The Builder of the Metaverse
RAOUL PAL: When change comes, opportunity abounds. We're about to enter a period of the fastest pace of technological change in all human history, something we refer to as The Exponential Age. And Real Vision is going to be your guide to this incredible future. One of the privileges for me working at Real Vision is the fact that our members are some of the most incredible people. And sometimes, somebody reached out to me and saying, hey, how can I help? And today, I'm going to speak to Vatsal, because Vatsal reached out and said, listen, I can see you looking at the metaverse. I know a bit about this, and I know a bit about gaming. And so, we had a chat, and I was blown away. Vatsal, it's so nice to see you.
VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Likewise, Raoul. Thanks for having me. RAOUL PAL: So, tell people a bit about your background, and how you got to where you are today. And then we can dig into your brains and get some of your knowledge of the whole space. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Yeah, absolutely. So, just going from the beginning, I grew up in India. And I think I was telling you, I grew up all over the country. And so, I picked up many different languages and foods and culture since growing up.
I came to the US, much like many people, for grad school. So, I went to Duke and then to MIT to get graduate education. And then for the last 20 years or so, I've spent time working either building platforms and services for game developers or building games myself.
So, as a game developer, I ran a studio called Storm8. We built 25 plus game titles cumulatively played by a billion plus people and north of half a billion in revenues. And then for last six, seven years, I've been on the side of building technology for game developers. So,
first at Facebook, I was part of the team which launched Oculus headsets, and a large part of the software and services were led by me. And then most recently, until last week, I was at AWS. So, I was Head of Games Technologies at AWS. And some of the work which we did, some of the work which is public and notable which we did was launching an Open 3D game engine. So, game engines are an essential tools to create games, Unreal and Unity are popular commercial game engines. And we thought there is an opportunity to create something with this much more open, accessible, free to democratized 3D content production. So, we open-sourced it. And then a handful of services which are in production for scaling games, so making games bigger, and as more and more players play the game, thus helping the game scale globally, Gamelift and Gamesparks. And there are a lot of services I can't
talk about which are under production. And they are all broadly in the areas of how you do 10x everything from developing games, to scaling games, to helping games 10x their monetization. So, that's all those areas. So, yeah, that's in brief, my background. RAOUL PAL: One of the things I want to get back a little bit first and dig into some of this stuff, gaming. So, it's quite funny because gamers used to be these people on the side, and the people who develop games on the side, and then everybody realized, gamers were the single best people that understand human psychology and behavior, and it became applied everywhere.
Talk me through a little bit about your journey about designing games, how you even thought about the game journeys, and all of that, because it's fascinating to me. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: So, actually, I'll go back, and then I'll come forward to what you're saying. One thing that has happened in games is that games have really become mainstream in, if you go back 20 years ago, there were probably 100 million or less people who identified themselves as gamers. And today, there are 3 billion and growing people who play games largely driven by adoption of smartphones, but the number of people who have played games has completely exploded.
