gonna just introduce very quickly surely and then I will start just with the same first question that goes for every guest that is more about talking about what got you into XR how you got here. What is your plan, like a little bit of your story more or less so surely is like a professional musicial musician sorry, sound designer and audio engineers specializing in spatial audio and 360 immersive sound. She founded a company with two studios after winning reality virtually hackathon 2017. So we have an early rising for XR as a top 10 innovative ideas. She managed the immersive technology lab at Berklee College of Music. And he taught dozens of students how to build immersive experience, I assume with Unity, hair leadership, both in real, okay, so we got unity and really in the past, way better than me, I use the real for short amount of time in architecture. But yeah, always been more heavy on unity. And just to end up the introduction here, like leadership skills, got her to win several awards for VR application, including unity award and BSL. It is the Boston Symphony, orchestra word and recognition in the Arab world, either to become a public speaker and advocate for immersive technology. So if you are participating to a lot of AR events, you will see surely around for sure. And I recommend you to go talk to her because it's very much of a good energy and amazing, you know, amazing feeling when you talk to someone who's so passionate about their work. And I also see a lot of myself in so. Of course, please go ahead and introduce yourself.
Seriously honored to be here. I met you, Alessio. And I felt like we found each other as soulmates have like, Okay, someone else is thinking like me, and someone else is also crazy, and like thinking about the future every day. So it's great to like, it was great to find you, it was great that we were working together, I'm really glad that we can share this experience inside of work. And outside of this, we usually can't really talk much about our work, which requires us to do a lot of things outside of work to get the recognition. Yeah, and it's great to be here with a crazy creator like you, that is trying to push the boundaries constantly. And in the same time also building a community of great phenomenal creators that I saw that you interviewed before. So happy to be here. What was the first question again?
It was more about yourself. It was more about like, maybe, if I need to recap it in a very short sentence like what got you into XR? So how did you get there? Like, what was the spark that led you to say, Okay, now I want to work with that, you know, with that headset, or try to build something.
I feel like creative people and also ADHD people and like in general people that like see creativity constantly. Once in a while they find something and they say, oh my god, this is the coolest shit ever. And I'm gonna obsess about this. And I'm gonna tell everyone that it's the best thing in the world, because I just found about out about this. And that happened to me a few times in life. And like, now, the newest thing is AR but probably if you talk to me in about five years, I'm going to tell you no, no, no, this is the coolest shit ever. And this is what you should be obsessing about. So I don't know what's going to happen in the future. But I can tell you how I got here. I started as a musician. I never studied code. I was always bad with computers. And I was always known as the technophobe in the class, which is kind of surprising to see me in a tech company nowadays, it surprises me as well, to be honest. Um, so I came from the musical side, and I was playing piano since I want to say since I was three or four, I don't quite remember when I started, but I feel like it was around three or four. And I never stopped since I can see like, my entire room is filled with instruments. Um, and I started playing Bach and Beethoven and Mozart and all the classical composers. And that was kind of cool as a child because I want all the talent shows and I had a great skill because I practiced it every day, but that was kind of not enough. Then when I got into high school, I'm like, okay, rock bands. This is the coolest thing ever. And like there was drums and there's like guitars and amplifiers and sounds that have never heard in classical music. And I said, Okay, this is the coolest thing ever. I don't even have to learn chords. There were like four chords. And that's it. And that was like so much simpler than classical music, that I bought it and I'm like, okay, that's my new obsession for now. That I went to college, and I went kind of back to my roots, and I picked up classical music again, but this time in the sight of composition, and I got to compose a lot of music. And through composition, I learned how to work with big bands and orchestras and on some balls and basically structures that requires a lot of people to play together. And that became the new obsession. It was like, Oh my God, you can just wave your hands in the air. And 80 people do the same thing. And it's the best instrument that I've ever heard in my life, you have no idea. Like when you stand there on the podium, you just wave your hand up and like 80 violins just like rip with you. And they wait until you wave your hand. And like before you do that, they don't move, they just wait for your signal. And I said, Okay, this is a really cool instrument, and I obsessed about orchestral music for a while. And then from orchestral music, I'm like, I found out what was that? I found out that I really hate the audience of