AR is for Productivity, VR is for Fun: The Future of Work

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the Be Live To Build podcast. Today's episode is with Martin Tobias, the founder of Incisive Ventures. He has a long and storied career as an investor in different verticals. You'll hear a little bit more about them in the episode. The reason why I brought him on the show is because he has, most recently been investing in augmented and virtual reality companies, and.

Sean Weisbrot: My company is looking to get into augmented reality and virtual reality for our team collaboration platforms. So between my experience as an operator in this space and his experience as an investor in this space, I thought it would be a really interesting conversation for us to have talking about what augmented reality and virtual reality looks like today and where it's going.

Sean Weisbrot: Why don't you tell everyone a little bit about yourself, what you're doing now, and how you became interested in AR and VRr?

Martin Tobias: Being a long time technology guy, double majored in computer science and business, and I always was interested in computers to solve real world problems.

Martin Tobias: A lot of my friends in computer science, you know, when I was studying in the nineties, were into solving purely technical problems like keyboard drivers and, you know, deep in the guts of things. And I'm like, you know, I wanna solve real business problems. And so that's how I ended up working for Microsoft and starting that way in the computer industry.

Martin Tobias: And for the last 20, 25 years I've been investing in early stage startups. I was an early investor in Google. I was an early investor in DocuSign. More recently, I was a seed investor in the open sea, which had a really good outcome. Recently in the last two or three years, I started getting really interested in AR and vr.

Martin Tobias: Not so much just as, as it's starting as a game platform with the thought of, hey, you know, what could this technology do better? Like an order of magnitude better than people are doing those kinds of things either on a PC or a mobile. And I started really looking for those real world solutions. 'cause many times technologies are sort of a technology looking for a solution.

Martin Tobias: And I was saying, what are the attributes of these technologies that would make it inherently better for a particular kind of thing? For example, I started doing that in crypto. That's why I invested in Open Sea, because I thought about what they were doing with selling NFTs and creating a marketplace for NFTs.

Martin Tobias: NFTs are something you can't do without crypto. So the idea that you can crypto tokenize some legacy business. Many of those have not been successful, but Open Sea has been very successful because it's sort of native and sort of using all of the levers and all the amazing things available in the crypto environment.

Martin Tobias: And I started looking at AR and VR in that way. Like what things can be done? I. An order of magnitude better with this technology then can be done any other way. And those are the parts of AR and VR that I'm interested in.

Sean Weisbrot: What are those attributes?

Martin Tobias: One of the attributes is more full sensory engagement. We can talk about some of my investments here, but if you think about things like media and entertainment right now, it's a very flat environment.

Martin Tobias: You know, you're watching a fixed screen and you're hearing something. In AR and VR, you can get a much more surround experience, a more 3D experience.

Martin Tobias: You can get a more full century experience than you can just by listening to an audio, like a podcast like this. you have more senses involved. That's really the primary thing. The second thing is because it's a world where you can create anything you want in it. There's an opportunity to create visual and, and sensory and sound experiences, that you couldn't get any other way.

Sean Weisbrot: You just gave me an idea to be the world's first VR podcast. I don't know how to make that possible.

Martin Tobias: A problem that happens a lot of times when a new shiny technology platform comes along is that people are like, oh, I can just take this thing I'm doing in this other way and do it on this new platform and it'll be better.

Martin Tobias: But if you're not really engaging, you know, the core fundamental things that are allowed there, it's not gonna be so great. I think a second thing that I didn't mention about VR is the ability to have other people. To interact with other people in a fairly realistic way. So if what you're doing, you know, has some community based aspect to it or some audience based aspect to it, you can get a much more, you know, rich engagement with a community in VR than you can in a 2D world.

Sean Weisbrot: Clubhouse.

Martin Tobias: Clubhouse, right? Clubhouse is generally a. Group environment, those kinds of audience participation type things, I think could use a lot of the aspects of VR as opposed to traditional podcasting, which is more of a static conversation without a lot of audience involvement.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, so I got involved with Clubhouse probably like 10 months ago, and I was listening to it every day. I was jumping into different rooms, trying to see what the buzz was about. I found it to be really interesting where people could have this kind of interactive dialogue about very different conversations.

Sean Weisbrot: I mean somewhere about dating, somewhere about business, somewhere about what was happening in Afghanistan. And you could hear from people in Afghanistan going, these are the things that are really happening to us. So it was really cool to see you could get this kind of. On the ground reporting in that instance.

