26: Mixed Reality

[Music]

Welcome everybody to the Coffee and Code Cast, a weekly live stream tech podcast where we

talk about neither coffee or code.

I'm Kyle Johnson.

And I'm Mike Sheehan.

And today on The Cast, what are we doing today, Kyle?

We're going to talk about some pretty large undersea, the world's fastest undersea pipe

data connection.

Data cable.

Data cabling.

And we're going to step into the world of virtual reality and talk about some new products

that came out last week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

And we'll cover some news and unveil some new, new little spiffy

artwork for the podcast.

All right. Well, yeah, let's get started with some quick show news here.

We got some really cool new artwork from my buddy, uh, your name,

your name, the gentle, the gentle giant is his, the name of his illustration company.

And he created us a really, really cool Seattle,

I don't know why you would call it like a sunset.

It's got the Pike Place Market style sign, but on it instead of Pike Place

Market is Coffee Code Cast.

Yeah, it's really nice work, really nice work and the space needle in the background

and little mountains.

Very Seattle-esque.

Definitely works for our area.

I love it.

It's really nice work.

And he's been working on this for a while.

We started sketching some things out with him,

what, back in the fall, winter, something like that.

- Yeah, and he's stuck with us.

We kinda had some different ideas

of if we wanted to keep the same name of the show

and which way we wanted to go and what we wanted on it,

and then we decided to change our minds.

So like he's stuck with us through a bunch of iterations there

and I definitely appreciate his work.

It's, I love it.

- And the process really cool too,

because I remember some of the beginning phases of this,

just like sketching out some stuff.

and from where we started to where we landed,

I'm really happy with the results.

So thank you very much for that.

- It was a fun process too,

like watching him do the storyboard

or what he called, a mood board is what he called it.

- Okay.

- So he put together a whole bunch of different ideas

that he found online of different podcasts

and their artwork and even some stuff that was not podcasts

he threw on the mood board and then shared that

and was like, well, what do you like here?

What do you dislike?

- Yes.

- Just to kind of narrow down in on an idea

of what the artwork might end up becoming over time.

And yeah, it came out, came out beautifully.

So if you listen to the podcast on an app

that supports artwork, go ahead and check out

the new artwork, otherwise I'll make sure to post it

also on the show notes on the website.

So be sure to check it out, it's really, really great.

We'll have to update it next week on the YouTube stream.

I don't have it up there right now.

Yeah, on the live stream, yep.

So be sure to go visit his other, his page too.

His artwork is fantastic.

you can visit his work by going to www.coffeecodecast.com/gentlegiant.

Love it. That's awesome, man.

Thank you very much for the work on that. Appreciate it.

Moving on. There's been a erotic photo hunt spotting.

Discovery. Shout out to Allie G.

She was that.

I got a good sense like.

We better stop here before we take a step back here.

Two episodes ago, we talked about

One of our favorite little taco places back in Omaha,

which happened to, unbeknownst to me--

I can't believe you didn't know about that.

I didn't know.

But apparently Mike's favorite portion of the taco joint

was the erotic photo hunt.

Well, that might be a stretch.

I don't think you quoted me.

I don't think there's any quote of me saying that.

Yeah, it was.

Somebody brought it up in the office,

and then it triggered a memory of, yeah,

going to Alvarado's and Council Bluffs,

and waiting for my hangover food to arrive,

pop a quarter into the little machine

and place an erotic photo hunt.

And so we were talking about it after that,

we were talking about it with some people

and like a week ago, I got a,

probably shouldn't have been on teams.

It was like, I got a message on the work chat

that some co, like one of my coworkers,

Ali was out at this place in Fremont Ballard area,

free lard we call it and send a nice big, it's an updated photo of erotic photo hunt,

much better resolution than it was back in those days.

Well, it's funny that you say that too because at some point, and I believe hopefully I did

this at home, but I looked up exactly what you were talking about.

I think it was actually for the show notes of that episode, which would have been episode

24, I believe.

And I was looking for a link to show people what erotic photo hunt might look like or

what it was or whatever.

Eater.com came up and it was talking about how that's a dying game platform,

whatever you want to call it, that they're, those are basically all being

phased out over time and they're really hard to find. So the fact that you found

one is really really interesting. Yeah, I thought so too and this was, it probably

had a thousand other games on it, I have no idea, but they found erotic photo hunt

in Seattle in Freelard. Real hot spot part of town, real classy game.

- I want to take a little trip up there.

- And four B's.

- Yeah, I've never heard of four B's.

Four B's up in Freelard.

- Four B's, I've never heard of it either.

- Yeah, no idea. - Must be a classy bar.

- Sounds like a real classy joint,

but they have a nice happy hour.

Let's go along with your erotic photo hunt pleasures.

- So what else is going on, man?

We got a real quick check in, I guess.

We should talk about our fitness and eating goals.

We failed on the, well, let's take a step back from that.

We did go do our CrossFit class, or I did, and you did.

But it was a very difficult class.

We may have talked about this even last week.

We did.

That was a ball buster, yeah.

It was.

And so last week, I think we talked about it.

The soreness hadn't totally set in.

It did the next day, and I was hurting pretty bad,

but that's kind of subsided now.

I'm ready to go again.

We were gonna go ahead and go the other night,

but we had some things come up.

So we're staying on top of that ish.

get back on the on the path. Right. Yeah. But as far as eating goes, definitely staying

on the whole 30. That's not not a problem for me so far. Good work. It's feeling pretty

good. I'm feeling I'm feeling better. Feeling like things are not quite as snug, which is

a good sign. I haven't done any like weigh ins or any of that kind of thing. I've actually

been trying to avoid that as much as possible. I don't like the idea that anyway. If you

feel better, that's good. You're doing the right things. Yeah. Yeah. And our our friend,

friend, I don't know how you want to refer to her, Erin.

Sure, she's a friend. It just depends on the day, I guess.

That's true. It depends on Mike's antics. She was saying that, yeah, doing CrossFit,

it's a bad idea to gauge progress by weight, mainly because you're going to be stacking

muscle on probably pretty quickly via CrossFit. So it's a poor metric.

I already stack on a lot of muscle too, so I don't want to throw off the weigh in.

