The AR Show: Matt Miesnieks (LivingCities) on Reflecting Our Reality to Inspire Social Engagement in the Metaverse - Part 1

6:39PM Sep 12, 2022

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Matt Miesnieks

Keywords:

world

ar

building

people

metaverse

real

virtual

3d

technology

foursquare

6d

describe

person

matt

place

cities

explore

social engagement

create

dennis

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 Matt Miesnieks. Matt is currently the CEO and co founder of living cities, a company reimagining social engagement in the era of the metaverse. Many of you know Matt as a serial entrepreneur and former investor focused on augmented reality. Matt was previously the CEO and co founder of 6d.ai, a company that built tools to help mobile phones understand the real world and enable compelling AR experiences. Niantic acquired 6d in 2020.

Matt started his career in a number of engineering and business roles before shifting his focus to augmented reality more than 12 years ago, Matt was head of customer development at layer early consumer AR company, he founded deco the first mobile mixed reality platform for iOS that then worked at Samsung has the Director of Product Development in AR and VR. And he was a founding partner at Super ventures, an early stage investor in AR and VR, all that before founding sixty.ai.

In this, the first of a two-part conversation, Matt shares the evolution of his perspective on AR and creating successful startups. After sixty.ai sail to Niantic, he talks about the foundational observations and ingredients for creating something special with living cities. Part of that is finding a unique approach to tying the real world to the virtual.

The reason we use the term reflecting is that reflections are possibly literal, but they could also be impressionistic, in some ways, like you can be reflections off water, reflections, like a funfair mirror, you know, they can be warped and be different. And so just a bunch of cells, we sort of refer to it as a digital sibling, rather than a digital twin. And then you can kind of tell the same family but they're not identically the same. And that that space, I think, is where a lot of interesting creative opportunities sort of open up into how do you experience this virtual world that feels like the real place but it's not an exact perfect cup, because I think that's a futile, endless rabbit hole to go down.

Matt goes on to describe key technology trends, his thoughts on rocket timing for living cities, and give some hints on what social engagement might look like in the future of blended reality. As a reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website, the AR show.com. Let's dive in.

One more thing. Before we get started, after several years of running this podcast, I've decided to open a patreon to fund ongoing maintenance and improvements. If you've enjoyed episodes in the past, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/the AR show, I'm going to find ways to engage more intimately with subscribers through events such as small group conversations with me or popular guest, or some other exclusive content patreon.com/the AR show. Now let's get into it with Matt.

Matt, you recently made the move from the Bay Area to New York City. In the few months that you've been there now, has there been anything fun or unexpected? You discovered about living in Manhattan? Since moving there?

Ah, that's a good question. I spent a fair bit of time here, you know, over the years. And so I had a pretty, I guess, pretty good handle of what it was going to be like living here. The thing has been new, I guess it's just all of the regular life aspects of it like doing the grocery shopping, dropping my kids off at things actually working. Because nearly all the other times I've been here they've been mostly for fun, or just like an event or something. So just that that regular life side of it and having to sort of find a new routine has been about the only thing but Manhattan itself has been. Yeah, exactly what I expected what I hoped

for it. What was that? What were you hoping for a lot of

just diversity of culture and all its forms, suddenly got to the point where in the Bay Area, I felt it was a monoculture of tech. And you know, that was great when tech is your entire life. And when you're you know, I was doing a startup and that was all we were doing. But I'd always loved the idea or like, you know, the appeal of Manhattan, just that it's got so many different industries. So have got a good presence here is obviously a mash up of all different cultures and things. And yeah, that was kind of the main thing. I wanted to find that lifestyle more than anything else.

Yeah. And so far, so good. Yes. Last time, we had a chance to get together and chat it for a recorded interview, at least we shared on the podcast, we talked about your experience and the lessons learned from building and selling sixty.ai to Niantic. And really, as we kind of explored previously, you've focused on augmented reality for a dozen years or so now through several different startups through super ventures as a venture capitalist. You've seen it from all sides here. How has your thinking about AR shifted over the last couple of years since selling 6d to Niantic?

