Anthony Batt Is Just Getting Started
Gnomes & Goblins, theBlu and Waves creators Wevr signal the coming VR creative explosion
For Anthony Batt, virtual reality was a natural extension of what he had already been working on since 2004. As the cofounder and CEO of social media music and celebrity content network Buzznet/BUZZmedia, since rebranded as SPIN media, Batt owned and operated one of the largest blog networks: 45 sites drawing 102 million unique visitors per month. There he first saw the deep desire for users to fully immerse in their interests.
So an opportunity to start Wevr (then called Wemo) with Scott Yara and Neville Spiteri just made sense. And it’s made a lot more sense since, with the Los Angeles-based virtual reality shop making big statement after big statement in a space largely defined by speculation.
While most companies keep their VR initiatives secretive — more known for massive investments and unbelievable valuations than anything they’ve actually built or created — Wevr plays no such charades, having released acclaimed experiences from industry-awakening theBlu to award-winning Waves to the hotly anticipated preview of their collaboration with Jon Favreau, Gnomes & Goblins.
We caught up with Batt to discuss what they learned from their early successes and mistakes; what the future holds for Transport, their distribution platform; and how to bridge the seemingly-wide gap between software and hardware.
There Is Only R: When did your interest in Virtual Reality begin? When did you begin to see it as viable medium and business opportunity?
Anthony Batt: VR was a continuum of what we were already working on, which was digital media. Not to bore you, but before I did VR I owned and operated the largest network of bloggers. I had 45 sites seeing 102 million uniques per month. So we saw a deep immersive desire to continue to look at all the content.
Immersive-ness, the desire to be immersed in subject matter for something you love, actually is occurring now. Someone that likes looking at houses, you ask them, “Why do you look at Zillow for 30–45 minutes a day?” Well, it’s because they like it.
They’re immersed in it. Taking the ten years of myself doing that, then fast forwarding, when I started looking at truly immersive medium, meaning you could actually put your head into it, I realized the core compulsion of immersive even on the Web is going to translate to an HMD. I thought this was a perfect storm of, can you marry a compulsion like looking at houses, or reading, or watching content, or playing games and make it immersive?You actually have the perfect product for this characteristic that I see in mass culture.
And so that makes it, to me, a business.
How did you end up there?
We were three cofounders — Scott Yara, Neville Spiteri and myself. Scott Yara and I started company called Metapa, which changed its name, kind of did a pivot in 2001-ish. We had a fundamental belief that data was going to be the core of enterprise, and we created a company called Greenplum.
And Greenplum became a massively scalable database which we sold to EMC. It had its own little thing inside EMC, and got spun out. It’s now called Pivotal.
Scott and I were cofounders in another company. Neville was one of our first engineers that got hired. When Neville and I both left Greenplum, we stayed in touch, and then when Greenplum sold to EMC, Scott said, “Hey, let’s do something.”
At the time I couldn’t do it. I was running a company called Catalyst. My partner is Ashton Kutcher.
So when my deal came up there, I decided to join Scott in developing what we call immersive content, and building AI sims. We weren’t called Wevr, we were called Wemo, and then once we got the DK1, we were like, “Okay, we’re just gonna do nothing but VR-related content, nothing else, just that.” That’s how we all came together.
When you decided you were just going to do VR, what did you set out to do?
Back in 2013, we focused on making VR content. Doing that makes you have to do the entire stack. In early systems you always have to end up doing everything, you know what I mean.
What we identified immediately was there was significant lack of quality interstice 3-D video playback, so we went out and built a product that’s now called Transport, which allows you to distribute and play video content on Vive, Rift and Gear, other HMDs. That may sound trivial now, but in 2013 it wasn’t. That product still works, still exists and is actually pretty robust. We’re going to be releasing more content on it.
Transport was one layer we attacked. The other layer was: we wanted to fundamentally become experts at the craft of creating this medium called VR. We use the word simulations too, we don’t always use the word VR. For example, we wanted to take people into some deep meditation, so we worked with Deepak Chopra to create some simulations for that.
Look at Gnomes & Goblins: it’s definitely a virtual reality world, but you’re in a sim. There’s AI, there’s things happening.
