Makers of The Metaverse: Michael Owen Of MediaCombo On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality Industries
An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis
Concern is privacy. There are outward facing cameras on VR, AR and MR glasses and headsets. On AR and MR spectacles and head mounted displays these cameras scan the viewer’s location and enable persistent display or positioning of virtual imagery over the real-world environment. But in the process, these cameras can also record other people as well as private home or office spaces. There was a lot of pushback when people realized that Google Glass users might be making surreptitious recordings as they went about their daily activities.
The Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality & Mixed Reality Industries are so exciting. What is coming around the corner? How will these improve our lives? What are the concerns we should keep an eye out for? Aside from entertainment, how can VR or AR help work or other parts of life? To address this, we had the pleasure of interviewing Michael Owen.
Michael Owen is an award-winning producer with three decades of experience producing commercials, music videos, short documentaries, video art and recently augmented and virtual reality projects. Michael is a co-founder of MediaCombo, a digital media studio offering museums, science centers and cultural organizations, cutting edge product development, including user experience, content creation, and strategy to drive interest in exhibitions and events, connect with local communities, and reach new visitors. Recent XR clients include The Morgan Library & Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the Pollock-Krasner House & Study Center. This project, Tracing Paint: The Pollock Krasner Studio in Virtual Reality, about the studio in Springs, New York where Jackson Pollock and, later, Lee Krasner painted some of the most iconic abstract expressionist paintings of the 20th Century. The project will premiere at the New Media Film Festival in Los Angeles on June 2, 2022. Michael is also co-chair of the VRARA (VR/AR Assoc.) Storytelling Committee.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about your backstory and how you grew up?
I was born and raised in New York City. My father was British and worked for the United Nations. My mother was American and raised in New York. She met my father when she was working at the ILO (International Labor Organization) office at the UN Headquarters in Geneva. But the reason I grew up on the Upper West Side of Manhattan is because my father’s job was based at the UN Headquarters in NY.
My father gave me my first 35mm still camera. It was a Yashica rangefinder that he brought from Japan. That’s what got me hooked on taking pictures that later evolved into my interest in film and then video and other media technologies.
Is there a particular book, film, or podcast that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?
I don’t read books as much as I would like because I have mild dyslexia which is probably why I’m so drawn to visuals and sound. But of the authors I’ve read, I’m particularly drawn to Neal Stephenson. Someone gave me Cryptonomicon, which I loved and from there I read Snow Crash, the Diamond Age and the Baroque Cycle. Everyone points to Snow Crash as the work that defined the “Metaverse.” It’s a great cyberpunk novel that illustrates how someone’s online and offline worlds can converge and was way ahead of its time for 1992. But having read it, I didn’t imagine the immersive, 3D spatial worlds that we are just beginning to explore and develop today. That’s what’s described by Ernest Cline in Ready Player One almost 20-years later. What I find amazing about Neal Stephenson’s work is he demonstrates how technology drives our culture. In Diamond Age he paints this dystopian world where the average person orders a meal — think fast food options — that gets 3D-printed in their home device that looks like a microwave. They will enjoy the meal watching news and entertainment on a massive screen that is the focus of their living space. In that world, for most people everything is mass-produced but the elite have their food, clothes and furnishing artisanal and hand crafted. In the books of Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, it’s kind of like reverse science fiction because he’s writing about the past to highlight how evolving technology and the resulting changes impact global culture.
Is there a particular story that inspired you to pursue a career in the X Reality industry? We’d love to hear it.
I became interested in VR very late compared to pioneers like Tom Furness and Jaron Lanier. Both did a lot of work in demonstrating use cases for the technology but everything they did was in a lab. Tom Furness’s early headsets for pilots required a massive amount of computer power to function that could only be done with military R&D budgets.
By 2015 VR was having a big public facing moment. Google had a deal to provide cardboard viewers to every New York Times print subscriber. NYT was committed to producing XR content for its readers. I was intrigued. In March of that year, I attended a conference in LA for an IMAX large screen film project I was working on. One of the presenters at the conference was from a company that did volumetric scans of landscapes that could be used for large screen nature projects or VR. They offered to show me their work on a headset and the feeling of presence, of being immersed in a 360°landscape was incredible and from that moment I was hooked.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began this fascinating career?
