3D Commerce in the Metaverse

Announcer:

Today on Building the Open Metaverse.

Martin Enthed:

We can handle a lot of things internally at IKEA as long as we are the end user of what we do. I want to connect to your headline here, the Metaverse. At least in my mind, the Metaverse, when it comes to become something really interesting is when stuff are leaking out from our page to the world, if you will take the web page analogy. So you have a web page, you put things up there, it's under your control, you know what it is, and you can link to others and nice. But when your things on your page starts to mix with somebody else's things on their page, and then I'm placing a couch on Times Square and somebody else puts another thing on top on it from another vendor, then we're starting to populate the metaverse with things.

Announcer:

Welcome to Building the Open Metaverse where technology experts discuss how the community is building the open metaverse together, hosted by Patrick Cozzi from Cesium and Marc Petit from Epic Games.

Marc Petit:

Alright, hello everybody, and welcome to our show, Building the Open Metaverse podcast where technologists share their insight on how the community is building the metaverse together. Today we have a very special guest. We have Martin Enthed from IKEA Marketing and Communications AB with us, Martin, welcome.

Martin Enthed:

Thank you so much for having me on your podcast.

Marc Petit:

You’re welcome, and of course I have my partner in crime Patrick Cozzi with us today. Hey, Patrick.

Patrick Cozzi:

Hey, Marc. Hey, everybody.

Marc Petit:

So today we're going to talk about the metaverse with a very specific focus on retail because we will want to do commerce in the Metaverse. We have the privilege to have Martin. Martin, you may know has been a pioneer in implementing CG at IKEA in all of the workflows and we'll get to talk about it in a second. So Martin is managing innovation at IKEA. He's been there for more than 15 years, but he also is a strong community contributor as the Vice President of Kronos (The Khronos Group), right Martin? With a focus on 3D cars and 3D, and is heading all initiatives at IKEA around spatial computing, 3D development, and everything. So Martin, welcome. We're very, very delighted to have you with us today.

Martin Enthed:

Thank you for having me here. It's a little bit strange hearing your voices and seeing your faces at the same time. I've been listening to you when I'm walking in the morning. So it feels like I've been here before.

Marc Petit:

Martin and I have a long... I supported Martin in his endeavor of implementing CG workflows at IKEA since my early days at Autodesk. So it's been a long, long road together, right, Martin? Now you're getting into the world of real time, and therefore in the metaverse.

Martin Enthed:

Yeah, it started really 2015 somewhere. It's really cool to be able to look into this in a company where you can have these long term plans. I normally make 10, 15 year plans, but in the companies before IKEA, I could really not have done that then, and it was three months or six months plans if they were long. So it's really cool to be able to do that and also have people around you and not doing it alone. That's a really cool thing to be able to do.

Marc Petit:

Of course. So we'd like to hear in your own words your journey to the metaverse through computer graphics. Can you give us an overview of how you got where you are today?

Martin Enthed:

How long do we have? No, short version. I'm a self-taught programmer from the beginning. Stumbled on computer graphics 31 years ago now, that's a long time ago and fell passionately head over heels in love with it, and I couldn't think about anything else then start working with this. There was no jobs where I was then so I had to start my own company. Then I did that for many years. Then I got hired by IKEA to do something that I was thinking, "This is impossible." And that was to use CGI, this was in 2007, use CGI to do marketing images. Not replacing photos, but actually having them next to photos. So, one photo, one CG and they should look the same. So that took me into a 10 year thing. It took like six years until we can actually could do it, and then three, four more years until we could really do it really, really well. Now it's a huge part of our production of images every year, and we do about 50,000 images a year. High-res 7k photos or renderings.

Martin Enthed:

So in 2015 when this was starting to roll out, then I started this next thing, and to make it really easy, it's doing the same thing but not saving the JPEGs. Just doing it live and delivering. For me, it's the same journey. As you're being part of the first journey, talking about cube maps for rendering, reflections, all those things, all those things comes back, when we're talking about what we're doing now, but we're doing in the real time instead of using them on a computer with less power. So in 2015, I started the lab thing and that's where we're looking at this spatially aware future. So that's what I'm doing now full time.

Marc Petit:

So does Ikea catalog contain any photographs anymore?

