00:00SPEAKER- Hey, we didn't do a cold open last week.
00:03SPEAKER- We broke procedure.
00:04SPEAKERWe violated protocol.
00:07SPEAKER- Does that mean we owe them two this week?
00:08SPEAKER- I don't know, how do we do two cold opens back to back?
00:10SPEAKERWouldn't they just be?
00:12SPEAKER- One would be warmer than the other, I think.
00:14SPEAKER- Dammit, this is definitely this podcast
00:17SPEAKERwhen both of our brains immediately went to like,
00:19SPEAKERwell, the friction of speaking for more than three minutes
00:22SPEAKERwould probably warm the temperature of the opening enough.
00:27SPEAKERSo there's a cold open and a lukewarm opening.
00:29SPEAKER- So I'm sure you've talked about,
00:31SPEAKERthere's a lot of weird stuff happening right now
00:33SPEAKERin the world.
00:35SPEAKERThere's like Reddit is destroying hedge funds,
00:38SPEAKERbut maybe not.
00:39SPEAKERAnd now there's some financial chicanery happening.
00:45SPEAKERThat whole thing seemed a little bit illegal to me,
00:47SPEAKERbut then when people explained to me how hedge funds worked,
00:49SPEAKERI was like, oh, that stuff should be illegal too, so.
00:53SPEAKER- Legality largely is, it seems,
00:55SPEAKERis defined by what you can get away with.
00:58SPEAKER- Yeah, the old wink and nod carries you a long way
01:00SPEAKERif you have a few billion dollars in the bank, it turns out.
01:04SPEAKERI was watching a late night TV last night live,
01:07SPEAKERwhich I never do.
01:09SPEAKERAnd I saw ads on TV for the first time in years.
01:12SPEAKER- Okay.
01:14SPEAKER- Like as seen on TV, like the cat.
01:16SPEAKERSo here's a thought.
01:18SPEAKERYou can buy ads on like CNN late at night for like 200 bucks.
01:23SPEAKER- What?
01:24SPEAKER- Like they're really cheap.
01:25SPEAKER- Broadcast cable CNN, not like the CNN digital live stream,
01:30SPEAKERwhich gets different ads, like actual television CNN.
01:33SPEAKER- You can put it in a place
01:34SPEAKERthat your mom and dad will see it, yes.
01:37SPEAKER- But late at night, my mom and dad are fast asleep.
01:41SPEAKER- They're going to have to get it.
01:42SPEAKERThey're going to have to set it in their arm or something.
01:44SPEAKER- They'll TiVo it.
01:45SPEAKER- But so I saw an ad and I was like,
01:48SPEAKERthere's this stuff called alien tape
01:50SPEAKERand it sounds incredible.
01:51SPEAKERIt's like, you can use it over and over again.
01:54SPEAKERIt sticks to almost anything.
01:57SPEAKERIt's like foamy tape.
01:58SPEAKERAnd they were like, you can rinse it.
02:00SPEAKERThey said, you can rinse it off and reuse it.
02:02SPEAKERI was like, wait a second.
02:04SPEAKERThis isn't alien tape.
02:05SPEAKERThis is nano bubbles tape.
02:08SPEAKERLike we're ahead of the game.
02:10SPEAKERAll these people are doing is buying nano tape.
02:14SPEAKERThey're sticking a kind of half ass logo on it in a box.
02:18SPEAKERAnd then they're selling it for like four prices
02:20SPEAKERplus shipping and handling and Brad.
02:25SPEAKER- I'm not a business guy.
02:26SPEAKERWell, I mean, I am a business guy, but I'm bad at it.
02:30SPEAKERIt seems like they're covering the entire cost
02:32SPEAKERof the product in the shipping and handling fee.
02:35SPEAKER- Who'd believe it?
02:36SPEAKERYou left out the part where they gave it
02:38SPEAKERa more exotic sounding name.
02:41SPEAKERVery important.
02:42SPEAKER- Nano is exotic as hell.
02:43SPEAKER- Yeah, but it doesn't play
02:45SPEAKERto the late night cable news audience, let's say.
02:48SPEAKER- I mean, that's probably true.
02:50SPEAKER- There is a what factor to the word nano
02:52SPEAKERwhere the word alien is like,
02:53SPEAKERoh man, did they smuggle this tape out of area 51, what?
02:58SPEAKER- I mean, look, that is the strong implication
03:00SPEAKERthat they made in this advertisement.
03:03SPEAKERI did not buy it, but I did post the
03:06SPEAKERas seen on TV tape ad in the discord
03:09SPEAKERso everyone can enjoy it.
03:11SPEAKERAll they do in these late night ads,
03:13SPEAKERokay, so there's two things here.
03:14SPEAKEROne is I think we need to make a late night TV ad.
03:16SPEAKERI got to figure out how much it actually costs
03:18SPEAKERrather than just like eyeballing and thinking
03:19SPEAKERthis can't cost more than a few hundred dollars
03:21SPEAKERor else nobody would do this.
03:23SPEAKERBut we need to make a late night TV ad,
03:26SPEAKERI think, for the podcast.
03:29SPEAKER- Oh boy.
03:30SPEAKER- And all you have to do is say the name of the podcast
03:33SPEAKERlike 25 times in a 30 second ad.
03:36SPEAKER- Okay, should we put the word alien in there somewhere?
03:39SPEAKER- I mean, look, if we wanted to sexy up the podcast
03:43SPEAKERfor boomers, how would we do it?
03:45SPEAKER- Oh man.
03:47SPEAKER- Would it be like Tech Corner, Technotronics?
03:51SPEAKER- Brad and Will made a hot rod.
03:54SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah.
03:56SPEAKER- You know, things that boomers love.
03:59SPEAKER- Your son-in-law, the podcast.
04:05SPEAKER- Fortunes have been made on less.
04:07SPEAKER(upbeat music)
04:21SPEAKER(upbeat music)
04:36SPEAKER- Welcome to Brad and Will Made a Tech Pod.
04:38SPEAKERI'm Will.
04:39SPEAKER- I'm Brad.
04:39SPEAKER- Virtually.
04:40SPEAKER- Ooh, ooh, that's a teaser.
04:43SPEAKER- That's right.
04:44SPEAKER- Is this the second cold open
04:45SPEAKERor we just, you know, we're gonna do,
04:48SPEAKERI mean, I feel like, I really do feel like we owe them,
04:50SPEAKERmaybe we do an oops, all cold opens episode one week.
04:53SPEAKER- We should totally, that's kind of that idea
04:55SPEAKERwe talked about, did we talk about it on the show
04:57SPEAKERor just on the discord of like our rapid fire
04:59SPEAKERthree minute topic back to back, to back, to back,
05:02SPEAKERto back, to back episode?
05:03SPEAKERYeah, it's just like how much can we talk about this topic?
05:05SPEAKERLet's get stopwatches, let's get egg timers
05:10SPEAKERand see how much we can cover in three minutes per topic.
05:12SPEAKER- Well, I like that.
05:13SPEAKERIt seems like all the research of a normal episode
05:15SPEAKERwith times 20.
05:18SPEAKER- Yeah, that sounds great.
05:20SPEAKER- What if we did no research?
05:25SPEAKERWhat if we came up with a list of topics
05:27SPEAKERand showed up and said,
05:29SPEAKERhere's what we know about these off the head.
05:31SPEAKER- I've often thought the Whiskey Media panel of experts
05:34SPEAKERwas ahead of its time, so.
05:37SPEAKER- I mean, God, this might be an entire podcast idea.
05:40SPEAKER- So I've been thinking about doing
05:42SPEAKERlike a late night call-in show
05:43SPEAKER'cause I've been having trouble sleeping lately.
05:47SPEAKER- I bet there's a market for that,
05:48SPEAKERespecially these days.
05:49SPEAKER- Yeah, and I feel like I like talking to people,
05:52SPEAKERbut not in person and if I can hang up on them,
05:56SPEAKERthat's better for me.
05:57SPEAKER- Sure, yes, yes, conversations with an exit clause.
06:02SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, so I don't know,
06:05SPEAKERmaybe I'll try that this week.
06:06SPEAKERI got nothing else going on.
06:08SPEAKER- That's right, except this podcast.
06:11SPEAKER- Well, I mean, this podcast,
06:13SPEAKERwe're talking about something that's close to me.
06:16SPEAKER- Yeah.
06:17SPEAKER- Personal.
06:19SPEAKER- Yes, it is something you've been living.
06:22SPEAKER- For a while, I was the public face of briefly.
06:26SPEAKER- That's right, you were the icon of virtual reality.
06:29SPEAKER- Yeah, I was the number one Google result for VR guy.
06:33SPEAKER- Who owns that photo?
06:34SPEAKERWho took that?
06:37SPEAKERDoes Norm own it or does his employer own it?
06:40SPEAKERI don't know how that,
06:40SPEAKERhow does that work for employees of companies
06:43SPEAKERthat take pictures?
06:44SPEAKERDo the photographers own the pictures or do the employers?
06:47SPEAKER- I don't know, my contract didn't,
06:50SPEAKERlike they didn't sign me to a creator contract
06:52SPEAKERwhen we started working for that company out of whiskey
06:55SPEAKERand Norm used his own camera to take that picture,
06:58SPEAKERbut it was onsite during a shoot at Tested.
07:01SPEAKERSo that's a question for the law.
07:03SPEAKERI mean, look, the opportunity to make money on that picture
07:06SPEAKERis long gone now, so it's a moot point.
07:09SPEAKERBut I don't know, I think Norm probably owns that
07:13SPEAKERunless his contract specifies other words,
07:15SPEAKERunless he signed a different contract than me.
07:17SPEAKERAnyway, like there was a moment when I left Tested
07:19SPEAKERwhere I was like, huh, they never made me sign
07:22SPEAKERa work for hire, like they don't actually,
07:24SPEAKERI didn't assign copyright to the work that I did
07:26SPEAKERfor Tested during that time.
07:29SPEAKERUsually when you're an editor,
07:31SPEAKERthey gave me just a normal employee contract
07:32SPEAKER'cause they were bad at hiring editors when they hired us.
07:35SPEAKERAnd I was like, I actually own everything
07:38SPEAKERthat I've ever posted on Tested still.
07:39SPEAKERI think I'm not gonna do anything with it,
07:41SPEAKERbut no, you know, yeah.
07:42SPEAKERAnyway, I mean, but that's as it should be.
07:44SPEAKERIf you're a writer, you should own your work
07:46SPEAKERand you should license it out
07:47SPEAKERto the people who are using it. - That would be nice.
07:49SPEAKERAnd then, yeah, you should make a book or something.
07:52SPEAKERI don't know.
07:53SPEAKERWe're talking about VR today.
07:54SPEAKER- Yeah, virtual apropos of nothing.
07:58SPEAKERI think we were spitballing topics a couple of weeks ago
08:00SPEAKERand this just kind of came up.
08:02SPEAKER- Well, so end of every year I'm on a nominations committee
08:08SPEAKERthat kind of goes through all the big VR releases
08:10SPEAKERand makes the short list for a large awards,
08:13SPEAKERgames award thing.
08:15SPEAKERAnd I just finished up that.
08:17SPEAKERSo it's a good time to talk about like state of the,
08:18SPEAKERlike, I know what's going on.
08:19SPEAKERI know what last year looked like really pretty well.
08:21SPEAKER- Right, that's kind of how I envisioned this
08:23SPEAKERis that it's just sort of a state of the virtual union
08:26SPEAKER'cause like, I feel like, I don't know,
08:30SPEAKERI don't wanna be too pessimistic,
08:31SPEAKERbut it feels like things are at a lull for VR to me.
08:36SPEAKER- Well, it's a weird, there's a bunch of stuff happening
08:40SPEAKERand some of it is good, but like,
08:43SPEAKERso the biggest thing that happened last year
08:45SPEAKERfor VR is probably that Alex,
08:46SPEAKERwell, Alex came out and the Quest 2 was launched.
08:50SPEAKERThe Quest is Oculus' mobile hardware standalone VR headset.
08:57SPEAKERYou can also buy a special cable for 80 bucks
08:59SPEAKERand plug it into your PC.
09:01SPEAKER- Yes, I'm told you can also use it wirelessly,
09:03SPEAKERalthough it takes some doing.
09:05SPEAKER- So you can use it wirelessly with,
09:07SPEAKERthere's a couple of ways to do that.
09:08SPEAKERThe one that I think most people use is,
09:10SPEAKERI think, virtual desktop.
09:11SPEAKERI haven't used that with a Quest 2.
09:13SPEAKERWith a Quest 1, it was surprisingly good.
09:15SPEAKER- Yeah, but you do have to,
09:16SPEAKERI think you have to like side load stuff
09:18SPEAKERonto the headset and so forth.
09:20SPEAKER- So side loading on the Quest 1 was really easy.
09:22SPEAKERYou just hit the install dev stuff button
09:25SPEAKERand then copy an APK over to it.
09:28SPEAKERAnd then there's a whole side load store
09:30SPEAKERthat you can put on
09:32SPEAKERand it makes it super easy to grab new software.
09:36SPEAKERThe other thing that happened is Alex came out
09:38SPEAKERfor the PC on Steam and it's the first,
09:43SPEAKERI mean, it's really the first big triple A,
09:47SPEAKERhigh fidelity, 20, 15, 20 hour game that I've played
09:52SPEAKERthat was actually worth spending 15 or 20 hours on.
09:55SPEAKERAnd it remains, we talked about it a lot last year,
09:58SPEAKERbut it remains pretty remarkable, I think.
10:04SPEAKERI would expect it to be the high water mark
10:07SPEAKERfor VR for a while.
10:11SPEAKERBoth in terms of like the sheer volume of art
10:17SPEAKERin that game is incredible.
10:18SPEAKERLike the number of things,
10:19SPEAKERthere are thousands of things you can pick up
10:20SPEAKERon every single level.
10:22SPEAKERAnd that sounds like a dopey metric,
10:24SPEAKERexcept for when you're in VR and you're doing stuff,
10:28SPEAKERyou kind of like, it's much more important
10:31SPEAKERthat you're able to interact with objects in the world
10:32SPEAKER'cause it makes the world feel much more real
10:35SPEAKERthan if you can.
10:37SPEAKER- That is the selling point of VR to me.
10:39SPEAKER- In a lot of cases, yeah.
10:41SPEAKER- Not so much being in the environment
10:42SPEAKERas being able to touch and manipulate the environment.
10:44SPEAKERThat's what I want.
10:47SPEAKERYou can make the nicest looking game ever,
10:48SPEAKERbut if everything is static and you can't actually touch
10:51SPEAKERand move things around and use them in a physical way,
10:54SPEAKERthen what's the point?
10:55SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, the whole point of it is it opens up
10:57SPEAKERthe available verbs to the player.
10:59SPEAKER- Totally.
11:00SPEAKER- And just the sheer act of being able to chuck something
11:05SPEAKERand distract a bad guy with it,
11:07SPEAKERor bring a goofy marker and write on windows
11:12SPEAKERlater on in the game or whatever,
11:14SPEAKERthat stuff is really cool.
11:17SPEAKERThe rest of the stuff that we saw,
11:19SPEAKERso there were a handful of real standout experiences
11:22SPEAKERin games that I saw in the nomination phase stuff.
11:27SPEAKER- The Museum of Other Realities, if you haven't tried,
11:30SPEAKERis a thing that Colin Northway and his team built.
11:35SPEAKER- Oh, what was that?
11:36SPEAKER- Fantastic contraption.
11:37SPEAKER- Yes, that game's great.
11:38SPEAKER- Yeah.
11:39SPEAKER- I love that game.
11:40SPEAKER- So Colin is one of the people,
11:41SPEAKERhe's been working on VR since before people knew
11:44SPEAKERthat the Vive was a thing.
11:46SPEAKERHe was working on fantastic contraption,
11:47SPEAKERand he has a really good understanding
11:50SPEAKERof both movement and space in virtual spaces.
