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What's up everybody, welcome back to the All Things Croatia podcast. I'm your host,
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Stanko Zovak, and I'm bringing you the best of Croatia from around the globe.
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This episode is brought to you by Adriatic Tours, the best place since 1974 to book your
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information, go to www.adriatictours.com or click the link in the description. Now,
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eat a modalia and let's get started. Alright, what's up everybody, welcome back to the podcast.
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On this week's episode, we have a special guest, Damir Firsht. Damir is a Croatian tech
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entrepreneur and the co-founder of Matterless Studios. A Matterless is a tech startup that
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innovates within the world of AR or augmented reality. In this episode, we're going to learn
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about what they're working on and the man behind it. Damir, thanks for coming on the podcast.
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It's a pleasure to be here. Awesome, thank you for coming on. I'm excited to talk with you about,
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you know, AR. I know that's a sort of a high level topic, so hopefully you'll be able to
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dumb it down enough for me to understand. I just upgraded my iPhone from an iPhone 6,
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actually just over the weekend, so I'm a little behind technology. I got an iPhone 11,
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which is not even the newest one, but it's like four, three or four behind, I guess, but
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I didn't want to go full out, you know, I'm going slowly into technology.
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Yeah, whatever is the stock tool for you, you know. Exactly, yeah. Before we get into some of that
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heavier stuff, you know, would you mind talking a little bit about your background, you know,
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where you're from and, you know, sort of how your life led up into you becoming this augmented
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reality expert? Well, up until I was 24 years old, I was living in Zagreb. I was born in
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Ereka, grew up in Zagreb, and then at 24, I got a scholarship to go live in Japan for a year.
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At the time, I was studying, I was doing my master's degree in art history and sociology here in
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Zagreb, and I also got very interested in Japanese. I was doing martial arts at the time,
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so I learned how to counterten and how to say left, right in Japanese, and I was like,
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maybe I should learn Japanese, how hard can it be? I already know everything I need. So I ended up
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going to Tokyo in 2008 and spent a year there where I was learning the language, culture,
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studying martial arts, and when I came back, I was very interested in doing my master's thesis in
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Zen aesthetics. So as an art historian, I was always very interested in Asian art,
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so I was also really into Zen through martial arts and meditation, so I ended up doing a topic
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that probably nobody wrote about in, like, Croatia ever about Zen aesthetics, and through that,
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I got interested in Chinese language because Chinese language is kind of like the Latin of Asia,
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so China is the cradle of most of the culture that's propagated through Asia, so I ended up
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learning a little bit of Chinese, got interested in Chinese, started learning Chinese,
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and ended up in a year's time getting a scholarship to go study in China. So then I went to China
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originally for a year to do my Chinese and also learn some Chinese martial arts.
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I ended up staying 11 years in China and I've done a bunch of different things. I've studied
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anthropology, I did a PhD in anthropology in Xiamen University, Xiamen is a city I used to live in.
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It's a small island town of four million people close to Hong Kong, and through a lot of things
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that I did teaching in the university, doing all kinds of things, I ended up in the gaming industry
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because I'm also a massive nerd and I've been playing D&D since I was 13 years old, so it's
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been a long time that I've been into Dungeons & Dragons. For those of you who don't know,
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the tabletop game where you get to roleplay, characters, create puzzles, storylines, and so on,
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and at 35 I decided I wanted to go get into the gaming industry. So I got into the gaming industry
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as a narrative designer, a person who designs storylines, characters, and locations, also quests.
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If you've ever played a video game where you have dialogue which branches off into different options,
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that's kind of what I did. And I realized that gaming really is my passion, so I've been doing
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that for a couple of years. Last year I came back to Croatia, realized that the startup scene here
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is booming, that people are very much in a very different mindset than before I left. It had been
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12 years since I've been away, and I loved it. So with a friend from Sweden who I met in China,
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who lives in Hong Kong, his name is Nils Nils and I started the startup, a little startup
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that builds AR companions and toys in something called shared augmented reality.
