The first day of AWE has just passed by. With the show floor still closed, the highlight of the day has been the speech by Unity CEO John Riccitiello that spoke about the metaverse, telling us what he thinks it is and how he thinks it can evolve. Let me tell you something about it… including the very embarrassing moment I had with him, which you absolutely can’t lose.
The Unity CEO talks about the metaverse
After the opening keynote by AWE co-founder Ori Inbar, the main stage has been taken by Unity CEO John Riccitiello, who has spoken for half an hour about the metaverse. I guess you aren’t surprised about the topic…
… and if you were there, you wouldn’t even be that surprised about what he said about it. In around half an hour of the keynote speech, Mr. Riccitiello said about the Metaverse the usual things we all say all the time: it is the evolution of the internet, it is our future, it should be open, it should be cross-platform, etc… It was not a speech meant to say something new to us “VR experts”, it was something lightweight ideal for people that have still to grasp the concept. There were anyway some tidbits in its talk that were worth a mention, and that I’m reporting to you here below.
The first is his definition of the metaverse, which is the following:
He repeated it many times during the whole speech to make sure that we got it. The word “mostly” is there because he sees that we’ll slowly transition over the next years from 2D to 3D, but not all content must be 3D, or not all content must be persistent or shared. Most content will be that way, but some others will still follow the old paradigms of the internet... a written article is and still will be a 2D element, for instance.
Everything which is a website now will become a “metaverse destination” before 2030. According to him there will be three kinds of destinations (thanks Mathew Olson for writing this down):
- Fully digital worlds, not unlike what’s seen in video games, that feel like “places you could live and inhabit.”
- Destinations that are “halfway” in the sense that they alter the real world “in a very powerful way.”
- Last, he said, are experiences that “are just a little bit of a layer atop today’s world.”
which translated means: VR experiences, AR experiences, and contextual-reality experiences (something like smartglasses-type augmentations). It’s interesting anyway that he also mentioned multiple times that the metaverse is not only accessible via XR devices but using all kinds of devices (smartphones, consoles, PCs, etc…)
Another thing he stressed a lot was the importance of “realtime” which, in his opinion, is the most important feature of the metaverse. The metaverse is not pre-recorded like a 360 video but is a world that is alive and reactive, where things are generated in real time.
Mr. Riccitiello stated what we all are saying in the field since a lot of time: the metaverse will be comprised of different platforms, and you will be able to jump from one to the others like now you jump from one website to the others. But interestingly, he’s instead not a big fan of the common opinion that we need a digital avatar identity that is common to all platforms. To him, it has little sense that I have the same avatar in Minecraft, Call Of Duty, and the Barbie Metaverse. If I’m in Call of Duty, I have to impersonate a character that fits the role of the soldier, while in Barbie I probably have to be a cute doll. Having the same character in both would be very weird (even if, I admit it, I would love to have a Barbie avatar in Call Of Duty). In this, Riccitiello has a vision more similar to the one of Mark Zuckerberg, who at SXSW said that he thinks we should all have a set of digital avatars we choose from depending on the context we want to use them in.
He then started talking about the “Killer apps of the metaverse” and while I thought he was going to say some fluff, he actually said one very interesting idea he has about that. He said that one of the killer apps of the metaverse will be the “contextual app launcher”, a smart system that will trigger the right “application” (whatever this term will mean in the metaverse) at the right time depending on the context you will be in. For instance, imagine that you are going around the city with your AR glasses, then you enter the restaurant, and the contextual app launcher detects what restaurants you are in and launches automatically the app that that restaurant has made to show the menu in augmented reality. Then you go around the street, and it’s time for you to go back to work, and it automatically triggers the navigation app with the instructions about the route you should follow. And when you arrive at the construction center where you work at, it automatically launches the app that lets you see the building you are constructing in AR. As you can see, it is not you launching the various applications, but your device is smart enough to understand the context you are in, and trigger the right app (or apps) for that moment. This is something that would actually be incredibly cool to have and would remove a lot of friction when using your AR headset. This vision is similar to what also Meta proposed when it said that the glasses should be smart enough to understand what you want and propose it automatically to you so that the only thing you have to do is confirm that yes, you want to do exactly that.
This has been his general talk about the metaverse. As you can see, nothing mindblowing or revolutionary, but some ideas he shared were nice food for thought.
John Riccitiello’s prediction for XR (…and my super embarrassing moment)
Let me now tell you in great detail about my embarrassing story from this AWE. (If you are not interested in reading about this personal story of mine, just jump to the parts in bold, which contain the actual interesting insights from Unity’s CEO)
When I discovered that John Riccitiello, the CEO of Unity, the software I use every day for my job, was the main speaker at AWE, I immediately dreamed about speaking with him. It’s totally impossible that someone at Unity makes me speak with the CEO because my magazine is just too little to waste the time of the boss of one of the most important companies in the tech ecosystem. So, interviewing him at the event was like a one-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I asked immediately my friend (and AWE boss) Ori Inbar about having an interview with him, but Ori answered that he had not the power to organize an interview with Mr. Riccitiello and suggested me “to simply catch John when he gets off the stage and ask him some questions”. I asked Ori if he could help me with that, and he said that sure, he could do that. That sounded like a plan. A terrible one, since I had no idea how I should stop Mr. Riccitiello going off the stage, but it was still a plan.
