HTC VIVE: Empowering Enterprise Use-Cases in XR

Daniel O’Brien
Brad, Will, thanks for having me. It’s great to see you guys. And excited for today.

Brad Scoggin
Well, HTC has a long, rich history in VR and has really been a leader for some time. I love to hear about the entry into VR and how you made the shift from initially entering into kind of the consumer entertainment space to now focusing on enterprise.

Daniel O’Brien
Yeah, thanks. Well, actually, it was interesting. We built this team. It was kind of a little bit of a skunkworks team inside of HTC, and, this was back in 2013, we were making Under Armor products and health products. We were making cameras, we were making bunch of stuff. And, Peter Chow, our CEO, and Cher Wang, our chairperson asked me to go over and meet valve and see this prototype that they had built which was this amazing, fiducial marker tracking headset that had smartphone panels and it looked kind of like a really fancy Lego, had soldering burns, and it had Velcro, had hot glue on it. They asked us to partner and work together, and, yeah, I agreed to go work on that project. And so I led the first product to market. And we started that in 2014. We started with developers in October of 2014 and then we had our first dev kit in 2015, our second dev kit in January of 2016, and our first commercial product in April 2016.

Will Stackable
I know we talked about this on the run up to the pod, but that first Vive with the incredible tracking, the base stations… we talked about how even if you dropped them, they still worked. I have such good memories of that headset. And what a fantastic first consumer product for it for you guys.

Daniel O’Brien
it was critical that we came to market correctly with the right first product. We wanted to have room scale. We wanted to have 90 frames per second. I mean, I remember in 20014 in October, we sat with 30 developer teams in there, and a lot of those companies are still kicking today, and I’m pretty I’m pretty excited for those dev teams. And they were all Indies. And it was my first foray. I was a real hardware guy: hardware and software from the smartphone business. And we met all these developers and we said to them, “hey, you’re going to develop content at 90 frames per second.”

And the air just kind of like was sucked out of the room and, and then Joe Ludwig and Chet Felsic and, bunch of other people from Valve stood in front of the room and calm them all down and said, this is how you’re going to do it, right? And kind of like, here’s the path to actually [developing] 90 frames per second.

And that was pretty amazing what those guys were able to do. Nobody leaked. nobody talks about anything. Developing then those base stations in a horizontal an x- and y- axis laser spinning as spread through the room and then having fiducial markers or basic sensors on a headset, like for a year, valve and HTC actually worked together on the angles of these sensors just to hit the headset just right, so that we could get that tracking accuracy.

Then to have that computational [capabilities] where you were in space and time in a VR headset, while you’re whipping around like you were still tethered to a five meter cable, but it was a full room scale. Like once your neck, your spine and your head is free to roam. You whip around pretty quickly, especially with the zombies coming for you.

But it was super critical solving the tracking for room scale movement for a five meter square area and then solving the problems for controllers and developing new controllers, game interactions and, interactions – that was all really, really hard stuff – But really fun problems

Will Stackable
you mentioned zombies, and I just have to share this story. And maybe you’ve shared before on the pod. But that first headset – that Vive headse – I think, in large part, is why we’re here today talking to you. We put Brad in the headset, and we were blown away. I remember I tried the DC1 or DK2, and I think I did some real roller coaster simulator. I got horribly sick and I thought, “there’s no way.” Then I got the Vive. One of the first ones that I could get my hands on and was blown away. But the zombie story is: I put my dad in VR and one of the first experiences I put him in was Zombie Training Simulator, which was a great game, kind of paper cut out, zombies.

And at one point, the zombies kind of rush you all at once when that happened. My dad was in my office, and he turns and runs full tilt into the wall. And he was okay. And shout out to the durability, the controllers, everything was fine, even the fall and collision. But I just remember for me, for some reason, that was a moment for me that I that sticks out to me because my dad is not a video game player.

