Journey with us into the future of technology exploring the transition from classic games to interactive storytelling in virtual reality.
Guests:
Rafael Brown, CEO/Founder at Symbol Zero
On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/rafaelbrown/
Carey D'Souza, CEO and Co-Founder at IAMPASS [@iampassHQ]
On LinkedIn | https://www.linkedin.com/in/careydsouza/
On Twitter | https://twitter.com/carey_dsouza
Sean Martin, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining CyberSecurity Podcast [@RedefiningCyber]
On ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/sean-martin
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Host: Marco Ciappelli, Co-Founder at ITSPmagazine [@ITSPmagazine] and Host of Redefining Society Podcast and Audio Signals Podcast
On ITSPmagazine | https://www.itspmagazine.com/itspmagazine-podcast-radio-hosts/marco-ciappelli
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This Episode’s Sponsors
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Episode Introduction
Welcome to another fascinating episode of Once Upon A Time, a monthly series on the Redefining Society podcast with Marco Ciappelli. This episode offers a deep dive into the changes in the way we consume entertainment, driven by the advent of technology. It's a conversation that transports us from the era of 8-bit games, through the immersive experiences of modern Virtual Reality, to the potential futures of personalized entertainment. It's an exploration that asks and examines some intriguing questions. How is technology influencing the way we experience stories and interact with narratives? How does nostalgic appeal factor into our connection with games and entertainment? Can we choose not only the stories we consume but also how we experience them? The episode doesn't shy away from these questions, providing food for thought and leaving the listener with something to ponder until the next edition of Once Upon A Time. So sit back, relax, and get ready to take a fascinating journey through time, technology, and storytelling.
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Resources
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To see and hear more Redefining Society stories on ITSPmagazine, visit:
https://www.itspmagazine.com/redefining-society-podcast
Watch the webcast version on-demand on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLnYu0psdcllTUoWMGGQHlGVZA575VtGr9
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Please note that this transcript was created using AI technology and may contain inaccuracies or deviations from the original audio file. The transcript is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a substitute for the original recording, as errors may exist. At this time, we provide it “as it is,” and we hope it can be helpful for our audience.
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Marco Ciappelli: [00:00:00] All right, enough chatting behind the scene. We have to get on stage. We're not, I think we've recorded two podcasts at this point. We're not Gans and Roses that we can make people wait. We never press the red button for an hour before rolling in. Thank you Axel for making me wait so many times. Okay, here we are.
Redefining Society podcast once upon a time tomorrow. We sometimes lose somebody on the way. Today is scary. We don't know what part of the world he's already in tomorrow. It's already in tomorrow, so maybe we'll catch up with him as we go.
Rafael Brown: His time traveling ahead of us.
Marco Ciappelli: I was just rewatching, uh, I'm doing like an Harry Potter marathon actually. And, um, there is a, at a certain point, uh, the, prisoner of Azkaban where they have the, the time, uh, traveling episode and it's pretty, it's pretty cool. Only way that, uh, Hermione can [00:01:00] take multiple lessons is just go jump back and forth in time so that she can take more lessons.
I would have done the opposite when I was a kid. I would have skipped. Exactly. I would have used the time travel tool to skip the lesson. Uh, completely not to take more lessons, like, get me, get me out of here. Anyway, uh, it's already a good start. We're talking about weird stuff, uh,, Rafael and Sean and myself and Carey, wherever you are, uh, we hope you're having a good time.
So what do we talk about? We don't know. We've been trying to decide because there is so much that we can talk about. Many fascinating things happening in the world of technology. But I think we are very excited when we meet the three, the four of us to talk about. We talk about music, we talk about videos, movies.
[00:02:00] Usually AI comes into place. Um, Carey and I talk about privacy. That was a little bit more, less related to entertainment, but on social media. And today we're curious. We want to take advantage of Rafael and his knowledge of All the video game industry and world and it's not necessarily anymore my cup of tea I think the last game I played was Myst a long time ago um, but uh, yeah, I I don't know sean I don't aren't you curious to know where we stand in with uh, Virtual reality metaverse touching things that are not there, you know,
Sean Martin: I was just thinking pong I was trying to remember did you actually get?
Haptic feedback in Pong. I'm trying to, did it, was there ever a version that had that?
Marco Ciappelli: No, but I do that when I play tennis, I get a real good feedback or paddle ping pong. I'll give you some real one. I don't think there was that back in the days. Could you have done that, [00:03:00] Rafael? Could you have that on Pong in the 70s, the 80s?
Rafael Brown: No, no, back in the day with Pong, we were happy just to have, uh, uh, two dials and, and, and little lines that move back and forth. That, that, that was, that was the beginning is, was, uh, you know, two lines that can move back and forth and, and, and a few pixels for, for, for a ball. And, and, and we were fascinated.
Sean Martin: Why, why do you think that is? I was just wondering, I mean, why, why would we not go outside to play? Now, maybe there might be weather reasons or whatever, but it might be dark, but what would two lines in a, in a box bouncing around do to us that, uh, Keeps us attracted to it.
Rafael Brown: Um, so I think part of it is, is that, I mean, we're tool users.
We, we like making constructions, you know, we're humans as primates, [00:04:00] as monkeys. We, we like to sit down and make things with our hands and then go like, look at that. Um, you know, I, I, I love going to the, um. There's, there's a, uh, the Musée Mécanique, um, in downtown San Francisco over by the Fisherman's Wharf that has old, you know, old, old, not just old video games and old arcade games, but like the original kind of notion of an arcade game where they were mechanical constructions.
