Here are the slides from my AWE 2015 talk and a link to the video on youtube. See below for the original speech in prose form. Thanks again to Ori and Dave for inviting me. And I was totally humbled to be sharing the stage with some of my heroes that day.

Funny story. I’d practiced the whole speech for a week or more. I was totally relaxed back stage. But I somehow got nervous in the moment and the speech escaped my brain about 20 seconds in. Embarassing!

Without a teleprompter or any notes, I had to wing the whole thing. So a big thank you to Travis and the A/V team for giving me a new clicker to buy time and cover for my fumble. Totally cool move.

Let me know which version you like better, “as written” or “as delivered”

Lesson: next time I’m going to just do it more spontaneously, since that’s how it may wind up anyway.

The Original Speech:

[1] In the last 23 years, I’ve worked for some really big companies and some really small ones. I’m not here to represent any of them. I’m here with the simple job title of Person. And I’m here to hopefully inspire some of you to take action, and others to at least understand what needs to be done.

We’re all here today because we recognize the game-changing potential of AR/VR. This technology brings magic into the world. It gives us superpowers. How can that not be game changing? But this new magic is so powerful, and the potential is so big, that some of the biggest companies are already vying for control.

[2] So what happens when big companies – with a variety of business models – bring what we might call “big magic” into the world?

I was a little worried about using such bold words until I heard David Brin talk so eloquently this morning. I’ll sum up. The danger zone of any big new technology is when it’s still unevenly distributed. We saw this fire to radio to books to TNT. There is no such thing as a purely good technology. It’s all in how you use it.

The good news is we get to decide how this goes down. We’re the creators, but also the customers. We can shape the world we want.

[3] I gave a talk here two years ago equating AR/VR to a host of new human superpowers. I’m pleased to see the theme of the conference this year.

That talk is on-line if you’re interested. But even then, these ideas had been percolating for a long time and I was just dying to talk about it.

[4] In 2010, I’d joined a secret project inside Microsoft to reboot the next-gen Xbox…

Leadership had concluded that cramming 10x more of everything wasn’t enough. They wanted something fundamentally more game changing, something where they could spend, say, a billion dollars to buy a strong lead. They wanted something that would normally scare them (and everyone else) from even trying.

[5] I had a few ideas…

I’ve been very lucky in my career to work with amazing people on amazing opportunities.

I got to work on Disney’s $20M Aladdin VR ride, helped craft Google Earth and Second Life. I was recruited to Microsoft in 2008 to help build social AR-like experiences into Bing. We called the project “First Life.” Alas, some folks didn’t think mobile was going to be a big deal and it stalled. So I switched tracks to work on communications, social avatars, and then interactive video holography.

That lead me to join XBox Incubations, with perfect timing, to propose and build the very first HoloLens prototypes and concept definitions, and invent about 20 new ideas in the first six months.

[6] Just to clarify:

TP is Telepresence. Holographic toilet paper == worst idea ever. The use (some might say abuse) of the word Hologram came from popular fiction, like Star Wars.

Hundreds, if not thousands of people worked on HoloLens after me, solving some very hard problems. Many of the original team have moved on. They ALL deserve credit.

[7] So AR is really coming. It’s only taken 47 years since Ivan Sutherland built the first prototype.

[8] But all of a sudden VR is exploding again. Yes. I want my holodeck too. But since my Disney VR days, I’ve come to realize that early VR is going to be mostly “Dark Rides.” Think Pirates of the Caribbean. You’ll sit in a chair and experience an exhilarating, magical, evocative but not-very-relevant journey.

On the whole, VR is:

üHigh Presence and Immersion

üLow Relevance to Your Daily Life

Not that there’s anything wrong with a little escapism, from time to time.

[9] The fundamental difference between AR and VR is not hardware. Same tech will eventually do both easily. The fundamental difference is that AR builds on Context. In other words, it’s about You and Your World. And context goes to one kind of monetization.

Mixed Reality, as a reminder, is that whole spectrum from AR to VR. You could look at it as a spectrum of reality vs. fantasy, but it’s more instructive to see it as a “Spectrum of Relevance.”

