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

12:20AM Sep 27, 2022

Speakers:

Jason McDowall

Matt Miesnieks

Dennis Crowley

John Gaeta

Keywords:

people

world

foursquare

building

real

thought

metaverse

place

happening

capturing

virtual

cities

talking

technology

living

experience

space

create

john

matt

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

How's that for you an extension of what you've done at Foursquare, or is it like how are the two concepts connected for you?

You know, it's still it's using software to enhance the way that people experience physical of space. So the work we're doing with living cities, it's it's very much about, you know, taking things that can exist in a, in a, in a virtual world and laying them on top of reality. You know, you see that a lot with, you know, just AR things in general PokemonGo is a fantastic example, you know, you're in reality and those little sprites that are moving around, but like, what if there was a population of people that were living in the virtual world that were positioned exactly on top of the real world? What are the ways that the real world can push into the virtual and the virtual can push into the real so that participants on both ends get to participate and kind of feel the effects of One World pushing against the other. And, you know, it's a little it's a little ambiguous and sort of amorphous, but I feel like that's what this group has assembled to try to try to solve to try to make those things happen and present them in a way that becomes kind of obvious in hindsight,

John, how did you join this group? How'd you meet Matt and get involved in living cities?

Well, I have been for some number of years been thinking about immersive worlds, I began working on concepts of virtual worlds with the work with Matrix trilogy. Eventually, I found myself at Lucasfilm years later, initiating one of the first immersive entertainment labs for Disney and for Lucasfilm. And it was roughly around 2013 that came together. And, you know, I was looking around at a lot of things, you know, that were beginning at that time. And I noticed Matt's thesis and theories appearing about the AR cloud, he was one of the first people I thought to succinctly and compellingly articulate this idea of, essentially a, I would say, these days, we might call it the spatial web, but to sort of predict that there would be this relationship, you know, from, you know, virtual space and the real world. And I was myself thinking about this for three years, you know, wondering about that, not really knowing that many people to not, you know, I mean, that people have speculated on these things in, in fiction for a while, and some people have experimented in, in a tech sense for years, but he was, you know, presenting it in a very grounded pragmatic way, with regard to some of the building blocks, computer vision building blocks, that would be necessary to take first steps. And I could relate to that, because, you know, my career began at the sort of inflection point between analog and digital visual effects, in which, you know, essentially measurement, you know, something as simple as measurement allowed computer graphics to be coupled to the real world, you know, and then memorialized on some media, you could not do any of the things, you know, that have come to pass in, in cinema magic, and now many other media types, until you were able to relate the real world to digital things. And Matt was kind of coming in in that kind of from that angle. And it was very sensible. So I reached out and began to talk became friends, sort of conversed over the years since then, I formed ILM X Lab, and we did that for some years. And then I went over to Magic Leap and our conversation continued. And it progressed at Magic Leap. We talked a fair bit about this thing called the magic verse, right, which were like layers upon layers on the world. We could go into it at nauseam, but eventually, we both kind of arrived at a moment where we had the time and interest to possibly collaborate. And then Matt introduced me to Dennis and we all realized that we were of like minds. And this is now where we're heading.

I remember the early presentations at Magic Leap when they started publicly talking about how the company was thinking about the metaverse and the magic verse, specifically, I thought was the best representation of this concept of how we're going to have these multiple channels of different layers placed on top of the world depending on our interest in the moment. It was just really, really well articulated. So nicely done.

I co conceived that with Neil Steffensen and Roni Abbott's they the the means of presentation, you know, the sort of conceptual presentation, I mean, it's still, it's still in the future, obviously.

Looking back at the past, you, as you noted, been involved in creating the matrix which is really one of the best, first and best kind of representations of what it might be to live in a virtual world to create this virtual world an imagined would mate to live there and separate from that what real life looks like. You kind of look back at that experience and the work you've done at ILM, Max and and these others. What are Are some of the lessons maybe that you've learned about interacting with virtual worlds that you took from those experiences that you might kind of play forward into what you're doing here and live in cities?

Well, it gets to the heart of something that we're placing very high on the value chain. And that is, there's a very big difference between a world that you know, and a world that you don't. And so whether the world is in the case of fiction, something that, you know, has been conceived of written, you know, manifested over time and different story and other experiential ways, but over time, you know, accrues meaningfulness, because so much time has been put into the depth of the world and that people start to understand his logic, it's valuable. That's, that's one kind of a world. But if you don't have that legacy, and depth, then if you're starting from scratch, let's say it's a sandbox world that starting from zero, you pretty quickly realize that it can be a lonely hollow place without without meaning for people until they build meaning into it. So there's like number one, right? So But number two, it actually is more important, I'll make this the actual one. Number one is the real world is filled with exquisite, important, deeply, deeply meaningful places filled with people that make them so. Right. So the spirit of place that Mattis talked about that we are, you know, that we're talking about focusing on is about essentially capturing if possible, channeling I think might be a better way, right, channeling the depth and value of of these places filled with people that make them incredible. And so the value of the metaverse could be accelerated by bringing the value of the real world into it. And thusly, people understand why, you know, why are we here? What do we do here? What's the possibility space? Can we and then and then you can jump off from there, like, oh, shoot, can we be inspired by this? Not just only be this right? Can we be inspired by this? Abstract upon this? Right, it can go further and further. So that's the the lesson to go back to the question. The lesson is, what is a meaningful destination? Why is it meaningful? And why does anyone want to be there in the first place has to come first. And it can't be expected that a person can build that from thin air, right on their app person could but not all of us can. Right? So this is one of the lessons.

As you look at this opportunity with living cities, there's this this new concept that you're bringing together here collectively is of connecting and channeling the real world into the virtual and vice versa. For you, John, what is was one of the one or two of the hard problems you're really excited to solve in this experience.

