The AR Show: BONUS: Karl Guttag (KGOnTech) on Apple and Their Ability to Invent New Physics (Part 3)

4:50PM Mar 22, 2021

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Karl Guttag

Keywords:

apple

people

ar

ibm

company

hyperloop

business

vr

luddite

turing

china

pc

next big thing

thought

bought

physics

building

kirin

intel

real

Welcome to the AR show right 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 episode is a bonus Listen, after I concluded my interview with Karl Guttag, we started talking about Apple and their rumored pursuits of VR and AR devices. Let's get straight to it.

You know, we didn't talk much about Apple, other than you noted that they have to follow the same rules of physics as everyone else.

Yeah, yeah. Well, it's interesting. I heard this Scoble. You had a scalpel on a couple of shows ago. And it was an interesting discussion. He talked about a flip down visor VR. And I'm seeing a lot of, you know, several solid rumors that Apple's looking at using Sony. Oh, well, ladies, we're back to the same thing. If you say it's Oh, oleds. Like Sony, Apple has also bought this company called I konia. That was working on diffractive waveguide. So when I first thought about it, I thought, well, it makes sense. They're probably using a county by county. As we talked about what the fractal waveguides can't be using all LEDs. So if they bought a konia, but they're using micro LEDs, and that means that the micro LEDs are not going to iconic, because physics says that won't work. So you start to get into those things. Now they could be doing a konia for a mirror. That wasn't what they were doing originally, they were originally doing basically diffractive waveguides, if you look at the patterns and stuff. So when you look at Apple, I think I really think that in some ways, Tim Smith is held hostage by the I feel like he's kind of hostage to everyone saying AR is going to be the next big thing. And he can't look like a Luddite. So a lot of lot of executives will say things because they think it's the right business thing to do. And so does he have the depth of convectional I know they're spending money, they're going to cover the bat because they it's like we got to get even if it's unlikely we have to protect the the market, we have to protect ourselves and they got so much money that they can afford to cover bets and who knows, maybe the best will pay off in different ways. You know, as a, as a part time futurist at times, too, I like to think about what the next big thing will be. And, you know, to but it's just like, like, I don't see how you get from where we are today with the technology we are at the day and get and get to that, you know, you could argue back in the you know, Turing what he came up with his ideas back before World War Two, the Turing machine and all that you had Colossus and stuff, which I highly recommend and whenever the COVID and stuff like everyone should go to Bletchley Park once in their life at least once in their life, but and then there was other guys past him Welshman and a bunch of other guy, big fan of what they did a bunch of the ark, but it's still that's 1940s. We didn't get PC, they were building prototypical stuff. And soon after the war, they had stuff soon, in the late 40s. They were doing ENIAC and all that stuff that used to be in Computer History. But look, we're still not getting PCs till 2030 years later. I just think it's, and some of these problems are not maybe perpetual motion, maybe unsolvable. In other words, it's one thing to say like, like traveling faster than the speed of sound. in the, in the Earth's atmosphere, what can be done, it's not economical, we prove that it's not fuel efficient. There's a lot of things that are wrong. more practical than Hyperloop. That's a whole nother subject. That should be fun. But the Hyperloop is like totally bizarre physics, people, people, I really concerned about America's youth when they think Hyperloop as possible, because it seems like they, they don't get even basic physics. So there are things that may suggest that some things in AR that people are imagining that they do require new physics, they require physics that don't exist. And so that concerns me a bit. But I do think, you know, I think there are real uses of it, but I'm not sure that so but I go back to Apple, sorry, but far afield there. But back to Apple. I think they're a little bit hostage by the fact that can't say it doesn't because nobody wants to look like a Luddite. I'm willing to, I'm willing to raise my hand and say I'm willing to look like a Luddite because I don't think that I'm, you know, I'm willing to call Emperor's New Clothes on some of this stuff.

