 Hello everybody, can everybody hear me alright? Perfect, that's great. I just wanted to welcome all of you to this 2022 flow symposium named A New Reality. I want to give a warm welcome to our speakers and to all of you who made it here. I believe the speakers are super interesting so I think you'll have a great day. So first of all about me, my name is Lewis, I'm the commissioner of the symposium committee and together with the committee I believe we organized a super interesting symposium which I hope you'll all enjoy. Then I'm a masters data science student but we try to combine all three faculties into this so you all have some interesting topics. So first of all about the speakers of today. First of all we have Nathan Wildman here. He'll be talking about how game streaming affects all of us. I already saw the presentation and I think it's going to be super interesting. Then secondly we have Dr George Knox, he's here as well. He will talk about Spotify's influence on us also as a society and some remarkable stuff in there that you wouldn't think was the case. Then there will be an intermezzo because I believe you all need to break from time to time. So that'll be 10 to 15 minutes. We'll have a live virtual reality experience which I think will be cool for some of the people that haven't experienced VR before. Then we have Robert Bauer. He has his own company regarding virtual reality and he will talk about the future of virtual reality and how he helps hospitals regarding virtual reality. So that's a super interesting topic as well. Then before each of the speakers we set up a short quiz to test your knowledge about the subject and hopefully then at the end of each topic you learn some stuff about it. Then there's also going to be Q&As which I hope to be super interactive today. So if you could all just raise your hand I'll run up to you and let you ask the question to the speaker. So let's keep it interactive today. Then at the end of the symposium at around five we'll have some drinks and snacks in Esplanada which I guess you're all looking forward to as well. So those are there to enjoy as well. And then further I want to give a big thank you to the committee for organizing this to Studium Generale, to Mind Labs for sponsoring today. So let's give a warm round of applause for everyone that's here today. Then let's start with the first quick quiz because our first speaker will be Nathan Waldman. I think you all know the concept. You can scan the QR codes or fill out the code which I will put up on the screen right now. Do we have people in here already? Yep. So people are joining. I can see. Perfect. I'll give you 10 more seconds. Okay great. I think most people are in by now. So let's start. Gaming. Yeah I love to play games. I used to play games when I was younger or I have actually never played online games. I'm just curious to see your answers. Okay so we have 35 people in here. Nice and interactive guys. Thank you. So it seems mostly that people used to play games when they were younger and some people play online games still. There's one person that has never played online games. Does anyone dare to say who they are? No it's good that you're here. We get to learn something about that. Okay and the next. What kind of games did or do you play? Jennifer didn't play anything so that's alright. Okay race. FIFA. I see some League of Legends in there. Mostly Mario games, Nintendo games. Wings Club. Who used to play Wings Club? Alexander. Nice. Cool. So I mostly see Nintendo games, Pokemon, Mario, Zelda and there comes some Minecraft. Call of Duty as well. GTA Online. So Spay the Pentanel. I know that one as well. So it's a nice variety of games. I think we're done for the quiz. I just want to give Nathan Wildman a big hand and introduce him to the stage. First thing. Can everybody hear me okay? Is that working? I'll try not to like flail into it or well probably cough once or twice but that's nothing I can do about it. This is yours. Thank you. So first thing to say. Thank you very much for having me. Super nice to see everybody. Nice to see a bunch of very familiar faces. I hope you guys are all doing very well. So maybe just a quick little thing about me. I work in the philosophy department. I do a bunch of random things research wise. I do two broad different things though. I work in kind of logic and metaphysics which is not what we're going to talk about today because very few people would be excited about that. The other thing I do is I work in digital aesthetics. And in particular I'm really interested in VR and what we're going to talk about today what I like to call voyeur gaming which is basically watching other people play video games. I'm too lazy to even play games myself. I get other people to do it. Spend all my time watching weird people play games on YouTube. It's awesome. So what I'm really going to talk to you about is streaming. We are very familiar with it at least most of you I think are students so you will have experienced this. I have some first hand experience doing some teaching streaming and also doing some game streaming. I was hoping to wear the same hoodie today but my wife said I couldn't. You can see the wear of the lockdown there as well. I've really gone downhill. So my plan is pretty brief. I want to start by just kind of giving you a super fast, super compressed description of what I take streaming to be because I think that's maybe a helpful place for us to start. A very potted history. I'm not going to talk about a lot of things. I'm not going to talk about anything about streaming music. I think George will talk to you about that. And then try and draw some history lessons from it. And that's kind of just generally thinking about streaming. The second half of the talk, the kind of more interesting one, I hope, is I'm going to pivot to think about specifically how streaming has impacted video games. And here I'm going to make three points. First I'm going to talk about voyeur gaming because again I love that stuff. Second I want to talk about streamers and VTubers. Let me just really quickly. Do people know what VTubers are? Yes. I slightly worry some. And then lastly I want to say a little bit about games as service and why the sad face is there. So that's the plan. Stop me if I go too long. I've never given this presentation before so hopefully it will be in time. So place to start. What is streaming? Well I think the first thing to note is it's not content. I don't think it's wrong to kind of talk about streaming as a kind of content. It's a content delivery system, right? It's a way to deliver content to viewers or users or something like this. Come back to talking about potential streaming content as something special in a few moments. And I think importantly it's worth noting that there's lots of different forms streaming can take. Basically I think there's two that tend to happen. Correct me if I'm wrong here. There's something like a kind of on demand, right, where you go and you find a file and you watch it? Or there's live streaming. Anyone who's gone through lockdown with regards to education has probably gone through both of these forms. What I don't think or shouldn't count as streaming is downloading. I think that's just a different kind of content delivery system. We can quibble about this a little bit but I think it's just sort of helpful to have something like a definition or working definition in the back. What's nice is streaming basically has a lot of different media applications in a lot of different contexts. You see an education. You actually get education with regards to closed captioning of lectures. YouTube does this freely, which I really love. As long as you have an American accent, which is great for George and I, you have things like this in news and politics. I think probably a really cool example of streaming is literally the live audio translations you get in like the UN. One of the hardest jobs in the world, I think. Something a little bit near and dearer to my heart, in entertainment and sports, you have AV streaming or text or live chat, so I can sit at home and watch Villains They Lose. It's great. Familiar stuff. We're all kind of used to this. Where did it come from and how did it start? Here's something kind of cool. Arguably the very first form of streaming was the intro foam. It's French, so I'm probably butchering the name. This was a super cool thing where you could call in on a telephone and listen to an opera being performed live. So that's awesome. And it went from 1881 to 1932. You've got to figure they probably intermitted during the war years. I'm not so sure. But like the history of streaming is kind of incredible, at least with regards to that live access to something that you're a long way away from. But the more internet-based form arguably starts in the early 90s with what's called Star Works, so close to a copyright infringement, right? They provided on-demand impact films, full motion video. I've actually dug up on YouTube one of the clips of some of these. They were absolutely terrible. They're about this big. They're about three seconds long. But hey, they did it. Slightly more interesting. In 1993, you had the first full audio-visual stream of the band severe tire damage. There's a cool story here. You guys probably know this, right? They literally used half of the bandwidth on the internet at the time because there just wasn't very much going. So just to simply project this little, again, terrible little postage stamp-sized thing of the band, also not really a very good band, unfortunately. That's personal taste. A little bit later, 1995, ESPN gives you live audio stream of Igyanke's Mariner's Game so we can all be bored about baseball online. 1999, you have this presidential webcast with Bill Clinton. This is so infamously, Al Gore talks about he invented the internet. This is a kind of connection where that came from. Slightly more interesting and we'll speed up a little bit. 2005, YouTube is founded. Used to have pretty substantive limits, pretty substantive short restrictions. Now let me say there's a whole bunch of technological innovations going on in the background here. We're going to just skirt over it. We're thinking more, we'll call it sociologically. 