Transcription
00: 00:09Welcome to the IAA Mobility visionary Club Podcast. Here we explore the intersection of technology, transportation, and sustainability. In this podcast, our host is an Aigenerated voice, but the insights and perspectives shared by our guests are purely human. Each episode features two guests who bring their diverse professional backgrounds and personal experiences to the table. Today we welcome Niels Woolney, CEO and cofounder of Hollowide and Bastion, schutz Manager Developer Partnerships at Meta Reality Labs.
00: 00:44Would you like to introduce yourselves briefly? Neils, let's start with you. Sure. First of all, thanks for having me. As you correctly stated, my name is Nils.
00: 00:55I'm CEO and co founder Hollow Ride, and my personal passion is not just entertainment, but also cars. So with Hollowride, combining both things is my personal dream job, and I'm very much looking forward to our conversation today. Thank you. How about you, Bastion? Please introduce yourself.
00: 01:15Hi, everyone. Thanks for having me today and very much looking forward to have a great conversation today to the audience. My name is Bastian. I'm part of the Reality Labs Developer Partnerships Team at Meter, and my passion is working with XR Developers, So studios, agencies, individual developers, or developer studios that build amazing content for our existing and our future mixed reality and virtual reality headsets. Thank you, Bastion.
00: 01:48In this episode, our guests will share their knowledge and expertise on topics such as AR VR and the Metaverse, the collaboration between technology companies, startups and OEMs, and the potential for NFTs in the automotive sector. They will also provide personal anecdotes and insights that add a human touch to our discussions. Join us as we dive into the fascinating world of mobility and discover how it impacts our lives in ways we may have never imagined. Neil's bastion, we have prepared questions for you. Please take turns choosing questions.
00: 02:22Would you like to start? Bastion I would love to, and I think I go for the obvious AR VR. But level one, let's start let's start with the basis. Which role can AR VR play inside the vehicle? That's a good one.
00: 02:41It's actually a question that you should answer, dear. Right? No. You want to start first? No, go ahead.
00: 02:48After what you have shared last week, I think it's also fair that you also answered, but we can do it both no. Brendan, let me kick start this. I think you referred to the recent announcement we made with manufacturer BMW, and just for one of the audience, give you a little bit of background. We've been working with BMW for quite some time with the main focus on exploring how AR and VR technology can work inside a fast moving vehicle. We had an amazing video that we shared with our CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, where he's actually putting on one of our headsets and showcasing how this can work in a fast moving car.
00: 03:36And I think what we generally believe in that this technology can kind of lead to more productive and fun passenger experience. And we think about it being in a car, it's kind of a captured experience, right? You have some time there, especially in the backseat. And what we are trying to do is figuring out how we can use this time or bring more quality in using this time. And yeah, we see huge opportunities there, allowing users to leverage content, consuming content, watching movies, watching videos, playing games in car and leveraging our technology, our VR and mixed reality headsets to really do that.
00: 04:26And I think it's only the beginning of what we are having there and the potential is huge. And this is where I would probably head over to Neil's because he can kind of specify this potential because they have figured out that there's a huge potential already years ago, which is great. And you already have a very good experience for in car usage, right? Thank you, Bastion. Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
00: 04:50And I want to double down on this. We spend so much time in cars and especially the future generation Gen Z. Gen A spends a lot of time in cars as passengers. Today, for most passengers, transit time feels like waste of time. And utilizing the fact that a car is traveling from A to B, the motion of the car, the location where it's traveling.
00: 05:13And combining this with immersive technology was one of our starting points. A few years ago, when we were still working, my two co founders and I for a German car manufacturer, and we spun Holoride out. End of 2018. To really focus on this topic because we also see a massive potential there and we also spun out to make this technology available for the rest of the market, whether it's other car manufacturers, platform providers like Meta or content creators. Because it offers such a big potential in entertainment but also in relaxation, productivity, well being, education, there are infinite possibilities to turn transit time into more valuable time.
00: 05:58Thank you. Please choose your next question. I think it's my turn, right question.
00: 06:05Let's take the second obvious one, metaverse level one. I like that. What is the metaverse and what is so special about it? What potential do you see in the technology? Well, I think that's also a question that is good for both of us, right?
00: 06:27And maybe even better for you. But I can start for me personally, and unfortunately there is not one definition out there regarding the metaverse that captures the potential fully and all the different aspects. However, for me personally, the combination of the physical reality with digital reality, combining those things to create the next reality is something that is a very elementary part of the metaverse because this is where we move to the next iteration of the web. So to say we detach from screens, we move into the space. So metaverse is a more consumer friendly term from my perspective, for spatial computing.