11:54SPEAKER- So the MOR is an art museum for art
11:58SPEAKERthat only can exist in VR.
12:01SPEAKERFolks like Danny Bittman created sculptures and drawings
12:05SPEAKERand things using everything from like Tilt Brush to Maya.
12:10SPEAKERAnd there's probably dozens,
12:12SPEAKERI don't think there's quite a hundred,
12:13SPEAKERbut there's a lot of,
12:15SPEAKERthe whole thing is set up like an actual art museum.
12:17SPEAKERSo you load into the lobby, it tells you how to navigate.
12:20SPEAKERYou can switch between walking and flying and teleporting.
12:23SPEAKERAnd there's also a mini map,
12:26SPEAKERlike a model of the art museum that you can click into
12:29SPEAKERto fast travel to any particular exhibit.
12:32SPEAKERAnd the exhibits are these incredible,
12:36SPEAKERlike some of them are just things you look at.
12:37SPEAKERSome of them you can shrink down and stand inside
12:39SPEAKERso you can like experience what it looks like
12:41SPEAKERas a human scale sculpture
12:43SPEAKERand then as something that you inhabit.
12:46SPEAKERSome of them are interactive.
12:47SPEAKERSo some of them like you'll put your head in a spot
12:49SPEAKERand follow a line with your head
12:51SPEAKERand you'll hear a story told
12:54SPEAKERas you move your head through the sculpture
12:56SPEAKERor it'll make music based on your head position
12:58SPEAKERand stuff like that.
12:59SPEAKERAnd then some of them are more dynamic.
13:03SPEAKERLike you'll be in a zero G space
13:05SPEAKERwhere you can kind of float around
13:06SPEAKERand there's stuff moving around you
13:08SPEAKERand sounds playing when the objects move around you.
13:10SPEAKERAnd the thing that struck me about that
13:15SPEAKERmore than anything else is I really, I didn't realize it,
13:18SPEAKERbut I really miss going to museums and just like,
13:21SPEAKERI wish I could just sit down with a book
13:22SPEAKERon one of the benches in this museum and read a book.
13:26SPEAKERBut it's also multiplayer.
13:27SPEAKERSo like you can be in there
13:28SPEAKERand be walking around with other people
13:29SPEAKERand they'll be exploring the art
13:31SPEAKERand you can talk to them the whole thing if you want.
13:32SPEAKER- Is this on Steam?
13:33SPEAKERI have to check this out.
13:34SPEAKERI love fantastic contraption.
13:36SPEAKERI also, I'm pretty sure I met him and his wife.
13:39SPEAKERI think they both work together on this stuff.
13:42SPEAKER- Sarah makes-
13:42SPEAKER- At a con like years ago and they were super nice.
13:45SPEAKER- Sarah makes zombie,
13:49SPEAKERshe used to make a flash zombie survival game,
13:51SPEAKERlike a isometric, I think it's called Rebuild.
13:55SPEAKERAnd there's the latest ones have been on the iPad
13:57SPEAKERand I think do pretty well for it.
13:59SPEAKERSo they really, I enjoy them.
14:00SPEAKERI think as a zombie,
14:02SPEAKERlike they're kind of like strategy part strategy.
14:06SPEAKERThey're not like a tactical game like X-Com,
14:08SPEAKERbut you kind of explore the town and rebuild areas
14:11SPEAKERand retake territory and all that kind of stuff.
14:13SPEAKERLike a light strategy game.
14:14SPEAKER- I feel like Alex notwithstanding,
14:16SPEAKERlike that is still the kind of bread and butter VR
14:18SPEAKERor like the stuff that is interesting or matters,
14:21SPEAKERlike these kinds of museum,
14:23SPEAKERlike figuratively museum pieces.
14:24SPEAKERI know that's an actual museum,
14:26SPEAKERbut like these kinds of like self-contained little novel,
14:29SPEAKERlike weird gimmicky things.
14:31SPEAKERNot so much like they're not a lot of like sprawling 60 hour
14:35SPEAKERlike Epic RPGs in VR out there, you know what I mean?
14:39SPEAKER- I think gimmicky is unfair.
14:40SPEAKER- I mean, I guess the word gimmick
14:42SPEAKERsounds a little pejorative and I don't mean it to,
14:44SPEAKERI mean more like they've got a hook,
14:45SPEAKERlike they've got a novel hook to them.
14:47SPEAKER- Yeah, it's like the stuff that I,
14:49SPEAKERso conceptually the things that I end up spending
14:53SPEAKERthe most time with are probably arcade games.
14:54SPEAKER'Cause I end up, I like to play the leaderboard game.
14:57SPEAKERYou know, I like to see if I can beat my friend's score
14:59SPEAKERin Space Pirate Trainer or, you know,
15:03SPEAKERbetter my score in Pistol Whip or Beat Saber
15:04SPEAKERor something like that.
15:05SPEAKER- I mean, you know, those are like high score
15:06SPEAKERlike actiony kind of experiences,
15:07SPEAKERbut even then they do like one thing very well, right?
15:10SPEAKERLike they're not, what I mean is like, you're not,
15:12SPEAKERyes, they, I'm kind of undermining my own argument here.
15:15SPEAKERLike, yes, they did put out Skyrim
15:16SPEAKERand Fallout 4 in VR,
15:17SPEAKERbut like they're not making new games like that for VR.
15:19SPEAKERYou know what I mean? - That's it, yeah.
15:22SPEAKER- Like to me, like obviously none of those games
15:25SPEAKERwere failures.
15:26SPEAKERLike I just looked at according to Steam Spy,
15:28SPEAKERwhich I guess is pretty fuzzy data,
15:29SPEAKERbut like they estimate that somewhere between two
15:32SPEAKERand 5 million people own Half-Life Alyx.
15:34SPEAKERAnd I think those Bethesda VR games have done quite well,
15:38SPEAKERbut like they haven't set the world on fire.
15:41SPEAKERYou know what I mean?
15:42SPEAKERLike they didn't make tens of millions of people
15:43SPEAKERgo out and buy VR headsets, so.
15:46SPEAKER- Well, so I haven't checked into Fallout 4
15:48SPEAKERor Skyrim lately.
15:50SPEAKERI played them around launch and both of them
15:53SPEAKERhad comfort issues to the point
15:55SPEAKERthat I didn't want to play them.
15:56SPEAKERLike I wouldn't have, if you had said,
15:59SPEAKER"Hey, could you spend a hundred hours
16:00SPEAKERin a VR version of Fallout 3?"
16:02SPEAKERI think I would have said unequivocally yes.
16:04SPEAKERAnd then when I actually tried it, I was like,
16:06SPEAKER"This is not what I want."
16:08SPEAKER'Cause like those are games that I usually load up a podcast
16:11SPEAKERor something or have a movie on on a second screen
16:13SPEAKERwhile I'm playing 'cause they're kind of like, I don't know,
16:16SPEAKERthey're often like chore simulators, right?
16:18SPEAKERIt's like, get a task, go out into the wasteland someplace,
16:21SPEAKERshoot something, bring back a piece of liver,
16:23SPEAKERand then build another wall on your thing.
16:27SPEAKERThe thing that I'm finding ports of 2D games
16:32SPEAKERnotwithstanding is that the VR versions of,
16:37SPEAKERlike one of the things that happened the last year or so
16:39SPEAKERis that we've seen a lot of clones of games genres
16:43SPEAKERthat have large followings on the 2D side
16:46SPEAKERon normal, traditional gaming.
16:47SPEAKERSo there's a battle royale, there's an ARMA clone,
16:50SPEAKERthere's a CSGO clone.
16:52SPEAKER- Okay, just to clarify, when you say 2D,
16:54SPEAKERyou're talking about like rasterized to a screen,
16:56SPEAKERnot like a side scroller.
16:58SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean a flat.
16:59SPEAKER- Not a sprite based like bitmap thing.
17:02SPEAKER- I mean, something you play on a screen,
17:03SPEAKERnot something you play in a headset.
17:05SPEAKER- Right, right.
17:05SPEAKER'Cause obviously those translate into VR to some extent
17:08SPEAKERbecause they are 3D.
17:09SPEAKER- They can, but because for anything where your camera
17:14SPEAKERmovement is integral to the way the game works,
17:17SPEAKERwhich is basically like any first person shooter,
17:19SPEAKERyou can't, it's hard to port that stuff over
17:22SPEAKERwithout making people either really uncomfortable
17:24SPEAKERor completely rewriting the way the game works
17:27SPEAKERas it happened with like Skyrim and teleport and stuff.
17:29SPEAKER- Yeah, can I just quote from the notes here?
17:32SPEAKER- Yeah.
17:33SPEAKER- Something that you wrote.
17:34SPEAKERDevelopers seem to be saying F comfort.
17:36SPEAKERI felt sick testing the games this year for the first time
17:39SPEAKERin ages and that is shocking to me.
17:40SPEAKER- Yeah.
17:41SPEAKER- Like I'm kind of with you.
17:42SPEAKERI mean, I'm not as shocked as you maybe
17:45SPEAKERbecause like it's just a basic physiological issue, right?
17:48SPEAKER- Well, but so it's weird
17:50SPEAKERbecause I don't usually get motion sick.
17:52SPEAKERSo that indicates to me that the level of willingness
17:55SPEAKERto make people uncomfortable has gone way up.
17:58SPEAKER- Well, so hang on.
17:59SPEAKERDo you mean you don't get motion sick ever traditionally
18:01SPEAKERor you don't get motion sick in VR to date?
18:04SPEAKER- I've played temple run in the back of a moving car before,
18:06SPEAKERwhich temple run is a thing that makes most people feel sick
18:09SPEAKERlike while they're just sitting still.
18:11SPEAKER- Is that VR?
18:12SPEAKER- VR, yeah.
18:13SPEAKERThere's a VR version of temple run.
18:14SPEAKER- Okay, so that's what I'm trying to establish.
18:15SPEAKERYou're saying that you have like you have a VR iron stomach.
18:19SPEAKER- Like Brad, I played almost all of "Alien Isolation"
18:22SPEAKERin an Oculus DK2.
18:23SPEAKER- Oh God, wow.
18:24SPEAKER- Yeah, like I don't get sick.
18:26SPEAKERSo the fact that I'm starting to feel twinges
18:29SPEAKERof motion sickness playing mostly quest games,
18:33SPEAKERa couple of PSVR games.
18:34SPEAKER- That's what I wanted to establish
18:35SPEAKER'cause I have never gotten motion sick at all outside of VR,
18:38SPEAKERlike moving cars, games, whatever,
18:39SPEAKERreading in motion, whatever.
18:41SPEAKERBut pretty much from day one,
18:44SPEAKERany VR game that you walk smoothly around in
18:46SPEAKERand use like smooth turning,
18:48SPEAKERlike kind of standard first person movement,
18:50SPEAKERlike from day one, like just sweats, hot,
18:56SPEAKERthat hot feeling, the queasy, just ugh.
18:59SPEAKER- So one of the things that's happened
19:01SPEAKERover the last few years is it has become clear
19:03SPEAKERthat you can become accustomed to that.
19:05SPEAKER- Really?
19:06SPEAKER- Yeah, that you can, like more exposure to it
19:08SPEAKERmakes it less bad for most people.
19:11SPEAKER- Oh, it's just, it's so unpleasant
19:12SPEAKERthat I don't think I could expose it.
19:14SPEAKER- That's the thing. - Exposed myself to it
19:15SPEAKERfor extended periods.
19:16SPEAKER- Yeah, you have to be kind of a masochist
19:18SPEAKERor really excited about VR to do that.
19:23SPEAKERSo I played "Alex", I played like a third of "Alex"
19:26SPEAKERwith teleport on, and then I switched
19:28SPEAKERto the smooth movement,
19:29SPEAKERand I was a little bit less comfortable,
19:31SPEAKERbut I never got to the point that I like had the cold chills
19:33SPEAKERand the stomach gurgles and all that stuff.
19:36SPEAKERAnd eventually it was fine.
19:39SPEAKEROn the lower frame rate platforms,
19:42SPEAKERlike the Quest and the PSVR,
19:43SPEAKERthat is a different experience.
19:45SPEAKERNow, at the same time, there were games
19:48SPEAKERthat used novel locomotion,
19:52SPEAKERlike the "Iron Man" game on PSVR,
19:53SPEAKERwhich actually didn't make me feel bad.
19:55SPEAKERI was kind of surprised, 'cause like with that,
19:58SPEAKERyou're literally flying like "Iron Man",
19:59SPEAKERputting your hands behind you to go forward
20:00SPEAKERand stuff like that.
20:03SPEAKERThere's a "Phantom Covert Ops" is a game
20:06SPEAKERon the Oculus on the Quest, I think.
20:08SPEAKER- Tactical kayak game.
20:10SPEAKER- Tactical kayak game.
20:11SPEAKERIt's basically, what was the thing
20:13SPEAKERfrom "Simpsons", "Nightboat"?
20:15SPEAKERIt's like "Night Rider", but it's a car, it's a boat,
20:18SPEAKERso the bad guys always have to be next to a canal.
20:20SPEAKER- Of course.
20:21SPEAKER- It's the same thing.
20:23SPEAKERThat game, that made me feel sick after like an hour.
20:30SPEAKERThe missed VR port, when you turned on smooth motion,
20:32SPEAKERwhich I think it defaulted to,
20:34SPEAKERmade me feel sick really quickly.
20:36SPEAKERLike there's a lot of games that I was shocked
20:39SPEAKERmade me feel bad.
20:40SPEAKERI would have been happy if "Mist" was just 360 bubbles
20:43SPEAKERof the original "Mist" layouts and not be like,
20:47SPEAKERI didn't need to have a real-time movement
20:49SPEAKERthrough the "Mist" island and have it look
20:50SPEAKERlike a kind of crappy PS2 game.
20:53SPEAKERAnyway, it's like the motion stuff is all over the place.
20:58SPEAKERThe other thing is when people do these ports
21:00SPEAKERof the existing genres, in order to make those games
21:04SPEAKERaccessible to the broader audience,
21:06SPEAKERlike a small VR audience that has wider interests
21:10SPEAKERthan say CSGO or PUBG or Apex or ARMA has on the PC,
21:17SPEAKERthey have to dilute the mechanics
21:18SPEAKERthat make those genres interesting
21:20SPEAKERand the mechanical complexity that makes those games
21:22SPEAKERinteresting on the PC.
21:23SPEAKERSo for example, I play a lot of battle royales
21:27SPEAKERin generation zero, which is the VR battle royale.
21:31SPEAKERYou have 16 players in a match.
21:35SPEAKERThe guns, like there's no recoil really,
21:37SPEAKERbecause you can't make the player lift their hands up
21:41SPEAKERwhen you're shooting and have recoil.
21:43SPEAKERLike the position of the gun has to align.
21:45SPEAKERSo they have accuracy cones instead of that.
21:48SPEAKERSo all you do is feather your shots
21:50SPEAKERand like the first shot lands exactly where you want it.
21:53SPEAKERBut there's no like, because there's so few players,
21:56SPEAKERthe maps aren't big enough to have like,
21:58SPEAKERyou know, long range encounters and stuff like that.
22:02SPEAKERIt all ends up being like close up fighting
22:04SPEAKERwith high speed, automatic weapons or shotguns.
22:07SPEAKERAnd it's just not, it doesn't have the same kind
22:10SPEAKERof cognitive load that playing a game like Apex or PUBG
22:13SPEAKERor Warzone or Fortnite has.
22:16SPEAKER- Not the same depth.
22:17SPEAKER- Yeah, it's-
22:19SPEAKER- Sorry, is that population one is the name of that game?
22:22SPEAKER- Did I say generation one?
22:23SPEAKERYeah, it's population one, sorry.
22:24SPEAKER- Yeah, okay, I just want to make sure.
22:27SPEAKER- It's like, imagine if you were playing Dota,
22:33SPEAKERbut you took out like 50% or 70%
22:36SPEAKERof the mechanical complexity of that game.