You are looking pretty swole these days.

Yeah, thank you.

Thank you.

I feel great.

Except for that pizza I had earlier today.

That was definitely--

Oh, maybe it was just you getting puffed up.

Yeah, getting puffed up.

Yeah, swole in, man.

Yeah, like that.

Very nice.

Yeah, no, that's cool, man.

I'm glad you're sticking with it.

I saw some pretty healthy eats coming across your desk

this week, so keep going.

We'll get the-- yeah, the thing yesterday was kind of too bad.

It was a client had a little internet outage,

a little side gigs that I worked on,

and so that ended up keeping me up late last night.

- That'd be another good topic.

That's a topic we should probably dive into,

not today, but for another show.

It'd be an interesting one to kind of revisit old applications

and learn from your mistakes and that sort of thing.

- I would love to talk about it.

I'll just say this.

I built that app and it hadn't been touched since like 2013

for the most part.

And so I was cussing up and down all night

having to fix this guy's shit and it was my shit.

So yeah, I think there's a lot we could unpack on that one.

- What kind of fucking developer built that?

- Six years ago, Mike, versus today, man, not good.

No, man, otherwise, the only other real bit of news I have

is I'm heading off to Blue Skies tomorrow, man,

a little spring training coming up.

I'm gonna head off to Arizona.

- Oh, I'm jealous, man.

I'm so tired of the cold.

- It's bad.

brutal. I keep getting these texts. I have my brother, I have a Nebraska phone number still

on Google Voice and I get texts from the mayor over there saying, "Oh, we're going to get another

10 inches of snow tonight, like snow emergency." And I'm just like, "I'm so fucking glad that I'm not

dealing with that shit." But it has been cold here still. It's been in the 30s. It hasn't really

gotten out of the 30s except for the weekend. Last weekend it was mid 40s a couple days.

But it's been an unusually cold summer. Winter? What season are we in? Winter in Seattle?

But yeah, and it's anywhere you go.

Like I've traveled in a number of different places.

And granted they're all cold-ish places.

I've traveled to Iowa.

I've traveled to my hometown in Iowa.

I've traveled to Denver.

I've been here.

And they're all just freezing.

And I'm tired of it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Time for a change.

Well, it was '83 in Phoenix today.

So I'll let you know how it goes.

I'll send you a postcard.

Send me a picture of you sitting in the ballpark

with shorts on and a beer.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Busting out the tank tops.

That'll definitely happen.

Excellent.

Oh, hey, why don't you crack me one of those, by the way?

Thank you, sir.

I don't mind if I do.

Ah, well, let's move it on, huh?

[MUSIC PLAYING]

So the Mobile World Congress, big event in Barcelona, Spain

last week.

Lots of cool news came out of that conference.

But the thing that I was really excited about

that I was talking with you the other day

was about the different modes of reality.

So Mixed Reality was a big topic discussion.

Of course, Microsoft came out with an update

to the HoloLens, their version of their Mixed Reality headset,

I guess, if you want to call it that.

And so yeah, a lot of cool things

that they showed on the demo there we can unpack.

But before we get into that product,

I thought it was interesting reading up on the subject

some of the differences.

Somebody had called out Microsoft and said,

something about their virtual reality or their augmented reality and they're very quick to

correct them and say no it's not virtual reality, it's not augmented reality, we're doing mixed

reality and so I thought maybe we could just do a quick high level because I didn't really

know all the differences. I think I've used those terms somewhat interchangeably thinking

they're about the same thing but they're a little bit different.

So HoloLens is a relatively, is it a relatively new product or were they, because I feel like

I remember seeing a demo of something very similar even say a year ago about this time.

The first version came out in 2015-ish.

So yeah, a little while ago, well almost four years I guess now.

And so this is the second major release that they've come out with, quite a bit improved.

But yes, they've been in the space for a little while now.

So the cool thing is, it's a, well I guess to describe what HoloLens is if you're not

familiar. It's almost like a helmet or something or a hat that you wear, right?

With like a visor that's more or less a screen, correct? Right. And then it's in

this case, I guess, there's a number of these different products that are

created by game companies or by Microsoft or whomever the case may be. Google, I

think, has their own. Some of them go completely over your eyes, right? Whereas

'Cause this one's kind of, like I said, just a visor.

You can almost think of it as like a,

I don't know, like a cycling visor,

you know, a motorcycle visor or something.

So it doesn't totally like block out your surroundings.

- So that's an important distinction too

when we talk about virtual reality versus augmented or mixed.

And so, so just, yeah, like compare that to your Oculus.

You're thinking of probably like an Oculus.

- Oculus or what's the Google Daydream, I think,

is what it's called?

Google had one too that you could connect to.

I think maybe that was even you put your phone in it

still if you remember back then.

- That was the cardboard one that you could make maybe?

- It was post the cardboard.

The cardboard was a different one.

But there was definitely, Google made kind of this

really nice looking, kind of had the same material

as like this on my keyboard.

But a nice platform that you could use

the same thing off of your phone.

But I don't know that it took off that well.

But anyway, it covered your whole face,

blocked out everything in your eyes

much like the Oculus does.

And so that's very much what VR is all about.

Like you're going to have some kind of device presenting

all your vision to you.

And so whatever that is, if it's a phone

or some other kind of screen, you're

very much in a different world.

A lot of times you're kind of roped off,

so you can't go fall off in the real world somewhere.

And there's a lot of different applications for that.

It's a very immersive experience.

But you're not-- oh, sorry.

I got something to happen there.

But yeah, you're not interacting with the real world

at that point.

You're having your own experience in the virtual world.

And it's very much separate from reality.

So that's VR.

Augmented is trying to kind of morph into the real world

a little bit.

So you've got Google Glass is a product

that I think of where it's just like putting up

visuals for you to see.

So maybe you're walking around downtown

and you look at a building and now it's

going to give you some data points on the building.

Or if you walk by the restaurant,

it's going to show you the reviews for that restaurant.

But it's kind of a one-way data transfer.

It's an overlay on the real world.

And so you're just looking and observing,

gaining information, right?

But is that-- so OK.

So is that also a wearable device, much like the HoloLens?

