Interview to Eduardo Siman: virtual reality makes data visualization fun, we should all work together to make AR and VR to succeed

Some days ago, I have had the enormous pleasure of speaking with Eduardo Siman. Officially he is a VR angel investor, but he is much more than this: he is also an immersive technologies enthusiast and an influencer that can really foster healthy debates about the main questions that we all have around these technologies.

The interview is very long, and I’ll provide you both as a video (here below) and a transcription containing a summary of all the answers. As always, every question will have a link to the related part of the video, so that you can listen to the original answers only of the questions that you are interested in the most. At the end of the post, I will also provide you the four main takeaways from this interview.

Hello everyone! I’m here with Eduardo Siman, VR enthusiast, influencer and angel investor. Thanks, Eddie, for your time (0:00)

Thanks for this amazing opportunity! I’m not as important as other people you interviewed… I am just like a kid in the candy shop trying to eat some of the candies, enjoying AR and VR while I also have a daily job.

I really enjoy your articles, I even read the ones about devices I don’t have… now I know how to remove the controller on the Vive Focus, but I don’t have it… (laughs). It’s really a pleasure to talk with you.

I’m honored as you! We are all kids in a candy shop. Now, please, introduce yourself to my readers (1:41)

My name is Eduardo Siman (Eddie Siman). In the last 6 years I’ve worked as the IT director at Intradeco Apparel, which is my family business. In the past I’ve had various jobs: I worked at Goldman Sachs in private banking, I’ve done IP consulting, I’ve an MBA from Columbia in mathematical finance.

I’ve done a lot of things, but actually, I’ve always been obsessed with new technologies. It started with big data, and I started blogging about that at the end of 2015 basically because I couldn’t find anyone to talk about it with (laughs).

In early 2016, I run into a paper from a professor at Caltech that was talking about data visualization in virtual reality and that blew my mind. I contacted them and I got no answer for 5 months. Then they reached out to me and one thing lead to another and in the end I was the first angel investor in that company that later on became Virtualitics.

The company is going good and those awesome people have changed my life. From that moment, I forgot about big data and started focusing on AR and VR.

One thing that I’m trying to do is continuing my daily job and at the meantime learn as much as I can about AR and VR. One great way to do it is giving speeches about how to use AR and VR in e-commerce: e-commerce is of course very important for our customers at Intradeco and AR and VR are my passion and are very relevant for the future of e-commerce.

In the meantime, I’m doing everything that I can to keep myself informed about AR and VR, I’m also very active on social media, I keep blogging and I am also informally an advisor for people and companies that come to me and ask for advice about these technologies.

Blogging is something very important for me… I don’t care if only one person is reading me, if that person likes or finds useful what I post, then it’s fine.

I blog because I want to understand myself… and no one knows where (AR/VR) is going and we all are coming from different perspectives, and I think that if we have a community of people from different places, different countries, different backgrounds, that try to understand where VR is going to go, we have better chances of making it work than if we were all independent, all commercially-minded, if everyone were just thinking about starting his own company. So, this is the idea of an ecosystem of creators, developers… I am an investor, I know a bit how to code, I am a blogger and I am obsessed with this tech… and you are as me: you have been an entrepreneur, you are a developer, you are a blogger, we are all trying to find a way to find our place within the metaverse.

What has fascinated you so much about VR? (8:05)

The moment when VR blew me away is when I went to Caltech to see what Virtualitics was working on. This was before the company even existed. George Djorgovski, that runs the astronomy and astrophysics department at Caltech was already doing this job of data visualization from 10-15 years with his colleagues. They started doing it in Second Life!

When they saw the Kickstarter campaign of Oculus, they immediately grabbed it and started thinking about how they could do data visualization in VR.

When I went visiting them, I did not know what to expect. They (Ciro, George, and Michael, the cofounders of Virtualitics) started guiding me about what to do: “grab that data cube, move it here” and I said “NO. I want to lie on the ground and look at it from below and see if I can live in a VR data space“. They were skeptic but in the end, they let me do it and so I was there lying on the floor, with this gigantic cube of data floating above me… and I was like “This is so much FUN!” It was fun and it was just data!

No one is for sure going to buy the product just to lie down and see cubes above him and spin it, but I would do that! Even at 2am when my kids are sleeping, I would love to take my data cubes and spin them. They for sure thought “Oh, this guy is crazy, but he really loves our product, so we should take him seriously!”

