Welcome to Episode #228 of CxOTalk.
I’m Michael Krigsman, industry analyst and
the host of CxOTalk.
We have, again, just another amazing show!
We're going to be talking about augmented
reality and mixed reality, and virtual reality,
and artificial intelligence [with] two people
who are among the most expert in the world
on these topics.
Before we begin, I want to say “thank you”
to Livestream for being a great supporter
of CxOTalk.
I used to use Google Hangouts, and I hated
Google Hangouts because it crashed, and there
is no support, and there were bugs, and Livestream
saved us.
And, if you go to Livestream.com/cxotalk,
they’ll give you a discount.
There's a … Hey, guys!
Hey, guys!
Hang on; hold on; hold on; there's a tweet
chat that's going to be taking place right
now with the hashtag #cxotalk.
And so, without further ado, I want to introduce
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel, and Robert
Scoble…
Yeah!
Right!
I thought you were the Amazing Ant-Man!
[Laughter]
Alright!
So, Robert Scoble.
Tell us what you’re wearing!
I’m wearing a Microsoft Hololens, which
is the first of the mixed reality devices
that are going to hit the market, but obviously,
this is not yet ready for consumers.
It's way too big, way too dorky, and way too
expensive.
But, it does show you the future, and it's
an amazing future; we’ll talk about it.
Yeah, I’m a tech journalist.
Siri was launched on that couch back here;
I had the first ride in the first test lab
in covering Silicon Valley for many years
now, and Shel and I have written three books.
Each book has predicted a decade-long trend,
and this latest book called “The Fourth
Transformation” predicts augmented reality
is going to change everything.
And this week, Snap and Facebook demonstrated
that principle pretty well.
Okay, so we’re going to be talking about
these things and the latest developments in
augmented reality.
Shel Israel, you and I have known each other
for many years, as I’ve also known Robert.
Welcome to CxOTalk!
This is your first time here!
I’ve known you ever since I lost my coat
in Boston, Massachusetts and you gave me this
beautiful Marmot.
And I have to tell you, Mike, after ten years,
my friendship with you has outlasted that
coat.
I’m partners with Robert Scoble and Transformation
Group.
It’s a new consulting service for large
brands, primarily.
We’re going to help them make the transformation
into mixed reality, and we can use the rest
of the show to explain what mixed reality
is all about.
Okay, so let’s begin.
You guys have written this new book on AI
and augmented reality […]. You’ve started
a consulting company called the Transformation
Group.
So, let’s level-set and when you talk about
AR, VR, mixed reality, what are we actually
talking about?
Can I set that up?
So, VR, first of all, you're in a black box
and you're only seeing virtual things, right?
You're not seeing the real world at all.
With AR, or augmented reality, you can today
use your phone like on Snapchat or on Facebook
and aim it at things, and see virtual things
on top of the world.
Soon, you're going to be wearing glasses,
and soon, being in the next three to four
years, you're going to see a range of glasses
from companies like Apple, Facebook, [Raw
Wave], Snap…
There are ten under development that Shel
and I know about, and we probably don’t
know about all of them.
That will lock the virtual image to the real
world, and let you walk around it.
And, that can interact, and that’s really
mind-blowing.
I mean, with the HoloLens, you can have aliens
coming out of your walls, and they’re putting
holes in your real wall.
You’re seeing the real wall, but it looks
like there’s an alien coming through it.
And it’s like, mind-blowing what this technology
does for education, for retail, for all sorts
of things.
Shel Israel, why does this all matter?
What are the implications?
Well, that gets to the core of the Fourth
Transformation.
I’m not going to walk through the whole
thing, but in the First Transformation, we
started with putting words into PCs, on knowledge
worker desktops, in the form of personal computers.
Then, we went to point-and-click with the
McIntosh, and that meant everyone could use
these desktop things.
Then, we went to touch and mobility, and that
brought us into what is now this third transformation
where anyone is using digital technology everywhere.
Now, we’re going to go to a system which
is much more intimate than what we have with
phones.
We’re going to have things in a few years
that look like glasses I’m wearing.
And, they are going to allow us to do all
the things that I had just named: MR, AR,
VR; and we’re not going to look freakish,
and we’re not going to be tethered to anything.
This means that the customer experience in
stores is going to be changed because they
can do things in 3D.
They will walk into stores, be at home, and
have an immersive experience with the product.
This means that surgeons can get assistance
while wearing headsets.
It means that anatomy students will be doing
virtual surgeries in headsets, rather than
with frozen cadavers.
Every single place we look will be virtual
teachers in China, at least; students will
learn what looks like what the Civil War was
like not be memorizing the name of a battle
and by dates, but by actually getting to Gettysburg
and getting the full impact of what a bloody
war is like.
