Data & Dimensions | Ep. 4 - Shopping Through Smart Glasses

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Neil Barbour   00:00:00 

 Hi, I'm Neil Barbour, industry analyst with S&P Global Market Intelligence Kagan. Welcome to Data & Dimensions, a podcast dedicated to exploring the transformative evolution of the internet into immersive 3D virtual spaces.. 
 

Ian Hughes   00:00:09 

I'm Ian Hughes, Senior Research Analyst at 451 Research in S&P Global Commodity Insights science fiction author and an honorary Doctor of Technology and I have specialized in emerging technology for the majority of my 35 year career. I primarily write and present about the rise of industrial metaverse use cases, as the multi-billion dollar games industry meets the multi trillion dollar operational technology world 
 

Neil Barbour   00:00:46 

Yes, that's right. And in fact, they built a digital twin of the entire planet, and they're hoping to populate it with all the shops, restaurants, banks and other points of interest around there. The idea is that when you're wearing smart glasses sometime maybe in the not-too-distant future, those devices will call upon this digital twin to surface data about the world around you. 
 

Ian Hughes   00:01:05 

That's quite a challenge to build something that large, isn't it? But I guess that's the metaverse for you. 
 

Neil Barbour   00:01:10 

And with that, let's turn it over to me and Sean Man from RP1. Okay. Today, we have Sean Mann, CEO and Co-Founder of RP1, which is building an infrastructure solution to connect the world's population in a single persistent XR ecosystem, providing on-demand access to self-hosted 3D content services. Sean, welcome to the show. 
 

Sean Mann   00:01:29 

Neil, how is it going? 
 

Neil Barbour   00:01:31 

Yes, super good. So Sean, I've been following the RP1 story for a few years. I'm always impressed with how forward-thinking the team is. And now here we are seemingly on the cusp of the smart glasses era. Maybe by way of helping our audience get to know your company a little better, why don't you walk us through why personal AR is such an intriguing proposition and what role RP1 might play in that future? 
 

Sean Mann   00:01:51 

I mean AR is going to be huge. I think AR is going to eventually replace mobile devices. And you've seen the heads of some of the top tech companies that have their own phones say that their mobile devices will be obsolete potentially in the next 10 years. And so the question is, why are they making those statements? And why hasn't been adopted or happened thus far. And I think if you take away the technology in the fancy terms, I think the idea of AR is that someone can join you as close to as reality as possible, meaning that if I'm sitting in a meeting space, someone literally can show up right in front of me, and I can literally be able to interact with them and it's as close to as if they're actually really there. And I think that's very, very powerful. I think the early Internet was to really connect the world population, but with web pages. And if you think of AR, it's going to really connect people. So no matter where you're at anywhere in the world, I can seamlessly join someone and interact with them in a way that wasn't possible with current devices. 
 

Neil Barbour   00:02:53 

Right. And when you say the jump from phones or AR headsets or smart glasses will be the new phones. I mean, do you have a time frame in mind? I hear a lot of answers around that. Is this a 10-year story, 20-year story, 30-year story? Or thinking in terms of that? 
 

Sean Mann   00:03:09 

Yes, I do. And I think the -- like I said, a lot of people are thinking it's a 10-year time frame. I think the reason why we should be a lot more excited it's going to happen sooner than later is this is really the first time that you see some of the top tech companies all race to build commercially viable AR glasses, right? So you have the Apples and the Metas and the Samsungs and all these companies that understand that they cannot miss out on this evolution of devices. and they need to get ahead of it. And so when you have that many companies pouring in billions of dollars to really solve hard technical challenges in building true AR glasses. And when you think of AR glasses, it's not just the smart glasses that we see from Meta, but really where we can interact with our environment. The glasses know where we're standing. It could present materials from different companies, whether I'm in an airport or in a hotel or a hospital or walking into retail outlets or whatnot, there's a way that we're going to be able to connect with our environment that really hasn't been possible. And so I think it's going to be really neat once these AR glasses go mainstream. But I don't believe it's going to be 20, 30 years. To really go fully mainstream, I believe it's going to be over 10 years, but I believe early adoption is going to happen probably within the next couple of years. 
 

Neil Barbour   00:04:19 

So give me some specific use cases you envision where the digital and the physical worlds meet and maybe where RP1 sits in that intersection. 
 

