 Hello, and welcome to a special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier, the co-founder of SiliconANGLE in the CUBE. We're here in Sundance 2018 at the Intel Tech Lounge for a panel discussion with experts on the topic of the new creative. We believe a new creative renaissance is coming and application development and also artistry, the role of craft and the role of technology and software coming together at the intersection. You're seeing results in the gaming industry, virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality. A new wave is coming and it's really inspiring, but also there's a few thought leaders at the front end of this big wave setting the trends and they're here with us in the special panel for the new creative. Here with us is Brooks Brown, global director of VR at Starbreed Studios. A lot to share there, welcome to the panel. Lisa Watts, VR marketing strategist at Intel, Intel powering a lot of these VR games here and Winslow Porter, co-founder and director of the new reality company. Many submissions at Sundance, not this year, but a ton of experience to talk about the role of Sundance and artistry. And then we have Gary Radburn, who's a director of commercial VR and AR for media within Dell, Dell Technologies. Guys, welcome to this panel. Lisa, I want to start off with you at Intel. Obviously the tech lounge here, phenomenal location on Main Street in Sundance. Really drawn a massive crowd. Yesterday it was packed. This is a new generation here and you're seeing a younger demographic, you're seeing savvier consumers, they love tech. But interesting, Sundance is turning into kind of an artistry tech show and the game is changing your thoughts on this new creative. Yeah, it's been amazing to watch. I've been here for, this is my third year coming back with VR experiences and it's really just been incredible to see. I mean, Sundance has been on the leading edge of exploring new technologies for a long time. And I think this feels like the breakout year really. I mean, it's been successful the last few years, but something about this year feels a little bit different. And I think maybe it's that people are getting more familiar with the technology. I think the artists are getting more comfortable with how to push the boundaries and then we certainly are getting a lot out of seeing what they're doing and how we can improve our products in the future. We were talking yesterday, Lisa, about this, the dynamic of Sundance and you were mentioning that you see a few trends popping out. What is the most important story this year for the folks who couldn't make it, who might be watching this video? You see at Sundance, I'll say it's great day today, it's snowing. It's a white day, it's beautiful powder, greatest snow on earth, but there's some trends that are emerging. We had a march this morning, Women's March. You're seeing interesting signals. What's your view? I think there's a lot less desire to put up with subpar experiences. I mean, I think everyone is really starting to push the boundaries. I mean, we saw a lot of 360 video which we love for a linear narrative, but they're really breaking out and really exploring what does it mean to have autonomy, and especially in virtual reality experiences, a lot more social is coming to the forefront and then a lot more exploration of haptics and the new ways of extending into more 40 FX, et cetera. So I think it's very, very, very exciting. We're really excited to see all the new innovations. Winslow, I wanna ask you if you could comment. You've been an active participant in the community with Submission See at Sundance. This year, you've had a chilling out, hanging out, you've been on the front lines. What is your take on the vibe? What's the sentiment out there? Because you're seeing the wave coming, we're feeling it, it feels early. I don't know how early it is and the impact to people doing great creative work. What's the take? Well, yeah, it's kind of like VR years or like dog years. Like a lot can happen in even a month in the VR space. So I had a piece here in 2014 called Clouds. It was an interactive documentary about creative code, but that was back when there was only two other VR pieces. It's interesting to see how the landscape has changed because CCP Games had a piece there. They had an early version of Eve Valkyrie and unfortunately in the last three months they had to close their VR wing. So, and then Chris Milk also had a Lincoln piece with Beck, which was a multi-camera 360. Actually, it was a flash video that they ported to the DK-1. And so that was, but seeing that everyone saw the potential, the technology was still pretty rudimentary or crude even, we should say, before any tracking cameras. But every year people learn from previous Sundances and other festivals and we're seeing that Sundance kind of raises the bar every year. It's nice that it's in January because then there's all these other festivals that sort of follow through with either similar content, newer versions of content that's here or people have just sort of learned from what is here. So I got to ask you, obviously Sundance is known for pushing the boundaries. You see a lot of creative range. You see a lot of different stuff. And also you mentioned the VR. We've seen some failures, you've seen some successes, but that's growth. I mean, this market has to have some failures, failures create opportunities to folks who are reiterating in that. What are some of the things that you can point to that are positive things that have happened, whether they're failures or no successes that folks can learn from? Well, I think that this year there's a lot more social VR. We're connecting people in this, even though they're in the same space, they're able to be in this new virtual world together. There's something amazing about being able to interact with people in real life, but as soon as you have sort of a hyper-reality where people are able to be, you know, experiencing a Sufi ritual together, or things that you just wouldn't normally, that are not possible in the real world. And also I think that there's issues with lines too, obviously every year, but the more that we can have, you know, larger experiences with multiple people, the more people we can get through, and then the more impact we can make on the audience. It's really, we were in claim jumper last year and we can only get one person in every 10 minutes, and that makes things pretty tricky. And what are you doing at Sundance this year? And you obviously got some stuff going on with some of the work you've done. What's your focus? So yeah, we have a company called New Reality Company where we produce giant and treat. It's