He, but he was so in it, and he took the headset off, and he said, “I thought it was real. I thought I was just this instinct – this primal instinct took over and I ran.” So anyways. But, yeah, that that first Vive, I put Brad into it and that’s how I started, really.

Daniel O’Brien
That’s awesome. I remember working with you guys very early on, some of the early demos, some of the early stories of people taking out, foam tiles. we were like, wow, we built a really good controller because that time that controller went through a lot of ceiling tiles and, that they withheld. But,

Brad Scoggin
You know what didn’t hold up? Because we started with in location based entertainment, with an arcade. And the thing that didn’t hold up –

Will Stackable
TVs. We were going to Sam’s club just about every week. Buy new TVs.

Daniel O’Brien
I remember, let me see, putting Jon Favreau in the blue for the first time and watching him rip the headset off and, like, it literally smashed. And we’re like, you broke the

Will Stackable
Is that. Is that the origin of him using VR for Lion King and other? I know he’s – Wow. Okay.

Daniel O’Brien
It was in the Weaver office,

Will Stackable
Yeah. Were they using Vive trackers mounted to a camera to give them that? Was that the –

Daniel O’Brien
Yeah, yeah,

Will Stackable
Wow. That’s cool.

Daniel O’Brien
Yeah, the tracker story of just how the trackers are being used across entertainment, TV, all these different ways. I mean, it is being used in so many use cases. It was used on Star Wars movies. It was used on so many, so many other locations and so many other, applications that we never we never.

But we built the whole system open right from the very beginning so that people could develop and Indies and big game developer teams or entertainment teams could actually go nuts with it. Like that was the whole design, right? And valve was actually instrumental in doing that in the very beginning to just kind of give them props like they were like, if you want this to grow and you want the developer community to really attached to it, this is it. You got to keep it open. You got to keep it easy. You have to keep updating and listening to the developers. And they were really, really great in those early days of the Vive days because we were such a hardware company and communications company. And they were really the kind of the guidance of how to work with developers and content creators. And it was a great experience working with those guys. So like, that was an amazing partnership.

Brad Scoggin
So we also as someone started in the entertainment space, like I said. And then we made a pivot into enterprise. Obviously, we’re a tiny company compared to HTC. But maybe talk about that, — that transition from consumer and entertainment into what your focus is today.

Daniel O’Brien
Yeah. Well that was fun to go from being a smartphone company – like we were a B2B to C company. So we sold phones to carriers, operators, AT&T, Verizon at the time spread T-Mobile. We were very, very successful, but we saw what was happening in the market there between Apple, Samsung market dominance and things of that factor.

I mean, Apple – we think they have this overwhelming majority of smartphone distribution. They do in the US but not globally. Android is the overwhelming majority globally as an operating system for so but I mean, our Android devices were very, very good. We’re Android experts. But then we were like “okay, what are we going to do next?” Right? And we really have this very strong theory about we were making smartphones before they were called smartphones. We made the first touchscreen smartphone, the first 4G LTE smartphone, the first Google Android smartphone, first 5G device. We turned on every carrier 4G LTE network in the world. Like, I sat in a room with the CTO of AT&T and they said, thank you for turning on our 4G LTE network.

So like HTC is this amazing, what I would call, innovation contribution company. And so we’ve done a lot for the industry and for developers and content creators. But when you think about now, we’ve built this new brand, HTC Vive, and we had this blue triangle and it really hurt Cher. I remember being in the meetings with Cher and we’re like, what is the purpose? Why does this company exist? Why does the Vive exist? And we came up with innovation. Technology, innovation and humanity is the three pillars of that blue triangle. And so much of like, everything we wanted to do was actually take our technology, put it together in innovative ways, create content services and solutions that would actually improve humanity.

And really that’s the purpose of the whole Vive business. And I was like, this is why we exist. Then we go into B2C with Valve as our partner. But think about those early days, like the only people that knew how to create a 360 degree environment was people like yourself in the entertainment industry that knew how to create really fun, engaging environment.