Wherever you look, whatever you do, it’s
going to be enhanced with mixed reality technologies.
And Robert, you are out seeing these companies.
You’ve been traveling around the world,
and tell us what are some of the really fascinating
examples that you’ve seen, and who is doing
this really well?
Well, it goes way back.
In 2011, I did I think the first interview
for our book, and that was with Metaio in
Germany.
And, they sent me monsters on the sides of
skyscrapers with a standard camera.
And we still haven't seen that ship, and that
company, and so I expect when Apple comes
down this road, we're going to see stuff like
that in its mixed reality strategy that it's
developing.
And, it's quite an expensive strategy because
[since] Steve Jobs, they've been working on
this for seven years and they still haven't
shipped product yet, which shows the kind
of investment that it takes not just to do
it at Apple but even at Meta.
I did an interview this week at Meta, which
is one of the first mixed reality glasses
companies that Shel and I have interviewed,
and they’ve been doing it for five years,
and their product is still not to where a
consumer can wear it and use it all day long.
Why are these products so expensive to develop?
Well, she has formative products through history
of very expensive to develop.
I remember when Windows came out, Bill Gates
said that the first version of Windows, the
first copy, cost over a billion dollars.
The second one cost seventy-five cents.
This is still in the hardware phase.
We are now looking at state-of-the-art stuff
which will soon acquaint [people to] things
to look at in computer museums in Boston and
San Jose.
And we will end up wearing something that
costs under 200 bucks, I would imagine, which
does infinitely more than we can imagine today;
the same way our smartphones do infinitely
more than mainframes did 50 years earlier
- except, the transformation isn't going to
take 50 years, it's going take less than 10
for sure; maybe 5, maybe less, because so
much money from so many great companies is
going into this technology.
So, right now, it looks to us like it's all
moving in slow motion.
But when you think of the technology going
into this, the things that have never been
done before that can now be done – the changes
from what we saw a year ago, at South by Southwest
to where we are now, this is a marvel.
You know, the thing, Robert, that I just made
fun of, was a marvel when it first came out,
but now just about everybody that I know that
wears it, that loves it, talks about their
frustration with it because it's heavy; it's
cumbersome; it's got a limited field of view.
There are so many problems being solved at
such a rapid rate.
When you're a consumer, you're trying to figure
out what technologies you should use the next
quarter in the enterprise, or for a brand,
then it seems very clumsy.
This is the fastest technology revolution
of the four of them, by orders of magnitude.
You asked why does this cost so much to build.
Let’s talk about the six technologies that
are on this thing, right? 
Yeah.
Sensors that are seen around the world, that
is billions of dollars for R&D, right?
IM-Sense was bought by Apple.
Google Tango is doing the same kinds of research,
Meta is doing the same kind of … Everybody
who wants to build a mixed reality glass has
to build sensors to see the world in 3D and
bring it into the glass.
Then, you talk about the connectivity that
you're going to need, right?
Because with mixed reality glasses, you get
as many TV screens around you as you want.
So imagine being able to watch CNN here; here,
ESPN is playing; and over here, you can watch
your security cameras from your business;
and over here, you can watch Amazon servers;
and over here, you can watch Facebook.
You just look around, you have dozens of screens
all around you, and you don't have to buy
more if you want more screens.
But, to serve all those screens with hi-res
4K or 8K video, or eventually even more in
the future, you’re going to need a lot of
bandwidth, and that’s 5G. 5G brings 35 gigabits
per seconds down to the glasses, but we don't
yet have 5G and we're going to … And, Verizon
has to re-do the architecture on a city, because
the cell tower needs to be a kilometer and
a half from you or closer, and that's not
true with today's cell technology.
You can be 15 kilometers away.
So, they need to put a lot more cell towers
into a city and they put fiber into each one
of those antennas, so it's going to bring
us 5G.
That's coming this year, right?
Verizon is turning on the first 11 cities
this year.
And that's really […]
You go through the GPU; the GPU is needed
to display the polygon.
So, when you are seeing virtual things in
VR or AR, you're seeing millions of little
polygons or little triangles that are underneath
what you're seeing; and you'll need a better
GPU to process more of those.
So, if you want to increase the resolution
or increase the frame rates, or increase the
experience of being immersed in the media,
you need more GPU; or, you need to do a lot
of trickery with […] rendering.
And you look at the R&D budgets of NVidia,
and AMD, and Qualcomm, and [Mallway], and
other companies that are building these chips;
they are spending billions of dollars per
quarter in R&D.
Then you keep looking around; there are companies
that are building eye sensors.
