Interview with Robert Scoble about Oculus Quest 2, Apple Glasses and more!

Some days ago, I have been very pleased to interview Robert Scoble, the famous technologist. He has seen Silicon Valley come to life, he has been the first one to test Siri, Flipboard and even the first one to go on a Tesla with Elon Musk. He has a very interesting working story, having worked for great companies like Microsoft and Fast Company. He has also recently written together with Irena Cronin “The Infinite Retina”, a great book about the technologies of the future, like XR, AI, and autonomous vehicles.

In the interview with me, he talked about many topics, like the rumors he heard on Apple Glasses, on the Oculus Quest 2, the America vs China war, XR entrepreneurship, Tesla, and more! It’s been 2 hours full of cool insights and you can watch all of them in the video here below: if you have the time, I assure you you won’t regret watching it!

If you don’t have 2 hours, don’t worry, here below I have extracted the most interesting tidbits of the videos for you to enjoy!

The effects of the pandemic on XR

Robert agrees with me that the pandemic has been both negative and positive for the XR ecosystem. On one side, it has been negative, because it is causing an economic recession/depression, and people and companies have less money to spend in AR and VR experimental gadgets. But at the same time, it has created the needs for new ways to communicate: Zoom is exploding, but Zoom is 2D while our brain thinks in 3D; when you are in a video call, you can’t be physical, you even don’t know if looking at the computer screen or the camera… so people are starting to feel the need of something better and more realistic like virtual reality.

But of course, the technology is still not there: the Oculus Quest is still uncomfortable, we can’t read texts in it, and so on. VR technology is still not ready today to fulfill this need.

“The farm has been plowed, the farm is now ready for seeds”, he adds. The world is ready for the seeds of VR, that will grow as beautiful plants in the upcoming years.

2022 could be the key year for XR

As John Riccitiello (CEO of Unity) said some years ago, the VR market won’t be interesting enough until it will reach the 10 million users mark. Until that moment, AAA studios, big corporates, Hollywood, etc… won’t consider it as a viable market for their products.

Robert thinks that the Quest is the best VR headset of the last 18 months and it is a very defining product. “It reminds me the first Blackberry”, he says, explaining that exactly like the first Blackberry let him understand what is the potential of mobile computing, the Quest made him (and many others) understand the potential of VR.

But Quest has sold only 1 million units, and while it may seem a good number to us, you have to remember that Apple can sell even 200 million phones in the same time frame (and it is only 8% of the phone market!). This gives you the scale of how much VR has still to grow to become mainstream. Next year, the new Quest will help in getting there, but it will be Apple that will really disrupt the market, because it will come up with cool wearable glasses. And Robert says that even Facebook’s goal is making wearable glasses: he has seen its strategy plans, and inside there it is written that its goal is not building a VR headset, but a slim AR glass that people can wear every day.

2021 will be a building year, where after the virus the world is rebuilding its economy, and consumers will start seeing and experimenting with these new XR technologies. There will be much more excitement than now. 2022 may be the key year when they actually buy it, also thanks to Apple, and finally, the market will reach the magic number of 10 million devices.

VR is not only for enterprise

Many people keep saying that VR will only be an enterprise technology, and according to IDC, next year, enterprise spending on XR will be bigger than consumer one. But Robert warns us not to make the same mistake that people made with phones years ago.

When he was working at Microsoft, he talked about the new mobile phone technology, and people there said that the phone was and would have always been just an enterprise technology, something that the CTO buys for his employees and that’s it. We all know that this thought has not aged well, and that Microsoft has failed completely entering the phone market, with billions of loss because of that.

He says that VR is not small enough yet, not that user-friendly yet, not that usable yet. In these 2-3 years, the enterprise will rule the market, but after that, things will change. XR is going to conquer the consumer market. Not now, but soon.

Remember that technology costs less over time. Robert recalls the first printers cost 45,000$ and now for 70$ you can buy something much better. Pointing a HoloLens, he told me “If you can’t afford it now, just wait 20 years, it will cost 50 dollars” and then we laughed.

Tesla is building the AR Cloud

Autonomous cars and AR are not so distant technologies: both of them have cameras, have Lidars, reconstruct 3D images of the world. The two technologies (and robotic also) are so similar that many engineers in the Valley switch jobs between AR companies and car companies.

The training costs of AI are coming down, the new GPT-3 AI technology by OpenAI is impressive, and now training an AI is relatively simple and cheap. AI is used a lot of environment understanding and this means that AR glasses and autonomous cars will become always more intelligent.

“I wouldn’t be shocked if in 3 years Elon Musk comes up with a pair of glasses,” says Robert. “He has one million cars collecting data of the world. He’s going to kill Apple and Google Maps in 2 years, at least in places where he has a lot of cars”. All these cars have 8 camera, Lidar, AI chips, and they are connected to the cloud. They are collecting data of the world surrounding them and Tesla is building amazing maps out of that. Silently, they’re building the AR Cloud of outdoor places, and who knows if in the future they will think about shipping some glasses. Elon Musk has the necessary money, intelligence and is able to create hype for whatever he does, so if HE really wants to do that, he can do that.