2006, Justin TV is founded. Who knows what Justin TV is? Cool. Justin TV is Twitch. That's how it started. Here's really, really cool thing. It actually started off as you literally would tune in and watch Justin live his life. He was one of the founders. It was not very commercially successful. But it's still around and it's Twitch. Also interestingly in 2006, Amazon releases their first video on demand and a connection, which I think is really neat. By 2007, Netflix and Hulu began streaming services. Before that, Netflix was actually a DVD rental company. You ordered your DVDs, they'd mail them to you and you'd mail them back. Interesting for me, 2007, the iPhone's released. Fundamentally changes how we absorb media. More importantly, the first video let's play is made by Slow Beef. We'll talk about him in a few minutes. That's slightly less on the important scale. And also with regards to games, the Chinese company Tencent probably invents or at least perfects the notion of games as service. We'll talk a little bit about that in a few minutes. As things kind of go on, we can see some things. So in 2011, Twitch pivots hard to do video games. Zoom is founded, FIFA Ultimate Team is introduced by EA in FIFA. By 2013, I love this, 2013 Twitch, the pivot to video games, over 45 million viewers per month. YouTube, seeing how much money Twitch is making, starts saying, hey, people should be doing live streaming with us, too. By 2016, do people know who PewDiePie is? Sorry. I don't want to talk about him, but we have to. He's earning more than 50 million a year, basically streaming games. Facebook and Instagram, seeing what's happened with Twitch and YouTube, try and get in on that sweet, sweet money train too. The last couple years, we've seen an explosion of these services. Apple TV Plus and Disney Plus launch, Skype and Zoom in 2020 explode. I wonder why that is. What happened in 2020? Ninja returns to Twitch after the Microsoft own mixer fails completely and totally despite the huge amount of money they put into it. Kind of interesting. In 2021, Coda wins an academy award. Coda was developed by the people running Apple TV Plus. I think, again, super potted history, just picking up on a few quick little things. So, what can we learn from this little silly potted history? Two things about why streaming is risen and two additional points. Here's the first one. I think streaming really explodes because of the ease of accessibility, both in terms from the viewer's perspective and from the producer's perspective. As the internet becomes more accessible, as more and more people get on it, you have a huge customer base if you're thinking about this from the producer's perspective. On the flip, if you're a viewer, you can sit at home and you can watch Villains They Lose, you can watch, I don't know, Excelsior Lose, you can watch PSV Lose, hopefully, right? You can watch any kind of football you want. You don't even have to get up. I can watch football, American football. Sorry, I shouldn't use that term. There's all sorts of cool stuff that's literally just there, and I don't even have to get out of my bed. Awesome. That ease of accessibility is incredible. Similarly, I think another kind of explanation here is cost effectiveness. It is much cheaper to just set up a webcam and start making a TV show than it is to actually try and record a proper television show. Cool. I think that's a big sell. It's super easy to store them. We don't have to worry about a lot of the machinery. You don't have to worry about union actors. I think that's a pretty good explanation. Now, the two broader points. Here's something that I think happened in the last, yeah, we'll call them 10 years, right? There's been a huge amount of fragmentation. So we went from let's call them, this is in the US, so broadly three streaming services or something along these lines to, I'm not going to count that, right? A lot. Just tons. Arguably, there's something like fatigue happening here in the market. People are getting a little bit sick, right? How many of us have gone back to torrenting shows because we can't be asked to get an Apple TV Plus thing? I freely admit, I really love Ted Lasso. I have never paid a dime for Apple TV Plus. You figure out where I got the show from, right? So there's something interesting there, and I think kind of pulling people in, pushing people away. The thing that's most interesting for me, though, is something like aesthetic gains and losses. So the aesthetic gains, as I understand them, are basically just that we have a whole new massive audience and a whole new massive group of people who are making art. And that's awesome. The explosion and the fragmentation means that there's going to be so many more people making art, and that's great. The problem is you start to see not so much consolidation, but certain kinds of organizations control how things develop. So there's a particular kind of Netflix documentary style that I think is really stifling the way that lots of documentary filmmaking is going now. A particular kind of way that they use music, the sort of narrative that gets developed, it's really crushing a lot of different other ways to approach making documentaries. So that's a game and a loss kind of brought about by what's happening here with streaming. So that's just a kind of general thing. Let's talk about what I'm actually here to talk about at streaming and video games. So as I said, I want to make three points about the relationship between video games and streaming. Here's the first one. Streaming has massively... Well, maybe a better way to put this. There was no way to separate out the popularity of what I'll call voyeur gaming from streaming because they are basically the same thing. So what's voyeur gaming? Well, it's basically when you have captured gameplay sessions, often accompanied by commentary, right? These are things like, hey, what PewDiePie makes, right? There's some gameplay, not always, but sometimes a face cam. There's reactions going on, things like this. So these can arguably be traced back, well, they can be traced back to sitting on the couch with your siblings kind of making fun of them as they play their games. But on the internet, these can probably be traced back to something awful forums. In about 2004, Michael Sawyer, aka Slowbeef, this is his avatar, screenshot let's plays of Metal Gear Solid 2 where he plays it and he just takes, literally with his phone, pictures, not his phone, he takes an actual camera because it's before the iPhone, he takes pictures of himself playing, posts them with some descriptions of what happens in the game on something awful forums. By 2007, he's making video, video of himself playing the game The Immortal, which is a terrible game. Thank God he played it because no one could actually get any joy out of it. It's very fun to listen to him and just struggle through it. This is a screenshot from it. So what was neat is the pivot to video meant that let's players could, as Newman says, annotate their gameplay in real time. Of course, the next move, the really fun move, is then to introduce live streaming where instead of just a kind of pre-packaged thing where there's something like post commentary, you as an audience member get to watch as the player is playing the game. I think there's a really cool quote from Slobys here, I'll read it. He says, Streams happen live, don't involve editing after the fact. For this reason, they tend to be a bit more exciting. It's interesting as a let's play, but seeing two people managing the same jump in Seek is exciting live. So what's he talking about with the two ones? This highlights, I think, one of the really cool things that streaming brought about. And that's one mind Mario. Have people heard of this or seen this before? So what you have is a bunch of people all linked up to one version of Super Mario World, and they're all playing at the same time. And every, I think it's three seconds, it switches who's actually in control. So you better be doing the same motions, because otherwise Mario's gonna, it's stupidly fun to watch. But I think this general idea of this kind of a level of interaction, a liveness, really, really fundamentally changes the way that people not engage with video games, but engage with people playing games in a way that couldn't have happened before. Another kind of fun one is, so Smite, God, five or six years ago, played through a game called Environmental Station Alpha. It's a Metroidvania, very fun. There's a bunch of really complex puzzles. So what did he do? He streamed for five hours straight, and we all got in and we helped together to figure out the puzzles. It felt like we were solving the game together. And that's, again, driven by this sort of mix between gameplay and streaming. But there, here's the coolest kind of gameplay form. Basically just where we get rid of the streamer all together. Presumably people have heard about Twitch plays Pokemon, right? So the basic idea is that you see people kind of inputting things, normally what would be the chat. They're actually just inputting commands, and then the game executes those commands. So the audience, the people who are, you know, normally would just be interacting with the player are the players. It's wicked cool. They actually managed to beat Pokemon Red. It took them a very long time. Because as you can see, Red is a little bit special when he's controlled by. At the largest point when they were playing this, had over 80,000 people playing Pokemon all at the same time. Which is super cool. And that only works because of the streaming stuff. So that's the first point. Here's the second point. And this is kind of leaning off the back of the first one. And this is, hey, look, being a streamer is a legitimate professional. Well, legitimate in some way, right? You can make money doing it. Let's put it that way. And I think that's very interesting because a lot of these people, not all of them, but a lot of them are really interested and invested in developing their craft here. Now the flip side to that is I think that the way streaming works tends to spur a certain kind of interaction that facilitates often problematic parasocial relationships here. And this is, again, I think driven by the fact that there's a live response. There's a really neat video here. I've linked it, but I realized you guys don't have a slide, so it doesn't really help. There's a very fun video about the parasocial problem of streaming. I think it does this very well. That's a kind of negative side to being a streamer. Here's the positive side. And this is where we get V-tubers. So V-tubers, here's Nanners. This is my friend Eat the Pen. V-tubers, instead of having themselves as the player, they use 3D models. And these 3D models often have a kind of mapping to what the person's actually doing. So if the person's like looking around or laughing, the model does too. And I think this is interesting. It's often in kayfabe, for those of you who are interested in wrestling, so done in kind of character, something like this. But it facilitates a kind of novel form of self-expression that I find really difficult to see happening, unless there's this sort of streaming stuff lurking in the background. So that's the second. Here's the third. And it's unfortunately kind of negative. So the third impact is about games as a service. So this is the idea that instead of just basically a game is something you sell and then you're done with it, as a games maker, you can get a continuing revenue model. You're going to keep earning somehow, some way. There's lots of forms that games of service can take. The one that I really want to focus on is cloud gaming. So this is where you buy a copy of a game, for example, Battleforge from EA. And what they give you is effectively just a client. And the client lets you log on to some server farm somewhere out there, and that's where the game is actually run. You don't even own a copy of the game. Not strictly. You own access to it. And if they ever shut that server farm down, cool, you don't get to play no more. Which is exactly what happened with Battleforge. Within three years of release, it was gone. So it's still in my Steam library, but it can't do nothing with it. And I think this is, again, something that's come about precisely because of streaming. It only works because you can actually play the game without it being on your machine. So I basically want to wrap up and say, hey, streaming I think has been both good and bad for video games. It's been interestingly good aesthetically. I think it's been bad for the industry and maybe potentially also bad aesthetically. There's a kind of connection here to that Netflix documentary thing. But yeah, that's the stuff I really wanted to say. I have some further questions if you want to talk about them or consider them. But that's me done. