What Is Really Real?

i've been thinking about the concept of a shadow you have let's say a solid mass and you have a light source the mass is going to cast a shadow like this the shadow has many of the characteristics of that solid mass the same thing is happening with screens in the 1990s if you saw some sort of content on a monitor right connected to a pc if you wanted to transfer that content you needed a floppy disk or a cd-rom drive right to pull it out from that computer and put on the next computer or the next device but today it's very different it's sort of like the computer is just a screen it's just emitting information that's not even on the pc that information is now on the cloud and it follows you around consistently like a shadow from the pc to your mobile phone to your pc similarly your personality on these digital platforms is different depending on different circumstances in a decade it's almost like you'll have the power of wizardry either through glasses or through lenses you will be able to project information on any surface instead of you having a mobile phone you are now going to be able to just project information onto the back of your wrist like those sci-fi movies instead of you having a very powerful pc that pc is going to live in the cloud and stream information to your glasses right it's just going to be visual information very powerful internet you're going to be under the influence of wi-fi all the time right and you are going to be able to just draw out the power that's sitting in the cloud one of the first companies that actually proved this was possible was stadia which is the gaming platform right where instead of you having to download the game they live stream the game to you so whenever you move left on the controller it is sending that information across to the internet and on that pc that lives in the cloud that character is moving left we basically just get windows into the world and our identity traverses with us everywhere no gaps not even for the bathroom i know your phone kind of still makes it to the bathroom but not even for the bathroom not only there's a secondary effect of having something in our visual periphery all the time the question i want to ask you is what is going to be in your visual periphery my belief is that it's going to be something that's very consistent among many people that are wearing the same device what i mean by that is your twitter profile is probably going to show let's say a thousand followers now if i open it it's also going to show me a thousand followers it's sort of like there's a database that's keeping track of this information and both of us see that same information that can be taken forward a notch just like pokemon go you could see a pikachu in front of you right and if i was playing the same game i would also see a pikachu in the same area which is what pokemon go did and became very famous for the implication of that is that we start believing things that are not truly real let me explain what this means let's say you and i both agree that i have 100 000 followers on let's say youtube but in reality there is no such thing as 100 000 followers it's just that on youtube's platform in their database it says varun maya 100 000 you and i both see it so it becomes real to us right we after the invention of the internet and screens have stopped being able to differentiate what is real and what is fake in fact i would go one step further and i would say that there is no such thing as real and fake if we all believe in something it becomes real like the concept of money is not real but since we all believe in it since that shopkeeper down the road will take your five rupees it becomes real to him it becomes real to you it becomes a utility similarly that is now going to extend to pokemon right it expand to so many other things outside of pokemon and that is where i believe that ar will have the maximum impact on our lives far more than we are like just imagine you and your friends have probably played age of empires online imagine being able to do that on a top where i have these glasses on you we're both seeing the same thing we're both seeing age of empires happen in the real world in real time and i can move my character you can see that character being moved in real time you can react accordingly immediately any flat surface right and i'm telling you just like the world has adapted for computers and mobile phones with charging points and stuff across the world flat surfaces are going to become more common as we want space to start projecting so that people can do multiplayer things with each other if me and my wife want to watch a movie instead of us turning on the tv we're just gonna have a flat space but we project information and we're both seeing the same information at the same time so having that sort of power in your eyes changes the burden of entertainment from