And, and, and that's the thing is like, if you roll back to that, like even before we could do things that were electronic, we were doing mechanical constructions because while it was good to have bigger things that we could wander around and look at, you know, the notion of, of a ski ball or an air hockey table, um, or just, you know, throwing a dart, um, those things got kind of compartmentalized.
into [00:05:00] mechanical constructions because humans like to play. Um, that, that notion of play is, is core to, to games. And, and it's oftentimes, can you give people guidelines or kind of a signpost for. What the play is. And that's really what, what Pong is. It's going, okay, we're going to take this core notion that you understand from tennis or ping pong, and we're going to bring it over here.
And part of it is we're fascinated, fascinated then by that abstraction of going like, Oh, okay, now it looks like this and I have to do it in this particular way. And then there's a challenge of doing it.
Marco Ciappelli: Makes sense. Funny story, Sean and I. Every time we go to San Francisco, usually for RSA conference, we make a stop.
In that, uh, museum list and we have some serious games of pinball. And, [00:06:00] uh,
Sean Martin: yeah, there's some weird stuff in there too, I have to say. Oh, there's some weird stuff.
Rafael Brown: Well, and that's the thing is, you know, like some of it is, you know, you have like the games of weight where you've got to, you know, hit a hammer on a thing.
And some of it is just. Some of it is just the equivalent of like a, a kaleidoscope where you're, you're just looking at something. But there, there's the realization, you know, that those early kaleidoscope things, some of those were analogous to, you know, to to that notion of, of a penny arcade. You know, you, you, you drop a penny and you get to look at something and it might be something risque or shocking or, or banal, but it's just, it's a distraction.
Marco Ciappelli: I'm going to throw another thing here that came in my mind because now I am visually in my head inside the arcade and there is a fortune tellers like you see in the movie Big, right? [00:07:00] And you have the horse racing, you have a lot of things and then you get ahead of time and you have the game that I used to play, you know, the Atari game, the video games in the bar and the arcade.
The little cars that go around, they're still pixel, right? But you got the wheel. And I'm thinking the, the magic element of this, the, yeah, we like to play game, but I think the idea that if you want to still talk about Pong, that you're actually able to move with a little, a little mechanism and the something that is not physical.
It's in a video is in the TV and you don't understand exactly how it works, but it's fascinating. It's almost magic.
Rafael Brown: So yeah, it's a suspension of disbelief. Um, you know, like one of those, one of those racing games that they have [00:08:00] and it's, it's funny because it's, it's working in reverse is, is one where, you know, they've got a.
A little physical toy car that's right in front of you that doesn't actually move except to, you know, shift back and forth slightly to show its angle. And then they've got a scrolling, physical scrolling screen, like, you know, effectively before the notion of, um, of pixels and TVs, you know, you've got a, a scrolling, you know, like painted screen that comes in front of the car so that the car is supposed to move to that screen.
Um, it's all about that suspension of disbelief. It's, it's, you know, it's creating an illusion. And if anything, it ties in, in a way to bits of vaudeville and theater. And it's this notion of, We're going to put on entertainment. It's a presentation. It's in front of you and we're going to use whatever tools we currently have to make that, you [00:09:00] know, the notion that our current mediums of TV and animation and film and music and games all come out of, how can we entertain each other?
Sean Martin: And it reminds me of another game that I. I don't know if I ever had it. I have one now, cause I went back to get it. The, uh, the Calico Noralco football game where, I mean, you kind of knew how it was going to go and you'd reach a certain point and I wasn't very good at it. So I, I'd always bomb out fairly early, but even still the, it's just little dots on the screen.
Granted, I'm hand holding it now, but it's a little dots. There's a little bit of sound and. Even if I sucked at it, I was mesmerized, right? And it, it's not like a computer screen or a television screen where something's projected, it's just little dots, but even still, it took me, to your point, took me away and into a different place [00:10:00] where that's what I was thinking about.
Whatever was on my mind before it was out, I'm just, I'm just worried or trying to figure out how do I move my thumbs fast enough in the right way in anticipation to, uh, To avoid these dots and get my pass off to the,
Marco Ciappelli: uh, to their scene. You know, Sean, it's using the imagination. I mean, now you go back to when we were kids, we will be fascinated by Formula One, we will draw with the chalk, uh, on the, on the floor, a circuit from a Formula One, and then with the caps of bottles, uh, we will just flip them around and those were the cars.
And then you just kick the cup around. I remember there were. Hours of fun just by doing that. We knew that they were not Formula One car. It wasn't Ferrari, it wasn't Renault, but who cares? We were having just a good time and we were projecting ourself in there. Now. Just to jump in our [00:11:00] modern day, it seems like in order for us to really do these things, and I don't know today's kids, but when I start thinking about virtual reality, is it because we can't use that imagination anymore, or is it because it's just bringing it to a completely new level of abstraction and make it more real?
Rafael Brown: I think that we have a wider range now. Um, and yeah, I mean, you know, I, I grew up, um, you know, I, I grew up playing with, you know, Star Wars action figures. I, I was part of that, that generation where I saw Star Wars in the theater and then was basically like I want those. And, you know, my brother and I played and, you know, set up, you know, elaborate, you know, stories and, and battles and things with our collected, you know, Star Wars and G.
