Breaking Banks
Hosted By Brett King, Jason Henrichs, & JP Nicols
The #1 global fintech radio show and podcast. Every week we explore the personalities, startups, innovators, and industry players driving disruption in financial services; from Incumbents to unicorns, and from the latest cutting edge technology to the people who are using it to help to create a more innovative, inclusive and healthy financial future.

https://provoke.fm/show/breaking-banks/

this week on the futurists I think that it’s it’s too to understand how hard it’s going to be to build as long as we don’t understand what it is that we that we will need to build you know there is this representation of the metaverse of the special web as the Ready Player One experience which is most probably what what it’s not going to end up being okay so I think that the why and the the what have not been answered yet digital twin is really a way to represent the outside world to enhance the interaction of real user with this real world so example if I do a digital twin of the of an entire airport I will be able to enhance the interaction that my Travelers going through this Airport have with the airport facilities foreign welcome back to the futurists I’m Rob turcic and my co-host Brett King here with me hi hey Brett you know one of the things we keep hearing about on this show it keeps turning up is this topic of the metaverse this uh this idea that someday we’re going to be spending all of our time not on Zoom like we all have been for the last couple of years during the pandemic but instead it’s sort of a 3D version of Zoom uh where we’ll be able to be in the same place and look around and look up and look down you might think of it as like an immersive game world that we’re going to spend all our time in now there’s a lot of controversy about this because candidly that vision is pretty far out in the future but what a lot of people don’t know is that real-time 3D has quietly grown to become an enormous force and I’d say real-time 3D is even big is way bigger than the metaverse well of course this includes um you know the new tech that we’re looking at with Apple’s uh the the new rumor is they’re going to be called Apple reality glasses yeah yeah we heard about the trademark filings for Apple for reality it’s not just apple right but Microsoft’s been working on real-time 3D for ages companies like Nvidia power it’s uh there’s a number of big companies in the space so this week what I thought would be fun to do is to bring on a good friend of mine someone I’ve worked with in the past and someone I have great respect for who is an expert in this topic he’s been working at the very Forefront of real-time 3D for more than a decade so let’s give a big welcome to Silvio druan Silvio hi welcome to Lou thanks for having me we’re so happy to have you here uh now Sylvia your title is the SVP of innovation at unity and um Unity is one of those companies that flies under the radar for most people I would say a lot of people deal with unity or a lot of consumers touch Unity technology but they’re completely unaware of it in a way it’s sort of like you know BASF or whatever that company is that that says you know we don’t make the magnetic table we make it better what does unity do and how does it make real-time 3D better but Unity is the unity is uh is what we call a game engine and for a lot of people you know when I say this they say what is a game engine you know it is the piece of software it’s a piece of software that is used to do two things to create games by game developer around the world and it’s also the engine that power those games that make those game run when the consumer or the player download and install and play that game so you know as much as people don’t know about us uh at the Forefront as a brand they certainly play there’s certainly three billion people uh monthly that play Unity made games on iOS on Android on PlayStation or Nintendo switch on Xbox you know on various platform so this engine which is called a 3D engine a 3D game engine is not just for games it’s to power other type of application in the in various uh Industries in film in construction in architecture simulation digital twin like you know there’s like an unlimited number of application of tech we’ll get into that in a minute because we definitely want to dig into some of those You Dropped a bunch of keywords there but I think the big point that you just made which I think is really important is that there are three billion people on Earth who are playing games you know for most folks we tend to think of games as something that’s secondary you know it tends to be something you think that your teenage kid plays in his bedroom or something most people don’t realize that more than half the population considers themselves Gamers and most people have at least a couple games on their mobile phone about 60 percent of people so three billion people are playing mobile games I I put that out there because when we hear about the metaverse there’s so much hype about the metaverse but if you took all the people in the world who are currently using the metaverse it’s not even a hundred thousand people it’s a tiny number relative to the number that are using games but 3D games are important because their conditioning half the users of the internet every single time they play they’re conditioning them to 3D interfaces yeah and 3D is how we deal with the world 3D is what we’re used to when we move around in the real world you know if you think about it it’s a little bit unnatural that for 20 or 30 years we’ve been sitting in front of digital screens and trying to understand the world through this rectangle of glass you know a flat two-dimensional representation and so in some ways 3D might be the full realization of the potential of the web but that’s a hard thing to do tell us a little bit about the the what makes it hard to create a 3D version of the web what are the challenges I think that it’s it’s hard to to understand how hard it’s going to be to build as long as we don’t understand what it is that we that we will need to build you