22:38SPEAKER- That's a bad example because that might make me
22:40SPEAKERlike not hate Dota so much.
22:42SPEAKERBut I get what you're saying.
22:44SPEAKER- Yeah.
22:46SPEAKER- I mean, that even sounds true of like
22:48SPEAKERthat Do Medal of Honor game,
22:49SPEAKERwhich just came out last month, right?
22:51SPEAKERIt's pretty new still.
22:52SPEAKER- It's December, I think.
22:53SPEAKER- I have not played it.
22:54SPEAKER- I thought it was Oculus only 'cause Oculus funded it,
22:56SPEAKERbut you just let me know that it's on Steam as well,
22:59SPEAKERwhich is, that in itself is a surprise,
23:01SPEAKERbut the bigger surprise to me was that you said
23:04SPEAKERyou were not very fond of it.
23:06SPEAKER- Well, so the cross-platform Oculus funded stuff
23:12SPEAKERdeveloped internally by Oculus doesn't come out on Steam,
23:15SPEAKERstuff developed externally seems to.
23:16SPEAKER- That's the distinction, okay.
23:18SPEAKER- Yeah, just because the market,
23:20SPEAKERespecially since Oculus seems to be focusing on Quest
23:24SPEAKERover PC VR, I think like if they had released that game
23:31SPEAKERand not put it on Steam, it would have sold like 15 copies
23:34SPEAKERand they would have spent a whole buttload of money
23:35SPEAKERon something that like eight people played.
23:37SPEAKER- That's fair.
23:39SPEAKER- But it's really weird.
23:41SPEAKERSo, like a normal Medal of Honor game or Call of Duty game,
23:44SPEAKERyou kind of like, you start the game,
23:46SPEAKERyou do the tutorial thing and then you land,
23:49SPEAKERyou have a landing, you have some sort of big showcase
23:51SPEAKERset piece sequence, and then you traverse,
23:55SPEAKERlike doing combat the entire time you're traversing
23:57SPEAKERand then there's another set piece.
23:59SPEAKERThis game seems to kind of just be set pieces
24:01SPEAKERor maybe like small combat arenas.
24:03SPEAKER- That's unfortunate.
24:04SPEAKER- Like you do the tutorial thing,
24:06SPEAKERwhich takes a really long time,
24:09SPEAKERand then you have to do this stealth encounter
24:14SPEAKERand then you have to break into a building
24:15SPEAKERand find some guys and like, it's just,
24:18SPEAKERit's just, the checkpoints were really rough in that,
24:22SPEAKERlike you would do half of the murders
24:24SPEAKERthat you need to in this area,
24:26SPEAKERbut it wouldn't checkpoint at any point along the way.
24:28SPEAKERSo if you failed, which happened all the time,
24:31SPEAKERyou'd have to go do the whole thing over again.
24:34SPEAKERAnd at the same time, your AI helpers
24:36SPEAKERare incredibly proficient murderers.
24:39SPEAKERSo if you just kind of hang out behind a rock
24:41SPEAKERfor a couple of minutes, you just have to kill
24:43SPEAKERmaybe two people and you're good.
24:45SPEAKERIt's just, I don't know, it just was kind of overwhelming,
24:49SPEAKERunderwhelming rather.
24:51SPEAKER- That's unfortunate, I mean, you know,
24:52SPEAKER'cause it's respawn and it's a big storied franchise.
24:58SPEAKERI kind of had some high hopes that it might be up there
25:00SPEAKERwith Alex as like one of the more ambitious things,
25:02SPEAKERbut it sounds like maybe not.
25:04SPEAKER- Look, if that game had come out last December
25:06SPEAKERbefore Alex shipped, probably I would have had
25:08SPEAKERa different feeling about it,
25:09SPEAKERbut since Alex gave you that continuous,
25:12SPEAKERlike in Alex, you move from one section to the next,
25:14SPEAKERthe end of one area is the start of the next area.
25:17SPEAKERThere's no, you know, there's no like time skips or jumps
25:20SPEAKERor anything like that. - It's a world.
25:21SPEAKER- Yeah, it feels like a real world.
25:23SPEAKERAnd this feels like a series of,
25:27SPEAKERit reminds me of, I can't remember which of,
25:30SPEAKERno, Siri, go away.
25:32SPEAKER- Siri has thoughts on VR.
25:34SPEAKER- It reminds me of one of those early,
25:38SPEAKERI think it was a medal of honor
25:39SPEAKERthat you just kind of jumped from battle to battle,
25:43SPEAKERyou know, and you're not really,
25:45SPEAKERlike it didn't feel like a continuous,
25:47SPEAKERit was before they realized that they should give you
25:48SPEAKERmultiple player perspectives,
25:50SPEAKERbut after they did like one giant long
25:53SPEAKERfirst person shooter campaign.
25:54SPEAKER- Right.
25:56SPEAKER- Anyway. - Yeah.
25:57SPEAKERSo yeah, the state of games is maybe a little bit
26:01SPEAKERunderwhelming, like you said, a bit muted at the moment.
26:04SPEAKER- There's a bunch of weird, cool, small stuff.
26:06SPEAKERAnd then there's a bunch of expensive,
26:09SPEAKERlike great to mediocre to actively bad,
26:13SPEAKERlike the expensive games are all over the place,
26:16SPEAKERI guess is the big takeaway.
26:17SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, but I am coming out of this
26:19SPEAKERwith a few things I wanna,
26:20SPEAKERI really wanna check out the Museum of Other Realities.
26:24SPEAKER- Paper Beast is really cool.
26:25SPEAKER- Paper Beast has been on my list.
26:27SPEAKERI've been meaning to check that out for a while.
26:29SPEAKERThat's Eric Chahi, isn't it, I believe?
26:32SPEAKER- Yeah, and well, the neat thing about that
26:33SPEAKERis everything's done in shaders, I think.
26:35SPEAKER- Oh, wow.
26:36SPEAKER- It's a technical marvel.
26:38SPEAKER- Is it, what is it?
26:40SPEAKERI really need to play that.
26:42SPEAKER- It's, it's...
26:43SPEAKER- Like it, is it, is it, like it almost looks like a,
26:46SPEAKERlike a horrifying, nightmarish version
26:48SPEAKERof "Viva Pinata" or something?
26:49SPEAKERIs it like a, is it a kind of an ecology simulator
26:52SPEAKERlike it looks?
26:52SPEAKER- It is, there's a little bit of that.
26:54SPEAKERIt's like, in terms of mechanics and what you do,
26:57SPEAKERit's probably closer to something like "Journey."
27:00SPEAKERYou're just kind of traversing this world.
27:02SPEAKERThere's some light puzzles along the way.
27:04SPEAKERThere's all sorts of weird creatures.
27:05SPEAKERSometimes the creatures are involved in the puzzles.
27:07SPEAKERIt's just, it's really neat and really pretty.
27:11SPEAKER- Is there terrain deformation in this?
27:13SPEAKER- There is all sorts of terrain deformation.
27:15SPEAKER- I've got to play this then,
27:16SPEAKERbecause he did "From Dust," right?
27:19SPEAKERWe're getting off the topic here,
27:21SPEAKERbut I just want to make sure I've got that right.
27:23SPEAKERYes, I love "From Dust."
27:26SPEAKERI feel like people do not.
27:27SPEAKER- I don't know if I remember "From Dust."
27:28SPEAKER- It's kind of, I started to say
27:31SPEAKERit's sort of like a modern day populace,
27:33SPEAKERbut that's not really right.
27:35SPEAKER'Cause it's not as much about like building a population
27:38SPEAKERand like goosing population numbers and stuff like that.
27:41SPEAKERIt's more about terrain-based puzzle solving,
27:44SPEAKERbut it's very much like you're a god
27:47SPEAKERand it has enough sort of physics simulation to it
27:50SPEAKERthat like you can like scoop out this earth
27:55SPEAKERto let the water flow through to turn this lava into rock
27:58SPEAKERso that people can cross the rock.
28:00SPEAKERAnd it's very much like a terrain deformation-based
28:03SPEAKERpuzzle game that I thought was super cool.
28:05SPEAKER- It's a little bit of like black and whitey stuff.
28:07SPEAKER- So yeah, kind of, yeah.
28:09SPEAKERSo it's sort of in that realm.
28:10SPEAKERSo yeah, if "Paper Beast" has any of that in it,
28:12SPEAKERI really need to play that.
28:15SPEAKER- I was gonna say the other big game
28:17SPEAKERthat was kind of neat in a,
28:19SPEAKERlike it felt, this is weird
28:21SPEAKER'cause there's an actual like "Project Wingman"
28:24SPEAKERcame out this year,
28:25SPEAKERwhich is a straight up like ace combat,
28:28SPEAKERlike spiritual successor.
28:31SPEAKERBut that "Iron Man" game for PSVR
28:33SPEAKERfeels very much like an ace combat,
28:36SPEAKERlike an old ace combat even in that it's kind of janky,
28:41SPEAKERlike you're aiming and stuff.
28:42SPEAKERYou end up doing ridiculous stuff in your living room.
28:45SPEAKERThe entire family really enjoyed watching.
28:46SPEAKERThey thought it was really funny.
28:50SPEAKERBut yeah, it's like in reality,
28:53SPEAKERso there's two places that things are really going well,
28:55SPEAKERI would say.
28:56SPEAKEROne is cockpit games.
28:58SPEAKERSo racing, car racing, flight sims, squadrons.
29:02SPEAKER- Yes, Alex and "Star Wars" squadrons
29:05SPEAKERare the two things that really got me
29:06SPEAKERinto a VR headset last year.
29:08SPEAKER- Yeah, squadrons,
29:09SPEAKERonce they fixed the initial launch problems
29:10SPEAKERthat they had with VR
29:11SPEAKERand high refresh rate monitors and stuff like that,
29:13SPEAKERsquadrons is amazing.
29:14SPEAKER- It's quite good in VR.
29:16SPEAKERLike it really hits that wish fulfillment aspect
29:19SPEAKERof like, I wanna sit in an X-wing
29:21SPEAKERand like, now I feel like I am.
29:23SPEAKER- Well, and they actually did a good job,
29:25SPEAKERlike respawn, no, that's not respawn.
29:28SPEAKERI said that's- - No, no, no,
29:29SPEAKERit was a Montreal studio.
29:33SPEAKER- Yeah.
29:34SPEAKER- I forget which one of the EA, was it Motive, I forget.
29:35SPEAKER- Motive is who did that, I believe.
29:39SPEAKERThey did a really good job with like the UI stuff
29:41SPEAKERthat like the Project Wingman is a good example
29:43SPEAKERof like how not to do ports
29:45SPEAKERbecause they have like problems like Z-fighting
29:48SPEAKERwhere the UI HUD elements that are in the 2D,
29:52SPEAKERyou know, flat screen version of the game
29:54SPEAKERare rendering over the cockpit
29:56SPEAKERin a way that's really weird and uncomfortable.
29:59SPEAKERSquadrons doesn't really have those problems.
30:01SPEAKERIt does occasionally, but they're hard to avoid.
30:05SPEAKERThe control stuff works really well.
30:06SPEAKERIt works great with a game pad.
30:08SPEAKERIf you have a HOTAS, it's really cool.
30:10SPEAKERIt is a phenomenal, phenomenal version of that game.
30:17SPEAKERMicrosoft Flight Sim VR stuff, I haven't tried yet.
30:20SPEAKERThat's the one thing that I haven't gotten into
30:22SPEAKERbecause I didn't have 300 gigs or whatever.
30:24SPEAKERI need three on my SSD to play that
30:26SPEAKERand it wasn't nominated.
30:27SPEAKER- Yeah, so yeah, oh, sorry.
30:31SPEAKEROh, no, I was gonna say racing.
30:32SPEAKERThen the other thing is like weird platformers
30:34SPEAKERis this game called, hold on, where is it?
30:38SPEAKERBelow the rabbit hole beneath?
30:39SPEAKER- I've heard of that.
30:40SPEAKER- Down the rabbit hole.
30:43SPEAKERI'm finding it in my notes.
30:44SPEAKER- Turns out whenever I lightly disparage VR in public,
30:48SPEAKERI hear from people who love VR with game recommendations
30:51SPEAKERand that was one of them.
30:54SPEAKER- So it's the whole,
30:56SPEAKERit's imagine like a platformer slash adventure game
30:59SPEAKERwhere you're going down where the entirety of it
31:02SPEAKERtakes place in a downward spiral around the hole
31:05SPEAKERthat Alice falls down to to get to Wonderland.
31:08SPEAKERAnd like they did a really,
31:10SPEAKERlike it's a really good example of using art direction
31:13SPEAKERto mask the limitations of the mobile hardware in the quest.
31:17SPEAKERSo it's all like flat shaded polys,
31:19SPEAKERit's kind of lo-fi in a way that's really attractive
31:23SPEAKERand they tell the story of Alice in Wonderland.
31:25SPEAKER- That's actually, that sounds very cool actually.
31:28SPEAKER- Yeah, but again, it's one of those situations
31:31SPEAKERwhere it's pretty light.
31:33SPEAKERLike if that game was a PC game or a console game,
31:37SPEAKERyou would expect it to be more mechanically complex
31:39SPEAKERthan it probably is.
31:40SPEAKER'Cause it's mostly just like tapping around, opening doors,
31:44SPEAKERgrabbing stuff from the environment, stuff like that.
31:45SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, the games situation is a bit up and down
31:50SPEAKERwith VR right now.
31:51SPEAKERLike you've outlined some app stuff here.
31:53SPEAKERI actually just happened to see,
31:56SPEAKERI guess it made enough news that it kind of got retweeted
31:58SPEAKERinto my feed that yeah, the Tilt Brush, Google's,
32:03SPEAKERwhat would you call it?
32:04SPEAKERKind of 3D paint application, I guess,
32:06SPEAKERhas been discontinued and open sourced.
32:09SPEAKER- Yeah, so Patrick Hackett and a small team of people
32:13SPEAKERworked on that for a long time.
32:14SPEAKERThey came over from Double Fine or, you know,
32:16SPEAKERthey started Tilt Brush and then got bought by Google.
32:18SPEAKERAnd they basically, yeah, when the team left,
32:25SPEAKERthey were like, well, we're gonna open source this,
32:26SPEAKERbut it's not development on it.
32:28SPEAKER- Is that how it worked?
32:29SPEAKERThe developers left and then they were like,
32:30SPEAKERall right, this was done.
32:31SPEAKER- Look, about two weeks ago, I saw Patrick tweeting
32:33SPEAKERthat he was leaving Google to go do something else,
32:35SPEAKERbut he couldn't say what it was yet.
32:36SPEAKERSo yeah, it's funny.
32:41SPEAKERThere's a lot of content creation tools out for VR
32:44SPEAKERand most of them are priced in such a way
32:46SPEAKERthat they're for professionals.
32:48SPEAKERYou know, people who are selling their work for money
32:50SPEAKER'cause they're priced like Maya or something like that.
32:52SPEAKERThey're multiple hundreds of dollars a year or more.
32:55SPEAKER- Yeah.
33:00SPEAKER- Oculus had Medium, which they sold to Adobe.
33:03SPEAKERThat's their kind of clay sculpting thing.
33:06SPEAKERAnd that's- - Oh, yes, yes.
33:07SPEAKERRight, I followed, I believe they have like,
33:11SPEAKERI'm sure he had plenty of other responsibilities,
33:12SPEAKERbut on his feed, it seemed like he was almost
33:15SPEAKERlike a medium artist in residence, kind of.
33:18SPEAKERI forget his name, but now that I think about it,
33:22SPEAKERI haven't seen him post anything in a while,
33:23SPEAKERbut for a while, he was posting like a sculpture a day
33:26SPEAKERon his Twitter feed for Medium.
33:27SPEAKERIt seemed like they were behind that pretty,
33:29SPEAKERand it was cool.