And what's also changed is the demographic of people who play games. So, back in the day, there was a stereotype of who a gamer is, that's no longer true. There are more females playing games than ever before. And if you look at the spread of ages in games, it's all ages. You have young kids playing games, you have people in their jobs and much more my age playing games, and then you have seniors, so it's all across the board. And so, the elements which I think which make a game successful in some way are also being adopted by other consumer apps which are successful. RAOUL PAL: Gamification is the
key word nowadays, right? VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Gamification. But when I thought of the game, when we look at game design, there are aspects which we are trying to include and balance. One is keeping it interactive and giving players good feedback. So, we know games are interactive by nature, but giving your players the right feedback so that they're learning by doing, they're learning the game by doing. The second aspect is
understanding and setting the right motivation for players in the game, and helping them-- There is a concept which we use a lot called flow, where when there is a game with an objective, whatever it might be, how do you make sure that the players playing the game, it's not too hard, but it's also not too easy. So, you are in this flow zone, it's then more of continuing to play and enjoy the game. And there are some cues which typically during game design, you use, where giving your players a sense of completion so when they reach a milestone, giving them an achievement, or a badge, so that they have a sense of accomplishment along the way. Also, surprising and delighting them, and sometimes showing them things in the game, which are just serendipitous. It could be a mystery item, it could be a quest, which they didn't anticipate. So, those are some of the elements of game design. Now, the other thing I'll say which are equally important is giving players a way to self-express. And they do it in a variety of ways,
clothing and dressing up their avatar, the way they present themselves. So, giving them just a rich means to self-express, whether it's their avatar, or if it's like a simulation style games, the way they have crafted their farm, or their city or build their house. I think that's important. The last point I'll touch upon is that with the explosion of games, you now have to make your games into almost a social platform, where it's a place to play, but more importantly, it's a place to hang out with others. RAOUL PAL: And you've created community within games. Games are the community, and you happen
to do things with that community together. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Yeah. That's exactly right. And I think that's probably one of the bigger changes we've seen in last five years with Minecraft and Fortnite where games are replacing times which Reed Hastings of Netflix famously said, look, I'm competing with Fortnite. I'm less concerned about linear TV. RAOUL PAL: On TV or whatever, yeah. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: I'm competing with Fortnite because you see this generation which is Millennials, Gen X, which are growing up, not just digital, they're growing up on games, and they view, again, Fortnite and Minecraft and among us as a place where they hang out. And increasingly, they want that, and you have Fortnite, which
Epic Games I think is one of the most exciting companies. If you get a chance, we can talk about how game technology is going to be on games, but you have Fortnite running concerts. The Travis Scott concert was attended by 15 million players are all during the event. They do movie nights. So, it's a place much more beyond just playing, it's a hangout.
And then you see the whole creative economy emerge around games. And you see it in two ways right now. The first way is players demanding tools or wanting tools so that they can contribute towards content creation in games. So, they can make their own virtual objects and transact or exchange. Now, transaction and exchange is still problematic. I think crypto has a role to play there. But then the other aspect is that there are games streamers who actually stream their gameplay for others to view and watch them.
And that's become a massive industry on its own. I think if you look at YouTube, watching game videos is probably the largest vertical. If you take all the time combined on people watching games on YouTube, and people watching games being played live on Twitch, it probably exceeds Netflix and HBO combined. And so, the amount of-- coming back to how games are becoming mainstream, it started just playing and hanging out, now it's actually viewing games. And there are competitions, like the League of Legends, which is a popular game by Riot Games.
It's a multiplayer competitive game, their annual championship fills out the stadium, a football stadium of 20,000, 30,000 people. And a few years ago, it was watched by almost as many people as a Superbowl. And so, when you step back and think about what was a counterculture, it's actually just completely mainstream. All the elements which you can imagine. RAOUL PAL: So, what you're really describing is this movement from being a pure game into a community and then into a metaverse world of which people are now-- we make TV shows about real life and now, they're making TV shows about gaming life.