Okay, well, this is might be a good one for all of us. Right? But because there's a lot of problems, right, there's, let's be pragmatic and realistic. Like, there is extraordinary things happening, obviously, in technology with regard V stage, right, with regard to capturing the real world in all different ways. I mean, when we made the matrix, these were mere fantasy concepts in movies, right, that are now becoming plausible in technology. But it is quite the lift to imagine that you could create a flawless simulation, right? That included all of the dynamic motions, movements, all the way down to things that, you know, you take for granted and human perception like, this is what's happening now. Here are people here now, here are complicated, complicated, let's say like compelling events happening moments everywhere all around us, right? To actually capture that imagine you had like a god sized super capture device that could get it all right, that's still in the future. That's still in the future to be get to get it all. So if we're realistic, and we look around, we like what is the state of play, you know, in that area? And really, what is what's more important than getting all of it one to one, you know, so when Dennis and Matt and I talked about reflecting the real world, a reflection is essentially in some form a depiction of what's happening, but it doesn't have to be the whole complete realistic, you know, aspect of it. And what we're trying to do is pragmatically understand how to build a reflection in a meaningful way. That allows you to really feel like okay, I do sense this is happening, but what are the steps we need to take in order to sort of make this reflection closer and closer to true is 100% true? Right? And that's a road, right? It's like not only our road, it's a road of many, you know, many of our colleagues and folks we don't even know around the world, they're like on this road to like, what is a way to sort of reflect into the metaverse?

That's great. Dennis, how about you? What's a hard problem? We're really excited to solve here.

Yeah, I mean, we talk a lot about this idea of capturing the spirit of a place. And you know, if you deconstruct that, like, what does that really mean, take a given town square, or something, right to reproduce the energy and excitement that comes from that, that public space, you've got a lot of people from diverse backgrounds, God, people that are moving at different speeds that are there for different reasons that are commuting or gathering or talking or lounging, there's different energy that's given off that changes depending on the type of the day or the season. And so it's like, you know, capturing the feeling of that place and bringing it into that real place and trying to bring it into a virtual environment. So that that same feeling can be felt by both parties, the IRL participants as well as virtual participants, that's a really hard thing to do is a lot of prior art you can look at and be like, you nailed it, this company now that lets us do what they did. Right? Like, we're inventing a lot of this stuff, we're figuring it out for the first time. And that I mean, that's what's so fun about this project is there's no cliffnotes to get there. It's just a lot of trial and error. I would say a majority of the product discussions that we have, and we have a lot of technical discussions, how on earth do you do this? How are we gonna solve this problem? This is the limitations of technology, what are we gonna do? But then we have a lot of like product conversations that are kind of like, the spirit of the place product conversations, no easy answers to them. But that's like, that's fun stuff to solve.

Very nice. Matt, do you want to add another one? For me? This

is a problem even before this one, which is, you know, the problem of which problem do you work on, I guess, the ambition that we've got and the potential if we can crack this thing open, we could get sucked into try to boil the ocean, like, there's so many interesting facets, we could go down like deeper and deeper. So, you know, we've sort of spent a fair bit of time just just sort of going well, how can we do less? What can we do less and less, until we sort of get down to this the one, you know, the problem that all the others depend on? You know, I agree that it's that capturing the spirit of the place. And to my mind, what makes that hard, is it's it's completely, you know, qualitative and subjective. And it's kind of where is that? How do you define success, you know, feels a certain way, you know, so it's not like solving a technical problem. So I think if we can, if we can capture that feeling, and communicate that feeling, the place will then start to reveal us as people and how we communicate and interact in that place. So that's what's exciting to me,

as you think about this kind of most important problem to solve this notion of capturing the spirit of a place in Unit, it's very subjective, one person might walk into a park and they see the homeless at the edges of the park and simulus, my walker to the park and they see the energy from the buskers and how they're performing in feeling feels like a very alive and inviting place. So it's very, it is very subjective experience, you have to figure out the right ways to capture it make that inviting for the audience, how much of the element is about the capturing of the place and the spirit of the place? That's number one problem. Or word is does it rank up this challenge of creating the right sort of interaction, the right sort of motivation for somebody to go in and in want to interact with somebody who's on the other side of that virtual wall?

I think if you if you can properly capture this spirit of the place, and the other stuff takes care of itself, you don't have to, you don't have to force the interactions don't have to use mechanics to try to trick people into talking to other people. I think if you can make make the space feel interesting, then people want to explore it. I mean, this is kind of like our instinct on this. And, you know, we, we haven't gotten far enough down down the path where like, we've proven this to be true. But I think that's kind of what we're driving at. Like, I don't want to overly use some kind of like game mechanics to try to get people to do things I want to, you know, hoping that we can create a place that is so inviting and so interesting and so energetic that it kind of brings you to want to interact naturally.

I mean, as a example, that Jason like we we sort of talked about what sort of interactions and a lot of the metaverse companies out there sort of end up getting sucked in towards gaming and sort of finding little games but we kind of took the you know, like as an example if we could capture the spirit of like Harajuku in Tokyo, you know, it's all about cosplay. Crazy niche communities and people watching and all of that sort of subculture that's expressed and communicated. If we can when captured like Pebble Beach Golf Course in are now and we got the spirit of that place, right, the interactions and activities in both of those two places that would feel natural. And each of those two places are completely different. So we need to, you know, as we think about what are the interactions that are meaningful and likely to be engaging, the place itself provides a lot of that context. So hopefully, that that will kind of reveal a lot of those first engaging use cases.

Yeah, I mean, this is how the, having a known special destination as a foundation, in itself creates an example of behavior, but also a constraint, you know, when you create a sandbox world where anything can happen, then you can, you could quickly get to a noisy, chaotic experience. But if one of the goals is to have the remote folk who can't get to the real place, but want to sort of be in the space to some degree, right, they want I want to, you know, go to Tokyo and be in some feeling of the space of that place. You know, the, the idea would be that you don't necessarily go there and do something, you know, that's completely off world. That's not that has nothing to do with the world, you can potentially do something that's inspired by, right or you can potentially amplify something you can be creative and abstract, abstract from it. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of space, you know, for being creative and an experimental, but, you know, if you're completely offworld, then it won't feel right, right. So we're hoping that this mirror world kind of concept would allow people on the on the virtual side of the mirror world to in some way have their behaviors influenced by the behaviors of what's coming up from, from the real world. But they don't have to be exactly the same. They can just they can choose to co mingle. But they could also be, they could choose to be inspired. Because if I'm in the metaverse, I could have powers that people in the real world don't. But if people are in the world world, they have, you know, they have a certain power that I don't either, right. So we have to find the sort of relationship between those two aligned worlds and see if a new behavior can happen between the two.