I. Joe action figures. Um, and in that era, you know, [00:12:00] I was going to the, uh, the, the arcades, uh, back in Seattle. And, um, you know, I, I, I love going to the arcade and just kind of exploring what was there and seeing all of the potential, um, as we, like, as the game industry has grown and we've had this range of expression from PC to console, to mobile, to VR and bits of early AR at the same time, yeah, we have.
You know, this greater and greater fidelity and you can look at like a Call of Duty or similar and you have, you know, 100 million plus budgets and all this attempt, you know, Spider Man 2 just came out and, um, uh, I think two days ago and it's probably going to be the big one of the biggest games of the year.
And it looks like a movie, but at the same time, keep in mind that the biggest game in the world right now is Minecraft. Minecraft has a billion people [00:13:00] playing
Marco Ciappelli: it, which doesn't look like a movie.
Rafael Brown: Yeah. And that's the thing is, is that, that, or Roblox, like Roblox, you know, it's increasing the fidelity and what the engine can do, but there's a contingent within Roblox that always likes the classic, what they call blocksy style.
Um, and, and, and it's part of the same reason that people still love Minecraft and Minecraft is still, Um, one of the most popular games is because, because you can invest your imagination in it, and sometimes it's useful. Like, it's, it's good to kind of think back to characters that can be iconic. You know, you look at Mario, and you look at the beginning of Mario, and it's this, you know, character with a cap, you know, like you have the tiny array of pixels, and it's just a with a cap and a mustache and kind of portly and overalls.
There's an iconicism when you have [00:14:00] simplicity in presentation that makes that oftentimes carry much longer ahead, um, for a Mario or a Sonic or other characters of that era. And it's part of why you sometimes still have people making things. in that style, that kind of 8 bit style, because they understand that there's something elemental about that.
Sean Martin: Is it, is that science or is it, uh, nostalgia?
Do we know? Is it, is it just, that's the brand so we keep using it and people love it?
Rafael Brown: It's partially, it's partially nostalgia. Um, like, you know, Roblox has been around since 2005. There are now folks who literally grew up playing Roblox, so they like that Bloxy style. You know, Minecraft debuted in 2009, but I think that it's more than that.
That, I [00:15:00] think that With a bunch of our entertainment, we're, we're finding that there are different styles and kind of different fidelities where animation, for example, can be much more detailed, but you still have, you still have points where people specifically make a cruder animation style, you know, South Park could be you.
Could have evolved and got more detailed, but it works just the way it is. Um, it's kind of funnier to have the characters be crude than, than, than not.
Marco Ciappelli: You know, another example I give you is I, you know, Halloween just went by, I don't know when I'm going to publish this, but I'm not really good at publishing lately, but.
Uh, you know, Halloween was two days ago, and it's a classic for me to watch the Nightmare Before Christmas, Tim Burton. I have to. It's my thing. And when you look at it now, it's already old, in a way. So you, you, [00:16:00] it's the clay animation, or, you know, the movement that when you look at behind the scene, you literally have to move one.
Piece of the arm. Change the expression. I mean, it's a tedious thing to do, like animation before computers. It was tedious. Redesigning. Drawing. Every single action. Disney itself was obsessed with the fluidity of the image. It wasn't about jumping from one position to another. It was Everything in between.
And, but for me, when I look at that, I, I like the fact that it is kind of clumsy. I don't need that perfection. And as a, as another example, when, uh, I don't know if you remember the Polar Express, when Tom Hanks was playing the The train chief guy and they pick up all the kids to go to the polar and he was one of the first I think where they were really [00:17:00] giving that 3D effect to to the character and people freaked out about that they were like, wait a minute.
This is going to Rio. This is not I can't. I can't really qualify it as classified as animation, but it's not a movie, so it's kind of weird. And, and I'm wondering again, if there is a place and time for that or the other, we, maybe we need both. Maybe sometimes we do need to use our imagination a little bit more and we can play with something that we need to connect the dots.
Another time, maybe I haven't seen the spider movie, but Go to Kind of sounds good and cool that I can play like if it was a real movie, uh, no, no, I probably like both. That's my point.
Rafael Brown: Yeah. And I think it's like, I think the best way to think of it is that we have a broader palette now than we did before.
And we kind of, we kind of don't want to put the older paints away. [00:18:00] We want all of those. And so you do have, you know, so like just by contrast, um, Avatar 2. I consider it to be an animated movie. Um, you will have a hard time finding a single frame in Avatar 2 that is not 51 percent CGI or more. Um, you know, the reality is that there was a lot of actual filming, but they layered over it so much that it's basically an animated movie.
But at the same time, while you have this high fidelity, complex animated CGI, You know, one of my favorite animated shows right now is, um, Star Trek The Lower Decks. And Star Trek The Lower Decks is a comedy, and it's not the only animated. There's also Prodigy, which is a little bit more for kids. [00:19:00] Star Trek The Lower Decks, they could have made as a, as a full on Star Trek, um, uh, live action series.
I think that they intentionally aimed it as an animated series because they wanted to make a Star Trek comedy where they took the, you know, redshirt ensigns and did a show about, you know, kind of the, all the junior cadets. Screwing up and making jokes and, and, and cracking wise at each other, but it kind of works better to have that be animated both so that they can have the occasional, you know, crazy alien thing without blowing their budget, but also because they can have like you're used.
