CES 2024: Nevermind the metaverse

Elizabeth Valleau We had a very long title for this session that you probably saw listed in all of your booklets, which was about, you know, Gen AI and blockchain and and XR and all these other things. But we went with a more pithy title, which is Never mind the metaverse making new realities real. And obviously there's a little bit of attitude to that. Elizabeth Valleau And I think it's because over the last couple of years, there's been a lot of conversation about what these new emerging techn

ologies are going to be for, what's their purpose is going to be, how they're going to evolve. And in that sort of flush of conversation, there's always a little bit of bullshit, you know. So today what we really want to talk about is, is coming back to both the origins of the dream and a little bit of a vision from the future. Elizabeth Valleau And we have some wonderful panelists with us. I'll introduce them later, but more about me actually for a minute. So I'm Elizabeth Valleau. I am the XR

Design Director for Accenture Song. And when I was a little girl growing up in Brooklyn, the first time I ever hacked a computer system was hacking the Brooklyn Library so I could keep my William Gibson books longer. Elizabeth Valleau So I've been waiting for these texts to be here, to be real my whole life, literally. So this has been a dream for me, and I think a lot of us have had very starry eyes as things like augmented reality have come into actual reality. But of course in the beginning o

f all of these emerging technologies, there's this period of time, this horizon, where the old ways of doing things bleeds into the future, ways of doing things. Elizabeth Valleau So if you recall, in the early the history of TV, old TV systems, when they came to people's homes, the first commercials on those systems were radio jingles. It would be a black screen with a bouncing ball and radio spots. And this kind of behavior, which I like to call radio on the TV, is something that happens every

time there's a new tech event horizon right there. Elizabeth Valleau It will be old ways of doing things shoved into those new kinds of technologies and there is some really cool stuff happening though in spite of that. Where we are right now, we've got incredible enterprise executions happening. I think actually XR in particular gen AI have proven themselves unequivocally in enterprise and in training, in health, in digital twins, etc. It's interesting because in a way, the most functional kin

ds of executions have become the ones that are most definitely proving worthy. Elizabeth Valleau And then we have beautiful craft forward things like the Gorillaz exhibition, which was a total takeover of Times Square. And these things are beautiful. And it shows us the power of location and presence. But unfortunately, we're seeing a lot of one offs. And I think that for these technologies to really grow up, what we need is sustained use cases. Elizabeth Valleau I'm sorry to make you eat your v

egetables before we get into the fun, sustained use cases, measurable goals, abstract thinking, which is kind of the most important part, right? If you have a company that makes X, what can we do more than just taking X and putting it into some of these formats? How do we let that format really breathe and grow and show us what it's capable of? Elizabeth Valleau And the combination of these disciplines will allow us to test and learn, have some benchmarks, finally, which is really difficult for

some of these executions, and really help drive business growth, not just beautiful stuff. So here's the pitch. So Accenture, we've got a vision and we've got a methodology for approaching what we call new realities. This is our infamous three circle diagram, which I'm sure you're learning everything about us just from that. Elizabeth Valleau But I think the key is to really go back actually to that radio on the TV moments. Right. We've had a couple of more moments like that since. And probably

the most disruptive one was ye olde iPhone, right? I mean, a computer with a camera in your hand changed everything forever. It changed the way that we consume things. Elizabeth Valleau It changed authorship. It changed the voice and the attention to voice that we all give to brands and companies and each other forever. And now we're in a position where we're actually starting to break beyond this surface, just the way we did with radio into TV. We're starting to have a third space between your

body and the world and your technology. Elizabeth Valleau And so to get there and have this really be awesome, you know, and not too clunky and feel great and look great and function, we're going to need generative AI because we're going to need a lot of models, right? I mean, making 3-D stuff used to be really slow and really expensive. And with gen AI, we're starting to cut through that into something that generates on its own. Elizabeth Valleau And it's also super fast and cheap and sometimes

really lightweight too. And then once you're there, once you're in this third space, we're going to need stuff, right? You're going to need your money. You're going to need your memberships. You're going to need your identity, you'll need security. You're going to need your passport and you're going to need to have that all come with you in a way that's not a clunky wallet, my man. Elizabeth Valleau Dave Treat over here is going to take us through that much more detail later. But today, I've go

