Why Virtual Reality Needs to Be Collaborative: An Interview with David A. Smith of Wearality
David Smith has been at the forefront of Virtual Reality (VR) development since the beginning of its conception. While working with some of the most visionary pioneers of VR and modern day computing, Smith was developing the foundational elements of VR and 3D graphics. Whether it was creating the first real time 3D adventure game The Colony or working with Tom Clancy and creating Red Storm Entertainment (developers of Rainbow Six), Smith was able to absorb the knowledge of the some of the greatest minds in the field. Over the years Smith worked with Alan Kay, a Turing award winner who Smith spent time working with on the Croquet Project, and many of the best known innovators of the computer age.
In more recent years, Smith has headed the head of VR and AR at Lockheed Martin and has been Lockheed Martin GTL/TLS Inventor of the Year for the last three years that he has been there. After his stint at Lockheed, Smith went on to launch Wearality, where as CEO he creates VR and AR headsets with the widest field of view on the market today.
On Collaboration and the Future
Beyond The Headset: In the field of VR, how do you view yourself?
David A. Smith: When we look at VR and AR, we see those as kind of a natural extension of the real world, and in that world you have this ability to interact with somebody else when you’re building something. [For example] you have kids playing with toy blocks and and collaborating to build a little castle. We can’t do that yet, but we’re on the threshold of being able to and that defines an entirely new kind of thing that I call an augmented conversation.
“Who you are and what you are is defined more by how you communicate than anything else”
Who you are and what you are is defined more by how you communicate than anything else. You think about things, whether you know it or not, in terms of how you communicate. Ideas often don’t actually become concrete until you are forced to explain them. This does not have to be a verbal communication — designs, algorithms, even art don’t necessarily have a verbal component, but your ability to understand and manipulate these ideas is strongly related to how you would communicate them to others. You think of ideas in terms of the context of your communication. What I see is a fundamental change of this capability to interact and share ideas. We’re expanding the very nature of how and what you communicate, hence we are expanding what you actually are: we’re redefining what it means to be human. I think that is the real message of what AR and VR are.
Alan [Kay] has been at the forefront of computers as the basis for our education since the beginning. The DynaBook, which was the predecessor idea of what we see as the PC today, defined the nature of computer education from the start. He wrote a paper called “Personal Computer for Children of All Ages.” It was focused on the idea of educating children and people and that’s what we’re really looking at here is the reinvention of humans. Reinventing the way we act, think and learn. That’s where we’re going with VR.
Ultimately what is the difference between VR and AR?
DS: There’s three things, they’re ultimately all the same thing. Technologically they’re not quite.
VR is obviously a simulated image that takes over your senses and you kind of divorce from the world. AR extends the real world with additional information.
Mixed Reality (MR) essentially allows you to engage with actual physical objects in addition to the augmented information in that world. So basically, you have a system that is sensitive to the state of current world. What will happen is that it’ll all collapse into one. The reason it hasn’t is simply the very limited technological limitations of AR. The field of view (FOV) is really tiny 30 — maybe 40 degrees. No one’s got 140 like we do [at Wearality]. We still have a limitation in our ability to sense the world around us. Appropriate tracking on the AR side is terrible, even on the VR side it’s really still a hack.
If you look ahead 5 to 10 years you will have a system with a great FOV and be able to say, “go into full VR mode” or “Tell me where the nearest McDonalds is,” and it’ll go into AR. Or if you’re in a MR, you’re playing a game with friends, and toy soldiers are there shooting at each other and if you move the chair the battle is on the soldiers move with it.
“Just as soon as AR is really good there will be no reason for VR to exist”
It’s all going to be one. Some people don’t agree with it. Just as soon as AR is really good there will be no reason for VR to exist, and it’s gonna be something that is totally integrated into your life in the same way a smartphone is today. That’s gonna happen in the next big wave, smartphones are gonna be wearable on your head. They’re gonna be very lightweight, under 100 grams to start. My reading glasses are like 30 grams — they’ll be about like that but they’ll have a very wide field of view. And then later on, contact lenses will be developed that give you even more amazing experiences.
What VR and Apple have in common
Are technologies like the Oculus Rift and Vive doing anything for the industry?
DS: There’s nothing new there, which is a sad thing, but that’s not bad [because] it’s moving us forward. You have to turn the funding taps on for any kind of business to grow. The same thing happened with Personal Computing. It was all junk initially, but it got people’s interest. The reality is these things are defined by key applications.
Apple is a perfect example, because they kind of were at the center of all these shifts. So, Steve Jobs and more importantly Woz created the Apple II, and they thought, “Oh it’s a hobbyist computer.” Or that you could program on it or keep track of recipes. They didn’t have a big vision for what the Apple II — the second generation of Apple computer — would be. They knew it was going to be important, but they didn’t really understand what its impact would be.