GoogleBot, Eyefluence that’s in our book,
Facebook product company called Eye Tribe;
there is lots of money spent on that, and
particularly in the new user interfaces that
you’re experiencing when you get a glass
like this.
They’re investing that.
Just …
You just keep moving down the stack.
The whole thing is just really expensive,
and there are ten companies building these
glasses, and they’re all building their
own infrastructure.
And the infrastructure…
Apple’s building a CDN, so think about putting
a server near you so you have low-latency
VR; you can play football with your friends
over the internet, right?
That requires a CDN that’s really a massive
new expenditure for Apple and other companies,
yeah?
Yes, Shel?
Yeah, I’m sorry.
Just an example: Everybody’s looking at
the mass acceptance, but there are all these
verticals that require remarkably new technology.
MindMaze is a company that we wrote about
in the book.
It has 1.2 billion dollars in investment money.
What they're doing with this money is creating
a virtual reality headset to cure schizophrenia;
to treat and help people recover from a stroke;
to treat Parkinson's … There are five or
six really complex ailments that they're addressing
and finding success with.
To do this, they're creating a net that goes
over the head, contains 32 sensors that are
reading directly from the brain; it is using
the patient's brain to move objects; to make
somebody whose arm has been cut off believe
that arm is still there to eliminate the pain.
Every single thing I mentioned is something
that's never been done in history.
They've been working on this stuff for four
years.
They're burning a lot of money, but when you
consider what they're working on, they will
probably have cured, I'm guessing, schizophrenia
in the next four or five years, that's kind
of remarkable.
When you think of the billions of dollars
that we'll save, the pain and suffering that
will be reduced, the investment that is going
in here is enormous, but the return is even
greater – far greater.
And, the time to make this stuff may seem
very long, but when you think about what they're
doing, it's rather short.
So, the sense that I have is there is this
enormous promise, and the ability to change
fields, as diverse as medicine, learning,
training, in profound ways; and yet, at the
same time, in order for this promise to be
realized, there needs to be a massive investment
in infrastructure; in wireless connectivity.
Let's talk about one that you're going to
hear a lot more about: Facebook was the first
one to use this term on stage in a big way;
in a big, company way.
And that's "SLAM."
And so, what we're building as an artificial
copy …
What does SLAM stand for, Robert?
Simultaneous Location And Mapping; which means
we're building a 3D map of the world, and
it's not a map like Google Maps, where there
is just a line in the middle of the street,
but it's capturing the entire street in 3D.
And, we're not just going to capture the street,
we're going to capture every surface in the
world with these glasses, and build a massive
database.
How big is that database going to be?
Petabytes or Exabytes?
How massive [an] amount of server space just
to keep a 3D copy of the world at some resolution?
You know, let's say a millimeter per pixel
or voxel resolution around you?
That's a huge amount of data, and that's a
billion dollars right there just in a data
center to start with.
It might be three or four billion, once you
are done, and certainly, you are going to
have to change those machines out like you
do with cloud computing machines at Amazon,
for instance.
And so, that's, right there, that’s a billion
dollars, minimum.
And, Uber’s building one of those copies,
Mercedes is building one of those copies,
Google already built one of those copies,
Apple’s building one of those copies, Facebook
is working on this, right?
That’s what they were showing off when they
said, “Oh, you can lock virtual things onto
your tabletop.
That’s using SLAM; the phone instantly builds
a point-cloud and then a 3D model of the world,
and then starts doing AI to figure out how
to lock things properly to the surfaces in
your room.
And that’s going to be something that over
the next 18 months, you’re going to see
a lot more of; because right now, we haven’t
seen any of the really good AI that recognizes
the objects in your room, but that’s coming,
and that’s coming big time according to
Google because they’re going to use the
data that they built off the self-driving
cars to bring to our glasses.
And how many objects in the street does the
Google self-driving car or now Waymo, recognize
the hundreds of thousands of things, right?
Because it needs to see a stop sign or a stop
light and know what to do!
And, the glasses are going to do the same
thing.
When you walk around, it’s going to tell
you stuff about the world that you’re looking
at.
What’s the timeframe for all of this?
It seems like it must be years away, still.
Umm, Apple is going to announce something
this year.
We’ll see how aggressive they are, but I
bet they’re going to be very aggressive
particularly since Facebook is such an aggressive
[…] for this AR world.
The big companies are going to keep trying
to outdo each other.
The question is when do we get glasses?
Certainly within the next two years.
Within the next two years, we’re going to
see ten glasses get unleashed from a variety
of different companies; maybe three years,
if you want to include more players; but Apple’s
coming within two years.