orchestral music. Because as much as I love the music, all the audience were people above 80 That would like you know, open their candy RABs in the crowd, and I would have to like shush them. So I realize, okay, how can we change the audience, but not change the style, this is brilliant, check this up, you change the audience without changing the style. So when the film scoring, so I went to film scoring, because when you call a John Williams, and when you call it, Hans Zimmer, people suddenly are much younger. The demographic just changes even though it's the same type of music, it came from the same origin, but I'm like, Oh, my God. This is orchestral music and symphonic music. But suddenly, I get to talk to young people that are super obsessed with those films. So I got to learn a lot about film scoring, I gave a lot of talks about how you can understand that narrative of the story based on the music and there, there were a lot of things like the Star Wars films were based out of Wagner's music, and like that, you can actually like, extract the entire story if you actually open your ears and listen to the music. And then from that, that was like the coolest thing for a while. And then I found out about video games, which is kind of like a film. But now you don't control what the character is doing. You're like, in a film, you know that someone is going to open the door and a bunch of ninjas are going to jump on him. In a video game, you have no clue and no kind of control of what the player is going to do. So suddenly, you have to compose multiple layers, suddenly, you have to think about every scenario, suddenly, you give the control to someone else. And for me, that was magical. That was like the first time that I saw a video game with my music on it. That was during a game jam. I barely even knew how to export my own sounds back then. But I did it somehow. And we got it into a video game. I'm like, Oh, wow, it's moving. And it's changing. And it's changing based on parameters that are happening in real time, and no one has control over it except the player. Um, and around that time, I moved to the US, I moved to Boston, I got accepted to Berklee College of Music. So I was new in the city. And I didn't know a lot of people and I decided to basically what you do Alessio, which is find a community, or try to open a community, but basically tried to find who is around the area and who can you talk to, and what is the scene in Boston. And I signed up to about like 20 hackathons. One of them is the biggest AR and VR hackathon in the world back then. I believe it was the biggest one in the world. I think it still is. Nowadays, we call it the MIT reality hack. But back then it was reality virtually. Completely. Nobody knows nothing about you. Were there. No way.
Yeah, I think I did. I did the 1017 18. I did the one that they did at USC. I remember that was my first one. Huh? Yeah. I think maybe you did the one there the year before. But I definitely remember reality virtually. Maybe it was 2019 that one? I don't know. Remember? But yeah.
19 It was already MIT reality or whatever. Yeah. Such a small community. I can't believe this, like finding so many people that like I met back then in 2017, and are now having like, insane careers in the industry. So this is a tip to anyone who's listening. The industry is really small. So knowing the right people is definitely going to help you get advance in life. Definitely. So I went to the hackathon and and I was kind of lost because I realized that not everyone is making video games, so I don't have much to contribute, if I don't know what it is. And I didn't know anything about AR and VR back then. I didn't know HTC Vive. I didn't know Oculus. Those words meant nothing to me. I tried once like the Samsung VR. And that's it. And it was kind of lost and I sat down at the keynote speak like, you know, sitting down and next to me, said Adam Sawyer, actually And he said why
he's always it was our last guest.
No. Yeah. So he sat next to me and said, like, what, what do you do? Like we started talking? No, no. I asked him like, are you pitching? And he said, Yes, I'm pitching my idea. And I said, What is your idea? And then he said something super boring about blockchain. And I didn't understand a word he was saying. I was like, kind of sad on the side. And he asked me, Why are you sad? And I said, because I'm a musician. I can't make music for blockchain. I don't even know what it is. And Adam looked at me and he said, maybe you can, like I don't know, like, move your hands and like, the controllers and some sound coming out. And they said, what like, out there, man, like, like this thing? And he said, yeah, just build like a VR Theramin thing. And then I remember like, Oh, my obsessions before and I said, moving your hands, instrument, you move your hands, and there is an instrument, what is the best instrument in the world? So I build the virtual reality symphony orchestra. And I got, so a second after Adam said this, I looked on the other side, and I said, Dude, I'm pitching, hear me out. And he's like, okay, let's hear it. And through the entire keynote, we like, mapped everything and how it's gonna work. And I told him, Listen, I don't understand tech. I get music, I get conducting, I can explain to you those concepts. And we can build something together. And he's like, Yeah, you know what, that's cool. Let's do this. And we found, we found a unity developer. And then we needed to find someone who can make the models, the 3d models. And that was Ali, that later also worked at Magic Leap, and