Hopefully this is working properly. We'll start straight off so that we can keep to time. Welcome to the first lots of streamed sessions for NDF 2017. My name's Michael Perry. I'm chairing this session. Today, this afternoon, we have two presentations. First up, we have a longer panel discussion on AV and virtual reality, which will be going over about 50 minutes. So it's a bit of an extra long one, followed by a session from Greg Rolston on digital transformation. I believe it was. He turns up. So this is a panel discussion on AV and VR. The panel members, we have Kailin Huntress from Stella Platforms on the end here. In the middle, we have Niles Pockel from the Auckland War Memorial Museum, who, as I see from Twitter this morning, moving to Nelson. So going to Nelson, going from Auckland War Museum to Nelson. So that's going to be a change in climate for you. And Christopher Petrie from UIT. So I'm going to pass it over to these gentlemen to introduce themselves and talk a little bit about what brought them to AV and VR and what interests them. When they finish that, we've got some questions and things to discuss, and then we'll open up to the floor for questions. So I'll start off by passing it to Chris. Thank you very much, Michael. So I come to AR and VR from a variety of perspectives. First and foremost, I've got a start-up called Insight VR, and we are building high-risk training scenarios for high-risk environments, say, like for firefighters or for industry training, basically. So I think VR in particular offers that affordability to be able to experience really high-risk situations without the risk of being seriously hurt. The second part that I'm really interested in, in particular, it kind of encompasses everything as teaching and learning. So I'm also a teacher and I've been in classrooms where we're building VR and AR environments using the Unity platform, which some of you probably know. So those are the two main areas that I am interested in in VR and AR. So I think that's probably me. Kia ora koutou. My name is Niels. Thank you for the introduction. So I'm the Digital Experience Manager at the Auckland Museum. I still am the Digital Experience Manager at the Auckland Museum. And we have had various attempts in AR and VR in the past, a bit of dabbling in mixed reality as well, using HoloLens, which was initially going to be my talk today, but then was collated in this panel. And we've learned quite a few things on the way of the kind of stuff that works, kind of stuff that doesn't really work that well in a high-traffic environment, just visitors trying to hammer the hardware as hard as they can. And I'm at a point where I'm starting to wonder, what does that actually mean when we think about planning future museum experiences? If we think about permanent galleries, what's the implication of mainstream augmented reality, mainstream VR? What are the sort of expectations from the visitors and how do we need to plan for that? Do we want to actually, spatially manifest if we want to create VR bubbles in the gallery space? Or do we worry about objects labels, because everyone's going to have MR overlays in their wearable lenses in five years? What does that actually mean? And I'm really looking forward to discussing that with the yourselves and the panel, to see if there are maybe some inklings of an answer to that question, who knows? And maybe also get a better understanding of whether that need is maybe just a fact or a lot. Maybe we shouldn't be bothering in the first place, maybe we should just stick to our guns and we're better off that way. So, yeah, looking forward to really good discussion. Thank you. Hello, my name is Kailin Huntras and I'm the Creative Director of Stellar Platforms, which is a digital marketing company. And I help people sell stuff online and help identify product-market fit between products and consumers. And I was involved with a couple of prototype VR applications that were... In order to discover where do we find this fit? And Steve Raymond, who's the CEO of a New Zealand-based VR company, I think the ADI, he said, VR hasn't found product-market fit yet. And I find this to be one of the most interesting problems with VR because the technology is fantastic. The things that we can do with the technology are really impressive. But getting it into the hands of users and achieving that mass adoption, whoever does that is going to... We know that there's going to be a lot of activity. The activity that we see in VR right now is people improving the technology and trying to figure out, where's that fit? And one of my earlier attempts to find that fit was documenting the Oregon Trail. And the Oregon Trail has a place of nostalgia with people of my generation in America because when public computers hit the public school system, they all shipped with this one game made by Broderbund called the Oregon Trail. And it taught you the history of these covered wagons that went from the Mississippi River in the center of the North American continent out west. And this was how the western half of America was populated in the mid-1800s. And so I worked with a group of people who got some funding from the Oregon Historical Society to document the Oregon Trail with immersive panoramas. And so we would take 360 panorama. We would get historical actors to enter the frame and talk about what was there. We'd link the panoramas together. And it was really interesting technology. But we couldn't find a fit so that it worked well for the school kids who could be going through an immersive experience on the Oregon Trail or for the on-site applications where on-site you'd be at a historical location where something of significance happened in Oregon history. But how do you access it on a tablet when there's no Wi-Fi, no internet connection and actually get into that panorama? So we spent some time finding out where are the limitations of this technology. And now the technology is continuing to advance. We're catching up to that point where somebody's going to find that mix where the technology, the story, and the user all align and this could get really big, really fast. And so I find this to be a really exciting time because nobody really knows when that is or how it's going to happen. And it's through conversations like this that somebody's going to uncover that idea. No one else is taking notes already. So we've got a series of questions that we've sort of pre-gone through that we'll start to move through, but feel free to interject at any time and pose questions to the panel. I'm sure that they would like that, especially if something comes up with a particular interest or particularly you want to know about. But the first thing we'll start off with is if you could give us a couple of things that you think are unique promises or unique benefits to AR and VR and what potential, you sort of covered a bit of it, and what you might think are the most obvious negatives or almost obvious disadvantages. So we'll start off in that way. Do we just kind of get a sense of the room? Do we need to provide any definitions of what that stuff is in the Christmas? Do we all know what AR, VR and AR stands for? Yeah? Cool. Thank you. Nostalgia. Nostalgia? Cool. So