Creativity in the Metaverse

Announcer:

Today on Building The Open Metaverse.

Glenn Entis:

One of the differences between torture and fun is iteration time. You could see that with almost any tool you would use. If it's fast enough, it's magic, it's play. Work is just joyous. And if it's slow enough or inconsistent enough in how it responds, iteration, you basically want to tear your hair out.

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:

Welcome, everybody. Welcome to our show, Building The Open Metaverse, the podcast where technologists share their insight on how the community is building the metaverse together. Hello, I'm Marc Petit from Epic Games, and my cohost is Patrick Cozzi from Cesium. Patrick, how are you doing today?

Patrick Cozzi:

Hi, Marc. Hi, everybody. Doing fantastic.

Marc Petit:

Today, we're very lucky to have Glenn Entis with us. Glenn Entis was a pioneer of many things in computer graphics, computer animation, and in games. Glenn, welcome to the show. I'm going to let you introduce yourself. Please tell us in your own words what was your journey to the metaverse?

Glenn Entis:

Sure. Well, first of all, thanks Marc and Patrick for having me. I'm really happy to be invited for this. The metaverse is still forming, so I have no idea if I'm in the metaverse or not. I can tell you how I go in this direction. I don't know if I can tell how I got here, because I don't know if I'm there.

Glenn Entis:

I was born in 1954, and like almost everybody, either you start with those seminal experiences you had as a kid, which was pre-digital, I had huge summers in the summer of '64 and '65 at the New York World's Fair. I still go back to that fair almost 60 years later and learn from it. When I think about that in terms of the metaverse, and some problems that are coming up now, I think of that fair as a place that was separate from the outside world. It was rich and had variety, but there were some rules, there was some consistency, there was some commonality that allowed you to go from the national pavilions, to the cultural pavilions, to the commercial pavilions. The commercial pavilions, some of them were just giant commercials, but some of them were amazing science fiction visions of the future or of the past.

Glenn Entis:

It was this place where you felt like you were in the world, but there was a new set of special rules that shaped the experience. There was a tremendous sense of the future as being this really vibrant, optimistic thing that was right around the corner. I think the World's Fair tried to bring future events into much closer focus for the people who were there. Video phones, imagine someday we'll be having pictures on our phones. And all kinds of new technologies. I still go back to that to think about how entertaining that was, how absolutely mesmerizing it was.

Glenn Entis:

But there was no story to the New York World's Fair. It created a place where people would live and create their own stories, and it completely enriched it. So there was plenty of design and plenty of thought into what would make an enriched entertaining place. But then it was left to us who were there to really make that happen. I see so many games that are still trying to aspire to that experience that you can get at a World's Fair, or on a smaller scale, just a great party. But we'll come back to that.

Glenn Entis:

That was when I was a kid. In college, I was a fine arts and philosophy major. I went to school thinking I was going to be a physics or math major, ended up philosophy and fine arts. Was in love with technology. Everything I thought about was technology and art. Got out of school in 1976, and then realized, oh, I need to learn a program. Maybe I should have taken some programming classes back in that. I Got a job on Wall Street as a programmer for Morgan Guaranty Trust, and started graduate school in New York in computer science. As part of that program, I was introduced to Ed Catmull, who had just been out NYIT for a couple years. And wow, what a lucky break for me to get into Ed's computer graphics class in 1977, and then again in 1979. It was just a phenomenal opportunity to learn from the best. Not just Ed, but the people who were in the lab and what they were doing was a huge eye opener for me.

Glenn Entis:

My first computer animation job was in New York City as a freelancer on a Rutt-Etra... It's a hybrid digital analog animation machine in 1977. I was hooked. I was absolutely in love with computer graphics. I got hired out of New York by HP in 1979, which moved me to Silicon Valley. Worked at HP as a software engineer. And then at Ampex on the AVA Paint System, which is one of the first commercially available paint systems. Working on adding features to Alvi Ray Smith's code that they had licensed from NYIT.

Glenn Entis:

And then in 1982, I met Richard Chuang and Carl Rosendahl. We had a common vision of having an animation studio. I had already applied to the handful of animation studios that were around at the time and they all turned me down, so what better way to get a job than just to start your own company and hire yourself? The three of us started into computer animation in 1982. We did broadcast graphics. And then that rolled into commercials, which rolled into character animation and the film special effects, and ultimately feature films. And then we're acquired by Dreamworks and became part of Dreamworks Animation.