Sean Mann   00:04:27 

Yes. Well, I mean, if you think of RP1, I think it's really important is we really developed the world's first 3D browser. And you have to understand why would -- a, why is it the first? And why do we need a new browser, right? We got this big web stack out there. We got this huge worldwide web that we've used for decades that's worked extremely well. And there's 2 big components that the current web stack doesn't allow. One is proximity-based content. And the second is to inject real-time services. And real-time services, think of it as just a piece of software that runs in real time that you can connect to without having to install it. And that could be the form of an AI. It could be an NPC that talks to you and greets you or helps you find things in stores. It could be a chess game. It could be a myriad of things, payment solutions. And so the question is that as you move around, let's think about how AR glasses are going to work. Right now, in the early days, people thinking, well, it's going to be like cell phones. you have to download an app, you have to install that app, you have to create an account and then I get to interact with that one service or that one company. And I have to rinse and repeat as I move around the real world. And that's going to be a pretty bad process, and it's not going to make it seamless as far as what the overreaching goal of true AR is going to happen. And so what we -- the 3D browser from the ground up, its sole job is to know where you're at in the real world, so you're going to need some type of map system and then easily connect you to services that are owned and operated by people that actually own that space in the real world. And so that's a really, really important step that needs to happen to really make or unlock what AR glasses are going to do for the world's population. 
 

Neil Barbour   00:06:03 

Yes, it's interesting. We talked about this offline a little bit. The idea of a web browser right now can tell you what ZIP code you're in. Or if you use mapping software, right, it can tell you maybe within a few hundred feet of where you are. This next wave of mapping, and you guys aren't the only one talking this narrative as well. We see it from companies like Niantic Spatial or development contracts like Echelon, they're talking about ground truth, and this is another way of establishing and feeding more information into your components into your devices so they can give you better outputs. Talk a little bit about the advantages of your approach to building AR ecosystems or XR content. compared to some of the existing solutions in the market? You have specific patents, some broader philosophical underpinnings. Walk me through some of that big picture stuff that RP1 does. 
 

Sean Mann   00:06:58 

Yes. I think it's important. I look at how do you solve a problem, right? And an XR has been around for quite some time, but the adoption rate has been quite slow. Even the HoloLens, there was a lot of enterprise companies that adopted the HoloLens. And they got burned pretty badly recently as HoloLens got dropped, and they had real live use cases that really helped drop the bottom line and really was a true ROI for their company. And -- but the challenge that you look at that is that they were locked into a device. They were vendor locked in from a software standpoint, and it wasn't a true open ecosystem. And so if you look at the flip side, you have every company on the planet that runs off a web infrastructure. And let's say, the iPhone goes away or pixel goes away or something, your software is still going to work on another phone, right? And if your Mac laptop or your Dell goes away, it's still going to work on another computer because there's standards that allow your web infrastructure to continue to exist. That doesn't really happen in the XR space. There's a lot of walled garden platforms, a lot of walled garden systems. And one of the nonnegotiables, at least by meeting with a lot of Fortune 500 companies, was they are not going to put their data and content inside a walled garden system. It just -- it's a nonnegotiable. Their security department, their CTOs are going to say that's not happening. We can't take our -- all of our IP, all of how we run our processes and put it in a walled garden system that controls all that stuff. So they need the ability to run it on their own servers. And so the importance of the 3D browser that we're bringing to market and really trying to create an open standard around a true 3D browser is that it enables all these companies to run all of their infrastructure, all their XR content, all the assets and real-time services on their own servers and have it easily connect to consumers and/or employees through an open standard that mirrors kind of how the worldwide web works today. And that's really the importance. Now as far as our patents, yes, we've seen this direction, and we've created a couple of things that are really important in this overreaching kind of goals. And so the first thing is, first, you need to connect the world's population seamlessly so that if customers want to connect to a certain location, you can't worry about what instance or what chart they're on. You have to be seamless. No different than when I go to a website, I don't have to worry about if you and are going to be in a chat room that we're on 2 different systems, and we can't chat on a certain website. And so that's not a problem in the worldwide web, but it's definitely a major technical challenge when you talk about 3D real-time content and services that you need to connect to. 
 

Neil Barbour   00:09:29 

Talking about rooms of 16 or 32 in many cases. 
 

