Jan 2, 2019 · 25m · a16z
a16z Podcast | VR, AR, and Beyond: The New Medium of Human Experience
Kyle Russell · 8m spoken Chris Milk · 7m spoken Jason Rosenthal · 3m spoken Darshan Shankar · 3m spoken Sonal Chokshi · 41s spoken
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this a16z Podcast panel discussion, industry leaders explore the evolution of virtual and augmented reality, analyzing market timing, content creation paradigms, social connectivity, and VR's unique power as a medium for human experience. The panelists examine the technical, artistic, and economic shifts required for immersive technologies to become the next major computing platform.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. The host holds 2.9% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
The host as informed peer 4.8 Guest teaching 2.9 Guest disagreement 2.0 The host pushing back 1.8
speaking balance: gold is the host, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 6:51 Jason Rosenthal challenges host premise on Hollywood dominance
Jason explicitly rejects Kyle's premise that incumbent entertainment giants will lead VR, stating history shows previous leaders rarely dominate new mediums.
Hardest push from the host ▶ 5:59 Kyle presses Jason to commit to a probable roadmapWhen Jason attempts to dodge committing to a future VR trajectory by saying nobody knows, Kyle refuses the deflection and asks him to commit to a most probable path.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 4:50 Chris Milk reframes the Netflix VR catalog misconceptionChris interrupts Kyle's consumer analogy to explain why subscription catalog models like Netflix cannot work in VR due to the lack of a century-old back catalog.
The host holds their own ▶ 21:01 Kyle showcases deep expertise on photogrammetry and educational VRKyle demonstrates technical fluency by explaining how photogrammetry extracts 3D geometry from Mars rover photos in Valve's Destinations app, framing it as the future of education.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | The host as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | The host pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Defining Emerging Computing Paradigms: AR vs. VR | 6 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Kyle introduces the session with clear technical definitions differentiating AR and VR paradigms. Darshan responds constructively regarding hardware improvements and software-induced motion sickness. | |
| Hollywood's VR Content Monetization and Catalog Challenges | 4 | 5 | 3 | 2 | Chris Milk explains Hollywood monetization models and interjecting during Kyle's follow-up to clarify why a Netflix for VR cannot exist without a back catalog. Kyle accepts the clarification. | |
| Next-Gen Camera Tech and Experimentation in VR Cinema | 4 | 6 | 7 | 4 | Kyle presses Jason to commit to a VR trajectory after an evasive answer. Jason directly rejects Kyle's premise that incumbent Hollywood companies will lead content in the new medium. | |
| Social Expression, Sharing, and User-Generated VR Content | 5 | 2 | 1 | 2 | Kyle draws on platform history from web and mobile to ask about user-generated VR content. Darshan provides a analytical response comparing early web bundling to current social VR tools. | |
| Addressing Isolation: VR as a Social and Collaborative Space | 4 | 3 | 2 | 3 | Kyle brings up the common objection around VR isolation, challenging Jason briefly with 'Even with the goggles?' as Jason argues VR is inherently the most social medium. | |
| Holograms, AR Potential, and Democratizing Human Experience | 6 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Kyle demonstrates technical awareness by citing Microsoft Holoportation and Tim Cook's stance on AR vs VR. The panel collaboratively discusses shared underlying infrastructure. | |
| Asymmetric Experiences and the Evolution of VR Formats | 4 | 4 | 2 | 2 | Chris Milk playfully turns Kyle's question back on him before explaining how VR differs from traditional film due to format fluidity rather than fixed rectangular framing. | |
| Interactivity, Real-Time Rendering, and Technical Roadmaps | 8 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Kyle showcases strong domain expertise by detailing Valve's Destinations app and how photogrammetry enables educational experiences, taking a prominent role in the segment recommendations. | |
| VR Showcase Recommendations: Clouds Over Sidra and Pearl | 2 | 1 | 0 | 0 | The guests take center stage sharing content recommendations and emotional personal anecdotes, while Kyle steps back to let the panel wrap up. |
Statements from this episode (19)
Russell: AR glasses will float LinkedIn profiles above people's heads
“You're never going to go to an event like this and meet someone where you're pretty sure you've seen them before, but you don't remember their name. You're never going to have that awkward exchange because their LinkedIn profile is going to be floating above t…”
Russell: VR will enable true telepresence for remote work and play
“Virtual reality, on the other hand, gives you true telepresence. You're going to be able to work and play from what feels like the same environment, but from any distance.”