part of a trilogy where Breathe is gonna be the third part. We're gonna be completing that by the end of this year. And right now, you know, I would say the best thing about Sundance is the projects, but also the people. Being able to come here, check in, meet new people, see partners that we've been working with in the past, also new, you know, like new collaborations. There's, everywhere you turn, there's like amazing possibilities abound. I want to talk about empathy and social. I mentioned social is interesting in these trends. I wanna go to Brooks Brown, who's got some really interesting work on, with Star Breeze and the Hero Project. You know, being a pioneer, you know, you gotta take a few arrows in your back. You gotta blow people's minds. You're doing some pretty amazing work. You're in the front lines as well. What's the experience that you're seeing? Talk about your project and its impact. Well, for us, we set out with our partners, Ink Stories, Naveed Khansari, a wonderful creative in his entire team, to try to create an intensely personal experience, kind of moving the opposite direction of these very much social things. The goal ultimately being to try to put a person inside of an event, rather than a game-style situation where you have objective A, B, or C, or a film that's a very, very hyper-linear narrative. What is that sort of middle ground that VR itself has as unique medium? And so we built out our entire piece, deep 40 effects. Everything is actually physically built out, so you have that tactility as you walk around. Things react to you. We have smell, temperature, air movement. The audio provided by our partners at DTS is exceptional. And the goal is ultimately to see if we put you in a situation, I'm doing my best not to talk about what that situation is. It's pretty important to that. But to watch people react. And the core concept is would you be a hero? All over the world every day, people are going through horrific stuff. We're fortunate because we're the kind of people who in order to experience, say, a tragedy in Syria, we're fortunate that we have to go to Park City, Utah and go in virtual reality to experience something that is tragic, real, and deeply emotional. And so our goal is to put people through that and come out of it changed, traumatized, actually. So that way you have a little bit more empathy into the real world, into the actual experience. And what's the goal? Well, this is interesting because most of the some stuff you see the sizzle out there is, oh, look at the beautiful vistas and the beaches and the peaks and you can almost be there. Now you're taking a different approach of putting people in situations that probes some emotional response. It's a big deal to us. The way Naveed likes to put it and I'm gonna steal this from him is you see a great deal of people prototyping on hardware and all of these things and it's great because we need that. We need to be able to stand on the shoulders of those giants to be able to do these things. But you see very few people really prototyping what is the concept of story as per VR. We've been doing it at Starbreeze, we've been doing location-based VR for some time now and I've been getting thousands upon thousands of pitches. And whenever you get a pitch, you can pretty much identify, oh, you come from a film background. You come from a games background. It's very few people who come down that middle line and go, well, this is what VR is supposed to be. This is that interesting thing that makes it very deeply unique. What's the confluence and what's the trend in your mind as this changes? Because you mentioned that gamers have affinity towards VR. We were talking about that before we came on the panel. Pump someone in mainstream USA or around the world who does email, does work, may not be there. You're seeing this confluence. How is that culture shifting? How do you see that? Because you're kind of bringing a whole other dimension. Well, we're trying to go back to a little bit, something about this Sundance being a little bit different. I think in general in VR, you're seeing this sort of shift from a few years ago, it was all potentiality. And I think a lot of us, the projects were great, but a lot of us who work in VR were like, oh, I see what they're trying to do. And people like my dad would be like, I don't see what they're trying to do. But that is shifting. And you're seeing a larger shift into that actuality where we're not quite there yet, where we can talk about the experiences everyday Americans are gonna have. What is the real ready player? One that we're actually going to have existing? We're not there yet, but we're much closer every time. And we're starting to see a lot of these things that are pushing towards that. Final question before I go to some of the speeds and feeds questions I wanna get with Intel and Dell on is, what is the biggest impact that you're seeing with your project and VR in general, that will have the most important consequences for societal impact? Well, we were fortunate yesterday we had a number of people come through Hero. And a number of them simply actually couldn't handle it, had to come out. We had to pull people out. The moment we took the headset off, they were tears were streaming down their face. There's a level of emotional impact VR is extremely able to cut through. It's not that you're playing a character. It's not that you're in a separate world. You are you inside of that space. And that is a dangerous, but very promising ability of VR. Winslow, can you take a stab at that so I'd like to get your reaction to that because people are trying to figure out the societal impact in a positive way and potentially negative. Yeah, I mean, so with that, whenever you traumatize somebody, you also have the ability to possibly re-traumatize somebody. In Giant, we made sure that we gave them a trigger warning because yeah, these things can be intensely intimate or personal for somebody who already has that sort of baggage with them or could be living in a similar experience. In Giant, we witnessed the last moments of a family as they're convincing their daughter that the approaching bomb blast is a giant that actually wants to play with her. And so we put haptics in the chair. So the audience was also surprised, but we let them know that it was gonna be taking place in a conflict zone. So if that was something that they didn't want to participate in, they could opt out. But again, we didn't know, we had to go and buy tissues right off the bat because people were crying in the headset and that's kind of a, it's an interesting problem to have for the sake of what are the rules around that. But also it makes it