Yeah, the Google Glass is just like a pair of glasses

and has a little camera in there that'll project up

- Okay, got you. - On the screen, yep.

So it is, so you see what's going on,

you're interacting in the real world

and just getting kind of a heads up display,

if you will, of what's going on around you.

- Got it.

- And so that's more of an augmented reality.

Pokemon Go, that is a very similar, right?

Like you're in the real world,

but you're also like picking up virtual objects

and that sort of thing.

- Right, yeah, I know my wife is a huge Pokemon Go player

and actually works for the company,

so I have a lot of experience with that.

But yeah, I know if you turn on the augmented reality, that's the correct term, right?

Augmented. Yes.

That you can like bounce the balls off like trees and stuff like that

as you're trying to capture your Pokemon.

So like you interact with the real world kind of overlaid or you interact with the game

with the real world in the background potentially and maybe can interact with it.

So that's getting more.

Yeah, that's kind of blurring the lines a little bit too,

because then you get that mixed reality space is really where how the lens takes off.

And so they had a lot of demos there,

but you're in the real world.

You can see what's going on, but then you can also

interact with virtual objects in the real world, too,

kind of what you're saying with the game.

And that was really neat to see the demo there.

And they covered a few different industries

where this could be applicable.

So right now, it's enterprise only.

It's kind of the focus to get started.

And it's because it's a little expensive, cost prohibitive.

But some of the demos were--

Like for example in manufacturing and they showed,

well it wasn't even like in these robotic facilities,

but they showed workers like mechanics

like working on machinery.

And with the HoloLens, it might instruct you

the torque settings for the motorcycle

or which tools you needed to perform the task.

And so it really just took a lot of the research out of it

and it was just more like if you're looking at a certain area

It maybe gives you diagnostic information in real time

and gives you up-to-date information

on what you need to do to fix the problem.

I remember seeing last year similar conference like this one.

Maybe it even was Mobile World Congress, I'm not sure.

But demo similar to where they were doing a job site,

construction site.

And it was basically a supervisor

was running the HoloLens device, monitoring the job site,

kind of looking around, seeing what

little worker bees were doing. And it had a couple of different demos that they were showing.

Number one was like an example of, you know, some guy that needed a saw, a specific type

of saw, and he didn't know where it was. Somebody left it in an area and he didn't know where

it was. So like the, via HoloLens and some kind of tracking chip in the saw itself, the

supervisor could kind of look around, figure out exactly where the saw was, and point the

worker to the direction of the saw. All right, that was one example. The other example that

they gave was like using HoloLens to define these zones that workers should not be in,

right? These are unsafe areas. And so as soon as somebody walks into this zone via HoloLens,

they would see like that area light up in red or something like that, right? Like, oh,

there's somebody here that shouldn't be here.

Right, exactly. I remember that demo, that was really cool demo at the time. And so,

yeah, you have kind of this up to date information. You could imagine that if police had access

to HoloLens, it could be a little scary, right?

Because now, like offenders, they can point out

and random in real time and know exactly

your background without, I don't know,

that could get a little creepy there,

but that's the idea, to provide real time information

and overlay it on the world.

And then some of the demos that they gave last week

were even more than that where you had a patient

laying on a table and all the doctors had HoloLens on.

And so now they're getting vitals in real time

and they can even open up cross sections virtually and see what's going on at different layers to try to make a diagnosis or figure out how to operate and what they needed to do.

Or even taking that a step further, maybe you have, let's say, a resident or somebody who's not experienced with surgery, right?

But via this HoloLens, they can be looking at the person, looking at the patient, doing some sort of procedure, but in their ear and with visuals from the HoloLens,

they now get help from like a very experienced surgeon that maybe is on the other side of

the country or something like that.

Yeah, absolutely.

But can see everything that's going on and yeah, bringing people together to make things

safer, have more eyes on the problem.

Right.

So it was really cool to see the demo for HoloLens here that they showed.

And it went from being, you know, the one last year that we were talking about with

the job site was very much a visual. There was no interaction.

Right. You were just looking at all these things and being like, oh, I see a problem.

I'll use my radio and I'll call or something like that. Whereas now, there's actually like

controls that you can use. You can use your hands to control different things that are

in the virtual world. You could even use your voice to input things if you needed to. So

there's a whole bunch of different things that they've now added that are making it

much more powerful than it was even a year ago.

Yeah, no doubt the hardware is getting better.

I would say on top of that,

some of the big announcements came around cloud,

around Azure services that are coming out.

So a couple of big ones that they announced

were what they call spatial anchors and remote rendering.

And so the remote rendering is very cool

because with this now,

you can take some of those really complicated renderings

up to the cloud and then on the edge

and then they'll push it to the device.

So it's really just streaming information

to the device, all the heavy lifting is happening in the cloud.

And so you have a lot more power now.

They don't have to beef up the hardware of the HoloLens

to handle some of these processes.

It can just stream it over.

And that makes a lot of sense.

If you start to think down the road, like 10, 15 years down

the road, there's no way you can put enough horsepower

into a device that you're going to wear around comfortably

to put all these different overlays

and do all these things that it needs to do.

So being able to put that in the cloud

and just basically make your screen in your HoloLens

kind of a streaming screen of information is way more,

makes way more sense.

- Yeah, and for other low power requirements

and that sort of thing, if you want it to have any kind of

battery life in the field, then you're gonna have to rely

on more heavy hitting processors that are wireless.

I can handle it for you.

- So another thing in the demo that I thought

was really interesting is at the very beginning

of the demo, she has what looked like

almost like her computer screen in front of her.

So her HoloLens was projecting this computer screen,

kind of, if she looked left or right,

like it stayed right in front of her, right?

So she was always looking at it.

Yes.

But then in yet another demo,

there was a different scenario where it was,

I think it was a wind turbine farm

or something that was kind of being simulated,

and that stayed put, right?

She would walk around it and be able to interact with it,

like it was a physical thing that was staying in place.

which is really fascinating that I can do either one or both.

And I haven't seen anything like that before.

Yeah, different modes that you can configure these objects.

And while you probably saw like they had the piano demo, that was an awesome demo.

So they brought up a grand piano or keyboard and she wanted to play.

And so just by pressing in the virtual space was in real time making music.

And that was really fun.