What is the risk of introducing game mechanics or little mini games in this type of experience that you guys envision,

and flip it around? Like, I think the opportunity of things like that, your one thing that's very clear, when you talk to anyone who's sort of built any of these things, is people need an excuse to socialize with each other. So you kind of gotta give them something to just do together. And it doesn't really matter what it is, you know, and usually, a mini game is a nice way it's like, it's like a pool table and a pup, you know, it's a chance to do something while you talk and get to know each other. So we, you know, we definitely don't see ourselves as a game company at all. But we do believe that you don't just put two avatars in a room, and they will instinctively chat and build a build a relationship together. So 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, far bigger opportunities is how people communicate with each other, not entertain each other. How do you express yourself? How do you express what's in me, to you, you know, where we can do 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 lead us to communicate in ways that we haven't been able to communicate before? Yeah, I

would, I would extend that to by saying like, before digital social media, you know, we had like old media, the end, at the end of the old media reign, there were things like reality, reality television sort of emerged, for example, like we didn't think that that would happen, it did. After reality television, we started seeing, you know, the emergence of social network platforms, right, sort of this new form of distribution of forms of reality and, you know, stylized reality, and we're about to see the next manifestation where that enters, you know, the quote unquote, spatial web, or the metaverse choose your term. So, you know, makes you wonder like, well, what are the next forms of social media, right? What are the ways that people are going to express themselves if social social media is is just expression of all different types between People, you know, some a synchronous, some synchronous? Well, what, what is that once you sort of enter spatial destinations, spatial virtual destinations, so what's the new social media? And that's something that often the users will sort of some will, some will show you, you know, through an experiment you never considered, right? Or you empower them with, you know, just a couple of tools. Yeah. And then they'll show you, you know, as long as you enable them, so we're curious what that turns out to be like, we don't, we don't have a specific hunch. But as, as Matt mentioned, I mean, like, if you're in a spatial world, and you're suddenly able to send UPS volumetric or spatial, social media, you know, what, what would that stuff be? What would it be? What's the form? What would it look like? You know, where would you experience it? How would you experience it? etc.

And then a spirit of place that we talked about a lot. I mean, that's, that's the, that's the probably manifests itself is the content. That's the content in this world that we're creating, that people consume? And then how are you? How are you consuming it? Like, you know, if you consume two D, social media by MLC scrolling, like, how are you consuming? In a 3d version of this? You know, someone said earlier in the call, but like this idea of like, is there such a thing as, as digital people watching, you go to a space just to a digital space as to sit and watch and hang out and see what's happening? In the same way you might a physical location? Is there a place that you go to just to just to be there to feel the energy and feed off the energy? Is there a place to go to just to, you know, there's places that you go to just stroll through in real life, and those things don't exist in digital world? What does that look like? How does that feel? Like? Why do you have to make to make somebody to create to make someone want to do that?

How important is this notion of real time versus time shifted?

It's necessary but not sufficient. I think that if you want real people to be able to interact like real physical people in a physical place, to be able to interact with a virtual person in the same place, the real physical person is in that place at that time. So they can't timeshift themselves physically. So if you we do we believe that that synchronous experience is important and interesting, even, like, even if they're like live streaming from the real world into the virtual world like that, that has to be a real time synchronous thing, then you can also have a lot of sort of offline timeshifted stuff as well. You could be a virtual visitor to a place and potentially, you know, turn the turn the dial and rewind back in time or catch up in time or shift to a layer that has like a historical experience that someone's created. So I think it's, it's very important if you don't have the ability to interact in real time, you have a totally separate product. It's much more a, you know, like a traditional online only metaverse.

So the synchronous real time is necessary, but not sufficient. You imagine having both elements but the real time element in some sort of dial back the clock? Yeah.

The ability to dial back the clock, I think is probably definitely won't be a day one feature, but it's it's something that we looked at, and we're like, okay, technically, it's not that hard to do. It's just kind of why would you do it? Who would they do it? What would they do it for the questions we haven't really explored yet.

Yeah. One of the questions that is ultimately important early in a company like yours is building such a broad swath of technology upon which to build these experiences is this question about what is the right technology platform to use? And one of the most incredible tech demos I've seen recently was one that you'd worked on John, with Unreal engine called the matrix awakens. It's incredible. I could barely tell the difference between the live actor talking on screen to this digital, you know, digital world in which they're now digital characters, that sort of that technology plus this snippet that I've seen from living cities, you guys create already these visually stunning, they look incredible. How do you as a team, think about this trade off between the potential power of a game engine platform like Unreal, with the potential breadth and ease of access of the web?

Yes, the right question. Good question. It's, it's something that we literally for, we literally debate every week for hours, literally, we're always thinking about that. The magic wand is the one where you can jump down three to five years from now and you don't have to make as much of a, you know, a hard choice. So it really is a question is what's of higher value? In what order right so we think we will converge on some ideal where, you know, we can have many people socializing in a spectacular simulation. But again, it's a road, right? We were forced to determine, like any else until, for example, it's possible to stream unlimited fidelity and massive multiuser. In one go, we have to make choices like anybody else. You know, we started the chat by sort of placing on top of the value chain, like the spirit of place, which isn't only isn't about the shape of a place, it's about the people, events, the activities, the moments, you know, whether it be a synchronous or asynchronous that that's still on top. And eventually the rest will come as as is possible. When we, when I was at Magic Leap, there was like this weird schism, you know, between people who thought that the device was the sun at the center of the universe, and those that thought that it was just like a window onto the sun. Right? And when we were talking about the magic verse, it caused a lot of consternation in there. Because it flipped the order to like, no, no, you're a wind, we're a window onto the thing that matters. So the question is what matters, because there's going to be a lot of windows one day, hopefully, ideally, there'd be lots of different windows from a, from a pad to glasses, to goggles to, you know, anything, right. But they're gazing, or they're like, it's an interface right onto the thing that matters. So what's the thing that matters? Well, you know, it's not just the visual quality of things. It's the what's happening. And so we have to prioritize that and try to understand that. And even that is a huge lift, right? Like if, if reflecting the real world, you know, a reflection essentially, is data, right? It could be like different media types. It could be different things being sensed, right. But like, at some point, there's some sort of understanding of what's happening. And there's a depiction of it. And, you know, a depiction could be like, Oh, this is an impressionistic painting by van Gogh of sunflowers. And this is a real sunflower field that he was standing in. Right? He's reflecting the real field and his feeling that he had during that time. So you could just say, Okay, well, the data is we his eyes cut, you know, what he perceives this field to be? And the medium he chooses is his his paint on canvas. So these are choices, we have to figure out, how do we build these reflections so that the spirit of places actually felt and then we'll start figuring out what form factors the fidelity that it can be the windows that can gaze upon it, etc?

