Military Simulations and Metaverses

like we're on that steep climb. We haven't rounded the peak of hype yet and started to go down the like the slope of realization of what the reality is actually going to be. And I think until we start going down the other side, I'm just seeing too many opportunities for folks to get taken advantage of, either on purpose or you know, just coincidentally. But that means that, you know, I'm focusing on the near term. That's really

what has been concerning me. Clearly, the metaverse is coming, whether I want it to or not, So maybe I need to take a moment to really think about what that's going to look like once it has arrived. You know, to know that, yes, the road to get there is going to be a bumpy one, but that doesn't mean

that the destination isn't worth going to necessarily. So to kind of help me get out of my you know, blinders, to get out of that hyper focus I have on sort of the issues right now, I invited Pete Morrison

onto the show. Now. Pete is the chief commercial officer at Bohemia Interactive Simulations, and Pete has been working in the military simulation game pun Intended for nearly two decades, and I wanted to first get an understanding of what he and Bohemia Interactive do and then sort of transition to talk about the concept of the metaverse because what he does in many ways serves as the foundation for what we will see in a fully realized general purpose metaverse.

So what follows is my conversation with Pete. I hope you enjoy it. Pete. I want to start off by just saying thank you for joining Tech Stuff. It's a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you. I'm really excited to be here and I can't wait for us to talk about simulations and and what what Bohemia Interactive does but I really want to start off just by saying, uh, how did you get into this world? Did you come at it from like sort of a a video game fan perspective and then developed that into

a career? Was it something that kind of uh of all old at the same time as your studies. What's your personal journey story? Right? So I started out as a gamer, I guess in the late nineties, and discovered pretty quickly that I was having more fun creating the

games than I was having playing them. And my mom actually got me a book on programming when I was still at high school and I was using the Commodore sixty four or Commodore or whatever we had, and I was I was kind of starting to build these computer games and it was the domain that I fell in love with from a very early age. And then later when I joined the army again thanks to my mother, I was actually intending to be a plumber, but my mom pushed me in the direction of the Australian Army.

They put me through university where I did computer science and I was involved in bigger game developments there and then in the Army. In the Australian Army, I was actually in charge of people who did simulation, and I was one of the people in the very early days. It wasn't just me who had the idea that we could apply computer games and military training, specifically specifically collective tactical training. UH. And I started working with VBS Virtual Battlespace,

which is the product created by Bohemian Interactive Simulations. I've been involved with that since about two thousand and four, and I've been with Bohemian Reactive ever since I left the Army in two thousand and five. So as a gamer, I've had a very rewarding career. Wow. And and for those who may not remember the nineties, some of my listeners are young enough where they didn't experience them. Um like that. That was right around the era where we

started to see the mods space really take off. You know, you started to see games in like in like the Doom and Quake spheres where people started to create level, editors and entire uh mods of the game that just completely transformed the game. In fact, some games that emerged out of that era started off as a mod of a previous game. So was that kind of the world you were in when you first started kind of tinkering

with the stuff. Yeah exactly, And so older people like myself would remember Operation Flashpoint, which came out in two thousand and one, and a big modern community formed around this game. In fact, one of my best friends was one of the hackers. He later became my business partner who pulled apart the file formats and started to build some of the level editors for Operation Flashpoint. But I

ran a moddeing site called the Operation Flashpoint Editing Center. Um, I'd like to say, I'd like to think that I was a little bit famous online. It was. It was pretty big, and we had staff running that and it was really really enjoyable. I loved Operation Flashpoint modifying that computer game. It almost it almost cost me my college degree because I was spending so much time in that in that computer game. But it was that same game engine that we took back to the military, you know,

years later, that that same Operation Flashpoint based engine. It's called real Virtuality. And I initially hired when I started the business in two thousand and five or so, the people that I knew from the modern community, Like I knew a pizza delivery person in Seattle and he was a really good uh scenario creator and mod editor and I actually brought him to Australia to work, uh as one of our initial employees. And that's where I went from my my first workers, the people who knew the

computer game. So my career and my business was a testament to the power of the modern community. Um that's only got stronger since then. And you you sort of touched on it already, but can you tell us a little bit more about exactly what Bohemia Interactive Simulations does, like what is their mission and you know, tell us a little bit about some of the stuff that's been created through there. Right. So behem Interactive Simulations is a

very interesting company. And to go back to the start, we were an offshoot of Bohemia Interactive Studio that created that Operation Flashpoint computer game. Since then, they've added many big hits, so to speak. The Armor series Daisy Daisy was huge for them, which is a zombie game created by Dean Hall that was also based upon the same engine. And there was an Australian it wasn't me an Australian gentleman who had the idea of building this first military

product based upon Operation flash Point. And I was in the military at the time actually left the military when I saw the potential of that technology and I wanted to get on board. Uh and we started to build a version of Operation flash Point that was specific for the military training. And it's not training a soldier how to use a rifle or how to drive a tank. It's really training them how to think and putting them into scenarios where they can play out training vignette to

draw out learning points. Now, when you see the soldiers using this computer game, I'm not technically allowed to say playing, but they're playing the game. But they're playing the game. It looks like they're playing Call of Duty from an outside observer. But what they're doing is navigating, communicating, thinking, making to see as making mistakes in a very safe,

