Hi everyone. Thanks for tuning in to the RightsCon panel on creating virtual reality for public good. My name is Jason Kelly. I apologize for kind of a froggy throat today. I woke up like this a few days ago. I am getting better but luckily we have a great set of panelists who will be mostly taking the lead as they're the experts on first reality and how to use it in the public good. So again my name is Jason. I'm going to introduce everyone quickly. My role at the Electronic Frontier Foundation is a digital strategist. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an online civil liberties and a non-profit to make sure that when you go online your rights go with you. And I work on the activism team and kind of help educate and also work on legislation and other various campaigns to make sure that our goals actually get implemented in the real world. So I'm going to quickly read through the folks that are on here just so you have a sense of their bios and then I'll try to do as little talking as possible so you don't have to deal with my ridiculous voice here. But we've got a really great set of panelists starting in alphabetical order with Kathy Bisbee who is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist who produces traditional and immersive social documentaries in the public interest and also organizes communities around media, art history, community action and culture. Kathy's the executive director of the Brookline Interactive Group, BIG and the founder of the Public VR Lab which is mostly why she's here today. She's the lead creative designer and producer of a project called Arrival VR which is a kind of national immigration and migration storytelling experience in VR. She's also co-produced eight additional Community XR projects and since 2018 Kathy has been also a research fellow at the MIT Open Dock Lab and her field work was recently featured in Ms. Magazine talking about the critical importance of building an inclusive accessible grassroots movement for Community XR in the public interest. Kathy received the next legacy prize from the Virtual World Society and was featured on Ken Bae's Voices of VR podcast in 2019 and this year joined the Cyber XR Coalition where she works on standards for XR privacy and digital rights. So I might have thrown out some terms there that you aren't all familiar with like XR, we'll get into that a little bit more. But continuing on, Rebecca Bow is a communications strategist at Earth Justice which is a non-profit environmental law organization as well as a freelance journalist and along with a drone pilot and videographer, she created Too Wild to Drill which is a 360 VR film experience that brings viewers directly to the threatened coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. This virtual reality experience helps viewers understand that defending the Arctic isn't just about protecting wildlife, it's also crucial upholding the rights of Indigenous people and diverting the worst consequences of global climate change. Continuing on, Courtney Ratch is the advocacy director at the Committee to Protect Journalists, an independent non-profit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide and defends the rights of journalists to report the news safely and without fear of reprisal. She's the author of Cyber Activism and Citizen Journalism in Egypt, Digital Dissidents and Political Change. She and the Committee to Protect Journalists help to provide information and fact check the virtual reality game blindfold which places you in the perspective of a photojournalist enduring a harsh interrogation for spreading anti-state propaganda. The game in which you're forced to deny or confess to crimes by remaining still or shaking your head was inspired by real life accounts from Evan Prison in Iran. And joining me also, my colleague from the Electronic Frontier Foundation is Artemis Shotskin. She's a, excuse me, front-end web developer at EFF and along with numerous EFF websites and projects, Artemis built EFF's first first virtual reality program, Spot the Surveillance, which is a VR experience that teaches people how to identify the various spying technologies police may deploy in communities. So with that out of the way, thank you for bearing with me. I'm going to go ahead and just get started with the folks, with asking questions of folks. And I'm going to start with Kathy Bisbee who again is the co-founder of the VR Lab, the public VR Latin. I'd like to ask everyone to talk about their VR projects and their experience in VR and why they chose it as a format. But Kathy who's worked on many VR projects will have, I think, a little bit more scope to answer that question. So I wanted to start with her. How did the VR, a public VR lab get started and what were some of the first projects that you worked on, Kathy, if you don't mind telling us? How many times have I had to unmute myself in the last five months? So I'm in the executive director of Brookline Interactive Group and we're actually part of the community media movement around the country. It's a long time movement since the 80s. We've been around for 35 years in fact and our goal has since our inception been how do we put technology and media tools and training programs in the hands of everyone. So our goal is really to make sure that the public has access to the media and we're one of 1,200 I think media centers around the country and there's also we have colleagues in Europe as well. Our funding is currently under threat. If you go to publicvrlab.com you can read more about that challenge that we're really facing both for our work as a community media arts organization in the public interest but also on behalf of the public VR lab and the work that we're trying to do to make sure that those same tools that we've made available in traditional media have now become available and will continue to become available in immersive media as well. So for me I'm a storyteller. I'm a documentary filmmaker and I was a community organizer for 13 years. I worked for the Pergs in five states, the public interest research groups and so I was always looking for how do I craft a story that's going to be visible in mass media. I was always thinking about that since I was young and so when I started to see Google Cardboard I saw people making them themselves. I don't know how long ago that was but five or six years ago, six years ago. I really was intrigued but I wasn't that interested because I'm not a gamer. I'm not a video gamer person and I didn't see the connection at first and then in 2015 I was at the Future of Storytelling conference in New York City which is an amazing conference. And I saw a piece that Gaby did about, I'm forgetting his last name, the UN piece on Syria. Not Nani, the Le Penya's piece but Gaby that worked for the United Nations piece. And I was inside of an HTC Vive and I felt it this early. I had an experience where I took the headset off and I was in tears. And for me as a storyteller I saw immediately the power of VR to be this immersive experience, this visceral experience, this opportunity to simulate the possibility, not exactly the same but the possibility of what it would be like to feel something that someone else would feel or what their experience was or for people to go places they've never been before. And since I'm from a town of 400 people in western Maine most of the inhabitants have never left the town that I'm from. I know that firsthand. I know what it's like to be able to see parts of the world and to then want to protect it. So a friend of mine said, you know, if you don't know it you can't protect it. And I think that that's really for me kind of led me to making media in the immersive medium and helping others to do so. I mean really my goal is to train others and train the trainers so that we can deploy community XR across the globe. That's great. Thank you so much for that explanation. And actually I think it leads really well the point you made about if you can't know what you can't protect it to Rebecca who worked on the Earth Justice project too wild to drill. Could you talk a little bit about that and about your experience? Yeah sure thing. And yeah thank you so much for the opportunity to speak with everyone today. And thank you Kathy for sharing that. So you know for Earth Justice I produced a seven and a half minute VR experience about the threat of oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And for those of you who are unfamiliar with the Arctic Refuge, this is a really unique wilderness expanse in Alaska. It's home to endangered species, polar bears, different kinds of rare Arctic species. It's also a place where migratory birds from every continent in the world actually fly there and use it as a nesting ground. And in 2017 the Republican-led Congress passed a provision in the tax bill opening up the Arctic Refuge to oil and gas drilling for the first time in decades. So I really created this VR experience as part of a broader campaign to stop oil and gas drilling in the Arctic Refuge. Earth Justice is an environmental law firm and we've been engaged in litigation to protect the Arctic for decades. So you know the purpose of my 360 VR experience was to really bring people to a place that they probably wouldn't have been able to travel to otherwise. It's extremely remote. You have to sort of charter your own private plane to get into the Arctic Refuge and it's very, very expensive to travel there. So I wanted to sort of bring viewers to a place that they likely would never be able to go that's very, very far away. I also wanted viewers to feel as if they had actually met the Indigenous people who are on the front lines of this fight, who are the Gwich'in people of Alaska and actually the Canadian Arctic as well. The porcupine caribou herd is a really important, you know, it's a caribou herd that migrates to the Arctic Refuge, uses the Arctic Refuge as a calving ground. The Gwich'in actually refer to the Arctic Refuge as the sacred place where life begins. And so for the VR experience, one of the first things that you do is go to the Gwich'in gathering, which is in the Canadian Arctic.  And so I just wanted people to sort of understand, you know, that community and that connection to the landscape and also travel, of course, to the Arctic Refuge, you know, where you can see like these braided rivers and just this gorgeous landscape. And then we also take them on an aerial tour of Prudhoe Bay, which is the industrialized oil zone, not too far away from the Arctic Refuge, which is sort of the epicenter of oil and gas industrialization in Alaska, so that you can really see that contrast between the beautiful, like, pristine Arctic Refuge landscape and Prudhoe Bay, which is just, you know, it's just like an oil camp. It's just pure oil and gas infrastructure. And one thing that was pretty cool about producing this film was that we relied a lot on drone footage. And so as you are in the experience, it's almost as if you're flying over these Arctic landscapes. I just tried to share my screen. I hopefully did that correctly so people can see just a still from that. Does that look right? Yes, that's Prudhoe Bay. And then I've got one more. I'll go back to Kathy's, a couple of the projects that you're working on, but I just wanted to quickly, so while people were talking about the actual experience, show some slides from them. So can you explain what's happening in this slide? Oh, sure. That is from the Gwich-In Gathering. That's a dance that's happening. The Gwich-In people have a lot of, you know, songs and dances and things that are directed toward the porcupine caribbean herd. And so this was a sort of a traditional event that we were able to capture. Cool. Okay. I just ended sharing and muted myself. And then I'll go back to that. But I just wanted to mention that, you know, there's this huge variety of types of VR. And your experience is a 360 video. Can you talk more about that and how VR works with that? Sure. Yeah. You know, I have very little experience to be honest with you in, you know, filmmaking or VR. But so I don't even really know that much about like AR or gaming or other, you know, uses for VR.  