Forest Gibson: The Power of Purpose – Episode 61

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts | Spotify | Android | TuneIn | RSS

Forest Gibson and his colleagues at Pluto VR have an ambitious purpose: “to help humanity transcend physical location.”

Even before they formed their company, Forest and his fellow founders did deep work to align on their purpose. That clarity helps them evaluate their ideas and make better decisions faster.

Their work aims to transform how people interact in virtual reality. By hacking human perception and behavior, they are creating experiences that feel more real than current prototypical VR experiences.

One crucial element in these new experiences will be content created specifically for virtual spaces. Just as movies became more immersive when directors moved away from stage-play esthetics, VR experiences will come of age when we master content practices that are native to the new medium.

Forest and I talked about:

• the early work that their founder team undertook to clarify their purpose
• the benefits of locking in vision and purpose early in the life of an enterprise
• how his background in theater and film prepared him for his purposeful approach to business
• how they melded two founder teams into one
• how human visual perception systems drive some at-first counter-intuitive VR system decisions
• the paradox of having a crisp, well-defined purpose but no specific product ideas
• how their purpose helps them quickly evaluate how well an idea fits into their business
• how having clarity of purpose works at any scale from a one-minute video up to large ventures
• how they vet early ideas and prototypes against their purpose
• how to manage content in virtual environments
• how there are currently few obvious communication channels to illustrate VR content distribution
• how physical devices anchor your experience in voice interactions
• how it will be native content, content that is created specifically for the new medium, that will really make this new communication medium take off

Forest’s Bio

Forest is a co-founder and the Director of Labs at Pluto VR. The company’s purpose is to help humanity transcend physical location so that everyone can more easily connect, communicate, and collaborate as if they were in person regardless of where they are. Before co-founding Pluto VR he was a creative innovations leader at Deloitte Digital, working with the largest brands in the world to help them stay competitive in the new digital landscape. He has a diverse background including VR, film, marketing, and crowdfunding. Other projects include: an automated brewing machine Kickstarter that makes beer at the press of a button, a new way to train employees through mobile gaming, and the web series Know Your Meme.

Video

Here’s the video version of our conversation:

Podcast Intro Transcript

When movies were first introduced, producers and directors simply captured stage productions on film. Once they figured out that they could move their cameras around and add sound to their productions, the medium really came into its own. We’re at a similar place with virtual reality right now. Forest Gibson and his colleagues at Pluto VR are building tools that mimic real human communication in virtual environments. As you might imagine, the implications of this for content strategists and content creators are huge.

Interview Transcript

Larry:
Hi everyone. Welcome to Episode Number 61 of the Content Strategy Insights Podcast. I’m really happy today to have with us Forest Gibson. Forest is a founder at Pluto VR, which is a really cool sounding startup here in Seattle. Well, first, welcome, Forest, and tell the folks a little bit about Pluto VR and your role there.

Forest:
Hey, Larry, thanks for having me on the show. So, a little bit about Pluto. And so, we’ve started about five years ago, and our purpose is to help humanity transcend physical location. So no matter where you are, you can connect with other people as if you’re there in person with them. And we do this with augmented and virtual reality technology, so, allowing you to have things like eye contact, and body language, that you don’t currently have with things like video chat.

Larry:
Yeah, that’s, that’s so fundamental. It kind of reminds me of your, that purpose statement reminds me of Google’s idea of just, “Well, we’ll just start anybody in the world access to any of the information that you need at any time.” And you’re at that same foundational level in the communication realm, of interpersonal communication.

Larry:
Tell me, and the fact that you can state that purpose so clearly, that’s why we had a great chat last fall. I think we had coffee and just talked broadly about a bunch of this stuff. And one of the things that’s super important to content strategists, and in any strategist in any role like this, is that idea of aligning people on that, around that kind of a purpose or vision. And so I want to talk to you a little bit about how you all arrived at it.

Larry:
Because that’s such a succinct, clear, just immediately understandable and evocative message. But I can’t imagine it came out really quickly. Can you tell me about how you arrived at that?

Forest:
Yeah, so, the specific purpose that we arrived at was definitely the culmination of all the co-founders, what we were looking to accomplish together. And I think the important part about it was the process.

Forest:
We did an offsite, in which we spent several days together, basically talking about nothing but our purpose, and what we’re doing. And an important aspect about this was that we did this before we even founded the company.

Forest:
One of the kind of agreements we all had was that we weren’t going to even start this new endeavor, this new company together, unless we could really lock down what our purpose was. And we had four co-founders.