Sean Weisbrot: So I agree that Clubhouse would be a really interesting VR play if you could bring that into it.

Martin Tobias: Well, yeah, but you would want to extend it to sort of the other things that would be native in something like vr, for example. I see Clubhouse as sort of like the general session. Part of conferences where you're going, you're sitting in an audience, you're listening to some fancy people up on the stage. Maybe at some point you get a chance to ask some questions, but for every conference you've been to, what's the best part of the conference? Is it those general sessions or is it drinking at the bar?

Sean Weisbrot: I don't drink alcohol, so I wouldn't know.

Martin Tobias: If it's not drinking at the, is it walking around in the halls and meeting random people or going outside in vr?

Martin Tobias: You could add the additional aspects that people do with those kinds of things. Maybe they meet, maybe they're sitting next to somebody in a general session and they're listening to something they like, and then they go outside and talk about it more. This ability to create little breakout sessions, his ability to go off and do other things with people that you have met at this thing in addition to the general.

Martin Tobias: Sort of speaking engagements, you can do that in VR and I think that, you know, being able to replicate more of a real life experience of having many different things you can do with people that you're meeting at an event as opposed to just listening to people present on stage. That's the exciting part for me about VR izing some of these kinds of events.

Sean Weisbrot: Well, that was something that I did when I was doing events in China where it was kind of like Ted, but our goal is to educate rather than to inspire in between our speakers. We gave them. Audience about five to 10 minutes to just turn to their neighbor and we would prompt them with a question. So, you know, so, oh, they, the speaker said this thing, what do you think about that?

Sean Weisbrot: You know, talk about it with your neighbor. So it gave us time to switch between speakers. So putting that into VR I think would be really, really cool.

Martin Tobias: It would, because then you're looking at somebody that has a, it might be a realistic version of themselves, or it might not be, but you know, you can have those kinds of personal interactions in addition to these general broadcast interactions. That's one of the key features of VR that I think could make it really interesting for these kinds of events.

Sean Weisbrot: Two weeks after Mark Zuckerberg said the word metaverse. I bought an Oculus two and I bought it because I knew that now is the time. It's still gonna take years, but now is the time I got involved learning about the blockchain.

Sean Weisbrot: And I don't. And I mean like the actual structure of the chain and how it functions, not like what is a cryptocurrency. I got really deep into technology. In 2015. For me it was like, this is it right now. I know nobody understands it. This is why now is the time to learn. And I don't know why, but when Mark Zuckerberg said, metaverse, I said, okay, this is it.

Sean Weisbrot: This is the time right now. I need to buy one. I need to spend time in it. I need to learn everything about it because this is what the future of work is going to be, whether we like it or not. The future of team collaboration, all of that. Is inside of AR and VR and if my company isn't prepared for that and building for that, starting now, even though it's gonna take three to five, maybe seven years for teams to be using these tools ubiquitously, we need to think about it right now.

Sean Weisbrot: And I dunno, what do you think about that?

Martin Tobias: I would agree with you that when you see a, you know, member of the tech royalty, you know, making a strategic commitment. at that level, it's probably the right time to decide how your business is gonna play there. I still think it's unclear, you know, how Facebook is gonna change or upgrade, you know, their experience.

Martin Tobias: If you remember, they tried to make Facebook an enterprise tool. They had my friend, a friend of mine was running their enterprise division and it basically failed. LinkedIn was the enterprise network graph, and Facebook was your social network graph. But I know that Facebook knows that. And is hopefully gonna do a better job in the metaverse.

Martin Tobias: I think it is the right time to start thinking about how you do it. They will invest billions and billions of dollars. Oculus three is coming out. There's still quite a bit that has to be done, which is why I've invested in two or three VR type companies. 'cause I think it's the right time as far as the right time.

Martin Tobias: If you had invested, you know, a lot. Of trying to create content for VR machines. three years ago you would've been for sure too early. I don't know what the Oculus headset sales were last year, but I think there were something like three times more than they've ever been. And so you start looking at the number of installed devices and you realize that Apple's AR device is likely to come out this year.

Martin Tobias: You know, once Apple gets in, frankly. I would really push the gas down when Apple gets in because if, you know, look at what happened in phones. You know, everybody was doing phones and then Apple did the smartphone and then phones just went crazy. When Apple gets in then you know these devices are gonna be cheap enough and ubiquitous enough to be able to develop a business on.