know there is this representation of the metaverse of the special web as the Ready Player One experience which is most probably what what it’s not going to end up being okay so I think that the why and the and and and and the what have not been answered yet you know building a game is already a very tedious process because if you want to build something that is rich in in content and narrative there is a lot of work and uh building an experience to uh to visualize a factory with iot with thousands and thousands of of iot device uh connected to the actual 3D simulation that’s a different set of problems right okay so okay so you’re saying that we need to do proper problem definition and yes nobody’s done a very good definition of what the metaverse is or what it should be or why we need it exactly but let’s talk a little bit about the challenges around 3D because this has been a long time coming and and to put it in perspective since games is the area where there’s a lot of traction and then later we’ll talk about how we grow from games into other fields but games is an area where today there’s a lot of use it’s worth bearing in mind just to put this in a kind of historical perspective 20 years ago real-time 3D didn’t exist and it was really hard to render things on the fly it was relatively primitive let’s put it like that you know so people might recall that back in the day console games that had the best power to render uh you know render sequences they had cut scenes little movies that would happen in between you know when the system was moving you to the next level you’d see a high resolution movie but that was fully rendered in advance it was basically just like playing a cartoon a 3D animation and then you get into the game where the graphics were noticeably less Vivid and less sharp and less crisp

that’s the point uh bring us up to today what has changed in 3D technology to make it possible now where you’ve got you know on a on an Xbox it’s like a motion picture when you watch a you know sports game it looks like you’re watching the NFL on television what has changed in 3D technology in the last 20 years but what’s changes the evolution of the GPU you know of of the graphic card graphical Processing Unit yeah that means like obviously the software to render evolve but the hardware is what’s been most uh interesting and it’s going to carry on evolving you know and the company said what I would like to I would like to but I would like Robert to to outline this two different real-time uh there’s two different meaning to the real-time term okay real time these days is what we talk about when we can render a game in real time it means that based on the input of a user the game can change in real time real time applied to the metaverse or this like you know 3D layer that we’re going to add to reality through various form of AR and is a different form of real time because it is a real time where yes things are going to be rendered in real time but things also the the data piece of the real-time uh aspect to the special web of the augmented reality set of experience that we’ll see coming to us over the next decades that’s a different set of that’s a that’s a different meaning okay what’s the difference between the game responding to my input or let’s say an augmented reality experience responding to all the input of the world around it the the basic difference is that the game answer to you using your you know the the source of uh data that will affect the game is either your your your screen that you touch on your phone or your joystick that you’re going to use on your Xbox so all the real-time input is coming from one user exactly leads you to track whereas in a population you need all the input from the whole world so it’s a lot more information to change exactly exactly but I would assume that um game designers would make very good designers of the web three three world for the the real world interfaces because they’re just used to building in the 3D format they’re using building in the 3D format for one player or for maybe multiplayer but that that that that that all play using the same model while in an AR experience that will have a input from millions of data points interacting the data point that is the one of the most difficult aspect of thinking about a a layer of reality presented in real time for end users it’s a different way of dealing I mean dealing with millions of data points to actually make sure that the the proper content is triggered at the right time is a problem that game developer and game designer have not faced at all so this comes back to like how how do we train web 3 developers um you know like you know what are what are the skill sets they need is it a similar path to game designers or well hang on a second it so you’re conflating two concepts that are really important that we have to distinguish I think web3 is a proposition that we’re going to rebuild the web the highly centralized web 2 which is based on these big internet platforms web 3 proposes to decentralize it using blockchain Technologies that’s that’s web three yeah what we’re talking about here is is the 3D web and I know the two terms are very similar so I can see how it’s confusing and it’s easy to switch those two things but I think it’s important to maintain a clear line between that but the other point you just raised which is really important is that there are not enough 3D developers right now in the world to build these uh these these realities these alternate realities whether it’s the metaverse or some sort of industrial application like a model and that’s a big topic for this discussion we should get into that in a bit um but what Sylvia’s doing right now is telling us about what the challenges are and I think this is the thing that people have been skeptical about when they hear about the 3D web and we’ve been hearing this concept for more than a decade I’ve certainly been hearing it since you know for even longer than that um people become a little bit skeptical about it frankly because it never seems to happen it sounds like a sunrise Eternal Sunrise