Once I discovered VR, I immediately started looking for an opportunity to produce my own projects. I attended every event or conference I could find to learn more about the field. Who was making VR, what sort of equipment were they using? Who was the audience? How were they accessing this new VR content? I soon learned that Google, an early promoter of XR technology, was acquiring content for a 3D 360° educational platform called Google Expeditions.
Each Google Expedition consisted of 3D panoramic images of a location that students could view using Cardboard, the Mattel View-Master or Samsung Gear VR devices. When connected together over a WiFi network, the teacher, using a tablet, was able to guide the students through a virtual field trip pointing out places of interest on each 360° panorama, ask provided questions about the location as well as keep track of where each student was looking.
I had been working on a film about Lake Baikal in Siberia, the oldest, deepest, most voluminous body of freshwater on Earth and I thought it might be a good subject for a Google Expedition. I got an introduction from the Education team that managed and commissioned Google Expeditions and they commissioned MediaCombo to produce three Expeditions about Lake Baikal, The Memorial Museum of Cosmonautics in Moscow and scenes of Life in Russia.
So, in March 2016 I was in Siberia filming on and around a frozen Lake Baikal with a Moscow based VR crew. While the Google Expeditions only Stereo, 360° still images, we filmed everything as moving video as well as still images.
I’ve filmed all over the world, but filming at Lake Baikal in winter was a truly remarkable experience. One of our locations, the Ivolginsky Datsan, is the most important Buddhist monastery in Russia. Here we were allowed to place our camera in the middle of the senior monks during a service in their main temple. It’s truly incredible scene that enables viewers to observe the chanting monks and their novitiates from their midst. A viewpoint that would not be possible in real life or with any other technology.
I’m proud of this work. It was my first foray into immersive media. But I soon learned that this was just one aspect of VR, AR, XR technology. 3D 360° video is powerful because it places the viewer in the middle of a scene. The viewer has agency to look anywhere they want in the 360° view. By moving their head, they can rotate their point of view up, down and around. But they can’t move or change their position within the scene. Another way of describing that is 3 DOF (Three degrees of freedom). For purists that is not true VR. That requires 6 DOF (six degrees of freedom) which involves tracking forwards, backwards, left, right, up and down, or the ability move around in a virtual environment and interact with it.
Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
A big misjudgment I made back in 2015 / 2016 that, in hindsight, might be considered a funny mistake is thinking there was an audience for VR that could actually support the production of non-entertainment VR programming. The reality is I caught the VR bug in the middle of a major hype wave that saw a lot of major media players jumping on the VR bandwagon. Time, The New York Times, The Guardian, ARTE all set up VR divisions. The United Nations / Samsung backed VR project Clouds Over Sidra, about a refugee camp in Syria, was heralded as a communications game changer because of the way VR enhanced a viewer’s sense of “presence” and “empathy” about the subject matter. Jaunt raised a $100 Million from investors including Disney to produce and distribute VR content. A lot very interesting and ground breaking work was created in this period along with a lot of less successful experiments. The bottom line is that very few people actually owned real VR systems that required the headset and tracking systems that had to be connected a computer with a powerful GPU that cost, at a minimum, several thousand dollars. The Cardboard option that many pointed to as the way to reach a mass audience, required the user to insert a state-of-the-art mobile phone running a dedicated VR app into deliver the content. This was OK for casual use but to arrange a screening for a group of people required the commitment of a lot of expensive mobile devices. The only way for most people to see VR was at media festivals. That was great but there was no consumer market yet to support the wide range of people, companies and organizations that had been drawn to the emerging field.
Following delivery of the three Google Expeditions, I produced a 3D 360° short film from the video scenes we captured at Lake Baikal. Together with my Russian co-director / producer, Georgy Molodtsov, we created “Lake Baikal: The Science and Spirituality of Extreme Water”. The 7:20 ambient documentary premiered at the Dubai Film Festival Alternate Realities section in December 2016. We considered it a calling card or trailer for a longer, more substantial immersive documentary. The project was accepted at the immersive market at IDFA in Amsterdam and Sheffield Doc Fest in 2017. And while the VR project was screened at VR festivals around the world for the next several years, it was clear that raising money for a VR documentary about a lake in Russia, however important, was going to be extremely difficult.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Every emerging field has evangelists. DJ Smith, Co-founder and Creative Director of the Glimpse Group in New York has been an avid promotor and supporter of the XR industry. He became a co-organizer of the New York VR Meetup in January 2014 and helped grow the group to over 6,000 members. Up until the pandemic in 2020 these IRL events brought together creative, technical individuals from all aspects of the XR community. Through presentations and relationships I developed at NYVR and other industry meetups, I got to see what developers were doing with photogrammetry and volumetric capture and building worlds with game engines such as Unity and Unreal and expanded my understanding of VR beyond 360° video.