t some amazing folks on stage and we're going to talk specifically about Gen AI and XR, which is my true love, and hopefully will have some really cool insights come from that since I have the stage and I'm allowed to talk and this is my show right now, I wanted to talk to you a little bit about a couple of the big territories that me and my teams are super excited about exploring. Elizabeth Valleau So one of the things that we say when we're approaching sort of an open brief about how Gen AI an

d XR can be applied specifically to a brand. To be perfectly clear, we work a lot with B2B to see brands, so some of this is pertinent for enterprise, but a lot of it is more for consumer. We ask ourselves, how can this this product and experience and brand become more interactive, more accessible, more generative and larger than life, which is obviously the really the really fun and kind of sexy part of that. Elizabeth Valleau And you know, some of the territories we could think about, I just w

anted to have a huge unicorn on the stage or a Pegasus rather. So forgive me, but transforming spaces, you know, as AR becomes more lightweight through the work of Gen AI, how can every space have footprints and breadcrumbs and interactions dispersed all over it so that you become accustomed to having this incredibly rich third space experience? Elizabeth Valleau How do we transform media? So we were just having a really cool conversation backstage about how when you are at a live event or you'r

e watching something on TV, you're used to your second screen. What is our third screen? Right? So some of these experiences, particularly in XR, are going to be enhancing and creating this continuity between a broadcast or an event. Elizabeth Valleau And you. Commerce - no brainer, especially as brick and mortar becomes less and less appealing to the modern shopper and younger shoppers. How does commerce happen everywhere? How is every interaction with an idea or a space become an opportunity t

o sell? And then, last but not least, gaming. So this is another one that I'm obsessed with. When is gaming going to leapfrog from your set top to your mobile, to your body, to the world all around you? Elizabeth Valleau When are you gaming? All the time. I know some of you might shudder at that if you've got kids, but it really becomes so rich and so delicious to think about continuing your game in all different sorts of media in this really magical kind of way. So I'm going to introduce my pan

el now. I'm going to sit down and this is my boss. Elizabeth Valleau Can I get a round of applause for James Temple, please. He's great. I just did that to embarrass you. KP - We used to work together at Meta, and he's a baller, so round of applause for KP from Snap. You're all going to get it. And then Dominic from Playhybrid, who is doing some really, really cool foundation breaking stuff in the in the industry. Elizabeth Valleau Give me a round applause for Dominic. Hi. James Temple Hello. El

izabeth Valleau How are you doing? James Temple Fantastic. Elizabeth Valleau That's great news. Yes. Yeah. Do you have anything to add to my spiel? What did I miss? James Temple So I was in a client conversation actually about half an hour ago. Now, I say an hour and a half ago, and it was posed to me. Why did you join those three things together? That's three separate things. And they exist in their own right. And I think that's true. But also what we're getting a huge traction are the converge

nce of these three areas of technology and XR around what's been blockchain around gen AI. James Temple We've been working a lot in retail and entertainment about the idea of distributing the download of a digital wallet and via that wallet activating AR enabled game experiences so I can walk around my physical world. I can then consume digital tokens. They exist in my wallet. There's a fair value exchange then between me as a customer and the brand. James Temple The brand then retains the data.

They have a direct relationship with the customer, which also often is not the case. So we're seeing a lot of opportunity and value about the convergence of these things. I will, however, this is a passion area, an area of expertise sort of folks in XR. One of the interesting things I think you know which probably might not have been expected to coming to CES James Temple is the most noteworthy thing so far that's been communicated from what I know is generally availability of Apple Vision pro

at the beginning of February. I think that's pretty important. I think for everyone that's been existing in this category. I spent five years at Magic Leap prior to Accenture. And, you know, it's another signal of the viability of this category of computing and technology. James Temple I think a couple of things I call outs around that as far as like opportunity that it represents, it's got very strong image fidelity. They've really double down on inputs. Inputs in this category is basically lik

e how you interface with the technology. So they've looked a lot at gaze they've looked a lot about your voice interaction. They've looked at very simple gestures and how they can be utilized without it necessarily having to be directly in front of your face. James Temple For example, as was true with with HoloLens, this is going to make it make it somewhat more intuitive to interface with the technology. I think with that you're going to start to see a new realm of experiences uncovering specif

