 The reality is amazingly real here to talk to us about that. Here on think tech tech talks is Tom Leyland, Tom and I go back to the 1920s, my right. When he was when he was a programmer here in Honolulu, and he taught me a lot of stuff got me excited about programming, and I still have today so I, I carry the benefit of our conversations from way back when Tom thank you for joining the show. Thank you very much for having me. So what happened. You've had a career of programming your program for big and little and this and that give us a handle on that with. Yeah, I had my own company for a long, long, long time so I was programming really quickly about 40 years, and I had my own company for 20 something of those and then I opted to be an employee at large firms, a little less risky. But generally at one point I said that's fine. I'm a little tired now, and I still program, but I program, whatever I feel like programming for me I don't have to okay it with anyone. So what do you do what do you do with it do you sell it or keep it or give it to your friends. I play it's. There's a thing called a discord bot there's web services there's any number of little tool things that you can build websites even stuff like that. And then VR development is a complete in in world kind of a thing so you're building worlds with anything vehicles in there you can drive around all that stuff. So let's move to that let's move to VR because that's what we're going to talk about and that's certainly to my estimation that's your passion these days you're invested in that. And I want to know why I want to know how. Okay. Oh well I'll tell you the why it in my estimation it's the early days and if you recall the early days of computers and I think you do say the late 70s early 80s. People left and right who said well what are you going to do with that you know, you can't do anything fun. Well, virtual reality is sort of in that ballpark right now it's affordable, but still a lot of people don't know what to do with it. But I keep asking everybody to think 20 or 30 years ago did you think you would have a cell phone that's as powerful as a great computer sitting in your pocket. And that's the kind of thing that VR will do to become lighter and lighter less expense well more bang for the buck would be the better way to say, and then a more capable of doing more and more, more things. So, you need a headset for it when you always need a headset for it. You'll always need some sort of a headset and we'll see if I can show this I don't know look again. This is called a quest to, and there's any number of them, some big players by the way and I think more coming HP is into an HTC company called Pimax Microsoft obviously. And basically they're running two types there's a consumer type which is what quest is doing. And then there's professional ones and the quest goes for about $300 the professional ones can be $12,000 they can be $5,000 but incredible resolution but not the average person is going to be using those. So, so I put one of these headsets on. Yeah, and it and I can't see anything outside the headset. I'm invested. You know, my, my vision is the headset. And, okay, then I can walk around. If I move it knows I'm moving if I turn my head. It knows I'm turning my head. I'm living in the world of virtual reality. And I can probably walk right into a wall and hurt myself that way. Definitely swing your arm into a wall that's going to happen. It's really three dimensional. And it's interactive. Yeah, we use the term immersive. I mean it's it's actually almost hyper three dimensional I mean you're literally in this immersed world. And just to clarify one thing there is a thing called AR and VR and virtual reality is completely virtual. There's more of adding stuff to it so you would be looking through your glass and seeing the real world and then it's accessorizing that with additional information. And they have two different uses corporations you can imagine of really quickly somebody working on say a car engine, being able to see the actual car engine but then looking up in the corner of his eye and seeing a diagram of the stuff he's supposed to be seeing so there's there's that and there's something now they call mixed reality and as well but virtual reality yes is a complete manufactured world. Well on that thing about AR for a moment. I remember this is this is probably 20 years ago but I remember a fellow had a little thing is like it hung down on the top of your glasses, and you could see the diagram of the car and whatever. It was essentially a browser it was a monitor in a browser, and you can see things that it would help you do whatever you wanted to do and it actually your computer was attached to your belt, and so forth. So if you have an AR rather than a VR situation. That's on the, you know, hardware side that's pretty easy to achieve. So you can have that in a business setting in a design setting in G I can think of a million settings where you would want to have your, your friend on your glasses, giving you advice, you know, being essentially essentially a 24 by seven Google thing, where you can look up, you know any question and, and that will assist you as your best friend in life. Is that coming. I believe it is and I think I mean I don't use it much so I really don't know but I believe it's under development right now certainly large corporations have those kinds of things available to them. But it's a kind of a rarefied air. Most of us don't work on aircraft engines and stuff like that so we're not going to need that kind of stuff as much as we are there to have fun. And the fun is that total immersion thing where you are literally