00: 07:17So interacting with digital content in the physical space. It's a lot about presence, it's a lot about social elements. So that interaction between people is made easier. And discovering the world is an interesting part. And we always talk about extended reality technologies as being a major part of the metaverse.
00: 07:44But I think also AI will do a major push forward for metaverse technologies in terms of content creation, enabling more people to create for metaverse environments. And last but not least, the whole blockchain crypto NFT part of it. It's really all about setting up an own economic system that also enables for fair royalty, distribution of creators, transparency and, yeah, I think the best is yet to come. Definitely clear. And at Hollow Ride, we have our focus area of the metaverse, which we call the motiverse.
00: 08:27So bringing metaverse to cars and cars. To the metaverse, I like that term a lot. I really like that. And you mentioned there are so many different definitions out there when it comes to the metaverse. I'm very happy that you touched upon most of the elements already.
00: 08:42But just to recap on how we as meta look at the metaverse, I think the way we as meter define the metaverse is the following for us. The metabolism itself, it's kind of a set of digital interconnected, inter experience that can be accessed via any device, right? Anywhere with anyone. What does that mean? What does it mean once it's built?
00: 09:06I think once it's built, the metaverse will be kind of a set of virtual spaces, of virtual and digital applications that you can share an immersive experience with other people in, right? Even they are far away from each other. And it will allow you to do things together that you may not can do in a physical world. And you also touched upon a couple of characteristics that we kind of see the meterworlds will look like. We talked about 3D spaces.
00: 09:43We talked about the idea of having digital applications itself. One other characteristic that we kind of see the MetaWars will be like is this idea of immersion. I mean, that's something that Rojolo writers is working with on a daily basis. The fact that the Internet and the computer world and what you see will really surround you. You will deep dive into those virtual spaces.
00: 10:13Also, the idea of presence, right? Being far away from each other, but being able to put an avatar into my space, an avatar of a good friend of mine who maybe lives thousands of kilometers away. And I can interact with this avatar as I would be in one place with this person, which I think this is one of the pieces that excites us a lot to bring people together and live this idea of community even in a virtual space. Yeah, I think this is also the kind of opportunity in terms of technology, right? We are investing a lot, a lot into building the technology and allowing companies, XR, developers, studios, to leverage this technology, right?
00: 10:56To leverage the SDKs, the APIs, the hardware, right? The headset, to build those amazing experiences for millions of people. And I mean, you guys do an amazing job doing that already, but I think it gives us a glimpse of what's going to happen in the future. And it's a lot of exciting stuff that is happening already, not only on the hardware side, but also on the software side. On the applications you use right now, it's not only gaming, right?
00: 11:29It's also educational pieces. It's also entertainment, health and fitness, all of those things that developers are working on right now and brands are working on right now. So huge opportunities there. And allowing users to leverage this technology, that is one of our core principles that we take an over. Thank you.
00: 11:52Please choose your next question. It's my turn again. Do we want to go for let's go for UX and level two? Let's go. How will UX and user interaction evolve in the future?
00: 12:11Should I go? Do you want to go? Yeah, go ahead. I think that's a good one. I think there are many topics that we can touch upon here.
00: 12:19I think one of the topics that I just mentioned is this idea of avatars holograms, right? Having someone in your physical space as a virtual avatar and interacting with this person, even though this person is thousands of kilometers away. Right. This is something that will bring people closer together, in our opinion. And that includes some of the topics I mentioned, right?
00: 12:53How cool would it be if you have someone, your best friend, in the same room, and you can play play games together, right? You could watch movies together, you could just spend time together. And this is where we also say, like, the meteor burst itself, it's not about spending more time online, right, or in virtual spaces. It's rather about increasing the quality of time that you spend in those virtual digital spaces and the time that you spend with other people, with your friends, with your family and those spaces. And this is where I think we're now building the technology of use cases and applications.
00: 13:36We may don't even think about right now what will be possible in the future. But I think avatars are one of those pieces where I think, okay, that's already really cool. This idea of not only avatars itself, but this digital presence, this co presence idea, which also excites me a lot. And I think the whole company is very excited about that. Yeah.