Sean Mann   00:09:33 

Exactly. And a lot of people, they think of it the wrong way. They're thinking, well, why would I want to slam 100,000 people? And it's not about having 100,000 people on the scene. It's about I want to pick and choose the people I want to connect to in real time and not worry about what instance they're on and if I can or cannot connect with them. And so you need to be able to seamlessly connect with the world no matter where you go in the 3D browser. And the second component is you need an unlimited map that you can traverse. So if you think of air glasses, as I move around the real world, I need a digital twin of our planet Earth to know where I'm standing and connect me to different companies and people and interest and other people as well. And right now, if you look at 3D rendering, you're very limited on the map size. And we actually have solved that problem and got a patent on the ability to have a map that is completely endless. And so we actually have a digital twin of our entire universe, including our solar system, 1:1 scale. And that's thought 30 years away from now, thinking it's a hardware limitation. 
 

Neil Barbour   00:10:34 

Right. And I've been in that digital twin or at least an early version of it, and it's impressive for us to look at. It's interesting you talk about HoloLens. They have sort of found new life with a partnership with Google and bringing Android XR over to that platform. It will be interesting to see if they are looking at some of the same issues that you guys are down the road as that hardware and software sort of converges. 
 

Sean Mann   00:10:59 

Yes. I mean there's great IP there. And so I think right now, for it to just go away is kind of silly. I mean I think they've learned a lot of lessons. They created a lot of great layers there that I'm sure can be piecemealed or used in different ways. But I think an open ecosystem where, again, if you think about like when you have apps that go through like the App Store, they take 30% of your revenue. And you don't really have the freedom to run your business and you're beholden of a company that really controls how you're able to market your stuff to consumers or businesses or whatnot. And an open ecosystem, I think, by far is the right way to go. It just was a massive challenge because how do you solve all these technical things and create an open ecosystem at the same time. And so that's where we're excited that we're not just thinking about how we can be the most profitable company, but we're actually trying to create open standards -- and those open standards are, I think, the biggest steps needed for the entire XR industry to come together. This is not about watching one company do it. It's about saying everyone, if we're going to win together, we can't watch one company take over and control what that looks like. There has to be an open ecosystem where every company can have its ownership, people could become the word press or create tools and have complete flexibility at every layer to participate just like you do with the Worldwide Web. 
 

Neil Barbour   00:12:12 

So you mentioned the 30% cut that app stores will take from people who build on their platforms, and those themselves are walled gardens to a certain extent. But talk a little bit about RP1's business model. How do you guys make money in this exchange? 
 

Sean Mann   00:12:26 

Well, I mean, I'll get to that, but I think it's important to see that this open ecosystem that we're starting the path down is -- exists with or without RP1. So you first need a browser. And think of a browser's job is to render content, connect to what is called a spatial fabric, which is a map system, some type of map, an XYZ coordinate map system and display that content and then some type of VPS system that allows me to know where I'm standing while within that map. And so -- and connect to unlimited amount of services. So services will be anchored based on a certain position, right? So the sole job of the browser, again, is to connect to one or many spatial fabrics. RP1 becomes a universal map system or a universal spatial fabric that has a handful of services that people may or may not want. And I'm hopeful they do want that we're able to scale on 1,000x less computers, that scale that we were talking about earlier. And we're able to do it at such low cost that it enables us to really at a very small cost, get the services needed to manage all of the people that need to connect your and traverse your content. And so we just provide a handful of services like the 6 DOF, which is the ability to move and move your fingers and face and all that type of stuff, but also the spatial audio, which we've built from the ground up using our technology. And we can, like I said, do that not only 1,000x cheaper. So that goes now to our business model. We become actually similar to like what ICANN is to websites. We create a universal map system. And let's say, if you're Walmart, Walmart will own or have rights to all, let's say, 10,000 locations of Walmart on that universal map system of the Planet Earth. And so they automatically have rights to that, and they'll pay us a very small fee to use our services to connect their consumers and their employees. to all of their XR content. And so that's kind of how we fit in that picture. And then we can provide other services as well that we can charge, but it's going to be closer to running a website than it is today's kind of 3D content, which is absolutely ridiculous because of how expensive it is to scale. 
 