So within two years, me and Shel are wearing
little Apple glasses that might have a limited
field of view; we don’t know; we don’t
know how good their optics are.
And then you’re going to see a lot of others…
But, however good they are, there will be
like nothing that’s ever been experienced
before.
It’s true.
Everybody who plays with my HoloLens is just
absolutely floored by how amazing it is to
have computing on all the surfaces of your
house, you know?
It just …
You need to picture another factor; we’re
talking all about the technology, but let’s
switch over to the humans for a while, because
right now, we sit around, we can say “I
was there when the Commodore Pat was blah,
blah, blah…”
Right now, the starting point for coming generations
is that old thing called the Smartphone.
That’s the starting point.
We have kids using Minecraft, who are learning
to code before kindergarten.
They’re learning to share.
They’re learning to … When they want to
learn something, they don't go to teachers
or parents, or handbooks, they go to YouTube.
So, we have a culture whose expectation, as
they grow up, will be to use VR and AR in
their work, as they shop, for their entertainment.
Everything that they do, they're going to
expect VR and AR rather than …
My generation started off with typewriters
and carbon paper, and can you imagine being
a recent grad sitting down at an office and
being handed and Underwood manual typewriter
and whiteout today?
That's what's going to happen if you hand
somebody ten years from today, a recent graduate,
a smartphone, they're going to say "What is
this?
My grandmother used this!"
So, you need to look at not only the evolution
of the technology but generations that are
rising; which is a great term, Robert, for
you to talk about the zero-learning-curve
generation that you discovered.
Yeah.
You know, in fact, one of our pieces of advice
to brands who are seeing that this world is
starting to come at them, and they’re starting
to wonder what they should be doing about
it, particularly when Facebook is doing it.
If you don’t pay attention to what Facebook’s
doing with augmented reality for brands, it’s
pretty stunning.
So, my advice is to get VR today, because
there are not enough experiences on augmented
reality to really have a good experience.
And, you need to start building and understanding
how to build for VR, because that’s going
to teach you how to think; how your engineering
and strategy teams should be thinking in 3D;
and starting to think about the next world.
I have to stick in the commercial pitch: This
is why we started Transformation Group.
We don't think there are too many decision
makers in high-level brand seats feeling the
great pain of an unfulfilled demand for mixed
reality technologies.
Yeah.
But the thing is going to come sooner that
people realize.
And, it is very important for brands to stay
a little ahead of their customers, a little
ahead of their competitors, and certainly,
far enough ahead that no young entrepreneur
says, “Ha!
I see an opportunity to unseat a big taxi
company or Sears Roebuck of today.”
If companies sit and wait for the best cases
to come out, it means that somebody will have
beaten them to the page.
And what the race is really for is the next
generation of customers.
And obviously, you guys feel that this is
going to just explode in popularity and adoption
in the world in the next three years, four
years, what’s the time frame?
Yeah…
… Go ahead, Robert!
It's now!
This week, Facebook and Snap laid out really
expansive strategies for this.
And if you're not paying attention to that,
you're going to get slammed every month because
over the next 24 months, you're going to see
ten glasses come out; and big companies come
out with major new strategies around this.
Apple is the one that I'm looking at the most,
and Tim Cook has been out there talking about
AR for a year now.
Now, we have a question.
Does he ship this year, does he ship next
year, does he ship in 2019, but certainly
by 2019, everybody is in the game!
So if you're running a business, you have
to start thinking about how your customers
in three years are going to experience your
business as they walk in, or as they call
you from this mixed reality world and what
their experience expectation is going to be.
“Explosion” is a funny word, Michael.
I think it’s more like when Ethernet came
in.
Bob Metcalfe used to say, for the first year
in a row to the seventh year in a row, “This
is will be the year of the network.”
No one really knows when the year of the network
was.
No one really knows what moment the smartphone
replaced the laptop.
This is going to be more like a river flowing;
very, very quickly.
And, if you just start getting your arms around
this now, if you’re trying something out;
when this is already happening, you have a
very long learning curve.
What you’re doing is transforming the way
businesses operate, the way they deal with
partners, customers, marketing, everything;
and there is a lot to learn.
And if you start waiting to see what the other
guys are doing, then you’re going to be
a laggard to market, you’re going to be
in the same position as Kmart or JC Penney.
You know?
We think, in retail, it's very interesting.
Home Depot has long been perceived as the
technology leader in its category.
And what's going on now is Lowes has come
out with a holodeck for kitchen redesign,
they're selling Tango technology phones from
Lenovo, not as phones, but as home improvement
tools, where $500 to save you the cost of
making a mistake in remodeling your house
isn't that expensive.