Glenn Entis:

In 1995, I got a cold call, was really out of the blue, to see if I was interested in being CEO of Dreamworks Interactive, which was a joint venture between Dreamworks and Microsoft. Looking back, I had so little experience in games and I still wonder what were they thinking? It was interesting because, wow, did I make some boneheaded mistakes. I mean, some games that were some problematic. I say this is important, because people always talk about their successes and everything that went right. I've paid for my mistakes with scars, and I have a big T-shaped scar on my side from Trespasser, which was the most painful professional experience I ever went through, but I learned so much from it. I mean, there was brilliant technology on that. And a hats off to the team that conceived it. It was amazing technology, but we had a lot of hubris. I certainly didn't have the executive oversight to really keep us focused on gameplay, so there were so many amazing things in that game and so much that went wrong, but we learned.

Glenn Entis:

I also oversaw Medal Of Honor. That was a different kind of learning is when things go right, and you start to have the focus and the clarity of what makes a great entertaining gameplay experience. That was a great education. EA acquired Dreamworks Interactive in the year 2000. A year later, they asked me to join the worldwide exec team in Vancouver. I was Chief Visual Officer for the Worldwide Studios. And then later they added Chief Technical Officer of worldwide studios to my portfolio. And that was my job. When I left EA in 2008 I co-founded Vanedge Capital with Paul Lee, who had been my boss. He had been president of EA Worldwide Studios. I did that for a number of years as a general partner. It was a lot of fun, but honestly working directly in technology for me was more fun. I'm still an advisor to the fund, but no longer daily active. And the fund's doing great, but I'm very happy that it's in great hands that don't happen to be my hands. Free my hands for other things.

Glenn Entis:

2013, I moved back to San Francisco. Now I'm partly retired. I'm going to be 68 in a couple of weeks, the same week that our first grandchild is coming in New York, so this is a good time to be stepping back. But I still consult a lot to a lot of companies, both large and small who were working on various aspects of the metaverse. For me, I think at this point in my life a couple observations. One is, it's really interesting to be an insider/outsider with the companies that I work with. Any company I work with, I get inside enough to try to understand the world from their point of view and the problems and opportunities that they're seeing. But because I'm not there every day and I'm not worried about getting fired or my job or who likes me, it gives me a clarity and an honesty and a distance and perspective that I just love. It is a particular value that I can add that compensates for all the value I can't add, because I'm not there full time.

Glenn Entis:

The other thing I would add... If I think about the arc of my career now, it's been 45 years since my first job in computer animation, there's ups and downs. My first SIGGRAPH was 1979. It's the first time anybody saw ray tracing from Turner Whitted. And then 1980 was in Seattle. Oh my gosh, fractals from Loren Carpenter. That was an era where it just felt like every year new things became possible. Things leveled off for a while. There was incredible commercial growth, but it felt like the technical advances started to become more incremental. It was about polish and nuance and details and optimization. Lately, it doesn't feel that way anymore. It really feels like the old adrenaline is back.

Glenn Entis:

I attribute it to three things. One is the fact that computing is everywhere. Everybody always holds up their phone. That's a billion times more than something. But the fact is, computing power, it's not just everywhere. So on that dimension, we're living with it. What used to be in a separate room is now everywhere. But because so much is real time, whether it's in the games we play on our phones or in film production, it's also on that time dimension. And the issue is, at the nexus of that, it's just where I am. Where I am in space, where I am in time. That's where interesting graphics are happening. And both those dimensions are important. Everywhere without real time wouldn't be that interesting. Real time, but in a special place wouldn't be that interesting. Together it's explosive. So that's one thing.

Glenn Entis:

The metaverse itself then, as a place where whatever the metaverse evolves to be the fact that it can wrap that experience around people and create an immersive experience like we always dreamed of having, but always felt like it was a step out of reach, but we can engage multiple senses at the same time to create the sense of immersion. That's something qualitatively new too, and feels explosive.

Glenn Entis:

And then the third, and in some ways most explosive thing, somewhat related to this but somewhat just a separate path, is AI. And that's where in some ways the most explosive growth is happening in every aspect of content creation, content editing. Every aspect of what we're doing is being fundamentally year after year dramatically reshaped by AI. All that stuff together makes this to me, wow, we're back to the best of times. Maybe not a few other parts of the world, but in terms of CG we're back to the best of times.

Marc Petit:

Yeah. Let's come back to some of those things. Before I get back in the past, about AI do you believe in augmented artistry or do you believe that AI is going to take away stuff from human creativity?

Glenn Entis:

Yes and yes. Of course it's going to be both. Let me go back in history. Did movies kill live performance? Well, there's still Broadway. There's still plenty of live performances. You can go all over the world and see live performances. So the answer is no, films didn't kill live performance. It’s still alive and doing well. But did the center of gravity shift from live performance to film, in terms of the economics, mass culture, celebrity formation, all that stuff? Absolutely. The same thing will for sure happen in AI. It's a fuzzy domain. There is not going to be a binary answer in that. It's really going to be where the shifts come.

