Makers of The Metaverse: Nils Pihl of Auki Labs On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality Industries

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Show the world something, don’t sell them something. If you put your sincerity, your craft and your art into what you are making, then you will connect with people. Build your road map around demonstrating value, be sincere, and invite the world to join you.

The Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality & Mixed Reality Industries are so exciting. What is coming around the corner? How will these improve our lives? What are the concerns we should keep an eye out for? Aside from entertainment, how can VR or AR help work or other parts of life? To address this, we had the pleasure of interviewing Nils Pihl.

Nils Pihl is the co-founder and CEO of Auki Labs, a behavioral engineer, and social transhumanist specializing in the intersection of modern technology and human behavior.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about your backstory and how you grew up?

I was born in Sweden, but I like to say that I grew up online. My parents were software entrepreneurs in the late 80s and 90s, so I had the good fortune of growing up very close to computers. By the time I was 14 years old most of my social interactions were online, and I found myself thinking in English rather than Swedish because so much of my identity and life was wrapped up in the early online communities that I was a part of.

You could almost say my “career” started around that time, in my teens, as a competitive gamer. I was very fascinated with social and behavioral dynamics online, and I started training a gaming team (or “clan”) in predictive behavioral models that we could use to get an advantage in the game we were playing. I was eventually recruited to train another team, where the clan leaders were more than 10 years my senior. We won the next four consecutive seasons. During that time, I met my first mentors, who encouraged me to continue to develop my interest in behavior. It’s thanks to them that I later ended up being a professional behavioral engineer, advising organizations like the World Bank, Weibo and Apple.

Is there a particular book, film, or podcast that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

I grew up on a diet of hard science fiction, cyberpunk and space operas. I felt a natural affinity to the cyberpunk visions of authors like Neal Stephenson because by the time I was old enough to read his books I was already living most of my life online. The concept of the “metaverse” didn’t seem like a very futuristic idea to me at the time — many of us were living in it already, spending more than eight hours a day in fully virtual domains. Rather than futurism, I found validation in cyberpunk culture — it empowered me to cultivate my digital identity. I would hear my online name spoken aloud more often than my real name, and had friends and even lovers who only really referred to me by that name. Books like Snow Crash encouraged me to think of myself and my friends as greater than our biological bodies, and ushered me into the transhumanism I espouse today. Cyberpunk and science fiction gave me the sense that history was not something that had passed already, but something that we are still writing and that my generation of internet-raised friends would have the opportunity to impact.

Is there a particular story that inspired you to pursue a career in the X Reality industry? We’d love to hear it.

The Japanese anime “Dennou Coil’’ left an indelible mark on my imagination, for sure. It takes place in a near future where AR glasses are commonplace and kids play with virtual pets and track down rare virtual beings and treasures. It was such a cool vision of the future that it was impossible not to feel a little cheated that I had been born decades too early!

I think that the drive for augmented reality is actually embedded deep in the human soul. I would argue that language itself is the oldest augmented reality technology, because it allows us to literally shape how we perceive the world. If you imagine that you and I walk through a forest together, and we come across a fallen tree, and I say “what a lovely couch to rest on”, then your perception of the tree changes. We have a deep desire to not only label things, but to annotate the world with depth and meaning. In a non-trivial sense, I actually think it is fair to say that augmenting reality with meaning and depth is one of the most important human endeavors.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began this fascinating career?

If you set your mind on building something that you think could be impactful and good for the world, and you approach that undertaking with sincerity, then you will find yourself in a new force of creative gravity. You end up being drawn to people, and people are drawn to you, and you find common cause and align your intentions towards creativity and connectedness. Once you do that, the world unfolds itself with opportunity and possibility. The most interesting thing I’ve ever experienced is how connecting with people around you amplifies all of your creative energies. I am thankful for all the people and ideas I’ve connected with, and find it captivatingly interesting every day to see what we can build together when we take building seriously.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

When I started working in AR in 2019, I — like most of the market — had an intuitive understanding of what phones were able to do that was deeply wrong. So at the time, I thought that it would be easy to create AR apps that could share the locations of virtual objects in a very precise way. I thought that if I could view something in AR with my phone, that someone else could view it with their phone in the same way. Of course, I was wrong. GPS, which is the default way for the phone to reason about its location, is a very imprecise source of location information. The phone barely knows it’s in the right building, so you can forget about using it as the foundation for shared AR.

This is what led to my “funny” mistake. I raised about $50,000 to start working on my first AR project, thinking that was all I would need. But then I started to realize that there wasn’t actually a way to share objects and experiences in AR in a precise way — and then I realized that this is something that major companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars trying to solve. I had “drunk the kool-aid” of the promises of what AR could possibly do in the future without realizing how limited the technology was at the time.

