Blockchain, AI and Spatial Computing Converge – Web3 Defined with Amy Peck | S4 E01

Amy: 1:09

To me is the very first seed of this creator economy and an economy based on abundance and not scarcity. And we're so busy trying to lock things down. Even with blockchain, for example, People are saying this is gonna prove ownership and it's gonna prove provenance. But what if we turn it the other way around and we have all this technology facing outward?

Joeri: 1:36

Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. My name is Joeri Billast and I'm your podcast host, and today I'm really excited to see Amy back again on my show. Hello Amy, how are you?

Amy: 1:50

Hi, Joeri, it's so nice to see you again and to chat again.

Joeri: 1:54

Yeah, I'm really looking forward. So, guys, if you don't know Amy Peck, she's an XR Special Computing and Emerging Tech Strategist Non-hype, I read on your LinkedIn profile yeah, we can come back to that. She's the CEO of Endeavor XR, also podcast host, like me, a keynote speaker, a futurist and also board member and advisor. And also like me, Amy has written a book and her book is called Blockchain is the New Black. So welcome Amy. Yeah, just to start, with all your experience in XR, in spatial computing, could you share how these technologies are transforming the way that businesses engage with their customers today?

Amy: 2:43

Yeah, I think what it's really going to do, especially as these devices start to hit the market you know we have the Apple Vision Pro. Now we have the Apple Vision Pro it's going to help brands and companies really start to tell stories around their brands. Right now, we're very focused on you have to be where your customers are right. So, in-store, online and it's going to be a while because we need to get to this form factor is to be able to have stories evolve between store and home, as everywhere in between, and be able to tell a brand story that is not just about selling, right, Because it's not just about selling.

Amy: 3:29

It's about evoking a lifestyle, and I think, especially the companies and look, this can even be not necessarily a brand, right, this can be. All companies can use some manner of storytelling when they're engaging with their company, their customers, even if it's in a B2B construct. But these are great. This is a new medium. It's a great way to tell stories and it's a great way to engage customers in a new way and get them off of their screens and have context to the real world. And that's really what spatial computing does for us it gives us context and location awareness.

Joeri: 4:07

I love the way you explain it in simple words, Amy. Everything has to do with metaphors or spatial computing, now with Apple's device. I know people can talk about the hype like they talk now with AI, about the hype like they did also with NFTs and so on. I read on your profile that you are a voice for non-hype strategies in emerging tech, so can you explain a bit about that and maybe about the misconceptions that people have about XR and so on?

Amy: 4:57

I think non-hype is certainly around looking at really what do each of these technologies enable. And the other piece of it is not always looking at what the kind of financial or economic opportunity is. If so many people talking about Metaverse was going to be a $3 trillion industry and AI is going to be triple that. That's not the point. The point is how do we want to use technology to change our lives? And I believe if we lead with kind of lifestyle first, with humanity first, with aspiration first and problem solving right, we have a lot of problems in the world that we're facing and point the technology at those things, the money is going to come and we I think we have an opportunity to really architect the future.

Amy: 5:38

We talk so much about predictions at the beginning of the year these are my top 10 predictions but we don't ever talk about architecting and what do we want to build, because we don't really feel empowered as individuals. AI, in particular, gives us incredible superpowers. Right, and I'd love to even talk about you. Just before the show, we were talking about how AI has completely changed your workflow and simplified it. So that's going to free you up to do what you do best. Right, it's engage with the world in any way you find meaningful to work with clients, to build your business and to streamline what you do so that you have more time to spend on the things you care about, and that's the beauty of technology and I promise all of you the money will come, it will.

Joeri: 6:29

It's really sometimes also a matter of time and people don't have any patience. And you know these technologies when you see how fast they can evolve. And then still, if you see the internet or mobile phones or social media or everything that we have had, how it evolves, and then now also with NFTs, now people are still looking a bit what is this? But in 10 years it will be so normal that we will have NFTs everywhere. I want also to come back to the AI point, but first because it's interesting to me that also you're a writer and your book is called Blockchain is the New Black. So I'm curious about how you see blockchain technology enhancing the security and functionality of XR.

Amy: 7:14

You hit the nail on the head and it's interesting because blockchain as a technology enhancing the security and functionality of XR you hit the nail on the head and it's interesting because blockchain as a technology, I think has gotten a really bad rap because of the crypto winter and because the market fell out of the NFTs, and I think that blockchain technology is an incredibly elegant technology and I became fairly obsessed with it back in maybe 2015. And I had already been investing in cryptocurrency and I love this idea of not only just the distributed ledger but more around. And you touched on it not only security, and you touched on it not only security, but source of truth and provenance. And we're very concerned also around IP and ownership and security. And I think, again, we're focused on the wrong things, like we're focused on the economics. I use this example a lot and maybe people are getting tired of it, but Grimes actually put her voice out on the blockchain and it lived on a smart contract 50 royalty split and she basically was just like don't be a jerk.