Forest:
So, especially from a business perspective, that’s a lot of stakeholders early on in a brand new startup. And so, having that really clear purpose, allowed us to always stay aligned.

Forest:
And so, there has never been any sort of misalignment when it comes to, specifically related to our purpose. And we locked those words in. Those words are the exact words they were before we founded the company.

Larry:
From five years ago?

Forest:
They have not changed one bit, from five years ago. All they have done is become deeper and deeper, as we explore the meaning of those words. And as I said, it’s, once you have that vision or purpose locked in, it gives you more room to explore. I mean, I think about, in the creative process, constraints are actually some of the best tools to be creative.

Larry:
Right. And so, and you mean in that sense, adhering to this purpose statement, just like a fundamentalist religion, almost, or something.

Forest:
I wouldn’t go that far, but-

Larry:
Oh, okay, thank you.

Forest:
From the concept, I mean, to think about it… So I have a creative background. I’ve done a lot of theater. I’ve done a lot of film, and having an initial vision for what film you’re making, what is the thing you’re doing? It was often held in the head of the director, but really good directors can articulate that for their creative team.

Forest:
One thing I have seen, or can happen in business is, is they can evolve in ways that they don’t check back in about their fundamental reason for being. And when you then start to look at generating content, whether it’s, literally products, actual content based on products, or content being additional marketing or other materials, making sure that you have that poor understanding of why you’re doing what you’re doing. That’s a really important essential part of, especially in the creative process in film and theater.

Larry:
Got you. Hey, I want to go back just a little bit, too. Because you, the four of you, there’s four founders, and you were already each doing things in this realm, and then decided to pair up? I want to go back just a little bit to the DNA, or the evolutionary heritage of what went into that. Can you talk a little bit about that?

Forest:
Yup, yeah. Yeah, of course. So, myself and Jared Cheshier had been doing VR for almost two years before founding Pluto. We had a company called Impossible Object. We were much more experimental. We were just discovering what was possible in this brand new technology.

Forest:
We were getting our hands really dirty learning how to, how to build things specifically in this new realm, the programming languages, the tools, the capabilities of the hardware, et cetera. And also making some fundamental discoveries around what allows you to have the sense of shared presence with others in virtual environments. And it’s not what most people expect.

Forest:
Most people assume it’s a photorealism, “Oh it’s, it really is going to look like the person,” when, in reality, our earliest experiments and tests showed that if you followed some key fundamental principles, you could have a floating white mask, like a party mask, and that would feel more like a person than an attempt at some photorealistic representation.

Larry:
Interesting!

Forest:
So that was-

Larry:
What were the characteristics? Or what was it about that experience, that made that more human, I guess?

Forest:
So our brains and our visual perception systems run off certain key things around the positioning, and relative positioning of features. So, the fact that your eyes are where your eyes are. And now, while this sounds like a straightforward statement, right? “Oh, your eyes should be where your eyes are.”

Forest:
That’s fundamentally not how video chat works, because a video chat, your eye is actually where the camera is, and the camera is usually offset somewhere. It’s either on the top of the device, it’s on the side, it’s somewhere else. So you don’t actually have that true alignment of your eyes being aligned to your perception system.

Forest:
That was one example. Again, proportions and scale. If you aren’t, if you’re two times bigger than you’re supposed to be, that creates a very different perception, and a feeling, when interacting with another person.

Forest:
Whereas if they’re the right scale, that the way that you’d expect to see them in real life, it’s a much more meaningful experience. And then, finally, or there’s many more, but another bullet is the precision of tracking, and making sure that when you’re talking about optimizing your network, optimizing the situation, that it moves like a person.

Forest:
Because you can have a floating sphere, and if it moved exactly like your head moved, your brain just says, “Oh, that’s a person.” Whereas if you had a hyper-realistic 3-D model of a person, and it was stuttering around, that didn’t move like a real person, you’d actually have this visceral negative reaction to it.

Forest:
Which is in the industry, what’s, or in psychology, known as the uncanny valley, this area between, the more human it becomes, the more we like it. Until it hits this massive chasm, where, if it’s too human but not human yet, it’s terrifying. We don’t like it.

Larry:
That’s fascinating.

Forest:
So that’s the creepy androids, things like that.

Larry:
Yeah. Yeah, I can feel that. So that’s the track you were on at Impossible Objects. You were figuring some of this stuff out, the specific technologies, and it sounds like, some of the fundamental underlying psychology of it. What were John and Jonathan up to at the time?