Christian it's less my thinking about AR and More about market timing. And hopefully, I've gotten better at that. I think where they are. And in particular, like, I still believe everything I've always believed about AR being, you know, the next major, or I guess the interface into the next major computing platforms. And what I guess what I've learned is that how long those type of shifts take, and you know how to hopefully better map that to the typical runway of a startup. So you really need to be looking at like, 12 month time horizon, it's not the clear vision you have of how the world's going to be one day. And so that that's definitely something that from my earlier startups and things I worked for three to 6d, we kind of got it reasonably right there. And living cities were kind of even being less visionary, I guess, in terms of the way we're thinking about technology, even though we certainly have the same vision, longer term.

Can you explain a bit more about this, this idea that your perspective on what will come remains, the sensitivity, you have to when it comes, is heightened here, as you're thinking about living cities? So what's the risk of maybe it's a bit obvious, but what's the risk of being too early or taking longer than expected,

you can have two approaches, if you're if you're early one is to wait until all the bits that you need to build the company build the product that you want to exist, or you need to invent or you have a company that invents those bits. And so 6d was a company that invented something, you know, we invented something that we thought would be necessary. And you know, we sort of time that reasonably well, with living cities, we don't want to be a company that invents technology, we really want to be something that applies technology to a really interesting use case. So in that sense, that's been the sort of different, I guess, different perspective on timing, we had to say, Okay, let's assume that the world doesn't change at all, from how it is today. What could we build today without any dependency on anybody else. So we don't have to wait for some slam to get better or for apples shipment, or, or for some, you know, something, the next version of something. And that sort of thinking means that your vision of what things can be you have to really scale that back and think, what's the simplest, most, you know, it almost feels uninspiring to you as a founder to sort of think, okay, we're going to commit to building this because we know this is what can be built today, and go with that and know that it's a first step on a long journey. And I guess the the other aspect of that is that we pay close attention to what is possible today, that wasn't possible 12 months ago. So you kind of look for these step changes in technology or user behavior are something that have changed. And you sort of try not to predict what changes are coming. You try and look at what changes have just happened.

That's here now usable, that you can build from? Yeah, exactly. So if this this kind of notion that AR isn't ready yet, right? There's still a lot of bits that need to be invented and made available at scale, even through companies like Apple or others. If it's not going to be an AR first sort of experience, and you're focused on what is available today. What are the sorts of things that you you began to explore? What are the sorts of interesting technologies that have recently been developed last handful of years? Yeah,

so it's obviously very interested in in the space we're exploring with 6d. And, you know, the vision of 6d was built around the idea of our cloud and this idea of a mirror world or a 3d map of the world, machine readable 3d map of the world existing. And since 16, came along, like pretty much every major platform is building that. And so I was really interested in sort of going, but what happens after that, what happens when it's built, you know, what do you do with these maps? And obviously, we went through that as we went through the sale process, we talked to everybody and no one really had any idea, they just knew it would be necessary, but not really sure what for and we'd built some prototypes of 6ds and little tests and a couple of those stuck with me, we always thought well, there's an interesting little insight into this test that we never really got to explore because we're required. So with that frame, you know, that mindset that I sort of started with, I saw a couple of trends you know, one a big one was the explosion of deep learning into computer vision and computer graphics. You know, we saw we were really early on the wave of that at 6d but that way just got bigger and bigger. And you know, nerf is a technology that a lot of people are talking about right now but that's it's it's legitimately exciting. Second was The game engines, I guess, have the ability to now you know, with like Unreal five and some of the new stuff coming from unity in videos Omniverse you know that you've gone from, like, just as a regular person you've gone from like, just things that look like video games to things that look like cinema, and the photo reel that you can now do that real time on a consumer hardware. That wasn't possible, you know, a year ago. And then the other big one was before was labeled metaverse. You know, I saw my kids 1314 year old boys. And during the lockdown in the pandemic, they did all of their socializing in 3d worlds with their friends. They weren't doing FaceTime, they weren't text chatting. It was like let's meet up in fortnight or in robotics or in Minecraft, or whatever it was, and they weren't really playing the game. They were doing other stuff, you know, and I noticed that, like, that's kind of an interesting shift. And I sort of thought, okay, you know, photo realism is now possible to both capture and render, people are spending lists of a certain generation, we're starting to spend more time in 3d worlds, doing regular life stuff, not just playing a game. And with my background at 16 years going, Okay, what happens if this 3d world was actually the real world? And what happens if it actually looked like the real world, not like a video game? And we thought all of those attributes were possible now that weren't really possible a year ago. And that was kind of the insight, I guess, that evolved into living cities.