And Indies were the only ones that were really willing to take the chance on creating that content. And Steam with their, I think, 120 million active users and, I think there were like 30 to 50 million congruent users, depending on the holiday time frame or weekend or weeknight. They had 8 million active.

They had 8 million PCs on their network that could run a Vive. So that was like the original addressable market. So there is the initial days which were fraught with friction and some hurdles from mass adoption. But we really just focused on those high-end steam gamers as our initial B2C and then but in 2014 – Cher, myself, — we were like, listen, we’re going to focus on automotive. We’re going to focus on design and architecture, and we’re going to focus on all these areas. But none of them had ever seen Unity or Unreal. They had no 3D graphics. And nobody knew how to create any content whatsoever or create training simulations and things of that nature. And so we really started 30% of the dev kits between HTC and Valve went to architecture, automotive space, and we went to professional customers in 2015 and ‘16, for sure.

That was always the part of the mission from day one. I think we’ve seen a lot of companies pivot in that direction because consumer wasn’t pushing the way that they wanted to. But just in general. Yeah, we saw this. We’ve been always focused on enterprise as a growing market. But the technology knowledge level, development cycle, very long in 2016 and ‘17 for enterprise and B2B and commercial customers.

Brad Scoggin
Yeah. Well it’s interesting. Our initial kind of purpose also was to help people live more meaningful lives. Remove the friction to help people live more meaningful lives through this new technology. And you know also starting in gaming entertainment for us. Right. It’s kind of this interesting cable that is that. And so we tried and not the gaming and entertainment is not important.

And I think one of the really cool things we said about that original Vive is, I do think that was the gateway headset for most people in the industry today. I mean, a lot of people today in an arcade put on a Vive back in 2018.

And that’s what got them excited about VR today, which is really cool. And it’s cool to think about all of us getting to be a part of that in some way. but even for us, it was this push at different points during those early years. Okay, we want to push into education. We want to push into enterprise and there was just it was just I mean, so much uphill, right?

There wasn’t either the content wasn’t there. Schools didn’t want to have to jack with tethered devices, etc., etc.. Right. And so at a certain point for us, it’s like we have this idealistic use of the technology, but we’re just not big enough to drive that type of adoption. And so for us I guess it was 2021 we made the pivot into enterprise.

And like you said, it’s like, okay, companies maybe early on we’re kind of like, what is this? I mean, we’re seeing across the board from our perspective, it feels like every major company on the planet right now is moving their training into VR because it’s so effective, so powerful. I mean, we all know the ROI.

The one thing you mentioned just a few minutes ago in the early days, your open approach with Valve. And I think that’s an interesting topic today with just the different approaches from different groups in VR. So just curious: how do you think about being open today in 2024 as you talk the enterprise?

Daniel O’Brien
It’s still really critical. It’s still really important. I think to lean into that there’s two pieces, right? One being open, super critical so that companies don’t feel super confined. Right? Like companies need to look at what does Apple doing? What is meta doing? What is Pico doing? What is Lenovo doing? What is HTC doing? We’re all solving different problems. The headsets all different little innovative moves. You know Meta puts out a headset with mixed reality passthrough. We put out a headset with mixed reality passthrough and a laser depth sensor so that you can measure everything in the room. So everybody’s looking at different problems and saying, what can we do?

And it’s like kind of like the early days of smartphones. Like we are all pushing each other, which is very, very healthy for the industry. So it’s super interesting. Apple put out their headset and it’s like, yeah, the passthrough frame rate and speed is great, but they designed it to be great when you’re sitting still or standing still like we designed that pass through so you walk around at full walkable speed. So we all made different tradeoffs. You all see the different use cases and you see the different decisions that the companies are all making. But the technology is actually not that far from each other. So that’s super interesting. I think companies need to be working with open systems and not closed systems.

I think that’s important for them to then benefit from what it is they’re going to use. It also makes it easier for IT infrastructure company – the CIO right. And the IT group, right. Like how are we going to incorporate this into our organization? Funny story, our first sale to a defense contractor, I think it took me three months to sell three headsets.