ically around product configuration display. You look at that thing there, would you really want to configure that on a 24 inch display in two dimensions? James Temple The answer is no. Yeah, you want to stream that at 100% scale right in front of you in your own domain. Once you configured it, you'd probably want to take it for a drive, an environment that resonates with you. That's how this technology, I think, is going to get like a real breath of breath of life and fresh air coming into this

like new advent. James Temple I'd also say, like it's a lot of people have been talking about remote work and how this technology can facilitate that. Apples done an interesting thing around positioning as the multi sort of interface desktop, right. And because you think of like financial services, for example, you know, privacy of the data you're looking at the ability, ability to authenticate in said environments with biometrics that comes with a device like Vision Pro for example, with their

optics ID. James Temple Already so you're starting to see things from like fidelity to interaction to like authentication and data privacy and so on, which just means that it's altogether more viable as both an enterprise and personal computing device. So I'm pretty I'm pretty stoked about that as being like XR being like a main stage item right now. I'm sure like I'm obviously competitive, but you know, like it's good for the category overall. Elizabeth Valleau I hear you on that. But I also t

hink that there is available, we've all been excited about the always on glasses, right? That was the dream from the beginning. And you know, Spencer who's in the audience and I we worked on Aria at Meta, which is always on AR glasses. It's hopefully hopefully it's going to be coming out really soon because that's more out in the world. Elizabeth Valleau But KP, there's still so much opportunity for really stretching out and making the most and coaxing mobile XR into its fullest expression. Thou

ghts on that? Because what I don't want is for people to wait right. Yeah. Until Apple Vision's affordable. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis I mean, look, I think the technology to some extent where it is VR or AR has become a lot more affordable of over three and a half grand, I would call it a lot. But at least, you know, like from my experience, at least from both Meta and Snap, we have millions and millions of people using the technology on a daily basis on the mobile screen. Konstantinos Papamilt

iadis And there are a lot of people that will claim, okay, but there is no form factor and stuff like that. But I would actually say it depends on the use case. When it comes to self-expression and communication I think Snap and TikTok and Instagram has proven that AR can become a vehicle for enhanced expression and communication in a way that's, you know, I think it's public knowledge. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis But at least on our platform, we see 250 million people engaging with AR 6 billion

times a day. That's kind of mind blowing right? I would argue that we are still scratching the surface because we haven't been able to provide the same level of engagement that we think, you know, like our own apps for other use cases. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis And so there is an opportunity for all of you to come in and embrace the technology in a way, I think that will allow you not necessarily to leapfrog, but to be prepared for that moment when the wearables are going to become a mass marke

t thing. Right. And I'm old enough to know that, you know, like we were waiting for the year of the mobile for a very long time. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis And then suddenly this, you know, like guys in Cupertino managed to introduce a device that effectively made it the year of the mobile eventually. I don't believe that they're going to do it this time around. I think it's someone else's responsibility to do this better, more out to be. But regardless, the point I'm trying to make is that if y

ou really want to be ready for that moment, I think starting with a mobile when you probably have all presence and experimenting with the technology and finding how the technology can solve a fundamental problem for you and your customers will pave the way for you nicely to be prepared for that bigger, moment. Elizabeth Valleau Yeah. No, that's really interesting. And on that same topic, so in terms of preparing ourselves and being in this liminal state between that always on future that we're d

reaming of and the kinds of case studies and use cases and behavior changes that we're really trying to institute here. Dominic, you've worked on some really interesting projects, startups which are starting very involved in creating some of those, what I would called liminal technologies right there in the space between mobile and the augmented body. Elizabeth Valleau Can you tell us a little bit about some of the stuff that you've worked on because it's really cool. Dominic Bilodeau I think we

're working on a bunch of stuff. It's funny because it's always around like getting 3D assets and then adapting it to different devices and it it will - I think there's an appetite for people to migrate those 3D assets to different platforms. By that I mean like the mobile, the AR, the VR, the Instagram AR ads, the virtual production, and now we're seeing devices that will become AR enabled. Dominic Bilodeau We're working while we're working with Aratic to on the AR chip that will be enabled rem

otely and with a whole back end platform. Elizabeth Valleau Are you allowed to say any more about that? Dominic Bilodeau Without saying what's in the chip? I think the idea is to enable to have some form of AR wearable or engagement at the image of gaming's if you want, you know, you you decide what you're going to be wearing today on your chip or what you want to display or how you're going to monetize it, what you want to do with it. Dominic Bilodeau Trading. We're talking about gamification.