then moved to the antics and move to other companies. But she's the one who recommended me to Magic Leap. Because of that hackathon. By the way. There you go. Yeah, um, yeah. So we ended up winning top 10 innovative ideas for MIT for that year. And I was shook on like, I don't even know this technology. I don't understand this, I'm new to this country, my English was not even that good. And somehow, I guess this is working. And like, I have a true belief in myself that when you find something that gives you success, then that's the thing that you should be pursuing. Because it's kind of like life, guiding you to where you should be going, you know, it's kind of like a stream that forces you towards the direction. So when you see success, don't ignore it, look at it and evaluate this and say, Do I want to continue in that path or not. And I realized I really wanted to continue that path. I wanted to develop it to a full video game and release it. But I didn't have the tools or the understanding of anything. And suddenly, I realized that films and video games are cool if you know orchestral music, but that's just part of it. And there is an entire different parts of electronic music of sci fi films of sound design of, you know, programming and computer science that I know nothing about. So I changed my degree. And I changed my degree to electronic Production and Sound Design for video games, which is what I graduated with. And that was also not enough. So I took some extra classes from MIT and from Harvard, any class that would let me and I would just sit in the back and listen. Eventually, we got a class that was a collaboration between Harvard, MIT and Berkeley that were start, I was a student there. And later, I became one of the TAs there. So I helped other students through the same journey. But all this time, I wanted to develop my app. So in the beginning, I brought some coders and some people that I met through game jams, and I realized that that's not really working out for me. And it's hard for me to trust other people when they speak a language that I don't understand, which is computer science or computer language. So I decided, You know what, okay, I can learn it. It's a learnable skills, I'm guessing that other people have learned it, that means that like it's a learnable skill. It's not a talent. So um, I watched a bunch of YouTube tutorials, until I figured it out. And eventually, we moved the game from Unity into Unreal, because we wanted it to look really fantastic and like really like a symphony orchestra. So I learned unreal as well.
That's the way
and that's kind of like what my launch my career and like for real. This like logic based approach taught me so much because I had a directive and a goal to get to where like nowadays, I'm like, looking to get more scales. And I'm like, I don't know, but I'm kind of good at this, but not really, and there's not really a point to like doing this. So once you have a goal, it's way way easier to just learn the skills that you need to get to that goal.
Absolutely agree. Yeah, every time My, I always approach my new, you know, journey always in the same way I did, like, you know, for Tokyo, it was like mixed up music, Project AI. And I was like, I just want to learn how to use properly stable diffusion and see how this thing works. Like literally I never use, I saw all of these people using it online making these images and I never really, you know, besides the UI from the website, and never do really to grasp at it, and I was like, Okay, let's just make an app. You know, that was the that was the prompt really all day project. And
we are the same person I swear to God, yeah, yeah. Stable the future. It's great. It's yeah, it's,
it's so much overlaps. We know, yeah, I feel like you know, like, as, as visual person, you get interested right away in that generative AI type of things. And I'm really now because you know, your your skills in the ears grow, you become more curious, you want to have more control, you see that you can unlock new things. It's like, I think like, if you see like a growing knowledge, I feel like you're way more motivated. Because you're like, well, if all of these efforts led me here, just think about, you know, if I keep going in this direction for the next years, I'm just gonna it feels like more of a game like you just step up every time your level. No. So you also feel
like it becomes like a habit of like, Oh, what am I really bad at that I can learn right now? Hmm, absolutely. What else can I do? What else can I learn? And it's always like, when you work in like, works like ours, there's, it's a never ending pool of knowledge that you can get. And that just makes us more hungry.
Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, working for certain companies that are so interested in this new frontier. So it's also very stimulating. And you also learn how to be patient and have a lot of patient in some problems that you're like, Oh, dang, like, this is gonna take a while. And it's not gonna sound exciting for a bit, but then maybe a because like, it's, it's like, looking at milestones that I'm looking to achieve, that's going to be called like mine. My goal? But that was a great first answer. And I want to just keep going, because I think, you know, we have like a lot of very good questions that I want to touch. So we have like, this question starts this way, we finally have an audio person on this podcast. And so shame
that you didn't have any beforehand, I'll tell the audio community and there'll be so angry. Now, I'm joking.