I'm very much a believer that this is the new platform that's going to inevitably, eventually, we don't know when, is going to take over our rectangular screens of that limited sphere. So I think a good way of putting it, as someone mentioned to me the other week, was it's kind of like you're stepping into computational space. And the cool thing about programming and the digital environment is there are no rules. There are no kind of limitations on physics and even if a square is the same dimensions as what it could be in real life. So I think in terms of what I've seen, we're only starting to scratch the very, very tip of that surface in terms of what could be a potential. And within that, I think one of the biggest gaps in terms of VR and AR at the moment is the level of interaction. So most of the experiences that I've seen have been just observational and they're quite short. And it tends to be a little bit gimmicky. So one of the questions I'm constantly asking as an educator is, what is the real teaching and learning value in this? What is the pedagogical impact of this? Beyond just presence, or beyond just being able to experience this, like being able to go to ancient Rome or whatever. So for me, that's when you start to interact with the environment. You can push objects around. You can see what happens when you try something. And going deeper into that, there's this idea of embodied cognition, which I'm just really, really super excited about once we start to break that barrier with the likes of Motion Leap, which some of you may have seen where you can actually track your hand movements and then interact with different objects and bounce them around and that kind of thing. So that's where it's super interesting from the perspective of an educator because then you can start to track your movements and you can start looking at the kinds of experiences that are highly valued in a teaching and learning environment rather than just this kind of observational experience of going, oh well, you don't really feel like you've been to ancient Rome to see the Eiffel Tower or whatever. To me, that's kind of a surface level and we're only just kind of going on those edges. But once we start to uncover those layers and start to dig a little bit deeper, particularly in terms of interacting with the environment and to start measuring those interactions, I think that's when things are going to get really, really interesting. And for me, I think where that's going to happen, where that innovation is going to happen, is going to be in universities and schools for educational purposes and also industry training. So that obviously has really huge implications for the glam sector as well. I think that's probably enough for me. I think I would add museums to that naturally and one of the things that most excites me about it is the ability to provide additional layering and contextualization of objects. Actually, a really unique form to provide storytelling mechanisms that are object-centric with augmented reality. So I could have an object and I could attach pointers to it that talk to specific features of the object or I could overlay the flesh and bones, the flesh on top of the bones of the dinosaurs to show what they look like or might have looked like when they were still roaming the earth. That sort of idea of bringing objects to life in a digital way that's not textural but is really taking into account the physicalities of the object is really interesting. So from my perspective, I'm probably more interested in the augmented and mixed reality side of it rather than the VR side of it where we've done quite a few experiments with VR and I think it is a very, very powerful storytelling tool but I'm thinking of public environments and most case, theme parks aside maybe it didn't really seem to do the right things for us yet but I'm very excited about the ability of creating a richer visitor experience using that sort of tech. That to me is one of those risks once you get over that fact that you're introducing technology layer that you force people to look through stuff through their screens and you're actually severing them from the physical special experience that they come to in the museum. You're actually introducing an artificial element that might be detrimental to the experience which kind of goes hand in hand with the fact that we're also introducing a digital divide for those people who don't have the abilities to interact with that stuff or who don't have the means, don't have the devices to do it so that's something that we also that I've learned that we have to be very mindful of because if you're setting that expectation it's this amazing content and you're going to have to look great at the time of your life if you manage to get in and if you have the skills and the gear to do it and we've learned painfully that if you create that proposition and then visitors can't do it for whatever reason they're really really frustrated and pissed off and it's a really bad experience for them so it's a balancing act really and then this idea of once this is ubiquitous and we have a no I always get that wrong ubiquitous, ubiquitous, sorry, second language so you'd have the wall plastered with AR content and wherever we go there's AR goboards that respond to our personalized preferences and so on will we be just adding to the noise or not? Yeah, so that to me is one of the risks that are inherent with that if it becomes this big thing that is just everywhere how long will it take for people to just zone out and it's just like ads that you don't see when you're browsing online? Yeah So one of the biggest limitations I see to VR to build on what Nels was saying is that the piece of hardware that you're using to interact with the virtual reality becomes the fourth wall and the fourth wall is a theatrical term where if the three of us are sitting up here and we're doing a stage play and we're talking to each other and ignoring you there are three walls around us and this invisible fourth wall that the audience agrees and the performers agree is there so that we can have our performance and have this whole world and you're watching the world through this fourth wall with virtual reality the hardware that you're using becomes that fourth wall and the effectiveness of a performance is usually based on how well that fourth wall is erected and maintained throughout the length of the performance Well right now we're in the early stages of VR technology when you think a century down the line how this is going to evolve they're going to look at this big headgear and think that we were so dumb in these big goggles and the goggles are fantastic they could do for us now but they only handle sight and so we have one sense that's completely immersive you can introduce sound as well but how well the user gets immersed into the experience is limited by how well they can integrate with the hardware and forget that they're not in the physical world and so that fourth wall question is becoming something that only hardware can really answer I understand though what you said earlier on about the technology not quite coming of age yet finding its market niche resonated with me and I truly