high volume. The incidents that could happen. The unexpected circumstances. So it brought that experience right to them, and that's that end of experience. And end of access era that we're moving into. >> Right. The other conventional thing is this whole robot and autonomous vehicle thing. Boston dynamics. >> Like a robot Jazz player. >> I was going to say, you got a robot Jazz player and the band is working with the other players in the band. And it's this interesting thing. One one hand, people are afraid of robots. They're going to take my job. They're suppose to do the menial work. On the other hand, there aren't enough people to fill the open Rex, and really again, It's going to be the two working together, that's going to get us to one plus one makes three. >> Yeah, it's exactly our belief is that, we believe that the future is really about human plus machine working together. We talk about this formula. Human plus machine equals super powers. It provides people with super powers so they can do different jobs and do jobs more effectively. And sure point, we don't have a jobs issue right now. We have roughly as many open jobs and the U.S. as we have unemployed. The issue is matching the people with the right skills to fill those jobs. >> Jeff: Right. >> And one thing we haven't talked about enough is the power to use technology to amplify people's capabilities, so that they could fill more of those jobs. We talked about innovation in the new book we're working on is the real power to provide people with those capabilities. >> Right, so you travel a lot. If you need some great travel advice, just watch Paul's Twitter feed. And I want to talk to you. You're were at Davos in the world economic forum. >> Right. >> Right, and there's again, everything's bifurcated. There's doom and gloom about fake news and tech taking over and automated fake news, and what's going to happen in the job thing. On the other hand, there's a whole lot of great, positive opportunities. So I wondered if you can share some of your thoughts and your insights that you brought back from Davos, which is not a tech conference. It's a much bigger, higher level thinking about what's happening with this technological evolution. >> Yeah, the take a way from Davos is that there's tremendous power to use technology to address some of the fundamental issues that we have in society and in the world today. So a great example was what we just talked about with human plus machine. We believe that rather than the fear of machines taking over the world, and machines putting everybody out of work. We don't believe that's the future. There's tremendous opportunity and there's industries we don't yet know of that are being created right now, that are creating new jobs, in addition to real jobs are being created today that we can point to. And the discussion Davos says how do we use the art of the technology to both help the people who need access to new skills and technology, and prepare people for those new jobs. We also talked a lot in Davos about how to use technology to solve some of the big problems we have in the world toady. One of the really exciting discussions we have was on this idea of innovation with purpose. Not just innovation but innovating to solve a problem with purpose and a great example of that was an announcement that Accenture made with Microsoft, along with an organization called ID2020. To use blockchain technology powered by the cloud with artificial intelligence to provide identity and credentials to a billion people in the world that lack identity today. So it's refugees and others who don't have documented identity and can't access the services they need. And that's an example of a multi-stakeholder community coming together at Davos. Governments, tech companies and NGO's working together to solve a real problem using innovative technology. That's what we call innovation with purpose. >> Yeah, it's still so much opportunity. There's still so many fundamental problem. The fundamental job thing, I saw some treat the other day. Said go back 1860. How many jobs do you think they're qualified to do back then? So if the job changes right, the market changes. >> Yeah and the real issue we'd have to deal with 'cause I don't want to sound like Pollyanna in this. Is that there are real issues we need to deal with in terms of jobs that would be eliminated more quickly than in previous technology revolutions 'cause the pace of this is so fast. >> Right. >> But it really comes down to us getting a grip around how do we prepare people with the right skills. And that's one of the things we're very focused on in our tech vision, and in the other work we're doing at Accenture is the idea of how do you prepare the future work force. And we just put out a report on this recently as well. And one of the things we found is that over half of executives believe that a lot of their employees lack the skills that need for the AI that's coming. Over half of the executives. Only 3% of executives are increasing their investment in training, and that's a problem. If you believe the workforce isn't prepared. There's an obligation to begin investing to prepare the work force. It's something we take very seriously at Accenture. Investing a billion dollars a year in trading to continually rotate our people to the next thing that's ahead. We think that, that's the mindset around responsible investment in technology and in people >> Right. >> And the skills that gets us this human plus machine future. >> Takes a much bigger conversation around just the structure of our education system, which is so front loaded to the young age. And it just really doesn't match this continuous learning that people are going to have to do at a faster rate than ever before. >> Yeah, I think that's exactly right. We need to create lifelong learning platforms for people in our society, but also in the companies that we create. And it's something we're very focused on, and we do have to do a lot with K through 12 education. We do have to do a lot with higher ed. We need to do a lot more with apprenticeships in other alternative routes into the workforce as well. And you put all that together and tie it to new learning platforms for many career professionals. And that's I think what the future work force and education of the future workforce looks like. >> Right, alright Paul. Well you're the master of ceremonies. You got a big presentation to do and 200 something odd people here waiting for you. So I appreciate you taking a minute. But before I let you go, I got something new that's coming up. >> Oh yeah. >> That is coming out in a month or so. You got to get it out here. >> The very first copy. I don't know if they can see this. >> The very first copy. Hold it steady, they'll zoom in on it. >> This is the very first copy of the-- >> Is this your first? This is not your first book? >> It is my first book. >> It is your first book, congratulations. >> It's by Carl and Jill Wilson. Jim Wilson and I partnered together on this. This is Jim's second book, and it's Human + Machine: Re-imagining Work in the age of Artificial Intelligence. We're talking about precisely about the issues we just talked about. It's a leader's guide to how you deploy AI in a responsible fashion to read to your work force, and equip them with super powers, and really reconfigure your enterprise for what's coming with artificial intelligence. >> Paul, it's always great to catch up. Always love to see you here at the cutting edge. You go to so many cool events and this is one of them, so break a leg up there in an hour, and we'll see you after it's over. >> Not literally, but okay thank you. >> Yeah, yeah the theatrical way. >> Good to see you Jeff, bye. >> He's Paul Daugherty. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching. (uptempo techno music)

>> Hello and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE on theCUBE. We're here in Sundance 2018 at the Intel Tech Lounge for a panel discussion with experts on the topic of The New Creative. We believe a new creative renaissance is coming in application development and also artistry. The role of craft and the role of technology and software coming together at the intersection. You're seeing results in the gaming industry. Virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality. A new wave is coming and it's really inspiring, but also there's a few thought leaders at the front end of this big wave setting the trends and they're here with us in this special panel for The New Creative. Here with us is Brooks Browne, Global Director of VR at Starbreeze Studios, a lot to share there, welcome to the panel. Lisa Watt, VR Marketing Strategist at Intel, Intel powering a lot of these VR games here. And Winslow Porter, co-founder and director of The New Reality Company. Many submissions at Sundance. Not this year, but a ton of experience talk about the role of Sundance and artistry. And then we have Gary Radburn who's a director of commercial VR and AR from media within Dell, Dell Technologies. Guys, welcome to this panel. Lisa, I want to start off with you at Intel. Obviously the Tech Lounge here, phenomenal location on Main Street in Sundance. Really drawing a massive crowd. Yesterday it was packed. This is a new generation here and you're seeing a younger demographic. You're seeing savvier consumers. They love tech, but interesting Sundance is turning into kind of an artistry tech show and the game is changing, your thoughts on this new creative. >> Yeah, it's been amazing to watch. I've been here for, this is my third year coming back with VR experiences. And it's really just been incredible to see. Sundance has been on the leading edge of exploring new technologies for a long time and I think this is, I feel like you know this feels like the break out year really. I mean, it's been successful the last few years, but something about this year feels a little bit different. And I think maybe it's the people are getting more familiar with the technology. I think the artists are getting more comfortable with how to push the boundaries. And then we certainly are getting a lot out of seeing what they're doing and how we can improve our products in the future. >> We were talking yesterday, Lisa, about the dynamic at Sundance. And you were mentioning that you see a few trends popping out. What is the most important story this year for the folks who couldn't make it, who might be watching this video that you see at Sundance? Obviously it's a great day today, it's snowing, it's a white day, it's beautiful powder, greatest snow on Earth. But there's some trends that are emerging. We had a march this morning, the Women's March. You're seeing interesting signals. What's your view? >> I think there's a lot less desire to put up with subpar experiences. I mean I think everyone is really starting to push the boundaries, I mean, we saw a lot of 360 video which we love for a linear narrative. But they're really breaking out and really exploring what does it mean to have autonomy especially in the virtual reality experiences, a lot more social is coming to the forefront. And then a lot more exploration of haptics and the new ways of extending into more 4D effects, etc. So I think it's very very exciting. We're really excited to see