Martin Enthed:

The Ikea catalog is no more.

Marc Petit:

True that. Does the Ikea website have any photography anymore?

Recorded Intro:

Yeah, if you want to look at something that is on paper, if you are a little bit old and want to hold your things and go through them, then go to a store and get your hands on the kitchen brochures.

Marc Petit:

Are they real photography or synthetic photos?

Martin Enthed:

All of it is CG.

Marc Petit:

All of it CG.

Martin Enthed:

Yeah, that's the ones that we started out with in 2008 2009. Because they need so many images because of all the differences all over the world. We are present in 62 countries now, I think. Some have gas hubs, some have electric hubs, some have this and some have that, everything is different in the kitchens. So doing locally relevant kitchens is a really big thing to try to make that work.

Marc Petit:

Patrick, I'll say it because... And the way Martin handled that, he makes sure that he could actually bring along the photographers and the traditional people to the new technology. He's not just replacing existing people with technology. So it was always top of mind and put the bar very high in tools so that traditional photographers could actually come across into the new world, right Martin?

Martin Enthed:

That was actually not my idea but it was another person's idea internally, one of the other managers, and I supported it fully when he wanted to do that. So it was a brilliant thing. We did it for three, four years between 2010 and 2013. I think it was where photographers had to become junior 3D artists and 3D artists had to become junior photographers. I could say that the photographer's got to understand that all the things that they had learned from real life work in 3D, so they can take all their tips and tricks for how to make things look good and make it all the way into 3D. And the 3D artists had to also learn how it is to not wait for render and not drink coffee or cola or whatever you want to do because you get instant feedback and that's so nice to get. And you learn so fast when you get them.

Patrick Cozzi:

Martin, your work here is contributing to the metaverse when we think of the metaverse as a move from 2D media to full 3D immersion on the internet. So you're very early here. I really love your move to real time. I'm curious, how far do you think you'll go with real time? And what do you think about that on the web? And how important is VR?

Martin Enthed:

So many questions. As I said before, it comes natural to the extension of the offline 3D case. So not saving the JPEGs is quite nice. So trying to do that is something that we are trying to do all the time. All the 3D models we have made already is made very high-res. The reason why we do that is that we sit in a situation where our products actually live for a very long time. That's unusual in retail, but we have things that we made in 1978 that we still sell. So if we would have made a 3D model in 1978 it would have had about 100 polygons and 128 one and 28 pixels pictures probably and we wouldn't have liked that model today. So I'm going back to your question, like metaverse or 3D on the web and so on. We have to make our models so they can work 10 years from now. That's one of our problems we have to solve.

Martin Enthed:

The other one is you saying if we are working with 3D, and if you go back to the catalog, you were talking about Marc, then we started with AR in that one in 2012. And that's what's made from the same models that we did, the high-res ones, of course compressed and everything, and in 2017, we could skip the catalog as a marker and use AR kit, and the year after AR core and then we have our own little app doing that. So that has, of course been a journey to do. Then, real time graphics, we have been using in 3D editors, our planners, we call them, where we mainly have had the kitchens in 3D so you can plan your kitchens and so on. Those who have been up and running since 2000 in 3D.

Martin Enthed:

So those are 21 years old. It's not the 21 year old tool we use now but you follow what I mean. The last five years, I think all these web browser planners or editors for different parts of our range are all 3D. All based for glTF. All optimized for that. We have things also for internal purposes where we're using that. Then as we said before, we have our offline rendering case that is using real time stuff. So we try to use as much real time renderings and so on in the tools we use. We try to use physics engines and so on so we can place products inside things. Just placing macaroni in a jar takes some time if you do it manually, so those real time things we have had in our production pipeline now for 10 years. So it's real time in different areas. Yes. And real time for us is just not having to wait. It's not really a purpose by itself. It's just not having to wait. Does that make sense in any way?

Marc Petit:

It does. First of all, synthetic for the metaverse are very, very fashionable topics, and I think people need to understand that you've been doing this for many, many years. Well, a lot of people are coming to it and so it's interesting. If you had to restart again with the technology of 2021, how would you approach your pipeline differently? What will you do differently? What would be if you had a white page situation in front of you?