more difficult to get people through the experience in a timely fashion as well. But yeah, we're seeing that as things become more real, then there's also a chance to possibly impact people. It's the, so it's social for you. You see it as a social impact? Well, I mean, if everyone's experiencing the same thing, that can be social. But again, if it's a one-on-one experience, it's sort of like up to the filmmaker to make sure that they have the scruples that they are playing by the rules because right now most every piece of content is being released through Oculus Steam or Viveport. But there will be, it's heavily regulated right now, but as soon as there's other means of distributing the content, it could take a different sort of face. Certainly some exciting things to grapple on and great stuff. I wanna get to the commercial angle, then we're gonna talk more about the craft and the role of artistry in the creating side of it. Gary, you're the commercial VR and expert at Dell. You're commercializing this. You're gonna make the faster machines. We want faster everything. Anyone who's in VR knows all the graphics cards. They know the speeds and feeds. They're totally hardware nerds. What's going on? Where's the action? Okay, that's such a large question. I mean, we've had some great stuff here that I also wanna comment on as well. But inside the commercial side, then everybody wants bigger, stronger, better, faster. And to win those comment about the dog years, that really puts the pressure on us to continue that innovation and working with partners like Intel to get those faster processes in there, get faster graphics cards in there so that we can get people more emotionally brought in. We can do better textures. We can get more immersion inside the content itself. We're working a lot around VR in terms of opening people's eyes for societal impact. So VR for good, for instance, where we're taking people to far-flung corners of the earth. We work with Nat Geo Explorer and Mike Lebecchi to show the plight of polar bears in Greenland and how they're gradually becoming extinct. For an edutainment and a learning tool, the boundaries are really being pushed in entertainment and film. That's always been the case. Consumer has always really pushed that technology. Commercial has always been a bit of a laggard. They want some stability in what's going on. But the creation that's going on here is absolutely fantastic. It's taken what is essentially a prosumer headset and then taken it into that commercial world and lit it up. 360 Video, it's very inception. People are using it for training inside of their businesses. So that's now going out into businesses now. We're starting to see advances in 360 Video with more compute power needed, where to the points about immersion and getting people emotionally brought in, then you can start doing volumetric, get them in there. But then we're also working with people like Dr. Skip Rizzo was on our panel yesterday where we're starting to go into, okay, we can treat PTSD, help people with autism through the medium of VR. So again, that buys into- So these are disruptive use cases that are legit. These are big time market moving, helping people. Absolutely. And that's where it becomes really, really powerful. Yes, we want companies to embrace it. Companies are embracing it for training. But when you start seeing the healthcare implications and people crying inside of headsets, that's affecting you deeply emotionally. If you can make that for good and change somebody's trigger points inside of PTSD and the autism side of helping somebody in interview techniques to be able to be more self-sufficient, it's absolutely awesome. This is the new creative. So what's your take on the new creative? What's your definition? Because you're talking about big range of use cases beyond just filmmaking and digital artistry. Yeah, absolutely. So the new creative is like, with all the great workers here, people are looking at film and entertainment. Now the world really is the oyster for all the creatives out there. People are clamoring out for modelers, artists, storytellers, story experiencers to be able to use that inside their commercial environments to make their businesses more effective. But they're not going to have a 360 video production company inside of their commercial organization. And it's then leveraging all of the creative here and all the great stuff here, which is really going to help the whole world along. Lisa, I want to get your thoughts on this because you guys at Intel here at the tech lounge have a variety of demos, but there's a range of pro and entry level tools that can get someone up and running quickly to pro. And so there's a creative range, not only just for digital artistry, but also business we're hearing. So what's the, because AI is involved in this too though. It's not just AI, it's a lot of these things. What's the Intel take on this? Well, I think it's really an interesting time for us at Intel because one of the things that we have that I think probably nobody else has, we have this amazing slate of products that really cover the end to end process, both from the creation side of the house all the way to the consumption side. And we talk a lot about our processors. We worked on an amazing project, a couple of huge scenes inside of the Sansar environment, which is a great tool for really democratizing the creation of spaces. It's a cloud hosted service, and but it utilizes this amazing client server architecture. We created four huge spaces in a manner of eight weeks to launch at CES. And in some of the technologies that Gary was referring to just in pure processing power, like two generations old processors were taking three hours to render just a small portion of a model where our newest generation Core i9s with our Optane technology took that time to 15 minutes. So when we think about what we can do now, and those technologies are gonna be available in even portable laptop form factors, we've got the piece where we were working with here spheres, they were able to actually make some corrections and some tweaks, basically immediately, and without having to send them off to some render form, they were able to do those things. And I had Winslow's talked about that as well. What does that mean to you to be able to react real time and be able to do your creative craft where you are, and then be able to share that so readily? I just think that's just kind of an amazing equalizer. It's really democratizing the creation process. Okay, the next question that begs for everyone to address is where are we in this progression? Early, what work needs to get done? Where are we holding back? Is it the