 and for our viewers joining us as we stream on Facebook and on JSC TV. The first panel is on a great, timely topic, virtual reality, and the communications ecosystem. The panel is moderated by a dear friend of mine, Mr. Rob Powell, the editor and creator of our industry's top blog, Telecom Remix. And to that, I read this blog with my first love of coffee every morning. And if you haven't checked it out yet, I recommend it. The E-telecom family does. His maps, his Q&A's with topsy-levels and more. Which means he's a really great resource. And Rob's love of telecom and expertise is evident throughout. So I'm going to do embarrassing. Prior to blogging, he spent 10 years as a software engineer at Bentley Systems. And he has a master's in chemical engineering from Princeton. All the way from New Jersey. Please welcome my friend, Bob. To talk about virtual reality. And how many people here notice? How many people actually throw their child around hunting? And taste of where virtual reality, augmented reality, all of these subjects. The data stored on your phone is just a mashup of GPS and mobile apps. And yet it causes an innocent amount of disruption to some people, right? And it leads us to say, you know, what happens when virtual reality gets scaled on something real that isn't, you know, chasing little monsters around? Where does that, what will be? What effects can you construct? Certainly when I asked people in the industry, what is the next big thing? The same single-phrased thing that they tell me is virtual reality. Or all of this reality or some context from there up. The question I have is, are we ready for that? Do we have the infrastructure to do it? Do we know what we're getting into? So with that, we have four panelists here today to tell us exactly a few things about that. There are at least a few theories about it. Let's see what we don't know. First, we have Ian Forster, who is the Chief Commercial Officer and co-founder of PR at Playhouse. He has a lot of people to tell us about virtual reality, whereas the rest of us are infrastructure here. We have Mark Lockman, who is the CIO of IO. That's IO as in that. We have Wes Hamar, a company that works. He runs the video services. He runs the video services division. And Roger Goodman, the VP of sales. So the first question we've done was simple. We're going to start off with what makes virtual reality an object of reality and related technologies the next big thing. What is it we need to be worried about? What should we expect from it? I'm going to work backwards. What should we expect from it? None of us have any idea because it's such a fundamentally different relationship with media than what we've had before. The second part of that was what should we look forward to or what should we be worried about? What should we be expecting to do to handle it? What is it that we're going to be, what are we going to be disturbing and how are we going to be disturbing? Well, okay, so now we'll go back to the front and start. So virtual reality is, this is a little long, it's a really long one. So virtual reality is a sensory rich simulation that is indistinguishable from your actual corporeal reality. It's a way to digitally mediate your sensory experience of the world. And this can happen in a couple of different ways. There's virtual reality is a full sensory deprivation and replacement. So you're taking the sensory information that you would normally be gathering, shutting it down, and going into one of the digital float tank and then pumping new information into your sensory receptors. Automated reality, you are combining, you are augmenting the sensory information that you're getting with layers of new information that are working with what's there already. So with virtual reality you need full shut it off and pump in something new. Automated reality, you need to be, your devices and everything need to be aware of everything that's in the room and then they provide layers on top of it. Mixed reality is you are not using any kind of device but you are experiencing a reality that is both actually there and where somebody's like, oh, you're in the reality industry. Yes, I suppose I am. It's interesting, I think we're going to see a lot of, we're basically, so scientists have been researching sensory perception for years and what they found is that 60% of what you perceive you're actually inventing. You're taking in all of this information and so somebody just kind of looks at the side of it. You're taking in a lot of information and you're filtering and your brain is doing this really good job of filtering things that are weird ones. So a really good example of this is the sound from my voice is traveling to your ear at something like 720 miles per hour. I'm sure somebody knows the exact number of that. But the light is traveling almost infinitely faster than that. Yet you're perceiving the sound and the light hitting, or having it at the same time, right? This is happening at the same time and that's because your brain is taking the sound and the light and putting a delay on the light so it matches up with the sound. So up until now, and the sensory perception, when it gets more complicated, is really informed by a very deep pantheon of myth. If you're familiar with the work of Joseph Campbell, what's been interesting is up until now the three factors of that mythic pantheon are primary sensory experience. I do something, this is what happens. I learn less, right? I touch them hot. It's hot. I learn not to touch them hot because they burn myself. Secondary sensory experience, you watch something and somebody, oh, I saw that. Man, I've hurt myself, therefore I know that's what happens when you walk a little walk. I'm using sort of painful. Cultural indoctrination, and cultural indoctrination is basically enough other people around tell me that this is what's going to happen so I'm going to go along with it. So we all agree that if we're all going to get behind the wheel, it turns out that primary sensory experience is the most credible and least available for our experiences, our education experiences, our art experiences are all driven by cultural indoctrination. The idea of work on this is not a direct sensory experience. It's not even secondary sensory experience. It's that third category. It's