Flashback to 2018 with Joanna Popper talking about the state of Location-Based VR. Popper is featured in the 7th chapter of Yale anthropologist Lisa Messeri’s In the Land of the Unreal: Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles field study conducted in 2018.
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] 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 I'm continuing on my series of building up to the book release of The Land of the Unreal, Virtual and Other Realities in Los Angeles, written by Yale anthropologist Lisa Masseri, which is releasing on Friday, March 8th, 2024. So this is the fourth of fifth in my series, and today I'm featuring Joanna Popper, who I had a chance to talk to at the VR strategy conference in San Francisco back in October of 2018. And at the time, Joanna was working a lot with location-based entertainment. And so this conversation ends up talking about a lot of the trends and experiences that are happening in location-based entertainment in 2018. And then, as we all know, the pandemic shut down a lot of these different LBE experiences. This was really a moment of time of documenting what HP was doing with their backpacks. This is before the Quest had come out later in May of 2019. So at the time, they were still using like PC VR to be able to do this type of location-based entertainment. So Joanna also makes an appearance in chapter seven of Lisa Masseri's Land of the Unreal, talking about making innovation women's work, the storytelling and world building for a quote, tech otherwise. And so just documenting the different paths of women into the XR industry. And so in that chapter, Joanna ends up being featured pretty prominently in terms of her journey into VR. That is elaborated a lot more than I get into in this conversation with Joanna. And like I've said in other podcast interviews, I've got lots of different unpublished interviews. And as I was reading through Ms. Arie's book, which I think is a real landmark book in terms of this deep dive anthropological study into the culture and political ecology of virtual reality as a technology, just a really fascinating look on so many different dimensions. And so some of the people that she's featuring, I had these unpublished interviews that I want to dig into my archive leading up to the conversation here in the final episode where I have a deep dive unpacking of Lisa's book. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the West Severa podcast. So this interview with Joanna happened on Thursday, October 18th, 2018 at the VR strategy conference in San Francisco, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:21.686] Joanna Popper: I'm Joanna Popper. I'm the global head of location-based entertainment for virtual reality for HP. And I'm also expanding my focus to work with education as well.
[00:02:32.530] Kent Bye: Okay, great. So maybe you could tell me a bit about like what is happening with location-based entertainment and HP.
[00:02:37.681] Joanna Popper: Sure. So HP, as many of you know, is one of the founding companies of Silicon Valley. It's one of the first companies of Silicon Valley. And our actual first customer was Walt Disney. So we have a really long legacy in the computing space. We actually had the first garage as well. So we're the first Palo Alto garage that was founded. And we focus on inventing and reinventing the future and technology. And within that, we see virtual reality and the immersive computing world as the future of computing. So it's very important to us to be part of building that future and integral in that future. There are five industries that we focus on, both from the point of view of where there's the most traction right now, as well as where HP is very strong on the enterprise side. Those are location-based entertainment, architecture, engineering, construction, training, with some emphasis on military and first responder, healthcare, and then education. I have an entertainment background. I was at NBCUniversal for about eight or nine years. And so for me, location-based entertainment is that really powerful blend of entertainment and media, tech, content, retail operations coming together. I see location-based entertainment as the place that most people will have their first, best immersive experience. So I'm very excited about it coming to neighborhoods near everybody.
[00:04:00.945] Kent Bye: Yeah, so maybe you could tell me a bit about some of the HP tech that is being used in location-based entertainment locations.
[00:04:06.599] Joanna Popper: Sure, so we have those really cool backpacks that you've seen. We actually have two versions of the backpack that are incredibly powerful and allow you to have an immersive experience without being tied to cables or tripping over or getting a little choked by a cable. So a lot of the free roam experiences that are out there in the market are using the HP VR backpacks. We have a version with the GeForce cards and a version with the Quadro cards. So depending on what people's specific needs are and what kind of program they're building, one or the other would fit the best. We also make one of the Windows Mixed Reality headsets. And Microsoft's been doing a lot of really interesting updates to make those more and more interesting and exciting for location-based entertainment. But the most important thing about them is they have inside-out tracking, so it takes away the need for some of the very expensive tracking systems, which, since location-based entertainment in general is still scrappy and entrepreneurial and just starting out, anything that takes large amounts of cost out is exciting to businesses. And we also, of course, sell laptops and towers and everything else that will power the location and HP and we sell the Vive, so we have a deal in partnership with Vive for both Vive and Vive Pro. And then HP as a company also has all the retail operations, so point of sale and screens and everything else that one might need to open up a retail location. We lead with the VR and then bring along the other areas as they're needed by our customers.