The Glimpse Group, now a publicly traded company, is a platform for a group of VR and AR software and service companies. DJ Smith and his team have been very helpful and supportive of MediaCombo and our projects.
Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?
Right now, MediaCombo is working on a number of projects that leverage the ability of VR to eliminate the barrier of distance to bring groups of people together in virtual spaces. We are just in the development phase, but have been doing testing with secondary school students. It’s gratifying to see the positive impact VR has on them when they have an immersive experience with other people in an environment that outside of their day-to-day lives.
Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. The VR, AR and MR industries seem so exciting right now. What are the 3 things in particular that most excite you about the industry? Can you explain or give an example?
Spatial computing in the form of VR, AR and XR will transform our culture in the way computers and the internet and, more recently, smart phones and mobile computing have in our recent past. It’s really astounding to contemplate how the world has changed since Steve Jobs introduced the first iPhone in 2007. The impact of these new spatial technologies will be just as revolutionary.
The technical advances and business adoption of XR technology over the past seven years are already incredibly significant. VR’s ability to convincingly simulate the real-world environments and processes is recognized by the military and industry who see its value for training. Firms such as Walmart, UPS, Bank of America and Accenture have made large investments in VR training because the ROI outweighs the high cost of production and headsets.
In the consumer space Meta has, by some accounts, sold just over 10 million Quest headsets, at a price close to or below cost. This strategy has succeeded in creating the largest market for VR content primarily made up of gaming and entertainment enthusiasts. Beyond this Meta has pledged to spend upwards of $10 billion each year on metaverse-related initiatives to develop and dominate what Mark Zuckerberg believes is the next computing platform. It is uncertain, at best, that Meta will succeed in this effort. However, there is no doubt that the enormous research and development commitment will also indirectly benefit the entire XR ecosystem.
It’s an exciting time to be in the industry because so much is unsettled. You can let your understanding of the technology guide you but in every other way it’s the wild west. No one is in control and no one knows how it will turn out. There’s still a lot of sharing information and ideas within the community. If you have a good idea there’s nothing stopping you from pursuing it.
What I personally find most exciting is social VR technology that enables groups of people to gather in a virtual space. What’s notable about having social experiences in VR is the feeling of presence and physical memory of interacting with other people and the environment. The potential for remote work, training, education and performance is unlimited.
There are already many publicly accessible virtual platforms such as Microsoft owned AltspaceVR, Meta Horizons, VRChat and Engage, among others. In addition, there are many platforms that have been created to replicate specific business meeting environments or real-world simulations such as classrooms, galleries or historical settings. All of these are precursors to the concept of the Metaverse as a virtual universe that consists of many different environments that one can seamlessly switch between like a streaming channel or website, and not controlled by any one or two companies.
What are the 3 things that concern you about the VR, AR and MR industries? Can you explain? What can be done to address those concerns?
The first thing holding back the XR industry is the lack of adoption of the means to engage with immersive experiences at scale. This will not happen until both the technical quality of head-mounted displays improves significantly and the cost becomes affordable. This includes AR devices that have the form factor of eyeglasses, like the Snap Spectacles that are currently only available as beta devices to select creators and also VR headsets that have higher resolution and are more comfortable to wear than current models.
The second factor is network connectivity and bandwidth. There is already a serious digital divide in terms of affordable access to broadband. This will only be exacerbated by the widespread adoption of spatial computing. The solution is universal high-speed data access. This is a priority for U.S. infrastructure goals. It is essential for the adoption of technologies as well the U.S. economic growth and security.
The third concern is privacy. There are outward facing cameras on VR, AR and MR glasses and headsets. On AR and MR spectacles and head mounted displays these cameras scan the viewer’s location and enable persistent display or positioning of virtual imagery over the real-world environment. But in the process, these cameras can also record other people as well as private home or office spaces. There was a lot of pushback when people realized that Google Glass users might be making surreptitious recordings as they went about their daily activities.
