 Good afternoon, I'm delighted to welcome you to this IIEA webinar. My name is Unifus Patrick, I'm the Director of Technology Ireland and iVectorate Association and I'll be chairing today's event. Today's event is part of a series organised by the IIEA and the IDA Ireland to explore digital policy issues relevant to Ireland. Today's event follows the Digital Ireland conference which took place in Dublin Castle in November which was organised by the IDA. Today's event also follows last week's event on transatlantic data transfers which was jointly organised by IIEA and the IDA. Today's event is on the subject of immersive technologies including virtual reality, augmented reality and metaverse technologies. We're delighted to be joined today by our expert panel who have been generous enough to take time under their schedules to join us. The format of today is that each panelist will speak for about 10 minutes or so and after each panelist has finished their presentation we'll go to a Q&A with our audience. You'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom which you should see on your screen. Please feel free to send your questions in throughout the session as they occur to you and we will come to them once our speakers have finished their presentations. A reminder that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record. Do feel free to join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IIEA and I'll now formally introduce our speakers and hand over to them. So we'll be joined today by Dr Martha Bockenfeld, Dean of Metaverse Academy then we'll be joined by Peggy Johnson, CEO of Magic Leap and then finally Nile Campion, Managing Director of BRAI. So first up we have Dr Martha Bockenfeld who is a Metaverse Evangelista, love that one, Advisor and Speaker who is passionate about emerging tech, blockchain and the Metaverse and a strong believer in the power of innovation. So I'm delighted to hand over to you and look forward to hearing from you. Yeah thanks a lot for having us today. I think also in the three minutes of preparation we already exchanged some view how important education is and how excited we are all here to be today. So the big question is usually always when people come to us what is the Metaverse and same as when you ask a lawyer and I'm a leading person by training then you get five or six or seven or even more different answers. So what we agree on I would say most of the people agree on that the Metaverse is really the future of the internet and remember when the internet was developed also we did never imagine Facebook or any other of those use cases. We also agree that the Metaverse in its full extent is probably something which will be developed over the next five to ten years and in its shape it will have different virtual worlds like we have in the real world it will be connected also which I think is a very important point some people totally misunderstand with the real world. So we will talk about some use cases today also with my fellow members here on the panel where you have real use cases where we connect the real world also with the virtual worlds and it's not only this interconnectivity which is not yet there is also not interoperable as we say so if you are in one of the worlds let's say with the digital twin or with an arbitrary you cannot travel yet to the other worlds nevertheless we have a lot of use cases already and we have a lot of different parts of the society which we are which we see which are changing. So in the Metaverse academy what we do we try to give those experiences we try to give education to people usually come to us not only want the experience but they start with I want to have a presence I want to have a presence in the virtual world without knowing what would be the right virtual world or wrong one and what they're trying to achieve. So also here for corporates it's very important to understand what is through your use case what is it what you are trying to achieve and what is it at a value you want to create. So if you look at some of the prediction in terms of value creation then we have predictions from I would say five to ten to even 30 million you are billion or a US dollar in the next decade and a half or even trillion. So if we say only a friction of that is true you can imagine that there is an amazing gross opportunity for corporates. So everyone is now thinking of okay how do I enter it and a lot of people are also believers in technology or in emerging technology and what we see now that we have all this kind of technology and I'm sure that Peggy will also speak to that and also now coming together so we're talking about the convergence of AI now we have checked GTP where everyone goes crazy and other AI experiences like you know we can just prompt words to create stuff so big crater economy but we also have in genetic terms we can have a 3D printing of organs and all of that comes together in one part and the question is how do we realize this how do we do this. So one of the things which we will see for example in healthcare which I find the most amazing and most underestimated in terms of those use cases is that you have doctors training for example in the metaverse in virtual worlds let's say let's not overuse this term too much and they not only train what they have done previously on their bodies but they also test virtual operations. So just recently there was a co-joined twin couple very little babies very very difficult to separate in Brazil and what they have done they worked with doctors in London and they had this virtual reality created where they could test where they were trying everything and thanks god it was successful. So these kind of things wouldn't have been possible a year ago here so it's amazing what for example in healthcare you can do and we haven't even talked about other educational parts like if you imagine and I think in the US is also a big thing the magic school bus where you can discover your body inside so these kind of things you can go in history lessons we know that from gaming and gaming is usually the gateway to virtual worlds if you think about how many people and how many of not only 12 to 25 years but older people are in the gaming world we have already 3 billion gamers so from a policy point of view because I know we will talk about this also today and cyber risk if you look at the gaming industry there's a lot of experiences we have there which we can relate to and which we can basically say yeah this shows us a way also from a policy and regulatory point of view what is happening what is happening with our tasks what is happening with digital currency because all of that is already being used in gaming and we I would say our generation now also at this table we are the old ones in that sense we we don't know I mean all my nephews know how to trade in digital assets they have digital models was 12 it's not a problem in them very often even now starting to have NFTs so for me it's very important that we focus not so much on the general term but when we have a look what are the use cases and how is it a creation of value for for what we do so we will also see training from from the company you are representing you where it's really helpful when you have military when you have in sustainability for example also people training this year beginning of the year we had at the vet I don't know if anyone was there but also even for politicians we had training in a virtual world in the sense of what happens with climate change and it's amazing once you have the headset on and magic leap is one of the very very advanced one then how you feel about it and that's you feel it's real so everything becomes real and if you have never tried it also people on the school in particular policy makers I think it's very important that you start trying that you start feeling it that you know it's real because everyone thinks I's all fake and maybe it's like a ready player one way everyone goes to goes to this oasis and the whole world is is dying no this is not what we should focus on we should focus on the possibilities how to create better human behavior how to create better worlds and coincidentally yesterday in the German parliament and I'm sure that a lot of people have watched this are they had a big discussion about the metaverse and that's free there were a lot of that street critics there so it's a lot of discussion going on in Germany as well can we apply the current regulatory framework now also to the new world and I would say no you can't because it's developing and you have to acknowledge this and if we also look at the gap between how fast it is developing which is exponential compared to what we have as regulatory framework today then it's a huge gap between the two so some of the statistic don't only show we have trillions of