[00:05:32.872] Kent Bye: Well, what are some of the marquee location-based entertainment locations that you have some HP technology at?
[00:05:39.015] Joanna Popper: Sure. I mean, it's been really great. The industry has really embraced our technology, which is very exciting. So we are working with Spaces, who recently launched in Irvine with their Terminator experience. And they are launching right now or next week, I don't know when you'll play this, but they're launching in October 2018 in Shibuya Crossing in Japan. So that's the most famous pedestrian crossing in the world. and there'll be a Spaces location there. And then they have a number of other locations that they're launching soon. Nomadic just announced their location that they will be launching in Orlando with Arizona Sunshine. They're also using HP Backpacks. And 2Bit Circus launched in September 2018. The vast majority of their technology is running on HP technology. They have the backpacks in their raft game that was built out by Starbreeze and then most of the cabanas the arena the D-box chairs, they're all they're all running on HP computers as well Does the void use HP so the void up to now has been building their own system They actually came to market before we had a system
[00:06:46.222] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. And so I imagine that there is a bit of a pipeline of what the artists and creators are doing in location based entertainment, but that there may be feeding into other like enterprise training, either with the military or other applications where you need to be free roaming. So maybe you could tell me a bit about what you see that pipeline is from what is being innovated and pushed forward in terms of the technology and the experiences and location based entertainment, but how that may have applications and other use cases.
[00:07:12.102] Joanna Popper: Yeah, absolutely. So it's an interesting place to sit in our team because the person who focuses on training, he's actually an ex-Marine. And so he works across training for corporate training, enterprise training, as well as military and first responder. And so he has that insight and know-how and then we all kind of learn together. I think LBE is pushing the envelope in terms of constantly giving feedback on what they need, what they want to see improved, and they're a really great partner to us as we think about the future, you know, you're talking about the future roadmap, about what we're going to bring to market. But what's interesting is that it's really going both ways. I've heard LBE companies who are interested in getting training contracts and military first responder contracts, and then I've heard about companies that have a lot of expertise and know-how on the training side coming into LBE. So I think since it's still such a nascent industry and that skill set is so specific that companies are looking for places that they can broaden out and take their know-how to other industries that have a need for it.
[00:08:18.997] Kent Bye: I'm curious to hear from you in terms of how you see the ecosystem from where you're sitting because when I talk to individual developers, I don't meet very many independent game developers who are able to sustain themselves completely by just making VR games. A lot of them are doing enterprise applications or training applications or medical applications or education applications. There's a diversity of their portfolio of different applications they're making. but they can't just solely focus on games. And so when I see someone like Oculus really promoting games, games, games as almost like their core strategy, I feel like there's a bit of like, that's not actually what I see is happening in the ecosystem is that there's a much more robust and diverse way that in some ways that the enterprise and all of these things that you're saying that HP is focusing on is really I see is going to be driving the continuation and growth of virtual reality as a medium. But I'm just curious to hear from your perspective, how do you tell that story or understand what's happening in the overall ecosystem?
[00:09:17.936] Joanna Popper: Those are great questions. So, thinking about it, the ecosystem is all connected, and so the knowledge and the learning from one place can filter on to another. So, there certainly are some developers who absolutely are supporting themselves very well by the game. Beat Saber is an obvious example, maybe it's an outlier, but hopefully we'll see more and more Beat Sabers that come out. I was on a commission discussion with the Venice Film Festival with the European Commission on the Future of Virtual Reality. We were talking a lot about these skill sets are so unique right now and how do we make sure that we have jobs for the people with those skill sets. I was thinking a lot about when you go to a film festival, the content there is very pushing the frontiers and pushing the edge. And if you think about the comparable content on the film side, those aren't always the most profitable businesses. So many people who may be working on indie film or documentaries may end up also taking a side gig or using their talents and their skill sets, maybe making commercial videos for those same enterprise companies, right? So I don't know that it's unique only to virtual reality. I do think that we are obviously even at an earlier stage with the monetization paths being less clear overall. But I don't know that all of these issues and all of these different paths to discover are completely unique to us. I think that a lot of people do go into the business because they want to express their own voice, bring their own art or their own vision to the world. And that might be in a cinematic piece that they show at a festival, that may be in their expression of themselves through a game, And that may be through their expression of themselves and helping to figure out how do we use this great technology for people who have PTSD or Alzheimer's or how to make sure that first responders or military that we put into harm's way have the best possible chance to come home safely.