Neil Barbour   00:14:36 

So I'm a retailer, and I want to give consumers the ability to come into my store, perhaps they have AR glasses on, maybe they're just putting their phone to things, and they can get real-time data inside the store. I want to find the milk. And so it will give you a map to where the milk is. It will guide you along. It will say, here's the price of the milk now, here's how much of stock, maybe that's of limited use. Maybe now we're getting into the enterprise side of it, where people stocking the store or doing the picking for the online orders. So they all have this visual information tied to a larger database inside of Walmart, feeding data down and up, down up the stack. And so you guys are in the middle and adding sort of middleware functionality to make all of that connect in a seamless way. Is that kind of what you're saying? 
 

Sean Mann   00:15:23 

No, did great great. You're hired. Knocked it out to the park. I mean it enables Walmart to build their XYZ cordened space, let's call it one store, right? They can build that entire map out. They can scan. They have all the assets that allow you to see and interact. They can pick and choose all the services they want to run, and they connect to those services. And they run all of that on their own servers or third-party companies that they decide to work with business-wise. And that all sits on their infrastructure. We are just like Chrome. We allow or enable consumers and employees to connect to those servers just like what Chrome does for websites. And so Chrome doesn't own your content. It doesn't own your -- it doesn't take over your web pages. You can update your web pages whenever you want. Same thing here. Walmart can update all their stuff. We just connect people and provide the ability to traverse or interact in those spaces. And it's kind of like before the web browser existed, all these companies had to force consumers to VPN into their specific island kind of website. But eventually, someone said, we need an open ecosystem that makes it easy for consumers to once you learn how to use one browser, you now seamlessly can connect to an unlimited number of websites. And so we're presenting that same process where you have a Switzerland-like entity that connects you to an unlimited amount of content as you move around the real world. So if I walk near Walmart, Walmart takes over what my experience is. But as soon as I walk away from Walmart and go to Chase Bank or Panda Express or into a hotel or airport or whatever, I connect to their content that allows me to interact seamlessly with no installs whatsoever. I seamlessly just connect to all these real-time services. So now you actually have an experience that I believe is a nonstarter. Like you have to have this type of experience for AR glasses to take off because if you're going to force every consumer to download an unlimited number of apps and accounts and avatars and all these different things and have a myriad of different experiences. I just don't believe the buy-in going... 
 

Neil Barbour   00:17:21 

Like just saying you walk into the bank and all of a sudden, a pop up like would you like to download the bank's app now? And it's just all that inertia or friction Yes, exactly. Speaking of inertia, and maybe you've already gone over this. When you think about pulling builders in your direction, you're talking about the power of the platform, the long-term advantages of democratization akin to what happened in the web. But you're going up against a lot of big players, a lot of big money. Is there anything in specific that sets the flywheel pulling enterprises and developers out of the app ecosystem and into your direction? 
 

Sean Mann   00:18:00 

I mean I think there's a precedent as far as how this is going to happen, right? So if you look at the early web days before the browser existed, you had companies like AOL and CompuServe and Prodigy and their sole job was to keep you in their closed ecosystem, their platform, right? And so someone created the web browser and you could argue, well, how is this web browser going to take off? And the reason why it took off is because everyone could participate. if you wanted to become or build a tool or be the word press of the open worldwide web, you had the ability to do so. Every individual and company had the ability to compete and build tools and pieces of this open ecosystem, whereas if it was inside of AOL, you would have to wait on AOL to provide whatever you didn't have. And so I think if you're a company, you're definitely going to go towards the open ecosystem because if there's a tool that you need to run your XR models or any type of business or things that you need to have as far as how your business runs, you're going to want to then hire developers that can build that piece, and that could be proprietary or it could be something you eventually open source and give to other people, but you need that openness to really run things. And so I believe once we start down this path of an open browser that is fully standardized that it enables every individual, every company, every studio, every artist, every creator to own a piece and build and be a part of that ecosystem, whereas a walled garden system is going to leave everybody out. And so I'm hopeful everyone rallies behind the idea of an open standard browser because I believe the XR industry needs it. 
 

Neil Barbour   00:19:30 

Interesting. So we talked sort of about the emerging ground truth, better maps, better location data. So I've seen demos recently of pulling in satellite data, weather views, the kind of like full digital twin experience. Is RP1 ready to incorporate that kind of data? Talk to me a little bit about the true digital twin experience. 
 