speeds and feeds? Is it the software? Is it the routines, libraries? Where's the bottleneck? Why isn't it going faster? Or is it going faster? I would, and I'm sure the team would agree here. I would say that one of the key things is the creator tools themselves. They are still somewhat cumbersome. We were talking to another filmmakers, like I can't even, I have to play the whole piece from the beginning. I can't just go in and edit, change control, be able to collaborate on these pieces with other people. I mean, if you can collaborate in a real world space, you should be able to also collaborate in VR and have change control and all those sorts of things that are necessary to the iteration of a project. So we're trying to work with our software partners. They're all doing a really great job of trying to iterate that, but it's going to take some time. I mean, I think that's probably the bigger thing that's holding everything back. We're going to be right there with the processing power and the other technologies that we bring to the table. Our OEM partners are going to be right there with the best devices. I really think it's something we've all got to push for as far as those tools getting better. Brooks, comment on anything? You're in this. So for me, the thing that's holding back VR in general is actually the art form itself. One of the great challenges, if you look back at, say, the history of film, where it's Sundance, so it's probably fairly apropos. Very early on, the early movies were, aside from penny arcade machines that you'd actually stare at, they were 10 minute, almost like plays that people would go to almost a playhouse and they'd watch this thing. There were no cuts, there were no angles. It was a single wide shot. Great train robbery came around and there was this crazy thing they did called an edit, where they spliced film together. And if you go back and you read and they did these dolly shots, people will have no idea what they're watching. There's no way people will be able to follow that. People were not happy with it at the time. Now it's stuff that children do on their IMAX at home. They do IMAX all the time. They do it on their iPhones, on their Android devices. These are normal languages of film that we have. VR doesn't have that yet. And there's not a great deal of effort being made in that direction. There's people here doing that. So I'm kind of speaking in the middle of the group, but outside of these people, there's only a handful who are really doing that. And it's a significant challenge. When people who are the mainstream consumer put on a VR headset, it needs to be more than just a magic trick where they go, well, that's cool. And that tends to be the vast majority of experiences. So what is the thing that is gonna make someone go, oh, I get why we have VR as a medium. And we're not there yet. We're in the direction. You mentioned earlier the point where you can tell if someone's from film or gaming or whatever when you talk about VR. Who is the future VR developer? Is it a filmmaker? Is it a gamer? Is it a digital artist? I mean, what is this evolving? Oh, it's a kid in his basement who no one knows and is screwing around with it and is gonna do something that everyone thinks is stupid. Like, it's gonna be that. It's basically every major leap in gaming is kind of the same thing. It's when we understand how ludonarrative dissonance works inside of telling how people move around to space. It's about how we do Dutch angle suddenly in film and these things get invented. It's gonna be some kid who's just screwing around who doesn't have the baggage of the language of film. A lot of the people I know in VR have been fortunate to work in film and games and interactive or web dev. So you come from a lot of places but someone's gonna come along who has none of that baggage and there are gonna be lots of people. Well, you guys are pioneers and you're doing it. So for the first person out there that's in their basement, that inspirational soundbite or comment, how could you guys talk to that person or that group? Because this is the democratization. This is what's happening. It's not the gatekeepers. It's real creatives out there that could come from anywhere. YouTube generation, Twitch generation, gaming. What would you say to that person to motivate them and to give them that passion? Well, it's only gonna get easier, faster, cheaper. All these things are happening. But again, yeah, I totally agree with what Brooke said. It's really about the culture and about educating the audience and getting them up to speed. There are some VR experiences that as soon as they put on the heads like somebody who's never done it before, immediately we'll take it off because they'll get nauseated. And then there's people like kids who are like jet fighters. They've seen everything. You could throw like a 30 frames per second experience at them and they doesn't even phase them. They could be all of a sudden, their worlds are changing and they're like bring it because they're ready for that. So I think it's sort of about raising the bar for what the audience is comfortable with, familiar with, educating the community. There's a lot of tools right now with Unreal and Unity that allow people who have very, they don't need to know C sharp or C++. They can get started in a lot of like visual. Like what you see is what you get being able to drag things into a virtual room and the Windows headsets that are out, they refer to them as mixed reality but just even having the ability to flip up the screen and transition from the virtual world to the real world and milliseconds, it allows you to be able to create things more at the speed of thought. Instead of coming up with an idea, coding it, making sure it works and then eventually putting on the headset, the sooner that we can actually be ideating inside this virtual environment is when things will get really interesting. So the next question is, to take it to the next level is, what's the playbook? How does someone get involved? How does someone ingratiate into a community? If I'm an artist, I wanna get, and I'm proficient with technology or maybe not, how do they get involved? Is it community driven? Is it social? You guys mentioned, seems social is a big trend here. How do people get involved? What's the track? Well, yeah, you don't just need to, go to like a grad school or there's a lot of programs out there that are popping up. Almost every single major state school has like an interactive art program now and that wasn't the case like two or three years ago. So we're seeing that that's a big shift in the culture. But again, VR is still, it's expensive and it's like VR, I refer