In the case of VR headsets in addition to outward facing cameras to track the viewer’s movement and hand gestures to match them in the virtual world, advanced devices today also track the viewer’s eye movements and other biometric sensors such as pulse and temperature are also in development. The eye tracking enables the headset to be much more efficient by delivering high-resolution imagery to just the part of the 360° world the viewer is looking at. But it’s also possible to use this capability to keep track of what users are paying attention to. The other biometric feedback is being used to gauge the performance of participants in VR training exercises that simulate operating equipment in dangerous or emergency situations.
Today this technology is only incorporated in devices used in professional settings. But this functionality will eventually be incorporated into consumer headsets and it’s important to get ahead of the privacy issues.
I think the entertainment aspects of VR, AR and MR are apparent. Can you share with our readers how these industries can help us at work?
As I described previously, VR has been embraced by many corporations and U.S. government agencies because it offers a high return on investment for the delivery and retention of a broad range of hard and soft teachable skills. VR is perfect for immersing viewers in settings that simulate the operation of complex equipment or social settings and role-playing exercises that enable them to appreciate and manage bias or behaviors that they might not have recognized before.
I also believe that VR, AR and MR can play a very important role in 5th to 12th grade education but it’s much harder to demonstrate the return on investment in secondary school settings.
Are there other ways that VR, AR and MR can improve our lives? Can you explain?
VR can transport people to places that they could not otherwise visit for reasons of disability, distance, cost, or because they no longer exist or don’t exist yet. It’s absolutely the next best thing to being there. AR / MR can make a loved one appear in your own space in avatar form. While the tools for AR / MR virtual exchanges are not consumer friendly, AARP has a prototype VR program called Alcove. The program offers games that family members with VR headsets, can play together as well as a number of virtual travel destinations they can visit together no matter where they are in real life.
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about working in your industry? Can you explain what you mean?
I’m a big supporter of immersive technologies and, as I’ve described how VR, AR and MR will have a huge impact on our culture in the future. Unfortunately, the biggest myth of the moment is that the “Metaverse” is just around the corner. Metaverse, in this sense, meaning an ecosystem of worlds where viewers can navigate around virtual spaces and interact with objects and other visitors while they are there. Essentially this is the spatial equivalent of surfing the internet, except on the web everything is flat. Today on an e-commerce site you will see a grid of items for sale. In the metaverse you will navigate through a 3D representation of the store itself. If you turn your head your view will change as if you were there. If you want to pick something up, extend your real hand to grab and your virtual hand will pick it up. You are represented in the virtual world by an avatar. And it’s possible to meet up with someone in the virtual store and go shopping together to make it a social experience. You would recognize your friend by their avatar. They would recognize you by yours. People will invest time, energy and even money to customize the appearance of their avatar. The idea of the “Metaverse” is that it is a series of interconnected domains. Today you can check out Instagram, buy something on Amazon and then check out a performance at a virtual club. Since these are now all virtual worlds you would want your avatar to appear the way you designed it in all of them. However, there is no such interoperability today and no real incentive to change that.
In the short term, most development will be driven by custom commercial applications. It will probably take another five years before future head mounted VR, AR, MR devices are powerful, comfortable and affordable enough to encourage widespread public adoption. It will take a few more years after that for consumer applications to flourish.
What are your “5 Things You Need to Create a Highly Successful Career in the VR, AR or MR Industries?”
Like many other fields or industries, a successful career in immersive tech requires collaborating with people with different skill sets and backgrounds. A typical VR project involves a creative concept, writers to describe how the story or message will be represented in the chosen medium. A User Experience (UX) designer will determine how the viewer will navigate the story, a User Interface (UI) designer will develop the actual graphical look and feel of the journey. The project may require animation, photography, photogrammetry of spaces or objects, or volumetric capture of people. All of these scans of places, objects, people and any other characters may need to be touched-up or refined in a 3D graphics application. A static 3D capture of a animal or character may need to be “rigged” so they can be animated. Think of the digital equivalent of making and attaching strings to the joints of a marionette puppet. If there is any 360° video, the scenes must be seamlessly stitched together and color- corrected. Sometimes it’s necessary to add a floor or sky to make the scene a full 360° spherical image. Once, all the elements are prepared, they need to be integrated using a 3D development platform such as Unity or Unreal. These spatial applications, also known as game engines, enable programmers to define how viewers navigate the space and interact with objects and other characters in real time. Once the mechanics of the program have been determined, a sound engineer will develop a sound design that will vary depending on where the viewer is in the virtual world. Standing by a fireplace or waterfall? The source of a sound effect can be placed on its location in the virtual environment and then programmed to taper off over a certain distance. Thus, the sound of a crackling fire will become apparent and then grow louder the closer a visitor gets to the fireplace. The same spatial sound design would apply to characters speaking. The closer characters are together, the louder their voices will become.