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Nathan Wildman. Wasn't that a super interesting talk? I think it was. I learned some stuff that I didn't know. I didn't even know that Justin TV was the first kind of Twitch. Yeah, kind of Twitch in the first hand. And also a kind of live reality TV because he was streaming himself. That's kind of weird. So for the Q&A, we have room for a few questions. Who would like to ask Nathan a question? Anyone want to put their hands up? I was wondering how you feel about videos that analyze live streams after the fact that maybe take for example what I've watched myself. I don't really watch any live streams, but I've watched a analysis of speedrun live streams where after the fact they look back on several years of history of this is how the speedrunning world has developed of Mario Kart. And they use the live stream as an example and they show the live reactions, but it's someone else. It's not the actual streamer. And I feel like that's another layer of removal for me as the audience from the actual content itself. But it also adds another layer of value because there's the analysis and the depth. I'm wondering how you view that. Yeah, I entirely agree with you. I think you're exactly right to point out that there's this kind of weird distance from the game. But there's something really cool and interesting there about the analysis. So one of the things, actually, if I can go back, so one of the things I think is really interesting about voyeur gaming, and it comes through, I think, also in what you're talking about, is you might think there's a problem with engaging with games only in this kind of voyeuristic way. So put really cheaply, you might think games are essentially interactive, right? In order to engage with them properly, you have to play. But if the way you're engaging with games is by watching someone else play, you're doing it wrong. It's a bit like I pay somebody to go look at a painting and then they come back and give me a report about it. It's not quite the same, but not terribly far off. I think there's something actually valuable and aesthetically distinctive in that kind of remove. So yeah, I think there's something really interesting there. I've got to think about it a little more exactly how to tease out what's really cool there, but I'm definitely on your side. Thank you for the question and the interesting answer. Is there one more question? We have room for one more question. Yep. Hi, thank you for the talk. Sometimes I feel like there are more and more games being developed that are meant as streaming games first and playing games second. So how do you view this and how do you view the way that games remain a unique medium, general media playing field? Oh yeah, good. I didn't mention that kind of stuff mostly because I was trying to go fast and made a mistake. But I think just to go back to this, yeah, I think one thing to mention is just how massively this kind of stuff has impacted the game industry. So you have game companies paying streamers to basically hype their games. You have built into the PS4 and the PS5 controller that kind of like let's do the share button. I think it's in the switch too. I don't have a switch, but yeah, there's something weird there. And I'm not sure it's necessarily impeding games as a distinct kind of medium or getting in the way of their aesthetic development. Mostly because I think there's a sufficient kind of indie stuff going on, like an indie industry, that's the wrong word, but that's the best I can come up with, to kind of keep it real. I do worry about how this might impact some AAA games. And especially when we tie that with this stuff, I think there's just a big worry that as companies start to focus more and more on like, hey, let's get a bunch of people like kind of engaging with tweets from our game. Let's make sure people don't actually own the game. I get hackles starting to raise there. So yeah, it's a cool question. Thank you. Perfect. Thank you. Then let's give a round of applause to Nathan Waldman for his great presentation. And we hope to hear more from you during the panel discussion. Then let's go through to where we left. Next of all, we're going to go do a quick quiz before we introduce Dr. George Knox to the stage who will talk about Spotify's influence. If you could all scan the code and otherwise I will open it right here. Perfect. Got it working again. So we'll just wait for the participants to increase. Seems like some phone's batteries might have died. Okay, I hope most people are in now. I see one more person trying to take a photo of the QR code. Maybe they can join a little later. So first of all, do you use Spotify? Yes. I use another music streaming platform. Well, they are there, but yeah. And I don't listen to music. I was kind of expecting this answer, but it's still kind of crazy to see that Spotify is such a big majority of the music streaming market. Who doesn't listen to music? I'm quite curious. Okay. Well, good that you're here. I think you'll learn something about Spotify and music streaming. I'm not here to shield Spotify in any way. So it's just my independent opinion. Next question. What genre of music do you listen to? Okay, hip-hop is massive in the screen. Everything, almost anything. There's some specific genres, but there's also some overlapping genres like touch music that can be rock, pop, indie, jazz or whatever. Eurovision music. Oh, there we go. Techno, ska. I'm not even really aware of ska music. Is it something big? Okay. I'm sorry. I'm not aware of it. Metal. There's a lot of different genres up here, so it's cool to see such a diverse group of people. Then I would like to end the quiz and welcome on stage Dr. George Knox. Thank you very much. Hi everyone. Yeah, my name is George Knox. I'm an associate professor in the marketing department at Tilburg University. Yeah, I saw the Sea Shanties thing. I was just telling Nathan my six-year-old son is totally into Sea Shanties. So we have the Sea Shanties playlist on Spotify. I've heard a lot of those shanties many, many times. So yeah. I want to talk to you a little bit about Spotify's influence, and this is some research that I've done and some of which is ongoing. Let me first tell you a little bit about myself, and this also relates a bit to Spotify. So I'm from Philadelphia in the US, and in 2006 I got my PhD, and my first job after graduating was in Tilburg. So I packed up all my stuff, I put all my CDs in boxes and whatnot, and I shipped them over to Tilburg, and yeah, I worked here for five years, and then I decided that I wanted to go back to Philadelphia for a little bit. So I accepted a job back in Philadelphia in 2011, and once again I took all my CDs and I put them in boxes and I shipped them back to Philadelphia. And then in 2013 I came back to Tilburg, and instead of shipping my stuff that just seemed ridiculous, Spotify now had started, and so it just made a whole lot more sense to me instead of putting all this stuff in boxes and having it shipped there to join Spotify and just have all of my music in the cloud. And it was very obvious to me as somebody who had made this trans Atlantic journey that there are some drawbacks of ownership, so that streaming where you don't own the physical thing, that that's actually nice sometimes, that there's a drawback at least for having possession, so physical possession of these goods. So Spotify, you know, you can think of it as sort of an all-you-can-eat buffet of music that lives in the cloud. And some quick facts that I got about this recently is that the number of subscribers is quite, is 182 million, so it's enormous. A lot of people, like what was it, almost 100% of people here are on Spotify. There are 82 million tracks that are available. It's available in 183 markets. Yeah, I mean, so it's grown tremendously, and it's a very widely used service. Yeah. A brief history of the music industry, so the music industry basically in the beginning of the 2000s took a dive, did quite badly, so I don't know if anyone here used Napster. Yes, Nathan. I figured you'd be the type. Yeah, so illegal downloads and stuff like that, that was one of the reasons that at least people were buying fewer and fewer CDs. So that would be in the red part down here. And yeah, the industry, you know, revenues, so about 2008 Spotify started, and you can sort of see that streaming, the blue part here, basically is now the majority of music revenues. So streaming is sort of the dominant business model right now, at least in music, and it's credited with saving the music industry. So it's important, since it's so ubiquitous, to understand what effect that has on our listening behavior. And so that's what I'm going to talk to you about. What is Spotify's influence on us as listeners? So we have some research and I want to tell you about it, and so that looks at how Spotify influences the total amount of music that we listen to, what type of music we listen to, what new music we discover, so that's new to us. And lastly, whether it makes us more similar or more different to others in terms of what we listen to. So for example, we may all discover more new music on Spotify, but is it the same new music that we're all listening to, or are we sort of discovering new music that's more different? It might be a little bit worried, for example, if we're all discovering the same new music that Spotify is promoting, and so we might be worried that it becomes like just a big radio station that's just promoting