I mean, that’s how bad we were, doing B2B in enterprise back in 2016 and ‘17. It was pretty rough. I mean, now we’re very good at it. It’s like we can go work with basically any company, almost any government in the world and deploy a corporate solution.

But I think, like, leaning into what you guys are doing now, today, what we were doing, how we were thinking about it, an open ecosystem. There’s two reasons you do that. One is you can allow healthy competition, healthy innovation. You allow developers to work across headsets and across platforms. And if Unity is working with Open XR and XR and Lenovo and everybody’s using open XR, there’s now an ease of use for the developers that are developing for that corporate entity.

I hate to say it. I want people to know why the Vive exists. What our purpose is. Because people buy why you exist, they don’t buy what you make. or they buy the cheap thing, because they don’t have enough budget to do what they want to do. But at the end of the day people buy why you’re there, right?

Buy why your solution exists. And then how easy is it to incorporate into their environment? How is it to control it, secure it, develop across it. Right. And will it work with other headsets? Will it work with other platforms? And you want to keep yourself as flexible as possible for, I think, B2B in commercial enterprise, as soon as you start bringing them friction, you’re out. You lock them down and they’re going to be like, “no this isn’t going to work for us”, right? And so you want to work with their existing infrastructure. I mean, just working with an existing product. Like headsets the metaverse, should be working with iPads and Android phones and iPhones and PCs and whatnot. Right. And Max. Right. You should be able to work inside of the metaverse, across a slew of different products and meet their security criteria.

Brad Scoggin
We talk about removing friction all the time. We also talk about selling it initially to some of these big groups. And I think you oftentimes have one shot at a first impression. And making sure that initial experience is clean and frictionless is so important. and obviously there’s the closed ecosystem or it’s tempting from a business perspective, but it does feel like at this stage of the industry is just not healthy.

And even in our platform, a high percentage of our customers are using devices from multiple manufacturers to exactly to your point for different use cases. And I think the enterprise market is different than the consumer space. And in enterprise there is an expectation that things are open and that there is an interlock. And I think we all have to lean into that, at least at this stage of—

Daniel O’Brien
Well, too when you see the pressure that’s happening on the consumer side of the market, right? Like you have price sensitivity, right? To get to deployment. And you have one company kind of setting the market expectations of what the pricing of this technology is. That’s not this pricing, this technology that is a loss model. Right. Like, great that somebody can do it. We’re not going to do that as a company. But when you look at enterprise and you look at the B2B area, a company can deploy a platform, they can control the devices, they can improve the human performance. Right? They can design better, collaborate better, they can train better.

They can. I mean, I have white papers through the roof of stats and performance, whether it’s healthcare, engineering, automotive, anything that you want to train, you can do more efficient efficiently in XR. The retention is better. Skill fade is decreased over time. We have better trained doctors, better trained everybody, first responders.

And so now you have better therapy. Right. So now we can actually start like our brand. one of the things that we’re working on is like first responders and all the different training solutions we can do with these people and I went to a conference with Axon, who’s one of our partners recently, and one of the big questions at that conference from one of the keynote speakers was, here’s all of these police officers, here’s all these safety officers. You have a million safety officers in the US and decreasing numbers and you go, well, who’s taking care of them? Right? They’re out there taking care of everybody else, but who’s taking care of them? And these these products and the infrastructure to deploy them and control them and deploy actual valuable, solutions like that’s the mission, right?

Like there’s really good that we can do. It’s okay to be profitable. That’s a good thing. Okay. It’s okay to deploy solutions that increase efficiencies, bring costs down, faster decision making, better training for people, and then deliver that to a sector of consumers that really benefits from it. Right. Like now you have why does why do brands exist in the space meeting a mission. They’re delivering products and services at a profit. That then benefits that company and brings their costs down. It’s a win-win for everybody. It doesn’t have to be a subsidy and loss, right? Like that’s another model for another solution for another user.