believe that that will happen before too long but the main market the main driver of most market growth in tech is uptake in the United States and that's where the craches let's call it for most new technology how are the impending this impending rush towards the abandonment of net neutrality and the potential for internet speeds to be actually quite seriously choked off for that entire emerging market going to affect this outbreak does it have the potential to sort of smother the baby in its crib I imagine this technology is going to succeed largely based on decent interconnectivity speeds decent interactivity with a server miles and miles and miles away when those speeds are choked off and that service starts to stutter and buffer and become not in any way seamless is that going to sort of smother the baby in the crib are we going to be looking back in 20 years and thinking what might have been with alternate reality and VR let's assume your proposition that the net is throttled and that we don't have ubiquitous internet connection speeds for everybody then VR would be limited to the hardware that's already downloaded the application it's not something that any of us would be able to load independently on our devices it would be something that in a VR headset that had already downloaded everything then you could use it there but we would lose the ability to load it on our own devices it's important to differentiate between those things that are networked I guess social experiences which are in a very different nature than those ones similar to gaming where you have your own sandbox that's just localized that's kind of where I see the big expansion of the big mushroom I can't imagine it would affect your interactive experience at the museum which is running on a local server and probably being over the local Wi-Fi oh sorry probably distributed over the local Wi-Fi what I see it inhibiting is online gaming people using it in social media format and with slower internet speeds and choked off internet speeds that's where I see the baby sort of having a failure to thrive if you like yeah, could be I'm not sure it feels like of course if internet connectivity becomes an issue that will stifle it but I'm not sure if I would see that to be the biggest risk what do you think about that just passing on the door here because yeah, I mean it's a definitely a neutrality as a worry but there's massive market drive to get this technology working, you know, Facebook or an Oculus I don't know how much magic leap is worth now but you see them in the news it's just ridiculous like how much money has been poured into this stuff and so there's there's huge huge drive to enable this technology yeah, how that gets affected by neutrality I'm not too sure but I'm pretty sure that companies want to make a lot of money out of it so if it becomes possible well, yeah, I don't think they'll open up as opposed to shutting down I think we're talking about internet connectivity and all that and the amount of money organizations will want to try and make out of this how much is this going to limit this technology just to the western world where all your developing countries are still struggling with some ridiculous prices like $50 a megabit bandwidth in Africa how's understanding all this yeah, I think so unfortunately yeah developing nations I think would be a huge factor in that respect in terms of limiting the technology do you guys have any thoughts? yeah well I think part of probably the biggest issue is that we have, or particularly the headsets if we're talking about headsets but yeah and I think even the smartphone and the iPad augmented reality style thing is still relatively new I think people are still trying to figure it out in terms of what works and what doesn't work do you guys have any thoughts? so, thinking about the possibility of a throttled internet or looking at the reality of lower connection speeds in developing countries the market could discover unexpected advantages to solve these problems and one of the example that's coming to my mind is Minecraft Minecraft can create an immense immersive world because of the simplicity of its graphics so a lot of times when we talk about AR requiring such high bandwidth to load anything it's because we're assuming that there's these extremely high resolution photos that we are capable of taking and that we use the highest resolution possible in order to create this immersive experience we may find that five years down the road a low-bit solution for an immersive virtual reality might be the more ubiquitous solution that more people can take advantage of okay so I do have a question but before I ask it I'm just conscious that we've been hearing from a bunch of blocs and I'm another bloc is there someone who's not a bloc who'd like to contribute to the conversation at that point because I'd rather that happen than I ask my question okay so picking up from the first round of conversation there's concern in the media about fake news and we might have a parallel perhaps deeper concern about fake views the possibilities of AR and VR might make us think about how when something's in a gallery or a museum it's a mediated experience and Ryan you were talking about the potential for totally new physics of interaction and if you've got totally new physics and it's a designed mediated experience what's the responsibility to ensure you're not delivering damaging kinds of fake views huge responsibility I think I mean I guess as museums that's something that was struggling would challenge with in all the Mahi that we do right it's if you break it down to the mere fact that it's just another way of storytelling mind you all be a way of intense personalized storytelling or empathic storytelling if you like it still comes down to us taking the responsibility to be as objective and considered as possible so I wouldn't tie that back to the actual medium itself I mean as museum speaking as a museum I would think that is our responsibility anyway it's not necessarily related to a medium I think there might be some possibilities in the medium so for example how could you represent uncertainty in a VR or AR environment because we don't have all the facts sometimes that's quite apparent from the way a museum will present an exhibit is there room for innovation to represent uncertainty about what the full story is in new ways I'd say yes but it's on charter territory but I think so yes there should be it doesn't need to be hyper real there needs to be room for ambiguity and that sort of grey area so I think that's a very interesting thought as to how you would how you would facilitate that so I wouldn't have an answer to that there needs to be that sort of that sort of discussion around how we actually do that yeah just I don't know I got related I think partly relate to that idea is we don't know what the long term effects of using this technology are health and safety is kind of a huge question mark I've probably heard that you get motion sickness from some of the older experiences having this screen this close to your face for long periods of time I'm not too sure about that and yeah picking up on the diversity and gender issue is a huge huge issue