 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. Covering Dell Technologies World 2019. Brought to you by Dell Technologies and its ecosystem partners. Welcome back to Las Vegas. Lisa Martin with John Furrier. You're watching theCUBE live at Dell Technologies World 2019. This is our second full day of double cube set coverage. We've got a couple of, we've got a really cool conversation coming up for you. We've got Ravi Pendekanti, one of our alumni on theCUBE back, SVP product management server solutions. Ravi, welcome back. Thank you, Lisa. Much appreciated. And you brought some Hollywood. Yes, I do. We have Glenn Glainer, president of Sony Innovation Studios. Glenn, welcome to theCUBE. Thank you very much. It's great to be here. So you are, I love this intersection of Hollywood and technology, but you're a filmmaker. Yeah, I have been filming movies for many years. I started off making motion pictures for many years. Executive produced them and oversaw production for them at one of our movie labels called Screen Gems, which is part of Sony Pictures. We have- You've seen a tremendous amount of evolution of the creative process being really fueled by technology and vice versa. Sony Innovation Studios is not quite one year old. This is a really exciting venture. Tell us about that and what the impetus was to start this company. You know, the genesis for it was based out of necessity because I looked at it and I said, well, you know, I love making movies. Been doing it for a long time. And the challenge with making good pictures is resources. And you never get enough money, believe it or not, you never get enough money, you never get enough time. That's everybody's issue, particularly time management. And I thought, well, you know, we got a pretty good technology company behind us. What if we looked inward towards technology to help us find solutions? And so Innovation Studios was born out of that idea. And what was exciting about it was to know that we had invited partners to the game, right here with Dell, so that we could make movies and television shows and commercials and even enterprise solutions leaning into state-of-the-art and cutting-edge technology. And what's some of the work prize that you guys envisioned coming out of this mission? You mentioned commercials, TV. Is it going to be like an artist, studio, actors involved? Take us through what this is going to look like. How does it get built out? I lean into my career as a producer to answer that one and say it's going to enable. That's one of the greatest things about being a producer is enabling stories, inspiring ideas to be greenlit that may not have been able to be done so before. And there's a key reason why we can do that because one of our key technologies is what we call the volumetric image acquisition. And that's a lot of words. You're probably saying, what the heck is that? Volumetric. But a volumetric image acquisition is our ability to capture a real world, this analog world, and digitize it, bring it into our servers using the power of Dell, and then live in that new environment which is now a virtual set. And that virtual set is made out of billions and trillions and quadrillions of points, much like the matter around us. And that's a difference because many people use pixels, which is an interpretation of like, we're using points which is representative of the world around us. So it's a whole revolutionary way of looking at it, but what it allows us to do is actually filming it in a 30K moving volume. It's like a monster green screen for the world in a way. You're wrapping around it because you have parallax. So these cameras could be photographing us and for all you know, we may not be here. Could be at stage seven at innovation studios and not physically here, but you couldn't tell the difference. So this is like cloud computing when you're talking the tech world. You don't have to provision all these resources, you just get what you want. This is Hollywood looking at the artistry, enabling faster, more agile storytelling. You don't need to go set up a town and go get all the heavy lifting. You're shooting in this new digital realm. That's right, exactly. Now I love going on location and there's a lot to celebrate about going on location, but we can't always get to that location. Think of all the locations that we want to be in that are just off limits, both space to one, which I haven't been, but on set I've been. I've walked on virtual moons and I've walked on set moons, but what if we did a volumetric image acquisition of someone set of the moon? Now we have that and then we can walk around it. Or what if there's a great club, a nightclub that says, guys, I want you to shoot here, but we have performances Monday night, Tuesday night, Wednesday night, they have a job. What if we grab that image, acquired it, and then you could be there any time you want? Ravi, we can go for an hour here. This is just a great conversation. I completely agree, I'm with you. The Cube, you could sponsor a Cube in this new world. We could run the Cube 24-7 in space. That's absolutely right, and we don't even have to sit here. So talk about the relationship with Dell and Dell Technologies because you're enabling new capabilities, new kind of artistry, which is totally cool, want to get back to it in a second, but you guys are involved. What's your role, how do you get involved? Tell the story about your- Sure, John, I mean, first and foremost, one of the things Glenn didn't mention is he's actually got about 50 movies to his credits. So the guy actually knows his stuff, so which is absolutely fantastic. So we said, how do you go take power edge to the next level? So what else is better than trying to work something out wherein we together between what Glenn and his team does at the Sony Innovation Labs, or studios, sorry, and us in Dell Technologies could do, is to try and actually stretch the boundaries of our technology to an extent that when he talks about gazillion bytes of data, right, one followed by how many of our zeros, we have to be able to process the data quickly. We have to be able to go ahead and do the rendering. We probably have to go ahead and do whatever is needed to make a high quality movie. And that, I think, in a way, is actually giving us an opportunity to go back and test the boundaries of the technology we are building, which we believe this is