Martin Enthed:

It's hard because as it were in the beginning 2007 to 2012, back then we only did the parts of the range or the parts of our product range that was possible to do in 3D. If we would start in today with that background, they would like us to do everything. Every hairy pillow, all these very hard computer graphics things directly. But if we wouldn't have had that and we would have started back then, we probably would have done the same thing. That we would have taken the easy ones, the plastic, the simple wood, the things that are almost in real time in almost any game engines like yours Marc, or other game engines. They can do that. They can do this, I shouldn't say simple, because it's not simple to do in real time, but comparatively simple things, and we would have skipped everything with subsurface scattering. We would have skipped everything would be tough ray tracing. We would have skipped anything that would have been an internal case where you're only lighting things from the side with a skylight or from the top with a skylight that is dimmed or something like that.

Martin Enthed:

So I would have started with the easy stuff to show that it works and then worked myself up to the next 10 years until everything can be done in real time. That's also one of the things that is really tough for us. If I only would have done phones or cars then I know the limitations. I know cars are hard. I know I've worked for car guys and I know how picky they are about the flakes in the metallic and all that. But it's only one problem. I have everything from plants to scented candles with soft subsurface scattering, glass stuff, we have hairy things, we have a hard surface body big things, we have almost every computer graphics problem but we don't have tough animations. So we don't have characters on those things. So that's nice. But if you look at static stuff, then from a material and rendering problem, we have all the problems there.

Marc Petit:

True. I remember we had a lot of conversation about putting us through on a sofa.

Martin Enthed:

Yes.

Marc Petit:

It was an animation problem even though the outcome was a fixed image. It was a tough one to solve back in the day.

Martin Enthed:

I was just thinking, but because I lost one of your questions, Patrick, the virtual reality one. If you mean an immersive, fully virtual space where we let you in and you can examine and look around and so on, then we have been doing that at IKEA for 40 years. If you go to the second floor in every store, you have these rooms that are made, like virtual reality experiences where you walk in and you touch things then you walk out and then you remember them. That's the whole idea with those. That's the reason why we got help from you Marc and did that virtual reality room in 2016. It was launched there I think. You helped us very much there.

Martin Enthed:

The thing is, when it comes to virtual reality, we have been using it internally for different use cases. But externally, we are waiting for our 100 million mark. And our 100 million mark is not Marc Petit, that's the mark of when there are so many devices out there. That's what we're looking for it. Because we have 100 million people in our loyalty program. If there are 100 million devices out there, there is a possibility that everybody who likes us has the possibility to get their hands on the device. So we have that as a rule of thumb. So we are really here just waiting.

Marc Petit:

The follow up question, is VR the future of the IKEA experience in the store? Because we see those productions with LED screens, we can recreate very compelling, immersive experiences. Do you see a world where an Ikea shop is just a bunch of screens instead of having physical products on shelves but then you can express the configuration that you like?

Martin Enthed:

Our stores work really nice, a lot of people go there. They work really well in our supply chain and all those kind of things. We are experimenting with smaller places inside cities. I don't know if any one is close to you. We have like 40, 50 different places in the world where there are in the middle of cities and some of them have a specific thing they are doing. So it could be a place just for kitchens, it could be a thing that is more generic and so on. Then of course, we have our ecommerce site and all that. The thing is, we are trying to be where the customer wants us to be. So we are not trying to push anyone. We are trying to be where they want to be. If they want to be in a VR headset, we will probably try to be there. If they want to be on a phone, we are trying to be there. So we are following in that case more than them pushing. Does that makes sense in any way? No, I think it does. It does for us, at least.

Marc Petit:

I know there's an IKEA Paris, a very expensive real estate. I'm sure that real estate is managed very, very strategically. So do you think digital content is part of the solution there?

Martin Enthed:

It definitely has. We are trying not to separate physical and digital if we can. It's hard in a big company like ours but we still try to make the use of both things where they make most sense. So if we can show variations on a screen instead of having all of them on very expensive floor space, yes, of course we do that.

Marc Petit:

That's pretty metaversy in and of itself. That merging of the physical and the digital and starting to put screens everywhere.