of revenues coming from the metaverse but that now also estimates 25 percent that's one force of the population will be in the metaverse at least one hour a day in the next couple of years so it's fast 70 percent of brands according to KPMG will have a presence in the metaverse so if we think about all those predictions and as we know there is a law saying we usually completely underestimate this we should all get involved now and that is something I think all panelists are trying to do get people involved get people to understand get people to know what's coming and don't leave everything to meta Microsoft they will do it you will do it you will be part of this so remember also our let's say even maybe parents when they're over 70 years old they're maybe not able to do online banking they're maybe not able to do what's up so you are not part of this world and they haven't been shaping it anymore so become really a shaper of this new world and that is my I would say big paid idea to everyone including policymakers thanks so much and that's really interesting I love the concept of being a shaper and I think that's something that you know in terms of a message to land people and you know not to be passive about this it's very apt and so I'm delighted to hand over to to our second speaker and hand over to Peggy Johnson who is CEO of Magic Leap which is an immersive augmented reality technology company and so Peggy with all the hype around the metaverse and the potential to revolutionize traditional ways of working there's a disconnect on what the metaverse really is and the technology that it will support this was from Magic Leap's perspective where do you see the opportunity for augmented reality technology to merge the digital and physical world and where are we in the cycle of adoption and where are the near-term opportunities? Thanks thanks and thanks for the opportunity to speak to this audience today I'm very honored you know that's a big question there is a lot of hype around the metaverse just like any technology when it's first introduced you you get a lot of hype about what what can be what will be but I think if we just go back I'll give a few definitions that may help at Magic Leap we make a device a headboard device your hands are free it's just a headset and when you put it on you still see your physical world and then we smartly integrate digital content into that so we're not maybe building the metaverse but we're building a window into the metaverse and I think in many ways the metaverse is here today most notably the way we interact with our phones with numerous apps you know if you're using Google map and it shows you the building that you're trying to find a picture but that's that's a type of metaverse it's mixing your digital world with your physical world and we do see this continuing to evolve and augmented reality I believe is definitely the next evolution in in making the digital content we already rely on just you know to be used in a more natural and integrated part of our our lives so rather than looking down at your phone like we do now to pull out digital content you'll have a heads up view you'll be looking around and you know seeing content digital content in that physical world that can actually help you and that actually is here today um it's it's being used in some incredible ways that Martha touched on both virtual and physical and virtual by the way is when you're wholly inside another digital digital world where you are you put the headset on and you enter a digital world and then augmented is is really that augmentation of your physical world but both AR and VR make up the metaverse and we believe though that in the longer term AR is the technology that probably will deliver the most value to corporates um Martha was talking about you know the value that that corporates can get right now today it can already be found in operating rooms um both as training but also as an age during complex surgeries we can our devices um it's gone through the regulatory approval to take it into an operating room but literally the surgeon can look down at the physical patient in front of them and a digital overlay can can be put on the patient for instance if they're doing knee surgery that can help them with an incision um it just it makes people more productive you can think of it as a tool to do their job better uh factory floor workers can be more productive they typically work with their hands and you can think of this as a PC on their eyes um the the example I like to use is in training we've got companies now who are reducing their training time from three weeks to three days because you can actually put somebody right out onto a factory floor much more quickly rather than perhaps sitting in a classroom and going through presentations and looking through manuals it just comes to life you can walk up to a machine that's gone offline you can uh through the digital overlay or the digital twin you can walk you can be walked through how to bring that machine back online and without you know having a lot of training so it's actually that not only shortens the training but it also shortens the time to resolution of getting that device or that machine up and running again so I just think it's a super exciting time to work in this space and for me it it seems very similar to other major technology revolutions like the mobile phone over the last 20 years you know in the beginning they just made phone calls and now you know we can't live without them and we're just starting to see the potential of augmented reality and virtual reality in in our worlds today um what one other point is uh virtual reality is is a great training tool the the mechanics around it are are less complex than augmented reality in augmented reality you have to your eyes still have to see your physical world and they have to believe that digital content is actually existing in the digital world and that optically is a very hard challenge so it's why you don't see as many augmented reality devices they're much more complex to to develop to uh to manufacture as well we've been doing this for over a decade at Magic Leap and um we've learned a lot along the way and have listened to our customers about what's what feels right on their heads you know definitely not heavy clunky headsets with low quality visuals it has to be very natural um as if the content is actually residing in front of their eyes so that's a big challenge but you can imagine with that capability just like with mobile phones the sky was the limit you know you you can take that capability you can work it into a number of use cases that can really really aid and uh corporate to become more efficient to shorten times of training and just to be able to do their job better with this powerful tool on their eyes so we're very excited about the future we're just at the beginning there's a lot you can do with it today but there's a lot more coming in the future thank you thank you so much and uh I can I can already see questions coming in so um looking forward to to put in some of those to you so I'm delighted to now hand over to Niall Campion Niall is the founder and managing director of BRAI and Niall's background is an award-winning editor director and visual effects artist working in the film and television industry over a 15-year career he worked on projects for the BBC, Disney, Netflix or to eat and many more now he specializes in technology technological innovation to tell stories in a more interesting engaging way so we look forward to hearing from Niall. Big build-up, I hope I live up to the that's also the other speakers um yeah so first of all I guess thanks for being here and thanks to the other speakers it's been really interesting to listen and never mind present here and hopefully the audience gets something out of this I guess my role I hope today is maybe to talk from a more practical level in terms of how we're actually deploying this technology and what I hope to do is maybe talk through a few examples of projects we've worked on both here in Ireland and maybe internationally as well that deploys some of the technology that the other speakers have been talking about today and I should say before it starts that I'm very jealous of Peggy's current location I was in Orlando for the last two weeks and the temperature difference between there and here is quite significant while it was there I also had the opportunity to try the magic leap too and attest to it being an amazing device incredible and I would say maybe before it starts as well maybe getting into too much what we do like as a company we're probably hardware agnostic so we don't really support a particular type of headset if we don't make headsets we we do the software side of of the metaverse I guess and although we kind of more