Sean Mann   00:19:52 

The digital twin is extremely important. And I think there's 2 forms of digital twins. There's digital twins that are truly a digital twin of where you're standing. So go back to that Walmart example. Walmart exists on a certain street, right? And it has a certain XYZ corner space in the real world. And for someone to join that space remotely, you need to be able to create a digital twin. So if I want to join with VR headsets or my desktop or mobile device, I need to be able to see it because I'm not actually there. And so Walmart is going to scan that entire environment to create a digital twin that you can interact with. And they're going to own all of those assets, which I think is an extremely important process. And there's lots of great companies that help you do this that also already have scanned assets, and they will still be able to operate with an open ecosystem. They'll be able to provide their content to the specific people that need to scan their area, but you now have the ability to have a standardized access to all that content. And so digital twins are extremely important because it enables someone to be able to join people in the real world when they're sitting at the comfort of their desk or their house or wherever they're at remotely. And I think that is a very, very necessary step. Now with AR, I don't need to see that digital twin. If I'm standing in Walmart, I see the shelves. I see the build, I see the walls, I see the floors. I just need to interact with what are called services, which would be potentially an AI that greets me. And that happens on the VR side as well, where these services are going to help me interact with that environment, whether it's helping me, like you said, move shipments to the warehouse and put them in the right place or if it's making sure a shelf is filled or if it's making sure someone clean the bathroom or folds a shirt in proper way, there's going to be all these services that the business is going to build and in real time can interact with their employees to make sure they're doing their job correctly and give them the tools needed to be very successful. But at the same time, you also need to connect to consumers. So if I walk into Walmart, and I have 2 items I want to get, I want to get in and out, how great would it be to have an MPC or an AI, help me navigate where I'm standing, which aisle I need to go to by drawing a digital line on the physical floor and then help me get out and potentially not even interact with the human being. I can just get along with my way and get the items that I need, and it's a great experience, right? 
 

Neil Barbour   00:22:03 

So yes, nothing worse than when you go into a retailer right and they move the shelves around a little bit and you have to do full life. 
 

Sean Mann   00:22:09 

I mean the last thing you want is -- and I think here's a big challenge. So retailers are like, well, why do people not want to come into my stores? And if I could get in and out really quickly, I think they can still exist and do really well. But there's a reason why Amazon is killing it, right? Because if I can just go to a website, I click boom and it's there tomorrow, and it took me 2 minutes to do that, why would I want to spend 20 minutes driving to a location, an hour to get in and out of that location to find the content that I need and then drive 20 minutes back home. I mean that's a pretty hard ask. But if all of a sudden, if I'm out and about and I know I get in and out of a place much faster, there's a lot more value to getting something that moment versus waiting a full day. And so I think that these types of things will really help retailers stay alive, if you will, because it's going to make the experience much better for people. 
 

Neil Barbour   00:22:58 

So when I go to RP1 now, you kind of have a browser in a browser. It's kind of a beta of what you guys are thinking about I see something that is kind of akin to Second Life or Roblox. Talk to me about connecting that legacy metaverse presentation with what we've been discussing here today, the more AR leaning side of it. 
 

Sean Mann   00:23:18 

So I would say we have the best worst demo alive to. And I'll tell you why, because we're showcasing underlying technologies, and we have a very restrictive couple of things. Number one is WebXR is very limited on graphic fidelity. And so the -- if you were to have me take you on a personal tour and you were to understand the underlying technology, I think people look at it and say, okay, here's a virtual world. I've seen this before. Thank you so much. But if you actually stay for a little while and understand how things work, then it's going to blow your mind away because what we're presenting a couple of things. One is we're showcasing the technologies that eventually will be used in a universal map system along with a true native spatial browser. And so right now, we're using, like you said, WebXR, we're a browser in a browser, which is a little bit confusing. But we're showcasing the ability to scale, which a lot of people think is impossible. They think the ability to move to 100,000, 1 million, 100 million or eventually 1 billion concurrent users in a single uncharted architecture is a hardware limitation and not possible today. And so we're showing that we can handle upwards of 100,000 concurrent users where you can handshake, literally talk and interact with 100,000 concurrent users in the system all at once. And that is an important step to know that we have the technology to do that. The second is we're showcasing an unlimited map. So when you go into RP1, you go to RP1.com, you click enter and you're actually standing in the space, you literally can walk around the entire planet Earth. You could fly straight up to space, go to the. 
 

