Not just for gamers: how the metaverse might impact your life

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Pearly Chen, Vice President, HTC, head of Business Development & Content Partnerships, VIVEPORT : The taxonomy doesn’t matter. Whether it's called metaverse today - might not be called metaverse when that digital future comes around. What matters is the right vision, what to build, who to back, and how to put the right values and frameworks in place so that this future is what we want to see for our children.

Robin Pomeroy, host, Radio Davos: Welcome to Radio Davos, the podcast from the World Economic Forum that looks at the biggest challenges and how we might solve them.

This week: virtual reality is great for gamers, but what about the rest of us? We talk to a metaverse company executive about the real-world uses of this emerging technology

Pearly Chen: In virtual reality, you are transported to a different space and you get to have a visceral experience that you don't get when watching a video because your brain tricks you to believe that you are actually there and that it's real.

Robin Pomeroy: Beyond entertainment, the metaverse could have breakthrough applications in education and medicine.

Pearly Chen: The doctor can now go into the patient's brain or heart together with the patient and understand together and also have a better plan of surgery that increases the success of such an operation.

Robin Pomeroy: And with the rapid uptake in artificial intelligence, perhaps each of us will be builders of the metaverse.

Pearly Chen: Power-charged by the development in generative AI, everyone can become a creator. I feel like that that's really important because everyone needs to participate in this metaverse concept or this digital future. We really want it to be built by the people for the people.

Robin Pomeroy: Subscribe to Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts, or visit wef.ch/podcasts.

I’m Robin Pomeroy at the World Economic Forum, and with this look at how the metaverse could change our lives…

Pearly Chen: With the right parameters and frameworks and tools in place, the kids will be empowered to build a the future that is good for them.

Robin Pomeroy: This is Radio Davos

Is the metaverse still a thing or has the world’s attention moved on to generative AI?

On this episode of Radio Davos, we speak to a vice president of the consumer electronics company HTC. Pearly Chen heads Business Development & Content Partnerships for VIVEPORT a subscription plan for virtual reality gaming - immersive video games played using VR headsets.

Pearly spoke to me and my colleague Connie Kuang just before the World Economic Forum published two reports on the metaverse, one on Privacy and Safety in the Metaverse and the other on its ​​Social Implications.

Pearly is convinced of the potential for metaverse applications beyond entertainment, for healthcare, social care and education, and, as you will hear, believes the advent of generative AI will make us all builders of the metaverse.

To introduce the interview, here’s my colleague Connie. I started by asking Connie to remind us exactly what we mean by the metaverse.

Connie Kuang: We get that question a lot.

The metaverse is a very popular topic and it's been confused for many things over time. Some people think it's only virtual reality. Others think that it is only blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

And in fact, the metaverse is all of those things and more.

It is a coming convergence of high technologies such as augmented reality, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, blockchain, as I mentioned.

These things are coming together to form what is inherently going to be our next internet. So it's going to be an interface that's more 3D, 360-immersive and digitally connected than ever before.

Robin Pomeroy: And you work on that issue here at the World Economic Forum, and the Forum's just published or is publishing a paper about the metaverse. Tell us about the latest publication.

Connie Kuang: I'm here for an initiative that started in May of last year, and since then we've done some publications about the consumer-facing metaverse, about understanding interoperability in the metaverse. And coming up: social implications of developing the space, because it's equally of importance that we look at societal impacts as we do the overall economic ones.

Robin Pomeroy: And we're going to look at the those today with our guest.

Connie Kuang: Yes, that is correct. Pearly is vice president at HTC. She's heading business development and content partnerships for VIVEPORT. And that is, of course, the world's first virtual reality content subscription service, Infinity for all PC VR headsets and is part of a growing family of just standalone VR headsets in the world.

But that's obviously a very official profile. Maybe over to you, Pearly, can you tell us exactly what it is that you do and why is the metaverse important to you through that course of work?

Pearly Chen: Sure. I've been with HTC for ten going into 11 years now, joining [HTC co-founder and chairperson] Cher Wang on her side as she comes back to HTC to really champion this pivot into investing the next spatial computing platform for for all of us.

Through the past decade of adventure with HTC, I've held various leadership roles, most recently building VIVEPORT's content business.