on a spaceship, or, and you're flying it. I mean that's how real it is you're literally flying upside down. Microsoft as an example has a flight simulator now that flies in real time. So you're not only flying a 747 but the time it takes from you to fly from New York to Paris is how long it would take in that 747. So, it's just, I mean just amazing in terms of simulation. So, you got involved in this because you were amazed by the reality of virtual reality. And that means as a programmer. You would want to create it, because you can't help yourself. And so you started creating it. How do you create virtual reality. The way to begin is to find an application that assists and those are typically called social apps, and there's any number of them. One of the biggest known ones is VR chat, though I caution people to not jump into VR chat and think that, oh, everybody is this crazy. They're not always that crazy. There's other ones called big screen Mozilla hubs the time alt space. I'm just dropping names here. One of the biggest players is in terms of pushing the envelope is Nios. I recommend anybody look for these people, but those apps allow you to drag and drop things you can spawn a sofa resize it, drop it there, put a light to make a light switch hook the light to the light switch. And that's how you just do that but that means you're using other people's things to build your world. The next step up is unity, and that's an application editor, and that allows you to build anything your mind can dream up. Oh my god. So you have to have the headset on when you do this or could you use that you know it's just an ordinary computer program and do it that way. You tend to do the final touches on the worlds that you design we call them worlds. You do that with the headset on or you very often put the headset on because you want to see that it still works correctly, similar to the way you debug software, but you do the majority of the design work on the PC, and you can rotate models and things like that while you're designing them. But that's just because you'll, it's just easier to do it on a computer. So let's talk about the potential on this. Well before we do that let's talk about what you're doing now in terms of designing the world, the virtual world. I would make a guess and say that you, you Tom have built the virtual world. You've taken assets you've created assets. You've made. I mean this is really enticing. You've made a world that you can live in. What do you do in the morning and enter this world. What is it like and what do you do in this world. Yeah, I'm, I'm going to qualify everything I say with I'm no expert, but I do have fun, and I try and push the envelope where I can. There are certainly people it's a, it's a slightly different than being a programmer it's more of a modeler. And so I think it's a little bit more of an artistic sense and not quite so much of a mathematics scientific endeavor. So I can create programmable things, but the artistic side that's still I kind of go grab somebody else's model and work from there. And that's the other nice thing about it you can actually grab models there are many of them are free or you can buy these assets as you mentioned, for in a relatively expensive go get a $20 castle or a car Chevrolet you want a 57 Chevy. And there it is. Change the color change the lights and drop it into your world. So yeah, and basically they create people create environments for meeting other people and that's one again one of the big pluses is that you invite people to your worlds and you can chat. In the world again I mentioned neos, you can literally interact so I can pick something up and hand it to somebody and they can save it and they can bring it back the following day. All of the assets are interchangeable and, you know, our sort of lives. It's, oh, so okay that's another dimension so you can put your headset on connected up to the internet. I can put my head set on. And we can engage wherever we are in the world. We can have a conversation we can do things together. We can. We can trade assets we can operate as I can take you for a ride in my in my in my Chevy. I can take you for a walk in my castle. I had a friend drive me find me in his helicopter. Yes, it's all doable. And again, this is tip of the iceberg so remember we're talking about 2022. Again, a couple of years where it's been. The price has been that everybody can get in it. Another five years we're going to be hard pressed to recognize it. And in 10, we didn't even dream that it was possible, what we're going to see. But I did want to mention a couple of things so that people don't think it's all just a social apps. One of the things is though is education. There's a lot of use in education. There's a lot of case of self learning and stuff because you can immerse yourself you can imagine that if you wanted to learn a foreign language you could drop in and either work with avatars things that are just not really people. But you're conversing with that person and it's a little different than talking into say your phone or an app which is nobody there. It's science and that's space medicine. There was actually an app with a full body you'll see a body show up. You can rotate it. You can strip off the skin, see the nerves, see the bones, zoom up zoom in all that kind of things. Fitness, strangely enough, is one of the things people get on and they're jogging or rowing in a virtual world. It's a lot of things like that and then just straight on entertainment. You can watch movies in there. So again, you have kind of three dimensional movies going on and stuff like that. So a lot of a lot of possibilities. Oh, and let