all the new innovations. >> Winslow, I want to ask you, if you can comment, you've been an active participant in the community with submissions here at Sundance. This year you're kind of chilling out, hanging out. You've been on the front lines, what is your take on the vibe? What's the sentiment out there? Because you're seeing the wave coming, we're feeling it. It feels early. I don't know how early it is, and the impact to people doing great creative work. What's that take? >> Well yeah, it's kind of like VR years are like dog years, you know. Like a lot can happen in a month in the VR space. So I had a piece here in 2014 called Clouds. It was an interactive documentary about Creative Code, but that was back when there was only two other VR pieces. It's interesting to see how the landscape has changed. Because CCP Games had a piece there. An early version of E Valkyrie. And unfortunately in the last three months, they had to close their VR wing. So, and then Chris Milk also had a Lincoln piece with Beck. Which was a multi camera 360, actually it was a flash video that they recorded to the DK1. And so that was, seeing that everyone was, saw the potential. The technology was still pretty rudimentary or crude even, we should say. Before any tracking cameras. But every year people learned from previous Sundances and other festivals. And we're seeing that Sundance kind of raises the bar every year. It's nice that it's in January because then there's all these other festivals that sort of follow through with either similar content, newer versions of content that's here, or people have just sort of learned from what is here. >> So I got to ask you. You know, obviously Sundance is known for pushing the boundaries. You see a lot of creative range. You see a lot of different stuff. And also you mentioned the VR. We've seen some failures, you've seen some successes, but that's growth. This market has to have some failures. Failures create opportunities to folks who are reiterating in that. What are some of the things that you can point to that are a positive? Things that have happened whether they're failures and/or successes, that folks can learn from? >> Well, I think that this year there's a lot more social VR. We're connecting people. Even though they're in the same space, they're able to be in this new virtual world together. There's something amazing about being able to interact with people in real life. But as soon as you have sort of a hyper reality where people are able to be experiencing a Sufi ritual together. Things that you wouldn't normally... That they're not possible in the real world. And also, I think that there's issues with lines too. Obviously every year, but the more that we can have larger experiences with multiple people, the more people we can get through. And then more impact we can make on the audience. It's really... We were in claim jumper last year. And we could only get one person in every 10 minutes. And that makes things pretty tricky. >> And what are you doing at Sundance this year? You've obviously got some stuff going on with some of the work you've done. What's your focus? >> So yeah we have a company called New Reality Company where we produce Giant and Tree. It's part of a trilogy where Breathe is going to be the third part. We're going to be completing that by the end of this year. And right now, I would say the best thing about Sundance is the projects, but also the people. Being able to come here, check in, meet new people, see partners that we've been working with in the past. Also new collaborations, everywhere you turn, there's amazing possibilities abound. >> I want to talk about empathy and social. I mentioned social's interesting in these trends. I want to go to Brooks Brown, who's got some really interesting work with Starbreeze and the Hero project. You know, being a pioneer, you've got to take a few arrows in your back, you've got to blow peoples' minds. You're doing some pretty amazing work. You're in the front lines as well. What's the experience that you're seeing? Talk about your project and its impact. >> Well for us, we set out with our partner's ink stories, Navid Khonsari, a wonderful creative, and his entire team to try to create that intensely personal experience kind of moving the opposite direction of these very much social things. The goal, ultimately being to try to put a person inside of an event rather than a game style situation where you have objective A, B, or C. Or a film that's a very, very hyper linear narrative. What is that sort of middle ground that VR itself has as unique medium? So we built out our entire piece. Deep 4D effects, everything is actually physically built out so you have that tactility as you walk around. Things react to you. We have smell, temperature, air movement, the audio provided by our partners at DTS is exceptional. And the goal is ultimately to see if we put you in a situation... I'm doing my best not to talk about what that situation is. It's pretty important to that. But to watch people react. And the core concept is would you be a hero? All over the world, every day people are going through horrific stuff. We're fortunate because we're the kind of people who, in order to experience, say a tragedy in Syria, we're fortunate that we have to go to Park City, Utah and go in virtual reality to experience something that is tragic, real, and deeply emotional. And so our goal is to put people through that and come out of it changed. Traumatized actually. So that way you have a little bit more empathy into the real world into the actual experiences they went through. >> And what's the goal? This is interesting because most of the some stuff you see, the sizzle out there is look at the beautiful vistas and the beaches and the peaks and you can almost be there. Now you're taking a different approach of putting people in situations that probe some emotional responses. >> Yeah. It's a big deal to us. The way Navid like to put it, and I'm going to steal this from him, is you see a great deal of people prototyping on hardware and all of these things, and it's great cause we need that. We need to be able to stand on the shoulders of those giants to be able to do these things. But you see very few people really prototyping what is the concept of story as per VR? We've been doing, at Starbreeze, we've been doing location based for some time now and I've been getting thousands upon thousands of pitches. And whenever you get a pitch, you can pretty much identify, oh you come from a film background, you come from a games background. There's very few people who come down that middle line and go, well this is what VR is supposed to be. This is that interesting thing that makes it very deeply unique. >> What's the confluence and what's the trend in your mind as this changes? Cause you mentioned that gamers have affinity towards VR. We were talking about that before we came on the panel. You know, pump someone in mainstream USA or around the world who does email, does work, may not be there, you're seeing this confluence. How is that culture shifting? How do you see that? Cause you're bringing a whole nother dimension. >> We're trying to go back to a little bit, something about this Sundance being a little bit different. I think in general in VR, you're seeing this sort of shift from a few years ago it was all potentiality. And I think a lot of us, the projects were great, but a lot of us who work in VR were like oh I see what they're trying to do. And people like my dad would be like I don't. I don't see what they're trying to do. But that is shifting. And you're seeing a larger shift into that actuality where we're not quite there yet where we can talk about the experiences every day Americans are going to have. What is the real ready player one that we're actually going to have existing. We're not there yet, but we're much closer every time. And we're starting to see a lot of these things that are pushing towards that. Final question before I go to some of the speeds and feeds questions I want to get with Intel and Dell on is what is the biggest impact that you're seeing with your project and VR in general that will have the most important consequences for societal impact? >> Well, we were fortunate yesterday we had a number of people come through Hero. And a number of them simply actually couldn't handle it. Had to come out. We had to pull people out. The moment we took the headset off, they were, tears were streaming down their face. There's a level of emotional impact VR is extremely able to cut through. It's not that you're playing a character. It's not that you're in a separate world. You are you inside of that space. And that is a dangerous but very promising ability of VR. >> Winslow, could you take a stab at that, I'd like to get your reaction to that because people are trying to figure out the societal impact in a positive way and potentially negative. >> Yeah I mean, so with that, whenever you traumatize somebody else or have the ability to possibly re-traumatize somebody... In Giant, we made sure that we gave them a trigger warning because yeah these things can be intensely intimate or personal for somebody who already has that sort of baggage with them or could be living in a similar experience. In Giant, we witnessed the last moments of a family. As they're convincing their daughter that the approaching bomb blast is a giant that actually wants to play with her. And so we put haptics in the chair so the audience was also surprised. But we let them know that it was going to be taking place in a conflict zone. So if that was something that they didn't want to participate in, that they could opt out. But again, like we didn't know... We had to go and buy tissues like right off the bat because people were crying in the headset. And that's kind of a... It's an interesting problem to have for the sake of what are sort of the rules around that? But also it makes it more difficult to get people through the experience in a timely fashion as well. But yeah, but we're seeing that as things become more real then there's also a chance to possibly impact people. It's the... >> So it's social for you? You see it as a social impact? >> Well, I mean if everyone's experiencing the same thing that can be social, but again if it's a one on one experience, it's sort of like up to the filmmaker to make sure that they have the scruples that they are playing by the rules. Cause there's right now most every piece of content is being released through Oculus, Steam, or Viveport. But there will be... It's heavily regulated right now, but as soon as there's other means of distributing the content, it could take a different sort of face. >> Certainly some exciting things to grab on, great stuff. I want to get to the commercial angle. Then we're going to talk more about the craft and the role of artistry in the creating side of it. Gary, you're the commercial VR expert at Dell. You're commercializing this. You're making the faster machines. We want faster everything. I mean everyone... Anyone who's in VR knows that all the graphics cards. They know the speeds and feeds. They're totally hardware nerds. What's going on? Where's the action? >> Okay, that's such a large question. I mean we've had some great stuff here that I