Yeah. For just building XP, wearing your Chanel bag at New York Fashion Week, that kind of stuff. So it's a mix of both, right? It's mixing reality with 3D graphics and and back end and I think that's what makes it engaging. I think the goal is to bring people back and reuse the same I mean, engage with an AR activation more than once. Dominic Bilodeau Yeah, I guess that's can we get people to just decide to wear some cool stuff today? I'm going to wear this cool high five hand floating on top o

f my head and I'm going to cross Spencer. We're going to high five. Like, can I just wear stuff that will be interacting with people? Yeah. I mean, I know it sounds a little crazy right now, but. Elizabeth Valleau No no not at all. You're in a good room to sound crazy all excited about this. But you talked you mentioned the sort of the 3-D-ization revolution. Yeah. Can you talk a little bit more about why that's important? Dominic Bilodeau Well, I think people are spending a lot of money buildin

g 3-D assets. You're spending it spending, I don't know, millions of dollars building CADs to do a BMW IX and then where does that go? That goes to trash. I mean, so I mean, in some ways, I think there's an appetite from the studios, from the car manufacturers, from a lot of people that are coming to us to just take their data and build an archive that they can reuse on different platforms at the same time. Dominic Bilodeau So we'd be getting a car from a big fashion, big brand. I can't say a na

me. And then we'll get in on Instagram ads, we'll get it on Snap, and then they want to do an ad in Unreal. So we take the thing in Unreal Engine and then we make an ad in it and we just reuse it in so many ways and they archive it. Dominic Bilodeau They can pull it back out, they have it available to them, and that investment is just paying off by using the same asset over and over. And I think that's our focus is we're building tools that are powered by AI and machine learning and manual stuff

to just enable people to just build that archive that is going to be very valuable. Elizabeth Valleau Yeah. And KP do you have any thoughts on sort of what is going to be the lubricant that helps that behavior change really take place? But there would be even a hardware one or an immediate kind of production one like Dom was talking about. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis I think it will be ultimately three things. The first one is the cost of the development. So if you reduce significantly the costs

, I don't think there is a particular reason for anybody not to have concerns about trying it right? This second, I think, has to do a lot with how the technology leveraging those assets will deliver business objectives. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis To your earlier point, like for example, just thinking out loud, right? But imagine the scenario where I can configure the Lambo and then I decide that you know what I actually don't like? It doesn't speak to me, right? So even if the technology is mea

nt to be, you know, like contributing positively, it helps the consumer make probably the right decision, but it doesn't help Lambo sell more cars. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis So there is a fine line between and on how the technology can be used in a way that delivers business value. Because without that, even if there is consumer value, then something in the equation is broken. And then the third thing I think it has to do with your point about distribution, right? If you do something with a pro

prietary format that, let's say, hypothetically speaking, only works on the Vision Pro, then even if there is a proliferation of other hardware that provide the same form factor, so you have to rebuild it in a way that will require, you know, like an extra effort that is, you know, like starting from zero rather than leveraging some Konstantinos Papamiltiadis fundamentals like maybe the 3D asset itself, then the distribution becomes like a burden. Elizabeth Valleau Yeah, that's really interestin

g. So I have a fun question for you. We've been talking a lot of business. What kind of stuff are you excited about for this year? James Temple For this year? Elizabeth Valleau For this year I. James Temple I thought we'd be going further out. Elizabeth Valleau No. Well, I mean, so so listen, I would love everyone in the room to walk away with a seed of an idea that maybe hadn't occurred to them or they hadn't realized was real now, for how XR and gen AI could actually enhance their business bec

ause I feel like a lot of folks are waiting and I think that there are opportunities to tackle now. Elizabeth Valleau So you can talk about by category or yeah. Just as loose as you want. James Temple I still feel that right now through the phone and through technologies like you're talking about, there is the mechanism to unleash layers of digital content on the real world. And I feel like there we did a talk earlier in the year at Arsenal Football Ground and we were sat there on a stage lookin