I think especially when you're starting to get people to socially interact in these worlds and they're actually playing like a second life kind of type game yeah it's one of those longer you imagine perhaps not now but 15 to 20 years time when all of this technology is being made and developed by a lot of what will be white males what kind of what kind of voices are getting missed out of in that spectrum so that is a huge concern with this with a lot of the disruptive technologies I think actually I have a question on that one for the panel in this they're broadening that out into a more ethics and ethics in the AR and VR when Google first came out with its google glasses vision wandering around with glasses there was a bit of a backlash against the possibility for about invasion of privacy you never know if someone's recording you when they're just looking at you with your glasses now with the way that the technology is improving and getting smaller soon we won't be able to tell even from a visual clue whether somebody's wearing a VR or AR set on their faces and I'm sure that's going to bring lots of things where you can wonder it's going to lead to that vision where you walk down the street and ads pop out in front of your glasses that no one else can see but there is ethical philosophical questions around that around invasions of privacies about what people can overlay on other people and what rights people have do you guys have any thoughts about that broader philosophical and ethical use of AR and AR technologies yeah absolutely I think probably some of people have watched Black Mirror and I think it's I can't remember what episode it is but there's an episode where there's a woman who rates all her social interactions and you have to get up to a certain rating it's just ridiculous but I think that really articulates some of the ethical issues I can't remember what does anyone know what episode it is third series I think it's maybe the first or second one but yeah it's a great dystopian viewpoint of that idea sorry I was just yeah I think there is a responsibility in the types of content that we create and that's something that we can already control now in those experience that we do put on the floor in our example you know in our instance so if we create a VR experience or an AR experience we need to be mindful that it's not too jarring say if I have a VR headset in the galleries and I expect visitors to put that on I need to make sure that I transition them into the experience and just block them out and drop them out of space and then they'll have they're disoriented they don't know where they are they get some sickness and they don't feel like it's a good experience so there's definitely things that already we can we can do that that help create pleasant respectful experiences and that sort of you know can translate into a code of AR ethics or whatever if that's kind of what we're getting to at some point that speaks to how we actually engage with AR augmented with augmented people there's definitely a set of rules that will be developing I guess as to how that engagement needs to work to be pleasant and not jarring and off-putting so I have a prediction that because we don't know what these ethical rules are in order for us to define what they are we're going to discover what they are when they're broken there are going to be people that break these unwritten rules that some of us will be thinking as we develop these kinds of experiences well we really shouldn't be too pushy there's going to be somebody who doesn't even think that way and is going to go too far and that will give us the story for us to define where the boundary is and until somebody can verbalize where that boundary is there's going to be somebody who pushes too far because they don't know that the boundary is there none of us know I'm a digital marketer and so I follow a lot of sales people and sales trainers and people selling stuff online and they have two considerations is what's effective what's going to make somebody upset and if something doesn't make anybody upset and it's effective great but if you don't know if it makes somebody upset but you know it's effective you still push as hard as you can until you get that push and so I think what we're going to see is a couple of really clear examples of somebody who has gone too far that story is going to get shared around on social media and all of us as civilians outside of the problem we're going to look at that and say well yeah that's not right because this and this and this and then all of a sudden we'll develop that cultural lexicon for what is appropriate and what isn't appropriate but we won't know until somebody breaks those unwritten rules I'm a money zone criminal I'm sorry just just going on that what you said right now so we're basically going to be blundering into these things to discover them is there any danger of that actually killing the VR industry I mean you know if we go too far I can't think of an instance where it would deflate the excitement and funding that's already pushing this movement forward so I I'd posit no as my answer sure if immersive virtual reality experiences caused widespread seizures in people and there was an unexpected medical component that would put the user at risk I could see that deflating sorry just one last question before I get going just going by how fast technology has been evolving these past few years do you think we'll ever reach that ideal level of VR because right now locomotion is just I'm talking about like open world games so you can't move around so you'd have to teleport so do you think we'll ever get to that point where we just jack into something and that's it we're in VR world I feel that the hardware is really the answer to that that as long as there's a piece of hardware between us we have to continually pretend that we're in this world but once we can jack in to the point where we are the hardware then I think it will be completely immersive do you think that will actually happen then Moore's Law anybody want to make a calculation we've seen people totally buy it like they're totally in here they're shocked when they take it off they're totally buying it so it's okay it's too early to tell with any kind of degree of accuracy with a question like that particularly because there's a lot of promises that AI will solve all our problems in terms of creating all these environments so we don't have to create every little blade of grass ourselves and all that kind of thing and there's a lot of technologies which you know for instance like shoot laser beams or whatever into your retina so you don't have to wear goggles and you know there's all sort and haptic suits which make you feel like you know the impact of crashing into something all that kind of thing I don't think it'll um I think it's too early to tell but I'm highly skeptical of the idea that you'll get to the point where that it's just seamless and it's perhaps more of a biomedical question which I don't have no expectation maybe it's more a dream state where you're in a stasis and you experience it as being a real a real experience even though that's your matrix version basically you're suspended in a in a