To understand what kind of software and infrastructure and tools have to be developed, you have to become the best in the world, in order to say here’s what’s needed. In computer programming in the early days, if you wanted to write a new language, you had to create a compiler to compile your new language.
The way we approach things is very much like an engineering discipline. That discipline is wrapped in creativity. We said, we’re going to make the best VR in the world, the best playback systems, interactive systems that supply that great VR. What we’ve been doing since 2013 now is a little bit more. There’s a little more speciality out there. There’s more software out there: we don’t really have to write anything for post production because that’s pretty much taken care of.
And like stitching: Google’s got some great algorithms and I think that’s going to happen. We don’t have to worry about that stuff.
On the camera side, we developed our own cameras for specific situations. We feel like our camera systems still hold up, but there are better camera systems we can buy commercially so we don’t have to worry about that. We’re really starting to just now focus on what is the best content, what’s the actual best way to tell a story for this new medium, and not look in our rearview mirror about any old mediums, like television, or film or gaming.
It’s just a new medium. What does it mean? And then we’re focusing on distribution and how do we get things around the world to people, so they can see it.
How do partnerships with companies like Reality1 allow you to further that reach and realize your full potential? What is the main motivation behind partnerships like that?
When you meet great people, you just want to have friendships but also create great working partnerships. That’s how that relationship first got started. When Reality1 started to grow, we thought we were both really great complements to each other because we have a core discipline of creating content, and Clint and Reality1 were focusing on distribution, rights management and essentially becoming a core partner on production.
That relationship is really easy to establish, as as result of the friendship we had. But it just makes sense. We have capabilities to make VR at a high level, and Reality1 was just starting and was able to help us kind of get deals, make deals, and that’s where that relationship started.
That’s the very beginning. I think Reality1 is going to grow into a very powerful distribution and original IP company. We just want to always be close to that, because people at Reality1 are people we want to have a multi-decade relationship with.
Shifting to content now—what would you identify as your first major success with Wevr, a signal to you all that you’re headed in the right direction?
I think it’s easy to say theBlu, which is running on Vive. It’s pretty, it’s Transport, for sure. And this is more of a nuanced win, but also when we started to embrace the creative community that doesn’t make synthetic sim-based worlds— the Reggie Watts, the Ben Dickinsons, the WeDidIt, like we did so much work last year or 18 months ago. Meeting those folks, and them and us being immediately able to put our heads down and make quality work — all of them got selected to go to festivals around the world — was really like an internal win for us.
We can embrace them, we can display them, and we can make great content. And we can really make transformational storytelling — I think that was an internal win for us.
So theBlu also represents a consumer win. If you meet anyone in VR, you just ask them what was the most important piece you saw? Almost eight out ten times they’ll tell you theBlu. And if out of the two times they didn’t mention it, you’re like “What about theBlu?” they’ll be like, “Oh yeah, that was the one with the play with the sense of scale, and all that kind of stuff was so important.”
But then on the live-action side, usually people will reference The Visitor, or or Reggie Walks Away because those were all at so many festivals, and those VR films really made a dent in the creative community in such a profound way that people actually wanted to go and see how to make that.
Contrarily, what were some early mistakes you all made?
Oh shit, there are just so many little ones. I think the biggest one would be you’re biting off more than you can chew in a single company — just taking on that much work. If you look at our slate, we have like 35 projects made, almost all of them internally, except for a couple.
And when you look at that, it’s like that’s just too much. We got really lucky that all of them turned out pretty great, but I mean this isn’t about that content. It’s more about wow, you just did way more, you probably took on way more than you should have, and maybe if you took on less, you would’ve gotten 20 percent better creative outcomes on the other projects. But we were super creatively infused, so we just greenlit everything.
So have you figured out how to temper that excitement now, as you see more and more traction by people who weren’t privy to VR before?
No, our enthusiasm is actually higher, but we have more financial rigor and commitment to being a little more precious about what we pick. But our excitement is continually growing.
Absolutely. Moving to Waves and Gnomes & Goblins, how did your earlier successes and mistakes influence the production of those?
So Waves, it was a first-time director to direct something in 360. He pulled it off, but we did the post ourselves and we underestimated how much post there was going to be, and how much rendering time there would be. We started off with 18 minutes. I think we trimmed it down to 12. So we just way underestimated the cost, the time, just everything on that.