your monitor and your television and your fire stick to pure software now i know you guys have seen the toy version of ar you've seen the version of ar where you put up your phone and you can see like a lion that is not what i'm talking about it has the elements of it it's like a toy camera which we used to use when we were young but it will evolve into something much much better in real time now ar has been overshadowed by its cousin virtual reality the problem with virtual reality after having used it for many years is that virtual reality has a retention problem people use it once people use it twice people use it for five times and then they stop they just put in their cupboard and never see it again and the problem is that having a big device stuck to your face all the time that requires charging every two hours is simply too painful and that's why i believe that in 10 years ar is going to dwarf vr but not ar on the phone and this is why every company from microsoft to google to facebook are all working on ar headsets that are light and portable and that are able to do everything i just told you goldman sachs in fact projected that ar and vr by 2025 will make 80 billion dollars in revenue it's going to be a steep curve in nowhere close to 80 billion dollars in revenue for these two technology facebook which is now meta actually believes that vr and ar is going to play a very big part of their revenues and facebook is historically not a company that's cared too much about revenue since 2019 ar sales have been climbing like crazy unlike smartphones ar is creeping up on us the reason for this is because unlike smartphones the initial customer base for ar is going to be businesses instead of you buying a thousand monitors it's easier for you to buy glasses for your team members and tell them hey you know take it on the go remote work you want to go to taiwan and work go do it you want to go to bali and work you can do that just carry these glasses along and the information the data is going to be here in our database which will be streamed to you over wi-fi over the internet and just like the internet and computers we won't even know when our life changed or adapted because of ar it's just going to be one of those things that happened now i want to talk a little bit about the opportunity here one of the first investors that ever invested in me once told me something very interesting he told me that every big business massive businesses are built on some cultural or technological change instagram and whatsapp didn't become big because you know photo sharing was a new thing or a chat they became big because they roared on the court tales of smartphones when the smartphone came out the first company to ever come out with a task manager for the smartphone is today making hundred million dollars in annual revenue new platform new opportunities so i believe that in the ar space there's going to be plenty of opportunities some of them are already taken for example it would be hard for you to make a video streaming service in ar because hey youtube is already the giant there but in many other segments for example shared excel sheets because excel doesn't have really powerful 3d capabilities yet you can build that technology first right and so millions of business customers because i feel ar is really going to kick start with business but as vrs has kick-started with games and i feel like whenever you do something for business you make money and whenever people make money and industry gets formed to get into this space i recommend the unreal engine now unreal engine is a platform that i've been using for a very long time at this point i've been a game developer since i was the age of 13 and unreal engine makes it very easy to get into actually building ar and vr technology in fact i even taught a cohort on unreal engine and many of those students got placed in companies like bombay player now lately i haven't really had the time to actually do a cohort by myself and i'm a really big long-term believer in ar vr and the metaverse right i don't like using the word metaverse but i'm a really big believer in this and one of the companies that i spoke to very recently that has actually built their own ar glasses is actually running a cohort very similar to mine where they're actually teaching people unreal engine among a suite of other technology they are actually one of the few companies that have actually built out a mixed reality headset given it out to many creators under the ajna creator program now i really respect people who both build the technology as well as build the software to run that technology now arjuna is one of the few companies that have actually built out a mixed reality headset and is now creating a set of courses to actually learn more and build software for that headset like i told you they figure out the technology part now it's time for the software so you can take advantage when 2025 or 2030 comes about starting with ar vr nfts blockchain and

even digital twin technologies something that i actually did in the past arjuna is taking you through the whole hog of what it means to build for that reality that's coming in 2030 using the unreal engine which is something that i fall in love with a long time ago now the people who know me know that anyone who's doing stuff in unreal engine in india i have a soft spot in my heart for them right and when i spoke to the team when i looked at what they're building hardware infra i was like these people know what they're doing right and it's rare for me to say that about this space now i asked them if this is only for computer science graduates or if anyone can join and according to them absolutely anyone can join you don't need a coding degree you don't need any sort of coding experience and by the end of it you get complete support either for a job or to go out and start your own ar vr business the first batch is starting on the 15th of august and for tracking purposes go use my code varun 50 to get 50 off on that batch the link is in the description if you want to know more about this now one very interesting or important point for me to put here is i want to tell you why they have skin in the game firstly because they are one of the only xr hardware oems to actually build ar vr glasses in india that itself is big credibility because nobody's doing it they were started all the way in 2014 at iit bombay with the idea to enable grassroots human performance for the next decade they built arvr technology for the indian navy for the army for drdo and bunch of other companies they've built ar based remote assistance they've built vr training simulators and they're also working with tata to build the world's largest metaverse for vocational training so definitely go give them a check out you know there's going to be a lush new playing field suddenly you're going to have this era where there is completely new hardware and zero software for that platform you need to be upskilled and ready for that platform and the tools for that decade are going to be unreal engine and unity and i'm excited for what you create for it is empty land prepared to do war