The AR Show: Matt Miesnieks, Dennis Crowley, John Gaeta (LivingCities) on Laying the Foundation for the Future of Social Expression - Part 2 | Otter.ai

The AR Show: Matt Miesnieks, Dennis Crowley, John Gaeta (LivingCities) on Laying the Foundation for the Future of Social Expression - Part 2

Jason McDowall1h 13min

Jason McDowall

00:03

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 a continuation of my discussion with Matt Miesnieks about living cities. Joining us for part two are cofounders John Gaeta and Dennis Crowley. John won an Oscar for his visual effects work on The Matrix movies, and after many additional creative and visual effects projects, including Speed Racer, he went on to co found ILM X Lab as part of Lucasfilm. He then served as the SVP of creative strategy at Magic Leap before returning to work on the latest installment of The Matrix franchise. Dennis Crowley was the co founder and CEO of location intelligence apps, dodgeball, and Foursquare. Both companies focused on using mobile phones to connect people to each other in the real world. Dodgeball was sold to Google in 2005. And Foursquare is still thriving today as it location intelligence provider. Now John and Dennis have joined Matt and living cities to explore new ways of blending the virtual and real worlds. But as Matt explains, they are not making a game.

Matt Miesnieks

01:01

We're thinking through, you know, again, in the context of the place, like what are those things that are going to give people that excuse to start connecting and talking with each other? The risk I think, is if you go too far in that and then you you become a game company, and are perceived as a game company. And we definitely see the bigger opportunity you know, far bigger opportunities is how people communicate with each other, not entertain each other, that you express yourself, and express what's in me to you, you know, where we can do it with voice or video or text today, but you know, 3d virtual environment, what are the unique affordances of a 3d virtual space that are going to let us to communicate in ways that we haven't been able to communicate.

Jason McDowall

01:43

They want to discuss the hard problems, they're excited to solve and provide some hints at new forms of social expression in a 3d spatial environment. They discuss the trade offs of different technology choices, as well as their ambitions and what they want to do differently or better compared to their previous entrepreneurial experiences. 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 already enjoyed episodes in the past, please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com/the AR show th e AR sh O W, I'm gonna find ways to engage more intimately with subscribers through events such as small group conversations with me or a popular guest, or some other sort of exclusive content. patreon.com/the AR show now let's get into it with Matt, John and Dennis. Dennis, how does it do? You met Matt and got involved in living cities.

Dennis Crowley

02:41

I was familiar with Matt's work through 60. And at Niantic and two of us had overlapped at beta works of venture fund in New York and have a co working space. We're hanging out there with some mutual friends. We started talking and just kept on talking. There was a day probably sometime last last summer where we sat in a park and just kind of in New York City and kind of imagined what the future of AR VR real life virtual world would look like and just started wrapping things together from there.

Jason McDowall

03:15

That sounds like fun. One of the things that you're just so known for these two iconic brands is iconic and forward thinking products. I remember in the early days of mobile when I when I played in the early days of mobile back in the early 2000s. I was so envious of the work you're doing at dodgeball, and you took that forward with Foursquare. Based on those sorts of experiences and the conversations you haven't been out there in the park. What is it that you kind of imagined? or what have you discovered about how software affects the way that we interact with the real world?

Dennis Crowley

03:44

Yeah, I mean, I think all the work I've ever done has been about trying to make software that changes the way that people experience the real world. You know, dodgeball stuff was originally inspired by the Marauders Map and Harry Potter. And so we really thought of ourselves as like, we're using like text messaging to create magical items like the illusion of magic, right? You know, find your friends know where they are. And with Foursquare, we kind of redid some of that. But we had the iPhone, right. And so that was kind of magical in itself. But we always thought Foursquare was about giving you like superpowers, superpowers to know where everything was where all the good stuff was, like the power to see through walls or see around corners. And I feel like the work we're doing now, it's an extension of that, in the sense that we're trying to make it so that people can experience kind of to two realities at once like a little bit of the real world, on top of a little bit of the virtual world in a really just just mixing those two things together. So you're in two places at once. And I think that's that's the thing that's so kind of interesting, because we're doing it in a way that I think a lot of other companies haven't tried to do before.

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