And basically, it's becoming the fully immersive experience. Is that how you're seeing it, where it's just sucking more and more people in, is it becomes just a broader cultural phenomenon? VATSAL BHARDWAJ: It does it and actually, it's both the things which you're saying. One is it's more and more people are participating in games, virtual communities but it's also more and more people. They are spending even more time. I think if you look back at the history like kids used to hang out at malls or parks, now all of that for a variety of reasons has just been replaced with game centers, to some extent, social media. And I think what you're seeing now is okay, now you have people spending time hanging out, spending time but how does this virtual world create an economy of its own? RAOUL PAL: Because that's the next big step, isn't it? VATSAL BHARDWAJ: That's the next big thing. And I think while games have done that in a closed way where if you play a popular MMO called Second Life, people refer to it as Metaverse 1.0, they made all these elements of yes, you can create objects,
there is land you can buy and sell, they had their own currency called Linden Dollars. There were designers who can come and design your home in this virtual world. I think what's changing now is this element of the same property rights which you have in the physical world, like how do you bring those elements of property rights, ownership, a free economy and a marketplace in these virtual worlds. And I think that's what you're starting to see now especially with-- and frankly, I think Epic Games, Minecraft, they took some steps in that direction, but some of the crypto games are just pushing it just to the extreme. RAOUL PAL: Yeah, Axie Infinity and stuff
like that is becoming fascinating. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Yeah. Axie Infinity, I think the term which gets used a lot for crypto games is play to earn, where you participate in the game and Axie Infinity, it's like a rock, paper, scissors style games. I think you and your audience might know. At its core, it's a rock, paper, scissors game where you're collecting these cute characters called Axies, you're forming a team, and then you're competing with each other. What's neat is, I think what gets talked about is the idea of play to earn where you can spend time and energy collecting the right Axies, forming the right team, breeding them, training them, and then transacting, like selling them to someone. RAOUL PAL: You sell resources. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Yeah, the way
you sell resources. But I think from purely from a standpoint of game industry, there is something much more profound. And I think one is the concept of ownership. Players did not have-- you can buy items, but if you don't give-- RAOUL PAL: They're non-fungible, you couldn't do anything with them. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Yeah, exactly. So, it's non-fungible. So, concept of ownership. It's also changing the relationship of what the business model arrangement look like if you're a game developer, and a player and a publisher or an app store. The astonishing thing about Axie Infinity is they are north of fighting 2 million
daily active players. And none of that has gone through the traditional modes of distribution. They're certainly not stacking discs in Best Buy, but they're also not going through app stores on iOS, or Android. And so, it's all driven by community, strong word of mouth. And so, it's changing. I think, what's changed here is ownership, the distribution and frankly, the relationship in how the value created by games, how it's shared between all the stakeholders. RAOUL PAL: I've been thinking about this.
And obviously, this is moving towards each of these economies having their own currency, which is if it's on, let's say, Ethereum, it could be traded. But therefore, you're creating digital sovereign states. Is that not where it's going, where you live within it, there's a set of rules within the community, you've got a system of money, you can live, earn, but you can take your money and go elsewhere if required? VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Yeah. So, I think that's
one issue where you do have multiple sovereign economies. But I think as long as there are mechanisms for you to transact, much like forex exchange, because I think that's where things will quickly head towards where, in a world that's so much driven by open standards and communities, I think if you're trying to ward off and say, well, my currency just stays within these realms, that's a recipe for losing. RAOUL PAL: So, you need that interoperability between all these worlds. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: You need interoperability when it comes to value, you also need interoperability- - now, this is easier said than done-- between being able to take the digital assets you have in one game into another. And the reason I say it's
harder is my avatar in, let's say, when someone creates a World Of Warcraft on blockchains, my avatar on World of Warcraft in blockchains, it had certain specifications for one game. And so, the items which I brought with it, as much as I want to take it to the next Battle Royale, there are some technical challenges to be solved there. But again, moving in the direction of how you have common formats around how all kinds of 3D data is specified will be important, because that's where you get true interoperability, just the way I can pick up my items in this house and move to a different place. So, that portability will be important.