where the Sun never fully Rises on this industry but one of the reasons for that is that the problem set is incredibly difficult it’s an incredibly Big Challenge I don’t think people grasp just how big a challenge it is so what Sylvia was just describing is that within a um within the context of a game you can shrink the number of variables down the game world is known the game the level map is known the number of you know uh adverse adversaries or bosses or hurdles you have to face those are all known and so the only variables then are user input which is hard that’s that’s plenty difficult uh and then the Game responds in real time to that and renders all that stuff for people who are not familiar with 3D rendering what’s important to note is that this is very different from what you see in a motion picture where we’ve had 3D special effects for a long time for 30 years yeah the special effects in a movie you’re talking about just one aspect one angle one View and it’s locked off it’s rarely moving um and so that can be rendered with a lot of precision but it takes months and months and months of rendering time to generate that so typically with a movie uh they’ll finish principal photography with actors on the stage in front of green screen and then they’ll spend nine months or a year in post-production rendering frame by frame those shots and those sequences in the background so you can see the monsters and the special effects and the aliens and spaceships and all that stuff that doesn’t exist that can’t be photographed but that’s a very different proposition from what we’re talking here real time means the camera can move the player can move and the whole world has to be re-rendered in real time to support that yeah I mean let me see like like I think we can use a very simple example for the audience but a simple example if if I play a game if I have a game I don’t know like it could be like a shooting zombie game okay if I played this game immerse in a VR headset uh I know the game knows exactly where the Character Are I can move the character around I can move my own character around it’s easy the constraints are well understood okay if I take this game and I play and and I want to make sure that it’s it can be played against against the physical reality around me I have to cope with because I don’t know in which environment my user is going to be so I have to build a very different game okay the and a game that can that that will have to work everywhere I could be at the park I could be in my kitchen I could be in my living room I could be on the bus I could be anywhere okay so if you think about this and you think about the type of EX of of experience that will be produced the complexity is uh exponential that’s right that’s right because you have to render it from every one of those perspectives right so the view from the bus is going to be very different from the view from the bus stop or something exactly the other factor is is other people right so multiplayer introduces tremendous amounts of complexity because now the system has to render multiple points of view for multiple people at the same time and it has to do that with absolutely precise synchronization it can’t be off by a millisecond because it would ruin the Illusion for one of the other players not only that but it couldn’t you know there’s evidence that could make you sick for example that’s exactly right that’s why people get seasick when they’re wearing a VR headset if there’s even a millisecond or two of of lag time you know so when you turn your head and it takes a second for the world to catch up you feel seasick because that’s the experience we have when we’re on a ship at Sea so you’re exactly right Brett and so the the um the more users you add the more complex that rendering problem becomes and the more processing power that you need have I got it right so far okay so this is one of the reasons why the metaverses that have been built so far are not very you know well populated they’re sparsely populated because the system simply can’t support thousands and thousands can you give us an example of what you you think about the what’s been built so far in terms of of is like do you consider like Roblox as my typos or it’s I consider it Like A Primitive version of the metaverse certainly you know absolutely because a lot of the things you’re talking about Rob we can do in Roblox but it’s just very low um low Fidelity that’s right so let’s break it down like this there are game worlds today that do support millions and millions of users those include Roblox and fortnite and they’re excellent games but to the point we’re making a minute ago those are worlds that are designed for a single purpose principally for one main purpose which is to play a game so a lot of the variables are known now of course they’re expanding into things like games and performance art and so forth so those are like a Proto metaverse to Brett’s point but they’re all yeah but don’t forget fortnite doesn’t you can’t be a million user in the same game instance that’s exactly right yeah you can be like I think it’s like a hundred player per game instance which means that it’s like a multiplayer game that’s exactly right and that’s the limitation we’re just talking about the ability to render multiple points of view simultaneously is a very challenging problem yeah the second kind of metaverse though is this non-game metaverse Silvio’s Point earlier those meta verses aren’t very well defined we’re not sure what they’re for if you listen to people like Mark Zuckerberg share their Vision you know they tell you that we’ll do everything we do in the real world we’ll have meetings we’ll have friends we’ll we’ll have parties we’ll you know we’ll watch TV shows and look at PowerPoints inside of virtual worlds I’m not sure that’s such a compelling use case um but you know certainly uh Facebook’s um Horizon worlds is an example of a prototypical metaverse and there are non-centralized versions companies like decentraland and sandbox have launched their own versions but these also run into the exact same constraints that we