g over the turf of Arsenal. James Temple It was quite a sad thing. Yeah, it's an iconic club, but the stadium was all covered, but the turf was there. The people were doing a tour. They want to really see they want to see Bergkamp's goals. They want to see Henry's goals. They want to see these signature signings unveiled. They want to see the cups that were lifted. James Temple There's no reason why right now that can't be achieved, right now. I drove through London at the end of last year. Any

time you drive through London, you'll see around 50 to 150 people standing outside Abbey Road Studios. Yeah, I mean, the studios is famed where the Beatles recorded a lot of their seminal hits and obviously where like a lot of like the most sort of like faint orchestral scores James Temple to films happen. What are they there to see? They're there to see The Beatles on the pedestrian crossing outside Abbey Road Studios. What is missing from that scene? The Beatles on the crossing. Could that be

the next week? I think we could really jam on that this afternoon and get at that and have it persistently there across platforms for people to enjoy. James Temple So you go across you think of like Martin Luther King in Washington. Why is that not there? Right. So I think all of these things that words. Yeah, like we're all a memory. They represent iconic stories and opportunities for you to engage with your real world. And the more amplified way that can happen now. And it surprises me, to be

honest, that there's not more of that because you have the tools, you have the tools, you've got the tools, we've got the skills. James Temple So I think that is a huge opportunity. And I'd say that a lot of like the platform companies would recognize that in the mobile phone era there's this big movement where people seem to look down in the world. Right. A couple of years ago, walked down Regent Street at Christmas. It was pre the stores opening. People are looking down. James Temple They're w

alking down the street. Look up. It's amazing. I think if you start to like overlay this content on the real world, you start to get people from down to up a look up state. And socially that becomes very powerful. Reengaging with people, reengage in the world with around you. That's why I think like a lot of brands should be doing James Temple in the consumer space, I'm massively passionate about that. I don't think it needs to be like a like an overly composed production costs to do that. I thi

nk that the power of gen AI now you're starting to see especially like a lot of the R&D activity in the 3D content creation, let alone like the 2D stuff, is like getting a pretty decent set of materials to go off that. James Temple But for me, I'd love to get your perspective on this, but like I'm surprised was what there's no more and the world is a beautiful canvas. I say to creatives, would you like 16:9 in film like you know in front of you would you like the world. I know what I would take

every day. Elizabeth Valleau No. 100% and slight nerd tangent from what he was talking about. So with the new capabilities for location based, location based pinning on most, at least web platforms, you know, all of the native platforms and stuff like that, we could sit here together if you were so inclined, create a 3D model of the Beatles crossing Abbey Road and drop it there, and it would be there for as long as we want it to be. Elizabeth Valleau So a lot of the dreams of sort of being every

where, any size, which is one thing that, you know, I'm obsessed with, like I'm like think bigger. Like there's there's no licensing here, you know, like in terms of the size of this thing, it can be as big as King Kong, you know. But yeah, no, there's there's technology that really allows us to be in a lot of places remotely, which feels a little godlike. Elizabeth Valleau But also once you're in those spaces, they can be beautiful, romantic, you know, evocative moments. There could be very str

ong brand tie associations or they could be pop up commerce or showrooms. Right. There's sort of not as much of a limit anymore in terms of what you can do there. So, you know, I think about, you know, the fashion stars in Marfa, you know, where people drive outside of Austin and visit the iconic Prada store in the middle of the desert. Elizabeth Valleau While that location may not be the most practical, there's no reason why there aren't Prada stores in every room that you go into. It doesn't c

ost anymore to drop something that doesn't weigh anything everywhere. Talk to me about your dreams KP. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis Well, how much time do we have? Konstantinos Papamiltiadis I mean, for me, you know, like I said, self-proclaimed technologists, there is a fundamental reason for why I think technology matters to the humankind. And this is to make our lives better, but in a way that is not exclusive to the privileged ones. And I think, you know, like the form factor that can be intro

duced with, you know, like these wearables that we are all, you know, like working hard to bring to the markets and the experiences on top of that so that we're all trying to build will allow access to information, whether it's for educational purposes, whether it's for, you know, like traveling and immersive experiences. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis You know, like when you do that to everybody, I think on the planet in ways that I don't think we have been able to see to date with the mobile. Like