[00:11:15.490] Kent Bye: Yeah, I was talking to one of the co-founders of the VR arcade conference yesterday and one of the things that he was saying is that they've started the conference in 2016 and that they've seen an evolution of the VR arcades that are out there and that he had this sense that the VR arcades that only had like five stations and not much more that those were the ones that were maybe going out of business and that there's other ones that have these location-based entertainment where you're able to roam around with the physical space and to have the types of experiences that you can't have at your home, either it's social or they're group dynamics, that those are the ones that are really compelling to really drive the growth and expansion of these types of experiences, especially for doing corporate events as well as birthday parties and having other people come in. I'm just curious to hear from your perspective in terms of like what you're seeing in the overall VR arcade ecosystem and if there's any of those indicators of like if they do have these free roaming experiences that they tend to be a little bit more successful.
[00:12:12.882] Joanna Popper: So I think it's probably too early to say, you know, free roam is a guaranteed success, whereas X, Y and Z other type of approach is not. I think it's important to note that we're talking about doing at very least three really hard things together. So we're talking about very nascent and new technology. content and then retail operations. So all of those three have a pretty high level of failure, right? You know, the content industry has some hits that sustain all of the failures. Most tech startups don't make it. I mean, we all focus on the ones that become unicorns, you know, often in, but many startups don't make it. And then retail operations also have a high rate of failure. So we're talking about really brave entrepreneurs and really passionate people who are taking the risk and the chance to bring all three of those together. And those are also disparate skill sets. So they're also needing to find people to be in their company who have the ability to be successful. in all three of those things that are all pretty different. So I think we're still in the phase of exploration and experimentation. And most of these first launches, I think, are betas. Some of the companies have 10, 30, 13, 20. Most don't have that many locations yet. And so there's still a lot of factors for each individual location. I mean, you're specifically talking about ones that might be very indie and, you know, hopped up, you know, essentially what was made for home use, but since most people don't have it at home, they're creating a business around putting that into a mall or into a retail area. And I think the industry becomes very fast to judge, like, one store went out of business or one place went out of business, like, now it's all a failure or now it's all red flags, but I don't think that's a fair metric. You know, we can look at, yes, you know, maybe that one didn't work or that one shut down two locations, but they still have five that are still running. I think IMAX is a story like that. I think they got some, probably a little bit too negative press about the two locations they closed when they have been very clear all along that they're doing a beta. So if five are still open, I actually went to IMAX Sunday morning and they were at noon and there was a line to get in and people waiting for them to open the door. So, you know. Pretty cool, right? And like tons of families and kids coming in. And then I played Beat Saber with my friends. So I think that there's like a tendency, I think, to, you know, look for trends and look for answers and try to find that magic bullet. But I don't think we have enough data. You know, we're all very deep in the industry and, you know, have thousands of VR experiences. The average person still hasn't even done one. So LBE is an opportunity to have people, for the price of a ticket, experience in some sort of social environment the wonder and the amazement of VR, which we get to experience all the time. And so I'm just really excited to be part of that and help build it. And I'm excited about the people who are taking the risks to invest their own money or the capital that they've raised in these businesses and help us all figure it out together. And I think that if you spend time in a lot of these locations like I do really all around the world and watch the enthusiasm and sort of that mind-popping moment when people and adults and children and families and men and women and everybody is in there and just having an amazing time. It's really inspiring.
[00:15:48.065] Kent Bye: Yeah, I feel like that there's a bit of these location-based entertainments being on the front line of being able to give a whole lot of people their first VR experiences that they've ever had before, especially if it's like room scale or they're being able to walk around in a social dynamic and a collaborative experience in some way. And so I'm just curious from your own personal experience of like what it's like to have a location-based entertainment and be able to take people and show a group of people VR for the first time.