solution, in a salt floating tank or something and you're having an experience if it was the reality but it actually and it kind of just does away with the physicalities of it and overcoming those physical challenges of interact just the simulation is real enough for your brain to be perceived as as real so I think that's probably also a you know very nice scenario but definitely a possible one Just going back to the the concept of ethics and things like that I think there is a huge barrier with VR and AR because it does cover your eyes and so much of evolution the way that we interpret one another is through the subtle the subtle interactions between our eyes and I think the mainstream adoption there's a huge barrier to get through with in regards to that I think people have a long way to go in terms of their acceptance of that idea of covering your eyes and for it to be socially acceptable you imagine someone wearing a mask and you know taking the bus to work or something like that it would be pretty weird so I think it's different like I think Forbes predicted that VR and AR would be 125 billion market by the year 2025 and I think that was based on smartphone adoption so I just don't really see that happening because of some of these barriers and a lot of different limitations that it has but yeah I'm aware that we've sort of gone on to a very dystopian sort of gone to the negative AV and AVR so maybe we should try and turn it back to some of the more positive since I think we're keen on AR and VR so could you give us an example of where you see AR, VR being done right now which is a really good example of something that's done well and done right I might just think about that one for a sec again speaking from a museum perspective and speaking about augmented reality I think that one of the things that I've seen that I really like is the flesh and bones that the American Museum of Natural History have released where visitors can look at a display case with dinosaur bones in it and they point their iPad at it and it shows what the animal looked like and it's as simple as that it's not much to it and they can see the layers and see what it looked like under the skin what the muscle system looked like what the nervous system looked like how it all how the blood's pulsing through it and there's various sort of iterations of that idea that it's been floating around that I really like this the one that's been funded by the Google Cultural Institute I don't know if you've seen that the the giraffe a titan it doesn't ring a bell it's a German museum and they have this big dinosaur hall and it's a similar sort of deal you look at the you slip on a VR headset and you are in that dinosaur hall as you see it that's what I mean by providing a transition from the physical space into the VR experience so you slip on the thing and you're in exactly the same space minus the people who are with you in the space obviously you can model those and you're looking at the dinosaur and then the dinosaur you know grows flesh and then starts to animate and come down and look at you and go you know and and then plants grow around it and then starts eating the plant so all of a sudden you know this whole thing comes to life you're just seeing the bones and all of a sudden you know you've learned about what it eats where it lives, how it moved so there's a lot of learning that you can package up like that without actually disrupting your physical you know without severing you from your physical presence and I think that's a really beautiful example of how that can work in a museum context so the best example I can think of of where augmented reality is doing well is with IKEA they have an app where you can go down at the corner and select a couch see what it looks like there and you can scroll and select a different couch and if you like it you buy it and then they send you that couch hands up those people who have experienced tilt brush and those applications so I feel that is one of the huge areas that's the applications that I have the most fun and the most interesting particularly when you're involved other people creative experiences inside VR and AR is where it's at for me there's so much potential there with you know just inventing just the wildest worlds of your imagination and also the playful ones so I think Facebook have a few demos of you being able to play just having a bunch of objects in a space to be able to play with someone within that space so like it has a table tennis racket and a ball where you can play table tennis for a little bit and then you can do something else there's all sorts of little fun interesting creative activities that I think has huge benefits for a huge range of applications that's what I'm really excited about with VR and AR you've mentioned medical training and hazardous environment training I think that's also a really good example for a really effective use of VR I wonder if there's I guess not medical training but medical treatment scenarios for VR as well because I know it's been used for it's been used for got what's the word patients with fears you know do you know anything about that? yes so I know it's been an effective treatment for phantom limb syndrome where accident victims experience like a limb that they have and some I don't understand it completely but some experience that internal pain so there's a certain trick to be able to do that and it's really effectively overcome with VR so that's a really huge application particularly in psychology simply things like public speaking there's a lot of research really interesting research already being conducted in that sphere so that's really exciting in terms of being able to do huge implications for that do you guys have any I have a little question it's sort of a question of observation I'm going back to the AR experience in a gallery exhibition setting has anyone seen we've kind of got hung up on using our phones and our rectangular iPads has anyone seen using AR with not rectangle flat box maybe a microscope or a magnifying glass type thing that you can run over the space something that's more interactive and human centered and more attractive yeah I haven't personally I mean that's something that we've been trying a lot to kind of take that device layer out also because we know that as soon as visitors realize it's a device for sure kids gonna try and break it and they do so if they don't realize that it is an iPad but it's just a window basically then then they won't break it and they have it they focus more on the actual experience that we're trying to get across so one of the things that we did is we took an iPad and mounted it in a way that you couldn't interact with it you just looked at something under it through the camera of the iPad and then you would interact with the thing under it so it was a tangible kinetic experience you had a little block and that block was augmented it had a rock on it you know there would be a hold fast of an algae growing on it which you wouldn't see if you were just looking at the block but you could basically take that stone and turn around the stone and interact with the stone which everybody's immediately intuitively capable of doing there's