But what we’re doing, I think our brand alignment to the execution to the… we report to the shareholders, right? That’s our job. And so while everybody wants it to be cheaper and all those things, I mean, it will come down. But I’ll tell you what. Like we already know how the prices will come down and how you get to those lower prices, but you have to innovate your way there. You don’t subsidize your way there. Nobody in the history of consumer technology has ever subsidized them their way to mass adoption. Sorry.

Will Stackable
The Axon use case Is one of my favorites. And at Christmas, when my relatives ask what I do, I’ll share about axon as one of the use cases, their vision to make the bullet obsolete. And all the work they’re doing with police officers around North America. It’s amazing. I’m curious for. And if anybody listening doesn’t know this already, I’m sure you do. But, I mean, HTC is responsible for some of the largest deployments in the world. Deep in enterprise, deep in government contracting. So on the side of things, I’m curious for an XR champion in an organization looking at choosing a headset for either a pilot or going to scale. What are some of the differentiators that you talk about? As is, they’re trying to navigate that landscape that you mentioned earlier.

Daniel O’Brien
I think you have to depending on the company, depending on the organization, depending on the use case they have to think about a bunch of their priorities, like, do they want to use it for training? Do they want to use it for what type of training? Hardened training. procedural training. Do they want to use it for soft skills training? Do they want to use it for collaboration and decision making or analytics and, data reviews and 3D models, like there’s so many use cases now where we can bring huge amount of value. But I think a lot of companies have to think about privacy. They have to think about security. They have to think about country of origin. If you’re a government entity, U.S. government entity or part of that, if you were part of a state program, school district as part of a state program, if you’re a part of the federal program, you get federal money, your country of origin really important what you’re putting inside of your, your, environment. So think about that. But we also think about just like, the ease of deployment, right? Like, how do you control the devices? I mean, what’s great about you guys and why we love partnering with you is we actually have like a small indie, that we created, but it’s mostly for small businesses like SMBs that only want to manage our headset.

And then mostly for like a pilot program or a smaller program, whether you’re testing it PLC or pilot program, they come to work with a company like you because, okay, great, I can deploy now multiple headsets, I can deploy accessories, I can deploy across brands I can deploy and it will integrate with an existing IT infrastructure.

Right. And so it has much more robustness and scalability and features. But companies really have to think about not only the privacy in the security country of origin, the functionality of the devices, like we have two devices that one is meant for like a lighter environment, right? And more comfortable environment can be worn like glasses.

And, and then we have a more robust headset and, and then we have our still our PC, VR headset, but our all in one headsets, we have two variants of it. One of them is meant for more of a classroom, more of a robust I would call it human abuse. We know how to make those types of devices made smartphones for a lot of years.

We pick them up and drop them all the time. but I think about robustness feature, functional reliability, quality, things of that nature. But a lot of the headsets are pretty similar right now in terms of a feature functional. But I don’t think people really buy what a product is all the time. I think they buy “why”. Like, that’s the most important thing. And I think you want to work with a company you’re going to trust. They’re not going to take your data. Right? If you’re a corporate entity, and you’re using biometrics off of that headset, if you know eye tracking or facial tracking or, interactions or specific type of training, that’s to your environment that data is that company’s data, right?

And it needs to meet that criteria. And nobody else should have access to that data. privacy and security for the enterprise space is paramount. It’s critical. it doesn’t matter if you pass like, simple ISO testing, right? It matters what you do with their data, how you protect their brand. And are you a trusted company then to go do business with?

We do business with the US government, anywhere from defense contractors to health care companies. We’re in every medical school possible. we know how critical data is to a corporate entity and protecting it for them. So, we’re not even touching it like it’s not ours, so don’t touch it. Don’t go near it.