also want to comment on as well. But inside the commercial side, then yeah everybody wants bigger, stronger, better, faster. And to Winslow's comment about the dog years, that really puts the pressure on us to continue that innovation and working with partners like Intel to get those faster processors in there. Get faster graphics cards in there so that we can get people more emotionally bought in. We can do better textures, we can get more immersion inside the content itself. We're working a lot around VR in terms of opening peoples' eyes for societal impact. So VR for good for instance. Where we're taking people to far flung corners of the Earth. We work with Nat Geo explorer Mike Libecki to show the plight of polar bears in Greenland and how they're gradually becoming extinct for an edutainment and a learning tool. The boundaries are really being pushed in entertainment and film. That's always been the case. Consumer has always really pushed that technology. Commercial's always been a bit of a lagger. They want stability in what's going on. But the creation that's going on here is absolutely fantastic. It's taken what is essentially a prosumer headset and then taking it into that commercial world and lit it up. 360 video, its very inception, people are using it for training inside of their businesses and so that's now going out into businesses now. We're starting to see advances in 360 video with more compute power needed. Where, to the point about immersion and getting people emotionally bought in. Then you can start doing volumetric, getting them in there. And then we're also working with people like Dr. Skip Rizzo who was on our panel yesterday where we're starting to go into, okay, we can treat PTSD. Help people with autism, through the medium of VR. So again, that buys into... >> These are disruptive use cases that are legit? >> Yeah. >> These are big time, market moving, helping people... >> Absolutely. And that where it becomes really, really powerful. Yes, we want our companies to embrace it. Companies are embracing it for training. But when you start seeing the healthcare implications and people crying inside of headsets. That's effecting you deeply, emotionally. If you can make that for good, and change somebody's trigger points inside of PTSD, and the autism side of helping somebody in interview techniques to be able to be more self sufficient, it's absolutely awesome. >> This is the new creative. So what's your take on the new creative? What's your definition? Cause you're talking about a big range of use cases beyond just film making and digital artistry. >> Yeah, absolutely so the new creative is like with all the great work that's here, people are looking at film and entertainment. Now the world really is the oyster for all the creatives out there. People are clamoring out for modelers, artists, story tellers, story experiencers to be able to use that inside their commercial environments to make their businesses more effective. But they're not going to have a 360 video production company inside of their commercial organization. And it's then leveraging all of the creative here and all of the great stuff here. Which is really going to help the whole world a lot. >> Lisa, I want to get your thoughts on this cause you guys at Intel here at the Tech Lounge have a variety of demos, but there's a range of pro and entry level tools that can get someone up and running quickly to pro. And so there's a creative range not only just for digital artistry, but also business we're hearing. So what's the... Cause AI's involved in a lot of this too though. It's not just AI, it's a lot of these things. What's the Intel take on this. >> Well I think it's really an interesting time for us at Intel because one of the things that we have that I think probably nobody else has. We have this amazing slate of products that really cover the end to end process. Both from the creation side of the house all the way to the consumption side. And we talk a lot about our processors. We worked on an amazing project, a couple of huge scenes inside of the Sansar environment. Which is a great tool for really democratizing the creation of spaces. It's a cloud hosted service but it utilizes this amazing client-server architecture. We created four huge spaces in a matter of eight weeks to launch at CES. And some of the technologies that Gary was referring to just in pure processing power like two generations old processors were taking three hours to render just a small portion of a model where our newest generation Core i9s with our opting technology took that time to 15 minutes. So when we think about what we can do now, and those technologies are going to be available in even portable laptop form factors. We've got the piece where we were working here SPHERES. They were able to actually make some corrections and some tweaks basically immediately without having to send them off to some render farm. They were able to do those things. And I know Winslow has talked about that as well. What does it mean to you to be able to react real time. And be able to do your creative craft where you are and then be able to share that so readily. And then you know... I just think that's kind of an amazing equalizer. It's really democratizing the creation process. >> Okay the next question that begs for everyone to address is where are we in this progression? Early? What work needs to get done? Where are we holding back? Is it speeds and feeds? Is it the software? Is it the routines, libraries, art? Where's the bottleneck? Why isn't it going faster? Or is it going faster? >> I would, and I'm sure the team would agree here, I would say that one of the key things is the creator tools themselves, right. They are still somewhat cumbersome. We were talking to another filmmaker. He was like I can't even, I have to play the whole piece from the beginning, I can't just go in and edit, you know change control, being able to collaborate on these pieces with other people. I mean, if you can collaborate in a real world space, you should be able to also collaborate in VR and have change control and all those sorts of things that are necessary to the iteration of a project. So we're trying to work with our software partners. They're all doing a really great job of trying to iterate that, but it's going to take some time. I mean I think that's probably the bigger thing that's holding everything back. We're going to be right there with the processing power and the other technologies that we bring to the table. OEM partners are going to be right there with the best devices. I really think it's something we've all got to push for as far as those tools getting better. >> Brooks, comment on anything? You're in the... >> So for me, the thing that's holding back VR in general is actually the art form itself. One of the great challenges, if you look back, at say the history of film... We're at Sundance, so it's probably fairly apropo. Very early on in the early movies, aside from penny arcade machines that you'd actually stare at, they were 10 minute almost like plays that people would go to almost a playhouse and they'd watch this thing. There were not cuts, there were no angles. It was a single wide shot. Great Train Robbery came around and there was this crazy thing they did called an edit. Where they spliced film together. And if you go back and you read, and they did these dolly shots. People will have no idea what they're watching. There's no way people will be able to follow that. Like people were not happy with it at the time. Now it's stuff that children do on their iMacs at home. They do iMacs all the time, they do it on their iPhones, on their Android devices. These are normal languages of film that we have. VR doesn't have that yet. And there's not a great deal of effort being made in that direction. There's people here doing that. So I'm kind of speaking in the middle of the group, but outside of these people, there's only a handful who are really doing that and it's a significant challenge. When people who are the mainstream consumer put on a VR headset, it needs to be more than just a magic trick where they go oh that's cool. And that tends to be the vast majority of experiences. So what is the thing that is going to make someone go oh I get why we have VR as a medium. And we're not there yet. We're in the direction, but that's >> So you mentioned earlier the point where you can tell if someone's from film or gaming or whatever when you talk to them about VR. Who is the future VR developer? Is it a filmmaker? Is it a gamer? Is it a digital artist? What is this evolving? >> It's a kid in his basement who no one knows and is screwing around with it and is going to do something that everyone thinks is stupid. Like, it's going to be that. Basically every major leap in gaming is kind of the same thing. It's when we understand how ludonarrative dissonance works inside of telling how people move around a space. It's about how we do Dutch angle suddenly in film. And these things get invented. It's going to be some kid who's just screwing around who doesn't have the baggage of the language of film. A lot of the people I know in VR have been fortunate to work in film, in games and interactive or web dev. So you come from a lot of places but someone's going to come along who has none of that baggage. And they're going to be... >> Well you guys are pioneers and you're doing it. So for the first person out there that's in their basement, that inspirational soundbite or comment. How can you guys talk to that person or that group? Because this is the democratization, this is what's happening. It's not the gatekeepers. It's real creatives out there that could come from anywhere. YouTube generation, Twitch generation, gaming. What would you say to that person to motivate them and to give them that passion? >> Well it's only going to get easier, faster, cheaper, all these things are happening. But again, yeah I totally agree with what Brooks said. It's really about the culture and about educating the audience and getting them up to speed. There are some VR experiences that as soon as they put on the headset, like somebody who's never done it before, immediately will take it off cause they'll get nauseated. And then there's people, like kids who are like jet fighters. They've seen everything. You could throw like a 30 frames per second experience at them and that doesn't even phase them. They can be, all of a sudden their worlds are changing and they're like bring it because they're ready for that. So I think it's sort of about raising the bar for what the audience is comfortable with, familiar with, educating the community. There's a lot of tools right now, you know with Unreal and Unity that allow people who have very little... They don't need to know C# or C++, they can get started in a lot of like visual. What you see is what you get. Being able to drag things into a virtual room. And the windows headsets that are out. They refer to them as mixed reality, but just even having the ability to flip up the screen and transition from the virtual world to the real world in milliseconds, it allows you to be able to create things more at the speed of thought instead of coming up with an idea, coding it, and making sure it works, and then eventually