Last Wednesday, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a review of the Apple Vision Pro on his Instagram page where at the end he made the claim that Meta intends on being a much more open platform and ecosystem than Apple. While Meta has pushed forward standards like OpenXR and has an industry-leading implementation of WebXR, their curation strategy on the Quest store has been highly curated and much more similar to a closed, walled garden strategy of a gaming console. According to my informal count, Meta has only launched around 620 official Quest apps in 4.7 years since the Quest launched in May 2019, while the Apple Vision Pro already has over 1000 apps launched after 11 days.
Sarah Hill was able to launch the Apple Vision Pro version of her Healium app onto the Apple Store on day 1 while they’ve been relegated to Meta’s App Lab for over 3 years now with no hope to ever be promoted. App Lab was originally inspired by the success of SideQuest, which was an third-party method for apps that were rejected from Meta’s official store to be side loaded onto a Quest device. But Meta launched their own alternative store competitor of App Lab in February 2021 and slowly made SideQuest harder and harder to use. Being App Lab is still not the same on being on the main store as Meta makes it much harder for consumers to organically search and discover her app. Despite all of the traction that Healium has found with enterprise customers, they still have not been promoted to the main Quest store. Given Hill’s experiences with both Meta and Apple, then she does not buy Zuckerberg’s claims that Meta will somehow prove to be the more open of a platform.
I wanted to touch base with Hill to have her elaborate on her experiences with both ecosystems, and how she’s been able to continue to thrive in delivering mediation experiences with biometric data integrations with different watches and EEG sensors by finding enterprise customers, integrating with other headsets, and making the most of their constrained access to the Quest ecosystem despite all of the disadvantages of being stuck on App Lab.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So in today's episode, I'm featuring Sarah Hill, who's the CEO of a company called Helium, which does a number of different meditation experiences, as well as integrations with biometric data from watches, as well as EEG sensors. And so Helium has actually just launched on the Apple Vision Pro on day one. But at the same time, she's been relegated to MetaQuest's App Lab, which is sort of like a second tier store that allows people to have access to the store if you know exactly what to search for. However, it's otherwise pretty hidden and there's a lot of other disadvantages for not being on the main store for the Oculus Quest. So last week, Mark Zuckerberg put out a video where he's comparing the Apple Vision Pro with the MetaQuest 3. And he's thought that initially that the Quest 3 would be a better value, but then he's making the argument that the Quest 3 is actually a better product. And so at the end of the video, Zuckerberg makes a claim that Meta is much more of an open ecosystem than Apple. I just want to play that clip.
[00:01:19.740] Mark Zuckerberg: Now, look, I know that, you know, some fanboys get upset whenever anyone dares to question if Apple is going to be the leader in a new category. But the reality is, is that every generation of computing has an open and a closed model. And yeah, in mobile, Apple's closed model won. But it's not always that way. If you go back to the PC era, Microsoft's open model was the winner. And in this next generation, meta is going to be the open model. And I really want to make sure that the open model wins out again.
[00:01:49.495] Kent Bye: So Sarah Hill actually reached out and sent me a comment that she had made on Zuckerberg's video. And so I wanted to talk to her to get a little bit more of her perspective of how much the Quest was an open ecosystem. I'm just going to share a brief little preview for some of our perspectives.
[00:02:03.448] Sarah Hill: I mean, we all saw the video that Zuckerberg posted comparing the two devices. And one of the things he mentioned in that video was that Meta was an open ecosystem, which I would disagree with as an entity that We've spent three years now in App Labs, not having the ability to be on their store. Apple Vision Pro comes out and the first day, you know, our products are on the store. So there's a very stark difference between an open ecosystem and a closed ecosystem. And, you know, for us as a developer, Meta's App Lab policies really hurt us and it hurt the people and the enterprises that use our products. And so, you know, when he made that comment, it's just, it hurt my heart because it's like, in no way, shape or form have we had an open experience.
[00:03:05.235] Kent Bye: So we'll be diving much more into why Sarah doesn't think that Meta is an open ecosystem, how that has both hurt her business, but also some of the different experiences she had with Honor Everywhere, which is a different application that she's also created that she had the hardest time of ever getting into Meta's store. And as a result, a lot of these Honor flights that she was documenting, weren't able to get to the veterans before they passed away. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of ER podcast. So this interview with Sarah happened on Friday, February 16th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:03:39.424] Sarah Hill: My name is Sarah Hill and I am the CEO and chief storyteller for Helium. And Helium is a mental fitness storytelling app that you power with your data that comes from fitness trackers.
[00:03:54.583] Kent Bye: Right. Maybe you can give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.
[00:03:59.147] Sarah Hill: My background is as a television journalist at my core. I'm a video storyteller and covered a lot of trauma, rapes, murders, homicides. We went in with the trauma teams in the aftermath of the tsunami in Sri Lanka and Indonesia, and ultimately developed an immersive media channel for the people that we covered as well as myself. And anyone else, you know, the millions of people who struggle with anxiety, want to feel better, want to sleep better, want to improve their media diet and don't want to necessarily pop a pill. So that's what helium is. It's just healing stories that are powered by your heart rate via a smartwatch or your brain patterns via an EEG headband.
[00:04:46.876] Kent Bye: Right. And I know we've had a chance to talk a number of times over the years, and I've had a chance to see Helium grow and evolve and many different iterations and demos from Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference and integrating with Muse headbands and other peripherals. Last time I saw you was at VMed 23 and Cedar Sinai Hospital had a conference where There's a lot of the 360 videos that you're showing that are part of your helium application. So maybe just give a brief recap for coming in and actually launching some of these applications across some of these different platforms.