me enter. I have a note. I just wanted to mention one thing if you think there's what's coming down in the future. They've already have haptic feedback. And so what that is basically is you have a vest on or something. So somebody taps you on your shoulder and you feel the tap. And somebody maybe if it's a shooting game, somebody shoots you and you feel a thud as it hits your chest. The possibilities are limitless. Let me let me let me track on some of those things. So, talk about another person who joins you now, this person who joins you say in the car or walking through the castle what have you. This is, does this person have the face of the individual you're connected with in Bolivia, or is it an avatar and what's the difference and what's preferable. Very, that's a really, really good question. It's all avatars, and it depends on the game, everything called the games or the app. What level of avatar you have some have full body avatar so your arms, legs, head, everything's there and moves. You can do that. Some are just upper body. And that's for instance, some all space you don't have any legs and all space they don't figure you need legs, but you have hands. They're almost always customizable. And I would say generally, there's two giant three maybe categories there are humanoid like looking ones. So they kind of look like you. I had some photos of one of me, but you can make as many avatars as you want. And then they have the other ones as a whole group of furries, and there's a group of say robots and stuff like that. And so they are whatever their imagination imagines them to be even size you don't have to be human human size I know one guy in Nios he's a car, and literally is it's a car avatar. I'm familiar with a program that's I guess it get caught in animation program where you put your phone is called real illusion. And you put your photograph in and you, you have to actually connect a photograph of anybody have to connect dots lines to the photograph. And then it will, it will animate your face. In other words, while I'm giving it is my photograph that's all. But now it will animate my face it will, it will talk it will, you know, it will have expressions and so forth. So it's not that far from an avatar, you know, which is a sort of an advanced cartoon, I suppose, on to one of these real illusion faces, where you made it into a real face so I can, I can have you as an avatar but I can advance you with that kind of software to look just like you Tom and act just like you. Yes, and I'll give it again you give you an example of a friend of mine on Nios who has. He's an amazing avatar designer and he has some what are called trackers, and the trackers are watching. Not only his body and his legs and his hips, but his face, his tongue his eyes. He was mentioning he was going to get two more trackers for shoulders so that when he hunches his shoulders up his avatar does that if he flexes his arm, you see the muscle on his avatar flex. And that's all wired in he's gone through and said when I do this do this. And it is quite extraordinary, but I think the tool that you're talking about I'd love to look into that, possibly as a way to help. So the design start with that as a design. They're using a lot of standards which is one of the things that's important for any of these tools has to be an avatar standard so that you can import it into any one of these worlds. So, yeah, well so so much either so many wonderful delicious questions here honestly. I told you before the show about movie I remember being made involving a heroine whose name was hockey Ross. She was an all purpose person. And it was a space movie it had a very thin and you know, unassuming plot. It was but it was mostly about her. And she had a personality and she could speak and the movie made her a movie star. They didn't do it again and I'm sorry to say I haven't seen anything like that since then but you know this discussion of virtual reality makes me think that that could happen that we could take this kind of facial recognition. You and make you into a movie star, which is very realistic, which, you know, emulates your actual personality. And then I use AI to have you conduct yourself in a certain way under certain circumstances smile frown say this say that I can even program what you say. I can make you into, you know, how in 2001 and better, I can make a personality out of you I can put you on the screen, and you won't have to join the union. It will perhaps eventually happen and the movie you're talking about his final fantasy. I love that movie I thought it was at the time it was a white the hair would move you would just see every detail and you knew it was fake. Boy it looked real. It has to be 10 or 20 years ago. Yeah. And now you could probably do much better with that and you could create this character. She was very pretty, a lovable kind of, you know, image, but I think they could do better now and I think it's so easy to to move. You know what's in a movie a movie is the plot a movie is the, the props the background a movie is the way they relate to each other and, and I believe that once you invent Tom Leland as a, as a movie star, and you put him together with Angela Jolie as Jolie as a, you know, co star. I could think of a pretty good plot. We all can we can think of a pretty good plot and we can put our, our characters are virtual reality characters together and have them react to each other. It would be just as persuasive as any first run movie wouldn't it. I think you need to write that down and copyright the idea right away because seriously what you could do is simply let each individual make their own little version of the