putting on the headset. The sooner that we can actually be ideating inside this virtual environment is when things will get really interesting. >> So the next question is to take to the next level is what's the playbook? How does someone get involved? How does someone ingratiate into a community? If I'm an artist, I want to get, and I'm proficient with technology, or maybe not, how do they get involved? Is it community driven? Is it social? You guys mentioned seeing social's a big trend here. How do people get involved? What's the track? >> Well yeah you don't just need to go to a grad school or... There's a lot of programs out there that are popping up. Almost every single major state school has like an interactive art program now. And that wasn't the case like two or three years ago. So we're seeing that that's a big shift in the culture. But again, VR is still... It's expensive and it's you know, like VR, I refer to it's in the stage of it's almost like in the neo geo phase, maybe a little before that. But it's the really expensive thing that your friend's neighbor has. Or his older brother or something. You get to play it a little bit, you're like that's great but there's no way in hell I'm going to... You know, I can't afford that or like that just doesn't really work with my lifestyle right now so it needs to incorporate itself into our everyday, our habits. And it needs to be something that... If we're all doing it then it makes sense for us to do it together not just somebody in their basement doing it by themselves. >> Yeah feel free to comment, this is a good topic. >> Oh yeah, absolutely. So what we're doing is sort of about democratization and accessibility. So for people to get into the then they're going to need a rig, they're going to need a headset and previously it's actually been quite expensive to actually take that first plunge into it. So now by democratizing and bringing price points down, it makes it more accessible. That helps content creators because there's now more of an audience that can now consume that content. And the people that can then play with the medium and consume it now have a better reason to do it. So we're working on that. We're also working on the education pieces like Key. It's actually going out there to schools and actually letting them experience VR and play with VR. Because it is a whole new different medium. We've seen film directors and filmmakers go into the VR space and things that worked in 2D film like fast pans and whatever else so the points have already been made don't really translate into VR without somebody losing their lunch. So it is going to be somebody who's coming up who hasn't got the baggage of previous skill sets inside of 2D doing it inside of VR. So we're going to see that. And in terms of the technology, everybody's wanting things to progress. That shows the level of excitement out there. And everybody wants to get into it. Everybody wants to see it go further. And I'm reminded of the mobile phone. Mobile phone, 30 years ago? Two suitcases for batteries, a large brick on the ear and a car antennae. Okay, so where we are now, if you had a time machine and you went back in time to talk to the inventor of the mobile phone, well, I'd be a lot richer because I know sports results and all, but that aside, but you go back and talk to them and you said do you know in 30 years time, everybody is going to be carrying that device? Everybody's going to be dependent on that device? They're going to get social anxiety and separation anxiety if they lose it. And they will probably laugh in your face. >> Alright so since you brought up the phone analogy, since I love that example, are we in the Blackberry moment of VR and no one yet has built the iPhone? Because the iPhone was the seminal moment for smartphones. And you see what happened there. Is VR needing that kind of break? Or is it there? >> I think we're on the cusp. Where we are at the moment with technology, we've had the headsets, which I say have been more in the consumer space, they've been designed to hit a certain price point. We had CES the other week where we've had advancements now in the resolutions of headset that are now coming out. One of the issues was well I can't see texts, I can't read texts. So from a working environment, if you're actually using tools that you would normally use on a 2D screen, you can now translate that and read that text. However, in terms of the tools that people use, why are we trying to put 2D screens into a VR headset? We've got a whole new way of interacting with data. We've got a whole new way of doing things that are going to be more intuitive than the mouse and keyboard interaction that we're used to. Why just translate that. Let's push that envelope and those are the developments that we're pushing our partners and our ISVs to really embrace. >> So it's an evoution. >> It's absolutely an evolution. >> You guys have any thoughts on that comment. That we have that inflection point, are we hitting that, will we see it soon, is it here? >> Well I think it's a very interesting symbiotic relationship between multiple factors. So you know, we hear the cost factor, we hear the technology factor, then we have the content factor. You know I saw an interesting evolution at CES we had created this virtual booth experience so that you could still come to the CES Intel booth without actually having to be there. And I met a guy in there and I was like hey where are you? He goes I've been in here like all week. (laughter) And I was like oh yeah, where do you live? He goes oh I'm in my basement in Nebraska. But he had just, this was Friday when I met him. He'd been in there all week, but in 2D mode. And he had gone out the night before and bought a headset just so he could come back and go in VR mode. And I think, yes, all these factors have to kind of line up, but I do think that content, those experiences that are going to keep people coming back for more. Like these guys literally kept coming back to our booth. Right, to see... >> Content gain. >> To see who was there. And to them at that point, it wasn't really a barrier of cost. It was like there is something that I want to consume therefore I am going to go get what I need to consume it. And I use the analogy of HDTV, right. When we kind of moved over that hump where there was enough content people didn't really care how much that television cost. >> Sports was great. Sports really highlighted HD. >> Yeah. >> But this is a good point. This is a good question to ask. Brooks, I'd love to get your thoughts. Content drives experiences, amazing experiences, but we're building the scaffolding of everything at the same time. So where are we, what's your opinion? >> So here on the Starbreeze side, we're fortunate because we have our own headset. We have the StarVR headset we've been building with Acer. 5K all of that stuff and we're upgrading it over the next year. Our focus has been, we skipped the consumer market very much. We went straight to location based and enterprise. And the reason we did that is because there's a promise of VR at a basic, I don't want to say technology stand point, but from an experience perspective, when it comes to that resolution, when it comes to that field of view, when it comes to these things people expect. Average consumers who go to a movie and they see these giant screens. They want that translated. They don't have the understanding like we do of well, LED panels are actually a pain in the ass to build and it takes a little bit and they flip at their own speeds. Time to photon is not a thing my dad will ever see in his life. But there's a reality that people have a need for that. And it is extremely expensive. It's again the reason we went straight to LBE. But for us it's about marrying the two and consistently trying to match what's happening. So when we're talking about, as I mentioned earlier the technology and how we're standing on the shoulders of giants very very quickly, someone who's doing technology is going to see what we're doing content wise and go well I can do that better technology wise. And then we're just going to keep leap frogging. And it's very similar to the phone in the same way that we're not at the final stage of the phone. Like we're at our stage of the phone and no doubt in 30 years people will laugh at us for carrying anything. The same way we laugh about the briefcases and the giant batteries in the cars we had to pull with us. So it's one of those things that's continually transitional. And VR's in an odd, amazing place. >> Well you know, it was a lot of waves that we've all seen. You mentioned the mobile phone, that's a good one to point to. It feels like the PC revolution to me because the same culture of entrepreneurs and pioneers come from a bunch of different backgrounds. So I'd like to get Brooks perspective and Winslow's perspective on this because I think there's an entrepreneurial culture out there right now that's just emerging very fast. It's not like your classic entrepreneur software developer. So in this movement, in this wave, the entrepreneur is the filmmaker, it could be the kid in the basement, could be the gamer. Those entrepreneurs are trying to find a path. >> Yeah, it's a weird mix. VR is at this odd point where not only is it the people who are wanting to be cutting edge in terms of content or technology, but also that first mover strategy from the business side of things. And so everyone wants to be those guys who are charging ahead because in reality, if you look at the financials around all of this, VR is one of those things that you don't want to finance. It's not nearly as safe as say Marvel Avengers or the next Call of Duty. >> You've got to be, you've got to hustle. >> Yeah you've got to hustle. You've got to make... >> What's your advice? >> Start doing it. That's really it. It's the same advice I used to give to game makers when people would be like well I want to learn how to make games. It's like go to YouTube, download a thing and go do it. There's literally no reason why you can't. >> Are there meetups or like the Homebrew Computer Club that spawned the Mac. >> There are, there are infinite groups of VR people who are more than happy to give you all the terrible and wonderful opinions that come with that. There's no shortage of people. There's no shortage and it's an amazingly helpful group. Because everyone wants someone else to figure out something so they can steal that and then figure out something else. >> Winslow, your advice to entrepreneurs out there that are young and/or 14 to 50, what should they do? Jump right in obviously is a good one. >> Well yeah, experiment, break things, that's really the only way to learn. I would say watch as much VR as you can because sometimes bad VR is the best VR. Because you can learn don't do that. And if you learn, if you put all that together, you can really... It's like this lexicon that you can really follow. Also, I think we... As people in tech, we kind of get obsessed with things like resolution, frame rate, and these are very important, but it's also good to remember, or at least for me, I watch some of the best experiences from storytelling when I was a kid, eight years old on a 12 inch screen that was 640 by 480. You know, like scan