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Shared augmented reality is a way for us to all see the same thing in the same place. So by using
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your device, scanning a QR code within a second, you can be in a shared AR session, meaning that
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multiple participants can see the same thing in AR, and also they can touch it by hand. So you can
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reach out with your hand and touch something digital and it will respond. So if you have a cute
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digital puppy, you can give it a scratch and it's going to sense your touch. And so what's the difference
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then between AR and VR, virtual reality? So VR, if you've ever played a video game in which you have
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a 3D level through which you move, so Counter Strike, a shooter like Counter Strike or MMORPG,
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like World of Warcraft, any kind of role-playing game where you're moving your character around,
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this is a virtual world. Effectively, it's a world that you enter, a different world that you enter
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with your character and then you interact in these made-up environments. So anything, you can put
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anything into a virtual world. It can be a medieval dungeon, it can be a base science fiction, like it
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can be a sci-fi starship, anything really. But the thing is virtual worlds, they're not real. And
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VR is a way for you to kind of like enter into a different dimension. So through your screen or
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through your goggles, you can experience a different type of reality. AR, or augmented reality, is a
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way for us to build a digital layer on top of our regular everyday material world. So AR would be
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me sitting here at my desk and then having maybe a virtual monitor, which is not physical, but
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through my goggles or through my phone, I can see a screen which is projected on top of my wall,
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for instance. So you can imagine the future being a place where there's going to be a lot of digital
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content which is going to be interactive and kind of seamlessly integrated into real spaces.
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But what are our, I remember last time... That's a good definition for you. Yeah, yeah, good enough
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that I can understand it. So I remember last time we spoke before we started recording the other week,
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you gave like sort of a real life application, you know, outside of the gaming world that this sort
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of AR can be used. And now I forget off the top of my head what it was, but can you give either that
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one or another one? Yeah, absolutely. There are tons of examples. So for instance, AR, one of the
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ways in which we can use AR is we can have, you can imagine AR kind of like a visual version of
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a radio station. So all of us can have headphones in and we can listen to a different radio station.
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And in a way, the music on a radio station changes your mood, right? So like if you're
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listening to music while you're walking around the city, if it's some energetic happy music or
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like workout music, you're going to feel more pumped up. If you're listening to, like if you
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recently went through a breakup and you're listening to sad music, it's going to really color your mood
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as you're experiencing the world around you. So with AR, we can do that, but visually, we can put
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all kinds of content, all kinds of digital virtual objects or beings in the world around us. So for
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instance, you can imagine having an exhibition, an art exhibition where you walk into a museum and
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it's an empty room and then you turn on your AR goggles or your phone through your camera and you
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can see digital items in the space floating around. So it can be used in the art world. It can be
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used in a restaurant. You could for instance have a menu where if you scan a QR code, you can see
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on your device or again on your goggles, you can see the dish materializing in front of you in 3D
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and all its glory. So instead of looking at a photo, you can see kind of like a 3D image of a, of an
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interactive 3D image of something that you would like to order or eat in a restaurant. You can use
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it in education. So for instance, imagine learning a language where if you go into a room, you can
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see everything in the room. You can see the doorway, the window, the desk, a cup on the table, a pencil.
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You can see it and then you can have a notation on top of it in a different language. So imagine
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how much easier it would be to learn a language if you would have just a layer on top of your
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everyday material world where you get to see a note in a different language for every single
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object that you look at. Yeah, that's really cool. Those are things I would never have thought of in
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a million years, you know, to even have. But yeah, that would definitely make a lot of things easier.
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Learning, especially I like the restaurant example. That's pretty cool actually, just to see your dish
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appear right there. I want to go back to something you said earlier after the introduction. You said
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in China, you were living in a small city of 4 million people, which is, you know,
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bigger population than all of Croatia right now. And now you're back here in Croatia.
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What are some of the differences in life? I mean, I'm sure there's plenty, but
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any sort of cultural shocks or cultural differences between life in China versus in Croatia?
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I mean, yeah, absolutely. I could talk about this for hours, you know, and especially being a sociologist
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and anthropologist, this is something that I'm very keenly aware of. But to keep it kind of short
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and sweet, life in China is incredibly busy and bustling. People are incredibly proactive about
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changing their social status. So like everybody and their aunt has a company, like a guy making
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pancakes on the street has a company. Everybody's like very, very into like changing their social
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status. So I would say people in China are incredibly good at business. They're very much
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aware of like how to negotiate, how to deal with everyday situations, very good at connecting
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connections. They have an incredible economy which is powered up by, you know, the government having
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a more long term idea about how they want to run different types of industries and economy.