So for you, what is the most important aspect of regarding you know, an hour that you experience in AR and VR, like, what is the most engaging factor, as an audio engineer, artist, that you would include in your experience,
um, there's Okay, there are a few things in it. The first one is understanding the medium that you're in and using it to the best of its ability, which is something that I'm seeing a lot of people lacking in, like, they would pick up new technology, and they'll use it like a 2d screen. So utilizing the abilities, from the get go of what a device can do, or what a headset can do, or what a phone even can do. And realizing that you have way more options than you thought of. So that would be the first one. And mainly acknowledging the idea that sound is in a very physical sense, it's moving air. And when air is moving, we feel like something is alive. And when you add liveliness to thing, it like uplift the entire experience. Because it's physically moving things around. And when we see movement, we feel like something is going on. When you have too much repetition, or you don't have any sound, then like your brain kind of like tunes that out and it's like, okay, it's boring, nothing is going on here. So you need to keep the movement all the time. And that movement is, as we call it, wiggly air.
That's yeah, that's, I feel like for me, what I what I really enjoy in immersive experiences is like really when there is a perfect match between sound and movement. And I feel like you know, some of the best experiences I tried. And I'm referring mostly in the, you know, I'm studying probably the with the world of entertainment. It was I felt very, I felt very challenged by this experience I try in Osaka Go. It was like a roller coaster in VR. And it was insane because they mapped our VR ride to a VR experience. So you have like a one to one match, the motion was perfect. And it was too fast. But it was, it was probably because you had like also your your your big headphones, because you were isolated and all of the sound were coming through was coming through. And he was crazy. Like I was very immersed. And I felt like you didn't have any choice because like that speed the roller coaster was was was going out, it was really the the only thing that could make you feel a little bit safe, because you're like, I seen something that is not outside. So I have this kind of disconnect of reality. But are you really like kind of feel the gap.
I feel like this is why a lot of people don't want to put headphones when they're in VR, because they need to still be grounded, people are sometimes a little bit afraid. And they need your voice to guide them through a VR experience because they feel like Oh, I'm in a different world. I don't know what to do. I don't know if I look weird. So they rely on their voice and they don't want to put overhead earphones. I think that a lot of companies that was part of the the decision that they made to not include really, really good headphones unless someone wants to buy them. And that's because it's scary. It's scary to lose your ability to hear.
I think so too, and relate it on the same line. So, you know, we designated surely as the audio person of our project. And we have to decide between a VR and an AR experience. How does the audio changes between these two media?
I feel like as you mentioned before, it kind of follows the visuals. And I used to think when I just started in this industry, I thought that AR and VR is exactly the same thing. It's like it's the same realm, we have the umbrella term on it that it's called XR. But now I think that they're exactly the opposites of one another. Because we are you're trying to put as much as possible, and you're adding content around you. So you will add the music and the background sound and the footsteps and everything. Well, you don't have footsteps in VR, but you add all the sounds and to get someone to forget about the real world and join you in an experience. And this could be very good. When you're trying to tell a story. When you're trying to get people through a journey. When you're trying to convey a message. This is a very powerful tool. When you want people to escape reality, like some time you don't want people to be in reality because it's a little hard. Now they're doing for kids like when kids go to the hospital, they get a VR headset when they get like their flu shot. So it's a great way to get someone immersed and care about a story. And I remember in 2017, we used to call it like the perfect empathy machine. It's the way to connect to other people, where AR is exactly the opposite AR doesn't take you anywhere, you're in your space, if anything, those creatures or things are coming into your world, but you're in your comfort zone, you never left you never went anywhere, you're still in front of your desk, you're still present in reality, you continue your life as normal, plus another layer that adds on. So it's the difference is the story that you're trying to tell. And in terms of audio, we're going to do the same thing where like if we're in AR I'm going to put less of background sound and less of things that will distract you from your environment and more. utilize the tools and utilize the small elements that are already there to not interrupt you from what you're doing. But just be a companion in Yes,
I think it would be for an audio person will be a cool JIRA ticket to have this task of you know, now there's so much mixed reality devices that you switch between the two things, so I would be curious to hear that sound that kind of like brings me from AR to VR and vice versa. Like how's that sound? You know, like you know, like something I'm very curious to hear like, what that moment is gonna feel like in your ears. And if you if you ever take a look at the vision pro simulator seems like they have these, these kind of like immersive spaces but they are not really all immerse because they're just like, half of your, of your environment. So for example, you just see like, you know, in front of you and behind, even there it's like a very particular Space, which I've never been in. Because usually I always been in the two extremes, but seems a mixed reality brings in a lot of new challenges, or also audio
problems I see. And I wrote an article on Medium about this, if anyone wants to, like, look me up on medium, you can read about this about people that are trying to escape immersion. And specifically on the analogy of music. Unless you do you have the memory of buying a new CD. From a store. Yeah, a physical CD, a physical CD.
