AXSChat Podcast with Robert Scoble

Robert Scoble works with companies that are implementing Spatial Computing technologies, though he is taking time off after finishing “The Infinite Retina” to spend time with his young kids. He is a futurist and technology strategist and the author of three books about technology trends, being the first to report on technologies from autonomous vehicles to Siri. Previous positions include being a strategist at Microsoft, a futurist at Rackspace, Chief Strategy Officer at Infinite Retina, and the producer and host of a video show about technology at Fast Company. 

Transcript

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Neil Milliken: Hello and welcome to access chat. I'm delighted that we're welcoming Robert Scoble to chat today Robert is a Technology Evangelist and journalist and has been

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Neil Milliken: Talking about the benefits and perils of new technology, mainly the benefits and the you know the amazing things that we're going to see in the future for as long as I can remember being engaged in tech

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Neil Milliken: FIRST MET Robert over a decade ago on a tech tour where we were having discussions about privacy and the implications of privacy in tech and sharing and the fairly new then social media.

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Neil Milliken: phenomenon that we've been writing ever since.

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Neil Milliken: Quite a lot has happened in the intervening years but it finally managed to persuade you to come on the show. So thank you very much. Robert, can you

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Neil Milliken: elaborate a bit more because you've been doing some exciting stuff.

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Robert Scoble: Oh yeah, well, since the role them. I, I think I met you, when I worked at Microsoft IT IN 2003 through six, and Microsoft had a big r&d lab and still does in Cambridge.

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Robert Scoble: And I came and visited man yeah so much has happened. I mean, we're, we now have decent video conferencing. Right, so we can just zoom call back then. Yeah, YouTube was just getting started with crappy little small videos you know on a web page, right, I mean so much has happened in 15 years

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Robert Scoble: I'm, I'm a futurist technologist journalist, you know i i had the first ride in the first Tesla with Elon Musk. That was, you know, shortly after I met with you guys.

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Robert Scoble: I Siri was launched in my son's bedroom, I was early to see Instagram and Flipboard and cloud. There are many enterprise and consumer companies.

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Robert Scoble: And I've been around the world, giving speeches about technology and Silicon Valley and and all that.

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Robert Scoble: And I've written four books. So the last book that I wrote was about spatial computing and about virtual and augmented reality.

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Robert Scoble: And robots and autonomous cars and virtual beings that can also move around in 3D space we're about to go through a paradigm shift of computing

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Robert Scoble: Where we don't just hold a computer flat screen anymore or or touch door, you know, use a flat screen like in my Tesla, I have a computer that's a flat screen, right.

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Robert Scoble: Soon, I'm going to be using glasses to see computing on everything and and we're going to be able to move through that space and

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Robert Scoble: Touch things and interact with things in a much different way than we can on a phone or on a iPad or on a laptop or desktop machine. So we're about to go through a real interesting paradigm shift and that that's what I read just read about with MARINA Cronin, yeah.

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Neil Milliken: Yeah. And, and I know that the

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Neil Milliken: The rumors about various different smart glasses.

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Neil Milliken: Coming out

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Neil Milliken: That you know are going to be potentially transformative in the way that we view wearable computing because

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Neil Milliken: That first experience of wearable computing was really, you know, Google Glass. A few years ago.

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Neil Milliken: It didn't get that sort of social acceptance that maybe

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Neil Milliken: Was hopeful.

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Neil Milliken: But actually, in the accessibility community. We were, we were quite keen to see that acceptance, because we see the potential of augmented reality for helping people with disabilities and actually

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Neil Milliken: So that

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Neil Milliken: The users amongst our sort of audience are

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Neil Milliken: Probably still that the people that are using these kind of tools right now.

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Robert Scoble: And and their answer.

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Robert Scoble: That those were almost five years ago now. Right. It's amazing, amazing how how long it takes to get these computers going but you look at a, like a pair of

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Robert Scoble: air pods right air pods have more compute inside them than an iPhone four did right, just a few years ago. So you can see the computing world thanks to Moore's Law is shrinking down and making more capable products for a cheaper price right and and that's about to hit the Google Glass.