just spoke about right so so what we’re trying to do right now in this part of the show is Define what are the hard problems to solve for a real-time 3D web to actually happen and one that we’ve come up against right very clearly in this very early part of the show is that we don’t have a way to render that much simultaneously like we can’t support a million simultaneous users do you think that’s going to be solved in the future do you think there’s a way to do that in the future that means uh just this is not just about rendering it there’s like you know there is multiple problem uh associated with with a million user and it’s also like do we want to be do you want to be in a world where there is a million user at the same time you know that’s another issue you know like can we find narrative and game narrative that lead to a game where you would be a million user with a million user I think that you know when we talk about the real-time treat you have we’re I think it’s important to to outline that you know that they are games games is not the real-time 3D web what I see as the real-time treaty where you know there is two things it’s it’s first it is a way to present information using three-dimensional interface okay the uh question here is is that useful okay yes I can present like a Amazon product or something I want to shop for as a 3D object that I can manipulate on my screen or in my VR headset is that useful to complete my shopping or to enhance my shopping experience not proven yet okay so and then the the other aspect of this is is yes will I serve the web going from an experience to the other experience to the other experience like I do today when I use my web browser and I go from link to link to link to link do I need to do we see a future where uh Fortune 500 companies retail shops uh anything will want to present their information in 3D it’s probably a be a mixture of what you have today and what is going to be actually useful for user to see in 3d not clear yet again that’s what are you talking about hey you’re talking about AR applications right no I’m going to come to AAR now the other aspect of this is a 3D layer on top of the physical reality that user experience every day that is probably going to be more useful okay there’s a lot of very useful application to add a 3D layer when I’m visiting a city when I’m looking looking for the right road to take to get to a place you know like I it’s it’s that’s there’s like multiple application fixing the the worker working in the factory or a plant to do like a repair of like some Machinery so that’s very useful okay so the first one which is when we talk about the 3D web which is like the know the transition from 3D experience to 3D experience is a bit less defined in terms of how useful it’s going to be the second one which is which is the augmented reality one it’s much clearer that it’s going to be very useful now on top of these things you have games and you have entertainment and that’s that’s that’s not going to change entertainment in VR it has not been proven to be very appealing yet you know of the 10 million quests too that have been sold not many users use them they’re mostly in the closet okay twice a month on average we’ve tried it’s because one of the reasons that we’ve tried to jam linear contents you know games that were built for 2D screens even if it if it’s if they’re rendering in 3D the actual narrative is like very it’s like a linear progression of scene in a VR even if it’s if it’s still render using the same 3D Tech you have more than 3D you have more than three dimension because you can move your head you can move your your hands you can do a lot of things that you cannot do with a 2d screen in front of you okay so so we have not understood the actual Narrative of how to create very compelling VR experiences and and games we’re like you know we’re like film wise like 125 years ago where it took 15 years to actually find the the to uh to to to actually the Cinematic language the language yeah yeah yeah yeah language itself we’re at the same stage here that’s why people are not are not using this and so Roblox is like the silent movies of the metaverse it’s like the silent movie very well said all right let me see if I can round this up then so so what we’ve covered so far is that real-time 3D is emerging and it’s useful today in game worlds persistent game worlds things like Roblox fortnite and other games um and by the way there’s like a thousand of those game worlds isn’t that this is not a small thing they’re used by three billion people the big question and maybe the big opportunity is can this be extended to other fields um for other kinds of entertaining or social applications business applications industrial uses maybe City Planning or transportation planning simulations for the environment and so forth that’s a question we’ll get into in the second half but what we’ve already heard in this first part is a really important distinction that Brett brought up which is that there’s really two kinds of real-time 3D applications or worlds if you will one is an immersive experience that you go into like a virtual reality or a game world that’s a destination I’m going to immerse myself in this other world many of the metaverse concepts seem to be built on that premise but the second one is one where you kind of cover the world around you the real world you cover that world with data you have you you paint the world with pixels if you will the real world and now that’s visible minted augmented reality experience so that distinction I think it’s important for our audience to get that that there’s two kinds there’s immersive worlds 3D worlds that you might go into or the real world that might be covered with data we’re gonna go to a break now and after break we’ll come back and we’ll delve into some of the applications and use cases of this technology so you’re listening to the futurists uh it’s myself Robert turcic and Brett King my co-host and we’re interviewing Sylvia Joanne stick with us because in the second half we’re going to get into the Practical use cases welcome to Breaking Banks the number one Global fintech radio show and podcast I’m Brett King and I’m Jason henricks every week since 2013 we explored the personalities startups innovators and Industry players driving disruption in financial services from incumbents to unicorns and from cutting-edge technology to the people using it to help create a more Innovative inclusive and healthy financial future I’m JP Nichols and this is breaking Banks