[00:16:13.323] Joanna Popper: It's awesome. It's super awesome. I'm taking a lot of people. I actually live right near the IMAX. That's why I can walk there. So the one in LA is in the Grove. So I've taken my brother. We did Life of Us over, actually, we went two years ago and he did the Star Wars one. And then we went a year ago and he did Life of Us. And he literally came out and said, wow, that wasn't a movie. That wasn't a game. That was something that I've never experienced before. And I totally get it now. It's like that innate experience that's built for that multiplayer journey. So I had another friend who'd done something somewhere, but she came with me this weekend to Beat Saber. I actually had a party at Two-Bit Circus a couple of Saturdays ago, and about 80 people came. A lot of people in industry, a bunch of people not in industry, and everyone had a blast. Some people did VR, some people did all of the other fun things that Two-Bit Circus has cooked up, which are all awesome. And that venue is awesome. amazing too because it has food and it has drinks. And so, you know, it has a time of the day when kids are there and after 9 p.m. kids aren't there anymore. So it really has something for everyone. We did another outing to Virtual World, which is an escape room in LA. I think they're opening in New York. I've taken friends for the first time to the void. I took my mom to zero latency and we did Ingenium and then we did zombie shooters. So my mom, I mean, I don't know how your mom is, but my mom is not a zombie shooter mom, She was very proud because she kept claiming she was the worst on the leaderboard ever. And the guy kept insisting she was not, but she's holding claim to being the worst on stage ever. If I brought friends, you know, one of my friends came to Tribeca and got to experience Spheres and got to experience Into the Now and Jack and Hero. I mean, there's just so much amazing, amazing, amazing content. Then we did another outing with group to Alien Descent. We have an outing coming up to Spaces. So I recommend that everyone grab their friends and family. and go to all the location-based entertainment places near you, because there's just nothing like seeing people experiencing it for the first time. It's really fun, and it's really magical. I think we've had exuberance around our industry. We've had a little bit of VR winter and doldrums around our industry, but being with people who get to have this experience, it's really hard to explain VR to people. And so most people are like, oh, I didn't really understand what you did before. But now this is amazing, and this is really cool. And so I invite everyone to keep doing that. And support your local location-based entertainment, entrepreneurs, and adventurers, and the content creators behind them as well.
[00:18:50.848] Kent Bye: Yeah, as you were giving a little tour of the different locations, I was getting the sense that some of the more cinematic or indie or story-based experiences are IMAX and that some of the location-based entertainments tend to be a little bit focused on short, quick, shallow in terms of not like complicating gameplay. It's like easy for anybody to be accessible to go in and so they they tend to be a lot of wave shooters, which I think, for people seeing VR for the first time, that is a very visceral experience and a lot of fun. But for me, as somebody who's been doing a lot of VR demos for the last four and a half years, it's a little bit like, the Void was probably the best wave shooter I've seen in quite a while, just in terms of, there was interesting things that were new that I'd never experienced before, going through different rooms, and there was a narrative story, it was Tension, it was Star Wars, there was a lot of things going for it. At the heart, it's still like you're shooting stormtroopers and it's a wave shooter. But some of the experiences, like I just did the raft and as well as the spaces experience, and it's essentially like I really enjoyed the haptics of the striker gun of the spaces. And there's some light mixed reality puzzles that you have to solve and have that visceral mixed reality type of experience, which I think also is a very visceral experience, especially if people experience VR for the first time and not had that ability to have their hands in the game and be able to do that type of stuff. I'm just wondering from your own experiences if like I feel like the wave shooters It's gonna be a phase and that there's gonna be something that comes after it that we're gonna maybe want something like a little bit deeper or meaningful or maybe if that's serving a very important function for a certain audience to be able to get it out into the mainstream and that will continue to see like the independent artistry and the storytelling coming from the Sundance and Tribeca and and the Venice Film Festival and South by Southwest, something that's really pushing the medium forum as what's possible, but I guess sometimes I go to these location-based entertainments and see the lost potential of what could happen with creativity or storytelling, and that sometimes there isn't something for everyone, because if you're not into games, then there may not be an experience that you're going to really resonate with.
