Episode 02: Down the Immersive Rabbit Hole
In this episode, Marcie and Christina go back to where it all began. Tracking the evolution of immersive from the Hollywood content creators and smartphone app developers, to creating an ecosystem that didn’t exist. They discuss gaming systems, headsets, content creation, and the billion dollar deal that set everything in motion.
Episode Notes
Mike Matzdorff: There's a lot that we don't know. There's a lot that we don't know about technology. This particular technology the quote "R" end quote technology. The letter R that is VR,AR,MR. I don't even know how many R's there are but Marcie Jastrow and Christina Heller do. Let me introduce them here on the second level podcast, talking about making the jump from where we are, to where we are going.
00:00:37:05 - 00:00:45:05
Christina: Welcome to the second level. I'm Christina
Marcie: And I'm Marcie and thanks for joining us today. The theme today down the immersive rabbit hole.
00:00:45:07 - 00:01:06:00
Christina : Marcie you were the one that suggested this topic. Why did you phrase it that way.
Marcie: I think that early on, we all kind of ran to the shiny ball of what VR was. I remember one time I was having a meeting and that meeting would start with one subject and it ballooned into 45 different things.
00:01:06:03 - 00:01:12:25
Christina: So somebody would come into Technicolor and almost like ordering off a menu, they'd say "I'll have the immersive please".
Marcie: That's right.
00:01:12:27 - 00:01:26:27
Mike: Hold on a second I need to interrupt, a VR set landed for my kids this Christmas. If you are at all interested in how something so amazing got into your living room, take a listen to the chronicles of the beginnings of VR, that are in this episode.
00:01:30:15 - 00:01:49:25
Marcie: I say it like this. You know people always say well you know virtual reality will become something when someone builds a killer app. I don't think it's a killer app. It could be a killer tool. It could be the killer headset. It could be the killer story. But ultimately I think it was something that brought people back into a headset on a consistent basis.
00:01:49:28 - 00:01:58:10
Christina: Well and jumping back I think that it was triggered if we're honest by Facebook’s acquisition of Oculus for one billion dollars.
00:01:58:12 - 00:02:58:22
Marcie: And that was the you know the first moment I think where everyone was like, "oh well it's gonna be Facebook". So of course it's gonna be successful, because there's a billion people on Facebook. And so of course they're going to market this headset to a billion people. And ultimately we thought there was going to be this place in which there was a repeatable, scalable distribution system in place for all the content we were making. And it didn't really matter the content we were making it could be branded content, It could be automotive content. It could be training content. It could be storytelling. And so when we opened this center it was about the exploration of who are you. What kind of content do you want to make. And why do you want to make the content. And so we would meet with literally people back to back. And it was really people just needing to be educated on what immersive was.
00:02:58:24 - 00:03:04:10
Christina: Right. Everyone felt like they needed to learn really quickly and not be left behind.
00:03:10:04 - 00:03:46:04
Marcie : That's right. The first challenge was you have traditional Hollywood content creators, so your studios. You have those content creators that live inside a studio system and then on the other side of it you had developers who were developing applications or apps for the smartphones or for things like Salesforce and so app became this container that was supposed to hold everything for immersive. And that's where I think there was a language disconnect and what it was everybody in the ecosystem was doing.
00:03:46:06 - 00:04:05:28
Christina: Everybody was looking to other mediums, both on the tech side and the creative side, as inspiration, how they were going to make it big in immersive. If they had seen that you know Twitter did well or other platforms did well, YouTube did well, Okay I'm gonna build a platform for VR. That is the YouTube for VR or the this for VR.
00:04:06:00 - 00:04:29:21
Marcie: Right. So nobody was productizing anything, so you had Oculus who had a headset, you had Vive who had a headset, you had Oculus who had a platform where people were putting their content to be downloaded, you had Vive who was doing the same thing and then you had PlayStation, right? And so now you had, oh, all these platforms, none of them talk to each other. So then you had to create a piece of content 3 different times, or pick your team. Exactly. But picking your team didn't necessarily mean that you could create an ROI from it. And so, when I say the rabbit hole of immersive, that's where I got caught up in this world of, I had to be everything to everybody.
00:04:54:19 - 00:04:59:13
Mike : ROI- When you're trying to finance a brand new thing you've got to think payback.
00:05:00:27 - 00:05:15:17
Marcie: If a client came to me and said I want to do something in virtual reality, I have this really great IP, I want to make it, OK tell me what you want to make.
Christina: Alice in Wonderland VR
00:05:15:19 - 00:05:31:14
Marcie: Right? So we, I did that experience, I saw that experience. I was at Cannes two years ago and it was awesome! And that to me was a moment, like that's when I realized it wasn't about an in-home market, it was about an out-of-home market. And by the way it was the best VR I ever saw.