In few words, what does Virtualitcs do? We got that it is about VR and data visualization, but can you detail it a bit more? (11:31)

The original idea of Virtualitics is to immerse yourself within the data. They got a patent on how to properly visualize in VR data spanning multiple dimensions: you must take care of things like the shape of the data clusters, the colors, and the opacity to visualize things in an optimal way.

Later on, the company started working also on machine learning algorithms performed in real time: so for instance, the application takes your data, that has lots of variables, and starts clustering it in real time, letting you tune how this clustering should happen. Or you can also do some kind of other analysis, so you can study your data better. Machine Learning has become a key part of the product, now.

The third component that has become a key part of the product is a shared virtual office. You can be there, looking your data in VR with your collaborators from all over the world and interacting with them.

The company officially started in August 2016, but then things skyrocketed because it basically gives the customer what the customer wants. And different customers want different things: someone wants a lot of virtual screens in VR, someone else wants a lot of 2D dashboards, others want to see 3D data with 3D dashboards… and there are even people that don’t want VR, but just want the machine learning.

The team is wonderful… and I forgot to mention Scott, that also worked in the Mars team at NASA and he was one of the first people in the world to use HoloLens, and created an incredible application for it to visualize how in the future astronauts can visualize the Martian landscape. He works on the AR division of the company. And then, along the road, a lot of amazing investors arrived.

I’m so happy that I have sent that e-mail to professor Djorgovski and that he answered me. And little by little, learning one thing after the other, I reached the sufficient level of nerdiness so that he could see me as someone worth partnering with. And he teaches at Caltech, so it has a high nerd-thresold, and meeting it for me was not easy! (laughs)

But… why should we use VR to visualize data? What are its advantages?(17:05)

Great question. Well, you don’t have to! There are many ways to visualize data… and sometimes even a piece of paper is enough! This is what I do all the times with the IT department…

It depends on the nature of data. There are some studies that show that VR can make in some sense data visualization better and faster, you can understand the data better by looking at it… but these are just a few early-stage studies. There is a lot of research that must be made in this sense. What can I say now from my experience is that:

1. Data visualization in VR is so much fun, is so great to be there floating inside data. This is for sure relevant to me;
2. It makes you understand better data spanning multiple dimensions. When you have 4, 5, 6 dimensions or even just 3 dimensions but drawn in 2D, it is not always easy to understand where you are exactly along all the axes, understand the opacity of the various particles, the colors, and so on, unless you are really inside that space. (What he wants to say is that the projection of data on a 2D screen makes you lose of lot information, and this makes understanding the data really difficult). And then there is interactivity: inside VR, I can rotate the various graphs, I can rotate the data to look at them from the point of view that I prefer… I can zoom the data that seems too little to me… I can analyze the data that is only inside a particular quadrant of a data cube… and doing this way, the data is more intuitive, makes sense easier.

Sometimes you have these data plotted in 2D… and good luck in finding a sense in them. But then you look at them in VR, and you start seeing a pattern. Maybe you don’t get what this pattern means, but you can see it. And using the right tools, you can figure out what this pattern means.

[Then I say that I am curious to try it and Eduardo proposes me to try Virtualitics in London or through VR]

Speaking via e-mail, you used the term “mediated reality”. What does it mean? (23:00)

[If you are a frequent reader of my blog, you may find this question strange, since I have published a post on mediated reality some days ago. Actually, the interview has been made before that post was published and that post was so interesting also thanks to the words that Eddie has said during this interview]

“Mediated Reality” is not a concept of mine, but of researchers in the mid-1990s. It regards the ability the change your perception of reality using some kind of augmented reality toolset. It can also regard VR, but I’m more interested in mediated AR.

Standard AR is just adding virtual elements in the real world. But to do mediated reality, you must be able not to only to add, but also remove. So, for instance, I add this object virtually (he grabs a Pacman-shaped alarm clock in his hand) and this is AR; but then I remove my hand that is holding it from the scene in real-time, and this is diminished reality. But if I take this real object (the alarm clock) and make it appear to the user as if it was flying, even if it is not, then you have mediated reality.

So basically, mediated reality is a mix of

• Adding objects;
• Removing objects;
• Making virtual replicas of real objects do what the real objects are not really doing.