cost effective environment. And the idea is to reduce the amount of time they need to spend training in the field, teach them lessons that they might otherwise learn in a more dangerous environment, potentially even in the theater. And computer games have been fantastically successful in this particular type of role, and so today the Human Interactive Simulations is a much bigger company. When I started, I was that I was the second employee. We now have thirty staff in I

think six or seven studios around the world. We provide software to the U. S Army, the U. S. Marine Corps, the UK Industry of Defense, pretty much all of NATO. Now there are hundreds of thousands of soldiers trained each year using VBS, which is based entirely on originally a

computer game, which we've modified heavily over time. I have to say it compared to call the duty or battlefield, it's sort of boring because you don't want soldiers to be able to jump in the air, to jump over rocket launched rocket launch rockets that are coming at them. You want them to be only able to move at a certain speed. You want them to be fatigued, you

want them to be a little bit inaccurate. You don't want them to be able to snipe at four at a moving target in the real world that's very hard to hit. But overall, we're quite unique and what we do. We were the first company to to really branch into this, and today we continue to win contracts. We've updated our engine multiple times, our rendering engine multiple times to keep it consistent with triple A quality. And yeah, we're used all over the world. So I'm very proud of of

what Operation Flashpoint has begun, my favorite computer game. The fact that we're still using elements of that original engine

is is pretty amazing. That is phenomenal, And I love this idea of being able to use a virtual environment to simulate things that that soldiers will potentially actually encounter in the field, but in a way that is safe and replicable, so that you can make mistakes without the obviously real world heavy consequences that come with making those mistakes when you're actually deployed, and being able to learn that that sense and be able to actually understand the

consequences of certain UH actions. I assume also that as UH as since you've been doing this for more than a decade a decade and a half, that that things have changed quite a bit in the way UH that militaries conduct various operations, everything from updated equipment to uh you know, the different kinds of theaters that soldiers find themselves deployed in. Have you have you seen a pretty dramatic shift over those years or has it been fairly steady.

Certain things have changed and certain things have tried sort stay the same. So if you look at a soldier's basic training tasks, shoot, move, communicate, those of very similar to what it was even twenty years ago when I was in the Army. The theaters that we operate, the equipment has changed dramatically and the capabilities of the equipment, for example, a UAVs. I mean you might be seeing

some of the footage coming out of Ukraine. There are ua vs everywhere, drones everywhere, and this is a fundamental change in the way that our forces operate. It's affected doctrine, it's affected a lot of things, and so we've been doing a lot of work to simulate those types of devices and even experiment with those types of devices within VBS, allowing soldiers to figure out how do we work this

new equipment into our tactic techniques and procedures. So, yes, there's been a change in equipment that the basic doctrine hasn't changed a lot. Inferguce soldiers still does what an infant Inferguce soldier does. And then when it comes to the locations where we're operating, what we heard very strongly about two thousand and twelve was that the military wanted a whole Earth experience. They didn't want a level they didn't want to map, they wanted to go anywhere on

the planet at a moment's notice. And in two thousand and twelve, that was pre Star Citizen, pre Nomad's Sky. The idea of having an entire procedural planet that you could just go anywhere on that planet and immediately start training or playing, that was very early days. So we actually invested in that in our VBS blue engine and

we built a game engine that supported that. So within VBS four, which is our current release, you can go to Africa, you can go to Europe instantly, and there's quite a good representation of that part of Planet Earth out of the box. And of course in the gaming space. Uh, and yes, I still play a lot of computer games. This is this has become commonplace. I mean, the latest Star Citizen drops are amazing that the technology they have

for going to different planets. Uh. And what's changing now is access to the cloud, so we have a lot more uh, different data sources that we can pull from down into the game to create higher fidelity environments. Quicker. Uh, yeah, I would ry you were still in a pre Star Citizen world, but maybe that's because waiting for the full game to Finally, I have not, but I've also been I've also been that kind of person who was like, how many years have been have I been hearing about this?

I know that the the there have been releases of significant content. It's one of those where um, as someone who covers tech and and games, occasionally there there tends to be this Uh. Certain certain gamemakers have tendencies to really drive up the expectation not just of what you're gonna get, but when you're going to get it, um and Star says, and I shouldn't just you know, target, because it's by far not the only one. I can think of one GameMaker in particular who has quite the

reputation for driving up expectation and then perhaps under delivering. UM. But getting back to this, I wanted to ask a little bit more to kind of get the sense of the scope of the simulations that we're talking about here, Like, typically, how many people can one of these UH simulations support simultaneously. So right now we are typically servicing what they call

battle simulation centers. UH. These are everywhere. The US Army has eighty seven of them, I think, and they look like a huge computer lab and they're full of soldiers, and it's not just desktop PCs. There's also tank simulators and aircraft simulators in these massive warehouses where they where they train. So typically two fifty is the maximum number that we would put into a single simulation, and that's each soldier playing from the first person perspective, just like

in Call of Duty. We support two thousand to three thousand artificially intelligent units in addition in our current construct. But as I'm sure we'll get into a little bit later once we move towards the military meniverse, we are going to say some dramatic changes there. But right now, that's about what we're doing, and that's still I mean, I mean, anyone who's played any like multiplayer online like first person shooter games would understand that two that's that's

no small shakes. That's pretty impressive. I mean, I know a lot of people who play, uh some of the games where when they first come out have support for maybe one hundred or more, maybe up to close to two d simultaneous players. But uh, they often then are the targets of a lot of criticism because there tends to be a drop in performance. Obviously, when you're talking