I'm that old? Yeah, yeah. Well, when I was a kid, my dad, which is definitely
Yeah. Apparently, like I asked people our age in America, and they like, some of them don't have this memory. But I remember going to Tower Records, buying the record. And then you just sit and you look at that record for a few minutes. And you say not the visuals are important. You open it, you look at the visuals, you open, the little pamphlet,
all of that tax breaks,
everything and you spend about like 20 minutes, just gazing on that art, before you even listen to anything. And then you put this in your system, and you hit play, and you don't touch anything. You listen to a full journey that takes you through sad moments and happy moments. And by the end of it, you're like, Hmm, I've been through a lot. And like you didn't nothing you just sat on your couch, but like you've been through such an emotional journey. That's how it actually felt. Um, and I feel like that's the immersion, that kind of VR can give you the idea of like, wow, I went through a lot right now, or like a good film takes you through this. But what I'm seeing is a big shift into, instead of buying albums, we rent them from Spotify. And instead of an album that tells a story, we change the word album to the word playlist. It's still a collection of songs. But now the songs are representing what you're doing right now. Gym, focus, studying, cooking, cleaning the house, motivation, chill and fun. They always represent your emotion and your feeling at that moment there don't take you through that journey. And this is a there to accompany you through life, it's not there to replace your life, it's not there to tell you how to think or what to do. It's just there to be your partner. Do you think
that music today not but not generally, the music in itself, but how it's, you know, consumed, it's way kind of less engaging? Like, I feel like also there is so much like, you know, you have to your disposal infinite, endless choices. So sometimes, I feel like it's very hard to value more artists than others. You know, sometimes I discover, I feel like I still have that fixation for certain artists, like when I hear some that I like, I tend to just dig into that for you know, four months in a row, and I just listen to that. And then I let it go, you know, like, I just have a moment like, like, all go all in. And then I just like, you know, just go out of it. And I feel like that was something that was more of, you know, I just have 10 CDs. And that was are the bands that you listen to? Because in the car of your parents?
Because they had to keep all of them somehow. Yeah, I do. Like yeah, like from places because they
are limited assets, you know, you cannot go endless. So, and my parents never changed the car until I was pretty, you know, like, I was kind of I never like I think I started to see the digital record for them they had so all like heart. Their car was so old that I was still using, you know, and I was still using some CDs that were like 10 years old when I would use their car because I would just whatever man like this, like place this Yeah. Yeah, there is some value in it. And I think maybe VR can bring back that moment of forcing you to be in a negative experience that can stimulate you against your will maybe because I feel like
the only place we don't have ads. Did you notice that? The only place we don't have ads? God forbid now the Facebook ads are going to hear me and they're going to add ads, but you can experience and there's no ads. Nothing. That's
fine. That's such a good point. I feel like there are no ads, probably because making ads in 3d is way more challenging and it's very well scoped in the industry yet. You know, I've seen more advertisement in the yard. Yeah, true. Yeah,
but they don't. Yeah.
Have you ever used a venue A meta,
I think this is their social app, right? Yeah, it's the one they did one of the conferences during COVID, we did a conference like the Oculus connect in, in venues.
Yeah, you basically you are in a big theater and you have doors at the right or the left, and you can just get into any of them. And I felt like, it was interesting to set up like, when I went in, I think I think I saw like, first time I saw a concert of Charlie ATX. I don't know if this is the right way to say it. But yeah, and, and I remember that the scale was so weird of the event, because she was like, basically like a video in front of you. And it was like a flat screen video in front of you. But you were in a theater like, it was. It was like kind of like a half sphere. But it's like a skybox, kind of you were in you were looking at a skybox, kind of. And that's what I
mean by like you need to create, you need to understand the medium that you're working with. I've seen way too many people that make the mistake of like, I'm just gonna take whatever is on a 2d screen, and I'm gonna put it in VR, and it's gonna be 10 times better. And I'm like, No, you just
done enough? Yeah, yeah. I think still the skybox appearance feels very flat. Even if it's like around this fear, whatever it is,
I feel like our world, our physical world have more dimensions than the computers used to be capable off, and now they are. So going into AR and VR is returning to nature for us. We need to relearn to forget that like the world is not 2d, it's 3d. It's physical. You can look through different angles on everything. So for me, it's more natural to work on something like blender when I'm in VR, rather than a 2d screen that I have to like, keep moving it and seeing where exactly did I put that model?