Glenn Entis:

You've seen this stuff coming out of people playing around with Dall×E 2. Dall×E 2 has just been out for, I think, just a few weeks or maybe a month or two now. The stuff that the hobbyist community is doing with Dall×E 2 are just staggering. That's a year or two after Dall×E was introduced. So that curve is like that. For sure there's going to be creations coming out of AI programs that artists would said in the past, "I would've done that or humans would've done that." So in that sense, there will be jobs taken away. There'll be things that we used to think computers don't do that computers will do. Will they replace-

Marc Petit:

Do you mind telling us what Dall×E is? Just make sure everybody understands.

Glenn Entis:

Yeah. Yeah. That comes out of the open AI initiative. It's a very, very capable neural network that basically takes in phrases and then produces images. The name Dall×E is a play on words. So Salvador Dali and Wall-E. So it's D-A-L-L.E. And then Dall×E 2 is just the second iteration of that. For any of your listeners, if you haven't heard of it or seen it, just type in just that spelling, pictures, and just wait to be amazed. And you see these amazing things, like a political propaganda poster with a cat dressed like Napoleon and holding to piece of cheese. That's actually one of the images that's there.

Glenn Entis:

You get this amazing thing that looks like a beautifully rendered propaganda with this cat with the coat and everything holding out the piece of cheese. This is coming out of a neural network, just from a phrase. It's staggering. And we're still in the infancy. So looking at that, it's hard to say AI is simply not going to be used to create at least some portion of what we consider to be art or entertainment. That question's off the table now. There's no question about it.

Glenn Entis:

It's not going to replace artists in the sense of channeling a human experience, a human sensibility shaping that. And what I hope is it ups the ante. If AI is going like this, then what the humans do using all those tools has also got to up its ante. And will be able to, because so much of that work is now being done. That's why I think there's going to be an explosive change, not just in the metaverse and how we experience our entertainment, but also the process of creating and editing and interacting and simulating worlds because of the underlying AI.

Marc Petit:

Okay. So let's go back a little bit to your beginnings when you co-founded PDI with Carl and Richard. In 1982 there was nothing about CG, right? What did you see there that decided to take the plunge? What it is that drove you? I mean, 10 years later, it was obvious. We all saw Terminator 2 and everything, it become straightforward to see why we would care. What was your internal motivation? Because the reason why I asked is, the metaverse, we're going to see similar situation. We don't quite know what it's going to be. We sense it's going to be big. How do we approach that moment?

Glenn Entis:

Yeah, so I'll admit part of my answer is going to be pure revisionism because the honest answer was, I just was in love with CG. I just realized if I don't do this, I'm going to be miserable. I'm just such a shrewd guy. Here's how the whole thought process. It was nothing that intelligent. It's just like, I'd rather fail doing this than succeed doing anything else, because if I don't give this a trial I'll die unfulfilled. I just had to do it. That's the real answer.

Glenn Entis:

The good answer is, I've always been attracted to the adrenaline of fast growth curves. You just go to an area where the technology is explosive, things are changing very quickly. When I was younger, I used to leave it at that. Now that I'm older and can be a little more honest with myself, I also realize part of that comes from a profound sense of laziness. That's really what drove me to CG in the first place. I was an art student. I was doing these meticulous still life drawings and paintings, and I saw how labor intensive it was. My first job in New York City was working on the animated film Raggedy Anne and Andy. I was just a cell cleaner. I had a menial job. But I saw how much manual labor. And I just said, that's just not for me. Oh, computers can do the hard work. They'll do the tedious work.

Glenn Entis:

What we saw and what drove all of us, I think at PDI, was we saw computer graphics was a great way to make fresh new kinds of images in a way you couldn't before. That was one thing. We had the passion and the interest, which was a really important part. Without that, it's too hard to start a company. I would never start a company if I didn't absolutely love what I was doing. And then the third thing was, we had an identified market. And that's key. I see so many companies that have passion and amazing product, and they really just can't articulate the market they're serving or the needs they're fulfilling. But networks were already doing these big graphics packages. The market was there, the buyers were there, the need was there, and we had an explosively disruptive way to serve that market. Those are all the good reasons. And we kind of sort of understood it, but like I say, the real reason was just I had to do it.

Patrick Cozzi:

What an amazing success story it turned out to be. I love the combination of having a market and following your passion. Glenn, you said something really interesting previously about that. We're back to the best of times for CG, right? And you said there's a lot of compute immersion in AI. So here we are 40 years after the co-founding of PDI. If you were starting over as an entrepreneur, what opportunities do you see?

Glenn Entis:

If I take what I said before, and then just take that as a template, which is to say, where is the biggest disruption happening? Where are the growth curves and the disruption curves the steepest? Try to match those against real needs in the market. It doesn't necessarily have to be needs that exist exactly today, because the really visionary entrepreneurs, who I don't consider myself one of those, but the really visionary entrepreneurs can see needs that really haven't been expressed in the market yet, but they know that they can create that need.