more and more stuff that we're all listening to. So we want to check that out, that's sort of the last thing. Let me tell you a little bit about the method behind this, because I think this is sort of interesting, and it has to do with big data. We got data on what people listen to, and what platform they use to listen to it with, from a company called Last FM. Not actually, when I say a company, I mean this is just a scrolling website that would say, you know, this user is listening to this sort of track on Spotify, and it could be that they were listening to it, for example, on iTunes or something else. This would record that, and we sort of monitored this continuously for a number of users, and over time, that gave us this sort of panel of users, and we could see what they were listening to and on what platform. So we could see, for example, what happens when somebody who wasn't on Spotify all of a sudden joined Spotify. And yeah, so when I talk about, so one sort of method here that's sort of maybe interesting to talk about too, is that it's a bit of using big data as a tool to approximate an experiment. If I wanted to see what Spotify's influence is, if I want to see what the causal effect of Spotify is on something, like listening behavior, I would, I'd be worried that if I just look at users who, or people who have Spotify and people who aren't Spotify members, the whatever, one person or something that isn't there, that that one person is just very different than the other 99, and so that they're really not equivalent. The person who doesn't join because they themselves chose not to join maybe doesn't like music as much. And so that sort of invalidates this comparison, when we want to say that, you know, we want to, the people that join Spotify and the people that don't join Spotify, we want them to be as equivalent as possible, except for the fact that one group joined and another group didn't. And so we'd be worried that these two groups are not equivalent because people make their own choices. Well, one thing is with big data, so let me step back, so an ideal experiment would be, you know, I randomly assigned half of this room to join Spotify and the other half to not join Spotify. And, you know, by sort of the logic of randomization and what not, you know, this, these two groups would be equivalent, except for the fact that one joined Spotify and the others doesn't. So if I compare the outcomes, your listening behavior, then I'd be able to say that the difference in your listening behavior is due to that Spotify and not due to some other factors. We don't have that experimental data, but what we do is we take, we use big data sort of an approximation here. We sort of say, well, in our data, we see so many people, we can basically look at all of these people who adopted Spotify and find their sort of data twin. Find all of the people who are very close to the people who adopted Spotify, except for the fact that they didn't. So in other words, they're from the same, they're from the same country, they have roughly the same age, they listen to the same amount of music, again, so that we're making an apples to apples comparison here. And so that when we look at the difference, we can say that that difference in listening behavior is due to Spotify and not due to some other factor. So that was a bit of an aside for the methods. Let me tell you about the results. So I said, I would tell you about Spotify's influence on sort of four different things. So the first is that the overall amount of stuff that we listen to increases when we join Spotify. Basically, in the long term, so even six months after joining, people are still listening to about 50% more music. That translates roughly in our sample to something like 20 more minutes per day. So they're like long-term effects of people listening to more stuff. And so if you think about why that may be, very simply, if we compare, yeah, yeah, that's a really good question. No, we only had access to Spotify because Spotify is just so, so we had too few people from, for example, Deezer to make any valid comparisons. So in our sample from, yeah, like 2016, 2015, Spotify was it, basically, in what we had. But that's a good question to see, like, yeah, to, there may be indeed differences across these different platforms that are important. So, yeah, so they listen, you listen to more music. And one sort of basic thing here is that, yeah, when you, for example, if you're comparing iTunes and Spotify, you know, variety is costly in the ownership model and sort of the iTunes model. To buy a song is 99 cents. On Spotify, it's free. So if you think of just the cost of listening or the cost of listening to more variety on Spotify, that's zero, or very close to zero. And so you would expect that people listen to more music because the cost of it has been, has gone down. So that sort of makes sense that, you know, once people join Spotify, they listen to more music overall. What happens to the stuff, like, so they listen to more music, but like, what happens to the types of music that they listen to? So we find that people listen to more variety, which is really nice. So they increase the number of artists that they listen to each week and also the amount of new songs that they listen to each week. So the breadth of variety increases. And we also can sort of characterize it by how much, like, for example, I mean, it's just a fact of the music industry, that they're superstars and then, you know, that have lots and lots of, that are extremely popular and listened to by everyone. Think of like Taylor Swift and, you know, others who are almost never listened to. So we find also in our, that people listen to fewer superstars. So fewer artists from like the top 100 or top 500 in our sample. And even, even sort of, maybe more interesting, is that they're, they concentrate listening less. So even, so users who join Spotify, they also sort of like spread their listening out to a wider set of artists. They don't concentrate their listening all on just like one song or one artist. They do that, they sort of spread it out more. So that's sort of interesting. So variety increases and it sort of fragments. It is spread out over a larger set of artists and songs. Because we have this data that tracks what people listen to, we can see when people find new stuff, stuff that they hadn't heard before. So one aspect here is about discovery. So how do, you know, how does joining Spotify affect the number of new songs and new artists that you listen to? Well, sort of no big surprise here because the cost of, of listening to stuff goes to zero when you join Spotify. It's just 10 euros a month. You can listen to however much music you want to. People listen to more new artists and new songs. So the story sort of, there's a bit of a sort of complication with this story though is that when you, when the cost of sort of, you know, when the cost of listening goes to zero, you don't have, you know, you're sort of caught, you know, if you don't know anything about a song or an artist, you know, you don't have to think that much about whether you want to hear them or not. Your only loss is sort of the loss of time that you have in listening to it. So actually people discover more music but most of that music is only listened to once. So the cost of experimentation also, you know, goes down and so we experiment more and most of those experiments are bad. And so indeed that's what we find. But sort of the, the flip side of that is if you look at the stuff that's listened to the most after people join Spotify, that is listened to even more so their top new discoveries are even better than they were before people joined Spotify. So people discover more music, most of it is sort of bad, but the best new discoveries are better on Spotify than not on Spotify. Last thing I wanted to tell you is does it make us more similar or different to each other? And so this is a bit what I was saying before. Yeah, so we discover new music on Spotify, which is what I just told you, you know, it might be problematic if we're all discovering the same new thing. And, you know, Spotify, of course, has these playlists, some of which are personalized, so in theory different for everyone, but some of them, of course, are the same. And one of the, one example of that is today's top hits, which has about 31 million followers. So that's that playlist is the same for everyone, right? So we might be worried that the new songs that we're discovering are being, you know, are all the same new songs that come from like this playlist like this. So it's sort of like a radio station on steroids that has a massive user base or listener base. So, yeah, you know, a bit further, you know, at the moment, you know, Spotify sort of is saying that if you agree, if it takes some of your royalties, it'll help promote your songs and put them on these playlists. And that's a bit of a controversy at the moment. So you can, like radio stations used to, you can sort of pay a little bit on the radio station so that it puts your record on. And so the same thing is sort of happening in the digital era. So again, we might be worried that this is sort of taking place. So at first glance, when people join Spotify, we find that they become more similar in terms of what they listen to. In other words that people, the stuff that we listen to looks more similar. But on closer inspection, it's not so bad. It turns out that because when somebody is a Spotify user, they increase the number of things that they listen to, the likelihood that any two users share a song increases just because we're listening to more things overall. So in other words, if similarity goes up just because I'm listening to more things overall, that's not so bad. I mean, people are listening to more things. That's okay. You can think about this in terms of welfare. That's probably good for them. So in other words, after correcting for this, the fact that people are listening to more stuff actually, what we find is that people are actually getting a little bit further apart. Not much, but slightly further apart. So what looks to be bad in the beginning, the fact that people are becoming more similar is really taken away once you account for the fact that just people are listening to more music overall when they join Spotify. So again, I think of that as not being sort of a bad thing for consumers, but actually a good thing. So people are listening to more music that's valued where the cost of listening is at zero, they're listening to more things. So the fact that we're more similar to each other actually isn't really that bad in the end. So yeah, so the conclusion here is, yeah, so what does Spotify's influence? So we listen to more music overall. We listen to more variety, fewer superstars and personal favorites. So we sort of fragment or listening across a wider array of