And, you know, I guess for me, having a 360 VR film experience just seems like a really good way for people to feel sort of fully immersed, you know, in a landscape and feel connected and sort of build a sense of empathy with the people who they were encountering. That's part of it. Great. Okay. Thank you so much. I'm going to move along so we can get everybody's kind of experiences on the screen and get everybody to talk about them. Courtney, could you talk a little bit about just what exactly the experience that, which is called blindfold that you worked on through the Committee to Protect Journalists, what it's supposed to do and kind of what your involvement in it was. And I'm also going to, while you're talking, I'll try to put it on the screen so people can see. Okay, great. Well, thanks so much. Yeah, so the production firm that was doing blindfold came to the Committee to Protect Journalists because they wanted to essentially recreate the experience of being a journalist in an Iranian prison and not just any Iranian prison, but really one of the most notorious in Iran and in the world. And they wanted it to be real and meaningful. And it is, it's also really, it can be very traumatic. So, you know, you want to know what you're getting into going into there, which is that you are going to be on the other side of the table from another Iranian journalist. And we were there to provide information about what journalists face when they're going through prison, the information, statistics about journalists who are imprisoned around the world because while this was focused on an Iranian prison, in fact, many of the tactics and the experience we would can only assume is indicative of what it's like in many parts of the world. And part of the reason that we wanted to do this with them is because we do a lot of advocacy on the cases of imprisoned journalists. And in fact, just over the weekend, we found out that one journalist that we've been working on behalf of for several years, as I'm done, Asgharov, died in prison, and we don't even know why, whether it was COVID or not. And it's, you know, I've been, I've been working on this case as long as I've been at CPJ, which is six and a half years. And it can be really hard to get people to care about these issues or to bring it out of just the numbers or a foreign name that doesn't resonate with anyone. And so, you know, we partnered on Blindfold because it was this idea that we could help people have a visceral experience of what these journalists are going through in prison and what it must be like. And it is really a difficult experience to have. But I think it's really important. And I know that for my work as the advocacy director at the Committee to Protect Journalists and really leading our campaign strategies on behalf of imprisoned journalists, it felt like an important opportunity to do something new and innovative, which would also get our issue again into new venues. We took it to Gaines for Change, the Oslo Freedom Forum, Santa Fe Journalism Under Fire Conference, and being able to bring this visceral experience of a journalist in prison, and then allowing somebody to be that person on the other side of the table and making choices. It was just a really innovative approach to this and to connect these stories with the reality of what it must feel like to be forced with those choices. And we wanted to connect with people in a new way and tell a story in a new way. So that was really the impetus for doing it. Yeah, that's really helpful. Thank you for explaining all that. And I'm sorry to hear about that journalist. And at EFF, we do some work on a project we call Offline, which is around usually bloggers or coders, but sometimes journalists who have been silenced or in some cases harassed or abused or been killed outside of the country usually. And so I am a little bit aware of this situation. And this VR app is something that I think it really gets to that experience that people need to put themselves in someone else's shoes in a way that reading a blog post can't. But I just want to quickly bring up Artemis, who is my colleague and who I worked with, a little bit on the spot the surveillance tool. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, speaking of how VR can put people in other people's shoes, how spot the surveillance does that and kind of what you worked on there and what it's supposed to do. You're muted. Sure. So I had a conversation months ago. I don't even remember when with Rebecca where we talked about how in both our experiences, which are very different, what we're doing is making the invisible visible in very different ways. And in too wild to drill, you're taking people to a place that they can't see because it's so remote. And in spot the surveillance, there's technology that's right in front of people, but they don't know that it's there. So they can't see it. So spot the surveillance is an experience where people learn to identify police surveillance technology in the experience you're in a street corner in San Francisco, where a citizen is speaking to a couple of police officers. And you look around the scene and try to find what technologies are there and learn about them. The idea is that you would see these technologies and then you could identify them in real life in your own community. And we created this, I guess, in 2018. And as we all know, times have changed a little bit since then. And so the idea of being able to identify police technology in your community is actually much more vital now than I mean, it's always been vital, but it's much more crucial at the moment. So it's, I feel like, you know, that part of the experience has become more to the forefront. In creating this, you know, it's like I was the coder. So it's a very small project. And that's an interesting thing also about our panel here is that we have quite a range here of experiences from a very simple small project to a large field project, but also in terms of intensity. Spotless surveillance isn't actually like storytelling per se. It's more of an experience where you get information. So in that way, it's not extremely emotionally intense.  And that's a really good part of it. I was going to say something else. Oh, I wanted to just point out that we keep saying the term XR, but we haven't defined it for everyone. So I just want to say that XR is kind of a global term for augmented reality, virtual reality, and mixed reality, which are all different types of new technologies that all have immersive qualities to them. Thank you for remembering to do that. And for having a definition, which is why you are on the panel. So you know what you're talking about. I'm just asking questions. Thank you. I want to share a few screenshots of the project that Kathy most recently worked on, I think, and then a different one as well while you just quickly talk a little bit about it. And then I want to kind of go through and see what people's feedback has been to some of these projects. And I'll just, after this, we'll just open it up and let people kind of say what, you know, what the experiences have been for folks and what they thought. And yeah, I'll be sharing my screen in just a second, but go ahead, Kathy, and explain. I'm going to start with, I'm sure I tell you the right one here, since Public VR Lab has done so much. I'm going to start with there's something in the air. Okay. I will say though, there's two things I wanted to comment on, if you don't mind. I don't know if you heard me earlier, I really struggle with this language that our industry uses, the VR industry uses around walking in someone else's shoes, because I think it's problematic. And so I want to just make things more inclusive by not, not continuing that, that language around VR, because we can never walk in someone else's shoes as, as I can't walk in somebody else's shoes that I haven't experienced their lives. So I want to be careful around that. I think it's better to say we can give people a feeling of what it might, might be like in Alaska or what it might be like. It's also not reality. It is a simulation of reality. And I like to think of XR as an umbrella term, but I have very heated Twitter debates with people in our industry about what we should call it, whether it should be called immersive, whether it should be called XR. So XR is kind of representative of the entire umbrella, but I don't know if we've solved that problem yet. So I'll just talk really quickly about this project. This was these three projects here were some of our first, first dish projects. We started the Public VR Lab in really 2015 doing research and then got our first HGC Vive in the spring of 2016 and also started learning A-Frame and working with folks in the community. Boston VR is a big partner of ours in Boston. We're a bookline. So we created a project called Hopes and Dreams in A-Frame that you, we filmed people individually in the community with a green screen and then just put them or white screen rather and then just put them inside of WebVR in a circle. And so you have the sensation of being in the middle of the circle listening to your community talk about what's important to them. And it was January of 2017 when we did that project. So people started talking about what was important to them. And there were some pretty intense things that people were talking about in our community. The second, one of the next projects that we did, I think it was our first paid project which was exciting. The town of Brookline actually supported this project. Thank you very much to do 360 video of all of the town monuments. And we also put that with the help of facility, both of these projects, put that into WebVR and we're able to provide that to the town. So people could not have to go to these monuments but could actually see them in the context of 360, which I think is really different than seeing a 2D or a flat environment. We did a big eco hackathon. I don't have a graphic for that but we did a big eco hackathon in April for Earth Day. As I was an environmental justice person for the first 12 years of my career, I kind of went back to that and I said, let's do an Earth Day hackathon. Boston VR co-sponsored it, helped support it. And we had about 150 really diverse participants sign up for it. And about 16s came up with final projects. And out of that conversation, out of that hackathon, the UN reached out to us and said, hey, we don't want to do it on climate change because this series theme is air pollution and water pollution. Can you guys make a VR experience on air pollution worldwide? And we said, no, we can't. We're a little nonprofit. But we know people in our industry that we've collaborated with. And so we collaborated with this organization. And we created a 3D globe and then took the data from the UN and populated it into every single country on the globe. This is all web VR, by the way. And so then created the little slider. You could actually slide it. The 1990, you could slide