Glenn Entis:

And then the third circle is, it's the disruptive technology, it's needs in the marketplace, and then it's your own passion and interest. If I was starting out today, which by the way would be lovely to be 22 or 23 again, I'd jump on that, I wouldn't go for the metaverse. I would go right into the center of AI. But then I would be asking, how does AI live and impact what happens in the metaverse? I think that, for me, the tech curve on AI is in some ways steeper and more interesting than the tech curve on metaverse. But it's not an either or situation, because they definitely support.

Glenn Entis:

In some ways you could argue, what are you talking about? They're obviously not completely orthogonal vectors. There's a lot of overlap between what those mean. I would start with AI, and then ask myself, how is this disrupting current markets? Here's the thing. I mean, this is the thing I've learned over the years is that people can only change so fast, and organizations usually change slower than the people in it. Which means when there's a disruptive technology, by definition there's going to be huge opportunities, because even the biggest players are sometimes going in slow motion trying to catch up with it. That's when the fast entrepreneurs can come in and grab market share and build a brand.

Marc Petit:

So let's switch from technology to people, because it matters. I know that one of your areas of interest is actually coaching creative teams and the overall creative process. We're seeing, as you mentioned, that real-time is changing computer animation, changing virtual production, and the arrival of game engines. Are these tools really impacting the creative process?

Glenn Entis:

Oh my gosh, yes. Yeah. Absolutely. I define it this way. One of the differences between torture and fun is iteration time. You could see that with almost any tool you would use. If it's fast enough, it's magic, it's play. Work is just joyous. And if it's slow enough or inconsistent enough in how it responds, iteration, you basically want to tear your hair out. It could be maddening. You expand that out over time and you say, well, in a given session would I rather have fun or rather be banging my head against the wall? I'd rather be having fun. In the course of the career or the lifetime of a team, that's the difference between individuals burning out and teams just basically breaking up because they can't take it anymore.

Glenn Entis:

If I break it down, I'd say it's this. Real-time. The quantitative difference in iteration time sometimes leads to step functions in the quality of that experience. It goes to just different kinds of conversations or different kinds of iterative creative loops can happen. I think it's wildly expressed in the technology that's available today. For example, a lot of technology that's being used for real-time film production. My jaw just drops when I think about what it was like to make a broadcast graphic with some flying logos back in 1982 versus the stuff that's happening real time right now. It's amazing.

Glenn Entis:

I'll give you an example from when I was at EA. One of the things I was asked to do was revamp our pre-production process, or least improve it. I was going to EA studios all over the world and working with teams. The first time I worked with the Harry Potter team, the team working on the Harry Potter game in London, when I got there, I said, "I'm so excited. I want to see your magic wands." And they said, "We don't have any magic wands." And we talked, I said, "Actually, I didn't think you had any. Here's my point. You guys are making a third person action game on the console where you're running around and casting spells at each other. That's the game. Harry Potter is friends and there's all these different wands and all these different spells."

Glenn Entis:

And my point to them was, "You've got all this software, you're doing some prototyping the software, but at its heart this is a game that's about physical interaction and running around a space with individuals who have different ways of casting spells and different motions and different wands. Why wouldn't you have a little umbrella stand filled with different wands so that when you need to communicate to something to each other, you can say, 'I'm going to grab the Elm wand and I'm going to do this one behind my back, or I'm going to do this under my leg.' Just partly to work out an idea. And obviously it might be a little bit lower fidelity if you've got guys running around the office with wands than actually doing in the software engine.

Glenn Entis:

One of the things I think that is underrated in the use of real-time or collaborative tools is that regardless of fidelity the creation of a space where shared experience could happen amongst the creative team where they're using parts of their brain other than their cerebral, where people can actually move around the problem space together we think physically, engage their emotions, engage their bodies, laugh together, experience something together, and have a shared experience where, even if it's low fidelity, there is that shared sense of experience and that speed of communication.

Glenn Entis:

I thought it was really important with little wands. They ended up doing some great stuff when they did the Quidditch game. I've got some great shots of them taking these little action dolls and running around the office with them on sticks. And again, that looks silly, but the point was you can visualize and experience things together as a team. Now that that's moved to tech, it's explosive.

Marc Petit:

Also, the pandemic must have been very difficult for those teams, because we deprive them for two years of that ability to interact with that feedback.

Glenn Entis:

It's a real loss. It's a total loss. I mean, it's a loss for us in our individual lives, but I think it's a real loss for teams professionally as well.