talk about immersive technologies and really as a company what we focus on are training applications and I should say we're also ore agnostic so Peggy can be talking about A ore we do V ore we also do X ore and all the other orders ore ore is one that I like to talk about which is real reality sometimes we end up doing a bit of that too and so primarily they'll be talking about V ore in some of the projects and I'm talking about today so again there's probably a lot of terminology and I'll try and stay away from sort of the ore jargons for the most part and so maybe to get into them what we do so as a company I guess our vision for this technology this immersive technology is that it's going to change the way people train like I said we're a training company primarily and we think that technology that was available to like fighter pilots formula one drivers high end simulation technology that allows these people to practice for their jobs better before being able to do them for real will become more available to to other roles and Peggy there was talking about factory floor worker so we talked about fighter pilots the factory floors and heads of technology is bringing simulation technology that was used by fighter pilots to factory floor workers and so that's kind of the the vision we set up the company on that we think you know a simulator that was 20 million dollars can now be made for or delivered for hardware or like a couple of thousand dollars and and so as we were developing these simulations I guess our main insight as a company is that a V ore headset and an A ore headset is a great way down of capturing data from individuals as they go through this training so I think I can't remember I think it was Martha was talking earlier about convergence of technologies and that's really something we talk about a lot as well so like while this be our headsets a ore headsets there's also like cloud computing has evolved to the point where you can sort of capture a lot of data and stuff like iot devices where you can sort of start to understand what people are doing and so really our main product as a company is a system for capturing storing analyzing they're presenting data back to instructors and trainees as they're going through their training experiences in these simulators and I guess where that insight really came from was in 2018 we did a project with the United Nations in Somalia and so I went to Mogadishu to make a project around how difficult it is to identify roadside bombs from a moving vehicle I should say primarily I guess we work in defense security aviation and then we do sort of aerospace logistics those kind of adjacent industries but I guess most of our work is in defense and security so I'll probably be talking a bit about that today and so 2018 when Somalia made this project and so the sort of basis of the project which was a VR project was that you drive down a road you are tasked with identifying IEDs or roadside bombs from this moving moving vehicle and then at the end of the experience you're given an after action review which tells you you've driven down this road for 10 minutes in VR which is a real road in Somalia that I went and filmed in VR and you look around you point where you think the devices are and you're told at the end you've successfully identified one of the five devices that were on that road and then you're also told and this is really where our insight came from that of the four devices you missed you look directly at two of them and you looked at it for like 10 seconds because one of the things we can do with the headsets with VR headsets and AR headsets is understand exactly where the person is looking down to like 30 times a second or 90 times a second as they move through these experiences and that becomes quite a powerful learning tool then was our realization because when we see that well you've missed these two devices which you've identified this one when we're training you we'll just train you on the device you can't identify and so every individual goes through the experience maybe will spot a different device and so rather than sort of a one-size-fits-all training experience we can start then to cater and individualize the training within this technology and so that's really what we built the company on and like we've been lucky to be supported by Enterprise Ireland we've got some private equity investment into the company as well and so we've kind of built this product which is based in the cloud uses VR and AR technology in order to train people in a more efficient way and really for like to go to the other end I guess at the spectrum then where we're deploying this maybe what's lighter pilots at the moment is we're working with the RAF and to try and codify something called airmanship so airmanship has defined as a non-technical skills required to operate an aircraft and so if you think about I presume there's not many pilots in the audience but like if you think about driving your car airmanship is kind of the equivalent to checking your mirrors at the right time or being in the right position the road as opposed to the technical skills which are you know what are you doing with your steering wheel what are you doing with your gear stick which gear you in at the right time and so it's quite a difficult thing to sort of subjectively or objectively assess because it's down to the individual instructor's impression of what you're doing and I'm sure everyone's had the experience in a driving lesson or a driving test where they've been told at the end of lesson you're failing because you didn't check your mirror and you go well I definitely did but what we can do again with this data capture technology is we can show you after you finished the training that you actually didn't look in your left mirror you're only looking at the rear view mirror or your right hand mirror and so again that's kind of I guess the learning experience we're trying to build so with the ORF we're capturing we've captured 975 million data points from 39 active duty pilots in order to understand and codify this thing called airmanship and so we've been probably doing that project for about two years now and we're pretty comfortable we're going to be able to do it now we're just going to the analysis phase of the data and so maybe to bring a project a little bit closer to home we're also working with the Irish Defence Forces and we've delivered for them probably it's to go back to the original vision which is developing or deploying simulation to maybe roles that wouldn't have had access to simulation before so what we've developed for them is a is a 12 person simulator which is deployed in the cura which helps them to train on their armored vehicles so previously they had no simulator for this vehicle and so obviously it made it quite difficult to train the only way you could train was to to go down to the yard get in the vehicle and drive around the field in the cura or around cork or around Galway or wherever these vehicles are based and to do sort of firing exercises using the weapon of the vehicle you had to get all your crew together so like up to 100 troops drive down the motorway to the Glen of Amal set up a range with all the safety requirements that are required for live firing ammunition and so like my co-founder was in the army for 20 years and he would describe that experience as like by the time you get to do your training so when you get to the range to your firing you feel like your day's work is done because there's so much logistics involved in organising you know you get there and maybe one of the vehicles breaks down and then like there's four people who can't train and so where they're really finding the benefit of this simulation that we've put in is is that like it just allows them to do a greater volume of training for a lesser expense and again through our data capture we're starting to track sort of the efficiency of this and it really it's it's they're showing return of the investment in a couple of different ways I guess the big one for me is the student to instructor ratio that we're able to change using these immersive technologies at combined with the data capture so they've changed the number of students that one instructor can train from three to 12 so one instructor previously could only train three students at a time now they can train 12 at a time because they have the confidence that the data is being captured that they don't need to watch every student all the time I guess the other big saving and I didn't really talk about sort of our company ethos but I can talk about that maybe later but but the carbon that we're saving on the vehicle so for every three day course we're saving two tons of carbon just from driving these vehicles around up and down the motorway so again that's one of