lines on the VHS. But for me the story still resonated and it's important to think of story first, but obviously it's a dance between the story and the technology. They kind of have to both organically work together. And if they don't, one thing in the story that doesn't work because the tech isn't supporting it, can throw you out of the experience. >> Other concern entrepreneurs might have is financing. How do I get someone to help me build it? And then doing relationships. Finding relationships that could... One plus one equals more than two, right. So how do you? >> You have to get really creative when it comes to funding right now. Unless you're doing location based, which also requires a certain amount of investment to get it up to a bar where you want to be showing it to people with all the haptic effects when it's heat, smell, vibration, stuff like that. You know, it's not cheap to develop. But as far as like working with film foundations, we're fortunate enough to be sponsored by Fledgling Fund and Chicken and Egg. But we also were able to get partnerships with people like Intel and NVidia. And also work with people who come from a traditional film background. There's not one way to successfully fund a project. There's a million. And that's why it's interesting that the technology's innovating, but also the market place is as well. >> One of the things I want to ask is as any new industry gets building, is cultures form early. DNA forms in the entrepreneurs, in the pioneers. And one of the big hottest topics in the creative world is inclusion and diversity. So what's the makeup of the culture of this new generation? Because democratization means everyone can participate, everyone's involved. What's the state of the community vis a vis diversity, inclusion, and the role of the actors in the community. >> Well I think it's important to understand that VR has a profound ability to place you in somebody else's shoes. The trick though is to make sure that those feel like they're your shoes. But I think that we're learning a lot more about story telling techniques and we're able to empower people that their voices you know were previously not heard. The tricky thing is being able to yeah, educate all different groups of people how to use the technology, but once they're enabled and empowered to do it, it's amazing what you can experience inside the headset. >> So VR can be an enabler for education, outreach, a variety of things? >> Yes, I mean the term empathy, empathy machine gets thrown around a lot. You could do a drinking game around it. For panels when people are talking about it. But it's important to know there is a truth to that. And it's, yeah the perspective shift from looking at a screen, a 16 by 9 screen where you can look away, then dissolving the screen and becoming that person. Becoming the director, the actor, the camera person, the editor. When you're in the first person perspective, there's so much more... It feels more personal and that's a really interesting angle that we're going to continue to explore. >> So you could walk in someone's shoes, literally? >> Yes, you literally can. You just have to make sure that you got a... The tracking system's proper or else you'll look like there's... It can be come a horror movie pretty quickly if your leg is behind your head. >> Lisa, your thoughts on this, I know it's important to you. >> Yeah, I mean I think it's fascinating because I've been in tech for a really long time. And seen many, many trends. I mean the first job I had at Intel I was a PC tech and as you can imagine as a female, I think there was one other tech female in the department at the time and I would get funny looks when I would show up with my bag. They were like hi can I help you? I'm like I'm not here to deliver coffee, I'm here to fix your computer, you know. So I've seen a lot of trends and it's super exciting to me to see so much diversity cross culture, cross country, I mean we're having... We had guys come in from all over the world. From even war torn, they've escaped their country just several years ago and they're coming and they're bringing all that creativity to the market. We're seeing very, very strong female contingent from the filmmaker perspective so it's this wonderful, wonderful just primordial soup of people that I think are growing their own voice and their own power. They're breaking molds as far as how you actually get content produced. Distribution is kind of crazy right now. I mean, how do you get it distributed? There's like so many different ways. But all of those things are so important to the evolutionary and biological process of this. Yes, we need to let it go and sometimes we're frustrated. We're like where's the standards? Where's the one ring to rule them all? Where there's not going to be one. And it's good for us that there's not right now. It's frustrating from a business perspective sometimes. You're like, I can't peanut butter myself around all of these places, but I think it's just a very unique time where so many people are... The technology is accessible, that means that so many creators can now bring their fresh voice to this space and it's just going to be fascinating to continue to watch. >> That's awesome. Well two more questions and I'll give you some time to think about the last one which is your perspective on Sundance, what's happening this year, your personal view of what you think's happening, what might happen during this year. But the question I have for you now is to go down the line. We'll start with Brooks here, and talk about the coolest thing that you're involved in right now. >> It actually has to be Hero. We're debuting it here at Sundance. We've been working on it and not talking about it for about nine months. And it's been very difficult. Again it's sacrosanct to the experience that you don't know literally what you're getting in to. And the emotional response has been essentially our goal, trying to find out how far can we take that. You actually being in a space, moving around, having that interactivity, doing what you would do. But it being your story and how deeply we can absolutely effect a human being. And again, watching people come out, it's one of those things, I've been doing game development, I've worked on films, I've done all kinds of stuff. And you usually get a chance when someone experiences something you've made, you walk up to them and you go so what'd you think? And that's not at all what we can do with ours. >> How has it impacted you, that reaction? >> Well, I personally suffer significant PTSD and I've had some traumas in my life. And so it's been incredibly powerful to be able to share these things with people. Share this emotion in a deeply profound, yet amazingly personal way. Which I'm amazingly fortunate to be able to be a part of it. >> Alright thanks for sharing. Coolest thing that's going on with you right now here at Sundance. >> Just the fact that I'm here at all. I mean, it's incredible right? Personally was able to be an advisor on the SPHERES project that is premiering here with Eliza McNitt. She's someone who was an Intel Science Fair winner back in high school and kind of came back to us. So just to see the evolution of an artist really from the beginning to the point where they've been able to come here to Sundance. I'm also very passionate about the work that we're doing with Sansar. I kind of consider myself one of the chief storytellers at Intel around Virtual reality and this new move into social where people are like well what's this game. I'm like, it's not a game. It's you are the game, you are the interactivity. You become the person that makes the space interesting. We're just really setting the scene for you. And there's so many... You know there's a lot of different people kind of chasing this be togetherness. But what we've been able to produce there. And just to be able to explore some of my own personal ideas has just been such a gift. Then to be working with guys like these on the panels and see what they're doing and just be in touch is really just an exciting time. >> John: Awesome. >> Probably what, other than the people on the projects, or the projects that are being shown here, we're working on our new project, which we would have loved to premiere here, but we did... Basically when you get in, you have two months to create a piece, so you have a demo and you have to finish it, so we're taking a little bit more time. This one's going to be about a year development cycle. It's called Breathe where we take you from where Giant left off, where, in Giant, the ceiling collapses on a family. They're in front of you. In this experience, we use a breathing apparatus to basically bring yourself back to life. And then you realize you're trapped under rubble and you remove the... We actually want to have physical objects on top of you that are going to be tracked. So you're moving rubble from you and you realize that you're a six year old girl. You're the survivor from Giant. And you get to witness what it's like to be a future refugee sort of in different key moments of her life that use breath. Whether it's a flirtatious moment, blowing a dandelion, seeing your own breath in snow as a drone shows you a message that your parents pre-recorded on your 18th birthday. This is all in the future, obviously, but every time you walk around an object, you actually grow 10 to 15 years older in the experience. As you get older, the world becomes smaller. And then we witness what's like for her last breath. From being six years old to being 90 years old. But it's a profound personal experience. >> John: That sounds cool, cool. Gary, coolest thing that you're involved in right now at Sundance. >> Wow. I could say it's all cool that would be a bit trite. They say if you enjoy what you do, is it really a job? And I'm lucky enough to be in that position. Because working with all these guys here and like people around the place, they're doing such great things that every day I wake up and I'm astounded of where the industry's going. In terms of what we're doing here at Sundance, then we're really starting to push those envelopes as well. I've been lucky enough to be involved with Dunkirk and Spider-Man: Homecoming. Like last year, so some great pieces there. And moving out into this year, we've got some other developments which I can't mention at this point, but we're showing things like AR and VR mashup. So we haven't talked much about augmented reality here. It's an evolutionary, it's not a replacement. Both can be used and we've started to really start to blend those two technologies now. So you can still see the outside world. Just touching on the commercial side, and health care's very big for me. That's where I think the really cool stuff is happening. Entertainment is great and that's really pushing the envelope and allowing us to then take it for the good of human kind. >> It happens everywhere, it's not just entertainment. >> Yeah absolutely. You start looking at MRI scans inside of VR or AR. Talking a patient through it so they can actually see exactly what you're talking about. You're now no longer pointing at flat things on a screen. You're now actually taking them through it. If you're using AR, you can actually judge the responses of the