Dan Bricklin, who was at Harvard Business School at the time, wanted a platform for a new idea for a software spreadsheet application. He was looking around and saw that the Apple II was the nicest platform — the nicest computer around for doing that. So he and Bob Frankston wrote VisiCalc. VisiCalc transformed the computer industry fundamentally, and since they wrote it for the Apple II, Apple had an expansion in sales threefold month over month and that is what defined Apple [as a company]. It became the most successful computer in history because of that one application and everybody who was doing accounting or running businesses had to have VisiCalc — and the only thing it ran on was the Apple II so people bought the Apple II not because they wanted it, but because they wanted VisiCalc.
This happened again with the Macintosh. An amazing computer — I bought mine in 1984 as soon as it hit the stores. The problem was that it too required a killer app to really define it, and that turned out to be desktop publishing. The Mac became a desktop publishing machine. And even the iPhone had that challenge. When Apple created the first iPhone, they said that they (Apple) would develop apps for the phone and the developer community could create web-page based apps using the Safari browser. This did not go over well with the developers, so Apple had to pivot to create the infrastructure to support app development and sales and today the iPhone is really an app machine.
We’re now at that point in VR. I think it’s probably some 19 year-old playing with these things somewhere and then saying to himself, “You know what? THIS is what VR is for” and so that will be the product that matters. But that one is going to be one that changes everything, and then everything is going to wrap around that defining idea just like it did in the past so that’s really where we’re at. The mistake we have is this idea that VR is this limited thing that AR is this limited thing. AR is the true next communication paradigm, the next big medium that’s going to expand what we are as humans.
Where did you see VR/AR going in 2010?
DS: The Oculus thing was going to happen no matter what. It was mostly due to Mark Bolas’s work. Palmer Luckey was actually working for Bolas. Mark had come up with what made VR possible. Why it works today has nothing to do with Oculus; it has nothing to do with the Vive, but has everything to do with smartphones. Virtually every technology that’s needed for good VR today came from the massive investment that was made in the smartphone industry.
The VisiCalc moment of VR being good enough was Bolas at USC who saw that and started building prototype devices — basically cardboard devices, and this was before Google cardboard. Google didn’t give him credit either which was a shame, but if you go on his website he’s got a bunch of DIY devices that are everything that Oculus does or Cardboard does and those ideas were there much earlier. He’s the one who saw it, he’s the guy who made it happen and it was just a question of time until someone got it and ran with it. It happened that Palmer Luckey did it but it could have been anybody else. It wasn’t Palmer that mattered it was Mark that mattered and the fact that the infrastructure, the necessary ingredients now existed and Mark had put them together to make it good enough so that critical mass was achieved to make it lift off.
Looking Forward Through the Headsets
From where you stand what is most needed in the industry, What can bring it forward?
DS: There are two things that are really key.
One is the FOV, the FOV in Head Mounted Displays is terrible. This causes a lot of problems including nausea. Wide FOV actually fixes that but also gives you a far more compelling experience. It’s the one area that the cellphone business didn’t have an investment in. We don’t have commoditized great lenses for VR. The lenses people are building are really bad and that’s what I’m working on [at Wearality]. Actually the realization was during my time at Lockheed Martin and it was that lenses suck, and the FOV sucks. So that’s what I did at Lockheed, I got Super wide FOV and when you compare them side by side it’s crazy, you can’t go back.
The second is understanding that this is fundamentally a collaborative platform and what Oculus in particular is doing is trying to close that system off. At the end of the day I think they will succeed at controlling it [Oculus Rift] but I don’t think they will succeed at creating the mass adoption that they’re looking for. I think those are diametrically opposed.
We’re too early in this field to be able to say that they’re going to dominate and control this because the next idea that shows up is going to be on somebody else’s platform and they’re gonna be shit out of luck because nobody is going to care about them anymore. You just have to look at history of computing and computer platforms and see that the winners and the losers are not defined by the hardware, they’re defined by the applications that people choose to build on top of them. The interesting platforms of the future are going to be the open ones, the extensible ones because there’s so much left to define it. We’re just starting.
BTH: What do you think lacks in the VR field in terms of educating people?
DS: They don’t know what it is. There’s nothing there right now with any depth, not yet and that will happen. The experiences that we have in VR are all shallow, there’s nothing there.
So rollercoaster rides essentially?
DS: It’s all demo-ware out there and that’s okay. We still have to reinvent the entire idea of what entertainment is. It’s a new thing, we don’t know what it is yet and there is a lot of experimentation going on.
“Even the old guys don’t know anything, the new guys don’t know shit and that’s okay because we’ll all learn together”
What’s funny and stupid is the idea that people think that they can start telling other people what VR is. All these ‘professionals’. I see these experts emerging saying “Oh we’re gonna teach you how to make VR content.” How stupid. the best thing you can do is just be creative — do something new and different. Don’t listen to other people because they’re wrong. They don’t know, if they knew then we’d be there. We haven’t even started, the biggest thing is the knowledge that we don’t know anything. Even the old guys don’t know anything, the new guys don’t know shit and that’s okay because we’ll all learn together.
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