about products that are meant to help soldiers train. That drop in performance isn't really that's not acceptable because you need to be able to have that that tool be dependable and usable for that purpose. So um to that end, I'm like, I'm curious, what are what are? Do you happen to have some idea about kind of the back end systems that are running this software, Like how how would you compare that to say, gaming rigs today? Or is it because we're talking about militaries are we talking about,

you know, much lower end but robust computer systems. Now I'm very proud that we have forced militaries all around the world to buy gaming PCs. I'm most only half joking. The we use everything that a modern graphics card provides, and in a lot of our procedural generation capability, which means kind of automatically creating a higher fidelity virtual environment than the data kind of gives you automatically putting in trees and grass. Most of us have heard about procedural

generation now that requires a modern graphics card. So we we take advantage of whatever the customer has, and I recommend that the customer upgrade to at least the video graphics card for example, um, we are working on the Vulcan Port right now. If anyone's not heard of Vulcan, you you will hear about it shortly. It's it's the new open g l to really exciting graphics library that a lot of games are porting to at the moment. Gives a lot of really powerful capability to these game engines.

So we do not recommend that the military use what they traditionally had for simulation, which wasn't gaming tech. Gaming technology has just progressed in leaps and bounds, and there was a time I think it was in the early two thousand's when Silicon Graphics was delivering kind of better hardware for gaming to the US military that there was

available in the game space. That's completely different now and almost all of the big flight simulators that I know of they're using Nvidia X y Z. And in the gaming space, we're recommending the video gaming cards as opposed to the professional cards, which is good because they're getting We generally try and make sure our software will run well on anything might in the last five years, just

like a normal computer game. So we don't want to force our customers to spend millions of dollars on thousands of new PCs, but we do expect to expect our customers to stay to stay current. We've got a lot more to come, and we'll be back after we take this quick break with more conversation with Pete Morrison of Bohemia Interactive Simulations. When VR was first starting to become

a thing, we saw some early very proprietary approaches to VR. Then, because the VR hit this hype cycle and wasn't able to live up to the hype in the eyes of a lot of people, there was a dramatic drop in interest, and it got to the point where people who were dedicating their work to VR suddenly found no support from f I, financial institutions, to academic institutions, and they turned to the video game sector in order to kind of pick and choose things that enabled them to continue their

work in VR. So you started hearing about people using all sorts of things like even uh consumer tech like the Microsoft Connect became an element that VR researchers were interested in that we that we actually was enormously important.

So so it's great to see that there are these parallels where you might start off in this very proprietary, closed garden approach which obviously they're their pitfalls to that, right, because if the company that makes that thing goes in a different direction or goes away, you're stuck with a system that no longer has support. It can go obsolete.

Whereas when you pivot to using technology that is is marketed not just for the military but for consumer use, you can have a pretty strong level of confidence that you will continue to get that support. And it's we're just fortunate that the consumer level of of h technology has reached a point of sophistication where you don't feel like you're trading off right, You're not losing something because you are no longer going in this very focused niche

um proprietary approach. I completely agree, and I have said many times talking to various customers, we don't have technology problems so much anymore. The technology is there. We have endless compute power in the cloud, we have fantastic realistic graphics. It's really now um. For example, in the military, it's a it can be sometimes waiting for certain people to move on, people who don't believe in game based training,

for example. Uh, there is a cultural shift that has to happen, not just in the military, but in many uh serious game type applications. A lot of people still think of computer games as the annoying things that their kids play, the wastes of time, A little bit like my father, who I who I love, but you know, he always viewed my computer at home as this kind of waste of time, this box I wasn't using my hands. I viewed it into well, a future for me, an

entire future. It was a portal into a career. And uh yeah, So it takes time for cultures to change, and we've seen that acceptance and I've been quite proud to drive that change in many military organizations. Um I would say that the U S. Military organizations have always been forward thinking. Ah so I don't think you've had that problem here in the US, but in other countries it's it's it's certainly been an issue. I can imagine.

It's so interesting that the convergence of technology was enabling this approach on a technical level, and it's the buy in that becomes the bottleneck for certain militaries that is really fascinating to me. It is somewhat understandable. I mean, I I suppose if you are someone who hasn't had that hands on experience, it can be difficult to imagine that it would have that level of beneficial effect. Heaven knows. We see that in politics as well, right where we'll

see politicians who perhaps print out their emails. Uh, then legislating tech, and you clearly get in the tech sector, you you feel this this very intense resistance to that because there's there's this gap between a person's understanding and the way things really are, and yet that person is still given the responsibility of of perhaps legislating that area. So it's one of those parts of tech that I love to talk about, even though it's not you know,

it's not how tech works. But you have to take kind of this holistic view in order to understand why is tech the way it is now and why I are certain things in tech uh perhaps taking longer than you might have anticipated to get you know, a larger roll out. Um, it's because people are not like tech. Uh. That's way back in in the day when I was first given the assignment of being the tech head writer for how Stuff Works dot com, which is where I

started when I started podcasting. Um, everyone was all of my coworkers were scared of tech. They were all we were all English literature or English majors, communications majors, and everyone was scared of it. Uh and I wasn't. And when people asked me why I wasn't scared, I said, well, because tech either works or it doesn't. People, that's way more complicated. I agree, And I mean there's a lot of people making decisions related to computer games that don't

understand the medium. And that always shows me a little bit crazy as a game. And my ad bossed to parents I'm also a parent, is to play games with your kids. You know, see what they're doing to stand and it doesn't just apply to the computer games, apply to anything. Understand if what they're doing is complete waste of time, are they just consuming or are they creating. If they're playing Minecraft and they're building castles and they're creating,

encourage them to do that. If they're modifying computer games like I was, encourage them to do that. Don't watch YouTube videos of other kids playing computer games like that. That is arguably a complete waste of time. I might get shot down for saying it, but that's just my opinion.