the first of its kind in the media industry. If we can go learn together from this experience, we can actually go ahead and do other things in other industries too, maybe. And we were just talking about how we could also take this. He's got his labs here in Los Angeles. We are thinking maybe one of the next things we do, based on the learnings we get, we probably could take it to other parts of the world. And if we are successful, we might even take it to other industries. What if we could go do something to help in this field of medicine? It's just thinking that. Right? Yes. Think about it, Lisa, John. I mean, it's phenomenal. I mean, this is something Michael always talks about, is how do we as Dell Technologies help in progressing the humankind? And if this is something that we can learn from, I think it's going to be phenomenal. I think that's so interesting. Not only is that a good angle for Dell Technologies, the thing that strikes me is the access to artistry's voices, new voices that may be missed in the vetting process, the old way. You know, you got to know whoever you're going to know. In the venture capital, we've seen this with democratization of seed labs and incubators where if you can create access to the storytellers and the artists, we're going to have one more exposure to people might have missed, but also as things change, like whether it's ray beaming and streaming we saw on the gaming side, to volumetric or volumetric things, you're going to have a better canvas, more paint brushes on the creative side, and more access to artists. Is that the mission to get those artists in there? Is that part of the core mission, submission, because you're going to be essentially incubating new opportunities really fast? It's very important to me personally. I know it speaks to the values of both Sony and Dell. I like to call it the democratization of storytelling. You know, I've been very blessed. Again, I've been a Hollywood producer and we maybe curate a certain kind of movie, a certain kind of experience, but there are so many voices around the world that need to be heard. And there are so many stories that otherwise can't be enabled. Imagine a story that perhaps is a unique special voice, but requires distance. It requires five disparate locations. Perhaps it's in London, Piccadilly Circus, and then Times Square, and perhaps it's over to Abu Dhabi and Libya somewhere because that's part of the story. We can now collapse geography and bring those locations to a central place and allow a story to be told that may not otherwise have been able to be created. And that's vital to the fabric of storytelling worldwide. That's going to change the creative process too. You don't have to have that waterfall kind of mentality like we talk about in tech, right? You're totally distributed, could decentralize potentially. The creative process is going to change with all the tools and also the visual tools. That's right. It's almost becoming unlimited. You want it to be unlimited. You want the human spirit to be unlimited. You want to be able to elevate people. And that's the great thing about what we're trying to achieve and will achieve. It is, you're right. I mean, it's interesting, you know, we were just talking about this too. We're in, you know, as an example, shock tank. Yes. Right? I mean, they obviously, you know, they did the filming and stuff and then they didn't have the access, let's say to the right studio, but the fact is they had all this done and they had all the rendering, they had the capture already done. You could now go ahead and do your shoot without having all the space you needed. That's right. In the case of Shark Tank, which shoots at Sony Pictures Studios, they knew they had a real estate issue. The fact of the matter is there's a limited amount of sound stages around the world. They needed two sound stages and only had access to one. So we went in and we did a volumetric image acquisition of their exit interview stage, their set. And then when it came time to shoot the second half of season 10, 100 contestants went into a virtual set and were filmed in that set. And the funny thing is, one of the guys in a truck, you know how you have the camera trucks and, you know, off stage, he leaned into the mic and said, hey guys, could you move that plant a couple inches to the left? And somebody said, I don't think we can do it right now. He said, we're on a movie lot. You can move a plant. He said, no, it's physically not there. We're on innovation studios. He goes, oh, that's right. That's virtual. Never mind. So he was fooled. He was fooled. But the guy in a truck is fooled. I mean, we were being hashing it out, you know, within our team when we heard about some of the things, you know, Glenn and team are doing is, think about this. If you had to teach people, I mean, we are running short of doctors, right? If you could, with this technology and the learnings that come from here, if you could go have an expert surgeon do surgery once, you're captured it. Wouldn't it be nice just imagine to take that, learning, go to the new surgeons of the future and train them. And so they can get into the act without actually doing it. So my point in all this is, this is where I think we can take knowledge at the next level, where we can not only learn from one specific industry, but we could potentially put it to human good in terms of what we could do and not only preparing the next set of doctors, but also take it to the next level. This was a great theme to Michael Dell put out there about these new kinds of use cases that the time is now to do. Before maybe you couldn't get there with technology, but maybe aspirational, hey, let's do it. I can see that. Glenn, I want to ask you specifically, the time is now, this is all kind of coming together. The timing's pretty good. And it's only going to get better. It's going to be good tech, tech mojo coming for the creative side. Where were we before? Because I can almost imagine, this is not a new vision for you. You've probably seen it now that's how, here now, what was it like before? And compare contrast where you were a few years ago, maybe a decade to now, what's different? Why is this so important? You know, for me, there's a fundamental change in how we can create content and how we can tell stories. It used to be that two most expensive words in the movie TV industry were what