00:05:31:16 - 00:05:35:29
Christina: So going down that over that rabbit hole was it was it cinematic? animated? Was it...
00:05:36:01 - 00:06:17:20
Marcie: Everything was game engine, it was animated, it was physical. You had a physical actor in the space with you, they fed you things so, a piece of meringue that you took a bite out of, and it was called Alice. At that same Cannes, I saw CARNE y ARENA and was shuttled to this hangar and you know outside of Cannes, and I had worked for Chivo and Alejandro on Revenant, so I kind of knew what I was walking into but, I saw this physical location based experience that all of the sudden started making me see that, wait a minute, we need to move away from the in-home market, because the in-home market can't be productized.
00:06:17:24 - 00:07:14:04
Christina: And your point is that for VR to truly work and to for it to bring the satisfaction to the viewer the way it is intended to, it needs to be in a more of a location based, or if you're not that familiar like an arcade type setting, versus a home setting because what the infrastructure is not right in the home or..
Marcie: Well, at the time remember earliest days, you needed a headset, you needed a gaming computer, you needed either that or a Playstation in right and you needed docents, you needed someone to tell you what you were about to experience, because 90 percent of the people that you were demoing to, weren't gamers. So when we would bring people in and Abbey would demo for them, she would have to give the people the lay of the land of what they were about to experience if there were hand controllers involved. You then had to do a whole tutorial on how to do the hand controller.
00:07:14:06 - 00:07:47:24
Christina: Let's see, it's funny because I never thought that the HTC Vive or the Oculus Rift was the at home experience. I always felt like these were early prototypes that would get us to the eventual at home experience. I never looked at an HTC Vive which if you have never seen like put an old HTC Vive looks like, you have to put hang trackers in four corners of the room, you needed it was 8 by 10 foot space you had to connect the giant headset to a very expensive computer, it was wildly impractical for the average at home user. That being said plenty of early adopters, who were very excited, did put them in their homes. We had them at VR Playhouse but never for a second, did I look at this system and think this was anything that the average person was going to put in their home. What I assumed we were all experimenting with, were early prototypes, and, and we were.
00:08:05:11 - 00:08:30:27
Marcie: And we were. but my job was to find how to make money with it. And so how am I going to find that avenue of, come to large corporation with lots of brands, that makes lots of content. And I now want to sell you a service that is building that content in the same scalable and repeatable way that we build content today for episodic television and feature films.
00:08:31:03 - 00:08:41:10
Christina: Right. And they were they were putting that pressure on you at that point to find a return on investment for like an IP property, and I don't think that's fair to say that they were putting the pressure on me,
00:08:41:12 - 00:08:53:17
Marcie : I think I was putting the pressure on me, because I was a cost center and I didn't really need to make money, but they did want me to throw, you know, I had four lines of business that were all wanting to be in immersive. And so every day I had to say, "oh well maybe it should go to this company a, or company B, or company C, or company D". So for me I had to decide who was I going to give it to right. It became the rabbit hole because I was creating this entire ecosystem that didn't exist. But let's back up a minute. Where is the best place to make money for location based. Where is the most footfall.
Christina: You mean like Foot, the foot, foot traffic.
00:09:28:13 - 00:09:57:21
Marcie: Yes. Called footfall, like retail establishments, you call it footfall. We started creating location based models on how many people you needed to have to get into a headset. What the ticket prices would be and then what was the form factor. So, I spent six months doing it.
Christina: Where is the most footfall?
Marcie: Actually it's McDonald's. McDonald's has the most footfall of anything else in the world, but the other really large footfall is museums. Museums are like peanut butter and jelly for immersive. They're constantly trying to reinvent those spaces. That's why you have traveling exhibitions. That's why you have all of these different things happening within museums. Incredible, at the same time me, and the tech team were building something called Mars home planet. Mars home planet was a project that came from the community where we were building what life on Mars would look like inhabited by 2134, and we went out to the community and we asked scientists, engineers, all of these people who were really passionate about Mars, to start building what a school would look like.
What automotive would look like, what the terrain was.
Christina: And this was born out of your out of the museum piece?
Marcie: It was already a project that we were launching the tech with. I see the whole point of it, was to show that you could take a CAD drawing, pull it into an unreal game engine, and create a pre visualization of what a city could look like. And so we said let's build Mars.
00:10:53:17 - 00:11:02:25
Christina: And for you, It was because it did in your mind, it hit the marks of being both having entertainment value, but also being a practical use case?