I think one thing, Jason's a question where, you know, that we kind of knew going in, but it's, you know, the was sort of getting this point of having to think through the compromises and tactical choices is, you know, Unreal Engine and the open spatial web are both very good at the opposite things to each other. The web is great at sort of quick, lightweight iteration, large scale, pushing, the ability to hack and remix things out to the users, and that's very much part of our culture are unreal, is very, you know, has this amazing, mature toolset ecosystem around it, you know, it's much easier to get a very rich, interactive, fully immersive experience. And you know, but it's kind of centralized in soccer. It's like a big theme that you kind of build on them ship. And the sort of discussions and sort of things we're trying to learn is, what today, you know, is going to be the best platform to solve the problem that matters today. And even though that may not be where we end up, because I think long term, we all definitely believe in open, open protocols, open ecosystem, but there's no point having an open ecosystem if no one wants to use it, because experiences are very good. So that's the kind of tension that we're the type that we're going to walk in as we make some of these tactical choices. You know, like right now, the next six months, 12 months, 18 months out, think that think all that through?

Do you have to make a decision right now on this? Or is this something that you can

delay, we have to build something you have to put in users hands to learn? We see your resource constrained as a precede stage company. So we can't just run down every path and explore them all. So yeah, we in reality, it is a it is a choice we have to make today. But we also realize the choices we make today. The path we're on forever, right?

We've talked a lot about you've talked a lot about this, this idea of the connective tissue between the real world and versus virtual world, this good news capturing the spirit of the place. It's not just the geometry of the thing of the place. It's it's the people and the activities that are happening in this place. This is kind of this notion of of reflection. And you ascribe that as really central to creating purpose of a reason for people to go and to be, in that that sense of place, because that sense of place is unique in Harajuku, as you noted, versus Pebble Beach, or wherever it happens to be in New York City. And, Matt, as you noted, in part one, we show up differently, depending on what that place is we do different things, we present ourselves differently, we choose to do different activities. How is it that you think about connecting, moving, it is a bit more deeply, but how do you connect the place the virtual to the real? What are the sorts of elements, sensors that you imagine possible in the early days of trying to figure all this out? And and how do you imagine that evolving as you think about scale over time,

especially a mash up of all of our backgrounds? So part of it is just building very high quality virtual environments that John's obviously worked on his whole career, then how do you align that and connect it with reality? And that gets into a lot of the computer vision slam cloud type technologies that I've been working with for a long time? And then there's a question of how do you how do you connect it to people's daily lives? And what do they do? And how do they use it? And obviously, Dennis has been doing that for a long time. And so the technical aspect of how do you align it and connect it actually isn't that hard, it's not that hard to get a coordinate in virtual space to correspond to a coordinate in physical space and get that to work over, I guess, smallish, but still pretty large, you know, specs. The unknown, I think, is is like, you know, John alluded to, so what are the data sources that matter? And then also, what are the data sources that you can practically get access to, because depending on a public square in one city, you may, it's unusual that you'll be allowed to like put surveillance cameras up and just film everything that goes on. But if you're doing some private location, in a different country with different laws, you know, it might be totally fine to do that. And so we're kind of looking at every data stream that we can possibly find, that doesn't overstep the bounds of legality or just creepiness. And looking at what can we extract from those data feeds to make this place feel, you know, feel alive and sort of hopefully tap into the spirit of it? So that's basically the problem, you know, like, in practical terms, and we talked about it almost philosophically, in terms of the problem we're trying to solve. And in practical terms, it comes down to what data can we get about a place? Is that the data that matters to someone's subjective perception? And then how do we present that data in terms of either rendering it or audio or interactions or something that looks and feels representative of the raw source of that data? And the technical work that we're doing that hopefully, solves that subjective philosophical objective?

Is there, you know, from pulling from your experience at 60? And what Niantic is continuing to do? Is there a need to map to 3d map all the spaces that you want to include?

Yeah, definitely. I mean, we don't need to do the mapping, like we don't want to be a mapping company. But I mean, this was the whole premise of the AR cloud was that some point in the future when we are wearing eyeglasses, and it's a sort of natural experience, you know, if you believe that AR is about putting content into the real world, the content needs to be aware of the real world in as much as possible aware of it. So what we're doing on that thread, like we started just a map of your couch so that poker man can run behind the couch. And then that extends to a map of your apartment and a map of your street, and then your neighborhood. And eventually, you've got this 3d map of the whole world that just has to exist somehow. We are just trying to explore like, what happens when those maps are built. And everyone like all the big platforms are racing to build these these maps. But no one's really got a, you know, any opinion in lists that I've met inside this companies as to what the use cases are for these types of maps. So that's our objective is to more, although we're doing an initial map that we're building ourselves in the first place. That's just because we needed to do something ourselves while everyone else builds this out. But we're much interested in what is that application layer, that interaction layer that would sit on top of these maps?

Yeah, we would just add to that, that, again, there's a different this kind of a difference between a shell and the dynamic things that fill so you know, you can have a map That represents public square. And it's missing of missing elements like people life thriving things, although, I mean, I guess you could go onto Google Maps and see 360 video, but at some point, they were, you know, you can imagine that these maps, you know, will will take evolutionary leaps, you know, they'll go from 2d, they're becoming 3d, they're 3d plus 360 pictures, right? At some point, there'll be 3d with 360 video, there'll become volumetric, we're going to across time move towards volumetric. The question is, how do you get how do you eventually fill the map with the the life that's occurring inside the confines of the structures? And you know, you wonder, okay, well, you could try to have the God's Eyes sensors, that would be creepy, but you can also potentially crowdsource the volume, with, you know, what, you know, people can do so, Pete, we live a life where we take pictures all day of our experiences. And, you know, for anybody following the explosive revolution in neuro radiants fields, and volumetric extraction from, you know, a few images, one image, you know, like, we're clearly about to hit a new error, where one could potentially crowdsource much more than the shape of, you know, static objects. And that's super exciting. But it's, you know, it's experimental. So the, what is the map become? So we've, we've created a micro map, you know, because we want to get deep, you know, our interest is not everything at the moment, it's like, how do you get deep? And so you have to start with a compact space, right? So you can get to the things that sort of a really vibrant and dynamic within the space, more than like, how do I cover how to how do i canvass the world? Right? So how do I, how do I actually define, you know, what might be spatially happening? If I don't have the God's eye super laser from space, telling me feeding up all the data?