Patrick Cozzi:

Glenn, continuing on this idea of the real-time and the fast feedback, you've led both movies and games teams. My understanding is the creative process for movies can be highly centralized and hierarchical, while the creative process for games can seem more collaborative. So do you think if games and movies can move to the same tools, do you think that their creative workflows will also converge?

Glenn Entis:

Let me put it this way. The idea of convergence or divergence, stay with me for a moment, on any problem domain you can talk about that if you're in a sense projecting the entire set of issues down onto a two dimensional plane. And then you could say we're mapping our production process on this 2D plane. Are they converging or are they diverging?

Glenn Entis:

In fact, from one projection you could have something that looks like it's converging, and then you turn it around and realize, oh, there's more than two dimensions here. In another dimension it's actually diverging in one dimension while it's converging in another. And the fact is, if you look at how games and films are made, there's a lot of issues. There's about the social and hierarchical structure of who's got the power and who's making the decisions. There is how pre-production and early concept work is doing. There's various aspects of how actual production and polished assets are created.

Glenn Entis:

This is a preamble to, I think it's going to be both. I am sure that the actual production process and the use of tools, how assets are created and edited, is absolutely going to converge. How can it not? If you go back into the 1990s and you look at the tools that were being used for films, live action cameras on a set versus games, relatively low res graphics, there was just no overlap between those worlds at all. And now there's huge overlap. QED, there's convergence.

Glenn Entis:

On the other hand, films are, at least as we understand them now, the final product is essentially non interactive and non-responsive to the audience. Games with all the advances in game design, real-time graphics, but then you throw AI into the mix, games are however interactive and responsive to players they are now... Again, I think we're at a place we're in an inflection point in the curve. I think that level of responsiveness is going to go up. That's a divergence, because the concept of what a game is as different is from a film, in some ways I think the visual polish will get closer to a film while the structure of what happens, even if their story, the interactive structure of what happens is going to diverge from films. If that makes sense.

Marc Petit:

Yeah, no, I think I agree with you. We haven't seen really anybody being able to fuse story arcs and game mechanics. As we looked at the metaverse you say same tools, same assets, same characters used by both. Is metaverse a new platform to create a next generation of entertainment products? I mean, new kind of content? What's your take there?

Glenn Entis:

I think it's inevitable. I mean, it has to be. As I said before, what's fascinating among the many things fascinating to me about the metaverse is the sense of immersion, this complete sense of immersion. Then you add to that the social aspect of one way or another the presence of other people in that world. That's unlike anything that we've ever had before. And as I say, I go back to the New York World's Fair and say, well, that's in some ways one of the closest models that I have. Obviously, there's a lot of games that have done something similar, including some well-known games from Epic, to create that same sense of we're having fun in this big shared space.

Glenn Entis:

But there's so much more to go. As a bonafide old guy, I tend to look back through history and you say, well, when radio came out it was actually just like people on stage talking. It took a long time for radio to evolve to top 40 playlists and all the different formats of radio. Television felt like radio, but with pictures. And then it took a while for that to evolve. That's inevitable. It's just impossible to have so many things changing in a medium, and then have the medium itself be mature right away.

Glenn Entis:

I would add to that, as I said before, the impact that AI is going to have on this then adds actually another explosive element on top of what would already be explosive with all the other stuff. So imagine, for example, what I described before is happening with, say, Dall×E 2. I can just describe a scene, and it's created. Well, right now, those neural networks are producing still images. There's no technical reason why those can't be creating 3D images. In fact, there's been some demonstration, a combination of Dall×E 2 type networks with things like NeRFs neuro rendering. You type in the description and now you've got a 3D scene that's got tremendous light transport, physics worked into the scene.

Glenn Entis:

Well, how long does it go before you can describe the motion that's happening in the scene, or you describe the simulations that are happening in the scene? And if you don't like that, then you describe the editing you want on those animations or those performances. Now we're starting to stack up the years of how far... But I'll put it this way. There may be barriers to that, but in principle all the magic we're seeing right now creating still frames, there's no fundamental reason why that kind of interaction to start to create scenes, characters, stories, whole worlds. Imagine you take that in the interactive immersive world of the metaverse, it makes your head explode about the possibilities. We're just scratching that surface. To go back to the original question, wow, how could that not be crazily wildly a new form of entertainment?

Patrick Cozzi:

Very cool. Glenn, I wanted to switch gears a little bit, and hope you could share some advice for all the entrepreneurs in the audience.

Glenn Entis:

I love giving advice. It's so much better than doing real work, so bring it on.

Patrick Cozzi:

In 2010, you co-founded venture capital firm, Vanedge, with Paul Lee, the former president of EA. I was curious, what advice would you give entrepreneurs and especially technical founders today who want to build something for the metaverse or in AI or both when they go to pitch an investor? What are you looking for?