patient as for how they're reacting to the news. And effectively, inside of the VR, and what's really cool for me is seeing people's reaction to that content and to the entertainment content. >> That's awesome. Okay final question. This is a little bit of self serving because I'd like you to help me do my job at SiliconANGLE. If you were a reporter and you were going to report the most important stories happening this year at Sundance or really kind of what's really happening versus what's kind of being billed to be happening here. What's the story? What is the story this year at Sundance 2018 in your personal perspective? We'll go down the line and share your observations. >> Well, mine here, I'm a Sundance newbie. This is my first year of being here. I'm absolutely astounded by the community spirit that's around. I go to a lot of technical trade shows and technical presentations. People coming here with a willingness to learn. Wanting to learn from other people. It's been touched on already. It's the pool of knowledge that's available inside of Sundance that everybody that comes here can actually tap into to create better content, to learn not what to do as well as learn what to do. And I just think that's brilliant because in that community spirit, that's really going to help enable this industry quickly. >> John: Winslow, you've got some experience, what's your thoughts? >> Obviously, this Intel house, just a little plug for you Lisa. (laughter) Tech Lounge. We got that? Okay good. I mean, yeah, the people that's here. Every year we come here and see where the high water mark is. All these people are... Some of these teams first started with two people and then they grew to six and then by the end of it, there's 100 people working around the clock, pulling all-nighters to be able to give the latest and greatest of what's available with these current tools. So it's amazing because the work itself doesn't really mean anything until people get to experience it. So that's nice that they make a big splash. The people here are very attentive to it. It's a very nice audience and this will continue the momentum for future festivals throughout the year, but also will excite people that have never done VR before. People who have never been to Sundance before. We're seeing that there's a lot of new people. And that will continue to influence many years to come. >> John: So you think VR is the top story here being told? >> As far as like just to generalize, I would say last year kind of the big VR year. This is kind of the big AR year. Next year's going to be the AI year. Then after that we're going to start putting them all together. >> John: Great, great feedback. >> I think it's just exciting for Intel just to be back here. I think Intel hasn't been here in quite some time. Dell coming in here probably one of the breakout years for us to come back and really talk to creators what we're doing from the Intel Studios all the way through to the stuff you can take home and do at home. And I think coming in, we're coming back here with a purpose really, not just to be here to be seen. We're really here with real things and want to have real conversations on how tech can enable what people are doing. Not just from a brand perspective, but from a real hands on point of view. >> John: Yeah, some great demos too, phenomenal tech. >> Really just, yeah everything from the AI stuff we have to the social to the great new pieces that have been submitted here like we mentioned with SPHERES. So I think, yeah, it doesn't feel gratuitous to me you know that Dell or Intel is here this year. We've really come with a purpose. >> You guys are moving the needle, it's really awesome. We need more horsepower. >> Brooks, your thoughts on Sundance this year. Observation, the vibe, what would you tell your friend back home when you get back? >> If, for me, I think it's almost the non-story. It's like the opposite of a story. It's just the deep integration of VR into the normal Sundance flow I think has been interesting. Some people have been here for a few years. And back in the day when it was one or two, it was a lot of oh, you do VR? What's that then? Whereas now, you see a lot more people who are crossing over. Going to see documentaries, then they come to see a VR piece and it's just a part of the normal flow. And the team at New Frontier has done exceptional work to kind of make sure that they have this ridiculous high level of broad content for all kinds of people. All kinds of experiences, all high end things. But it's not that VR's here. Oh good, we have a VR section. It's a lot more of an integrated set up. And it's been really encouraging to see. >> Well you guys have been great. It's been very inspirational. Great information. You guys are reimagining the future and building it at the same time so entrepreneurially and also with content and technology. So thanks so much for sharing on this panel The New Creative. This is SiliconANGLE's coverage of Sundance 2018 here at the Intel Tech Lounge at the Sundance Film Festival. I'm John Furrier thanks for watching. (upbeat music)

>> Narrator: From San Francisco, it's The Cube. Covering Samsung Developer Conference 2017, brought to you by Samsung. (upbeat music) >> Okay, welcome back, everyone. Live here, in San Francisco, for day two. We're winding down day two of two days of wall to wall coverage, The Cube's exclusive coverage of Samsung Developer Conference. I'm John Furrier the founder, co-founder of SiliconANGLE Media (mumbles) the Cube our next guest Larry Cutler, co-founder and CTO of Baobab Studios. >> You got it right. >> And you're co-founder and CEO Maureen Fan was at our Grace Hopper event. >> Larry: Yes. >> Well thanks for joining us. >> Thank you for having me. >> So you guys are doing great. Love the story-telling, gaming, tech culture coming together here at Samsung. >> Yep. >> And seeing the future. The future, if you connect the dots, is augmented reality voice-activated, headphones that can be hacked and programmed and customized. You guys are doing some interesting things, you've got some good awards. Take a minute to talk about your studios. What are you guys doing, what's the aha moment for you guys. What should people know? >> So we at Baobab Studios, we're reinventing animated storytelling using VR. And so what we've, our aha moment was feeling that you could completely immerse yourself in the world in VR. And when we started thinking about well what is so special about an animated film, it's really about transporting you to faraway worlds, and making those worlds so real that you could like reach out and touch them. And then if you think about VR, that's kind of the same thing, where VR's promise is being able to transport you to incredible places and to make you really feel like you're in those worlds and you're part of those worlds. >> And to relax and chill a little bit too. >> Well relax and chill as well. >> Or entertainment or to be thrilled. >> So in our case we wanted to take all the experience that we have telling stories at places like Pixar and Dreamworks and apply that into this new medium. And so we found that VR is an incredibly powerful medium, and it really is one that's unlike film and unlike games. So, you're talking about bringing together the expertise of people from films, and people from games. That's critical to what we're doing, and yet at the same time, the experience is something that's totally different. >> Yeah we were commenting with some of our guys in our office how Twitch was experimenting with using the comments to drive the game behavior. You start to see new kinds of game systems develop around the storytelling as more of a behavioral dynamic, not the boring game I figured out, or the multi-player game with my same friends, or whatever that's going on, you're seeing a whole new level of creativity going on, one. Two, the other question is how much does it cost to make these things, 'cause Dreamworks and these guys are spending a lot of dough to do animation. >> Larry: Yes. >> I mean it's not cheap, so how do you guys crack the code on keeping it low, not low-budget, but low-cost and also intelligent is that the secret sauce? >> Yes well that's certainly super important for us. You know we're a start-up company, so obviously we need to be able to have a pipeline that if we run efficiently and you know for us, I think what we've done is we've brought together some of the best people, you know. So we've hired our friends, we've hired people who are really experts in the field, and we're really creating a next-generation VR platform so that we can actually create these animated experiences, be able to experiment in this space. You know, sort of try out different techniques and storytelling methodologies and at the same time do it in a way that we can, you know, sort of experiment as much as possible. >> John: Talk about some of the awards you guys had, I mean, you guys done some things. Share some of the accolades you've gotten. >> Yes, so, I mean what's amazing is that we started with our first piece of content Invasion!, and we premiered it last year in April at Tribecca Film Festival, and it's really gone on to, first of all, from a consumer standpoint, it's one of the most popular downloaded pieces of content on all the VR platforms, and at the same time it's been shown at a number of different film festivals, and it recently won an Emmy, so we're very excited about that, and, you know, what we realize is that audiences just fell in love with this bunny character Chloe. So Invasion! is this story about two aliens that try to take over Earth, and they're thwarted not by humans with powerful weapons, but by cute little woodland creatures. In the first episode in Invasion! they're thwarted by this cute little bunny Chloe, and what happens is that at the very beginning of the piece, Chloe like hops up to you, and if you look down you're a little bunny in the scene, you've got bunny legs, you can hop around. And audiences, you know, the viewer just reacted in ways that you would never do in a film, like people are waving at Chloe, a lot of people reach out and try to pet Chloe, a lot of people mimic what Chloe's doing, and in short people are just treating Chloe as if she's real. And it made us realize that there's something really powerful here that is really worth kind of leaning in and digging deeper into. >> And what was the next step after that, so you went what you went, some development, was it the game, was it the character development? How do you double-down on them, I'm just kind of curious on thinking about how the, on the thinking behind it. >> It was really interesting because we, in Invasion! we were kind of the first to make you a character in the story, but at the time there really weren't hand controllers, or any of the devices so that you could actually really have sort of a more like increased role in the story. And so at the same time, people really felt that they were front and center, and they felt this sense of protecting Chloe from the aliens 'cause you're placed right in the center of the story. And so with Asteroids! when we started, we just wanted to dive deeper into that idea of you playing an active role in the story. And so in Asteroids! we focused on the two alien