The AR Show: Nicole Lazzaro (XEO Design) on the Four Keys to Crafting Compelling AR & VR Experiences

11:25PM Jan 17, 2022

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Nicole Lazzaro

Keywords:

game

metaverse

emotions

ar

fun

play

experience

world

vr

create

mechanics

xr

sims

called

design

people

book

keys

work

great

Welcome to the AR show where I dive deep into augmented reality with a focus on the technology, the use cases and the people behind them. I'm your host Jason McDowall.

Today's conversation is with Nicole Lazzaro. Nicole is the founder and president of XEO Design. Previously, she was the designer of Tilt, the first iPhone game to utilize the accelerometer, but it's her research into player emotions as attracted big firms like EA, Sony and Ubisoft to seek out her expertise. By tapping into emotion profiles, Nicole helps designers create more engaging gaming experiences that resonate with all types of players from casual to hardcore.

Nicole has been a leading expert in player experience design for 30 years, she laid the foundation for her research and insights by earning a degree in cognitive psychology from Stanford. In this conversation, we dig into her distillation of how we as humans engage with games. She calls this framework the Four Keys to Fun. Nicole shares her work on Myst and The Sims franchises broaden the industry's perspective and helped motivate her to pursue her research. Nicole also shares how she turned her focus and insights to AR and VR.

What we've seen is a lot of focus on let's bring the traditional games that work on pancake monitors and try and bring them you know, we'll just blow really hard and get them like all puffed up or something. And then we're going to make them dimensional. And we'll create, we'll recreate them in VR. And they will work to a certain extent, but they're not going to be you know, from the ground up VR and AR experiences. And so I've been a long proponent since 2015. Or so I think. I've been giving talks about design leadership, the need for design leadership in VR, the need to fund innovation, the need to create new kinds of experiences. And so there are these enormous, you know, swaths of blue ocean out there in the ecosystem of XR, that haven't even been nibbled on yet.

We go on to talk about her work on the Bose AR glasses in her current XR project, as well as her take on the biggest risk and hope for the new types of AR and VR experiences we're all creating. Let's dive in.

Nicole, I know you love to travel the world, what was one of your most favorite or most unexpected discoveries you made while traveling?

That's a very good question. And it would have to be at the turn of this century, I found myself in Egypt, on top of a temple in the middle of the desert, looking out over the Nile. And it was a hot, dry, dusty day. And I reached down to get that last sip of water, you know, from my canteen. And as I looked at my feet, I stopped in amazement, because they're right, where I was standing, someone on the top of a temple, someone had carved a game board. And I thought, wow, you know, two people had stood where I stood 2000 years ago, and you know, thought to pass their time with a game. And so I had to wonder, you know, what kinds of games did they play then? And then what would they think of the games that we played now, and this was in 1999. And then looking forward into, say, the year 2020? What kind of games would I want to be playing at that, you know, at that point in the far distant future. And I realized, you know, as I walked back to my boat on the Nile, is that everything that I knew about games, the way they were made, funded, distributed, to get the experiences, I was thinking of everything would have to change. And because we didn't have the rules, we didn't have the rules, we didn't have the tools or the language even to describe the kinds of experiences that you know, I wanted, that I wanted to have, you know, in this, you know, in this year 2020. And, you know, looking from that, you know, vision of games in 2020, back to what was present then in 1999, that 2020 vision, you know, I just realized that there was so much that we didn't know, because games at the time, you know, they had like three emotions, and they're great, you know, it's awesome. But the if you look at any two kids and a group of kids playing tag, you know, there's a whole pantheon of human emotions, all from a game with a single rule. Yeah, Tag, you're it. So again, like my 20 year vision was I wanted to get there, I wanted to get that those tools in the language. And that's when I started my research on emotion and games. How did we How do games create emotions? And what can we do to make make new kinds of experiences that are as compelling as the games we play in real life? In 1999? What were the three emotions that you saw the games had at that time? Well, the the games at the time, I really, it was all about and I would get this this criticism when I would, you know start talking about games and emotions. It's like, well, games had three emotions they had the thrill of victory, you know, and the agony of defeat, and you know, you might have like the camaraderie from the battlefield type of type of thing, or maybe games can be

you cry, that was a common thing. And at the time, there were, you know, probably about only five genres of games, and they were good, you know, they were good games, but it's kind of was kind of like going to a Toys R Us. And there being only five kinds of toys on the shelves. Now you had your, you know, you had your cowboys and Indians or you had your, like your cowboy, kind of, you know, shooting kind of war games, you had your, you know, your racing games, you had your sports equipment, you had your dollhouse, you know, for The Sims, but not a lot else. And so what I was hoping in starting the work, and eventually releasing it, you know, for free, was to inspire other developers to come up with new kinds of mechanics gives them a framework, so they could come up with new mechanics, that moved people in very different ways. Because I had, you know, a lot of experience of seeing emotions, I had done so much work in prior research, that I knew the games were capable of making all these, you know, hundreds of emotions. And all we needed to do is we just needed that tools and language and the inspiration to create new kinds of games that stood on that framework, you know, and created these new experiences from, you know, interacting, and, you know, in a game kind of context,

and how did you take that sort of insight that there was this big gap between what games were focused on creating in terms of emotions and what they could create in terms of emotion? How did you distill that and extract from that a framework that others can now use to create a broader stretch, broader breadth of experiences?

Well, I knew that game developers love psychology, and that they really liked, you know, things like operant conditioning, and you kind of the psychology of the slot machine, lots of really good research on that. So I thought that if I proposed not a counter narrative, but another way of thinking about games that had a very good strong psychology background, because I have a degree in Psych from Stanford. And then then if I could release that as research, that's where one person could kind of steer the mothership, if it was interesting enough, and if people were and effective enough. So I went through a very long process, I did a whole year of secondary research, which was a lit review, reading all that I could about emotions, and game and design, and from all the disciplines from movie from film architecture, to product design, and there wasn't a lot of the time for sure. But I did that. And then I then did the dive into psychology. So the how could we measure the reactions of gamers and you know, I could do a, you know, on one hand, you could do a satisfaction survey, or like, let them tell me like how many what kinds of emotions they were experiencing, or on the other, I might be able to do some, you know, biometric, you know, measurements of like galvanic skin response or pupil dilation. And that, but what I chose instead was, instead of the, is something that's called facial action coding. So I had found the work of Paul Ekman, and who does micro expressions, and he's become quite famous now that so I could directly measure, you know, 60 Emotions plus curiosity plus a few more directly from the player. So they didn't have to articulate the emotion, they don't have to know a lot of people are not even aware of their emotions, first of all, and so I felt it was a much it was a much finer toolset to work from. So in short, the short version of that story is that too, I knew that I had to do moment by moment measurement of emotions, during gameplay at home school work wherever they were. So I did also feel this was in the context of field research. So I designed the study to be field research. And then I needed to actually, you know, code by hand, you know, hundreds of hours of videotape, to identify these micro expressions, which are very quick. And then and then take those and do an enormous cluster analysis at the time, and still even still, is there wasn't a computer screen big enough to hold the data so that I could actually, you know, move it all around. So I printed it out on little strips of paper, these action emotion pairs, and the if you are if you're able to see it, but the wall behind me and to the side, there's actually a giant pinboard two giant pin boards that are used to actually you know, pin up these different emotions and these actual emotion pairs and that's how I constructed that enormous you know, kind of cluster analysis to identify these Four Keys to Fun, each is a set of actions, if you will, mechanics that create related emotions, so the related mechanics related emotions, and they go across genres. So it's, you know, whether you were you know, I had people playing, you know, Tetris and be jeweled and Call of Duty and You know, World of Warcraft, they're all all ranges of games in different genres, and of course, different platforms and of course, different you know, genders.

As you went through this, these action emotion pairs. Give me an example of a cluster of related emotion or action, emotion pairs and how they ended up coming down. Being distilled into a single

one of my favorites is easy fun, which is a fairly original part of the model in the secondary research that I did there. are a couple of other models and stuff like that one, of course is Bartles for player types. And Bartow was a big fan of my research and I'm definitely a big fan of his as well. But what I was seeing is I wasn't seeing a lot in the data I wasn't seeing a lot of player killers which is one of his four I wasn't seeing you know, that didn't work and B jewel that didn't work with a lot of a lot of games. It didn't seem to across everything. So an example of this was what did I found? Well, I saw things if you can imagine I saw that there was a lot of areas of appeal so in I really look at a couple of things like the game the board game Clue, for example. And clue gameboard is this top down view for those perhaps outside the US it's called Cluedo, I believe in the UK, you have a top down view of a mansion, and there's a murder that happens in one of the rooms and you're our detective and you have to play this game about Okay, was it Colonel Mustard or, you know, Scarlet plum, you know, in the drawing room with the rope or with the candlestick. With the game board, you forget the game, the game board itself was just amazing. And you see this pattern design pattern throughout traditional board games, and then also games themselves, is that you just I would just sit there as a kid and just look at one of the rooms like what happens if I go to that secret passage from the kitchen to the library? What was that like? And in between the turns you know, you get these these moments. And that that element I then started to see in the in its electronic form as well. And so I saw people, you know, playing just for the sound of the cards shuffling you're playing solitaire, just for the card shuffling. I see people playing with bubble wrap. Easy fun is definitely the bubble wrap of game design, people would play for story and not want any of the challenge. They just wanted to be there immersed in that world where they'd finish a level and then they run back and just play in the world just be in the world and play in the world even though it was completely outside of the challenge. And in pair testing since we had some some people your friends playing together as well, some multiplayer testing is that we saw that sometimes the person who wasn't as good at the game would then start making the game like Forza or something like that a racecar game is they would basically actually, you know, they would make a new game of trying to run their car and everybody else because that's something that they could they could do. So this off track play. They weren't good at the main game that hard fun of the game, if you will, the main challenge the main goal but instead they started you know just trying to disrupt everybody else's experience and and having fun that way. And then you know, there was a way of including it so and you saw it in World of Warcraft, the ability to you know, you do the dungeons, you can do like the main quests, but you can also just spend the day Irving and that was sometimes just going you know, gathering stuff in the world environment was sometimes people's favorite experience fishing in like Ultima Online Everquest. Also very simple feature to program and actually drove probably more hours of gameplay than some of their larger dungeons. So that's when that's the kind of the birth of what we call easy fun, which is like it's like blowing bubbles. It's like bubble wrap. It's this it is the fun of novelty exploration. And surprise, you know, that leads to joy leads to curiosity, wonder and surprise.