So when today the moment of the conference arrived, I decided to tactically sit down at the far left of the room, so that I was close to one of the two little stairs that let the speaker go off from the stage. One was on the left and one on the right, so sitting down on the left, I had 50% of chance of being on the right side when he went off the stage, and grab him before the others. I had prepared three questions, and I wanted to ask him 5 minutes alone to have a private interview with him, or to just answer these questions while I recorded him. I imagined him going off the stage and immediately being surrounded by dozens of people wanting to ask questions, and that I could record all these questions and write a good article (plus a video) out of them. I’m a big fan of his prediction on XR he made in 2017 (most of them turned out to be true), so I wanted mostly to ask him some predictions for the future in XR for the next 5 years. Again, that was the plan, which in my imaginary movies was going very well.
John Riccitiello at 9.30 went on stage, made his speech, he finished, and then he went… backwards. Fuck. He didn’t go on the left or the right, he went back, when there was the backstage, because the room he was speaking in was the only one with a backstage. At that moment, I was kinda lost: “what the hell do I do now??”. All that strategy of blocking him going down the stage, of surrounding him with the other YouTubers and journalists wanting to ask him questions… all disappeared like the money of the crypto investors after the cryptocrash. I started looking around for Ori, my savior, but I couldn’t see him. I started thinking really fast about what to do, and then I had an idea: I could find someone from AWE, and ask him/her if I could go 5 minutes in the backstage to interview Mr. Riccitiello. A new plan, probably even worse than the first one, but yeah, better than nothing.
I started moving to the right part of the room where there was an entrance to the backstage, looking for an AWE employee, but while I did this, actually John Riccitiello himself exited from the backstage and came back into the room with two assistants of his and started walking towards the exit of the room. At this point, I was totally lost about what to do, because he was walking fast and I was already behind him… so I started chasing him… like a stalker. Plan number three, called “I have no idea what I’m doing, but I hope it will end out well”. I waited for the big number of VR content creators stopping him from ahead and started asking him questions, but actually… no one was giving a fuck about his presence. There was the CEO of a major company like Unity walking in the room and no one was interested in talking with him. That was totally insane. I was the only one trying to speak with him: a guy with a hope, and a plan, or whatever was left out of it.
John was walking towards the exit of the room surrounded by his collaborators and by me, who was the intruder in the group. I knew I had to stop him to talk with him, but I literally didn’t know how. But I knew that if he exited the room, I had no way to speak with him again, for like the rest of my life. So I had the genius idea of starting screaming “MISTER RICCITIELLO, MISTER RICCITIELLO!” like a man in love chasing a girl running away in some Bollywood romantic B-movie. At this point, there were no plans anymore, just me inventing in every moment what to do. He was not turning back, of course ignoring the voice of a weird guy calling him, but then, suddenly he stopped and turned towards me and said “what do you want?”.
I don’t know if it has ever happened to you that you find yourself in some situation where you are obtaining what you want, but actually, you weren’t expecting it. Like when you try to do something with a girl out of your league and you totally expect her to dump you, but then she actually says that she’s ok in coming to your home and see your collection of butterflies… and that point you have no idea what to do because for your brain a similar outcome was not possible at all (and especially you don’t have a real collection of butterflies). Well, I’ve found myself in that exact situation. I was sure he was going to ignore me or tell me to go to hell, but instead he was there, watching me and expecting an input from me. My brain totally got in TILT from the situation. I’m not an assault journalist, I have no idea about how to chase people and ask them questions, so I totally didn’t know how to carry on the conversation from there.
I started stuttering and saying something like “aaaagh hello, I’m Tony… VR… blog… questions… metaverse… ah… eh… predictions. No… XR… next years… metaverse… fan… predictions”. I was speaking much worse than a chatbot. He looked at me and said: “this sounds like a long question to answer”. No, John, this absolutely didn’t even sound like a question… I’m glad you thought it was a question, but it was just me hyperventilating and saying random words. So, I was there, with the CEO of a super-important company looking at me as if I was an idiot (and surprise… I was), and together with him there were all his assistants, and the people sat in the part of the audience next to us staring at me. No pressure at all. I was kinda panicking, but then I breathed, tried to stay rational for a second and finally managed to ask him a question.
I asked: “What are the predictions for XR and the metaverse for the next 5 years?”. He answered that the metaverse is not only XR, so to consider the two things separately: the internet will become the metaverse in the next years, and XR will just be a part of it, a way to access it, but not the only one. So I should not consider the adoption of XR and the metaverse completely related. He then repeated that by 2030 most websites should become metaverse destinations.
I then asked, “And what about the adoption of XR hardware?”. He said that in the next 5 years, he expects XR hardware to have the same adoption level of gaming consoles, and not smartphones. Adoption levels in the billions like smartphones will happen later, but not in the next five years.
At that point, his assistants started saying that he had to go. I asked just for a final picture, saying that I was a big fan of him and his predictions, and so with my trembling hand, I shot this horrible picture where I look terrified and he looks like Hannibal the Cannibal impersonated by Anthony Hopkins.
After that, Mister Riccitiello went away, and I spent the next 30 minutes staring at the ceiling and thinking about this absurd moment of my life. It was terrible, stressful, embarrassing… but you know, at the end of the day, I went through lots of things that scared me to talk with the CEO of Unity, and I succeeded in it, so it was a good day 🙂
Other highlights of the day
Before letting you go, let me tell you two other highlights of this day at AWE:
- Hugo Swart announced that now Snapdragon Spaces is available for everyone to download and experiment with. Interested developers can use a devkit comprised of a Motorola Edge phone and Lenovo Thinkreality A3 glasses to work with it
- Avi Bar-Zeev has launched the XR Guild, a new association of people that defend ethical values in XR. It is an initiative I totally support, and I invite you all to check out its website here to learn more about it. I’ll leave you here below some pictures I and my friend Eloi have taken from today’s official launch, so that you can understand why it is an important project for all of our ecosystem:
See you tomorrow with other news, and hopefully less embarrassing stories, from AWE US!