And then in Australia we have the situation where computer games are regularly being banned by a committee of people who I believe have never played a computer game because of they think they're too violent or you know, and so on. And I find that very problematic as well. You know, so this technology is with us, it's here to stay, and we need to all make an effort to understand it. And I'm forty two years old and my daughter is doing things that is already kind of

beyond me. The metaverse, for example, which we'll get to. I'm sure I kind of rolled my eyes, but you know, we can't do that. We can't be cynical. And these technologies on moving, uh with huge momentum, and we need to understand them and grapple with that well. And and that's a great way for us to even segue to talk a little bit about the metaverse. And this is going to require a lot of extrapolation on your part.

And and so this is really us kind of batting around our understanding of what the metaverse is supposed to be. It's a little complicated because there is no firm definition on the metaverse. Generally speaking, I think the accepted definition is it's a persistent um variation of the Internet, perhaps except um perhaps it's something that is really focused on things like virtual reality or augmented reality is a way

to interact with that persistent representation. UM, you have persistent virtual environments where you can pretty much do all the things that you would do in the real world, but you do it online through this virtual environment. Whether that's commerce, you're going to concerts, you're hanging out with friends, you're having business meetings. Maybe you're touring a an actual real world location, either for virtual tourism, virtual vacations, maybe you're

virtually touring a house that you're interested in buying. Like they're all these different potential applications. But the the thing that I keep coming back to is that if in fact the metaverse is going to support all of these and more, it is going to have to be such an incredibly robust infrastructure to support that that it's it's hard for me to get my mind wrapped around it

right now. And since we were talking earlier about military simulations, and you're talking about simulations right now that can support up to two fifty simultaneous human operatives and then a few thousand more artificially intelligent ones, like that's to me

is phenomenally impressive. It is also at the same time, I would argue probably a fraction of what most people are thinking of when they're envisioning the metaverse, right, because they're thinking of essentially they're thinking of Ready Player one or some other science fiction incarnation of this virtual world. So what is your kind of concept of the metaverse? What does what does that? What does that word conjure

up in your mind? Right? So, I my thinking about the metaverse and the military metaverse has been shaped by an article called the Full Potential of a Military Metaverse by Jennifer Maccardell and Caitlin Dormant, And I do encourage people interested in this and how it might relate to the military to check that out. Uh. And it became very clear to me that people are talking about the metaverse versus art metaverse, and there have been metaverse is

for a very very long time. You know. Gave Neuill spoke about this recently in a in a in an interview that he did and if we have an online virtual world with the appearance of persistence, then that could be thought of as a murder verse. Um. They quote Neil Stevenson, a sci fi author from way back and he says, it's a series of interconnected and immersive virtual worlds that afford their use as a sense of presence via agency and influence, and that was coined over thirty

years ago. So this concept of this online virtual world, it's it's not it's not new. But what's interesting about this is the idea of the metaverse, the idea that there would be only one and this is an intriguing concept. Within the military, we've been connecting simulations together for twenty

five years using various wondrous technologies. We can connect a flight simulator to a first person shooter like what we build, connected back to what we call constructive simulation, which is like hearts of Iron where there's divisions kind of moving around as icons and a map. And in the military, we've been connecting those types of things together for years.

And what I think is going to happen over time is that we'll see the Microsoft net reverse the Facebook metaverse, and then these things will begin to connect because unless they do, we're not actually achieving the vision of the metaverse, when we're not actually reaching the promised Land, which has a lot of potential, right, I mean, the idea I

think is really really intriguing. But the problem is going to be that these gatekeepers that within Web two point oh sort of one one the fight, so to speak, these centralized companies or or companies that have all the

data centralized. Facebook is a portal onto the Internet in some countries around the world, for example, They're going to need to somehow work together or there needs to be an open source, uh push that gains enough momentum to actually become its own thing that these big companies have

to connect to. So when you think about the metaverse as an open architecture where there are different entities and interoperable servers kind of all interconnected vice via shared and agreed upon interfaces, then it becomes a very interesting prospect. So that's my thoughts about the metaverse. And you know, I I might talk a little bit about what we're doing in the military just because I think that could

be interesting. So to go from where we are today, the players too, with two thousand artificially intelligent units to scale.