The classical example that I do to family and friends, that think that I am crazy, is: let’s take the chair of my office. I can scan it, obtain its 3D model and add a virtual replica of it to the real world, obtaining AR. But then, I could also remove with diminished reality the real chair from my vision. This means that I could use mediated reality to take my chair, and move it so that to make it fly (it is the virtual replica that flies): visually you are making your chair to fly, moving it up and down with your controller, but in real life NOTHING is happening.

How can this be done? There are various methods. One is “in-painting”: you take all the colors, the textures around the object and then in-paint the space occupied by the real object by replicating the pattern around the object you are removing. Sometimes this is easy: for instance, if you remove that poster (he points at the poster behind him), for sure you know that behind it there will be a white wall. But this is not always so easy: how do you guess how it is made the shirt that is under my jacket? The part that you see is made of stripes, but this does not guarantee you that all the shirt is made of stripes. So, there are a lot of challenges to be overcome.

And it is fascinating that Fayteq, the German company that was perfecting diminished reality, has been acquired by Facebook in 2017. And then there has been nothing else about the topic.

I tried to learn more about diminished reality from the brilliant researchers that are making research on it: there are great people in Japan working on it, for instance. I also talked with the founder of Sketchfab on the topic… and the general consensus is that mediated reality will be possible, but won’t happen anytime soon.

The problem is that mediated reality requires to solve problems that are NP-problems, that don’t have a linear computational scale, but that are exponentially difficult. One of these is the in-painting problem, and the other one is how do you create a 3D model of a real object in real-time and then you move it without creating distortions that make the user understand that what he/she sees is not real. I think that it will be possible: I don’t know when, but I think that we will have the possibility to scan easily a room and then take the objects and move them virtually. I want it to happen.

And this is only what concerns AR. But also VR will be important: imagine that you have a 3D scan of the room and that you move inside this virtual replica of your room, that is perfectly matched with the real world so that when you touch the virtual table, the real table is exactly there. And since you are in VR, you are in a virtual world… well, it is just Unity, just C#, you can do whatever you want to modify the reality that you are seeing. You can change the reality however you want. In this sense, VR is ideally even better. The ideal is having the environment scanned and then viewed through an AR/VR headset… you can change everything, you can even change the physics, you can even float in space because you have moved the floor down by two meters. You can even make things appear as if they are made of jelly.

I want to see someone that gets us there. Actually, I’d prefer a group of people. I want the community to get us there.

And what will be the final vision of this mediated Reality? What will be the uses? (32:47)

I don’t know if you know David Foster Wallace, he was like a nerd super-hero for a while here, he wrote a book called Infinite Jest and in that book, a lot of people get completely obsessed by VR experience to the point their whole life becomes the virtual one. When you can’t tell a distance between what’s real and what’s illusory, it’s dangerous, because some people want to live only in the illusory reality.

So, I worry about the negative use cases… so for example if an advertiser can put his brand wherever you look or if every object can be replaced by the product sold by that company… it would terrible. Think about what is happening now on the web, with all those annoying banners being everywhere and appearing in front of your eyes.

But on the positive side, there could be amazing uses for mental health, for instance by changing the colors of the world around people having problems, or making objects glow so to activate some certain areas of the brain. And then of course for gaming, it could be huge: imagine a massively multiplayer online AR game where everyone can change the visual perception of their environment. So, for instance, I could take two buildings in Miami and make them fly in the air… and all the other people participating in the game would see them as flying. The change of reality would be persistent and shared. We could turn Central Park in a museum of Medieval Art. Why not? Everything would be possible.

I know that you like a lot Magic Leap and the work that Rony Abovitz is making… why do you love it so much? (38:34)

Well, it is not because of technical reasons: I don’t own it and I have never tried it. I love Rony’s vision, because, first of all, he was already very successful with the robotics company and he took a big risk in jumping into this AR venture, knowing that he would have to fight against the big companies like Google, Facebook. And he decided to create the hardware, that is very hard.

Let’s ignore the funding stuff… I don’t blame him for having taken the VCs’ money, because this is how the game is usually played. I like that he has inspired a lot of people in believe where AR can go. Even HoloLens has made a fantastic job, but Rony has made AR part of the creative universe, like in that app that mixes visuals, sounds and hand movements (Tonàndi). I like that vision.