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Robert Scoble: In a way, it failed because it was so early at it just didn't do all that much for consumers, right, the camera wasn't as good as GoPro camera.

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Robert Scoble: The microphones weren't that good. It didn't have a good Siri or Good AI to talk to and understand you. It didn't do real augmented reality where it's gonna lay you know things on top of the physical world. And that's all about to change. Right.

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Robert Scoble: We're seeing pieces of it in r&d labs, but we're starting to see real glasses that can do real augmented reality, not like that.

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Robert Scoble: With light ours that are highly detailed and with AI that really starting to understand this. At this point, and has huge efforts behind it. I mean, Amazon alone has 10,000 people working on Alexa

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Robert Scoble: Right. That's a huge effort and you're starting to see those efforts pay off in a lot of different ways.

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Antonio Santos: Sometimes we observe a certain narrative and companies when they talk about VR Google Edwin about Google Glass.

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Robert Scoble: Yeah.

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Antonio Santos: You feel that is the right narrative to reach the audiences and to reach know everyone know someone that barely knows how to use the phone.

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Antonio Santos: How can the yeah related a gap between them, what they are saying and what should be saying not to facilitate an option.

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Yeah.

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Robert Scoble: There's, there's a lot of confusion about why Google Glass failed and many people just don't don't realize what actually went down there. I wore mine for a year and

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Robert Scoble: Most people blame the camera and and I know it's not the camera. It was actually there's a new social contract problem.

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Robert Scoble: Where we evolved over millions of years to look into each other's eyes to see if you're trustworthy or see if you're paying attention to me and and we have a social contract.

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Robert Scoble: That happens because of that. And here was a new screen in front of in between us and it confused people

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Robert Scoble: Distracted people and they didn't know how to explain that. So they blame the camera because that's the first thing they saw that they could actually talk about and I have proof of this, because I was at Coachella with

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Robert Scoble: And two guys in front of me, said I need to get away from the Google Glass. Guys, I wasn't actually wearing it. There was two guys behind me glad it on

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Robert Scoble: And I grabbed the two guys in front of me and I said, what, why is that because he laughed because I don't know. It might be the camera. I go, come on.

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Robert Scoble: There's everybody around you is holding an iPhone with a camera on it recording right and it's being professionally recorded on TV, it's not it's not the camera. What else is there. Why does that

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Robert Scoble: Why did that make you nervous. Why did you want to get away from that and it was a social contract problem where one guy said said it just makes me feel uneasy because he

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Robert Scoble: He might be a cop with information and as I and I don't have the same for, I don't know what he's seeing. I don't know what he was looking at. I don't know if you've done face recognition. I'm yeah

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Robert Scoble: You go into all these dystopian fears. Right. And part of its media control, but part of it is just how we evolved over millions of years to look into each other's eyes so

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Robert Scoble: That leads into a whole narrative problem right and i think i think when Apple comes out with its glasses, they're going to come out with a much different narrative, they're not going to jump people out of a

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Robert Scoble: When I was in the front row when when Google announced Google class and they jumped.

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Robert Scoble: Performers out of a blimp and had them skydive down and then, you know, do some tricks on bicycles and, you know, all while wearing the glasses and live streaming it

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Robert Scoble: Which set this whole expectation around the camera that just wasn't true, my, you know, my mind Google Glass. If I tried to run the camera would only last half an hour.

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Robert Scoble: Right, the battery wasn't that good and and the quality wasn't very good, you know, putting a GoPro on on the side of my head was way better in terms of video quality than the little camera and this little glass was so

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Robert Scoble: The narrative was bad. From the start, and they shouldn't have come out that way they should have come out with

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Robert Scoble: Hey this is this is a new kind of product for very specific thing. It's very expensive. It's doesn't do a whole lot, but the things that did work we're pretty damn amazing, I mean,

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Robert Scoble: Like, like you said, If you, if you're somebody who can't see very well and you have a little camera that's helping you live your life or listening to you are telling you directions. That's a huge improvement in your life right and we're about to see that kind of stuff really big because

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Robert Scoble: Like like Apple is coming out in a couple months with in our next month in the new iPhone with a new LiDAR on the back right so now you start

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Robert Scoble: Thinking about all the developers who are going to build things to to build a complete 3D model of your house right in your phone.