Forest:
Yeah, so, John had been working at EA. And so, he had just stepped back from that, and that was part of the acquisition of PopCap. John Vechey is one of the co-founders of PopCap. He was just starting to dive into the VR space, and he was really fascinated about how this can bring people together in new ways.

Forest:
And so, even in our initial conversation, when we first met, his perspective was, “What if we could do a Neil deGrasse Tyson lecture for a million people, because he’s such a powerful presenter?” And then, he was working with Jonathan, and talking to Jonathan, about new ways and better ways to manage engineers. Jonathan Geibel came from Disney Animation, and was working with this animation, to help lead and manage their engineering teams.

Larry:
Oh, interesting. Well, that sounds like a dream team there. You’re the media guy, and I know John, actually, PopCap was founded in an apartment building that I used to live in. So when John had, his co-founders were doing that, they were down in the basement apartment, in the same building I was in. So that’s a weird little connection.

Forest:
Small world.

Larry:
Yeah, this town is crazy that way. But so, and I know John is sort of, you’re a media whiz, johnny’s picture is a marketing, and just a people wizard, and then Jonathan is like a process and management guy. So the four of you get together, was it a pretty quick melding of the minds, or how did that unfold?

Forest:
Yeah, it happened pretty quick. I mean, especially for co-founding a company with people that we had never really met before. I mean, we got introduced, so the two pairs knew the person each other. But as a group, we had not ever worked together before. And so, we made sure to spend a lot of time upfront, really getting to know each other better. And that’s what led to this, the creation of this purpose, which was this really crisp aligning function so that we knew exactly what we’re going to do.

Forest:
Which is funny, because, in saying that, when we first started, we also had no idea what we were going to do. We had this incredibly specific, crisp purpose, but yet, we were all over the place. We didn’t know what it would turn into. But because we could always reflect back and say, “Well, what is it we’re trying to do?”, it allowed us to constantly test our assumptions and our planning.

Forest:
Because we could say, “What, so, ,if we did this thing and we took it to the logical conclusion, is that in line with the purpose?” And then it was very easy to say yes or no.

Larry:
Exactly. And I wonder, how many people who haven’t, this is what’s so interesting to me about this is, I wonder how many people who haven’t done that, have failed, and we’ll just never hear their story, because they never got there.

Larry:
That’s what’s fascinating to me about this, is that my hunch is that you guys are really onto something there, both in terms of the subject matter you’re tackling, but just in the way you’re doing. Can you tell me a little bit more about that, that offsite that you did?

Larry:
So it’s a multi-day offsite with the four of you. Did you have someone facilitate it for you, or was it just the four of you working out on your own, or how did that unfold?

Forest:
I would say that John played more of the facilitator for this one, but it was just us. So we did not have an external party. And this helps, because we didn’t, I don’t think we needed it at this point, because we weren’t already in flight.

Forest:
As soon as you start having multiple stakeholders working on a business, and then you need to try to circle back and clarify what you’re really doing, you’ll start to have comp flex, because you’ll start to see areas of misalignment. And it’s very difficult to work through those conceptually.

Forest:
It’s very difficult to say, if two people have two different ideas on what they’re actually doing, but they’ve already done a bunch of work towards those, it’ll often be very difficult to articulate why someone else’s idea feels wrong. Because you don’t have those words. And this is-

Larry:
So this is like the sounding board for that, then, right?

Forest:
Yeah.

Larry:
Yup, yeah, got you.

Forest:
Yeah. So, because we hadn’t really started any new work, I think our egos or our work wasn’t caught up in what we’ve already done. If I just spent two years working on a project, and now I’m, as part of some offsite, and it sounds like the direction the offsite’s going, will make my project obsolete, it’s very difficult for people to step back and say, that’s okay.

Forest:
If you start fearing that your job’s on the line, or something, or all the work that you’ve been doing is for nothing, then you’ll start to get those tension points. But it’s at the level where most people struggle to articulate that, because-

Larry:
Right.

Forest:
Because, unless they have their own clear, unless they’ve already established their own clear mission, and they say, “I believe we should be doing this,” crisply, then other people will also have their own blurry versions of what’s happening. And that’s why I, again, I bring this back to, I’ve had a lot of historical experience and content around film and media. If you have a director and producer who drastically disagree on what they’re making, and depending on the power dynamic, you can end up with something terrible.

Larry:
Yup, yeah. Describes a lot of Hollywood, in my experience.