it all the way up till present day. And you could see over, I think, a 30-year period of time how air pollution had changed in each of these countries across the globe. So what was really cool about that is we went to Kenya, to Nairobi, to the United Nations Environmental Assembly, and we were able to show it to all of these worldwide leaders and help them understand how air pollution was rising or falling and see it in a really visceral way. And then the new project that you showed there for just a second is our Immigration Storytelling Immigration and Migration Storytelling Project. We are on a unity timeline showing pre-1620 American migration and immigration all the way through till 2020, which coincidentally is the 400-year anniversary of the Mayflower. And also a cultural reckoning. So the timing is good for us to be having conversations about what it meant to have already been here or to have arrived, how people arrived, where you come into the project, you say what your family came as far as you know, and then there's a little glowy orb that makes you feel like you're connected to this story because you're on the story on this timeline. And then you can see everybody else's story on that timeline as well. So we have had several iterations of that. We had, yep, so this is the most recent one. We have interns in South Africa and the United States all still working on it during COVID, trying to finish the project. But the goal from this is, and I think that next slide with the Statue of Liberty shows you kind of the project plan. I think this might be of most interest to people, which is that we're building a Community XR guidebook from this to help nonprofits understand how to use VR, how do you scale up for VR, how do you make decisions about what kinds of software and tools and training and building capacity inside of your organization. Do you have that slide, Jason? I saw it flash up for a second. It has a Statue of Liberty on it somewhere. I'll just talk for another minute if you can find it. So we'll have a tool book for nonprofits to use, very similar to what across the line that Planned Parenthood put out. They put out a really nice guidebook you can actually go to across the line. I gave Jason the link and I think they'll be up later. You can go to their website and you can download their sample action plan with postcards and with their guidebook. And that's similar to what we're doing with the idea of Community XR and using this Immigration Storytelling project as an opportunity to create Community Dialogue and to facilitate Community Dialogue about a topic as also a way to educate people on what VR is. I'm going to bring that up in one second. It wasn't in the right order and then my computer freaked out. One second I'll drop it in there. While I'm getting that up, could you talk a little bit about what the experiences people have had in response to these? You know what you mentioned about trying to show other people's experiences? Do people, especially in this most recent one with Arrival, have they commented about the kind of connection that you're creating? Absolutely. There's some really interesting things that come out. So when people take the headset off, it depends on where they are on the spectrum of having tried VR before, right? We spend a lot of time just being VR educators, frankly. But we also get things like, you know, in Africa, it was amazing. People actually believed what they saw. So it was a non-Western mindset around sort of the mysticism and the magic of VR, which I just loved. I thought it was beautiful that people would maybe when they took the headset off think that there was still water underneath them. I love that people can really be playful and engage and you see people. I've seen seniors, for example, chase after robot dogs and throw sticks at them and almost run into brick walls because they're so engaged physically. I've even seen seniors. We do a lot of work with seniors. I've seen seniors who have a physical limitation outside of VR. Inside of VR, they suddenly lose sense of themselves and are lost into the experience to the point that they lose some of their physical limitations. And caretakers have said to me that they've never seen anything like it. And there's a lot of amazing research being done around how much we can convince ourselves that something else is happening, right? So that's also power that we have to communicate. It's also power that can be misused. I think we need to really make sure that we're being ethical and that's why I'm part of the CyberXR Coalition. So back to these project goals. So VR education, participatory media. So we, when people step out of having watched this experience, we ask them to tell their family's story if they know it or what they know or if they don't know because that's a story too. It's also one of the goals is really to facilitate a depolarized dialogue in communities. COVID may change some of this, I don't know. And to really inspire other community creators to create community-based programs that are in the public interest. And also to learn how to operationalize that because I think it's really important that we figure out how to build our capacity. And it's tricky because things, the first year that VR cameras, 360 cameras came out, there were 27 cameras over three months period of time in 2016. So you try something, suddenly the company's gone in its vaporware that happened to us on a number of occasions. We did the inauguration in DC in an AR app in 2017 and the Women's March and the app disappeared. So even though we have inside of that app, 77 pieces of media content and stories that we told inside of augmented reality, which was super cool and historical importance, that's gone because of vaporware. So you do, it's a lot to navigate these different kinds of changes that are happening within VR. And that's why I gave you a number of the links because I thought they would be helpful from my perspective in the industry, what some of the current organizations and nonprofits and companies that are helping us create media really simply. That's super helpful. And especially the last kind of points you were making about the, it's also new. I know, I want to get people's thoughts about what experience they expected people to have and what feedback they got with their projects. But I also wonder if people experience any difficulties just given the technological kind of shifting that's happening. I know Artemis can speak a little bit to that. But if someone wants to talk, Courtney or Rebecca or Artemis a little bit about what people within your organization were hoping for and then what actually they've experienced in terms of feedback, that would be great. And I can call on someone. I'm happy to do that. Courtney, are you able to speak on that? Sure. So I think that we went into this with an open mind because it was an external, there was an external partner who came in who wanted to do this and they wanted to do it in a sensitive way and they wanted to do it accurately. And they wanted to do this experience also to raise awareness about the broader issue. So it felt like it was coming from the right place. I think it can be very challenging to partner on something like this, especially when it is a really traumatic experience that you're doing. And you want to be sensitive to that. I think that we were hoping, so we took it out to a couple of events where the company that produced it was there and we were there to talk to people about the experience and walk them through the broader issue. I think what we were hoping was that it would be a little bit more mobile, but one of the things we found was kind of the gap between what you could do as an exhibit, say at a space that's made for that type of experience versus something that people might download an experience or be able to take more on the road, which is I think what we were hoping to do was maybe do more with say college classes, university students who want to be engaged in this issue and that is a way that maybe to connect with a younger audience. I think there was a gap there just in part because of the technology. I think VR is still very new. I don't think most people have the headsets at home in order to use it. So that was a little bit challenging, but I think it was a great learning experience and it gave us a real idea about how you could use not only the virtual reality, but also this kind of choose your own adventure format, where the person then becomes very invested in the story. So it's not just it's not just you're in somebody's shoes and I think being in somebody's shoes is very different than occupying them as a person, but you're in somebody's shoes, but you're also having to make some choices and frankly realizing in some situations like the ones that we advocate in, there are no good choice sets, which is I think can be really hard to illustrate. So it was a good experience. I think we would do it again. I think it also helped us realize frankly that it's unlikely that we are going to do our own VR experience from scratch because there's so much. I mean, even just in this session, I've learned a lot. You know, there's so much to learn from and this is a whole field unto itself. So I would definitely say that if we were going to pursue more things like this that we'd want to do it in partnership, but I definitely think there's a huge potential both for that kind of experiential side, but also for learning. Like I would love to do something with the VR firm to help people learn what it takes to do journalism, for example, or what it's like to be a freelance journalist on the front lines and the choices you have to make about what you can afford based on how much that editor who commissioned an assignment paid you or you're still waiting for your check or, you know, there's all sorts of I think interesting things that can be done. And so it was definitely an exciting way to start exploring that. I particularly like that you would do it again, but that you recognize, I think we had this experience VFF that this field is just so expansive. And there are kind of part of this is that it's new and part of this is it's fast moving. And I do think part of it is just language barriers also, like you said, like, what is XR? What is VR? What like what is a frame? But there are a lot of resources that people can start with. I'm actually going to drop a few of them into the chat. Thanks to Kathy for putting those together. So people who are watching can, you know, scroll through some of those links and see some of the ways to get started. I'm going to jump over to Artemis really quick, since you were a coder on the spot the surveillance project. Both what did you see in terms of, you know, your experience with that? Was it difficult? How did it feel getting into it? And then also, you know, just in terms of the response people, how has what you expected become, you know, the reality from the results of the project? Or has it been different than you thought it would be? Yeah, thanks. Well, I did a lot of brainstorming before I ever even got started with a couple of colleagues about how to approach this. And we did want to have something that was as accessible as it could be in two meetings of the word. One is that we went with WebVR. So we could build an experience that people could view from their desktop if they didn't have a VR headset, or even from their phone. Obviously, the experience isn't going to be as immersive in those cases, but that we wanted to make it as accessible as possible in that way. And so we ended up using