You know, yeah, you could do VR, I can't get I can't get it to all fit with Apple. Like like the liftable visor VR stuff. You know, you can do pass through AR which is cameras with VR, but it doesn't feel very Apple like you're not going to go out in public that way. It's dangerous to be it would be dangerous to be walking around with a with that, you know, You're walking out in traffic and when I do get killed, because what you don't realize your peripheral vision and all that stuff is, as we used to, as we always say, in this business, you know, it's to keep you from being eaten by the tiger. Well, that peripheral vision has no acuity at all, but it's very motion sensitive. That's what keeps you from getting hit by a truck. Okay, that same thing that keeps you getting by Tiger also keeps you get hit by a truck, you lose all you start to lose all that stuff, and it doesn't behave right. And so you lose that stuff when you start wearing a VR headset and your your chances of getting killed just go up astronomically. So I don't know where Apple's going there. I think Apple's you know, I don't know if they're gonna cry COVID that's a classic thing when somebody falls behind now they just cry COVID and say what our plan changed. My guess is they're going to come up and in the end, Tim Cook or somebody will say, it's just not Apple enough. Yeah, we we solved that better than anybody could have trust us. Our labs came up with the solution. But it just wasn't Apple it didn't have the rounded corners we liked. Yeah. Sorry. Little pejorative there. But But I that's my best bet is they're gonna find it's not quite good enough. They don't want to do a google they don't want to be, you know, Google kind of made a fool of themselves with Google class. HoloLens. They're kind of patching it up. As a loss leader from a business plan, avoid, there's basically calling is basically a loss leader for Azure cloud services. The military thing was 500 million, but they're spending billions. So it's not a moneymaker directly. And they kind of the industrial fight is is working kind of you know, is I think there are some real uses there. So they're kind of getting something out of it that way, but I don't know that, you know, it's not, it's definitely no iPhone business, and it's never going to be so. And I think Apple's going to kind of have to come to reckon with that, that, you know, Pokemon Go. I mean, Navteq made billions lit. I mean, it's incredible what they've done. With the Pokemon Go, mostly I don't like the Harry Potter thing did quite as well. But they've done some stuff with that. But that might be more appropriate for more of a mirror solution where it's only 100 bucks, or something or less than 100 bucks, we add it to your phone. That's not going to be but that's once again, going to be people playing Pokemon. That's not going to be every mom pop in and whatnot. So I think it's, it's I think people are just expecting too much that they that, you know, back in my day, the apple of the day was at&t, at&t back in the 60s and 70s. back early on. IBM people forget IBM has almost gone bankrupt. When I grew up in this when I was in college, there were only two big computer companies that counted worth a flip, IBM and Digital Equipment Corporation, they were the only two companies in computers that counted. And most people in college thought Dec was going to win the PC war. Or they if you would pull this in the 1970s when I was in college, who was going to win the compute the PC war, because we all knew PCs were coming. Any of us in electrical engineering and stuff, we all thought it was going to be Dec. Dec had all the insight they were building the smaller, more personal computers, where IBM was building big mainframes. And today, that deck was bought by compact who was then bought by hp. And IBM is almost gone bankrupt. So you know, it's tough, but those guys were seen as gods, it was amazing. People thought IBM could do anything. They could do just anything. They were doing amazing things where they took a block of ceramics with layers and layers of silicon, probably a decade before anybody else could do it. That's the same kind of thing you see in an iPhone. Now where did they do some amazing things inside an iPhone with how many out thin the layers are and the kinds of things they do to make those iPhones and get as much crammed in there is amazing. A lot of other companies can't touch it. Of course, it's all done in China now. So you got to think about that. That's my, that's my fear for us. Technology is that you look at how much of this stuff like you know how much is gone to China, I'm worried about microheli ds. If I want to buy a micro led today, well, Jaipur display. They're the only one who is getting ready to ship and I can literally put money down and get one. And they're the only one there in China. Something our military guys should be thinking about is where are we going to get our strategic materials? Where's America? You know, where are they going to do that? And that's nothing gets jaybird they're working hard. They're doing good stuff. But there is a concern there that you know, is America going to keep doing these fun things, you know, and now we got Intel's going to TSMC for fat. Look at that. What if What if China decides that, you know, it's just like Hong Kong, it's another territory. They already they already believe that

China could almost pull the Huawei say, you know what, nobody in the West gets anything out of tsmc. Granted, tsmc is in Taiwan. from China's perspective, they're lawless territory, but, but there is that risk that China says, Okay, you know what, the West doesn't get anything out of our factories?

Yeah. There's a real concern there. So I'm also big on thinking the military, certainly US government should be putting stuff I like my I think microheli ds, like, like, when I look at military product, I think microheli Ds are the way to go. I think the government should be putting more money in. I'm an advocate of that, that there are things that the you know, we had DARPA, DARPA did some really good things. Quickly. I mean, you forget the internet's the one everyone talks about. They did phenomenal stuff for us. People forget the space program, people always talk when I was growing up people talk to, oh, why don't we just put everything into welfare? Why are we doing all this space stuff? The Space Program, basically funded the semiconductors, he got to look at where semiconductors were in 1960s. The Space Program did such stuff and game goals and stuff to do that. So I am for basic research, I am for fundamental research. Now most of what companies did today is not even compared to what it was when I started out. There's very little fundamental research done in in comp big companies like Apple that I can see don't i don't see a lot of fundamental right, maybe the AI and the software there are doing some fundamental stuff. But we look at hardware, very little an iPhone is is fundamental stuff that came out of Apple is really Apple putting things together better than anyone else. I don't see that fundamental. I don't see the fundamental fact, if you looked in the air industry, I my joke is is no If you can dream it in AR, Facebook's already tried it, they filed a paper or a patent on it.