The piece we did with Samsung and Skype, which is 100 minutes long, is still the single longest episodic piece made in VR. I’m on a Paramount lot speaking on a conference call on the lot, and that was the piece they wanted me to talk about, but that piece was 100 minutes long, and it has full interactive video based on time shifting. That piece was probably way to ambitious for us, and we would have fit that project differently. We would have probably actually selected a different way to shoot it, but we were out in the field and it’s very hard to do.
Just think of all the stuff we did with Reggie Watts, Run The Jewels, Gnomes & Goblins — we’re just taking that and dropping acid on it, and turning it to eleven.
But the outcome was amazing. But those are sort of internal things that we just learned by doing. There’s some naiveté in doing this stuff that we have to do. We kind of said, “Yeah, we can do that.” Then you realize like whoa, it’s really wrong.
There’s so many micro fails that happen that just build the company’s capability and grit to become so much better. There hasn’t been any catastrophic palm-to-the-forehead fails right now, knock on wood.
What is the role of AI?
You asked were there things we’d have done differently. The way you write software: you write, then you’re like “that’s not it.” You write again, that’s not it. You write again, that’s not it. And then finally there’s a breakthrough, or you write and there’s a bug, and that bug is actually the unintended consequence. That’s the thing you wanted.
There’s lots of that on all of our projects. But writing that kind of code helps the project. There’s a lot of learning that you do, and there’s also a lot of trial and error.
You’ve worked with a variety of projects — Reggie Watts, Jon Favreau, Deepak Chopra, humor, fantastical interactive VR, mindfulness. What do you look for in partners and projects? What makes your ideal partner and project?
We think about the partner under a lens of what is that partner’s audience? We look at people that want to be in a meditation simulation: we look at that first. We’re like, “Yeah, there’s a real place here, this is an area that we want to occupy and explore.” Then we went to Deepak Chopra.
He has endeared himself to an audience that wants to explore that space, so we think about the user and what we can bring to them first, and then partner.
We looked at Reggie Watts and we’re like: fiercely smart, amazingly creative, he’s like unbelievable, right.
And he touches an audience in a way that influences the influencers, and we really believe in him. So we said, let’s do something with Reggie. We got Ben on top of that.
This is a new medium and frankly, no one knows what they’re doing. We are pretty wise, but it’s too new for anyone to have extraordinarily fixed ideas.
Then with Jon Favreau, it’s really looking at his body of work and how that work actually affected so many people. And we were like “this is a guy that is so genuine. He’s so tuned in and he’s so smart, and he wants to explore VR. And his audience is so that he pushed the envelope for Iron Man and everything.” So we’re like, “Yes, this is the guy we want to work with.”
There are a lot of people in Hollywood that are filmmakers or directors, but most of them we don’t want to work with. There’s only one Jon, and all of Hollywood only has one Jon. There’s no one else like Jon, period. He’s unique.
And nothing against Hollywood filmmakers, but Jon has a sort of self-awareness, the actual respect of the technology, knowledge of technology, and knowledge to say, “I’m going to go into the new medium and I’m going to learn.” We want to work with people, when we talk about partners, that actually want to learn. We do not want to work with partners that are like, “I know what I’m doing, I’m this previous director.”
This is a new medium and frankly, no one knows what they’re doing. We are pretty wise, but it’s too new for anyone to have extraordinarily fixed ideas.
You write software, then you’re like “that’s not it.” You write again, that’s not it. You write again, that’s not it. And then finally there’s a bug, and that bug is actually the unintended consequence. That’s the thing you wanted.
We want people to be brave enough as we enter into doing this that they’re actually saying, “I’m making a new space of learning, and creative, and trial and learning. I’m going to leave what I’ve learned behind and call on it when necessary.” I don’t want people coming in with what they already have and say, “Hey, I just want to drop this into VR, boom, it’s done.” That’s just a huge fail, we stay away from all that.
There’s a lot of that happening right now. There’s a lot of people from the game side, the film side that are trying to repurpose, and repurposing will not work.
We have to find native creative thinkers that want to make something happen in a simulated 360 world that we call VR.
