A day with Mr President

Today I’ve had the occasion to meet HTC China president Alvin Wang Graylin in my city, Turin (Italy). He had to be here to do some business, so two weeks ago he asked me if I was ok with the idea of meeting him for a chat. Being a big fan of him, I was truly excited at the idea of meeting him, so I answered that it would have been a pleasure. And being a big fan of him, well, expect this post about our encounter to be full of excitement and biased opinions about him 😀 … I mean, I’ve just met someone I esteem a lot, let me be a bit emotional 🙂I’ve been waiting for this great event since that message and today the big day has arrived. I and Max went to the city center to meet him and have some interesting discussions. We got to the address of the meeting, we entered an office and then I saw him, seated on a couch messaging on the phone. He saw me and stood up to greet me and my inside reaction was

but on the outside I just smiled and told him that it was a true pleasure to meet him. Damn business protocols…

If you haven’t ever met Mr. Alvin Wang Graylin… well, it is not the classical Chinese person: he is very tall and has large shoulders… I think that he has been conceived in some HTC genetics labs to be tall, muscular and handsome. Damn, why does my mother haven’t been to those labs as well?

Anyway, after this first encounter, I have been able to speak with him and other smart people for some time. I was looking around myself, with all these skilled and important people and I asked myself: “WHY AM I HERE?”. But again, I used my poker face to pretend that I actually was able to sustain a conversation with such clever people.

It has been really an interesting talk about VR, AI, robotics, China, politics, whatever came to our mind. I also tried asking him more practical things like when will we know the price of the Vive Pro and this has been his reaction

Ok, actually his reaction hasn’t been exactly this… being a very positive person, this is what he thought but not what he said. He politely told me that we have all to chill out with this thing about the price of the Pro and that info will come soon (of course, they promised a release of the Pro upgrade kit in Q1 2018, so I guess that before the end of the month we will obtain some info). So, VR community, just relax, we will know the price of the Vive Pro at the right time. There are no delays.

Mr. President is a very inspiring person and has a very positive attitude towards VR and life... I think that every one of us should talk with a Mr.President every month to become more motivated in what we do every day and to clear every negativity. He continuously smiles about everything… I also talked him about my previously failed startup and he smiling said to me “Great project, but… too early!”.

Speaking with him and the other people there has been truly a pleasure. I’ve interviewed him some weeks ago and speaking with him “officially” for a magazine is great, but speaking with him about random topics, without cameras, videos and such is even better.

Do you want to know some interesting things said during our conversation? Well…

• You have to find your motivation in life, your purpose. The reason that makes you get up in the morning and make you hustle each day. This is the true meaning of success in life. I tried telling him that in my opinion discipline is more important than motivation, but he answered that discipline has no sense if you don’t have a purpose (you’re disciplined to reach a goal, otherwise it has no sense);
• He has played basketball and trained for boxing. I won’t ever ask him again about the price of the Pro because now I am afraid to get a punch in the face 😀 😀 😀 ;

  

• An important thing for this world is that the vast majority of people get a proper education and VR can have a great impact in help for education. A VR headset can, for instance, let a student from China attend the lessons of the MIT as if he were there, but without paying taxes or travel expenses. Futhermore thanks to gamification, VR could make learning more interesting;
• His overall vision of VR is that it something that should help people in having better lives. He also agrees that VR could help us, people, to have “something to do” when machines and AI will do all our jobs;
• The battle of virtual reality headsets on price has no sense because it is not beneficial for the ecosystem. It may have sense in a mature ecosystem, but start battling on the price on this new ecosystem has little sense, because it may make users perceive that the VR devices are cheap because they have little value. He says that if a VR headset makes a businessman to spare the money for 5 business trips a year than it is surely even worth more than $1000. And if people can spend $1000 to buy a smartphone that has almost the same functionalities of a $400 one, then can also afford a VR headset that is not super-cheap (My answer here is of course: yes, cool… but I’m poor, so I’m happy if VR headsets lower their prices);
• Content is fundamental to convince people to enter VR, to make them understand why they should spend their money on a VR headset. Continuing the previous example, if the $1000-headset has not the travel application, it is worthless. So VR needs content, a lot of content to be perceived as useful by all people. Not only gaming… gaming can be a great way to make people want to try a VR headset, but then they should use it for other applications.;

  

• He has a vision of the future when in some years we will all substitute the screen of our smartphone with the screen of our AR/VR headset. “We’ll be spending most our day in VR/AR devices in 5-8 years but they will look more like glasses not like today’s HMDs”;
• I tried saying him the world “Oculus” sometimes and I also said that my CV1 is a good device and it is very comfortable, but he didn’t roundhouse-kicked me because of that. He recognizes that competition is very important in this field because in every field where there is no competition everything becomes dull, people become lazy. So, competition is beneficial for VR;
• The social VR worlds where we’ll all live in, we’ll probably be just 2-3 platforms, as current most popular social media are only few;
• Ready Player One will help a lot the sales of VR headset because Hollywood is great in making things popular and trendy and this movie will make VR trendy. Furthermore, it will let people understand why VR is useful, what it will enable in the future;
• 6 DOF videos are very very close: I told him about the predictions of Alex Novak of SLR, that says that we’ll see 6 DOF videos by the end of the year and he said: “no, no, sooner”.

These are just some pills, but actually, nothing can substitute the experience of directly talking with him. And then, he made me try the new Vive Pro (for which we don’t want to know the price anymore :D) and the Vive Focus… I’ve tried the future! Actually, he also lent me a Focus for some days to let me experiment with that… WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW, I’m pretty excited. So expect some reviews and experiments in the next weeks!

I really thank a lot Mr. Graylin for the invitation to chat with him and for the great time spent together. And also for having let me try a lot of interesting hardware. He is really a very positive and inspiring person, with a very open mind and a great vision for a future in which VR can empower people. I think that VR at HTC is in great hands.

Speaking with him has really empowered me and I found this experience unvaluable. Unluckily, the time with my idol has flown too fast and I had to leave the meeting too soon. But I hope to see him again one day and pretend to be a smart person again 🙂

P.S. To compensate the too much love for HTC in this article, I will close with: “I love my Oculus Rift. And I hope to meet John Carmack one day”.