movie so here's the plot. Who would you like your co star to be. They'll pop up the lines for you to read. And, you know all the background comes in and everything but it's you as a star. Crazy. And you can play with it and play with it and play with it until, until you know it's going to be popular. The question is what depths, you know, of programming ability do you need to give to the movie designer. I mean I think at first you'd need a real pro, but then after a while, you know you could make it such that anyone can do this. And of course you have real competition for Hollywood, you have a whole new spectrum of of intellectual property that that has market value. I see this coming out of what you're talking about. I think there's a potential. Yeah, most definitely. So the other thing that, and this is sort of right in the middle of what we're talking about is, you talked about this as an educational tool. I mean, the body for example where you can look inside the body and that's kind of be great for medical schools, which spend a lot of money on dummies you know to teach medical students, but it goes beyond that you could program the avatars you could program the experience. So the individual with the, with the, with the headset is, is in a learning situation where somebody says to a nice move Tom but that didn't work you made a mistake there. So you should do that properly. And then you learn with the best possible teacher you can have, who is way smarter, who has got all the knowledge, and who is able to watch you one on one, what a great learning experience. Absolutely. Plus this is again this idea of having, and a lot of the worlds can't do it but for the further third or fourth time I mentioned neos they should be happy that I've done this. So there's an example of where you'd be able to pick up a scalpel or pick up this and actually do the operation and then hand the thing to somebody else or the other person's holding the dummy's head, because it really does have that kind of detail in the modeling. And so again if you if you say it's not all just fun and games but it has great potential for learning and for education. So somebody just has to apply it. That's all it is a matter of. Well, you know we live in a time of coven where people are forced to stay at home and do their thing. They have meetings this way. They, they, they learn they watch they, you know, and I think it's built into our culture to some extent, after now the third year of coven. I'm thinking, well, do I really need a classroom of people physically together. I mean, the big problem with higher education is nobody wants right now, including you age. Nobody wants to, you know, bring the class together because of the risks of coven but if I have the class together in virtual reality. It's almost as if you are together, you can interact. I'm going to give you a plus on that as well. You're not, you're not stuck with just people in Honolulu or just people in Connecticut or just people anywhere else, you're getting a select group of people from around the world so you're interacting with a guy who really in London who really wants to do this and a guy in Paris who really wants to do this. And so you're getting sort of the best cooperative group, you know it's a group you're working with and pull them together. And so yeah, I think I actually I was going to mention that I socialize with more foreigners now I speak in foreign languages and stuff with people on a regular basis then I do my neighbors, and I jump into a conversation and I'm talking to somebody in Holland or somebody in Kuwait or somebody in Scotland. And I do that on a daily basis. You know, you know, somebody in Russian saying well what's the story in Russia right now or the Ukraine. I'm talking to somebody there. But you don't speak Russian it speaks Russian for you. I don't know I speak, they speak English traditionally, although really quickly I think we're running a little short on time really quickly they do have a automated translations in all space. Right now it's beta. But the point is I speak in English and the listener can say I speak Spanish so do the translation. I speak English and a sound bubble comes up and has it translated in real time. It's just, it's getting better and better. And we are into international stuff. Yeah, I mean we're on April 1 we're doing a program involving seven continents all at the same time on zoom. And what you're describing is really very interesting for that kind of collaboration. And it's not only programming in our treatment of global issues. It's the collaboration and science the collaboration which means so much. So you could have a collaboration to beat all collaborations with scientists and every continent collaborating and their latest work. Absolutely, and no flights, and no hotels and no time lag or any of those kinds of things it's immediate. Yeah, no parking. No parking. Well, how far advanced this is in other words you talk about, you know, your, your engagements with other VR people. What, what, what, how many people are doing this. Do you have to search them out is there a place on the web that I can find somebody who has a headset and has the software and the interest. I would suggest yes there we do have a couple of places where people gather but it tends to be application specific. There's actually an app called the wander, which if you know Google Google maps and you know that there's this street view and Google maps right. Well this is Google wonder is Google maps in VR you're walking down the street with five other people up to six people. I want to show you my neighborhood and there's my house and then go down the street