[00:05:21.192] Sarah Hill: Sure. So we started giving virtual tours to a group of veterans when Google Cardboard first came out. When was that, Kent? Probably in like 2013? 2014. Yeah. Like long time ago. Right. And that's essentially how we started. And, you know, then we created the app. We noticed that it appeared to be impacting their physiology. They weren't just watching these experiences. They were feeling them. And so we integrated biometrics. Someday, all of these goggles and mobile devices will come equipped with easy ways to capture EEG or heart rate. They are already baking sensors into the goggles. You know, just from your mobile device, you can capture PPG data and biometrics without any wearables. So, you know, the future coming of contactless wearables that are derived just from your camera or just from a fabric sensor are here. And so as a storyteller, obviously it delights me that, you know, we have a product that integrates that bio data, allows you to see your feelings, to learn, to self-regulate. But yeah, it started with a cardboard box, right? And a mobile phone, you know, giving a group of veterans virtual tours of their memorials.
[00:06:41.819] Kent Bye: Right. And I know that you've been showing a number of these different demos where it's a little bit more towards this healing context of guided meditation, or at least the biofeedback that you're integrating into these experiences. And so maybe you could talk about the Helium application and when it first launched and where it is available as of this point.
[00:07:01.163] Sarah Hill: So we started out as a brand studio, just learning how to create this kind of content and brands hired us essentially to go all around the world. We were in China, Guatemala, in the Amazon. by shooting these immersive media, social purpose documentaries. And the Helium product was a private beta first, and then a public beta 2018, 2019 area, and then the pandemic hit. And so we started creating more augmented reality content that didn't require the use of goggles and just on the mobile device. And today we have both any flavor of video that you can imagine from 2D video just on your mobile device, to augmented video on your mobile device, to augmented video inside the goggles, to fully immersive virtual reality video inside the goggles. And we're powering them either in the goggles or on your mobile device with smartwatches. So either Apple Watch or Samsung Galaxy Watch. And we also use the BrainLink Lite EEG headband. We're hardware agnostic. So if you have a wearable that you'd like us to integrate, certainly let us know. We'd love to get it on the platform. And we're welcoming other creators to other meditation companies. Flow in Iceland is one of the first to upload their content to our platform, and they can also get those biofeedback and neurofeedback integrations through our technology and our app.
[00:08:40.878] Kent Bye: Yeah, I remember some of these early biofeedback experiences where, as I was looking through the backlog of 36 videos that you have on the Apple Vision Pro application of Helium Mobile, there's like a waterfall that you go up and there's like clouds. And I was like, I remember seeing this when it was connected to EEG, where you would like pause the video or you would get higher and higher. So if you were able to get a certain brainwave state, you would progress the video. So I just tried out a bunch of the videos on the Apple Vision Pro, but I don't have an Apple Watch. I didn't have any other external peripherals. And so I didn't see any of those additional, how that information may have been interacting with the content. And so is that implemented in both the Quest and Apple Vision Pro to have peripherals added? And how does that change the experience of this meditative video of a number of different scenes you're going through and how are you taking data from the body and modulating or changing the experience?
[00:09:35.222] Sarah Hill: Yeah, so what we'll be updating and we need to get you on our test flight so you can get some of the new stuff before it actually comes out. But those biodata integrations are implemented in Quest. So you can use an EEG headband. Very soon you'll also be able to use an Apple watch inside a MetaQuest. You'll also be able to use a Samsung Galaxy watch. Those are on our beta channels and coming soon, probably by the time this airs, they'll be out. Also, Apple Vision Pro, you can use Apple Watch. Very soon will be added other fitness trackers into that like EEG headbands and also Samsung Galaxy watches as well. So we're hardware agnostic. Again, we play with all the wearables and we play with all the headsets, Pico as well. Pico has a great headset called the Pico G3. completely 3DOF, which our demographic is viewing these experiences in a seated position. It has one controller, which is simple and easy for them to use. And in Pico, you can also power those experiences with an EEG headband and very soon Galaxy Watch and Apple Watch as well. And essentially what it does, Kent, is it displays an aura around you, and that aura will glow green, kind of like a traffic light. It changes colors, so it'll glow green according to your stress levels or yellow. And then you have a breath pacer that's coming in and out, but it's powered by your own heart rate and your own feelings. And in a way, it allows you to see your feelings. something that has historically been unseen inside the body and learned to self-regulate. And I don't know about you, but that's something that I never learned until I was an adult, how to self-regulate my brain patterns and heart rate. And why was it so hard for me? Because it was a muscle or an organ. Technically, it's an organ, but an organ that you can't actually see. to know, am I doing it right? And so that's the whole premise behind helium is media has a really powerful impact on your physiology. It can increase your heart rate in a good way or in a bad way. It can scare you. It can change your emotions. But flip that on its head, media can also have healing properties in shifting brain patterns or shifting the heart rate away from a stress response. And then also providing me with a visual to learn to self regulate. And so that's one of the things that I'm super passionate about is this connected mental fitness. That's certainly not a replacement for psychotropic medication or professional counseling, which we all know. is a wonderful thing that we can do for ourselves. But it's a small tool in our tool belt that we can do an exercise for ourself, much as we would go to the gym. This is a mental fitness exercise where you're learning to self-regulate your stress or self-regulate your positivity. In the future, blood pressure, skin conductance, anything that captures data, we're pairing story to it and visuals and you as a storyteller, you know, story is king. It's how we learn. It's how we make sense of the world. And at the core of our company, we are a storytelling company and a media channel.
[00:13:08.182] Kent Bye: Yeah. Um, as I had a chance to try out the Apple vision pro, I know that I had a chance to talk to you after the WWDC announcement with Raven Zachary and getting some of your first impressions. And so I'm curious if you developed all of the helium application on the simulator, if you had access to the hardware to be able to develop it, maybe you could just talk a bit about the development process of the Apple vision pro version of helium that has launched with Apple vision pro.