They Hey, Facebook, if you look at it now, I don't know maybe AR maybe Apple's doing a much better job of hiding it. But if you look in terms of papers published, accumulation of some of the smartest minds in AR and VR, Facebook's been spending the money and accumulating the people if the problem could have been solved. I think if if just money and smart table is all the problem, Facebook has already should have already solved it by now. So I'm not convinced that just Apple is going to bring back Apple, I'm not convinced Apple is going to be the be all end all solution to all this that all of a sudden, magically, I think people have a load apple. They're still human, you know, there's still a bunch of humans, there's still a bunch of individuals that they're not godlike. You know, people are putting these godlike things. It's like, like I mentioned to her, I always said, You know, I looked at The Imitation Game movie. And I know the history of Bletchley Park quite a bit. And some of the other games like Bill tut, you know, people there, they turned, I always say that, that Turing was turned into a comic book superhero. That is so almost nothing other than the names of the people like were real, not almost very little of what actually they did, and what actually they were doing was done by the people who did the people whose names were in that movie. So I liked it as entertainment experience, but from a historie is total garbage. It helps, you know, it. I mean, Turing was was a genius, and very, very important to the whole process. But they they ascribed to him stuff that maybe a dozen people had done. He wasn't one at one person didn't do with what they showed in the movie, you know. So, you know, he was still a human being. So anyway, so yeah, I think Apple, I know, Apple's working on it. But I think they're still fighting with the same physics as everyone else. So then the question is, do they risk doing a Google class, which could be very embarrassing to them? And you know, that vineyard is a jump down that road of DAC and, and IBM, I had that in my own company, I sometimes we have discussions on will Apple be number one forever. And I'm like, when I grew up, it was at&t and IBM and Exxon Mobil, or Exxon back then. So they didn't emerge with mobile. So you had Exxon and IBM, and then that, and then computers, we thought, well, maybe this up, you know, Dec had a real hand because when things shifted to small, but you know, the problem you have is that you get into this, you know, Apple's even found it that they can only grow the iPhone market so big. First it was unit sales dropped, and then it was total sales drop. Because you know what, at some point you become the economy at some point, you can only grow so big. And sometimes the next guy coming in this is, I call it the attack from below. And I've seen this many, many times. Like, you saw the PC on did that mainframe, right? The idea of attack from below is and this is where IBM even though they kind of invented the IBM PC. I mean, they were kind of reacting to AP on and on. They didn't really hold it the way they did I the MPC was very different. And the way they treated it than the rest of the mainframe because they would have controlled the whole thing, they would have provided the software, they wouldn't have gone to Microsoft, they wouldn't use an Intel process. They've done their own processes, their own software in their own everything, it is traditional idea. So they will control the thing much more know what they want, or not. Who knows. But anyway, the thing with attack from below is that oftentimes that smaller thing takes it out, you can kind of say what the phone the phone is taken out the, you know, the PC took out the mainframe. And now the phone is kind of from a business standpoint taken over the business opportunity that the PC used to sell. And so they attack from blood work because the guy coming up sees a big market. The guy when that markets first starting, the guy from above sees a tiny market, they have different lenses, that the guy coming up has a sees a huge market. If I can just get a fraction of this business I'm I'm golden. The big guy says Why should I waste my time on it? Why should my board waste my time on it? I mean, I saw the ti t i miss the semicolon, ti invented the semicon industry was the largest semiconductor company in the world. They looked at, I had a VP guy found that Jerry Rogers, who found that cyrax Okay. When I told him, I looked under a microscope, and I told him, I said, I've already got an Intel and a Motorola chip. I'm looking at why are we doing this CPU. He read me the riot act about how Intel was nothing compared to TI and that that that all this stuff and read the riot act to me. Well, you know, where, you know, ti is still around, but they're an analog company. They're not even really in digital at all anymore. They totally Miss Seema say. I mean, I was five to 10 years behind the state of the art are they competitors in in IC technology when I was working there, and looking back on I didn't know at the time. probably gotten out. But but at the time I you know, I knew we could feel we were behind, but you don't realize suffer. Anyway, my point here being is, is that most companies, they try to try to look at another great example. This is I remember Michael Eisner bragging out he didn't get involved in a Time Warner deal. You remember may remember AOL. But you know in Time Warner, they merged. Well, I always said a fake company, a company with a lot of stock of stock value, but no real product. No, you looked at their business. It was nothing and they were not making anything. But a fake company bought out a real company Time Warner and I remember Michael Eisner bragging how he didn't fall for that, you know how he stayed out of it. And then he turned around and bought go calm, which was a total disaster. He spent billions of dollars on going calm, which was a joke. Like they still succumb to it. I think sometimes you got the people yelling in yours. You're the Tim The reason I bring this up. You got Tim Cook yet people yelling at you. AR is the next big thing. See all these articles and see all this stuff and all. And at some point, Tim Cook says, Well, I don't I'm not gonna be a Luddite. It must be AR. But like I said, I happen to go on a stage with anybody and let's argue it let's let's go say well, how are you going to hear my list of 20? Tell me how you're going to solve these things.

I look forward to that debate.

Before you go, I'm going to tell you about the next episode. in it. I speak with Kirin Sinha. Kirin is the co founder and CEO of Lumix a company building an AR first mobile gaming platform. They've already found a lot of success with their first title Five Nights at Freddy's AR Special Delivery. In this conversation, Kirin shares how she thinks about creating compelling stories in gameplay from mobile AR. We talked about how the Five Nights at Freddy's franchise is a great fit for AR and why she's going to make her underlying mobile game platform available to third party developers. I think you'll really enjoy the conversation. Please follow or subscribe to the podcast so you don't miss this or other great episodes. Until next time.