But also since 2016, I've been investing in a very broad range of start-ups across the globe. So our Vive X investment programme was a $100 million commitment on a balance sheet to invest in the ecosystem of founders, building the future of spatial computing with a very bold vision.

I want to find vision-aligned founders pushing the boundaries of technology, but really keeping that that humanity, how we benefit humanity at the centre of what they do.

So this portfolio of companies have really grown to more than 100 companies now. We are clearly a corporate strategic investor, but we also an ecosystem investor. We believe in learning through building this network and where possible we try to accelerate their growth through strategic partnerships, synergies, market access and more.

Robin Pomeroy: 100 companies. What kind of things are they making? Hardware? Are they doing software applications? What kinds of things are these companies making?

Pearly Chen: Some are in hardware, I would say a very small amount are hardware-focused. Primarily in software, in core tech, deep tech, in different applications and different categories, whether it's healthcare, education or enterprise productivity or different foundational technologies or AI or 5G or some have blockchain web3 components as well.

We're all hoping to see that enrich all of our digital experiences will really converge all of these technologies, different pillars to to to make this vision come to life. We're agnostic, we're learning, and we hope to provide value as we invest and back the right founders.

Connie Kuang: I want to go back to your notion of spatial computing. We've been working together in the capacity over the last year or so on an initiative at the forum, which is called Defining and Building the Metaverse. And so the definition or the taxonomy we have sometimes around technology can be changing.

Can you maybe help our listeners understand and bridge from this notion of the metaverse to this notion of spatial computing? To you, are they the same thing? Are they different? You know, how can we explain that to people who might be hearing all these different words out there now?

Pearly Chen: Yes, it's all very confusing, probably unnecessarily. We started building HTC Vive as an ecosystem, a platform for what we called VIVE Reality back then, which will be technology converging to humanity to bring positive impact to society.

So how we see this manifesting is virtual augmented reality as this immersive spatial interface. But in of course, all this different content that is enriching and life changing needs to be created and AI plays an important role in that. And blockchain as a foundational infrastructure technology needs to provide that trust layer for transactions, for identity, for ownership. And then there's 5G and next generation high-speed network that will allow these super low latency requirement experiences to come to life.

And so what we identify as the vision, we called VIVE Reality in the beginning, has somehow morphed into this metaverse concept. But I feel that it's been important to not be blindsided by the hype because they're usually pretty dangerous. It brings a frenzy of, whether it's capital attention or expectations, and then we crash pretty hard. And that's a big impact for start-ups for founders, for companies in the ecosystem.

So we have been staying the course in terms of the vision of what we hope to build - converging all these different cutting edge technologies. Consumers don't necessarily need to know all the ins and outs of it, but at the centre of it is how can we bring these together to bring people a more enriched and meaningful digital experience.

And when HTC was pioneering smartphone era, that digital experience primarily now exists for billions of people around the world on a flat screen that we hold in our palm as we evolve into this next phase of a personal computing platform it will simply be a much more intuitive, more spatial, immersive, and that's what I call spatial computing or some call XR.

But of course, all these taxonomies all have different nuances, really, depending on what you are referring to. But for us, it's the vision that you will have more meaningful digital life on where you can have amazing experiences added, but you also have more time in your physical reality with your loved ones and forge meaningful relationships. That's what's important to us.

Robin Pomeroy: So you mentioned XR. Earlier, Connie mentioned VR. VR is virtual reality. Most people have some idea what that is. What's XR?

Pearly Chen: So XR will be extend reality. It's a blend of virtual reality where you're completely immersed and transported to a different world, computer generated world, a fully immersive world, or augmented realities where you overlay digital content on top of your physical reality that you see with your eyes. Or mixed reality, which can also include a concept of high definition video pass through so your digital content is projected through the high definition camera, through the goggles, into your real world.

So there's different combinations of blending physical reality and digital reality. That's what we call extended reality or XR.

But again, taxonomy doesn't matter. Whether it's called metaverse today - might not be called metaverse when that digital future comes around. What matters is how we focus on the right vision, what to build, who to back, and how to put the right values and frameworks in place so that this future is what we want to see for our children.

Robin Pomeroy: So we're going to talk about social impacts, particularly in this conversation. But before we really dig into that, I just want to give listeners a bit of an idea of what this future might look like.