no learning if you pick up a stone and you look at it only that you look at it through the screen and then the stone becomes an augmented thing and you learn things how the plant attaches to the stone what sort of organisms live under it and that sort of stuff so that was one way, I mean it still had that sort of that screen barrier that fourth wall, I really like that that you put between the visitors but at least you we managed to get around the fact that they noticed necessarily that there was one because the rest was so intuitive and easy to interact with but then other than that the closest that I've come is with the HoloLens where it actually recognizes the spatial makeup of the room that you're in and the furniture that you're in so you can place a virtual object on a physical one and it will interact with it so if I place a ball in that chair and pull away the chair, the ball falls down and it doesn't take long for me to forget about the device that I'm wearing because it's just sitting there on my head, there's no cable, there's no mouse or interfaces I just interact with the actual, interact with reality for a change and that changes the digital experience that I'm seeing but it's also fair to say that in my opinion it's the first generation device and it's we're still a bit away from it but not for much longer I'll give it a couple of years yeah, oh I didn't know that no interesting, well the technology was really compelling funny I didn't know that some homework to do it's probably worth mentioning that VR in particular has been around since the 60s and so it's already been through a couple of VR winters I'm not sure about AR but I imagine it's kind of the same kind of deal where these technologies they come in and out and I think I feel like a lot of the hype in the last since the first DK1 of the Oculus Rift has been a little bit overblown so I think we're but there's a kind of stage there where I think it's becoming feasible to at least get to that initial level I think so long as we have rectangular screens as our personal interaction device that's going to be one of the primary mediums of VR but some of the advances in screen technology include bendable screens and once we get to the point where a screen can bend and we can do things like bend them into a sphere so that you could have a helmet we could get a truly immersive experience but the technology is on the way there we just haven't gotten there yet I think we've got time for one more question anybody got a last question I think we should probably finish up with maybe getting you guys to give us one takeaway one thing that you'd really like people to focus on about AV and VR before we round up if that's alright on the spot one thing to focus on I might try and think in the next well I think my advice would be to if you haven't already is to experience with it and see if it does things for you depending on what you want to get out of it at the least have a crack playing Pokemon or creating your own AR it's a very simple thing to do it's not that there is a big technology learning curve anymore there's existing platforms that you can just use and put a 3D model and see what it looks like in AR and see what it feels like build an experience that allows you to have an opinion I guess and just work with it because we're all kind of part of the journey of exploring where this could take us and in addition to experiencing the technology and having an opinion about it my advice would be to be forgiving in your opinions about it this is in toddler stage this technology and so I also encourage you to go out and try things that are in VR and AR but remember that we're trying to figure it out nobody's found the magic formula yet so as you're experiencing it if you have that user friction where you're dissatisfied with the experience make a note of it but don't let it deter you from the technology in the future it's because we're in that toddler stage that that friction is actually what we need to identify what's going to be overcome in the next generations of this technology we've got an idea so I think there was a demo of tilt brush just around the corner so for those people who haven't tried it I think you should give it a go and experience what it's like to create a 3D sculpture in space I find it really heaps of fun and I think there's huge potential for that idea of creativity to be enabled and to Papa's stand in Oceana thank you very much if you could join me in thanking the panellists for that very interesting panel


With information technology we've gone from a world that was private by default to a world that is public by default. In a pre-digital world our lives were primarily private by default, by the fact that most of our communications were not mediated by tools of mass communications, that our conversations were bounded by the physical location and thus it took extra resources and effort to publish publicly. Now it takes extra effort to make things private. This massive amount of data that is being generated by people can of course be used for beneficial outcomes or for detrimental outcomes. This social data can be used by researchers to understand society better. It can be used for beneficial security reasons. It can be used to enhance public services. But there are growing concerns that our data is or might be used against us in a multiplicity of ways. Today our platform societies are engaged in a dubious and questionable relationship with their IT platform providers. If the interests of the platforms that control this data were always aligned with the interests of the user then there would be no great concern but the issue arises when the two are misaligned, which often happens given that these platforms are private organisations. Individual people give over their information willing me to online platforms in exchange for the services they provide but few fully appreciate the negative externalities of this when taken on aggregate. The ubiquity and complexity of surveillance are very difficult for people to grasp. For example one of the largest data brokers, Axiom, claims to have 1,500 pieces of information on 200 million Americans while the company Hunt says that it can predict people's consumer preference from just 5 data points about them. Our private information is being traded all around us and ever more sophisticated technology is being used to predict and alter our behaviour without even knowing it. As we become more digitalised we start to leave an endless trail of data dust behind us that is hoovered up by companies and used to predict and alter our every next step. With the next generation of technologies, the internet of things, advances in big data storage, advanced analytics and smart systems this data economy will greatly expand and so too will the predictive capacities of these organisations creating a significant imbalance of power. The first question though is why should we care about privacy at all? Social systems always engender a complex dynamic between the group and the individual, between the public and the private. Functioning social systems require diversity of individuals that are able to come together, find commonality and coordinate both differentiation