Sean Weisbrot: So I've been devouring knowledge about all of these different companies and what they're doing for the last. Two months. Now, I'm not an expert, but I can answer some of the things you're talking about. So I don't know about the multiplier or the difference in installs, but I do know that because of the supply chain shortages that caused the PS five to be impossible for everyone to find the Oculus.

Sean Weisbrot: Sold two to 3 million units during Black Friday and Christmas time. So it's difficult to know whether they were simply purchased because people were really excited because of Mark Zuckerberg talking about the Metaverse or. It was the only thing available that they could buy. That's why I'm not clear on all of that.

Sean Weisbrot: But it is exciting because there's a lot of games that have come out. Like I love the mini golf game, the table tennis game, the boxing game. I won't name them here, but when you have more users coming onto these platforms and buying these products, it gives the companies more money to improve the products.

Sean Weisbrot: And I think those products are already quite good. Now in terms of Apple, I looked at their acquisition list for the last five or six years. I was. I was confident that they were coming out with a product this year, but they kind of leaked that they're probably gonna be forced to wait until 2023. And from the way that they talk about it, it's going to be an AR device, not a VR device.

Sean Weisbrot: Hmm. And I find that interesting because right now. AR can be done on your mobile phone and if you can like a smartwatch pair your iPhone to your eyeglasses, whatever they're gonna be, then you can kind of put the phone in the pocket and eventually over time make the AR glasses the dominant form factor and kind of make smartphones basically unnecessary.

Sean Weisbrot: But I disagree about the price point. 'cause if you look at the way Apple charges for everything, I have a feeling that these glasses are gonna be over a thousand dollars. In the first generation because they're, they probably spent 10 to $20 billion developing it, not to mention the five or six companies that they've already acquired to make it possible, which were all undisclosed amounts.

Martin Tobias: You know, Apple will always be a premium product, but it will always also be accessible. Product, you know, I, you know, maybe they have a cheap version and a, and a more expensive version. it may start out at a thousand dollars. I, I don't know. But I mean, Apple's definitely a mass market product company, right?

Martin Tobias: I mean, they're not gonna make something that is, you know, like Google Glass that only five people could afford. Apple will not come out with something like that. They have to come out with something that they can sell millions of units.

Sean Weisbrot: And I think it's an interesting comparison with the HoloLens too, because Microsoft has been strategically selling to enterprise users for two and a half to $3,000 per unit for the last few years.

Sean Weisbrot: And so I feel like Apple, as you said, their focus is on the consumer, not on enterprise. However, with their price point, they may make it something that companies want to purchase over a HoloLens, and so Apple's entrance into the market might destroy the HoloLens market.

Martin Tobias: I think that's a real risk to Microsoft. but that's what Apple, you know, does, apple consumerize is something that, I mean, what was the smartphone? Blackberry was out there selling to the enterprise, and then Apple comes in and had a consumer version of it and people brought it into their companies and said, you have to make this work with my work email because I like this device better than the Blackberry Apple's done this many times, and I expect them to do the same thing.

Sean Weisbrot: I am excited about what Apple's doing. I personally don't own anything Apple has ever made just because I don't like their walled garden approach. However, I acknowledge that there's a high chance that the people who will be using my product will probably be using an Apple product to use my product, right?

Sean Weisbrot: So I'm excited about their development. And I wish they pushed it out this year so I could buy one and test it out and, and give it to the team to throw around. What, if any, are use cases are you seeing in the real world right now?

Martin Tobias: I haven't seen any that I think are really compelling. I. Frankly, you know, I occasionally use the Google one inside of maps just for entertainment's sake.

Martin Tobias: I, frankly, haven't found anything in AR that I can't live without.

Sean Weisbrot: So then what is. A use case that companies could develop for AR that would make you excited as a consumer.

Martin Tobias: So I invested in a company that's doing this on the desktop today. I can't mention their name 'cause they're in stealth mode, but one of the primary enterprise use cases, certainly, and I think it's useful for interpersonal as well, is meeting context.

Martin Tobias: Having a little more information in a meeting and ability to track. Follow-ups and to-dos and stuff like that. So I invested in a company that's doing this and, and they're one of these companies that will send their AI bot into your Zoom call, create a transcript, and pull out to-dos from your voice commands in there, and send them over to your to-do list.