A-Frame and definitely had some support and conversations with Kathy about that, which is, you know, a framework built by Mozilla to create VR experiences that are viewed through the browser. So I feel like that was a really good choice. It's also open source, which goes along with, you know, EFF sensibilities. And we also thought about accessibility in terms of different people's different abilities. So in the experience, information is given to the user through sound and visuals. So if they're more reliant on one than the other, they can still get the information. And also that we decided not to use any hand controllers. So if that was a challenge for people, they didn't have to do that. Of course, that means that it has to be a pretty simple experience. But with all these assumptions, we did a lot of user testing within EFF. And then we did user testing outside EFF. And we were pretty happy, which once we launched it, that our assumptions proved pretty correct. And that there was a lot of ways to get to the experience and a lot of people could access the experience from wherever they were coming from. We also made a Spanish version. So the exact same experience in English and Spanish would be great if we could expand further. But that's as far as we got. So I would say that it's a reception in the world was good. And kind of what we were hoping for. I, as the only other person here who's probably spent a lot of time with spotless surveillance, I can just say demoing it at the Journalism 360 conference, I did. It's so fascinating to tell someone what they're going to experience in words. And then they put on the helmet or the headset or whatever. And everyone has always been surprised and pleased. I think that's a really interesting thing about VR right now is that you, you know, if you tell someone what a video game is going to be about, I think that they turn it on and they're like, yeah, that's what I kind of expected. But it seems very different with VR because it's still so new and it's also so different from what you're used to, even though in many ways it's kind of just sometimes it's just video and it just happens to be in 360 degrees. But that immersiveness seems really to take people by surprise, which I like a lot. And I wanted to talk quickly with Rebecca then about the kind of drone footage experience that you created and also just regular footage with Too Wild to Drill. Did you get the kind of feedback you wanted? I know when I've looked at it, it brings you to this, I just finished reading a book, Into Thin Air, the John Crackauer book about Disaster on Everest. And yeah, it's an amazing place, the Arctic in these areas in Alaska and these mountaintops in places where you couldn't normally visit. But do you feel like people get that experience now through this and was that kind of what you hoped? Yeah, it's so interesting because the way that we decided to share this VR experience was through these small group screenings in different environments. So we had six different Oculus Go headsets and we'd sort of bring people in and sit them down in swivel chairs so that they could go all the way around and see the full spectrum of the shot. And we did this at the Wild and Scenic Film Festival, which is in Northern California. We also gave the Film Festival a couple of VR headsets so that they could take it on tour nationally. And we also went to the halls of Congress. So we took it to DC and we showed it to legislative staff and advocates who happened to attend this event. And we brought it also to a conference called the Tanana Chiefs Conference in Fairbanks, Alaska, which is attended by Alaska Native people, including Wichin people and tribal leaders from around the interior in Northern Alaska. So in each of these different settings, the feedback was really, really different, as you can imagine, you know, from Wild and Scenic Film Festival. A lot of times you'd get somebody who was maybe, you know, a college professor and said, can I use this as a tool in my classroom or people had already been educated about the Arctic and wanted to know what they could do to protect it. In DC, it was fascinating because people were well aware of it as a political issue. But for them, the visuals was what they didn't expect. You know, they were like, wow, I had no idea. Prudhoe Bay looks so, so very different, you know, from this Arctic refuge that you're trying to protect. And then of course, in Alaska, it was just a really, you know, as I mentioned earlier, the Wichin people have a very strong, they rely on the porcupine caribou herd as a primary food source. They have a strong cultural and spiritual connection to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge because that's the calving ground of the caribou herd. And so for them, you know, people would just, you know, they were seeing people they knew in the video at the Wichin gathering for one thing. And then afterwards, you know, it was just really emotional to like have the conversations with them that came up after the experience. So I would say it really kind of depends on your audience a lot, you know. I was going to quickly ask folks, looks like Kathy dropped off. But whoever's got thoughts about, let's see, the question from the audience was about kind of like the cost of creating these experiences. And if it would be difficult as like a high schooler or if someone isn't, you know, familiar with this, my own understanding, and then I'll let other people speak to this is that, you know, there's this huge spectrum, Artemis, you mentioned this. You can get a drone that does 360 video, or you could just get a 360 camera, and you could create a virtual reality experience without too much effort, you know, with some free tools. So I do know there are ways to build these with a little bit of ingenuity on the cheat. But what do other people think about, you know, is this an easy thing to break into? Does anyone want to speak to that? I can speak to it a little bit. I think easy depends on where you're coming from, you know, if you if you have some, I mean, I think what you're mentioning about 360 video, I think if you can get a 360 camera, and, you know, pretty much everybody has video experience at this point because of their phones. That's probably like the easiest entry way for me, writing code in a frame, while challenging, because I never did it before, wasn't super challenging, because I have been a coder for a long time. That being said, a frame is not super complex. So in that way, and it doesn't in its open source, so it's free. So I think in that way, it's it's not a difficult way to begin. But I think the more robust an experience you want, the more skills you're going to have to develop. So it really depends on what what your goals are. And I know in this experience, my supervisor, you know, every time we met and talked about it, they wisely said, yeah, scale it down, scale it down, you know, because it's easy to get really excited and start talking about all these things you want to achieve. But I think if you are working in a limited way, then having a simple idea that you can finish is better than having a complex idea that you may never get to the end of. Thank you. Yeah, welcome, Kathy back, who just rejoined. I'm going to drop the slides that I've created into a Dropbox and share them on the chat really quickly in a little bit. Hopefully everyone will be able to get those mostly just for the links to people's projects and other things like that. I'm going to take another quick question from the from the chat, which is just basically, I'm going to I'm going to expand it a little bit. The question is, do you envision VR being used for fact checking in the future? I think I can actually speak to that a little bit. But I think the larger question is, are there fields that, you know, are hard to do right now that could be that we could use VR to expand into what I was going to mention about fact checking is I'm going to get the name wrong. Probably someone on this panel remembers better than me. There was a bomb again, a chemical bomb dropped in Syria a few years ago. And I forget which group put together. I think it was the New York Times. I'm not sure who it worked with. Based on footage and photos from the immediate aftermath, they were able to put together kind of a 360 experience that helped prove in court that the Syrian government dropped that Bellingcat. Courtney, do you want to talk more about that? I think that's an interesting case. No, okay. Okay, sure. I don't I think that the I mean, I think that was a lot of information. You know, there are expert organizations that use, you know, various sorts of digital, you know, data and videos, et cetera, to cross reference and do that fact checking. So I think that's kind of there's a separation between, you know, I think Bellingcat, which was really helping to do the digital forensics. And then the New York Times, which was really about presenting some of the evidence and the fact checking. I mean, I do think VR is potentially powerful as a way of telling the story, because I have seen a lot of the Bellingcat charts. And I would say, you know, you can look at it as a layperson. And frankly, that chart, you know, sure, it looks factual, but you don't really know. But when you are able to put that into this immersive experience, it does seem, you know, to have more residents. But I guess I haven't really thought about VR for fact checking. And just on the top of it, my my head, I would seem that that would be challenging, because it's called virtual reality, which is then inherently somehow contradictory, or potentially contradictory to fact checking. And so I'm not sure. And also for like the production time needed, I'm not sure that it's really about fact checking. But I do think it could be about how to tell complicated stories from maybe different sets of facts that aren't necessarily visual. That's really helpful. Yeah, that you make a really good point. It's, I guess, what I was thinking of really was the way that the experience lends credence to the message they're trying to get across, and less that they used it to do the fact checking. That's a really good point. I want to just quickly ask, don't Kathy, go ahead. I was going to say, I mean, I think it's really important to talk about the ethics of this, though. This is one of the reasons I joined the cyber XR coalition, which is doing amazing work on privacy and digital rights in the VR space. So kind of not quite the EFF of VR, but, you know, I think we are very vulnerable when we're inside of a fantasy world to knowing what's real and what's not real. And I think it's really important that there are standards so that companies can't just lie to us and present information as though it's real, that our bodies feel like is really real. I think that's something we need to be really working on. Those of us who are concerned about digital rights and making sure that there are standards that they sign on to and agree to, because this is a communications tool that can be used very powerfully for propaganda, for good and for evil. So I really think it's important that all of us who are creating any kind of VR content at all talk about that wherever we go and whatever panels we're at and really raise that awareness around that, that actually needs to be taken. Thank you for bringing that up. Yeah, that's a really important note and one of the elements of that that I think we have talked a little bit about at EFF, at least internally, is the potential for online harassment in the virtual space, which is, you know, in many ways potentially even more intense than, you know, Twitter, where you might be able to block people, but thousands of trolls in a virtual world, you know, could make it unusable and Twitter has at least some ways to back out of that that would be harder to do perhaps in VR. So thank you for bringing that up. I want to ask everyone one quick question and I just kind of want to go backwards through the line about there's a lot of thoughts in the chat about organizations that are interested in creating VR. Let's close on just kind of what advice would you give to organizations that would be interested in starting a VR project? I'm going to start with Courtney and we'll go backwards from there. Yeah, I think knowing that there is this whole world out there and I think it would be, you know, it's developed quite a bit I think since we we did the project, but I would say, you know, having some idea of what you want to get out of it and if it is just about experimenting that's fine, but to think about, yeah, the whole picture I mean, the ethics of everything that we do in this human rights and digital rights space is critical and fundamental to the work. And so I think thinking about that really understanding how you're going to be able to use this or not like what are the, you know, what are the effects on people who are involved in it.  