You're used to seeing wacky hijinks and crazy jokes from things like Looney Tunes. It works. It makes sense. And Star Trek The Lower Decks, even though it's totally different, it feels [00:20:00] similar in some ways to something like Rick and Morty. And you just go, okay, these are adult animation shows. Um, they're not really made for kids.
Kids can potentially watch them, but there's a lot of hidden in jokes. Star Trek The Lower Decks actually Now is very heavily lore based and makes tons of references to things all over Deep Space Nine and The Next Generation. So it's not just like a full on comedy. It's trying to be a serious show that's also a comedy and it works better for being An adult animated show than if it was like the comedy works better.
And it's in some cases easier to do than if they filmed it live action.
Sean Martin: And so I, as we were talking here, I'm, I'm thinking we're not all one person, right? Uh, so we're all, we're all unique and like different [00:21:00] things, dislike different things. But at any moment in time, we are. Different ourselves, right? We might be in a good mood, a bad mood, uh, upset, uh, in love, whatever, right?
Just pick, pick an emotion or pick a current state and a desired state, and that may decide or determine what we want to do next and how we, how we search for and absorb different types of entertainment. And so how Are we, I guess what I'm trying to figure out is, do we have the ability to create stuff that adapts to all of those different nuances, different audiences in a broad way or because we have technology?
Um, whereas maybe in the past, a certain type of comedy delivered in a certain way, you're going to, you're going to limit your audience to. To a subset of, of humanity, right? Just, they're [00:22:00] not going to resonate with it. It's not the, not the tone of the tone of the times. So it's not going to fit a particular audience.
So do we have a better chance now of being more dynamic to align with?
Rafael Brown: Yes. Um, and, and like at some points people will talk about like the rise of genre fiction. Um, I think that a lot of it is like, historically, if you look at film and TV, we've always had genre fiction. You know, you can go back to Westerns or, or gangster movies.
Um, but there's a range of. fantasy and science fiction and superheroes that we didn't have a good way to illustrate, um, in film and TV. We could in animation, um, but it was a lot harder to bring them into live action, [00:23:00] um, and, and frankly it was often harder to, to bring them and illustrate them well even in games.
Um, until we got the ability to render parts of them on, on screen, you know, whether it's pre rendered or real time rendered. Um, but it does feel like we have a wider range of expression. In some cases that people are more people who weren't as willing to. Let's say, um, digest science fiction as a, you know, when it was a book, um, that they needed to read or a magazine.
Like I used to read, you know, Isaac Asimov science fiction magazine, and they would have fantastic short stories, um, that reached a niche audience. But then it becomes black mirror. And a great many more people will watch Black Mirror than will read a science fiction magazine. Um, it becomes [00:24:00] more accessible when, when genre fiction that needs illustration to showcase parts of the imagination then goes into film and TV because we can new pictures.
Sean Martin: I love it. I was, I was picturing the Slee stack. I dunno if you remember that. Uh, , it's very, very realistic. , the Slee stack. Um, seems like maybe we lost Marco's camera, but, um,
Marco Ciappelli: no, I'm here. I don't know what happened. Uh, yeah. It's a much better view now. That's all I, I know. Let's just leave the little thing.
Do you know, this is funny. It seems like I've done it. I've done it on purpose.
Rafael Brown: Looks, he looks more spelt .
Marco Ciappelli: I, I think I've done it on purpose. Okay. No, it's not there, but this kind of helps me to make a point while I, I'll talk while I try to figure out this thing. So not everybody [00:25:00] is the same. It's, uh, it's Sean said, Oh, look, I'm back. So some people like to, or maybe they can use their visual imagination more than other. Like some people see things when people talk. When I listen to a story, that's why I listen to Audible a lot, or I read, I I don't just read, I see stuff, right?
So what I'm saying here is that some people may prefer consume something in a different way. And I think the point of the movie is that you're representing a reality already. When is there and I think we had this conversation in the past where if you say this is Sean's favorite story, it was a stormy, dark and stormy night.
There is a lot of way to represent that. And yeah, this was a conversation we had with Carrie and Rafael, but once you. Picture in your [00:26:00] mind that could be lighting, that could be other things, that could be, you know, where is the location? Are there mountains? Or is this in a city? I mean, you don't say that with that sentence, but the moment that a director put it in a scene or in a painting and you visualize it for others, you, you actually see it and everybody sees the same way.
Now, I personally don't like that much. I like to see shit in my head. So, but I think that the fact that the Black Mirror may have captured more people than iZmove Magazine, I can see this to be the point. And another one, Dungeons and Dragons. I just had a conversation with this guy, a fantastic storyteller.
He creates these events for the community, the neurodiverse community. So he created this, these events, so where everybody's at ease and maybe people that normally [00:27:00] wouldn't express themselves very well. He, he plays the master in the Dungeons and Dragons and, and, uh, and, and the kids start, opening themselves and understanding and participating and telling the story.
And that is just by moving the Dungeons Dragons pieces. And there is not a, you couldn't achieve that, what I'm saying, with, with a video game, probably. Um, so maybe for everything and everybody, uh, depending on the situation, we, it's good to have all this variety of storytelling technique that we can use.
Rafael Brown: Yeah. Well, so I wanted to jump on that specifically with Dungeons and Dragons because, um. You know, that that's near and dear to my heart. Um, I, I started, um, playing Dungeons and Dragons, uh, as a kid, um, back in, in Seattle where, um, my [00:28:00] parents sent me to summer camp, uh, one year and I think I was about seven, um, seven, eight, and, um, one of the.