And lastly, I also think that we have an opportunity to build and try. So, we have an opportunity to build it on open standards. Everything from, I think we talked about just the sovereign currencies and making sure those are exchangeable. The 3D data formats,
those are interchangeable, and then the distribution mechanisms and the value exchange contracts are set correctly in the first place. RAOUL PAL: So, there's tons of questions I want to ask you. First one is, okay, there was a clear battle lining up between Facebook and Epic Games. One is the idea of the closed metaverse, which is the Zuckerberg vision essentially. And the other is Tim Sweeney's vision. I imagine it's
going to be a mix of many. The metaverse is not one place. It's our digital lives that spreads across. How are you thinking through that battle between the open-source distributed ideas versus the big closed platforms creating their worlds? VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Well, the way I think of it, I think you're absolutely right. I think there is a bit of a battle of ideas there. And the core of this, I think, is around identity and ownership of assets. What we will want and
most people I think will agree what we want is like a completely distributed decentralized economy, where I as a player, I as a citizen user can participate in whatever metaverse application. I think of Facebook as a metaverse application, wherever that transpires and Epic Games also as a metaverse application, where I can go to any of these realms with my identity. I can share what's needed, I can take whatever assets I need. Now, I think it's solving that problem on how do you make it easier and understandable for an end user the way I understand this phone is mine, or this wallet is mine, like how do you make it easier for a user online? The concept of this is your digital identity. This is what you own. And this is how you transact with
different ecosystems, whether it's Facebook or Epic Games, Minecraft or Axie online. We have to crack that nut. RAOUL PAL: It feels to me that that is somewhere-- you and I both seen it in India with Aadhaar, right? Where you have a digital identity, it's provable. Okay, the next step is to maybe wrap zero-knowledge proofs around it in some way that I can have different avatars in different worlds, but you know that you're dealing with a particular person, and you don't need to see my details. Something like that needs to scale, I think. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Yeah, it needs to scale. And I think some of the hard part there isn't technical, necessarily. The technical aspect is
probably solvable and doable with blockchains, and zero-knowledge proofs and public/private key encryption. The hard part is actually just education, and awareness and making it easy. So, I think that's one thing which you do want to crack. Going back to what you said, I do think that there is a battle of ideas, there is also a battle of definition. I think everyone wants to define metaverse not in their own way, but stake ownership. And to me, sometimes it almost feels like 20 years ago, you were talking about, well, I am the internet. Like
if AOL said, look, I'm the internet, it could be a bit short-sighted. So, I think again, like the metaverse, the way it can emerge is-- and some of it is already here, that it will span both digital and physical. And there'll be a variety of applications. There'll be games, there'll be social media, there'll be a whole host of enterprise technology, which will be built around it. Some of the distinguishing characteristics would be
it's going to be primarily 3D. Now, not to say you can't experience it on the phone, but we as human beings, we live in a 3D world. So, it's primarily 3D, persistent with the simulation behind these digital objects is going to go on and hopefully it has a much more decentralized, creative economy behind it. RAOUL PAL: So, I want to start talking a little bit about some of the technological issues that you've been trying to solve for the last few years. First one is when I look at the crypto style games, blockchain games, or metaverses, whether it's Sandbox or Decentraland, or whatever, they are pixelated, awful experiences. And anything built on the Unreal Engine is 4k gorgeous. Why can't we get
a consistent 4k standard? Is it because gamers are using different computers, so they have more power, so the general experience? What is that that's stopping this world going to what 4k should be? VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Yeah. From a technology standpoint, there is lots of challenges. I think we'll start with where you're going. Like, how do you get a 4k experience, Unreal, AAA, high-end experience everywhere? Some of it is on your local device. So, whether it's your phone or your PC,
there are some constraints on just based on what graphics card you have. Like, if you have a 3090 GeForce, you can pretty much render anything in real time. So, I think that's one constraint. And there are solutions around it. I think one talked about solution is you can render and run any of these games in massive data centers. Well, pick your choice, build your own, pick a public cloud, and then just the way you stream movies down, you can actually stream it down. So, then you're taking away your iPhone, or even much lower than iPhone, if your device can play a movie, it can play a high-end game in full fidelity.
And the idea is that all the rendering and simulation, it's actually running in a data center somewhere with the latest GPU. So, I think I think that's one challenge. The second challenge is that creating these high- resolution assets at a massive scale is cumbersome, it's costly. If you look at typical game companies, they typically have anywhere from 10 to 50 artists per engineer. And so, there is a just tremendous amount of work which goes in creating these high-resolution assets, realistic looking assets. And then, you can change that. And you're already starting to see content being procedurally generated, like Minecraft is almost all procedurally generated. No Man's Sky in large parts is procedurally generated.