artists and songs. We discover more new music, most of which is not good, but the best of which is better than it was before Spotify. And in the end, after accounting for listening more overall, we're actually more different, not more similar than before joining. So those are the findings from our research into this. How am I doing on time? Okay, well, five minutes. I'm happy to take questions. Some interesting stuff. I mean, we can leave this for later, but streaming is of course changing a lot. And yeah, I mean, I think some projects that I'm sort of working on at the moment or interested in working on are these types of things. So like, how do artists get discovered on Spotify? They have to pitch their music to get onto an appropriate playlist. Yeah. And you know, actually, this is a little bit like what Nathan was talking about. Are we sort of aesthetically limited by the sort of Spotify song? You know, there's there are also criticisms on Spotify that, you know, the chorus has to come in at 30 seconds. All of these songs sound alike, just like all of these Netflix documentaries, maybe are a little bit alike. So yeah, that's sort of an interesting idea of how the platform, which is so powerful, how that shapes the music that's being created. So that's one sort of area of research. And another weird thing that sort of come up here is that recently, hedge funds have invested in the rights of songs. So they've bought up the catalogs of like Bob Dillon, Taylor Swift and others. So when you're listening to a song on Spotify, actually the royalty that, you know, that you're is going probably to a hedge fund instead of the artist, at least for some of these. And so that's sort of interesting. So what is, you know, yeah, so what is that sort of mean for music and for consumers? So yeah, that's what I wanted to say. Yeah, if there are any, I'm happy to end right now. If there are any questions, I'm also happy to answer them. Perfect. Thank you very much. Let's give a hand to Dr. George Knox. Thank you. We can just go to the next slide. I think we do have room for a question if there is a burning question. I'm glad that there's Spotify because I have like 80,000 listening minutes and I'd be broke if there was only iTunes. So we have a question here in the back. I was wondering, considering that you said that everyone's listening goes up using Spotify, what do you think about listening fatigue with Spotify? Because like a lot of people, I feel like I experience it. I don't know what to listen to anymore because like everything, like listening to so many things that you get fatigued for choosing your music. If that makes sense. So you're saying what do people listen to now? What do you, sorry. I feel like people get fatigued over choosing their music because there are so many people. Oh, fatigue. Yeah, fatigued. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, I agree. I mean, so that's that's where recommender systems come in. Well, so the number of, yeah, so with like you know, with 84, whatever it was, million tracks, there's no way that anyone, 82 million, sorry. Yeah, it's, you know, no one knows all of these tracks. And so we really rely on things like recommender systems to try to like guide us to, to stuff that we'll like. But that's a big if, right? I mean, our recommenders, I mean, are they good or not? You know, maybe they push us in certain directions. Yeah. So, so there's more access. So, I mean, so, so it's nice that all these tracks are available and more people can create, more artists can connect with listeners everywhere. And that's a good thing. But on the other hand, they may not get discovered because they never end up on the recommender list or whatever, or they're not. And so that's not good. And so we have to sort of think of those, those, those two different things. And so, yeah. So choice overload and stuff like that, that's indeed something that's a problem. Yeah, maybe. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. George Knox. Thank you for the question. Let's give one round of applause again to Dr. George Knox. Here we are again. I see six people are in already. You're all quick. Let's just wait for all the people to be in again. Is everyone in? Let's wait for a few more. See more people coming in. All right. The first question. Have you ever used virtual reality? Maybe just now? Maybe in 2017? Maybe way before that. Okay. So almost everyone just used virtual reality. Is that just here? Or did you use it before already? Before here? Anyone else? Before as well? Okay, cool. Okay. So for a definition, we just had virtual reality. Then the next question is extended reality. Is anyone aware what extended reality means? And what do you think it is? We're curious to see. Mixing realities. Okay. No idea. VR with. Okay. So there's a lot of ideas. Also a lot of no ideas. Other sense included. Also with smells and touch. Okay. I think we're not quite there yet, but let's hope we get there in the future. Meta layers on top of physical. Mixing realities. Cool. I think if our third speaker is almost ready, he'll explain what extended reality means and talk a bit more about virtual reality. Let's welcome our third speaker and give a round of applause. Thanks a lot Lewis for the kind introduction. And somewhere in this presentation, I will touch upon the topic of extended reality and give you a small definition around that. First of all, I would like to ask you some questions. And the first one is to ask you to stand up. If you have a passion for extended reality, can be VR, AR, everything around these realities. If you've done something with it. Okay. Okay. Let's see. And now for start standing. If you find that accessible health care is important. Quite obvious. Quite obvious. Let's see. And keep standing if you work in health care. No one. All right. Okay. Based on that, I think our health care system is facing an incredible infarction. So what we see in health care is actually that the month is going up like crazy. We're all getting way older and older. That's because our health care system is getting way better. We can cure people who years ago we couldn't cure anymore. But people also get chronically ill. So even they, we all live longer. We also live longer with more diseases. We also see actually supply of health. So people actually want to work in health care or actually work in health care actually going down. You saw it here in the audience as well. No one works actually in health care. And if kind of like this current, this current development is continuing, in 2041 and four people needs to work in health care to actually to cope with the demand that is there for health care. So quite a big group here actually needs to shift their career and actually start working, working in health care if we don't change anything. And actually what we need in health care is actually a completely disruptive, different way of working. And for that we actually need more young and bright entrepreneurs. So people who actually were just standing and say, hey, for example, a passion for extended reality or maybe you have any other technologies. I would actually advise you to have a look at working in health care. You also need to be a little bit crazy because what we actually need in health care is more and more people working with technologies like extended reality. And that's basically an umbrella term for virtual reality. So that's what we see there, argument reality, mixed reality. So just a small definition. But we need more people who, like you, young, bright minds who are going to work in health care with, for example, a technology like extended reality because with these new kinds of technologies we can actually cope with this whole infarction that we're now facing in health care because with technology we can actually disrupt the way of how we work in health care and we can actually digitalize certain ways of working. And today I hope I can inspire you a little bit to also, even though you don't have the ambition to become a doctor or a nurse, you can still become active in health care. For example, with working like Cool Tech, like we're doing with single-care medical, we're working with extended reality in health care. So basically what we have done over the last years, we've developed an extended reality app store. You can basically see it as the Netflix for extended reality in health care where we integrate worldwide the best XR apps that are there, all in one centralized app store. And we mostly see now a lot of use cases for extended reality in pain management and medication reduction, education and training of health care staff and using XR for rehabilitation. And today I will show you a few examples in these three pillars of how XR is actually in these days already being used in health care and how we can actually, how we'll look in the future as well. And hopefully through that, that everyone starts realizing that of course I was actually just talking to you, we said, hey, these new kind of technology, always starting gaming and entertainment and that's usually what people focus on, but actually there's a huge need for working with these kinds of technologies, but also with artificial intelligence and with big data in quite old-fashioned industries like health care. So how do we use, for example, virtual reality for pain and medication reduction? Our brain is pretty fascinating, and sometimes it can be brilliant, sometimes it can be pretty stupid. But before example, see, and we see a lot of children who are facing actually also adults, I think one third of adults have a sincere fear of needles. But actually especially in health care, see certain children, for example, in the Princess Maxima Center for paid oncology, child cancer, where children day after day and week after week a month after a month need to get certain needle treatments, can be IV placements, can be blood sampling. And some of them are actually completely traumatized by this and it causes them fear and they get super anxious for already this whole moment leading up to that. And now we are working with almost 70% of all pediatric departments in the Netherlands and actually also outside in some other European countries where VR is being used to distract patients, distract children, but also up to adults and give them actually a pleasant experience in virtual reality that can be swimming with dolphins, playing a game, having a nice relaxation exercise on a tropical beach. And this immersiveness of virtual reality being in this virtual world 360 degrees around you actually tricks your brain so much and draws so much of the cognitive ability of your brain that your capacity to experience pain and anxiety goes down. And what we've seen in study, we just finished a scientific study in Denmark, is that the pain threshold, so how well you're able to handle pain, doubled with our VR headset with a group of 