the sort of unseen or un-sort of realized benefits of simulation training is that it's actually you know in in an era where we're trying to do less carbon emission be more efficient it allows that kind of training to happen and again not just for sort of the high-end roles the flight pilots but actually for the sort of the guys on the ground and the people in factories you know traditionally like one of the other industries working is offshore wind and traditionally the way offshore wind would train is it will be a central training hope you don't have to travel to train the one location maybe actually before I leave the defense forces like and as we're talking about metaverse like I think both the other speakers have talked about this sort of the ability to network people together and like sort of the core one of the core principles of metaverse is that it's lots of people all coming together with physical presence being able to work together and so in this simulator that we've put into the current there are 12 simultaneous users 12 people in your headsets sitting in a room all working together and so you know it's a core part of how a military would operate it's a team-based experience it's not just a single user practicing on a single simulator the next phase of this project will allow us to network it across different sites so if you're based in the curry you can train with people in cork or people with cork and train with people always so we can bring 12 people from across the country together to all train together and so a similar principle applies I guess to offshore wind where people would traditionally have come to the one location to train offshore wind really is an industry that doesn't have that much of a legacy of simulation training so like one of our one of our early experiences was we're training people in fire safety or fire safety awareness and the way that's currently trained is you go to a classroom somewhere in the UK or in Ireland you see it in the classroom for six hours watching PowerPoint presentations and then at the end of the experience you go to the car park and watch the instructor put out a fire in a bin and so that is the level of qualification you have to put out a fire on an offshore wind turbine so it doesn't take into account that you're maybe 12 kilometers offshore you're working at a hundred meters in the air you know you could be under in waves five ten meters high and and how do you sort of reproduce that on land and the answer is it's quite difficult so we think you know this technology allows people to simulate that and again simulate it not just for a single user but for a crew who go out to repair these turbines and so I guess hopefully there are kind of a few examples of projects that we are working on at the moment that allow or this technology is enabling and I'll maybe make two points before before I wrap up and the first is like it's that this technology isn't just maybe a creative industry like it's not sort of like it shouldn't be thought of like a film industry or like a performing arts industry like there is certainly that component to us what's really and I think probably the other two speakers have talked about too it's about sort of the benefits it can bring to industry and from a like we are very much a B2B company and and then maybe the other thing I will say and maybe issue an open invite like I said I'm based in 10th bar today and we have an office here and and really the only way to understand this is to try it so if anybody who is on the call is still in base they'd like to try this technology like we've an array of headsets in the office feel free to reach out afterwards I'm happy to give demos to anyone who'd be interested in seeing it. Fantastic Nile and I think you'll definitely be inundated or correct. But yeah for Christmas in the New Year please. No but fantastic and I you know definitely I think in terms of you know the sustainability points that you make and you know we hear a lot about kind of the green and digital transition and but I love the practical examples you know in terms of you know getting vehicles off the roads that would have been kind of driving up and down motorways and that really does help I think crystallize it for people in terms of kind of that that real life example. So we might come now to some some questions and we've had a few come in on the chat and so what I might do is just maybe I'll put one of the questions to Peggy. So Peggy is one of the questions that came in is what is holding back the A or B or wave more hardware or software and also I suppose was hype-surrounded magically years ago do you think something similar with the metaverse at present? Yeah so it's a little bold but there are devices out there so there are hardware devices a number of virtual reality devices and we're just starting to see more augmented reality and again that's a bit harder to to build. HoloLens is another fully immersive augmented reality device from Microsoft so we do have devices some of it is still education on what those devices are capable of doing right now versus the hype because you don't want disappointment you don't want someone to try something out now this doesn't work and you know put it on the shelf and they don't pick it up again for a decade that's not what we want to happen and frankly I mean just going to the second question that they're you know magically did have a great device they launched their initial device in 2018 I think an issue there was the market it was very early in the market there was some hype around it it was entirely pointed at consumers and so the the disappointment was it was being sold alongside a mobile phone that was very performative mobile phone could do all sorts of things and this more expensive device had a very very small ecosystem of applications the cost was high and people weren't quite sure what to do with it in from a consumer perspective and that was when the company pivoted back to focusing on corporates because there were things you could do at that moment with the technology in its current state and frankly I draw the analogy back to mobile phones again the very first people who bought those were corporates a lot of times traveling sales people who previous to the mobile phone had to call to their office they have to find a parking spot a phone booth make a call to the office you know get directions on their next sales visit that took time and now they could just make a phone call and so there was a return on investment there and that is the point that we're at right now with augmented reality there is an absolute return on investment I mean going from three weeks to three days to train new factory workers is is a very solid metric and so the focus needs to be about what these devices can do right now and if I just move to the software side of things a lot of the you know some of the delays there are just getting people understand how you build really 3d applications so a lot of the talent comes out of the gaming world that we see in it as they're building corporate solutions because they're already involved with 3d applications now those 3d applications in a gaming world are typically shown on a 2d device your pc in front of you and now that thing comes to life you know so you have 3d visualization like never before it is you know if you're working on a car with you know three people who aren't co-located with you you can all be looking at the same CAD drawing of the car right in front of your eyes you can all modify it you can delete you can annotate it's it really makes those kind of design experiences come to life and that's what's what's possible today but it's it's getting you know corporates to understand what these devices can do getting the right developers trained up understanding what they can take advantage what they can leverage in in these devices so a solution can can really pop and it's just funny but now you talked about a fire safety solution we just had one in our factory the other day because we have to train our fact we have a factory we manufacture our product we have trained our own factory in fire safety once a year there's a compliance you know box you have to check and so we decided to build a with one of our partners an app to do that and I took the test the other day I tell you my heart was racing I walked into our clean room I had to look around for the fire there it was blazing in the corner it looked just like a fire but it was digital but I was in the physical cleaned room and I had to run to the to the wall to get the fire extinguisher run back over but it was like it was real to me it was everything but the smoke which maybe someday will incorporate but it was it's an awesome way to learn and to train and all of that is is possible now so we're trying just to focus on the here and