One of the things that you noted that was kind of one of the ingredients in this the brewing was going on, as you started living cities was this notion that all these major companies you talked to, when you were selling 6d, didn't really know what to do with math, they didn't know what to do once they had figured out how to tie the physical world to some sort of digital equivalent. Yeah, but the company end up selling to Niantic they they have built a business on Pokemon Go, which at some level, is tying a digital experience a digital world to the physical world. Yeah, what is it that they were doing right? Or where is it they're leaving room for for improvement or something different in and how they're integrating the digital into the physical?

You have? Obviously, they're doing a lot right with pokemon pokemon go in particular. And I think they're certainly have the right mindset for with their launch product in terms of trying to expose a lot of what a lot of that infrastructure and a lot of the stuff we build at 6d and exposing that for third party developers. The difference, I guess that how we see it at living cities, is firstly, we're not interested in building games. But secondly, we're viewing the world as a 3d map of the world, not a 2d map of the world, Pokemon users. And we're thinking, okay, they have that third person kind of isometric view of the map, we're going to go what happens if that map was actually felt more like a immersive video game, where it was, you're down in maybe a first person pedestrian view of the city. And that was, I guess, the difference? I think, I mean, we definitely believe that all of these companies Niantic snap, Facebook, obviously, Apple, Google, are all trying to build the same sort of maps. And were trying to go, you know, skate where the puck is going, you know, and try and show everyone. What what this could be,

what this could be. How do you describe what this could be? How do you describe living cities?

So we used to try and describe it in words. And it always ended up being like a four paragraph conversation and you try to avoid terms like The Matrix, and you know, all this type of stuff. And you try and avoid using the word game, but it got difficult. So the way we are going to describe it as to show you what it can be, and we're close to a demo, we're going to start leaking little snippets and things onto our discord in a month or so. And when people see it, they get it straightaway. When we take that time to explain it about being a way to make the metaverse a socially engaging place by, say, reflecting the living world, it's that idea of Okay, what if better than a long spiel here, most of the 3d worlds you go into right now that aren't games generally aren't that engaging. They're sort of empty, it's sterile. There's nothing too much about them to make you want to stick around and enjoy that place. It's usually the activity that is designed to be the engaging thing to do. So everyone sort of gets sucked into games. The best way to describe the difference in what we're doing is the way John John Gatto, my co founder, describe that as you said, world building is an extremely, extremely hard thing to do. And most creative people fail at it when they do it. And whether that's writing a novel, making a film, making a video game, or to come up with that world that feels, you know, feels like a real place. Maybe every five or six years, you know, someone will actually come up with something that turns into a franchise and sticks around for decades. And there's really been none of that in any of the metaverse, platforms that are out there today. But when you look at the real world, you get all of that for free. You don't have to think about Gee, what in New York City, what would people wear? Maybe? What sort of music? Would they listen to? You know, what would the weather be like? You know, what were the architecture be like, like, all that stuff is like, it's right there, just somehow bring it into the world. And when you have a world that's full of more full of behaviors, full of culture, then that gives you context for things to do. And, you know, that was kind of the really, you know, I guess the aspirations that we have, why we call the company living cities to try and tap into that, you know, that world building that's already been done. So but it is that we were trying to make the metaverse socially engaging. And the thing that we believe is going to make a virtual place engaging, is to fill it with lore and fulfill it with do the world building part of it. And that's where like the the flip side of the scription is by reflecting the living world up into the virtual. And that's, that's sort of the simplest description, you know, we've come up with, but even that, you need to explain a lot. So, yeah, it's sort of a big concept, we use words like 3d maps game maps, this idea of a digital twin of the real world that you can inhabit, as if you're playing a video game and move around. But it's also aligned with the real world. So that if you are physically in a place, your avatar will appear in the map in the same place the same way that today, if you're in Google Maps, you get a little blue dot that correlates to your physical place. And if you take 10 steps, you know the dot moves, we think the same thing should happen in a 3d map, like you take 10 steps, and your avatar will take the same 10 steps as you correlate where you are in the in the real world. And when you're doing that, opens up a whole lot of novel use cases around and interactions around. How does a physical person in a place interact with a remote virtual person who's just dropped their avatar into that same place? And what can they do for each other?