to, it's in the stage of like, it's almost like in the neo-geo phase, maybe a little before that. But it's the really expensive thing that your friend's neighbor has. Or he's older brother, so you get to play it a little bit, you're like, that's great, but there's no way in hell, I can't afford that or like that just doesn't really work with my life style right now. So it needs to incorporate itself into our everyday, our habits. And it needs to be something that, if we're all doing it, then it makes sense for us to do it together, not just somebody in their basement doing it by themselves. Feel free to comment, this is a good topic. Oh yeah, absolutely. So what we're doing, it's all about democratization and accessibility. So for people to get into it, then they're gonna need a rig, they're gonna need a headset. And previously it's actually been quite expensive to actually take that first plunge into it. So now by democratizing and bringing price points down, it makes it more accessible. That helps content creators because there's now more of an audience that can now consume that content. And the people that can then play with the media and consume it now have a better reason to do it. So we're working on there, we're also working on the education pieces like Key is actually going out there to schools and actually letting them experience VR and play with VR. Because it is a whole new different medium. We've seen film directors and filmmakers go into the VR space. And things that worked in 2D film like fast pans and whatever else. So the points have already been made. Don't really translate into VR without somebody losing their lunch. So it is gonna be somebody who's coming up who hasn't got the baggage of previous skill sets inside of 2D, doing it inside of VR. So we're gonna see that. And in terms of the technology, everybody's wanting things to progress. That shows a level of excitement out there. And that everybody wants to get into it. Everybody wants to see it go further. And I'm reminded of the mobile phone. Mobile phone 30 years ago. Two suitcases for batteries, a large brick on the ear and a car antenna. So where we are now, if you had a time machine and you went back in time to talk to the inventor of the mobile phone, well, I'd be a lot richer because I know sports results are now, but yeah, that aside. But you go back and talk to them and you say, do you know in 30 years time everybody is gonna be carrying that device. Everybody's gonna be dependent on that device. They're gonna get social anxiety and separation anxiety if they lose it. And they would probably laugh in your face. So since you brought the phone analogy, since I love that example, are we in the Blackberry moment of VR and no one yet has built the iPhone? Because the iPhone was a seminal moment for smartphones and you see what happened there. Is VR needing that kind of break? Or is it there? I think we're on the cusp. Where we are at the moment with technology, we've had the headsets, which I'd say have been more in the consumer space. They've been designed to hit a certain price point. We had CES the other week where we've had advancements now in the resolutions of headsets that are now coming out. One of the issues was I can't see text, I can't read text. So from a working environment, if you're actually using tools that you would normally use on a 2D screen, you can now translate that and read that text. However, in terms of the tools that people use, why are we trying to put 2D screens into a VR headset? We've got a whole new way of interacting with data. We've got a whole new way of doing things that are going to be more intuitive than the mouse and keyboard interaction that we're used to. Why just translate that? Let's push that envelope. And those are the developments that we're pushing our partners and our ISVs to really embrace. That's an evolution. Absolutely. It's absolutely amazing. Do you guys have any thoughts on that comment? We have that inflection point. Have we're hitting that? Do we see it soon? Is it here? Well, I think it's a very interesting, symbiotic relationship between multiple factors. So we hear the cost factor. We hear the technology factor. Then we have the content factor. And I saw an interesting evolution at CES. We had created this virtual booth experience so that you could still come to CES the Intel booth without actually having to be there. And I met a guy in there. And I was like, hey, where are you? He goes, I've been in here like all week. And I was like, oh, yeah, where do you live? He goes, oh, I'm in my basement in Nebraska. This was Friday when I met him. He'd been in there all week, but in 2D mode. And he had gone out the night before and bought a headset just so he could come back and go in VR mode. And I think, yes, all of these factors have to kind of line up. But I do think that content, those experiences that are going to keep people coming back for more, like these guys literally kept coming back to our booth to see who was there. And to them, at that point, it wasn't really a barrier of cost. It was like, there is something that I want to consume. Therefore, I am going to go get what I need to consume it. And I use the analogy of HDTV, right? When we kind of moved over that hump where there was enough content, people really didn't care how much that tells you the cost. Sports really highlighted HD. But this is a good point. This is a good question to ask. Brooks, I'd love to get your thoughts. Content drives experiences, amazing experiences. But we're building the scaffolding of everything at the same time. So where are we? What's your opinion? Well, so here on the Starbury side, we're fortunate because we have our own headset. We have the Star VR headset. We've been building with Acer. It's 5K, all of that stuff. And we're upgrading it over the next year. Our focus has been, we skipped the consumer market very much. We went straight to location-based and enterprise. And the reason we did that is because there's a promise of VR at a basic, I don't want to say technology standpoint, but from an experienced perspective when it comes to that resolution, when it comes to that field of view, when it comes to these things people expect, average consumers who go to a movie and they see these giant screens, they want that translated. They don't have the understanding like we do of, well, LED panels are actually a pain in the ass to build. And it takes a little bit. And they flip at their own speeds. We need time to photon is not a thing my dad will ever say in his life. But there's a reality that people have a need for that. And it is extremely expensive. It's, again, the reason we went straight to LBE. But for us, it's