00: 13:56And I think you guys have done a fantastic job over the course of the last few years, because what you're doing, you are redefining user experience in the space, which is different than on a 2D screen. So moving into the space and interacting with digital elements allows for a completely new way of UX. So user experiences, you have been a pioneer in the space where I think there are a lot of good logics how people can not just interact with each other, but also with content. There are more immersive ways now to interact with digital items. So, yeah, I think this will be further evolved over the course of the next year once we get used to it, that we have a virtual presence and are active in a 3D space.
00: 14:52So very much looking forward to the new elements there. I mean, if everybody looks back to the first smartphone, we mirrored a lot of the elements from the real world, like wooden textures, and a calculator looked like a physical calculator, and then it evolved over time right into something completely new that now feels super familiar. And I expect the same thing with spatial computing with the metaverse to happen. Thank you. Please choose your next question.
00: 15:20Okay. Yeah, let's dig deeper into the metaverse level two. In addition to individual mobility, what use cases do you see for shared or public mobility? Hand it over to you in the. Context of the metaverse.
00: 15:36Yeah.
00: 15:40Wow. That's in the context of the metaverse. I think first and foremost, we need to think about vehicles slightly different than we did in the past because it was a vehicle to bring us from A to B. But with the evolution of cars in the last few years, they turned into computing devices. So there are a lot of sensors built into a car in the interior, in the exterior to enable for assisted driving, functionalities, et cetera.
00: 16:13So there's a lot of intelligence in the car. And if you reflect this to the metaverse, you have the perfect spatial device out there. So cars are already the perfect spatial device.
00: 16:30Looking at vehicles from a different perspective, one could say it's not a smartphone on wheels, because smartphones are, like, 20 years old. Here is a massive opportunity for the automotive industry to perceive cars more as spatial devices and make use of the responsiveness, the receptiveness of the vehicle in its environment, and the fact that a lot of vehicles are traveling from A to B every day everywhere around the world. So building a metaverse that maybe is an overlay of the physical world. As a digital layer, cars can play a major role, and this counts for private passenger cars as much as for shared vehicles. What we can definitely see in the market is their ownership is less important, and people will switch vehicles more often, very often based on the current need they have.
00: 17:30But what always stays with you is your personal device. I bet everybody in the audience has his or her smartphone right next to him or her because it's statistically proven that the personal device is always close to you. It's never further away than 1 meter. If you think about wearable technology, it's even close to your body the whole time. So the personal device always stays with you, you might switch cars or transportations methods more often.
00: 18:01So I think it's a natural to expand the car to the personal device to enable for Metaverse like immersive experiences. And I think this is where Meta is doing a great job and we deliver our part to enable this in vehicles. And I think we'll have a very interesting future once the whole automotive industry perceives cars more as spatial devices than just a smartphone on wheels or a basic method to travel from A to B. Thank you. Please choose your next question.
00: 18:36Oh, I answered to that. That is good. I love the answer. I think it's my turn, right? Yes.
00: 18:43To be fair, we have missed out the part of ecosystem, so let's go for ecosystem one. What are the different roles of OEMs traditional tier one suppliers, software suppliers, or tech companies in developing software based solutions for the automotive industries?
00: 19:02Okay, to be fair, I would take any question, but I think this is the one that may you should start with. I think you have a way more decisive idea of those different roads. And maybe I could add to the technology role at the end. Yeah, that would be great. I think what we clearly see in the market and need to see more in the future is strong collaboration of all ecosystem players.
00: 19:25So if you think and if you have the passenger, the rider as your core audience, I think it's inevitable that all the elements need to work together seamlessly. And collaboration brings the most benefit not just to the individual rider or passenger, but also to society in general. I think we'll see more collaboration than before, and I think we'll see all these players work on standards so that a lot of people have accessibility to the experiences or the contents being offered. And I'm very much looking forward to this. And there are so many good examples, like you touched upon your research case you did with BMW in the past, or the ongoing research you're doing together also to establish a standard.
00: 20:21We spun out of Audi with the idea to make this technology not just accessible to the whole Volkswagen group, but to all car manufacturers out there, because we also think a spatial device should be used in any car and not just in a specific one, because then it adds the most value for passengers. So I strongly believe that players will focus more on collaboration than on competition in the future. That's at least what I hope to see. And I think you guys have done an amazing job on a content side itself, but also on the technology side, right? Bringing this into a car and making this a workable solution, not only for one brand, but for many brands.