Amy: 8:33

So this, to me, is the very first seed of this creator economy and an economy based on abundance and not scarcity, and we're so busy trying to lock things down.

Amy: 8:42

Even with blockchain, for example, people are saying this is going to prove ownership and it's going to prove provenance. But what if we turn it the other way around and we have all this technology facing outward and we look at an economic construct that invites everybody in, as opposed to locking people out? Instead of what's mine is mine's, mine is ours and inspire whether it's in the creator economy, inspire other artists to build on top of what you've built and in a weird way it's like multi-level marketing. Right, it's like you have the seed, you have that kernel, NFT which germinates and you inspire all these other artists and then they build on top of it and then everybody wins. You get to participate as the one who had that initial inspiration and but they were inspired and then that grew and then they inspired somebody else still, and so you start to see that becomes a much more expansive landscape and I think that's a mindset shift that we should all look at.

Joeri: 9:49

Yeah, I love your positivism and indeed there are so many possibilities for these new technologies. Like you mentioned AI. I use AI for my podcast. I had one of the former guests on my podcast was also using music NFTs music so that was also really interesting. Now XR also has so many possibilities. I've been organizing myself even some events then in my area. You are an advisor on different places I'm also curious to hear about. Are there any surprising sectors, Amy, where XR is having a significant impact today?

Amy: 10:25

I think it's I wouldn't say, surprising. I think it will impact every single sector. So maybe that's the surprising part of it, and I think all of this technology will and is great. Today, where I see some incredible value is understanding how your business is running, so adding a visual component to the data. We're so heavily reliant on data and we bring it into all the different data visualization tools, whether it's Power BI, and so you have an exact replica of your physical space or even your products or assets, or where you're actually looking at your supply chain end to end, and then bringing the data in, visualizing it in a way that gives you a whole new layer of understanding and ability to act on the way you can parse data today, and we're barely even scratching the surface of that.

Amy: 11:33

So I find that to be one area that I think is really interesting, because data is so important to every single company, and you look at factories like BMW, nvidia partnership, building on Omniverse, building the factories of the future, looking at that end-to-end factory in a virtual environment and simulating those outcomes before you even break ground on the building. That is going to build tremendous efficiencies, and then, beyond that, we can leverage some of these AI and simulation engines to be able to simulate not just the sort of products and services that we're doing now and how to optimize that, but what are the products and services of the future? And for brands, what if you co-create products and services with your customers and your loyal customers? And it's not just about oh, here's the collection, knock yourself out, but having these hybrid digital physical, being able to combine the two and going out and not only asking your loyal customers for nicely, for access to their data, but then rewarding them with some kind of collaborative way of working with them. And I think we're just scratching the surface of that.

Joeri: 12:54

Yeah, that's also the beauty with Web3 that you have this rewarding system and that people can. They can choose what they share and so on. Also interesting is when we talk about Metaverse or spatial computing, people see it as the future of work, Like I see it already since COVID. I am already so many people from around the world. I'm not working here in Belgium, but spatial computing offers even more possibilities. So how do you look at or how do you envision better XR spatial computing in the future of FERC?

Amy: 13:30

If you look at the way Apple Vision Pro has been promoted, part of it is very much around lifestyle and entertainment, day-to-day utility. I think there's one video where there's a guy in there and he's working on a recipe and it's just the whole, all of the ingredients and everything's right in front of him, which, by the way, they love their recipes because when they first came out with the iPad, that was one of the use cases, for the iPad is not having this big cookbook, but you just had a screen. But then the other part that they've been promoting is being able to have these multiple screens. And what's interesting is that I think we all agree that what you know Web3 gives us is also, ideally, this kind of interoperability, that you can move from these in one environment to another, and there's a lot of work being done on that. It's not a perfect system yet. However, I will say in favor of what Apple has created is that even though they are effectively a walled garden, the benefit of that to the consumer, if they choose to engage, is that we could literally be sitting here like this. I could put on my Apple vision Pro and look just above the screen, and then this whole screen will appear in front of me and that's pretty amazing, and the same thing will happen with my phone and then eventually, as those get lighter and lighter to the point where they're, we call them wearables, but they're not really wearables per se, but where we can wear it out, has this form factor and I can just have just a little notification pop up whatever I want to see whenever I want to form factor, and I can just have like just a little notification pop up whatever I want to see whenever I want to see it, and I can move it out of my field of view, move it over to the side. That's when you start to see how moving all of this data off of these 2D screens and into a 3D realm is going to offer us so much benefit and what I hope also is have us actually communicate more as humans.