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Robert Scoble: And the AI now is getting so good and you know this from computer vision work that's being done in cars like I'm sitting in my Tesla right

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Robert Scoble: And my Tesla can see an orange cone on the freeway 200 meters away right well that that technology is coming to the phone. So now it can tell you where your Cheerios are or where your keys are in your house or

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Robert Scoble: All sorts of different things, right. Where's your pills. What, where's your where's your glasses. So now you can start building something for somebody who's blind. Right.

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Robert Scoble: To really understand their house in 3D and where things are right and so when Apple comes out with its glasses in a year or two or three

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Robert Scoble: The lighters going to be the same that's coming out on the phone and the AI is going to be next level right and it's going to tell you all sorts of stuff about the world.

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Robert Scoble: And it's going to have a really good voice recognition system because serious barely capable

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Robert Scoble: It's not perfect yet, for sure, but it's getting a lot better and it will be a lot better in the classes because there's going to be a microphone right next to your mouth.

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Robert Scoble: And it's going to know what you're looking at, which is real key because there's going to be a laser looking at your eye, knowing where you're looking in the world.

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Robert Scoble: And it's going to know it's going to have that that LiDAR, which is 300,000 points of data that can be directed around to know what you're looking at. So if you look at a product and ask it.

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Robert Scoble: How many calories or can I buy 10 of these on Amazon, it'll go oh yeah that's a hint bottle. Yeah, it'll look up on Amazon and find you an answer and give you an answer right in front of you right

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Debra Ruh: Wow, that's amazing. I have a question that

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Debra Ruh: I was talking to someone at Google and I brought up smart, the Google smart glasses because it really was helpful for the community of people with disabilities and people like me that are over certain age, we want to

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Debra Ruh: Age in place and be independent and and as older, even though I actually have 2020 vision I no longer can see very well at all because of my age, partially my age.

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Debra Ruh: In dry syndrome, blah, blah, blah. But I'm curious, from your perspective,

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Debra Ruh: So I was talking about Google glasses and then article that I was doing. And one of my friends at Google back and said, Deborah don't

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Debra Ruh: downplay Google what it's our it's our biggest failure. We're very embarrassed by it and it's just something we don't want to talk about. And I thought,

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Debra Ruh: I think that's the wrong way of looking at it. Now this was just on Google employee perspective. But I think that, as you said, That's such an interesting point that you made of sort of the social contract. We have because I

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Debra Ruh: I know my husband always struggled and my daughter did to

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Debra Ruh: Interestingly enough, with down syndrome, but they were both bad. My husband had a real bad traumatic brain injury as a child, but

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Debra Ruh: They both were really bad about looking people in the eyes, and I would always say, you gotta look people realize that they know they're looking at you not taking into account vision impairment and all that.

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Debra Ruh: But so it's like society.

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Robert Scoble: Yeah, I have an autistic son and he can't look in your life look in people's eyes.

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Robert Scoble: Right, that's

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Robert Scoble: That's right, Mark, your body's not listening.

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Debra Ruh: Right. He doesn't doesn't mean he's not listening. And so of course we were about to we are doing redoing social contracts right now. I meet people. I had some plumbing work done and seven men came into my house and

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Debra Ruh: Okay, I know I'm not supposed to shake their hands. I know I'm specific but the normal social contracts, aren't there. So I just wonder though if we should all instead of, you know,

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Debra Ruh: People thinking the Google glasses of failure. Wasn't that something that we needed to walk so we could learn this stuff. It seems like it's just part of what we have to do is we're learning to use these technologies.

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Robert Scoble: I totally agree with you.