Shankar: Software, not hardware, causes VR motion sickness
“At this point it's the software that's making people sick, not the actual hardware itself.”
Milk: Hollywood is shifting from marketing-funded to monetized VR content
“We're starting to see a shift from VR pieces that are exclusively funded by marketing budgets, because that's all there was to fund them with in the last year to more of the forward thinking studios actually funding content for the purpose of monetizing it.”
Milk: Multi-million dollar VR content cannot recoup costs in 2017
“That's not entirely possible with the current addressable market, I think, in virtual reality, when you're spending millions of dollars on, on a piece of content”
Milk: A 'Netflix for VR' cannot exist without a back catalog
“You could not start Netflix of the art today because there's no back catalog to license every, every, you know, Netflix starts and they license a hundred something years of cinema and television and they have a catalog. Got it. And you pay for it, access that …”
Rosenthal: VR is the first medium without pre-defined content formats
“One of the things that's super interesting about VR is it's kind of the first, ah, medium of media where the formats aren't defined and locked in from the very beginning. There's lots and lots of, ah, experimentation because it's kind of the first, ah, the fir…”
Rosenthal: Legacy media giants will not dominate virtual reality
“So I think if you look at any new medium, right. Be it the internet, or mobile games, or what have you. It's never been, ah, the companies that were dominant in the last form of entertainment or media that have become the leaders, ah, in the next form, and I t…”
Shankar: 360 VR sharing requires effortless consumer capture tools first
“Pre-sixty content once it becomes extremely easy to film, extremely easy to capture for every consumer the way we capture with our phones, any sort of photos, that becomes really easy to share. That becomes, but first, you have to make it really easy to captur…”
Shankar: Curated bundled content always precedes user-generated platforms
“If you look at the history of, The internet, the web, and mobile, a lot of bundling was occurring in the early days where it wasn't completely user generated. It wasn't Geocities super early on. It was a lot of, it was AOL. It was kind of bundled news before e…”
Rosenthal: VR has the potential to be the most social medium
“I think the bold case is that VR has the potential to be the inherently most social medium, kind of any form of technology that we've seen so far.”
Russell: AR is a couple years behind VR in development
“With that said, AR is a couple years out, even relative to VR in terms of difficulties around optics, in terms of computer vision.”
Milk: VR will democratize human experience like the internet democratized information
“What you're going to see in the long term, especially with virtual reality is. The sort of democratization of human experience in the same way that the internet led to the democratization of information.”
Rosenthal: Early AR and VR require the exact same infrastructure investments
“We're sort of in the stage of the medium now, ah, where, where everybody's working on the underlying infrastructure technologies and, ah, kind of the first experiences around those, and it doesn't matter, ah, you know, if it's AR or VR, ah, the investments tha…”
Milk: VR format is fluid and constantly evolving, unlike static cinema
“What's different about virtual reality is the format is fluid. So you, and you see it changing on a bi-monthly basis where you're now able to tell a new kind of story because the actual format has changed.”
Milk: VR will feature AI-driven interactive rendered humans
“You imagine on the real-time render side, that's going to get faster. You're going to have real-time rendered humans and environments that are driven by AI that you can interact with.”
Russell: Interactive VR is the future of education and museums
“And all I can think is this is the future of museums in the near term and the further term. This is the future of education. Like, why you know, why read a textbook about, you know, significant moments in history when you could just kind of actually get to liv…”
Rosenthal: VR creates empathy unmatchable by traditional media
“It's the most human way to connect someone to what's going on in another part of the world, and you watch it, and you feel like you're there, and you have a level of empathy for what's going on that you just don't get from reading the newspaper or watching You…”