 Live from Toronto, Canada, it's theCUBE. Covering Blockchain Futurist Conference 2018. Brought to you by theCUBE. Hello everyone, welcome back to theCUBE's Live Coverage, day two of Untraceable Presents, Blockchain Futurist Conference, where the industry insiders and community get together to talk about the future, really great event, great content on stage, of course with the live coverage bringing to you here with theCUBE, I'm John Furrier, your host. Our next guest is Gabriel Renee, co-founder and executive director of Versus. Okay, one of the big sponsors here, congratulations and thanks for sponsoring, but really great story you guys have in a space that's where it's stood in, but a lot of people want it to go faster. This is the new creative environment. Yes, talk about your company. Sure, Versus Foundation was created to basically develop and support new standards for interoperability across all of the different emerging technologies. We see that one of the problems with going faster is everyone going faster in different directions. So we think it's critically important that as we start to look at the internet of value, which is what the blockchain community likes to consider when 3.0, but the internet of things guys see it in an entirely different way and the sort of semantic web, internet of intelligence folks and the metaverse VR sort of future world. We're saying guys, the future is the internet of everything, so you need a fundamental protocol to connect these things. Then you can start to get smart factories and smart cities and smart supply chains that work interoperably globally. And given kind of where we ended up in web 2.0, with a big sort of fragmented and fractured and overly centralized set of powers, we think that it's really important that we establish a set of protocols that are part of an open standard and that's really what the foundation is building. You know, web 2.0, nothing really happened. It was just Ajax and no fundamental structural change happened. Yeah, social networks, graph, databases, but the world needs a better thing because it's not just siloed artists anymore, it's a lot of interdisciplinary factors going into the new creative. You could have a data science driving some value. You could have UI or UX, but the foundational footprint seems to be what you guys are working on. Is that kind of how I see it? Yeah, we believe we need a new infrastructure tier for the next era of the web. And it's primarily because the interface is changing. I mean, it's changed every 15 years, almost on the dot, right, from mainframe to desktop, to laptop, to mobile, to wearables. The next wearable goes on the face. You know, you got Apple, Google, Samsung, Intel, everyone focused on developing AR or VR smart glasses. The reality is that then content is placed in a space, not on a page. And the web was designed for interactions between people navigating between pages, interacting with media and text, but with an internet of things world that has nothing to do with the web and virtual augmented reality that have no connection to that either. How do you have all this work interoperably? So we have a spatial protocol that actually lets spaces have sort of spatial domains, like web domains, and the ability to create a spatial URL and an asset ID for any object. Then you can, people and things and currencies can interoperably move between them. And then you can awaken an entirely new developer class that's building spatial applications that are also decentralized and secure. And that then enables the sort of creative era, I think, of development. As we move a bit out of the information age and maybe into what some are calling the imagination age. So enabling is the key word, right? You're enabling technology. How's it going? Give us some updates on what you guys are working on. Where's the progress of this? Yeah, because yeah, we need an underlying baseline to create value, otherwise it's fragmented. Yeah, I think one of the big trends I've been hearing at the conference is the word interoperability is finally a term that everyone's starting to consider. The industry is still very young, and so in the beginning, everyone kind of wants to run their own direction, and hey, I got another coin and another project. And now, given the status of the market, everyone's starting to realize that interoperability and collaboration and standards are important. I was seeing a lot of companies that are creating bridges between sort of middleware providers. I think that that's really critical. So. Where are you guys out of the protocol? Is it deployed? Is it under development? Yeah, so we had MVP about six months ago, our proof of concept stage where we were confident then that we were going to be able to deliver this at scale. We've been able to track some really, really amazing developers on the team. Folks we've pulled from Microsoft HoloLens and Google and Samsung and Magic Leap and others, kind of the tip of the sphere of these technologies. We will be launching our beta at the end of this year. We've got about 20 partners that have already signed up to do pilots with us across 20 different industries. Advertising, entertainment, IMAX partnership, which we just announced. Livestreamers? Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, look it, we're terrible. This is not immersive, although it's live. Imagine having a hologram here. Yeah, and so, you know, it's funny because we talk about this idea of holo-portation and it's very sci-fi, very kind of Star Trek, right? And then I remind people that, you know, we teleport our voices to each other all the time. We're teleporting images to everybody right now and that's, you know, 150 years ago that would just sound totally insane. Well, you bring a community into it too. Think about the community impact, right? If you're doing content like we're doing. Imagine bringing Brock Pearson or someone we want to bring from the community with us right now on the telegram chatters. Yes, yes. That's where people want to see content. And so, you know, the funny thing is, we've been watching these sci-fi films for decades, right? And watching how holograms and things sort of poured in and out and how people interact with these things and moving through different virtual worlds. Robots able to do transactions, you know, in the new Blade Runner. There's a whole scene around that. Versus actually the basis of our technology makes that now possible. You obviously need the new interface, but that's what's coming. I mean, you're seeing cameras everywhere. So for instance, in San Francisco, the new Warrior Stadium is going to have cameras everywhere. So why not have a protocol to give me a front row seat? I mean, it's not Ready Player One yet coming, but it's still going there. We need better content. Yeah. Is this what you guys are trying to solve? Really what we're, well, fundamentally what we're trying to solve is that we recognize that we've got really significant challenges with these new technologies. Artificial intelligence is so powerful. The internet of things is so incredibly powerful. Virtual and augmented reality, because you're now experiencing something, it's incredibly powerful and people have very transformative experiences. I see people come out laughing hysterically, crying hysterically. You know, you can literally walk in someone else's shoes. So when we talk about exponential technologies converging, that's a lot of power. That's power that we can funnel towards the kind of promise that we want from these technologies or if they're fragmented or overly centralized, they can be used for all kinds of things that I think we would prefer they aren't. So Versus wants to make sure that we're working together in a smart way to try to get the best of these. The challenge you have is it's just a great use case. The whole world's your oyster. You can go from content immersive to some low hanging fruit, IoT industrial applications. Yeah, that's a big one actually. I mean, cameras, sensors, rendering, accident reconstruction on a corner. All this is now possible. This is kind of where, I mean look at blockchain. Industrial cases are supply chain. Makes sense. Blockchain, supply chain. Right, you know. How are you guys prioritizing? I mean, it sounds like it's a challenge. You've got all this big demand potentially. Yeah, it's the how you're boiling the ocean sort of question, right? The way I like to look at it is we're giving everybody boilers. We're not boiling the ocean. We're designing boilers. So, you know, at the heart of it, we have some really amazing partnerships that have already been in place. One of them is with the VRAR Association. It's kind of the preeminent association in the space. 4,000 corporate members. These are all the Fortune 500 companies that you think of. Plus early innovators. They've got 60 chapters around the world. 20 different industries that they're supporting. So we're working with the co-chairs of each of those industries, whether it's industrial or construction or education or medical. And then actually creating pilots that we can use as case studies to promote each of those industries. So we're going actually wide before we go deep. And then we're trying to create advocacy and adoption and let leaders in the space help us tell that story. How does people get involved? How does someone get involved? It depends what a someone is right now. Community at large. People want to join the mission, partner. Yeah. Is it open right now? It is. So at the moment, you can go to versus.io. It'll kind of start you down the path. We're signing up partners by the day right now across multiple different industries. Robotics, aeronautics. I mean, every day there's some new opportunity. So come to the website, get started there. We'll route you into the Telegram channel. There's a whole developer community we're spinning up. And then we'll have a lot more exciting announcements that come in the next few months. I know you're busy, got another video to do. Thanks for coming on theCUBE. Appreciate it. Thanks for sharing. Thanks, wonderful. This is great technology, enabling developers from work to play. A lot of great use cases, new environment for rendering objects, 3D, all kinds of spatial. This is the future of content. Again, work to play. It's theCUBE bringing you live content from Futures Conference. Stay with us. We'll be back after this short break.