watching people play out a scenario according to beliefs that is correct. That becomes a piece of our popular culture and we hold that up as an example. This is the first time we've been able to create media where people go in and decide for themselves, does this feel right? And I think that that is going to have a huge impact where you can't really control what people are saying about it. There's a lot of policing in the audience that's going on. This is going to cause a lot of very major, very rapid cultural shifts with the same kind of skin. Yeah, in huge ways. I mean, in ways that we can't really comprehend right now. The only sense to us in retrospect is to look back and say, oh yeah, this happened, this happened, this happened. Right now, looking forward, the way we relate to each other, the way we work together, it has a potential to change what we see. I think the question is going to be, where we come to in terms of mutual agreement between the dominant and existing culture and this new disruptive force that's coming into it, that intersection is going to be really fertile ground. I think the first thing in place that's going to happen is the internet. It's going to be in your browser. And that's what this thing really seems. Yeah, it's going to fundamentally change the way we interact with the internet first. And the internet is going to become a spatial place. That we can freely explore and move through as if they were rooms and houses. The other three of you, focusing in on the internet, the first day, where are you seeing the personal reality begin to show up? How do you see personal reality? I'm going to say for some reason that enormous amount of part, enormous amount, but there's no parts that are not practical. It will be, for some, they end up being a policy today. When we looked at 3D, what we've got is the virtual reality that has been what we've, the marketplace has allowed itself to evolve with now your tool is in your hand with every mobile device we have. I don't know what is my associates here that run so much of the internet probably know how much it's actually doing. It's almost like it gives you the real devices and so all of that stuff is sitting out there now. So the transport mechanism is not for me in our business. Transport mechanism, video and real life was the real issue before. Now it's like, who cares about transport? It's just like, which ones do you put the effort into first? Operations, latency is a bit of an issue when you try to move the scalpel around. Gaming, we're looking at all sorts of different things like horse racing, virtual reality, anything from the building blocks right whether it be my social network gets that right is going to be the real real super winner. We have something you said that goes around latency. I was in the data center business and what we're seeing our customers ask for is not a replacement for the large scale of data centers in the mega complex and the center. I think the data center we're going to evolve to is edge computing where the tolerance, the latency that you can withstand today things like virtual reality you're not going to be able to withstand those latency so we'll be extending the data centers of the networks out to the edge not just in primary markets but secondary markets. And then within that data center we see that there's an opportunity for traditional co-location space for people that want to bring their own kit also believe there's an opportunity there for cloud or infrastructure providers or smaller companies that don't have the scale that need the benefit and can't handle the logistics and then I also see the same thing a traditional data center for meeting where all of your low end providers selects wireless to all peer locally so that the traffic really never leaves that local market so the trick I think in the data center world is to be able to extend them to the edge and to the best degree possible get the same level of resiliency in the data center you know at the end of the day you're not going to build these big $100 million facilities at those edges so I think it's also going to drive a lot more resiliency in the applications that support the willingness for a data center to go down to be able to move and that will drive sort of tech network technologies like software to find it so I think we're looking at it from a few different angles if you're a company it's a personal enterprise business and in Japan we're a consumer to a business depending on where we are in the world with the VR and AR from a different lens and also we look at the different layers of the business you've got the the development side of the business you've got developing the content we've already got customers around the world who have very very intensive software development operations and another thing in three different companies 24 by 7 there will be large files around the difference with VR and AR is their files are compared to software developed for chips and their files they're about 5 to 6 times bigger so this is just larger files being developed probably in a similar kind of 24 by 7 in different places so that's of interest to us that generates traffic it generates the cooperation and large amounts of data and when you look at consumer there we've already seen with Pokemon that mobile devices are going to be a big and it seems that we're working just fine with the infrastructure in some places today these things are just going to get more sophisticated, more complex and put more demands on the network so 5th generation mobile data is probably going to come into play and so the AR is involved that's something that we're interested in but also the gamers who are going to benefit from that are likely the last mile providers who are going to have connections to the gamers needs and then finally let's look at what's the similar kind of technology that involved and if you look at streaming music they have similar challenges how do you move large files around a structure that's really not built for this and no surprise that the innovation can overcome that so we can expect that when you look at the amount of resources the kinds of companies that are focused on making sure that they they leave and succeed in this marketplace so they're going to be innovations that tackle