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Robert Scoble: And and I'm sad that they still do it that as a failure because it really did try to introduce us to this new paradigm of

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Robert Scoble: Wearing a computer on your face right and not it's a rough, it's a rough thing to convince people to where it's something new on their face, they

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Robert Scoble: People are very particular about what they put on their face, right, they have to look at it a long time. And this is, this is sort of why I think Apple has to do it right. Google doesn't have that kind of social empathy with people. It just doesn't you know

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Robert Scoble: They don't launch good products I'm I you know you you look at Google's his history over the last 15 years. How many products that they launched that are

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Robert Scoble: That have caught you know they've failed over and over on Google Buzz and Google Reader and Google

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Robert Scoble: You know, and Google Plus social stuff right and social stuff is hard to do for Google that they're not a very empathetic company. They're an advertising company right and the search and the utilitarian company and that that they will have their day and glasses because

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Robert Scoble: The, the AI that Google. Google has the best day i in the business right when I talked to Alexa. It's stupid. It doesn't understand me very well right when I talked to Google Assistant and understands me almost all

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Robert Scoble: And it almost always gives me a better answer than Siri or Alexa or or my Tesla has, it has one of these voice recognition systems or Facebook has has one in the portal.

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Robert Scoble: And so Google will have its day, again, and they shouldn't have looked at it as a failure, you know, Silicon Valley tries things over and over again until the until we figure it out and fix all the problems with it, you know, in

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Robert Scoble: General magic came before the cell phone right and you know we have many, many examples of that, where we tried things over and over again until Moore's Law flipped enough times to make a technology possible and interesting to people. Right.

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Debra Ruh: And we should celebrate that. That's part of us moving forward.

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Robert Scoble: It shouldn't be seen as failure.

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Debra Ruh: I

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Robert Scoble: Time is

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Robert Scoble: The time is coming. And then because this the computers have now shrunk in five years they have shrunk quite a bit there.

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Robert Scoble: We went from 13 millimeter silica silica silicon chips to five now right

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Robert Scoble: And that means that the number of transistors on a chip has more than doubled in five years, and that means things have gotten smaller and cheaper to make and that and more capable and

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Robert Scoble: While that's happened all the infrastructures gotten better. I mean, my house has fiber line in it now. Right. I didn't have fiber line five years ago.

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Robert Scoble: And I didn't have Wi Fi six in my house LTE didn't work very reliably. Now, it's very reliable and so

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Robert Scoble: In California, I mean I drove all the way from LA to San Francisco watching a live concert on my

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Robert Scoble: While my Tesla was self driving. I didn't have a self driving car. Five years ago, right, you know, and this thing is starting to really self drive and it didn't drop the whole way didn't used to do that. Five years ago, right. So we now have a different world coming at us and

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Robert Scoble: Kobe has also completely changed. Everybody's

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Robert Scoble: belief about technology, all my school teachers are using zoom. Now that was if you told me, January 1 that's my school would be honest.

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Robert Scoble: I would have been like, What are you talking about, how is that going to happen. Well, now my kids in a half an hour going to be on zoom calls are having school right

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Robert Scoble: So everything has changed this year and that is led to to a plowed field. I mean, it's Silicon Valley is a former farm. Right. And so we plowed the field and gotten it ready

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Robert Scoble: For this next paradigm of moving toward computers on on not just our face because we're wearing them on arrest apple next year, next week is going to announce a new watch right with more sensors.

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Robert Scoble: And these new air pods have really gotten much better and soon they're going to be spatial as well. So you're going to be able to hear sound from different places with these airports and

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Robert Scoble: You know, there's a breeds and they put such such high computer and these little headphones to do new kinds of things with them right so lot is going to change in the next two two years. Yeah, so

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Antonio Santos: Well, as we speak, probably does know a good number of companies that are organizing events, conferences, webinars, know this was a boom know

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Antonio Santos: After will end up all being confined at home, but all everyone is struggling to get the attention of platforms to have engagement between the speakers and the audience and sometimes even engagement within the

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Antonio Santos: Within the audience itself. I'll do see VR and they are addressing this problem, because this is something that everyone is struggling with

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Robert Scoble: Yeah, but let's stop. Let's stop and not talking about VR and AR per second. My, my wife works at VMware on the conference team. So last year, they had 22,000 people at their conference in Las Vegas or San Francisco, San Francisco was last year.