Amy: 15:27

I think one of the things that people are concerned about, particularly with VR, you're in this headset. That's very isolating, even you talked about. You go into these worlds, there are other people there and you can invite your friends in and you can engage with and physically see them right. And our avatars are going to get more and more photorealistic, to the point where we actually have this construct of bring your own avatar right. So I'll look like me, you'll look like you, we'll pick an environment, we'll meet there and it'll be much better than this, as good as this is, and I at least get to see your face, but we'll physically feel like we're in the room together and that's coming as well. So that's another element of the spatial computing and that Apple's done and I promise I'm not working for Apple, but them coming into the industry at this time really tells us that XR and spatial computing is here to stay.

Joeri: 16:23

Yeah, but even not talking about Apple, but other VR headsets, like the Oculus, for instance, the heavy one that I have. I used it and I organized my events. It was really like being in the same room with people from all over the world, that you are really afraid of stepping onto someone's toes because it's too close. So, yeah, I really like that, but of course, there are some challenges. Of course, this one is heavy the Apple VR headset. Still, I read also about that that it's not comfortable to have it on your head all the time, long time yeah.

Joeri: 16:55

Yeah, so what are some of the other challenges maybe that you see that we need to solve to get poor adoption?

Amy: 17:03

I think for everyone. Just they're a little bit challenging to put on. To get up on the network Even the Apple device you have to go through a whole setup. It has to measure your IPD, which is interpupillary distance. It checks your vision. So it's a setup that takes a few minutes, ostensibly, once you're done, but it's not really a shareable device. I can't take it off my head and just hand it to you because they're the same setup and it's just not. That's not ideal. So eventually we'll get over that, because that, in effect, is also IP right.

Amy: 17:47

How different companies are manufacturing their goods has got to be highly secure and they are considered corporate secrets and those are in very secure environments. And sometimes these devices, because of the outward-facing cameras, there's just not a way to actually get them up on the network securely unless they have their own servers or data center or hyper secure cloud constructs. So there are just some more IT challenges on the back end. And then, when I mentioned interoperability, it's something that I think intellectually we all want to work towards. There's definitely some technical challenges and we need to build more standards around it. There are a lot of standards bodies working on this, but that technology has to evolve. We have a lot of the underlying technologies, but how to actually effectively network these worlds together and information and have it flow from one environment to another and back again, those are things that I think we need to start thinking about how to overcome.

Joeri: 18:49

Absolutely. What I already like is the concept of ready player me, that you have the same avatar in different worlds, that you look as you, if you want to, are the same, but of course, they are not really linked. It's not like you go from, like in the real world, you still need to take the plane or you still need to do some heavy lifting before you are in the other world. You already touched upon AI, so that's, of course, an interesting evolution in the world of XR, AI, XR, maybe something about AI, or maybe something else. What are you most excited about these evolutions that you see in XR?

Amy: 19:37

Oh I love it. And I almost think about more the outcomes than the underlying technology, like how XR gives us this spatial computing component and gives us context. Imagine this sort of invisible, these multiple layers of invisible data and information that are just everything that we are surfing on the web for, either on our phones or on our laptops will be projected in our field of view at the right place, at the right time with the right people. But AI is hopefully going to be this incredible agent to be able to give us a lot of our time back. So instead of which is what we did with COVID, unfortunately is that we got all the time back. We weren't commuting, we were working from home, but we just filled that time with work. But I think if we really leverage AI very well, we get that time back. But then AI can even help us unlock new creative avenues, new interests, new elements of our lives that we hadn't really considered before and that we can spend time on, or we can educate ourselves, or we can write music, or we can learn any kind of new skill you mentioned.

Amy: 20:38

You have had a guest on the show who's doing music NFTs one of my very good friends, tony Parisi, who was one of the authors of VRML, the original virtual reality language, and then he was at Unity as head of XR for a very long time Unity, the game engine and he's gone back to his roots. He was always a musician and he's done the same thing. He's written a rock opera. He has 10 songs and he's been selling each one. He's written a rock opera. He has 10 songs and he's been selling each one. You can probably still get them, so look them up. Tony Parisieth on Twitter now X.