We are using cloud technologies and we are working as part of a big team on the US Army Synthetic Training environment, and they are looking at employing cloud really in new ways to achieve the kind of scale that the military needs for its training, but also you would expect to see in the metaverse eventually, using containerized simulation workers, we can scale up the number of artificially intelligent units

into the millions. Because everybody is connected directly to the web architecture instead of being connected to a game server, we can also dramatically scale up the number of human participants that are connected into that military metaverse, so to speak. So when all the metaverse hype began, I was quite proud, especially of the U. S Army, who are already thinking ahead and have companies like Alazon contract to solve these

these types of problems. I believe that VBS four, our current VBS, will be the final version that is sort of tethered to an old school game server. The next version will almost certainly connect directly to a web architecture. So you're seeing some really massive changes. And if there's one organization that could make at metaverse work for itself,

it would be the U. S. Department of Defense. And I think you're going to see almost a parallel development along with sort of Whip three point are happening out here in the civilian world. Uh and I think that's quite exciting. It's almost like a rice pete and I will dive further into discussions about the metaverse, some of the challenges we face both in the near and long term and more after these messages. I think we can learn a lot of lessons through the way that the

Department of Defense approaches this continual evolution of the military metaverse. Uh. I think those lessons are ones that will be valuable. Uh. It's I think because the military approach has a I would argue a much more focused view on what the metaversees and what's purposes and what needs to do and how it needs to do it that these are all things that are doably beneficial. When you're actually engineering it

out right, you can start to define your parameters. What are your what are your deliverables, what are the things that you absolutely have to be able to do? How can you do it the best way that supports the most people. At the same time, these are all things that are easy, not easy. These are all things that are answerable. But like when I look at conversations about a a metaverse, it's more of a general purpose metaverse.

What I what I typically don't encounter are those kinds of easily identifiable objectives where you could see, like, this is something you can actually work towards, like an engineering problem you can work towards solving. And I see this could be the issue of the media too. I don't want to put everything on all the companies that are working on creating a metaverse. Obviously they're not going to share everything that they're working on right now with everybody. Um,

it would be overkill. And no one's really certain which pathways are going to end up being the profitable ones, and I don't just being profitable from a financial standpoint, um. And so there are there are a lot of reasons

why I think this is. But the problem falls that falls on me as someone who's just kind of passionately following developments in tech, is that I'm getting a lot of information about the well vague information about the destination we're heading, but very little about the steps that need

to be taken to get there. Apart from the fact that you know, you have people like representatives from Intel saying that in order to achieve a really robust metaverse that allows for things like VR and ARE implementation, the tech we have is going to need to be a

thousand times more powerful than what we have today. Um, again suggesting that if you want to support a large number of people in the same environment at the same time, and we've seen that sort of with VR right now, where I think Horizon Worlds, I think metas Horizon world supports maybe twenty or people simultaneously right now. So obviously that would not be that would not give you the feeling of attending like a massive concert for I don't know,

Metallica or something. I mean, it feel great, like I can't believe Metallica is playing for me and twenty four other people. But but but it's But it doesn't create of the experience of the promise of the metaverse um. And so I think there's just this big disconnect between sort of the the marketing speak and the hype of

it uh and where we actually are. And that, to me is what I like to warn people about because I fear that with that lack of of clarity, there's a lot of opportunity for people to either uh get scammed or maybe just engage in speculation that it's probably not the wisest choice, especially if it's you know, you're pouring money that you can't really afford to lose into something. The thing to get excited about is web three point oh and sort of ignore all of the noise and

potentially ignore what big companies are doing. So Web three point oh it's it's it's almost a redesign of the Internet around open technologies, like this concept of an open ledger that the technology that underpins crypto and I hate saying it, but you know, blockchain, these technology technologies have huge potential and you you you sort of need to take a long view or you will get depressed because in the short term, I mean crypto and n f T S I'm not going to invest in them because

I believe in the short term they're they're kind of like a scam. It's pure speculation, and I think it's

fact that n f T s R a scam. But you can't throw the baby out with the bathwater and ignore the potential of these technologies is long term, and the web three point o vision is really appealing, right, and it does go against I think the interests of these companies that want to control all the information and host all the information on their servers and and scour through that information so they own the data that they

can sell to others. Web Web three point oh is a reimagining in some ways, of what the Internet could be. They called the semantic Web. Its it's this ubiquitous, open internet that uses artificial intelligence to give you what you need based upon your browsing history and what you're doing. But it's designed to do this in a way that

that information isn't necessarily owned by Google. And I don't know a lot about it, but the reading that I've done I am excited about because it's a vision that I think we all can get behind, right and if enough people understand the vision and where Tim Burners Lee, you know, the founder of the Internet, wants to take kind of Web three point oh, then I think it

has a chance. Personally, I think what you're going to see in the short term is the Microsoft's and the Facebook's kind of doing their metaverses pretending like There's is the best at the same time as there is almost a community driven Web three point I metaverse that begins to take shape. I mean, I truly hope that's what happens, because I don't want to have to access the metaverse through a single company. I wanted to be like the Internet, right,

I shouldn't have to access it through Facebook. I should be able to disconnect and um and there I am. And then if I want to contribute to that, I should own what I create. If I create a new house using whatever design tool is provided to me, the intellectual property of that house should belong to me. And that's what should be stored on the open Ledger, which obviously is immutable, you know, and everybody can see that I created and own that house. So Web three point

I was definitely worth looking at. When it comes to n f t S and what's happening in the short term. I mean, there is an amazing I mean it went viral. I think it's Dan Olsen's the problem with n f t S YouTube video. I don't know if you've seen it, and it's an amazing takedown of n f t S, but it's extremely shortsighted. Y. Yes, n f t s are really bad right now, but the technology that underpins

them is awesome. And so I do worry that people are kind of taking a position with a very short term view when we should be talking about where we want to get to. Does that make sense? It totally makes sense. I think, you know, I have repeatedly slagged off n f t s like I have, but it's again on the way that they're being dealt with right now,

which is largely as the speculative investment slash scam. Depending upon the actual you know, implementation, some cases it's out and out scams where people are just trying to, you know, capitalize on the combination of the fact that there are a lot of people out there who are eager to see their money increase and they have a large ignorance of what n f t s actually are. And when you have those things paired together, you've got marks, you've

got targets for scams. So I have a pretty negative feeling for n f t s in their current manifestation. I can see the potential benefit of n f t s down the road, just as I could see the benefits of cryptocurrency if it ever emerged from being this speculative commodity and turned into an actual working currency. I just have never seen crypto really behaving like a currency. I've seen it behave more like like stocks or you know, investing in precious metals. That's the way people have treated it.