as you know, like I traveled to India several times. I traveled to sub-Saharan Africa several times. And it's a it's an interesting place if you haven't been there trying to get out of Delhi, try to go to, you know, like a tier two a tier three town when, you know, like people like us will feel kind of like very privileged, but also maybe inspired about our responsibilities to give these people this access to the type of information and opportunities that we had that they may Konstantinos Papam

iltiadis not have right now because of all the restrictions that their lifestyle introduced. And so if we manage to get to a point where the technology that we are all working on provide, you know, a, like like I was given as a kid, you know, like I was born and raised in a small town in rural Greece, an opportunity like the one I have right now that I consider to be my privilege, to provide similar opportunities to the next generation of kids, you know, like and our kids and their kids. Konstan

tinos Papamiltiadis Then I think it would be, you know, like a dream that would come with a nice legacy and something that will make me very happy. Elizabeth Valleau I mean, be behavior driving at the same time, which is I always feel like it's an interesting subtext to the things that we decide to invest in in these spaces, which is why it's, you know, it's a privilege to work at a company like Accenture because folks don't tend to come to us for one offs. They want to invest in something that'

s programmatic. Elizabeth Valleau And in that program, then we'll be able to see this evolution of behavior. You know, we're stuck in sort of like the tornado of trying things, but you don't end up with benchmarks and you don't end up with behavior change when you try things once. So something that's super worthy like that would demand for legitimacy, some provenance and some programs, you know. Elizabeth Valleau So I love that. I'm going to let you, I'm going to ask you something. Let you. I'm

going to talk to you and ask you something a little bit more sales-y. So tell us about Playhybrid. We both work at a big companies, people generally know what we do. But tell us a little bit about your company and tell us a little bit about the kind of work that you're really excited to work on. Dominic Bilodeau I guess I started Playhybrid in 2014. We started as a video game company. I left DreamWorks Animation with my partner. We dove into gaming after my time at Ubisoft and I think at first w

e were coming at a time where graphics are kind of shitty on iPhones and we wanted to have film graphics on phones. And I think eventually it circled all the way back around with Universal, where we started taking characters from DreamWorks, getting them on Instagram under 4 mb and Snap, and that was the limit. Dominic Bilodeau And I think it's still the limit. I still I think I'm right now I'm super passionate about the micro formats because I think that's the way that people will be able to ex

change asset and trade 3D assets. And how can we get people to move into the 3D space going beyond taking a pictures with their phone, but just creating 3D on the fly and enabling people to create 3D very easily. Dominic Bilodeau I mean, I feel like now you have to jump in Maya you have to learn software. It's it's hard and it's complicated. Elizabeth Valleau Can I ask you a question? Dominic Bilodeau Yeah. Elizabeth Valleau What would be an example? Use case of why someone would make - create 3

D on the fly? Dominic Bilodeau I remember talking with Chris and then he was like, I was like, Hey, what's hot on Instagram? And they're like, Hey, there's this guy. He scanned the Happy Meal and they made it 3D and they put it on IG and it just blew up. And I'm like, It blows my mind, right? But it was someone that had the power to create something 3D and do something crazy and post it on IG. Dominic Bilodeau Right. And that's what I want to see more. I wanted to be able to, you know, see my pa

rents, grab a phone and create something. Yeah. Elizabeth Valleau So. KP You were talking about this backstage, actually, how sort of empowering the user, the end user to become more involved in the creation process of XR is going to be fundamental to that behavior. Dominic Bilodeau Yeah, I think it's a mix of like creation tools and platform, right? And having a compression that will be able to trade asset, right. James Temple Yeah. You should say the from-to on the X-Wing. So yeah, the idea th

e asset the X-Wing yet like the full size, you got it from-to. Dominic Bilodeau Oh yeah. I mean we're getting files sometimes. I mean, I think we got the tie fighter and I was like, I don't know. I think it was like 250 megs. We got it down to 1.87 megs. We got mini and mini at 650 megs. We got it down to 300 kilobytes. Yeah. Elizabeth Valleau So folks who are not crunching file sizes for a living, what that means is that the investment that you've made in the model is scalable. So if you have m

ade something that's appropriate for for broadcast or for a film that is now usable across e-commerce, across social media platforms, which are extremely restrictive in terms of file sizes and nimble enough potentially to put it into consumer hands, potentially, which is makes the investment have some longer legs. Elizabeth Valleau You know. Dominic Bilodeau I mean, I remember when we did Puffy, we did Puffy at DreamWorks for Trolls 2 got this thing was like six gigs it was insane. We got it on