And then, yeah, to your point, like,

whether you want to follow or not,

I think the demo, they had a browser with Microsoft Teams

running, virtually.

And she wanted to have that with her

when she was doing the walkthrough.

And so put it into this, like, follow me mode.

And then now, like, walking around, checking out

other things, like, the browser was always kind of off-center

a little bit, but following her moves around in 3D.

The piano demo, I thought, was really, like, number one, cool.

Like the fact that you can do that is amazing.

But on the same token, like I would have really loved

to have seen something more complex out of that one.

Like I'm sure it's probably very difficult,

but you know, she played like chopsticks

or something very simply, one finger at a time, right?

And then kind of just did like a from end to end

on the piano, which that was cool to see.

But it would have been really powerful

if they could have played something more sophisticated

through that.

But I mean, the fact that they can do it at all is amazing.

- It's come a long way in a short time.

it's going to get better and with their focus on enterprise.

So yeah, the price right now, price point $3,500.

- It's not such a cheap price.

- Yeah, it's not going to be for gaming

or anything like that today, probably,

unless you really want to go crazy on that.

But they have some software that they are,

have already released that try to make it more accessible

to developers who are trying to build things

at a commercial level.

Like I think the guides kit was one of the things

that they talked about where that could be used

for training and manufacturing and help people even spot.

Learn on the job.

- I have another, I just kind of thought to myself

of another instance of this that,

and I think would follow into the,

is it mixed reality?

Yeah.

I think it's made by Niantic or they're working on it.

They have a video out.

And effectively what they're trying to do

is make it able to where you can play laser tag.

So the demo is them in a pretty large room.

There's no obstacles or anything like that,

but they're in a large room

and they're all holding their phones up,

walking around and then you can fire

at other people that you see in real space,

but the phone on the other end

somehow knows how to detect that they've been hit.

- Whether it was hit or not, right.

- And so it's a virtual game,

but it's using real life players

that are moving in a real life world

And then you could conceivably add obstacles that are virtual.

So now you can't hit the person, because it's now bouncing off

some virtual object, which is really fascinating.

They're still working on it.

It's something that I've seen in a YouTube video that I'll link

in the show notes.

But I think that's another example of mixed reality here,

right?

Absolutely is.

Yeah.

As long as they don't obscure the real objects,

everybody should be safe.

Yeah, a lot of other improvements, though,

So on this, on the second gen, so that I think they said they doubled the field of vision

from the first one.

And that's the other thing too, if you're looking at Oculus, we've had some VR headsets

in the office before.

And that's one thing that has been slow to improve is just the resolution, right?

Like you can kind of make you a little nauseous even just because it's good but not quite

there yet.

It's almost like looking at the old 640 by 480 screen.

is a bit pixelated and out of not entirely in focus.

I would contrast that to what they showed the other day

which looked very high res, very high quality.

So it was a different visual experience

than I've seen with other types of headsets.

- Yeah, I think a good point to bring up too

is you mentioned earlier that the Oculus covers

your whole face so it is your entire field of vision.

It's giving you everything that you can see, right?

So I know in the office here,

we had a pretty cool demo on the Oculus.

That was kind of a roller coaster ride.

And it's trippy because as you're sitting there

in a still chair, watching this Oculus thing,

like your body is reacting as if you're moving through space.

You're getting the churns in your stomach as you drop.

It's freaking you out.

Like you have no concept of reality anymore,

at least not from what you're seeing.

No.

Whereas the HoloLens, you can still see what's real.

You're just getting additional information overlaid.

Exactly right.

And it does change the whole experience.

I haven't done it firsthand other than seeing the demo,

but it would be neat to see how that works

because even she was showing how just like natural gestures

you can use to scale and pinch things

and move them out of the way.

And it's very much the way that we would interact

with any real object in 3D space.

They did talk about that in the video that I watched where she was talking about buttons,

you know, buttons in the virtual space and how even though it's not a real item,

we still interact with it as it if it is.

So like she was giving the example of a small button versus a large button.

Yeah.

And then the small button, you know, you might use one finger or two fingers to push it because it's a small button.

It doesn't take much force.

Whereas like the big button, most people would suddenly use their whole hand to touch it or to push it.

Exactly.

She was making the comparison that basically the real world still applies in a big way,

even in a virtual space.

And so they were trying to make sure that they realize that and utilize things in that

way.

Well, I think anything you do to make it more natural is going to help the adoption of it,

especially if you're in a real technical position or task.

So if you're a doctor working on things, you're going to want the feel to be the same feel

that you're used to because so much of it's based on those sensitivities.

And I think that's going to be really critical to the success and the adoption of it is how

it has to be better than the real experience, right?

Like it has to provide, minimally, I think, baseline, the everyday experience that you

would have of something and then give you the added benefit of whether it's knowing

more, seeing a wider range of things or whatever it is, giving you more information.

There has to be no compromises, right?

No.

The one that I do see when I watch the videos, like all of it looks very cool.

and it's very slick demo and whatnot.

But the big thing that they're still missing

and that I still don't know that we've solved,

whether it's Microsoft, Apple, Google, whomever,

is she was working in her Teams app,

you mentioned that earlier, and all of a sudden she was like,

oh, start dictation.

Oh boy.

I'm like, come on.

Yeah.

That sounds so not futuristic or, you know,

of all the, the demo was very impressive up to that point.

And then I was just like, come on, man.

Like, who's gonna, in the middle of the world,

that they're looking around and start dictation?

All right, I'm walking. I've got my Starbucks coffee and I'm walking down the street. Yeah, like it's bad enough on your cell phone that you

Might want to do speech to text and you're like looking at your phone and saying what you're trying to say, you know

Type out, but it's one that's another thing when you have to actually announce. Hey

No, you need a more discreet way to signal intent right for it to be

Adopted and you I would agree with that. That was probably the biggest like negative that I took away from it

The rest of it was very very impressive

The graphics were impressive like seeing the different ways that you could interact with it and even even like they showed like a spatial view

So

What would be a good example here?