And it's worth mentioning, just so I'm hearing everyone, you know, answer these questions in different ways, you know, the v1 of the product will showcase, I think a lot of things that are just recently possible, but they're not not going to be perfect. And I think we're kind of setting up this world and this product that we're creating, so that we can continue to add to it for years as our own sandbox to showcase, you know, as many new and emerging forms of technology as soon as they come online. So I mean, there's every conversation we have with John, I'm learning about, you know, different r&d areas in the space where I might think I know a lot about it. But then John always has 10, other things I haven't heard about. And I'm thinking I guess we could spend a lifetime learning and perfecting these things and waiting for them to be perfect, so we can put them in world. And I think that's, you know, the kind of the journey that we're on. It doesn't feel totally dissimilar from like, when we started Foursquare, and we had a sense of like, this is where the technology is going, lets us build something now. And we'll grow into what we want to be as the stuff starts to, you know, become possible. And I feel like we're doing that exact same thing. Here, just different tools, different technologies, potentially even different devices, you know, things we haven't even seen yet, right? But that's, we kind of, you know, I think among the three of us in the rest of the team, we get a pretty good sense of like, what what is inside of the crystal ball of the future. And we're kind of building a framework that's going to allow us to do lots of cool stuff as more stuff comes online.

I think that's the key word. I'm glad you said that word framework, because we're never going to, we're never going to be able to manifest on our own by ourselves, write some of these, moving these white papers to pragmatic things that everybody, any person could experience we really want to collaborate and or fine if you're hearing this podcast, and you believe that you you want you you believe in the premise of what we're talking about the idea of what we're talking about. We want to collaborate with people who want us who want to get on the road there. We have a container, right? We're building a framework, basically. And we we definitely expect to be collaborating with people. That's an important point to put out there is like, no, no one group could ever, you know, could ever pull this off. Nobody.

Yeah. From an entrepreneurial perspective, entrepreneurial perspective, how do you want to take all of the lessons you've learned at Foursquare and do something do one thing better at living cities or is that one thing you might do better here at living cities?

Gotcha. That's That's tricky. You know, I think a lot of stuff we we did a Foursquare it was like we had these ideas, we push them out and It wasn't it was like it was very one way. Right? We invented the system, people interacted with it. We took feedback and fix things as we needed to. But it wasn't like, it wasn't a world. It wasn't we weren't were world building, we weren't building something that could people could build on top of we had the API, but it doesn't really count. It's not like a consumer thing. That that, you know, what we're building now is totally different. Right? Like we are building a world we want people to come in and build things on top of it. It's not just like, we write the rules of the game, you play it, and then we'll tell you who wins. It's like, we kind of design the infrastructure, and we put some tools in there. And then you show us what we should do you point the direction that this thing should go in. And, you know, we just we never got down that that road with with Foursquare, I think it just the product took all sorts of different turns. But I mean, we're going to be going down that road day one with this. That's which is extremely, super exciting for me. I've always wanted to do that. Yeah.

So switching will kind of extend this the same question here. This, this idea that from an entrepreneur perspective, and maybe John, from the time you spent at Magic Leap, which is a really unique sort of company, what's one thing that you want to do better at live in cities?

It's not even necessarily the word better is not even maybe applicable, it's get to do might be a better way to put it. The thesis of aligning real world and virtual world, actually, I mean, yes, there's people who are experimenting, have been experimenting with CO presence in collaborative workspaces, sort of, you know, you have like horizons, workspace stuff, and whatever. I've seen all of these great efforts, you know, over the years, but they're not really high value feeling to me, in the sense that well, whilst Yes, I think there's like, absolute high value in having a more sophisticated, you know, virtual to real co present work experience, with using mixed reality, or perhaps virtual reality, I haven't seen anybody do something significant, and a value where you're trying to mine the more important things to people in their everyday lives, let's say it magically, you know, we did lots of tests with enterprise customers. And, you know, it'd be like, Hey, I'm going to try to align the simulation over the top of my, you know, worksite, or to try to learn things, right, or, and these are extremely useful applications and use cases, right, or I'm going into surgery, and I'm going to use a visualization to try to understand the procedure, super, incredibly useful. But at certain point, it is going to have to be looked at what could be of high value to the average person of reward, something rewarding, you know, something that basically allows them to apply their imagination in ways that they haven't been able to before. And we just want to try this in a way that can marry what has been so far too siloed, essentially, to two siloed opportunity spaces. One is, you know, may perhaps you know, what you can do in the real world, through capture through mixed reality, all these things, and what people can do in the virtual world, which could include everything from, hey, it's an online game, to it's a virtual reality experience. You know, it's a Metaverse concept, we want to join those two things together. And we were at Magic Leap, we speculated a little bit about this. But nobody at even at that time, when I was over there, which wasn't that long ago, I hadn't seen other than that, maybe even my own tests, right? I hadn't seen anybody doing any of that, right, just getting the basics to work, which Matt sort of explained is now you know, in this three, four years, since then, like much easier, you literally in the last four years, it's become much easier. So we can finally get on to the business of figuring out how to channel in both directions, something meaningful. That's what we want to figure out that, you know, it's like, you gotta get past. And there's still plenty of problems. Like, I mean, how do you do that with a lot of people concurrently, this like, lots of problems to solve, but we are actually at a place where we can start exploring, you know, the value to everyday people. And we don't have those answers. We it's like anything else that we're going to be told eventually, by the way, people want to use the framework or the use the platform. So we look forward to learning. You know, we know that we're learning and I didn't get to do that in this particular way before this project.