Again, for us deciding that we can definitely do this through partnerships, because after I like I had a great VR idea, but after I costed it out, you know, the it was just going to be so much that it was clear that wasn't really the right direction. I think there's a lot of exciting things to do and, you know, being willing to maybe take a little bit of a risk, but also, you know, doing that in a fully knowledgeable and informed way. That's great advice. Thank you so much. I'm going to jump over to Artemis. Now, what would you what advice would you give to an or since you were a coder on one of these projects now from your perspective? You know, as a coder, I would be like, yeah, do it, because then you get to write cool code. So that's not the best advice maybe. I think the important thing is our project was about street level surveillance, which we already had on our extremely large text filled site. And that information wasn't well conveyed in that way. And so if your organization has information that you feel would really benefit from immersive storytelling, it would be worth it to explore if VR would be a better way to get that information to your community or to the public. Yeah, that's what I would say. That's I think that everyone needs to hear that. That's helpful. Rebecca, what about you? What would you offer his advice? Yeah, so you know, I would really emphasize that before going into it, just get clear on your goals. What are you trying to accomplish? What audiences are you trying to reach? And you know, a lot of it too is figuring out what is the story that you want to tell. And I think arriving at all of these answers really requires a lot of collaboration and creativity, you know, with your partners, with the people who are experts in this area. And then there's a lot of logistics, you're gonna have to think a lot very carefully about logistics. So making sure that you have enough, you know, staff resources and just dedicated time to make a plan from start to finish and think about that promotion plan at the end as well. Thank you. Thank you. I'll let Kathy kind of close out maybe the person who's done the most training on VR and helping other orgs work on it. What would you recommend people do in this space? Well, as both an executive director and someone who likes to play with code but is not great at it, I will say find the people who are experts. Find good partners that you have good communication with that also care about the work that you're doing outside of VR. Document your process, because it's really important for all of us who are doing VR to share what we know with others at this early stage in VR. And lastly, ask, I think what Courtney said is really true, ask does VR bring something new to this story or to this communication? And if it doesn't do it in traditional media, but if it brings something new, a new perspective, a new insight, a way that people can experience something that they don't know about yet and that they can learn to love by bringing it to them in VR, then it's a good choice to go into VR. And become part of our community XR community, because we'd love to help support other XR creators that are doing community-based public interest work. Thank you so much. Yeah, I will just say for my part, as a novice, being involved in the community is the best way to get started in their variety of these communities and places to kind of get involved. I've just dropped the PDF and the PowerPoint presentation in the chat. So there's a bunch of links in there as well as more information about everyone's experiences and the individual organizations that everyone here is representing. I think that's all we have time for. Thank you all so much. This has been really, really delightful. Thank you to Jason and Artemis especially, and really wonderful Rebecca and Courtney to see you and hear your work. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all.


Hi, I'm Jean Rosenberg and I'm a professor at Brute College at City University of New York and I also am faculty associate here at the Berkman Center. I found it to be incredibly useful. First I found the report to be incredibly useful because there are so many strands out there, so many fragments in terms of looking at this whole problem of information quality, how to search for, find, assess, verify, fact check, and also how to contribute information online and how to empower youth to have those skills so that they can be better informed, more engaged, and also successful in their own careers and academically. So these are critical skills that really are cut across I would say all disciplines, high schools and colleges and community colleges as well and there's a huge challenge in terms of how do you teach these skills and how do you empower not just youth but really the whole public to be better informed consumers of information and also more credible contributors. And so to bring these people together, to discuss the report, to discuss what we already know, to think about what we don't know, and also to learn from each other what interventions people are already experimenting with and what kinds of technologies are used in which ways is incredibly useful and really helpful. I mean some of it is very practical for me, such as using Google Maps as a way to have students contribute information and really build a very interesting project that has them out reporting in their own communities and capturing that reporting in a way that really almost synthesizes itself so that you can present a project. I thought that was very, very helpful. It was great to see educators from all different disciplines, from librarians to teachers to people in healthcare who are all concerned about these issues and all addressing them in different ways and I think having this kind of event and this kind of conversation will really help to enrich the quality of programming that is created and also will help people to figure out ways to get this curriculum to make it available to students.


Welcome to the session. I am Aashira and I am going to help you with the following question that says in figure 6.33 PQ and RS are two mirrors placed parallel to each other and incident ray AB Strikes the mirror PQ at B The reflected ray moves along the path BC. This is the reflected ray and strikes the mirror RS at C And again reflects back along CD Proves that AB is parallel to CD. Let us now begin with the solution. First, let us draw normals B, M and RS respectively. Write the construction draw normals is perpendicular on parallel to each other. Now perpendicular to the line RS therefore these two lines are B, M parallel to CD. And now since B, M is parallel to C, M once versus which intersects them implies angle, this angle is equal to CB Just this angle. Let us name the angle's flexion Incidence is equal to the angle of reflection that is V is equal to X Y is equal to equal to the angle of reflection Equal to Y on multiplying we have 2x is equal to 2y Equal to Y plus Y Now since X is equal to V.  Thus we have angle ACB is equal to angle BCD implies line AB is parallel to CD Since if a transversal intersects two lines. So this implies Line AB is parallel to the solution. Hope you enjoyed it. Take care and bye for now


on the ground, presented by theCUBE. Here's your host, John Furrier. Hello everyone, I'm John Furrier with Silicon Angles theCUBE. We're on the ground here in Palo Alto, California, Catalyst, Ventures, Partners, we're here. Venture director, Steve Herrick, CUBE alumni. Third year, second year, third year. Three years as a venture capitalist, former CTO of VMware. Obviously a great industry player, great person in the community and plugged in. Welcome to On the Ground, great to see you. This is great, thanks, John. So this year, we're hearing a lot of talk about the bubble bursting. Certainly Apple forecast on their awesome earnings call yesterday about record shipments, 18 billion in profit, 76 billion in cash. The iPhone's only eight years old, going on nine years old this year. This is just the beginning, and yet this bubble's not bursting, or it's kind of reshaping, but not in a major way, but still a lot of great opportunities in tech. If the iPhone's going on its ninth year, it's coming into middle school. So what's your take on this trends that are happening now? Certainly enterprise is hot, what are you seeing? Yeah, right now it's wild on all fronts. Last year was wild because there was irrational exuberance everywhere and money being thrown left and right at all sorts of ideas. I kind of feel this is the year of getting real on so many fronts. And this is where these shocking things like profitability and how you're gonna have a proper margin and grow the business, those are back absolutely as the dominating factors right now. There's really a lot of companies these days that they've raised a series A or a seed round, meaning they have a cool idea, but the question's now are how are you gonna scale it? How are you gonna make money from it? How do you go to market with this? And that's where you go from being a technology to a business. I always enjoy our conversations as we talk about more of the long game in tech, being a CTO to VM where you've seen that. We've had talks with Jerry Chan, who's also at Greylock, one of your cohorts here in the venture community. And there's a long view on this transformation, this platforming with the cloud and data, and I'll see mobility, I mentioned the iPhone. But yet now the capital markets are shifting, you're seeing a lot more IPOs and some lackluster performance, but yet this secondary finance is going on.  