80 children. So this kid for two times is able to handle pain with a VR headset because they were so well distracted. And that actually means that we see an opportunity for decreasing medication because we give pain medication because people experience pain. But if they are two times better able to handle their pain, if they experience less pain, we can actually decrease their medication. So this is an example of, it was really, it's an older man, I think he was in the 70s, coming for thorax surgery, so that's a long, long surgery. And he was actually too weak to undergo this surgery under general anesthetics, so full narcosis. And then together with this thorax surgeon, we actually, they performed this surgery on their local anesthesia, so just the local region, he got his pain medicine and in combination with the VR headset, and there was enough for this person to actually undergo this surgery. So instead of a way longer time in the hospital, because from full narcosis you need to have a way longer recovery period, way more people from the hospital need to be involved, the procedure was shorter, less pain medication, less time for this person in the hospital and less side effects, just to a VR headset with some software on it. And it's also seen in studies where you actually see that this was a study where they gave heat stimuli to adults and they measured what it did in your brain, if you had VR or you didn't have VR. The yellow parts of your brain are the parts in your brain where experience pain. And what they saw, giving this heat stimuli to adults that the VR group, those areas in the brain were way less active and other parts of the brain were more active, like orientation in this virtual world. And in the non-VR group, actually the areas in the brain where they experienced pain, they were way more active. So you really see this shift in your cognitive attention when using VR, actually in this case, for pain, anxiety, and stress reduction. Some other use cases, improved rehabilitation. So these kinds of VR headsets, you put them on and you can watch a video, you can look a bit around, there's some basic interaction. There's actually also VR headsets like the man is holding here with two controllers. Nowadays, you also just have hand tracking where you can actually physically move around in a virtual space. If you think, so roughly two years back, first COVID wave, we instantly saw that people who had COVID had a tremendous recovery period. People who were coming from the intensive care unit were completely traumatized. They were almost off this world, something we didn't see before with such infectious diseases. So together with the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen, we set up a study to help a group of patients with home rehabilitation in virtual reality. So it was a group of 50 patients who got a VR headset at home with video shows. With a whole set of physical movement exercises that needed to do each day, specifically focused on general body movement of all kinds of different difficulty levels to really tailor it to this patient rehabilitation path. Mental relaxation exercises to cope with their stress and cognitive exercises, to really recover the cognitive ability of their brain after being on the intensive care unit. And what they really saw is that this gamified way of rehabilitation, instead of general, I know, doing your lunches or your squats for your rehabilitation process, we actually gamified all these rehabilitation exercises. It was for patients way more fun. They had a way more structure in the rehabilitation because they just put on their VR headset and their set of rehabilitation exercises was there. And this physiotherapy could also monitor on the distance of how their patients were doing. So in this way, we saw that almost, it was 80% of the patients really enjoyed this way of rehabilitation. The majority of physiotherapists really said they had significantly less contact moments with their patients because, hey, things were going well. They were just at home doing the rehab. I didn't need to see them in my practice. So we save a lot of travel time as well and contact moments. So we really made a model where people can, at home, rehabilitate with virtual reality. Papers are being published at the moment. We're now in the process of setting up a new trial with almost 250 patients to really way better measure the effectiveness of this way of rehabilitating in comparison with traditional physiotherapy. And finally, improved training and education. The amazing thing of these new types of reality is that not depending on time or place, you can actually train people. So with VR, you can put people in a completely simulated environment and let them go through all kinds of trainings. Well, if you now look at nursing or doctor education, you really see that people either learn in such an audience, watching at a lecture and read some stuff in the book, or they need to do it on the job. And on the job, there's always a huge bottleneck because there's an operating theater. It's really full of surgeons or one surgeon and nurses. So maybe one or two people can join that operating theater. But with these extended reality technologies, we can actually let people be in that operating theater without actually being there or make a simulation actually from it. And they can, after being there one time on the job, they can do it over and over and over and over in their simulated environment. Because what we always also saw from studies, for example, this, you see it's fake, 100%, and this technology needs to develop. But as a surgeon, the moment you see a patient with blood coming out of their leg, you forget it's fake, you go into your adrenaline mode and you start doing your work. And that is basically the same with maybe if you have a fear of spiders or if you have a fear of heights. If you think about it, you already start panicking. So even a fake image in your head already triggers a certain type of anxiety. And that is actually the same what we can do with simulated environments in virtual or augmented reality. You can actually, not depending on time or place, actually train and educate people. And this is going further and further. So this, for example, this is a Dutch company who developed a sense glove, which is a haptic feedback glove, which actually now in VR you have controllers or you have just, yeah, it's just air. But with these haptic feedback options, you can actually grab virtual objects that give haptic feedback to your hands. So you can actually grab a drilling machine and it feels actually like you're holding this drilling machine in virtual reality. So it's pretty cool how this technology is developing over time. And a small look into the future where this might be going. That was a pretty cool sound, doesn't work, but it doesn't really matter. Pretty cool example of a small, it's a commercial, it's a bit American over-exaggerated. But where this guy is at this daughter's wedding and he gets, it's a high end surgeon and he's actually doing this from completely remotely. I hope I never get, I'm being on the surgery from someone who maybe had a glass of champagne at this daughter's wedding and steps out for a moment. So I'm not sure if this is the best example, but in the end it does actually show what is possible with this technology. And also with the realization that these type of headsets that we currently have is basically comparable with the first generation of smartphone that's out there. So back then, super cool, this first iPhone and wow, you're completely amazed by it. If you would use it now, it would be useless. Not connected to any apps or anymore, not updated, but back then it was super cool. And that is kind of like what we're currently at. The current generation of headset is this first smartphone and there's still so much more development coming that will enable so much more possibilities. And having actually remote surgery will definitely become a thing in combination with all kinds of other technologies like 5G and all kinds of interconnectivity, but also with extended reality. And I really hope to inspire you guys a bit that with these kinds of technologies, you can actually also make an impact in health care. It's not only about gaming and entertainment, but there's actually also a new reality in health care. Thanks a lot. Thank you very much, Robert. To me, that's very interesting also because you use it as training on the job, for example. Maybe time for one short question and then we'll head over to the panel discussion. Do you have a question? You haven't had the turn yet. Let me just walk to you. I wanted to ask how does using VR compare to using other types of games to distract or motivate people to move? Yeah, so actually the study that I just quoted we did in Denmark with the pain threshold with children, then the setup was the control was talking to talking to kids on small talk. They used a tablet with a video for distraction for the kid, a 360 video in the VR headset, and an interactive game in the VR headset. And also the tablet also had a significant effect, but the 360 video was even higher effect and interactive game was even higher. So that is usually what you see in this area is all types of distraction work. Every, there are probably not many parents here, but if you have kids distractions the way, if you have kids files you give a candy or you wave and you distract people and then your brain gets less so every type of distraction works, but you definitely see that this immersiveness of virtual reality really triggers something else in your brain then watching something, for example, on the tablet. Perfect, thank you. Then I'll invite you to take place on the stage as well as Dr. George Knox and Nathan Wildman. Let's give another round of applause for Robert. Thank you very much. You could just stand by the blocks here and I'll propose a few statements in which you can answer if you feel that you have an opinion about it. Of course the audience can join as well if you feel that you have a strong opinion about something. Just raise your hand, I'll be looking into the audience and hand you the microphone. So the first question is, could constantly living in virtual worlds change our perception of our life? Is it something that you already notice yourself or for others around you? Sure, go ahead. I'll go because this is right up my alley. Microphone working okay? Cool, okay. So first thing to say, everybody familiar with Robert Nozick? Probably not. So he has a really famous thought experiment called the experience machine, which is like, hey cool, imagine that basically next year, instead of living your life, what we're going to do is we're going to plug you into a machine that's basically just like the holodeck from next generation of Star Trek, which I realize is probably older than many of you. So