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We pick up where we left off, with Part 2 of Alan\u2019s interview with Kent Bye, host of the Voices of VR Podcast. In this half, the two VR podcast hosts discuss the ethics of XR, building a strong economic ecosystem for emerging technologies, the AR Cloud, and more.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlan: Coming up next on the XR\nfor Business Podcast, we have part 2 of the interview with Kent Bye\nfrom the Voices Of VR podcast, the podcast that got me started in\nthis industry.\n\n\n\nI\u2019m actually one of the founding\nmembers of the Open Air Cloud Group and Kronos Group is is really\nkind of trying to pull together these standards for 3D, as well for\ne-commerce. I know there\u2019s a group right now trying to standardize 3D\nobjects for e-commerce and retail because right now it\u2019s a dog\u2019s\nbreakfast. Facebook accepts glTFs, Hololens is FBX models, VR is\nusually OBJs. So you have all these different 3D file formats. None\nof them really work well together and you can\u2019t\u2013 it\u2019s not easy to\nconvert one to the other. And then of course, Apple came along and\ncreated USDZ. Or in Canada, USDZed. It\u2019s crazy right now to think\nthat there\u2019s fifteen different 3D model types and it\u2019s kind of like\nwe need to settle on the JPG of 3D, whatever that happens to be,\nwhich in my opinion is probably glTF. But I think we need to\nstandardize that and just pick, it so that\u2013 can imagine trying to\nsend a photo to somebody and you send it in one format. And we saw\nthis 10 years ago on the Web, just\u2013 it was 10 different ways to send\na photo in different formats. Your camera would take one format, and\nit wouldn\u2019t work with your MacBook. I think the tolerance for\ninteroperability, I think the world just demands interoperability\nnow. And if you\u2019re not building for that, well, then you\u2019re going to\nend up like Facebook and get broken apart.\n\n\n\nKent: Yeah. And I published a\npodcast with the managing director of Open AR Cloud, and one of the\nother founding members. And yeah, they were talking a lot about these\nvarious different issues. So, yeah, it\u2019s something that you don\u2019t see\nnecessarily a lot of news on, until\u2013 unless you\u2019re sort of deep into\nthe weeds of helping design these protocols. But I did go to the\nDecentralized Web Summit last year, and one of the things that I saw\nwas that there\u2019s kind of like this pendulum that swings back and\nforth between the centralized systems and the decentralized systems.\nAnd I\u2019d say that with cryptocurrency, with the containers being able\ntake different aspects of a server and be able to push it out to the\nedge. We have it self-contained within either Kubernetes or Docker\ncontainers. And just in general, it\u2019s kind of a movement away from\ncentralized systems into more decentralized architectures.\n\n\n\nThat\u2019s a interesting trend that I think\nthat paying attention to the rise of the decentralized web and what\nthat is going to afford. I feel like it\u2019s a lot more about open\nprotocols and collaboration and having people collaborate in\ndifferent ways. And that\u2019s something that I\u2019d say has been a little\nbit lacking within the VR and AR industry. I mean, there\u2019s been a\ncertain amount of not sharing of knowledge, but in terms of like real\nmeaningful collaboration. There\u2019s been a few things like OpenXR and\nWebXR are of the big standouts, as well as probably the Chromium\nbrowsers that a lot of different companies are working on. But in\nterms of specific things to grow an ecosystem, it\u2019s been difficult\nfor companies to figure out what does it mean to grow community and\nwhat it mean to grow an entire ecosystem that you may be a part of.\nAnd I feel like the cryptocurrency world has had to deal with that a\nlittle bit, in the sense that they\u2019re creating these open protocols,\nand they have to prove that there\u2019s a buy-in to pe