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And because of that, life in China has changed incredibly in the last 15 years, I would say.
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So when I came into China, I didn't even have a smartphone. I got my first smartphone in China.
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It was an iPhone at the time because I wanted to have a digital dictionary, for instance.
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And within a couple of years, I was using my phone to buy almost anything. So in China,
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there's this app called WeChat, which is a kind of a combination between Twitter and WhatsApp and
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Facebook. And what it does, it allows you to basically send money, receive money, buy a ticket
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for the train, for the bus, for any event. You can even use it to buy plane tickets or train tickets.
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You can use it to send quite large amounts of money, you know, I would say up to like
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five, $6,000 a day to somebody else. And now it's integrated into multiple different types of
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chatting apps and social media apps as well. They have their own reel, they have their own
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way for you to kind of engage with friends. And, you know, we had that in China like 2014.
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So I remember one time I went to Beijing, I went to the capital and I couldn't find my wallet.
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So I said, screw it, I'll just use my phone. And I did. I went on a 10 day trip where I never had
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to use my wallet once. I was just scanning a QR code to pay or to enter a certain area.
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And that's how China has been living for a while now. So the tech in China is pretty impressive.
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They really changed everything about how people live there. And it really is affecting the way
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society works and how people behave. On the other hand, here in Croatia, there's also been
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quite a big leap in the last 10 years. But, you know, after living in a country where you
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practically can live seamlessly without using any kind of physical money or documents, in some ways,
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it's quite, it was quite a shock, you know, like here in Croatia, we have something different.
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We have, we have contactless payment with a card, which is also pretty great. It's now accepted
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everywhere. So that's like the immediate thing about the convenience of life when it comes to
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when it comes to culture, when it comes to thinking about how humans like live their lives,
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you know, China is very much like a pressure cooker. So people are very, very,
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I would say they feel the need to accumulate stuff and to be very much in the mindset of
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of materialism. So a lot of kind of outside views in China, you know, China is a communist country,
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but it's really in the way that people live their lives on a daily basis. It's exactly the same as
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here, if not worse in some ways, because, for instance, you don't have unions, you know, you
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don't have really a lot of ways in which you can ask for things legally, unless you know someone. So
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in a way, it's, it's quite, you know, building up a network of people, acquaintances that you know,
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is very, very important. In some ways, it's very similar to Croatia. Croatia is very much
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a place where it's also very important to know people to get stuff done. So in that way, I kind
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of felt in China, very similar that I did here. In fact, if I compare China and Japan, I would say,
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you know, Japan is kind of like the Germany of Asia and China is the Balkans of Asia. So in some
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ways, we are very, very similar. As an interesting comparison. How do you, relating it now to business,
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now how do you go from, you know, China, where you say everything is so business oriented, everyone
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has their own business, so much more technologically advanced, you know, all these cashless transactions
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and everything, now coming back here to Croatia and to Zagreb and to say, oh, there's a, you know,
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budding tech scene going on in Zagreb. How do you, I mean, how do you come from China where
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everything, you know, seems so much more advanced and in that realm quicker back to Zagreb and say
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that it's a, you know, see that it's a good place to have a tech startup? Well, I was very much
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surprised by the amount of the younger population really going for building global businesses,
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which don't have local limitations on, you know, for instance, like if you're building software,
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you can sell it anywhere, right? So it becomes logistically much easier to build a product
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for the entire world. And this is exactly what most of these people are doing. They're building
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very cool, very cool solutions for multiple things. Like one of the companies that I can
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kind of mention is called Gepec and Gepec does, Gepec for maybe for the German speaking population,
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they will know Gepec is basically the trunk of a car in kind of like bastardized German.
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And what Gepec is doing, they're doing something called ride sharing for packages. So if you
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know Blabla car, where you can just hitch a ride to another city by just simply checking who's going,
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they're doing the same thing for packages. And for me, this was a fantastic idea because
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in Croatia, we have this thing where if you were to send something to a different city and you
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can't use the post office, because for instance, is the weekend, you can go to a local bus stop
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and you can send a driver, you can give a package to a driver to the bus driver and he will deliver
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it to somebody else for like, you know, a coffee like two euros, right? So yeah, you can send like
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a lot of older folk, they send their kids in the cities like food, like, you know, tangerines or
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some sort of pancetta or like any kind of like locally, locally produced stuff. And
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what these guys did is they tapped into that mind space. And they decided to do the same thing.