and here's where I work. And so, yes, anybody who is into wonder would sort of meet up. And then I say if you if you belong to alt space there are places there where you would chat and say I'm going to go into alt space today. I'll see you there. Everybody has a not only a different avatar but they have different names. They make up complete names for themselves. They make you know your imagination on that which is extended and my perception of it which is extended by this discussion. Where does this all go. How is this going to change the world I mean I can see it's going to change education. It's going to change, probably going to change the media because I can talk to anybody anywhere. You know how else is it going to change the world. Will, here's my question. Is it going to make the world a better place. Will it be used for the various purposes. Yes, and yes, unfortunately. Well, yes, what will happen I think what's happening now by the way I was just speaking with somebody on all space today, and I was suggesting that who you're meeting right now are the early adopters again similar to computers. I see a person in a headset from Saudi Arabia and I've talked to people from Iraq, and Oman, and stuff like that. Well, these are, and these are not the average person there. These are people who went out and spent a fair amount of money to get into virtual reality. And so you're going to meet these kinds of future thinkers and they say well you know I want to be prepared for five years from now. I want to know what has what I'm doing. I don't want to be it dropped in my lap in five years. So, we can't predict the future that's the trick but I'm going to suggest similar to computers, it will be used for good, more than it will be used for evil, but there will always be some evil in there. By the way, real quickie don't anybody get caught up in all of this cryptocurrency is not related to VR. And all these other kinds of things people are trying to throw these in, and they can be a part of it, but they aren't universally a part of it at all. I know I hear this discussion and see this discussion, and I really want to know more I want to be prepared, as your friend in Oman was it. I want to be prepared. So, where do I start. What are the steps I take to fully appreciate the, you know, the leverage of it, and to actually engage with others here and there. So, a quick notes, one is do a little tiny bit of research. So I would suggest doing a internet search for virtual reality and stuff like that look at some of the videos that are available. They'll show you immersed videos of people who are walking around in these different locations. If you have a little bit of spare money invest in a headset. The cheapest thing in town, and because it would be the same as sort of getting the cheapest guitar and then saying, Well, this sounds horrible. I know you got the cheapest one that's why you don't need the $5,000 one. But again, the quest is a quite a bargain at $300. And it'll allow you to experience almost everything that's out there. And if you don't think it's really well worth it, you can go buy a $1,500 one but if you don't think it's worth it you only spent $300 to find out. So, I would say jump in and experiment a little bit. And I don't need a new computer at this will connect up by USB. The quest to is completely wireless. So it doesn't require a computer at all it has the computing built into the headset. And yeah, so you're still you're still good if you have a PC. I mean I use both, but you don't need to at all. Do you need to have broadband though, available to, in order to get faster the better. And finally, where do I go to two things where do I go to learn about this I guess Nios has to be one of them. And where do I go to find out who's online. So that can actually connect. Well, now you bring up an actual we need a whole not the 30 minutes and that's the whole idea of the metaverse. There's no, there's no single place at the moment there are a bunch of individual unconnected places. So what is the goal ultimately that there is this sort of metaverse that allows you to jump from app to app or world to world with minimum amount of effort. Right now I speak to somebody and say, oh, let's go over to a wander, I'll be on V time, both of us turn V time off, go on to wander and meet there, but it'd be nice to just transition over there. But again, I'm going to suggest that the people do a little bit of research, read up, watch videos. There's all sorts of tutorials, by the way, that's the other thing that's good on YouTube. It's filled with people explaining things. And anywhere from a five minute introduction to several hours their courses complete courses you can take for nothing for free. If you don't use it. Here's again, I'm a sort of an educator at heart, even if you never write a line of code, you can take a four hour course on unity, just to see how it works. You don't have to key it in just because they told you to do this now. Just watch it. I know I know I do accept that you are an educator at heart. And I remember how much you taught me back 3040 years ago whatever it was. I changed a bit and hope we can get together again to talk about this or other related things and maybe you can tell me how to make think that into a virtual virtual reality global experience for everybody. We'll do that we'll see if we can't put together one episode in a virtual world, guys who can do filming inside of there, and they can broadcast stream it straight out of there. And a programmer and a virtual reality aficionado can I say that. Extraordinaire. Thank you so much Tom. Thank you very much. Very nice to happen with you again. Aloha.