[00:13:35.402] Sarah Hill: Yeah. So I can't say much about, you know, before it came out, but we had access to a device and were able to learn how to develop with it, but we were capturing on the simulator just like everyone else. And so being able to quickly iterate on those devices you know, that took some skill by our engineers and got a great team of engineers that a lot of that was anticipating, okay, you know, what are some of those future features that could be out there? You know, we didn't know. And so, yeah, lots of iteration and lots of creating in the dark in some way and, you know, back and forth on simulators and then sometime with the device as well.
[00:14:21.321] Kent Bye: One of the things that I found really striking about the Apple Vision Pro is that I was able to see my full body and my hands and it felt like I was in a bit of a sphere and I'm watching what looks to be mostly a monoscopic 360 video. It looked like you had some stereoscopic videos, but it didn't seem like it was being rendered in stereoscopy just yet. I'm curious if you could elaborate on the rendering aspects of some of this content that you have that seemed like it was mostly monoscopic, but it seems like I've seen it before where it was also some stereoscopic videos.
[00:14:54.150] Sarah Hill: Yeah, we're continuing to iterate on that as we learn the capabilities. So right now we're going back through and actually re-rendering a lot of that to take advantage of the full capability of the device. And so yeah, update your app and you should see something different as it relates to that. But stereo videos, certainly capable in that device as it is on all of the devices. And it looks beautiful, unlike any other resolution or clarity that you're able to see. And, you know, beyond just the Helium app, the whole, you know, UI and integration of it, you know, that all of your apps are there. There are a lot of different fun things that we have planned for the future now that we can more quickly iterate with the device in our hands full time.
[00:15:47.188] Kent Bye: Yeah, I did see a range of different resolution fidelity and it did seem like some of them were higher resolution. What can you say in terms of like how high of video resolution are you able to push for the Apple vision pro in this application?
[00:15:59.863] Sarah Hill: Yeah, I'd have to look, but I'm pretty sure it's eight K. Okay. And obviously a lot of that depends on bumping up or down the bit rate. And we, you know, try to keep ours as close to half a gig as we can. And in the future, you know, we'll be able to stream them, but for right now, in order to get the highest resolution and you know, the best experience you download them. And then once you download them, once they live on the platform, you don't have to keep redownloading them. And a lot of our people who use Helium are in areas that either, you know, they don't want access to Wi-Fi or, you know, they don't necessarily want the device connected to the internet. So that's one of the reasons why you can download those experiences.
[00:16:52.848] Kent Bye: And so I know that there is a way to sign up to helium, but then there's also like more than 30 videos that are around seven minutes on average. It seems meditation videos. A lot of them are CGI. You've got some three 60 video scenes that you have. And so maybe you can talk about like, what is the model moving forward? Are you going to always have a set of free things people check out or how do people sign up or what did they get if they did sign up?
[00:17:16.872] Sarah Hill: So our goal is always to have some amount of free content that people can try it. On our mobile apps and on our other devices right now, there's a free trial. So there's a two week free trial that you can try it in its full glory and then, you know, continue to have a full subscription. And there on all of our platforms collectively, there are about 40 different experiences. And we add a new experience every 60 days. So we just released one. I think it's on AVP. It's called African Oasis. And you're going through this African Oasis alongside a baby elephant and a mother and some tender stories. And some of them are music and natural sound. Some of them have narration. On AVP, we haven't added narration to all of them, so that'll be, again, it'll continue to evolve as we discover, you know, some of the unique capabilities of that device. We have another one that will be released in a couple months with this Cosmic Turtle. You could follow this journey of the Cosmic Turtle. And we're adding new assets, so new interactive assets, specifically with Apple Watch. You know, your hands are you know, in their full glory inside Apple Vision Pro. And so, you know, the ability to look at your watch in the real world through your AVP on your hand and see some unique things coming out of it that allow you to self-regulate. So we're excited about the additional interactivity that we'll add, all the while trying to keep in mind inclusive design, as there are some individuals in our world who can't walk around the room in a sixth off experience, they don't have hands, right, to pick up a hand controller. So it's really fascinating to see what Apple's done with AVP in that you don't even have to lift your hand. The hand can be on your lap and click, and you can just use your eye tracking in order to do it. So we're excited about leveraging some of those unique inclusive design capabilities.
[00:19:25.189] Kent Bye: Yeah, so when I'm in the Apple Vision Pro, I can see my full body and it's actually really quite bright and it gives me this additional sense of presence as I'm going through some of these different meditative exercises. And you'd said that there's gonna be more of these type of biometric integrations into the helium, into all these different versions. And I know that in the past, I've probably done a dozen or two dozen different types of biofeedback related XR experiences over the last decade. And the thing that is a persistent annoyance is, how do I know that whatever I'm doing in my body is actually being accurately tracked? And how can I have some sort of agency over things that already feel like so much out of my control? And the biofeedback devices seem to have this rolling average where it's not like you can really find a specific trace of your agency. And so you have this design challenge where if you're creating these interactive biofeedback experiences, then how do you really cultivate this sense of people gaining more and more control of what seems to be totally chaotic process. And so I know there's been a number of different processes and approaches of that over the years. And so just wondering if you could elaborate a little bit more of what you've been able to find overlooking at this issue for many, many years now. You said there's color change. But if there's numbers you can look at or how you track it over time, or at least find these little traces of agency as you do these types of biofeedback experiences.