Will Stackable
You mentioned Axon, and I thought. I don’t really do this, but is there another customer just to kind of help for somebody who either, again, at the pilot scale stage or going to scale to understand some of the nuances, the decisions that need to be made and even how they would interact with a hardware company like HTC and what that experience is like versus, I don’t know, going and buying stuff off the shelf at Best Buy and trying to figure out some kind of a consumer headset in an enterprise setting.

00:28:37:21 – 00:29:11:09
Daniel O’Brien
Yeah. No, that’s a good question. I mean, we have companies across aerospace. D.O.D., financial services now is a really big sector, compliance training, job training, soft skills training. We work with a lot of the banks right now. One of the reasons that of the banking industry actually reached out to us, started contacting us, was because on the DoD and federal side, we have three products with three ATOs, which is called Authority to Operate.

That means you’re meeting high security criteria, with not only your physical hardware, but with your software, which means basically you’re safe to go work with. and so, financial industry, which is, I would say, higher level criteria of regulation than many of my government contractors and government entities. They are they are very serious about the several of them are part of the fed.

Their criteria is critical. So a lot of companies are thinking about it from that point of view first, like how do I go where what companies, what branch should I go work with? And then what is the criteria then that I can deploy and can I even bring them into my company? Right. And, can I test them? And so, yeah, we focus on a lot of that initially. We have pilot, programs, where you can buy a certain amount of devices, and then you get access to all the features and services. the other thing, too, about HTC is like we actually have a what we call it Viverse. I think it’s competitive to maybe somebody that’s looking at like, Meta Horizons or the Mesh solution for Microsoft or I think Qualcomm has a solution. Everybody’s looking at the platform solution. But we created a very, easy to use solution for one user up to hundreds of thousands of users that can go into a collaboration space. They can do keynotes, they can do meetings. It’s it was integrated with Microsoft Teams a while ago at Microsoft. Microsoft products, as well as like zoom. So you could do your meeting invites in your meeting. Yeah, we work with a lot of companies to come in, start a POC, start a pilot, get access to a Viverse, test it from a security standpoint, testing for functionality standpoint. We can work with partners like you guys to integrate armor into diverse users so that they can deploy. We have longer extended warranties for customers because they’re going to deploy them for 3 to 5 years. or 2 to 5 years. and some of these deployments, companies also want to know, are you going to end of life this thing in a year? Do I have to certify another device? And then incorporate that into my infrastructure, like putting a company or corporate environment in a constant loop of like, oh, evaluation and certification approval? They don’t like that. Especially government entities. So they want to have trust, right? That they can see a roadmap. They can see when they’re going to deploy things, things of that nature. So yeah, we really look at all those different scenarios, and whether they’re using it in a classroom environment or in location-based entertainment multi-user environment.

Yeah, we really try to make ourselves just a one stop shop where you can come in, you can get us, talk to us, and we can deploy a comprehensive solution for our customers.

We have really enjoyed there several large accounts. We’ve partnered with you guys, and it’s just been great. We’ve appreciated your flexibility and willingness to work together to make it work with some of these larger deployments.

Brad Scoggin
You have, as you’ve shared you personally in HTC, have a rich history in technology and in so as we moved to a kind of a close here, I’d love to hear your take on kind of what next? Like, what’s the next 18 months look like the next few years? Where’s VR going?

Daniel O’Brien
Yeah. Yeah, sure. Well, where things are going we’ve already incorporated 5G technology into the headsets. from an accessory standpoint. Everybody keeps asking the question, like when are we going to get these things cheaper? Are they going to be connected more easily? Things of that nature. just like from a history standpoint, like just to make our hand tracking work more effectively, we created those wrist trackers, the wrist trackers that ended up being used on a whole bunch of peripherals and accessories and bunch of stuff.

And it’s kind of funny. Some people always kind of like propose some of those little in-between technologies, but we actually deploy stuff like that all the time just to kind of help us get to the next stage. and I before I wrap, I want to go back to one of my first intros of somebody that did a demo and tell a quick story about that.