33:30SPEAKERLike there was a really nice looking stuff
33:31SPEAKERcoming out of there.
33:32SPEAKER- Well, yeah, Medium was really neat
33:33SPEAKER'cause it was like a blobby,
33:35SPEAKERit was like sculpting with clay, right?
33:36SPEAKERIt was like clay, but you have an undo button
33:38SPEAKERand you can scale things and also, you know, do all,
33:41SPEAKERyou know, it's like Photoshop, but for clay.
33:42SPEAKERThat was the pitch for Medium.
33:44SPEAKERIt was really neat.
33:45SPEAKERThey sold it to Adobe.
33:46SPEAKERAdobe, it's an Oculus native app,
33:49SPEAKERso that means it's only on Oculus PC headsets
33:53SPEAKERand it's unclear what Adobe is doing with it.
33:55SPEAKERI hope that they're gonna port it to SteamVR
33:57SPEAKERso that everybody can use it, but we'll see.
34:00SPEAKERThis is one of the other things that's worth mentioning
34:02SPEAKERis it's hard to port
34:04SPEAKERbecause there's not a lot of control parity.
34:07SPEAKERYou know, I went to Valve in December of 2019
34:10SPEAKERto play Alex on all the different headsets
34:12SPEAKER'cause they wanted outside feedback
34:13SPEAKERand they wanted to show, you know,
34:15SPEAKERthe work that they put into porting it on,
34:17SPEAKERporting it into different controller schemes.
34:21SPEAKERYou know, you have the original Vive ones,
34:23SPEAKERyou have the grippy controllers that are limited fidelity
34:26SPEAKERlike grip on or a binary grip, basically,
34:29SPEAKERso like Oculus and the Windows MR controllers,
34:32SPEAKERand then you have the index and controllers
34:34SPEAKERthat give you like analog control of individual fingers.
34:38SPEAKERAnd making something as simple as throwing work
34:42SPEAKERon all of those different interfaces is challenging.
34:48SPEAKERSo like, I get why they haven't ported it to SteamVR.
34:52SPEAKERIt's just, that needs to happen
34:54SPEAKERif they wanna continue using it.
34:57SPEAKERGoogle Open Source Tilt Brush,
34:58SPEAKERwe'll see what happens with that.
34:59SPEAKERI don't know if there's enough of a community
35:00SPEAKERin the programmer world to make that continue to be a thing.
35:03SPEAKER- People seemed excited about it for what it's worth.
35:05SPEAKERLike people, again, like who knows how many people,
35:08SPEAKERmight be three people, but I did see people saying like,
35:11SPEAKER"Oh, this is huge for VR productivity.
35:13SPEAKERPeople will be able to extend this out in some wild ways."
35:16SPEAKER- No, I just, I will say this really caught my attention
35:18SPEAKERbecause like Tilt Brush was probably top three,
35:22SPEAKERlike initial VR things I saw that was just like,
35:24SPEAKER"Well, this is magic."
35:26SPEAKERBecause I mean, you were literally painting in open space.
35:28SPEAKERYou know, you're literally just like slinging particles
35:31SPEAKERand this weird, like tangible, you know,
35:33SPEAKERanti-gravity paint that just sort of hangs in the air
35:36SPEAKERand then you can kind of move around in it and stuff.
35:38SPEAKERLike it was one of the first VR proof of concept things
35:40SPEAKERthat I use that I was like, man, this is kind of amazing.
35:43SPEAKER- I mean, the demo, when I was showing people VR
35:45SPEAKERfor the first time, I would always have them draw a cube
35:49SPEAKERand Tilt Brush, right?
35:50SPEAKERAnd usually they do the thing where they draw two squares
35:52SPEAKERand they do the diagonal lines and then you get them to walk,
35:55SPEAKERlike to circle that 90 degrees around the outside
35:57SPEAKERof their circle.
35:58SPEAKERAnd they're like, "Oh, it's flat."
36:00SPEAKER- Yep, that's because you were trying to draw a cube
36:03SPEAKERon a 2D surface.
36:04SPEAKER- Exactly.
36:05SPEAKER- It's not 2D anymore.
36:07SPEAKER- I mean, the neat thing is there's,
36:08SPEAKERthe really exciting thing is there's already a bunch,
36:10SPEAKERthey'd already built a bunch of exports
36:11SPEAKERso you can get Tilt Brush sketches into other workflows.
36:15SPEAKERLike for display and stuff like Museum of Other Realities
36:19SPEAKERor also to bring it in to like use that
36:22SPEAKERas your sketching environment for Maya
36:25SPEAKERand other like professional 3D tools.
36:28SPEAKERThere's other stuff, Quill is like the animation.
36:32SPEAKERIt's like Tilt Brush, but with more animation steps.
36:34SPEAKERSo you can do like individual drawings
36:36SPEAKERand you can move them through time and space
36:38SPEAKERand then export those into other places as well.
36:41SPEAKERThat's only on Oculus PC.
36:43SPEAKERIt's another Oculus developed app.
36:44SPEAKERAnd, but there are viewers for that stuff on the Quest.
36:49SPEAKERThen there's a bunch of other things.
36:52SPEAKERThere's, Google has this cube.
36:54SPEAKERIt's blocks, I think is what they call it.
36:57SPEAKERBut it's like building things out of primitives.
37:00SPEAKERSo if you want to build spaceships and stuff like that,
37:01SPEAKERit's pretty good for that.
37:04SPEAKERAnd then there's a bazillion startups.
37:06SPEAKERBut I think realistically it's this space in particular
37:14SPEAKERis in a weird waiting for AR space.
37:16SPEAKERCause I feel like that's where we're at.
37:20SPEAKERLike nobody really figured out,
37:21SPEAKERhey, here's what the UI should look like
37:23SPEAKERfor this kind of app.
37:24SPEAKERLike there's no analog to the Photoshop tool,
37:29SPEAKERlike the tool tray with all the stuff on the side.
37:32SPEAKER- I was going to say, it's not clear to me
37:34SPEAKERhow many artists are actually out there
37:36SPEAKERusing these things in their workflows
37:38SPEAKERfor like non VR applications.
37:39SPEAKERLike it kind of is reminiscent to me
37:41SPEAKERof that pie in the sky magic leap idea of like,
37:43SPEAKERwell, we're never going to have monitors again
37:45SPEAKERbecause everybody will just sit at their desks
37:46SPEAKERwith these AR glasses on.
37:48SPEAKERAnd it hasn't, it has not quite come to fruition.
37:50SPEAKER- So the people that I know,
37:52SPEAKERthe artists that I know that we're working,
37:54SPEAKERthat I was working with mostly would use it
37:58SPEAKERas a sketching type situation.
38:02SPEAKER- So that sounds like a good application for that actually.
38:05SPEAKERNot necessarily like production assets
38:06SPEAKERare going to come out of that,
38:07SPEAKERbut more just like here's a quick way to like
38:10SPEAKERconcept out some stuff to look at in 3D.
38:13SPEAKERI mean, there's no reason that production assets
38:14SPEAKERcan't come out of that, but around the launch,
38:18SPEAKERthe headsets were a little bit low resolution.
38:19SPEAKERSo it was hard to see exactly what you were doing.
38:21SPEAKERThat's less of a problem now with the index
38:23SPEAKERand the reverb too, and even the Oculus, the Rift S.
38:31SPEAKERBut it's a thing.
38:34SPEAKERSo for me, as somebody who's bad
38:36SPEAKERat using the four pane traditional CAD interface,
38:40SPEAKERthe XYZ view, and then the 3D preview,
38:46SPEAKERmy brain can't convert between what those three panes show
38:50SPEAKERand a 3D model unless it's straight edged, right?
38:53SPEAKEROr circles or something like that.
38:55SPEAKERSo like being able to load up medium and sculpt clay,
38:58SPEAKERmy brain, I can do that.
39:01SPEAKERSo I feel like if you're already a 3D artist,
39:05SPEAKERprobably you're not the kind of person
39:06SPEAKERthat can't use those four pane CAD interfaces.
39:09SPEAKERSo maybe the market for that stuff is limited.
39:11SPEAKERI don't know.
39:13SPEAKERThe folks I know that use that stuff for production assets
39:17SPEAKERfind it to be much faster and more effective.
39:20SPEAKERAnd it's also a lot easier to do stuff
39:21SPEAKERthat was really complicated on 3D spaces,
39:23SPEAKERlike voids inside things and stuff like that.
39:26SPEAKERAnyway, the other stuff, there's a bunch of demo stuff.
39:32SPEAKERLike, I mean, Google Earth is still cool.
39:34SPEAKERAll of that stuff is still out there,
39:35SPEAKERbut it's slowed down a little bit, it seems.
39:38SPEAKER- Right, that's kind of the point of all of this to me
39:40SPEAKERis like, eh, it's been a while
39:41SPEAKERsince there was a Google Earth.
39:43SPEAKERLike the kind of the big showpiece events in VR
39:47SPEAKERare not as frequent as they were.
39:49SPEAKER- I mean, we talked about this.
39:50SPEAKERWe've talked about this off pod before,
39:53SPEAKERbut it feels to me like at this point,
39:57SPEAKERif you're buying a VR headset, fitness stuff is really good.
39:59SPEAKERThat's something you'll do every day, whether it's-
40:02SPEAKER- That's something that's interested me,
40:03SPEAKERbut the idea of sweating all over my several hundred dollar,
40:07SPEAKERvery high-tech piece of equipment is not appealing.
40:10SPEAKER- Well, you can, most of them have foam,
40:14SPEAKERopen or closed cell phone, face masks by default.
40:16SPEAKERYou can get like leather replacement ones
40:20SPEAKERthat will make them less absorbent,
40:23SPEAKERwhich is probably good for the electronics.
40:27SPEAKERI don't, I've sweated in both my Vive Pro
40:31SPEAKERand my Index a lot and have had no problems, and my Quest.
40:36SPEAKERSo yeah, like even Oculus has even leaned into this
40:39SPEAKERand has a fitness app that uses like Beat Saber mini games
40:43SPEAKERand Pistol Whip mini games to do leg and arm day.
40:46SPEAKERSo if you put some wrist weights on, you can actually,
40:51SPEAKERyou're not gonna get huge Dwayne Johnson muscles,
40:56SPEAKERbut you'll burn calories.
40:59SPEAKER- That's cool.
41:00SPEAKER- And then stuff like Box VR,
41:01SPEAKERand there's a ton of fitness apps that are pretty good.
41:04SPEAKERThere's dancing apps, there's all sorts of stuff.
41:08SPEAKERYou wanna talk about headsets?
41:09SPEAKER- Yeah, sure.
41:10SPEAKER- Stay to the headset market?
41:11SPEAKER- Kind of a quick rundown of the stuff.
41:12SPEAKERI mean, a lot of it has been out there for a while, but yeah.
41:15SPEAKER- Yeah, so I think starting with the old stuff,
41:17SPEAKERit seems like PSVR is basically dead.
41:19SPEAKER- Yeah, I threw that in here.
41:21SPEAKERThat, God, when was that?
41:23SPEAKERPrior to, I think it was just prior to the PS5 launch,
41:26SPEAKERJim Ryan, the head of PlayStation,
41:28SPEAKERdid an interview with the Washington Post
41:29SPEAKERwhere he just kind of threw cold water all over VR
41:33SPEAKERor PlayStation VR in particular.
41:34SPEAKER- They sold, they sold, if you bought a PS5,
41:37SPEAKERyou get a free dongle that makes it work with your PSVR.
41:41SPEAKER- Yeah, you can use the,
41:42SPEAKERand they said that way before PS5 came out
41:44SPEAKERthat the original headset would be compatible,
41:46SPEAKERbut the implication was,
41:48SPEAKERand there were even some patents going around
41:49SPEAKERthat people dug up that they were also working
41:51SPEAKERon a next gen PSVR for PS5, and well, maybe, probably.
41:57SPEAKERI mean, let me pull up this.
42:00SPEAKER- That thing sold, it sold.
42:02SPEAKER- Well, so that was-
42:03SPEAKER- It was the best selling VR headset for a long time.
42:04SPEAKER- That was in this Washington Post story that,
42:07SPEAKERI'll just quote,
42:08SPEAKER"While 5 million headsets were sold by January of this year,"
42:11SPEAKERthis was last year, I believe,
42:13SPEAKER"sales were slowing in 2020."
42:16SPEAKERSo like 5 million, I mean, when I read that,
42:19SPEAKER5 million sounds like a lot of VR headsets,
42:21SPEAKERalthough against the full-
42:23SPEAKER- 80 million PS4s or something?
42:25SPEAKER- It's way more than that.
42:27SPEAKERAgainst the full, let me see,
42:29SPEAKERI think they're way past a hundred million.
42:32SPEAKERI'm seeing numbers, 110, 112.
42:38SPEAKERYeah, they passed a hundred million in like mid 2019.
42:41SPEAKERSo we're talking like less than 5%
42:44SPEAKERof your user base has the headset.
42:46SPEAKERThat's like 5 million is a pretty big number,
42:48SPEAKERbut it's not much in the,
42:51SPEAKERit's kind of a drop in the bucket
42:52SPEAKERof the overall PlayStation audience.
42:54SPEAKERBut-
42:56SPEAKER- I mean, the unfortunate thing is that they were using
42:58SPEAKERwhat are essentially PS3 controllers
43:00SPEAKERthat have a single point of data.
43:03SPEAKERLike those controllers were always pretty good
43:06SPEAKERat tracking X and like left and right and up and down.
43:09SPEAKERBut if you had to move closer or further away
43:11SPEAKERfrom the camera, they're bad at that.
43:13SPEAKER- I mean, I'm not, you know,
43:14SPEAKERI didn't work on the PlayStation VR, I could be wrong.
43:16SPEAKERBut to me, it seemed like depending on that camera
43:18SPEAKERfor the tracking was really the Achilles heel of the PSVR.
43:22SPEAKERIt's never been, it's never been stable for me.
43:25SPEAKERLike, you know, I've used most of the PC headsets at one time
43:29SPEAKERor another and they generally all track
43:31SPEAKERlike they're supposed to, you know,
43:32SPEAKERlike obviously setting up lighthouses is a pain
43:34SPEAKERin some cases and like inside out is what it is.
43:36SPEAKERBut the tracking on the PSVR has always been
43:39SPEAKERby far the least reliable to me.
43:41SPEAKER- So for me, the headset always worked great,
43:43SPEAKERbut the hands tend to fly off into space,
43:45SPEAKERwhich means they lose tracking.
43:47SPEAKERBut I mean, I think it varies wildly based on your room.
43:49SPEAKERLike if I have big glass windows opposite the TV
43:52SPEAKERin my living room and when the shades are up,
43:54SPEAKERthen I can't use the PSVR in there
43:55SPEAKER'cause it sees two copies of the headset, right?
43:58SPEAKER- Right.
44:00SPEAKER- They're still releasing games.
44:02SPEAKERThat Iron Man game came out this year.
44:04SPEAKERThere's a couple other things that came out.
44:05SPEAKER- Well, Iron Man, God, is, will be a year old
44:08SPEAKERbefore we know it.
44:08SPEAKERIt was like May or something last year.
44:10SPEAKER- Oh, that's right.
44:11SPEAKER- Hitman 3 is probably the biggest recent example.
44:14SPEAKERIt just came out and has a VR mode,
44:16SPEAKERbut you have to download the, and granted it's one purchase,
44:19SPEAKERyou get the PS4 and five versions for the $160,
44:22SPEAKERbut you, if you have a PS5 and a PSVR,
44:25SPEAKERyou literally have to download the PS4 SKU of Hitman 3.
44:28SPEAKER- Is there, wait.
44:29SPEAKER- VR version, because if I read that interview correctly,
44:34SPEAKERyou essentially can't make a PS5, PSVR game.
44:37SPEAKERLike it has to be like, I assume,
44:39SPEAKERI assume what they're saying is there's no API support
44:41SPEAKERfor a native PS5 game to have VR in it.
