Exactly. At some point, in the office next door, they’ve got all the VR devices and there’s an uncanny valley, like a period where the VR/AR gets almost good enough but not quite. Then, it does create a jarring experience for people who spend extended time in it because it’s too...finding details on parts that’s not fine.
They shouldn’t be finding any details on the parts that my eyes are not looking but it’s not detailed enough in the parts that I actually look, which my eyes focused on and things like that.
Yes.
Like three or five years in the future.
The contents are still going to be useful.
In Taiwan, public universities are not companies, in the strict sense. They are more like units in the Ministry of Education.
If you do want to work directly with universities, it will have either to be private universities, or you will have to find yourself a way into fulfilling some specific Ministry of Education goals, which I’m not aware of anything corresponding to your plan, at this moment.
For K-12, there are KPIs around digital and media literacy in K-12 curriculum but it’s not strictly vocational in the way that you displayed it. It’s more about...
Exactly.
It had to be designed in a social way, in the sense that five or six children interacting with a single object, settings like that. For K-12, I’m not aware of anything specific like the thing you offer here, in the K-12 curriculum that’s taking effect about a year and a half from now.
In addition to the K-12 curriculum, there are also experimental schools.
Taiwan does have a very vibrant alternate schooling system in the K-12 and private universities above K-12, so that is one venue. I’m not very well connected to that private university scene but it is a possibility.
The other possibility would be regional governments, where you mention that you’ve been approaching. I think, in our last meeting, you mentioned Taichung, Taoyuan, and Kaohsiung, something like that.
Right. Even if the national government doesn’t have exactly a corresponding plan, perhaps the regional governments do. If the regional governments see that it is important, like the Kaohsiung city did, to have AVR industry as its local cluster, then it will have the sufficient land and planning in that region to develop this kind of ecosystem.
That would be business between the private sector and the city government. It wouldn’t be a national level investment. That’s two different levels.
Mm-hmm.
There are many such plans. I’m not sure which one you’re referring to.
Right, there is that. It is called Taiwania Capital Management. Which is, I think, AI and IoT-focused at this point but they may do some AVR as well.
There’s virtually one per ministry interested in it. There’s one for MOEA, actually two for MOEA, one for MOE, and one for MOST, but the MOST one works with the NDC.
I think those are the four primary programs. I’m not directly in touch with any one of them. [laughs] I just read some bi-weekly reports.
Honestly, I’m not involved in the case selection process or the review process of any of those four funds. I’m aware of their existence and what kind of companies that they produced, but I’m not involved in the process at all, so I have no idea about the criteria that they use to pick the investments.
What I will do is that after each of our meetings, I will do a full transcript of what has been spoken here, and you can edit for brevity, making the message more powerful.
Right. You can use that. Maybe not the neural lace part; other parts.
Feel free to use the transcript’s URL, which I relinquish all copyrights. Go ahead and use it in however way you want. Maybe we can do a short summary as a summary statement or whatever. I think that’s the extent that I can help.
I can certainly lend my URL, which is the PDIS site, the https://sayit.pdis.nat.gov.tw website that we use to capture all the transcripts that we have made in all our discussions that we had there. We have plenty of meetings with companies.
For example, there was a Bitcoin company here and talking about how they want taxation regulations to be changed to be considered a virtual currency instead of a virtual good, which was repeatedly taxed and so on. Then, that company used its transcript and forwarded it to the Minister of Finance, but the tax code did not change.
Exactly. It is, actually, very challenging to reclassify Bitcoin into any of those terms because when the terms were made, there was no Bitcoin, so it doesn’t really clearly fit into any of those slots for the central bank. That was that.
Feel free to use the same model and communicate either with regional leadership or with other ministries.
Well just today, that plan got the budget from the parliament.
I would encourage you to look at the detail plan. It’s at http://achievement.ey.gov.tw/cp.aspx?n=1E42BEB0F68720CB&s=0E1FF5CBE8AF0056 -- if you just go to the ey.gov.tw website, you can see the special budget. Then, if you click the special budget, it will lead you to a page where all the currently -- well, today -- approved special budget items are there. That’s the red square here.
The one-time hardware part of DIGI⁺ are there. The recurrent parts, we can’t use the special budget. It’s all at DIGI⁺ webside, http://www.digi.ey.gov.tw/. Here you will see this AVR science mark hub project.
The Kaohsiung city and the Ministry of Economic Affairs. The MOEA.
I would encourage you to read the KPIs there because it was done in a bottom-up fashion. Also, they consulted the existing AVR companies. There’s a lot of people doing special effects and things like that, around that area. They talked with them and so everybody felt that it’s reasonable in that region. Then, they proposed it to the national level for the special budget.
If you are looking for alignment with KPI, I would highly encourage you to compare your KPIs in other governments with the KPI that’s outlined in this special budget item. That’s the most relevant part.
All the others, I think, would require a lot of adaptation of your program to fit the Minister of Education’s K-12 or the Ministry of Science and Technology’s AI-based platform, in which AVR is still important but more like a facilitating tool.
It’s in a nearby time zone, we could meeting VR.
That’s right.
A little bit.
It was a pleasure. Thank you.
Hello, Alex.
Pretty good. Can you hear me?
Great. Thank you for making the call.
How much time do you have?
I have another meeting in an hour or so, maybe in an hour of time, give or take. I just received this document which I was just briefly reading, the pre-election briefing of the social enterprise opportunity.
It is very useful, actually. I had just finished reading it, and I do have some questions and some notes. If you’re OK with that, maybe we just use the presentation as the agenda, and I can also introduce briefly where Taiwan is in each of the slides, if that’s OK with you.
That’s exactly right.
That sounds excellent. Let me try sharing the screen with you and see if you can see the screen. Any moment now. Like this.
OK. It’s working. Awesome. If I put annotations, does it also go through?
OK, great.