I guess I really feel young that like, I feel like for example, something I feel like when I moved to unity, and I was in architecture school, I really, I kind of always hated to see things from always like a very perfect elevation view. Like, you know, those those drawings look so beautiful. But uh, but I'm like, that's never gonna be like, you know, people are gonna watch these things from a scale that is like, they're gonna be like, these big and look up and see
a box, they're gonna see the giant plan that you put near the door before the building.
Exactly. So that is kind of also what I saw. Let me think that maybe immersive experiences way, way better, realistic way to think about, you know, the future and of things. Yeah, that'd be cool. Let's go out and this is going so great. I really loved it. This discussion we're having this is amazing. Okay, so who is your favorite composer artists or anyone that inspired you the most? Well, this
is this is a hard question to ask a professional you know that because it's, it used to be that it was depends on which genre depends on what year depends in what aspect do I love them the most. But nowadays, it depends on my journey through life. So it used to be Steven Tyler from Aerosmith. Because I saw his energy and I saw how he's giving himself to the music and giving everything that he has to give the best performance of his life every time he goes on stage. And nowadays, actually, it's Brian Eno, who is mostly and Ambien composer. But he made some of the most iconic sounds that we know including the Intel sound and the windows opening sound, the old one with the Windows actually flying off. But now when you hear that logo you would hear today it's because the windows are physically flying off in terms of the visuals so he partnered that up with audio and he came up with a lot of studies around the 90s and try to create operating systems the computer operating systems as almost like a symphony of itself. And since then, we moved into more like tactile small sounds that machines are making. But you still sometimes see memories of like systems like Apple for example, the try to be a little bit more musical and try to add those elements to everyday life to everyone. So that's my current inspiration. He has a lot of stuff on Spotify as well. I highly recommend
listening for a second Hey, yeah
40s on the video not only audio, audio never on the audio side, always side, you know that
we all know the audio as always no time to be comprehended by everyone. But yeah, so I think last few questions. And thanks also for your time and being with this thing, because it's gonna be probably very valuable for people looking at this. So the first one is, how does it work for a person that has such like, uh, you know, creative background, and, you know, you're composing music daily, and you're mostly, you know, like, selling to be that that transition that also designers go through, which is you, you work for a corporate company, which imposes you to have like, a very precise and tight deadlines. And it kind of like tries to box out all of your, you know, all of your progress as an artist in a way, because you're trying to, you know, create the sound. So they say, you know, we need, we need this sound, you know, in a week. And we all know that for, you know, for for artists, it's always like very challenging, delivering things in a very short amount of time, or having a schedule for making art. I think anything that goes toward that direction makes maybe artists feel a little bit more contracted. So how do you cope with that?
I feel like actually, the ones that I again, I've been doing music since I was three. So I saw people dropping. Basically, in every step of the way, I saw people leaving music school, when they're in high school, I saw people that like got a degree in it and didn't continue. So I feel like most of the people that get into creative arts like drawing, cooking, making music making sounds. A lot of them don't make it, because they feel like someone just came and butchered there are because they tried to make them into professionals. And becoming a professional requires you to think a little bit less from the heart and a little bit more in the analytic sense. But it's a matter of creating yourself a system that can support both because you always need both. It's understanding that when inspiration comes, you can stop it, you have to drop everything that you're doing and right now, make your art. And if your space is not ready for it, for example, then you're just like you just lost ideas. So always keeping a system that is working. If you're let's say playing guitar, I'm currently not playing guitar. But if you are playing guitar, don't put it on the wall like me, but it's connected to an actual speaker. If you're working on your beats, make sure that Ableton is open and ready with a session at any time. If you want to create I don't know, if you want to draw, keep a pen and paper always available, because you never know when inspiration is going to hit you. So that would be tip number one. But honestly, I created systems around me that allows me to still be creative, but do it within a span of time. And I feel like deadlines actually help a lot because they constrain you into, you have two hours now to explore as many ideas as possible, you have three hours now to just edit as much as possible and remove all the bad stuff. You have two hours to mix this and then you have to be done. So I'm taking the process and breaking it down to smaller bits that each one of them require different parts of your brain is I think the key to success here. Because you can't collect information and toss it out in the same time. You can't edit your files while you're still creating them. So you always need the separation, and you need to be ready for it whenever it comes.