So, there is an example of where I think one
company that is perceived as the follower
is going to become a leader.
And, I don’t think there’s any way that
Home Depot today can adjust course and catch
up because Lowes has been at it for two years.
And we have a comment from Twitter.
Jay Ferro, who is a prominent CIO and has
been a healthcare CIO makes the comment that
he sees huge applicability in healthcare for
both patients and providers, as well as construction,
security, and others.
So, maybe can you talk about the healthcare
applications of AR, VR, and mixed reality?
Umm, yeah.
Pfizer sees it as a drug, and they are already
doing studies along the lines of what Shel
talked about earlier.
They’re studying it for use in Alzheimer’s,
ADHD, autism, depression, and physical pain,
among other things.
So, first of all, putting light in your eyes;
turns out it’s a brain hack and it can affect
your brain; it can change your brain.
And we are already seeing examples of this
in studies.
The University of Washington studied burn
victims, and they put VR on the burn victims
and compared their responses to pain via VR
versus morphine, and they found VR is way
more effective at solving burns that have
pain than morphine.
It may be just as addictive, but it doesn’t
have the side effects of that addiction.
And morphine and opiates take you down a path
of if you go all the way down the path, you
end up with heroin.
This is one of the reasons we have a huge
heroin problem in America.
And we’re killing people; a lot of people
in this addiction.
And, if we can stop that, or cut that down
by moving some of these things away from opiates,
and into using light in your eyes to affect
your brain, that’s really a big deal.
Where else are we going to go with this?
The doctors are going to wear it.
I just had my eyes scanned in 3D; that’s
the first time.
Just last Saturday, I had my first 3D eye
scan done, so now the doctor’s going to
be able to walk around the surface of my eye
in 3D with her glasses.
A couple of more … in this area, because
I think health and healthcare is one of the
places that is going to be … For me, it’s
remarkable because we’ve written three books
and health was always a laggard.
They were busy thinking about, “Maybe, we
won’t have to carry around our records in
manila folders from one doctor to the other,”
and now suddenly, they’re the leading edge.
Outside of Boston, at Duson, a company that
has designed 3D modeling for Tesla and Boeing,
they’ve developed a 3D heart, which is a
thousand times bigger than a real heart; a
much larger [heart].
Doctors can go there with a 3D model of a
patient’s heart where they can’t find
the problem, and tour; take a 3D tour of a
heart and see what the affliction in their
patients’ heart is by seeing what a perfectly
healthy heart will look like.
In Case Western, they are using HoloLens to
teach med students anatomy so that they don’t
have to cut up cadavers, which I think I might
have mentioned before.
Every aspect of healthcare is working that
way.
And, we’re just beginning.
One of the possible dangers of all of this
is one of the sources of miracles.
VR and AR impact how the human brain works.
It can make pain go away.
We don't know what the lasting effects are;
we don't know what is going to happen when
millions of people start having their brain
somewhat adjusted by this stuff; but in terms
of health, it can only help.
But when you say it makes pain go away, you
have to elaborate on that because what that
implies is that VR and AR operate on centers
in the brain that are related to things like
pain but that are very different mechanisms
than when we take drugs.
And so, I’m skeptical.
So, tell us…
There’s an eye doctor in South Africa Sherylle
Calder.
She runs EyeGen.com, and she works with professional
athletes.
And all she does it put light into their eyes,
and she fixes them.
She took the worst rider on the South African
cycling team […] per race, he played with
her app for ten minutes a day for six months,
and now he’s best on the team at that task.
And, she has dozens of examples of this.
It shows how deeply hack-able our brains are,
and how little we really know about the brain,
but we’re doing a lot of research.
MindMaze is one.
Elon Musk just announced that he’s doing
brain research because he knows that you’re
going to interface with things with your brain.
Facebook just announced the same thing; that
they’re doing brain research because they
think you can think a post and have it appear,
or something else, right?
Drugs have been hacking brains for a very
long time.
Psychedelic drugs, you know, we all can talk
about acid or LSD, but it goes back hundreds
of years when natives have been using mescalito
in the desert as the Don Juan books told us
about.
We have been using drugs to alter sections
of the brain for a very long time.
We have been concerned about the side effects
of that.
Robert talked about morphine to heroin.
There are countless - not countless – I
have seen reports about what has happened
to veterans who became addicted to drugs when
they were being treated for pain and suffered
a battle wound.
And, they become homeless guys in the street
with heroin addiction, because their brain
never got out of the addiction.
Now, we can do this without the medication.
It may have the same or different impact on
the human brain.
We do know there are at least four companies
who are talking about replacing morphine and
other opiates in surgery.
This sounds, to me, like cause for optimism
because of the dangers of opiates, particularly
in teenagers.
