I’ve written out some key quotes from these 2 SVVR Panels
Welcoming Notes at 42:20 - 47:56: Bruce Wooden & Karl Krantz
Keynote at 48:19 - 1:07:00: Matt Apfel - Samsung
Matt leads creative content and strategy innovations for Samsung.
We (Samsung) can’t do it alone and if it is really going to take off as a storytelling platform, we are going to have to do it as a community.
It’s an emerging ecosystem. Entertainment is the tip of the spear. We are seeing workflow companies, camera companies and folks doing things with industrial VR uses. The cool videos are getting the the lion share right now, but the ecosystem is what’s really going to make it into a platform.
In America, about 50% of the consumers now feel that they are aware of VR or think they are aware of what VR is. You can look at that as a challenge in that 50% don’t know what VR is.
- Strong adoption and low returns > Hardware makers ‘dream’
- 70 apps in 120 days > illustrates that it’s not easy to make content and how to we make this number - Emphasis on Games and Video > as I mentioned earlier, it’s the tip of the spear
- Great content is driving sales > the content will be the trojan horse to get people to try these devices
We need people to adopt this as a consumer behavior, whether it’s our device or somebody elses.
Samsung launched VR as a companion video service to accompany Gear VR.
Our goals was to cultivate a daily VR viewing habit.
We’ve seen very quickly people getting better at storytelling (see examples at 1:00:46)
Samsung will be launching a branded community channel in Milk VR to become a sustained on-going effort to bring you the best storytelling out there. We’re not just going to highlight the best films, but we are going to highlight the challenges. We are going to have brands going into it.. mentors who are the best in the world at what they do. I would urge everyone here to pay attention to… what we are doing.
We are building that future, one game, one app, one experience at a time. We’re off to a good start, but my challenge is that let’s keep going, let’s improve.
The Rise of Consumer VR at 1:20:05 - 2:20:45
Nicolas DiCarlo - Samsung
When is consumer VR here? - Ben Lang
I don’t see it that far out— you don’t have to have people who are non-gamers— mainstream type people… we ant VR to become bigger so that developers can make more money… but as soon as there are products that let people spend money on content and start buying a headset, that is my low-benchmark for VR being here - Palmer
I felt we are here when Samsung came to us with their 3d printed headmount with an s4— just try and you will see what we are working on. It was a clear message that it was here. It took a year and they released Gear VR… now every mobile phone from Note 4 is a VR enabled phone. Talking to At&t and Verizon, what will make you give away these phones for free, and they said they just need VR to be popular - Amir
The tech works, now its about consumer acquisition via distribution and awareness. - Nicolas
I think we will see some intersection of ease of use, easy setup, be high quality and the content has got to be there. We have to give you a reason to put these weird goggles on your face… We’re not that far from the intersection of those three things. - Clay
The demonstrative power of VR is incredible… There’s this issue with how do you scale that so that everybody has the chance to see this (VR). Do you think inshore VR demonstration is going to be crucial to the adoption of these products?
We just announced a partnership with Sapient Nitro.. we are looking forward to handle the problem of getting consumers introduced in the retail space to VR— for Home Depot, REI.. typical brands that have a difficult time telling the story of how to use the products… We will put these kiosks out at all these locations and thats when people will realize that VR is a better way to interact with media… it’s a better way to do almost everything… people will be so impressed. - Amir
Question in regards to lawsuits
We’ve got a lot of sort out.. - Clay
What’s your answer to critics who say VR effects on human psychology is not enough to put out to market
They don’t know what they are talking about… VR has been in use in military, in medical, pTSD treatment, for almost 30 years. - Amir
Going back to in store demos
Cardboard is a taste of what you experience in Oculus or Vive but I think it’s enough to get people interested and that drives future interest in higher end systems. But I think it’s enough to get people interested… and that drives future interest in higher end systems… There will be a natural enthusiasm for people who’ve seen these devices (VR). - Clay
How do we call Cardboard or dk2 or what Vive are doing?
We have no illusions that Cardboard provides the same level of experience. We’ve been making a taste of VR accessible to anyone, easy approachable to anyone. It does not have a head strap because it should be easy to take on, take off. We’ve been thoughtful about Cardboard as a good introduction to VR.
Cardboard is the least threatening. It is an ice breaker. Then I can persuade someone to experience Gear VR. Then we can take them to the DK2. The fact that Cardboard is in 2 million hands, is helping Google more than all the marketing dollars of other companies - Amir
Do you think that it is necessary to have some minimum bar of performance to make sure that people who are getting their first demos aren’t experiencing something that makes them sick.. and then they never want to buy one?
I think we are beyond the point of not getting people to not try it again… I think people will ride it out as a ‘bad virtual reality’ experience… but for the long term future of VR, we are past the part of killing people’s interest forever. - Palmer
Ultimately, give developers the tools to measure and understand how their apps are performing and educate developers about not droppingg frames, mining 60 frames per second and it’s an opportunity to share learnings to help the world get better at sharing applications. - Clay
What do you see that is a really cool potential use case that is not receiving as much attention?