44:45SPEAKERI could be wrong about that, but that's,
44:47SPEAKERthat's the implication is that they basically said
44:50SPEAKERyou can play PS4 VR games on a PS5,
44:53SPEAKERbut there will not be PS5 VR games for any time soon.
44:56SPEAKERAnd he basically said, I mean, the quote,
44:59SPEAKERthe quote was, I should just pull it up.
45:02SPEAKERIt's.
45:03SPEAKER- Is it that maybe we'll get back to that eventually?
45:05SPEAKER- I think we're more than a few minutes
45:07SPEAKERfrom the future of VR.
45:09SPEAKERPlayStation believes in VR, Sony believes in VR,
45:12SPEAKERand we definitely believe at some point in the future,
45:14SPEAKERVR will represent a meaningful component
45:15SPEAKERof interactive entertainment.
45:17SPEAKERWill it be this year?
45:18SPEAKERNo.
45:19SPEAKERNext year? No.
45:20SPEAKERBut will it come at some stage?
45:22SPEAKERWe believe that.
45:23SPEAKER- So 2023.
45:25SPEAKER- So yeah, like they probably are working.
45:28SPEAKERThey probably are working on another headset,
45:30SPEAKERbut who knows when.
45:32SPEAKER- Is this Sony Europe versus Sony US business?
45:37SPEAKERIs this like, like the normal?
45:39SPEAKER- Well, he runs everything now.
45:40SPEAKERLike, I mean, yes, probably behind the scenes on some level,
45:43SPEAKERthere is maybe some level of territoriality
45:47SPEAKERor power struggle or something,
45:49SPEAKERbut like, yeah, he is the head of the whole thing now.
45:51SPEAKERSo he is speaking fourth company.
45:55SPEAKERSo yeah, like, yeah, this was a little bit of a shock to me
45:58SPEAKER'cause I had always been under the impression
45:59SPEAKERthat PSVR was kind of the most successful headset.
46:03SPEAKER- Well, the story they were telling
46:05SPEAKERin the first part of last,
46:06SPEAKERI mean, it probably is the most successful headset.
46:08SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, by the numbers is what I mean.
46:08SPEAKER- In terms of numbers, but yeah.
46:11SPEAKERThe story they were telling
46:12SPEAKERat the start of the year last year was,
46:13SPEAKER"Hey, we're gonna keep supporting this thing.
46:15SPEAKERWe're gonna make it work with your PS5s,
46:18SPEAKERand there's gonna be new stuff coming out."
46:19SPEAKERAnd then, you know, well, interesting, okay.
46:23SPEAKER- Yeah, with this weird like one foot
46:25SPEAKERin the last generation approach that they've got here,
46:27SPEAKERI would be shocked if there were a ton more
46:29SPEAKERPSVR games anytime soon.
46:31SPEAKER- Yeah, if it's gonna,
46:32SPEAKERit's probably gonna be stuff that's late, right?
46:34SPEAKER- Yeah, beyond stuff that has been in development
46:36SPEAKERfor a while.
46:38SPEAKER- Well, okay, so the PC side is equally complicated.
46:42SPEAKERThe second generation Vive, the Cosmos is pretty,
46:45SPEAKERis their inside out headset.
46:48SPEAKERAnd at least I haven't used it in more than a year,
46:50SPEAKERbut when I use the inside out tracking version
46:52SPEAKERof that headset, it was almost unusable.
46:54SPEAKER- What?
46:56SPEAKER- The Cosmos.
46:57SPEAKER- What?
46:58SPEAKER- Yeah, it was bad.
46:59SPEAKER- How's that possible?
47:00SPEAKERThere have been good inside out headsets
47:02SPEAKERon the market for like three years now.
47:04SPEAKER- Well, they did a bad job of it.
47:06SPEAKERIt didn't work very well for me.
47:07SPEAKER- Wow.
47:09SPEAKER- And it uses the old one style controllers as well.
47:12SPEAKER- Huh.
47:13SPEAKER- Is that right?
47:14SPEAKERI can't remember.
47:14SPEAKER- That might actually not be right.
47:16SPEAKER- It's probably telling that when I looked over these notes
47:17SPEAKERand saw the phrase Vive Cosmos, I had no idea what it was.
47:20SPEAKERLike I, you know, I know what the Valve Index is.
47:23SPEAKERI know what the Vive and the Vive Pro are.
47:27SPEAKER- So the thing about the Cosmos.
47:28SPEAKER- Quest 2, Rift, Rift S, Windows, like I know all of those,
47:31SPEAKERbut Vive Cosmos was like, what?
47:34SPEAKER- Well, so the thing about the Cosmos is you can buy
47:37SPEAKERface plates for it that add functionality,
47:38SPEAKERlike the hand tracking stuff and things like that.
47:42SPEAKERThey actually sold a face plate and sold it in a bundle
47:45SPEAKEReventually with the face plate,
47:46SPEAKERwhere it just has the normal lighthouse sensors
47:48SPEAKERon the front and that worked okay.
47:50SPEAKER- Is it? - That's my understanding.
47:51SPEAKER- HTC?
47:53SPEAKER- HTC, yeah.
47:54SPEAKER- Is Vive an HTC brand?
47:56SPEAKER- Vive is an HTC brand.
47:57SPEAKER- It has nothing to do with,
47:58SPEAKERor not nothing to do with Valve,
47:59SPEAKERbut it's not owned by Valve.
48:00SPEAKERIt is HTC's property, right?
48:02SPEAKER- So yeah, Valve creates the technology and the lighthouses.
48:07SPEAKER- Right.
48:08SPEAKER- And then HTC was using the sensors
48:13SPEAKERand was doing the rest of themselves
48:15SPEAKERfor the lighthouse tracked versions.
48:18SPEAKERFor the inside out tracked versions,
48:19SPEAKERthey were doing it all themselves.
48:21SPEAKER- Okay.
48:22SPEAKERAnd so the Index still uses the lighthouses as well?
48:25SPEAKERIs that correct?
48:26SPEAKER- The Index uses the lighthouse, it uses V2 lighthouses.
48:29SPEAKER- That's shocking to me.
48:30SPEAKERLike did that come out, like time is such a blur.
48:33SPEAKERMan, I swear to God.
48:34SPEAKERI mean, Alex is one of those games that came out
48:36SPEAKERright around the time that the pandemic started.
48:38SPEAKERSo it's like impossible to think back
48:40SPEAKERon that sequence of events,
48:41SPEAKERbut didn't the Index basically come out
48:43SPEAKERaround the time of Alex?
48:44SPEAKERLike wasn't it sort of time to that launch or no?
48:46SPEAKER- No, so the Index came out in 2019.
48:49SPEAKER- Okay.
48:50SPEAKER- It was sold out constantly.
48:52SPEAKER- That's what it was.
48:53SPEAKER- And they had a big dump of new skews
48:56SPEAKERthat they released in time for Alex.
48:58SPEAKER- Okay, right.
48:59SPEAKER- But like it's just new, yeah, new hardware.
49:00SPEAKER- As much as Valve has been behind the technology of VR,
49:03SPEAKERit was shocking to me
49:04SPEAKERthat when they finally made their own headset
49:06SPEAKERthat they didn't push the tracking forward
49:07SPEAKERand that they relied on that old external model.
49:10SPEAKER- Here's the thing.
49:11SPEAKERThe tracking on the Index is the best that you can get.
49:15SPEAKER- I believe it.
49:15SPEAKER- There's no skipping, there's no glitching.
49:17SPEAKERIf something's weird, it's because your computer's fucked up,
49:19SPEAKERnot because the tracking has gone bad.
49:21SPEAKER- Yeah, I mean, I believe it, but at the same time,
49:23SPEAKERmy very old like first gen Windows Mixed Reality headset
49:27SPEAKERthat I bought for $199 that has inside out tracking
49:31SPEAKERis like 99% totally fine.
49:33SPEAKERLike just the convenience factor to me offsets
49:36SPEAKERany kind of shortcomings in the tracking,
49:38SPEAKERlike having to mount that stuff in your room, just ugh.
49:41SPEAKER- Well, so the places that the inside out tracking
49:43SPEAKERbreaks down are things like holding up your hands
49:46SPEAKERright up to your face to like aim a gun,
49:49SPEAKERyou know, like to ADS down a gun, stuff like that.
49:51SPEAKER- The old in our headsets,
49:53SPEAKERI mean, I guess we're skipping ahead a little bit here,
49:55SPEAKERbut like those things are especially limited
49:58SPEAKERbecause like the controllers,
50:00SPEAKERthe field of view for controller tracking
50:02SPEAKERis incredibly limited.
50:03SPEAKERLike if you basically move the controllers
50:05SPEAKERkind of over your shoulder,
50:06SPEAKERit will, it doesn't completely lose them
50:09SPEAKERbecause I think it's still got like gyroscope,
50:10SPEAKERaccelerometer data. - It infers, yeah.
50:12SPEAKER- Coming in, but part of the tracking of the controllers
50:14SPEAKERis based on the headset,
50:15SPEAKERthe front of the headset being able to see them.
50:16SPEAKERSo like that is very limited, but even then,
50:19SPEAKERlike it's not the end of the world.
50:20SPEAKERLike it still mostly works.
50:23SPEAKER- It's very manageable for games is what I would say.
50:26SPEAKERIf you're doing content creation stuff, the precision,
50:28SPEAKERthe extra precision of the lighthouse sensors
50:31SPEAKERversus the inside out hand tracking stuff is good.
50:34SPEAKER- That I could definitely say, but at that point,
50:36SPEAKERI mean, at that point you're outfitting a workspace.
50:38SPEAKERLike if those are your needs,
50:39SPEAKERlike you are devoting space to that and that is fine,
50:42SPEAKERbut like for just a home office living room kind of
50:45SPEAKERsituation, like having to mount those sensors
50:47SPEAKERis just kind of a lot.
50:50SPEAKER- The, so you can use Oculus.
50:53SPEAKERSo on the Steam VR stuff, the Cosmos, the Index,
50:57SPEAKERthe old Vive, the Vive Pro,
50:59SPEAKERthere's a couple other smaller headsets
51:00SPEAKERwe don't need to get into.
51:03SPEAKERLike smaller, tiny market sized headsets.
51:07SPEAKERThey work with everything on Steam, obviously.
51:10SPEAKERThey also work with Oculus native stuff
51:12SPEAKERusing a third party tool called Revive,
51:14SPEAKERwhich is, has always been a little bit janky.
51:17SPEAKERIt's better than it has been in the past.
51:20SPEAKERThere's not a ton of first party Oculus stuff.
51:22SPEAKERSo mostly you're playing old things at this point,
51:24SPEAKERlike Echo Arena and the shooting galleries and stuff
51:28SPEAKERthat they released over the last few years.
51:31SPEAKERAnd it also works with VR games on other stores like Epic,
51:36SPEAKERbecause when you play a VR game that's on the Epic store,
51:38SPEAKERit just fires up Steam VR.
51:40SPEAKER- That's so weird. - Which is really weird.
51:42SPEAKERYeah.
51:42SPEAKER- The overlapping and like piggybacking kind of platforms
51:46SPEAKERfor VR is the weirdest thing.
51:48SPEAKER'Cause like not to, I mean, I am speaking very mixed reality
51:52SPEAKERcentrically here 'cause that's what I own,
51:53SPEAKERbut like that thing does Steam VR, but yeah,
51:56SPEAKERlike you launch into the mixed reality interface,
51:59SPEAKERwhich is a very Microsoft store looking like modern art
52:03SPEAKERmuseum kind of interface.
52:04SPEAKERAnd then you launch a Steam thing,
52:06SPEAKERand then it launches Steam VR inside of that.
52:07SPEAKERAnd then you're in the Steam VR interface.
52:09SPEAKERAnd so from what you're saying,
52:11SPEAKERif I were to play Oculus games on this mixed reality
52:14SPEAKERheadset, I would go MR interface,
52:17SPEAKERand then the Steam VR interface,
52:19SPEAKERand then the Oculus interface on top.
52:20SPEAKERLike I would literally be stacking like three.
52:22SPEAKER- Then Revive, then the Oculus interface.
52:24SPEAKER- So three and a half, basically like it's just,
52:26SPEAKERit's kind of a mess.
52:27SPEAKERLike, it's a bunch of walled gardens basically, right?
52:30SPEAKER- Look, man, you just got to jack in
52:32SPEAKERto the mixed reality store.
52:34SPEAKERAnd then from there you jack into Steam VR,
52:36SPEAKERand then you jack in your soft for the Revive.
52:41SPEAKER- Like if you're saying that VR is just Inception,
52:45SPEAKERI think I'm out.
52:46SPEAKER- You can just recall those robots, man.
52:47SPEAKERThat's what you needed.
52:49SPEAKERYeah, that stuff's weird.
52:50SPEAKERIt works.
52:51SPEAKER- Yeah, it works.
52:53SPEAKERIt's just a little bit, it's very confusing to get used to.
52:55SPEAKER- It is.
52:56SPEAKERWhich interface am I in right now?
52:57SPEAKERWhat do I need to launch first and then second?
53:00SPEAKER- Yeah.
53:01SPEAKERSo the thing I'll say about the index
53:02SPEAKERis I think that those hand controllers are my favorites.
53:05SPEAKER- And that's the one with the individual finger controls?
53:07SPEAKER- It's the one with individual finger.
53:08SPEAKERIt's capacitive along the edges of your fingers,
53:12SPEAKERand it will model the curl of your finger
53:15SPEAKEReven though it's not measuring it directly.
53:16SPEAKERIt's inferring still from pretty good data,
53:19SPEAKERbut there's a stick on the top.
53:22SPEAKERThe stick has had problems over the years.
53:24SPEAKERIt seems like the newer versions,
53:25SPEAKERlike the newer revs of the hardware are better.
53:28SPEAKERBut on some of the initial ones,
53:30SPEAKERif you move the stick all the way to one of the extremes,
53:34SPEAKERI think it's the outside extreme,
53:35SPEAKERand then try to click the stick, it won't click
53:36SPEAKERbecause you're outside the range of motion.
53:39SPEAKERBut other than that, they seem pretty reliable.
53:41SPEAKERI've whacked the shit out of mine, and they still work.
53:44SPEAKERWalls, it turns out, are still VR's natural enemy.
53:49SPEAKERAnd when you're playing a game,
53:51SPEAKERI mean, Alex obviously was designed
53:53SPEAKERwith that controller in mind,
53:55SPEAKERbut it's really cool to make a grasping motion
53:58SPEAKERwith your fingers to gravity pull stuff up towards you
54:00SPEAKERand then chuck it and have that work well.
54:04SPEAKERThe Oculus PC side is the Rift S, which is still available.
54:09SPEAKERIt seems like they're moving away from that.
54:10SPEAKERIt's unclear, they haven't said
54:13SPEAKERthey're gonna end of life it, but it's Facebook,
54:15SPEAKERso who knows, they could kill it at any moment.
54:19SPEAKERIt's probably the best deal in PC VR right now
54:22SPEAKER'cause the older Windows MR headsets
54:25SPEAKERare no longer really available.
54:28SPEAKERAnd the controller, the Rift S controllers are really good,
54:31SPEAKERreally reliable, they use normal AA batteries.
54:33SPEAKERSo when you run out of battery in a controller,
54:35SPEAKERyou just pop a new one in,
54:36SPEAKERand if you use antelopes or something,
54:39SPEAKERyou're basically wasting nothing.
54:41SPEAKER- Sure.
54:42SPEAKERBut I mean, there have to be quest-only games
54:45SPEAKERcoming out at this point, right?
54:47SPEAKERIf you're buying into a Rift at this point,
54:49SPEAKERare you potentially just kind of shutting yourself
54:51SPEAKERout of most of their ongoing development?
54:53SPEAKER- Absolutely, yeah.