There are reports, I think, Robert, you’re
the source of that; reports on teenagers having
surgery, becoming addicted to morphine and
other opiates.
This may not happen with AR and VR, and I
can’t tell you what will or will not happen,
because it’s all too new, but it certainly
sounds better to me.
You know, if I had a choice putting on a VR
headset, and swimming around with the seahorses
of the Great Barrier Reef while they’re
doing open heart surgery, rather than risking
my life with vapors going up my nostrils,
I would pick the glasses and the Great Barrier
Reef.
Are you aware of any medical research studies
that are using AR, VR, and mixed reality in
controlled studies?
Has that happened yet?
University of Washington; and if you search
"VR pain," you'll find it.
Vrpain.com.
What about the artificial intelligence aspect?
We have a comment from Arsalan Khan on Twitter,
who says these technologies can also create
biases and perhaps make us more lonely through
technology.
And, the whole bias question brings up …
I don’t buy the loneliness at all.
If you play with Facebook spaces that just
got released this week, you can do incredible
things with people over the internet, and
now start thinking about making that mixed
reality where you’re walking around and
you can play Frisbee with your best friend,
or you can work on a work project in 3D all
standing around a table without leaving my
bedroom here.
That’s incredible!
And, people have been saying that this stuff
is kind of desensitizing people.
I just don’t buy that.
I’ve been watching a lot of people play
VR and UploadVR.
I had an Oculus for a year.
I wore a Google Glass for a year before that.
I’ve been studying this for a while, and
I just don’t see any signs of that.
There will be downsides, and in our book,
we have lots of examples of downsides.
One chapter in the book is called “What
could possibly go wrong?”
A lot of things.
Just watch Blackberry, and you see the downsides
of technology.
You know, right now, we're sitting here and
I see these three boxes.
I see four boxes.
One is a black box that just says your name
in it.
But, picture, in the future; we're located
remotely from each other but we're all sitting
in each other's rooms talking to each other.
I might punch Robert in the shoulder and he
feels the impact through that haptic technology.
You know, I can toss a Frisbee over to you,
Mike, and you can retrieve it and toss it
over to Robert, and we see the Frisbee coming
at us.
So now we can play … We can be social with
people all over the world.
Take something like Minecraft, which is teaching
kids who are completely apathetic to global
politics, which makes me envious of them,
they’re sharing code with kids in countries
that we’re in hostile relationships with.
You know, you can find people like yourself
all over the world.
You can play with them, you can study with
them, you can adventure with them; you can
zap aliens with them; you can zap each other
with them; you can play ping-pong Frisbee,
and this is just the beginning.
Ten years ago, we had the horrors of Web X,
which was a miracle at the time, and all the
fourteen steps to get in and out of it.
And now, we just click.
And look how far we've gone since Google +,
which you made fun of at the beginning of
this program.
Think about where we're going to be two years
from today when the screen's gone.
We're just sitting here.
We're not wearing headphones, we're just looking
at each other.
It's funny, I just started looking at you
in my room.
But that's what it's going to be like.
Every phone conversation; I know phone conversations
are getting outdated, but every phone conversation
is going to be without a screen separating
this.
We're going to be there.
We're going to be socializing with each other.
And the issue of place becomes almost totally
irrelevant but almost irrelevant.
More irrelevant.
We have really just a few minutes left.
This conversation has gone by so fast and
I wish we had another hour, but we have not
spoken about the AI, the artificial intelligence
connection, and so please, bring that in.
Where does that fit?
When your glasses sense the world in 3D, it
sees planes like your wall, your ceiling,
your table, your floor.
But it doesn't know really anything about
those planes, and the AI is going to recognize
all the objects in your world including the
planes, right, so that it will really know
that is is the floor.
And when it knows that, then you can have
artificial things moving around your world,
because it's going to know every surface.
So aliens could come out of the walls if you
want that; you could have assistants sitting
on your table helping you do things; you can
have a Spongebob jumping around back here,
or something like that.
But, you're starting to see tastes of this
with the new Snapchat and Facebook functionalities
where they are augmenting your face or augmenting
the world and putting things onto the world,
right?
The world is stupid today.
Five years from now, the world is going to
be really smart.
These glasses are going to know everything
about things that it’s seeing, because this
is how the self-driving car sees the world,
and these are the systems that are going to
be put in place to see this stuff.
Or a surgeon in the middle of surgery.
I mean, incredible!
Well, you know, I’m thinking just the mixed
reality stuff.
The surgeon’s going to have a robotic surgery
machine that’s going to be training on his
or her work, and it is going to assist that
surgeon in doing sutures, for instance, or
doing whatever they need to do; scoping your
knee, or whatever.