[00:20:54.856] Sarah Hill: Yeah, so when you come into the app, it gets a baseline. And so it's, you know, measuring your biometrics over a period of time. And then that baseline, you're being visually rewarded. If you meet the threshold, visually rewarded in a positive way. And then if you don't meet the threshold, you're visually rewarded in a different way. so that you're able to discern what is green and what's necessarily gold as it relates to a traffic light. So your point is well taken and for a lot of people using helium for the first time or any biofeedback mechanism, They've never seen their brain patterns or their heart rate in near real time. And so it can be much like riding a bicycle for the first time of like, holy cow, am I doing that? No, I can't be doing that. Am I doing that? Am I doing it right? And so it does take practice in learning how to self-regulate and how to become more self-aware. And specifically, if you've never seen your heart rate displayed or your brain patterns displayed, it can be difficult to know, am I doing it right? We have a video curriculum that teaches users how to learn to self-regulate. It's called Heal You. And it's presented by neurofeedback, biofeedback specialists and specialists in neuromeditation, which is the core principles of helium mindfulness, positivity, calm and focus. And not all meditations are the same, and they're not all just meant to calm your mind. Some of them are meant to open your heart in positivity. Some of them are meant to allow you to become more aware of your surroundings. So we have different flavors inside Helium that we combine with the biometric data so that you can see your feelings and learn to self-regulate that when you change your breathing or you focus on your hands on your lap or your thighs on the chair, what does that do to your brain patterns and heart rate?
[00:23:10.113] Kent Bye: Yeah, it seems like a lot of this, you're gonna need some of these external peripherals to really take the full advantage of. When I got my Apple Vision Pro, I had an iPhone, it's not the latest version, and I've since bought a Magic Keyboard and a Magic Trackpad, and I feel like in order to really take the full advantage of the display, I probably have to get a Mac laptop, and now as I hear about the Helium app, oh, should I get an Apple Watch to be able to get this? So it feels like there's this benefit of leveraging ecosystem. If you're already fully bought into the ecosystem, you can take advantage of this. And if you're not, then I can feel the goal towards having more and more of these tightly integrated devices. But from a developer perspective, I'm curious to hear some of your reflections on this Apple ecosystem and how you're able to potentially start to leverage it in a way that takes advantage of people who already are fully bought into the ecosystem.
[00:24:00.518] Sarah Hill: Yeah, it certainly does tie together all the things in Apple's ecosystem and put it inside one display. So, you know, your spatial videos are there. That's one of the things that we're excited about, you know, leveraging somehow in Helium's app. you know, Safari is there and the hand interfaces is intuitive. There are your app store is there and you're able to seamlessly go between your Mac book and your iPhone and you can see it in its full glory and you can dial it in and out. And it has a breakthrough image that if you look at someone, it recognizes that as a person and then you're able to see that person broken through that pass-through. So yes, if you would already have all of those devices, it would be seamless. But for someone not, then you can see how they would be drawn to another headset because they don't necessarily have all the accessories that would be required in order to propel those experiences. With us, that's one of the reasons why we're hardware agnostic. So bring your own fitness tracker, bring your Galaxy Watch, your Samsung Galaxy Watch, bring an EEG headband. And there's value in trying to make it as broad as possible to encompass the 300 million people who have something strapped to their wrists or to their heads that's capturing data.
[00:25:35.147] Kent Bye: Well, there's certainly been a lot of comparisons between the Apple Vision Pro and the MetaQuest and both the technical specs, but also the broader ecosystem issues. So from your perspective as a developer, what have been some of the things that you've noticed between these two different approaches for being hardware agnostic and having your app in all these different places, including on mobile apps? But what have you seen specifically between the MetaQuest versus the Apple Vision Pro?
[00:26:01.161] Sarah Hill: Yeah. And so just to be clear, we're rooting for all of the goggles, right? We want them all to succeed and sell, you know, tons because that's an existing user base for us. In addition to mobile devices, you know, you don't need goggles to use helium, but specifically the main difference I see is just typing on keyboards, right? That, you know, you're able to keep your hands on your lap and yet still interact with the screen. And to me, that was a big aha moment of. you know, less energy expended in being able to interact with those screens. The other was having all, as you said, the ecosystem is there. So my photos are there, you know, easily having an ability to capture those photos. And my apps are there. It's built into a existing mobile ecosystem. And you can easily go between that mobile experience and your laptop, which we all know that we do that in the real world. And so to me, I think that was definitely a difference. But a lot of pros and cons as far as the MetaQuest 3, that's a great device as well. I mean, we all saw the video that Zuckerberg posted comparing the two devices. And to me, I think the main difference is The open ecosystem versus the closed ecosystem and one of the things he mentioned in that video was that meta was an open ecosystem which i would disagree with as an entity that. We've spent three years now in App Labs, not having the ability to be on their store. Apple Vision Pro comes out and the first day, you know, our products are on the store. So there's a very stark difference between an open ecosystem and a closed ecosystem. And for us as a developer, Meta's App Lab policies really hurt us, and it hurt the people and the enterprises that use our products. Helium is used by brands around the world, from government entities, military, NFL, major league baseball teams, and also populations that are underrepresented like veterans. And so in the early days of Oculus Go, when App Labs first came out, we had 200 terminally ill and aging World War II veterans on a waiting list. that we were having to talk through how to sideload SideQuest on their virtual reality device. Think about this, an 80 or 90 year old having to talk them through how to get access to their memorials because Meta wouldn't put us on their platform. We contacted everyone who we could think of. We contacted people of influence who also contacted their people to try to explain to them the gravity of this situation. And these veterans, you know, they're dying at a rate of 180, 190 a day nationwide. And so there was this huge impetus and push to say, you know, hey Metta, we realize these aren't the most highly interactive of the World War II Vietnam Korea women's memorials. We realize these are 360 videos that were shot in 2015, 2016 on vintage cameras and may not be the most interactive piece of content that