What can they do for each other? I'd love to dig into some of these a bit more deeply. One of the things you talked about this, this this notion that the real world contains so much life? Yeah, so much intrigue and interest. For us as humans, that is a fantastic place upon which to base purpose for going in and hanging out interacting with others. What are some of the other maybe you can spend on expand on that one and describe some of the other sort of fundamental concepts or beliefs that are guiding you as you kind of go and create this sort of experience?

Yeah, or one is, one is this idea of liveness. Living and life, you know, it all. It corresponds to like, actually, your life that you live and who you are as a person, but it also is live like real time. And when you look at today's maps, about the only live thing on there might be like the traffic jams, you know, you see like little red line, whether it's when there's a traffic jam right now happening in this bit of the freeway. And that's, that's an aspect of liveness to Google Maps or Apple Maps. We're trying to extend that and say, Okay, now imagine it's a 3d map. How do you make that live, and you know, the simple things you can do like making sure that the sun is in the same position, so the shadows and things match, the weather matches the seasons match. So that helps you look at the real world to look at the map. And they should kind of always look close to each other, if not as close as you can get. Then there's a whole bunch of other data feeds, you can get in like estimates of pedestrian traffic and vehicle traffic in a place. And then you get into like site specific sensors, I guess. And that can be anything from if you say it's a private place like like Disneyland or something, they've got security cameras, everywhere that I looked at all you swipe your wrist tag, whenever you go on to any ride, you know, the position of every every ride. And so you could make something like that a very, very rich copy of the real Disneyland. When you're doing a public place, you can put surveillance cameras up and film everybody all the time and sort of replicate each person exactly where they are. So you need to sort of make some estimates on those and try and get them close. And there's the whole idea of like, crowdsourcing some of that data as well. So you start wading into a whole lot of privacy type concerns, as usual, but our I guess, ambition is to find enough of those data sources of liveness that feels live when you're there. It's that subjective or qualitative kind of sense of feeling that where we're trying to capture.

And so here, I guess you're describing is this connective tissue between this virtual representation as the map as you describe it, and in the real world. And in a private place, there's a lot of opportunity for that, because the lots of sensors that Disneyland, for example, is already installed. In in the public places or other ways you can kind of get at the same idea, at the most basic, you can have a sense for the time of day and the weather and seasonal shifts, or daily shifts, and it can go deeper than that, in terms of understanding,