Martin Tobias: Also provide in the meeting window, LinkedIn, links, links to other documents that you have done about this topic. Other notes from other meetings you've had with this person. Provide a little context. I don't know about you, but in today's zoom. Crammed meeting schedule. Many times I'm sitting there going, you know, I, I have something pop up on my calendar.

Martin Tobias: I'm like, who is this person? What are they all about? How did this get scheduled? You know, was there something I was supposed to read before this sort of, all of that context to meetings, that can be delivered in air very easily. You meet somebody and it says, oh, this is so and so, and then it pops up the last three tweets or emails or something like this.

Martin Tobias: I think providing context for real world scenarios, especially meetings. is a really great, enterprise use case for art.

Sean Weisbrot: I agree that it would be really interesting if, like, I were wearing glasses and I walked up to someone and they're like, oh, hey Sean, how's it going? And I'm like, oh crap. Who the hell are they?

Sean Weisbrot: And then the glasses are like, and they're like, okay, this is, you know, we, based on this person's face, we like to know that they are this person on LinkedIn or this person on Facebook. So that would be cool. But what you're talking about, if it's specifically like this where we're both using flat screens.

Sean Weisbrot: There's no reason for ar. It would just be something that happens on the side.

Martin Tobias: My other sort of perfect use case scenario for AR, which I'm sure would get banned, when I had Google Glass, I actually had Google Glass. I'm that old. I'm a big poker player. One of the things that you have to do in poker is to calculate odds of certain things happening, and that's difficult to do in your own brain.

Martin Tobias: That's something a smart form or a computer could do very quickly. If you had an augmented poker coach in your AR head, it would be amazing. They would outlaw them from casinos immediately, just like they would outlaw something that could do card counting in backgammon, in air, but it would be really cool.

Martin Tobias: And I'm sure people are gonna do it.

Sean Weisbrot: Definitely cool and definitely banned for sure.

Martin Tobias: Yeah. I actually wrote an algorithm to do that on Google Glass. It was not very good, but it could identify cards and could suggest strategies.

Sean Weisbrot: Don't feel so old. I know what Google Glass is. It came out like 10 years ago.

Martin Tobias: Yeah. Not that long ago.

Sean Weisbrot: I, one of my friends had it and I, I didn't put it on my face, but like I saw him wear it and he thought it was cool. So Yeah, I know a lot of people had that problem with them, uh. Camera and they're like, I don't know if you're recording me. I don't like that feeling.

Sean Weisbrot: So I think there's somebody working on it and they're like, we've got a thing that shows the camera's on like so that you can see it.

Sean Weisbrot: And it's like, okay. So you've just solved the only problem with Google assets.

Martin Tobias: That's true.

Sean Weisbrot: So then what VR use cases do you see that are out right now that excite you?

Martin Tobias: I see a little more in vr. I've made two investments. One of them is in a company called Trip, which is basically doing a meditation app in vr.

Martin Tobias: And one of the reasons I made the investment, I mean, they've got a couple hundred thousand users, I think they're the number one meditation app on Oculus. one of the reasons I invested, first of all, Naya, who's the CEO, is amazing. But they had done a test, an ab test of 20 minutes. On Headspace versus 20 minutes on Trip, and they showed roughly a 35, 40% increase in HRV, which is a measurement of how calm you are using trip versus Headspace.

Martin Tobias: And when they dug into the physics and everything behind it, the bottom line is. When you're listening to Headspace, you're basically listening to audio, only a guided guy in your ear. When you're in vr, you've got video and audio cues. You've got some motion going on on the screen, and by engaging more senses in your body, you're able to calm yourself down quicker and more effectively than using audio only as a prompt.

Martin Tobias: And they had a study that actually proved that. So then I said to myself, oh, here is something people like to do. Meditation, which is quantifiably better done in vr. So that's one. The second vr investment that I've made is a company called Morpheus xr, which is an enterprise company doing its own virtual world and a bunch of meeting related stuff and, and activities for the enterprise in vr.

Martin Tobias: They currently have 30 or 40 companies using it, for teams, and they're using it for remote workers, for doing standups, for doing socials. One of the things they found when they started hosting these kinds of events in Microsoft's Altspace environment or whatever, the current virtual worlds that have been built in VR have been fundamentally designed for games and for lots of social interactions.

Martin Tobias: So they allow anyone who happens to be in the environment to walk into your event. They don't have things like ticketing. They don't have things like. Authorization. They don't have security around devices or presentations. So Morpheus was trying to work inside of Altspace and realized they had to create their own world because it didn't have things like document security.