You’ve talked a lot about about unique creators brave enough to explore, learn, creative. As producers, what’s the most important thing for you to do in order to allow these creatives to create? What are things you find yourself needing to walk back, and what are the things that you need to encourage?
Great question. After doing like 30 projects, I should be able to have a quick answer for you, but I don’t.
Every project, every person I’m working with, is so unique in their own way that I can’t necessarily say here’s the standard thing I do, or here’s what I want to do. At the highest level what we do is try to make it a safe place, and we try to show them a lot of the VR.
A lot of people that are new have never seen VR. They don’t even know what it is, so we try to give them ample time to actually dwell in VR. And then what we do is we take them through lots of shots of what we’ve done, and explain how those are made, and why they were made, why did we do this, why did we do that, etc.
We get them very familiarized. Then at that point it’s like “just be creative,” and we stress the new medium, and this new medium doesn’t care about your old-media goals.
That’s why I go back to saying make it a safe place. The reason we use the word “brave” often: guys that have big careers don’t need to make lots of risks. And it takes people that aren’t brave and have the courage to say “I’m gonna go in this new area, and I might actually fail.” So we have to make it a safe place for that to happen.
Gnomes & Goblins is being previewed on Steam. I remember when I was talking to Rob Ogden, he was really excited about the kind of feedback loop through Steam. What are your thoughts on the feedback loop between larger studios like yourself and individual developers who are testing preview things and giving their two cents? How constructive is that for you?
It’s constructive now. I think Steam is a very sharp place, has a tolerance of almost zero, you know what I mean? So for example, I don’t think we’re going to release the Deepak Chopra meditation simulation in the Steam, it just doesn’t make any sense and the trolls will attack.
Because it’s not a game. There’s a huge portion of the audience that’s not a small number, it’s 150 million people that are kind of like “get this VR shit out of our PC gaming religion area, it’s not cool,” right. So for us, releasing theBlu and Gnomes & Goblins there, we’ve gotten really high quality reviews because the fidelity of the experiences.
Therefore the feedback loop has been positive. If it was not good, it’s a lot easier for all humans to write a negative review than to actually find an honest way to say something nice about something. It’s just harder.
And in Steam, the encouragement is to actually be snarky and bitter. But when they find stuff they love, they actually write really good feedback. It’s like quality feedback. But the signal to noise ratio — you have to get up above the snark and pile-on, and then you get a really strong signal that these people are experts. Just like if you were in a stacked overflow thread, writing the best sort of react module.
The signal in there is really good because the people that are actually writing the language react are there listening. But if you go in there and just throw up some crap, it’ll either get ignored, which is kind of the worst case, or you’ll be hold the bail, you know what I mean?
So I think that feedback loop is critical, and it’s also a medium in which we live in. I’ve made most all of my career in the Internet. I’ve lived in a feedback loop system, so we’re comfortable in it. And the film industry hasn’t really had audience participation really forever.
It’s always been through editors, or writers. We love writers, but at the same time the critics are sometimes always deadpanning things that were amazing and vice versa, they were looking for something really artistic that the audience was just like what? You know what I mean?
So someone from Madison Wells is more oriented toward a notion of where they come from, which is film and television, and therefore the feedback loop might not seem new or interesting, but for us it’s old hat, you know what I mean?
Where is the content with regard to the hardware? They seem to be developing at very different rates.
Hardware gets to live and die by Moore’s Law. It literally has a linear — the actual way hardware is catching up or surpasses — by the way, hardware has been ahead of VR content since Day One, going back to the 1960s. The software may actually never catch up. The actual content may never catch up to the content’s capability.
Because coming up with a creative, though, and mastering it into a project that can hold someone’s attention is extraordinarily hard. There’s sort of a non-Moore’s Law — there’s no scientific thing, you know. Movie studios, and book publishers, magazines — everyone has been trying to figure out how to create a supply-chain side of content or storytelling, so that it’s just easy, it just pops out. Like, can we have an algorithm like that?
They’re having Big Blue now cut trailers. Okay, that’s cool, but the best creative is irrational. The mistake becomes the idea. So that just takes time, you know what I mean? Hardware has a much different sort of lifetime, so I think hardware will stay ahead.