Is there an inverse of that? There's a there's a notion of like hard fun.

Yeah, absolutely. So what happens is that curiosity is usually the hook in a game that pulls you in, right? So it's easy fun. It's exploration fantasy roleplay. It's you're configuring your avatar in fortnight or in you know, in The Sims. And then kind of like dribbling a basketball is fun, just on its own. It's just it's repetition. It's got some fun, it's got some fun dynamics. But at some point, you then want to have more structure or a challenge because you get bored of the knob. The novelty window lasts for only about 15 minutes or so. And so then that's when hard fun break comes in. And so there's a goal there is obstacle and then strategy to get around that obstacle. And those three things are the key components for what we call hard, fun. And hard. Fun is very, it's a very interesting thing. If you think about play, it's because you're, you know, you're playing to relax, you're playing to have a good time. Why would you want to be so frustrated that you throw the controller out the window? And but that's, that's actually, you know, people will vary, of course, but to feel that feeling of epic win to feel like you won the Grand Prix. You can't just press a button and win, right? You have to basically go get yourself so frustrated, if you will, so that you're about ready to throw that controller in, you win at that point in time. That's when the arms go up. And you go, yes, you know, I got it, I won that I won the Grand Prix. And the arms punching the sky is what we call, we use the term fear from Italian, which is the feeling of that epic, epic win, and you have to be super frustrated first. So this is sort of this balance between, you know, difficulty and skill, and you have to vary as a game designer, we have to vary the player's emotions between those things, because if it's too challenging, and too frustrated, they'll quit. And if it's not challenging enough, then the they're gonna quit because they're bored. So you've got that balance between frustration and boredom. The are not at all the emotions from easy fun. So that's how I could really feel that those were two different playstyles two different things that were that were going on. And best selling games tends to do at least three out of the four different different types of fun

when you were describing some of the elements of hard fun reminds me of Joseph Campbell's journey, like the hero's journey, and the sort of struggle that in that standard story that we tell each other as humans of the common person who has to go who discovers themselves and has to go through this very difficult period of time. That usually forms them in some way. And then they you know, that the whole striving and ultimately achieving kind of mixed with all the self doubt, yeah, yeah. The obstacles along the way, it seems very similar.

It absolutely, yeah. Joseph Campbell's stuff, his the hero's journey really is definitely you can, I could see it reflected in the map of the four keys. The Four Keys to Fun is sort of like this compass, like the four points of a compass. And you have the you know, you have the, you know, the beginning story, which is often you know, you go easy fun, and then you you know, you cross the threshold, though, to you know, commit. And that kind of gets into a lot of the hard fun challenges, you have to bring your friends along. So that's, you know, that's a people Fund, which is the third key, and then you come back with, you know, Jason and the Golden Fleece. And that's, that's serious fun. That's the value. That's the reward at the very end. So I've done several analysis of side by side of the four keys and the mechanics inside of the hero's journey. And it's not surprising to me, you know, to me at all, there's a lot of really good psychology on why that on why his framework works so well.

So you'd mentioned the end here, very briefly, the other two categories of funders, the people fund, and then there's the serious fun. Can you talk a little bit more about the people fund side? Oh, absolutely.

Yeah. So people will play what I noticed, and I was sitting down talking with players and watching them play is that people will play games just to spend time with their friends. They'll play games that they don't like, in order to spend time with their friends, they'll play games, even though they hate playing games, in order to spend time with their friends. And then when we're watching people like Play console games, it really wasn't so much the experience really wasn't was actually not so much. Most game designers are dismayed when I say this, but it's really was not as much like what you see on the screen. The game, the experience to them was the experience on the couch between people. And so what we saw is that people playing World of Warcraft, for example, in separate rooms using like a voice chat, or voice and video chat, they weren't nearly as emotional as they were, if they were playing, you know, into two computers in the same room, even though it was the same game. So colocated group play as the most emotions that have that any kind of play, you know, any kind of game has an In fact, there are more mechanics, and there are more emotions, more intense emotions, more frequent emotions, in people fun, that third key than the other three really combined, we have so many emotions around a social interaction interacting with people. And when the model came out in 2004, you know, we hadn't gotten our Farmville yet, we hadn't gotten the Wii yet. So there's a lot of things that have come out, you know, since then, that have really taken advantage of people fun,

this idea that people play the game, because their friends are playing, and they really don't care much what happens on the screen. It's just It's with their, their buddy, is really interesting. I'd once heard some analogy that so many games are basically just chat rooms with a purpose. And the purpose is really to be with your friends with something, something that's in front of you, right, you know, to kind of spur a bigger conversation.

And it goes even further, because the other data that we got in the study was that two people would play the game to stay in touch, you know, they were in the same town when they're growing up. But now they lived in different towns live totally different lives. And not only was it a way for them to chat, or you know, communicate, but they could create a shared experience that they could talk, they could share an experience that they could talk about later as well. And that which they wouldn't be able to do because they were in two different cities, right? And so that that is very, very, very important for social bonding are very rewarding. You know, social bonding is very rewarding. So that's a really wonderful thing that games do. And I think everyone should probably about everyone that's listening right now has had the experience of going over to a friend's house to play poker. And you've had the experience of one of your friends going, come on, shut up deal, you know, we're here to play poker not not chat, and some people will show up because they want to socialize and it's all about the people and other people want no talking. Let's just play poker, right? It's this is Poker. So that's a good example of people fun, whether you're into the hard fun of poker, right? And the betting and the strategy and reading people's faces or you're there to have a good time and you know, chuckle and laugh with your friends with people fun the emotion lead emotion is laughter so if it's if you people are laughing, you're getting social social bonding laughter laughter has a very some very amazing psychological properties as all the emotions do in the model you you know, bond with people But anyway, the the mechanics are, you know, communication cooperation and competition. And the emotions are laughter as I mentioned, but also like shot in Freud and envy. And of course, you know, I call it a mirror, but social bonding, you know, the feeling of the feeling of friendship, the feeling of friendship increasing is very, very important. And you can go further into, you know, neuro chemicals like serotonin and oxytocin if you like. But yeah, it's just it's a really fun, it's a really fun space that people find key.

The fourth one you mentioned, you'd also mentioned my namesake, Jason and his pursuit of the Golden Fleece. Yes. What how do you describe serious fun what what exactly is serious fun?

Well, serious fun was really was really interesting. And if you go onto my website, and you download the original white paper, actually called it altered states, the first time I published I changed it to serious fun for we got more data in educational games and stuff like that. And it felt like a better a broader, a broader title. And certainly, we have now serious gaming. So you know, that's a whole as a whole segment that's come out. So with what was really interesting with, with the research is that I saw people playing games at the morning, like they play, they're playing like online card games as a mental workout. That was their description. Yeah, I'm just doing this to, you know, kind of keep my brain active. And I feel like it's, you know, I'm pushing it, or I'm playing a trivia game to learn stuff, or I like this. Because it's based, I like playing Civ. Because there's so much history, and I'm learning about history. And so we would, in a sense, serious fun is all about people who are playing the games to change themselves, and to change the world around them. And so in a sense, serious fun is all about the game not being as much a waste of time, because it created value and or meaning for the person or growth, the feeling of gross is really important. And that's also true, like, in a very intense war game, for example, you had a lot of stimulus, and you know, you get this barrage of stuff, and you got to pay attention and that sort of stuff. And so that intense experience with a lot of excitement can actually you can, either you can get you excited, so you can be like feeling low, or whatever. And so now you're excited, or there's so much there that I have to, like, totally focus and become very zen. So it's kind of like smoking in ways like you know, you get it to be you know, to increase your arousal or to calm down. So you do both, you can do both, depending on the player and depending on their intent in going into the game. But they were literally using that to blow off frustration at their boss, they were literally playing, you know, a Call of Duty or, you know, Medicare to, to change their to change their state, just like some people were playing solitaire to kind of calm down, you know, after work, or they were had, they were late at work, and they would play a quick round of an intense game, so that they would get the adrenaline up a little bit so that they would stay awake driving home. And then then they could go to sleep, as opposed to getting caffeine because they wouldn't be able to sleep, or that's what their self report was that they wouldn't be able to sleep at the at the end. So it's a balance of, you know, desiring something and acquiring it, that's a kind of it completes the loop, it's the compliment to hard fun. Because the feeling of fear is very intense, it's a full body emotion, just like wander over, it's over an easy fun, I'd love to. But anyway, fear is really intense, but it's also very quick, it's very fleeting. And so, the serious fun mechanics will come in and extend that feeling of winning, extending that feeling of value, extend that feeling of accomplishment. And in fact, in some games, there might be 50 features that are all about you know about the serious fun, just making it feel like less like a waste of time. So with serious fine you get collection and completion mechanics, you get repetition, and rhythm mechanics, all of these are affecting the brain or the you know, the player psychology in a very specific way that you know, pulls them into the game and helps them you know, accomplish what they you know, what they intended to do. In the world of applying the four keys outside of games, you know, people will often wallpaper on points and badges and then consider that a game. But unfortunately, it's those are both those can be applied in a very extrinsic way, not a very intrinsic way. And you know, doing so often has very limited value and, and short shelf life you have because you have to keep increasing the reward and you have to induce novelty. So you have these huge you know, asset production things you'd have to climb in order to keep that working. Whereas if you had something that did intrinsically feel like you're making progress you know, then I think that that can be better. That can be much better so like in basketball you know dribbling the basketball is fun just on its own let's easy fun. And the hoop in a basketball court. It's not big and right in front of us. It's like small and overhead to make it challenging. So that's the hard fun, right? People fun you know all it's all about like socializing. You're playing it's multiplayer multiplayer game. And then at the end of the day, you're getting exercise. So that's the serious fun so I'm getting a workout. So I felt feel good about the game? That was fun. And then I also feel good, good because, you know, in my body I feel I feel just didn't feel good. And then I also feel assuming I didn't injure myself, of course, but then I also feel good because I'm, you know, working out and achieving, you know, my physical physical goals, stuff like that.