you've ever seen, but they were narrated by living pieces of history that are no longer with us. And that's the value of those programs and going through those memorials is that you hear the voice of the people who were actually in those experiences. And so you can't go back and redo that. Maybe someday in the future with AI, we could remaster that, but you can't look in those same faces and hear it from their own mouths. And we tried very hard to share videos of their reaction and what this program meant to those veterans who weren't able to physically travel on Honor Flights. Honor Flight is the nationwide program that takes veterans on real flights to see their memorials. But this program, called Honor Everywhere, an app, allows them to see it in virtual spaces. It's a free app. And so when I say closed, I mean closed. It has been really frustrating over the years. They said, well, if you do this, well, I actually need to do this. You need to do this. And we did all of those steps. And then, oh, well, actually, you need to do your VRC checks. Well, we did that. And to make a long story short, we had people die on our waiting list before we ever got the ability to get them access to the app. So it brings up an interesting discussion about access to virtual spaces. And with all of this push to have better mental wellness and social media, and yet those healing spaces are being hidden by an additional layer that you have to talk people through how to even find the content. You know, to me, that is not open in any way. And it's also hurting not only the developers, but the people who need access to that content. And, you know, you need not just one kind of these apps, you need a whole medicine cabinet full, right, of things that can downshift your nervous system, take you to places that you can't physically travel. And so, you know, when he made that comment, it's just, it hurt my heart, because it's like, in no way, shape or form, have we had an open experience. And who suffered from that was the families that we had to email back and say, I realize that your loved one passed away before they got to see it. And in a lot of these experiences, they'd see it. And then because they were terminal, they'd pass away sometimes days, months later. And you would go and tell them, hey, we found a kit for you to ship to you. And we can probably get it there next week. And then you get the email back. Actually, Mr. Johnson passed away. So It will be interesting to see in the future how physical spaces and access to some of these spaces is viewed on an inclusive design perspective, because I can't imagine in the real world having at a memorial in the real world and them saying, actually, you have to go around to the back, and you have to go through these three more steps in order to see that physical space. So I would love, you know, a conversation or some kind of entity to ignite that conversation about inclusive design, in addition to privacy and cybersecurity and data protection of what kind of layers are we adding to these developers who have healing media and have content that could actually improve the mental wellness of our youth. So when he said that, that really struck me as not being an accurate representation of what I've experienced as a creator on their platform.
[00:34:07.164] Kent Bye: Yeah, so just to elaborate, Mark Zuckerberg did a video on Instagram where he was essentially saying that not only is the Quest 3 a better value, but it's an all around better product. And that at the end, he emphasized that Meta is taking an open approach and Apple is taking a closed approach. The only way that I can really say that that has actually taken place are things with OpenXR and Metas collaborating with Qualcomm in a way that there's more of a collaborative approach with the processing chips, whereas Apple has everything vertically integrated with both their operating system and their Silicon and everything else. And so the fact that Apple has been both really delayed on both their WebXR, WebGPU type of implementations on Safari, they've artificially locked down Safari. There's a lot of things that Apple has done that has really been antagonistic to an open approach. And there are very locked down relative to Meta. However, like you're saying, Meta has a two-tiered system, which I think is what you're speaking to, which is that they have their app store, but they've taken a highly curated approach to the App Store. By my calculations, over the 4.7 years since the Quest launched in 2019, there's been 620 Quest apps that have launched. There's been 2,094 Rift apps, and then 1,784 apps that were on Go, and then 1,672 apps that were on Gear VR. But those 3,000 apps are basically not even available anymore if you wanted to get a hold of those. Those basically have been shuttered. And by my estimates, there might be anywhere between 2000 to 3000 apps relegated to the app lab. It's hard for me to really know, but you're someone who's a developer who's been trying to get their app on the main store.
[00:35:53.404] Sarah Hill: Almost five years.
[00:35:54.765] Kent Bye: For nearly five years, you've been trying to get onto the main store and you've been relegated to this app lab. What are the implications of being on the app lab in terms of search and other ways that that impacts you?
[00:36:05.033] Sarah Hill: Well, obviously it's impacted us, you know, financially as a company. Right. But we found ways to get around it in selling to enterprises. you know, enterprises, VA, Air Force, Army, you know, major brands are using Helium as a way to learn to self-regulate. But the consumer market, you know, it's tough to reach when you're not on the store. And so that lack of access hurts developers, not only in the bottom line, but also, you know, the greater community that doesn't have, and I'm not just talking about the Helium app or the Honor Everywhere app. but the tons of other apps that might be geared towards someone in a 3DOF experience or apps that are geared toward people who might not have hands or might not even have the ability to walk around the room, but simply because they don't have those interactive experiences in them that they're put in a different tier. But, you know, we're scrappy here in the Midwest, right? You know, a lot of people like, wow, you know, you've really been able to your company has really been able to scale and grow despite not even being on the store. And that's true because, you know, Helium is on iOS and Android. And also, you know, we're on other platforms. Pico has been a great partner and that's a great headset. a simple headset, that little G3 that has a single controller with our populations and the enterprise market who are looking for those quick escapes from reality and stressful situations. Those are really handy. Victims of gender based violence in Iraq. You know, not all of the experiences out there are meant to be a game. There are phenomenal games in there, but virtual reality is so much more than a game and really has healing properties to it from the media that comes through those devices because the brain is believing what it sees. If it sees everything around it, the body is responding in the same way. So I would really hope that going forward, Metta would rethink how they are handling that openness, or at least rethink calling it an open ecosystem, when to us it's been anything but.
[00:38:36.078] Kent Bye: So yeah, people go on an Oculus Quest and they search for healing that won't show up right online.