There are some game-changing opportunities. What are you seeing out there that are still the great opportunities for entrepreneurs to dig into? Obviously, one says top of mind for you. What are you seeing? Yeah, I just, as a whole, I couldn't be more bullish on where the world is. And obviously there'll be ups and downs in terms of capital markets, but this real innovation doesn't have a cycle. And you find the right people at the right time. These macro trends are unstoppable. So we get involved in all sorts of things as general catalysts. We're here in Palo Alto, where we obviously are in the Silicon Valley side, but we're in New York and Boston as well. And so I think it's really important to be looking, not even just across the US, but globally at all the things that are changing and making sure we're part of that. I will just say the most thing that I see all the time, it's very easy to get obsessed with what people talk about in Silicon Valley, and there's obviously amazing cutting-edge stuff, and people are building startups faster and doing more things yourself, like all kinds of things you can do now you couldn't do before. And the point also though is that the rest of the world isn't on the same speed and not on the same sort of an option cycle. So on the one hand, we wanna know absolutely where the world's going, and we like to think about trends, like what are engineers at Google or Facebook doing, and how can we make that applicable to the rest of the world? That's a very interesting approach to it, you gotta stay in touch with customers like the Fortune 1000 all over the world and the problems they have with PC management. It's a real thing, like you think if you're here, it's all Macs and phones only. So I think I would just say there's a lot of forward-looking stuff you wanna be there at the right time, but there's a ton of existing problems that are ready for newer solutions. The exciting thing about Silicon Valley is there's a lot of shiny new toys that are developing and certainly a lot of experimentation, failure and successes, but at the same time, at the end of the day, it's about the business outcomes for the folks who try to solve their problems. And that was clearly articulated by the CEO Mark Hurd at Oracle when I talked to him, because really it's a timing game on execution. So I wanna bring that question to you, which is, okay, you got the shiny new toys, you guys are looking at a lot of new cutting-edge stuff. Some of it's like crazy good, go big or go home, some of it's more practical blocking and tackling, get profit, get scale, but yet customers still wanna solve their problems. How hard is it, or is it getting easier for startups to compete in the enterprise businesses? Because in the old days, it used to be only the big guys can serve those customers. Then with the cloud, startups came in, but now it's getting more complicated. You got security, you got integration, you got horizontal and vertical specialization. These are interesting dynamics. What's your thoughts there and what's your advice to your portfolio companies and startups? Yeah, and this is a great topic and when we deal with every single day, I'd say there are kind of three competing factors that are always at play here. First of all, enterprises are the companies that have a lot of money to use versus individuals. They have problems that have hit at scale because they're so much bigger and hitting them. Certain types of problems such as how they reach their own customers or how they secure their crown jewels have become so important that they're even board level issues. At the one hand, there's this great demand for solutions and more accountability and holding. On the flip side, one of the challenges of the last couple of years is that there's so many startups funded, especially in certain areas, that there's so much noise. And how is a CIO supposed to understand which of these many cybersecurity companies is the one that's really gonna help them or how do they choose among so many more things? So I think that has put a more emphasis on both marketing as well as like, how are you proving that you can truly solve their problems in a shorter amount of time? I think that's a really good driver. So we often ask, from the time a company first sees your product, how quickly does it take them to actually get it off the shelf and then use? And that's a metric that is super critical these days. I think people haven't always watched as much. The other thing is back towards the third part of it, which is funding. I do think right now, you kind of look through startups as these phases, usually for what I look at as kind of high tech companies trying to use new technologies in a hard way. So there's a technology risk that you have to get through. Can I even build this thing? Then you have to prove that there's at least two or three interesting customers that would actually pay for it and use it. And that's sort of phase two of the company. And then phase three is how could I do this sales in a repeatable model that has margin to it and could be a sustainable business? So each of these requires different people, different questions that we ask, different skill sets that are in there. And there's attraction proof points too, as well as that you want to look for that traction for the startup to see that validation with the idea of kind of commercializing. So on that thread, what's the B rounds like right now?  A rounds have been bigger in this past cycle, you know, 10, 15 million dollar A rounds. B rounds tended to be a little bit higher, maybe even 30 plus. But that's really an indicator for the market. We're hearing B's are tight, B rounds are hard. The traction points are, can you comment on that and what's your thoughts on that? Is it more revenue? Is it more traction? What's your thoughts on the B? It comes from this pipeline of company starting, which is so awesome around here. It's fairly easy to get a seed round. It's harder, but not as hard to get an A and then it's harder to get a B. So it's always this filtering or this like hunger games type of thing that's going on. I would just say that the questions now for a B round and the proof points required are just more poignant. And it's a supply and demand discussion where there are, perhaps it's higher level of criteria being applied for these bigger rounds. And back to the specific point in the enterprise, the question that any good VC firm is really gonna be looking for at a B is, they've proven that the technology works. They've proven that they have good people skills and can recruit. They've proven that at least a handful of companies will pay something for it. The B round is in theory, it is really created for, I've figured out this pattern for how I'm gonna sell and this will be the accelerant that lets me hire more people and repeat that process in a different way. So it is, at the end of the day you've proven that you have a repeatable way of selling something. It could be big. It could be big. That's the thesis. Actually in more, I've figured out who I need to reach with what message and with what means. Is it a phone call, is it an email campaign? You've at least figured out a pattern that you can repeat. You don't typically wanna experiment with hiring giant sales forces but you haven't figured that out in a B round. So that's why it's just gotten more stringent on that front. Awesome, it's a scale piece. That's Dave Vonte would say is rationalization. Things get more focused. That's more growing in the market. I wanna talk to you about developers. You know, when you're the CTO of VMware and you still are active in the community, the community was really a key part of that growth and certainly funded that whole universalization trend and then cloud. What's your take on developers today? Because now you're seeing companies looking at commercial available software and solutions in the cloud which brings back like it doesn't have to be to do it yourself. It has to, there is some commercialization opportunities for companies to make money on. You know, in the old days startups would make it because they didn't have a lot of cash and they would build their own web scale stuff. So now we're moving to this next generation of developers. What's your thoughts on the makeup, the persona, any sentiment that you're seeing, trends around today's developer community? Yeah, I think this has been going on for a while but I do think there are more choices than ever for now. I think what most people recognize is that at the very top level of businesses more and more things are obviously digital, more ways of reaching the customer than ever through on the channel or whatever else are requiring developers to get there. So more of the company's value is limited by what they can get out either by speed of development or people that they can hire. So at the top level developers are a scarcer resource than ever and wanting to make them both productive and happy so that they stay around matter. And the end result of that has been that developers do absolutely big companies and small companies have more influence over how things are done than in the past. And we've actually talked about this before too, it's you can't tell developers to do certain things when they can just get up and go somewhere else. And if you're on a crappy schedule for products they wanna go somewhere where they can get their work out. So that's why DevOps movements and tools are there. If they wanna be productive and write beautiful applications they're gonna choose one framework over some older one that was the standard. So I think the big recognition first of all is developers have more influence over where the spend and where the tools are going and that companies can and should look at their productivity and happiness as a very, very critical part of the puzzle. Translation, don't jam stuff down the developer's throat. Yeah, and translation to startups is like make developers love you. You gotta recognize developers don't ultimately usually pay. It's usually someone else there. But make developers love you, have operations teams pay for you. Like that's kind of the mantra if you're in the development world. We mentioned DevOps, you mentioned DevOps. Agiles obviously is out in the open now and everyone's adopting the DevOps but it's really implementing to the application level. So you mentioned developers are closer to the action. We've had many talks on theCUBE on that. But now you're seeing as it's like retail is a retail event this January. You know retail would be conversation like, oh omni-channel, but now that's being disrupted by DevOps, it's a horizontal integration. So the DevOps is actually impacting all aspects of this digital transformation that's happening. So I want to get your thoughts on that whole digital transformation. If you assume that the app has a development component and or cloud and data, it will be horizontally disrupting and might have some vertical packaging per the verticals. So I ask you, the old way versus the new way? If you had to kind of like create sides of the street, old side of the street and new side of the street, what are some of the forces that you see happening out there, old way of doing things in the new way? Can you give some examples, some technology, some approaches that you've seen, startups and examples? Yeah, that's a great set of questions to get into. Maybe at the top level. So definitely, actually there's this funny survey, John. I read this thing that said 92% of CEOs want to deliver software faster. I was like, who in the world, who's the 8% who doesn't want to? So at a top level, again, because it is the thing that's exposing access to the products, everything around businesses are coming through that. It can be the bottleneck for putting out new SKUs and new products and reaching your customer and good support. So at the top level, everyone wants to move faster. I think to talk out of two sides of my mouth, I think you want to have the tools that allow people to experiment and get the feedback more quickly when appropriate. I do think the downside of this is for certain types of software, whether it's maybe lower in the stack, things that have to be