[10] Why are highly relevant experiences worth an order of magnitude more?

1)Because we spend so much more time and money in the real world

2)Because we care so much more about the real world

All good so far. AR is a goldmine of reality. VR is a goldmine of creativity.

[11] But, Beware the Dark Side

[12] You knew there had to be a dark side somewhere, right?

Fact: the more you can be swayed by a given ad, the more that ad is worth. Companies want track your desires, your purchasing intent, and your ultimate transactions to (as they say) “close the loop.” The world is moving from analyzing your clickstreams (on the web), to analyzing your communication-streams (as in chat, voice, email) and eventually to studying your thought-streams.

How do they obtain your thought streams and mine your personality without literally reading your mind?

It’s not like people would ever treat other people like lab rats…

[13] Oops. And Facebook is not alone, not by a long shot.

Note: scientific experiments are often very positive. There rely on this thing called “informed consent”

And no, EULAs and privacy notices don’t count. Let’s stop pretending people read those. Informed consent means informed consent.

[14] In 1995, I had the honor of working with Dr. Randy Pausch at Disney Imagineering to help study, with informed consent, how people experienced VR… We continuously recorded people’s gaze vectors – hundreds of thousands of people — as they flew their magic carpets through the world of Aladdin, to study which parts of our storytelling worked best.

BTW, we found that while men averaged a head angle of “straight ahead,” women, on the whole, looked 15 degrees to the left. What?

We figured out that the motorcycle-like seat of our physical VR rig forced people wearing skirts to sit side-saddle. So, statistically speaking and unintentionally, the data told us if you were wearing a skirt.

[15] More recently, VR helped reveal dangerous sex offenders before their release, even where the offender believes he’s been cured. They were shown risky scenes. I won’t elaborate on how their responses were measured…

But with coming face capture, eye tracking, EEGs, muscle sensors, skin conduction, pulse and more built into new HMDs, imagine what kind of latent inclinations can be teased out of you. Companies like Facebook and Google, betting on VR, will be able to show you something and tell instantly how you feel about it, no Like Button necessary.

[16] Did you look at the woman in the red dress? We know you did.

The thing about the Matrix is: the whole humans as batteries trope is kind of silly. But if you imagine people as wallets and credit cards connected to the internet, that seems to be exactly how some companies look at their customers.

But for the record, I don’t think we’re in danger of being grown in vats anytime soon.

[17] Tobii is a leader in using eye tracking to help understand user behavior.

The picture on the left is of a woman wearing glasses that track her gaze as she shops. The person with the tablet is studying her behavior.

Another study on the upper right tracked men and women’s gaze over various photos. Conclusion: men have no idea what they’re staring at most of the time. These are involuntary reactions. Stimulus and response.

To the extent AR or other devices track what we see and do, companies will be able to monitor our sensory inputs and emotions as we pursue our day. The thing about AR is it now gives us a compelling reason to wear it all day long.

[18] The point of all this is not to get scared, feel powerless and withdraw.

The point is that we have control. We always did.

Nothing in the world is free. You’re going to pay for stuff one way or another.

Companies that sell things can and should be the most customer-focused, protecting privacy and curbing abuses. That’s in their core business interest

Companies that sell user data, sell ads, sell you, well, they have every incentive to keep pushing the envelope on this front and keep you ignorant of it.

It’s all about their business models, not you personally. You can steer this by simply choosing who you do business with.

[19] Case in point, Apple lately has one of the better takes on user privacy, responding to latent fears over just how much data they’re collecting. They’re a product company, and even their iAd product is more privacy-friendly than most.

But can Apple bring it home? The next thing I want to hear from Apple is: “You OWN your data. You made it. It’s about you. Can we help put it to work for you, please?”

HealthKit is the closest thing to that so far, with opt-in studies. And it’s great to see them trying to figure this out.

I’d also give Cortana kudos for the notebook feature, letting you easily see and edit what Microsoft knows about you. That comes from consumer demand.