Glenn Entis:

Okay. So I'll start with one bit of very practical advice, which is, we actually started the fund in 2008. We didn't do our first close until 2010. First piece of advice. We started right when the financial system collapsed, but we thought smart money's going to be investing, which they did. But the first piece of advice is it's probably going to take you longer to get your initial money than you think it is. We started September, 2008 and we didn't close on the first close was May of 2010.

Glenn Entis:

The advice I would give to entrepreneurs, in some sense I've already covered it, which is those three things about the question before, about what would I do if I was a young entrepreneur. I would give that to other entrepreneurs as well, which is passion, disruption, and clear sense of what your market is. A couple of other things I would add is... One question I always like to ask entrepreneurs back when I was a VC is, "What's your unfair advantage?" Sometimes you get a quizzical look. And I said, "Look, it could be anything. Often there's an unfair advantage you have with a university. You've got an uncle who's got this amazing connection. You're sitting on this patent."

Glenn Entis:

Or as an individual, we all have some liabilities. We all have weaknesses. And we all have superpowers. I always tell people the most important story to tell is your own. You can know all about the world, but if you can't tell the story of who am I? Why am I doing what I'm doing? Why is it exciting? Why should you be excited? And why do I think that I'm better positioned to do this than anybody else? Then you need to start there. The story I was really looking for is for a group to start with why they think they're better positioned to do this than anybody else. What's their superpower?

Glenn Entis:

The other thing that I think, especially when the tech curves are so steep, that I think sometimes gets lost in the shuffle, is at least as a professional investor you learn how cheap ideas are. I finally realized if someone came with a fresh new idea my mantra was, if you've got this great new product or this great new technology, probably every major metropolitan area in North America has another company working on something that's a very similar idea. What is going to differentiate winners from losers is quality and speed of execution. For people who are idea driven, and it's like, this is new, this is brand new, their instincts don't necessarily go to that. It's all about the excitement and quality of the fresh idea. As a creative person, that's what gets me excited. As an investor it's all about execution, speed, and quality of execution.

Marc Petit:

So let's talk about the community. I know you've been very involved in SIGGRAPH. I think it's fair to say we all use SIGGRAPH going to Vancouver.

Glenn Entis:

Perhaps if it was a large team effort, but that's very generous, Marc. Thank you.

Marc Petit:

And we're happy to be back to Vancouver this year. First this podcast was born of the SIGGRAPH BOF meeting, especially SIGGRAPH is where all the foundational technology that will make the metaverse were born. I mean, this is where we, the industry, have been meeting and exchanging ideas very openly for more than 50 years, I think. I personally think a lot of trust, the relationships they’ve built between industry people like you and me, you can turn around and it's always rooted in something around SIGGRAPH, whether it was a SIGGRAPH meeting, a SIGGRAPH party, or some of those things. How should the organization evolve to play the role it deserves as 3D computer graphics becomes actually the core on the internet?

Glenn Entis:

Wow. I think that's a great question, Marc. I feel like I'm a late comer to SIGGRAPH. I didn't get there until 1979. What is that? 43 years ago. But you're right. It's an amazing community. And when you look at what's happening now, partly because of COVID and the acceleration towards the need to build both individual communication and community communication virtually, but also then this convergence of all these technologies that are helping make things like the metaverse possible, it makes sense that the community of people who've built those foundational technologies are still building them. Should be in a sense eating our own dog food and saying, if we think all this stuff can make a great virtual community let's make a great virtual computer graphics community.

Glenn Entis:

But it's hard, I think for a couple reasons. One is that what makes a great entertainment community is different than what makes a great productive professional community. A lot of things that would be fun and amusing for, say, Fortnite are really just going to get in the way for people who are really focused and they want to find the people they want. They want to get to the information they want. This gets to something that's near and dear to my heart, which I'm not going to go there because it's a huge digression, but it's about creating informationally rich spaces. When I do my workshops, I talk about, "Make your environment intelligent." What I mean by that is make your environment so that there's more likely that intelligent conversations are going to happen in there that if you didn't design it that way. We can get to that if you want to.

Glenn Entis:

It's a whole different set of design issues. I'm involved with annual computer graphics conference in Torino, Italy called View. It's a good example because it's similar overlap with the SIGGRAPH community, but spectacular representation also from the creative community. The last time they had pre pandemic new conference in 2019, there were nine feature film directors there. And they were there the whole week hanging out with people, having dinners and lunches. I don't remember seeing anything like that at SIGGRAPH ever. James Cameron might come and go for a day, but not really. It was for the technical community. View brings those two together. I'm on the advisory board.