absolutely rock solid and you actually want them to have more bake time before they're put out into the wild. That's where those advocates would call it fragile programming instead of agile programming because you really do need to have some things that bake. There's a five millions aspect to it. There's more ops, less dev kind of thing, right? That's right and that's a big chunk of it. The other chunk for enterprise in particular, when you're really truly an enterprise company, especially lower in the stack, there are a lot of dependencies on you in terms of what tools you're plugging into and people that have been trained around how to use you. Now I think that's something, if you're in the consumer world, you probably don't appreciate quite as much and so the ability to absorb and have all of the ecosystem work around a super fast moving piece of code causes a lot of challenges as well. So I do think you have to apply this technique to the right areas and with the right thinking and absolutely experimentation is better than ever, you can get real time feedback. That matters in every part of it. But knowing that some parts have to just be rock solid and shouldn't move that quickly. Thoughts on digital data in this data transmission, we say digital data, our thesis that we're speculating on now is that customers would prefer to buy from a brand whether it's consumer enterprise, prefer to buy from a brand that has digital assets that are engaging. When that's basically data, assets are now data. And data's got to be protected and it's got to be integrated, all kinds of opportunities around data. What's your thoughts around today's world around? Big data facet, just data in general as an asset. Digital asset. Obviously it's everywhere. There's all kinds of data. You're generating plenty of it as we speak too. It's everywhere through all the different assets. And I do think this rise in the hotness as we were talking about earlier of whether it's data analytics or people are using AI and machine learning in different, maybe not always the right way, but the idea is that there is so much data, the real challenge I think for everyone now is what do you make of it and how do you actually get an insight that you do something with. So absolutely more sources than ever and this is whether it's splunk dealing with logs all the way up to marketing analytics looking at how their drip campaign is working. I think everyone's fully recognized now that great, we have a lot of data, what do I do with it? And that's where all these, I think a lot of great innovations are happening. Yeah, I mean I think still it's really early there. I'm super excited about as you know data, we love data, and theCUBE is looking at you with your bond. Just what's up with you these days? I mean obviously your focus has recently been security, we talked about that. What are you excited about this year? What's some of your investments and what trends you're watching closely? Yeah, I mean security is a big, big focus of mine and clearly it's got a long way to go to be perfect but it is a spending priority and I think there are a lot of great technologies coming to bear across a rapidly changing world of public clouds and mobile phones and a lot of weird attackers coming in new ways. So that continues to be a big focus and a priority for enterprises. But also to the point on DevOps and generally people productivity is something that I've been really heavily focused on whether it's tools that let developers be more productive or you'll speak with Zugata in a little bit. How do you actually make sure that the employees you have are improving and developing themselves as fast as possible? But all this has to be done in the modern expectations of a mobile world and of a world where I don't want something once a year or I want it real time and I think it applies to whether it's me figuring out how I'm doing as an employee and getting better or putting out a product and getting real time feedback. It ultimately comes down to more sources of data being used in a quicker cycle to make things better. So basically digital disruption or transformation as you're referring to there is really a process change fundamentally within companies. I mean, everything is essentially being disrupted. It's not the old way of doing it. It might be vertically stacked or there's the application that does it. Now there's a lot more integration and cross functional process improvements or process changes. I think it affects absolutely everything. Every part of our lives in my heart is doing that certainly around the people side and the technology side but the marketing side, the product development side. And like if you zoom all the way back, I think what's ultimately happening is things move faster than ever. They change faster and they grow faster. So everything has to change. If you're doing something once a year that's sort of like the world has changed a huge amount. You just mentioned iPhones like these things are only in their middle sort of middle teen years or early teen years. Eighth grade, is it nine year old? But anyway, it's early. It's so super early, a lot of opportunities. What are you most excited about right now? What is, let me rephrase. What's the coolest thing going on in Palo Alto and Silicon Valley that you're seeing come through the board room here at Catalyst? Is there a trend? Is there a coolness? Obviously people talk about AI virtual reality. Obviously you see it by the Facebook and others do some cool stuff. Obviously the development communities are exploding. What are some of the cool things you've seen come through this room? At a macro level, the coolest thing going on right now is I think when people leave school now, it used to be you would think that I want to go be a lawyer or a doctor. But creating a new company is so top of mind for people that wouldn't previously thought about that. So at the top of what's so cool is the diversity of ideas coming in. And diversity isn't even just in this tech space. It's how do I apply this to some new disease or how do I apply it to something else? So this notion of starting something new applying across the board, I think it couples with, there's definitely an attitude among newer graduates coming out that they want to do something meaningful. And it's sort of cliche and it's like a digital transformation for entrepreneurship. Across the board, just name anything that we deal with in life, whether it's food or doctors or anything, there are people trying to try something new around that. And I think just the notion of failure modes and everything is fine. People are very happy with the trade-off. We're psyched to have you here on the ground. We'll see you at theCUBE. Any events you got on the radar, we make sure we connect with you on? You guys, you're in a lot of the good ones. RSA is right around the corner. That's where a lot of security companies are going to be really going wide. And we'll have, it's always fun to go to VMworld and to reinvent all kinds of interesting things going on in that world. All right, Steve, thanks for taking the time here on there. This is theCUBE on the ground. I'm John Furrier with Steve Herrod, Managing Director of Catalyst Partners. The cost ventures we'll be right back with more after the short break.


All right, let me continue with a closer description of the scheduler and the two modes of operation. The first one I'd like to touch is the cooperative multitasking. The cooperative multitasking is a little bit special in the fact that it requires a cooperation between different tasks or between all tasks. So each task has to give up to be able to allow other tasks to run. This requires that the task gets, for example, blocked by calling a function that blocks it by waiting for something, being it a timeout or some other object. Or it can get to a ready state by calling, for example, OS thread yield and it can be as well put to suspend mode by the system, typically other tasks, or it can as well suspend itself. One advantage is that the tasks are not preemptive by tasks with a higher priority, so you get all the time you need to finish your own job. Then there is not implemented a time slicing, so the tasks don't switch periodically based on a time base. And to allow it, you have to disable the preemption in the freeRTOS config. When we choose a preemptive multitasking, the situation changes a little bit. So the preemptive multitasking works with the tasks, especially if they have the same priority. So the freeRTOS always chooses the task with the highest priority, but if there are more tasks with the same highest priority, it will switch between them with the round robin algorithm. So in this case, the context, the tasks, which happens when there is a time slice that passes, which can be a millisecond or longer time defined by the global system frequency. Then when the task with the higher priority has become ready, when the task gets blocked or when the task gets ready by yielding. The preemption is enabled by a use preemption macro set to one. So this way the behavior of the operating system becomes a little bit more human friendly because all the tasks with the same priority get scheduled after a time slice. So there is a feeling that all of them run faster, even if this may not be exactly the same thing. Why I don't use preemptive multitasking too much? You have to think about the fact that the time slice happens in an interrupt so the tasks which can happen anytime during your application run time. Which means if you use non recursive functions and a lot of CRTL functions are not reentrant, you may have a trouble. For example, printf, the typical case, the typical function is not a reentrant function because it uses some internal variables of the CRTL library. And if you interrupt it in the middle by an interrupt and you give a job to another task that as well uses printf, then it starts overwriting the internal variables and it becomes non consistent and it can as well crush your application. So be careful about using non reentrant functions and this you will typically learn in the documentation for the compiler and its libraries. So if it's described whether it's reentrant or not, it helps you whether to use it or not. If you don't have any information about it, then I discourage you from using preemptive. There is as well a possibility to use the cooperative with preemption by IRQ, which means that still the task switch normally happens when you give up your CPU time. But the task switch can happen as well when you get an external interrupt and at the end of the interrupt you wake up some higher priority task and then this causes the task switch. So at that moment the interrupts are used to trigger the context switch and it can force a higher priority task to execute instead of the original one. So it's a preemptive system without time slicing. The scheduler is a way how to switch the tasks and to define under which priorities the tasks will switch. So it's typically triggered by the Pandable SV and it scans all the tasks that are in the ready state and chooses the one with the highest priority. If the priority is equal among other tasks, then it goes in a round robin. In freeRTOS round robin is implemented for the tasks with the same priority. Now let's talk a little bit more about the interrupts and connection to the hardware. So when we look in the interrupts, you can see how the interrupts cooperate together. The system service interrupt is raised by an SWI instruction and it's used only once to start the scheduler at a high priority. So