Then we are both from South Florida and we went to the same university (at different times). I love that we have an important tech company in South Florida now and this is important for us.

I admire that guy, and I really hope that he will be successful.

I don’t blame him for having taken the VC money, because it is necessary to make a company grow and become profitable… you can only refuse it if you have a business that can already sustain itself. And then I’m an angel investor myself, so I can’t throw rocks at a glass building…

As an investor, what is the most important thing that you look at in a startup? (42:28)

100% the team. It’s the only thing that matters to me. A lot of people have great ideas… I mean, I have myself great ideas, but I don’t expect someone to come in and give me money for them, just because they are good. Because maybe Tony and other five people can have that idea and make it better than I can.

You have to be humble and realize that your idea may be good but there are other people that can make it better than you.

I have only made one investment, that is Virtualitics… and I don’t know if I will make other ones. In these two years, I’ve learned what makes a company successful, and you have also to be lucky so that all the things will go at the right place at the right time. I’ve seen all the stages where a company can fail and I have understood why more than 90% of startups fail. And I have been lucky that the founders and all the investors always found a way to overcome the issues that have happened.

Running a business is hard… and if one day I will see another company with a team that seems as good as the one of Virtualitics, maybe I will decide to take another risk. But it is 100% about the team.

Of course, I must be WOW-ed by the idea, it must be something that surprises me, something that I’d like to have. But this is not the only important thing… I don’t have huge amounts of money to invest, to throw at companies to see how it goes… so, I must trust the team, that every year will have to face different challenges in the company. And if the company goes bankrupt, I want to know: how are they going to treat me? If they will be able to sell this company, how are they going to treat me? And what kind of ethics will have this company? Are they going to be honest? Are they going to treat your employees well? Are you going to care more about the customers or the VCs? That’s what matters to me.

The founders should treat me as another founder. And they should treat well also all the other people.

Let’s talk about marketing… you foster a lot of healthy debates on Twitter about AR and VR… why do you do that? And how to foster healthy debates on the topic? (48:02)

The initial idea of going on Twitter and connecting with AR/VR people was knowing what these people were saying. I didn’t have to search for things: I could go on Twitter, and read the great content shared there and get to know the leaders. Then I started realizing that there is a community on Twitter, of people commenting each other and exchanging opinions.

So I decided to experiment on Twitter on how to build a community. And I have been very lucky because I found that on Twitter there are people like you, Rick King and other ones that are very active and love to express opinions. And there are people with lots of different backgrounds: there are developers, entrepreneurs, creators, investors, etc… and all of them ask themselves the same questions. It is like the early days of the Internet, where people wondered how the first browser could be… everyone was in AOL chatrooms, and then Netscape come out and everyone went crazy.

We have lots of questions that we are asking about the tech. We don’t have an organized place where we can discuss them. There are people like Malia Probst and Kent Bye that have fantastic podcasts and they bring people and ask them questions about these topics… but I want to create on Twitter a community of people just giving honest opinions. Yes, sometimes the discussion takes the wrong route, maybe because some people are too much in love with opensource or a particular company, or hate another company.

But what I like to do is: I ask a question, I tag the people who I know have thoughts on this matter (up to 10 people, as Twitter allows me), then I retweet all the relevant answers. It’s not about my opinions… they are by far not the most interesting (eh no, Eddie, you say a lot of cool stuff!), but I like to start the discussion and see the amazing different point of views that get expressed. Then there are a lot of side conversations that spawn from the original one, like in a discussion tree. And that’s a beautiful thing, it is like having a family, a community of people that loves AR and VR.

Maybe there are better ways than Twitter, but the good thing of Twitter is that everything is public, so other people can read the conversation and join it, they don’t have to join a particular group. Of course, there must be a better way to do that, and I would like to hear your advice about it.

[Then I express my opinion: what Eduardo does is great, but Twitter is not ideal to manage such conversations that are not linear. Maybe we should discuss a new way all together. I also said that we all should have a very positive attitude when we express our opinions in our social media… even if sometimes I am very sarcastic about companies like Magic Leap]

Well, I am cynical as well… because I am a techie, and we nerds know that when you are going to try something, it is going to break… we have to go around our instinct. Our instinct is saying that it is hard, that it is not going to work. We have to say that maybe it is going to work and that even if it doesn’t work, it will lead to something else.