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Robert Scoble: And this year, they already have 75,000 people signed up and the conference hasn't even happened yet. It's coming in in September. Then later this month, a couple weeks.

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Robert Scoble: And so they're doing it mostly on zoom and video and and having some chats doing stuff like what we're doing right here, right, because most people don't have the are yet, right, and they just couldn't

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Robert Scoble: Figure out how to buy enough headsets for everybody, or or whatever. It just wasn't ready yet to go to be are

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Robert Scoble: Now,

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Robert Scoble: Soon, we're going to see more improvements in VR Facebook next week is going to announce a new vr headset, which is going to be lighter and it's $100 less than it was.

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Robert Scoble: And it has better cameras better hand tracking better microphones better audio more GPU in it so it can do better visual quality right much better product for less money right 300 bucks, instead of 400 bucks and it does more and it's more comfortable.

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Robert Scoble: So that starts giving you a sense of okay in two years, there's going to be another one which is going to be like closer to a pair of glasses right

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Robert Scoble: And and when the glasses. Come, that's when this world really changes, but there we had spent some some conferences that have used to be are already Burning Man is one that just happened this weekend. I think Burning Man's effort is in the history is going to be a real key.

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Robert Scoble: We can to look back on and say, Man, that was real important that that changed how everybody everybody looked at advance and how to do virtualized things

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Robert Scoble: So VR gives you some some real benefits over zoom calls right one, you're immersed in the media, I'm looking at you on a little phone right and you're three inches by two inches.

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Robert Scoble: And I barely have an idea of you know what it feels like to be in the room with you. That's not very immersive if if I had you in VR, and you're an avatar.

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Robert Scoble: I can actually touch you. Like I would, in real life, I can shake your hand or high five you or I can even pass you virtual things I can throw a ball at you I can shoot you. Right. And that, that gives you

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Robert Scoble: Two things. One, it gives you presence, which means I feel like I'm with you in real world and it gives you emerging, which means you feel like you're in the world you're in in

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Robert Scoble: A game or you're in a movie set right at Burning Man. There was some camps that they had built where the media.

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Robert Scoble: Was on a dome and it was like being in SAM.

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Robert Scoble: Exploratorium in San Francisco where everything wraps all the way around human. It was really beautiful and really immersive and it was something that you

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Robert Scoble: You would have to go to a movie theater like an IMAX theater to experience that kind of immersion right where you feel like you're in a movie set. And that's just the start. Right. The burning that so Burning Man. One of the guys who went to Burning Man in 2014 Greg Edwards.

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Robert Scoble: When he went he he took scans 3D scans of a lot of the pieces of art that was on on the desert floor. They caught the playa right when you go to real Burning Man, it's in a desert in Nevada. There's 60,000 people out there and it's laid out like a, like, you know, a fan and you have

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Robert Scoble: art pieces all through it, you know, temples and different kinds of things that people have created and

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Robert Scoble: It's big. It would take you maybe an hour to walk all the way from one end to another. Right. Well, he took the scans and and he even hired a helicopter to take pictures.

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Robert Scoble: Overhead. Now, you can do it with a drone, but he took all of those into virtual reality. So he read recreated

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Robert Scoble: A 3D representation of Burning Man in VR. So when you're in your vr headset, you can actually walk around is 3D scans of everything and they're laid out like in real burning that takes you an hour to walk across it right move across to your little controllers and

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Robert Scoble: Then they invited all of the artists that went to real Burning Man because they couldn't hold Burning Man. This year right they canceled it and they said, we're doing it virtually we're doing a Metaverse

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Robert Scoble: And they invited them into Microsoft's program called alt space we are, which is where Greg put all this art into and

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Robert Scoble: Each one of them built little camps like one guy built one that looked like you were inside

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Robert Scoble: snow cave. Right. Another guy built a whole man's in rock formation and it was a lot of fun to go through that with other people. You, you go through it with 20 or 30 other people and you try to figure out which which way to go to

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Robert Scoble: To get to the end. If you went the wrong way you would fall through some quicksand right virtual quicksand. And you respond to the beginning with a lot of fun.