So, and my brain is there, so remind me at the end. But, where things are going is we’re absolutely going to incorporate the 5G technology into the headsets. you’ll very likely be incorporated into the rear housing. the batteries. Like, right now we have the ability to create a 5G battery that can be replaced on the back of the headset. So you can have it in Wi-Fi mode or Wi-Fi six mode or tethered mode, or have it in a 5G connected mode. so now you can we’ve created 5G boxes where you can actually run 12 to 15 users off of one box. You deploy that anywhere. If you’re a forward looking base and you need to do training on equipment out in the field, we have a solution for that. So 5G connectivity is and then 6 G connectivity, 6G is coming in 2030. but where things are going is we will make these headsets connected. They will continue. We will then virtualize more of the products and hardware that’s in the headsets into an edge network and into a cloud infrastructure that takes bomb and takes materials out of a wearable. Now we get to smaller headsets. Now we get to smaller wearables. Now we get to lighter products. And when you have less things in those products, they cost less. And that’s how you get to a lower price product. You actually innovate your way there. you don’t actually just lose money — 250 bucks a headset and say, innovation.

That’s a bunch of malarkey. so, but I just think in general, like you, you innovate your way there from a connectivity standpoint. And that’s where we’re taking so much of our, like, smartphone days and knowledge architecture we have. I mean, I don’t even know how many hundreds of thousands of man hours of knowledge that we have in the wireless connectivity industry.

How these devices then will connect. I mean, we have 5G boxes that can connect to any carrier network, any fiber backhaul, or to a satellite infrastructure. So you can backhaul to a number of different satellite companies. Right. And so you can have connectivity on an oil and gas platform in the middle of the ocean. Right. And you can have 5G headsets out there and you could be training remotely. So like that’s where things are going, like, but that’s actually right now, like that’s happening now, that’s things that we can do now. but I do think that with infrastructure and all the work that, like your company has done, our company has done to deploy at scale, I think we’re going to start seeing in the half million deployments, to couple hundred thousand deployments of headsets into corporate entities and into government entities and where these headsets will be deployed at scale. They’re going to be used for mental health. They’re going to be used for suicide prevention. They’re going to be used for, design and engineering collaboration. They’re going to be used for training. It’s a really effective tool. And when you think about our brand like technology, innovation, humanity, like, this is everything that we were meant to do.

So that’s why we’re so focused on doing it the way that we’re doing it today. that’s where it’s absolutely going now are, just so we were working on AR glasses in 2012 and ‘13, and the problems were vast and challenging. But the main problem for AR wasn’t so much like glasses and field of view and just this one little thing or cameras embedded into a headset or glasses. It was connectivity. And what the hell are you going to do with it? Sorry for my line, but like, what are we going to do with it? What are you going to do? And so, like, what made you know oil so great, right? It was the railroad systems, right? It’s the old model of like, what is the railroad to deliver the content?

Well, 5G networks, 6G networks is the railroad system to actually get a sub10 millisecond round trip on 90 frames per second, content to display in front of your eye on glasses that everyone’s like, well, what’s the killer app. No one cares. But, they just want it to work. But reality is for AR glasses to really go out at scale and for developers to have a very healthy economy to then address a very broad user and content, you have to be able to deliver that content ubiquitously in any environment where they are. And that is an infrastructure of a network to be able to do to that. That’s where we’re solving today with 5G connectivity and mixed reality headsets that can do a version of a AR and VR and mixed reality. So like all these problems are being solved now, I think people can appreciate, like the level of innovation and technology that’s happening today that’s going to allow that kind of ubiquitous scale and adoption of AR glasses in the future.

AR glasses are 100% going to happen. They’re going to be awesome. I hope they’re used for good and not just the Olympics system draining on your brain applications. I mean, I’m an addict on some of the platforms, like, anybody else. But hopefully we can use that technology also for a lot of highly valuable use cases and benefiting humanity in some way.