[00:38:40.744] Sarah Hill: You have to know to search for it by name. So if you went and searched meditation or mindfulness, it won't show up. You won't see it listed anywhere on the store. You have to know to search for it. And H-E-A-L-I-U-N, search for it and download it. You can download it that way. And in the early days, you know, before there was App Labs, you know, SideQuest is a great tool, but talking an 80 or 90 year old or even the spouse of an 80 or 90 year old. how to sideload these experiences on their goggles. Yeah, it was incredibly tough and continues to be a barrier to entry for us to get these experiences in the hands of those veterans. And so we made a decision three months ago because these veterans are dying at a rate of, you know, a large amount. And, you know, sadly, most of them won't be around anymore. we open sourced all the content. In order to get it in the hands of most people, we needed to give it away, right? We needed not just us to have that content, but everybody. And so some amazing other VR companies like Penumbra, Mind Immersive, Neuro Rehab VR, Behave VR, Weya Health, XR Health, Rendiver, Arbor XR, Manage XR, 18loop, mind immersive, clean box, and a lot of companies came together. And so you can now find those experiences. Now, I don't think any of those have an app, a publicly facing app on meta, but that's what we had to do in order to get the content out there. Now those companies have stepped up like, yeah, with our veterans customers, we'll share that content on our platform. So at least they have access to it.
[00:40:37.636] Kent Bye: And so in the past, when you were on App Lab, you wouldn't show up in the search results at all, but it sounds like that if you search for it, you will find it.
[00:40:44.741] Sarah Hill: If you know to search for our name, Helium, H-E-A-L-I-U-M, but you have to type in our name exactly. You can't search World War II Memorial or Washington, D.C. or mindfulness or meditation. It's hidden in those spaces.
[00:41:03.707] Kent Bye: So when I look at Meta's approach, it very much seems like they've taken a highly curated approach for what gets shown on the store, what gets promoted on the store. If you're a game, it seems like it's a lot higher chance that you're be sort of into the main store ecosystem, but then there's all these non-gaming apps that have been out there that feels like metas de-prioritized. In fact, there seems to be even potentially some de-emphasis of like medical based applications that I've talked to other folks who couldn't even get on the App Lab after they showed that they had medical results that were showing The only thing I could think of is that Meta seems to be really hesitant to have anybody think that this might be a medical device, because all the data that they're gathering could also be classified as medical data, which would then potentially disrupt their surveillance capitalism business model. But I'm curious if you've heard something similar in terms of if there are other medical based applications that have either had difficulty with getting onto Metastore or if there's other privacy issues in HIPAA compliance that makes it a bit of a non-starter for some that they have to go elsewhere anyway.
[00:42:09.972] Sarah Hill: Tours of the World War II Memorial is not a medical application. There's nothing about Honor Everywhere that's medical. And Helium is a meditation tool. It's a self-awareness tool. We don't make medical claims. It's not a treatment or a replacement for psychotropic medication. Those warnings are all over our app. And so we had that conversation with them. And we said, is that it? Is that why we're not being allowed access to your platform? And, you know, they didn't really give us an answer, but they did give us some things that we could do to try to get on there. And we did all of them and still got the same either non-response or circular. communication, talk to this person and then talk to that person. And I mean, I've got all the customer support requests over those five years. I mean, it's been a battle that sadly, we've lost and actually being able to be on the store. But even though we're not making medical claims, we do have clinical validation, right? That These experiences for the self-management of stress and anxiety as part of a healthy lifestyle can make a difference. So just because you have peer-reviewed journals, eight peer-reviewed journals showing that your product quickly reduces anxiety or improves mood in a matter of minutes. That shouldn't preclude you from having your meditation app on the store. It should enhance, right, the fact that you do have backing and you do have science behind the fact that your product works, even if you aren't making medical claims. But that isn't what happened here. And you know, we've not been able to get any indication as to why, why that is. Maybe your listeners can help get us to the right persons. But let me tell you, we've talked with dozens, dozens over the years. And you hear it from other entities that have healing spaces in app labs as well. They've been treated the same way.
[00:44:24.935] Kent Bye: Do you suspect that there is something where Meta may have a legal ear over anything that could potentially classify the Quest 3 as a medical device?
[00:44:35.288] Sarah Hill: Couldn't say. Couldn't say. They've not indicated that to me, so that would be a good question you should ask them.
[00:44:44.195] Kent Bye: So there was this video that came up that I think is catalyzing some of these conversations because of this claim that Meta is a more of an open ecosystem. And yet you've been trying to get into their main ecosystem for nearly five years. And then essentially on day one, you're able to get into Apple's ecosystem without a problem.
[00:45:01.688] Sarah Hill: Correct. So I understand what you were saying about open and closed, and you can view it both ways. But just my personal opinion, obviously, after four years of trying to claw our way and having a product that is used and is popular and is generating a decent amount of revenue. And from a revenue perspective, why wouldn't they want the apps that are generating large amounts of revenue on their store, right? That's money on the table. that has been left.
[00:45:34.834] Kent Bye: Yeah. And you sent me a comment that you sent Zuckerberg's video, where you said that you want to share this feedback with them because their open ecosystem is broken and it's hurting access for the disabled and mental health community. And so you talked about trying to get access to some of these experiences, but that these claims of openness, that there's something that's gone horribly wrong, because if it is an opening ecosystem, it certainly isn't operating as an open ecosystem for all the developers that are involved within the ecosystem.
[00:46:01.142] Sarah Hill: Correct. Yeah, I posted that on his video. And sadly, I think the comment was hidden. No one has been able to it shows up on mine. It does not show up on his feed when you look at it. So either whoever was moderating his comments, or that comment was hidden. And obviously, that's your prerogative to hide comments on your platform. But, you know, I mean, let's have an open discussion about what's happening there. And I think in today's mental health emergency, specifically, as it relates to the impact that social media has on mental wellness, should we continue to keep these healing spaces hidden? And should we really continue to keep all of those apps and app laps?
[00:46:54.246] Kent Bye: What would you like to see happen?