you can see that the SVC occurs only at the beginning of the freeRTOS execution and as soon as it's finished, it provides the task switch and the first tasks execute. Then we have got a SISTIC interrupt that has lowest priority of all the interrupts used by the freeRTOS and it is used for defining a task switch on the defined tick rate related or expressed in hertz. The SISTIC, if the preemptive operation is defined, calls the task switch which means it sets the flag for Pandable system interrupt if the context switch is necessary. And finally the Pandable SV interrupt is finally used for a task switch and it's typically called from the SISTIC and it is as well set in functions of the RTOS API to guarantee the context switch whenever we change a state of the task. So if for example we enter a blocking state, if we enter a ready state, in all these situations the context switch is generated. Now let's look at the priority of the interrupts. The interrupts are selected or differentiated by the fact that you either call the RTOS functions or not. If we look at the RTOS related interrupts, they are defined on the lowest priority. Then the interrupts within the RTOS space, so those where for example you get a character from the UART and you put it into the freeRTOS queue, they have to be or they are limited in the priority below the SISTIC call interrupt priority. So all interrupts with the relation to the freeRTOS have to be run below the maximum SISTIC call interrupt priority. This is to guarantee that the freeRTOS will always have the option to take over using system routines. If you look in the CubaMix interrupt definition and you enable the freeRTOS, it will give you the option to checkmark if the interrupt calls the RTOS functions or not. If yes, it is limited to the RTOS interrupt priorities. If you declare that it doesn't use the RTOS functions, you are free to choose higher priorities, which means you can define a very fast peripheral response time if you don't use the RTOS functions. Speaking about the IRQ, when we operate with interrupts, we need to use specific functions. These functions typically have suffix from ISR. They are different a little bit from the standard functions used among the tasks, because they can as well pass a context or a calling task. So this differentiation has to be done if you use native API by a programmer. If, however, you use a CMSIS API, this differentiation is done by the CMSIS function. For example, in the case of OSMF for release, you don't need to care which function you call, there is just one. And it internally differentiates whether it calls from the interrupt or from a standard task. You can as well see the API functions used in the native API from interrupts and the CMSIS OS API. So all the functions for the native API have the suffix from ISR. The CMSIS OS APIs don't care. Now let's look at the boot time of an application running on RTOS. There are things that are dependent on the hardware and they allow you to tweak the startup. So what is hardware dependent? The CPU clocks. Cubemix sets the CPU clocks in a main routine, but if you need a very fast application startup time, what can you do? Where you can tweak your CPU clock if you need a very fast startup time. Do you know function system in it? It is the very first function called after the reset. In our library, it's defined to reset the oscillators and to run from the standard internal RC oscillator. So it guarantees a safe and reliable startup. However, if you have a crystal connected and you have a very big memory to initialize, it's probably better to start with boosting your clocks, turning on the PLL and starting on the PLL. Because then the memory initialization, copying of the blocks, initializing the init values of variables and so on, will be much faster. So the first way is to move the clock initialization from the main to the system in it. Then the RTL library will initialize the variables. So it will take the init values for the static and global variables. It will as well clear the static and global variables without initialization value. So it's lot of memset and memcopy. And then if there is any other setup needed, for example for C++, then it will as well call the static constructors of the classes. And it can as well initialize stack, heap and other things. And only then you get into your main routine. And in the main routine you set up your main task and any others if needed. Then you set up the queues, mutexes, timers and so on. And you start the scheduler. From that point you can see how much time it needs. So per one object it takes approximately 500 CPU cycles. The application task needs more than 1000 cycles to create. And the initial scheduler start takes approximately 1200 cycles.  So sometimes it's beneficial if you start the scheduler very quickly. You just create your init task, launch the scheduler and then while you define other tasks you can initialize the peripherals and other tasks later. So the primary tasks that are needed to execute very quickly can be defined for example in preemptive mode and they can already run while you initialize further peripherals. So you have got a possibility to create tasks that wait for a peripheral initialization and only when a peripheral is initialized, especially if it relies on some external things like connecting a ternet cable or detecting the ternet cable. Such tasks can be created very quickly at the beginning but then it can be launched when the cable is physically connected. So you then speed up the response. Further, the RTOS defines an idle task. This is a special one. It's implemented for the sake of having at least one active task that will run if nothing else is available. It's created automatically by the kernel. The idle task has one interesting thing. You can create an idle hook which then gets called whenever idle task starts. This way you can implement low power mode because if the microcontroller has no other task to be scheduled, which means it doesn't need to do anything. Then this idle call or idle hook allows you to put the microcontroller in a low power in sleep or stop mode. If you use the tickless idle, you have to do a couple of other things like stopping the timebase, like defining the wakeup interrupts and so on. But it allows you to disable the periodic wakeup of the microcontroller from a timebase interrupt. Additionally, implementing the entry and exit macros or hooks in the idle allow you to calculate the CPU idle time. So it can tell you how much the CPU is loaded. This is all the counters. Now I am running at 30% free time. Now I am running at 0% free time or 99% free time. This is because we can measure at which time we entered the idle and when we exited the idle. Friartos is started by calling the OS kernel start in typically main.c file. So when you initialize at least one task, you call the OS kernel start and as soon as you enter it, it starts scheduling the tasks. Normally, it calls the vtask start scheduler from the native API and then it should never return. So when this is called, it calls the task create for idle task. It as well sets up the timer task if you opted for it. And then it calls the export start scheduler which generates a first context switch and chooses the first active task to be running. The port start first task then locates the stack, sets the MSP and PSP and it triggers the software interrupt which calls the SVC handler and this one restores the context, loads the tcb from the first task that you implemented and starts executing this task. So you can see that it's a series of different jobs to do before you start your first one but it all makes very clear sense. I would say that the all behavior of the Friartos is based on lists. If you create a queue, it's a list of items. If you create a semaphore or a mutex, it's a list with a one element. So most of the functionality in the Friartos is different lists. So there exists a possibility to instantiate a list and a lot of lists are as well used internally in the kernel. When we look at them, you normally don't get access to these lists but in case you want to debug, you can still put them in a watch window and you can traverse them through. So we can see that there is a ready task list that lists all the tasks or pointers to the tcb for the tasks that can be instantiated and put into the running state. So task list is an array with a size of maximum priorities because it lists the tasks depending on their priority. If you define a specific priority, it will be put in the appropriate element of the task list array. Probably one interesting information, you can change the priority of the task in runtime and that means it will be moved between the ready lists. Further, if you terminate a task, it will be put into the list tasks waiting termination until they are removed. Further, there is a suspended task list, pending ready task list where it is put after you, for example, send a message to the task. So it's put from the blocked state to the pending ready and then the scheduler will put it into the appropriate priority ready list. You have got a delayed task list where the tasks wait for a specific timeout. So with each timebase, the waiting time for these tasks is decremented and when it reaches zero, it gets into the pending ready. So that the task that's waiting for something has elapsed its waiting time so we can use it again. And we have got as well overflow delayed task list that overflows the current tick time. That's how the Friartos organizes different tasks in different states. Speaking about the kernel start, we already discussed that on the previous slides, but the API offered the functionality to end the scheduler. It's not implemented on STM32 so we cannot finish the Friartos, which means we never exit from the OS kernel start. Further, we can check if the kernel is running or not. This is a very important thing, especially if you, for example, implement lock functions. So if you print something on a UART, like error messages, status messages and so on, and this function formulates the output and sends it. When you, for example, use this functionality before you start the scheduler, for example, during peripheral initialization and different stacks initialization, such function, if it uses, for example, a queue for the messages, can use the operating system functions if the kernel is running. But if you run the lock function before you start the kernel, it must use a different method of synchronizing the messages and sending of the data. So, for example, if the kernel is not running, you will use a blocking function for sending the data over UART. But if the kernel is running, you can use DMA and some task that takes care about the messages from the queue. You can create dynamically the space for the text. You can send it through the queue to the sending task, and then it's more efficient because you don't need to wait for the DMA transaction to finish. So, the function OS kernel running is a very important one when you need to create a cooperation between non-RTOS and RTOS functionality. And you can as well read the value of the kernel SysTick where it's implemented as a 32-bit counter internally, and it's used for timing, but you can as well use it to monitor how long your application is alive. Be careful when you implement support for tickless mode. In low power modes, the kernel SysTick is not incremented while the microcontroller sleeps. So, when you wake up, if you need this time to be rather precise, you have to maintain the time separately and you have to update the internal time.