And so it's like the intent of the thing didn't matter. It's how people interact with it once it gets into the real world and and it becomes a totally different thing. Um,

So I agree with what you're saying. I also, I mean, I just recently this past week covered the story about how Snoop Dogg acquired death Row Records then started to remove some of the albums and songs off of various streaming services because of his pronouncement that he's going to turn death Row Records into an n f T music label and be the first major music label in the metaverse, another move that I think I would say is perhaps

a bit premature right now. But at the same time, I can see a world where the music industry tries to get behind the idea of UH and n f T approach as opposed to streaming or the classic download digital store model. I don't know if that's going to happen, but it's certainly potentially. You know, it's a possibility with all this focus on the metaverse. I also agree with you.

I don't want a world where a massive company has created UH the gateway to the metaverse, or I would argue even worse, you could have siloed metaverses that don't have any connectivity between them. You could have the Microsoft metaverse or the Facebook metaverse, which just kind of creates

splintered internets. UM. It makes me think of like back when before Facebook dominated all of the social networks, you went to wherever your friends were, so like, I was on my Space holdout for a long time because I was out of college by the time Facebook came around. I couldn't get into Facebook when it first started because it didn't have a college email address. I was on my Space and I was thinking I was Facebook thing, that's flash in the pan. It's never gonna be like,

it's never gonna stick around. Um, But you know it does create like like you either get into a scenario where ultimately these entities have to work together to integrate their uh their their interfaces so that you can pass between these or you get to a point where no, they decided they're going to stick it out. They're just going to pummel the competition until they're the only one left standing. Neither of those are particularly good for the

individual user. UM. I also think that an open source approach would be ideal, like having that having everyone agree you know, it makes way more sense for us to all focus on open interoperable standards so that we don't have this painful process where everyone's fighting for dominance, nothing is portable from one experience to the other, and the consumer is just kind of left holding the bag. I have a lot of faith in the Internet, and you need to almost go one step below the hype. Right.

So n f T s speculative asset, lots of scams, bad. But the idea that I have data that everybody can see, that diet of his mind, and it's stored for everyone the Internet and can't be deleted, it can't be changed, like that's that's kind of a cool concept, right. So um, I was I was reading about are We've or are we've a r W E A v E dot org and they're trying to make make it a little bit uh. I guess makes sense in the sense that you could

store like an entire document, so to speak. At the moment, you can only saw like a little bit of text like a U R L in the n f T. But what if you could actually store a document? What if you could store more data? And there are these initiatives that I'm very excited about that are looking at the problems and trying to solve them and do it in an open source way, right, So I'm really excited

about about that. I think that's you know, for the military, just kind of bring it back to what the military is doing. You know, they're going to go a different route.

The biggest problem with the blockchain approach is the fact that everybody can see the ledger, right, there's no concept of security, and one of the things that slows the military down, uh in anything I t related is security for very good reasons obviously, and there are very big contracts with certain companies for secure clouds and the like.

So I think that figuring out where blockchain technology actually is useful and where it simply adds overhead uh and is not necessary it's really is really important as as well. And I think every Internet user is almost obliged to do their research a little bit. I don't I'm not saying that people should sign a do a training course in order to access the Internet, but and I guess it would start at school, but it would definitely help. Like everybody needs to do the training that my company

makes me do you know, twice a year. The anti scam UH anti phishing training. I feel like that sort of mandatory, especially for grandmother's I think they would really help. Yeah, again, it gets to that, it gets that that target of opportunity for scam artists, right like ignorance is one of the biggest opportunities that that cons have when it comes

to pulling off their scams. The more the less aware someone is of something, less educated they are in something, the more likely you're going to be able to take advantage of that. And so but that I mean, we've also seen that in pretty much every security story that's out there. You typically, when you really get to the end of most, not all, but most computer security stories, you ultimately get to someone somewhere fell victim to a trick.

And that's how the Hollywood version of someone trying to log into a server and typing in a password, getting two incorrect ones and the third one works almost never happens. You do have brute force attacks that occasionally happened, but they are pretty hard to do. If you're talking about even semi sophisticated security systems, it's far more likely that

someone somewhere got compromised um one way or another. And we can just apply that across the board for everything, like not just for basic computer security, but pretty much all like Internet etiquette could could benefit from people having that level of Oh, I understand what the bad guys are looking to do, like how they're looking to exploit it, and by understanding what they're looking for, I have a

better appreciation for various processes. I know that if someone calls me up claiming to be from the I T department and they want my admin admin level name, login and password, probably it's best not to give it to them straight away. We've got a bit more to go with our look at the future of the metaverse, but

first let's take this one last break. I love this conversation Pete, largely because, like I have been so kind of laser focused on the issues that I see with the metaverse that it it often can be hard for me to step away from that and say, well, you know, okay, yes there are problems that have to be solved before we get to that destination, but that doesn't mean the destination isn't worth going to. That's where I can kind

of lose my way. Sometimes I get so focused on, you know, worrying about big tech playing too large a role in this, or worrying about the scam artists who are taking advantage of people when there is a lot of excitement around this idea, or worrying about companies that might be investing heavily in a future but without without a clearly communicated pathway for how they want to get there.