in the experience machine, you can have whatever kinds of experiences you want and your life's going to be exactly like you want it. You're going to feel like it's real life. When you come out of it though, you're going to basically just think, hey, you lived through all of this stuff. Nozick asks like, who would want to actually plug into the machine? And he thinks pretty much nobody would. No matter how cool the experiences are, he thinks they wouldn't quite live up to the right thing. I think it's an interesting kind of version of this thought experiment. I actually kind of disagree with Nozick because things like VR allow for a sort of interactivity that maybe the experience machine as it's set out is. But I don't know. There's a flip to it too. And this kind of comes back to something you were talking about with them. I always ask this digital aesthetics. Imagine you're going to get on a plane and the only pilot on the plane has been trained in the absolute best possible VR system that's ever been developed. Again, only pilot on the plane. Would you feel comfortable on the plane? That's an interesting question. Just like considering that in a podcast with Lex Friedman, Mark Zuckerberg talks about the avatar effect, which means that humans will feel more comfortable in the virtual world than the real world. Maybe, Robert, you can allude on this. Would you feel that way? Always, like my first reaction would be, yeah, probably no. But then I think back at this moment, I still realized when I had my blackberry with your physical keyboard, I said, and then that was the first touch screen smartphones come out. And I said, no, it's cool, the smartphone, but I will never lose my physical keyboard. And of course, I have now a smartphone with touch screen and everything ready for a year. So it's always unexpected things will happen. It is. I do find it, yeah, it's quite a big ethical. There's quite a big of ethical discussion around the development of moving actual more and more into virtual world. So any ready player one, anyone who watched it? Few hands. Okay, so if not, definitely watch it where you really have this, where you see the ethical dilemma of being kind of like addicted to a virtual world instead of actually enjoying your actual world as well. So I wish you really look at what are ways, how we can really use this virtual to our benefits. For example, we're now building a quite big consortium with many Dutch hospitals to build a kind of digital twin of a hospital where place and time unrelated. You can go in there, do a simulation, ping up your college. Hey, let's yesterday that surgery, let's do it one more time. It didn't feel comfortable. Let's practice it one more time. And then we're really using this virtual world to our benefits. People are getting really addicted to it and move away from the actual world and actual interaction as well that will be definitely pretty. Yeah, so that's one big advantage, but also one big disadvantage that you just named. I see two questions here in the back. Amaya, do you want to go first? This is in relation to the Ready Player One reference that was just made. Basically, there are already a lot of concerns with the data handling. And now when you talk of a company, basically in a Ready Player One situation where you spend about 20 hours of your life in a virtual world. So what do you think is the ethical consequence of putting so much of your life in the hands of one company? So basically in the Ready Player One reference, I think the OSS company. So basically say a meta company. What are the concerns and what are the ethical consequences? Cool. Yeah, I mean, I think here's a cheap comparison. And it's the first one that comes immediately to mind is thinking of mining towns. So in the US and in Western Australia and things like this, you had these towns where people worked for the mining corporation. The mining corporation owned all the houses. The mining corporation owned the store that they would go to for all of the food. They would own the ways that you could get in and out of town without walking. So what happened? People's lives fucking sucked. Like basically because they control everything, they control everything. So I think there's a kind of version of something worrisome like that, maybe lurking. Now that's absolutely catastrophic thinking as well. I don't think it's very likely to happen, partially because of the kind of fragmentation things that I pointed out with history stuff and I suspect is lurking behind a lot of these things. But I think that's a big worry there. Okay, great. Thank you for your interesting answer. Then we have another question right here. Yeah, I think all three of you mentioned something along the lines of via streaming or virtual reality, we can do things regardless of time and place. At the same time, I think this disconnect from time and place from chronotopes so to speak is also the reason behind a lot of stress that we experience today. We are always online. We are always working. We always have to be available to everybody. How do you guys see this developing when we start looking for more things to do regardless of time and space? So for example, a training at your work, you know, great that you can do an operation from your daughter's wedding, but maybe you want to say, fuck that, I met my daughter's wedding. Horrible. Yeah, maybe George, if you could comment on that. Well, not about the wedding specifically, but maybe regarding the streaming. Don't operate on somebody's heart when you're at your daughter's wedding. I feel like that's a pretty unambiguous show. But so you're saying that we're stretched too thin and that virtual reality is going to stretch us even thinner? Yes, streaming in general. Yeah, I mean, I can see that. I mean, I don't know. What I thought about, you know, is that historically, every time there's some sort of new medium, there are always these complaints or worries that things are going to happen. Like I believe when radio came out, they were worried that people wouldn't think for themselves anymore. They would just listen to the radio and the radio would be this subversive tool that would make you think according to a certain way. And of course we know that's not how things turned out. So I think with a lot of new technologies, there's a lot of worry and anxiety and maybe we should let them see a little bit more, especially with virtual reality, see a little bit more about what it can offer. I mean, when I saw Robert's presentation, I think the thing about the training looks super cool. The idea that you can use virtual reality to do that, that seems like a big win. I mean, you know, how much, you know, to help training doctors and stuff like that. So that sounds pretty good to me. Okay, very cool. Thank you very much. Is there a question from the audience? Otherwise, I will ask a question myself. Oh, the question regarding the change of the perception of time. Social, how to say, behavioral, attic code or something like that, both in the gaming community and both in reality? And when if we mix it, I'm just thinking, wouldn't it be a little bit more trouble? Some, for example, would it cause some behavioral anomalies between people? For example, let's consider games as the wide west and let's consider society as a more regulated behavioral structure. So what do you think about this, Nathan, yes? Yeah, cool. I think that's interesting. So yeah, I'm trying to think of good examples where this happened. I think arguably stuff like Ultima Online, which I know is definitely older than everyone, almost everyone in the audience. Ultima Online is a really fun example because it was basically like Minecraft, but sort of three quarters down. And there weren't really any kind of rules about what happened. So it very quickly became just grief central, right? People would wait for the point where people spawn in and just immediately murder them and take all their stuff and then when they spawned in, murder them again. Eventually, an interesting little thing, kind of codes of ethics did develop, imposed internally, but that's just a fun example. I think kind of stepping back and thinking about the contrast between how we ought to behave in meat space versus how we ought to behave in these virtual spaces and things is hard. But arguably, there's a kind of golden rule lurking here, which is just don't be a dick. And that should apply regardless of whether we're playing around in VR or whether we're walking around in meat space. So yeah, there is something really interesting about how exactly to figure out the ethics and how to slide back and forth there. Yeah, cool. Okay, thank you. And then maybe a short answer from each of you. How will our privacy be affected by the move from the physical to the online world, not only virtual reality, but also in the streaming world? Yeah, well, in Europe right now, so there's the Digital Services Act. And yeah, I mean, very soon there's going to be a lot more regulation on what platforms can do with your data. And so yeah, so I think for a lot of privacy, well, so obviously a lot of information was given out. There was less regulation, let's say, of these giant platforms like Facebook and Amazon. And that seems like now that's going to change, that there's going to be more regulation there. So for example, in the area that I work in in like recommender systems, you know, companies are going to have to say how they, like the parameters they use to determine which things are recommended to you. They'll have to be more transparency and they'll have to be an algorithm audit. So yeah, I mean, I see sort of that people will be regaining some of that privacy lost in a short way. So you're saying we kind of lost it in the past few years, but we're back on track to a better privacy system in the new reality? Yeah. Okay, Robert, your view on this? Yeah, I think it's always evolved. In the beginning it's good that there's not too much regulation because else innovations will never, never see the light of day with us as well. When we started with VR and healthcare, it wasn't considered as a medical device yet. So it was just quick game development nerds that together, us together, they built it, we sold it and we grew a business. And with that, we got a bit of money and a bit of more understanding. And then suddenly they talked about CE certification, medical device regulation. Okay, yeah, probably we're now big enough to handle that and to make some steps in that. So I think in the end, it's good that in early days, there is a bit of a free, open space to get really good innovations that they see the light of day and then institutions, governments catch up with the latest developments and adjust policies to it. Okay, could you take one step forward? Yeah, perfect. Cool. So I actually think this kind of comes back to your man with the hats question about exactly how