That is exactly my Friday night soccer game. Oh, yeah. How does a designer take this sort of framework and apply it? If they were starting with a blank sheet? Right, I want to create a great experience. How do I leverage the framework itself in order to do that? Well,

great. Yeah. So what we saw as we saw a lot of a lot of designers, developers and projects getting funded to chase the number one or number two in a category, so Oh, look, something something happens. So let's go you chase that let's go chase, miss, let's go chase, you know, the Sims, let's go chase, you know, Battlefield or whatever. And what would often happen is that they didn't, they would copy some of the most obvious mechanics, but not enough to complete all of these different circles. So I think the first thing for a developer to think about and designers think about is that the interactions in the world need to have completion. And so that it isn't just a list of features, it is a sequence of them, and they're built into systems and those systems have to when you use them, they have to come. And it can be a delayed completion, but they have to come to some kind of some kind of closure. And looking at the systems, looking at how that game was other games closed loop is super, super important. In using the framework, what we can do is we can come up with new genres, and new kinds of gameplay, because now we're dealing with not the not the tropes, not the game tropes, necessarily, but we can look under the hood into some of the inner workings. And so to use the four keys, what I encourage developers to do is to take a look at these, what I call action, emotion pairs. And so looking at your, your theme, looking at your story and your characters, what are some of the actions or the behaviors that you can take? And then what kind of emotions would those you know, could those could those tie into, and then on the opposite end, which is something like I did with tilt world is look at the emotions that really work on that platform. And then let's look at some of the mechanics of some of the actions that relate to those emotions. And then see if we can get some of these, you know, get a system of these actions together, that if we wire them together a certain way, then we'll get these, you know, loops that people can be can complete. That's sort of the super high level of you know, how to use the Four Keys to Fun.

Yeah. Does it apply outside of games? Like if I were to build an educational app, for example, or some other sort of experience to the four keys apply as well?

Oh, yes, absolutely. With my psychology background, I was really looking at what are some of the core kind of core motivators of human beings? And how did they engage in why would they engage in this curious phenomena called play, you know, it's, it's something that all mammals do. And so what, what and what and why, and if you look at it, all humans play all mammals play. And in the real world, a lot of that play, and a lot of fun is just when you become an adult, it just gets kind of squashed out. And that we're losing this amazing ability, or this amazing, this amazing faculty in a sense to, to to learn, essentially, we play to invent our future selves. So play is about learning, learning is about play all games, all games teach. So on that layer, almost all domains of human activity, have some element of play in them. On a more practical standpoint, spreadsheets, and if you think about spreadsheets, and websites, and photo editing software, and and, you know, data visualization, the ability to add a little bit of play can put the brain in a very good state to actually increase increase its performance, and then increase the the length of time or the amount of activity that you that you actually do. So if you've ever wondered why Google plays with their logo, it generates this and it's not obvious often, like what's going on. And so that generates this moment of curiosity. And that moment of curiosity is the ideal emotion to have if you are researching something on the internet, right? Because that's the brain state that you that you want, but you don't want the you know, get the sniper and move on kind of emotion you have in a first person shooter necessarily, you don't want a lot of fear, you don't want a lot of you know, the you know, avoid avoidance mechanics. To put it kind of in a story context if you think about like the world of suffer right now it's very you know, autistic almost, it's almost computing is a genre is very as a technology is very artistic. It doesn't really and I don't mean that by their it's my Photoshop, or my you know, my photo editing is, you know, laughing at me. Sometimes it must. But I made it the other way, in a sense that this we it doesn't really respond or respect or conform to us as emotional, emotional beings. So if you think of a photo, like if I'm doing a A movie poster a poster for a game from doing a poster for a game. Then at the very beginning of the process, I want to come up with wild ideas and do you know everything and do everything possible to make things work. And then the so I want to do everything, everything is just a wild ideas, I want to be having a good time, I want to have a positive aspects, I want to be goofing around a little bit later, I got to have to like winnow those down, I have to, you know, take those and more more seriously. So got to change my gears, if you will, I'm not like wild idea branching out, I'm like going in. So I have a very different emotional state from that to that. And then I need to get feedback from other people. So now I need some of social emotions, now I need to experience that. And then when I get to the deadline, then I've got to be like, okay, focus, a lot more negative effect. And like, Okay, this is the one this is these are the actual features that we're going to use. But my photo editing package, it has the same interface from the first to the last. So all of the emotions that it generates are interacting with it, just as it's generating it, it's all the same. And it's really up to me as the designer to bring those emotions, what we really need is, you know, this sort of Aeron chairs for the brain type of thing to we're cognitive, we are both cognitive and emotional creatures, and they work together. Our decision making process is both a cognitive one and a, an emotional one, you know, your brain and your heart type of thing. But it really is, it really, really is. Because if you have in the psychology and lit you, if you have a person that has it has injured in their emotional systems, they can look at a problem, like a choice on a menu, very, you know, logically, they can even tell you the consequences of each choice on the on the menu, but they can't actually make the decision very easily, because their emotions are not there to guide them. And so here we are in the world of computers and tech, and society, in general, asking people to make lots of decisions without providing them the tools. And I think it should be in the control of the person using them without the ability to give them you know, the ability to set an emotional context to make their work easier. So with this sort of thinking, you get, you've probably heard the phrase gamification. And that does come from, you know, my work and the work, you know, the work of others, to create a more playful, you know, kind of system or layer on top of things. But really, it's got to be worked into into the work itself, even into those actual decisions.

You mean to say that adding a leaderboard isn't the beginning and end of gamification, and an award?

I hope not? I hope not. I hope not. Well, first of all, because not everyone plays for social ranking. And secondly, just like people don't play for points, like we've done, we've done we did like about 40 projects with the play first on the Diner Dash franchise. And you know, only 10% of players really cared about their points at all. And then you so you really need to know, like, what is your, you know, what are what are those different reasons people play, and that maps in the four keys? Well, because they're different, you know, kind of motivators, people will, they tend to like three out of the four, they tend to have a dominant one, but they don't exclusively work in that. So as a developer, if you use the four keys to find and spread your mechanics out so that you've got a range of them, that you've got stuff in each of the each of the four quadrants, that really does help a lot with appeal. And it just just makes it a lot more fun.

Throughout your career, you've had an opportunity to touch a lot of different experiences both those created by third parties as well as things you've created yourselves. And I'd love to dig into some of those, maybe you can help us map or reflect on how how they were fine, or how the how the experiences you've created, again, map back to this framework that you've created. A couple of the biggest tiles that you've been involved with from back in the day are ones that I've also experienced and loved as a back in the day was missed incense. So two massive titles that were quite different than kind of what many of the what I thought of as a traditional computer game at the time. What made those those types of experiences fun. Oh, they