now the the things that we see the some of that hype I do believe all of that is capable but it's going to take some time the devices will have to get smaller lighter more of a glasses format to reach that point okay thanks to Peggy and so do we have a question there that maybe I suppose it's kind of open to the panel and so I suppose from to the panelists do we have any experience or feedback on the adoption of mixed reality applications in industry HoloLens app development for example do technicians love it is it too clunky does it improve workflow or hinder so welcome any any thoughts on that one I can give you multiple examples of it but I would say like to go back to the Irish Defence Forces like they absolutely love it I would say everyone we talked to down there not only like they're sort of like I don't know if anyone you've had experience dealing with soldiers but typically they're quite cynical and so particularly in the current like they'd be there for two or three generations of soldier and like any new stuff that like I want to be doing this for like look at these new guys in that they're shiny thing like that'll be gone by the end of the week but I would say almost exclusively they put on the headset they did the thing and they go this is amazing like and like I don't say that just to sort of make our stuff because it's not necessarily our content that they find amazing it's the experience of putting on the headset and being able to sit in the in an environment and train as they would in the real world and again for me it's back to like their their access to the equipment so like they would not be able to sort of go in and or they would be afraid to go in and press buttons on the in the car for fear of breaking it and that takes out a commission where they can go in and they can just play and they can like you know well what happens if I do this what happens if I move this thing over here and I can go in and make all those mistakes and stimulate it before they have to go and do it for real which is something they've never been able to do before. Exactly everyone who has this experience and as Peggy described because it feels so real here which all of a sudden then only realize when you have a headset or from from any company on from from Google or from Quest the latest Quest from from meter is how real it feels and I think it's also psychologically your brain is like in the real world from a neuroscience point of view is very interesting and the biggest cases I would say right now are what you described in the so-called in more industrial metaverse where you create together and one of the biggest companies very very active and there is NVIDIA. So NVIDIA is basically a building ditto to twins of whole factories like Siemens or BMW and they they create the the factory process is one thing but also also health and safety and also even the creation like for BMW of the cars like Peggy described it they do in 3D they do globally they can all of a sudden see not only from a design perspective but also they don't need to do this painful very expensive and not really supporting sustainable processes of driving these cars and that's the same with e-cars even yeah so it's for me it's not only the sky is the limit it sometimes feels like there is no limit at one point but there is also clearly as Peggy said a managing expectation but when you get into this like stuff like in the NVIDIA does is amazing the other thing which I really admire what they recently have done is obviously the entire play of other ecosystem other people in the ecosystem is digital twin of the earth so they have created a digital twin of the earth they're still creating it this is not one thing to foresee climate changes to do simulations and to help us to understand what does it mean if we take this or that action and have this basically this whole data gathering from Google Maps from all over the world again which is all available to pull this together to create something which is really outstanding and just one final point on that um actually we're working with NVIDIA and their Omniverse that they bit building yeah awesome platform and we worked with one of the do-it-yourself companies Lowe's and what they have done is put the headsets on their associates the folks who work in their stores and it helps them restocking so you can go down a physical store and look at an empty space and that digital twin of what's supposed to be there can pop up and a sort of a really positive outcome of that whole program is the empowerment that the associates feel that you know particularly new ones they don't have to run back and ask someone where is this the the device can walk them to where the stock is they can pick it up bring it back to the shelf if there's far less uh dependency on others which makes you feel very empowered you put the device on and you can do your job by yourself and that that was sort of a a happy side benefit that we hadn't realized when we first started working with it as a tool it's it empowers employees and they actually feel very good about it yeah I mean talking for example to Microsoft the Microsoft lab for HoloLensis is in Zurich so I'm based in Switzerland and what they do also similar I think you will be very well aware is that when you develop the HoloLensis for sure for the normal consumer they are too expensive now but also think about for people who have never done any operation in them in their in their life and then you live in very remote areas in Africa or so they're still obviously doctors flying there but how amazing that is that you can empower to your point someone who has absolutely not done anything like that before to do this kind of operation because you're helping him with all the augmented and virtual reality tools you have if you have obviously this kind of headset so the point is also in this different in this different parts of the world we can create more and better life standards we can also create more inclusiveness but what it means is bandwidth for example as we know it needs a lot of bandwidth and a lot of energy which we don't have available or in the form we want to have now but this up to us you know is also there we need to change the way we produce energy because we have a lot of what we can use and all of this when we talked about convergence and interconnectivity everything of this is connected so talking about this in in silos doesn't help and with the examples we have shown you it's basically there is a whole ecosystem of different players who come together brilliant thanks everyone for for the input on that one and i suppose kind of leading on from some of the discussion you know it was one of the questions there is how do you see the metaverse impacting on public service delivery is the focus now more on training you know and training simulation so i think you know we can definitely see again i think it's back to return on investment the point i think Peggy you were making that there's a very clear correlation between you know if you can reduce number of training days you can get someone on to kind of working quicker and so from an industry perspective or even public service perspective it's it's quantifiable i think often in business we want to be able to quantify the the savings of the impact of a new technology and you know you add something to that because they're in south Korea they are very very far advanced in public services they are created and there's something also in the US i don't know which your city that was they have created a complete digital twin of of the city yeah also with the from the government so also with the aspect of trying what is the infrastructure how can we improve infrastructure in terms of the entire processes for buses for others and how can we make it more easy and in addition to that dealing with government as we know can be sometimes very painful in terms of documentation and everything you need so they're also testing they have government offices there where people can come obviously they come as an avatar helping them so they're all kind of different initiatives from the government and basically South Korea is one in total also for everything they do an industry and banking most advanced in the metaverse so they are really the the primer you can say from a country perspective uh there might not be on everyone's map right it's absolutely when you look at everything they have done and you can really find for every industry an example there anyone else i'll tell us on that one or i can move on maybe just like briefly to talk i don't know it's probably more of a viewer thing but like where it works really well for me coming maybe from a filming background is like being able to put people within experiences so obviously training is a great way to do that but but like i've seen a