[00:20:52.152] Joanna Popper: Those are all great questions, all great questions. You know, I went to, you and I were in China together, and after that trip I went to Korea, and I asked somebody at SCONIC, who's one of the major game creators and runs arcades, or LBEs in Korea, why everything was a shooter. Because that was what I was seeing, pretty much definitely in Korea, but also in China. And really not everything. I'm exaggerating when I say everything, but such a high percentage. And they said, oh, it's because it's easy for people to figure out. And so when you're in an environment, when you're doing an at-home game, and you bought it and you downloaded it, you probably have the incentive to learn the mechanisms and learn what the gameplay is. And maybe you want to play it for hours. And you're going to play it for hours. So you have more and more incentive to do that. But, you know, a lot of these games are 8 to 12 minutes or sometimes even shorter. And so what I took from what she was saying was that it's that because it's going into an arcade and, you know, you're not going to want to sit there and learn for a really long time. that they needed to do something that was intuitive. And sadly, shooting seems to be an intuitive motion for people. You know, there's certainly other examples. The Blue shows at Periscope. Exit Reality has been showing The Blue for a long time and everything that they've done. That, I think, is a beautiful, beautiful, very immersive example of the power of what can be done with cinematic. Obviously, Beat Saber, you know, one of the Top games right now is not a shooter at all. It's the opposite. There's been fruit ninja, which I guess just slicing but you're slicing fruit So people don't feel so violent about it Audio file I think was kind of an earlier similar to beat saber specular theory just launched a game that's in that same genre
[00:22:31.839] Kent Bye: The Hotel Transylvania Popstick.
[00:22:33.820] Joanna Popper: Popstick, yeah. And then Dreamscape, we haven't talked about them. Their pop-up that they launched in the spring was experiential and more like a journey through the alien zoo. You know, I don't know what the answer is for sure, but if you stop and look at gaming, which is certainly not a mature industry, but a much more mature industry, a much larger industry, My impression, from where I sit, isn't that they've turned a corner and that it was all the violent games in the beginning and now they're doing something else. I think they're still doing that, right? For a vast majority of what the games are. And again, not all the games. There's FIFA, there's like... other sports games. So I don't know what that human, you know, there's like that connection of people to find that fun. I'm not sure what it is. I do know the first time I did Raw Data, I did Raw Data, and I'm a pretty anti-gun violence person. And I do know that when I personally first played Raw Data, I was like, wow, I'm like a badass. I'm like Angelina Jolie. Like I had that sensation that I wouldn't have expected myself to have. So I don't know what the psychology is behind why that is so appealing to people, but it seems to be. I think where it's important to have focus on all the other things that are popping up that are also having success and give energy to those and to support those as well. I mean, there's hopefully room for everything and hopefully, I think we're way too early to say this is the end state of what the content will be. So everyone's still learning, but I think definitely giving energy and interest to lots of types of content I think is important.
[00:24:07.775] Kent Bye: Yeah, just from tracking the industry for the last four and a half years, I've noticed there's a number of different factors. One, the controllers have a trigger on it, which you have an embodied experience of being able to use hand controllers as a trigger because that's the way they were built. Another thing is that, from what I've heard from storytellers, that they've had to work against the Unreal and Unity for the longest time just to even tell a story. Like they had to kind of bootstrap their own technology stacks, even just to do the things that storytellers would want to do. So they're really game engines at their heart. And I think Unreal's been doing a lot of great work on that, but I think still Unity, there's a bit of it still primarily at its heart a game engine, and that it's just easier to build those shooter dynamics. It's just like easier in terms of programming. But also, yeah, there's the reflection of what's happening in the larger gaming culture, which has a lot of first-person shooters, and it's very popular. and you have that visceral competition aspect of it. And one of the things I'm seeing is that, for one, a lot of the first-person shooters are maybe having a social dimension, so you're not just playing by yourself, but you're playing in squads and teams, and even more so lately. But also I think that there's this different temperamental balance with what the real affordances of virtuality are. It's not always necessarily as compelling to go out and have a big grand adventure. Sometimes it's just you're receiving an environment and it's more passive yin or emotional or embodied in different ways. And so I didn't actually get a chance to try out Karni Arena, but imagine that there's going to be like museum locations where there's going to be, you know, that they pretty much like sold out and did a couple of runs like very quickly, but an opportunity for artists to be able to create different cinematic experiences within the context of the museum. And so it feels like there could be other location-based opportunities that aren't necessarily in the LBEs that are focused on shooters and games.