You have tools who can make digital humans or meta humans, which are getting pretty damn close, and very photorealistic. So, that's the other challenge on how do you create all of this content and then deliver all of this content across the world? The last part, I would say is, there is a computational challenge with when you have this metaverse on a 4k application, which is very rich, which is very rich in fidelity, and has lots of players or users all together at once, it's an infrastructure compute challenge. And let me give you an example, not to pick on Epic Games or Travis Scott's concert, which I thought was fantastic, but when you are there in that stadium, you can see at most 10 people around you. And you and I both know that when you go into a concert, a part of the concert experience is that you are there with thousands and thousands of people all around you. And to replicate that experience, there is the 3D challenge we talked about, but just having large number of people in the same world altogether, it's a compute challenge. RAOUL PAL: So, let me understand this. So, if they managed to get 10 people,
even the idea of having a university class of 100 people together, it's still impossible that you can actually meet fellow students. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Yeah, you can play around with tricks. And I think you can play around with tricks of like, hey, I'll trade off the resolution or the quality. So, for example, everyone in the class will be wearing the same clothes and then we will take maybe one or two characteristics of what makes us different, but more or less, our tasks will look the same and then we can have 100 people or 1000 people, but then you start making tradeoffs. But I think what we want is you and I
in this resolution among 100 other people with the same resolution, I think that's a challenge right now. Now, it's solvable. But it's a compute challenge, and the reason is that if you take the largest computer, largest server, the amount of compute available on it isn't enough to run that simulation in full fidelity. There are solutions companies working around the world on how do you break past? And how do you have not just hundreds, but thousands and hundreds of thousand people in full fidelity all interacting in the same world? But yeah, again, I think if you have to realize metaverse, that's another challenge which we'll have to solve. RAOUL PAL: How far, because you know the technology, you're seeing people working on it, how far away do you think it is where we make that quantum leap from some of these slightly blockier experiences, or like Epic Games is high fidelity but you can't get many people together? When does it suddenly start to see, oh, wow, okay, this is now a real human interaction thing where we can engage with large numbers? How far is that? 10 years? Five years? VATSAL BHARDWAJ: No, I would say it's within five years, definitely, even faster. And you are seeing some examples of it already, again constrained either by it's high fidelity, but it's not fully real time yet, or it's fully high fidelity, it's real time, but not enough people. There are a variety of teams working on this. And I think you'll see breakthroughs in the next two to five years, where
you will have 100,000 people in a Travis Scott concert in Fortnite, and all together all at once. So, I think technologically, we're getting pretty damn close. Now, all the constraints I talked about about the local device and local device ability to render, I think, all of those and how many people you can have in the same world, things are getting pretty close, where you will pretty soon see just massive scale games in hundreds of thousands of people in full fidelity and they're rendered in the cloud and back in wherever you're hosting it. And then they are just streamed down to devices. And some of the streaming tech is already there.
You see Google Stadia, and NVIDIA GeForce, for example, streaming really high fidelity, AAA games. So, we're getting pretty close. RAOUL PAL: So, the other thing in the technology side, talk us through AR and VR, because those are the other parts of this. And how are you seeing-- so Apple seems to be the AR leader. That's where they seem to be going, and Facebook's obviously the main player in VR right now. How do you see that playing out? Because that's, again, a lot of new technology coming? VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Yeah. So, my view on both AR and VR, is that obviously like I think when some of these experiences become online, and they mature, they'll be a key part of the consumer experience. They'll be a key part of-- if you are in fully
immersive VR, put on the headset and experiencing a concert in 2D or hanging out with your friends in 2D, you are in a fully immersed world, and you can pick and choose on where you want to be, wanting to be on top of a race or you want to be on your favorite playground. So, I think on consumer, you will see that on AR, again, with both AR glasses, and frankly, with phones, Apple iPhones. Apple is certainly a bit ahead. You can embed virtual objects in real world so for example, I can leave a gift or leave something for you in a physical space for you or a friend. And when you get there, it just gets activated. But the key point is it's tied to a geographical point and it's persistent and you can interact with it.