Like let's say you were working in like a conference room and you were you had all these different

Papers and maybe a whiteboard and some images and you know, I don't know what else you would have

But you could move these things around in your virtual space

So you would like pinch and say move the whiteboard over here

so I don't have to look at it right now or put a group with these other items

Was really really cool way to arrange things and they were talking about that a

Common thing that you might have in in a work environment like ours

We have what three whiteboards in here oftentimes are all full and you don't want to erase what's on them

So instead nope just bring up another one move this other one over to the side and start new

And everything's preserved and then you still have your space to do it and everybody's happy exactly. Yeah

Yeah, lots of possibilities for it. I thought there were some other examples that were great

Search ways you're gonna improve on search in the real world. So if you wanted to find a

Certain location and you only knew it by certain

What do you what do you want to say like?

Geographical markers. Oh, what's that? I want to find like that coffee shop down by the water. Da da da da da da like you can get

That type of technology could could do something like that. I could look and see what matches the criteria you're talking about

That'd be really cool. I mean the search the search possibilities, you know between mapping and

Overlaying information on you know, like you said restaurants or a menu on a restaurant or who knows like the the that kind of stuff

Like when you're trying to find something the possibilities there are pretty amazing

You know even navigation if you started to think about using this off outside of a job site like if you were

On a bike on in a car, whatever the case might be like being able to navigate

Yeah, and that would I would think that having that type of technology would be safer than having a GPS or a screen off

To the side because now it's an overlay and so you're less distracted

I guess the science will have to prove that out

But in theory your your eyes are still focused on the road and your surroundings

you just have some visual aids.

It's like reading a street sign when you're driving down the street.

You're going to see these things when you're going by.

Now there's other overlays that say, "go left here because traffic's better," or whatever.

I would say, depending upon how noisy the thing was with information, a HUD is going

to be much, much better than having to look off to the side or down or whatever the case

might be when you're driving.

As long as it's not noisy and printing out a ton of flashing stuff and, you know,

notifying you of all kinds of different things, I think it'd be very valuable.

But I could see how that would be abused rapidly.

>> You have to be very careful.

But it's similar to what they do with in-car displays.

They try to minimize what you can see and do on there.

So it's not quite the experience you would get on your phone if you were just poking

around on apps.

>> Yeah.

>> It's a little bit of a tangent, but it made me think of this.

we're talking about virtual reality and augmented reality,

different objects that you're looking at restaurants

and how you can really move things around

to get an idea of what it will look like.

There was a news article recently saw

that talked about how people doctor their images for homes.

So I think one of the bigger issues right now

with home buying is that a larger percentage,

something around 20% of home buyers

will buy sight unseen.

Now these guys are probably more investors, right?

That type of audience.

But regardless, 20% or more homes are bought sight unseen.

And there were some image--

doctored images that were shown, like the before and after.

And it wasn't even just filters that make shit look brighter

or maybe even enhance the background.

Like, no, this was moving furniture.

Like if it was an empty apartment staging it virtually,

putting all kinds of cool furniture in there,

changing light fixtures.

In one example I saw there was a kind of a viewpoint

from the entryway, and there was a load bearing wall

that kind of made for a low entry to go into the other room.

Well, they just removed that entirely.

So now you don't have the load bearing wall,

you just have the open floor plan kitchen and living area.

I mean, taking it really to deceitful levels,

like it's not just making the paint look brighter.

That's really egregious 'cause I definitely,

before we bought the house that we're in currently,

we were looking at some houses and yeah,

you'd look at them on Redfin or Zillow

or whichever website you're looking at

and you'd go to the house and you'd get there

and there'd be smudges on the wall

and marks where furniture had clearly been drugged

across it and stuff like that.

But then you go back to the website

and you look at it and the paint's beautiful,

it's clean, it's bright.

Same thing on the outside,

the color is really vibrant,

the grass is super green and you look at it and you're like,

"Oh no, that's all fucking dead."

(laughing)

- Yeah, there's always gonna be someone out there

who's gonna try to profit off of that sort of technology.

So you just gotta still do your due diligence.

But yeah, I thought that was unbelievable.

I had not seen so much, such a contrast between reality

and what was published out there.

It was crazy.

- Eventually you'll be able to have hollow lens

while you're looking at your houses

and they'll be able to tell you what,

You know, if we want to replace a load bearing wall ourselves, boom,

this is how you do it step by step with the HoloLens.

Well, that'd be great.

Like that would be really cool because we didn't know what the hell we were doing.

All you do is take some, what, five buys and liquid nails and away you go.

Yeah.

I didn't actually pay for the professional engineering, uh, you know, overview.

It was just the landlord that was a framer.

And I said, you know, what, what I do here.

And he goes, yeah, you just get a bunch of these big ones and nail them together.

You'll be fine.

Still standing.

Don't worry about it.

It's been there for 12 years, 15 years.

Cool, man.

Well, that's kind of our intro into the mixed reality space.

We'll have to cover some more.

I'm really interested in the Azure features too.

I think that'll be pretty cool

'cause they keep coming out with updates on that side.

So we'll have to follow that and bring updates to the show.

- I'm excited to see where it goes.

Hopefully Hargis, maybe Hargis can talk Mr. Anderson

into getting some hollow lens here in the office.

- Get a hollow lens in here?

- I mean, Hargis is our resident VR guy, so.

- Yeah.

- I'm sure he'd order some new toys.

- We could get some hollow lens

and some virtual flamethrowers from the boring company.

(laughing)

Have a little fun.

- Let's move on.

- Moving along.

(upbeat music)

- I have great news on the show today, as always.

- Oh God, what's this about?

- Every week we have some Tesla news.

Oh, dude, kill it.

Oh, jeez.

What's going on now?

You want to get arrested yet?

Maybe by the SEC.

I don't have that news.

But other news, Tesla finally offered their Model 3 for 35K,

which is something they've promised ever since they

announced the vehicle.

That was actually what I was going to go for.

Originally, it was the 35K model, the entry model.

But they finally have done it.

They finally have launched it.

It's for sale and available.

It is somewhat restricted.

It looks the same, functions the same.

It has limited miles.

Obviously, you're not going to get the fancy rims

and those types of things.

And they've taken a few things out

of the center console that are kind of nice.

But beyond that--

They give you all the cool paint options you can get to.

That was something they had, right?

You could get different paint options.

The paint options all cost more.