Older kids at the summer camp, uh, organized, you know, it was like, basically here, we're going to play Dungeons and Dragons. I was like, what's that? Um, and it was done as a, around the camp, like literally around the campfire, where it was an interactive storytelling session, you know, the, the kid hadn't brought his, you know, his rule books and his dice, but, you know, what he was, he boiled it down to its most.
Elemental parts where he was the dungeon master, the game master. And he told us a story and we were, you know, literally around the fire, you know, around the campfire and he explained the basics of like, okay, you're going to be this character. You're going to be that [00:29:00] character. And so like we immediately got.
You know, kids understand role playing right away because, you know, and the notion of like, okay, you're going to role play an adult, a big person, you know, like you get that as a kid, you know, kids do dress up and you're like, okay, now I'm going to be an adult. Um, and so like the notion of like, okay, I'm, we're going into a movie together and you're telling us, and we get to talk about what we do, that notion of interactive storytelling.
Purely using our imagination where he didn't even have, you know, the dice or any figurines or anything other than his words, I got immediately and just after, and I connected that into another thing that I experienced early on, which was, um, that, um, My father was a music professor, and he, um, he would periodically have a, uh, Ghanaian master [00:30:00] drummer, uh, come up from Portland, and he would organize concerts, uh, through the Seattle Arts Commission, and, uh, so, uh, a family friend was a master drummer named Ogo Ade, um, and Oboe would go and perform.
Um, my dad would usually film it and then he would come back to the house and hang out, um, you know, before driving back to Portland maybe the next day. And he would always tell us stories. He would, you know, he would tell us stories of like Anansi the Spider and others, but he would tell us Ghanaian folk tales.
And, um, But it wasn't just, you know, it, he under, he understood at a core the notion of call and response. Um, when he was telling us stories, myself and my brother, he would ask us questions and he would incorporate that in. And it was very clear the correlation between folktales done in a traditional African style.[00:31:00]
and Dungeons Dragons boil down to its basic elements of, I say something, what do you want to do? Okay, this, let me incorporate that in, let me change the story a little bit, allow it to grow, and it builds in the imagination more, and every, and you The storyteller keeps the attention of the audience by that call and response, and by incorporating things, and by growing it together, it becomes a conversation.
Games have that at a core. It's just a question of, do they paint in 8 bit? Do they paint in, you know, um, a Early third, you know, 16 or 32 bit, do they paint in, you know, 4k? Um, there, there's a range of detail that they can have, but, and, and if anything, like we've gotten used to different stylizations and we've got comfortable that they are locked in.
We have literary genres, but we [00:32:00] also have expressions of particular style. You go like, this is stop motion. You know, this is eight bit, you know, four. You go like, Oh, I want to see something that looks like Wallace and Gromit. I want to see the physicality of that and I care about it. And I want to hear a story in that world of Wallace and Gromit or chicken run.
And it feels right because you see the physicality and you see the lighting on the models and you know that they're physically real. You can look at a style of one thing or another or an old arcade game in 2D and you can go, I am immersed in that world and I'm fully in it. I'm invested. I have that suspension of disbelief, whether it's stop motion.
You know, it can be enter the spider verse and it's crazy 3d with shaders, or it can be stop motion with simple clay models, but you go into that world. [00:33:00] But at its core, it's still it's storytelling. Someone sat down in front of you. In a bedroom at a campfire in a living room and said, let's weave a story together.
Um, that's something that I always carry with me is that anytime that we're making entertainment, we're weaving stories.
Sean Martin: So I want, I want to, so let's assume it's a phenomenal story. Um, but I want to experience that story in a different way. I feel like we're approaching a time where I can turn a dial. I want to see this story in eight bit with a mono speakers, or I want to dial it up to eight K with Dolby.
I don't know what the highest Dolby is now at this point, but all the way up at the other end from an audio perspective as well. And I feel that the technology is like right there. I mean, we see it in, we can take some [00:34:00] audio. Piece and translate in different languages. We can take a sample image and translate that into different styles of a picture.
Um, and it's nothing new, right? We've taken full, full color frame or photos and made them black and white or sepia to get a, get a different feeling for the same image, right? So, uh, are we at a point where we'll be able to. Choose the experience, not just the story.
Rafael Brown: Choose your own story. Choose your own adventure.
We, we, we have some of that. Um, and, and, and that's the thing is we have some of that right now, but it's not a thing, like it's. An intentional choice that has to be made by the developers. Um, so like a good example is, um, there's a classic game called Karateka. Um, it's an old, old school, um, uh, game. And I think they've actually done this with [00:35:00] Karateka and Prince of Persia, where they, you could basically.
Tap and toggle buttons back and forth to go between the original graphics and, and the updated graphics where, where they have the classic of those games from the eighties and then, you know, they, they did effectively like a criterion collection for Karateka so that you have like the original, you know, early eighties version, you have the, the modified, um, you know, 2020s version and you can, You can even just like This one, that one, this one, that one, back and forth, um, just, just to sort of see the same thing in motion and see that notion of like, what does a new modern paint over that's still in 2D look like compared to that original thing?
Um, in a slightly different vein, there's a classic, um, 90s, [00:36:00] um, pre rendered FMV game called 7th Guest. Um, as the seventh guest was kind of around the same time as like mist and phantasmagoria. Um, they just remade seventh guest, uh, as, as a VR, uh, game. And so, yeah, it's, it's very much someone has to sit down and build it.
