It's hard to get paid to do what you love.
Perhaps no one understands this better than dancers, but Taku Kodaira and his team at Mikro Entertainment are on a mission to fix that.
But this conversation, and Mikro Entertainment itself, is about much more than dance. Mikro's marketplace for dance moves is just the first application of Mikro's new motion-capture technology, and things are just getting started. Today, Taku and I talk about the surprising economics of dance moves, the adoption curve of disruptive technology, dance-move lawsuits. and one very important law that looks like it is about to change.
It's a great conversation, and I think you'll enjoy it.
Show Notes
How you sell a dance move
Making a market - who is buying dance moves
Why growing up international made it easier to start a startup
How copyright law needs to expand
One danger in allowing dance moves to be copyrighted
Lawsuits against Epic Games over Fortnight dances
How big is the motion capture industry
The adoption curve for disruptive technology
Why it is impossible for any startup ecosystem to have enough engineers
Links from the Founder
Everything you ever wanted to know Mikro and GesRec
Friend Taku on Facebook
Mikro coverage in Wired (in Japanese)
How to use GesRec models in Unity
Transcript
Welcome to Disrupting Japan, straight talk from Japan’s most successful entrepreneurs.
I’m Tim Romero and thanks for joining me.
Truly disruptive technology is usually hard to spot when it first shows up. Sure, after the IPOs and the mass market success, everyone claims that they knew it all along. But in the early days, disruptive technology is usually shrugged off as being too simplistic or unprofitable or most often, just a solution looking for a problem.
When Kodak invented the digital camera, they dismissed it as a toy with no real commercial applications. LED light bulbs were first written off as impractical. And in 1911, the military brass dismissed the airplane as, quote, "a scientific toy with no military value." All of these seemed like, well, solutions looking for problems.
We'll pick up that thread later. But I want you to keep it in mind as we sit down today and we talk with Taku Kodaira, the founder of Mikro Entertainment, who's developed technology that can create full 3D motion capture models for mobile phone videos.
Now, Taku's initial and current application of this technology is the world's first global marketplace in dance moves, and he has some of the world's most famous dancers signed up on the platform.
But this is a conversation that will take us on a journey of how digital dancing is already being monetized in gaming and social media, about copyrights in dance and plagiarism and choreography. And we'll also explore the new uses and new markets that this technology will open up in the future.
But you know, Taku tells that story much better than I can, so let's get right to the interview.
Interview
Tim: So I'm sitting here with Taku Kodaira, the founder of Mikro Entertainment and GesRec motion capture marketplace. And thanks for sitting down with us.
Taku: Thank you very much, Tim.
Tim: Now, what you guys are doing, it's really amazing tech, but you know, you can probably explain it a lot better than I can. So what does it do and what are you selling?
Taku: Right. So just starting about the name GesRec, we tried to combine two words gesture and recognition and tried to create like a one word. My wife is a dancer, and I've been talking to her and she told me all the difficulty dancers are facing, and we just realized, okay, these people are doing so much stuff out there. Is there any way we can try to support them? Right now we are utilizing our technology to capture 3D motion and turn it into the data from the 2D video. And we are creating a marketplace that we sell and trade those 3D motions that's actually coming from a lot of people, mainly right now dancers and choreographers.
Tim: Okay. So I mean, I totally -- I mean, in another, what seems like another life I used to be a professional musician, and I completely understand that even compared to musicians, dancers have a really hard time making money and supporting themselves. So anything that supports that is good.
Taku: Exactly.
Tim: So the dancers, the choreographers, they take videos of themselves using just a regular cell phone camera. You guys can extract the 3D modeling from this and put it up on the on the website.
Taku: Yes. And what's amazing is they don't really need to take the video again, because throughout their careers they have a lot of videos already on their hands, they can just hand us the videos they have.
Tim: So we have these dancers uploading their videos to the marketplace and you guys rendering this into 3D models. So tell me about your customers, who's on the other side of this, who are buying these dance moves.
Taku: We are actually looking at slightly different customers depending on the categories. The first customer as we saw was the 3D artists or production companies. Currently, we see a big boom where a lot of people are able to work on the 3D models. Because of PCs getting faster, there are more options for the software. The second customer we see is more in terms of like gaming and social media. As you probably know, on the gaming world, the metaverse is really there expanding. Right now people have their avatars and the next thing they want to do is make them do the motions, especially coming from somebody who has creatively created it. And the last one is a little bit similar, social media is expanding to the 3D world plus the avatar. So similar things with the gaming.
Tim: Yeah. I can see how that'd be used that way. I mean, the potential is fantastic. But I mean, who are the customers specifically rather than the user? For example, like Fortnite dancing has been really in the news, it's the first thing that kind of comes to mind here. So it's the gaming companies who will buy these models, social media, I guess, would be the social media platforms that would buy these models. So is that the same customers you have or are you trying to do more direct or something broader or something different?
Taku: Right now we are doing things in combination. We are in discussion with the gaming companies and we are also discussion with the social media companies. The problem there is a lot of times, dancers or choreographers are feeling that their work has been stolen. So they don't get credit, they don't get the revenues. And that's something we're trying to change here. What we can actually do is we can be in between those gaming or social media companies and the ones who's creating the motions. What we are seeing in the very near future is that they can collaborate together as a kind of like influencer and platform relationship.
Tim: Before we dig deeper into that, because there's a whole fascinating area of motion rights and an extension of copyright here. But before we get into that, I want to ask a bit about you.
Taku: Okay.
Tim: You spent a lot of your time overseas when you were growing up and in your early career. Did that have any influence on your decision to start your own startup?
Taku: I would say so, actually, yes. Just a little bit of my life, I was born in Singapore. I spent a lot of time of my job in Hong Kong, about eight, nine years. And I finished high school in the Philippines. I got a college degree in the United States, a master's degree in Japan. So that kind of got me into the startup. Also, what we see as a trend in Japan is most of the startups are focused on the Japanese market because we are here. But as Mikro Entertainment, we tried to go into the global markets.
Tim: And you mentioned that your wife is a dancer. Was she kind of your inspiration for starting this or is she involved in building and running the startup as well?
Taku: Absolutely. So I got a lot of inspiration, especially in the beginning. And now she's also involved into our business as well. In the beginning, she was more like somebody who gives me inspiration and also tells me how things work in Japan around dancing. And now she's expanding her career as well. She started to learn about coding, something I can't do. She's also into those 3D modeling stuff. So again, this is another area, I can't really do it myself.
Tim: Oh, that's awesome. Let me ask you a bit about the technology and then we'll dive into the business model. So looking at it from the outside, this is kind of amazing technology, right? Because 3D motion capture has always been, you know, people in the motion suits with the ping pong balls stuck on the outside, you know, specialized cameras. It's been a very specialized and expensive process. So the fact that you can extract it from a single camera view is pretty amazing. So can you dig into that technology? How exactly are you doing this?
Taku: The very simple way I explained is we can take the 3D motion out of a 2D video. And there are some other companies who specialize into this, most of the time what they're utilizing is AI. Our technology is a combination of AI, physics motion, and some other stuff. We are pretty confident we are one company that can provide the most precise or at least getting very close to those motion capture suit quality motion extracted from 3D video.
Tim: Are you free to talk about the technology? Disrupting Japan listeners tend to be a pretty technical bunch. So can you share anything about the specific technology or techniques you're using?
Tim: Sure, just a little piece of it. As I mentioned, we are combining all sort of technologies out there. So one thing to mention about AI, for example, we are combining several different AIs. One is taking the finger motion from those 2D video, and another one is taking the whole body motions.