Glenn Entis:

When the pandemic hit, the question we asked is, "Okay, this sucks. Part of the View experience is the great camaraderie of people being together. How do we use that as an opportunity rather than a problem?” And what the director of that conference, Maria Lena Gutierrez, did was basically seized the opportunity and started putting the talks online, started building an international following. And in the course of that, what felt like it was originally catastrophic for the conference, has substantially increased its reach, and also its impact in the industry. It's a much smaller scale, but I think that there are certainly opportunities for SIGGRAPH.

Glenn Entis:

What I will say, as just someone who's profoundly grateful for the staggering amount of volunteer hours that go into making SIGGRAPH possible... SIGGRAPH's an all-volunteer nonprofit organization. Time's always an issue for them. Money's always an issue. I would hope that some group of the companies, like the large well-funded companies in this space who have benefited from all the great technology that's come out of SIGGRAPH over the years, it'd be amazing if there was some group of companies that got together and said, "We might be able to kill two birds with one stone here or three birds. Number one, we need to build community amongst ourselves. If we're going to build a shared metaverse, that's not just going to confuse people, piss them off because it's just so fragmented. We need to have a place where we can, neutral territory, get together and talk and communicate. We want to give back to SIGGRAPH and the technical community."

Glenn Entis:

But what a great place to test out new ideas of building out different kinds of community than simply trying to build entertainment or triple A entertainment products. Really use that as a forcing function to try out a whole bunch of new ideas of how you shape a community and give them places to come together. I'd love to say SIGGRAPH should be doing all these things. They should. It's just not reasonable unless I'm willing to roll up my shirt sleeves with 100 other people and get in there and do it. I think being profoundly ungrateful for anybody in the SIGGRAPH community to knock on SIGGRAPH's door and just say, "You guys should be doing this," because it just takes resources. Takes more resources than SIGGRAPH would have on their own.

Marc Petit:

But I love the idea of dog fooding the metaverse. If we are bound to create something that works, we should be able to do it to ourselves first. The companies you mentioned, I'm sure the big wink was for Cesium, right?

Glenn Entis:

Of course. (Laughing) Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Who do you work for, Marc? I forget.

Marc Petit:

Patrick and I are working on some other initiatives. As businesses we're going to have to come together anyway, because we have to agree on a bunch of things. We inherited from SIGGRAPH the traditional working together, that open culture. I think we can take it to the next level. But point taken again. We'll take you up on this. But you're right. We should not go to they. It's we. We have to do something.

Glenn Entis:

Yeah. It's definitely we. As soon as it becomes they, the community's lost. And then it's just a matter of finger pointing.

Patrick Cozzi:

Glenn, I mean, we see time and time again that the CG community we do find to be incredibly collaborative. And even competitors will work together for the common good of the industry. I wanted to ask if you had any other ideas on how we can help preserve this culture? And then also your thoughts on open standards to facilitate interoperability?

Glenn Entis:

Well, in some ways, I mean the second question is at least part of the answer to the first question. Having those open standards leads to that. It's tricky, and probably outside my can at this point to discuss the finer points of when it's too early to try to get to shared standards, or standards of any sort. I mean, when things are happening this fast it's really hard. You don't want to try to bake things in too early. But I think that having that sense of shared mission... The early days of computer graphics, we used to do an annual camping trip. Our arch competitor for commercial jobs was Rhythm and Hughes down in LA. And every year we would do a joint PDI Rhythm and Hughes camp out. We'd all have our families and be out there in the woods. Hard to do it at that scale now. And then we did a PDI Pixar pool party, I think in SIGGRAPH 1985 or '86. We joined together and did a shared party.

Glenn Entis:

But the point is, I think at that point we realized that the opportunity for all of us came in growing the pie, not fighting over who was going to get the biggest slice. Yes, we were competitive. Yes, we would bid each against each other on jobs. But we all recognized we had a shared interest selfishly for ourselves in the industry in growing the pie. And then if you want to take a step back and say, why are we on this planet? What are we serving? We're going to serve the world better by just focusing on growth and creating new things, and not getting caught up in zero sum games of trying to kill each other.

Glenn Entis:

The stakes are much higher now. It makes me laugh when I think about what was at stake back then, the dollar amounts. Oh my gosh. What you guys have done with Epic, Marc, and the incredible value you guys have created there, it just dwarfs by orders of magnitude anything anybody can imagine back in the computer animation business in the '80s or early '90s. It is harder when the stakes are that much higher, but I think that having a shared vision for a shared set of standards, obviously open source can help that as well. I think you guys interviewed Rob Bredow in an earlier version of that. Certainly, he's a good guy to talk to about that.

Glenn Entis:

I think that sense of shared mission. I think that the more the industry cultivates thought leaders who are willing to articulate a vision for what's happening that goes beyond what their own company happens to be doing. And I get it. Look, when we're working for a company we have to articulate a vision of the world, what a wacky coincidence, it just happens to be exactly what we're doing. This thing is happening so fast, and it's so much bigger than that. It's beyond what any one company can do.