54:55SPEAKERIf you buy a Rift at this point,
54:56SPEAKERyou're committing to buying stuff from Steam, pretty much.
55:02SPEAKERThat headset's 300 bucks.
55:05SPEAKEROculus is selling stuff on mobile and PC.
55:08SPEAKERSome of it's cross-buy, but most of it isn't,
55:10SPEAKERso you have to kind of pay attention
55:11SPEAKERand think about where you wanna play stuff.
55:16SPEAKERGenerally speaking, I find the mobile headsets
55:19SPEAKERto be pretty underpowered to the point
55:23SPEAKERthat worse than the PSVR in some cases.
55:27SPEAKERThe Quest 2 is more capable,
55:29SPEAKERand it seems like they're selling
55:30SPEAKERat a really impressive rate,
55:31SPEAKERso the market will probably push
55:35SPEAKERtoward not supporting the Quest 1 earlier
55:37SPEAKERthan it would in a PS4 Pro type situation.
55:42SPEAKER- Sure.
55:43SPEAKERI mean, at the end of the day,
55:45SPEAKERit's still kind of souped up
55:46SPEAKERmobile phone hardware in there, right?
55:48SPEAKER- Well, so the Quest 1 is definitely that.
55:51SPEAKERThe Quest 2, they have hardware acceleration
55:55SPEAKERfor the slam tracking, the inside-out tracking,
55:58SPEAKERand all that kind of stuff,
55:59SPEAKERso it takes a lot of that load off of the CPU,
56:04SPEAKERwhich isn't happening on the Quest 1.
56:09SPEAKERThe second version of that
56:10SPEAKERis a dramatically more capable piece of hardware.
56:14SPEAKER- That's fair.
56:16SPEAKERWhether that matters is entirely up to developers
56:19SPEAKERdeciding whether or not they wanna shut out
56:21SPEAKERhowever many people bought.
56:22SPEAKERHere's the other thing.
56:24SPEAKEROculus doesn't post sales numbers
56:25SPEAKERfor any of their hardware,
56:27SPEAKERso I don't have any idea whether,
56:31SPEAKERit could be that Oculus has already sold
56:34SPEAKERan order of magnitude more Quest 2s
56:36SPEAKERthan they sold Quest 1s,
56:38SPEAKERand nobody cares about the Quest 1 hardware
56:41SPEAKERsix months from now.
56:42SPEAKERI don't know.
56:45SPEAKERBut you can also plug the Quest in,
56:47SPEAKERboth of the Quests in with a special cable.
56:49SPEAKERIt's a USB 3 Type-C cable that's 80 bucks and 16 feet long,
56:54SPEAKERand that will let you play PC games.
56:57SPEAKERIt's not particularly comfortable
56:58SPEAKER'cause of where you plug in the USB cable on the Quest 1.
57:02SPEAKEROn the Quest 2, especially with the Pro Audio strap,
57:05SPEAKERor the Elite strap, it's much more usable.
57:09SPEAKERI haven't really spent substantial time with the Quest 2.
57:14SPEAKERBut the thing that all the reviewers said is
57:18SPEAKERthat with the Elite strap, it's very comfortable.
57:21SPEAKERYou can get a $50 strap that has nothing.
57:23SPEAKERIt's just a physical, more comfortable strap
57:25SPEAKERthat replaces the cloth one that it ships with,
57:30SPEAKERor for 130 bucks, you can get one with a battery on it too
57:35SPEAKERthat counterbalances the front of the headset a little bit
57:38SPEAKERand gives you a lot more playtime.
57:40SPEAKERAnd that starts at, I think, 400 bucks.
57:43SPEAKERI can't remember, but that's a pretty good.
57:46SPEAKERIf you just wanna get some VR
57:48SPEAKERand you wanna play some Beat Saber
57:49SPEAKERand just play some Pistol Whip,
57:50SPEAKERand you're probably not gonna get Medal of Honor on there,
57:53SPEAKERyou're definitely not gonna get Alex on there
57:55SPEAKERunless you use the link cable,
57:56SPEAKERbut you can play Steam VR games
57:58SPEAKERif you get the link cable for 80 bucks.
58:00SPEAKER- Yeah, that thing acting as just a sort of
58:03SPEAKERquote-unquote dumb headset that connects to your PC
58:05SPEAKERwhere the PC does the processing.
58:07SPEAKERSo it is a real VR headset like these others
58:10SPEAKERin addition to being a standalone.
58:11SPEAKERThat is a huge selling point to me.
58:13SPEAKERIf it didn't have that,
58:15SPEAKERthat thing would be a non-starter for someone like me.
58:18SPEAKERIf it was limited to only games
58:20SPEAKERthat could run on the headset, then no, thank you.
58:21SPEAKERBut since you could hook it up
58:23SPEAKERand played Alex on it as well, that's kind of a big deal.
58:26SPEAKER- Well, so the thing I'll say is that
58:27SPEAKERfor every kind of disappointing quest game I've played,
58:32SPEAKERthere's pretty amazing, like the port of the room,
58:35SPEAKERthe VR room game, the room game is,
58:39SPEAKERit has issues that are mostly related to it
58:41SPEAKERbeing a straight port of an iPad game.
58:46SPEAKERLike it has weird UI choices and stuff like that
58:48SPEAKERthat I wouldn't do if I was making a VR native game.
58:51SPEAKERBut it runs really well in Quest.
58:53SPEAKERLike that stuff is really good.
58:54SPEAKERAnd like there's no,
58:58SPEAKERlike I notice a little bit of a frame rate difference
59:00SPEAKERplaying Beat Saber or Pistol Whip or Space Pirate Trainer
59:02SPEAKERon Quest versus Steam.
59:07SPEAKERBut you know, that experience is fabulous.
59:10SPEAKER- Totally, I'm not saying that Quest native stuff
59:12SPEAKERis bad or anything.
59:13SPEAKERIt's just that there are always going to be things
59:15SPEAKERlike Alex that will just be PC only.
59:17SPEAKERAnd having the option to also play those on the Quest
59:20SPEAKERis a pretty big selling point.
59:21SPEAKER- Exactly.
59:23SPEAKERThe interesting thing is, my bet is that the PSVR stuff
59:26SPEAKERprobably ports pretty straight to Quest.
59:28SPEAKER- Sure, I can see that, yeah.
59:30SPEAKER- Yeah, let's see what else.
59:33SPEAKER- Windows, Windows MR, mixed reality,
59:35SPEAKERwhich I'm sort of shocked still exists, but here we are.
59:39SPEAKERLook, they just, so most of the first gen headsets
59:42SPEAKERare no longer available.
59:45SPEAKER- I got in when there was, basically there was a fire sale.
59:47SPEAKERSo this is why I'm so shocked that it's still around
59:50SPEAKERis that there was a fire sale on them, basically.
59:53SPEAKERLike I think those things came out at sort of
59:55SPEAKERstandard VR prices of like four or five, $600.
59:58SPEAKERAnd then all of a sudden one day I saw people going like,
1:00:00SPEAKER"Hey, the Lenovo Explorer is 199 right now."
1:00:02SPEAKERAnd I'm like, "Hey, that's a pretty decent price
1:00:06SPEAKERto check out some VR, sure, I'll give that a shot."
1:00:08SPEAKERSo like, it was, what is it, Lenovo, HP, Samsung,
1:00:13SPEAKERthere were like six different companies make an MR insets.
1:00:16SPEAKER- Dell, I think made one.
1:00:16SPEAKER- Dell made one, yes, couple others.
1:00:18SPEAKER- It's all kind of the normal Microsoft OEMs,
1:00:21SPEAKEROEM partners.
1:00:22SPEAKER- Totally, and they kind of all just went on deep sale
1:00:24SPEAKERand then ceased to exist.
1:00:25SPEAKERSo I was like, "Well, this platform's
1:00:26SPEAKERprobably going away soon."
1:00:27SPEAKERBut for that much-
1:00:29SPEAKER- They're still releasing updates for the portal.
1:00:31SPEAKER- Right, so that's the thing.
1:00:32SPEAKERLike the, I think from what I can tell,
1:00:34SPEAKERI think they tend to come with the kind of
1:00:35SPEAKERWindows feature updates, the, you know, your 20H4,
1:00:40SPEAKERor whatever they're calling the semi-annual updates.
1:00:42SPEAKERBut yeah, they still like support the platform aspect of it.
1:00:47SPEAKER- Yeah, so HP just announced,
1:00:50SPEAKERjust released the Reverb 2 at the end of last year.
1:00:52SPEAKER- Yeah, so that really surprised me
1:00:54SPEAKERto see a new MR headset come out.
1:00:57SPEAKER- Well, so it's interesting 'cause it's a part,
1:00:59SPEAKERit seems like kind of a partnership.
1:01:01SPEAKERValve makes the lenses and speakers for it.
1:01:06SPEAKERSo it uses the planar speakers from the Index
1:01:10SPEAKERand the Fresnel lenses that they use on the Index.
1:01:16SPEAKERNorm really liked it.
1:01:17SPEAKERI haven't actually used one.
1:01:18SPEAKERLike normally, when new headsets come out,
1:01:20SPEAKERI go over to the tested office or Norm's house
1:01:22SPEAKERand try stuff out.
1:01:23SPEAKERAnd for obvious reasons,
1:01:24SPEAKERthat hasn't happened in the last 10 months.
1:01:27SPEAKERBut he seemed to really like it in his review.
1:01:31SPEAKERThe reviews are pretty good.
1:01:32SPEAKERThe controllers have always kind of been the weak spot
1:01:35SPEAKERof the Windows MR stuff.
1:01:36SPEAKER- Yeah, they're okay.
1:01:38SPEAKER- Samsung made really good Windows MR controllers
1:01:41SPEAKERand they were, and everybody else shipped
1:01:43SPEAKERthe default Microsoft ones, it seems like.
1:01:46SPEAKERThey're fine.
1:01:47SPEAKERLike they're very workable.
1:01:49SPEAKERThey do have tracking problems
1:01:50SPEAKERwhen you get them up super close.
1:01:51SPEAKERIf you want to play like an Arma, Onward or Pascal or Pavlov,
1:01:57SPEAKERyou might not have a great time with that.
1:02:00SPEAKERBut they're really high resolution.
1:02:01SPEAKERIt's 2160 by 2160 per eye.
1:02:04SPEAKERAnd if you plug that into a PC that can actually drive that,
1:02:07SPEAKERthen it looks good.
1:02:11SPEAKERThe screen door stuff is gone.
1:02:12SPEAKER- I bet that looks pretty good.
1:02:14SPEAKER- Yeah, you can read text, all of the things.
1:02:16SPEAKERLike you can use normal ass Windows.
1:02:19SPEAKERLike when I fire up the Windows preview,
1:02:22SPEAKERdesktop preview on my Index,
1:02:24SPEAKERit just looks like a normal ass Windows desktop
1:02:26SPEAKERon a big giant monitor 10 feet in front of me.
1:02:29SPEAKER- That sounds awesome.
1:02:30SPEAKER- I mean, the thing I find with VR though,
1:02:32SPEAKERis that you kind of don't know what you're missing.
1:02:34SPEAKERLike, I mean, I played a decent amount of Alex
1:02:38SPEAKERon that first gen Explorer and it was fine.
1:02:42SPEAKER- Oh yeah.
1:02:43SPEAKER- That's what I mean.
1:02:44SPEAKERLike if I were to play it side by side
1:02:44SPEAKERwith this new, the Reverb 2 or like the Index or something,
1:02:48SPEAKERlike I'm sure it would be a world of difference
1:02:50SPEAKERto side by side them,
1:02:51SPEAKERbut only having that Explorer in here,
1:02:53SPEAKERlike, yes, the field of view is a little more limited
1:02:56SPEAKERand like the resolution is slightly lower
1:02:58SPEAKERand the controllers are not amazing,
1:02:59SPEAKERbut like, especially for a hundred or 199, like it's fine.
1:03:04SPEAKERSo it does the job.
1:03:05SPEAKER- In my experience, when you put on the headset,
1:03:10SPEAKERunless there's something wrong with the game,
1:03:12SPEAKERyou usually stop noticing the VR after.
1:03:14SPEAKERIf you don't stop noticing,
1:03:15SPEAKERstart noticing, stop noticing the VR after a few minutes,
1:03:18SPEAKERprobably it's not a very good game.
1:03:20SPEAKER- Right, your brain kind of tunes out the shortcomings
1:03:24SPEAKERof the individual headset you're using.
1:03:26SPEAKERIf you don't have a frame of reference,
1:03:27SPEAKERI guess is what I mean.
1:03:28SPEAKER- Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
1:03:31SPEAKERThe Reverb is eternally out of stock since they released it
1:03:36SPEAKERas every new exciting piece of consumer electronics
1:03:39SPEAKERthat came out in 2020 is.
1:03:40SPEAKER- Yeah, like how some of the retailers I checked for this
1:03:42SPEAKERstill listed as a pre-order.
1:03:43SPEAKERSo it's very soft launch, paper launch.
1:03:45SPEAKERI mean, reviews only came out,
1:03:47SPEAKERI think a couple, three weeks ago.
1:03:48SPEAKER- December, yeah.
1:03:49SPEAKER- Or something like that, yeah.
1:03:51SPEAKER- The, yeah, if you release something
1:03:55SPEAKERand it's not available to purchase, is it out?
1:03:58SPEAKER- Perhaps, does it make a sound?
1:04:00SPEAKER- Like I haven't seen a PS5 in the wild yet.
1:04:05SPEAKER- No, no.
1:04:08SPEAKER- So yeah, and that works with Steam.
1:04:10SPEAKERYou can use Revive with it as well.
1:04:11SPEAKERI haven't actually tried that,
1:04:12SPEAKERbut apparently people do that.
1:04:14SPEAKERIt seems like, that seems like one layer too many,
1:04:16SPEAKERbut I don't know.
1:04:18SPEAKERMy recommendation is if something's available on Steam,
1:04:21SPEAKERyou should probably buy it on Steam.
1:04:22SPEAKERSo that way you're, that Steam seems to be
1:04:25SPEAKERthe err platform for VR,
1:04:28SPEAKER'cause that's where everything ends up.
1:04:30SPEAKERAnd then there's also weird things like,
1:04:32SPEAKERI think the games that come out on Game Pass
1:04:39SPEAKERthat use the different APIs, the WMR stuff.
1:04:43SPEAKERSorry, the, no, the, what are the apps called?
1:04:48SPEAKERThe, you know, the ones that you can't access.
1:04:50SPEAKER- The UWP?
1:04:51SPEAKER- The UWP, yeah.
1:04:53SPEAKERIt seems to be issues getting those working with Steam VR,
1:04:56SPEAKER'cause like Tetris in fact came out on Game Pass last year
1:04:58SPEAKERwith all that new multiplayer stuff
1:04:59SPEAKERand VR doesn't work on that version.
1:05:01SPEAKER- Yikes.
1:05:03SPEAKER- That said, Flight Sim seems to work.
1:05:06SPEAKERSo I don't know, I don't know what the story is.
1:05:09SPEAKERIt could just be a developer choice.
1:05:12SPEAKER- So yeah, I guess that's kind of,
1:05:14SPEAKERthat's kind of it for like the nitty gritty,
1:05:17SPEAKERlike how do you feel overall about,
1:05:20SPEAKERor is there one more thing you want to touch on?
1:05:21SPEAKER- Yeah, the lens inserts.
1:05:23SPEAKERSo this is something that's kind of new there.
1:05:25SPEAKEROculus is supporting it directly with the Quest
1:05:27SPEAKERwhere you can go to a, you can go to Frames Direct, I think,
1:05:32SPEAKERand buy these.
1:05:34SPEAKER- Oh, that's crazy.
1:05:35SPEAKER- Buy lens inserts that just snap into the headset,
1:05:38SPEAKERso you don't have to wear glasses inside it.
1:05:40SPEAKER- As somebody who mostly has played VR with glasses on,
1:05:42SPEAKERthis is very appealing.