00: 21:06This is really amazing and maybe touching upon the idea of technology itself and maybe giving the audience a little bit of insights into what is the role that we actually want to take it as meter. You mentioned we're increasing collaboration, have been doing this in the past already. Also, our teams are working closely together to figure out where the overlaps, how can we intensify our work? Our role as meter is really in enabling the ecosystem to build on our technology, which is, as I mentioned, the hardware part, right? Making those devices better in terms of performance, making them smaller in order to being able to use it or use it on a daily basis, but also on the software side, right?
00: 21:58Building the right platform that allows users to access content, but also developers to build content and offering the content to millions of users that are out there that maybe already have a headset or are planning to buy a virtual or mixed reality headset. And this is a role we take. We invest a lot of time and a lot of resources into making those. We call that tools, those SDKs. I talked about APIs, making them better, allowing developers to leverage those tools, but also asking those, what is it that is working already?
00: 22:34And what is it that isn't working already? What do you need as a developer who built this content to make even more exciting content for the millions of users out there? And this is a continuous commitment that we have as meter to really make this technology better on a daily basis and then allowing developers to build amazing content and amazing applications, digital applications for those users. I'd like to add a little bit to this, because what I think what you're doing very well is you started with a consumer market home entertainment solution, so to say, a very confined space, the home. Then you expanded to the work environment with the Quest Pro.
00: 23:15You clearly stated that the workspace is interesting. So the second space, and then comes the third space, the car, right? So where people spend a lot of time, where you have a confined environment. And I think this is where we'll see the technology flourish first in these three environments before it goes out into everyday situations. And I think you have the right focus there.
00: 23:38Cool. So I think it's my turn again for choosing a question bastard, right? Go for it. Which ones? We didn't touch up on NFTs yet.
00: 23:47Let's do NFTs Level One. In what way do NFTs provide opportunities for customers to participate and engage with a company? Which use cases do you envision to have the biggest potential for NFTs in the automotive industry? Oh, wow. This is also a broad one, but thanks for the question.
00: 24:08First and foremost, NFTs are about utility. So if they provide you, the owners with some value, then the first step is being made. Especially in the automotive space, there are a bunch of use cases where this could be helpful. So whether it's about proof of ownership for maybe the car, but maybe also for certain digital elements in the car, but also for creators, it's a fantastic way to ensure that they are fairly participating in what they have created. So if you think about digital content, if you have created an item that people love, that they exchange, and with every transaction, with every purchase, it's ensured that you get a certain percentage as a royalty, as a creator, this is a fantastic way because it can be digitally tracked.
00: 25:02And if you now leap forward a little bit and look at the whole AI movement where still you have to figure out the whole ownership royalty discussion because everything is being mixed and matched to create something new. I see NFTs also playing a big role for creators on a Mitral level. So it could be just an interaction principle of the game, or a specific material, digital material surface texture that you create as a developer. And as soon as it's being mixed and matched in a new creation, the NFT could ensure that if it's being used, if it's being sold, that you're benefiting from it by automatically being assigned royalties from it. So I think there is a massive opportunity, on the one hand in the experience space at cars, but also in the ownership space, you want to personalize things, your individual screens, all those items will see NFCs play a major role and I think they're fantastic technological basis for this.
00: 26:09Agree with everything you mentioned, especially the idea of royalties. I think this will drive a lot of value to creators. I think NFTs and adding this perspective is touching upon a very interesting characteristic that we see as part of the metaverse. It's kind of the continuity of goods, which maybe goes a little bit different direction of what you've talked about. But what we see as a necessity looking at a future meteor, is that you have an NFT, you have any kind of digital good that you own and that you can take from one platform into the other.
00: 26:49Right? From one digital space into another digital space, that you can leverage on a roblox platform and then take it out of that platform into another platform. But you can use you have the utility, this exact same utility in another platform. I think this is an interesting part where we'll see a lot of kind of traction in the next months and years to really ensure that we also have this technical layer that allows you to bring all of those digital assets, including NFTs, with your digital identity, with your avatar from one platform into another. And yeah, we are very keen to see how this will evolve and are working actively as part of the metaverse standard forum as well.
00: 27:34We as meta working actively on figuring out how we can support building this technical layer that allows connectivity between different platforms and transferring your digital assets from one platform to another. For car brands, it's also a way to create a community, have direct access that'd be like a membership pass where you get early access to specific information. So I think also for brands, you can leverage the community aspect much better than you could. Thank you. Please choose your next question.