Martin Tobias: If you're standing up in a meeting, presenting a PowerPoint presentation to everybody on their headset, you don't want someone else who's not in your company to be able to walk into that room or to be. To download that PowerPoint presentation or something like that. So they had to add a whole bunch of enterprise security features.

Martin Tobias: And then they also, you know, the enterprise wanted some reporting, for example, which wasn't involved in Altspace. So let's say that what you were doing was training, some diversity and inclusion training in vr. Well, how can the enterprise get a report that says how many people went. Did they participate in the entire thing?

Martin Tobias: Did they complete the training? You know, they need some reporting on what their employees did in the environment, and that kind of user level tracking was not part of Microsoft's Altspace either. So those are the kind of enterprise features that Morpheus has built in their world and I think are gonna be very important for real enterprises to adopt vr.

Sean Weisbrot: I tried to travel from the last time we spoke until now. I tried it a few days ago. Okay. I felt like it would be better if somebody was on psychedelics than meditation. Sure. Because, because of the visualizations that they provide. Right. So I meditate with my eyes closed. So for me, having my eyes open is different. It's strange.

Martin Tobias: But what they've done with the visualizations are quite good. The idea of a trip. Their first few things they have now are meditation experiences, but you could imagine them providing different kinds of experience. 'cause the idea of trip, you, you actually hit it with the psychedelics.

Martin Tobias: The main investor, you know, is a friend of mine who I met at Burning Man. And the idea for Trip came at Burning Man. They're like, this is crazy. Multisensory experience and the drugs make it amazing. But what if you could get that kind of experience without the drugs? Could we do it? And that was sort of the foundational idea behind the trip.

Martin Tobias: You know, when you say what kind of experience they started with sort of meditative, sort of calming type experiences, because that's. In the pandemic, what everyone wanted was some sort of escape, but psychedelics, to your point, do lots of other things. They deal with PTSD and getting you out of fight or flight and other types of benefits.

Martin Tobias: So, on trips, the road map is to provide different kinds of experiences that provide different kinds of effects. You know, I think their current experiences are pretty good, but they're gonna come out with a menu of different experiences.

Sean Weisbrot: Okay. And so about the other company, morphia xr, I have been using Altspacevr. I find it to be interesting as a consumer and because my company is looking very heavily at developing into AR and VR in the future, I am trying to find opportunities for my team to use AR and VR products out there. and one of the reasons why I like AltspaceVR right now is because they've got a desktop application.

Sean Weisbrot: So of the 13 people on my team. Only myself and my CTO have a VR headset, the others don't. So I can put together something where all of us can get together inside of Altspacevr, where I'm using the VR alongside my CTO and everyone else is on their laptops. Yeah. But I definitely had to spend a little bit of time trying to figure out how to make it possible.

Sean Weisbrot: And what I learned was that it was annoying, but it could be done where all of my team members had to create an account, tell me their username. I would, friend them, then I could have my own world make it private and whitelist these users. Right. So it can be done, but for me, the goal is specifically for a happy hour.

Sean Weisbrot: So if we wanted to do something more strenuous, I think Morpheus would be an interesting opportunity.

Martin Tobias: Well, Morpheus' platform will work on the desktop too, so that'll be fine. But they've just streamlined a lot of those things that, that, that you have to do in sort of the hacky way in Altspace now.

Martin Tobias: Registration, authorization, you know, signups, stuff like that. Access, security, accounting, reporting, that kind of thing.

Sean Weisbrot: Let's talk about the use cases of AR and VR for employees of companies, because this podcast is about entrepreneurship. So while it's important to think about consumer level use cases. Employee level use cases I think are far more interesting for the future, especially in the rest of this decade.

Sean Weisbrot: And as we get closer to 2030, I think it'll become more important. Obviously what Morpheus is doing is providing an experience for employees, but what other things have you maybe heard of or are thinking about or would like to see? Or have seen AR and VR related to tools that employees can use.

Martin Tobias: The idea behind Morpheus is really to provide a platform that allows people with remote teams to, you know, provide a culture, experience. First of all, I. I think this trend of having more, more of a remote workplace and having a higher percentage of your employees be remote, even if it's not all of them, that's permanent and it's gonna stay.