It's interesting, Pearly, you're saying, we're not sure it could be this, it could be that. But if someone were to google HTC Vive, the first thing that's going to come up are the headsets.

So to anyone who's not used one, I have used some version of this, but could you give some idea what it what it feels like, what it sounds like to wear one of these headsets to have some kind of interaction, some application that you would use that headset to access?

Pearly Chen: Absolutely. For example, Notre Dame is still closed for renovations from that fire five years ago. But now with one of these virtual reality headsets, you can go back in time and space to the beginning of when the cathedral was built and understand how people live their lives.

I went into that experience with my children while visiting Paris, and I repeated a similar experience in New York, going to the Grand Pyramids, which again, is difficult to access type of experience. But in virtual reality, you are transported to a different space and you get to have a visceral experience that you don't get when watching a video because your brain tricks you to believe that you are actually there and that it's real. Except for that it's much more scalable and repeatable.

In the same token, I can wake up every morning and meditate in my favourite glacier in Iceland through one of these virtual reality headsets versus I would love to go to the glacier every day, but I can't. I've been there three times in physical life, which is always better, but the repeatability, easy accessibility, is what is magical about having a portal like this in your pockets.

Connie Kuang: The entrepreneurs and in the businesses that you support, what exactly are those better digital experiences that they're building? You mentioned it's hardware, it's software. But in terms of the problems they're solving, can you give us some examples of that in the context of social issues that we might look at?

Pearly Chen: Yes. In healthcare, for example, today doctors are often making decisions based on 2D images that they have to construct three-dimensionally in their heads before conducting a critical surgery, for example. And through a tool like the surgical theatre that uses AI to take in all these different 2D medical images that is available today and build them into a three dimensional anatomy that is patient-specific - the doctor can now go into the patient's brain or hearts together with the patient and understand together and also have a better plan of surgery that increases the success of such an operation.

This is one of my favourite examples of real-life value-add today. It's not just about gaming entertainment, it's something that can be done exponentially better using this immersive interface in artificial intelligence tools.

Robin Pomeroy: What would that actually look like? You could actually walk physically through your own arteries into your own heart. Is that what you're saying?

Pearly Chen: Absolutely. You're immersed in your own anatomy that is 3D models converted from your actual MRI scan or CT scan. You understand where the tumour is, where the arteries are, what is a better incision point that would improve the patient outcome.

And this really makes the patient experience not so scary anymore when it's a communication tool that can be viscerally understood and it increases the doctor's ability to carry their craft.

So many different start-ups are building such tools, building interaction, building so the medical schools or hospitals can easily put their doctors and medical staff through training in a local scalable way, increasing again patient outcome.

Or imagine therapies that you see happen in a clinician's office, whether that's physical therapy, mental health therapy, now they can all be delivered through virtual reality headsets at the comfort of the patient's own home.

So there's so many different ways that these start-ups that we back are really making an impact through their innovative products and go to market.

Another example that I love to talk about is, is mind VR, for example, that brings virtual reality experiences into senior homes in assisted living environments where our senior population is increasingly feeling isolated and suffers from a range of issues. Oftentimes a lot of it is mental unhappiness, anxiety and depression. So virtual reality experiences really bring them outside of those four walls and bring them the possibility to go through shared experiences with loved ones regardless of physical distance.

Robin Pomeroy: Very intriguing possibilities. And as you say, there'll be others that we haven't even thought of yet.

That's kind of the optimistic side. I wonder what the risks are of some of this. It strikes me perhaps that one is is cost of entry point if we consider the millions or billions of people who don't even have basic Internet access at the moment. And is there a risk that the rich world ploughs ahead with these marvellous new applications, but they just won't be available to half of the world? And this famous digital divide that we often talk about on this programme is just going to get bigger. Is that a risk?

Pearly Chen: If you like, the optimistic take would be that consumer electronics evolve very quickly, the cost of components come down quickly also.

Smartphones that started out as an elitist type of new gadget quickly now becomes the centre of everybody's livelihood, even in low income countries in different shapes or forms.

So it is important to push the boundaries of these new technologies that will always bring those worries of unintended societal consequences and impacts.