And you know, that's not a case of. You know, going back and forth. That's, you know, there was an FMV game that I think came on six CDs. And then, you know, you have this remake that now is, you know, you put a headset on and you, you know, you walk around in it. Um, and you walk around at that same mansion.
Marco Ciappelli: Oh, let's reconnect the dots. We started with the Virtual reality, we never really got into that and we went of course all the way back. So let's let's connect that So nowadays you just brought an example of you put your virtual reality goggle you walk inside the [00:37:00] environment You can maybe toggle between one, um, one style and another.
Uh, what else can you do now with, uh, the actual gloves and what is your feeling? Your sensation is a also I'm curious, it's, it's becoming more accessible or are we looking at the 3, 000 Apple to be
Rafael Brown: Yeah, so we're still in a period of growth, like the way that I often try to describe it to people is that, um, 2D, um, you know, we've gotten to the point of where we've really mastered, uh, two dimensional graphics, we can show anything that we want to, uh, in 3D, we can actually show almost anything that we want to, um, You know, like the, the Enter the Spider Verse movie just as a movie is so mind [00:38:00] blowingly past something like Toy Story because it's a 3D movie, but you've got all of this visual effect and shader work.
And, you know, it looks like as he's moving around in different parts of kind of a multiverse that there are different styles, like they go into different worlds and they have different rendering styles. We could, we could. We could draw that as a comic, you know, 30 years ago, but we couldn't even think of building that.
Um, and, and so, um, in this kind of XR realm of like VR and AR, there, we're still kind of in the 8 bit era. That's probably the best way to think of it is, is that XR needs another 30 years. Um, you know, now in games we've gone from, you know, Pong to Mario to Super Mario 64 to, you know, crazy Call of Duty, um, and, and Fortnite.
[00:39:00] But in XR, um, we've still got these small productions and even where we're doing 3D. It's still, like, the best way to think of a lot of the VR stuff is that it's still kind of the equivalent of Toy Story. The things that we're going to make 30 years from now will probably be, you know, virtual cities, um, or, you know, things of complexity that we can just barely understand in the same way that, like, you look at Toy Story back in, I think it was 1996, and you go from Toy Story to, you know, Spider Man Enter the Spider Verse.
And it's, it's not just night and day, it's this spectrum of growth that takes a long time to get to. Um, we, right now we have these headsets that, you know, you can have a mobile processing and battery and, and, or you can run it on a PC. You know, you [00:40:00] look back at, at VR, you know, like, NASA stuff from the JPL, um, you know, back in the eighties and it's these very clunky things with big wires and it's basically just like, you know, it's, it's broadcasting a simplified version of a TV onto your head and it's not really doing any head tracking or, or, you know, any haptics or any of that.
We could just barely. Make a thing back then and and now we've got things where you can put something on your head and we can do hand tracking, which is kind of magical, um, or, you know, like the quest three, you can basically tap a button and you can go from looking at VR to looking at a pass through camera.
With some distortion correction and you can go like, okay, let me double check the world around me. We couldn't [00:41:00] even imagine that, you know, like we have papers that talk about that from 92 that talk about like VR, virtual reality and augmented reality and mixed reality, but we have this really hazy notion of what mixed reality was.
Um. What, what I will say lastly, just to wrap it up, is that haptics is a good area where the most advanced haptics are actually in things like the PlayStation five controller. Um, it's, it's, it's doing like really finely detailed rumble in things like the Spider-Man two. PlayStation 5 game, um, there's a lot of actual mechanical miniaturization work that we need to do in haptics.
Haptic gloves that are actually really good for giving you sensory feeling are probably like 50 years away because we need to create like little nano machines in there. Um, we, we focused on, on the visuals more than [00:42:00] anything. We have a bit more work to do in terms of 3D audio, but we're just starting to, to look at touch and hand tracking and we don't even know how to do things like smell and taste
So XR is very early.
Marco Ciappelli: It'd be a good idea after all. That's good. Good. Can you imagine Shonda the virtual pizza?
Sean Martin: I know in the real one. Um, just a, a quick, uh, thought and I don't remember where I went or where I. Pick this up. But I have this notion that at one point, all of this was going to be on systems, all of this, whatever it is, we're talking about stuff presented to us, audio, visually would be on some systems in locations that we were going to, um, Where you'd have a special wall that would give you these experiences.
Um, it seems like we've taken a turn to, [00:43:00] we have, we're bringing the devices to, to us and wearing it on our head. Um, but remember last time, I think we talked about the sphere a bit in Las Vegas. And so I was just recalling that in the context of this. And as I thought at one point. You're going to go to places to experience things.
Um, not necessarily inside an arena or an auditorium, but perhaps even just along, along the street. Um, so I don't know, do you see that still happening or?
Rafael Brown: Um, no, not honestly, not so much. Um, so yeah, like I, I can, I can literally roll back in my head to where I was back in the nineties had read. Snow crash, uh, somewhat recently and I was working at Looking Glass on, uh, on the Thief Games and we were doing early 3D and we knew about how much we could do with 3D and kind of where that would go and I would, you know, [00:44:00] working in, in, in Cambridge, go from, you know, on the weekends into Cybersmith and Cybersmith had You know, had a VR setup and you could go and you could, you know, put on a headset and you had a little kind of pod around you.