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Robert Scoble: And there was other camps that had beautiful temples built and you went in the temple and you heard a concert or a speech like I heard Barrington day give a speech at one of these temples.

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Robert Scoble: And it was really amazing. And you could be there with other people. It felt like you were walking next to somebody else. Right. So you got that kind of presence, which we're also hungry for right now, right. Wait, we can't go to the conferences and we can't go to, you know,

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Robert Scoble: Even restaurants and meet with our friends anymore. So we're really hungry for that kind of

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Robert Scoble: Presence and be sure you get it.

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Robert Scoble: But to me it's just the start of

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Robert Scoble: Something else right every conference in five years, it's going to do a virtual thing like this and you're going to use your glasses to

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Robert Scoble: Go to virtual conferences and virtual conferences are far more inclusive than physical ones right i mean you know I've talked about this for many years even VMware right

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Robert Scoble: Corporate conference, it costs. I don't know if you're coming from Africa, it costs 2000 for the flight. And then you have to stay for a week and in San Francisco. That's $450 a night or it was

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Robert Scoble: And then you have dinners to go to. And, you know, and other things and and you want to

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Robert Scoble: Put a couple of days of vacation on there, right, it turns into four $5,000 to go to a conference like that. Right. Well, now

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Robert Scoble: And I think this is why the numbers and it's not VMware is not the only one. And notice this Microsoft with its build conference and Amazon, with its kind of conferences all had bigger numbers and had more gender diversity and more racial diversity and more and

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Robert Scoble: More people from more places more diversity in terms of places because now all of a sudden a poor kid in Mumbai could go to a conference because there wasn't much cost involved in it right and

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Robert Scoble: Open it up to

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Robert Scoble: A lot of people. Yeah.

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Neil Milliken: So, so, so there's a few things I'd like to serve unpack so so we think back to the the benefits of inclusive it

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Neil Milliken: Through these sort of virtual environments, the disability community really

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Neil Milliken: Adopted and invested in

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Neil Milliken: You know, early versions of history. Second Life. You know, there was a bit disability community in Second Life.

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Neil Milliken: I think, you know, again, we're going to have a big disability community and in virtual worlds, because you can

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Neil Milliken: Do more stuff on on the

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Neil Milliken: On the other side of things, you know, with avatars at the moment I have problems with them. So, Antonio turned up to a

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Neil Milliken: Team's call recently and put his avatar on and after about 10 minutes the my brain just melted down because what happened was I wasn't able to read the social signals or I was misinterpreting the social signals.

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Neil Milliken: That the avatar was trying to convey because it wasn't quite accurate. So I wasn't sure whether he was bored with me pissed off, or just mocking me it's like please just turn it off. You know, I can't

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Neil Milliken: Yes, I can't actually cope. So, so this still, I think, you know, some way for us to go before we can be comfortable

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Robert Scoble: Yet

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Neil Milliken: In this world, but I absolutely see the potential

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Robert Scoble: And avatars. We call this crap crossing

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Robert Scoble: Crossing the Chasm but there's there's a term I'm forgetting now.

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Robert Scoble: Where are your, your human mind as things get closer to as digital things get closer to being real.

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Robert Scoble: Or real representations of them your mind starts noticing the flaws in that right and and this is certainly true with App avatars and this is one reason why most avatars are very cartoony so far, cuz

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Robert Scoble: I'm on a second here.

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Robert Scoble: I'll just go. Can you hear me off that

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Neil Milliken: We can

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Robert Scoble: Okay.

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Robert Scoble: I got my phone running and my Tesla just decided to go to sleep mode and go back to

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Robert Scoble: Rebuilding mode.

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Robert Scoble: Where we were talking about avatars. So the avatars today are cartoony

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Robert Scoble: And there's not a 3D sensor on your face to know where you're actually looking so that they have a little AI that actually predicts where you're looking

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Robert Scoble: And makes your eyes look like you're looking at somebody or not looking at somebody right and it's listening to the microphone and making the mouth move and it's not real right and and you're noticing all the problems with that.