Patrick Cozzi:

Martin, I want to ask you a geeky question as I'm known to do from time to time. I really liked your insights on the variety and challenges of the different materials you have to render and your definition of real time. Not necessarily 60 frames a second but fast enough so the user doesn't have to wait. So a theme we've seen come up time and time again on this podcast has been hybrid architectures where the rendering may be done in the cloud. So have you looked at anything where you may do something real time in the browser that's instantaneous and then maybe path trace in the cloud and send down an image?

Martin Enthed:

Yes, I presented it publicly. We did it in 2010. It worked nicely. The problem is we have too many customers. We have to have too many servers standby and waiting for the job to do it, even if it only took 10 seconds to render. So yes, we know we can do it. It's just, we have too many customers so it will cost us too much money to do it. To be totally honest.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, everything is IKEA is at such a scale.

Martin Enthed:

Yeah, that's the real problem. So if we hide it away somewhere where nobody can find it, then we could do it.

Marc Petit:

But then it's defeating the purpose.

Martin Enthed:

I will say this, what we are trying to do is trying to make most of it happen on the device that the customer has. It makes most sense. Then, of course, we could offload smaller things, like if we would have liked to have collision detection, or if you would like to have some things that are not really rendering or something that doesn't have to happen 15 frames a second, those kinds of things I'm at least thinking about how we could push to the cloud or do something and because then you can do it in an effective way and it doesn't have to be snappy and all that. So those kinds of things, yes, but the full thing and they just streaming video doesn't really fit our use case.

Marc Petit:

So maybe guys we'll switch gears and talk about open standards, because Mark is also a vice president of The Khronos Group and the premise of this podcast is to sustain the conversation around the creation of an open and fair metaverse, but primarily open and discuss interoperability. You have deployed extensively glTF in the ITF pipeline. What's your take on NClTF? And what do you think is the next step that glTF should take?

Martin Enthed:

Yeah, we started looking at the glTF almost at the same time as I was switching over to this spatial computing thing. And I started to talk to the people behind or leading Khronos in 2017. And my first question was, does a retailer like IKEA have any space at all in anything like Khronos, you know who's there? It's software developer or hardware developers or hardware companies, there is no one like us or weren't no one like us when we started. So we went in and I still remember the first time I dare to speak up, it took like almost a year to listening in and trying to understand how it worked.

Martin Enthed:

I think you were there, Patrick. I had a presentation on a stage at SIGGRAPH, telling what I would like to have as a roadmap for PBR next or extensions. And I actually looked back at that before this meaning and I had five things, they're on a roadmap on a falling scale, and they are actually come now, three of them. There are two left, I won't tell which, but it took a few years. Nobody's listening. Yeah. The things that happens in the working group should be staying in there, and the maps and then the plants and all that. So that's it. But it's nice to see that even if it's a company like us coming in, in a group like that, we cannot I think in a way affect the direction, of course, we are not part of the solution. We are not the deep geek tech people, we have some now, but we didn't have back then. And we can still be part of having a voice. We have a vote even if we don't vote a lot, because we are almost always doing things on consensus.

Martin Enthed:

But still, it's nice to see that you can have a place in there. And we are coming with real examples, like how many objects do you have that needs any kind of coating? Yeah, we can take it out from our database. This many objects needs some kind of coating, okay, then we should maybe focus on doing coating. And then coating comes out. So that's really our contribution in there. And then I think a year or two years after we, together with our friends, Target and Wayfair and a lot of others, I shouldn't name anyone. But we came together and said that we need to do something when it comes to the consistency on how it looks. So really trying to say, okay glTF as a format, it's not really made and when you use that it's not really said that exactly how you're going to render it. It's just said, you can render it this way, you can do a cartoonish rendering, you can do a playful rendering, or you can do with flat 2D rendering, you can do anything you want to, the format doesn't force you.

Martin Enthed:

But if you want to do it the way it's gonna look like a real thing in the real world that we are interested in and most retailers are interested in, then we form 3D commerce in there. And that's what we're trying to aim for with 3D commerce. So really, commerce is more how it looks and 3D formats for me, it's more the actual format than what it contains. Patrick, you have been leading it, I shouldn't say this. Am I right? Am I okay with telling it like that?

