SANJAY RAVI: Thanks for joining me
for On The Go,
the podcast where we look at
what's driving the future of mobility.
I'm Sanjay Ravi and I lead
the automotive mobility and
transportation organization at Microsoft.
This week, I'm joined by
the CEO of Touchcast, Edo Segal.
Edo, thank you so much for being here with us today.
I suppose you know this,
but there's an article in
a magazine that opens by claiming you
built your career on making
unfeasible sounding projects a reality.
That's quite a statement.
EDO SEGAL: Well, thank
you for having me.
Really excited to share
my journey with you and the listeners and viewers.
Yes, it's been quite a journey and really,
I always akin the work that I
do to a bit of time travel is like
we go into this future in
our mind and we try to bring it into the present.
The further out you go,
the more outlandish it might seem but look
at the amazing things we see happening every day.
It does seem like we live in an age of miracles
on the technology front in a very turbulent world.
I do think technology has a big role to play in
compensating for all these changes and
all the volatilities in our societies and businesses.
It really is an amazing time
to work in innovation and find amazing partners like
Microsoft and amazing platforms and work with some
of the world's most incredible companies
on these journeys.
SANJAY RAVI: When it comes
to your latest venture,
Edo, Touchcast,
you launch a new category of service
called Metaverse as a Service running on Azure.
This allows for people to seamlessly
deliver powerful experiences in the Metaverse.
Can you please explain a little bit more about
that and how you're making this a reality.
EDO SEGAL: Yes, we really have all
experienced a transformative event during COVID,
where so much of the way we used to do
things changed into being conducted
as Teams calls and being done synchronously
or in a world where you're not physically in a place.
That really accelerated innovation.
We really view the work we do at
Touchcast as an extension of
that evolution as a communication technology.
We view the Metaverse as enabler of
much more effective technology
to communicate for many use cases,
whether it's a use case of trying to sell,
like you can see me now inside of
an environment which is the actual car showroom,
or an ability to train employees, ability to inspire.
There are so many opportunities to basically put me
inside of what we refer
to as a triple A Metaverse experience.
The way this is made possible is because we
use Azure to render these experiences
live on the Cloud and fuse in the Teams color.
As you can see, it's not
a typical avatar, a cartoonish character,
but rather a photorealistic outcome that
looks as indiscernible from reality where,
in fact, I am sitting in my home office without moving.
This isn't just a great way
to enable and empower people to communicate,
it is also a way for businesses to
re-evaluate how they think about their human capital.
Where are those associates that are meeting
the customers both in the physical world
and the digital plane?
At the time where businesses are
challenged and they need to reconsider
how they approach the utilization of
the humans and the IP and the connection,
the relationship that is created
between them and their customers,
as well as how they think about real estate.
The Metaverse, I think, will play a massive role in
the future of commerce in general,
just like the Internet did back in the early 2000s.
SANJAY RAVI: Segal, that's super
impressive to see how seamlessly you are
able to go in and out of that Metaverse environment.
Automotive in particular, has
been at the forefront of mixed reality.
I remember working many years ago
with engineers at Volvo and
Daimler to use HoloLens and
both Winkle design and support aspects.
When it comes to Metaverse,
we're collaborating few ways.
Could you talk about how you're partnering with Microsoft
and the work you've done in terms
of your product development cycle.
EDO SEGAL: Certainly. I think one of
the core challenges with companies in
pursuing the potential of the Metaverse is
what we refer to as the weakest link problem.
That's specifically is oriented towards
the dependency on the specific device
that the end-user has.
For as long as we expect for the potential to only come
true when people have a high-end set or a gaming PC,
we're not going to be able to penetrate a mass audience.
While we have use cases that are
phenomenal for niche use cases such as
training or design when it
comes to engaging with customers or broader universes,
we do have to find a solution like mass Metaverse,
the service that we run on Azure,
which basically runs on the server.
Generally the pendulum swings between client
and server at least throughout my career.
This is another moment where
the server has a meaningful contribution to make.