Um, and, and there were times. You know, playing with that and thinking about what the future of VR would be. And this is probably about, uh, maybe 98. Um, and you know, like playing with 3d glasses and there was a sense that VR was expensive. And that it would probably be a thing where you would go to a theater and that, you know, that like, I, I can literally remember having a dream about building VR games for, um, for theaters and the [00:45:00] notion that people would.
People would go to either like a seated or standed pod and you'd have like a hundred people. And my thought then was like, you know, it could get to the point where you could create a murder mystery and a hundred people could go into that and they'd all be milling around and it would be something like, you know, murder on the Orient Express, but everybody would.
You know, go into the theater to experience a VR movie that they would get to live through together and that they would need to go into pods to do that because the electronics would be too expensive for everyone to have them at home. But that was before the days of. You know, that was what, in the days of when laptops were, you know, like weighed about as much as, as like a textbook, you know, like a biology textbook and where nobody had phones in their pockets.
Now we have an expectation that [00:46:00] the computing experience can eventually be brought down to where whatever it is. We can wear it, you know, an Apple watch, a phone in your pocket, a thing on your head, but there's an understanding and an expectation that there should be a consumer version of that thing that's probably somewhere between 400 and 1, 000 that you can take home with you.
That didn't used to be the case, you know, I, back in the eighties, I went to an arcade and we had battle tech pods, um, in Seattle and, you know, like four massive pods and they were like 10 feet long and you went and you sat in one and they were networked together on a custom network because that was how you could play a multiplayer thing.
Now, everyone's like. Okay, I've got a few computers at home and a PS5 and an X Box and a this and a that. And, you know, I've got [00:47:00] a Steam Deck back there and a Switch downstairs. And you have all, we're used to having all of these electronic devices that can do different ranges of things. We couldn't imagine that back in the 90s.
You know, back then it was just like, Yeah, we have computers, but like there's all this other stuff that you're going to have to go to a location because it's going to be so expensive that you'd never imagine you could have it at home. And now we do.
Marco Ciappelli: And that's one of those changes in society that I always try to talk about.
Like, is it still real? If we get together with people in a virtual world, in the metaverse, and we interact with them with our own goggles, and we don't need to be physically together, is that really Not good. Is it not real? Because my, my, my point is that is real. If I'm doing it, [00:48:00] either I'm doing it virtual or there and my, I'm having these emotions and feelings from a philosophical perspective and psychological too for me is real.
A lot of people will disagree in person. We can talk about events and all of that. So I think this is a good conversation to it. To have, uh, longer than this, because it's, uh, but it was interesting to reflect the moment in my head as I wrapped this conversation. The fact that there should be room for all of this.
We always present things in a way that they felt comfortable with. In a way that is just the new is coming and the old is going. And I think the new is coming and it's just layering up on the old. And then as we do ourself, we just go back and feel nostalgic about a certain thing. And we go to play pinball games at the arcade.
And yes, we could be doing a metaverse immersion and [00:49:00] we're probably going to do both. Um, sometimes I may want to play with the some music on a digital digitally and other time I'd rather hurt my fingers on on the bass on the guitar. So the good news is that there is all of this and the news many times just presented to Oh, this is the new.
And the old is going to disappear, right? I don't think so. I hope not.
Rafael Brown: Yeah, and that's the thing is you make space for new experiences and we're still in many cases trying to understand how those fit together like, um, If I roll back to, let's say, 2008, um, you know, there's a point where, uh, Guitar Hero and Rock Band as video game experiences were, were big, you know, playing with plastic instruments.
Um, one of the things, And actually for a few years after that, one of the things I really love and, [00:50:00] and I'd love to see it come back is one thing that rock band did really well. Like it, it, it, it's not that you're playing music, it's karaoke, but it's, it's a form of group karaoke. Um, we would gather folks together and we would play rock band.
Um, and actually even into the last decade, um, where it becomes about this four, four player. Living Room Karaoke, where, you know, you can switch back and forth, but you can basically go, there's, you know, guitar, bass, drums, and actually up to, up to three mics as well. You know, like I, I loved playing. Rock band Beatles and singing Beatles songs.
But the notion that we could, that it could even track harmonies and that we could have three of us harmonizing [00:51:00] together while we're trying to do a particular song and everybody can, you know, can kind of do it to their skill, their own skill level. This is part of what video games are starting to get into where you can go.
It doesn't have to be just like run around and shoot things. There's new forms of play that we're constantly finding and being able to role play as the Beatles became one of them where, I mean, it's not like, you know, one person is George and one person is Ringo, but you go, we're going to role play doing a song together.
And that becomes a new means of play and expression that wouldn't have been possible in that same way, you know, 10 or 20 years prior. We keep finding new ways. And like, so I'll throw something out there. One area that I'd love to be able to go into, and I know that it's still fairly complex to get to, but [00:52:00] one thing that's on my bucket list is immersive theatre.
Immersive theater would be a fantastic thing to take into games. And I'm convinced it would work best in VR, but that we need time for the VR hardware market to grow. But if you think of immersive theater, San Francisco has the speakeasy, and New York and Chicago have others. The core notion of immersive theater, just to take that particular form of is to have a series of actors who are moving back and forth effectively like NPCs.
Um, you know, you have the audience that are the player characters that have the agency to go around and observe, and then you have the NPCs, which are the actors, um, and you have an expansive space for them to move around in, and the players don't [00:53:00] know the story or necessarily where they can go, and they need to explore and look around.