characters Mac and Cheez and their relationship, and you're a helper robot on the ship, so you have. >> So how do I get involved and get these stories, do I have to have a VR kit? So I don't have, I haven't bought anything yet VR-wise, so for me, how do I engage with you guys, what do I do? Do I buy Oculus Rift, or certain headsets? >> So our stuff is meant to be available for everyone. We really want to have as many people be able to see our content as possible. And so first of all, if you have a VR headset of any type, our, Invasion! is available on all those platforms, so that's the high-end headsets like the Rift and Vive, the PlayStation VR for Sony, as well as if you have a mobile phone like a Samsung phone, you can plug it into your VR. At the same time, we also have a Baobab Cardboard app, so you don't even need to have VR to see our product. So you just get an IOS or Android app, a Baobab app. >> So I'm in the market to buy a headset, I'm not price sensitive, what should I buy? What would you recommend? (Larry chuckling) >> Well there really are so many options, so you know obviously at the high >> John: What would you get? >> Well at the highest end, you know, getting a Rift or Vive really gives you the full VR experience because it's really tracking your position and orientation so you can actually walk around a space, the characters can react to you in believable ways, and it's all happening in real time. And on the other hand, the Sony PlayStation VR's are really affordable if you've got a Sony Playstation, you just buy the PSVR headset, you plug it right in and you're ready to go. I'm really excited looking forward to a world where you're not tethered to your computer, and so it's really exciting to see these stand-alone headsets that are going to come out that basically there's no tethering to a computer and yet you have that same inside-out tracking so that >> And this is the Samsung vision, right? The Samsung vision is to use their displays. >> Yes, exactly. See right now what you have, which is, which is already really exciting, is you take your Samsung phone, you plug it into a Gear VR, and the one thing that's missing is that you're not able to track both the position and orientation of where you are, and so the next generation headsets are going to have that. And the experiences will be much higher feeling. >> Alright cool, so then I, I'll actually download all of this stuff. So as the CTO of the venture, your job is to kind of look over the landscape. You have to have the 20 mile stare of the future, not screw it up, but you've got to win the present. >> Larry: Yes, we're all about being able to deliver in the present and look forward to the future. >> And that's the key, and you have that unique skill as an entrepreneur. What are you guys doing now technically and with the product, what are some of the key things that people should know about, because I mean I look at the CG and the animation world, and you see the Moore's law kind of coming that way, right, so you go wow, as someone with a live video, I would love to have a bunny and the cube set right here, right? So we see a future where I want to immerse myself with characters, not just stickers. >> We of course see that as well, so you know, obviously. >> John: Is expensive I mean it must be, 'cause in the old days what, you had the artists, monster storage, tons of compute, what's it like now? >> Well we're a really small start-up company, so we are not a, you know, 300 person organization that is producing a full animated film. We're a small team of artists and engineers working together in the same way that we had that same excitement in the early days. I started my career at Pixar in some of their earlier films, and it was that same >> John: Power work stations, you had that high-end gear. >> Yeah so it was that same excitement in those early days, like we just had to figure out like how are we going to actually create this shot, how are we going to like, you know, build this character, how are we going to like finish this on time. And we have that same exact excitement in the office. >> When were you at Pixar, were you there for the Toy Story kind of thing? >> Yeah, so I worked on the Toy Story films, and A Bug's Life and Monster's Inc., and then I went over to Dreamworks and headed up all of their character technologies on their various films. >> Okay so you guys do anything different than those guys, or are you guys more focused more simple? >> Yeah, I mean what's interesting is that this is really a new medium and it's a new skill set, because what's happened is that you are part of the world, and for us the thing that's most exciting is that by you being a character, first of all, the other characters are not just able to have, you know, sort of high-quality animation, but they're able to react to you, and so there's there A. a number of technical innovations that you need to overcome so that we can have that same high-quality character performance that I would expect from a Pixar or Dreamworks film happening, running in real time at 90 frames a second on my headset, and at the same time also be able to have those characters react to you and respond to what you're doing. And you know, so we've scratched the surface on that. So one of the things that's really interesting is how two people will actually have all these subconscious communication cues, you know, whether it's eye contact or whether it's two lovers sitting across the table and mirroring each other's behavior, that's the type of thing that we can add into our animation. And at the same time, we have stories where depending on what you do, whether you choose to participate or not, that actually affects the outcome, and affects the way that characters respond to you. And so having much smarter character performances is certainly one area that I think is really exciting. >> And that's going to be interesting for you guys because you have some structured ways to do that, and then some unstructured ways to do it with community data, machine learning, and then you can use bots in a way to help you get data, but you almost could have character developments be dynamic. >> You definitely could, and you know for us I think the thing that is always the biggest point that we come back to is story. And so on one hand we want to tell one story that's really told well, not ten different stories, and on another hand, because you're part of that story, depending on what you do, that's actually going to affect how the characters respond to you, and that could be in a really nuanced way, and so, you know, building up AI systems, and building up the smarts so that you can actually have that type of response, and yet still feel like these characters are alive and breathing. >> Well the Chloe example on Invasion! is great example, you'd love to have that automated, so when you see those magical moments, the story could evolve, you can kind of give it that programmable policy-based taping. (John laughing) >> Yeah exactly so you know, so this is the type of thing. >> We're geeking out here on the set, Larry, great to have you on, super informative content, and I love the world you're in, I think the world's changing, I think you're going to see some interesting dynamics coming, you certainly have the historical view, Pixar and Dreamworks, old school, if you call that old school. >> That's right. >> Now the new school's coming in, certainly AR looks good too. >> Yeah, we're really excited about AR as well. When we think about stories, you know, VR is about transporting you to a different world and having a story take place there. AR is about the characters being alive in your world, both are really exciting. >> Have you seen the Magic Leap demo? >> Larry: Yes, yeah. >> What's it like, can you tell us? >> I'm not allowed to tell. >> John: Is it good? >> Yes, yeah. >> So it's worth half of another half a billion, oh I can't wait. >> That I can't say, you know. I can't comment on their business, but. >> It's a freaking award chest. >> I think there's a lot of exciting things you know, AR. >> They must have a killer demo, I want to find out, I want to see this demo. Magic Leap, I want to to see your demo. All seriousness, great to have you on, and certainly come down to our Cube studios. I want to follow your story, I think you guys are on the cutting edge of a new user experience that's going to bring computer animation, computer graphics, into a new persona as a storytelling, so congratulations. Larry Cutler, how do you say the. >> Baobab. >> Baobab, B-A-O-B-A-B Studios in Redwood City, California. It's the Cube live coverage from Samsung Developer Conference, I'm John Furrier, more after this short break. (peppy music)

>> Narrator: Live, from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering NAB 2017. Brought to you by HGST. (lively music) >> Welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here, everybody, with theCUBE. We are live at NAB 2017 at the Las Vegas Convention Center. 100,000 people, all kinds of gear. If you're into video and you're into fun, this is the place to be. We're real excited to have Brian Frager on. He's a VR and AR creative producer for Technicolor. Welcome Brian. >> Thank you, happy to be on. >> And then, on your bio, you have all my new vocabulary words that I've picked up. Photo, I can't even say the stupid word. Photogrametgramatry? >> Gamatry, photogrammetry. >> Jeff: Awesome. >> Yeah. >> So, first off, welcome. >> You've been doing this PR thing, since the beginning, early days. >> It's still early days. >> Jeff: It's still early days. >> Basically, I have a film back on, a traditional film production. But when I saw these new work flows emerging in these interactive stories and really, the whole spectrum of story telling opening up from what was, traditionally, either a film or a video game. Now, there's this whole spectrum of experiences in between that are, very much, a hybrid between the two and you, as a user or an audience, have some agency and some control over how you effect the experience. I was just all in on that. I took a deep dive into coding and development and the game engines and landed at Technicolor within the last few months. >> And that's through the volumetric video response to that, right? Cause you're creating a space or correct me if I'm wrong. >> Brian: Exactly. >> And now you interact in that space. >> Exactly, so you're building a whole environment and the idea is that, the user rather than, most 360 experiences that we're seeing right now that are being shipped as VR, are, really, just from a fixed point. Even though you can look around and that's, a little bit, innovative it's still very restrictive in how you can interact with the space. We focus on real time rendered game engine experiences where you build the entire environment and so, really, you, as a user, can go walk around the whole room, look at anything, inspect things and you just have a lot more freedom to explore. >> On the story telling aspect of that, how does that now, get stitched into what's, basically, a video game engine? >> That's a great question. It is a paradime shift because rather than dictating the sequence of events or the linear story and force feeding it to an audience, you're, really, creating an open