yeah, it's just when it comes down to like how much surveillance or recording we comfortable, or I'm not a sweeping population comfortable with being done where, you know, like recording loops of audio spatialized audio, you know, obviously, there's no real way to do smells, or temperature or things like that. But you can definitely get a sense of space, like how open it is, you know, if it's claustrophobic, you know, the things like the architecture and getting all that sort of stuff, right. And getting that very realistic, all of that contributes to that feeling of it being more and more real. The sort of aspect of that, that people don't really explore, I think we haven't acknowledged is, there's the term digital twin, and for mirror world, and there's a implication in those terms, that every pixel matches every atom in the real world. And in the physical world, it is, it is always a twin, literal twin. But the reason we use the term reflecting is that reflections are possibly literal, but they could also be impressionistic, in some ways, like you can be reflections off water, reflections, like a funfair mirror, you know, they can be walked and be different. And so just amongst ourselves, we sort of refer to it as a digital sibling, rather than a digital twin. And that you can kind of tell the same family, but they're not identically the same. And that that space, I think, is where a lot of interesting creative opportunities sort of open up into, how do you experience this virtual world? That feels like the real place, but it's not an exact perfect cup? Because I think that's a futile, endless rabbit hole to go down.

And so this notion of reflection can be impressionistic, which gives you a lot of artistic freedom, interesting ways to explore that. What might social engagement look like? In this sort of experience? Yeah,

I mean, that's that is the question like, if it's the thing that you talked about, at the beginning, like, like trying to look at the technologies, and what's what's recently changed, rather than waiting for something that hasn't happened yet. That 6d You know, we invented some new technology that didn't exist yet. The one thing, the problem I guess, we're trying to solve early on with living cities is exactly that question. What does social engagement look like between a person physically in a place and a virtual avatar in the same place being controlled by someone on the couch on the other side of the world, as far as I'm aware, that hasn't ever really been done? Like it hasn't been tackled over in all my years? I've never seen anyone really explore that. You know, there's been experiments with CO presence and telepresence and things, but they're usually in labs and with big equipment. So for us, that's the thing that we don't really know, we've got a hypothesis as to what will be interesting. We definitely believe that people are the most interesting thing. And we're most interested in ourselves and then in each other. And so it's really going to be a matter of how do we how do we explore the new medium that's now available to us in the metaverse, which is 3d becomes the medium. And one of the one of the ideas that take inspiration from is, is to do photos, when Instagram, and before Instagram and Flickr and those things photos have always been like a an archival record of our memories. We take a photo of something we'd save it and we remember it. But camera phones came along and digital photography became ubiquitous. And snap had the insight that oh, this new medium can actually be used as a communication medium. Like how can I send photos back and forth constantly, like they get thrown away? They're definitely not archived. But the idea is to communicate something using the capabilities of a new medium in a way that hasn't been possible before. We are trying to think the same way about 3d in that if we're in a 3d space, and 3d is on the verge. I wouldn't say it's happened today, but it's on the verge of becoming ubiquitous and easy to create, particularly with a lot of the AI assistant creation tools right now. Like like 3d version of Dolly isn't far away. And you can start to like it like anyone can just start to say, I want to see a cat that looks like a whale. And you can see how that would become created as a 3d asset, you can then automatically possibly rig it and animate it and things. So that that direction is where we think the interesting social interactions are going to be. Obviously, that technology isn't available today. So we're not betting on it. And we're really trying to find ways to kind of explore that idea using today's, you know, today's capabilities, but really sort of researching and looking into how do we start to treat 3d content as a communication medium? And what new types of social interaction and self expression are possible when you when you can do that?

You talked at the outset about this deeper appreciation you have for the timing, when you create the company is as important as what it is that you're creating? What is it about right now, maybe beyond the availability of these cinematic reality, sort of 3d game engines and their amazing ability to create these sort of 3d worlds? And you also talked about neural radiance feels sort of nerve technology? What does it beyond these technologies that makes now feel like the right time for a new type of social engagement platform?