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Robert Scoble: When, when we get glasses and the next versions of VR. There's going to be better I sensors that are going to watch where you're looking and going to be able to feed that back to the avatar. So the avatars, you're going to get better about

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Robert Scoble: Actually looking at where the human is looking at, and we're getting face recognition face sensors that are now looking at our faces. If you get that you get a whole bunch of cool stuff and you're starting to see improvements and avatars. There's many companies working on that.

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Robert Scoble: It's just a matter of years before we get good good enough to actually feel like you're with another human and not notice all the flaws with them, but for a while, there's going to be this gap. Yeah.

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Neil Milliken: We're in the uncanny valley well

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Robert Scoble: That's what I'm

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Robert Scoble: Thinking of yeah uncanny valley where where it just isn't good enough. And it's cartoony and as we try to get from cartoony land to land, you're going to notice more and more slots on on these things.

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Neil Milliken: I think there's also the issue of latency latency plays a big part in this as well.

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Robert Scoble: It's it's it's less light. The reason alt space VR. It's still

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Robert Scoble: Pretty cartoony have a login and I'm playing with the new Facebook horizon that's in beta test right now and everything's cartoony they do that because

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Robert Scoble: The VR headsets that they're aiming are the Oculus quest, which has a small little mobile GPU in the headset itself the GPU is what drives the polygons in the world right

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Robert Scoble: The game processing, you know, Graphics Processing Unit and if, if you have a big gaming PC with an NVIDIA card in it, you have a big GPU. Right. It can draw five times more polygons, then the little one in the in the quest us, but because

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Robert Scoble: We want to be Inclusive and exclusive and we don't build things just for the rich people have the NVIDIA card with a tethered to the NVIDIA card. We're building for the lighter way.

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Robert Scoble: All in one headsets. And so we're keeping the polygon count down in these virtual worlds. And if I started making your avatar really sharp with a lot of polygons and

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Robert Scoble: Latency comes into this because if I have to draw a lot of polygons.

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Robert Scoble: In the, in the GPU everything slows down. So now your world gets gets lagging right and you start noticing jittery, or you notice that things don't work. Right. That's a real problem. So it all fits together.

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Robert Scoble: It's a we're in a we're in the early days of this right now right and and we're just

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Robert Scoble: We really need more lot of flip three or four more times, you know, which is six years from now.

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Robert Scoble: Before we can do really great stuff. Right. But we're doing pretty good stuff with this little tiny GPA and it's pretty amazing, right.

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Neil Milliken: Oh no, I'm certainly really excited about the potential and you talked about the cost of, you know, going to conferences and stuff like this that

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Neil Milliken: There has been a paradigm shift in how we how we work with a lot of people with disabilities. Again, we, you know, we've been working from home for a long time and saying we need flexible working. Oh no, that's not possible. Clearly it is

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Neil Milliken: You know, the digital transformation has been driven more by in the CIOs and CEOs of the world.

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Neil Milliken: Combined yeah what what I think has been a struggle has been some of this stuff where we've rolled stuff out really quickly. And it's been inclusive for some

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Neil Milliken: But, you know, we're looking at education. You're saying your kids are on zoom right I can imagine the cognitive load for your son who is autistic is going to be really significant being on zoom calls all day, you know,

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Neil Milliken: Yeah, that so and so there's the spill more that we can we can learn about some of this stuff. But it doesn't mean that I'm not excited about it. I'm very excited about it. And I'm also excited about the idea that we might actually

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Neil Milliken: Use the sort of things like augmented reality to actually reduce cognitive overload.

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Neil Milliken: Because, you know, Debra and I both have ADHD.

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Neil Milliken: We are massively distractible and that that that takes a toll on you. Right. And we're in a world where there's lots of distractions ever more so.

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Neil Milliken: Yeah, I'm finding ways to sort of net out to, to enable us to do stuff might actually be really enabling and at the same time feeding as pertinent information and and that's where you're you're talking about Google Assistant being really good

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Neil Milliken: Yes, actually it. It's very good at Context based reminders. So you know what

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Neil Milliken: You know your way or up to it knows what you're doing.