Their agency is largely their movement. They mostly can't go and they're not supposed to interact with the actors and change the story because that's a whole other level of thing. And, but, and, you know, the Star Wars galactic cruiser was trying to get into this, but it like that, that was pushing it into resort and, and hotel territory.
But immersive theater is really just. Let's have a complex non linear story for about two hours and let people explore it from any vantage point that they want to. That's a thing that can technically be done in games, but you need to have, you need to run it on a server and you need to have ideally Some amount of cloud support for running a [00:54:00] lot of AIs at the same time, and it can be run in 3D, but it would be better in VR.
And the tricky thing is that it's not really a game. It's entertainment, but that's an example to me of part of the future of entertainment. Is you have an interactive story that people can explore, whether it's something like immersive theater or, you know, thinking back to the notion of people going into pods in the theater and going into a murder mystery, but.
You know, which is also kind of existence. If you remember David Cronenberg's Existence, having something that has branching and immersive or nonlinear narrative and allowing people to go into that is something that we're just on the cusp of being able to do because It needs to be a multiplayer experience, and a lot of our past multiplayer, whether it's [00:55:00] like an MMO or an FPS, is like, we can just barely render this stuff and do some really simple activity together.
Shoot each other, or collect loot, or, you know, whack things Diablo style. We're now getting to the point of where we can go, we can have some actors, and we can mocap them, and we can have complex situations. And we can run 20 to 40 actors all at the same time that are all moving around and keep track of where they are.
There's a lot of potential for virtual worlds, never mind like get into a massive virtual city, but just to go, can we have a non linear narrative and have people explore it? We couldn't do that before a few years ago.
Sean Martin: I liken it to, uh, the silent disco. We have multiple DJs beating, let's say three DJs feeding three tracks.
So you have different pockets of [00:56:00] people in an area, each in their own space. Presumably with each other. Um, everybody on red is listening to the same, bouncing at the same beat. Um, but I've been to one where they've, they've actually planted people in to Get people to dance and to do different things, um, do the train around or do the YMCA in a certain way or whatever.
And so kind of a, that's the real world version of that in my mind. Um, so it's not linear, right? But somebody's kind of controlling the scenes. You can come in and out of different scenes, interact with each other in that scene and then potentially others coming in and, uh, making you feel and do. So add the virtual, virtual visual stuff on there.
And it sounds like what you just described. Sounds like nuts. It is nuts. If you don't have a headset on you're [00:57:00] like, what the heck's going on?
Marco Ciappelli: As you're presenting this theater and even now the. The individualize, um, you know, we talk about in the individual personalized finance, everything is personalized.
It sounds to me we're going to personalize entertainment, where you can choose exactly the one that you want. I'm wondering if what people will choose, if they will choose wisely. Or, or not. And, uh, I don't know, a lot to think about. So I'm going to call this off at 58 minutes. Um, I had some technology issue with the internet and I'm wondering if I can even have a regular video and audio, how am I going to be in a virtual world and actually enjoy it 100 percent of the time.
And now the question is, if you die in the virtual world, do you actually die in the real world as well? You have to escape first before you die. Does it count? Do we have [00:58:00] multiple lives, like in a video game? Play again?
Rafael Brown: You just have to collect one up mushrooms.
Marco Ciappelli: Talk to Mario. Talk to Mario.
Rafael Brown: I'm going to leave you guys with an amusing anecdote here.
Heineken back in, uh, in spring 2022 at the height of kind of the, the metaverse craze. Um, and, and this like shows that they were trying to understand it and they were making fun of it. They knew that this stuff was kind of half baked. So they did a promotion in this thing called Decentraland, which was a, you know, kind of early web three thing that was still trying to find an audience.
Um, So Heineken did this thing where they set up a promotion. Uh, for their Heineken Silver Brew, and uh, and the tagline was that the Metaverse is [00:59:00] not the best place to taste a new beer. And so, you could go into Decentraland, and you could get a Heineken Silver, and you could You know, quote, unquote, drink it.
And they made fun of the fact that you couldn't actually drink it. And, um, and, and their, their other tagline was, um, no calories, no hidden ingredients and no beer. So they, they, they stressed that you could, you could go to the launch party and you could have pixelated lobster and caviar, and you could have virtual beer and they.
Absolutely made fun of the fact that they were giving you a virtual beer that you could pretend to drink and that you could not taste at all.
Marco Ciappelli: But if you actually had to pay something for that non beer, then, uh, then they made something interesting or maybe even or collect a credit after you drink a virtual [01:00:00] beer for a real beer.
Yeah. At the store. That's another. That could be another marketing idea.
Rafael Brown: You had to pay for a beer that you couldn't drink.
Marco Ciappelli: And that's going to be the end of this. Everybody think about that. Go outside, take a walk, smell the flower, because they ain't going to be able to do that in the virtual world anyway.
And, uh, enjoy life, but also enjoy technology, because it's still life. as well. Thank you, Sean. Thank you, Rafael. Uh, thank you, Cary. You, you really made a lot of sense today in this conversation. Uh, I'm glad Cary was on. He didn't say anything controversial. Well, well done.
Rafael Brown: Cary had some deep thoughts.
Marco Ciappelli: All right, everybody, as usual, we had a lot of fun. I hope you did as well. Stay tuned, subscribe, and share. Share with other people if you enjoy this and leave us comment maybe to talk about this, uh, any other time because sometimes we don't know what to talk about and then we ended up talking for an hour and two [01:01:00] minutes.
So goodbye. Take care everybody.