Martin Tobias: So then companies of every size have a challenge of how do they get cultural engagement? And the culture comes not from the. Standup meetings where one guy's giving a PowerPoint presentation. It comes from all of the other causal interactions and social and fun things that people do together. And in VR you can do some of those things.

Martin Tobias: And so you know, you can go play basketball, you can go snowboarding, you can go, you know, do these. fun things. So I think that VR has lots of opportunities to provide remote employees, an ability to have a little bit of a more realistic social connection, which they can't do in Zoom. I mean, it's in incre, these things that I've done where people try to do socials on Zoom and everybody's like.

Martin Tobias: Drinking shots or something like that. It's really lame, super lame. And the experience of being social with other people in VR is a huge upgrade. So I really think the opportunity for VR is to give people something, an environment where they can do some more cultural type things, you know, that have to do with it, in developing their interpersonal relationships with other employees as opposed to just productivity.

Martin Tobias: And I think that's it. The next thing that's gonna happen with these enterprise VR apps is, you know, the ones that get this, how do we provide some interpersonal culture experience as opposed to productivity? Those are gonna be the ones that are gonna be more interesting in my mind.

Sean Weisbrot: If you had to choose between AR and VR for productivity, which one do you think is more likely to succeed?

Martin Tobias: I think AR is gonna be all about productivity. VR is gonna be more fun. And social,

Sean Weisbrot: Is it possible to develop something that can be in AR and VR for a single company where they can do both of those things as needed?

Martin Tobias: Possibly. That would be an interesting application.

Sean Weisbrot: Do you know of anyone that's trying that or do you think that's what employees or business leaders want?

Martin Tobias: No, I, I don't think anybody's trying that and, and I don't think business leaders or employers want AR or vr what they want. Is low employee churn. They want happy employees. They want productive employees. If these technologies can give them that, they'll adopt them If they can't. You know, they won't, you know, the reason my Microsoft is selling, you know, that their current AR headset into the enterprise so much is that I think the primary use case is for airline maintenance employees or something like that.

Martin Tobias: And it's because I. The guy's wearing the thing. He goes, there's a broken part on the airplane. And he's like, what the hell part is that? And what's this SKU number and how does that thing work? And he can pull up the manual and get the, you know, engineering diagrams right there on his thing. And he doesn't have to go back in the, you know, file drawer and find the user manual for this thing.

Martin Tobias: That saves a lot of time, makes their employees a lot more productive. Because the information is available exactly when they need it. That's why Microsoft's selling that is because they're increasing employee productivity.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, I saw the initial HoloLens demonstration and the trailers they've done after that, and it's really cool. What you can do with that. And I've seen use cases for surgeons as well, being able to like people, like students who wanna become doctors. You can learn about the anatomy, you can have the skin layer and the skeletal layer and the blood layer, you know, all the vessels and, and joints and s and all. It's so cool.

Martin Tobias: My wife and I are doing some remodeling in our house, torturing some drywall and we had to move an electrical thing and we had no idea how to move electrical so. What do we do? We go to YouTube, we look for videos on how to do that, and we pull out our phone. An AR headset could do that very easily as well, but I mean, giving that sort of contextualized help when you need it, like right at the spot, is a huge advantage of these kinds of technologies.

Martin Tobias: And I think that if you could do it in a. In an AR headset and get a 3D and multilayer, you know, better wiring diagram, you're, it's gonna be a much better experience than watching a YouTube video. But it's the same idea, right? I've got a problem, I wanna solve it. I need some information. I need it right now, and I wanna be watching it as I'm doing this thing.

Sean Weisbrot: I see the benefit there in the AR headset with using. A vocal command to an AI agent. So you go like, hello, Google, for example, hello Google. I'm trying to fix my Charmin faucet and I need help to understand. And it goes through YouTube. 'cause of course it's Google and it goes, here's a video I think you'd like.

Sean Weisbrot: And you go, yep, that's it. That's the one, and then it starts playing on one eye and you're still seeing out the other eye. Something like

Martin Tobias: that. I think that'll be the first use case for a lot of these things is just simply accessing things like YouTube videos. The next level would be to get the engineering diagrams or more custom content that was optimized.

Martin Tobias: I have motorcycles, you know, I was going out to change my oil a couple months ago and I had forgotten how to change my oil so it could, you know, YouTube the thing. But in ar. You could have the, if somebody built one in specific, you know, you could have a schematic diagram of the engine. You could say where the plug is.