Forest:
Exactly.

Larry:
Yeah. Hey, but the whole process you just described speaks to something, wisdom that came from somewhere. I know that, I know John was an experienced founder, and you’ve had some experience. Of the four of you, had some of you started from scratch before, and was part of this process, and attempted to head off things that had arisen in other ways of doing it?

Forest:
Yeah, so I’ve done a quite a few different startups, and I’ve done some specifically with Jared before, as well. And John also had a lot of reflection back on PopCap, and the lessons he learned there, as well.

Forest:
And so, I think, those things put together…. And to me, and this is where I bring back my experience to film and media, is every time you spin up a new piece of content, every time there’s a new thing you’re creating, you go, the best ones go through this process.

Forest:
And you say, “Well, what are we doing? Why are we doing it? What is our purpose in making this new thing?” And even if it’s a small thing, even if you’re making a one-minute video or something, it’s really good to understand why you’re making that, and get really, a lot of clarity on that. So I’ve gone through this process hundreds of times at this point, but on different scales.

Larry:
Nice. And you’re, and so, you’re five years into this now. You just, what was it, a couple of years ago you launched your first product, wasn’t it? Well, and I love the fact that you didn’t have… Like, so many startups or product driven. You get a product idea and then you create a company around it.

Larry:
You’ve sort of done the opposite, created the intent and the company first, and then… Well, tell me about how that fits into the products, and other things that you’re creating there.

Forest:
Yeah, I mean, so in terms of the, how the purpose fits in, or-

Larry:
Because it’s, the fact that you start with purpose is so great. It’s so fundamental. I think, I’m thinking of how I could benefit from that. And I think so many companies could benefit from that.

Larry:
But if you have that strong purpose… Because, I think, the purpose, to be honest, or brutally honest, of a lot of startups, it’s like, a developer has a great idea in the shower, and then wants to share it with the world. And then everything unfolds from that.

Larry:
I mean, isn’t that, that’s an oversimplification, but I do think it often comes from, a more, a specific product, or specific implementation. Whereas what you came up with is a really fundamental deep purpose. And I’m assuming that makes the individual products and services or whatever you do easier to create. But I’m just wondering, as those things have unfolded, how the purpose helped that.

Forest:
Yeah. So, I mentioned, when we had this crisp purpose, and then when we started, we had actually no idea what we’re doing. We were really on an industry. We very fortunate, because, heading into this, we had seed funding. So we weren’t entirely bootstrapping ourselves. We weren’t, we didn’t come out of this, just in the way that often many startups do.

Forest:
So we were very fortunate on that front. And that gave us the time to really develop these ideas. And so, we still, believing, we’re in line with the purpose. We said, Okay, well, what are the things that we like to do, when we’re together in person?” And then, thus, we could then transcend that location.

Forest:
We like board games, we like poker, we like watching TV or movies together. We like presenting information or whiteboarding together. And this whole huge list of things starts coming out.

Forest:
And as I said, the purpose, what the purpose did was, every time we’d go down one of these paths, we’d have to ask ourselves, “Okay, let’s assume this is highly successful, because we build these prototypes, and we think, ‘This is great.’ Let’s assume we succeed. Where does that lead us?” And when the answer was, “The world’s best board game company,” then we had to ask ourselves, “Well, does that really feel like it’s in line with our purpose? Does that feel like it’s the thing that we’re trying to do?”

Larry:
Got it.

Forest:
And so, it kept forcing us to ask these questions. By doing that, our products and our prototypes in early phases, prototypes evolved, into, well, what is the fundamental cohesive factor that is important for all of those use cases that we talked about? It was the people. It was, just having people, was a fundamental technology that didn’t exist yet in this new virtual augmented mediums.

Larry:
Got it, and that’s [crosstalk 00:17:19]-

Forest:
And that’s, yeah. And so, things that were not obvious. So we did a lot of innovation. We’ve done some work with IP. We’ve been doing these kind of really early industry things, because we are still very early in this industry. These are the things that led us to say, and kept pushing and saying, “It sounds silly now,” but at the time we had these conversations where Jared, who’s often a big advocate for our purpose, especially from a very first principles technical side said, “Well, what if it was just talking?”

Forest:
Given that, the evolution of the virtual market, that was a weird thing to say. Like, “Well, what if the product was just people talking?” And everyone says, “Well, what would you do? Why would you do that?” But that’s still, just like, now, looking back, you say, “Well, that’s the telephone. The telephone is just talking. It’s people’s voices.”