Just like the advent of SaaS,
it wasn't obvious because
before the pendulum was on the client,
you would have thick client
running on people's computers.
Then there was the realization
that we can run things on the Cloud and,
of course, that changed everything,
I think with Metaverse as well,
if you want to have this really high fidelity experience,
you can't expect every end-user device
to be able to run this level of experience.
Leveraging Azure and
all the supporting services of Teams,
Azure Communication Services,
Azure Cognitive Services we're able to put
together an incredible solution
that really delivers the future today.
If we waited for
all this compute power to be on every device,
we would need to wait 5-10 years,
but we can actually deliver that future right
now when it's architected in this way on Azure,.
SANJAY RAVI: Edo, I love how you can
transport someone into
Microsoft Teams and they
don't even have to leave their home.
Let's talk about your mission for
the wrinkle purchasing cycle in the Metaverse.
EDO SEGAL: We're having
an incredible amount of
traction with different OEMs in
the automotive sector as they look
for ways to engage with customers and
specifically educate as it
applies to the journey to electrification,
which presents several challenges
for customers that have never owned an electric vehicle.
The information you need to communicate about
the technology of these vehicles is significant.
In some cases, very basic things that you would
expect would be easy to communicate or hard to
communicate even in a showroom.
Environment.
It's hard to communicate things like,
how do I charge my car?
The ability to communicate these things
using the metaverse becomes
trivial because in a digital twin,
of course, you can do that very easily.
That's exactly what we've been doing with our customers,
is showing how we can teach all these moments by
using a digital twin of
the vehicle and all its supporting capabilities.
It goes from the world
of telling to the world of showing.
If in the past you had this notion of
collateralizing the features of
the vehicle as a book that
you get when you buy the vehicle,
which of course nobody ever opens.
In the future, you'll be able to explore it through
a digital twin and have an associate,
a product genius if you will,
literally show you where to click inside the vehicle.
You can do that live over a Teams call,
it can be embedded in the car company's website
as a form of the future of the configurator.
Just imagine that this configurator,
which in the past was the static
a set of images pre-rendered layers,
is now a living video game
that you can move around the car.
You can go sit in the car, you can click a button,
and a product specialist shows
up and they are right there with you talking to you,
walking you through things, driving the experience.
They're empowered to show you features in a way
that even is even better than a physical showroom.
Generally, when you
use digital communication technologies,
they have a tendency to reduce the fidelity of
communication from the in-person experience.
This is really, for me, the first
technology I've experienced in my lifetime where it
really elevates my ability to communicate more
efficiently and communicate to my intended audience.
That's very significant, I think,
and it's telling of where
we're going together on this journey.
SANJAY RAVI: It's really
impressive to see
the immersive experience that you are able to activate.
Now you're fully integrated into Microsoft Teams
and Azure communication and cognitive services.
How can people get this integration?
EDO SEGAL: The beauty of the integration
into the Microsoft fabric
is that our offering is
available on the Azure marketplace.
If a company is choosing
to start and go on this journey,
they can effectively use
their Azure credits towards all of
these capabilities and utilize
those to deploy metaverse as a service,
a mass experience,
and then embed that on their website,
in their apps, etc.
We even have a Teams application that allows them
to very easily add that as
another app that their team members can leverage.
Once they make this investment in
that digital twin of their vehicle,
of their showroom, of their event space,
whatever that might be, that
could be leveraged across the company.
It's no longer just the domain
of the tense poll events, if you will,
but rather that level of communication
could be leveraged across all the different disciplines.
Whether it's a salesperson meeting
a customer before they purchase,
or after where it's
a support call and they can support them,
or training that dealer network and showing them
how these new features
work and how you configure things,
or even doing auto show
which some of our partners are abandoning,
the physical auto shows,
and moving them into the metaverse
because they can present
incredible things even before
they're produced and test them.
More concept cars, more innovations,
faster innovation cycles and
an integration into the entire design cycle
as companies embrace and
engage more of this digital twinning approach
and realize that that investment that a lot of them
already make in the design process
could be leveraged all the way
through the value chain to
the marketing, communication and sales.