Yeah, well, really, for all the same reasons that Facebook rebranded themselves to mirror whether we're right about it or not, I think it's too early to tell. But there's suddenly a consensus that those types of Metaverse platforms represent the future of our, our compute and our interactions and our socialism. So the question then is why now like directionally, we think that's the right way to go. And the reason why now is because, like I said, it's now possible to have a 3d replica of the real world. And hopefully, it'll feel like the real world. And our bet is that that gives you the stage for these new types of social interactions. So we might be wrong about that. There's always you know, I try and take on like, one dimension of risk in a company now not multiple. And that's our that's our bet. That's the risk that we're taking on. Everything else is just hard work. The rest Despit? We don't know.

Right? There's no dependency on external things that don't yet exist to exist. Yeah. Do you have guesses yet? Or can you describe how you imagine a person in a real place interaction with the person that's in that virtual reflection of that place?

Yeah, I mean, the tests that we've done so far that seem interesting, it's, again, it's very much about liveness. So you're live streaming video. And audio is the most interesting thing we've seen, just started, these tests are sort of bunch more to explore. But that's a big one, the alignment of the real world content with the virtual content. So, you know, it's like those, I know, you've seen those like historical AR, those demos of interfer, with someone like holds up an old photo in front of the real modern place, and they line it all up. So the buildings and everything match, like doing that sort of thing, when in both directions is interesting. When you can do like live streaming between the real world in the metaverse, you're effectively broadcasting yourself into the virtual world. So all those types of like every busker on the street can now start doing that sort of thing. And they can have a virtual tip jar and get tipped by people out there. And so we think that type of idea is, is an interesting one. But the moment these are just sort of guesses that we've got that seem interesting. I've definitely learned that, even with all my time, and the space has actually taught me not to trust my instincts too much. Because everything comes down to you know, the implementation, the execution, and how does it actually feel when you try it. And little simple things that you you sort of think of trivial or immaterial, they can completely transform the experience can go from like horrible to awesome. And things that you thought were this is an awesome idea. This is a no brainer, it's going to work you build it. Now, this just isn't interesting at all. It's so obvious. So where we're sort of entering now the state of experimenting and prototyping, and hopefully we'll prove or disprove some of these ideas that we're all pushing around.

As an aside, can you describe a little bit neuro radiants fields, Nerf this technology and why it applies to what you're doing?

There's a level of technology that I defined, don't understand. So sort of the layman's description is previous 3d reconstruction techniques like using your Lidar scanner, the scanner statue, built a like a 3d asset that would come out of a lot of voxels and then those voxels might be turned into a mesh and then you'd apply textures to that man hash and yeah there was the it always be kind of not quite photorealistic like it put them side by side you got it looks definitely looks similar but you look up closely okay, you can see the mash and see where the texture kind of warps and all these places. What you know what nerf does is it actually gives you a photorealistic it's like, moving your virtual camera around a nerf is indistinguishable from moving a video camera around, the real thing just looks like a video playback. So that that lift in visual fidelity. And it's all I'm not sure if I'm sure how the magic works. But it's definitely heavily reliant on Deep Learning and AI to interpret what should be there and to render it realistically. And it works great, there's still a huge drawback to nerf is that you're, you're not getting a textured mesh, and you're not getting something that you can just drop into a game engine. And it'll do physics and occlusion and be viewable from big scenes and things are hard to do. So it's still early days, but all those things are monthly, there's progress being made on all those fronts. The big takeaway for me is just the fact that at the moment, it's really amazing to look at the you can't quite use them as a 3d asset. So people saying that it's the future of everything, I think, I think it's definitely the future of 3d capture. But until that, like, shortfall is overcome, like, they'll just be pretty pictures basically to look at, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But it is for what we're doing. We actually want assets that that can be used. So where or you just put them in the background,

this notion of using the real world as inspiration for an engaging and interesting virtual sibling? Is the real world primarily that source of inspiration, or is it meant to be more like is it about a jumping off point for people to now fully more fully engaged in the metaverse and to be there? Or is it some other sort of connectivity? That is important?