Now, the creatives all want stuff the hardware can’t do right now. It’s like, “Hey, I don’t want to have a tether to my PC. I don’t want to hold big bulky controllers.” Like, “Hey Oculus, where are the controllers?” There’s all these things that we want or we can foreshadow that we need, and we don’t have, but that’s what’s coming all the time.
But for the creatives saying “I want this thing” — they may say they want that, but they might not have the actual content or story to actually take advantage of the time the hardware guys drop on it. Make sense?
The creative can say “I want this,” but when they get it they’re like, “Oh, well now I’ve got to make this, which takes time,” right? So there’s the interplay that’s happening. I’m not a scholar or expert on all that, but I’m saying right now the Vive device can deliver amazing experiences. So can the mobile version. And inside the constraints of those systems, the creatives have to actually punch through and make something amazing.
Stories for television are getting actually better. Television, the hardware has gotten no better in a sense. Does that make sense?
So at some point it’s upon the creative to actually make the best thing in the world. My mantra is always “no pressure to diamonds.” Your hardware is not your limit, it’s the creativity, and the hardware is what you have to unlock that.
But the hardware guys will continue to deliver stuff. I mean as you look at the Oculus thing, they’re like, “Hey, here’s this, this, this and this.” And in one case, John Carmack was basically saying hey, if Qualcomm and Samsung would just do this one thing, we’d get a 50 percent improvement.
In one sense you could say, “Well no, the hardware guys are blocking.” Well, they’re blocking, but if we actually got that 50 percent improvement, is the creative community going to take advantage of that 50 percent improvement at Day One? No, it’s going to take them some time to move into that.
But my last thought on that is the creative community that is making everything is what’s driving hardware innovation. Because until VR came out, it was you know, screens, and all GPU, and all this stuff — nothing was happening. And then what happened was this boom, everyone wants to make VR, so everyone, Nvidia, Qualcomm — you know, everyone — they’re all like “Holy shit, let’s let’s do this.”
And now they’re unlocking all their geniuses to make stuff smaller, faster, better, cooler. You know what I mean? Cooler meaning temperature, thermal temperature.
What then are the biggest needs in software and hardware? What are the biggest shortcomings in the space for each?
The hardware needs to become no tether, interactivity. You need controllers. It needs to be light. The human design of it needs to just change drastically.
It needs to go from the Motorola flip phone to the iPhone. That seemed gradual, but actually there’s a lot of engineering effort in there. And remember, when iPhone dropped, there was no amazing content on there. It was just like “Oh, you can make a phone call and you have a crappy phonebook.”
Then like seven years later it was boom, the earth changed, you know. The hardware here right now is all there, but it’s really raw. It’s like you’re connected to like a GOB PC, a GOB box, and then that all has to become invisible.
Let’s leave it at that: we need real human designers to get in there and make that thing invisible, light to wear and fun.
On the software side, the only two options are Unity and Unreal, and if you make video and you want to put like any sort of interactivity or you want to put any sort of CG clickable item, you’re screwed. It just doesn’t exist.
That was like a $2 or $3 billion idea. It’s a fucking right click.
We’re the only people that we know that have software that allows you to put video that can run at frame rate, with thermal control on headsets, and also have 3-D elements in it— and we’re a small company.
But all of that has to change. Premier, all of the Adobe products need to actually be able to offer you complete and full geometry distortions, with a right click. It’s like, “Hey, I have this thing. I’m gonna right-click it, now it’s conformed for Daydream, Oculus, Rift.” That just needs to happen. And that’s just geometry.
This is literally a guy that knows geometry. There’s already plugins that you can buy, but they’re a little funky. Adobe just needs to step up an solve this problem, boom, done, so every editor in the world is like “Wow, cool.”
Then the actual cube mapping and reversing it back to rectangular would be that simple. That needs to be right clicks and simple. Just sort of like Pinterest said, “Hey, we’re gonna make it so you can save a photo.” Well, couldn’t you always just drag a photo from a webpage on your desktop, or click and hit save-as, then make a selection to what folder you want to save on your desktop?
And then when it’s on your desktop, you can’t show it to anyone unless you have Dropbox, of course, and you upload it. They just said, “Fuck it, we’ll click the image, save it, everyone in the world can see it.” That was like a $2 or $3 billion idea.
It’s a fucking right click.