1:05:44SPEAKER- Yeah, it's super good.
1:05:46SPEAKERThere's also third parties that you can buy them for
1:05:48SPEAKERfor most other headsets,
1:05:50SPEAKERall the way back to like the original Rift.
1:05:52SPEAKER- Oh, that's cool.
1:05:54SPEAKER- That usually involves like faxing your prescription
1:05:57SPEAKERto China and good luck,
1:05:59SPEAKERlike sometimes taking a couple of tries at the lenses
1:06:01SPEAKERbefore you get them exactly right.
1:06:02SPEAKER- Sure.
1:06:04SPEAKER- But I know multiple people who've done that
1:06:06SPEAKERand have had good results, so.
1:06:07SPEAKER- Of course, at the same time.
1:06:08SPEAKERAt the same time as someone whose prescription
1:06:10SPEAKERseems to be changing,
1:06:12SPEAKERI seem to be, I seem to be ahead of the curve
1:06:14SPEAKERon needing progressive lenses.
1:06:16SPEAKERI don't know if, do you have?
1:06:17SPEAKER- Oh no, no, no, no, no, no.
1:06:19SPEAKERI found recently that I was like,
1:06:22SPEAKERhow come when I hold my Kindle up close to my face in bed
1:06:26SPEAKERwhen I'm trying to read at night,
1:06:26SPEAKERI can't focus on the letters anymore?
1:06:28SPEAKERWhat's going on?
1:06:29SPEAKER- That's bad.
1:06:30SPEAKER- It's bad.
1:06:31SPEAKERYes, my eye doctor said,
1:06:32SPEAKER"Hey, you're a little young for this, but here you are."
1:06:35SPEAKERSo like, anyway, I mean,
1:06:37SPEAKERmost people's prescriptions don't change in adulthood really,
1:06:39SPEAKERbut like going, jumping through all those hoops
1:06:42SPEAKERand then having those lenses
1:06:43SPEAKERand those inserts suddenly no longer be useful
1:06:45SPEAKERwould be kind of a bummer.
1:06:46SPEAKER- Well, so the inserts aren't super,
1:06:49SPEAKERokay, my perception on what glasses should cost is weird
1:06:52SPEAKERbecause I have a really complicated prescription
1:06:53SPEAKERthat's expensive.
1:06:54SPEAKERLike I don't think I've ever bought a pair of glasses
1:06:57SPEAKERthat was less than like 300 bucks for the lenses.
1:06:59SPEAKERSo the inserts are 80 bucks for the Quest.
1:07:06SPEAKERThe ones that my friend of mine got for his Vive
1:07:10SPEAKERor for his Index, I can't remember which one,
1:07:12SPEAKERwere significantly less than that.
1:07:14SPEAKERLike the China ones are like 10 bucks a lens
1:07:17SPEAKERor something sometimes.
1:07:18SPEAKER- Okay, that's not so bad.
1:07:19SPEAKER- Yeah, like you can take some chances with that I think.
1:07:24SPEAKERI don't know if they have those for the Windows MR headsets.
1:07:26SPEAKERI do know that they have them for the Vive, the Index,
1:07:29SPEAKERthe original Oculus, the Rift S and the Quest.
1:07:32SPEAKER- That is cool.
1:07:33SPEAKER- And you can 3D print frames for those too
1:07:35SPEAKERif you have a 3D printer.
1:07:37SPEAKER- Sure.
1:07:39SPEAKER- So yeah, that's kind of it.
1:07:40SPEAKER- Yeah, how do you feel about the state
1:07:44SPEAKERof the VR market?
1:07:45SPEAKERAre you, my gut feeling is that I don't feel
1:07:49SPEAKERespecially bullish about where it's at, but.
1:07:52SPEAKER- I mean, look, the last year has been really bad
1:07:55SPEAKERfor my company because we make cartoons
1:07:58SPEAKERin front of live studio audiences.
1:07:59SPEAKER- Yeah, that's rough.
1:08:01SPEAKER- I'm looking, speaking of,
1:08:03SPEAKERstuff's happening on the food front,
1:08:04SPEAKERbut just in case I'm starting to look for work.
1:08:06SPEAKERSo if anybody has anything they think I'd be interested in,
1:08:09SPEAKERhey, shoot me a message.
1:08:10SPEAKERI'm available for both consulting
1:08:13SPEAKERand maybe full-time, I don't know.
1:08:15SPEAKERI've specifically helped some brands and charities
1:08:17SPEAKERwith their Twitch strategy.
1:08:18SPEAKERAnd I would love, love, love to talk to your company
1:08:21SPEAKERabout ways to use podcasts to communicate internally
1:08:25SPEAKERor externally what you're working on
1:08:27SPEAKERand why that stuff is cool.
1:08:30SPEAKERIt feels a little bit like we're kind of
1:08:32SPEAKERin a holding pattern waiting for AR.
1:08:34SPEAKER- Okay.
1:08:35SPEAKER- It feels like a lot of the VR stuff maybe,
1:08:41SPEAKERlook, I wanna be careful
1:08:42SPEAKER'cause there's been incredible work done in VR
1:08:46SPEAKERboth in terms of games and apps and other stuff.
1:08:48SPEAKERLike there's really, really neat stuff.
1:08:49SPEAKERBut on a larger level,
1:08:53SPEAKERI don't think anybody ever thought VR
1:08:55SPEAKERwas going to replace screens as an interface,
1:08:58SPEAKERas your main interface for computers.
1:09:00SPEAKERI think people think that that's still the case for AR.
1:09:02SPEAKER- Yeah, that's definitely the Magic Leap pitch.
1:09:06SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm not sure, I'm convinced.
1:09:08SPEAKERMagic Leap, things haven't gone super great for Magic Leap.
1:09:11SPEAKER- Yeah, I don't know what they were thinking
1:09:14SPEAKERgetting out there using the grandiose language
1:09:16SPEAKERthat they were.
1:09:18SPEAKERWhen has that ever paid off for any startup in history?
1:09:21SPEAKER- I mean, look, they knew that they needed
1:09:23SPEAKERto raise a buttload of money
1:09:24SPEAKERand if you don't have grandiose language,
1:09:27SPEAKERyou're not gonna raise billions of dollars.
1:09:28SPEAKER- Well, to your investors, sure, but in public,
1:09:30SPEAKERwell, maybe, to be fair, I guess a lot of the like,
1:09:33SPEAKERhey, this is the future of everything talk
1:09:35SPEAKERwas kind of coming out organically, not necessarily.
1:09:37SPEAKERThey weren't exactly putting out press releases saying like,
1:09:40SPEAKERhey, this is gonna be the only interface
1:09:41SPEAKERfor computers going forward or anything like that.
1:09:43SPEAKER- Yeah, the NDAs that they made people sign
1:09:47SPEAKERbefore they did the demos of Magic Leap
1:09:48SPEAKERbefore it was public were like, anyway.
1:09:52SPEAKERYeah, they actively tried to keep that shit down.
1:09:55SPEAKER- Okay, that's fair and I guess in fairness to them,
1:09:58SPEAKERthat's not necessarily their fault,
1:09:59SPEAKERbut like people we knew who had gotten those demos
1:10:01SPEAKERwere coming out of those things going like,
1:10:02SPEAKERyo, this shit is fucking mind blowing.
1:10:04SPEAKER- I'm gonna go and tell you, it still is amazing.
1:10:07SPEAKERLike it's still some of the best tech demos I've ever seen.
1:10:11SPEAKERThe multiplayer game that they had at GDC
1:10:13SPEAKERa couple of years ago where you were kind of like
1:10:15SPEAKERducking around objects in the real world
1:10:18SPEAKERand shooting virtual people and overlaying
1:10:21SPEAKERvirtual characters on top of other human characters,
1:10:23SPEAKERstill amazing, like it is amazing, amazing technology.
1:10:29SPEAKERI think we're starting to see hints
1:10:31SPEAKERthat glasses are going to be smaller.
1:10:34SPEAKERLike we've seen some prototype slash patent application
1:10:37SPEAKERdrawings and stuff like that that indicate a chunky frame,
1:10:41SPEAKERbut not like a goggle type situation.
1:10:48SPEAKERMy understanding is that there are thousands of people
1:10:53SPEAKERworking at most of the big five thing companies
1:10:56SPEAKERin the Valley working on AR at this point.
1:11:00SPEAKERI don't know about Facebook, but I know Apple
1:11:02SPEAKERhas a massive team of people working on this.
1:11:04SPEAKERI know Google has a massive team of people working on this.
1:11:07SPEAKERAnd I suppose, I assume Microsoft does as well.
1:11:11SPEAKERI don't know what's going on with Amazon
1:11:12SPEAKERor some of the other stuff.
1:11:16SPEAKERI mean, look, the idea of being able to chuck a window
1:11:26SPEAKERanywhere you want it seems pretty compelling.
1:11:28SPEAKER- Sure.
1:11:29SPEAKERLike I don't know if that's actually gonna work in practice,
1:11:32SPEAKERbut we'll see.
1:11:33SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:11:34SPEAKER- And the one thing that has happened is the hand tracking.
1:11:36SPEAKERWe didn't talk about this at all in the Quest,
1:11:38SPEAKERbut the hand tracking on Quest,
1:11:39SPEAKEReven though people aren't really using it in games
1:11:41SPEAKERis working really well these days.
1:11:42SPEAKERSo like those SLAM cameras give you the ability to,
1:11:46SPEAKERif those give you the ability to track hands
1:11:48SPEAKERand fingers pretty reliably,
1:11:50SPEAKERthen that solves kind of one of the big problems
1:11:52SPEAKERof early AR stuff,
1:11:53SPEAKERwhich is that you need a weird controller to make it work.
1:11:56SPEAKER- Wait, you're talking just your...
1:11:58SPEAKERYou can work your organic fingers and hands?
1:12:00SPEAKERLike you're not talking about like wearing a glove
1:12:02SPEAKERor anything that is tracking like literally just your...
1:12:05SPEAKERWow.
1:12:06SPEAKER- Yeah, it is not fidelity of like four finger tracking,
1:12:10SPEAKERbut like you do gestures and stuff like that
1:12:13SPEAKERand you can control the UI
1:12:14SPEAKERand open and close stuff and things like that.
1:12:16SPEAKER- That's crazy.
1:12:17SPEAKERI did not know it was that good.
1:12:18SPEAKER- Yeah, it's...
1:12:19SPEAKER- That's very cool.
1:12:20SPEAKER- I would say it's up and down, but when it's good,
1:12:22SPEAKERit's surprisingly good.
1:12:23SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:12:25SPEAKER- So yeah, like I feel like in 10 years
1:12:30SPEAKERwhen we look back on this and we're doing the,
1:12:31SPEAKER"Hey, remember old VR stuff?"
1:12:33SPEAKERIt's gonna be that VR was the dev kit for AR probably.
1:12:35SPEAKER- Okay, interesting.
1:12:36SPEAKERSo yeah, so that leads me to my kind of final question here.
1:12:39SPEAKERWhen you're basically,
1:12:40SPEAKERyou are talking about AR supplanting VR.
1:12:43SPEAKERIs AR gonna get to the point where like,
1:12:47SPEAKERto me this sounds trivial,
1:12:48SPEAKERbut I'm sure the actual technical execution is way harder,
1:12:51SPEAKERbut is AR gonna get to the point
1:12:53SPEAKERwhere it can kind of defacto act as VR
1:12:54SPEAKERby just sort of like blanking out
1:12:57SPEAKERor drawing over the entire field of view in the lenses
1:12:59SPEAKERand just not letting you see your surroundings?
1:13:01SPEAKERDoes that make sense?
1:13:02SPEAKERLike kind of letting you inhabit an entirely virtual space
1:13:05SPEAKERby just sort of obscuring your, bless you.
1:13:08SPEAKER- Sorry.
1:13:08SPEAKER- Does that make sense what I'm describing?
1:13:10SPEAKER- Yeah, no, I think that's, I mean, I think, look,
1:13:13SPEAKERVR is a subset of AR, right?
1:13:15SPEAKER- Right, okay.
1:13:16SPEAKER- I think that probably it won't be happening on the screen.
1:13:19SPEAKERI think that'll happen on like a physical,
1:13:22SPEAKERlike you'll flip the blast shield down, right?
1:13:23SPEAKER- Oh, I guess that would be a lot easier
1:13:25SPEAKERthan just having like,
1:13:26SPEAKER'cause you would need a field of view
1:13:27SPEAKERthat could fully obscure your range of vision,
1:13:30SPEAKERwhich would probably be asking a lot, right?
1:13:32SPEAKER- Well, and it also depends on the,
1:13:34SPEAKERso it depends on the hardware.
1:13:36SPEAKERLike one of the interesting things about AR
1:13:38SPEAKERis that the hardware for drawing the stuff
1:13:41SPEAKERthat's in the world can be a little bit less potent
1:13:44SPEAKERbecause like, if you're not drawing the room,
1:13:50SPEAKERlike the frame rate of your room is real good in AR, right?
1:13:53SPEAKERIt's the things that you're drawing on top of the room.
1:13:56SPEAKER- Well, it's the old Nvidia tech demo thing, right?
1:13:59SPEAKEROf like, this tech demo looks for this new graphics card,
1:14:01SPEAKERit looks amazing because 100% of the compute power
1:14:04SPEAKERis going into this one character model.
1:14:06SPEAKER- Right, and, but with VR, the floor of what you can do is,
1:14:11SPEAKERis this gonna run at a frame rate
1:14:12SPEAKERthat doesn't make my users sick, 95% of my users sick.
1:14:16SPEAKERAnd yeah, and that's less of a problem in AR
1:14:18SPEAKERbecause if the characters that you're drawing
1:14:20SPEAKERon top of the real world are running at 60 frames a second
1:14:22SPEAKERinstead of 120 frames a second,
1:14:24SPEAKERit's not gonna make you sick,
1:14:25SPEAKERit's just gonna look a little janky,
1:14:27SPEAKERand you can art design your way around that
1:14:29SPEAKERin a lot of cases.
1:14:30SPEAKER- Right, but you lose the ability to do these
1:14:32SPEAKERkind of whole world, like, transportive experiences
1:14:34SPEAKERwhere you actually feel like you're in another place
1:14:36SPEAKERunless you, unless you can render that whole room.
1:14:40SPEAKER- Well, so the other, the other side of that
1:14:43SPEAKERis that in the five years since the first VR headsets
1:14:46SPEAKERhave come out, the amount of computing power
1:14:48SPEAKERthat we can put in one of those headsets
1:14:49SPEAKERhas gone up a couple of orders of magnitude, probably, right?
1:14:52SPEAKER- Yes, especially like the, you know,
1:14:55SPEAKERonce Apple jumps into this space
1:14:56SPEAKERwith the way that their mobile hardware performs,
1:14:59SPEAKERyou know, increases in performance year over year,
1:15:01SPEAKERlike that's gonna be pretty wild.
1:15:03SPEAKER- Well, yeah, and the fact that we're accelerating
1:15:07SPEAKERthe CPU computationally expensive stuff now,
1:15:10SPEAKERso like the 3D audio, the SLAM computations
1:15:13SPEAKERthat tell where the headset is in 3D space
1:15:15SPEAKERfrom camera feeds, the machine vision stuff,
1:15:17SPEAKERall of that has hardware,
1:15:19SPEAKERa lot of that has hardware acceleration at this point.
1:15:22SPEAKER- You mentioned Apple, there was a rumor that landed
1:15:25SPEAKERlast week or the week before that Bloomberg posted
1:15:29SPEAKERthat said that Apple's gonna announce a VR headset
1:15:32SPEAKERthis year that's gonna be incredibly expensive
1:15:35SPEAKERand that they expect to sell no more
1:15:36SPEAKERthan one per day at stores.
1:15:39SPEAKER- What?
1:15:41SPEAKERWow.
1:15:42SPEAKER- So expensive that they only sell one per day at stores.