Martin Tobias: I mean, it could be much more interactive and it could be looking through the camera at the engine and it could show, you could identify the different parts of the engine and say, oh, the oil plug is here. I mean, it could be a higher quality experience than simply watching a video of somebody else. Changing their oil on a similar motorcycle.

Sean Weisbrot: I feel like it should be the responsibility of Harley Davidson. Let's say you have a Harley to make that for each model that they put out rather than for someone else to make it. Because if that other person makes it, how are they gonna make money off of making it?

Martin Tobias: Exactly back to your, you know, when is the time for people like Harley to consider making apps like that? Probably they might start after Apple, but when Facebook and Apple, once you have x millions of these things out there, it will make sense for them to start making their content that way and then they could charge a premium for that.

Martin Tobias: It's funny you mentioned Harley, so I have three of them. I have a Harley manual. I have not opened that manual. I have always used U YouTube videos, but if Harley had an AR. The Harley manual that was connected to my camera and I'm looking at a broken part on my Harley and it figured out what it was, and then showed me the engineering diagrams and told me what to test and all that stuff.

Martin Tobias: I would pay big money for that.

Sean Weisbrot: I would. You touched on something very interesting. You said an app. I get the feeling. That in AR we may not have apps because if the main focus of AR is to pull up information, it might be something that you just call up from the internet and the internet just provides it as a search result.

Sean Weisbrot: So you say, oh, I need to know the schematics of this Harley Davidson 5, 2, 1 3, and it goes, sure, here you go. And they come up kind of like a search result.

Martin Tobias: Well, I am fairly certain that the first version of those things will be mostly information retrieval. I am looking for and have talked to a couple companies that are really building apps, and I think the ultimate use case for those things is apps.

Martin Tobias: And so the difference would be just pulling up the manual from Harley, but all Harley's gonna do in that case is show me a PDF of their paper manual. You know? And maybe I can with voice commands. Search it a little easier, but when I say an app, an app would take the camera and have the camera be looking at my motorcycle, be able to identify the make and model of my motorcycle, and be able to point me on the screen to things to check.

Martin Tobias: I could say things like it won't start, and then Harley's, an app could say, check the spark plug, and there's a little arrow. I'm looking at it and pointing out the spark plug here or checking the carburetor. Right, like it could be interactive with what you're seeing on the screen, guiding you through a troubleshooting process.

Martin Tobias: That's an app that can be developed for an AR headset that has not yet been developed, but which would be an order of magnitude more useful than simply a PDF of the owner's manual.

Sean Weisbrot: We're going to be using a company called Intercom for guided tours of our product, which is a web application right now.

Sean Weisbrot: So. It's interesting you say that because it's kind of like taking that which is an overlay of your product and making it useful for the user to access on demand. So by putting something like that into the AR headset, for example, we could make it so that we don't even need to. Use it on the web app.

Sean Weisbrot: You could just have the AR glasses and you could see a guided tour as you want. For example, this becomes an interactive FAQ. It's like, oh, you know, how much do I need to pay for this product? And it goes, oh, well, you know, it depends on what tier you want, but blah. You know, this is Patrick package one, package two, package three.

Sean Weisbrot: And you could go, oh, okay, well I wanna select this one. So you would like to pay through your AR glasses with an NSC chip or whatever it is.

Sean Weisbrot: So that I, I think there's. So many different potential things. Yeah, that's

Martin Tobias: What I'm talking about, about apps. I think people will start thinking about these technologies as platforms to develop apps, and that gets back to vr. The reason I like Trip and, and I know it's not for everyone, but you know, I think the experience for me is better than Headspace and quantifiably better because it's using some things that you don't have with Headspace. I know you'll see the real standout apps be that same way in ar it won't just be information retrieval.

Martin Tobias: It'll be things that natively use. Some of the features that are there, the fact that it has a processor, the fact that it has a camera, the fact that it can identify things through automated machine learning of what you're looking at and you know, open up databases related to that. And then do things. I think for things like troubleshooting, that's going to be an amazing app for art.

Martin Tobias: You know, this thing's broken. What should I do?

Sean Weisbrot: We are looking at, for our product, how we can use AR alongside an AI that we are going to build, which I know is going to take incredible amounts of money, but we wanna do it and make it so that the employees. Can have help to get their work done.

Martin Tobias: One app that I think is gonna crush it in, I 'm using it right now, it's sort of, I don't know what I call it, my kids use it as a 6-year-old, she's huge about Legos and there's this app called Brick.