Glenn Entis:

Last couple days I started just sketching out this little graph of who really is bringing what to the metaverse, and just realized there's so many big components. You could take company after company and just, wow, they're phenomenal in these areas. They've never really had much experience in these areas. When you look at the whole chart, it's a great complimentary picture of the skills that are out there to build something amazing. You take any one slice of that, it's like, no, they're not going to get there on their own. The more companies at a deep fundamental level realize we cannot succeed on our mission without cooperation. I'm a firm believer that at some level everybody's selfish. When they people say, "Leave your ego at the door," it's like, how do you do that? If you don't have an ego how do you get up in the morning and do all the work it takes to build something amazing? But I'm also a firm believer that a long term intelligent vision of what's good for yourself ultimately ends up becoming what's good for the community.

Marc Petit:

I fully agree. But it's time for our closing questions, Glenn. Unfortunately, the time's flying. Is there any topics that we should have covered today and we did not?

Glenn Entis:

Sometimes my problem is just shutting up. Yes, there's plenty of topics. I mean, a couple things that I'd just like to touch on. I'm not going into go any detail. One I touched on before is that so much of what we talk about with the metaverse is about entertainment, but I think that there is such an incredible opportunity there to just help us be more intelligent and make better decisions.

Glenn Entis:

I'm a big fan of Edward Tufte, T-U-F-T-E, the ex Yale professor who grew information graphics. I think he continues to make great points about the importance of using visual information intelligently so that it helps people understand complex information in a more intuitive and clear way. You look at everything that he's done in his books, and then you imagine not just the stuff verbatim, but that sensibility in the metaverse, I think there's some pretty amazing opportunities.

Glenn Entis:

The corollary to that, of course, is as humans we found with anything from petroleum to social networks and information, if we're good at producing something we're also really good at polluting with it. Everything we're talking about the metaverse, and about how easy it's going to be for people to create stuff and to share stuff, it also means they're going to pollute with it. And then you have to know, what's the difference between pollution mitigation versus actual censorship? I mean, there is a whole set of issues there that aren't for me.

Glenn Entis:

And then there's a whole other set of issues, which I wish we could do another set of talks on this, is just animation and the creation of emotionally believable experiences and characters inside the metaverse. Because it still fascinates me. I've got so many things I learned in the game industry and the animation industry behind before that about ways of economically getting bang for the buck by creating, in some cases, the simplest possible characters with the most expressive presence in the world. Sometimes I see people animating. Wow, why are they doing it the hard way? They spent all this time, modeling budget and animation budget. They tried to get lots of details, which means they're animating it poorly. And then I see something like, I love The Minions and Despicable Me because it's so simple and they got so much emotion. There's a whole set of conversations there about making a space emotionally rich and believable and engaging and interactive. There's probably more, but I'll leave it at that.

Patrick Cozzi:

Last question for you, Glenn. Is there a person or organization you'll like to give a shout out to?

Glenn Entis:

Sure. I've already shouted out the View conference, which I will say anybody who's interested in this intersection between creativity and technology, they host a lot of online things. That's the View conference and Maria Elena do a phenomenal job with that. So I'd like to shout them out.

Glenn Entis:

I work with a lot of different companies. One of the companies I work with is an animation studio, Baobab Studios, which has done brilliant VR work, has won a ton of awards, and is creating animation and intellectual property for other media as well. I'm on their board of directors. Ed Catmull just joined us recently on the board, and it's phenomenal to have him on the board. He just brings so much guidance and wisdom. To Maureen Fan, Eric Darnell, Larry Cutler, and the team at Baobab.

Glenn Entis:

But again, I'd say that they're small company. They're not operating anywhere at scale. But that's why I'm calling them out because I could shout out Epic and Google, there's amazing companies, but everybody knows about them. It's worth sometimes looking at these small companies that are really small boutiques, creatively driven and doing some amazing work. So that'd be the other company I would call out, Baobab, B-A-O-B-A-B.

Marc Petit:

Yeah. We know Maureen and Eric, they're fantastic. So thank you so much. Glenn, it's been a treat to have you with us today. Thank you so much for your time and for your wisdom. By the way, I will be at the View in October. I told yes to Maria Elena to be there in person. I look forward to meeting you there, right?

Glenn Entis:

I'll be there virtually,. This year I'm not able to go. Yeah. But I'm glad you're going. Thank you.

Marc Petit:

I'm going.

Glenn Entis:

Yeah.

Marc Petit:

Great. Patrick, thank you so much. Glenn, thank you so much. We want to thank our audiences. We get some great feedback on those conversations, so please hit us on social, let us know what we should and should not do. Keep the feedback going. Thank you very much, everybody, for being with us.