Neil Barbour   00:24:52 

The best part is flying into space, yes. That's... 
 

Sean Mann   00:24:55 

No, I totally agree. And it's -- but that's showing you that you can actually have one massive continuous map, which is needed for AR. So it's really just the map system. We don't want to build the content. We have quick content that we put there. We've actually partnered with a couple of companies that recognize the importance of the technology they have built using RP1, but we're showcasing those pieces of technology. And the most important one is you connect to real-time services. We have samples of that, that you -- just by going into RP1, you've installed nothing, you instantly can talk to anyone anywhere in the world with full 6 off and spatial audio and you can connect to third-party services running off of a different server without installing anything. And so all of a sudden, we're showcasing the most important pieces of technology for the next browser that is needed for the world. Now if you can get by the graphics. Now that we're going to now move and split those 2 things from a browser, we need to actually start constructing a true native browser that you install from the ground up, and that's something we're going to be doing with open standards. And we have a lot of huge partners that we're eventually going to announce to really bring that to market. And that browser can connect to RP1 spatial fabric, which is that unlimited map system and scale and audio services to take their business and enable the world to connect to it. And so that's going to be a service that we provide. But the standards itself are literally the most important piece. 
 

Neil Barbour   00:26:24 

Interesting. And there's also room in RP1 for traditional virtual spaces as well, right? Like you talked before about hosting an MMO RPG or you've even said something like Roblox could bring their entire platform into RP1. 
 

Sean Mann   00:26:38 

So the purpose is, again, just like the open web, any company can provide whatever service or products or things that they want and connect their people to or consumers or businesses. And so the purpose of RP1 is a couple of things. One is we have a digital twin of Planet Earth, and that is not a game. That is purely to help run the future of AR and for businesses to run their operations. And so if you own your land, meaning if you own your own house meal, you automatically have right to that same XYZ coordinance space on Planet Earth. Same thing with Walmart, same thing with the hotels and the airports and all these things. They need a master universal map system that they can connect to and instantly have the technologies needed to run their servers of their XR servers or spatial content. And if you want to build something that has nothing to do with the real world or a digital twin that doesn't have anything to do with actually running an operation in the real world, -- outside of our solar system, there is endless space to build whatever you want. So in theory, Roblox could take their own planet, have their own servers, their own services, and I should be able to travel or instantly go to Roblox that planet and be able to start building my own spaces that I interact with kids and have games and fun things. But Roblox really has nothing to do with me running my conference room at Microsoft or having a meeting or going to Stanford University and taking a class. And so the purpose of the 3D browser is to bring not only gaming, but also real-world experiences that allow us to connect with each other in ways that the entire Worldwide Web has done for decades. And so it's -- a lot of people have digital twins of planet Earth that they say that they have this thing, but it's -- anyone could buy land. There's this whole land thing in this. We don't sell land. Nothing is built inside of RP1. We are just literally a map system that connects people servers with their own XYZ cordiness spaces together to make it seamless for AR glasses or virtual devices to connect to those. 
 

Neil Barbour   00:28:34 

What will you do when the ever-expanding solar system eats into the other MMO someone's built outside of the solar system? 
 

Sean Mann   00:28:39 

That is a great -- you know what, you would have to argue with NASA. So that's outside of my purview. So I think the goal is we want to work with NASA and other major bodies around the world that really manage space, right? And so they can come in and manage what that looks like. And I believe that we can push out the boundaries much further to make sure that never happens because I'll tell you, there's a lot of space out there. No joke. I mean there's millions upon millions, if not billions of miles of space. And so I'm not too worried that if someone wants to come in and build a large MMO game or something, there's an unlimited map system to build whatever they want that people want to connect to and interact right away. But I do know if you make a seamless open ecosystem, people will come. Imagine that everyone -- think of just the browser itself today. I can go to any website anywhere and interact with it. Now imagine I can create an avatar and not worrying about -- because think about the opposite if it weren't true. Let's say the browser did not exist. Let's -- if I said, "Hey, Neil, I got this really cool place in Roblox I want you to check out. And you're like, okay, what do you have to do? You have to now go download Roblox, install it, create an account, create an avatar, learn the user interface and then figure out how to find my one space just to interact with them. 
 

