889: AI-Powered Virtual Reality: The Future of Education and Entertainment, with Mary Spio
🎯 Summary
Podcast Episode Summary: 889: AI-Powered Virtual Reality: The Future of Education and Entertainment, with Mary Spio
This episode features an in-depth conversation with Mary Spio, CEO and CTO of Seek, a platform pioneering AI-powered virtual reality (VR) and blockchain-integrated digital experiences. The discussion spans Spio’s extraordinary personal journey, the technical fusion of AI, VR, and blockchain, and the transformative potential of these technologies in education, entertainment, and digital asset ownership.
1. Focus Area
The primary focus areas are the convergence of AI, Virtual/Extended Reality (VR/XR), and Blockchain technology to create next-generation social and digital asset platforms. Specific themes include the neuroscience of VR memory formation, the future of digital content monetization (especially AI music), and the critical role of blockchain in verifying authenticity against deepfakes.
2. Key Technical Insights
- VR and Memory Formation: VR training can create memories that are neurologically indistinguishable from real-life experiences in the brain, making it a powerful tool for high-stakes training (e.g., medical diagnosis, space engineering).
- Blockchain for Digital Asset Ownership: Seek utilizes the blockchain (backed by the Seek token) to store user-created content (posts, videos) as verifiable digital assets, ensuring creators retain ownership and facilitating easy trading/licensing via smart contracts.
- AI in Music Production: AI is revolutionizing music by assisting with beats, vocals, and production, allowing solo creators to easily manage and sell full digital rights of their work, bypassing complex traditional music industry structures.
3. Market/Investment Angle
- Value-Driven Content Monetization: Seek focuses on high-value, professional, or specialized content (like celebrity academies or medical training) rather than ad-based models, recognizing that users are willing to pay for unique, immersive, or expert-driven experiences.
- Digital Rights Marketplace: The platform functions as a digital rights marketplace where content, particularly AI music, can be licensed or sold, leveraging blockchain efficiency for solo creators.
- Addressing Inaccuracy: In the age of AI proliferation, there is a growing market demand for trusted voices and verified educational content, which Seek aims to provide through immersive experiences.
4. Notable Companies/People
- Mary Spio (CEO/CTO, Seek): Former deep space engineer (Boeing, SETI program involvement) and US Air Force satellite technician. Holds over 10 patents in AI, XR, and spatial audio.
- Seek: The platform enabling blockchain-backed, VR/standard consumption of digital content, trusted by figures like Lady Gaga and Dwayne Wade.
- Industry Backers: Meta, Apple, Microsoft, and Universal Music are noted as important media players backing the ecosystem.
- Dr. Steffy: A professor at Georgia Tech with whom Spio worked on the SETI program, involving sending heat probes into space.
5. Regulatory/Policy Discussion
The discussion highlighted the impending tsunami of AI-generated deepfakes. Spio suggested that blockchain verification may become the essential defense mechanism to authenticate real content against synthetic media, implying a future need for decentralized verification standards.
6. Future Implications
The industry is heading toward a blended reality ecosystem where content consumption is fluid—accessible via standard screens or VR headsets—and where digital ownership is intrinsically linked to the blockchain. AI will democratize creative power (like music production), while immersive tech will redefine professional training and entertainment access.
7. Target Audience
This episode is highly valuable for Data Science Professionals, AI/ML Engineers, XR Developers, Digital Media Executives, and Tech Investors interested in the practical application and business models emerging at the intersection of AI, Web3 (blockchain), and immersive computing.
Comprehensive Summary
Episode 889 dives deep into the intersection of immersive technology and decentralized ownership with Mary Spio, CEO and CTO of Seek. Spio’s narrative arc is compelling, tracing her path from growing up in Ghana during a military coup—where TV served as a vital escape—to becoming a US Air Force satellite technician, a deep space engineer working on SETI projects, and ultimately, an AI/VR entrepreneur. This background fuels her mission at Seek: to create experiences that allow people to “feel what’s possible,” inspired by her childhood fascination with the moon landing.
Seek is positioned as a next-generation social platform where content is stored as blockchain-verified digital assets via the Seek token, allowing creators to own and trade their work directly. A key feature is its accessibility: content can be consumed traditionally or immersively via VR/XR headsets (like Apple Vision Pro). Spio showcased successful use cases, including celebrity academies (Dwayne Wade) and entertainment experiences (Lady Gaga).
A significant portion of the discussion centered on AI’s role in creativity, particularly music. Spio detailed how she uses AI to enhance her own vocal performance and production, overcoming personal confidence barriers and enabling her to release her own music (a fusion of EDM and Afrobeat). She emphasized that AI music thrives when humans finesse the output, and the blockchain simplifies the licensing of these rights, as solo creators often own the entire IP gamut.
Technically, Spio highlighted the neuroscience behind VR training, noting its ability to forge memories indistinguishable from reality, which is crucial for high-stakes fields like medicine (e.g., sepsis diagnosis training for Baptist Health). She also addressed a technical challenge she solved: fixing VR headsets that were causing severe illness in women users.
Finally, the conversation touched on the critical need
🏢 Companies Mentioned
đź’¬ Key Insights
"I think, and that's why we built a platform like Seek, one, to verify a lot of this information. And we're building a master node with our blockchain, master nodes and validators that can actually do nothing but go after these billions and billions of content so that when you use our content on certain platforms, you know that you're actually consuming content that's been validated for accuracy."
"Where those people are going to go is really working with AI to curate those experiences. And the blockchain is going to come in because we're going to need validators for the types of content that are real and what is not real, because otherwise, there's really no way to tell between fact and fiction anymore."
"could also be used to completely change people's political preferences, especially. We are already in an era of deepfake political environment, but when that's experienced in this kind of virtual reality, and it's bespoke for you, it's personalized to you and your preferences... it sounds like there's potential for misuse there."
"But there is also—you mentioned earlier talking about with things like eVTOL training in VR, how people experience that as reality. And so, you can kind of manufacture memories."
"what I discovered was that most of the VR headsets, of course, they were designed—most of them were designed by men. And so, they weren't experiencing this because there was no way for them to know. But there is a difference between the IPD, the interpupillary distance, for men and women."
"VR headsets were causing nausea in women at unusually high rates. And so, it looks like you made a discovery that allowed hardware VR headsets, which were probably predominantly designed by men, to have the hardware actually change."