Amy: 21:12

But this, I think, is a great model. You said that NFTs are going to come back. I believe so, and I think it's not going to be these just collectibles. I think, like, this model is really interesting because it's a per each song. There's a hundred of us who have purchased one of the NFTs for each of the songs, and so now we're owners of part of the rock opera, right, and so as that evolves and I didn't buy it, I bought it because I actually love the music no-transcript, right, they're real and we've seen that in games that's going to start to bleed out into everybody.

Amy: 22:25

We're all going to have a digital house. We're going to have digital clothing. I think I wear all black almost all the time just because I travel so much, and I know I always know I'm going to match, no matter what I've done. We could just have these monochromatic clothes and you would have this projection. You would have your AR wearable so that you could trigger if you wanted somebody else to see you in one of your digital fashions. You could enable somebody to see what you're actually wearing in the digital landscape. So it's food for thought and, again, not predicting the future, but really architecting the future.

Joeri: 23:04

Nice. Yeah, every time you mention something, I think of other podcast episodes I did. There were a few about digital fashion too on the show. So that's also what I love about podcasting I'm meeting these people, I'm hearing these stories from all these different angles. And, yeah, for me, the definition of Web3, everyone has maybe another definition, but it's not only about blockchain, but also about spatial computing and AI and because for me it all comes together, that's what I love about your story. You have NFTs, you have then metaverse and you have AI playing its role, and all of these technologies come together and then, for the benefit of everyone, of the customers and so on, any other developments that you are now thinking of. That, yeah, you don't want to predict the future, but maybe some exciting trends that you see in the landscape today.

Amy: 23:56

I think, relative to AI, I think it's moving really quickly. I was just at South by Southwest and it was really unfortunate that people were booing about some of the AI panels, because I think people are fearful. Again, it goes back to some of the ownership pieces and creators are concerned about their works. Again, I look at it differently and I try and look at it in a more positive light. We're building these AI algorithms to mimic the way that we're hoping that these AI agents will become human-like in their thinking and sentient in their thinking. And if you think about as a creator and I think we're all creators to some degree, whether we're artists for a living or not but we are influenced by a multitude of art and artists that came before us, right, and who's to say how that influenced us? And yes, there are companies that are making money out of all of the information that's on the Internet and then distilling it down through these LLMs and making it available to us, so willfully gave away all of our information and data, and that ship has sailed. So instead of being angry about it, let's collectively figure out what could we do from an economic standpoint that would enable more people to participate, that maybe we look at a different value construct with AI and blockchain and identity right, because those are all going to be linked together and if I'm managing my own data, you're managing your data. We want to have some kind of a business exchange.

Amy: 25:54

It doesn't necessarily mean that I'm going to sell you this phone for the fixed price, and maybe it goes on sale, maybe it doesn't, but maybe I'll sell it to you for less, because I query your database and it turns out that actually we care about the same things in the world and we're trying to accomplish the same things in the world, and maybe I also care about, like, your ability to pay. Like someone who has more money could pay more, and maybe if you make less money, you could pay less. Or if you has more money, could pay more, and maybe if you make less money, you could pay less. Or if you make more money, you would be willing to pay more. And then you could, in turn, query my database and say how much did it cost you to make this? And then we could, through our AI agents, just come to an agreement that isn't based on this current market economics construct, right, and so this is this era of invention that I'm really excited about and really the thing that all of this technology, I believe, will help enable.

Joeri: 26:55

Oh, actually it's a fascinating time today that we are living in, with so many changes, and time always flies when I'm talking to you, Amy. I remember last time when we were at the WebS ummit, they came in the booth to kick us out. I remember that, yeah, but for today, it was a really nice conversation with you, Amy, and probably people are excited or want to know more about you. Yeah, where could I send them?

Amy: 27:28

LinkedIn's probably the best. I'm the most active on LinkedIn and after I wade through the hundreds of offshore development and explainer video and lead generation outreach that I get, so please stop doing that, people, because I don't need it. I don't. I respect all of you. I know you have a job to do, but then I will find your message and I will reply eventually.

Joeri: 27:48

Yeah, I love that. I have the same thing on LinkedIn, but you have so many communication channels these days, so, yes, amy, it was really a pleasure to have you.

Amy: 27:58

Thanks so much, Joeri. So good to see you again, it was really a pleasure to have you.

Joeri: 28:03

So, guys, wow, what an amazing episode with an amazing guest, Amy Peck. If you think that this episode is interesting also for people around you, well, be sure to share this episode with them. It can be your neighbor, your friend, another entrepreneur, people in marketing, people in fashion all people that could benefit from learning from the story that Amy told. Please share the episode. If you're not yet subscribed to the podcast, this is a really good moment to do this and, of course, I would like to see you back next time. Take care.