were just it was amazing to work with the folks at Cyan Worlds on UNMISS so we worked on three of them over the over the years and again also with the folks at Max's with we're right and Claire Curtin and Roxy and Lisa on the Sims and what made them very stand out in the time and were very influential in my understanding of what games could do is that they had mechanics that appealed to a broad audience it wasn't just you know this hardcore mature rated you know, hyper violent kind of kind of game neither of them more Miss was a very much of a storytelling game. It was a mystery it was a it's a game that tells the story really through environment you get character revelation, like peeling back an onion, as you would go through and you know bring bring the pages to each of the each of the books and the Sims was likewise more of a you know, kind Have a social experience. So you had the characters interaction, they didn't have to annihilate each other, they had to interact, or they you know or not, you can also play, you know, you also you could play like, you know, make the most money you could make get the most stuff, you can have the best friendships or whatever, multiple different types of goals in The Sims. And I thought that was really, really amazing. What was cool about the Sims, we worked on Sims two, with the team, we've done a set, we did several workshops, a column play shops, and for The Sims team, we came back on Sims two, and it was all about if you remember the UI, it was all about your, you know, your wants, and your fears, and your goals. So each of the characters had that. And so in a sense, like, what we did was we actually sort of baked the baked the four keys of fun into the AI of The Sims, because, you know, the characters all had emotion, emotion models, and then the players emotion model was also guiding the design of the AI. So that was really amazing. It's very privileged to work with work with the team, and all of those very talented developers, if you think about, it's social, so it can also be you know, you're, you're managing the health score, and you're managing the the happiness score of your little characters, that provides some some people fun, and then you've got the ability to interact with the interact with the environment, and, you know, work work with, you know, a number of different parameters under, you know, kind of under the hood, if you think about mist, what's amazing about that is that essentially, the first one was just a slideshow. It was written in HyperCard, with the add on the Supercard extension, so we could actually get color was one of the very first early color games. And we had that slow repetition of you know, clicking from screen to screen, because was a slideshow. Riven, which is another one we worked on was more, you know, more more rendered. So it wasn't quite as I mean, it had, it had had a lot more rendering in it. And so you just got into this rhythm of clicking, which is very much a serious fun sort of Zen like focus, you looked around so you, you know, you transport yourself into that world. And then you had these characters, especially in the first missed was that they were, you had to figure out what their motivations were. And the more they set the the narrative up in this amazing way, where the more you found out about the characters by helping them the less you wanted to help them in a sense, and then you had to choose, do I choose between you know, this, this, this brother, who's all about greed, and this or this other brother or the other brother, that's all about cruelty, which which person do I interact with? And there was nobody else and then was I involved in destroying the world because I could see these books being destroyed Was I playing a role in that so they did a lot of the got a lot of mileage on easy fun as well, because it was about mystery and trying to figure it out. And you had this you know, kind of extended very, very great things about extending the the play through, not quite explaining what things are from the SIR surrealistic art style. You had Shiprock island with a ship that was also a rock that just didn't quite make sense, the surrealism there. And moto that's up on I got to visit cyan the model is up on their wall says the journey is the reward. And that is a very different approach to game. So those were super eye openers for me. I want games could do.

Yeah, I remember playing mist and having these emotions, upon discovering the two brothers and who they really were being violently being very disappointed and frustrated. Like I felt those that conflict as I was playing through that game. That's so funny that you brought that back up for me,

well for and then for us, like when we worked on guru mist online, we did a number a lot of player testing for it. And it was quite significant. It was a very significant moment in my professional career because people were we brought in a bunch of you know, diehard mist fans to play the new the new mist, and they had brought back the original transportation sound, you know, when you put your hand on a book, of course not put your hand you put your hand on a mouse, that's not a clicker that's on the Upload arrow on the screen. But players felt like they put well, they said like, Well, when I put my hand on the book, I get these shivers up the back of my arm and up the back of my neck. And I went, Whoa, that's amazing. First of all, that's amazing feeling, I think we can all kind of feel that. Secondly, that's wonder that's the physiological sign of wonder. And they were doing that that moment in a game, that moment in a game created that emotion. And so that's when I was like, Okay, I need to study, you know, this isn't the another like penny drop type thing. I need to study this more, I need to get into this more and see like how we can connect them up. And that's how I knew that, you know, we, you know, in the start, I said there's only like three emotions. That's when I knew that there were more than three. We just didn't talk about them very well. We didn't have the tools or language or the way to like, you know, kind of figure it out. And so that's what started me. That's what started me off. There is a funny story at GDC that was also the another kick, kick in the backside for the four keys was that I had asked a question of a panel of like, all my favorite people again, all my favorite designers were up there on the stage. And so ask them, like, did they think it made sense to do a study? And you'd go out and like ask players what they thought about games. And, you know, maybe, you know, get, you know, get a sense of like, what created emotions for, you know, for people, like when they were actually out there playing. And at the time, at the time, this is again, before I released my research, they, you know, basically one after the other, if the other all these people I really love, just slam me down hard. And they said, No, that was silly. It was at the time, it was very much the tour kind of game designer. So there was no player testing in games, practically. There was no talk of emotions. And that was the well, yeah, so thrill of victory, the agony of defeat the feelings of the sports stadium, nothing else in games, not in my games, those kinds of those kinds of emotions. But I knew I knew because I'd seen what happened in in in mist, right, I knew I knew that there was creating, that was a moment of wonder, it was not on the stadium list at all. It was not coming out of competition, it was and it was driving of very one of the most successful games of all time. So I I thank them very much and turned around and I said to myself, I'm going to show you and that's when I did the the bulk of the field research that year and came back at GDC and gave the four keys to fund in 2004.

Wow, amazing. It wasn't that long after that, that iPhone came out of this new era of the sort of experiences we had smart ish phones with the feature phones and snake which is you know that the beginnings of games on a mobile device, but really, it was with larger screens and the iPhone, the iPhone been around where we had this new platform to experience new things in you had a very notable first when it came to that sweet spot for you. You had designed this game called tilt. Can you describe that game? And what made it special?

Absolutely. Yeah. So I was surprised when I got the I was one of the first people to get the iPhone. I stood in line that very first day. And I was surprised when I opened it up that there was no game on it because that the you know, the first iPod you have the little wheel, they had breakout, you know, they had they had a game, but there was no nothing on the iPhones like, Oh, wow. But I had, you know, interviewed people in line about what emotions, you know, they had around or listening for what emotions they had around the iPhone before they bought it. And then I had gone home with people to like, follow them home, essentially. And then like looked and you know, ask them about like that what what emotions were they were they experienced then. So a week after about a week after the iPhone launched there, I went to iPhone dev account. So I was invited to iPhone dev camp, and I show up and I said and I thought wow, I'm going to make a game. Let's design a game. And the what I found what I found is people just loved you know, picking up this device and rotating it and watching their email, you know, go back and forth that I get like a webpage would reformat their photos would you know always point down? People really love that they they were just like monkeys, they were just kept rotating the phone like, oh, wow, this is really cool. And it might be hard to imagine that now. But that's what that was happening at the time. And then they had, it was like all about magic and wonder that was a big part of the you know what we saw like in the emotions that they were having while they were they were doing their favorite experiences on the iPhone. So I designed a game that baked in that core mechanics. So I designed the game mechanic around moving the phone orienting it, I designed a tilt labyrinth kind of game, but there was no way that we could access there was no SDK, they hadn't even defined an app, there was no actually third party content on the phone at the time. So we had to put that one aside. But instead I designed sort of afford for directional Tetris, if you will, that where you rotate the phone to play, so you put it horizontally to match blue and then vertically to match green. And then you just rotated back and you just rotated back and forth to to catch there was a little character that would jump from side to side. And it was called tilt and adventure in 1.5 dimensions. And the it was the best hack of the iPhone and iPhone dev camp. It was the best game. And we had about a million downloads of it. And so I thought, oh wow, this is really cool. And the developers, Joe Hewitt. And what was fun is that he measured the width of the Safari browser. So that's how that was the hack that allowed us to create a game a motion control game for the phone. So you couldn't play on a laptop you couldn't play on a computer you could only play it on a phone because that's where the mechanic was so really it was the tilt world was the first game you could only play on the phone first really true a true game on the phone. A couple years later, I decided I want to I really I loved I love the game. And it took me a couple years to raise to you know set aside savings to make to to make the full game and that became tilt world and so I expanded the story that's all about a character named flip. And she's a little eco tadpole and she eats carbon out of the air gathers seeds and plants essentially plants, trees and Madagascar. So During the game, when the game was live, we were actually planting real trees based on the player's points in on the island of Madagascar. And I've actually seen the trees go into ground because I actually went I went actually went there to, you know, choose the forest and stuff like that where we're gonna go, we're gonna plant and so flip you know, she's this tadpole and she goes through you know, there's you know, bioremediation to clean the soil we get we plant grasses to hold the soil in place. We you know, fight acid rain, we dismantle all of the all of the meccanica agro mechanical that come in, the agro Tillis to come in. And that sort of thing is this, like 12 stage, you know, Joseph Campbell, kind of almost hero's story with, you know, different, you know, clumps of different of different scenes. So it was really fun to do. And the core reason though, why, and then why it wasn't number one, it was definitely the number one app, when we launched it, we were lunch title on iPad, and then brought it to iPhone, is that it had the mechanic that people loved, it was something new and different. And then it also had the feeling of relaxation, it would almost be a casual or hyper casual game now because I didn't put many like points and you know, kind of two, you know, addictive kind of qualities into the game. I kept it very relaxing, and you know, fun and very, very simple and open again, it was sort of this experience to you know, you're saving a little forest and as you do the the blight, the evil blight goes away a bit. And you're forced becomes you know, more and more, you know, more and more green more and more lush. The artist is the lead artist for tilt world is Egon Madera. So he just I loved working with him. And Stuart Dooby did the amazing audio as well. We're helping to bring it back to the app store. I've got it. I mean, we've been working on a unity version since you know, it's it was a launch title. So you know, everything all the launch titles had to go away a while ago, so we're hoping to bring hoping to bring your back. I think that'd be amazing.

Speaking of unity, and now here we are, fast forward another decade, and the era of XR, VR and AR games. How do you think about these new devices and the new types of experiences they enable when he talked about the iPhone, one of the elements was the IMU and the fact that it paid attention to its orientation, its rotation. And now we have this new class of devices, what makes them stand out? And how do these new capabilities end up affecting the sorts of things we can create on them?

