The AR Show: Nils Pihl (Auki Labs) on Augmented Reality as an Extension of Human Language | Otter.ai

The AR Show: Nils Pihl (Auki Labs) on Augmented Reality as an Extension of Human Language

Jason McDowall1h 12min

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 with Nils Pihl. Mills is the CEO and co founder of Auki. Labs, a company solving the limitations of GPS to accurately position virtual content, particularly for shared experiences. Nils and the team at Auki are building advanced peer to peer positioning protocols, and AR cloud infrastructure to enable a new era of spatial computing. Prior to founding Auki Labs, Nils was a behavioral engineer who studied meme theory and was a practitioner of mimetic Engineering. He also is a serial entrepreneur bringing forward some key lessons learned into his current endeavors. In this conversation, Nils shares his perspective on AR as a natural and inevitable extension of human language,

Nils Pihl

00:49

I think augmented reality is a subset of language. Or if we flip this around, I think language is the oldest augmented reality technology we have. What do I mean by that? Let's say that we are walking through a forest, right, and we come across a fallen tree. And I tell you look at that amazing couch, by the act of saying, look at this amazing couch, I have now most likely made you perceive this tree differently. You now see the sitting Enos of this tree, I've painted the environment with an emotional context that now makes you see the whole world differently. And I think the impulse towards language is a very deep human impulse on the level of, you know, food and sexual reproduction. And all of these things, I think, the desire to annotate the world and add depth and meaning to objects, and transmit memes to each other, like arrive at an inter subjectivity, where we perceive the world the same way. It's such a deep human desire that I kind of feel that augmented reality, the way we talk about it today is an inevitable technology like in any timeline, where humanity survives, they invent augmented reality. We go

Jason McDowall

02:17

on to discuss meme theory and explore Aukey labs unique positioning technology. As a reminder, you can find the show notes for this and other episodes at our website, V ar show.com. That's th e AR sh o w.com. Let's dive in. How did you discover tabletop war games? So

Nils Pihl

02:36

I was working at a company normal nine to five, and one of my colleagues brought in some Warhammer miniatures one day that he had painted himself, and he was so excited. And I was very fascinated, you know, because he is a grown man with his painted little figurines, so excited about them, inviting everyone at the office to play with him. And he challenged me to a game. I was like, ah, but I don't have any of my own stuff. And it's like, it's okay, I'll play you in three months, go to the store, go get an army. So I did, I went to the store, I went to the Warhammer store. And I completely fell in love with the hobby, but also with the company that makes it I felt like wow, this is like peak capitalism in a way, you know, because they're selling me the miniatures, they're selling me the paint, they're selling me the brushes, they're selling me the rule books, the lore books, all of this stuff. And I got very, very fascinated with them as a company. And I got very, very fascinated with the hobby, these tabletop board games, they're played with a measuring tape and with dice, and the rules are very arcane, and hard to follow. And I realized that 2 million people a month watch these games on YouTube. And I started thinking, like, Wouldn't it be super cool if we could like, watch this the way we watch an American football game, you know, with, with AR. And that's, that's how I discovered tabletop Wargaming. And how I ended up down the path wanting to make augmented reality things because I wanted to make tabletop Wargaming into a proper like esport

Jason McDowall

04:12

proper esport. So here, you're thinking about AR from the perspective of like, we see the superimposed, you know, first downline in American football or whatever, have all these image overlays for us home viewers. Yeah, to really deeply, more deeply appreciate what's going on in the game. Yeah,

Nils Pihl

04:27

I think one of the things that makes it difficult to understand sports for me, it's I often don't understand the rules. I don't know what's going on. And, you know, there's this behavioral expert called Kathy Sierra, who refers to it as high resolution, where if you understand the rules of something, the whole thing appears differently to you an example that she used this you know, if you know how to see the Big Dipper in the sky, you can't unsee the Big Dipper. The night sky just looks different. And if you understand the rules of football, you see some Think completely different from someone that does not understand the rules. And as someone who's very interested in behavior myself, and also very interested in language, I thought like, well, it's super fascinating how hard it is for me to communicate what is happening in a tabletop game. And how effective a tool language tool, augmented reality would be. If we could show things like, here's the aura, here's the range, here are the things that this character is capable of doing that, you know, as a player, I can intuitively see them. But as a non player, I don't see it at all,

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