[20] Recapping so far:

Big Companies are bringing “Big Magic” to the world

Big Magic can either Liberate or Enslave us

We get to pick. Here’s how…

[21] Basically, we need to build the AR equivalent of the World Wide Web. And I don’t mean just boxes in space.

You own your content, your little part of the graph.

You create the world you want to live in.

[22] All of these statements may be true, to some extent. But they don’t have to be true. We’ve also let developers of web technologies largely off the hook. We can demand parity of browsers and native experiences. Apple, Microsoft have for years let their browsers, especially on mobile, lag the native side.

Now, it’s true that having a free and open web today doesn’t guarantee privacy or lack of exploitation. Just look at web bugs and cookies and Facebook. And security is the primary reason cited for the lack of features in web tech.

But having a free and open web does at least make it very hard for any one big company (or government) to eliminate your choice unilaterally. You get more options the more open the field is. And you get more voice. That’s the point. Just look at the fight over net neutrality. Could that have happened if AT&T provided everyone’s internet service? No way.

[23] So consider what made the WWW a winner. Why didn’t the web take off as a series of native “apps” and walled gardens when they’re clearly much more safe and capable?

üContent is device independent

üContent is dynamically and neutrally served

üContent is viewable, copyable, mashable

[24] Same for the next phase of evolution.

[25] Content is going to need to adapt based on the chosen device, its resolution, perf, field of view, depth of field. And for AR it’s going to also need to adapt to real-world location, people and activity.

Baking this all into native code and statically packaged data is problematic. It has to be adaptable, reactive at its core.

There are millions of self-taught web developers out there who live and die by View Source and Stack Exchange. It will take an army of AR/VR enthusiasts to likewise capture the real world and build new worlds that we want to see.

Or it could follow TV, Movies, Games and big Media down a content-controlled narrow mind-numbing path. I hope not.

[26] In AR, content has to adapt to the user’s environment, including other people in view.

Here we see just the furniture playing a role. That’s pretty cool to see in action.

Mapping the world is far less invasive than mapping our brains.

[27] Business instincts will naturally drive companies to have app stores, to protect all IP and mediate access from the irrational mob, i.e., you.

Resist the urge. It’s not good for them and it’s not good for you.

The value of copying and remixing content far outweighs the loss of control. Look at YouTube vs. the App Store.

I look at App Stores and see more clones and less inspiration. DRM doesn’t prevent copying. It just makes everything suck.

[28] Most Importantly: We need a way to link people, places & things into a truly open meta graph.

Here, I’ll praise Facebook for Open Graph and Microsoft for following with their own kind of graph. What we need next is the meta-version of these that spans companies to build a secure graph of all things or GOAT.

Open experiences need to understand the dynamic relationships among people, places, and things. But information about people should be considered private, privileged, and protected. Those links can’t even be seen without authentication, authorization and auditing, aka user’s informed consent.

Users will live in a world where they subscribe to layers of AR based on levels of trust. Do I like Facebook’s view of the world? If yes, then I can see it. Do I like Microsoft’s. Ok, then that’s visible too. Do I trust Facebook with my data? If yes, then they can see me too.

We can build this. We built the web. It need not be owned by any one company. And we have just enough time to get it right.

[29] This is the key. You already own the content. Copyright is implicit in the US and beyond. If you published it, you own it.

If you express yourself on Facebook, right now, they own it, or at least can use it anyway they want. That’s because you clicked a EULA. But that’s not the natural state of affairs

We need a markup language for reality, letting us describe what IS in a semantically rich way.

We also need an expression language for content, that lets this content adapt to the environment.

There are some great starts in open standards. We can build the next steps on top of those.

[30] Ask yourselves: why are we doing this AR/VR stuff? For the technology itself? For the money?

It’s not an internet of things or a web of sites or a graph of places. it’s about people.

We do this because we ARE those people, building amazing things for ourselves and others to enjoy. And the things we build next are going to knock their socks off.

So our focus must always be on the people, our customers, and how to help and not hurt them. Because, even if we’re selfish, they and we are one and the same and our choices matter.

[31] We live in and make up an internet of people.

Thank you for inviting me here today.