Think he brought up a very interesting point that I feel like it made me think that I feel like the you know, the fact that people iterate on things constantly and have this kind of like model of, oh, we need to get one sound. So we just create 1000 then we pick one. It's like kind of like a little bit the meaning of life in my opinion, like I saw, I see this, like there is no such thing as like, oh, I have an inspiration. Let me put it down. That's gonna be forever. No, like you're gonna reiterate on your ideas. So so many times. And that happens in design, too. That happens in technology that happens in coding when you you know refactor your code. it. And that happens also in AI when you can just go through 1000 Millions of iteration and pick the right one. So I feel like that's
you have to do it, you have to sit with it, you have to sleep about this, you have to constantly think about this. The one problem with our job is that when you're a creator, you never take a break. People used to ask me like, What do you listen to on your own free time? And I'm like, What do you mean silence. Like, I don't listen to music, because for me, music was work. And every time I listened to music, every concert I went to every night with friends in the bar, that they played music in the background, my brain was working and thinking about new patterns and new ideas and collecting things from everywhere around me to use those as inspiration later, actually, spoke to Brian Eno quote from Brian Eno that I really, really liked. He said, being an artist is kind of like having a garden where you throw like 50 seeds, and you never know which one of them is gonna grow. But then one day, you wake up in the morning, and you look at the side and you see like a little something that grew there. And you're like, Oh, what's that? Now I'm gonna invest in that. And then you invest all your time and energy and you water it and you give it fertilizer, and you grow it into the beautiful bush that it is. But you never say like, I want it to have three flowers on this side and two leaves on that side. No, you just, you kind of let it grow. And once it's done, you kind of like you remove whatever is not needed, you kind of like trim it a little bit from the side, remove that branch, remove that leaf. And then you take it out and you bring it to the world. And that's your gift.
Yeah, being too much prescriptive. It's counterproductive. Most of the time. I feel like you're totally right. Yes. But you
constantly have to put those seeds everywhere. Everywhere you go, every person you meet, every interaction you have, might lead you one day in the future, you're never even going to know when to the next big idea.
That's a great, very nice, pure inspiration for whoever's listening, I feel like this is really, you know, it's a lot of it's there is a lot of analogies here. But it really comes down like to me how is life for like consistency and, and not being so prescriptive, what is like being open to the evolution of things that are out of our control, but that doesn't mean that we don't have control, because every day we are on it. So we can you know, just like not control it and realize that the right word, but we can direct it, we can try kind of like we can name it toward Yeah, toward a certain direction that we prefer rather than another. Yeah, that's true. That's amazing. That's, uh, I'm glad that the camera worked again. And we could just continue. So for closing this, yeah. For closing this, I think that is working still.
Yeah, I think we're good.
I think for finishing this, like, I would just go back to the meaning of community that, you know, like this, this kind of podcast started as initially as helping students applying for jobs and doing web portfolios. And then they were like, well, we want to have people that actually work in the industry and tell us what they do and how they did it. And so it became like, okay, let's have some guests sometimes. And then guests every time is. So it became something a little bit. Yeah, yeah, it became a little bit more something. You know, not live sometimes there are live events, but mostly I feel like it's kind of not live format works better, because maybe they just bring the question directly on the discord server that now has like more than 1000 people. And Wow, great to know. Yeah, it's like now this part is like a sub channel of big big AR VR. Discord, which I think
I was one person 10 person to join.
You are? Let me check. join you. I think you are the 12th person on this podcast and actually the first the first woman so
Oh, no. Less. Yes. Yes.
I know. I know. I felt I really really was like okay, we need to do something about this because it was pretty random initially and good. We did it. Why
are there so many women in XR doing incredible things.
