April 22, 2021

Good morning, and welcome to Protocol Next Up. This week's edition is about AI music, which can help you be more productive — unless you are a lawyer who has to figure out how to license it — and Facebook's quest to bring more of the real world into VR.
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As I am writing this newsletter, I am listening to an endless stream of minimal techno, designed to improve my productivity and focus. The soundtrack comes courtesy of Plastikman, the alter ego of Detroit techno legend Richie Hawtin, and productivity-enhancing AI music app Endel.
Endel uses a bunch of data, including your location, weather, time of day and even biometrics to create an individual soundtrack on the fly. "This is a technology that is designed to help you focus, relax and sleep," Endel CEO Oleg Stavitsky told me this week.
Endel's execs have long said that their app is better at helping you focus than random Spotify playlists, or YouTube's Lofi Girl. Now, they do have some data to support this: A study released this week shows that Endel's AI music can improve focus better and more quickly than pre-programmed playlists.
The tech and science behind AI music is intriguing, but there's also a fascinating business story here:
"We are inventing a new way to experience music, and we have to come up with everything," Stavitsky said. That also includes Endel's own business model. Most of the company's revenues currently come from subscription fees, with Endel charging users $5.99 per month after a free trial. The company is also in discussion to license its service to carmakers and consumer electronics companies, and has even begun selling enterprise plans to companies.
"Endel is essentially an art project turned business," Stavitsky said.
"We had those 10 years where we were growing smooth as silk, and it's just a little wobbly right now." —Netflix co-CEO Reed Hastings, responding to his company's weaker-than-expected Q1 growth.
"For the first five years at Oculus, I really fought to keep us from attempting to do the metaverse, because I just expected it to be a disaster." —Facebook Reality Labs consulting CTO John Carmack during a recent Twitter Spaces Q&A.
The pandemic upended life as we knew it. Most of us experienced the abrupt shift in the way we work, learn and connect, with blurring lines between office and home. While the future of work continues to evolve, the focus on a more engaged and fulfilled workforce will outlast the pandemic.
Facebook is taking one small step toward a unified future for augmented and virtual reality: The company will give VR developers access to the Oculus Quest's passthrough video feed soon, revealed Facebook's VP of consumer hardware, Andrew Bosworth, during a recent Q&A session on Twitter Spaces.
I've been fascinated with video passthrough ever since Facebook launched the first Oculus Quest in 2019, arguing at the time that it offered a peek at the future of mixed reality, and things have only gotten more interesting since.
More recently, Facebook has made a big push toward integrating more of the real world into VR. Quest users can now use Logitech keyboards and track their desk surface as part of something Facebook calls Infinite Office, and immersive teleworking startup Spatial showed off a demo of its app last fall using the Quest's passthrough video to combine a real office with virtual avatars.
Video passthrough is reportedly also a key feature of Apple's upcoming headset. The device, which Apple hasn't announced yet, will most likely be positioned as a way for developers to build apps for future AR glasses, so we can expect the video quality of the passthrough feed to be quite high. It will be interesting to see how far Facebook can push passthrough on the Quest before Apple's device is being unveiled.
Last week, Twitter user @TaxBeast asked his followers to post a picture of the first MP3 player they ever owned. The thread went viral, and it's a wonderful collection of weird old-school technology, with devices from companies like Creative, Sony, iRiver, Samsung and SanDisk, among others. A few iPods made the list as well, but most of the contributions were from pre-iPod days, including an original Diamond Rio with 32 megabytes of space ("about 10 128kbps MP3s"), weird no-name MP3 sticks ("12-16 songs from Kazaa") and the Q-Be, likely the only MP3 player ever that used a headphone port for USB file transfers ("I had to stop using it after I misplaced the cable"). Personally, I was partial to the Archos Jukebox 6000, one of the first MP3 players to feature a laptop-sized 6GB hard drive, giving it enough space for hundreds of songs. It was also super heavy, bulky and geeky — enthusiasts even developed their own open-source operating system for it, which I at one point installed just for the heck of it. The whole thread is great, if only as a reminder of how fun and chaotic those early days of digital music were. Or in the words of TaxBeast: "The replies to this are crazy to me. I had no idea so many varieties of MP3 players existed!"
Thanks for reading — see you next week!
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