Patrick Cozzi:

I love the origin story and your perspective there. Yeah, I think it's really accurate. And certainly my experience with the 3D Commerce has been just a huge influx and interest and ecosystem growth for glTF. And very much moving forward the PBR materials, which I think glTF now has a nice set of open PBR materials.

Martin Enthed:

Yeah, I see it moving. But then I know a lot of people think that standards Oh, boring, it takes too long. I want to do it myself. I don't want to wait. And I understand that... If you have three months, like three months heads up, you can look that far or six months and I have to deliver, I need to get food on my table, I can totally understand your impatience. That's why I say it's so nice to be at the company where I can have a 15 year plan. And I definitely have a 15 year plan when it comes to standards, because I think it will take time.

Marc Petit:

So tell us more about this 15 year plan. What do you think? What's the next big thing that we need to tackle from a vision perspective?

Martin Enthed:

Yeah, the thing is that we can handle a lot of things internally at IKEA as long as we are the end user of what we do. And I want to connect to your headline here, the metaverse. At least in my mind, the metaverse when it comes to become something real interesting, is when stuff are leaking out from our page to the world. If you would take the web page analogy. So you have a web page, you put things up there, it's under your control, you know what it is, and you can link to others and nice. But when your things on your page starts to mix with somebody else's things on their page, and then I'm placing a couch on Time Square, and somebody else puts another thing on top on it from another vendor, then we're starting to populate the metaverse with things.

Martin Enthed:

Or if you are inside a game or playing like I almost always only know the games my guys have been playing. So it won't be any of the nice ones. But you follow what I mean? It doesn't have to be a shoot them up game. It can be a nice Roblox or something like that. It doesn't have to be in the physical world, but it can be in a totally virtual world, but still mixing up things. Because that's what we were doing in the real world. Why shouldn't we do it in the metaverse thing?

Marc Petit:

I mean, this was interesting to observe in Fortnite is that collision of brands and franchises. You can have Spider Man and The Mandalorian in the same action. But as Matthew Ball pointed out on this podcast, that's what we did in our bathroom in our bathtub with figurines as kids. For users, this notion of brands is something that they... The brands they like, they want to put them together. So how do you approach this, the dissemination of the digital versions of your products. Is it something that you're looking forward to? Do you want hopefully to make others IKEA furniture proactively or what's your take?

Martin Enthed:

We are already doing that in the physical world. So why should the digital world be different? I don't know. I think that's a little bit of a way, but if you would like to do this anyhow, you have to come together around standards. And I think you have to come together around rendering materials and shaders and surface appearance, whatever you want to call that. Because otherwise, if you take something from an IKEA thing, and you take something from Target, you take something from JD or Alibaba or Amazon or anything, and you put it in the same space. If you haven't at least try to align on how you do these things... One of them will be burnt out, so you don't see anything, it's totally white, the other one is totally black. And the two of them, one is green, and one seems to be a yellow, but all of them are supposed to be in the green.

Martin Enthed:

And as long as you're in your own walled garden, then it doesn't really matter. Because then you know when you have control and everything. And I guess that goes for Roblox or if Facebook does something or Snapchat does something, it's their thing and you have to do your content specifically for those. I would like it to be in a way so I can do content once, and it can work everywhere. That will be...

Marc Petit:

So we had Guido from Adobe, Guido Quaroni, on the podcast a few weeks back and he's a strong advocate of MaterialX actually... USD and material acts to support those workflows. So is USD and MaterialX other things that you've been looking at at IKEA?

Martin Enthed:

Yes, definitely for our offline rendering case. So that we have been doing. The problem for us there is that we have been working with this for 10-12 years so we are a little bit stuck with our friends at Khronos Group. And that's no secret. So we have been rendering with V Ray all these years, and that works great. We have been trying to make this work with V ray in a good way, we haven't figured it out yet. But as soon as it does, we can start playing with it in a way we want to play with it and see how it works.

Marc Petit:

So what is your take on the IUD plan or are you using USD as an authoring solution? We talked a few times on the podcast about how glTF is transmission publishing format and how USD seems to be emerging as a potential candidate to become a unified offering format. So is that a vision you subscribe to?