So I think it was $1,000 more per paint color

unless you wanted white or black.

Well, that's right.

Originally, they had all the colors.

And then when they started ramping up production,

they cut that back.

You could still get them, but you'd have to pay more.

Yeah, that's right.

So the cool thing is it is available for $35K.

You can get it.

It's a fully electric vehicle.

It's got, I think, a 250 mile, 280 mile range,

somewhere in there.

Single-wheel drive train.

So the more expensive ones are all-wheel drive.

Which kind of begs the question.

It's still not a car I'd probably

to spend money on. It's tough. I mean the Tesla Supercharger network is pretty

robust, but I mean if you can only go 250 miles that's not really that far.

They had to make some compromises. I think they did some things that were nice

and they had something. Some things came out better than expected.

They did get a little bit of a boost in mileage for all vehicles via software in

some way. I'm not sure how they accomplished that, but they did get a

boost in mileage. The thing is though is like the model 3 for the 35k entry price, there's

not a ton of compromise there. I mean it is the lower mileage, it is the only one axle

drive train, those are the big compromises. The rest of them are pretty minor fit and

finish items. So you're getting still the car, you're able to purchase enhanced auto

pilot, you're still able to do all the different things that it's able to do but it's in a

cheaper package. I think that will appeal to a lot of people. I don't know

it will appeal to me. I think I'm still one of those guys who couldn't just get

the regular MacBook. It's like well, but 32 gigs of RAM. It's like double. You know?

Like that would be good. I can't upgrade it. Like once I buy it, I'm stuck

with it forever. You're like our VP. You got to check all the boxes when you

order. Well sometimes you got to check all the boxes. If you're making a big

I don't know. Fancy your rims, some other feet.

I mean, yeah, they have other things you can get.

Is it worth another $20,000 or $30,000? I don't know.

But if I'm going to have this thing, how long are you going to have it?

12 years, 15 years?

Maybe, yeah. I don't know what the batteries are rated for.

I want to say they're rated eight or nine years, maybe something like that.

It's a hard sell for me.

If I'm going to make that kind of investment in something for a long time,

I might just want to have it.

I don't know what the batteries are rated for.

I don't know what the batteries are rated for.

I don't know what the batteries are rated for.

I might just want to have all the bells and whistles.

I mean, it's just to your point when when I buy Macbooks,

that's what I do.

I buy the highest dollar most every option I can get because you know what?

I buy one once every seven years, eight years, whatever the case might be.

Like I'm I'm going to make sure that thing lasts as long as I can possibly make it last,

which I would say in that case is worth it because you're not buying regular laptops every seven years.

If you just buy a standard laptop off the shelf, you're going to get two or three years out of it.

and then it's time for a new one and you junk it.

Or it's too slow that you don't want to work with it anymore.

But you can also upgrade them too if you get a standard Windows laptop, for instance.

Whereas a MacBook, you can't just bust it open and start throwing new parts in there.

Most of them are soldered.

No, they're glued on.

They look beautiful.

The construction has got awful, right?

They're glued on and they have no serviceable parts.

So you give them another $300 for AppleCare

so that when it's time for a new one,

you can just run it over in the driveway and turn it in.

That's right.

So--

In your Tesla.

Yeah, where you didn't have to pay for any gas.

So another big news announcement around this,

at the same time that they announced that,

they also basically said that they're

going to close all their outlets.

So basically, you might have seen around different showroom

stores that Tesla has where you can look at the vehicles,

get in the vehicles, maybe test drive, and so forth.

But they're gonna close them all they're only gonna do online sales as a car company

Which is pretty crazy when you start to think about it. I heard that they were gonna have galleries

I think they're gonna hand and hold on to a few and like some really high-traffic areas as I understand it

But you're not gonna go in to buy a car like that's that's gonna go away

It's the same thing that they already do like you can't you can't walk into the

Tesla stores as they exist today and say hey, I want to buy this car. Okay, you don't do that you go online

To something that they call the configurator

And this is where you purchase all your options.

Like they don't have cars just sitting on a lot

that you say like, I want that one.

- Yeah, you don't go out to the lot and walk around

with the guy and haggle on shit

and decide that you want the red one or the blue one.

- Yep, they're all basically a custom order,

pretty much everyone.

- You go to the configurator

and you can do the damn thing in 60 seconds pretty much,

right? I mean, it's pretty fast.

- I mean, there's not a ton of options for them.

I mean, it's basically you want, you know,

the sport package, the extended range package

or the standard package.

That's one option, wheels, color,

whether or not you want enhanced auto pilot,

those are basically your options.

- Yeah, I went on and did that when you were in pre-order.

- Yeah.

- And oh, I could have hit bot now, by now.

It was really close.

It was just boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

(laughing)

It was right there.

- Yeah, all the boxes checked.

- All the boxes were checked.

It was within reach.

My problem was it didn't have Amazon Prime two-day shipping

so I didn't really get it then.

- You need to talk to Elon about that.

- I know.

If it had two-day shipping, I might have been.

you could get Amazon. Yeah. I didn't know at that time when they were going to be released,

right? They were still ramping up production someday, getting closer. But it wasn't there

yet. Wouldn't that be funny? Going to Amazon type in Tesla and they're like, Oh, prime

next day. Next day or ship that sound of a bitch across country for free. I'm sure that

would do a wonderful things to their bottom line there. Yeah. Yeah. So they're going to

close all their showrooms. So I mean, personally, I love Tesla, I love my car. It's a great

car. But I bought it basically side unseen. And I bought it without driving one, right?

Right. For most people, I would assume that's going to be a problem. Like that's a very

typical procedure. Most people are going to go to the dealer, they're going to try out

many, many different cars, test drive, many different cars, come to a final conclusion

about which one they like, start haggling on the price, yada yada yada.

Well, none of that exists with Tesla.

You're basically going to, unless you have a friend or somebody who has one already that

you can go give a ride in, you're basically going to buy it side unseen.

So what Tesla does to negate this a little bit, but it isn't, I don't believe that this

is a good way to negate it, but what they do is they say, if you purchase the Tesla from

us, we will guarantee your money back for X number of days.

I don't have that number in front of me.

But for a certain number of days,

you can effectively drive this thing for no cost.