of individual and commonality of the whole that are required. Individuality and diversity require subjectivity that is inherently private, it has to be developed autonomously. This requires individual space and privacy to develop ways of being that others may not like or may not be aligned with the group. Social dynamics emerge out of the interaction between the private and the public. It's an inherent part of how social systems evolve through individuals developing new solutions in private to overthrow the commonly accepted norms. This is how we got rid of slavery and achieve women's rights. When these movements were started the society of the time would have rejected them if they had not had the private space to be incubated. Without that privacy there would be no incubation of new solutions, limited diversity and societies would become stagnant. The same is true today, for gay marriage in marijuana, they're currently in the process of being legalised around the worlds we would never have got there in a world of perfect information and complete surveillance. Frank Riga of the Chaos Computer Club states it clearly when he says if you have your privacy guaranteed, technically or politically, then you can come up with political dissent, ways to change the world. When you don't have privacy, when the things you do are completely transparent, knowable and predictable, then you cease at that point. People name places where they can be free from the judgement of others in order to develop underdeveloped subjective dimensions themselves, to develop into new people or for societies to develop into new societies. Privacy is a space where creativity, exploration and dissent can thrive. What we do away with privacy, we limit those valuable resources required to sustain a society. A measure of how well a society is doing is not how well it treats its favoured, compliant and obedient citizens, but how well it treats its dissenters and rebels. Mass surveillance dampens our freedom in all sorts of systemic ways that are largely unnoticed. It removes many behavioural choices without us even really being aware that they've been excluded from our options. There's plenty of research to corroborate the fact that when people are in a public setting where their behaviour is being observed or they know that they might be watched in some way by others, the behaviour they undertake is greatly more conformist and compliance. Human shame is a very powerful motivator shaping behaviour towards conformity. When people are being watched, people make decisions that are not necessarily of their own innate agency and are in fact the expression more of the will of others and their society's orthodox. Surveillance creates a conceptual set of constraints and conformity. The idea that government regulation is somehow going to solve the privacy equation is somewhat naive given the current context. It's important to appreciate that the power of the technological process of change that's underway fire out strips are existing institutional capacities to deal with it. Professor Josy Van Dicht of Amsterdam University notes this when she says What's at stake here is not one platform or one thing, it's the credibility of the system in which commercial and state public interests are becoming increasingly intertwined and very hard to discern. The core of the problem of the paradox is that public values are no longer rooted in public institutions. Deinstitutionalization, deregulation, globalization have really caused the erosion of what public value is all about. I think and I regret that public institutions are alarmingly underprepared for the questions raised by this global information influx. If you're serious about finding solutions to such issues as privacy then you really need to be working with the technology and not against it. There is clearly a shift that needs to take place in data ownership and privacy for the platform economy to arrive at a more sustainable model. The current model where data becomes public, the property of private organizations and stored in centralized data centers by default needs to change to one where it becomes the property of the individual and is public to the extent that it needs to be public, thus reducing risk and negative externalities. The blockchain can and probably will play a central role in this. The next round of internet applications built on the blockchain can enable the creation of distributed social platforms without centralized management where data is secure and owned by the user with it then being up to them as to when and how they share that data. The blockchain actually gives us the technological means to build platforms that would take us to a much more sustainable data future. The algorithmic regulation in the form that is currently emerging in contemporary modern democracies seems to be providing a one-way mirror that allows institutions to look down to survey those below, but those below have no real prospect of peering into let alone understanding and challenging these algorithmic black boxes that increasingly regulate our lives, but it doesn't necessarily have to be like this. As Kevin Kelly of Wired Magazine says, our central choice now is whether this surveillance is a secret one-way panoptagon or a mutual, transparent kind of covalence that involves watching the watcher. Through open source software and blockchain technology, we can shift this balance of data power from centralized institutions to individuals to build systems that put data in the hands of people make it secure and only accessible under their consent. We can now build systems that have a two-way transparency and accountability to them.


Wyoming is a mostly arid state, but many of our communities are actually built in low-lying areas adjacent to rivers and streams, known as floodplains. Floodplains are a natural part of a river structure, and during high flows, such as spring runoff, rivers will exceed the normal channel capacity and flow across the surrounding land, the floodplain. People have built in and near floodplains throughout history. In the past, rivers were important corridors for transportation and trade. Because they receive periodic high flows that often carry lots of sediment, floodplains have excellent soils and agriculture thrives in floodplains. In order to accommodate human uses, floodplains are some of the most altered ecosystems in Wyoming. The natural processes that make floodplains valuable to humans, attractive to wildlife, and highly productive also make them hard to manage. Channelizing streams and draining wetlands in the floodplain make these areas easier to develop, but many of the benefits such as soil formation are lost without periodic flooding. People living in floodplains should understand that no matter how these areas have been altered, they will still flood at some point in the future. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, provides maps and resources for people living in floodplains. Your local extension office has additional resources to help you understand floodplains and also to assist with disaster management during floods. For the University of Wyoming Extension, I'm Milton Geiger, Exploring the Nature of Wyoming.