Well, I think that real time engines game engines like Unity and Unreal, have fueled a whole plethora, like a whole explosion of indie games, which has gotten you know, now we're in year 2021, has really gotten us quite closer to those kinds of games, I wanted to play, you know, back in 1999, on, you know, thinking about the stuff in Egypt, in Egypt, Egypt. And so So now, what's amazing, is that we can create, we can actually create games that you're actually inside of. So I have a game called Follow the White Rabbit. And it's a series of escape rooms. And what's amazing about XR, whether it's AR You know, smart glasses, or you know, AR mobile work, you know, the for like, pass through kind of, you know, AR or like, like, you know, fully occluded VR is that it's this trip to Wonderland. And, you know, I and I and I grew up in Wonderland I, I grew up I'm in the United States, you know now, and but I grew up for about five years, my family was stationed overseas in the Mideast. And so I grew up riding camels, climbing pyramids, exploring fire temples, and I want to go back, I want to re experience those emotions that full body wonder I had is that as a as a kid, and you know, AR and VR are like the first kind of platform that allows me to go that deep that allows me to really, you know, tuck inside someone else, you know, my own imagination or someone else's imagination and bring all my friends. So you know, that's what we're doing with with follow a rabbit. It's a game about a magician who's been the charlatan all his life until one day the magic actually works and the rabbit disappears wearing a priceless diamond bracelet. The magician borrowed from the audience. And so now everyone wants to follow the White Rabbit. So we go around the world, all of these locations that I had, you know, lived in as a kid or experienced as a kid. And there's these a series of escape rooms that you you know, you go through to, you know, follow the follow the White Rabbit. And each room or each place is very culturally is culturally based, a lot of puzzles are very cultural based. So it is because, you know, VR and AR are so transportive I wanted to bring in some of the some of the amazing insights that I had about human beings and psychology that I did. I'm actually traveling to so many of these different locations. What's amazing about the opportunity with VR is that it's like kind of going inside your own imagination. So I had this it starts in a cafe in Paris, you know, it's 1889. It's the eve of the world Fair and the Eiffel Tower, as you know, still is outside and still under construction. Because it's, it's 1889. And it wasn't quite ready for the opening of the World's Fair. And what I wanted to do there is create this interactive experience that was not necessarily super pre, you know, pre scripted, if you will, I wanted to sort of maximize the ability to feel like you were really there and kind of dance on that edge of LARPing, if you will, and you know, Game and Game Design. So, if you were to go in and roleplay, the, in that experience, it can be, I really just hate the experience of like having to outguess the game designer, I think that says it best. And so if I detect that there was this intentional, like ladder, I'm supposed to climb, it's like, oh, I want to get off the ladder, I want to, you know, I just want to have it play it my way. And not super mechanical, as mechanical as like The Sims was, but somewhere in the middle. And so that's where I've been working on this Emotion Engine or this narrative engine based on, you know, based on the four keys, and designing interactions and puzzles in a way in which these worlds work, that generate emotions, strong emotions, like you have like for you know, for a movie or, or you know, a book or something that's more that has a very strong narrative construction. But it's very loose and open ended. So it, it hits these notes, if you will, these emotional notes, that creates a rich experience without without having to feel like it was planned from the start. And so as you you know, as you turn, for example, in the world, there is a different emotion in each of the different directions of the room of this of this particular room. And then as you interact those emotions, you know, change and breathe over time. And your inter your choices, you know, in that also change your emotions about how you feel. So it's, it's got some interesting, it's an interesting layer cake of different emotion techniques. I've learned, you know, over the course of my career, with, you know, some interesting insights for how the human body, you know, generates response to emotion, as well. So,

it sounds magical.

We're hoping we're hoping it definitely that definitely magic and wonder is what we're going after? Well, it actually, yeah, it's mind bending. So you're in there, and you're going like, What the heck just happened, I actually have some magicians as consultants on the project. And what's challenging with a game is that if I put a CGI hat, a computer, graphic hat, it's AR as well as we are. So I put this this hat in like, like a Snapchat lens type of thing. Yeah. So I put this hat in front of you. And then I put this virtual hat, I pull a virtual rabbit, I pull a virtual rocket, pull a virtual book up, pull a virtual Eiffel Tower full scale, it's not super magical, because you know that it's a virtual hat, and anything could be inside. So given that we know we're in a simulation, and I do a lot of work to try and make you forget, you're in a simulation, of course, but you do kind of still know you're in sim, and what can you do to make that magical feeling, you know, feel create these moments of wonder, even though I know it's completely not real. So I've looked a lot at different, you know, a lot of the best, you know, magicians best practicing magicians, like what did they do? And how does that How are they guiding the audience? How are they guiding people? And then I putting that into the engine, the Emotion Engine, so that for that particular set of emotions, this is how we get there. This is how we get there without trying to just like, Okay, here's a hat, here's a rabbit boom, because that that won't work won't work at all.

You're designing this both for VR and AR. Yeah. What are the differences between those two platforms? And how does that affect the sort of mechanics of the sort of interaction that you're creating for the two different platforms?

Well, in VR, you have, you know, the obvious is within fully occluded VR, you have more control of the environment. So I know exactly, you know, what you're looking at. And I can control what you're looking at. If you do something, I can change it. You have a more limited scope of like motion range of motion, because you're usually you know, in a room, or maybe you're just seated when you're in full on VR. So I have to reduce the size of the world and that sort of thing with AR like with Bose AR for example, I made a game called unscramble the Oracle with Patrick O. Shaughnessy, and David Fox and micro crabs. And it's a choose your own adventure you play it's audio only. So it's audio with head pose. So I did positional audio, and it's two miles of content. So it is like Pokemon Go on steroids type of thing. You have to keep moving in order to play, you have to keep moving to find the next choice and move around. And so with AR this was obviously audio only I also working on an experience on the snap the new snap next generation spectacles, which has audio, spatial audio, and it also has video or it has visuals so I can put holograms in front of you. There. It's the in AR It's really more about the game happening in the real world. It can still be imaginary. It still can be this layer of imagination on top of it, but that the game is really have to, I think I believe that for AR games, they really have to take advantage of the world around the player. A lot of experiences now are like a hologram that's just floating in front of you, or you put it a virtual game board, and you're just putting it on a desk, and then you play chess or something, I really like to have it you be inside the AR simulation, and you're looking out, and the AR is either, you know, mapped to the world, or, you know, it becomes your world. So with another experience I made for this one for Magic Leap. It's Aladdin's Cave of Wonders. So it's this treasure filled cave. And you you start with that? Well, essentially, it's you are a Latin. And this is the Cave of Wonders where he finds the lamb and the cave, but the cave is cursed. So you can't touch any of the treasure until you have the lamp. So I projected to your room, a bunch of CGI trees, some computer 3d computer trees, with gems, large gems as large as grapefruit, so do rubies, diamonds, sapphires. And then the goal of the game is to find the lamp. So you have to navigate, it's kind of a combination of twister, you know, maybe Twister visual learner, you have to you have to basically navigate the world until you find the lamp and then you do these magic finger spells. So I'm using hand tracking and gesture recognition to unlock the lamp. And then once you have the lamp, then you can gather as many gems of these virtual gems as you as you want. And so this is with AR in that kind of sense, with a room scale kind of AR, that it's a full body experience. And because I'm using my own hands to grab in my own hands to do the finger spells, that is a much more personal experience than if I have to hold like a controller. And obviously, you know, we're getting more hand tracking, you know, in in VR experiences now as well. But it's quite magical with in AR because it is your real hands. And so I actually put, you know, CGI on your hands often too. And so your hands are now magic. And so who wouldn't like to, you know, cast finger spells with their hands. I think that's really fun and, and challenging. I've given several talks on design UX design UI design for AR and VR, like the recent one, I just gave it a web. And there's some fun things there. But the big thing about both AR and VR is you want to use depth, because essentially it's a box of crayons. And for generations we've had three crowns red, green, and blue made amazing games with AR and VR though both us have a fourth crayon which is depth and we want to be able to share to use that in all the layers of experience in our you know in our in our games in our games. With AR I think also too there's a lot of Wonder still because when you see something map to your own ceiling if you think about like magically pedals, like to Nandi was really influential. And you know, Pokemon GO TO is definitely a definitely a very, very popular game. It's when it's it's saying something the game is saying something about it's transforming your real world into something else. And so game mechanics in AR that focus around that, that push hard into that are unique right there. There's there's a reason to put it on an AR platform, and not just have it be, you know, on the Nintendo Switch or you know, your iPhone.

Yeah, it has to it has to make sense in that particular platform. Wait, it has to

make sense. It has to it has to provide extra value. So going back to serious fun, extra value extra fun, and you don't believe your eyes in the case of wonders like my whole world is kind of doing little mental flips sometimes, because of this experience. I just had like i Well, in this case, I was like developing I spilled spilled dark magic on my notebook, and I went and then it realized, oh, wait, wait, it's just a CG. I think it's not real. It wasn't really going to eat the pages, it'll eat the virtual ones, but not the real guys.

You'd mentioned magically, certainly Magic Leap of last several years has been a primary consumer of both media attention and in financing around creating AR hardware and experiences. And on the flip side of that, right, we have the the VR ecosystem has really done extremely well in the last couple of years, we've had millions and millions of devices sold. Now is a really large install base, but it's led by another company that absorbs a ton of spend certainly a lot of money absorbed a lot of attention, which is meta, aka, Facebook. How does leadership buy these companies? Maybe even Facebook more specifically, how does it affect the dynamics of the ecosystem around the products are creating?