That's great. Met, how about you thinking back on that 60 experience and from an entrepreneurial perspective? What do you want to do better or different here at living cities?

Yeah, two things. I I want to manage myself my own emotions better. I feel like that's like a lifelong journey. You know, I know it may serve deco that failed my identity and the company's identity were very much one of the same thing. I think it's 60, I did a better job at still staying attached but not not whiplashed around by the company. And I'd like to be better at that, you know, this company. And a big part of that is the people I work with, and the learning to trust them more than I that I have in the past. So this is, this has definitely been the most amazing team I've ever worked with. So it's that sort of makes it easier for me, but it's certainly a personal goal. The other thing that I'm really enjoying if even if it's finding it new and difficult, and a bit scary, is that this is a consumer product with a, you know, huge dependency on a creative, creative, visually creative execution. And that's just not something I've done before professionally. So what sort of worked on in a deep tech or infrastructure or enterprise, you know, that type of stuff. So I'm really enjoying it. But it's also something I wanted to do. And I kind of chose this concept to spend my time on because it gave me the opportunity to work with more creative people. But it's new, and there's times where I'm just like, Okay, I don't know what's going to happen here. But I'm just going to trust the process and hope it works out. So

trust the process. You mentioned something, I think in part one, there's this idea that sometimes it's a relatively small tweak, that takes a product from feeling not quite right to really good. Yeah. And in finding that small tweak, I have to imagine is, essentially trust the process, do you have to really kind of thoroughly go through the process?

I mean, do it go to things at 60, that sort of, you know, gave me the confidence, I guess to personally to sort of get I'm missing one was my co founder, Victor, who is a professor of computer vision at Oxford, what was interesting about him was, he was a great programmer, you know, he could write amazing code, but it wasn't that he did it better than other people. He was a Victor had this creative ability to do something that other people just couldn't do was like a complete step function. And that made me realize that, okay, you know, creativity isn't really a, you know, like, a nice, incremental line of it gets better and better and better, you know, there's there often is with the right people, they can have an insight or have some, you know, you could be grinding away making no progress on some insight could happen and transforms everything. So that was part of it. And the other part was working with Sashka Unseld 60, who's a former Pixar director and help that Oculus story studio, and he was he was doing most of the work on our prototypes 60. And he would sort of have those ideas, we just put this little tweak in here, if we just do a transition between this state and that state and make it make it smooth, or we we change the way the camera works, you know, the camera works to give you a different feeling. And these are all subtle things that from a, you know, from from me looking through a technical lens, it's like 10 minutes work, you know, and but it completely changed the subjective feeling of the demo. And so those two things made me realize, okay, you know, working with great creative minds, talents, trusting that, you know, it's not a linear process, and also trusting that something that I might not think is a big deal actually, is a big deal to the way the product experienced. And I'm kind of I'm really enjoying learning about that. But learning from people like John and other guys on our team, and it's fun, and scary.

Both. And pathetic is part of what makes it fun. This new chair, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's wrap the couple in lightning round questions here. And this one is really about what, what inspires you? Or what are you passionate about outside of work? So what is what is an area of passion for you outside of living cities?

Yeah, my kids are teenage boys. I love just watching them learning about their, how they see life. Cycling, I love getting out on my bike. And I love exploring, like, design and sort of that, that side of culture and how, you know, beautiful objects can change how you feel about a place.

I love that. John, how about you?

I think I will opt for the kind of simple answer to I mean, you know, what's interesting about working in virtual worlds, I guess is that it actually opens your eyes to the real world because you are constantly trying to understand the difference, right? Like, you can be really Lazy, and that perceive what's right there in front of you as important, and why it's important. So for me, outside of the work life, I mean, I, I moved just recently up to a more rural place I wanted to be, I wanted to be in a slightly slower place more or less complicated place. Because I get enough of that elsewhere. I essentially building a new chapter, you know, in this in a new place. And that's super exciting. And I'm invested with my family in that. And that really takes up a lot of my thinking, like, at the moment, I'm off line, right? I'm in that world, right. And it's a pretty fun, simple place to be. And it's like, the most enjoyable thing. You know, like, I hope most people listening, completely agree with that. So we can get ourselves really, like, worked up and have a thrilling time, you know what I mean? geeking out on creative and Tech Tech, and it is so awesome. It is really to get into this stuff. But like, there has to be like a completely other side of that. And then you have balance. So that's, I'd say, that's the same answer, you know, like my, my family, my little spot, taking a walk.

It's good, that's amazing. I just got back from a couple of weeks, I grew up in South Dakota, in the western side of the state, and my my parents still live there. And we try to get my daughter's there a couple times a year. So probably outside of COVID spent probably a month a year in rural western South Dakota, as opposed to busy Los Angeles. And for that exact reason, it's just so wonderful to go outside and be in a place where it's all about the place. And the neighbor and the people who are there in a much more simple experience and simple existence, which I just find it so refreshing and energy rejuvenating to have those sorts of experiences on a regular basis. So I deeply appreciate that. People should practice reality at least once a day. I love that. Dennis, how about you,

outside of living cities, all the work I've done has been around connecting the digital world and the real world. And it was get pegged as a technology guy, but I really think it's about like building communities and you know, building software that brings people together. And so like another thing I've been working on really outside of this and outside of tech is, you know, building community through soccer. So I run a local division for soccer team up here in the Hudson Valley. It's called Kingston Stockade, which has been super fun. Like we started the team from scratch. We wrote all sorts of, you know, blog posts, and essays, you know, teaching other people how they could do it, which has been super fun. And then I'm involved in another startup called street FC, which just, you know, makes and spawns pickup games. Eventually, all over the country all over the world. Right now. It's in five different cities, it's kind of like SoulCycle, but for Buffalo pickup soccer. And you know, at the end of day, like using software that brings people together using technology to bring people together. But you know, it's people in space together, enjoying something together, maybe cheering on a team or playing out in real life. I find that stuff super fun and super rewarding in a way that like is a little bit different than I think building online social systems and tech infrastructure.

There's this recurring theme about bringing people together, you have I think I haven't you have a T shirt that's defend real life or defend in real life. Yeah, defend this notion that really is about fundamentally bringing people together physically in the real world.