A lot of startups in this space are going to fail. This is the reality. They need support, they need someone that tells them “go on, we need you, we need your research”. Also, the universities working on AR and VR need support. They need to know that there will be a community of people sharing the results of the research because those results maybe are going to have an impact on VR.

Try not to think the commercial implications of it. Everyone wants to make money, obviously. But we also have a heart and so we should all help each other, instead of just saying “How do I do a buck out of this?”. We have enough people that think this way and think “How am I going to help this guy? How am I going to help this girl?”.

A guy that just sold a great company of his, has spent 10 years in his lab in Oxford to find the solution to the math problem he was trying to solve. I don’t want that to be the way we figure out mediated reality, foveated rendering, and all these problems. 10 years alone in a lab is so sad. It should be something made by all of us together. Some of these people will make a lot of money out of it… great for them. But I want, 10 years from now, to look behind and think “we did it together as a community”, instead of “ehi, that guy figured out VR”.

What about your future? I’ve seen on Linkedin that you want to go to Mars… (1:1:18)

This is something that my friend Scott, that was one of the founders of Virtualitics, made me think about. When I visited his lab at NASA JPL, he showed me the Mars 2020 Rover. And I was fascinated by the extreme details and by the incredible quality of that device.

He spoke with so much passion about NASA, about going to Mars, about the device… I so understood that there are a lot of intelligent people in the world that are really studying Mars. And maybe during my lifetime, there will be the possibility to go there. And as a tech-nerd, what is more fascinating than going to Mars one day?

I have not the possibility to make it happen (I’m not Elon Musk), but I will support the people working on it. And if there will be the possibility to go there… I will discuss that with my family… but if in 2037 there will be the possibility to go safely to Mars and return in 3 years, for sure I’m going to go! If it will be a situation like “you go and you don’t know if you come back”… well, it is a bit different! (laughs)

Let’s close this interview with your advice to people in this ecosystem (1:4:11)

My advice, especially to the entrepreneurs out there, is: the vast majority of the companies are not going to be 1000 million dollar companies. And it shouldn’t be that way… it’s ridiculous to think that in whatever ecosystem every company needs to have one billion dollar evaluation. 

Economically makes sense that there are various companies in an ecosystem that put together a product that as a market can have billions of dollars in sales. If you look at the (Boeing) 747, there are many companies making all the components of the plane. Some of them are really small, and make for instance the wingtip, and some others are very big and make for instance all the chassis.

Everybody has a role to play. If we all try to make a billion dollar company, if we all want to be the Boing of VR, we will never have the AR and VR we want to have. Try to do your part, don’t focus too much about getting VCs funding, about being a 10x company, just do your part. If the company doesn’t last that long because you run out of cash, that’s ok, you made your part, you gave your contribution however you could. That’s my main advice.

I’ve still my daily job, I have a salary in an IT department… we need to support people that take a jump and go full-VR. Don’t try to be a billionaire company, just build a component that can make VR/AR where we want it to go.

And I think that doing this way, we have better chances to have, 10 years from now, the VR that we want, than if everyone just thinks about having a billion dollars company. There’s not so much money into the economy.

Thanks for your time, Eddie! I loved your passion a lot (1:7:20)

Thanks to you, Tony! I loved talking with you… And please, don’t stop doing what you are doing 🙂

---

This has been an amazing interview. The 3 key points that I want to highlight are:

• Virtual Reality can make data visualization better: you can manipulate the data as you wish and see it from various vantage points so that to identify patterns more easily. Furthermore, it is also more fun;
• Mediated Reality is a technology that regards adding virtual objects to the real world, removing artificially real objects from the real world and making real objects do stuff that they are not actually doing in real life. The company that was doing that very well has been acquired by Facebook in 2017. It is something very hard to do and we will need a lot of time to get there;
• In a startup, the team is fundamental. Ideas are cool, but without a team that can execute them, they are useless. And apart from the technical knowledge, they should be people with values;
• We should all help each other to make Virtual Reality to evolve all together. We should be a community making the technology grow as a whole. We won’t become all millionaires, but looking back, in 10 years, we will be able to think “we did this all together” and have the XR that we want. We can choose if succeeding as a community or failing as individuals.

---

And that’s it! I hope you enjoyed this long journey with Eddie and if this is the case, please subscribe to my newsletter!