With all these facets of a production, good communication skills are required to keep all departments working together efficiently. Whether you are a manager, department head or team member good communication, which means listening, as much as explaining, is essential.
To be a successful producer, creative director or production manager it’s not necessary to be computer programmer, application wizard or expert in any of the crafts involved in the project. However, it’s worth spending time learning about what’s involved. Be clear about what you want to achieve from a technical and storytelling standpoint and get every departments’ input in the planning stages of the project before you commit to a budget or schedule. Often a creative request may involve a lot time and effort. But the team involved may offer an alternative that, while different, will achieve the desired result. Also, don’t assume that because something is easy to do in traditional, linear editing that it’s equally simple in an immersive environment where the player controls their position and pace of the experience. For example: I want to shorten a section of dialogue by cutting some copy. In video I would just delete the offending audio track on a video editing application timeline, then cut the picture by the same amount and, if there was a resulting glitch, cover it with a cutaway. When producing a VR, I found out from our programmer that this request, while doable, would break several connected actions that would have to be reprogrammed. What should take five or ten minutes to do in a video edit might require a few hours in Unity or Unreal.
The other important skill is expectation management. Especially if you are producing a project for a client, it’s essential that their expectations align with what you will be delivering from the outset.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
My team and I are working on a project that would empower educators to transform 21st Century learning by accessing museum resources in the U.S. and around the world through virtual reality.
Schools are struggling to equip children with the knowledge, abilities, and experience needed for success in 21st-century society. Museums are struggling to be recognized as providers of essential services to their communities. The pandemic has exacerbated the situation for both institutions. The next few years will present ongoing challenges and opportunities, compelling museums to adopt new methods and tools to connect with their communities, and schools to transform instruction to prepare the next generation for the long-term.
Our project will combine museum galleries and museum collections with Virtual Reality and Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS) — a proven, 21st-century instructional model, has clear potential to meet these challenges.
VTS is a student-centered pedagogy and supplemental PK-12 curriculum proven to drive growth in the key ‘21st-century’ and ‘soft’ skills that schools are striving but struggling to support — critical thinking, social and emotional, and communication skills.
Virtual Reality presents particularly compelling possibilities for schools due to its potential to authentically and holistically engage 21st-century learners in ways that are otherwise hard to achieve through more traditional ‘teacher-as-medium’ instructional strategies.
By situating the learning experience within realistic representations of world-class museum spaces populated with carefully curated works in museum collections that remain out-of-reach to the vast majority of learners, teachers, and schools, the VLG project has the potential to bring museum resources to educators, curated to meet their core standard requirements and drive transformative instructional improvement in K-12 schools.
If adopted, this program will teach life-long learning skills to hundreds of thousands of students in underserved communities. It would do a lot of good for a large number of people.
We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂
The person I would really like to meet and have a conversation with is Laurene Powell Jobs of the Emerson Collective. Her foundation is very interested in transforming education and is already working with organizations that using EdTech to achieve their goals.
They also supported the exhibition of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s virtual reality project “Carne Y Arena” in the Washington, DC. Produced in 2017, “Carne Y Arena” is one the best a location-based virtual reality experiences I’ve seen. It plunges the viewer / participant into the harsh reality of immigrants crossing into the United States. The powerful VR program only lasts six and half minutes but it’s integrated into a well-designed on-boarding and exit process that made for a truly memorable and impactful experience. The Emerson Collective funded the location and staffing costs required to exhibit “Carne Y Arena” in D.C. for several months. Everything about the installation was impeccably executed. Admission was free to the public but tickets were gone within minutes of becoming available twice a month. However, impressive, Carne Y Arena experience is not scalable. However, it is a great example of the power of VR to give people experiences that they will remember as real. I would like to talk about how VR can be applied to education.
Thank you so much for these excellent stories and insights. We wish you continued success on your great work!
Makers of The Metaverse: Michael Owen Of MediaCombo On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