SANJAY RAVI: Thank you, [inaudible].
Now, mobility means something
different depending on your perspective.
At the end of the day,
it's about moving people and goods across the globe.
How do you think the metaverse is going to
play into mobility from a business perspective?
EDO SEGAL: It's a great observation
and I think what we've seen during COVID
is that many of our customers
moved different workloads into the metaverse.
The result was a very significant deduction
of their carbon footprint.
Because rather than moving
hundreds or thousands or
tens of thousands of people around on planes,
cars and automobiles and taking up the hotel space, etc.
We were able to do these things in the metaverse.
That by definition has
a very material impact on the economy and,
of course, the ecology.
That's an important aspect of
leveraging these new forms of digital communications.
The ability to create an incredible showroom and scale
it is something that
alternatively might cost literally billions of dollars.
If you look at success of
some of the leaders in the retail space,
they have to invest those billions to build
and replicate those experiences.
Whereas in the metaverse, you can actually
build it with technology such as ours,
which is again photo realistic,
and create this experience that
feel better than what you can do in the physical world.
Not a reduction in quality and scale.
I think the automotive industry is
always been grounded in the showroom experience.
It's always been an experience
that requires that connection.
When the migration into the web really,
I think, reduced that experience to
something that's not very experiential.
It's a print catalog,
of course, powered by some great commercials.
But now we have the power to
come back to that experience,
which is a very visceral one in the automotive industry,
and deliver it through a digital funnel and also
deliver that digital experience in the physical stores.
SANJAY RAVI: These are some real
big concepts coming to
life and you are a lifelong big concept creator.
What are some lessons you have learned over
the years when it comes to innovation?
EDO SEGAL: I think that you
have to be willing to
make mistakes and take
risks and in some ways get a lot of no's.
I always say that if I didn't get a couple of no's a day,
I know I'm not doing my job.
I think living on the edge of what is
possible and making it possible is really crucial.
The challenge that entrepreneurs have in pursuing
their dreams of what innovation can
do is always the fundamental question is,
are you too early or is it just the right time?
That is really the difference between
a very successful entrepreneur
commercially and one that's not so
successful, is the timing.
Many of the concepts that we manifest in
our mass stack today
have been around for quite some time.
But the enablers, the technology,
was not ripe for that to scale and be available.
We're very fortunate to be in
a position where all of this is now
available on Azure so that we can put it
in motion and deliver the future today,
which is why I'm extremely
optimistic about our partnership with Microsoft.
SANJAY RAVI: Thank you, [inaudible].
Technology has changed so
fast over the past handful of years.
Probably faster than ever before in the history.
If you were to look into a crystal ball,
where do you think we'll be in the next five years?
EDO SEGAL: I think we're at a moment
a very significant tipping point
as it relates to the role of
AI in the future of how we
communicate as a species and how we
conduct so many of the things that we do.
I think that's going to have profound impacts
in our lifetimes.
But even in the next five years,
I think we're going to see
a maturity of this notion of neural rendering.
The idea that rather than
represent an environment like the one
you're seeing me in now, which is a pristine,
beautiful 3D world that is represented by
polygons and textures like your traditional video game,
we'll be moving into a world
that's rendered by virtue of inference.
We're seeing some of that amazing activity going on.
Basically, the generative
AIs that we're seeing for art,
but now also for video.
I can't say how profound that is in terms of what it's
going to do and how it's going to
impact the future of how we communicate.
I can't wait to see that revolution unfold.
SANJAY RAVI: Thank you for joining
me here today [inaudible]
It's amazing to see the phenomenal work you are
doing in the metaverse and how it can
be applicable to the future of mobility.
EDO SEGAL: Thank you very much.
It's a pleasure to be here.
SANJAY RAVI: Thanks for joining me for
another episode of On The Go.
I'll see you soon as we continue
the discussions with thought leaders,
pushing the boundaries of mobility.