Transcriber: Massimo Bidussi Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
Today I will be talking about
how our world is in a digital transformation
and I'm here, I'm here to ask you
to embrace this digital transformation
because if you embrace it, you can also shape it.
You can shape it towards the benefits of yourself,
or the benefits of others
and of course both is fine.
So, my name is Robert Overweg,
I create art,
and I help companies in changing towards a smart digital world.
In the beginning of my presentation,
I will be showing you a lot of examples
of where you already see this digitisation happening.
So, let's start the show.
So, digital is taking over.
Maybe you know Hatsune Miku.
She's this digital pop star,
-- and the sound can go just a slightly bit higher? --
she has millions of fans, mainly in the Asian market,
and people can sing together with her
every word of her lyrics,
and these people go really crazy about her.
And you could say that this is an Asian phenomenon,
and maybe this sort of crazy things happen more over there,
but she already visited David Letterman,
so, you see, these crazy phenomena
are already moving into the Western world as well.
And in a more recent example,
this is a game character from the game Final Fantasy
but she's also a Louis Vuitton model,
and she gives her own interviews.
So, it's a crazy world already.
And on the other side of the world,
people are 3D scanning their children,
objects around them, and you can do that really easily
just with a simple application.
Application is called 123D Catch,
you just take 20 something photographs,
the app stiches it together
and then you have a 3D scan of your kid.
Of course you can scan your kid,
(Laughter)
or you can scan other stuff.
So, people all around the world are already documenting these things.
And this guy, this guy went to a fair,
it's CES,
and he had his face 3D-scanned
and now he ends up in a computer game
in a really popular game right now, Fall Out 4.
So, he's walking around as his own avatar
in this computer game.
And Obama, instead of having a normal photograph being taken of him,
he has a 3D-scan made of his face
through a set that you can see here.
And for me where it comes really interesting
is where the physical and the virtual world
sort of transform into each other
or where they mix together.
That's what you see here.
And the company Rescape has been acquired by Oculus
and the most interesting thing for me here
is when your friends walk into the view of your phone
that they walk into the view as avatars.
So, the physical and the virtual world is really mixed here,
you can have different experiences
while you're in this physical space.
If you look back at the movie Avatar,
it cost 300 millions dollars to make
and James Cameron said "I can only make this movie
if I have the right equipment".
And they built this.
So, this is a camera, and through this camera,
he could look from the physical world into the virtual world.
And if you make the comparison back to the previous example,
then it's almost the same but of course still in lower quality for us,
but it runs on your own iPhone already.
It's the same sort of software, so it's moving really fast.
And Project Tango is a project by Google.
They will add two cameras on your tablet, and when you walk around with your tablet
it will 3D-scan your environment,
so you will 3D-map, for an example, this space.
And people will probably be doing this at home
because this could be end up on your smartphone or on your tablet.
And when a driveless car from Google drives around
it's constantly scanning the environment and this is actually what it sees.
So it gathers one gigabyte of data each second.
So it's constantly scanning and constantly scraping the data.
And you can't tell me that they won't be using
this kind of data files later in the future.
And other companies have created 360° cameras
and through these cameras, you can put it here,
and then when you're sitting at home, you could experience
like, how it is to stand here on the stage
and Jaunt is building this, Nokia, Google again,
so a lot of companies are working on this.
So, when you see all of these things combined,
then I believe that we will experience these recordings
or simulations through virtual reality.
And of course virtual reality, it's not there yet,
and it would probably take another couple of years
before it will be among the masses,
among many people.
But Facebook bought Oculus for £ 2 billions,
Sony jumped on the bandwagon, this virtual reality train is leaving.
And every 12 to 14 months, this technology gets better.
It's improved in latency,
the quality gets better, and the price will eventually drop as well.
So what Google did, they already handed out 500,000 headsets to schools.
And those kids in schools they can go to, for an example,
the Great Wall of China and the teacher can select
where they are going and together they can be on this virtual school trip.
And the teacher can ask questions about what is happening, what they see.
And so it can be the Great Wall of China or anything they want,
maybe even in the deep sea.
And of course you can also drive a Formula 1 car in VR
and feel like you're really doing that
or look over the shoulder of Max Verstappen
and see how he's performing, that's also pretty crazy.
Or maybe soccer, we can transform soccer matches
into virtual reality simulations.
So, for you, you can actually stand on the field
and feel how it is to score as Messi
or how it is to stop a goal as a goalkeeper.
This is already a reality, so we're already here.
Or you can go to a concert, but you don't need to leave your room,
or leave your house,
you can just sit at home, put on your headset,
and then when Kanye West raps towards camera
it would feel like he's rapping towards you.
But while all of this is pretty cool,
this is entertainment, and I love to create entertaining stuff,
I love to create stuff that makes you feel laugh,
which makes you laugh.