The doctors are training the machines to do
the work [laughter].
So that’s a huge trend that’s bigger than
just the few minutes that we have.
One more thing about remote surgery, which
is if you’re in a tent in a battlefield
and suddenly you have to do an emergency heart
valve replacement, somebody at John Hopkins
can be watching this surgery over your shoulder
and say “Aah!
Not that one!”
Yeah.
.. and save lives that way.
The possibilities are great, and that is the
same application as an oil rig worker being
trained in a corporate headquarters what to
do when a fire breaks out in the North Sea
or the Gulf of Mexico, as we've experienced
in this country.
I mean, clearly my mind has certainly been
opened hugely.
So we have really just about three minutes
left, and in our last couple of minutes, what
advice do you have for brands?
I mean, you alluded to some things earlier.
What should brands be doing today in order
to make sure that they are ready?
The problem for brands is when they don't
know how to dream about a world [where] that's
coming really fast.
That's very different to today's world.
And so, you need to start getting into VR
or getting a HoloLens and start really thinking
through strategically how your business is
going to be changed by these technologies.
Sephora, for instance, already is doing augmented
reality signs in the stores, and they're already
building augmented reality into their Apple
app to augment makeup onto your face, so you
could try out pink lipstick, for instance,
on the Sephora app on the iPhone or on the
Android.
And they're already playing with this.
So when the glasses come along, they're already
going to have their engineering teams geared
up, and they're already going to have a good
idea of how they’re going to build things,
and they’re going to be able to build it
iteratively and nicely, right?
And now, a Unity developer is fairly cheap,
and in a year, a Unity developer is going
to cost three times more than it does today.
So if you convince a Unity developer to come
and join your team today, you’re going to
get them cheaper and cheaper.
Then, you will in a year because Apple and
Facebook and Google and Snap are going to
really wake everybody up.
If that’s the lesson this week, companies
need to wake up to the fact that this stuff
is becoming real, and really fast.
And you need to get into it.
I just want to end with just a touch of shameless
self-promotion; that Robert and I are offering
educational workshops to brands to understand
what is going on now, to see how other companies
in their fields are starting to use this and
help them understand that they need to pay
attention now.
They don’t need to move now, they don’t
have to start offering headsets when you walk
through the door, but we can help them understand
what is happening that is relevant to them,
not this quarter but maybe eight quarters
down the line.
You also … One really deep change, because
your brand is going to be sprayed onto the
world, right?
You’re going to walk into a hotel in five
years, and the hotel is going to be augmented.
Disneyland is going to be augmented.
They’re already working on it, right?
So, their customers are going to walk in with
Apple, or Facebook, or Google Glasses, or
Snap Glasses, and things are going to be augmented
in the park when you walk around.
So, you are going to have to build a new kind
of team that hasn't existed, and is a cultural
review team, because you're going to make
mistakes in this new world that are cultural.
You might piss off Trump supporters, for instance;
well, that's a lot of people to piss off.
So, you've got to run a diverse team of people
through your software the same way you run
a diverse group of people through, to make
sure you don't have bugs and crashes; to make
sure you don't make cultural mistakes; make
sure there are no Nazi symbols on the walls
anywhere ... That's not through the design
process.
This stuff happens, but you need to have a
team to work on this.
So, that’s the kind of strategic thinking
that I’m starting to think that companies
need.
But, they aren’t investing in this because
they haven’t even started thinking about
it yet.
The first stage is you have got to get into
VR or into the HoloLens and really start playing
around; and understand how fast this market
is moving, because it is moving ferociously
fast, now.
Okay.
We're out of time, however, we've got two
great questions on Twitter.
So let me ask them just in turn, and if you
can give a sort of a Tweet-sized response
to questions that probably deserve an hour
apiece… okay?
First one is from Ian Gertler, and he is asking,
"What about Internet of Things?
Where does that fit?"
These are the user interface for Internet
of Things, for Smart Cities, for your drones,
for your robots, for your Uber car, for everything.
That’s why the title of our books says,
“It will change everything, and we are not
kidding about that.
Shel, you were going to add something quick?
Robert’s answer was pretty good, actually.
But, this is where the humans meet the sensors.
This is all this Internet of Things; it has
no value unless we interact with it and that’s
how we’re going to be doing it.
Okay, I love it.
“How the humans meet the sensors” The
new user interface for IoT.
And then, finally, we have a question from
Curran Danison, and I hope I pronounced your
name right and if you haven’t I apologize;
who is saying, “The impact of these new
realities on education and also higher education,
and also timing.”
Yeah, that one definitely does require an
hour!