foreign

welcome back to the futurist I’m Brett King your host with Robert tershek and our guest today is Silvio drawing from Unity um Silvio um one of the things that sort of comes into this world of AR and and so forth that we’re talking about is that the concept that when we need to represent you in the virtual world or place you in an augmented reality world we need to be at a you know understand some things about you and this extends into multiple areas now that we’re thinking of um around this concept called a digital twin or a digital equivalent of yourself we also have the emergence of digital persons which will be you know non non-player characters if you like that will will interact in this world but the digital twin concept how does that fit into this emerging world of VR and AR the digital swing concept is probably uh you know when we were talking earlier about the the the the why of the metaverse is probably one of the most uh well understood and useful concept you know and they are real projects real project and real usage and the digital twin is really a way to represent the outside world to enhance the interaction of real user with this real world so example if I do a digital twin of the of an entire airport I will be able to enhance the interaction that my Travelers going through this Airport have with the airport facilities something that I would not be able to do if I did not have a digital representation a digital twin representation of that airport so you can apply this to anything you know buildings and mall and uh a block of a city or an entire one uh a plant uh you know anything that is a physical system can be transformed into a digital twin maybe that’s why that sort of makes it interesting for Amazon’s acquisition of Roomba yeah because Roomba gives you a A Primitive way of mapping out 3D virtual spaces at least a floor plan exactly that’s right that’s right and actually you know these phones that we have here uh you know the reason there’s three cameras on this phone is that that’s how the phone can sense three dimensions right it’s able to capture it’s able to do that dimensional mapping people don’t realize that but your phone is constantly measuring the environment around you uh so we’re starting to develop then sensors that’s all the phone really is in that instance is a kind of sophisticated sensor that can sense three dimensions so we’re starting to solve the problem problem of sensing in three dimensions that means that the network or you know the the cloud computing system can have an understanding of the 3D world around you that’s one part of the problem that’s not the whole problem the other problem then is to render all that in real time that’s what we were talking about in the previous section you know this concept of digital twins not new it’s been around for more than 30 years early use cases were uh cern’s Large Hadron Collider you know it’s a gigantic multi-kilometer installation that’s just too big which I had a chance to see with the personal private uh so that’s a that’s an example of an industrial installation that’s so big that no human can see the whole thing at one time therefore you need a digital simulation in order to understand it exactly the earliest users of of digital twins are NASA they were used in space because most of uh deep space exploration today isn’t done by humans it’s done by robotic systems it’s all those Voyager uh all those Voyager systems that are sent out into deep space or into the you know into the deeper into our solar system it’s more like the Rover that are that are basically not being Mars you know so those threw off Telemetry data that can be captured and used to render kind of a digital version here on the earth and that’s how you can control that remote system and understand where it is and how you know what its attitude is and position is and where it’s at and so forth so those are like remote control systems and monitoring systems um but I think what’s important about the new generation of digital twins for industry is that they’re no longer used just to monitor or render or show us a picture they’re also used to control those systems in other words the model is starting to be controlling the real world and that’s where artificial intelligence and real-time data become extremely important for digital twins today you have to have high fidelity data and you have to have an AI that you really trust because it’s going to be making decisions not only about what you see but about what actually happens in the real world that might be a factory or a plant or a business process can you comment a little bit about the use of simulation in Industry this way 3D simulations simulation is really different than you know it it’s it’s related to digital twin and not that means it’s it’s more used in in the world of in the industrial world today to simulate and understand the problems in complex physical system before they actually happen and uh and it’s also obviously to simulate those complex system before you actually build them so that you make sure that they’re going to work and so the uh the amount of data Ai and machine learning that we can feed into this basically enable those physical system builder to understand the problems and the intricacies of what they’re going to build and that’s that’s one way to generalize this is obviously like various case and and but in order to understand this as to why we would do 3D simulation that’s the reason that’s right yeah there’s also the fact that if you have have built a simulation of the way a Machinery Machinery or system will work that once that is built you could use that same simulated data or that same design