Martin Enthed:

When I saw it the first time I totally fell in love with USD, maybe it's because I'm a programmer and a database person at the same time. So looking at how it's written, it's almost like a programming language with classes and overrides and inheritance and those kinds of things and external references that makes it really powerful. So that's what I've been looking at. And my problem again is my Lego pieces. The things we have in glTF now or max and V Ray and rendering, and so all the objects have never worked in USD, so we can use them. Because we haven't gotten support for the rendering engines we have, and from the tools we have been using. So it has been a thing we have been looking at, we have been inspired by it.

Martin Enthed:

But we have never been able to use it in large scale. We are trying to use it in the non-render sensitive part right now. That's where we are trying to use it. And we have been using it, of course, to try to get USDC files out from the glTF. So yes, we are looking at it in that end use case, but the power of it should be when you are authoring, when you are building things. That's where I would love to use it, but haven't been able to.

Patrick Cozzi:

So Martin, we've covered a lot of ground today. Is there any topics we didn't cover that you wanted to talk about?

Marc Petit:

No, look, the USD conversation is always something that comes back and especially around... USD seems to be such a strong base, but where do we go from there? So do you have any opinions or sense about how we should, as an industry, evolve on top of the base that uses...

Martin Enthed:

I hope that USD can come into some kind of governance that is not handled by one company only, even if they have done it very openly, and very nicely from Pixar to make it open source. I think that's a tremendous thing they've done. But I would like it to be in some kind of governance where a company like us could contribute also. A company like us is not the company who are earning money from me using 3D really. Everything we do with 3D is costing from something else. We are not selling a game, we are not selling an experience, we are using it to promote something else. So we want it to be as slim, as easy and as open as possible. And all the problems we want to solve, we would like to get the input to somewhere.

Martin Enthed:

And it's really hard to do that when there's no governance to go through. But then if they want to make it, where they want to put it, or how they want to do it. I don't really know. I'm trying to be part of the discussion when it comes to where it could go. Because I would be feeling so bad if it didn't come into an open governance somewhere, that I think they would benefit from.

Marc Petit:

I agree. And I'm going to say you've seen these because, I mean, a few people have said it here on the podcast, I think it's kind of an important topic. Again kudos to Pixar, done an amazing job taking the technology to where it is and Guido left a few weeks ago, we got to tell him in person that we see all the work that Michael and Guido are doing around USD with everybody... It's such a potential to solve some important problems that we will have to create an open Metaverse set, that governance topic is yet to be addressed. So I'm glad we got to talk about it.

Martin Enthed:

But it doesn't stop really with like USD or glTF or these different things. It's so many more things that we need to do. It's like defining resolution, defining where does things snap to each other? How do you do that in a generic way? How do you store alternatives? How do you store physics? How do you store persistency in AR, so you can have it anchored somewhere in the world, and it's there when you come back? There's so many different standards out there... Some of them exist, and we just need to connect to them. And some of them don't exist and we need to figure out where the heck should we have them and where do we govern them? How do we do this? So it's not like okay, we have a forum and now the metaverse will work. We have like 99 of the 100 standards that still needs to be done. So I see the next 15 years where we were talking about these things.

Martin Enthed:

So many times there will be so many podcasts around so many new things that we need to solve. And we haven't even gone into ethics and how much data we are allowed to store on things and so on and thankfully it's not us who will be the biggest ones there. That will be the people who make the applications, and mainly the guys who make the hardware, who will be figuring out that first. But there's so many things needs to be done before we get to what I think the metaverse will be.

Marc Petit:

I fully agree and it was nice for you to remind us that the material problem is not even solved today. So we have to go all the way to simulated worlds. So the road will be indeed very long. But hopefully we get... And I want to see we advocate, Patrick and I on the podcast, is a bias for action over conversation and try to start now and chip away at the problem with a regular cadence.

Martin Enthed:

Yeah, and we are trying to help as much as we can. It's a little bit hard for us to share stuff, because it's sensitive, some of the things. But we have actually started something really small. If you go to github.com/ikea, you will find our first little data set that we have been releasing. A small little thing. And it's really to help people who want to do research around assembly instructions. So you will find glTF files of products you can buy, that also have all the things in there. All the screws, all the things so you can start doing those kinds of research that we know a lot of people are already doing, and on data sets that is not even ours. And that is from IKEA, it says. But now this one is actually the first one that is coming from us.