Everybody forced here ripping an eight-box baseball mixer for Tom C. Tom has a 2023 a leaf exotic 2022 leave Trinity Rester 2023 is bowman chrome baseball hobby bowman chrome baseball mega Gilded tier one bowman sterling and Cosmic chrome those are all from 23 the only 22 is the Trinity everything else is 23 Good luck. Tom. Let's get started work the leaf box first and then we'll kind of just Have at it, right? All right, here we go do exotic baseball first First up is a Gavin cross auto out of three of eight Cross number to eight James triantos here on another auto. It's gator three of four and a Tony LaRusa Tony LaRusa auto one of one That's pretty sweet That's pretty sweet at 22 Trinity now a redemption for Dylan Lesko Dylan Lesko Steel signature here no wave on that's that's the start of us.  I said on the God Gabriel or Hughes Sick patch auto here to 50 awesome patch on this one and a Juan Soto auto 5 out of 7 Trinity box Juan Soto auto 5 of 7 Who the mega now? Yeah, Von I stand corrected immediately. You're right. That's my That's how naive I was Sean's gonna go find some more ice cream.  Do know here's the pack we're looking for that each of Valdez Pena house Arroyo Melton, there's a well-being Francisca Followed by a fuchsia blaze Jordan. That's out of 199 Spencer Jones and Gabriel Gonzalez There's a decent box Let's see some heat out of Bowman Chrome now the hobby box Looking up juicers online. Yeah, they are expensive good ones are yeah Dude, I need to get I need to get a food processor to not a job I'm not gonna get a juicer. I never do it And they just trying to make daiquiris or something. I'm talking about juicers juicer Hey, dude, he goes he googled out. He googled. I'll try to read guys Yeah, you're trying to try to make it to the big leagues Bleu refractor here is Shohei Ohtani Ice cream 150 or 15 of 150 aureus Pull a freaking monster in one of these boxes for Tom Here it is healthy. He's drinking the hard do yeah, that's real good for you refractor first auto Anderson de los Santos the 499 Solid hit there you Andrew Vargas base Orange of Rokey Sasaki 13 of 25 WBC flag Tom that's sick man Gonna be a big free agent in like a year or two Rokey Sasaki orange to 25 big-time WBC flag card Super super sought after That's going into a mag Brady did it once Cush on a moss Go Interfractor is Yasser Mercedes in 99 first woman auto Peyton Williams and Shimmer of Junisak Shim All right pretty good box there with that the orange Sasaki. Let's do the cosmic now Stop Candler 27 that's pretty bad with three years away now Nucleus DL Hall I forgot how young he is the old Rookie Nucleus seager and young Schwerber there Jordan Walker Harper Betch trout in our hard hard betch judge to her betch judge Gold here is a Hennios Suarez out of 50. Good morning Alvin time for some crumpets, huh? Green to not agreeing to 75 actually is Kate Cavalli green to 75 Kate Cavalli ET talent of Senga The nightly Tom see make sure rookie refractors Ryan Nelson out the rutchman Is that really English though does he wake up with a pint red come on red Come on red rookie Matthew Libretor That's sick number 305 Grats on that one Tom red to five and Matthew Libretor very very nice young Riley green there Crumpets and trumpets what? Nucleus Brandon Nemo for the Mets I could just ban Anthony right now We don't have to deal with us anymore refractor type France. Do we still have in the trash list? We're dragging it out big time here and a rutchman stars in the night Smash my head to the table Anthony's drunk and he's got diabetes great great One last to Rob before getting healthy. Yeah, we've all been there Like I'll be healthy. Well, I'm gonna start tomorrow first. I got to eat these chicken wings in the burger and the beers and all that I'm gonna get no sleep either and it could be so unhealthy all around Not gonna brush my teeth tonight Oh boy, Anthony's here for the long haul To 150 rookie mini diamond Jordan Diaz and the first auto the box is gonna be Jordana de los Santos Cosmic your favorite baseball Cosmic's pretty sick Thank you everybody enjoys cosmic Fuchsia Ricky Oswald Parazza to 75 followed by a base out of the honor. Hey, I Mean like characters, I don't know if there's like a literal clown You can act like a crazy person and some of those like The first suits they dress up in or whatever What are the what are the chipmunks called? Could I sanga other names? I forget their names Alvin Simon and Theodore. No Yeah, Anthony Gutierrez base auto. What did it know?  You could be goofy Could be goofy. You're goofy Pluto Ruchman it's 199 Krishna for Carol. Oh, come on. Ah, that's who it is who it is Or their chipmunks, right and then a wave auto Jackson holiday out of 125 We're heating up for Tom now. I like it. I like it 125 125 on the Jackson holiday Clean sig on that one too. Nice Were you moving Anthony? Don't say central, Florida. We got enough people dude I'm yours. Tavares base auto for the Braves if you move here You got to convince two other people to move Jackson holiday it is getting crazy It is getting crazy. You're I should say let's do a tier one now It's here one for Tom. That's pretty solid Candler. That's solid Jersey is each year over to 400. I think you got a three auto box as well These are looking up right now Rookie out of the 299 Kyle Stowers 9 to 25 on the Jorge Polanco bronze auto nice Polanco and rookie auto buddy Kennedy to 299 That's solid box there Nothing crazy Here's something crazy gonna be come on Just want to pull a cut auto or super super more likely, but All right got an Aussie Smith here out of 99 no wizard Mini diamond Lou Gehrig 18 of 50 nice Lou Auto is rookie JJ Bleday 3 of 75 on the yellow color match and a wave of Tony Gwyn out of 75 Framed auto to 25 of Barry Larkin Pretty solid box Barry Larkin on the back appreciate it Tom had fun as always Well, how these here for you picking them up