data to Overlay for example 3D virtual understanding absolutely problem solving and fault solving and so forth the ultimate example of that not being necessarily just fixing equipment in a factory but something in the case of like um augmented surgery where surgeons are using that data you know a previous scans of you know a tumor or something like that in a in an operating environment simulation also applies you know like if I’m building an airport again let’s let’s come back to the example and I want to know with the architecture or the plan that I have how The Travelers will walk and flow through this airport I can actually simulate this to understand what I need to change in order to make sure that there’s no bottleneck that’s right and that’s a really good point um because I think some people might be wondering how does a game engine fit into all of this we’ve been able to use 3D you know a computer-aided design systems for for decades now so there have been all sorts of ways to render architecture in 3D that’s not new yeah that’s not new simulation is really basically the merging of AI and game engine and that’s it and the reason we use a game engine is because the game engine has the motion the kinematics the physics so you can populate that 3D model the art the architecture if you will you can populate that model with people and dogs and you know kids playing basketball and balls exactly and all the physics of that will be uh will be will be quite accurate that’s really important for anyone who’s doing planning like urban planning or industrial planning or space robots in a factory you know you you really want to actually understand well how they’re going to interact so that’s another example well and and those systems can be used to train an AI as well so an artificial intelligence can take really you know a virtual world that’s rendered in 3D to us would look like a game world uh simulation but populated with simulated people simulated animals simulated trees and so forth all this stuff is really high high various similitude now it’s high actually this is a very good point uh you just made simulation is a very good way to actually produce the data that will be used to train the neural net Models All right so uh that’s another way to uh you know there’s like uh if you have complex neural network and you don’t usually you don’t have the actual data that you need simulation can be used to generate that data yeah that’s right and that’s useful for training purposes so with ML with machine learning more data equals more training which means you get to a better result fast exactly and so we can accelerate the training uh you know kind of like uh collapse the learning curve for the ml system by using a simulated world uh we’re getting deep into the weeds here um but the the the promise of all this technology from my viewpoint is that something like industrial metaverse might emerge as a more compelling use case sooner than consumer metaverse earlier you said there’s not a really compelling consumer use case for the metaverse I think that’s probably true most people are sort of like meh you know they’re not sure why they would use it why would I put on a VR headset to go to the office on the other hand there’s already compelling use cases in industry for simulation those are already widely used and we can we can train astronauts in the 3D space we can train surgeons in the 3D space we can we can yeah we can train robots and artificial Learning Systems uh so what is it the metaverse is it the metaverse because the metaverse is really about the connection of the different experience together if I have a single use case which is example a simulation of an airport is that the actual metaverse if it’s not connected to anything outside I think that there is a confusion in what the actual metaverse is you know if I have a single application of my AR glasses to I don’t know and there is like maybe I have like five apps on it and one is to find my my way around the city another one is to help me make food another one is to help me do this with this okay is this the actual metaverse if I go from uh I’m in New York I’m at the Empire State Building and I put my glasses on so that I can understand the history of of the place and I can press a button or I can tap a button and be transported into a game where the Empire State Building is then it starts to be you know I think that over the years over the coming next years we’re gonna we’re gonna start to understand the actual the word metaverse as a set of linked experiences okay how do we get there like how do we get what what do we need to solve between today and that vision of the future to get there yeah what’s stopping us from having a miniverse today but I think that you know I think that the initiative like the open metaverse of the standard uh is a very good is a very good effort into this direction you know okay yeah uh okay so that that’s about interoperability Between Worlds and for folks who don’t know what the term interoperability means it means um well for instance when uh this the apps you download on your iPhone won’t work on your Android phone that’s because they’re not interoperable if you have data that’s trapped in one software program and you can’t move it over the way things used to be with say your contacts in Microsoft Office uh you can export those out easily in the past that was that was because it was not interoperable sometimes that’s by Design in the tech World Tech companies often like to foist the proprietary standard that locks people into their system but already now even in this early stage of the metaverse uh a lot of Industry leaders not all but a lot of the companies that are in the lead have come together to create an interoperability Forum to make sure that the worlds they build can link together and people can easily migrate from one world to the next uh so that’s the point that Sylvia was Raising I think that’s a good point but there’s other stuff that has to happen as well if we’re really going to start to create simulations of the world aren’t we going to need a completely new