Oculus and Vive are focusing on gaming… We just passed 16,100 developers that are working with us and told us the industry that they are developing for— less than 20% are focused on entertainment, 35% are education and training, the next industry is healthcare. - Amir
I hope someone comes up with an Instagram or a twitter for VR— an application that is native to the platform that it is born from and you can’t imagine, where it just makes so much sense that it’s like “Oh this is what you use VR for”. This is what I am hoping for. - Nicolas
You could dominate the entire VR medical market— theres a lot of dollars but there are not going to be a a lot of companies, a lot of headsets, a lot of developers. It will be a decent pie. Same thing for enterprise, same thing for education and training. In the short term, entertainment is going to dominate things done in VR. In the long-term, entertainment and education are going to the the biggest. Military, enterprise or medical will remain a tiny market because if those industries were enough to drive consumer VR, they could have already done so. But, it’s the entertainment companies like Samsung, that have now taken interest because of hundred of millions, potential billions of consumers who want to use this in their everyday life and military/enterprise/medical does not fall into their daily life. - Palmer
There’s more people trying to shoehorn Virtual Reality into places it doesn’t really have a place, than people in the 90s because it is much bigger now. Most people are pulling in the right direction but there are a lot of people trying to shoehorn VR into their latest thing as if it’s a magical cure that makes their product good… they do it because it’s the hippest new thing. Like “look our startup has a VR port of our application, it’s poorly implemented, it doesn’t add anything but it’s virtual reality!” VR is not a perfect solution to all problems in every business and every piece of software, like some people imagine it is, it’s a good for for certain things. And as it gets better there will be industries that today don’t make sense but will make sense.
What would you say to somebody who wants to get involved in this market? What kinds of people do you guys need in your companies?
Get yourself up and running developing for Android… You will have hundreds of millions of VR enabled phones in the next 2-3 years (to distribute on). - Amir
That’s a very aggressive target - Palmer to Amir
For the last 10 years, a lot of Internet companies, you studied CS to participate in it. But VR is so broad… from electrical engineering, optics… and the importance of the creative side. We will see a renaissance in creative direction, 3d animation and rendering, film. If you are more creatively inclined, there is tremendous opportunity… to really go deep in how do you build experiences for this new medium. - Clay
‘I find it interesting that we have 90% male audience, 100% male panel and no one wanted to discuss adult entertainment… I think back to Beta and VHS War and the fact that Adult entertainment backed VHS, everyone ended up with VHS players and Beta (a better product)… Do you guys see Adult Entertainment as a major driver?
People forget the much more recent example of HD DVD VS Blu-Ray. In that case, it was the other way around and HD DVD very much lost… That’s not to say that it’s an argument for one way or another, but it’s not apparent that strong support by the standard providers for a type of entertainment is critical to a success of a particular kind of technology. - Palmer
‘Are you guys making attempts to diversify your workforce, diversify your creatives and not look like the same old group of white guys?’
It’s going to be incredibly important to bring something to everyone that everyone find value in, resonates with everyone. That’s our goal at Google. - Clay
Milk VR is being programmed as a main stream media outlet. We just launched three series with: Refinery 29. And we’re trying really hard that’s easy and appeals to different kinds of people and beyond the ‘young male gamer’ that is very natural to an emerging medium but is not the only market.’ - Milk VR
We are fully focused on enabling content to be focused on women and the main reason is that women make most of the decisions of what people buy at home… What we’ve done is we’ve specifically teamed with Publicist, who gave us a creative director who runs VR, who is a brilliant story-teller and without a doubt a woman and focused on telling stories about family, brands. She believes that there is a unique opportunity in telling stories to their consumers and the majority of those are women. - Amir
VirtualReality is going to be largely driven by the game industry, not because of the attitude of the game industry or the people they hire but because most of the people with the skills to develop real-time 3d environments are in that games industry. if you see that as a positive or a negative, a lot of that character is going to come into the character of the VR industry… if you are a good creative in the game industry, you can make content for everyone not just white male gamers… I think a lot of it is going to be market driven… Women are going to want to use Virtual Reality too. - Palmer
Gaming desktop VR will be driven by gamers. And for me, in mobile, you are looking to who plays games and there’s an equal percentage of men and women who play… I believe in mobile VR gaming will be less than 20% and interactive, which is what will make VR successful.. and across the board, every industry will benefit from VR. - Amir
“Do you expect VR leaders to actively start blocking adult entertainment on VR systems.”
The Rift is an open platform, we don’t control what software can run on it. And that’s a big deal. - Palmer
“Can you discuss the recommendation of minimum age requirement and how that might change.”
The else distance is sized for adults and we try to sell it for adults - Nicolas
“When do you see the revolution coming for more personalized content being created by (360 cameos) like Samsung’s 360 project”
It’s going to be awesome. I think the production of 360 video is very labor intensive and certainly not in the realm of the average user. Live 360 video is a huge opportunity in the space. - Nicolas
It’s one of the spaces and personal applications of VR. I think we are limited on the camera side on the laws of physics because if you wanted to design that could look with two eyes in every direction then you’d actually run out of atoms and space. There’s going to have to be pretty deep innovation on the software side so content creators aren’t spending 80% of their time stitching the seam. It’s a big deep problem and I hope someone solves. - Clay
It’s a problem that has to be solved if you are going to have consumers to capturing content… You are going to need hardware that can understand the enviornment, what the depth is and re-create it. It’s going to be interesting once we have proper 360 capture technology to see what that does to our perception of other forms of media. If you look back a few decades, where we don’t have videos of event, you only had it of important events and if you go back even further we only have pictures. I think it’s going to follow a similar trend in VR. First we are going to capture important events, like sporting events or speeches… And then eventually, it will go to people to capture their own memories. I’m looking forward to a future a few decades ago when people say ‘God, in 2020 we didn’t have any immersive captures. It’s only pictures and videos, it’s hard to understand what it was like to be alive back then.’ - Palmer
Until we have that memory capture device, we’re going to look back as ‘oh my god, we lost out on capturing a birthday party, or that special event or that time in history’ and we will feel kind of like we feel now when something wasn’t captured on pictures or film. - Clay