Yeah, I mean, at the end of the day, that's what all this stuff is for. It's not so you can sit and endlessly scroll through your Twitter or Instagram feed. It's like software is supposed to, you know, change the world world to make it a little bit more easy to navigate to make it more accessible to us, like a classic line that we used to use in the dodgeball days was we make software that makes it easier to use, we build technology that facilitates serendipity, you know, those are kind of the the mantras I build software that helps you get off the internet, right? What's the famous quote, use use the internet to help people get off the internet. And I think that's kind of, you know, that's been in my DNA. And I think that gets sprinkled into all the all the projects that I've worked on.

Amazing. I too, have a deep passion for soccer. Where did yours originate? Did you play when you were young a lot?

You know, I didn't play I didn't play growing up. You know, I played when I was like five years old, not very skilled. You know, what happened is like, I joined a team when I was like, just starting Foursquare, and I had no business being on this team. My buddies started, they invited me to play like I didn't play in high school I didn't play in college was full of people that played in college and played in the pros. And it was in New York City super competitive environment. And literally the worst one on the pitch, probably the worst one in the league. But it was such a crazy juxtaposition between, you know, Foursquare was growing. And it was, it was just kind of this freight train that was going on. Everyone thought I had all the answers to everything. And I would do that during the day and I go play You know, pick up at night. And it's like, nobody cares that Johnny Foursquare no one wants to pass the ball to me. And it was just like this awesome, grounding juxtaposition of experiences. And it just, it made me just totally fall in love with the sport, and really just what it can do for people outside of just playing, you know?

And for you, what is it this notion of grounding and starting at zero, really, this, this notion of being a novice again, which is kind of inspiring, I imagine at one level, but what do you think it does soccer specifically, for the community players who engage

like when St FC and some of these other things are just getting people to play I haven't played before. I think it's just it's social write people think of sports as being ultra competitive. It through the work of Kingston Stockade, you know, the Semi Pro Team, it's like I said, you have to be on the field, you just just show up and cheer, like be a part of the community that is supporting this thing that's going on here. And then in st FC, and I'm still pretty unskilled player. And so, you know, I focus on making sure that we have amazing beginner games, and you could never have played, you could be soccer, curious and just show up and be able to kick a ball. Right? You know, interesting, as your question is talking about being a novice again, you know, to some extent, I feel a little bit like a novice, and in living cities, right? I don't have a huge deep background in VR, and AR and, you know, building in depth graphical worlds is the world building, right? But like, our team is stacked with those folks. And I'm like, Okay, I have this like little, you know, deep niche knowledge and I connecting the real world and the digital world. And it turns out that, like, it's okay, not to have that other deep knowledge. And it's actually good not to have that deep knowledge in a way because you bring this other, this other set of experiences to someone else's other set of experiences. And I think that's where real the magical stuff kind of comes from.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Agree. I think that one of the challenges for the industry, kind of given where we are over the last we've gotten traveled over the last 10 years since Google Glass and in the early experiments with Oculus is that we have a lot of people who are passionate about it, but they've been working in IT for all these years, and they're coming at it from an insider's perspective. And, and while that does a great job of maybe showcasing what the technology can do, it doesn't that does not necessarily allow the technology to meet the rest of the world, and where it is right to finding the sort of things that really encourage broader adoption, beyond the kind of niche adoption that we have today.

I think there's a lot there. I remember, like when I was just kind of cycling off of Foursquare and trying to figure out what's gonna be next. I was talking to an investor, and they're like, listen, we really, and this is interesting, we really want to get web two people working on web three stuff, mostly because like a lot of people are working on web three are kind of new to that space. And they're building all the stuff that already exists in that space, which is really, we need the people that have been in the space for 1520 years, that, you know, we're building that dodgeballs and the flickers and the delicious and you know, like the first wave of social services, and say, Hey, take that mindset and apply that stuff to new platforms, new technologies, you know, all things, quote, unquote, web three, I just thought that was an interesting way of looking at it, like how do we get that old guard to come over and start building things in a different way in a new way? You know, so that just, it's not more of the same?

Yeah, yeah. Last one here, if you could sit down and have coffee with your 25 year old self, what advice would you share?

I would probably say, move to Silicon Valley. I was living in Australia at the time, I didn't appreciate the opportunity, I guess, you know, I was working in tech in Australia versus working in the same tech in the Bay Area. The other thing would be take more emotional risks. Yeah, that would be another like things that in

what was happening your life that you were not taking emotional risks, and what does an emotional risk look like? You've got

everything. You know, it's really, a lot of it comes down to people, you know, whether people you work with your friends, your romantic relationships, like all those things, I just kind of wish I would just tell myself to take more of those risks, say the things that you you regret the things you don't say. So I kind of would encourage myself to be braver in that regard, and be more vulnerable, more open. And it's only as I've later in life, have learned how important and effective that is to everything, how you enjoy life, what you accomplish in life, who you who you journey with. So that's, again, it's like a constant journey, but I kind of would have liked to have that insight a lot younger than I did.

That's great. John, how about you?

I love that answer. I would say take less emotional risks. No, you know, I mean, if you're talking about the 25 year old self I mean, that's a pretty Yeah, that's a pretty different self. I mean, I saw a movie once. There was like a one hour movie called The mr. We have Picasso. And basically, it was just like one camp, two cameras, one, one behind the canvas that was translucent and one facing side on, and you could see him and he can talk to the camera. And so like across an hour, he painted on this translucent canvas. And it was like a painting that transformed three times, she didn't know you thought it was one thing, and then another and another lady's talking about life. And he's, you know, really, like, you know, talking about the things that he loves in his life and everything. And then he gets to the end, and he's like, Okay, we're done. Now, this painting is now dead to me, because it's over the experience of making it was over. So when I was younger, I used to always think about the end, like, Oh, if we ever get to the end of something, when we finished the thing, it's going to be great. People will love this, or blah, blah, blah, right. And it was always about the ending the destination and the reaction of anything. And I like realized, and it took a long time to understand what this movie was about. But like, if you don't enjoy, you know, what you're doing along the road, if it isn't about the road, and it's only about the destination, then you could, you know, be quite disappointed. So you have to really like the journey you're on. So you have to have passion for something, you have to like, follow your passion. It's not always awesome. It can be like fraught, you know, with highs and lows. But if you're if your passion is leading you down the road, than the road is the thing that is the most important that I learned. And I would tell my 25 year old self like it's not about the end, it's about the journey.