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And, you know, they're tackling as someone is already going. So you can just hitch a ride,
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put the package in the car because somebody is already going. So there are a lot of solutions
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like this happening right now in Zagreb, where not just in Zagreb, but in the whole Croatia,
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where you can kind of see this local spirit and and and our way to solve problems like having
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getting a tech layer. So that was it was very interesting for me here in Croatia, because
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like there's a lot of very innovative stuff happening. And in general, I think Croat's are
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very, very good at IT. And we have like an amazing university for electrical engineering. And we have
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very, very good developers. And one of the one of the ways in which I wanted to be a part of it is
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by after living in China for so long, staying in Croatia for a couple of years and trying to
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build up a business which can touch certain areas of commerce and economy and infrastructure here.
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So I'm not necessarily my startup is not a Croatian startup. We're actually registered in
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Hong Kong and Switzerland. But simply by me being here by the virtue of me being in Zagreb,
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I can try to offer some of these solutions to, for instance, Zagreb holding the city of Zagreb,
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certain companies and it's it feels very gratifying to be able to try to help build the
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local economy and infrastructure by being here just by virtue of being here.
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Well, how long ago did you start Matterless Studios, your company? And what exactly are you guys working
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on right now? Yeah, so Matterless builds digital toys and pets in shared AR. We have started,
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actually, we started a while back in 2019. We had an idea to build an app which is kind of like an AR
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ruler. And it was for a board game called tabletop game called Warhammer 40k. Are you familiar with
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this? Sounds familiar, but I've never played it. All right. So you have two players who collect
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armies and then fight these armies on a board like on a big ass table. So basically what you need
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to do is you need to build up an army. So you need to buy the figurines, you need to get the paints,
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because you need to paint them, you need to you need to buy the books, the rule books, you need to buy
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everything, right? And this company, the CK company Games Workshop did a really fantastic sale of their
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products. So what if you want to play the game, you buy everything from there, you know, the brushes,
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the paint, the books, and of course the figurines. And we thought about that and we said this is a
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really good business model. Like we want to get, we want to work with Games Workshop. So we thought
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about a certain aspect of the game where you have a ruler on a table and then you use this ruler to
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like see how far some units are from other units and you use a physical ruler to like move them
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around. And we thought maybe we could do that in AR. Maybe we could make sure that the computer
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vision software that we use is recognizing certain units and then you can immediately see the distance
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between them. So you wouldn't have to use a ruler, a physical object. We did that for a year. We did
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the Kickstarter campaign. It was pretty successful. And after we nailed it, after we nailed the
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tech, we realized we can use it for much more than just a ruler app within one game. So we realized
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that we can do now is we can actually precisely position things in AR by scanning the QR code.
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You can effectively see the relative distance between different things within that AR session.
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So when you turn on your camera, something called SLAM opens up. SLAM is an algorithm which recognizes
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feature points around a certain area. So it will see the outline of a table or how far a wall is.
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And because of that, it can give you a relative distance from that certain object. And by doing
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this, we realized we can create something that has never been done before. We can create a way for
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people to experience things together because we were able to use that technology to have multiple
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devices see the same thing in the same place. And of course, this is much bigger than just one game.
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So we decided to spin out two companies. One of them is called Alkylabs. And Alkylabs does this
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infrastructure for AR, precise positioning. And then on the other hand, we have Matalus,
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which is creating the flagship product. So the way to onboard people is by not talking about it
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the way I just did. It's about giving them something they can really connect with. And we
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thought long and hard, what can people connect with a digital thing that might seem real?
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And we realized that what people really connect with is pets. So for you to kind of understand
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what we do is we give you a digital puppy that's on a table. You can see it through your device,
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but you can touch it with your hand. You don't tap the screen, you go out and reach out and touch it
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and it will have a reaction. It will interact with your hand. So it's really cool because when we see
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kids, kids are very good at kind of immediately responding to it in an intuitive way. So we
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give them the phone, they look at it, they take the phone and then they just reach out with their
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hand to touch the puppy. So you don't need goggles or the headsets or anything, it's just through
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your phone? Well, it's through your phone. But of course, we're getting ready for the fact that a
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lot of manufacturers are bringing a lot of AR goggles onto the market, which for us is very
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exciting because at this point, if you're using your phone and you see it through a camera, which
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you totally can, it's still a little bit limiting because you have to use one hand to just kind of
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see through it. But the moment that the AR goggles and glasses come, it's going to be a complete
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check game changer. In my opinion, and in the opinion of all the co-founders and people who are
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working on this, once that happens, it's going to be the same as the iPhone coming and changing the
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way mobile internet works. So 15 years ago, nobody had a phone with no buttons. You just
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didn't associate the phone with a little magical tile that you can tap and interact with the world
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and get everything from the latest weather reports to any kind of knowledge about science
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and news. And today, everybody's using this smartphone and it started with the iPhone.