00: 28:07Okay, let's go with ecosystem three. To what extent can traditional tier one suppliers, engineering service providers, or other upstream players benefit from AR VR and metaverse applications in practice? Shall I kick it off? Okay. Yeah.
00: 28:25I hope you agree with this, but what I have seen in several conversations that we had over the last months is the idea of leveraging AR VR and also mixed reality as part of the overall production process and product development process. A couple of amazing examples out there. I recently worked with Deutsche Lufthansa on an interesting project that had, at its core, that Deutsche Lufthansa rebuilt their new inflight seats for the first business and economy class in mixed reality, right? So what they're planning to do is getting those new seats into airplanes, I think, in 2024, and then a huge launch event showing those new seats, and they also introduced it in mixed reality. And what you can do is you could put on your headset, can really immersively experience those new seats, the structure of those seats itself, right, even though you can't touch it, but you can really go into that and get a very good feeling of how the seats will look like in the future.
00: 29:39It gives an idea of not only showcasing those product additionally in a more immersive way, but also working on products maybe in a copresence setup where you're not in the same room, but you can work on the same product and design a product in a virtual space and a virtual product with different people that are not in the same space. And I think that also expands into, as I said, like the supply chain that expands to machines, maintenance of machines, where you don't need to necessarily send someone into another country where the machine is maybe placed where we want to repair it. But you may can kind of leverage mixed reality to put virtual elements onto the actual physical machine and then give a third person kind of an advice and guidance on how to repair specific parts of those machines. I think this is where the mixed reality, virtual reality, and also metap reality technology will create many opportunities. And as I said, it's not at an early stage.
00: 30:49There are already many amazing experiences and applications out there. Remote maintenance, product development, product design, where it's already in practice, and it's driving a lot of ri and a lot of value and benefit to OEMs and to other brands that leverage this technology. Yeah, I agree. And if we mirror this back to the inca experience space, also from OEM to supplier and first and foremost to the passenger, it provides a lot of value. Also monetary value because, hey, if you can monetize the time people spend in cars, this is beneficial for all players involved.
00: 31:31And the way we approach it, we do a very simple ref share model with the car manufacturer for providing the data we need in real time to enable for those types of experiences. And of course, suppliers, very often they build the software stack, but you can also imagine suppliers becoming massive contributors to this overall platform development that is agnostic across many car manufacturers. So I think we'll also see more rest share based models as a fair compensation method for contributing value in the ecosystem. I also like the production use cases you just described because there's lots of efficiency already today with the technology, which is really great to see. It's time for our last question.
00: 32:22What are your expectations for the next IAA Mobility and what are you looking forward to? So I'm very excited about the next IA mobility event. And what I'm specifically looking forward to is the state of technology, where OEMs are heading, where partners are heading in terms of how do they leverage technology around augmented reality, mixed reality, and virtual reality applications. I think there's a lot to learn from this industry. It's an engine that creates new technology and creates innovative use cases.
00: 33:05And I'm excited to see where we are and where we are heading in the future when it comes to leveraging those technology for this industry. I'm very much looking forward to the IA Mobility this year because I love the combination of industry experts and consumers, spectators, audiences that try the latest cutting edge technology. And I'm very much looking forward to show our latest applications to welcome people to the motiverse. Powerful insights. That's all the time we have for today, unfortunately.
00: 33:43Thank you so much for being here. That was fast. Yeah, thank you so much, Basil. It was always a pleasure. I had gained a lot of new insights and a lot of fun.
00: 33:55Looking forward to continue our collaboration and have a follow up discussion on these topics was really cool. Yeah, no, amazing. I think we could have talked way longer today. I was looking forward to the next ARVR questions, but yeah, thank you for all of those insights. I think always talking to you guys is, for me, learning a lot and makes it even more like makes me even more excited to kind of intensify our collaboration that we have already.
00: 34:25But all of those opportunities, especially in. Cars, there's a lot it's right into the motiverse. Yeah, indeed. Thank you for listening to this episode of the IAA Mobility Visionary Club. In our next episode, Jessica Robinson, co founder and partner of Assembly Ventures and Majeeb Ejas, founder and CEO of our next Energy will be speaking about electric vehicle batteries. Stay tuned. If you liked what you heard, please consider giving us a review to stay up to date on all things IA. Mobility follow us on our social channels. They're linked in the description for you.
00: 35:07The IAA Mobility Visionary Club podcast is produced in cooperation with our knowledge partner, the Boston Consulting Group. See you next episode.
