 Hey, welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're at the Accenture Technology Vision Event 2018. The actual report comes out in a couple of days. We're here at the preview event. Couple hundred people in downtown San Francisco. A lot of demos of AR and VR downstairs. It really Accenture kind of highlighting the top trends that they've surveyed their community. And we're excited to be here to be joined by one of the experts. He's Tony Parisi on theCUBE a long time ago. We looked at 2013, amazing. He's the global head of AR and VR for Unity Technology. Tony, great to see you again. Good to see you. So you've been on this AR VR virtual reality thing for a while, amazing development in the space. I've been working in the field for a couple of decades now in one form or another. And it's just been great to see with the resurgence of virtual reality. And we had experiments 20 years ago trying to turn this into a consumer-ready technology. Really wasn't ready yet. With the advent of Oculus and some of these other technologies, we've seen something that a consumer could afford that enterprises can afford in large numbers. You know, a sub-thousand dollar piece of hardware connected to a personal computer that's a few thousand dollars that can drive amazing VR experiences. These same kind of immersion techniques brought into a phone where you can take a smartphone and just look through it like a magic window into this extended reality where you're seeing 3D graphics that persist in the environment around you. These are all working toward this future where we're going to have all this 3D amazingness, digital magic in front of us. And it's just incredible to see how far we've come in all these years and how it's just about to be both consumer-ready and be deployed into businesses for all kinds of different productivity applications. Yeah, it's interesting that Accenture rolled them all up into one. They went with the extended reality. Because there's a lot of confusion. Is it augmented reality, virtual reality? You know, how much of it is virtual stuff overlaid to reality? How much is reality is brought back into the virtual space? But at the end of the day, it's a lot of blending. It's going to depend on the application. Devlin depends on the application. If you just take marketing terms and put them aside because everyone's got their own way of talking about this and agreed, there's a little bit of confusion right now. If you just look at the common element, it is 3D graphics. It is graphics that represent objects, environments, places, people in a way that's much more realistic, that's much more intuitive for an end user to grasp, that touches us and our brains in a place that a flat screen doesn't so that we remember it better or learn it more effectively. That's what all of these different techniques have in common. So, you know, call it what you want. Accenture's rolling forward with all of that. My company Unity is supplying the core technology to power all of that across 30 platforms when you look at the whole industry. Game platforms, which is where we were born. And now in a VR and AR, it's, you know, a dozen platforms, at least, that look like they could be viable. The common element for anybody who's developing is that it's 3D graphics and they're going to make investments in certain kinds of software, certain kinds of application design and techniques and knowledge that's going to transfer among all of these different kinds of hardware platforms. Because we know at the end of the day, they'll be a handful, probably three or four that end up dominating, just like in any other part of the computer industry, with any other digital technology. So, you know, we're in this moment because it's so early. We're the technology. We don't know how to talk about it yet. But I think if you look back, probably the same thing was true of mobile and the PC at the time, if you were in the middle of it. Right. People call it the PC, or they called it the internet, or they called it the web, and then they called it mobile or a smartphone. You know, there's just all these terms for it, but that, you know, we'll see, that'll be in the rearview mirror in a couple of years. And we'll just take this for granted as all this 3D stuff now in front of us. Whether it's this 3D place, I go into it at VR headset. Yeah, even we were at Baobab Studios last week, and you know, even in entertainment, right? Early television replicated just a stage, right? And early movies replicated just a stage before they figured out what they could do at the medium. Same thing here, and interesting comment, you know, how much of it's interactive, kind of game-like, how much of it's narrative storytelling like a movie, and he's like, don't think of it that way. It's a completely different medium with a completely different opportunity to tell stories, to do things in a different way. 100%, that team at Baobab's amazing, they use Unity a lot to create their experiences, and they're the first to tell you, we don't quite know what it's gonna look like in a few years. We're trying lots of different things. We are gonna start from some, you know, touchstone, some places we already know, game design, linear storytelling, but this is a different beast, and we don't know where we're gonna get. They have a great example of a company that's not afraid to experiment. They're gonna try and put you, I mean, what they do is they make Pixar kind of quality, high production value, animated content, like a Pixar movie, but you're in it in VR. You can look all around, you can see the entire action and folding around you, and more than that, they've made you a part of the story. They make you a character, usually a secondary character, so the whole burden is not on you as the viewer to have to figure the story out, but someone who can help the story along so you feel fully involved. And if you play that forward, if you think about where that's gonna go in a few years, we may be the folks that are making the stories up. I mean, it starts with just kind of being a secondary character, but as we learn this as users, as we learn how to do this, we may start making the stories up and being a much more active part of it, but somehow still having that sweet spot where we're giving the director and the content creator the final say in sort of how this world is being created. Brett Leonard, his famous director, he did Lawmower Man, if you know his work. In the 90s, a seminal movie about VR, he's back in the world here, also doing VR again, and he likens this to world-building. He thinks VR creation for entertainment is much more like creating a Disney theme park, a world that you can inhabit and be part of and have fun for hours, days at a time, versus telling one story from start to finish. Right. So I mean, think about what's gonna happen in the next couple years. It's mind-blowing where this could go, and we really don't know. None of this can predict. So you're deep, you're deep into it, Tony. I wonder if you could share a story about maybe some applications that you're seeing either in production or kind of in development, where people are not thinking, layman like me, obviously we know entertainment, we know games, we know some of the industrial stuff, like walking a shop floor and seeing the RPMs of a machine. What are some of the applications that we don't know that you see coming down the pike? Well, if you just think about, take one industry, like the auto industry, right? I think you can imagine, like you said, if you're somewhat versed in this, the idea that you could use virtual reality to design a car, instead of what they do today, which is they use some 3D computer-aided design packages, but they still build a physical prototype of the car out of clay and, you know, company-wide, a Ford or a Volkswagen or a company like that will spend millions for every new car building these physical prototypes. They want to replace that with purely digital and virtual processes at some point, which is gonna save them a heck of a lot of time and money and materials costs, right? But now you just take that one example and you take that car design through the entire life cycle of that car to when it's assembled, manufactured, you can train people in VR how to do that, when it's getting rolled out into a show floor so people are selling it, all the way to when that car is a self-driving car, that you put somebody into and they get in the cabin of that thing in the cabin because there's no driver in there anymore, you have now a lot of room in there, right? Right, right. It's an entertainment center. So these kind of augmented virtual reality technologies could potentially touch every phase in the life cycle of not just the development, but the deployment and the ongoing operation of a motor vehicle as we know it. So that's gonna radically transform things sometime in the next five to 10 years. All right, Tony, I'm gonna let you go to parties underway, we've got the autonomous robots that are playing in the band. In five years from now, we can't wait five years because I don't even know what's gonna be here. I hope we do this again. It'll be crazy different. One of that's a five years from now. Crazy different, so thanks for taking a few minutes. All right, cheers. Tony Friesi, Jeff Frick, you're watching The Cube from the Accenture Technology Vision 2018. Thanks for watching.