00:11:02:27 - 00:11:14:06
Marcie: Well at the very early parts of it, it wasn't that, it was simply to see if Technicolor could build a high end asset, a high end image, for VR in 3D in a game engine. Could it be high enough fidelity cinematic quality to be able to use a game engine. I said to the team we're pivoting, we're stopping. Stop, stop, everyone stop. I want to build a location based experience that will be specifically for the museum market, specifically the vertical of science centers, and so what we will build is a story, that will go into the Positron Chair, which is directed VR, and we will create a business model around that museum model and around that content.
So that's kind of how it was born, and I use that as the thesis behind productizing what VR could look like in LBE.
00:11:59:07 - 00:12:28:16
Christina: I see it's coming together for me now. Yeah, you had in order, So you needed the chair, you needed the content, you needed the place to put it, you needed the people, the foot traffic, so that people would see it, you know, in your in your quest to find something that made sense. Right. That you had to kind of create the whole thing from scratch. Yeah and so that was, that was how when somebody ordered off the Chinese menu I'd like the immersive. This was the dish you prepared.
00:12:28:18 - 00:12:29:25
Marcie: That is exactly right.
00:12:52:13 - 00:13:18:03
Marcie: I knew that there was only going to be a certain amount of time, before the negative press around VR would happen, where all of the sudden, everybody was going to say "oh you know what, VR is just a gimmick". You can't make money. Forget it. We're gonna move away from this, when in the reality, the whole point, the whole point was for us to learn and I think that people got bored with it. They got bored.
00:13:18:05 - 00:13:22:05
Christina: I immediately thought, you know you were racing against the clock of people's patients.
00:13:22:07 - 00:13:49:11
Marcie: That's right. I remember Brian Frager, who was on my team, he was our head producer at the TEC and he came to us with Wonder Buffalo, which was a piece of content that was also alongside the ETC Entertainment Technology Center of USC. He came to me and wanted us to fund this project. And when I say funding I mean maybe it was ten thousand dollars here, 20. I'm not like big money, but we were associating ourselves with content and making it because we wanted to learn. I said OK I'm great story. Awesome wonderful great thesis but how are you activating it. How are you gonna get it out in the wild?. How are you going to get people to see it? How are you going to get people to interact with it? How are you going to get the press? How are you going to get the marketing? How are you going to get people to say positive things about it? Because at that point, I just wanted positive press around numbers.
00:14:10:24 - 00:14:31:12
Christina: Yeah. I have a funny vision of you, Alice in Wonderland. There's the the hole and it says a sign and it says immersive and Marcie's very excited. She goes into the rabbit hole and then she gets there and she realizes it's a dead end. So she gets her pick and shovel and just keeps digging convinced that there is going to be something there. Meanwhile others join, digging at the hole altogether, digging, digging that immersive rabbit hole. Many many have turned back. They're convinced that there's nothing on the other side of this, of this hole that is a fool's journey and yet we're there
Marcie: And honestly, that was what was happening in this company I worked for.
00:14:49:00 - 00:15:06:20
Christina: I understand the desire to want to make VR an immersive a part of our lives. It's a thrilling notion to be able to transport yourself into a magical world, to transport yourself to another place, to share that place with someone else who's not physically located with you. I still believe in that vision. For me I think that the problem was the patience. I'll dive into my own version of that, I really enjoyed that story by the way.
00:15:18:20 - 00:17:49:05
Christina: For me the immersive rabbit hole looked a little different. I fell in love with the potential of what VR could be, but I knew right away that DK1 or DK2 or even CV1, by the way I'm just listing the various prototypes of Oculus headsets that came out or HTC Vive. None of those items were the thing. We were prototyping and building experiences for these early headsets in pursuit of the eventual platform in which we would be able to engage in the true virtual reality of my dream.. But commercially, I was always very focused on what was the most attainable way of engaging with people right today. Initially it was YouTube 360. There was of course the debates in the VR community about whether 360 video is VR. But they fall into the immersive bucket and there is a lot that you can do in 360 video that will be a good education or foundation when you then move to game engine or you know true VR. So a lot of our early work commercially was for YouTube 360 and 360 video, because of the fact that people could access it easily and the Samsung gears were giving out headsets along with phones.
And so it's always felt incremental to me and I've always felt like there was progress and I've seen progress over the past five years and astounding progress. What, and VR Playhouse never took investor money, which really did set us apart from a lot of the other companies. I was really happy in retrospect that we didn't because the company would be closed now and I don't know if when in 2015 and 2016 when all of the companies in VR did their their VC rounds, I don't know if they were just being wildly optimistic or if there was a bit of a cash grab happening where the idea was these investors don't understand this technology, the vision of VR is and always has been and always will be compelling and tech to a lot of people that don't make it, feels like magic like that there is a magician, just waving a wand and boom you have Uber.