AR is inevitable

Once AR will start taking foot in some years, it will be inevitable to wear AR glasses. They will make you work better, they will let you connect with machines, they will make you work together with people distant away, they will make you visualize data better (as Suzanne Borders has showcased). It will arrive a point that who wears glasses will work better than the others, so all other people should buy them if they don’t want to lose career opportunities.

Apple is (maybe) already testing Apple Glasses in the wild

Robert is very well connected with people at Apple, so I asked him what he does know about the upcoming Apple Glasses. The biggest reveal that he made me is that they’re already testing the prototype of the glasses this summer in American national parks. A friend of his saw the test happening. When I asked him better about this, he said that he can’t be sure that they were Apple glasses, they could be of another brand, but he thinks they are from Apple, and one of the reason he thinks this way is because the glasses had no wires, and all other brands are experimenting with AR glasses tethered to the phone. And if Apple is already testing the devices in the wild, it means that they are close.

How will Apple Glasses be?

Playing the speculation game, Robert, using the information that his sources told him, thinks that the first Apple Glasses will:

• Be very thin;
• Have a LiDAR (not sure about an RGB camera);
• Have one or more microphone;
• Feature a low-res display that will appear as high-res to the eyes of the viewer;
• Work as prescription glasses. The idea of Apple is substituting your current glasses with new glasses that not only make you see very well (the lenses can also adjust the vision electronically so that to match perfectly your vision parameters every day), but also let you see more than reality.

APPLE AR GLASSES CONCEPT VIDEO from VRrOOm Info on Vimeo.

Anyway, it is difficult to predict how exactly will they be because there are at least 19 XR Apple Glasses prototypes currently (this is the ones Robert knows about), so every rumor we hear may be about a different prototype, and this makes us very confused about what is happening at Cupertino. Some of these prototypes are in the low end, others in the higher end, like one for a glass that features 7 cameras and cost $2000.

Mr. Scoble assures us that anyway, Apple is working very hard on XR: now they’re working even during the weekends on them, and it is pretty unusual for Apple. They know that there is a lot at stake, and they also feel the pressure of competitors like Facebook.

It is very hard to make glasses, because it is a mix of technology, fashion (it is something that you wear everyday), UX (a new interaction paradigm), healthcare (prescription lenses), etc… That’s why “People at Apple say that they’re doing more human testing on this product than on all other Apple products combined”. Apple wants this product to be great and to disrupt the market and they’re working very hard for this.

Why is Apple the company that can disrupt the market?

I asked Robert why all people in the XR ecosystem are waiting for Apple to come and disrupt everything. Why can’t it be Facebook, or Magic Leap?

Robert bets on Apple because it is all the ingredients to succeed:

• They have billions to invest;
• They have a very powerful and known brand;
• They have free advertisement whatever they do: every announcement by Apple gets reported by all the most famous magazines, plus in the communities, everyone talks about it, memes get created about it, etc… All the other brands have to pay to have such visibility;
• They have the best supply chain: if you go to China, manufacturers of phone parts have a special chain just for Apple products, that get tested more, get produced with higher quality, etc… The same factory makes the same product better for Apple.
• They control all their ecosystem: software, hardware, chips. And all their hardware is interconnected: you can use your Apple Watch to lower the volume of your AirPods for instance;
• They have lots of content: music, videos, TV shows, movies, apps. All the others have to start from scratch and it requires time and money;
• They have their payment method accepted by almost all retailers (Apple Pay);
• They have phones with powerful AI chips, 5G, and soon wireless power chips;
• Especially they have retail stores. AR glasses are personal and fashionable objects, and before buying them you want to try them on your face: Apple can do that easily and also offer carefully studied demo sessions, the others must sign agreements with other stores;
• The final apparent cost will be lower. If Apple Glasses will really be $500 as someone says, it is because the phone supporting them will be worth $1500. So the total cost of the system is $2000, but the apparent price of the item is just $500. Other brands working on all-in-one solutions will have to add all chips inside the headset and maybe they will cost $2000 the same, but they will seem to cost more because Apple Glass is only $500.
• They will be “safe”. Robert has worked in retail many years, and he told me that “People buy what is safe”, that is what they are certain that will work well, that will satisfy their purposes. You buy a fridge of a known brand because you’re sure it will last more, because you don’t know how the other Chinese brands will perform. If you buy a gift, you buy it from a known brand because you’re sure that the receiver will like it. So if you don’t know AR and you won’t be sure what glasses to buy, you’ll buy Apple because it is a safe bet of a company already doing great phones that make you feel fashionable.

Facebook has no stores, no phones in the pocket to exploit, and especially its brand has a bad reputation. Magic Leap is not going to last long, at least in the consumer space (he says): 2 billion are not enough to build such kind of product, it would have needed at least 10B to compete with Apple. Amazon and Tesla could be two outsider of the XR ecosystem instead.

Robert thinks that Apple will have like 2-3 years of monopoly in the AR glasses sector, then the real competition will come, maybe also from China. Because this is what happened with smartphones.