IG at four megs and I think in organics they had millions of people creating content with it. I was like, Wow. Like organically people were just dancing with Puppy in their living room and posting it and just re using it as it just blew my mind. Dominic Bilodeau The volume of people that it was just literally taken from DreamWorks Pipeline dance animation from them, piping it on IG and then boom, it was just massive. Elizabeth Valleau Yeah, yeah. KP what's your message for brands? Konstantinos P

apamiltiadis I mean, I think the last few years may have been a little bit interesting for most brands, right? Because there have been a lot of hype around certain things, the blockchain or, you know, like crypto being you know or like metaverse and stuff like that. And you're like, oh my God, that's, you know, like Elizabeth Valleau Thats the title of this talk. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis Yeah. What am I supposed to do? And I'm not supposed to swear here, but I would actually say sometimes its

easier than you think to tell what is real value for your business versus what is BS. And you can probably ignore because at the end of the day, you know your business better and you know your customers better and you know what problems you're trying to solve that will make, you know, like your interactions and the engagement, the model that you provide more meaningful for both parties. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis Right. And I think, you know, like the combination of this technology that we're ta

lking about here is probably something that you cannot ignore, but do you need to embrace all three at the same time? I would say start with the most obvious one and then, you know, like build your confidence, build your skills in-house and try to expand so that you can find yourself eventually in that middle of that Venn diagram, to the extent that's applicable for their business nicely and gradually, not like Zambonis, you know, like with, you know, like all your resources in one go and try to

, you know, like compete even internally, you know, like with what technology would actually work best. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis Try with one or two that makes sense and then build on build your understanding of other technologies can be beneficial to you. And then from then on, I'm pretty certain that you're not going to be left behind. I'm pretty certain that you're going to have a future that is brighter than the one you have, right? Elizabeth Valleau Yeah. I mean, or come to Accenture and

we'll do it for you. Yeah. James Temple Yeah. Elizabeth Valleau What about you? James Temple Yeah, I agree. I think that the word metaverse has been problematic, you know, like and I think a lot of technologies have been clustered into that probably unfairly. I think it actually has quite a specific meaning for me, but I think certainly AR has been clumped into that. Elizabeth Valleau What's the meaning? James Temple For me, Metaverse is a digital destination. It's about escapism. You're porting

. Yeah. To to a digital realm effectively. And you see from Horizon Worlds and obviously a lot of gaming titles are referred to as that. But I feel like it's been this sort of, you know, it's, it's in some respects been a category where AR and VR, mixed reality, everything of this sort of, you know, just been lumped in there. James Temple And so it's it's got a lot of skepticism around it. Yeah. Technology is, quite frankly, like mobile. Oh, just people should be skeptical about that. Yeah. Yeah

, it's it's a now technology. It's a super scale technology. So for me, yeah, my, my main, main message to folks would be like there's, there's a lot of these in the world, like a lot of them, and they're incredibly capable and augmented reality is incredibly powerful. James Temple We've seen just how rapid gen AI tools are evolving. So I think that the combination of these two things together, it's there's no reason to pause. Yeah, there's no there's a proving ground to be waited for to embrace

what a phone can do right now. And I'd say, like there's an inevitability to headsets I think Meta's been very honest about it's a phenomenal engineering challenge you're almost creating a secondary pair of eyes just to be honest. James Temple And that's going to take some time. But why not start on the phone? You can still get billions of people, billions of reach. The return investment is right that. Yeah. So I would say like, you know POCs on phones, there's no POC. You can march to producti

on you can get a lot of return that's that's what I think folks should be embracing. Elizabeth Valleau The event horizon is now. The future is actually right now we still say that at middle all the time. They're like, no, no, no, no, it's now. Yeah, but I think that we need a little bit more divergent thinking and longer programmatic approaches to working with these technologies to make sure that we can really prove the actual value of them. Elizabeth Valleau And we've got about 5 minutes, by th