Look, I just saved a photo, right. There was so much friction pent up in every human. It was like “I want to save this photo, and be able to recall it or share it. I don’t want to drag it in the desktop and do all this crazy crap.” It’s a $3 billion idea, $3 billion right click.
There’s literally a $20 billion or $100 billion set of ideas that say if you want to make 360 content in interactive functionality, here’s a right click to stitch your stuff, you’re done. Google, hats off to them, made stereoscopic renderings. Zero friction.
I shoot on the camera, 16 cameras, I upload it. Five hours later they give it to me as a stereo image. We need more of that. That software needs to be completely freely available to everyone that wants to use it.
I can just go down the list — like audio. I need to put spatial audio in a headset, and I don’t want to have to continue to put a headset on and off my head and my neck’s breaking. I want to be able to design my audio elements with sound, and shapes and volumes inside of VR, so I could be looking at the tree, and I could go I’m gonna drop a wind on that tree, I’m going to adjust the sound to this level.
When I walk over here, I want the wind to sound differently. Oh, now there’s water over there, I’m gonna throw some water on the water, and I’m gonna add water there, so whenever you walk by it’s perfectly done. So I just spend hours talking this through, and other entrepreneurs need take note, Adobe needs to take note and just do it.
Turning to the consumer side, what are the biggest challenges for VR and for Wevr in marketing and reach audience? The challenges with reaching people outside your community?
I want to sound confident but at the same time humble —I think we kind of know how to make this stuff at a pretty high level. So I think we’re like, hey, we’re competent, we’re always learning, and we’re confident. We feel like we’re in a good swing line there.
But we’re a startup, so we’re suffering from classic startup stuff, like we need to hire more quality people, and we’ve also got to control our burn. Okay, how do you do that? That’s just hard work, right, that’s execution.
Strategically, we think we’re in a good spot. We have stellar content. We have a core strong team, but we’ve gotta grow everything.
Marketing and reaching people is always a functional of how well you do work, right? I don’t believe necessarily in the classic form of marketing. I believe in a new form of marketing where you become noticed, and when you become noticed, you actually can tell your story.
I think we’ve been noticed, meaning we keep showing up, we keep bringing good work, people notice, and they want to talk to us and we want to talk about it. We have no classic marketing where we’re buying banners and crap like that, trying to scream for your attention.
We get attention as a result of doing good work. We get attention by being nice people. We get attention by actually showing up and being friendly. That’s the company we are. When we start getting even bigger, we’ll always come in the form of how are we sharing content, are we making great content? That’s going to be our form of marketing.
Now, we do some classic stuff — we’re printing posters for stuff like that, but that’s all execution. The way you get noticed nowadays is to do good work.
Aside from production and distribution, how do you plan to support further development in the VR community at large?
We’re going to distribute most of our platform to our platform called Transport, sort of how Netflix markets and delivers their content. They have a really good package called Netflix, you download it and you put it on your devices, you go and watch Luke Cage because you like Luke Cage. You know what I mean?
You’re kind of popping up to where that’s just a regular media business. How does anyone work inside a media world? You make an app, you promise the consumer that downloads the app or pays you for the app, that you’re gonna continue to reinvest that money and make joyful experiences for them. That’s what we’re going to do.
We’re gonna have great content, it’s gonna get noticed. People are going to say “How do I get Reggie Watts?” We’re going to download Transport, put it on your phone, put it on your Vive, put it on your Rift, turn it on, boom you’ve got it. If you like that, there’s plenty more behind it. Does that make sense?
At that point it’s not, “VR is digital media asset.” All digital media assets follow the same pattern of how it gets to consumers. There’s no magic pixie dust on how that works.
Are you able to talk about any major projects coming up that we haven’t, aside from the completion of Gnomes & Goblins? Anything you’re really excited about that’s coming out?
We have some dope stuff coming out, all of which I can’t tell you about. I want to and Keith will probably hang the phone up or kill the conference line, but we have some really cool stuff that’s just taking it to the next level. I’d love to break all our NDAs and get in lots of trouble, but I can’t, so I won’t.
But yeah, it’s more cool stuff — just think of all the stuff we did with Reggie Watts, Run The Jewels, Gnomes & Goblins — we’re just taking that and dropping acid on it, and turning it to eleven.