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Like in 2007, the first iPhone came out and within 15 years, it completely changed the
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environment of how we use the internet, what we need to access it. And we believe that the same
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thing is going to happen when the goggles come in. Well, yeah, you mentioned that it's also Apple
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headset, right? Or the goggles? Well, Apple is, yeah, I mean, there are rumors of Apple coming
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out with this and they're always very much very secretive about it. So I couldn't comment on
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when they're coming. But yeah, I've read the news like everybody else. And you think that
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exponential growth will be just as fast as it was in the telephone, the smartphone boom,
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I guess you can say? I think it's going to be faster because the rate of adoption is increasing. So
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I think around 2005, there was around 1 billion people on the internet. And I think now it's around
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4 billion people, which means that since the time we got the smartphone, of course, this is not the
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only factor. But like since we got the smartphone, the rate of adoption has increased because the
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barrier to entry is lower. You can now buy a phone for $150 that has 4G connectivity.
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Some for a couple of hundred dollars have 5G connectivity. And that's a massive, massive leap
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from 4 to 5. And then of course, a massive leap from the amount of stuff you can put on that phone
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and how quickly it can kind of render stuff around you, create the environment around you as well.
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And you also have a podcast that you mentioned. Can you talk a little bit about that?
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Absolutely. Yeah. So as a part of our goal to spread the ideas that we are building and working on,
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we created a podcast called the CyberDellic Podcast. And what we talk about in the CyberDellic Podcast
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is how augmenting reality is this innately human desire to share our ideas and perceptions with
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other people. And it's quite a mind trip. We talk a lot about transcultural humanism,
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how our ideas affect the way we live. We talk about the digital reality that's coming. We talk
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about augmented reality that technologies needed to make it a mainstream way of life, AI, all kinds
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of crazy things. That's why it's called the CyberDellic Podcast. So if any of your listeners are in
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for like a deep dive down a rabbit hole of what technology is bringing, I think they might like it.
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Awesome. Well, I'll have to check that out myself and I'll include a link to that in the podcast
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description as well so people can check that out. Thank you. Well, with this exponential sort of rate
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of adoption and all this new technology coming out, what do you think the future of, I guess, the
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world also, Croatia looks like in say maybe 10, 15 years in terms of new technology and AR?
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That's a very difficult thing to say. I know it's impossible to answer, but I guess just in your
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opinion, what things do you think will be changed the most? Well, I think two great battlefields
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of tech right now are something everybody's talking about, which is AI, so artificial intelligence.
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And another part of the puzzle is something called spatial internet. And spatial internet is, in fact,
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if you've heard about Web 3, decentralization, this is the kind of stuff that a lot of people in the
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IT world are very excited about because AI is something that's very close to the mind of most
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people. It's been in the meta in a way in the culture for a very long time. We can talk about
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like terminators since the 90s and so on. But AI is already very integrated into a lot of processes
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and systems that we have. Spatial internet, not so much because what spatial internet does,
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what spatial internet does, will do is it's going to basically create like a real life infrastructure
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in space that you can use to interact with the internet. So as I said earlier, you might have
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a screen that is projected through your goggles onto a wall instead of buying a new TV. You might
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have a character, a digital pet that you interact with in real space that serves you as some sort
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of a companion. You might have internet of things, IoT connectivity with every device that you have.