And so, I think we are going to see that. In some ways, you already have those examples with Niantic's Pokémon GO game where you are embedding these virtual objects in real world in some way and enhancing the real world and in VR games. Where I think it's more interesting is on enterprise technology. And if you think about what COVID did, it made it impossible for us to work together in the same room. And so, a lot of collaboration which typically happened with architects standing
around a model of a new building, or a design of a new car fully crafted in play, that went away. And so, what that did was just open up this opportunity for creating it virtually. And again, going back to where the technology is, right now, you have game engines, which can do full real time ray tracing, and what that means is you can, for the first time, have very photorealistic 3D models, which you can change in real time, have multiple people interact with it in real time during product design. And a lot of automotive companies and other engineering firms
were already looking to adopt these technologies, but that's certainly something which has accelerated partially by COVID. But partially, they also realized it's much more cost effective and it's just a much better way to collaborate when you can have people from around the world looking at the same model, making changes, starting causes and effects. So, I think that's one part which I see in addition to like consumer which more medium term, I think short term, you're already seeing that. You're also seeing good applications of we AR and AR in defense and public sector. And so, I think I will completely mess
up the acronym, but IVAS is a program by US military on equipping soldiers with augmented reality headsets. And they're bringing all the technology which is present in headsets today with infrared sensing and all of that, with full immersive map of the mission and real time communication between the entire fleet which is doing an operation. So, you see those in different sectors. You see people being in VR actually, there is Strivr is an interesting company, and it partners with football teams, where if you're a quarterback, you have to memorize thousands of players.
And the way for you to quickly memorize and learn is actually much more-- you can do it much more faster by putting on a VR headset. So, you see some of these enterprise-type applications now which are taking off. And then I think eventually, we get to the complete consumerization of yes-- RAOUL PAL: It sounds like things like AR is obviously going to go fully into cars when we've seen it with things like Waze and stuff. But as you go further into it, Apple's building a whole AR digital map of the world. And I think even of your local proximity by using your iPhone to ping the surroundings to understand what it looks like. So, it feels like everything is going to be guided
not just the military, but all of our lives. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Well, yeah, totally. AR and geospatial data will both create applications and experiences which we can't imagine today. And both for consumers where enhancing the physical world geospatially with these virtual objects, but also, again, I think, even in enterprise setting where one of the developers in Beijing he created-- I think it's called 51World, they created a full live model of the entire City of Shanghai. So, the entire of City of Shanghai in full fidelity and they used a combination of satellites and drones and sensors on the buildings and traffic patterns. Again, you can do a very realistic rendering of some of these large worlds. So, you have a full digital representation of this entire city which are being created. And what it does is it opens up possibilities for city planning. If you want to create a park or a new building, instead of doing it on a paper,
you can actually all visualize and then you can run a whole simulations around, if you make these changes in the city, what is the impact on traffic and utilities? RAOUL PAL: So, you can use machine learning and AI to then understand the knock-on effects of doing certain things? VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Yeah, I think so. That's already happening. You have the City of Shanghai, you have Wellington is another city. So, these projects creating digital life cities are smaller. So, that is the city scale AR and simulation, but there is a much more of a room or a factory scale of the same thing where you can make changes, where it's a live link between your digital replica, your digital twin of the real-world object, where it's a live link, where you can make changes in this digital object, and it gets reflected in the physical world. And there is a feedback loop back. And so, the way for me, it all comes together and eventually in this larger metaverse is that it's not just our social life, or games, movies, play, but we'll also bring most of our work into this world. RAOUL PAL: One of the things I've been thinking
about is we've we saw remote medicine, skilled remote medicine in India servicing, let's say, hospitals in the Middle East, but you can now be an expert surgeon by using VR, a surgeon in one place can basically do hundreds of surgeries, and help by either using robotics and VR or whatever. Are we seeing much development in the medical space and all of this? VATSAL BHARDWAJ: That's an area I haven't kept up. I think I'm very familiar with what you were saying around like performing remote surgeries. It is certainly on we've seen much more on training around trauma [?] and soft skills and more counseling. And I have to get back on like, what's
the latest on-- the remote surgeries have been around for a while and VR assisted, but what's the latest? I've not kept up. But yeah, I think medical applications, especially on counseling, they're definitely taking hold. RAOUL PAL: So, what is the thing that you've seen recently that's totally blow you away? That you were like, wow, okay, that's another whole quantum leap that I didn't expect yet. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Let me take a little example, actually, which is pretty cool. Again, I think last year stretched all of us in many ways. And
one thing, which I thought was super neat was how Google has a division called Waymo, they're making autonomous cars and technology for autonomous cars. When everything shut down, they were able to carry on training for their car sensors for their autonomous setup, and generating all of this data to train their models in a virtual world. So, they have a project called CarCraft, think of it as GTA but done for cars in full fidelity for a massive city in which they could train I think 100 years' worth of training in the physical world in a single day. And that's 100x leap. That's 100x improvement and 100x leap of what's possible in the physical world. And they were able to use and argument that data along with everything they are doing in real world around collecting data. When you run an autonomous car, you're collecting all these signals. So,
it was pretty cool and interesting, at least from my perspective, that look, you're almost training a robot in a virtual world. This is one example of a 100x-- RAOUL PAL: Making the singularity fast is what you're telling me. I want to wrap up on some of this because we've talked about this gigantic wholesale change that came from gaming is spread into commercial world, financial world.