world. You want to design it in a way where they still take away a narrative experience or at least some kind of experience from it. But you need to give the user freedom to navigate that world however they see fit. It's about a lot of play testing, to be honest, to get early iterations out into user's hands and to see what they're instinct is. You have an idea for how they're going to consume something but until you see someone in the experience and see what they're impulse is and what they want to interact with, then you can build towards that. So, it's a more iterative process that's more akin to game development. >> Are you sharing any funny stories or surprises or something where you thought somebody's going to go left and they went right, just completely counter to what you built into your script if you will? >> Oh man, funny experiences. You know, so we've been to a few festivals. We premiered it at Sundance and then at South by Southwest. We've put hundreds of people thought it. There's one character that's very anthropomorphized and we had an idea that people would like to interact with it. But the minute it shows up, there's people getting on the ground next to this little water buffalo and he's just chillin and looking around. And there's people sitting right next to him and trying to pet him and do all kinds of things and you realize people, once they feel emersed in a space and they find something they can emotionally connect with, they just want to hang out there and spend some time with that as a microcosm of the experience. So, we added some little interactive elements to him. So, that was an insight. Actually, the fumiest was when I showed it to my mom for the first time. They don't, totally, understand this new world. A character appeared and she happened to be standing, you never know where the user's going to be standing in these paths. So, she happened to be standing directly in the path where the character was going to run. So, she turns around and sees the character and it just starts running straight at her and she just screams and throws the controller. (laughing) And the character just goes right through you but you know, that immersion. You feel like you're about to get hit by something. >> Right, right. So, a lot of us have played, I've got the Samsung thing I put my Galaxy in. What are some of the secrets that help people feel that immersive experience? In terms of is it, really it's not the super quality view cause a lot of times, you don't have that. But a lot of times, it's the softer things is what pull people in. So, what are the things that, really, make it connect with people from VR? >> Absolutely, there's a lot of elements because, really, you are recreating reality, sense by sense. The nice thing about VR is our visual system is so overpowering in terms of how we interpret the world around us that, luckily, that's been the access point and the entry point to this whole VR boom that we've seen. Is that, finally, mobile screens are at a point, the sensors are all packed very tight. So, we can, really, ship at a low cost. Google cardboard, for example, being the widest distribution and give people a pretty compelling visual experience. That's really step one and I'd say that's, pretty well, established and distributed. >> Visuals and audio have been married but, really, it's about bringing the other senses into VR. For example, the agency of being able to move around a space and interact with real things in the space. That's more commonly termed mixed reality and that's going to be the next wave that you're going to see which is highly interactive spaces that are more of a mixture of the virtual world and physical elements. So that, even though I'm in a headset and I see a pen, in the headset, when I reach out and touch it, there's really a pen there that's tracked in the space. That adds a whole other level of immersion that allows it to be social. Because that's a contract between you and I that this is a physical thing that one of us is holding. It allows for a whole new world of opportunities of what can be done in VR. >> How important is the social aspect, in terms of adoption? Yourself or your mom cruising around on her own versus the opportunity to bring other people in? Is that some of the stuff that's going to make this, really, the killer app to get it over the next hump? Or what is the killer app, I guess, beyond cruising around half the time? >> 100%, I think it's making it social. How to open up that world. Because right now, it is a very isolating experience. There's no reason that it has to be, necessarily, it's just that the user base is not congregated around individual platforms. Facebook made a big opening salva last week when they released their Facebook spaces. That allows you to bring in people from the real world into your virtual experience. By being able to, through Facebook Messenger, I can call out while I'm in VR, I can call out to anyone who has Facebook Messenger's app installed. Then, I get a little video feed and they see me as an avatar on their phone screen. So, it's those hybridizations of connecting people in VR to people who are outside in the real world that's going to, really, hit the inflection point of wide adoption. >> There were some early versions of that in the past right? Where you had these virtual reality spaces inside the computer but they were not nearly as immersive as the ones that we have today. Why did those not, really, take off What was the one of them? I can't think of the name right now. Let's say it's Second City but that's not it. >> Brian: Oh, Second Life? >> Second Life versus today's world. What changed? >> Sure well, I wouldn't characterize Second Life as a failure. It had it's heyday. >> No, not a failure but I mean, it was an early attempt at what you just described, really, in the Facebook Messenger which is what triggered the thought. >> And funny enough, the Second Life team is now creating the virtual version of that called High Fidelity. So, they have their own attempt. There's a couple of other like ALTSpace Nobody has the install base of Facebook. And so once you plug in to that community, you're already connected with your friends. It just takes away the friction. The friction of VR is, really, what's holding back people. That and the isolation, I'd say, from wide adoption. Which is that, it's just not a seamless experience. Going in, finding the app I want, connecting with people easily. Being an early adopter, I've tried to run meetings through the Oculus social spaces. There's just a lot of friction with technical issues and people dropping in and out. It improves. They do releases all the time. All those issues are being worked out and the friction's just going to slowly going to go away to the point where it will be more convenient for us to take a meeting where we can sit face-to-face and read each other's expressions then it will to try to get the same amount done over the telephone or something like that. >> I have to laugh cause every time, whether you're on WebEx, pick your favorite meeting tool. It's still technical issues. I was thinking that YouTube video. One of the greatest YouTube videos ever. >> New medium, same problem. >> Yeah, same problem. Is Bob even here? He checks in at the end of the meeting. So, that's very cool. As you look forward and I know it's a fast moving space. What are some of your priorities? What do you see as some short term changes that are going to make a big impact? And what about, say a year from now. I don't even want to even guess much further out than that, that you see coming down the pike that's going to have a huge impact on the adoption of VR? >> Sure, so at the low end, we're starting to see inside out tracts mobile solutions. Meaning that, you can get that same kind of freedom to wander around a space that you can on a Vive or an Oculus but with a mobile headset. So, because the price point and the buried entry is so low, everyone already has or they'll have soon enough, a phone that's capable of running an experience like that. I think that will be an important first step. At the Technicolor Experience Center, which is Technicolor's new VR and AR and mixed reality focused wing, they're really betting that these immersive stories are the future of entertainment and how that will trickle across different market adjacencies and verticals to apply to medical and education and sports and fitness. The applications are just endless. I think we're seeing early Enterprise adoption right now. And then, on the consumer side, gaming is, really, where they found the early niche and there is a modernization model. But what we're, personally, interested in is showing people the very, very high end of what VR can be. Because once we show them the high end, they have a compelling reason to familiarize themselves with whatever it can be to them today. We're working on very high fidelity tract spaces where social and networks and we can be geographically together or remotely beamed in together but we feel embodied in that space in a way that's more immersive than currently available. In terms of being able to move lens and interact with the objects around us. That's what we're trying to prove out at Technicolor is how do we build high end entertainment experiences around those technical infrastructures that are not widely deployed today but they will be coming. I think, for monetization on those models, you're going to see a lot of installed spaces that people will, hopefully, flock to to get these high end experiences. >> So, what's your favorite high end experience right now? >> Well, I did get the chance to do the Void, the Ghostbusters VR Experience after Sundance and that was pretty incredible. It was a lot of fun. Just cause you're in it with someone else. It's like a new version of laser tag. It can apply to other areas, that was just a shooter game. Just that shared experience where we are both in the space together and we just know that we're getting access to this virtual world that no one else is seeing is a really special thing. >> It's just amazing how powerful the social aspect is to all these things. >> You want to talk about it with people. >> You want to talk about it. You want do it with somebody. You want to share it. It's such a powerful impact. >> Yeah and, I think, even on the mobile side that will help open up the world a lot because right now, if it's on a Vive or an Oculus, you can plug it into a monitor or a TV and I can see what you're doing in it. So, that's easy enough for me to feel like I'm, at least, participating in your experience. But when you're in mobile right now, you're, pretty much, locked in and I, really, have no idea what you are doing in the experience. So, I think, making it easily shareable across traditional channels or just me being able to opt into your experience or jointly share one, those are all things that are going to make it much more compelling for us to just say, hey, we have 10 minutes, let's dive into VR and do something together. That would be fun. >> Right, right, very cool. Alright Brian. Thanks for stopping by out of your busy day. >> Of course. Great to talk. >> Alright, Brian Frager. I'm Jeff Frick. You're watching theCUBE from NAB 2017. Thanks for watching. (lively music)