But I believe and I'm optimistic that as we build out all these different foundation technologies, including the 5G, 6G next generation internet, and of course internet coverage is still an area that many players around the world are still trying to to really broaden that impact.

But the whole point about what we think the headset is expensive because it still has a lot of on-headset or on-device processing. When that can be offloaded to the cloud, to the edge, to to other computing devices around you, the display that you put in front of your eyes can be significantly cheaper and lighter and more comfortable to wear.

We do understand that such a device can still be expensive to access now, which is why it's important to have a bridge to browser-enabled three-dimensional experiences also. So we also build products and services along those lines to make sure that more people can can have access to what 3D experiences mean and the benefits they can bring to productivity, to happiness experiences.

Robin Pomeroy: So there'll be this bridge technology. You're saying the applications will be available for headsets that people can experience 360 degrees, but also a lot of those applications will be accessible on much simpler devices until the time comes when the headsets are more available for more people.

Pearly Chen: Absolutely. Correct.

Connie Kuang: Continuing this topic around access and adoption, oftentimes it's not just the cost of the hardware or the connectivity that's a barrier to people adopting and using technology. We also see that a lot of it is just the literacy. So digital or media literacy and understanding of technology and how to actually approach it in our lives.

How do you think about that through HTC? What's the role that different organisations or different sectors can play in bridging the gap from that perspective?

Pearly Chen: I think it's thinking outside the box of obvious target audience that we're building for.

For example, when we shipped the original HTC Vive in partnership with Valve, it was very much like a gamer's device who has high end PCs that can run incredible experiences, but that makes it extremely inaccessible.

And in the beginning you always push from where the early adopters enthusiasts are naturally hanging on to. But then quickly you think about inclusivity, how do we design the products and experience in a way that can be accessible by a broad range of people, even if they're very much not in your obvious range of view?

For example, seniors turn out to be great users and that benefit from virtual reality. Or form factor wise as we think about reducing the the size, the weight and the more attractive form factor of glasses-like headsets, they fit a more wide ranging a demographic group.

So it is important to think broadly and again, to be learning and be very curious. Sometimes the magic happens in places that you just don't see, in very unexpected ways.

Another great example as we work with global museums around the world, like the Louvre and the Victoria and Albert Museum, we have almost 100 projects with these global cultural institutions around the world to bring amazing experiences to museum-goers, which can be usually they will come from all demographic groups. Always a great learning and great way to see how new technology like this can benefit, but also use by by different type of people. And then we learn that way also. So it's a different way of storytelling that brings more to the experience.

So the Notre Dame experience I mentioned or the Great Pyramid experience, these are both great examples of how digital media and this immersive form can help the public find a new way to appreciate the arts.

Sometimes we make, we work with artists to bring their their artwork to to life in the immersive way.

So we need to be thinking about this new storytelling medium in the very much out of the box fashion, not just replicating them into virtual reality.

Connie Kuang: I think it's a great segway actually into education as another topic we wanted to cover. So can you tell us maybe a bit more a case study from education in that respect?

Pearly Chen: In terms of education again this is a very obvious use case of immersive media, because students are no longer learning with text or video where the retention rate of knowledge is much, much lower versus when you can live through and use all of your senses and body and interaction. The retention rate is as wide apart as 90% versus 5 and 10%.

Robin Pomeroy: By retention you mean remembering the information?

Pearly Chen: Correct, versus reading and video or in-person classroom, versus living through, going through a virtual reality simulation, the learning outcome is drastically improved.

And that's why so many enterprises are starting to use a virtual reality for staff training, whether it's procedure-based or hard-skill based or a soft-skill based, simulating your leadership skills or hard conversations or empathy or DEI training, there's so many things where simulation can add a layer of understanding and retention. And engagement with the content also, emotional attachment to the content also.

This is a great platform of learning for learners of all ages, but when kids go into VR, everything is so natural for them. They touch things. They manipulate things. They understand things very easily without explanation. I feel like kids and actually senior people are surprisingly great target users of virtual reality.

I think teachers, educators and companies can soon enough readily create in a very low-effort way learning materials that is customisable and repeatable and just will make their learners learn and accelerate with much, much better outcomes.