Marc Petit:

So do you see a day when we have an instruction manual that's self-contained into a glTF file? Because we have all the logic and all of the sequences for that kind of presentation.

Martin Enthed:

Would you like that Marc?

Marc Petit:

I would love it. Personally, I would love it. I think it's...

Martin Enthed:

Do you think we want our customers to like us?

Marc Petit:

I do.

Martin Enthed:

Okay.

Marc Petit:

Well, thanks for returning the questions to me. So anything we didn't ask you, we should have asked you.

Martin Enthed:

Yeah, I always get questions about our meatballs. So you didn't ask about those. And they come in two flavors nowadays. They're both meat and vegetarian versions.

Patrick Cozzi:

They're delicious.

Martin Enthed:

Yeah. And then actually, they're selling quite well. And no, you didn't ask if we have problems to find talent. And yes, we do. And yes, we are constantly looking for it. I guess the problem is that the rest of the world is doing that at the same time. And people haven't really understood that we are pretty good at computer graphics, because our images are too good. So it actually hurt us a little bit. But that's also one of the reasons why I'm talking like on these kind of talks, and I'm out talking about our problems and all that so...

Marc Petit:

Yeah, so I want you to see there is almost no more photos in the IKEA marketing, because they are not...

Martin Enthed:

There's a lot of photos still, but then a huge amount of CG too, yeah.

Patrick Cozzi:

And Martin, we have a lot of really brilliant computer graphics students at University of Pennsylvania. I'm happy to introduce you.

Martin Enthed:

Yeah, just point them our way.

Marc Petit:

Since we are doing this podcast as a community and we like to get some your perspective, is there any organization or person that you would want to give out kudos and a shout out to that you think deserves some public attention?

Martin Enthed:

Yeah, I'm so happy that so many want to interact with us. It's not the first company in the world you think about when it comes to computer graphics. So I'm really happy for that and especially the people who helped us on our first 10-15 year journey we had with Khronos Group and Autodesk. But then in the real time journey, you guys at Epic have been really nice to us, helping us out... As well as Unity with the early AR stuff. And nowadays, the 3D web engines, and smartphone graphics card companies and all that. So a lot of people are interested in helping us and I am... Like I turned back the question to you, it seems like a lot of people understand what IKEA problems should be.

Martin Enthed:

I don't even have to tell. So I get a lot of nice people coming to us with their ideas, and it's really nice working for a company where people want to come to us with their ideas. So I would like to give a shout out to almost everyone. It's really cool to see all the people who are thinking about IKEA as a problem. That's really cool.

Patrick Cozzi:

And Martin, I think just the breadth of your shout outs there is just a specific example of the amount of collaboration that's happening in graphics and the building up the metaverse.

Marc Petit:

And I think, Martin, you've been on the road for the past 15 years to evangelize both the problem and the progress of IKEA, so I think you got this upon yourself. You got all this attention upon yourself because you've done such a good job. And I want to thank you for being there with us today because you're one of the people from your company that have been advancing the state of the art. I mean, the pipeline you've put together is world class. I got the privilege to see it. You have some companies and nothing, could run entire movies on the pipeline that you have built. So it's fantastic to see you there, fantastic to see you guys invest in real time, fantastic to see you bring all that knowledge to the Khronos organization and, help the community so that, we do e-commerce properly. And ultimately we have a good looking metaverse and a fair and open metaverse. So thank you so much for everything. Thanks for being with us today.

Martin Enthed:

Thank you for having me. Both you and Patrick.

Marc Petit:

Great to have you, Martin. Yeah, I want to thank our listeners, we have more and more. I pretended earlier that nobody was listening, but that's not true. We are actually getting extremely good feedback, because people like you Martin. We invite people who have things to say and I think we get good feedback. So thanks for everybody who's listening. As usual, we want to hear from you so you can of course subscribe. You can rate, you can review, you can send us on social your feedback, your comments. We're looking forward to hear from everybody. So Patrick, on to the next time. Thank you. Thank you, Patrick.

Patrick Cozzi:

Thank you, Marc. Thank you, Martin. Thanks, everyone for listening.

Marc Petit:

And we'll be back. Take care.