But it's also interesting if you can do a little bit more.
So, it was 2008, I was in a museum in New York,
and then I found this game, it's a game called Snow World.
And in Snow World, you need to throw snowballs toward snowmen and penguins.
And you move through this icescapes,
now you're thinking "Ok, what's the big deal?"
They used this game for children who have burn wounds.
These burn wounds need to be changed, the bandages need to be changed everyday.
And that caused them excruciating pain.
But when they play this game in virtual reality,
they feel less of the pain.
So actually through virtual reality and a little bit of distraction,
we're making their lives better.
And when I saw this, I was like, wow, if we could do this sort of things,
I really need to get on this program as well.
So, what is then important to do?
First, gather knowledge of what is possible
and this has a little bit to do with manipulating the mind maybe,
so we started looking into what has already been done in this field.
This is a study by Elisabeth Loftus, it's called Lost in the Mall,
and what she did, she had 24 people, she interviewed them
and she wrote down four childhood memories.
And she wrote them down on paper,
and she gave them to then
but one of the childhood memories was false.
And then she interviewed those people,
and seven out of the 24 people
started to have recollection of the false childhood memory.
So, I'd like to show you a video of Chris,
there should be audio with this:
"…I was lost and I was crying and…
I remember that day, I was so scared I might never see her again
I know I was in real trouble.
I remembered the stores, the guestrooms, the stores
an older man approached me, he was tall, I don't know his age but he was older.
He had a flannel shirt on, I remember the flannel shirt.
And I remember my mum told me "Never do that again".
RO: So, how great is it, that Chris can remember this older gentleman,
who had this flannel shirt on, while that never happened.
So, it's quiet easy for us to manipulate the mind
and implant false memories in that way.
And then we did a research,
this is an existing research, not by us,
into the more visual field.
So, for an example, if I take a photograph as you here in the audience
but then as an individual, then together with your father
and I photoshop you in a hot-air baloon.
Then 50% of the audience,
would start to have recollection of that event.
You would think: "Ah, the weather was so great,
maybe we even had a popsicle icecream"
while that never happened.
So, we are quiet easy to manipulate.
Now we also did our own research
because then virtual reality comes around the corner,
and we proved together with the University of Utrecht
that it's possible to adjust existing memories
through virtual reality replace.
So we can alter the mind. What we did,
we had soccer players kick a ball like 20 times towards a goalpost
and then we showed them the replace of their performance
but we increased and decreased the accuracy of their kicks
and we did it by 2 times, or by 1.5 times, we made it better or worse.
And they believed anything we showed them.
So, that's quiet interesting.
But what is the most interesting
is that we could also make them feel better or worse about themselves.
And then if you look at the possibility
to adjust exisiting memories through virtual reality,
then we were wondering,
what if we can adjust exisiting memories of traumatic experiences?
Then we can really add something to the world.
So, for an example, you've been in this car crash.
Normally, when you've been in something like this,
and luckily you survived, you could have anxieties,
anxieties like hyperventilation, flashbacks,
and maybe you're even afraid to drive a car.
So, it's a real strain on your quality of life.
So, we built this traumatic treatment experience in virtual reality.
What we do is, we put a photograph in front of your face in VR,
and this photograph reminds you of the traumatic experience.
At the same time, we let you perform a task with your hands.
It's called a dual task.
And you need to sort shapes and put them into designated holes.
And because your hands are busy with this task,
it desensitized the part in your brain which is responsible
for the traumatic memory.
So, in a way, if you use this technology and ethical thinking together,
then we can treat people, and make people better.
So, we've done a first pilot study already,
and the results seem really promising.
Currently, we are waiting for approval from the ethical commision
and then we can test it on an extra large group of patients.
Now, I've got one more thing we're working on:
so imagine this guy, he has clogged arteries
And because he has these clogged arteries,
he can only walk for 200 m and then he literally needs to pause his life
because his legs hurt too much and he can't walk on.
So, he can do 2 things: either he can have surgery
or he can have treatment and he needs to walk through the pain.
And because it's really painful, that's really difficult to do.
So what we developed, we put the patient on a treadmill,
we put him in VR, and we tell him:
"that lighthouse you see over there, that is your 200 m mark."
But then we play a trick on his mind, and when he approaches it,
we just slightly put the lighthouse into the distance.
So, without him noticing, of course.
So he thinks: "I should be able to make it towards the 200 m mark",
but actually maybe he's already passed it.
And at the same time, we put birds in the sky,
and beautiful things to distract him from the pain.
And that's my story, that's why I'm here,
I'm asking you guys to embrace this digital transformation
and see all the possibilities that there are.
And join us in making people better through virtual reality
and help shape this change.
And we are open-sourcing all of our research
and all of the other stuff we find interesting as well,
which might help you as well.
And that's it for me, thank you very much.
(Applause)