about marrying the two and consistently trying to match what's happening. So when we're talking about, as I mentioned earlier, the technology and how we're standing on the shoulders of giants, very, very quickly someone who's doing technology is going to see what we're doing content-wise and go, well, I can do that better technology-wise. And then we're just going to keep leapfrogging. And it's very similar to the phone the same way that we're not at the final stage of the phone. Like we're at our stage of the phone. And no doubt in 30 years people will laugh at us for carrying anything. The same way we laugh about the briefcases and the giant batteries in the cars we had to pull with us. So it's one of those things that's continually transitional. And VR's in an odd, amazing place. Well, you know, it was a lot of waves that we've all seen. You mentioned the mobile phone. It's a good one to point to. It feels like the PC revolution to me because the same culture of entrepreneurs and pioneers come from a bunch of different backgrounds. So I'd like to get Brooks's perspective and Winston's perspective on this because I think there's an entrepreneurial culture out there right now that's just emerging very fast. And it's not like you're a classic entrepreneur, software developer. So in this movement, this wave, the entrepreneur is the filmmaker. It could be the kid in the basement. It could be the gamer. Those entrepreneurs are trying to find a path. Yeah, it's a weird mix. VR is at this odd point where it's not only is it the people who are wanting to be cutting edge in terms of content or technology, but also that first mover strategy from the business side of things. And so everyone wants to be those guys who are charging ahead because in reality, if you look at the financials around all of this, VR is one of those things that you don't want to finance. It's not nearly as safe as say Marvel Avengers or the next Call of Duty. You got to be, you got to be, you got to hustle. Yeah, you got to hustle. You got to work. What's your advice? Start doing it. That's really it. It's the same advice I used to give to game makers when people would be like, well, I want to learn how to make games. It's like go to YouTube, download a thing, and go do it. There's literally no reason why you can't. Are there meetups? There's like the homebrew computer club that's on the Mac. There are infinite groups of VR people who are more than happy to give you all the terrible and wonderful opinions that come with that. There's no shortage of people. There's no shortage, and it's an amazingly helpful group because everyone wants someone else to figure out something so they can steal that and then figure out something else. Winslow, your advice to entrepreneurs out there that are young and or, you know, from 14 to 15, what should they do? Jump riding obviously is a good one. Well, yeah, I mean, experiment, break things. That's really the only way to learn. I would say watch as much VR as you can because sometimes bad VR is the best VR because you can learn, don't do that. And if you learn, if you put all that together, then you can really, you know, it's like this lexicon that you can really follow. Also, I think, you know, we, I think as people in tech, you know, we kind of get obsessed with things like resolution, frame rate, and these are very important, but it's also, you know, good to remember, or at least for me, you know, I watched some of the best experiences from storytelling when I was a kid, you know, eight years old on a 12 inch screen that was 640 by 480, you know, like scan lines on the VHS. But for me, the story's still resonated and it's important to think of the story first, but obviously it's a dance between the story and the technology. They kind of have to both organically work together. And if they don't, then, you know, one thing in the story that doesn't work because the tech isn't supporting it, you know, can throw you out of the experience. Other concern entrepreneurs might have is financing. How do I get someone to help me build it and then doing relationships, finding relationships that could, you know, one plus one equals more than two, right? So how do you... So you have to get really creative when it comes to funding right now, unless you're doing location-based, which also requires a certain amount of investment to get it up to a bar where you wanna be, you know, showing it to people with all the haptic effects when it's, you know, heat, smell, vibration, stuff like that, you know, that's not cheap to develop. But as far as, like, you know, working with film foundations, we're fortunate enough to be sponsored by fledgling funds and chicken and egg, but we also were able to get partnerships with people like Intel and NVIDIA and also work with people who, you know, come from a traditional film background. There's not one way to successfully fund a project. There's a million and that's why it's interesting that the technology's innovating, but also the marketplace is as well. One of the things I wanna ask is as any new industry gets building, is cultures form early, DNA forms in the entrepreneurs and the pioneers. And one of the big hottest topics in the creative world is inclusion and diversity. So what's the makeup of the culture of this new generation? Because the democratization means everyone can participate, everyone's involved. What's the state of the community vis-a-vis diversity, inclusion, and the role of the actors in the community? Well, I think it's important to understand that VR has a profound ability to place you in somebody else's shoes. The trick though is to make sure that those feel like they're your shoes, but I think that we're learning a lot more about storytelling techniques, and we're able to empower people that their voices were previously not heard. The tricky thing is being able to educate all different groups of people how to use the technology, but once they're enabled and empowered to do it, it's amazing what you can experience inside the headset. So VR can be an enabler for education, outreach, a variety of things? Yes, I mean the term empathy, empathy machine, gets thrown around a lot. You could do a drinking game around it for panels when people are talking about it, but it's important to know that there is a truth to that, and it's, yeah, the perspective shift from looking at a screen, a 16 by nine screen, where you can look away, and then dissolving the screen and becoming that person, becoming the director, the actor, the camera person, the editor. When you're in the first person perspective, there's so much more, feels more personal, and that's a really interesting angle that we're going to continue to