We don't think it's the be all and end all it's it's like this is, you know, this digital copy of the real world is going to be a little one little corner of the metaverse, you know, that's going to be lots and lots of virtual places. So we don't think, you know, we don't think this is the one Metaverse to rule them, or one one way that people should approach them universe. We think that a place like this idea of a spirit of a place is kind of important in that, again, it's not the place, it's the people that matter. But where you are kind of determines who you are. Like if me sitting here in my office talking to you, I'm a kind of different person than I am at the pub at nine o'clock tonight. Or if I'm pitching a client, or if I'm playing with my kids in the park. And so that place really does influence you know, who we are. And we think that if you can drop yourself into places, it'll bring out aspects of our behavior of our character. And that's why we think places matter, especially places that have a life sort of culture and spirit to them. Because we want people to go to places where they can be who they want to be. And sort of, I mean, that's what we do in real life, you know, you go backpacking as a student, or you move from San Francisco to New York, you know, I'm the same person as I was, but now I'm in a different city. So I do feel differently, and I can behave differently. You know, it's a different culture here. So I can be a slightly different person than I was. And I think, you know, that's the reason why we think places matter. It's not, it's not to sort of do like some architecture or like, come and look at look at New York or because Google Streetview, Google Earth does a good job of that. How

important is it to create connection interaction in the real world itself outside of the metaverse or is that not important?

It's one of the sets one of our values, and we're still working out how to how to put it into the product. You know, Dennis talks about Dennis Crowley, the co founder talks about get used to say get on the internet to get off the internet. And Foursquare was a fantastic, which he co founded was one of the fantastic example of that, like, you would get on Foursquare to find out where your friends are and then put your phone back in your pocket and go there and have fun with your friends. I think that's just a fantastic way to think about our our view of the metaverse and that's why we want that aligned place. So that if maybe you in a place in the real place, but maybe I'm traveling and I can't be there with you. So I can be there virtually and feel like I'm there. Those types of things are more important to us than building the matrix and we put via headset on so Oh, wow, now we're in like virtual New York and I never have to leave. That's definitely not what we want to do. So the opposite of what we want to do, we want to find a way just to really connect the physical people to virtual people and hopefully, find ways to make everyone's life a bit more interesting.

Where does or when does AR and VR play a role in what you're creating?

It's, it's sort of work today, like, if the devices were out there in volume, you know, we would support them. So start with VR, that is like the matrix like you could put your VR headset on. And hopefully, you'll feel like you're in New York, and you'll look around and it will be incredibly realistic visually of the audio, and people and all that sort of stuff. So VR is kind of an easy, easy one to describe. With AR. So let's see, we've got, you've got this virtual copy of the real world. And then you feel that virtual copy with content and people avatar so that could be the avatars themselves, the people that are sort of see create a bit of just simplicity, circa, I was an avatar with my VR headset on in the middle of virtual Time Square, and I do a sculpture, you know, using Tilt Brush or something. And now, right in the middle of Times Square is my virtual, in the middle of virtual Time Square is a virtual sculpture and my virtual avatar standing around it. Now, if I went to physical Time Square, and put my AR glasses on, I would see the same sculpture in exactly the same place, and the same avatar standing in exactly the same place in the real world as they are in the virtual world. And that ability to kind of use populate the virtual world with content, which also populates the physical world with AR content is kind of the AR angle on all of this. Obviously, there's the problem of how to stop people walking through each other and bumping into each other and all that sort of thing. But that's just a problem inherent with all AR. So when I'm trying to solve that, does that make sense?

Answer the question. Yeah, absolutely. Absolute makes sense. There's this kind of inherent notion here that it doesn't matter, the device, they kind of both give you maybe a different view, a different lens, just seems sort of

weird. Yeah, that's exactly what we do have, like, you know, just sort of started pushing on this concept when he has it magically, you know, they call it the magic verse, And they sort of pushed it as their thing. But the metaphor he used as sort of, we're trying to build the sun. And whatever device you use is just just a planet, you know, that goes around there. So whether you're using AR, an AR headset, a VR headset, a phone, a PC, at home, a tablet, you're all seeing the same thing, same content, same behavior, same activity, whether you're sitting on your couch at home, experiencing it or whether you're physically in a place experiencing it. We're completely device agnostic. And the only reason we're not supporting every possible device, game consoles, you know, all that stuff, is just because we're a small team, and we can only do one thing at a time. But definitely down the road. We see this as any device type thing.

mesin. Let's set up part two here very briefly, perhaps with this, how is it that you came to know Dennis and John in why are they the right fit for what you're doing with living cities as co founders.