generation of processors and and what’s the load on the network these are Big Data models yeah and the energy requirements yeah it’s huge it’s huge it’s expensive uh because it’s expensive to use I know a thousand or ten thousand GPU in in the cloud so uh the infrastructure the computational infrastructure will have to seriously uh evolve and uh and grow in order to and while you know keeping this through a affordable price yeah in order for us to actually you know go into this uh full speed so obviously the real-time 3D web is a great thing for the companies that make the graphical processing units those are companies like Nvidia and AMD for instance silicon manufacturers but that’s a considerable cost that someone’s going to have to bear is that one of the reasons why this hasn’t been broadly taken up outside of specific use cases and you know very specific micro worlds and simulations for particular Industries is that one of the reasons why it hasn’t broadly caught on no I think that on from an industrial perspective it it has caught on that means it’s it’s clear that more and more and more companies as I you know as I had said like you know five years ago that there’s going to be a need uh for fortune or there’s going to be a want or a need for fortunate partner company to start going from a 2d world to a 3D world uh in all sorts of use of of use cases and that is happening that’s clear okay what’s not clear is the and it’s clear also that 3D that uh the the consumer is playing 3D games okay so that’s clear all right what’s not clear is the browsing of the internet using a 3D you know a set of of 3D experience or interfaces and then again what is this you know how will AR pan out and how will VR Banner so that’s not clear yet okay so maybe it’s a periphery around the periphery industrial use cases on one hand consumers playing video games on the other hand um we’re starting you know we kind of work our way towards something new in the middle that spans do you think there’s a possibility that the web that we understand is today you know this idea of basically a bunch of destinations they’re usually rectangles of information you know text-based worlds uh even if you think about YouTube is just a bunch of rectangles with Tink text links yeah that’s the web that we have today do you think that might just exist in parallel to some 3D World metaverse or some 3D experience that is very different from the web that we’re familiar with the web we’ve had for the last 30 or 40 years your question completely clearly but I think that we are not going to one day wake up and suddenly everything is is going to be of course not yeah yeah in front of us so there’s going to be mixture of you know and co-existing of of 2D experiences with 3D portals and you know we’re not gonna this is gonna be and and we might be 20 years from now still reading article in a 2d web browser you know we’re not necessarily want to read you know so it’s always going to be this mixture and I think that over time the mixture will be very clearly defined as the use case become more clear and as the usage become more clear which isn’t which it is not to date all right okay well tell us what you envisioned for the future so one of the things we love to do in this show is to is to get a forecast

yeah yeah take us out 10 20 30 years when all these uh these kind of narrowly network problems have been solved so a long-term Vision what I see is obviously the evolution of augmented reality to a level where it enhanced our life and we don’t have to scroll on our phone all day because today we spend our entire day on the phone pulling information to us which is mean that we scroll and we scroll and we scroll don’t stop all day and I think they will move away from that world to a world where uh where content will be contextualized triggered based on the context that I am in you know I will manifest intent and based on the competition of millions of data point this content will come to me and that will basically hopefully I would hope that it will allow us to have better human to human interaction and not be always on our phone and so I believe that this will evolve a lot and that’s a very interesting much more so to me than the VR aspect of what we’re talking about and I believe so I believe this in terms of evolution long term machine learning and uh and AI will obviously evolve you know a lot now if we can make Quantum Computing work the mixture of quantum Computing and machine learning will be very very important very very also dangerous but very very important yeah we’re still some way away from that right now we’ll still somewhere you know it could be 20 years it could be 50 I don’t know but once we have this once we have connected machine learning and Quantum Computing we will I think that long term 50 like years 100 years we’re going to connect nanotechnology systems to to that so then you’re going to have a very powerful AI able to create physical things so uh that’s one of the that’s a bit of like you know long term long term if you really ask me long term that’s what I I believe is gonna happen I I just had a conversation with a technologist who I’m uh friendly with who said that he is now using um AI for game design and he said look it’s a hack it doesn’t work 100 but this is his technique he’ll be with his daughter at the park and he’ll start talking to gpt3 and he’ll start with a short description of a game and ask gpt3 to write a game description and he said he gets a decent game description yeah then he uses he takes that description and goes to Dolly two or it’s a mid-journey and asks it to simulate or knock out some uh AI generated images you know some to portray like what might that look like that game description now he gets some images generated um and then he goes over to another system that allows him to simulate a rough model of the game he said look it’s not perfect it’s it’s a Cheesy hack but he said with zero effort while he’s playing in the park with his daughter he can actually start to knock out screens of a potential game design and at least get to the point to say is this worth