couple of really interesting use cases again in Ireland like there's projects ongoing around like court service making viewer experiences that allow you to experience what it's like to go to court before you actually have to go there so it's like it's kind of training but it's kind of exposure redeployment therapy or whatever and like you know Peggy was talking a lot about medical use earlier like one of the most interesting studies i found around viewer and it's again it's an old one was using viewer headsets as pain relief so there's a i can't remember exactly the details of it so i'm going to try and for just but like don't quote me the science on this but broadly it was people who are getting burned dressings changed and they did a ab study with morphine versus a viewer headset and what they were doing was putting people in viewer headsets in like really cold environments so like looking at penguins in the Antarctic or whatever the environment was and their tolerance for the level of pain they could appreciate was much higher than even compared to the morphine treatment and it has a longer lasting effect too so the morphine would wear off over time so like i think this yeah that is specialized on these topics who deal with therapy so really as you say post-traumatic also for people who come from Afghanistan for example or even during operations you know how painful it is because you even though you may be under anesthesia you still have that feeling so there is a whole range in medical healthcare and healthcare spectrum where companies are focusing on the different basically parts of it and one of the points which connect all of this and all of our discussions is obviously digital identity and data right now in particular also in medical healthcare as we know when we go to the doctor he has some data we have some data maybe from wearables and then when we travel to another country then there's another data set and that is a huge problem because ideally like we see now in webstreet is in that in everything that you own your data so you have a digital wallet you have a digital identity you could have what we call a soulbound token and this is also already there and that part of the whole equation of what we have discussed about apart from the personal data point is really who owns the data and how can I make sure I it's my data so an amazon dealing with it so I give what I want to give here I want to give my house data here I want to give the other data yeah so this is a huge topic for discussion and obviously also for regulation so another question that's coming in and whenever we've gone we've landed the message because someone says there's no denying the transformative power of immersive technologies which is great and how do the panel see more mainstream adoption and readiness of industry to invest in b or a or x or seen this as a high barrier of entry to create in the content would you agree there's a high barrier of entry and I suppose how then do we kind of get industry more kind of ready to invest in this I think that they are huge investment I mean and Peggy will say more right there 120 billion of VC investments alone in VC investments and then others are investing too and if you think about the daily consumer if you start with what Peggy emphasized the augmented reality you have Shopify and you have IKEA you have all these companies who are ready into augmented reality so changing the way we we shop and e-commerce is huge as another billion industry where we see a lot then the guys the whole fashion industry is into it so they are huge investments already made Peggy but you're sorry yeah and I think that you know a big tailwind for this whole industry was meta Facebook changing their name to meta talking about the 10 billion a year they're spending in this space that drew a lot of additional investment around it but some of the actual barriers are and I touched on this already is you know developers we need to train developers in this medium really because it is a new type of medium similar to games but but different in that you know you you are looking at things in a in a in a very spatial way it's it's you know we some people do call this you know spatial computing because you're actually modifying the space the actual physical space around you and there's there's a fair amount of training to get a developer up and running but going back to ROI and again I'm going to draw back to my mobile phone past when we when the industry came out with mobile phones I was working at Qualcomm and I remember we put into the chip the capability to the the tc ip protocols so that you could actually build data and read applications on the phone and I remember you know a lot of the the CEOs of the telcos at the time say why would you want to do that you know so sometimes you get a little bit of hate like the the technology is a little bit ahead of what people think they can do with it and but as soon as people saw that they could earn money for instance if you remember way back in the beginning it was ringtones there was all different sorts of ringtones that we would pay you know like a dollar ninety nine for a ringtone and that drew the developers so once the developers see an ROI a reason to develop on another platform you know and now it's you know do I develop on iOS do I develop on on android do I develop in a unity environment you they have to make choices they have a you know they have limited resources but if you can show an ROI to those developers they will come and that's what we're working on we have a big focus on the developer community in AR and getting them to understand that there's real value here and you know solid metrics help like some of the ones I've mentioned already and that that then breaks the dam and they they start to come and we are definitely seeing that but but again no doubt that meta announcement did a lot for the industry to sort of wake people up to the opportunity. Probably double down on almost everything Peggy has said there like maybe pick up two specific points first being developers and like for us like that's our biggest challenge all the time is trying to find suitably qualified developers to to build the content and in fact like we have often been in a position where we have more work than we have developers able to do the workforce and like to sort of go back to my previous life at working in film and tv like we're kind of at the point with that industry now where like anyone with a mobile phone can make content almost at a professional level that can be uploaded to youtube and you know like I watch sort of youtube videos with the kids where people are making them with sort of gimbals with sort of go-pros and gimbals and stuff and like the means of production is quite available and very cost-effective for that industry and so there's an abundance of content and I feel like that's probably what this industry needs is like the the amount of content being produced or the amount of people able to produce content to increase and I think that will come with time as people sort of start to get interested in it and then from the other end of the spectrum I guess it's it's the user part and like we've been doing this for over six years now and like at that time you know you were going to people out with their first time using a VR headset but really and it feels like I don't know if Covid changes or maybe it's maybe it's the meta stuff but like we've had increasingly experience where people come to us and say I tried VR in my brother-in-law's house over Christmas and we were playing something and I had an idea of how that could work for for my business and so like I feel like the more people who use the technology the more good ideas are going to come out of it come out of it and again back to Peggy's point like why do you need data on a chip well someone somewhere is going to work out a reason why that's going to be beneficial and just the more people who are using it the more good ideas are going to come out I think. I think that is a super point that we also that's why I say everyone has to be kind of the shaper because we get more creativity as a community as well and we cannot think about the Facebook right now of the metaverse I mean there are similar things but what I mean is something so mind-changing that that there we need to get more people into it and not only as you say the developers but everyone can be a creator in that sense here and what are your pain points and how how can we or how can we solve them? You think I'd be better at them at this stage but I just want to pick up on some of the points right there just in terms of you know the impact of this technology and I suppose the idea is that you know just even trying it it can it can spark with people and I suppose your own comments in terms of you