Robin Pomeroy: That's a really interesting point. So if it's customisable, I suppose you can imagine a point where a teacher could fairly easily create some kind of metaverse experience - they don't have to wait for something to be delivered from a creator of that. They could, from my own experience of generative AI, it's quite quick to put something together, including images or sounds. This could be what teachers will be doing in the fairly near future.

Pearly Chen: Absolutely. And there are already tools. We've invested in such tools too, XR content creation tools that involves no coding. It's true that it takes engineers, programmers, designers, a team of many over many months of time so very costly to produce a content or application. So it becomes really hard to to adjust in real time in a timely manner and upgrade it and customise it etc., etc..

But with all these different tools that are coming now with assistants, power-charged by the development in generative AI, everyone can become a creator. I feel like that that's really important because everyone needs to participate in this metaverse concept or this digital future. We really want it to be built by the people for the people. Hence we want to be invested in that, in that tool and possibility that everyone can take tools and start creating. Whether it's a teacher or a doctor or a hospital or enterprise or just individuals. The creativity can really be unleashed with these amazing tools.

Connie Kuang: Pearly, what do you think parents or teachers in the future need to consider when they're bringing these technologies into their home or into their classroom? Given some of the challenges we've had with our current internet parents or teachers or educators in general might feel a little bit more anxious about these things rather than optimistic. I mean, you describe yourself as as a humanist and optimist, which is great in this respect. So could you help to maybe shine a light?

Pearly Chen: I'm a humanist, optimist, also mother of three young girls, so I am very well aware of how parents are very nervous about the usage of digital devices, social media, etc. etc. But I feel like more so than actually placing the blame of the concern on the device, it could be actually the business model. If we design our business models around attention, eyeballs and content, or create in a certain way to ride the algorithm to reach your target audience. Hence social media or content consumption behaviour becomes a certain way that is not desirable by parents or society as a whole.

So I feel like with such benefit of hindsight, we can design this future in a much more mindful way. People need to be consuming immersive digital experiences because it enhances and benefits their lives, not because it provides better data for emergency, sell them more service and products.

And that's why for us, metaverse or whatever we call it in this future, this needs to be open, transparent. There needs to be a very healthy business model that awards creators.

So yes, that's how I think about it. And we need to back the right founders building with the right intentions and vision. And we need to, as an industry, come together all the stakeholders and commit to standards like how we treat data privacy, how we design safety, ethics framework.

I think with the right parameters and frameworks and tools in place, the kids will be empowered to build a future that is good for them.

Robin Pomeroy: I have one final question for you then. If someone listening to this is not a gamer, hasn't been immersed in that world or they haven't really come across the metaverse in person before, where would you suggest they start?

Pearly Chen: I would say go to vive.com!

Robin Pomeroy: Other providers are available.

Pearly Chen: Absolutely. Absolutely. In all honesty and transparency, our headsets are not the cheapest in the market because our products are the business model. The consumers and their data are not the business model.

But I would suggest everyone to stay very curious about these experiences. Start it by trying. There are so many developers building all kinds of entertaining, healthcare, wellness-oriented or learning-oriented experiences that kids can start getting curious and start creating also, there are plenty of creator tools that I enjoy getting my kids to play with.

So really, regardless of headset, we we all want to see this future happen. And so the more people get curious and and start imagining where they can play a role in making this future happen, the better outcome for all of us.

Whenever there is a possibility to see a new experience, new content, whether it's a museum or it's online or one of these app stores on the headsets that you get, really stay tuned and just keep learning. I feel like that that would be a great place for all of us to start.

Robin Pomeroy: Pearly Chen is Vice President at HTC, heading Business Development & Content Partnerships for VIVEPORT, She was speaking to me and Connie Kuang, Lead, Metaverse Value Creation at the World Economic Forum’s Centre for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Find out more on the Forum’s Defining and Building the Metaverse Initiative on our website, where you can also download the reports ​​Social Implications of the Metaverse and Privacy and Safety in the Metaverse.

Please subscribe to Radio Davos wherever you get your podcasts and please leave us a rating or review. And join the conversation on the World Economic Forum Podcast club -- that's on Facebook.

This episode of Radio Davos was written and presented by me, Robin Pomeroy with Connie Kuang. Editing was by Jere Johansson. Studio production was by Gareth Nolan

We will be back next week, but for now thanks to you for listening and goodbye.