Martin Tobias: It. And basically you can spread a pile of Legos out on the floor. Just a random pile of, you know, 500 Legos. You take your camera, you point it at the thing. It analyzes all the bricks. It identifies all the bricks that are there. It looks up in its database what you could build. And then it suggests like 30 things that you could build, and then it steps you through screen by screen.

Martin Tobias: Take these three point things, put 'em together like that, add these four things. Ta, ta, ta. You could imagine that as an AR app too, which is amazing. I'm looking at this pile of stuff, what can I build? And then it steps you through screen by screen how to build a whale or a car or whatever, IKEA piece of furniture.

Sean Weisbrot: The most difficult thing in the world is to take an IKEA manual and turn it into a real product.

Martin Tobias: Yeah, it is. I mean, they're doing it on paper, but that would be an amazing AR app.

Sean Weisbrot: Brit should try to sell themselves to ikea.

Martin Tobias: IKEA maybe. That's Really cool.

Sean Weisbrot: So is there anything that we haven't talked about yet that you'd like to point out?

Martin Tobias: I'm very excited about AR and vr and you know, as an early stage tech investor, I continue to look for opportunities there. I invest with a bunch of other investors that are looking for that. I haven't written anything specifically about AR or VR on my blog yet, but I do write industry pieces when I have a thought on my blog at Incisive vc.

Martin Tobias: So, you know, maybe if people are interested in general venture capital investing, they can read those things and. Maybe one day I'll write something about my overall thesis around AR and VR since I've made a couple investments. That's a good idea. That's a good idea for a blog post.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, and I mean, why do you think I'm looking into AR and VR content for my podcast? I think it's a fantastic opportunity. I think a lot of people are starting now to think about it, and I think it's the time to kind of nudge them like, Hey, you need to be thinking about this. I think that there's a lot of companies that will die in the next five or 10 years. If they're lucky, if they don't have an ar vr strategy.

Martin Tobias: Yeah. I mean, it'll start in gaming. It'll lag in enterprise. I agree. I'm super interested in what Microsoft's going to do. They just bought Activision, right? And they've got Xbox,

Sean Weisbrot: They bought Altspacevr. It's kind of interesting. I mean, Morpheus could probably position themselves to be acquired by Microsoft and then they'd be like, oh, well screw this AltspaceVR thing.

Martin Tobias: I dunno. Alt AltspaceVR is very good for games. it's not good for enterprise. Microsoft has got two sides to their business, you know, the games and the enterprise and, they have different products there.

Sean Weisbrot: We'll see. Last thing I want to talk about real fast. You were talking about the Medi Quest three. There's another one coming out that Meta is working on called Project Cambria, which is supposed to be a high level VR headset. Have you heard anything about that? Nope. It feels like they're gonna be building this. As a way to show people what VR could look like in the future, but right now it's gated by a higher price point.

Sean Weisbrot: So they're talking about better eye tracking that provides better avatar movement, as well as full color pass through for your lens. So instead of having a gray, a gray scale ar solution, it becomes something that you can actually see. So it sounds like a really exciting thing.

Martin Tobias: Well, I, I would expect meta to keep doing that, showing people, you know, the future, like car companies put these, you know, fancy cars that they're never gonna make out there.

Martin Tobias: we've got a long way to go in AR and VR headsets. I mean, you know, the Oculus right now is basically like the first version of the iPhone and you compare the first version of the iPhone to the iPhone 12. It's not even close, and we've got a lot of versions yet to go.

Sean Weisbrot: Well, the interesting thing about Cambria is that they're not positioning it as. Quest three. Oh, it's not a Quest product, it's its own line, but a high level version. And so I don't know what the price point's gonna be. I really wanna get it when it comes out because it's supposed to have a smaller form factor and it's supposed to just be, that totally makes sense. You know,

Martin Tobias: The Oculus will stay the $300 consumer type thing and they'll have a thousand or $1,200 one.

Martin Tobias: You know, just like Apple has a $300 phone or a $1,200 phone, I mean, it makes sense for Facebook to have different. Hardware and I would expect it.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah. So apparently they're supposed to be announcing it this year.

Martin Tobias: That would be cool. And if Apple comes out with something, if it's 2023, I would expect them to start at the top, not at the bottom, like Oculus did.

Sean Weisbrot: Exactly.

Martin Tobias: Start at the top and then add a bottom. You know, that's three versions behind.