- Fun, it's kind of like the Casper mattress, but--

- Return it, yeah, kind of--

- A little bit more exciting.

- The same type of idea.

The problem is though,

most people don't have 50 grand laying around.

- Right.

- So chances are you took out a loan

or something against this car.

So great, I can return it,

but now I gotta eat the interest or pay back the loan.

It's not as simple as it may sound, right?

- That's right, yeah.

- So I don't know, I don't know how this would work.

I mean, I totally get that there's a lot of overhead there

with showrooms and all that kind of stuff

and they have to pay, you know, real estate

and all that kind of stuff.

But I don't know, the jury's out to me as far as

if this is an effective way to sell cars.

I mean, you're gonna get the Tesla enthusiasts like myself

who are gonna bite real hard on it and have no problem,

But the person that you're going after with the $35,000 base model, probably not that.

I don't know if I entirely agree.

I think that could appeal to the millennials, even though they're getting away from cars,

just because they want to have a simpler experience.

I think that if you really wanted to know what it was like, you could go on Turro or

some of those other sites where you could rent one.

That's fair point.

I hadn't considered that.

Or maybe you'd get one in an Uber.

I've heard of some people doing Uber with them.

I've never had an Uber Tesla.

That would be fucking cool, but it hasn't happened to me yet.

And I've been on Uber for six years, damn it.

But maybe I'm just picking the wrong one.

Maybe they're not showing up in Uber pool, probably not.

Yeah, you probably have to do Uber Black or whatever

the high end one is these days.

Yeah.

Well, that's a bummer too, because like side note,

but I really loved the Uber Black experience back then.

You were a baller back in the day.

Oh, dude.

Like that's how I commuted from first hill down

to the waterfront.

Yeah.

Uber Black.

Door service, everything.

Yeah, door service, Lincoln Town Car.

Coming out in your big jacket that you had in there, right?

Yeah, wore the old trench coat.

Yeah, looking like a big baller coming out of that.

Everybody--

Wasn't it Chad, coworker Chad here?

Like, when you very first started--

I think I heard this story.

Like, when you very first started,

he thought you were like something special,

because yeah, you'd come down in your town car

and get the door open for you and come rolling into work.

I don't think I fooled any of my coworkers in the least bit.

What the fuck I was up to but the doorman bill really wonderful man

He he would always like jump up to get the door when he saw the town carp

Roll into a stop. Were you were you a big tipper?

Tipping the doorman. I didn't in fact. I just told him I said bill

I'm just a programmer on the third floor man. You can just like

Keep talking to guests inside. You don't have to come out for me. I didn't do it all the time

I got in trouble, you know racking up the expense. It's not a cheap ride

even then. But it was wonderful. I mean those cars are, there's a reason why they're off

the road now because they're just, it's a leather sofa on wheels. I mean it's amazing.

You can just kind of sink in the back, tinted windows, nobody knows what the fuck's going

on, they can't see you. And the drivers knew what they were doing. They didn't need a GPS.

They didn't have ways on there trying to figure out which way to turn. You could tell them

where you were going and they would know exactly where to go.

There's definitely something to be said for that.

I can tell you that.

I don't know how many people we have to direct.

Here's how to get to where we're going,

whereas you're getting a certain level of service there

instead of somebody just reading a map.

Yeah, this is me being an old man,

talking about the good old days of Uber and ride sharing.

Six years ago when you didn't have to have some moron

didn't know how to read a phone,

they just knew where to go.

They knew the city.

They were the real experts.

Subject for another subject we need to talk about soon

is that Lyft is going public,

but that's for a later show.

I did see that.

We need to talk about that.

Dara from Uber gave them a big high five, big kudos online.

Yeah.

It's a good thing for those guys.

Let's get that in the show for next week.

Pop that into the show notes for 27.

Moving back to Tesla news.

We got more Tesla news.

Tesla's on fire.

I think we just lost 30 subscribers.

Just out of them.

No, but we gained, you know, five Tesla fans.

They were moving enhanced autopilot.

So that's what I purchased.

Enhanced Autopilot is basically the features

that allow the car to maintain its lane,

maintain distance from the front of the person

in front of you.

It allows the use of summon, which

is the thing that'll let it back out of the garage on its own.

So they're basically taking all of those features.

They used to have that, and they used

to have full self-driving, which is something

you could purchase, but had no function yet.

It was the idea that, oh, once we can make this thing drive

itself everywhere, that'll unlock or something.

Well now they've rolled them both into the same package.

So it's one package.

Just autopilot, it's not enhanced anymore.

I think it's called autopilot, yep.

And there's multiple different price tiers for it now.

So I think it goes up to seven grand now

if you elect to add it on after delivery of the car.

But I think you get a discount of--

I think it's five grand if you do it as you're ordering.

Once you're going through the configurator,

you buy it then then it's five grand. Okay. But that'll give you any any future

updates that they make to their hardware software etc. Which include a couple of

new features which are really cool. So the first one is that they're going to

enhance the the auto park and the summon features. So what that means is before

summon all summon would do is it would pull itself out. So like if you were in

a parking stall in a garage somewhere it would just back itself up so far and

and then stop and wait.

Yes.

Now, you could be at the elevators in a parking lot

or something like that and say summon

and it'll drive itself to you.

So it'll pull out and drive itself up

to where it is you're standing.

Yeah, that's some real night rider shit right there, man.

That's kit coming around the corner

to get your ass out of a jam.

Yeah.

And then the same thing for auto park.

Auto park used to be parallel parking.

A lot of cars have this now, right?

Where you can pull up to the side, click a button

and it'll figure out how to parallel park itself.

So they're gonna do the same thing now where you can do,

what would you call that, angle parking.

So it'll handle that as well, both parallel and angle.

- It's getting fancy.

- So.

- It's like a real getaway mode.

You can just go rob a bank

and have the Tesla around the corner, ready to go.

- Yeah, throw the bag of money in there

and just be like, Tesla go over there.

- Have it open the trunk first and take off.

(laughing)

- So, final Tesla notes.

Later this year, they announced that they would have

new software that would allow it to respond

to traffic lights in the city and stop signs.

So it would basically be able to stop itself at lights.