Those are the things that kind of worry me, just because I see it as opportunities for this to take longer than it should honestly, Um, but with your talking with you, I feel better about that because I do think that you know we are going to get it there. The question is just like how much how much garbage are we going to get to go through before we

hit that destination. Hopefully, by the time that we start seeing metaversees uh like common youth general purpose metaverses start to really take off, I'll still be interested and I won't have turned into a luddite hermit who lives in the woods. Yeah, it's very easy to be cynical about it, especially if you're like an older gamer. We've all seen Second Life, we've all played massively multiplayer online games, and

the first inclination is too eye roll. When you speak to someone who's just learned about the metaverse and they've never played a computer game in their life, but this technology. I mean, my advice to companies that are interested in investing in this area is is to look at the problems that we're seeing in the short term, you know, the security issues, the problems within n f T s,

and invent ways to solve those problems. Uh. And I mean you probably end up selling a business to fight this book, but ideally contribute to some of these these some of these organizations. I mean, you know, that's I think that's the best thing you could do right now if you're kind of a tech entrepreneur Personally at Bohemia, we are looking at the terrain aspect. So the idea that a metaverse requires one of two types of terrain.

Either it's a full on fantasy land, which is totally fine, you know, that's that's what the Internet is amazing for, and computer games are amazing for just building these fantasy lands. But but also there will be a in our opinion, a need for really realistic, a really realistic virtual earth where you can kind of build your own house in the metaverse in the same location as your house is in the real world. So we are doing a lot

on the terrain side. We have a lot of technology related to streaming terrain from the cloud and processing that terrain and procedurally enhancing it and getting it out to multiple different simulation engines. Obviously focused on the military, but it has applicability outside the military as as well. So I really do think this is an exciting area. And but to get involved and just jump on the HiPE

without kind of understanding. I mean, how many companies were selling blockchain stuff five ten years ago with no real idea of what that was. Um, yeah, you really do need to to look at it. I think especially the tech investors are sort of smarter than ever. And um, even as I was sort of researching to talk to you, it became clear that it's just moving so so fast it is hard to keep up with it. There's no

there's no doubt. Yeah. I actually taught to one of my co workers yesterday and I said, the weird thing that I'm going through right now, the weird realization I'm going through is that you know, we're uh, like ten years ago, the big concept in tech, like the far off future concept of tech that was a conversation that was just going was about the onset of the singularity, this era where technology is changing so quickly you can't

even define the present. And I said, here's the weird thing, because I think part because of the pandemic, which forced a lot of companies to go through very rapid evolution. They started to adopt practices and processes and technologies that maybe they had been considering but perhaps was on like maybe a five year plan, and they ended up saying, well, we got to do it now because we have to be able to continue to do business in a world

that's completely changed. And we saw such an incredibly rapid evolution that is continuing because now the companies are saying, well, it doesn't make sense to go back to where we were. It makes way more sense to build upon what we've learned just trying to get through the pandemic. So it's a very exciting time. I said, It's it feels to me like we might be in the singularity now. It's you know, maybe in the maybe in the future will look back and say like, yeah, no, that's what it began.

We just couldn't tell because we were too we were in it. But but I feel like that's kind of where we are. It's not the science fiction version of the Singularity. It's not like we're all, you know, playing Shadow Run for real and plugging directly into computers and injecting our consciousness into the Internet. But but it feels like we we are almost in this this cycle of such rapid change. The just defining what's happening now is a huge challenge, let alone kind of projecting out what's

it going to be in five to ten years. Yeah, ignoring the noise is certainly hard. I mean, within my little industry, there's a lot of hype around hardware as well, so the latest VR or m R a R headset. And for me personally, what helps is within my industry is to identify what we're trying to do. The heart of my business is training soldiers. Do soldiers need device X cloud y in order to train? Will it make

them train better? And so for me, I get the luxury of doing that assessment against any new technology that comes along within bohemiteractive simulations. And it's been very interesting for me to see hype even within military simulation about for example, VR headsets via hype ramped up a few years ago, many many computer games were created. A lot of game developers were very unhappy with the profits that they got from that because the market was so inundated

with VR games. I think a lot of people were just like me. I bought an expensive v I headset, I played a game, I got a headache, I put it back down and went back to my PC. Maybe it's because I'm forty two and too old to quite understand, but VA headsets were kind of a painful experience for a lot of a lot of people. Now Here we are today, and instead of just pure virtual reality headsets, we now have mixed reality headsets where we can similar to Microsoft holl of lends, we can mix the virtual

in the real world. It's a much more pleasant experience for the operator. You don't get a headache as quickly, and we're seeing for the first time, for example, pilots saying on yeah, this could potentially work, whereas up until one or two years ago, the pilots were saying Nope, unless it's a big dome with images projected on a screen,