Oh, yeah, it's it's central. It's very central with the challenge of computer platforms. They transform every you know, roughly every 10 years. You know, it was the you know, the iPhone, you know, about a while ago and then it was before that it was a low cost computer with color computers with CDs, which is what gave birth to the Sims. And now we've got these, you know, VR VR devices and it's a very expensive technology to develop. So you need to be a very large player. So That's why we see the valuations and the investments that magically on Facebook are making. The challenge, though, is that when you get these transform, and this is basic, you know, Harvard Business School Stuff, is that when you transition to a different platform, there is a lot of change. And you know, in a sense, like, you know, management is about efficiency management is like there's management leadership are two sides of the same coin. Cotters got some great essays in the HBr review, but management, you can only get about a 5%, you know, course correction, and anything more than that, you really need leadership. And so when we think about a platform shift, there's more changes, you know, more difference in experience, and financing and in types of games and what are in technology in this generation of games in for VR, and AR, then the entire hit that in the, in the entire history of games, computer games, you know, combined. And what we've seen is a lot of focus on let's bring the traditional games that worked on pancake monitors, and try and bring them you know, we'll just blow really hard and get them like all puffed up or something, and then we're going to make them dimensional. And we'll we'll create, we'll recreate them in VR. And they will work to a certain extent, but they're not going to be you know, from the ground up VR and AR experiences. And so I've been a long proponent since 2015. Or so I think. I've been giving talks about design leadership, the need for design leadership in VR, the need to fund innovation, the need to create new kinds of experiences. And if you look at you know, Tilt Brush, and you know, beat Sabre are not traditional you, I mean, you can't play them on flat screens very well. And so but those are, you know, just two titles that are very innovative. And so there are these enormous, you know, swaths of blue ocean out there in the ecosystem of XR, that haven't even been nibbled on yet. And so we need the courage as an industry to fund more innovation fund more experimentation, so that we can, you know, find those teams, when mist came out, when the Sims came out to the best selling titles in all the world. Nobody thought they were games, because they were so different, and so new, it's just when they started raking in a bunch of bucks, right? When they started making a lot of money, you know, and it kept piling higher and higher and higher, then people are like, oh, yeah, these are games, let's do more, let's create these genres, these new genres. And we're going to have a lot more you know, there's the Angry Birds on mobile, right, for example, that God and a lot we're gonna have, we're gonna have these some new experiences in the XR space coming coming soon. But I don't think we've really I don't think we've really seen those those big hit heroes yet. And you don't have to be a big hit to be a high quality or be a valuable, you know, XR experience for sure. But the biggest, the most successful titles in XR are not going to be ports of 2d flat screen games. I think the only exception of anything that had much success, well, much excess is super hot, which came out on flat screen first, but because it's this game, when you put it in XR now becomes this game of Red Light, Green, right? Light, you know, you if you if you if you move, you know, time moves forward. And if you stop, if you hold your position, it stops. That's, you know, I think that that mechanic actually works much better in VR than it does on a flat screen.

And so part of what you're suggesting here is that we have to innovate, we have to recognize that what worked on one platform is not necessarily directly going to port over to the next platform and and find the same level or greater success. We have to really innovate and think about, from first principles perspective, what is it about the platform that's different and unique, and more valuable than the other platforms? And in funding innovation around exploring that and creating great experiences around that?

Absolutely. And I think it's basically it goes down to funding and promoting but funding, you know, diverse, diverse creators, first of all, so a lot of the funding most of the funding, almost all the funding went to, you know, successful teams, but they were successful in you know, last genre game kind of games and experiences. You know, so I think that that we need to look at where teams are from the ground up, you know, tasks to come up with new genres, new mechanics, new ways of doing things with the Four Keys to Fun example for us as a guide, we know that we can create an regardless of what you know, new kind of genre we invent, we can invent a new genre and like, Okay, well, if we're doing that underwater basket, underwater basket weaving kind of genre, what could we do to flesh that out? I mean, there are many ways of innovating. There are many ways of doing game design and it's many people are, you know, are the Minamata motor signs in the wheel writes, you know, they don't necessarily need models, whatever because they just kind of get it but I think that if we don't fund you know, these new goals, we don't set new goals out there then we're not going to move the move the puck forward. And it wasn't until like The Sims became very successful or Sim City became very successful. Then there was this, oh, wait, someone's making money over here. And then like all of this, you know, all this stuff kind of started it started to chase it Farmville was also based on three successful games by other developers somewhat, you know, then then once that great a lot of traction and a bunch of money jumped in. But yeah, so we've got to have that design, leadership, leadership, and that courage and the ability to fund different initiatives, and just have the courage, you know, then to promote it and to, and to see you see what happens, see what works, see what breaks. And that can be hard, that can be challenging, if you you want to guarantee success for this particular particular title.

Yeah, no guarantee and this kind of old thinking around the franchise model, let's just make the next version of the last thing that plays out much better on

innovation, right? It's like, it's gonna be the next thing with you know, better content, more more money at the production values, and in three new innovative ways. There's lots of formulas out there that I don't think work.

You know, one of the things you'd mentioned early on is that computers seem autistic, in that they do not respond at all to us as humans and all the emotions that we carry with us. How does this kind of human centric perspective and in this kind of coming age of XR, how do those fit together for you? What's the importance there?

Oh, that's a really that's a really good question. Because the so much is, is so much focus now in XR in from a leadership perspective is on driving KPIs. So the thing that gets the headline is how much I how much I raised and you know, how much my company is valued and stuff like that. And getting lost in all of this conversation is the the human part that it really is, you know, humans are really at the center of the metaverse. It isn't the you know, lifetime value. It isn't necessarily the wallets with eyeballs these click through kind of mechanics. Do you think of what the metaverse is? It's really Put very simply, it's the merging of the real world and the virtual one. So that pretty much any thing that can be called a Metaverse type of project or fall into the metaverse, you know, has that has that quality. And what we see so much as we see a lot of focus on Okay, well, how can we get as much you know, advertising into this? How can we get as much the financial transactions into it? How can we dominate people's attention? And I think that we really need to look at it from the other perspective, from the more humanistic centered perspective, in a sense of how can we bring value to them? My company's co design is and my game companies do play. It's all about unlocking human potential through play. And so with the metaverse, it's super important to create things from a personal perspective and provide, you know, sort of provides superpowers to the people and thing and experiences that we are going to want to want to engage in, as opposed to piling on more operant conditioning, a lot of social media, and it's getting a lot of blowback. Now it's actually getting a lot of you there's a concept of technical debt, we're now getting ethical debt for a number of the different leading social platforms. And if there isn't a concerted effort, they're going to, you know, take those kinds of things and push those into the into the metaverse. And that's going to be that's real, that's a real challenge. Because if it's on your face, you can't you know, it's really hard. It's on your eyeball, like a contact doesn't shut off. When you close your eyes. There's no way like extract yourself, like take a break from social media. If it's, you know, if you're wearing it 20 471 of the challenges we're facing now with technology is that it is so driven by KPIs, and it is really ignoring the welfare of the human beings that use it. And so I envision the metaverse as being something designed around things that improve, you know, quality of life, which is you know, what my companies are about, and that the interactions in these worlds could bring more it'd be great to bring more more value to people. So for example, one of the challenges with it, people talk a lot about privacy, for example, in the metaverse and privacy with these additional sensors that are required for, you know, AR bibles to work or you know, a VR headset or even mobile phone, extra cameras. And so what are we going to do about privacy because privacy is all this you know, big thing and it is important, it's it's important, be able to control what you're able to work with or what you disclose to different individuals and you need to know where that data goes. But the problem actually is quite bigger. what's really at stake is something much, much larger. And it's not only is it your problem Sr, your information which might be used against you or try and convince you of something, it actually goes quite deeper in a sense that the the data that they collect the biometrics and the you know, this always on possibly always on microphone possibly always on video camera, is that what's at stake, it's really about your mental agency. what's really at stake is your mental agency, because the systems using operant conditioning in social media I'm talking about specifically is that they can affect your self image, they can adjust your priorities, they can, or these mechanics can, you know, change your focus or eliminate your ability to focus. They can adjust your beliefs, or even they can shorten your attention span, they can decide who your friends are. And they can deplete your mental resources, your ability to complete tasks. And the list goes, you know, goes quite, quite on. And that's what's been happening. That's why in the US, we had such a toxic election cycle, and we have become so polarized as a nation. And in the UK, that's also why Brexit happened. It's one of the enablers of that is the use of this social interactive technology to change not only just, you know, market to you better, but actually change your belief system. So if you think about human beings in that, that were just wallets with eyeballs in a big deli case. And it's not just a deli case of you know, eyeball sitting on wallets, the technology can actually stretch that wallet with its eyeballs into a new configuration. And then keep going until it's quite a different different shape a different human being, because interacted with that particular system with that particular goal. And the goal would happen to be an advertiser, whether it was someone who a group that wanted to win an election, a girl, a group who you know, want to eliminate regulations for food production, or something like that, which is what happened in Europe and the UK. And if it's, if that's fun, that funder is there, then you can actually steer people towards that goal. Well, basically, like if I click so if I click on something like Oh, an SE, you know, Loch Ness monster thing, oh, that was fun. Oh, now I'm going to go to UFOs, then it then it feeds me, after UFOs. It feeds me this and this and this. And so I get into this very get very into this real extreme conspiracy theory ecosystem. And then all of my friends also are conspiracy theorists. And then because I've liked them, or I like their posts, and then we start Sephora self referential. And then my other more sane people are like over here, and I haven't interacted with them in a long time on social media, because it was beneficial for the algorithm it up to the algorithm just optimized for a specific goal. And that can be that can be quite challenging. Now, I think all the platforms are doing some really hard work and really hard thinking the past couple years and have made significant changes to their UIs to their to their platforms to reduce some of this shaping of behavior effects, and giving people a little bit more mental focus. But in addition, anytime you think about and I'll be speaking tomorrow at a conference about you know, privacy, and the metaverse and about ethics in the metaverse, we also want to think about mental agency, which is the control of what over what we have in our heads and what we decide on the positive side, you know, just like in 1984, and, you know, the book and, you know, a lot of science fiction is, is, you know, can be prescriptive, or at least a big warning, is that if we have no transparency is really helpful. So if that camera goes both ways, as both it can, if it can see me, then I need to be able to see the person that's using that data and what that data gets used for. If I can have a reset button on the AI and I just go push and then and then my my world can go change and get back to get back to more normal or back back to more about what I want. And not about what daisy chain dairy wants me to wants me to buy in terms of milk products, or whatever, or where they want me to vote in an election. So I think that that transparency is really is really important, and we can get there.