That was pretty embarrassing. But the story has a happy ending — and in a way, I’m glad that I moronically made the mistake of starting an AR company when the tech wasn’t there, because otherwise I wouldn’t have discovered that there was a big opportunity to fix a major problem and create something new.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

I’m really excited about the tools that Auki Labs is building to make AR experiences instantly shareable. I think as soon as people see augmented reality, their imagination starts racing — like, “Oh, I can create something really wonderful with this.” And people have made really amazing things with AR. But previously, these objects and experiences were not shareable in any kind of practical way.

And I think for augmented reality to be really meaningful, we need to be able to see the same things — we need to be able to share the experiences with each other. If I’ve got a virtual pet sitting on the couch next to me, but I’m the only one who can see it, that’s nowhere near as cool as if my friend and I can both see it. Sharing these kinds of experiences makes them more real.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. The VR, AR and MR industries seem so exciting right now. What are the 3 things in particular that most excite you about the industry? Can you explain or give an example?

• AR enables people to create new kinds of meaning. To me — because I have a background in behavior — one of the things I like about augmented reality (as opposed to virtual reality) is that we perceive it very differently because it happens in real space. We get to engage our proprioception: our sense of where we are in space, and we get to recontextualize the world we actually live in, which is pretty cool. For example, if you have a pet, you might know that that pet has a favorite spot on the couch, even when it’s not there. But the fact that you know where your pet’s favorite spot is makes you perceive the couch differently. You think: this is the spot on the couch that my pet likes. In that way, that place is colored with a sense of meaning. AR allows us to color spaces with meaning in the same way. This ability to color the real world with emotional context is really cool, and I think it has the potential to make people interact more frequently with each other in real life rather than online. It’s a more expressive kind of language than mere words!
• The meaning created through AR allows us to create new kinds of experiences and perceive reality in new ways. The ability to “color” spaces that AR provides turns the world into a canvas. Imagine the virtual pet I mentioned previously — if that pet is sitting between my friend and I on the couch, we don’t both need to be consistently seeing it to know that it’s there. Even if I put my phone away, the fact that my friend can still see the virtual pet on the couch does something. It makes it feel like it’s still there, something that is temporarily invisible to me but still present. Something matterless, but still real. It’s very, very, very cool.
• The meaning that AR can create provides companies with a new way to tell stories about their products. Augmented reality is incredibly exciting from a behavioral point of view when you think about what kinds of experiences can be created, and how they can impact consumer behavior. For instance, what can brands do when they have the ability to literally meet you where you are? And creatively speaking, what are the kind of stories you can tell when you can make it happen in the real world — when you can make the user really feel like they are a part of what’s happening? The potential for creative expression is amazing.

What are the 3 things that concern you about the VR, AR and MR industries? Can you explain? What can be done to address those concerns?

One thing that concerns me is that we’re in a bit of a “hype bubble” now. This isn’t the first time that this has happened — the first AR hype bubble blew up when Magic Leap came out several years ago. At that time, expectations were so high that eventually, everything crashed down. We’re seeing the same thing now. There are so many new projects that don’t have the technology to support what they’re building — for instance, their demonstrations are created with CGI rather than actual footage of actual AR. There’s a lot of talking about what you’ll be able to do in the future, especially in the metaverse. But the industry has to be careful not to set people up for disappointment. This could really delay how long it takes to actually deliver meaningful experiences.

Another thing that concerns me about the AR industry at large is the hardware that many companies will require users to use. It’s not always practical — it can be expensive, and AR takes a lot of battery and computing power. There’s a part of me that worries that the hardware that is necessary to build the experience that people really want could be years away.

Beyond that, there’s also the risk that AR technology could reflect the trend towards hyper-personalization that’s currently a big problem in many areas of the online world. People’s experiences of the Internet are so customized that they are practically unrecognizable from one another. An AR world that reflects this siloed architecture could have a major negative impact on society.

I think the entertainment aspects of VR, AR and MR are apparent. Can you share with our readers how these industries can help us at work?

A lot of the largest adopters of AR and VR today are enterprises who use it for training purposes. This is partially because industrial hardware can be very expensive — so when people need to learn how to use it, VR and AR remove quite a bit of risk. One of the oldest examples of this is flight simulation, because it’s very expensive to train a fighter pilot. It’s risky to train people in how to use very expensive equipment, and XR allows us to simulate the experience and involve our muscle memory. AR and VR also have some very cool use cases in live inspection — for example, building managers could use it to see where pipes and electrical wiring are inside walls.

Are there other ways that VR, AR and MR can improve our lives? Can you explain?

I think that AR can help us express ourselves in really meaningful ways. I think that language itself is a kind of augmented reality technology — it informs the way we conceptualize things. If we’re walking through the forest together and come across a fallen log, and I say, “Oh, what a comfortable couch!” Doesn’t that change the way that you perceive it? In this way, I think as AR becomes a more accessible tool for people to express themselves, that it will genuinely and deeply improve human communication.

What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about working in your industry? Can you explain what you mean?