if. Today, the most important words to me are what if. Because what if we could collapse geography? What if we could empower a new story? Technology is at a place where if we can dream and chances are we can make it a reality. We're changing the dynamics of how we make content. It used to be lights action, camera, I think it's now lights action, compute power action. You know, it's that kind of difference. That is an amazing vision. I think society now has opportunities to kind of take that from distance learning to distance connections, to distance sharing experiences, whether it's immersion, virtual, analog, face to face, could really be powerful. Yeah, absolutely. And this is not even a year old. That's right. So if you look at your launch, you said I think, Glenn, June 4th, 2018. What's, where do you go from here? I mean, like we said, this is like unlimited possibilities, but besides putting Robbie in a movie, naturally. Yes, of course. Of course. I have a star here. Oh my God, there you go. See the personality. So I got to say, he's got star power. Yep. But what's the next year exactly? It's very exciting. I will say we have Shark Tank, the Advanced Imaging Society gave us an award for being the first volumetric set ever put out on the airwaves for that television show. It was a great honor. We have already captured Men in Black. We captured a 50,000 square foot stage that had the Men in Black headquarters and it's been used for commercials to market the film that comes out this June. We have captured sets for television shows in hopes that they got a second season and one television show called up and said, guys, we got the second season. So they don't have to go back to what was a very expensive set and a beautiful set. We captured that set. It reminds me of a story that production designer a friend of mine said, which is every year the greatest gift I have is building a beautiful set. And to me, the biggest challenge is when they say, you remember that set you built four years ago? I need that again. But now you can go back to that set. It's always hard to replicate the exact set. You capture it digitally, it lives. That's exactly it. And this is amazing. I mean, I'd love to do a cube set and do like a simulcast virtually. So this is the next thing. So John and Lisa, you guys could be sitting anywhere going forward. Good. You don't have to be really sitting here. You could be doing what you have to do and you know, we've got everything rendered, captured. I mean, we don't have to come to Vegas 20 times a year. We could build up the set once. Yeah. That's true. We want to see you here. Believe me, that's true. I'll take that back. Well, the visual is a really beautiful thing. So if we can, you know, with holograms, you're seeing people doing concerts with holograms. Frank Zappa just did a concert, hologram concert. But bringing real people and from communities around the world where there's localization, diversity, right? Into a content mixture is just so powerful. Actually, you said something very interesting, John, which is one of the other themes too, which is, if you have a globally connected society and you want to try and personalize it to that particular nation, ethnicity group, you can do that easily now because you can probably pop in actors from the local area by the same setting. Yeah. Yeah. Think about it. It's Shelley Rake. There's a cascade of transformations that this is going to generate. I mean, just thinking of how different, even acting schools and drama schools will be while teaching people how to behave in these virtual environments, right? That's right. How to immerse themselves in these environments. And we have tricks up our sleeves that can put the actor in that moment through projection mapping and other techniques that allow filmmakers and actors to actually understand the world they're about to step in. Rather than a green screen and saying, okay, there's going to be a creature over here. There's going to be blue waterfalls over there. They'll actually be able to see that environment. That's right. Because that environment will exist before they step on the stage. Well, great job. We got the Dell partnership. On my final question, Glenn, for instance, you're awesome and got a great vision, so smart and experienced. I've been really thinking a lot about how visualization and artistry are coming together and how disciplines, silo disciplines, like music, they do great music, but they're not translating to the graphics. I was just talking about ray tracing and the impact with GPUs for immersive experiences, which we're seeing on the client side of the house at Dell. So you got the backend stuff on volumetric stuff. And so as artistries, the next generation come up. There's now a link between the visual, the audio, the storytelling. It's not a siloed. It is not. I want to get your vision on it. How do you see this playing out? And your advice for young artists that might be looked at as contrary. What are you, that's not how we do it? Well, the beautiful thing is there are new ways to tell stories. Hollywood has evolved over the last century. If you look at the studios that still exist, they have all evolved. And that's why they do exist. Great storytellers evolve. We tell stories differently. So long as we can emotionally relate to the story that's being told, I say do it in your own voice. The cinematic power is among us. We're blessed that when we look back, we have that shared experience. Whether it's anime from Japan or traditional animation from Walt Disney, everybody shares a similar history. Now it's our opportunity to author our new stories. And we can do that in physical assets and in volumetric assets. And we can blend the real and the unreal with the compute power. The world is our oyster. Wow. Very nice to see that. A mic drop right there. Well done. Exactly, that is a mic drop. The transformation of Hollywood and what, and it's really the tip of the iceberg. Unlimited story potential. Thank you, Glenn. Thank you, Bobby. This has been fascinating. Can't wait to see and feel and touch what's next for Sony Innovation Studios with your technology power. We appreciate your time. Yeah, thank you. Thank you both. Much appreciated. Our pleasure. For John Furrier, I'm Lisa Martin. You're watching theCUBE live from Dell Technologies World 2019. We've just wrapped up day two. We'll see you tomorrow.