e way, do we have any questions? Audience member Such a great panel. You guys all did such a great job. So thank you. From all of us in the audience, I have a question. It's something I was thinking about. James was saying Dominic Bilodeau something that sparked it to me. But it's it's the transition of. Making. Experiences, be they AR XR VR, a discovery mechanism to another experience or a product. It's the transition of that user behavior to that XR VR. AR thing being that the experience itsel

f. Do you know what I mean? Like any thoughts of how we engender that behavior shift in people? Because I think oftentimes the majority of us still see it as a discovery tool or as a way into one another thing versus the thing. Elizabeth Valleau Well, and also to be perfectly honest, the connective tissue between the AR thing and the thing we're linking to is not it has not always been built seamlessly. Right? And if you have a bad experience getting from an AR retail experience into a commerce

experience, now you might not come back. But more to your point, though, in the in the very complex XR experiences that I've built personally, people come in and look at the thing and they're like, whoa! Elizabeth Valleau And then sometimes don't do the thing that you've set them up to do. So, I mean, I don't know what you guys have out of your thoughts on that, but like AR as destination or AR as tool. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis I mean, as a social media company, we've got to some degree of res

ponsibility of trying to use a format that's very native to ours for the purposes of I guess expanding our inventory of ads. So to put it in a different way, right. You know, like if you're browsing through the Snapchat carousel a video ad wouldn't make sense but you know like an AR that's sponsored by a brand totally makes sense because it's a native format right? Konstantinos Papamiltiadis Whether that leads to an AR experience or something, that's just leveraging the technology because it's c

ool and the brands want to adopt it, it's down to the brand. My preference would be for the brand to try to use a native format for the native experience. But we're not there yet in a way. You know, like maybe this analogy is not perfect, but it may resonate with you. If you want to advertise a new movie, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis you use video trailers to advertise it right? But sometimes we have seen AR effects or lenses being used to advertise it. Right. Okay. If there was an AR element in t

he movie, I think it would go even further. But the reality is that the best of both worlds would use AR both as a distribution channel, but also part of the experience. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis And I'm more committed to the latter part personally because I think that is what we call the 'always on' type of thing. Hi. So my question is, and this is really for Snap, because we do a lot of work with the different platforms. I experience this with video, you know, having sort of an IMF solution f

or asset creation that's interoperable amongst all the platforms is critical for sort of the mass adoption, and you look at video, you look at Pro Res, MPEGs, I mean, everyone's got their own proprietary format and ideally like with 3D, we have GOBs, but we got, you know, there's various formats that we can put out there. Are you really working with the Meta's of the world and the Apple's and trying to create a way to create an IMF solution? Konstantinos Papamiltiadis Well, okay. Doesn't this ga

ve me the fact that, you know, like if you're a creator, that monetizes I think their assets by distribute them to a wider audience. We are making it very hard for them right now because we have a proprietary stack Meta has a proprietary stack TikTok has a proprietary stack, right? But you know, like any sort of attempt to create some sort of standards, most likely it's not going to go all the way because each of us have different, you know, unique capabilities around certain aspects of the tech

nology that may not be universally, you know, like there, right? Konstantinos Papamiltiadis So it's not like a video where it's a it's a format that's, you know, like everybody can distribute anywhere. The way the technology works requires some kind of like proprietary components that may not necessarily be available. So what we have been trying to do is at least try to understand what is the common ground, what is like the minimum denominator. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis That's I think they star

t with just a 3D asset that can be used, but then all of the animation around the asset, all the controls around how the asset behaves may be still proprietary within its platform, but hopefully that still reduces significantly the cost with without necessarily taking away anything from the platform because the worst thing that can happen, Konstantinos Papamiltiadis sorry if I'm giving you a very long answer, is that the platform that has the least amount of capabilities is the one that most cre

ators will end up defaulting. And then us having the superior, you know, like a visualization engine for the 3D asset will be at fault because, you know, like the creator will do just what works for TikTok, for example, and not respect, you know, like the superiority of our platform. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis And that's not good. Elizabeth Valleau I think just I think that we're out of time, actually, folks. Sorry, sorry for folks who are not obsessed with file types like we are on a very insid

e track. But thank you so much to my panelists, thank you to Dom, thank you to KP, thank you to James. Thank you to me. Konstantinos Papamiltiadis Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.