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Neil Milliken: So long as you don't mind giving away your inside leg measurements. You know, it can be really useful.

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Neil Milliken: To speed you those kind of person and

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Neil Milliken: Things that you need to do is like, Oh, you're here. Now you need to go and take your pills or you need to do all this stuff. So I think it's

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Neil Milliken: It's, it's an exciting period. I mean, before we get to glasses. What do you think are going to be the sort of the new and enabling features in to the mobile and wearables in the next

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Neil Milliken: Year or so.

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Neil Milliken: We're about going through release cycle right

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Robert Scoble: Yeah, we're just just about to get the LiDAR in the new phone. So, so the new phone on the back, we'll have a 3D sensor that has 300,000 points of data.

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Robert Scoble: And can see the world in 3D. Right. And you can now start you'll start, start seeing develop developers.

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Robert Scoble: Work that into their applications to do navigation and shopping malls and I was talking to one company in Iran, who's actually building amazing things for stores and navigation around because they're getting much better 3D data off of these phones.

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Robert Scoble: And and you're going to see the beginnings of real augmented reality where you can have a virtual thing in your house on your on your coffee table right

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Robert Scoble: And now you can start seeing different kinds of education. Um, I, I walked around a virus with a bunch of scientists in Dr.

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Robert Scoble: And it because you're in 3D and the viruses blown up as big as a house, you can walk, walk around the chemical structure. So the virus and really understand how the thing

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Robert Scoble: evolved and how how a drug might attached to it or how a vaccine might break it apart or something like that and you can learn a lot faster that way. Right, so

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Robert Scoble: It's endless in my book we we cover seven industries that are going to see radical change over the next decade, right from from

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Robert Scoble: Healthcare we're seeing surgeon of US HoloLens is during surgery to get guided to understand where the tumors are and where they're cutting tool is and do that without being able

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Robert Scoble: To see inside somebody's body because you're using very, very small holes to put tools in to cut tumors out of people. Right. And so having a 3D representation in a hollow lens of where the cutting tool needs to be is really helpful to the surgeons.

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Robert Scoble: To take construction workers who are going to use this technology. I talked to one guy at Trimble who is using the Boston Dynamics dog.

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Robert Scoble: To walk around a construction site. Do you use a lighter to make a 3D image of that and then look for all sorts of things like

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Robert Scoble: Planning out next days construction or looking for problems like is, is there a bolt missing on a on a beam that was supposed to be there right and

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Robert Scoble: They can do all sorts of things with their whole lenses that are different than a surgeon tests. Right. You can we could talk for hours about

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Robert Scoble: This what you know about

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Different things that are have

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Robert Scoble: Yeah, I

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Debra Ruh: Read the book, I just went to your site and saw the link. I'm going out there and I will be leaving a review always leave reviews on the books that help

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Robert Scoble: It does. We have 4.7 stars on Amazon and really does help.

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Debra Ruh: Yes. In 45 years

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Debra Ruh: Already already for you. So he needs more

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Debra Ruh: So,

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Debra Ruh: I'll make sure that I do it too.

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Robert Scoble: I appreciate it.

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Easy.

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Robert Scoble: For people like my son. This stuff is really going to be transformative for blind people, it's going to be transformative for people who are stuck in a wheelchair.

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Robert Scoble: Like I have friends who who can't move right there, they're paralyzed. This is huge because they can now participate

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Robert Scoble: And nobody knows that they're stuck in a in a wheelchair, because they're just yet another avatar standing next to them right so now they don't get the social judgments that they might have gotten if they had to go to a real conference, right.

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Neil Milliken: Yeah, I think that's an interesting one because quite quite so there's a really mixed to view of avatars and I know you've got to jump in a second. Deborah because you've got product.

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Debra Ruh: I'm sorry I did. I did.

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Debra Ruh: I could

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Debra Ruh: burn forever. And I want you to be on my other show, so listen to your

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Debra Ruh: Email so

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Debra Ruh: Okay, I'm good. I'm real quick.