I think this this notion of mental agency is super interesting. And probably my biggest fear about certainly the direction of, as you noted, these kind of socially connected platforms that absorb so much of our time and thus, in have the potential to influence so much of the way that we think about ourselves and about our world. It seems, you know, on the surface, that is we fantasize about the coming age of VR and AR, that the opportunity is even greater with these sorts of devices because the sort of sensor data they have will be stronger. And the type of information in the context the information is being presented in has the potential to be more impactful on our brains. That absolutely it's it's imperative that we talk about it we think deeply about it. We start to put in place the right sorts of frameworks and thinking in controls to ensure that we're not creating a bunch of slaves to the to the The algorithm, and the people that have control the algorithm are properly elected, consciously elected officials, right? Ultimate, whatever that kind of ends up playing out, the set of rules that we're following are the ones that we all agree to, and have insight into?

Well, I think that's a key thing to just interrupt is that the whole concept of that we are following the technology, as opposed to us, you know, in the driver's seat, and we're actually able to, you know, drive ourselves. And in a sense, with social media, it's a self driving car already. And we don't have that phase of like us being in control. And I think a lot Another solution is to be able to give it, give it to us, you know, us personally, and flip that on its head. So instead of us following the algorithms and us, I mean, we do have to trust the algorithms, we do have to have responsible people there. But if it were, the systems were designed, so that they were so transparent, that we understood what was going on that it wasn't, you know, secret, it wasn't this AI black box, which is, you know, a challenge that if we had that, and now it'd be you know, that would be that would be quite, quite amazing. Indeed. So when you talk about the social platforms, if you remember back to the four keys, you know, when I said people fun, there are more emotions than the other keys combined, right? There's more emotions, wide right emotions. And so that's what makes social media so compelling. And so you know, I've given talks at the White House in the State Department on this in the shadow of Arab Spring, some years ago. And the, it's the technology that's fueled by social interaction, or things that are fueled by social interaction can be quite, quite powerful. And to your point, they definitely can change, you know, your opinion, can change what you do, they can change what you're excited about. So, yeah,

powerful systems, I realized that I am wired differently than, than most in this regard, that of the four keys, the fun that people find is the one that was least engaging for me. And I'm sure it's reflecting the fact that I spend, I basically don't use Facebook, unless I have to, because that's the only place I can find a piece of information. And I barely use Twitter. And LinkedIn is useful for me. So I find myself on there more often. But anyway, my own brain, sometimes when I reflect inward to understand the rest of the world, that's an area in which I have very poor insight.

Well, and like I said, it was, you know, three out of the people usually use three out of the four. And so there's often one that you know, that they're not as interested in. So you found you found which one it is for you. Yep.

Let's wrap the few in lightning round questions. We've been kind of talking about some of the challenges here around influence, and ultimately how to better understand how human the human mind works better way to influence others, often with sort of this potentially nefarious or underhanded, self interested purpose. Amongst all of the the ideas that are floating around about what's patient fitting is or what it could be, what's one that you, what's one that you really disagree with?

Well, that there's a difference between AR and VR, I think it's going to be all, you know, completely all the same. I also think that it's a fallacy to believe in AR, that we're going to have a label on everything. And then that's the most valuable use case is probably the most popular illustration of AR where, you know, I can look at someone I see their name, which is useful. I can, you know, look at the ground and I can see, you know, an arrow to my next destination, which is, which is actually that is kind of useful. But you know, just basically, you know, taking these what I call wimps, I like to say that there's no wimps in the metaverse, so there are no windows, icons, mice and pointers. And it's definitely not so low. And so we have so many of these visions about spatial computing are all just taking these flat screens from your pancake monitor. And now it's like oh, great, now I have 20 Pancake monitors, I've got one pancake monitor that's 200 inches, 220 inches, I think I was reading earlier this morning. It's like amazing, you know, I've got these AR glasses and I can make this amazing, that's not that that's not going to be the real the real value proposition. So again, that goes to design leadership. And if you are, you know, if you are in investing at all in you know, AR and VR, we really want to push the design forward in a way that adds value not just simply copy and paste stuff I like to give the example of designs always evolve and that's true of any human design is always evolves. So we used to you know, get around in these things called horses, you know, like a horse and carriage right? And now we get into like, you know, like a Tesla. And those those two modes of transportation have gone through a lot of design. And there was this awkward you know, teenage phase, which is what we are in now in XR which is this horseless carriage phase where it's neither a horse and buggy, nor is it a Tesla, but it's this auric car right? It's this awkward thing. And so when we looking at spatial computing, we're fairly early in the in the process. But I can see people doing this horseless carriage thing where they're taking the the keep putting carriage features on this when they need to, like be thinking about an automobile. And so I see a lot of I see a lot of that. So instead of like wimps, you know, which is again, Windows icons, buttons, you know, mice pointers, that sort of thing. We want to literally want to create experiences, like, you know, Neo in the Matrix like, whoa, right. And so I use that as an icon as an acronym, in evaluating my designs, which is, you know, instead of, instead of Windows flat windows, I want worlds, instead of, you know, mice and pointers and stuff like that, I want hands, I want avatars instead of cursors. And I definitely want it to be social. So you know, wh, you know, oh, a and our objects don't interact with objects, right? In these worlds. And so it's not plastering those real world in AR with like pancake information tags, which see a lot of and in VR isn't playing a first person shooter game, and where I'm in just that environment. And then with with a, you know, with an inventory screen, like, like a wet newspaper on my face, or like, you know, like a sign in the, you know, you're running by and I have to click on the sign or buttons and say, you know, we want to be interacting with our hands, we want to be able to manipulate objects, we want to be able to go interoperability is super important. You know, as we go from place to go to place to place to place, which is the the conference, I'm at tomorrow. And we want that evolution, because if web, sort of the web has gone through, like, like combat three eyes, web 1.0 was all about information access. Web two was more about interactivity. So I can interact with that information. I can interact with others, other people like social media, and then web three, which is where we are now it's all about immersion, and, you know, interoperability. And so if you're looking at your experience, or when I look at my experiences, I'd look at that, you know, at that evolution, and what aspects can we get rid of? So we're no longer you know, the horseless horseless carriage, you know, the horse and carriage horse and buggy. Let's get ourselves to more of an optimize native experience that could only happen in the metaverse in spatial computing. So I think that would be my top one. The second one is that, you know, I don't think we're going to, you know, just do first person shooters in AR with our phones, or glasses, or, you know, in VR, I don't think that's the only or most dominant form of play, I think we're gonna get new genres that are gonna be even more more fun and amazing and cool.

I mean, I look forward to this. I'm really looking forward to experiencing your follow the White Rabbit.

We just imagine like if it were an AR game, what would these people play? Like, you know, that were standing with me, you know, but 2000 years prior on that temple in Egypt? What would they think of the games you were doing now? I mean, they would, what would they want as an AR game with follow it rabbit, you, you, you want to have the AI you want to have all of those amazing, all those amazing hieroglyphs come to life, all those paintings, you know, come to life and be able to talk with all of those characters. And there's the Book of the Dead that's often inside a tomb, you know, painted along the walls, Luca, dead parallel is a very parallel through the 12 labors of Hercules, they're very similar stories, possibly have similar basis. And so to be able to follow that and interact with that, and would be, you know, together with your friends, I think would be would be amazing. And what the games I want to play now is to be able to actually go back to that time in Egypt. And what were those people like? What songs did they play? What sort of stories do they tell each other? How was their life? What was their culture like? Again, I grew up overseas for about five years and that my very first AR experience was again in Egypt on a previous trip. And much earlier when I was very, very young. And we were on the plaza and Isa your the pyramids and the sun was going down and we saw the sound and light show you we would sit we sat in the small bleachers in the they had rigged up the entire Giza plaza with lights. So at dusk, they had this the sound and light show and they had the swings his own the Sphinx and the Sphinx would light up and then they told the story of the different pharaohs. And you could hear the dancing bells of the dancers, you could hear all these things, and it was dusk and you could almost imagine seeing everything in front of you. I really want to capture those kinds of feelings and that kind of experience and then bring it into the metaverse bring it into AR so we can have a story and an experience together with my friends.

truly transformative and deeply immersive. Yes, absolutely.

What book have you read recently that you found to be deeply insightful or profound?