And then the everything around us world, as everybody builds out AR/VR, and all of this stuff. How does it affect society in a society where humans don't get together? There's no sense of smell in the metaverse. There's no sense of taste in the metaverse. Things that are very human experiences. How is it going to affect people? VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Yeah. As a technologist, my first answer is not yet. I think it started with vision and haptics and I think things will get pretty close. But I do think of it as
we are at the very early innings, and we have an opportunity to actually shape it. The one way in which we can shape it is not just fully digital, again, like enhancing physical spaces with virtual or digital objects. That's one way in which we can shape it. The second way in which we can shape it is now the time to think about what does again, property rights, ownerships, identity, because things are already headed there. And how do we, as a community, help drive right decisions on ownership, identity? RAOUL PAL: That foundational layer is so important. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Yeah. So that we get it right,
so that it's truly a utopia and not a dystopia. I think that's the second thing I would say. The third thing is, at least personally for me, I'm an optimist. It's certainly going to take the time away from other-- I forget, I think on an average, an American spends 20 plus hours watching TV, it's going to take time away from passive consumption of media to much more active and interactive, now albeit it's in a digital world, I do think it's better for your overall wellbeing. RAOUL PAL: These, you would say the 3D digital world is better than being in a 2D digital world. So, if you're spending that long watching television, you'd be better off probably mentally healthier in a 3D world. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Yeah. I think it's not going
to be a replacement for what we do physically. I think that will persist. I think what you'll see is, again, it takes time away from passive media, where you're watching television to you're immersed in a virtual world, you are immersed in a 3D world where you are picking up skills, same skills you pick up in real world around how do you interact with others? How do you collaboratively create things? How do you hang out? There is an aspect of all of these that do teach your life skills. But at the same time, I do think it's not going to be-- I don't believe the real Player One version of it, where you're always in the headset. RAOUL PAL: And I love your vision that you've
mentioned, I hadn't really thought about it that way. But this is something to think about, is you can exist in a physical world, yet there'll be digital objects around you. And digital enhancements. We understand the enhancements, your phone can help you out. So, you can have your NFT art displayed in the wall that you don't see in the physical space, but you see it in the digital space by you pick up your phone, and suddenly it reveals things. That's an extraordinary world where physical and digital are real properties as you talked about. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Yeah. And I think once the AR glasses, they will get to a form factor
of your sunglasses. I think that's a little bit further away and I don't think next two years, but next five years. But just imagine you actually have an AR glasses which transform not just NFT, but they can transform your room. You're still in the physical world with people but it's a bit more enhanced. And in some way, we enhance ourselves today. We wear clothing and watches and all kinds of things to enhance our world. We decorate our homes today. So, I don't view it as much different from, hey, I'm going to digitally enhance it in addition to do it physically today.