some of the things that we see as being challenges particularly how do we have enough capacity in the last mile is the mobile network fast enough so we expect there will be innovations that will surprise everybody so get ready for some surprises in terms of what innovation is out there we really have a chance to talk to the infrastructure that I and everybody else is relying on so this is really exciting in terms of making virtual reality content is that our needs you know HD video online is awesome it looks great on your screen it looks great everywhere I mean even you can get down to 720p or 960 and still have a really great quality and it's amazing like the way that those increments have happened 720 to 960 to HD those are very incremental changes now all of a sudden we're going from HD to 4K and then that's not even enough we're finishing our content as 8K by 8K stereo lap long to over under I know with all the hope that you could jump in I mean it's crazy like we're trying to serve up when we're serving information to our headsets if we're using mp4 codec we're 30 megabits per second which is like you know on a high side you're talking usually 10 if you're dealing with great video so all of a sudden the needs for us have increased exponentially and I think there's a real opportunity here from the telecom side because brute force will cut up until now it's been this brute force thing more computing power more GPU power we'll shift it over to the GPU how we push through the pipes of bigger pipes and I just don't know I think that what's happening at least when I'm seeing VR we're at 8K that's not even big enough like we're talking about oh man it's going to be so great like whoa okay we can make that stuff but to play it it becomes impossible to serve so I think that there's a conversation here around what's the next step what happens when we run up against the ceiling of brute force and where do technologies like the distributed internet I don't know how many IPFS or these kinds of things but when does that start coming into play and how does that brute force fail at the end of the spectrum here it's almost let's see if we can be a legal full producers and have cured so that just recently in Middle East and Middle East is not the cheapest place to get there was one performance of the hdbc codex three weeks later they come up with a new hdbc codex that was reduced a bit a bunch of that is the advancements of chip technologies while it doesn't have the latest chip it should have the latest chip and there's a lot of people that when we start getting apps to drive that you have that situation and I'm acceptable even the early adopters people were saying the iphone 7 is not going to be that much is that much of an improvement we're going to keep on I think it's amazing the amount of bandwidth that we keep on putting into the ground and 100 gene exist we're sitting there with our new transatlantic high speed low latency pipeline ok that next fiber pair we're going to have to light it up before so you have both the bandwidth that you need to get in there it's like Sweden that has so you have the 1G way the point of the end the Swedish people we do a lot of work are sitting there going well that's all going to be tele is it's all going to be taken over by the 5G it's going to be a wireless delivery infrastructure being able to deal I'm not going to be able to no matter how much infrastructure I build I'm not going to be able to deliver an A&K signal unless I have the next evolution of the hdc it will not have a person who's a thousand people we'll speak a little bit to your question what's the average server utilization running in a data center 10-15% that has highs and lows that's when I talk about application resiliency the ability to move the work loads there's a lot of untapped resources just laying around there not being used so that's one opportunity there rather than like you said you got to look at what's there and be able to take the applications to a point where they can use those unused resources and move the work load there and basically make better use of the actual computing storage resources that exist today the internet is sometimes involved for years how is all this likely to change the way the services are delivered by infrastructure providers how does it change the way that infrastructure works on itself in reality on the other side we've been working with quality of service and latency the quality of the quality of the need to spot all the rates that issue that's one area on CDN to be able to help with smile that's where CDN is so like web pages are composed of files videos all those pieces would then be stored rather than just one big video file so it's almost like a low level distributed network of sort of mirroring essentially a lot of people place the pieces that they want to deliver closer to the people who are consuming a little bit the difference with CDN is the truly static content what we're seeing our customers ask for again, there's all that latency on a backhaul of this data halfway across the country so what we're being asked to do is put data centers in locations like a power substation where I have fiber that are available to me not all substations are created equally and have never lost power in 60 some years so if I can build a data room there and I don't need UTSs and generators and I can tie myself directly into the utility that's an economical way of delivering those services in those local markets another example I would give is I've heard numbers that when you drive your electric car and you go and plug it in to fill it up they download two games of data so there's an opportunity there there's going to be a lot of power there they download cell towers think about the network is already going there more and more of the world is going wireless why not be able to put that compute storage and network capability sitting right in the bottom of the cell towers that's the pride of the anti-cap I say it sounds easy to do but it's actually a very challenging problem to figure out so a couple of us in this room actually used to switch our TVs by actually turning them and the amazing thing that you had was the CDN the other channel came right up there was no delay in latency so when you choose your direct TV or your dish