Caterpillar is using augmented reality glasses
to teach people how to fix million dollar
tractors.
This is the best education technology humans
have ever invented.
We can teach people how to do new things in
real-time while they’re doing them, and
that is incredible.
And, we’re going to see a huge, new revolution
in education.
In every aspect of learning, just my tweetside
to that would be the virtual teachers in China.
As much as they try to have good birth control
practices, they can't produce teachers fast
enough to keep up with students.
So now, they're experimenting with a game
company in a classroom where kids wear glasses
and they customize their teachers.
It can be an old teacher, a young teacher;
a teacher watches the student and teachers
as the pace where a student learns.
The teacher gets bored, the teacher, the virtual
teacher creates a pop quiz right there.
This allows every pupil, for better or worse,
to have a customized education at that pupil's
ability to learn; no faster, no slower.
And you can't do that in a classroom.
All right.
We are out of time.
And, still, there's one last point that I
just want to…
Robert, you predicted six-eight months ago.
You were the first person that I saw who predicted
that Apple is going to make some type of announcement
with AR and VR.
Yep.
Absolutely.
They’re coming out…
I believe they’re building a massive strategy.
It comes from Steve Jobs; they did the first
patent back in 2007, but the real patent for
the iPhone with a 3D sensor would pass through
augmented reality was done in 2011.
So, they’ve been working on this for a long
time, buying tons of companies; all of that’s
going to come out this year by the end of
September in their new headquarters.
And we’ll see when we actually get these
products; but they’re going to explain that
there’s a new Apple here, and you’ve got
to get on board with the new 3D map they’re
building, and the new CDN, the new Siri, the
new iPhones that are going to do mixed reality;
the new glasses that are under development;
we’ll see if those come out at this announcement.
I would assume they will.
And if they don’t, you’re seeing Facebook
announce big announcements this week, and
you can see; well, Zuckerberg told me personally
that he’s aiming at mixed reality glasses.
He sees that as the big prize now, and he
just bought a micro-LED company to build optics
for glasses, right?
So, he’s not playing around.
Apple’s not playing around.
Google has invested half a billion dollars
in Magic Leap and they’re building their
own teams.
So they’re not playing around.
Microsoft spent, I don’t know, many billions
of dollars already on HoloLens, and has a
thousand people working on the next version.
So, on and on and on.
So, if you bet against what we’re betting
on, then you’re betting against the best
and brightest technology companies in the
world, and the best and brightest new developers
in the world.
But, then again, Sears bet against social
media.
Alright.
And, I’ve learned a lot.
I’ll just tell you we have another question
on Twitter, and I don’t think we have the
time to answer it but it’s a really great
one.
And, Bob Resselman says, “I need to ask;
what is the effect of virtual reality on intimacy
between humans?
Parent-to-child, dating and marriage behavior?”
It's gonna change it.
I have a friend who already has had sex while
wearing a VR headset, so…
That's a whole ‘nother topic and not one
that Shel and I are particularly adept on!
[Laughter] But, that will be something that
you’re going to discuss at South by South
West for my age.
My Twitter answer to that is we will see,
and we’ll see sooner.
Not later.
Yup.
You …
Well, I’ll add one thing.
If you’re a teenager and you’re shy with
girls, you can create a virtual girl to your
liking, and you can have sex with it.
Robert Scoble; [Laughter]
Do you want me to continue?
No!
[Laughter]
Everybody prefers this system.
I don't know what happens to the human race
because we're not going to be reproducing
very much.
We’ve moved from the sublime to the ridiculous.
He asked!
Well, it’s not ridiculous, Michael!
CNN has a program called “Mostly Human”
already, and they found somebody who fell
in love with their sex robot.
So there is a change here, but it’s not
for your show.
[Laughter]
Yeah, falling in love with your sex robot.
Alright.
On that note, what an interesting CxOTalk
this has been.
We’ve been speaking with Robert Scoble,
and with Shel Israel, who are two of the most
knowledgeable people on the planet on the
subjects of augmented reality, virtual reality,
mixed reality, the connection to artificial
intelligence.
Their book is “The Fourth Transformation,”
and their new consulting business; they work
for brands, teaching brands how to do this
stuff, is the Transformation Group.
Gentlemen, thank you so much for being here!
Robert Scoble, and Shel Israel; and everybody,
next week we have an amazing show.
We will be speaking together with the Chief
Privacy Officer from Cisco Systems, and she
will be joined by the Chief Information Officer
of the Federal Communications Commission.
And we will be talking about privacy and AI
in this new world.
Thanks, everybody.
And thanks to Livestream.
Have a great one.
Bye-bye!
