Ted Schilowitz, futurist at Paramount Pictures, discusses the importance of long-term investments for the next wave of VR and forward-thinking in the XR and technology industries. The following is a transcript of our interview with him.
3E: Can you tell us your name and the company you’re here to represent?
TS: My name’s Ted Schilowitz. I work for Paramount Pictures, and I’m the futurist at the movie studio. So, I have a very unusual job; exploring, adventuring, and finding new things and new ways, and bringing them back to the studio to explore even more.
3E: What does a futurist do?
TS: There is no typical day. There is not even a typical hour. Part of what I do is look not just around the next corner, but around the next three, four, or five corners. I investigate a lot of technology, and I investigate its relevance to the art and creativity and inspiration of storytelling in all of its forms, traveling all around the globe speaking at conferences like this. Yesterday I was in Montreal doing a talk, before that I was at a university in the middle of the country doing a talk. I sit on boards and do a lot of pro bono work around the educational institutions simply because education is where a lot of new things get started. So, I put cycles into education, and youth, and young people, and their ideas, and the technologies that are valuable to them because we learn a lot from them, and we discover relevance from what they think about technology.
3E: What trends in the XR industry are exciting to you and why?
TS: One of the most exciting trends I’m seeing in the virtual reality (VR) world is the movement from the tethered, tied-to-a-computer world now migrating to a wireless world. We find that’s going to be a broadening of the marketplace. Albeit that the actual amount of power that you can park up on your face is not nearly as much as you can park in a box or in a laptop – that doesn’t matter. The thing that matters tremendously more than that is the freedom, and the form factor, and the ability to sell these devices at much lower costs that actually give what was called true six degree of freedom virtual reality, and that’s a new level of magic for a lot of people that only a few of us in the world, like me, have experienced for a long time. Now the world is going to get to experience that, and we’re very excited about it.
3E: What should be explored in XR?
Well, I would like to see more energy, capital, resources that go into the mixed reality (MR) world, and in terms of creating the software, and experiences, and the hardware associated. The more energy there will not be wasted. It will start to show its real power and its real muscle, and I believe will be, truthfully, the main attraction of spatial and immersive media. Being able to choose how much or how little of the real world you want to bring into that, or not, based on where you are in the world, or what you’re doing in the world. Virtual reality has a difficult time doing that, mixed reality will have a very nimble, easy time doing that.
3E: What is a missed opportunity in XR?
I think that because of some of the perceived softness of the VR marketplace, and the fact that it is not this sort of overnight success, that it’s a giant, mass-market product, which was a bit of a fool’s errand, anyway, for anybody that believed or believed that hype. These things take a long time to migrate into the human equation, and into the desirability of customers. So, I think that the overall market for investment for young, spry, smart, ambitious companies has softened. I think a lot of investments is now missing opportunities because they took their first shot at this wave and expected something to happen much quicker than it actually has.
And now they’re shying away from putting more capital in, and I actually see that as a massively important opportunity for those that watch the first wave go past, and knew that there was not going to be what they thought it was going to be, and this is a much longer play put the right kind of capital and the right kind of resources into seeing that succeed. I’m hoping that it it starts to right it ship now that cooler heads will prevail, and that the sort of instant dollar gratification of giant exits is moving to its relegated place of that was a really bad idea.
Real investments are in this space are going to take time, and I believe they will massively pay off for those that understand the long burn of this stuff.
We talked more about the future of XR among other initiatives, and how it helps to accomplish the goal of making XR as a whole practical, approachable, and inviting to newcomers.