So this is one thing that's actually,

you currently, they don't recommend

that you use autopilot in town for this exact reason

because it can detect if somebody's in front of you

and it would stop.

So if somebody's at the stoplight already

and you come up to that car, it'll stop.

But if you're the only one at the intersection

and the lights red, it'll just blow through.

It doesn't have any comprehension.

- I kinda like that.

If it's fast enough.

Yeah.

They're all right.

So now I can detect the stop signs and the traffic lights and adjust accordingly.

At least that's what they say.

That's coming later this year.

And then of course, what we just discussed is driving automatically on city streets.

So really cool stuff coming out of Tesla.

Hope they continue to push this stuff along and are able to release on time.

So.

Well, I hope for your sake too, because I know how excited you are about all these Tesla

news releases over here.

So.

They got to keep it up, man.

Otherwise, how are we going to keep the show going?

Don't know man. We haven't even gotten any sponsorships or free banners or even a fucking sticker from them yet. So I don't know what we're doing this for anyway

Elon

All right, there's gotta be something in here that isn't involved Tesla. Oh

Yeah, this is cool man, this is that joint venture between Facebook and

the goog

The Google yeah, so no Microsoft not the Microsoft and Facebook. Yes. Yeah, so

You've heard about undersea cables like these are the cables that are able to connect

Basically our worlds right right yeah, and and I thought there was only a handful of them

But there's these fuckers are everywhere. I mean ever all these guys are building newer bigger faster

Undersea cables connecting all the whole world over the place and they're huge like and then so I think this one

I don't I guess I don't have the map in front of me

But don't usually I think they run to like kind of the corner of Africa or something don't they I think well

They're fucking everywhere. I mean they'll go from your East, you know the East Coast over to Europe. Oh, here we go

Sorry to interrupt you runs to Spain Spain to Virginia Beach in this case

Holy shit bill bill bow Spain to Virginia Beach, Virginia

Yeah, and I think from what I understand many of them terminate in Virginia for whatever reason

Yeah

Because they talk about in this article that we're gonna talk about here that

Many of the big players Microsoft Facebook Google have some sort of presence in Virginia at this area

Where all these cables come in because they want to be as close to the termination point as possible, right?

Yeah, faster speeds lower latency

Yeah, of course

So the story here is that Microsoft and Facebook partner together and they created a new undersea cable or late in undersea cable

And this thing's crazy. This thing set a record

for data transfer. A couple of what is this like 5G speeds or what? Yeah it's

your new 5G it's 6G actually. Oh Trump wanted that last week man that was

pretty quick little turnaround time. Well you know whatever Trump wants he gets.

That's a whole other show. What are we doing here we're talking about nine tell

me tell me the stats on this thing it's just fucking you can't even comprehend

how fast this cable is. So this cable has a theoretical capacity of 160 terabytes per second.

Terabits. Bits. Bits. Bits. Terabits. I mean that's fucking great. It's a small b right? Tb.

It is a small b. T little b. Yes. Terabits per second. Yes. Yeah that's insane. Yes. Still crazy.

That's terabits. I don't know how many you could stream like the Library of Congress in

two microseconds or something like that. Yeah. So they basically currently haven't they haven't

turned it all the way up right as I understand it so they've only tested it up to 9.5 terabits per

second. Crazy. But it has a theoretical limit of 160 so they're not even pushing it anywhere near

what it's supposedly capable of.

But yeah, when I read this and I saw these numbers,

I was just like, that's insane.

It's a 4,000 mile cable.

- Right, like the sheer length of this cable

is mind blowing anyway.

I mean, if you look at the photos,

they show what I'm assuming is just some kind of

specialty ship that houses all this fucking cabling

so that they can kind of unspool it as they move along.

And this is not really even a cable.

I mean, if you really break it down, this is a monster pipe.

Lots of protection, lots of layers.

It's really impressive.

And it's a 20-- what do they say?

20% increase-- 20%-- excuse me--

20% improvement for each pair.

So it's many, many fiber optic cables

that are inside the sheath that you were kind of explaining.

Yeah, the technology that it uses is something that the phone

companies used to do.

I mean, this is on a much larger scale, of course,

but they're using QAM, which I will just

get like dip the toe in the technical for a minute,

but that's the quad amplitude modulation.

And so what they're doing is like for each line,

they're able to rotate the sine wave varying degrees

to use the same line for multiple transmission.

So I don't know.

I'm guessing here it says 16 QAM.

I'm going to take a stab and say that it's

going to have 16 different pipes per cable.

So really just by shifting the wave,

you're able to get a lot more.

Because back in the day, it was like a serial connection.

It's just one signal goes across on the wire.

Well, they found a way to pack in multiple signals.

And that's how you get that density and that high speed

on such a small factor.

So to kind of give any kind of context,

like these days you might talk generally

in megabits per second.

Sure. Most often there might be--

Maybe gigabits.

Maybe we're just getting to that point, right?

So nine terabits per second is nine million megabits

per second.

Yeah. Is that right?

90 or nine?

They're each, yeah.

If your home network would be one gigabit.

1. million. Yeah.

That's insane. Yeah. 9 million megabits.

It's huge. You know, any movies you could download and like, so in a second,

I do actually. So for reference, 160 terabits per second is 20,000 hours of

Netflix HD video in a second.

That's insane. In one second, 20,000 hours of Netflix video, man.

That's some fucking matrix shit right there. Wow. Yeah.

There are-- I was curious about the number,

because I said I know they've been building

lots and lots of cables.

There are over 400 undersea cables right now.

No kidding.

And all running kind of-- well, you

said they're all over the world.

Obviously, they've got to connect other areas of the world

besides the United States and Europe.

But--

Right.

But they're all over the place.

I mean, that's not of that size and that magnitude, of course.

Yeah.

Crazy shit, man.

So kind of in the same vein, like, you know,

I don't know if it's, again, not for this show probably,

but another good show topic would be kind of like

the security of these cables and, you know,

possible warfare against these cables

and that sort of thing,

'cause that's a pretty big topic anymore.

- Yeah, or just what happens if like a whale

just like gets in a fight with another whale

and takes a chunk out of the cable.

- That'd be another problem for sure.

All right, well, you can,

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