[00:25:55.160] Joanna Popper: Absolutely. I did have an opportunity to go to Carne Yating and yes, it did sell out for every showing and I think it's still in DC and it went to four markets around the world. It was a really amazing experience about what it might feel like to cross the border from Mexico to the US. And they also did a when you came out of the VR experience, there was a portrait experience of real people who did make that journey and are living in the U.S. right now and their stories. So they used different types of artistic renderings from VR to portraits to tell the story. So that's something we saw that did have a lot of success and also has an Oscar winning creator attached to it. So it's a very unique one. But there's experiences like Tree, which was done by new reality that have been in different museums. There's a project we're working with, another one that we're working with at the Pacific Design Center called Hyperspace that is an LBE journey. They're using the backpacks. It's already open that you can go check out. Hyperspace is the company that created it. HP sponsored something called HP Mars Home Planet, which was a three-part journey for people around the world to imagine what life will be like when one million people live on Mars. Because most of the conversation around Mars is around launching and getting to Mars and not a conversation around, and then what? And so it was three part and had thousands of creators from around the world entering to give their vision about what life will be like. And we had a ton of great partners, from Technicolor, to NVIDIA, to Microsoft, to Unreal, I mean, I'm not going to be able to name every single partner, but there were a lot of really great partners. And then Technicolor took the winning submissions and created a VR piece that we showcased at SIGGRAPH, and we ended up partnering with Positron to have it be shown in the Positron chairs and that's a great great great piece for science museums for history centers for any space centers and and there's a lot of really cool content like that that gives that ability to learn and Experience and be interactive all at once Great and and finally, what do you think is the ultimate potential of virtual reality?
[00:28:05.368] Kent Bye: And what am I people to enable?
[00:28:08.658] Joanna Popper: So for me, you know, you and I were both at LeapCon last week and there was one thing I really, there were many things, but one of the things that I connected with that was what I also believe about the potential of this medium and why I am so excited about being in this medium is that This is something that, while we have a great legacy and there have been people who have been in this and working on this and creating this for 50 years, we're at this touchstone point where this technology is being productized for the first time, where you can go out and buy it and consumers can buy it and touch it. And I do believe that this is the next wave of computing. And I think that at this very critical and crucial time, when you look at the state of the world and the state of politics and conversations, to have an opportunity for so many voices and so many different people to get involved, which in all of the previous evolutions, there wasn't so much inclusion of different voices at the table. I think if we're building that next computing platform, which has such a strong impact on how we view ourselves, how we view our lives, how we interact, how we connect, how we communicate, how we love, how we learn, how we educate and get educated. It's incredibly important to have all of our voices represented. And I believe that this is a great, great, great opportunity about building this new medium now. where there's incredibly talented people from all corners of the world with all types of points of views and life experiences coming together to build it. And I think this is very different and distinct and unique from the past computing phases that we've been through.
[00:29:57.255] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the VR community?
[00:30:01.696] Joanna Popper: Kent Bye is the best. You always do such a great job of unpacking and diving right in, as you say. I think there's an interesting tone and vibe that happens around us becoming jaded people that have seen thousands of pieces. But to really keep connecting with the magic of the industry and why you got into it in the first place. to also, like they say, grab your wallet or vote with your wallet. Go and support the LBs in your neighborhood. Bring your friends and family and help us all build the industry together.
[00:30:41.885] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining me today. So thank you.
[00:30:45.668] Joanna Popper: Thank you. It was fun.
[00:30:47.455] Kent Bye: So that was Joanna Popper at the time she was working with HP, helping to facilitate lots of location-based entertainment experiences. So of a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, well, it was super fascinating for me to go back and listen to this conversation because I had done 20 different trips to VR conferences and another 18 trips. So just in the course of 2018 and 2019, I was traveling on average like once every three weeks or so. And so just to go back and hear what was happening from my experiences of location-based entertainment, but also the work that HP was doing for the backpack-based approach to virtual reality, which I have a couple of other unpublished interviews talking about the evolution of trying to put a computer onto your back in a backpack to be able to drive more of a standalone experience, to be untethered from cables that are connected to an external source, but to have a lot more agency as you're moving around. The Void had developed their own system to have these computers driving The Void's immersive experiences. And so, yeah, I actually think that location-based entertainment has an opportunity to come back because it's still able to provide a lot of really deep immersive experiences. There's a lot of wave shooters at the surface level of what VR could be, but there's certainly a lot of other experiences at the time that were happening that were trying to take some of the different experiences to another level. Joanna's featured in chapter seven of the series book, making innovation, women's work, storytelling, and we're building for a quote tech. Otherwise, Missouri follows a number of different women, including Joanna popper into her journey into virtual reality as a technology. Interestingly enough, Jonah was announced as the chief metaverse officer for CAA on August 4th, 2022, and was doing that job for a while. But now she is doing more consulting work for folks and still within the XR industry, doing a lot of amazing producing work and overall just a really amazing leader, really advocating for diversity inclusion in the context of XR. So that's all I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. So 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 supported podcast. And so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue bringing this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