RAOUL PAL: Just a final thing on the AR versus VR thing is-- I just want to pick your brains on this quickly- - is Apple has an advantage because it has massive computing power. So, it can have AR glasses that can talk to the phone. How to Facebook sold that without having clunky headsets because I think Mark Zuckerberg said the hardest thing to solve is how do you get all of that in a spectacle frame. They can't, but Apple can. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: So, my view is that it's still quite open. Like AR/VR headsets are still quite open. The Oculus headset, it has its own "operating system" like the new quest two devices. It's a headset, it doesn't need to be connected, it's a fully untethered headset, it doesn't need to be connected to your PC or your phone. Now
it does take a hit on battery life. And there are constraints today on how much graphics and compute you can pack on it so that it doesn't heat up and make your brain hot. But I think it's still open. I think Apple has an advantage with an iPhone. But I also don't believe that one of the early learnings of the VR industry was that you need a fully untethered and fully mobile headset or glasses for it to get traction. So, my view is yes, you will have a phone. But I think this phone also gets broken apart. You already have a AirPods, it's matter of time, and you have a watch. And you can make phone calls from your watch. And it's only a matter of
time where the phone is completely untethered into, like, yes, you can make phone calls with Siri with just your headphones and your watch. And so, the need for Apple's advantage around phones, I think it gives them an advantage of what you're saying in install base and know-how, but when it comes to form factor operating system, I think it's still open between Apple and Facebook and Microsoft, and others in this field. That's just my view. Where I think they have been smart is they probably have the most advanced chipset on their phones when it comes to AR, their software. Both the hardware and software, they are further ahead, is they can bring it together. And that's been Apple's genius of like being this fantastic curators of technology, hardware, software form factor put together, so they can certainly blow us away. RAOUL PAL: So, this is clearly an exponential trend that is accelerating. It's one of the true classic of the exponential age.
Let's go 10 years ahead, how much further advanced is it from now? Are we really starting to see this whole vision come together? VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Oh, definitely. I think you are starting to see bits and pieces of all of these things today. Again, Fortnite is an example. Niantic's Pokémon GO is an example. Some of the simulations in public sector like BMW just having a digital replica of their factory floor and making changes as an example, Shanghai. So, I think it's already there. I do think in 10 years, all of this comes together and accelerates and where I think the physical-- the scary part is that the boundaries between physical and digital world will start to blur even more. I do think it changes the nature of jobs, I think we talked about-- like we started this conversation talking about gamification. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. You can
only imagine like kids are growing up now, it's not just they're gamified but they are actually so used to working and immersing themselves going back and forth between physical and 3D. So, it's going to impact the whole nature of workplace and design of workplace. It's going to create jobs which we can't think of now. When I look at Axie online, yes, it's play to earn, but it's a new type of job, new class of jobs which are created. The skillset will be materially different for what we are teaching kids today. So, I think that's the scary part of like, yes, it's happening so fast. The kids send the human subject off but will our institutions and
our regulations and the law and order [?]? RAOUL PAL: I've been thinking through this, it feels like the world is going to go to these digital states. And the regulators will have to catch up. It's just a different world. It's just a very different world. And as you said, that whole traditional institutional infrastructure is going to have to change. But I think of this as a whole new GDP like discovering Americas. It's not incremental. It's
an entirely new thing. You can get the same way. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Yeah, I agree. And again, ICOs transformed how you can start a company. And I think that compounded as just going to have just massive effects on what it is to own a business. And so, yeah, it's an exciting world. I think the part which will lag behind is regulation and new norms will be established. Institutions is the part I feel like will get even further behind, like any of human created institutions. RAOUL PAL: Because the entrepreneurs that are innovating so fast, but look, really fascinating. And thank you for spending some time with us
to talk us through what's going on, because most people hear about it, but don't realize how real it is and how fast it's happening. And the quality of what is coming ahead is something people can't get their heads around yet. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Yeah, Raoul, I enjoyed it. Thanks for having me. RAOUL PAL: Thank you. And I'll definitely pick your brains again in due course, once this stuff all starts moving again. But great to see you, Vatsal. VATSAL BHARDWAJ: Likewise, Raoul. Thank you. RAOUL PAL: Thank you. When change comes, opportunity abounds. We're about to enter a period of the fastest pace of technological change in all human history, something we refer to as The Exponential Age. And Real Vision is going to be your guide to this incredible future.
2022-03-04 19:28