So there is a lot of ignorance in the investor community. A lot of trust and faith that they place in the business folks and the technicians in the technology world and because of Facebook's investment into Oculus, it was a market signal that made a lot of investors sit up and pay attention and once they did a lot of people, I think sensed that there was an opportunity to get money to do something interesting. I really wonder if back in 2015, 2016, when they were showing those charts that said oh here's how, here's the hockey stick and here's here's how many people are gonna have headsets in 2018, 2019, 2020.
I wonder if you really got them alone, and just said "Hey do you really think they're gonna be that many headsets in 2018??". If they would've said yes or whatever, I just I have to say that to get the get to get the money.
00:18:18:00 - 00:18:30:02
Marcie: I honestly believe that people thought, including me for a time, that there were going to be these headsets in the world, because we were in this very hyped world of, of all of us, all 5000 of us, honestly all selling each other. I used to say it was one big circle jerk. I knew it was going to grow. I just think that we all thought it was going to grow faster than what it did.
00:18:30:04 - 00:18:50:21
Christina: And that's and that I think came from an ignorance in the technology on all of our parts. The fact that we thought that Facebook had a lot of magicians in their back rooms that would be able to solve incredibly complicated problems around data processing and latency and how much you can really do with a computer on your face.
00:18:50:26 - 00:20:12:06
Marcie: Right. Everybody was trying to build their own studio. Everybody didn't realize what the burn rate on artists would be, on game developers, on what it was supposed to look like. And so if I went to go raise twenty thousand dollars or twenty million dollars, and my headcount was 40 people at one hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year do the math. That's just your your artists. That doesn't include any infrastructure, that doesn't include anything that has to do with not only creating something, but then marketing it. It's about patience, it's about sustainability. I think Baobab is a really good example of this, Maureen and how she's managing the distribution of content how she's really keeping it smart and how she's managing her burn rate. But there's sustainability there, and I think that that's what companies need to do today. Don't just have a company, focused solely on the creation of immersive content. You need to have another line of business that is helping to sustain the innovation of what it is you're trying to do, and investors, they they want to have 10x. They want to have 100x, and it's going to take a while for us to get there.
00:20:12:08 - 00:20:13:02
Christina: Absolutely. Well, to end this on a positive note, how do you feel about the immersive rabbit hole at this point? point? Are you feeling, how are you feeling digging that state...
00:20:22:02 - 00:21:03:24
Marcie: I don't, I don't think of this as a negative at all. Whenever you're building something, you have to take the feedback, implement the feedback and that takes time,
00:21:03:26 - 00:21:21:03
Christina: For sure, really what we should be doing is taking a month or two and thinking about these tools and developing a really smart pitch that really understands what this is good for. Who's going to want it and how it's going to be executed, similar to you, your Chinese menu. The, the meal that you created and with the Positron Chairs and yes Mars, but we aren't given that much time to really, really to meditate, especially those that are here and dealing with it everyday, we aren't given a lot of that time to to think about how this would best serve the world. And so we're just iterating really really fast. That's right all the time. So it's taking time but it will affect everybody's business. I think it's worthy to consider a proof of concept for your company and it doesn't need to be a gigantic investment. It doesn't need to be a long piece.
00:21:21:05 - 00:21:33:25
Marcie: It doesn't have to be millions of dollars of a win. The win could be a small win to jump you to the next level. I love that. And I think that that's what everybody needs to understand.
00:21:33:27 - 00:21:57:17
Christina: Talk to somebody. I guess it's just like right now, it's like a dog chasing its tail. I'd like the immersive please. You stay. We will. I think it's still worth it. Come in. Ask for the immersive and if you can find a consultant that can figure out how to do something, you will come out the other side, much wiser and smarter and ready to go to the next level. Awesome. So that's it for today. Thank you so much for joining us.
00:21:57:23 - 00:22:10:03
Marcie: And we want to thank everybody on our team who is pushing this podcast farther and farther every day. Yes. So let's start with Abbey Tate. Joel..
00:22:10:05 - 00:22:14:03
Christina: Joel Douek. Thank you so much for loaning us your beautiful studio in the Hollywood Hills.
00:22:14:06 - 00:22:22:18
Marcie: And of course Mike Matzdorff, who cut these episodes and is our voice on the podcast. So thank you everyone. We'll see you next week. Bye!
Technicolor’s Mars Home Planet Press Release:
Alice: https://alice.dv.fr/#about-the-play
Carne y Arena: https://www.lacma.org/art/exhibition/alejandro-g-inarritu-carne-y-arena-virtually-present-physically-invisible
Positron: https://gopositron.com
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Thanks to Simon Says