do. So you could walk on someone's shoes, literally. Yes, you literally can. You just have to make sure the tracking system's proper, or else you'll look like there's, it's like a, it can become a horror movie pretty quickly, if your leg is behind your head. Lisa, your thoughts on this, that is important to you. Yeah, I mean I think it's fascinating because I've been in tech for a really long time, and seen many, many trends. I mean the first straw I had at Intel was I was a PC tech, and as you can imagine as a female, I think there was one other tech female in the department at the time, and I would get funny looks when I would show up with my bag, you know, they'd be like, hi, can I help you? I'm like, I'm not here to deliver coffee. I'm here to fix your computer, you know? So I've seen a lot of trends, and it's super exciting to me to see so much diversity across culture, across country. I mean, we're having got, we had guys come in from all over the world from even war-torn, they've escaped their country just several years ago, and they're coming in there, bringing all that creativity to the market. We're seeing very, very strong female contingent from the filmmaker perspective, so it's this wonderful, wonderful, just primordial soup of people that I think are growing their own voice and their own power, their breaking molds as far as how you actually get content produced. Distribution is kind of crazy right now. I mean, how do you get it distributed? There's like so many different ways, but all of those things are so important to the evolutionary and biological process of this, that we kind of, yes, we need to let it go, and sometimes we're frustrated, we're like, where's the standards? Where's the one ring to rule them all? Whether there's not gonna be one, and it's good for us that there's not right now. It's frustrating from a business perspective sometimes. You're like, I can't peanut butter myself around all of these places, but I think it's just a very unique time where so many people are weird. The technology is accessible. That means that so many creators can now bring their fresh voice to this space, and it's just gonna be fascinating to continue to watch. That's awesome. Well, two more questions, and I'll give you some time to think about the last one, which is your perspective on Sundance, what's happening this year, your personal view of what you think's happening, what might happen this, that they're in this year. But the question I have for you now is to go down the line, we'll start with Brooks here, and talk about the coolest thing that you're involved in right now. It actually has to be hero. I mean, we're debuting it here at Sundance. We've been working on it and not talking about it for about nine months, and it's been very difficult. Again, it's sacrosanct to the experience that you don't know literally what you're getting into. And the emotional response has been essentially our goal, trying to find out how far can we take that you actually being in a space, moving around, having that interactivity, doing what you would do, but it being your story and how deeply we can absolutely affect a human being. And again, watching people come out, it's one of those things I've been doing in game development, I've worked on films, I've done all kinds of stuff. And you usually get a chance when someone experiences something you've made, you walk up and you go, what do you think? And that's not at all what we can do with ours. Because- How has it impacted you, that reaction? Well, I personally suffer a significant PTSD and I've had some traumas in my life. And so it's been incredibly powerful to be able to share these things with people, share this emotion in a deeply profound, yet amazingly personal way, which I'm amazingly fortunate to be able to be a part of it. All right, thanks for sharing. Coolest thing that's going on with you right now, here at Sundance. Oh, just the fact that I'm here at all, I mean, it's incredible, right? Personally, I was able to be an advisor on the Spheres Project that is premiering here with Eliza McNett. She's someone who was an Intel science fair winner back in high school and kind of came back to us. And so just to see the evolution of an artist really from the beginning, and to the point where they've been able to come here to Sundance, I'm very passionate about the work that we're doing with Sansar. I'm kind of considering myself one of the chief storytellers at Intel around virtual reality and this new move into social where people are like, well, what's this game? I'm like, it's not a game, it's you are the game. You are the interactivity you become. The person that makes the space interesting. We're just really setting the scene for you. And there's so many, there's a lot of different people kind of chasing this, be togetherness. But what we've been able to produce there, and just to be able to explore some of my own personal ideas has just been such a gift. But then to be working with guys like these on the panels and see what they're doing and just be in touch is really just an exciting time. Awesome. Probably other than the people and the projects or the projects that are being shown here, we're working on our new project which we would have loved to premiere here, but we did, basically when you get in, you have two months to create a piece, you have a demo and then you have to finish it. So we're taking a little bit more time. This one's gonna be about a year development cycle. It's called Breathe where we take you from where Giant left off, where in Giant the ceiling collapses on a family but they're in front of you. But in this experience we use a breathing apparatus to basically bring yourself back to life and then you realize you're trapped under rubble and you remove the, we actually wanna have physical objects on top of you that are gonna be tracked. So you're moving rubble from you and you realize that you're a six year old girl, you're the survivor from Giant. And you get to witness what it's like to be a future refugee in different key moments of our life that use breath, whether it's a flirtatious moment blowing a dandelion, seeing your own breath in snow as a drone shows you a message that your parents pre-recorded on your 18th birthday. This is all in the future, obviously. But every time you walk around an object you actually grow 10 to 15 years older in the experience. So as you get older, the world becomes smaller and then we witness what it's like for her last breath from being six years old to being 90 years old. But it's a profound personal experience. That sounds cool, cool. Gary, cool thing that's new and you're involved in right now at Sundance. Wow. If I was