[00:46:56.788] Sarah Hill: I would love to see them free all of them, right? All right, there you go. It's an open ecosystem, just like Google Play, just like Apple. You have an app, it goes through a review process, and you're not keeping a certain kind of app or a certain number of app separated. And it's a review process for the technicality. If you don't think the content is of a gaming nature or doesn't have the interactivity level or doesn't utilize all of the tools that they have in their headset, doesn't prioritize having hands, you know, that's not something that you see from the Google Play Store. It's not something that you see necessarily from the Apple App Store. You'll get kicked back if a data policy or some rendering issue or you'll have to reformat a graphic or you have a logo in your graphic, right? But how much harm has been done with that as it relates to mental wellness?
[00:48:05.775] Kent Bye: Yeah. My take is that if you read through some of Meta's strategy documents, they seem to really want to have ownership of first party apps. And so they're very concerned about promoting their own horizon worlds and getting that lot of advertisement and treatment. And I saw on upload VR that some of the most popular apps now are some on horizon worlds. And so if they're really promoting an open ecosystem, then you would expect them to not trying to buy up all these companies to have the top performing app in each of these markets and to treat it less like a game console that has high curation and truly make it an open ecosystem that is really allowing anybody and everybody to submit and publish an app without it going through this tiered system that as a first class citizen and a second class citizen, where you don't get the same type of privileges as the first class apps, which I said, there's like a 620 of those apps over 4.7 years. So yeah, it seems like their curation strategy has very much treated it much more like a games console than an open spatial computing platform.
[00:49:09.056] Sarah Hill: That's a great way to characterize it. And certainly, obviously, I mean, that's their prerogative, but I just wish that there was some listening session or some way beyond the feedback that you send to the ethosphere that that can be rethought. And, you know, there are people in meta who have tried to figure that out and try to get answers of, you know, why that's happened to us. And, you know, some of the other great apps that are still stuck in App Labs, but it hasn't gone anywhere. And, you know, after nearly five years, it's like, you know, obviously that door has been closed to those immersive spaces. And not just, you know, with meditation, but with access to those memorials for those that's with honor everywhere.
[00:50:04.280] Kent Bye: Yeah, well, hopefully this podcast will go out and some folks will send it up the chain and get some feedback to if they're really going to live into this claim that they're an open ecosystem, then they're going to have to make some changes because as it is right now, they're still pretty closed. Despite all of their work with OpenXR and WebXR and all these things, you could make an argument that they're doing things that are much more open. However, this seems to be a pretty vital aspect of what it would mean to have a truly open ecosystem, to serve developers as equals and not create this whole tiered system. Unless you want to call yourself a games console, which is what games consoles do, versus what open spatial computing platforms might do.
[00:50:44.130] Sarah Hill: Open as it relates to not only technicalities, but also content, open genres of content.
[00:50:51.555] Kent Bye: Yes, beyond gaming for sure. Well, I guess as I always like to do, I'd love to hear some of your thoughts on what you think the ultimate potential of spatial computing and immersive storytelling might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:51:05.062] Sarah Hill: So I love that question because it harkens me back to the very first time that I chatted with you. And I said, I want to go back to my home that I lost in a tornado. I want to go back into my room. I want to hear the creak of the wood floor. I want to look around and see it. And now what do you know?" Right? We can do that. I can go back to those pictures, put them in my Apple Vision Pro. They're not necessarily spatial, but I could capture that room that I lived my life in and then be able to go back to that in the headset. So it's really interesting to see how this industry has expanded into the things that we said we wish we could do. And now we're actually being able to do with spatial video. So I'm super excited about that and the ability to take a single photo and make it immersive. You know, right. That technology is right there with what's happening with open AI and Sora. And it's an exciting time to be in video technology.
[00:52:12.251] Kent Bye: Yeah, I imagine that there are already processes to take 2D images and add depth maps and give spatialization to those and to translate these 2D films into more of a spatial format. There's obviously photogrammetry, which has been around for a long, long time, but also neuroradiance fields and Gaussian splats and all sorts of new techniques that are going to probably come together with that answer you gave to me back at VRLA back in like 2016, where we're talking about having memories and going back into these memories. that, yeah, the technology has really caught up and continues to progress where it will not be too much longer that you could take some of those old 2D photos and probably create a whole 3D spatial reconstruction and walk into those memories.
[00:52:53.779] Sarah Hill: Yeah. The stored memories. And that's, you know, one of the beauties of immersive media, the ability to create a stored memory that you can go back to in a stressful situation.
[00:53:03.607] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left inside that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:53:08.241] Sarah Hill: No, just that I appreciate you giving a voice and interviewing all of the industry veterans over the years. You are a rock and your reporting and stories, as we look back on this 20 years from now, is It's going to be the Encyclopedia Britannica of all of those building blocks. So I know about hard work it takes to dominate a beat of reporting and you've certainly done that. And yeah, just appreciative of the time and this great community, that collaborative community among app developers that we live in and keep going everyone. Right. We're building the future and. rooting for all of the platforms, Apple, Meta, Pico, HTC, Sony. I mean, we want them all to succeed.
[00:53:59.552] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, sir, I know you've been on the cutting edge of this intersection between biofeedback and VR and a healing meditative context for a long, long time. And I'm looking forward to seeing how you continue to blend all these things together with the Helium app that you can find on both the Quest store, if you type it in, as well as on Apple Vision Pro and Pico and lots of other platforms, mobile apps as well. So highly encourage folks to go check it out. You can see a lot of the videos to check out, get a little bit of a taster for some of this stuff. and lots of pioneering work that you've been doing as well on your own end. So thanks again for taking the time to help share some of your latest thoughts and perspectives on these different ecosystems.
[00:54:38.165] Sarah Hill: My pleasure. Keep going.