pursuing is this worth exploring what you’re describing is that in this future scenario where these artificial intelligence systems are so good that they can generate not just words and text or images but they can actually start to generate entire experiences and maybe even start to engineer physical products for us yeah that’s that’s your vision for the future that’s a powerful you know I started to think about this like seven years ago where I’m like what is the future of content creation right and like if I want to bring like you know 100 million and half a billion Creator to create content it’s way too hard today so it was clear to me that machine learning driven content authoring will would be the actual future and we are you know if you look at gdp3 and you look at Dali and you look at mine journey and you look at others uh we gonna get there we’re gonna get there within like you know the next decade we’ll be able to create complete 3D scene and complete 3D games by just talking to the game engine yeah and that’s very powerful you know yeah in fact yesterday on Twitter I saw a woman uh has developed a hack she’s she’s built some sort of system where she can take all the single frames of a video so she just shoots a video of herself walking down the street yeah and she can get uh Dolly too to generate um and line up almost perfect with almost perfect Precision a virtual outfit and so it renders a team by scene and then she found another program she can import all those individual shots into and it recreates the video and what she ends up with is um basically simulation mapped onto the video stream that she started with and again it’s a hack it’s a workaround yeah but those sort of things that we’re closing the gap on those capabilities pretty quickly now so fast exactly that’s what’s so astonishing I mean gpg three I saw uh well I’ve heard talk about gpt4 that it’s going to change the world yeah right that um it is the closest thing to the touring test that we’ve ever seen secondly you know I’ve seen demonstrations recently with these AI um you know artistic tools taking a video frame and in the example I saw was a tennis player playing on a tennis court and completely changing the environment so that you take the tennis player and put him on the surface of Mars or the moon or whatever just by telling the AI to change the uh the background it’s evolving very very fast right now so that means means we’re going to be giving superpowers to everybody very soon where people with just uh just by talking to a phone or by typing a few commands on a keyboard they’ll be able to generate video scenes and manipulate video scenes so I have a real concern about this because that’s like giving people superpowers to generate a lot of deep fakes and they’ll be incredibly compelling deep fakes and you can just imagine where that’s going to lead to so I think we’re already there you know like right now we could create convincing deep fakes that this is where we need to have a different way of thinking about um not just digital assets but identity and those sort of things you know I like you think about the fact that today we carry around a physical driver’s license and a passport to identify ourselves in the in the physical world that’s not going to work in a world of deep fakes and so forth because you’re going to be able to simulate someone almost perfectly the only way you’re going to be able to tell is whether it’s a synthetic ID or a real person ID I think but I think the concept of identity which is more related to your to what you were initially talked about about web tree is key to uh to the future of uh of entering this new era of a massive more amount of data that’s going to come at us yeah and data that could be manipulated yeah the various usage of this Tech deflate being one is going to become more and more and more dangerous if we don’t establish some form of real identity which is you know too easy to to fake right now yeah you know we need to do something about this because well you know we we will be certainly getting into the topic of identity on a future episode of the futurist it’s interesting that it parallels it right yeah it’s interesting how we talk about 3D for the whole uh podcast but then we end up saying oh you know what in order to evolve in this world of 3D we’re going to need to protect identity and really identify the source uh yeah yeah all this ability to simulate different worlds leads us to question what the real world consists of and what’s really true so we end up questioning the truth and questioning reality yeah because you see imagine that in 20 years or 15 years you’ve got uh rendering of reality so a photo realistic that you cannot understand if what you’re looking at is the real world or the digital world where does that go it’s the simulation man you know well on that note thank you so much Sylvia dran the senior vice president of innovation from Unity thank you so much for joining us this week on the futurist session it’s a real great pleasure talking to you thank you if you liked listening to the futurist this week you know what you can do you can give us a five-star review you can give us a shout out on social media all that helps other people find uh the episodes and the content and that helps us support the program on an ongoing basis also my thanks go out to the production team and the team behind us supporting us from provoke including Elizabeth severins uh uh Kevin herscham silby and uh Carlo working on the social media side and of course out to you guys um but uh we will be back next week with more compelling future focused content until then we’ll see you in the future well that’s it for the futurists this week if you like the show we sure hope you did please subscribe and share it with people in your community and don’t forget to leave us a five star review that really helps other people find the show and you can ping us anytime on Instagram and Twitter at futurist podcast for the folks that you’d like to see on the show or the questions you’d like us to ask thanks for joining and as always we’ll see you in the future