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So that, for instance, when you come closer to your door, your door immediately unlocks because it has
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a very, it has a unique key that only responds to either your device or actually a wearable that you
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have just for that particular purpose. So there's going to be machines talking to each other much
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more through RFID. There's going to be also humans connecting with machines much more often than they
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do right now. And one of the ways that we envision that's going to work is through precise positioning
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of virtual objects in real space, which you will be able to interact with. So imagine like you had
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a lever on the wall or a socket on the wall, which is a virtual socket instead of, sorry, not a
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socket, a switch, like a light switch, you can turn on and off, which is just position wherever you
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want. So imagine like you have smart lights, but you can put a virtual object next to your bed
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that you can just like wave your hand at and then it's going to turn on and off the lights.
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There's going to be also a really big shift in how we interact with space in our private,
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in our homes. For instance, if we look at right now, we have a router in the house, you know,
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you have your Wi-Fi that you can access in any room. Now imagine if you had a way to position
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virtual objects into your room that only you and the people who are in your household can see. So
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you walk in, you scan a QR code and you see a bunch of notes in your space. Let's say I go for
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holiday and you want to come and help me out to water my plants. So you come in, you scan a QR
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code, you look around and you see all the plants in my house and you can see above them notes
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and it says, you know, water this one once a week, half a glass of water. So or you know, you want to
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move a couch and your girlfriend wants you to move a couch and then you enter into the house and you
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see a note that says, please move the couch here. So this kind of stuff, kind of like everyday things,
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convenience is that I think people will be very happy to use. So you know, whenever we think
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about how tech evolves, you know, a lot of people think about the macro level, how does it work
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when you need to build the infrastructure, like how difficult it is for engineers,
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but we really try to think about like what does the end user do, you know, how does it affect my
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life, you know, is it more useful for me? Like, am I going to have more time for myself to hang out
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with friends or am I going to be like, annoyingly checking through manuals on how to change, you
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know, a channel on my television set. And this is why we're also building social AR. So we're
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building like a social experience, which is easily accessed by multiple participants, because, you
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know, you're asking me about the virtual world. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of applications of
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like virtual reality where you maybe play games or you have some sort of design sessions where
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you're looking at how to build something in your own room. But I think that what humans crave the
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most is this sense of togetherness. And through this sense of togetherness, we really connect,
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you know, we are now sharing a mind space, you know, we're talking together and all of our listeners,
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hopefully they feel engaged and interested in what we're doing, they're sharing the same room,
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the same mind space with you and me. And that comes from wanting to do that in real life. So
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instead of creating a virtual world where you access it by yourself, you sit in your room,
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you know, you see the blue flickering light of your screen while you're in your room by yourself.
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In fact, what we want to do is we want to bring people together. So instead of us playing a game,
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each one of us on our computer or on our goggles at home, we actually want to meet and do it together.
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So, you know, humans will always crave this thing where you want to live in a nice neighborhood,
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you want to have greenery around you, you want to have your friends close so you can go out for a
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drink. And then once you do, maybe, you know, maybe we sit in a bar and we get a couple of drinks.
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And we play this little game with the cars, which can race on top of the table and whoever loses
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buys the drink. You know, this is the kind of, these are the kind of experiences that we're
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really interested in building. They bring people together, they make us feel connected. And I
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also think that this is kind of what the future is going to be like for most people. Like, it's not
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going to be you sitting in a room by yourself. It's going to be a bunch of digital stuff that's
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just kind of floating around in space around you. And you can access it like you do a different
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radio station, depending on your mood. Yeah, we sort of hit the nail on the head with the stereotype
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that, you know, technology is going to make us more isolated. Yeah, you sort of changed my
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perspective on that, that it can, you know, help bring people together even more. And Damir, as we're
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running down to our last couple seconds here, hopefully I get this off in time. But I want to
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thank you so much for coming on the podcast and, you know, sharing, sharing everything about you
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and your company, Matterless Studios with me here and with all of our listeners. Thank you so much
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for having me. It's been a real pleasure. I hope your listeners enjoy what we talked about. And
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if they do, I would love for them to come and check out our socials. They can go to
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metals.com to see what we're doing. They can find us on Discord. They can find us on Twitter. And I
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would love to share our socials addresses with you if you don't mind in your episodes to give
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people a chance to see what we're working on. Absolutely. I'll share all those links in the
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podcast description so anyone can check those out. And Damir, thanks again for coming on the
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podcast. Beautiful. You can also try our app in the App Store. It's called Floorcraft Arena and
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it's tiny little cars that bump into each other and go boom. And Loser has to buy a drink. Loser
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buys a drink. Awesome. Thank you Damir.