[00:54:40.848] Kent Bye: So that was Sarah Hill. She's the CEO of Helium. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, this conversation was really catalyzed by Mark Zuckerberg's claim that Meta is operating an open ecosystem, which listening to Sarah, that's clearly not her experience because there's a very much a tiered system that's happening within Meta's store. It's not just a process of submitting to the store. You have to, like, jump through all these hoops, including giving Meta, like, a whole presentation and a business plan. I mean, it's a lot of stuff even just to get onto the store. They operate their store much more similarly to, say, a closed-wall garden games console. There is the ability to publish App Lab experiences, but they're not in the same tier. They don't show up on regular search results unless you're searching specifically for exactly the name of the application. So, I did a bit of digging into this because I was actually really quite curious to see, like, is this a matter of a lot of these apps being relegated to the App Lab? And so, there's around 621 applications that are published on the MetaQuest store. Around 68% of those are games, 20% of them are apps, and around 12% of them are entertainment. And so when I look at App Lab, there's a website called App Lab game list that has what I've seen as the most comprehensive gathering of all the different App Lab links. It's actually very difficult to do a complete audit of all the experiences in App Labs because it's up to the developer to disclose whether or not it's public. And so there's a lot of stuff that's completely private on App Labs. And then for the people who want to eventually become on the main Quest store, there's an incentive for them to advertise it. So there's around 2,300 of those experiences that are on the App Lab game list. And there's, I would estimate, probably another 1,000 or 2,000 other apps that are relegated to the App Lab store, either for purposes where people want to keep it a little bit more private, sort of like the equivalent of the test flight for the Apple ecosystem. But for a number of people who are trying to get onto the main store, there's probably around 2,300 of those that would like to be on the store. And of those, then it's still around the same type of distribution of percentages. It's 72% games, 20% apps, and 8% entertainment. So if anything, there's a little bit more games on the App Lab that have not been promoted up to the Quest Store. When I look at the Apple Vision Pro apps that have been released, there's been some lists that are out there doing a little bit of an audit. There's around 68% of them are apps, 20% are entertainment, and 12% are games. And so it's a little bit flipped, whereas on the Quest Store, it's 68% games, whereas on the Apple Vision Pro, it's around 68% apps. And so I think it speaks to most of the apps that are on the Quest Store are made on Unity or Unreal Engine. These are game engines. And so it's most likely be games that are being created for the context of the Quest Store. The Apple Vision Pro has a whole other approach where they're designing non-gaming applications, and it's a lot easier to be able to do that. But in terms of the curation strategy for meta, there's around seven experiences that have a relaxation and meditation tag for the main quest store, and there's maybe three or four of those that are really primarily a meditation experience. Whereas when I look at the genre tags in the context of apps on the App Lab of the 2,300 sample size that were on the App Lab's games list, there was probably 70 or 80 of those that had tags for relaxation meditation. A lot of those were games, none of them were specifically meditation applications. But the point is that MET is essentially becoming a kingmaker, saying these are the different types of experiences that are going to be promoted into the main store, and these are the ones who are not going to be promoted into the main store. Now, the reasoning for a lot of this, I think, was from Meta's experiences from when people would buy a VR headset and they would see a lot of experiences that were not necessarily the best quality. It would lower retention because people would say, well, I guess all of VR is really bad and it just sucks. Meta took the approach to treat it more like a games console. The problem is that Meta had a very specific bar for what would be a good experience to have and most of it would be these Highly interactive games because it's a lot of the stuff that's being developed on Unity and Unreal Engine around 70% of all the experiences are games but that left all of these non gaming types of applications and to be relegated to things like SideQuest or App Lab. The other things that Sarah was talking about was the Honor Everywhere, which was these 360 video experiences that they never were able to get even on to the App Lab. She's telling the story of what is the access to these immersive spaces? Are they only for gamers, or what about all these other applications? That on Apple's side, they are taking a much more open approach. There is over a thousand applications that have already been launched on the Apple Vision Pro, And it's very difficult to get a list of them, or even search, or to really find what you're looking for. So there's a lot of work that Apple needs to do to make that just a lot more searchable. But the thing is, with the Apple Store, you still have to do a lot of your marketing. It's just going to be a completely different approach for what it's going to be able to take to have success on the app market. But in comparing Apple's Store approach from the Quest Store approach, the Apple approach is much more open. I mean, from Sarah's own accounting, she was able to get onto the Apple Vision Pro on the first day, and they're still relegated into like this weird second tier App Lab system within the context of Meta. So, Yeah, I had a chance to actually try out a lot of the different meditation applications and experiences. Unfortunately, I do not have a Apple Watch or other EEG headset to be able to tie it in and integrate to see some of these other features that I think actually are going to be launching later. And they're still in the process of re-rendering a lot of their content to take the full advantage of the resolution on the Apple Vision Pro. So there's a range of different rendering fidelities that are on there. There is some nice meditation experiences that are in the context of Helium that I'd highly recommend checking out. And when I had a chance to see it in the context of VRX, they had all these other like haptic chairs and other things that are mostly for when they are demoing it. But if you do have a sub pack or other haptic experiences, it can take the level of immersion into the next level. So definitely check out the Helium application if you're wanting to see a little bit more. of other options like Sarah said to only have like one or two or maybe a max seven different relaxation meditation experiences on the entire quest store and having another 60 70 or 80 of them that are relegated to the app lab with no real good way to search through all those So yeah, just to have like a uniform system that is really putting the developer ecosystem first. And one of the other things that Meta has been doing is they've been promoting their own horizon worlds. They have a whole icon. Whenever you open up the Quest store, one of the first things you often see is like logging into like Instagram. And so Meta is like promoting a lot of their own products when you go into their ecosystem. And so if anything, when you're a developer on Meta's ecosystem, you feel like you're deprioritized from Meta's own apps that they're trying to promote. So, anyway, just really great to hear some of Sarah's own first accounting because, you know, that's her own direct experiences of what it's been like to be within the context of Meta's ecosystem. So, that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a list of support podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