The thing that I'm reading right now is the dawn of everything. You know, it's a new history of the world by David gray bar and a David one grow. And it's, if it's possible, it's definitely blown. It's just blowing my mind. Having grown up overseas, I already knew that there was there are cultures other than the Western one. And there were many cultures actually, other than the Western one. And I also knew that the Western culture wasn't didn't like sort of birth into the world fully formed with all of these insights. So you know, it didn't like suddenly sprout out of Greece, and you know, that with everything that we knew everything to do. So it's blowing my mind is that it's a it's a new history of the world. And it's essentially this, you know, the short form of it, a 500 page book, the short form of it is that it is that the concepts of, of liberty, the concept of freedom, the concept of equality, you know, which is the American Constitution, those actually came from the like the 1600s, you know, early 1700 conversations with Native Americans. And what happened is that these indigenous, the indigenous Americans critique of European society birthed this, these concepts of freedom, liberty, and equality, like equality in front of the law and stuff like that. And that the the stories from an indigenous cultures contact with indigenous cultures in America, then went to Europe, and then transformed Europe as well. So obviously, the formation of the United States, unfortunately, to the detriment of the people who already lived here, right. It also led to like the the French Revolution. And so having that seed is just fascinating, just fascinating to me, no replacement for a book that was actually written by, you know, indigenous authors or female authors, by the way, but it is it is a really amazing step. And so back to your Metaverse question earlier, is that here we are, you know, we've just stepped foot in a new world. And it's been around for a while, you know, in a sense, we 20 or 30 years we've been like playing in games we've been nibbling at the edges social media clubhouse, you know, those things are kind of Metaverse is part of the metaverse already, somewhat. But I think it's a great time to reflect and why I'm digging the book so much why I enjoy it so much is that what are the human values? What are the discussions we can have now so that we lay the foundation for this new era, this next era of humanity? Because it's it's going to have different physics, it has different physics, just by the way it is. And you know, what kind of constructs do we bring from the old world into the new one? You know, are we going to get like a mega Magna Carta? Are we going to write a declaration of independence for the metaverse? Are there going to be truths that we you know, commit to being self evident in the metaverse that are not about private property, which is heavily critiqued by the indigenous Americans as you as you can imagine, you know, if you think about the mechanics, so there's so much in Metaverse conversations now about, you know, crypto and FTS and having an ability to do commerce into a digital realm. If you think about what happened with this, again, with this, the book that Don was everything goes really into goes deeply into a lot of really interesting critique of that system. And can give one pause and think like, oh, wow, I wonder if that is something that we want to bring into? Or is that the most important part of the old world that we're going to bring into this this new world, you know, called called the metaverse. And from a design leadership perspective, I see a lot of people just trying to port you know, manage their way into, you know, a new a new paradigm with with the metaverse, which is, you know, of course, AR and VR, it's all included. And the things that really take off aren't going to be from the old world, right, they're going to be, you know, ground up from the New World. And so we will, it will be a very interesting, interesting time. But if you think of private property, if you think of real estate, if you think of, you know, businesses and transactions and stuff like that, you know, what, what is it that we want to keep? And what is it that we want to rethink because the physics work differently, and in an entirely digital economy, entirely digital environment and smart contracts, especially allow us to have NF T's for example. And if the other thing that so but there are many other things that a smart contract could do, in addition to saying that, you know, this, this PNG has one has one owner, right, or this is the current owner, and this is how much they paid for it. And this is the percent that goes to the original artists, which is lovely, I love that. But what about other financial transactions? So for example, there could be a chain or a technology where the more I when I spend when I spend or use it locally, there's some kind of bonus to it. There could be some really interesting transactions, you know, how the way in which they operate to benefit people. So it's almost like you know, a plugin for the Firefox browser. We can we can add these plugins to money and commerce and all of that, to change what happens Right now when we when we move when we move products and services around like, you know, everyone's shopping, many people are shopping online right now generates enormous amounts of co2. I mean, just from the packaging alone, just those boxes. And so there's some some really interesting, interesting things that is there anything we can do in the metaverse that might have the opposite effect that might generate might generate human health, it might generate more mental agency, it might generate more emotional happiness. Yeah, I would like that. I'd love to chain that was all about generating emotional happiness. Like I like that a lot.

That would be something that we especially as Americans, how would probably struggle to grasp given that so much of our society is really focused on striving for more wealth and financial security.

And that's the heart of the indigenous critique. Yeah. And it's, it's really, it's really interesting. I think that if you look at other books, like a lot of my my favorite is the, the the primer, Neal Stephenson's Yeah, other book, The Diamond Age, right? Yep. A lot of people are trying to recreate Snow Crash, the meta versus Snow Crash, but really, it would be nice to do Diamond Age because it's, you know, it's a book that you know, you interact with this world, and you become smarter you become a better leader. And I think there's some real opportunities with Metaverse kind of technology to do that, as well.

You know, for me, I also really enjoyed Diamond Age, more than more than Snow Crash, Diamond Age for me, felt uplifting and enlightening and inspirational and Snow Crash felt very dystopian.

Yeah, yeah. And we need those, we need some stories that are warnings, you know, don't you know, Little Red Riding Hood, you know, don't go into the forest, or, you know, don't trust strangers, I guess. And Hansel and Gretel is kind of don't go into the forest alone type of thing. But we also need the pro noia stories, we need the solar punk stories that help us imagine what the future might be like. And there's not a pie in the sky thing, that there's a, you know, beloved franchise that did just that, and that's Star Trek. So Star Trek is super pro Tolkien. And they would, you know, literally rip each week, they'd really rip headlines from the newspaper headlines, and, you know, change the, you know, the communists and the Americans or whatever to, you know, the Federation and the Klingons or something, and then have very deep conversations in the story about, you know, racial tolerance. And, you know, later on, there's the, you know, the prime directive, and you know, what the, you know, what do you what do you do, there's a lot of really interesting ethics. And in their, their case, they are an abundance of post, you know, post money society, with transporters in with the replicators. So, a lot of things change, because there's no money in Star Trek, for example. So when you're in that universe, when you're watching a show, or when you're when you're, you know, thinking about it, it gives you freedom to think about things like how do I How might our world be better, even if none of those ideas, you know, resonate with you, it might gives you permission to think of like some other some other things. So yeah, I'm totally with you on that. If

you could sit down and have coffee with your 25 year old self, what advice would you share with 25 year old Nicole?

Well, that would be before the four keys. So I would say I would definitely say to trust your gut, about the things that you see that are wrong with the world. And that it's okay to pursue this idea of fun, you know, really, really understand it, you know, for the next 2030 years, that you might have to do your own thing, if doing your own thing is what you need to do, then then to go do that, you know, and then don't, you know, don't take assumptions that others make about you because of your gender, or how you look how you show up to seriously, believe in yourself, believe in yourself more, if I could change something, I would say, you know, to not outsource programming as much and you know, keep keep your hands on the wheel. I was I was definitely I was a pretty serious programmer when I started. But I focused on design and then hired engineers, you know, to build the company. But I would, I would love to have, you know, done done a bit more engineering, you know, for a time I'm back into it now. So that's, that's really fun. So I think that would be the advice I would have is that if you see a North Star, you know, don't be afraid to go after it, you know, have the courage to do that. And that when you don't feel like you fit in sometimes it's because you don't see anybody that's like, like you. It's because you're leading, they're all like behind you. They're all following you. So just turn around and say hi. And then you know, keep moving forward. But just because there's nobody in front of you does not mean you're going in the wrong direction.

Wow, what great advice. Any closing thoughts you'd like to share?

I would love people to encourage people to to really recognize that human beings are multifaceted, right? We all like to play we all have emotions, and we're all creative, we all design. And so you know, think that you know in your own world, nurturing those processes that really help you grow as a human The artists way, for example, was a book that helped me you know, creative recovery, if you will become a much better, much better designer much more comfortable in design. And then I would, I would definitely, you know, encourage people to reach out to expand your horizons on whom you work with and who we are, what kinds of experiences you have. So go out and have lots of different experiences with other people, a wide variety of people listen, you know, more than you talk, especially, and that you vote with your dollars and with your time. And so if you agree with where the this, whatever this thing it is that you're doing, if you agree with where it's going, then yeah, double down on that, if you don't agree with where it's going, then maybe you know, look around and either find another, another ship to join or start your start your own. Because life is really too short to be, you know, a slave to a cause that is out of step with today. And so many things have happened over the past couple years. So the especially with the pandemic, but you know, we have this great opportunity to create a new society. And it doesn't happen by one person saying, oh, let's do it. It's actually the millions of millions of people making small decisions about their life while they spend their time their money, you know, their their work effort. And if you have the blessing to be able to be an investor and to invest in, you know, marginalized voices, because the innovation happens on the edges. And one of the great things about being a marginalized creator is that, you know, you're on the edge by default, by definition, you're on the edge. So if you can invest, invest time, or invest money in helping some of these marginalized voices out that that is just amazing. And that's how that's how we win. That's how we win.

That's, that's amazing. That's beautiful. What do people go to learn more about you and the work you're doing zero design,

I guess you can go to our website, which is ex co design.com Best Places to follow me on Twitter because you get updates about what we're doing. And I share a lot of my AR explorations and VR explorations there. And on my Twitter, it's just my name, you know at Nicole Lazaro twosies when are like puzzler, and you can download the Four Keys to Fun on on our website zero design.com. It's also a shortcode with 4k to f.com. Well, we'll get you there right away. If you'd like to, you can also on Play white rabbit.com is the website for follow the White Rabbit and if you want to sign up for email updates you can do so there's a little small link at the bottom and join our mailing list or waitlist and you'll get some updates about

where we are and where we're going. Amazing. Nicole, thanks very much for this conversation.

Thank you so much for having me. This has been a this has been a joy and a real pleasure and all the whooshing Enos of the of the metaverse activity that we have. It's been lovely to take some time and set it aside and have this nice chat.

Before you go, I'm going to tell you about the next episode. In it. I speak with Faisal GLORIA The CEO at Blippar. Faisal took over at Blippar about two and a half years ago after the company went from being an early AR pioneer and tech darling in the UK, to a company finding its way through insolvency. Under Pfizer's leadership, the company is releasing new products and has regained its stature as a key enabler of a broad range of AR experiences. In this conversation, we talk through the challenges of managing the downs and ups of tech startups and the recent product releases by the company. I think you'll really enjoy the conversation. Please follow or subscribe to the podcast you don't miss this or other great episodes. Until next time