Larry:
Right.

Forest:
Yeah. So it’s like, what if he was just talking, but you could see the person as if they’re in person?

Larry:
That’s so interesting. But what it really is, and this goes, I’m thinking… I think, if I recall correctly from our conversation last fall, what it’s really about is just human communication. And the phone is one manifestation of that. And there’s going to be new manifestations that I can’t begin to picture, but you guys are beginning to glimpse there, I assume, right?

Forest:
Yeah.

Larry:
Yeah.

Forest:
And what’s interesting is, all of these things are all the same thing. They are technically advanced, using brand new technologies, they’re still very early on. But ultimately, everyone knows what it feels like to be in person with someone else. And while, unless you’ve studied this topic really deeply, most people can’t describe why it feels in person. They just know it feels in person.

Larry:
Right. Because that’s right. Because you know what? When you see it and feel it and experience it, but you can’t articulate it, for another 10 years after that, or something-

Forest:
Exactly.

Larry:
Probably. Yup, yeah. Hey, one thing that, and that sort of ties in. I do, one of the presentations I do about content strategy, I show this slide that has all the communication that we do on, sort of the outer, this part of the sphere. And then inside of that it, it culminates back down to the purpose and intent.

Larry:
But in between that purpose and intent, and the external communication, is this whole field of content strategy, this notion of having a strategy to manage the words, the images, the recordings, that make up those kinds of communication that you’re doing.

Larry:
Have you had any insights into, either about specific communication channels as they manifest in AR and VR, and/or, just about the content? How do you manage content in a virtual environment?

Forest:
So this is still a big challenge, and something we’re working through. I’ll try to make an analogy here, but saying, what we’ve realized is that, if you’re talking about the… Content is a lot of ways, the language, how are you speaking about your purpose? How are you sharing with others, how, what and why you’re doing the thing you’re doing?

Forest:
But when, and something is natively in three dimensions, as opposed to two dimensions, so most electronic media screens, phones, computers, et cetera, the TVs are all two-dimensional. So when we think about content, you wouldn’t think about… One, I don’t know, you wouldn’t talk about one-dimensional content, to represent TV and video.

Forest:
I don’t know, it’s hard to describe, but you, there’s this dimensionality to it, which is, it’s one thing to say, you’re going to advertise a movie, right? You’re going to show some 2-D content. If all you do is have print media, if you just have words to describe the film, and that’s all you ever do. Instead of a movie trailer, you just have a printed out, or some sort of blog posts with no images, that says, “Here’s what the movie is going on. You should definitely check this out.”

Forest:
You’re missing something. And so imagine, whatever experience you’re trying to communicate, you have to just think, one level below, that in terms of fidelity, or one level below that, in terms of things. And that’s where we’re stuck right now.

Forest:
It’s difficult, because in spatial, and in AR and VR, it’s best to, the best content is native. Its best content is 3-D content. And so, there still aren’t a lot of really obvious communication channels, to get that out there, and to get that into people’s hands.

Larry:
Got it. Hey, I wonder if we’re getting a glimpse of this, with the voice interfaces that people are routinely using now, like Alexa, Cortana and that kind of stuff? Is that, is there any insight from that world that informs how content manifests in your spaces?

Forest:
In a way that you might not expect. So, the only way that that really resonates and manifests itself, is the physical device, not the voice, not the fact that it talks or responds to you, but that there’s a physical device in your room. And all it is, is basically a camera array, or a speaker array, and connection to the Internet and power, basically.

Forest:
And that is just as conduit to a piece of software. And it exists somewhere in your room. So you know when you’re close to it, or you know, and you’re farther away from it. You know which rooms it’s in. You also know which rooms it’s not in. You might actively not put one of those smart devices in a room, because you say, you know what? “I don’t want them listening to this room.” So you might actually make these decisions.

Forest:
What that is, that is the security and permissions matrix for what spatial computing is. Where do I want my spatial software to be in my house, or connected to me?

Forest:
So, imagine an Alexa or a Google home, that isn’t a physical machine. It isn’t a physical device, but it is a virtual device that you can put in a room, does everything exactly the same, except it’s not physically there. But otherwise it, if you’re not in that room, it doesn’t hear you? It’s those kinds of things that there are parallels to.

Larry:
Got it. Okay. That’s, yeah, it’s blowing my mind a little bit, to be honest. But, because of that, but what you said makes perfect sense. It’s like, in the actual world, these things can happen anywhere. But with that specific setup, that the physical device has to be there. And it would be an entirely different situation, though, if you replaced it with a virtual device.