So I met John five, six years ago, he reached out to me with a early blog post I wrote, and we connected and we just found we had exactly the same view of where this AR stuff was going. And we stayed in touch when he was at ILM. And then he went to magically, you almost joined 6d as an advisor. And we're always looking for some way to work together, this would be you know, we should try and find it. And Dennis, you know, when I was thinking about the idea, I thought, Look, what people have had experience with building a social product that's based on the real world. And Dennis is probably the only person on earth who has done that. Like there isn't too many other success stories apart from Foursquare. And so I want to talk to him just to get his thoughts and advice. And we had a we had some friends in common. So we got introduced a couple of years ago, we met for coffee and a little park and sort of trying to explain the vision. And as he kind of understood it, he was like, you know, this is where I always sort of hoped directionally, Foursquare would sort of end up. And he's like, How can I be involved? And I said, Well, he sort of shared that he was in the process of leaving Foursquare and I said, Well, do you want to run product? And he said, Yes, I'd love to. So that sort of started that conversation. And the reason why I think we're the right team for this is, firstly, we've all been looking at this exact same problem for decades, or each of us for decades, but from three different vantage points, you know, through different perspectives, you know, John's coming from, obviously cinema storytelling and narrative that what's possible creatively with new technology. And you know, from an extremely high level of production values that he's, that's his background, Dennis has come at this from a really, you know, he brings a focus on just how's this going to help one person today improve their life, but just that very grounded human focused insights and passion. And I've got that background around 3d capture and AR and sort of future tech stuff. And my guess what I bring is more of that longer term view of where a lot of this stuff is going. And so all of us kind of complement each other really, really well. And we're just been building up a team, and as a founder CEOs perspective, like having having people around you that have had success in their domains, and Dennis has obviously run a much bigger company than moving cities is. It's really, really nice just to be able to be more hands off and less anxious about the details, because they're covering appointments. That's a that's a nice change from the past.

Yeah. How big is the team now altogether?

So it's hard to answer that because some people are working part time, and some are contractors who are just for a little thing, but I think at the moment, there's somewhere around 1011 People kind of touching the product at the moment, you know, sort of floating plus or minus a couple of people on that number, you know, month to month. And, yeah, so we're 10 People can't build very much when it's this ambitious. Our challenge has been how do we not boil the ocean? Because we have enough ideas to fill the ocean. And it's what do we say? What are the great ideas that we love that we're saying no to, to get to that? What can be done today? Like, if it's up to me, I would love just to go, let's explore these AI technologies and some new web stuff and all the new computer vision things and three years from now we'll you know, we'll have something mind blowing. And you can't do that as a startup. So everything we're doing is like, how do we say no, no, no, or later, later, later, to just right now with the 10 people that we've got on the runway that we've got,

I will definitely ensure that we have all the latest links to whatever demos or public in the show notes here so people can listen to us content. Check it out. Cool. Matt, thanks for this for right now. We will pick up again with car to look forward to it.

As you surmised The conversation continues with Matt in the next episode. In part two, his co founders John Gaeta and Dennis Crowley join us for a deeper dive into the new company. As Matt mentioned, you may know John from his time creating special effects for the Matrix movies. And you may know Dennis as the co founder and CEO of location intelligence apps, Dodgeball, and Foursquare. I think you'll really enjoy the conversation. And please consider contributing to this podcast at the patreon.com/the AR show. That's th e AR sh O W. Thanks for listening.