know the way immersive technologies can be used for you know the future of work and hybrid working and remote working and I suppose the the role it can play in in that sphere obviously it's an issue that's kind of up for a lot of debate at the moment so so welcome your thoughts on that one. Yeah I'd like to jump in on that one I think one of the ideas that you know people would love to see is the fact that well maybe I don't have to get on a plane and cross the country to go to a physical meeting if the experience is as good as or as close to a physical meeting right here at my house or in the office and that we're still a little a ways from that we can obviously you can put the headsets on anywhere you can all look at the same digital content and modify it but if we if we want that experience where we are seeing people as they are that requires a lot of cameras and that that seems again you know you see it you see a video of something and you know everybody's in the same room in order for that to actually occur so if you had the headset on and you were in Ireland and I was in the States you would have to have a bunch of cameras on you so that that image could be packaged up and sent to me so I could see you as if you were standing there and we we just don't have that yet um actually Cisco is coming out with something called WebEx hologram early next year and that'll it'll come very close to that they do have a set of cameras uh it's a it's a beautiful setup but you know that is what's going to be required for a real true 3d experience now many times we don't actually need that if you're meeting someone for the first time I think you'd want that but if you've met them already that's where you see you know you could they could be replaced with an avatar you know and they could be walking around that automotive that you're both designing and you could be you know talking to each other by the way the spatial audio is really wonderful in these devices so if if you walk behind me I hear you walk behind me um because we have eye tracking we know where your eyes are looking so often avatar comes up and looks at me right in my eyes I I see that you actually feel that presence so we get close to it in in the current technology but where we need to be I think for real truly true 3d meetings to take the place of a physical meeting is still a little ways off and we'll lead those cameras in place yeah also the avatars I would also not underestimate them as as you say for certain use cases because once you have it's very interesting for us also to watch when we have experiences with with people joining us and their first time doing their avatars their first thing or the avatar has nothing to do with me but once you have one you want you want this to be the expression of yourself yeah so some obviously have a you know fish on the head or whatever but most of the people who start first were in our age they are more um they like to have it more like themselves so with with one of the applications with radio player one you can do the the photography and will be in your avatar so that's for normal consumers it's not the highly sophisticated you mentioned but also with a class three we have tested this now it's it's still expensive for normal because it's 1600 us dollars you can have the eye tracking and that's the first time it's a bit it's like wow because the eyes are the most important in in communication that's what what also reports have shown so once you see that as as Peggy mentioned it feels more real even in an avatar because when you raise your eyebrows or so the avatar will raise the eyebrows so it's when you first see that oh my god you know this other person has a much more expression so maybe like I don't make an adjacent point to all of those as well which is like when we're talking about avatars and maybe to open this out to a broader metaverse discussion I guess that you know do you want to have 20 different avatars for the 20 different products that you're interacting with on a daily basis like so if you're in a metaverse like and I think I feel like this is probably one of the bigger problems that needs to be solved for this to become a lot more mainstream is you know do I want to have a Facebook avatar that's different to my Google avatar that's different to my whatever work avatar and like probably not and do I need to want to be switching between them all the time like probably not and so I think one of the things that the internet early days did very well is set a sort of common standard so like a website will display as a website will display as a website and so I haven't really seen and maybe it's happening in the background but like much discussion on how a common metaverse standard is going to be applied that allows you know the meta metaverse to talk to the Google metaverse talks to Microsoft metaverse and for people consumers to move seamlessly between all those different standard forums one is around meta maybe here and so on and another one is also very much driven by what we call the open metaverse yeah so there are two forums but obviously they they have started beginning of the year to exactly do this and you have for the avatars you also have ready player one which is an application which gives you the possibility to use your avatar already in a number of different worlds the challenge is as you say some are blockchain some are not blockchain but they are also now people building bridges but this is the part of the technical side but I would also say that what we noticed was in the beginning you start with one avatar and you dress it differently depending on the location like in real life the more advanced you are like you are when you're also game you want not one avatar maybe for your party avatar you want to be a minotaur or you want to be a unicorn yeah but as there are no standards right now can you be a unicorn obviously when you show up at work maybe not depending but depending on your work if you are in a creative job maybe you can gamma as a unicorn yeah so it's it's quite can be quite creative as well but one of the company's driving standards there is NVIDIA with their omnivores because they want to transfer this this 3d graphics data using usd universal scene description so there is starting to be some momentum around usd across platforms and and the good thing with development of the virtual worlds and the augmented worlds is there is more collaboration at the start now I think they saw what happened with the internet where we had to fit things into the internet over time it's like let's get it right in the beginning and so there is more collaboration across the big tech companies to start to standardize on some of these descriptors yeah one of the let's say partially surprising even partnership was in october between microsoft and meta yeah and this is huge because for for working microsoft as we know microsoft teams has hundreds of millions the office suite is used by 345 million of people and they now have a cooperation strategic partnership which I believe I mean for meta it's a no-brainer because they can extend the reach and microsoft has their own application not meta horizon but microsoft mesh which can be used with their with the goggles or basically always a headset and it has been already tested with Accenture for the last two years what is called the Sutton's floor I believe where 150,000 people were were testing this and just imagine now instead of zoom because microsoft has such a strong base we usually everyone uses microsoft teams then you can imagine how the acceleration of adoption also can be through this partnership but to Peggy's point what I found amazing that obviously for commercial reasons but might even microsoft and meta are now having this kind of partnerships here but on the other side is two big giants coming together so it will be quite nice like others as well and Niveda is one of the super I love Niveda because they're doing what is called the omniverse but they also are open they create an open metaverse yeah so where you don't have what we call the world garden so Niveda is really one of the top companies I think for people to get closer to I suppose just one other question I think I suppose it goes back to kind of the discussion we're having there about kind of common metaverse standards in terms of the panelists I suppose what risks do you see as being kind of particularly serious with immersive technologies and what would you think needs to be done to address or prevent such risks and you know I suppose as policy makers what should be done to regulate against such risks I mean again I always caution don't over-regulate until you have the thing in place but you know just welcome your thoughts in terms of where you think the risks are what can be done to mitigate them and then I