Bring them in? I tried to reach out actually to already a lot of them. So next, just expect from from now on a lot more. Yeah, so going back to the community, you're super involved as well. And every time Today I am in a hackathon, especially the last year we are in Boston. People have come to me and they're like, very surely. And I was like, Oh, you're looking for surely again. So she's there. happened a lot of times in the last Boston AkhaTEN that makes you feel like really? Oh my god, like, she's like, she's popular. And so why, in your opinion, like, what is the role of community and why it's so important for you building community? Now, I have my personal answer, but I want to enforce behaviors.
Um, it goes back to the metaphor that I said before, it's seeds that you put everywhere, this industry, you have no idea how tiny this industry is. So that means that the people that you go to hackathons with are either going to be your bosses, or your colleagues, or they're recommend you to the next job. And you never know when jobs are gonna hate you, or from what direction and especially when you're going into something like very, very niche. Like, for me, it was like I do music, but in VR, but in an interactive experiences, so like, I'm not really a musician, but I'm not really a VR person. And I'm like, in between everything. So um, so this is when your community will come in, and like when there is an opening, they're going to be there before you and they're gonna say, Oh, I know exactly the right person to that job. And as I said, when I was interviewing to magically, my boss, Brett, he actually called Ellie, because he saw that she was on a hackathon with me. And she told him, the reason why I loved audio so much is because I saw how she really was passionate about it, and immediately he hired me. So you never know when those things are going to come and like change your life forever. It's one of those seeds that you put in, and the more you give to this community, I feel like the XR community is so firstly, forgiving, secondly, including others and different people. And I feel like we all came to this profession from something else. And we all know this. It's like almost like a conversion thing that we're like, Oh, where did you come from? And what did you do before the life that you had. But, you know, when I saw VR, for the first time, I said, Oh, my God, I can make a virtual reality Symphony Orchestra, every person that I talked to send Stan, and I'm like, this technology is really cool. They all have their own ideas of what to do with this based on their own professions. And that's because VR is so new, and XR, in general is so new, that there are still not enough rules, there's still a lot to invent. And you're probably going to be the first one doing it. On most of the things that you do in VR, you're going to be the first one. Definitely,
there is still it's very exciting, because there is no such a thing, like a standard and and you really have like, you might find yourself on voluntarily doing something for the first time. And I've actually added people need, you know, like, so you would, you would not only do your idea, you would make it you will maybe like solve problems of others. And so it's a very cool place to be in. I would also like to add that, you know, like, I feel like because it's such a new wave of it's not really the technology itself is not to me new, it's more like the way is utilized right now. And the format that is utilized is way newer, and, you know, like for how much they say that. There is still like a lot of you know, discussion to say the form factor is not solved, it's not going to be solved in the next 20 years. And we all know that. But I mean, it's a great progress from what it was from the start. So you can definitely buy a hospitalist for $300 and be transported in a VR, you know, beautiful world that you're
already working. It's already it's already here. And you're like, oh my god, think about the future. We're all going to be with VR headsets. What future we're here we're doing it it's here. It's happening.
Yeah, I think so do so it depends really like what you want to lock with it at this time. And I feel like it's great to have a community because you involve like such a different kinds of people and not just maybe people that have like a background in games, because games is probably the closest thing to it. So yeah, I feel like the diversity in the in the profession is very important. They've actually used
to be I think about games. And we used to call things like Unity and Unreal. We used to call them gaming engines nowadays we call them more physics engine because we realize that they're more than just a gaming engine. And you know, you mentioned the MIT reality hack, and you walk there and you see people that are from the fashion industry and architects and photographers and designers and artists and homeless people that we just came and wanted to create experience for homeless people and I'm like, Yes, I'm I'm in for that. Let's do it. Do you know so many individuals that are in two completely different things that are finding a home in this new technology that still doesn't have something
very experimental? Yeah, I like I love divided at the hackathon. Oh yeah. Well thank you so much surely this was you know, incredible in you know, for your time and all what you do I think you should keep going. You're going to be the best at it forever and ever going to grow and become the best we'll know because your enthusiasm and your energy and yeah, I'm pretty sure that if anyone will need to leave you a note or ask you any question they will do from the discord. So keep an eye on it.
Discord channel message me anytime. And good luck to anyone who is listening to this. I can't wait to hear all of you as guests on this podcast one day, because I know it's gonna happen.