I don’t know if it’s a myth so much as it is a common misconception, but I think most of us go about our days not thinking too much about the accuracy of GPS. Because today, we only use the technology to find large objects like restaurants and gas stations. We are rarely confronted with the fact that GPS can only locate things with rough accuracy that can vary by several meters.

On that note, there’s one persistent myth that many, many people seem to believe in — that GPS is a sufficient positioning mechanism for us to build all the cool applications on top of. It isn’t. I think a lot of people don’t realize that it is going the way of the fax machine. After all, it’s that’s hard to imagine — and similarly, if we went back fifty years ago and said “Hey, in the future, there will be better ways of real time communication,” it would have been hard to accept. Because what could have possibly been better than the telephone?

What are your “5 Things You Need To Create A Highly Successful Career In The VR, AR or MR Industries?”

• Before you find a solution, find a problem — pick the problem that you want to be the best at solving. Make sure that you can clearly articulate what the problem is before you think of what the solution could be. If you’re the person that can really describe what that problem is, then you’ll be in a good position to succeed.
• Use the power of language. As I said previously, I think that language itself is the oldest augmented reality technology, because it allows us to change the way we perceive the world. Choose your words carefully, and use them wisely.
• When in doubt, NASA. In this case, NASA stands for Need, Acceptance, Solution, Acceptance. This is a persuasion technique that is extremely helpful for explaining your point of view. The idea is that when you want to persuade someone of something, the first thing you need to do is to make sure that both of you understand that there’s a need — a pain point. Make sure that the understanding of this need is freshly presented in the conversation, that it’s on everyone’s attention and not just in their memory. Stay on the topic of the Need until you have established a shared understanding, and then you can talk about what a solution might look like, with both of your minds present. You shouldn’t even get into your particular offering at this point, but rather establish together what a solution to the agreed upon need might be. When you have gotten buy-in from the other party, their Acceptance, then you are ready to make the right decision together.
• Establish that there is a need, and get acceptance from the other party. Describe a solution together and reach an agreement.
• Always build for a bear market. When the market is excited and exuberant, a lot of ideas and visions of the future will be laid out — and a large amount of them will gather enough momentum and funding to have a stab at building that future. Many will fail, some through well-meaning but inadequate efforts, many through scams and rugpulls, but some will survive the feeding frenzy and still be a project worth supporting in the bear market. We believe that our focus should always be on building the meaningful, not responding to the whims of the market. Build something that you would want to help build.
• Show the world something, don’t sell them something. If you put your sincerity, your craft and your art into what you are making, then you will connect with people. Build your road map around demonstrating value, be sincere, and invite the world to join you.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

Spread good memes. Connect with each other. Build something. Build a village. Start from scratch.

The idea of memetics was invented in 1976 when the biologist Richard Dawkins wrote a great pop-science book called “The Selfish Gene” where he shared the lens of the neo-Darwinian synthesis, a new perspective on natural selection that had great explanatory power. It told us how natural selection, survival of the fittest, worked on a level below the species, below the tribe, below the individual — at the level of the gene.

Genes are these code-analogous biological packages that help describe how our bodies are made, and the neo-Darwinian synthesis suggested that it was here that natural selection had the biggest impact, where the hand of evolution was felt most firmly.

But we are not only our bodies. Our minds are formed by our collective experiences, and in one of the chapters of the book Dawkins asked the hypothetical question: Could we imagine something like a gene equivalent to culture?

He introduced the theoretical concept of a meme, a small piece of behavior or culture that can be observed by one person and transmitted to another. Everything from the songs we sing, to the fashion we wear, to the word “word” itself is a meme, and consciously and subconsciously we spread these behaviors to each other, and our collective behaviors create the products of our culture.

Memetics asks us to picture the world as a thriving, bustling and often competitive ecosystem of memes battling for the scarce resources of our attention. Some ideas will spread more often, some will be better remembered, some will fail to spread and be forgotten.

“Spread good memes” is my personal motto and its an ideal I try to hold myself to in my work and my personal relationships. It means that I want to take responsibility for my actions and their direct consequences, but also to be mindful of the memetic impact of my actions. From that first principle, that axiom, that we should want to try to embody and spread the behavior that we wish to see in the world, I build out the rest of my intention:

Let’s connect with each other. Let’s try to be present and sincere, strive for inclusion and intersubjectivity. Rather than building a big tent of faceless strangers, try to meet each other around a fire or anywhere else where we can feel truly present with each other. The best ideas are born in conversations between connected minds, so practice being present and connect with your peers. Let’s build things, make things better, spread that energy, and have our creative works bring us together. Stand on the shoulders of giants and the community, but take on the responsibility of building the world you want to see. Start from first principles, remember what is important, and let’s find each other and build that village. Spread good memes.

Thank you so much for these excellent stories and insights. We wish you continued success on your great work!

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Makers of The Metaverse: Nils Pihl of Auki Labs On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed Reality… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.