The new Quest will be a Quest Pro costing $600

Talking about the upcoming Oculus Quest, Robert told me “Look inside and not at the box”. According to some voices he has heard, plus some speculations of his, the new device will feature:

• Better GPU
• A smaller and more lightweight design
• Better cameras to provide better hand tracking, room tracking and maybe object tracking
• 90-120Hz framerate that can be set via software (it seems that Facebook is still discussing what should be the default one)
• 4K screen

for a price around $600. The Quest 1 will lower its price of $100-150 to foster the adoption.

Robert believes that there’s no need for a cheaper Quest because he has problems in selling the device because of the resolution that doesn’t let you read text or enjoy a movie better than on a physical TV, and not because it should cost $100 less. So he believes it must be a Pro device: “There’s a bigger market for a better quest than a cheaper quest”.

It seems that Oculus hoped to get it out for Christmas, and they’re still trying, but because of problems with the supply chain (COVID, plus the fact that now Americans can’t fly to China), most probably it will be released in spring 2021.

PS5 + PSVR2

Regarding this, he just told me that “PS5… I’ve heard it has a wireless headset that is pretty nice”.

Interesting startups

Regarding the XR companies to keep an eye on, he said that the best ones are the one that are helping in overcoming the difficulties of the lockdown:

• Fitness: people are afraid to work out outside, because they are afraid of injuries and now hospitals are a mess. SuperNatural is doing a great job in this sense. I’m happy to hear this because we ourselves made a fitness XR game called HitMotion: Reloaded;

• Virtual events: physical concerts will probably come back only in 2022 and things like the Jean-Michel Jarre concert that we did can make people enjoy concerts remotely. Talking about our JMJ concert, Robert said “It felt like Coachella, but without leaving your room”;
• Education: like Nanome. But he says that making money with education is really hard;
• Training, especially corporate training;
• Meetings: Spatial is doing very well in the field, but we must wait to see how Facebook and Microsoft will answer to it.

USA vs China

“Don’t bet on China not being innovative”, Robert told me. He visited China in 1995 and the country was very gray, everyone stood at his own place, but they already planned lots of things that eventually happened. Now the society is very different, they are all investing a lot in technology and R&D and the internal market is so big that some companies can be very profitable without never exiting China. This is the reason many of us think that China is not innovative, it is that we don’t know about its innovative companies. Furthermore, they have a huge population, and this means a huge number of talents.

China will eventually win the AI race because the surveillance society is giving them huge advantages in getting all the data of billions of users and analyze them. Apple has one last great product with the glasses, “but they better watch out, because the Chinese are coming, and coming with a product that’s less money and more capable” because it will probably have much better AI capabilities.

The economic system of China is primed to take over now.

Some precious pieces of advice on business

At the end of the interview, in the last 15 minutes, Robert gave me some amazing pieces of advice for business owners, and I think that if you are a startupper, you should watch the last part of the video, because it is very inspiring and interesting.

Summarizing the 4 key points:

• The best entrepreneurs are the ones that can attract talents: “They (Jobs, Musk, etc…) are important because they can convince other people to join their companies and build products with them. Their power comes from other people… and we forget about the other people”. If you want to build a great company, you should be able to attract other people in joining your journey with your charisma. This is something in which I personally I’m not good at and I must improve.

• If you want your company to dream big, you have to follow the future, not your present. Robert told me how Bill Gates became a billionaire with DOS while another company, DRI, already having a good OS called CP/M sunk. When IBM went to DRI, it proposed a deal for $25 for every license of the OS, in a moment when DRI was already selling copies of CP/M for a thousand of dollars to many enterprise customers. DRI didn’t want to leave its existing business and didn’t sign the deal with IBM, especially because in ’79 it was hard to think about a big market of personal computers, so going from $1000 to $25 for a single license looked like a stupid move. Bill Gates was smart enough to see the potential of personal computers, and he became billionaire selling OS to people at home. “Existing customers are like a noose around your neck and keep you from getting into the future” told Robert. He says that one company doing well in this sense is Tesla, which is making bold moves in the automotive space, disappointing many existing car owners.

• “Pick good friends. Right friends can improve your life, bad ones can destroy your careers. Steve Jobs, Elon Musk got luck for the friends they were with. Right friends will let you in the right industries”. He Scoble himself started his career in journalism because he was friend with an editor. Pick your friends wisely, because the people around you may help or may disrupt your future possibilities. “Your friends will drag you into good things, or bad things. Or sometimes both… that makes for very interesting friends!”
• “Pick something that will be interesting some days and cover it, be around it. Many engineers are not making money with VR, no billionaire has come out from VR. The money is not flowing yet. That will change in 5 years. If you pick one of these spaces, you will grow with them.” Most people work on what is popular now, and very few bet on what the future will be. If you bet on a future technology like AI, autonomous cars, VR, AR, etc… you will be very successful when they will explode. Just be patient now.

One last thing…

The next 24 months are going to be really interesting. New amazing software and new hardware is coming. It will be fun to be in AR and VR.

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