Larry:
So that’s, so I can see where that’s a tiny glimpse into what you’re doing. What about, to the extent that you’ve communicated in these virtual environments, are there, is it, how close are you to mimicking actual face-to-face human interaction? And how, what are the challenges in communicating there?

Forest:
So, there’s a lot to unpack there. I mean, the quickest answer is, even in our earliest published alpha, which is a VR client, which just runs on a specific set of VR headsets, we are able to convey a sense of being in person that has never before been done.

Forest:
The examples I can point to, that really resonate, is things like, in video chat, you’ve never had the guttural fight or flight reaction when someone’s leaned in too far their webcam. But, through Pluto, and through these spatial communication tools, if someone gets too close to you, your animal brain kicks in, and actually triggers that the fight or flight mechanisms, the same mechanism that if someone gets up in your face in real life, if someone gets in your face in virtual life, it triggers the same emotional reaction. And that that is just one little proof point that we are touching on something new and different.

Larry:
Right. And just that concept, because I was first exposed to that idea of proxemics in a psychology class years ago, and the context and intent, I think, at that time was to talk about cultural differences. In some cultures, it’s more, it’s fine to be right up in somebody’s face. But if you’re in Northern Europe, you want to be three feet away, or whatever it is. So I’m curious, so are you learning things about culture, as well as interpersonal communication?

Forest:
Oh yeah. What you just described, that when you talk about, this is somewhat off topic, but when you talk about localization for software?

Larry:
Yup.

Forest:
Right now, it’s just like, “Oh, well, there’s language, but there’s more, there’s certain norms, especially in UI UX, that are different between different cultures in different countries. In this new realm of spatial computing, spatial communications, you’re going to have localization settings that are things like, by default, how close are people standing next to each other? Like, proxy, is it proxemics? Prox-

Larry:
Proxemics is what that is. So that’s how I was taught it.

Forest:
Okay.

Larry:
I think that’s correct, yeah. Yeah.

Forest:
Okay. I never heard it, so I looked into it as well. I just didn’t know how to pronounce it, because I was just reading it. So yeah, I’ve looked into that, as well. And that’s actually informed, that research has informed a lot of our understanding of this, because it’s the same thing. It is, in 3-D space, how do people stand or interact with each other, relative to each other?

Larry:
Interesting. Fascinating. Well, again, we could go down, there are so many rabbit holes here.

Forest:
It’s true. There’s more of them.

Larry:
But it’s great stuff, but thanks. But we’re coming, and these conversations always go so quickly too, but I want to make sure… We’re coming up close to time. I always try to keep this under a half hour.

Larry:
But I want to give you, just, is there anything that’s on your mind that’s come up during the conversation, or that is just on your mind about VR, AR or content in general, that you want to make sure we get to, before we wrap up?

Forest:
We touched on that a little bit, but I think it’s when you’re looking at content, especially, for a new medium like this, realizing that it’s going to be the native content, the content that actually exists on the same level, that’s really going to make a real shift. Right? I talked about that example of writing about a new film versus watching a trailer.

Forest:
A trailer is the same medium. It’s a condensed medium, but it’s the same medium as the film, and that’s something that’s actually still lacking, but coming up now in AR and VR, which is this idea of, to start advertising or creating content for spatial, it needs to be spatial. Because every time anyone makes a 2-D video, the only response you can ever have is, “Well that doesn’t really capture the real thing.”

Larry:
Yeah. Well now, that? So all of a sudden, I’m thinking about, the first movies were like stage plays that were just filmed. And then they figured out that they could move the camera around. And then they figured out they could add, do talkies, add soundtracks to it and stuff. I’m assuming that we’re looking at a similar transition, only like, magnitudes of order higher in complexity, and interesting-ness, I’m going to guess?

Forest:
Exactly. I mean, that that is, we’ve, I’ve seen that exact trend. I’m very fortunate to have studied the origins of the film industry in school. And so, through that, I actually see those many parallels to the transition of stage plays to film.

Forest:
We’re seeing that exact same thing, with people trying to just apply film to VR and AR. And it’s really not the same thing. Film is a specific medium, not, you can’t just apply it to this new, entirely new thing.

Larry:
Got it. Yeah. Well, this sounds super fascinating, Forest. I can’t wait to see where you guys go with this.

Forest:
Thank you so much.

Larry:
Right. Thanks so much.

Forest:
Okay, thanks, Larry.