we're gonna present ourselves of all the time. I think basically the short answer is we really have to re-understand what it means for private, like privacy. That they have a fundamental rethink about what that notion is, which isn't that weird. I mean, we did it once or twice already thinking about the ways that various technology and technological innovations impact the notion of privacy. So yeah, I think we're gonna have a new conception. I agree very much with both of the previous speakers that yeah, we're maybe gonna get a little bit better but we're gonna have to rethink things. Okay, so regarding the privacy, there's a general consensus that there's still improvements but we've come quite a way already. Then lastly, would you say a new reality regarding streaming, regarding virtual reality or the extended reality? Would you say it's a sustainable future for us because it's kind of a big question but it is the way we're going it does not seem to hold at the moment. What are your views on this? I definitely see it as a sustainable future else I could stop with our company I should better stop with it today and but indeed there's just things that we need to yeah keep track of and that is indeed governments need to step up with understanding these type of new technologies consumers in years need to step up and have a thought around what means privacy for you and I think it's at least a really good development that several major tech companies are investing in this it's not it's not only made Facebook but basically every big tech company is investing in this technology so you get distribution of this technology as well it's not that it's a need like ready player one with always just everything send life over one company then it will definitely get then we'll get very good as long as you have this distribution and no one owns it and in the end you own your data and your avatar and it's you who make certain decisions with proper rules and regulations following it and I definitely see a huge sustainable future for it that's very interesting you're talking about more decentralization maybe that's a bit too specific to get into right now but Nathan you have a view on this as well well yeah actually I think so there's a kind of sustainability that we haven't really talked about with tech stuff that doesn't tend to come up which is environmental sustainability and actually I think there's a really powerful argument for something like this decentralization that's really driven by environmental concerns so I'm part of an AR and VR consortium in Glasgow and one of the big things we're trying to do is to push office workers instead of having their own computer systems and like three monitors set up you have one set of glasses and you have literally wall-to-wall computer space now and you can space things out and you do like something like kind of games as service where you're running your various programs off a central bank it's much more environmentally sustainable that's incredibly good and that's something that doesn't come up a lot with talks about VR and AR because a lot of at least my initial thing is like cool it's nice to solve these problems with tech but that's more batteries right that's more environmentally bad stuff but actually in the we kind of cost it out it turns out to be better which is super weird and cool that's super cool since I got the Oculus Go I actually download actually bought in the Oculus Store the virtual desktop app and I could just lay in bed with my lights off and do some work not that that's a very productive way of doing work but yeah you could just work from anywhere if you're in a busy environment or either work from home that's all good I kind of missed the joke I think George do you have an opinion on the sustainability or would you say well I guess one thing that's sort of interesting in the Netherlands is that it's with these data so the Netherlands is like the data center location of choice for Facebook and Microsoft and all that stuff and yeah so when you I mean that has an environmental impact of all these servers running and all that stuff so at least from the sort of streaming business model may yeah may not be that good actually for the environment the system where there's one this sort of system that we have where everything is stored there and we're streaming it so I don't know I mean yeah maybe indeed but I agree that the environment is certainly something that yeah that you have to consider well let's hope the data storage and that kind of stuff gets more efficient because indeed what you mentioned is a big problem do we have one more short question from the audience I'll run up to you I'm not really sure how short it is though but you guys determine how long the answer is going to be we have been talking a lot about virtual reality about creating an entirely new reality but I was wondering what you guys think is the future of augmented reality we'll be walking around with glasses that augment what we're looking at give like alt-tree blossoms so that the world looks more pretty like are we pretty fine things but still staying within our own reality or is virtual reality going to be way bigger yeah I think it's in the end you all you don't need to choose they will become headsets where as you just your example they think okay I need some time away from our colleagues completely put my glasses on virtual reality mode I'm closed off and I have my five screens open I'm doing my hardcore coding or writing this paper and full focus mode or hey I'm a bit more social mode I put a bit more transparency my colleagues and we're actually we're looking at this I know 3D model together and we're actually collaborating with each other so I don't think on that area now it's really you have separate hardware for either mixed reality or augmented virtual reality now but you're getting more and more it's now super high end but for example Fario you might know Finnish company who has an XR headset where you basically can choose different modes and I think that is I think the most feasible option where we're going towards how it works actually look maybe it's it will go more and more towards glasses maybe we shouldn't want to a lens that you put in who knows Musk is working on chips in your brain there are a link yeah so that's yeah and with it unfortunately I do need to leave it was a bit the last moment when I got asked was super cool to be here but I need to catch a train almost yeah we are we are gonna round off thanks for having me here please thank you George, Nathan and Robert for contributing to this symposium I have one more short little quiz but I want to end it here because Robert has a train to catch so thank you guys very much then we have one more little quiz for you guys to check some what you at least learned today because we did hope you learned something today let's open this internet before we get to all this virtual reality stuff we have to have working internet all right let's all look into the Mentimeter again all right I see 16 registrations already 18 we're going up okay let's wait for a few more more people are registering all right are we all ready to start okay so a big big question is streaming the new reality for us okay wow it seems like a uh let's let's let's go over each one yes who answered yes who wants to give their opinion on why they said yes anyone else in the back maybe okay let's hear it I think it's the streaming is the new reality one says yes one says in the future but I think it's practically already now that so many services are streaming from well just music especially entertainment of course but yeah I think the same as with the metaverse there's a lot of talk about the metaverse and immersive technologies but we see that a lot of aspects of the metaverse already exist so I don't really see it as a future thing I see it as a something that's already a reality all right thank you then in the future who is willing to say something about their opinion Volas is there anyone else that wants to give their opinion nobody on the right side we have someone who wants to give their opinion I think that we are still in a transition so a lot of companies I think they're still sometimes a little bit reluctant to actually change and that's what Joe will see with the other for example Agility Lean that was also a process would took years so I think we are now in the startup phase and the transition we still have to make so therefore I chose in the future all right very sensible explanation as well then 22% of you said no I'm wondering after these talks who answered no you did okay let's see and hear it I guess I mean meet space has a very rude way of kind of intervening no matter how badly we might want to get into new realities so this kind of stuff is always going to trump whatever we're trying to do with the digital things that's my thought behind it okay that's interesting as well maybe or maybe not you're curious what I'm thinking I'd say in the future I think we see I'm very active as well in blockchain decentralized stuff but we still see a lot of problems and things going on that you think we can't all adopt this yet now so I'd lie more into the future kind of spectrum then the next question is what was the most interesting topic you heard about what did you learn today and answer something and I might ask you why you answered it so I'm curious who has heard of that I said work but I learned this part as well if you are in the healthcare one mind yeah the one mind Mario was interesting I had a question myself I was wondering what if someone just wants to meme it just keep pressing the option button and that's an option as well right yeah that's really funny is that Lewis works in bed okay VR for training purposes medical VR just in TV still a long way to go who got the idea that we still have a long way to go after this symposium Palace you had the idea that we still have a long way to go oh okay you do agree VR for training purposes there's a big Nathan Fang group first phone streaming what Lewis does in bed very cool so I think besides the part that I talked about wearing my headset in bed there's some really cool topics that we discussed today and by that we are going to go to the last slide I want to thank you all for joining today's and the annual 2022 flow symposium regarding a new reality I want to thank the symposium committee I'm standing here by myself but I didn't organize it by myself so and I want to thank studio general Hannah especially for contributing to the symposium and MindLabs for sponsoring today's symposium we're going to have a drink in Esplanade next to here you're all going to get a voucher for a drink and there's some snacks we can talk about the upcoming topics and the stuff we discussed or you can have an informal talk about how your day was and whatever what you're going to do tonight thank you all