Neil Barbour   00:29:58 

And Roblox is arguably one of the easier ones to inside of. So yes, I mean... 
 

Sean Mann   00:30:02 

Exactly. So now imagine thousands of platforms that you have. It would be what I call and I wrote a white paper -- not a white paper, but a paper around it was the 1,000 Internet problem. if we had 1,000 different Internets with 1,000 different browsers and 1,000 different things, it wouldn't be the worldwide way we have today. And that's the purpose of having a standard that's open to everyone that everyone knows how to kind of play to make it easy for all people that contribute, whether you're someone that wants to consume the content or create the content, you know how to -- the rules of engagement, right? It's really easy. Right now, it's the opposite. You need something that makes it easy for consumers or individuals to get the content, remove the entire friction because I believe friction is what's holding the XR industry back. And I think most people would completely agree with that because right now, businesses, if I have to get my employees, or customers or consumers to download and learn each of these individual pieces of content that are radically different. It's really -- it's great for really early, early adopters, but for the massive, it's just not going to happen. And an open 3D browser makes it super easy to get into this content where you don't have to think about it. 
 

Neil Barbour   00:31:14 

So let's talk a little bit about money and time lines. Are you comfortable discussing what kind of funding you're looking for, what that builds and when? 
 

Sean Mann   00:31:21 

Yes. Yes. No, we're an open book. I mean you have to be because we're not trying to be the next meta. We are -- there's a balancing act where we are literally creating an open source browser, a native browser from the ground up, and that's not going to be within RP1 corporate environment. It's going to be an open standard that we create with other open standard bodies to bring to market. And so that would need its support from the community by large. So every company, every individual that wants an open ecosystem so they can start running their XR initiatives, I believe, would want to support the creation of a 3D browser. And I'm hopeful they will raise their hand and join us in creating that that it will be completely open to the entire world, not controlled by any one company. And I think that is an extremely important step. RP1, the company that provides services for that open ecosystem, we are a bootstrap company. We've been around for about 5 years, and we're a 10-person company. And we've kind of stayed bootstrap for a number of reasons. One is we didn't want to be controlled by any entity at this point. We wanted to have the creative control to really understand. And it took us a while to really get to where we're at today, as you know. You've been following us for a long time, we started off with solving the big scale problem, which people are like, we don't believe you. And so that's why we created demos, but those demos actually help point us in the direction that we're actually creating the first layers of a browser. 3D browser. And that's what helped us really create this vision. And so it gives us a leg up having this vision because we know all the pieces that are needed to make it possible. And we want to share that with the world. We don't want to keep it a secret. It's not about RP1 hoarding this and creating a conglomerate. It's more about creating standards that we can all use, and RP1 will just provide services that we can make some money off. 
 

Neil Barbour   00:33:06 

Do you think we'll see seed funding within the next year or 2? 
 

Sean Mann   00:33:09 

It's a good question. The goal would be is to -- a couple of things. One is a lot of our programmers and architects would actually go to help build the open standards. So I'm hopeful that when the companies come together to build it, they'll help us really support some of our staff. I do believe once people truly understand what we're working on, and the importance of our technologies, we'll have great partners that will benefit from understanding these technologies, but also helping us make sure that we grow because it's going to help their initiatives as well. So it's like if you were the word press of the worldwide web and you want to figure out how you're going to build for the next 3D open ecosystem, it would behoove you to kind of work with us in tandem to know what you're building towards. And so I'm hopeful eventually, a lot of companies will help make sure that we succeed and can grow at the rate that we need to. And so yes, the goal is, to answer your question is we would love to raise some capital so we can have more people to push these ideas much faster because like you, I don't want to see this 50 years from now, right? And only our grandkids get to enjoy the idea of the metaverse or open metaverse. I think it's something that we need to come together and build it versus waiting for one company to do all the work. Because if they -- one company does all the work, we're just going to be stuck within their ecosystem. And I'm not sure that's what everyone wants. 
 

Neil Barbour   00:34:22 

Great. Well, we've been in a good half hour here. I guess we'll leave it at that. Sean, thanks so much for your time. 
 

Sean Mann   00:34:27 

Neil, thank you. Thank you for having me on. 
 

Ian Hughes   00:34:29 

So that you have it and the entire solar system will the metaverse. This is data and dimensions insight across every reality. See you next time.