or your podcast files or time order you change the channel when you sit there and wait so one of the technologies that we're working with and Steve or Lowres and cameras everything is tied together so you'll be able to watch the ISO on your phone of who's doing the dunk but at the same time the camera is in the back so somebody will be in the room watching the general TV and you can be watching or hearing the games over and like once again you have to have the device that lowers the end to the end now you have a reason to put five times as much bandwidth down that pipe to serve all the different types of people that are watching that different event whether in a pies and not just sports is the most logical one but it's an annoyance that we don't really know until it's gone away to be able to have to wait for that channel and you want to tune that channel and you're waiting everything is tied together so when we buy you on here we'll be tied and so it'll be nice sitting time in our VR channel we'll have certain CDNs that some of the CDNs are going to a full open stack structure so that you can just know it's an open stack structure so I just layer them on so let's open up the questions to the audience here is a change around the audio world isn't that going to change VR can we do peer to peer VR? we've been looking in we're very excited about that I think we're here as a global idea for many industries I think as our world gets more populated as we require more resources and we require the movement of those resources and we need solutions where our points of production points of production and points of consumption are co-located that's going to be a huge advantage because as these guys are saying you can only lay your pipes but you're just going to have to come back and lay bigger pipes and the geo and all that stuff and software will that's exciting from wasn't there recently a ruling that say you're seeing some of the pieces starting to come in that will enable that to your point of protecting intellectual property ubiquitous files some of the files in the store computer stores or other software defined networking so peer to peer I can set up a private network protect my intellectual property tear it down and be able to do that very dynamically as opposed to the very command and control way the command and control there will be a win and a loss this and that toy this system go to sport to have a monocle sports season let's try this thing charge anybody for it because you got to figure out the production it doesn't work very well you don't want people to see it's a reality today the rule it takes 10 years many of these technologies 25 on the end 25 it will be the rule that's what happened with HD maybe it's a little shorter I think it's a bigger challenge it will be evolutionary just personal reality internet of things it will push the infrastructure the user experience will suffer as it starts to reach that edge the infrastructure will grow and over that time and there will be security concerns I think that we don't even see today more of a commercial setting as opposed to the internet so I think you'll see a lot of little changes in there but it will push the infrastructure and there will be that cycle over time to meet the demands how they're going to use this stuff I think I can say 9 or 10 years because of the my estimate would be a little more bullish because the technology is here it's in our pockets it's in our web browser like that but it's here we're just not using it yet to me it's like where does that first use case come when are we banking with VR when are we the same things that happen when we high level it's for that sort of it's for people to get into the practice eSports that you could never do there's already one but there's going to be a real version of somebody responding to the funny internet video but she's really in an armchair and everybody's laughing at her we can see the roller coaster around her that could be that person flew through space and spun the streamers into the most beautiful shape do right now I'm a panelist I'm going to do this a VC infrastructure and a software development community globally that means things are going to happen faster I think the driver or what's the other kind of niche ideas a lot of companies would play with how addictive it is but on the Facebook it was a great idea but it's going to accelerate the tradition and adopt it quickly you look at the cell phone that we're here in Hong Kong one of the things that's affected self in usage is there's a concussion we've got seven hours to work we've got seven hours to sleep a little time left to do other stuff and there's lots of other stuff to do the cell phone you can do use your cell phone everybody's multitasking they're checking text your kids are checking text cell phone probably twice as often as you are there's potential there you can do other stuff you can see the world and maybe do other stuff maybe you'll mention reality when you look at what's going to get adopted maybe you'll mention reality just as we've only got a few hours left from the day between looking at the cell phone and doing other stuff maybe that will get adopted more quickly an entertainment or is it really going to break in we're going to end up with some entertainment that's going to get adopted way faster just because developers are working on this Microsoft, HTC all coming out working hard on Facebook on how to make this exciting and give them each an edge so maybe the entertainment side gets adopted quicker than the enterprise and the enterprise takes 10 years to get them on so does it? I think that that's right on Snapchat is going to be they seem to be catching on they're not suffering with the thing about actually based on a game called Ingris and that game was as addictive to me all these youngsters but what's interesting about Pokemon Go is that it didn't catch fire until it was associated with something that everybody already knew about until they cast a celebrity in this Pokemon and all of a sudden everybody lost their minds it was the same game the exact same game mechanics and I would argue that better game mechanics were the flag game it just didn't have a celebrity attached to it so I think that's like for sort of knowing where the mid blows like where