1:15:45SPEAKERI did some math, some back of the napkin math.
1:15:47SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:15:48SPEAKER- They have about, they have a few hundred stores.
1:15:51SPEAKER- Okay.
1:15:52SPEAKER- If they sold one per day per store for a year,
1:15:55SPEAKERthey would sell a few hundred thousand units,
1:15:57SPEAKERwhich to me sounds like a really good dev kit launch.
1:16:00SPEAKER- Yeah, yeah, that's for, yes, for something expensive
1:16:02SPEAKERand kind of not quite ready, that sounds fine.
1:16:05SPEAKER- Well, and if you're thinking about, you know,
1:16:08SPEAKERlike how they rolled out the M1 Macs to developers
1:16:11SPEAKERso that they can port their apps and stuff over.
1:16:13SPEAKER- That seems very on Apple-like.
1:16:17SPEAKERI mean, I mean, Apple is a different company now,
1:16:18SPEAKERbut like in the jobs area, to me, like the Apple strategy
1:16:22SPEAKERwas like, let's wait until this tech is really there.
1:16:24SPEAKERLike we're not gonna be the first ones out there
1:16:26SPEAKERwhere they touch screen phone.
1:16:27SPEAKERWe're gonna wait until we can bring it together in a way
1:16:29SPEAKERthat it becomes the definitive touch screen phone.
1:16:31SPEAKERSo to hear that they're doing some kind of weird,
1:16:33SPEAKERlike soft tech demo launch of this technology,
1:16:36SPEAKERinstead of like kind of being the definitive one
1:16:38SPEAKERis a little weird.
1:16:40SPEAKER- My assumption is that they're looking at app ecosystem.
1:16:44SPEAKERLike when Jobs launched the iPhone, they said,
1:16:46SPEAKERhey, look, you don't need apps.
1:16:47SPEAKERYou're just gonna do everything on the web.
1:16:48SPEAKERThis is the web phone.
1:16:50SPEAKER- He was a little set in his ways in some capacities.
1:16:53SPEAKER- Well, but that was also a convenient fiction
1:16:56SPEAKERbecause they didn't have an app ecosystem
1:16:58SPEAKERbecause they didn't want to tell developers
1:16:59SPEAKERabout the phone in advance.
1:17:01SPEAKERSo I don't think they can launch in an established market.
1:17:05SPEAKERThey were essentially establishing a market
1:17:06SPEAKERwhen they did that, right?
1:17:07SPEAKERWith VR, they're coming in and competing against Facebook
1:17:11SPEAKERand Microsoft and Valve or AR, you can't launch it.
1:17:17SPEAKERIf you launch an AR headset without apps,
1:17:20SPEAKERnot having early VR apps is one of the things
1:17:22SPEAKERthat actually probably hurt VR
1:17:24SPEAKERas much as not being able to make enough hardware.
1:17:26SPEAKERAnd I think that they don't...
1:17:31SPEAKERLook, the benefit of owning AR for consumers
1:17:35SPEAKERis that they are the Microsoft
1:17:38SPEAKERfor the next phase of computing.
1:17:40SPEAKER- Sure.
1:17:41SPEAKER- They are to next phase of computing
1:17:43SPEAKERas Microsoft was to GUIs in 1995 to 2015.
1:17:50SPEAKERSo I think that they're not gonna take any chances
1:17:55SPEAKERand if that means that they don't have a big surprise reveal
1:17:58SPEAKERon the stage, the surprise is gonna be,
1:18:00SPEAKER"Hey, these look like normal glasses,"
1:18:02SPEAKERnot, "Hey, we're making an AR headset."
1:18:06SPEAKER- Sure.
1:18:07SPEAKER- So anyway, but I think the VR thing's gonna be dev kit.
1:18:11SPEAKERI don't think people should, normal people,
1:18:13SPEAKERI don't think that's a thing for normal people.
1:18:15SPEAKER- Yeah, I'm just sitting here skimming this story,
1:18:18SPEAKERtrying to see if there's anything unusual expected about it.
1:18:21SPEAKER- Also, Bloomberg is notoriously bad for Apple rumors.
1:18:24SPEAKERThey were the ones pushing the Apple television
1:18:27SPEAKERand the Apple car. - The Apple car?
1:18:29SPEAKER- Apple car, yeah.
1:18:30SPEAKERThey weren't the only ones pushing that,
1:18:32SPEAKERbut they were among the proponents.
1:18:34SPEAKER- Okay, okay, so maybe grain of salt.
1:18:36SPEAKER- Dude, judging by the number of people I see
1:18:39SPEAKERgoing to work from VR stuff that now work at Apple,
1:18:43SPEAKERjust hit my LinkedIn, I would be shocked
1:18:46SPEAKERif there are not thousands of people
1:18:48SPEAKERworking on AR at Apple right now.
1:18:49SPEAKER- Something has to be happening.
1:18:50SPEAKERI mean, they acquired a VR company a couple of years ago,
1:18:52SPEAKERaccording to this. - They acquire
1:18:53SPEAKERall sorts of people, but yeah, it's, yeah.
1:18:55SPEAKER- Yes.
1:18:57SPEAKER- It's virtual reality, it's virtually ready for prime time.
1:19:03SPEAKERThat's bad, it's not like it could come up.
1:19:06SPEAKER- I still, the stuff I play the most is like,
1:19:13SPEAKERI play Pistol Whip and Beat Saber every week, pretty much.
1:19:16SPEAKERLike I'm still, I do that when I can't leave the house
1:19:18SPEAKER'cause of weather, 'cause people walking around
1:19:20SPEAKERwithout masks and stuff like that.
1:19:21SPEAKERI don't know if I'd still be doing that
1:19:23SPEAKERif we weren't quarantining.
1:19:24SPEAKER- Yeah, but it's a good way to move around, right?
1:19:27SPEAKER- It's a good way to move around.
1:19:28SPEAKERLike my kid loves playing Vacation Simulator
1:19:30SPEAKERand Job Simulator and stuff like Down the Rabbit Hole
1:19:32SPEAKERand those kind of small adventure games
1:19:34SPEAKERthat don't exactly exist on PC or console.
1:19:39SPEAKERBut it is, do not expect a large number of Alex-like games.
1:19:44SPEAKERAnd if they are, expect them to be more like
1:19:47SPEAKERthe Medal of Honor game that is like a really
1:19:49SPEAKERscope-limited thing and not like a big, long 10 hour,
1:19:54SPEAKERyou know, on, I mean, Alex is essentially on rails too,
1:19:57SPEAKERbut like don't expect a big, long experience
1:20:01SPEAKERwhere you're following a linear path and having an adventure.
1:20:07SPEAKER- VR. - Yeah.
1:20:09SPEAKER- Should we pick our patrons?
1:20:11SPEAKER- I feel like my expectations are managed, sure.
1:20:15SPEAKER- I mean.
1:20:16SPEAKER- That's what we do around here, right?
1:20:17SPEAKERManage people's expectations.
1:20:18SPEAKER- Well, hold on, the other thing is,
1:20:21SPEAKERit's not fair to talk about this.
1:20:23SPEAKERAlex is in, everybody, if you like games,
1:20:25SPEAKERyou should play Alex. - Oh, totally.
1:20:26SPEAKER- Like there's a sequence in Alex,
1:20:29SPEAKERI'm not gonna tell you what it is, I'm not gonna,
1:20:30SPEAKERbut I put it in my game of the year right up at Giant Bomb
1:20:34SPEAKERabout, there's this creature named Jeff
1:20:37SPEAKERwho is maybe the most, like I don't like horror games,
1:20:42SPEAKERit's the most effective non-horror game implementation
1:20:47SPEAKERof a character, like it is the best design sequence
1:20:51SPEAKERI think I've ever seen in a game like this.
1:20:53SPEAKER- That's cool.
1:20:54SPEAKER- And it works because of VR
1:20:58SPEAKERin a way that it wouldn't work on a 2D screen.
1:21:00SPEAKER- Sure.
1:21:02SPEAKERYeah, I mean like, that kind of goes both ways, right?
1:21:05SPEAKERLike it's on the one hand, it's amazing that VR
1:21:07SPEAKERis capable of doing things like that.
1:21:08SPEAKEROn the other hand, Alex is kind of an outlier
1:21:10SPEAKERof coming from a company
1:21:13SPEAKERwith functionally infinite resources,
1:21:15SPEAKERwilling to throw a bunch of those resources
1:21:18SPEAKERat weird projects like that and stretch the limits,
1:21:21SPEAKERbut not everybody is gonna be able,
1:21:22SPEAKERin fact, just about nobody else is gonna be able to do that.
1:21:25SPEAKER- Well, I mean, Gabe did that interview and he's like,
1:21:27SPEAKERlook, Alex sold really well for us,
1:21:28SPEAKERwe're gonna keep making more VR stuff.
1:21:30SPEAKER- Oh, okay, that's cool.
1:21:31SPEAKER- And then he also talked about brain-computer interfaces
1:21:34SPEAKERfor a very long time.
1:21:35SPEAKER- Of course.
1:21:36SPEAKER- Seemed like, you know, we talked about that
1:21:38SPEAKERwhen Elon Musk rolled his thing out a few months ago,
1:21:40SPEAKERbut the people I know that work in that space,
1:21:44SPEAKERlike human vision interface and stuff like that,
1:21:46SPEAKERare incredibly skeptical of anything that interfaces
1:21:49SPEAKERdirectly with your brain in any kind of meaningful way.
1:21:52SPEAKER- Look, all I'm gonna say is that once we reach
1:21:55SPEAKERthe eventuality where we all have to pledge failty
1:21:57SPEAKERto our techno-feudal overlord of choice.
1:22:01SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:22:02SPEAKER- I will take Gabe over Elon Musk any day.
1:22:05SPEAKER- Oh, yeah, I'd take him over all of them probably.
1:22:11SPEAKERThe thing that people tell me, we talked about this
1:22:13SPEAKERon "This is Only a Test" this week a little bit,
1:22:14SPEAKERbut the thing that the people who work in that space tell me
1:22:17SPEAKERis that there's not, A, there's some real material science
1:22:21SPEAKERstuff like when you put electrodes in people's brains,
1:22:24SPEAKERthey get plaque buildup on them that makes them stop working
1:22:26SPEAKERafter a really short period of time,
1:22:28SPEAKERso they're limited use only.
1:22:32SPEAKERThe other side of that is moving from computers
1:22:39SPEAKERto phones to VR, there were these massive markets
1:22:42SPEAKERalong the way that fostered development of technologies
1:22:45SPEAKERthat were required for the later things.
1:22:47SPEAKERSo the iPod begat the iPhone because they started
1:22:51SPEAKERputting color LCD screens on to bring the price
1:22:53SPEAKERof those screens down, and they started making flash iPods
1:22:56SPEAKERto make bring the cost of flash down,
1:22:58SPEAKERand all of a sudden an eight gigabyte iPhone was possible
1:23:02SPEAKERbecause the price of flash and the price of LCD screens
1:23:04SPEAKERgot to a point that they could sell for 600 bucks.
1:23:07SPEAKERAnd then the phones generated inertial measurement units,
1:23:12SPEAKERaccelerometers, gyroscopes, compasses all on one chip,
1:23:16SPEAKERand cameras, and screens, and all of those things
1:23:19SPEAKERwent into VR headsets, and those made VR headsets cheap.
1:23:22SPEAKERAnd there's not a clear product to product path
1:23:27SPEAKERto get to a billion people using direct neural interfaces.
1:23:34SPEAKERBut Gabe's very smart, so maybe we're just dumb asses,
1:23:39SPEAKERI don't know. - That's right.
1:23:42SPEAKER- Should we talk about patrons?
1:23:43SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:23:44SPEAKER- If you would like to support the pod,
1:23:46SPEAKERyou can by going to patreon.com/techpod.
1:23:52SPEAKERFor two bucks a month,
1:23:53SPEAKERyou get access to the tech pod discord,
1:23:56SPEAKERwhich is full of just beautiful nerds
1:23:59SPEAKERthat are talking about the things that they're into.
1:24:05SPEAKERThe conversation's all over the place on a day to day.
1:24:08SPEAKERThere are something like 25 or 30 channels now
1:24:10SPEAKERthat range between indoor/outdoor activities,
1:24:14SPEAKERparenting, getting work advice from people
1:24:17SPEAKERwho are doing different stuff than you.
1:24:20SPEAKERHome ownership, audio/video production, coding,
1:24:24SPEAKERjust the works.
1:24:25SPEAKER- Mechanical keyboard nerds, we have everything.
1:24:28SPEAKERWe have it all.
1:24:29SPEAKERAnd if there's not a channel and there's interest,
1:24:30SPEAKERwe'll make it.
1:24:34SPEAKERAgain, you can go to techpod.com/patreon.com/techpod.
1:24:40SPEAKER- There you go. - I think I'd done this
1:24:41SPEAKER75 times, and sign up there.
1:24:45SPEAKERAnd then we also do a patron exclusive episode each month.
1:24:48SPEAKERThere's another episode back in that backlog with Doug.
1:24:51SPEAKERSo if you enjoyed last week's episode with Doug,
1:24:52SPEAKERyou can go back and listen to that.
1:24:54SPEAKER- Seems like a lot of people enjoyed
1:24:55SPEAKERthat last week's episode with Doug.
1:24:57SPEAKER- We gotta find more nerds.
1:24:58SPEAKER- Yeah.
1:25:00SPEAKER- But yeah, that'll do it for us.
1:25:02SPEAKERThis is our last episode of the month,
1:25:03SPEAKERso we have to thank a bunch of patrons.
1:25:05SPEAKER- Yes.
1:25:07SPEAKER- As always, thank you to our executive producer
1:25:09SPEAKERlevel patrons, The Bunny Fiend, Jacob Chappell,
1:25:11SPEAKERDavid Allen, and James Kamik.
1:25:14SPEAKERBut also, I would like to thank our associate producer
1:25:18SPEAKERlevel patrons, Cedric Cozenmacher, Andre Burke,
1:25:23SPEAKERBrian Rabe, Sean Tallon, Tom Hilton, Jacob Wilson,
1:25:28SPEAKERTerry Cox, Arthur Geese, Ben Gulmi, Dave Ullian,
1:25:33SPEAKERDan Brockman, Jad Rita, still a Star Wars name, I love it,
1:25:38SPEAKERThomas Shea, and Graham Banks.
1:25:40SPEAKERThank you all so much for your support.
1:25:43SPEAKERAnd thanks to everybody on the Patreon.
1:25:45SPEAKER- Quite literally, make all this possible.
1:25:47SPEAKERSo yeah, thank you very much.
1:25:48SPEAKER- Yeah, you all are rad.
1:25:50SPEAKERAnd just as a reminder, I know a lot of people
1:25:53SPEAKERdon't like monthly charges, especially since Patreon
1:25:56SPEAKERis kind of bad about the way they charge,
1:25:58SPEAKERthere's always problems with it.
1:26:00SPEAKERYou can sign up for an annual now,
1:26:03SPEAKERand you get a little bit of a discount
1:26:04SPEAKERif you do an annual, back at any of the annual tiers.
1:26:10SPEAKERSo I guess that'll do it for us this week, Brian.
1:26:12SPEAKER- Yes.
1:26:15SPEAKER- See you all, waiting with bated breath for your outro.
1:26:19SPEAKERWhat do you got?
1:26:20SPEAKER- Look, I have to finish this 'cause if I don't,
1:26:22SPEAKERthen the way it edits doesn't work right.
1:26:24SPEAKER- Hey, look, if Audacity wants to change the way
1:26:26SPEAKERthat audio ducking works so that I don't have to put
1:26:29SPEAKERyour track right under the music to make it duck right,
1:26:32SPEAKERthen I could send the show off one of these days.
1:26:34SPEAKERBut until then, will you have the floor?
1:26:39SPEAKER- We'll see you all next week.
1:26:43SPEAKER(upbeat music)