So, I think that that mission needs to stay strong and why we exist and why we do the innovation that we’re doing. So I got into communications coming out of college and worked in Lucent Bell Labs and that organization because I thought the world will always need communications.

And, I could have went into banking and had a really smart professor that said to me, world won’t always need bankers, but we’ll always need communications. And I was like, oh, I’m going into communications. So, as, doctor has seen, he was my international finance professor. He probably also guided me there because I think I got a B-minus in his class.So, Yeah, right. That’s, Mr. O’Brien, I think you need to think about communications. Right, right. That’s right. It’s all coming back around.

Brad Scoggin
Well I, I definitely like the sound of 500,000 device deployments. That’s exciting. And you use the word malarkey. And I think that’s going to be my goal going forward is that we slip that word into every show.

Daniel O’Brien
I remember, I think I was when I was talking about kind of the early days, the intro days. And I remember Mobile World Congress, 2016. It was just before the actual launch. And we put everybody, all this press and media through these demos. And Chet felsic, what a tremendous, amazing human being. He has amazing following, and he is one of the, I think one of the Half-Life writers and has BAFTA awards and he’s a brilliant guy. But, anyway, he’s, he’s a tremendous person. We sat down and we wrote down headlines on whiteboards right in the valve offices of like, what do we want to accomplish? Right? Like, what do we want press the media to say? And one of the demos that we were going to initial demos we were going to do was, tilt brush, which I think Google ended up acquiring is now called something else. But, I mean, you can basically paint with rainbows or lightning or things of that nature. And one of the headlines that we wrote was “I painted with rainbows.” Right? We were like, wouldn’t it be so cool if we got press to put that in a headline? And I think we got Scott Stein from ZDNet to actually, like, I’m not sure if you put that in the headline, but he came out of the demo and I was standing in the hallway, he looked at me and he goes, I painted with rainbows. Mission accomplished. Right. And so like, it’s since painting with rainbows to now suicide prevention and doing amazing impacts in like people’s lives and training doctors and nurses and, and really being a I mean, we did an amazing thing with penumbra, right? Like that was another huge deployment for us. And that’s stroke rehabilitation, right? Like working with rehab centers for patients. And we work with companies like mine VR to, work in senior care facilities like the largest population of human beings in the United States today is our boomer audience. And like that is the biggest population. Like, who can we help with these applications and with these products and with these services and like you got to focus on, like, where you can do the good where you can make a huge impact and then what is the right audience. And like senior care facilities, huge impact that we’re making in that space. So really good stuff. Really, really great.

Brad Scoggin
Well, this has been, great. Dan, I know you’re a busy man, so we really appreciate it. And, we look forward to catch up with you soon.

Will Stackable
Thanks Dan.

Daniel O’Brien
All right. Thanks, guys. Thanks for having me. Thanks for all the work you guys are doing and helping us. And, I look forward to doing a lot more together.

Brad Scoggin
Oh, man. super impressive. I think hearing some of the back story at HTC and how they got into VR to begin with and even their approach to things. it’s like there’s no they’re not they’re not chasing flash or hype. They’re doing the work. They’re innovating. They’ve got the long game in mind. And I leave the interview just feeling really encouraged about, where VR is going to go over time.

Will Stackable
I agree it’s fun stepping back in time, rewinding a bit, remembering the early days with with the before standalone when everything was cables and base stations and life was beautiful and simple. yeah, I agree. I mean, if I’m responsible for developing an Excel program at my organization, I’m definitely checking out the Vive headsets. I mean, there’s just a number of things that feel very dialed in for the enterprise in a way that, is unique. And I liked how you said that. it’s a big landscape and there’s a lot of options. and it’s worth checking out what they’re what they’re working on and getting your hands on a Vive headset and giving it a shot.

Brad Scoggin
Yeah. Yeah. Very, very thoughtful in their approach. well, as always, we appreciate you spend a little bit of time with us, and, make sure you check us out wherever you listen to your podcasts. And we will see you next time.