I don't want to use VR. So we are beginning to see changes, but but these changes come slowly, like they don't come quickly, and it's very interesting for me to go back and look at presentations from futurists in the past. I mean, I've been doing this almost twenty years, and you know, I think that the progress has been steady within our little area. Obviously, things like social media sort of exploded, uh, and you never know when the

next explosion is going to be. But with for me personally, what I've done to focus our business is just how do we how do we do our thing better? How do we train soldiers better? And if it doesn't do that thing, then it's useless or potentially useful for marketing. And that's about it. And that's the sort of approach I want to see kind of adapted across the industry. I feel like with that approach, you're able to work

towards that goal. More concretely, you're more likely to achieve the goal than if you have a more vague definition and no one's really sure one what you mean, and even if they kind of have a grip on what you mean, they're not sure how to get there. It makes me think I have a background in acting, and I once had a director jokingly give me the least helpful direction I have ever heard. But it was a

joke where he said, Jonathan, could you act more? Which doesn't mean anything at all, Like it doesn't mean anything, but it was. It did make me laugh. Um, and then later he gave me very concrete direction that was actually helpful. But that's that's the way I feel that a lot of companies are kind of taking this, or

at least that's the communication. Again, I shouldn't project too much on the company's A lot of this comes from press releases, which might be drawn up by someone who is working from bullet points, or it might come from the media, where you've got, you know, another degree of separation from the actual source. Uh. I am trying to be a little more gracious in my uh in in the way I analyze the metaverse. H Pete. I have to say it has been a real pleasure to have

you on the show. I could have you back and we can chat about computer games as much as you like. I love computer games. They're they're amazing. I still play them. I I think I'll be the guy in the nursing home when I'm playing the computer game. You know, I just can't. It's such an important part of my life. Um, everything that I have is a result of computer games

and the amazing people that are behind them. So um, yeah, I recommend people play more games well out of curiosity before I before I let you go, what's a computer game that you're currently playing. Doesn't have to be your favorite, but something that you go to. So I just played, uh, Space Engineers. Because I have a gramming background, you can actually like program awesome, awesome inventions in Space Engineers. It's like it's like it's like Minecraft, but a little bit

more for forty two year old men. Say so, I love I love computer games that where you have to create, and I've really enjoyed that. I've been playing Star Citizen, which I do recommend people check out. It has come a long way. I I've enjoyed it. I've played it for about a hundred hours and it's been in a positive experience. And so I used to be very pessimistic about their chances. Now I'm just kind of lukewarm. So we'll see when that goes. Just two more elden Ring.

Elden Ring, Oh, yeah, of course. I mean that's like the big one right now. Now I have to play it, have to play it now, I love it. A big fan of the Soul series, so I love I love Elden Ring. And then I have been playing the computer game that's got banned in Australia Rim World. So I'm sorry to my Australians. Uh, you guys can't get that game, but it is. It is fantastic, excellent. As for myself, In case anyone's curious the game, I go to game because I can play a level and then like bounce

off Not Tonight too. If you ever wanted to be a bouncer in front of a nightclub. It's kind of like Papers Please. It's one of those games where you're like checking stuff against data that's in your hand. Um. I know I'm not really selling it the best way here, but it's I really love those games. I was a big fan of Papers Please, and a big fan of the first Not Tonight and this one. There's a lot of pretty heavy handed commentary in it, but I'm really

enjoying it. Choice, the amount of is amazing. What's available, well, yeah, and if you dive into the independent gamer like the stuff that's just being released directly to the internet, and like you go to place like ich e O or something like that it is beyond overwhelming to see that, like you're gonna be spoiled for choice when it comes to innovative experiences. UM. Yeah, I'll definitely have to have

you back. We'll have a rap session about like computer games and the various eras and the standout and things of that nature. But for now, I should probably let you get back to creating virtual worlds, uh and and doing what you do best. Thank you again for being on the show. My pleasure, Thank you. Thanks again to

Pete for being on the show. I think it's important to chat with folks who have a different perspective on topics, particularly people who are kind of in the thickest things, you know, and something that's at least related to that topic. Pete certainly has, you know, tons of experience building out platforms that allow for numerous people to congregate in a virtual space. I don't have that experience, so getting his

insight was invaluable. I'll likely have to do a future episode about web three uh, you know, Web three point oh, which is another tech concept that I have some concerns about. I like the idea behind web three point oh. I think the idea is a very strong one. It actually kind of the same way. I think the Internet idea is a very strong one, this giant communications network that

democratizes so much of what previously had been siloed. However, I do have some concerns that what we're gonna see in practice with Web three point oh will effectively be the same old song played on new instruments. Uh. In other words, that some new parties will end up becoming the sort of uh, centralized monoliths of that particular incarnation

of the Internet or the Web. But you know, that's another topic for another episode, and I'll probably reach out to someone who has more experience in that to kind of address some of my concerns and explain where I may or may not be off base. So look forward

to that. I don't have anything firmly in the works on that right now, so it might be a little bit before I get it, but I really want to get my head wrapped around the whole thing and just to make sure that the the concerns I have are either merited or maybe that it's based off of misunderstanding,

which is entirely possible. I don't magically understand everything right away, but in the meantime, If you have suggestions for guests that I should have on this show in the future, or topics that I should cover on tech Stuff, please reach out to me. The best place to do that is over on Twitter, where we use the handle text stuff h s W and I'll talk to you again really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.

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