I feel like that's such a hard lesson to take at that age at the age of 25. But I definitely appreciate it more as I've gotten older that this notion that you really have to enjoy each step, well, maybe you don't quite enjoy each step. But you have to appreciate each step as you notice, as you go along. That's great. How about you, Dennis? What advice would you share

for a five year old that is just in real life, just got laid off from his job, and just broke up with his girlfriend and was in the process of getting evicted from his apartment? And so I think the advice would be, hey, listen, I know you have a hard time focusing on getting a real job. And I know you want to tinker around with all sorts of like weird projects that aren't products and they're not companies. And that is okay to do. Don't don't get off that path. Because ultimately it will it will figure itself will figure itself out. You know, I remember very specifically being in New York, around the time where like everything was imploding, right, the the jobs and the apartment thing. And my mom telling me, I remember, like, you know, I don't know what to tell you about, I can tell you this, like, do what you love in the best will come and the rest will come right. And I remember thinking like, that is the worst advice ever. Like, I don't have a job. I don't have an apartment. I mean, I eventually ended up moving out of the city for a year and then coming back. But you know, but during that time, I just kept, you know, chipping away at the stuff that I was interested in. And I kind of always had that in the back of my brain just just work on the stuff that I kind of love doing. And I think is interesting. And I always think like, hey, if I think it's interesting, maybe someone else does. And if someone else does that maybe, you know, 10,000 people do, right? And I can't, I can't understate how much like when we were working on dodgeball, like people laughed at us because we thought it was a silly idea. And then when we started it again, as Foursquare, like everyone was like we were, you know, you already did this, you already sold this company like it. Google didn't want it's not going to turn into anything. Like I know there's something here that I just want to keep doing it. And you know, all the stuff that people have kind of chuckled, that has turned out to be like the most the most interesting and kind of the best the best journeys. And so, you know, that's kind of what I seek out. And I have to choose something to focus and work on. Yeah,

tinkering. Focusing on the pastures can get conviction to kind of follow through for the good. Yeah, yeah, just like

you kind of see like, I kind of see it as a light at the end of the tunnel. And it might maybe it takes like five years to get down that that path, but you just you just keep doing that, you know, I think everything I've ever worked on has been like a little bit crazy, a little silly, a little stupid. And then, you know, the more you tinker on it, the better the more infocus it gets, and the sharper the story gets. And then people start to people start to get it. And I think it's really just, it takes a lot of discipline to stick with it and not and not just abandon it for the stuff that's easier and more obvious.

Yeah, absolutely. Are there any closing thoughts you'd like to share about living cities or in general what you're trying to accomplish here?

First, I'm psyched to be on the podcast because I'm a longtime listener first time interviewee or whatever the first time guests and I you know, living cities is one of these projects is kind of like that last question, right? Like, what does it turn into be? How do you define it? Like we're, we are redefining it every, you know, every every couple of weeks, and it's one of these things where we found these really nuggets, these really interesting nuggets of interaction between the real The world and the digital and you know, and AR and in real life and, you know, being able to use, you know, kind of today's technology, iPhones and lenses, and you know, imagining what's to come. And, you know, it's not, it's not totally obvious what the end product will look like, you know, call it 10 months from now, or even like, three, three years from now. But I think like, we're all kind of comfortable in that space. And so I think it's gonna be fun to listen to, you know, even this this interview that we did, where like, you know, we kind of talk around the product a little bit, mostly, you know, mostly because we want to share too much and also because, like, we want to make sure that what we're building is actually coming together in the way that we want to, and then compare this to, you know, where we are in a year, where we are in two years, right, as hardware changes as people's understanding of the space changes as like, you know, the art of the reasonably possible changes, right, and just in this kind of car, everything matches up. But like, that's, that's part of the journey. And we're, we're excited for I'm super excited to be working on all this stuff. Man,

I can't wait to talk about the product. I feel like, we're just holding back talking about like, the, the ideas of philosophies, the ambitions, you know, we have that are all kind of abstract at the moment. But yeah, I'm so looking forward to in coming months starting to share details of the product itself, start to see people's reaction to it. A so enjoyed that aspect of 60, you know, urgent is hated it, you know, whatever, every time, I'd like, take some random feature that we just built my bike posted out to social media, but it was, you know, I loved it. And it was so valuable to shape the direction of the company, John, anything from you,

we're appreciative of getting a chance to talk about it. And, you know, we want to have a conversation, you know, we don't want to push, as Dennis put it, right. We don't want to push, right, we would like to have a conversation with people about this. And they should know that we're on a road. We'd like to be on the road with them. And you know, the first steps we take in the road on the road are the invitation to like, get with us and let's, let's figure out where where we want to go. So that's my only closing thought.

Great. And Matt, last one is for you. Where can people go to learn more about you engage with you and what you're doing at living cities and ultimately learn more and even get involved?

Yeah, it's not just about me, I guess. But to learn more about living cities and a whole team. Discord is our primary like channel, there's a link to it on our website, which is living cities that XYZ, we've got a, you know, I'm pretty active on Twitter and discord will be where we start to leak some of the first sneak previews of what we're doing. It's going to be where we reach out to to find our earliest testers and earliest users. So that is, that is definitely the place to start with, and we're going to be wrapping up a lot more activity on Discord. Probably six weeks from now in like September, October time.

Awesome. Thank you all so much for the conversation.

Thank you. Yeah, it's always a good chat.

Yes, it's super fun. Thank you for having me on the show.

Yeah. Great to talk to you.

Before you go, I want to tell you about the next episode. In it. I speak with Glenn Schneider. Glen is the co founder and CTO of red six, a company that has developed an augmented reality solution to allow real pilots flying real aircraft to see simulated threats. The augmented reality solution works outdoors and in high speed dynamic environments. Glenn shares his background in visual effects, a fun and slightly crazy early tech demo, and some of the challenges he and his team have overcome in creating their solution. And please consider contributing to this podcast@patreon.com slash the AR show. Thanks for listening