suppose the policy side yeah I'd love to jump in on that because we've been thinking about it for a long time the company that I'm involved with Magic League is about 12 years old and and the founder was deeply focused on privacy and the reason is because these devices are bristling with sensors much more than your mobile phone you know you've got four cameras looking at your eyes you've got five world cameras looking out at your at your world and a lot of data passing in between and and you know more sensors to come because it is body-worn we can actually add more you know physical body sensors over time we're not doing that right now but you can imagine something that's touching your body can add those sorts of sensors so we've been thinking about that for a long time and we've tried from from day one to be absolutely locked down on privacy security that's very personal data you know four cameras looking at your eyes we know who you are and and only you should get to say where that data goes the user and so it so what we've tried to do is work right away with regulators let them first of all know what these devices are capable of doing so they understand that because so they don't try to fit in an old regulatory framework into a new technology that never seems to work and then to talk about how we smartly regulate going forward you know allowing for innovation but understanding the need to keep user data private secure and within your own you know responsibility as to whether you release that data or not so it's going to be a big issue if we don't stay on top of it just because the devices are much more much more personal than a mobile phone even yeah I like can I commend that one too because I guess as a company what we do is is data that comes out of your and seeing what is possible to come out of it I would absolutely again agree with what Peggy said there and like it's great to hear magically for taking that approach but I would say not every company is taking that approach and maybe that's where regulation has to come in and like there's always that fear of like you know you see what's happened in Twitter you know all it takes is one not so benevolent owner to come in and say well I'm taken over and I'm going to do this my way now so without the regulation being there it's like you're reliant on companies like magically enforcing it themselves and like again I would be probably similar to what you said like don't overregulate but at the same time like I guess regulators need to be aware of what's possible coming out of these devices and like what I keep going back to similar to what Peggy's saying there and tracking your eyes like one of our data scientists said like he can work out pretty accurately who an individual is based on just on their widest place and their heights basically so how high the headset is off the ground you can tell to a reasonable degree of actually who the person who's using the headset is and so we capture I think 220 data points per frame of your so like straight away you can get a lot of information on and really personal information on people and so standards that say this is how that data has to be stored this is who owns the data and for me it's always the individual's data like we only see anonymized and what can be done with it afterwards so like again we as a company would never sell that on and like in our contracts with the customers we specifically put in we don't own and we will never resell this data whereas I would say and like again without naming companies and getting myself in trouble but like there are certain headset manufacturers who part of their business model is the headset is discounted to purchase but we are making the value of back based on the data we're capturing as the person as they go through the viewer experience and so like that for me and like you know seeing what some of the bigger players in viewer have done previously with their internet data that for me is a huge risk actually to us as a company because all it takes is one company like that to do something bad that you know then pulls the whole industry down because it becomes well you know see what you can do with the data and like and then everyone else like falls down because of yeah I would also say it's a call for urgency because from everything we have heard so far we it's already quite advanced so that regulators really get involved now and not after one of the companies as you described does something really awful and unfair because that is for the whole rest of the people who develop and who create and who are really passionate about it is a nightmare so the data point gathering for off-behavioral data and you mentioned that before and I we need not something which is detailed because we cannot imagine all the use cases but it should be something which sets certain standards and for me what I haven't seen yet was regulators like also the in Germany when the debate was there they talk about it but none of them has ever tried a device you know how can the Deutsche Bundestag all the politicians talk about it then they have all the experts there and have never tried a device that this is our incredible so from that point of view probably their kids would know better some of them at least than themselves it's magically like you said certainly will offer that your company will offer that we offer that there are tons of companies where regulators can say can I try we also work with regulators in Switzerland they come there's tears we and they try on stuff and they try to understand so I think this is the way how it should be you get involved you know what you're talking about yeah because with the smartphone it's fine we know what the smartphone does or it doesn't do right now that with with the headset is still a bit of an unexplored area I would say and I suppose you know just from my own perspective you know we can see kind of what's coming from the European perspective of you know files coming down on AI and data so I suppose if you cover some aspects of metaverse but not all and I suppose the broader question is also you know we see kind of Europe sometimes you know moves ahead in these areas but you know perhaps an OECD approach you know a broader than just Europe approach and you know we see the difficulties that arose obviously Europe goes ahead with GDP or but then you're left kind of dealing with the consequences then of like last week the transatlantic data flow and things like that so I suppose yeah just from from your perspective obviously Europe you know tends to take a lead on some of the the regulatory areas as it should and you know very much in that kind of eurocentric values but I suppose sometimes we we have to try and look to who are we working with in this space if there's other you know geo regions that could maybe work with us and developing those standards yeah and it's also interesting you know you should look beyond Europe you know because I mean like the internet is it's all global and we have talked about health and all the other areas is all global and this is just it was already in the internet is all global but in my view here it's even more so you could basically you need to have a forum which is global like the UN or something which is dealing with this massive shift of society which is happening now is also different in my view from certain perspectives what you can do with all the virtual worlds and everything we have talked about different from what the internet was so it's even more even more more uncomfortable in certain senses but also more more possibilities so so from that point of view it's even including the Mars and where they have the NASA testing and trying which suits they should have going on top of the world so to speak or beyond the world so it's a big big thing so it might be really you should get the top people together to to also think about it and not over-regulate but see what are the possibilities what are the use cases work with the companies work with those who are actually on the ground like Magic Leap or Nvidia or others to do it which is happening in parts I would say that's great well I think we are we are nearly at time so I want to end my thanking our wonderful panelists and thank you so much for your your time and your insights today so to mark the denial to Peggy thank you so much and on behalf of myself I'd like to thank IIEA and IDA Ireland for organising the event it's been really interesting and definitely thought-provoking and you know definitely kind of set us in good stead to to continue this conversation in terms of both from the policymakers perspective but also from from the industry perspective as well so thank you all for your time and I'm sure on behalf of the IIEA to say have a lovely Christmas and look forward to welcoming you to another event soon.