to say it was all cool that would be a bit trite. They say if you enjoy what you do, is it really a job? And I'm lucky enough to be in that position because working with all these guys here and people around the place, they're doing such great things that every day I wake up and I'm astounded of where the industry's going. In terms of what we're doing here at Sundance, then we're really starting to push those envelopes as well. I've been lucky enough to be involved with Dunkirk and Spider-Man Homecoming last year, so some great pieces there. And then moving out into this year, we've got some other developments which I can't mention at this point, but we're showing things like AR and VR mashups. So we haven't talked much about augmented reality here. It's an evolutionary, it's not a replacement, both can be used. And we've started to really start to blend those two technologies now so you can still see the outside world. Just touching on the commercial side and healthcare is very big for me, that's where I think the really cool stuff is happening. Entertainment is great. And that's really pushing the envelope and allowing us to then take it for the good of humankind. Content's everywhere, it's not just entertainment. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you start looking at MRI scans inside of VR or AR, talking a patient through it so they can actually see exactly what you're talking about. You're now no longer pointing at flat things on a screen. You're now actually taking them through it. If you're using AR, you can actually judge the responses of the patient as to how they're reacting to the news. And effectively inside of the VR, and what's really cool for me is seeing people's reaction to that content and to the entertainment content. That's awesome. Okay, final question. This is a little bit of self-serving because I'd like you to help me do my job at Silicon Angle. If you were a reporter and you were gonna report the most important stories happening this year at Sundance or really kind of what's really happening versus what's kind of being built to be happening here, what's the story? What is the story this year at Sundance 2018 in your personal perspective? We'll go down the line and share your observations. Okay, well, mine here, I'm a Sundance newbie. This is my first year of being here and absolutely astounded by the community spirit that's around. I go to a lot of technical trade shows and technical presentations. People coming here with a willingness to learn, wanting to learn from other people, it's been touched on already. It's the pool of knowledge that's available inside of Sundance that everybody that comes here can actually tap into to create better content, to learn, to learn not what to do as well as learn what to do. And I just think that's brilliant because in that community spirit, that's really gonna help enable this industry quickly. Wenzel, you got some experience. What's your thoughts? Obviously, this Intel house, just a little plug for you, Lisa. Check out. We got that, okay, good. No, I mean, yeah, the people that's here and every year we come here and see where the high watermark is, all these people are, some of these teams first started with two people and then they grew to six and then by the end of it, there's 100 people working around the clock, pulling all nighters to be able to give the latest and greatest of what's available with these current tools. So it's amazing because the work itself doesn't really mean anything until people get to experience it. And so that's nice that they make a big splash. The people here are very attentive to it. It's a very nice audience and this will continue the momentum for future festivals throughout the year, but also will excite people that have never done VR before. People who have never been to Sundance before, we're seeing that there's a lot of new people and that will continue to influence many years to come. So you think VR is the top story here being told? So now, I mean, so as far as like just to generalize, I would say last year was kind of the big VR year. This is kind of the big AR year. Next year is gonna be the AI year. And then after that, we're gonna start putting them all together. Great, great feedback. I think it's just exciting for Intel just to be back here. I think Intel hasn't been here in quite some time. Dell coming in here, I think probably one of the breakout years for us to come back and really talk to creators about what we're doing from the Intel Studios all the way through to the stuff you can take home and do at home. And I think coming in, I feel like we're coming back here with a purpose, really not just to be here to be seen. We're really here with real things and want to have real conversations on how tech can enable what people are doing, not really, you know, not just from a brand perspective, but from a real hands-on. It's a great demos too, the phenomenal tech. Really just, yeah, everything from the AI stuff we have to the social to the great new pieces that have been submitted here like we mentioned with Sphere. So I think, yeah, it doesn't feel gratuitous to me, you know, that Dell or Intel is here this year. It's really, we've really come with a purpose. You guys are moving the needle. It's really awesome. We need more horsepower out. Brooks, your thoughts on Sundance this year, observation, the vibe, what would you tell your friend back home when you get back? For me, it would be, I think, it's almost a non-store. It's like the opposite of a store. It's the just deep integration of VR into the normal Sundance flow, I think has been interesting. Some people have been here for a few years and back in the day when it was one or two, it was a lot of, oh, you do VR, what's that then? Whereas now you see a lot more people who are crossing over going to see documentaries than they come to see a VR piece and it's just a part of the normal flow and the team at New Frontier has done exceptional work to kind of make sure that they have this ridiculous high level of broad content for all kinds of people, all different kinds of experiences, all high-end things, but it's not that VR's here. Oh, good, we have a VR section. It's a lot more of an integrated setup and it's been really encouraging to see. Well, you guys have been great. It's been very inspirational, great information. You guys are reimagining the future and building it at the same time. So, entrepreneurially and also with content and technology. So thanks so much for sharing on this panel, the new creative. This is SiliconANGLES theCUBE's coverage of Sundance 2018 here at the Intel Tech Lounge at the Sundance Film Festival. I'm John Furrier. Thanks for watching.