ATP: True Tennis VR – play tennis anytime, anywhere with Virtual Reality Tennis

Welcome to the Atlanta tennis podcast.

Every episode is titled, "It starts with tennis and goes from there."

We talk with coaches, club managers, industry business professionals, technology experts, and

anyone else we find interesting.

We want to have a conversation as long as it starts with tennis.

Hey, hey, this is Shaun with the Atlanta tennis podcast, powered by GoTennis!

In this episode, we talk with Mark Segan of True Tennis VR.

True Tennis VR lets you play tennis anytime, anywhere.

With a meta quest, their true racket, and the true tennis VR software, you're able to

work out build skills, compete on leaderboards, and work with your coach anytime, anywhere.

Have a listen and let us know what you think.

Our job is to make you look good and get to know you and a little bit about true

tennis VR, but I want you to start with yourself if you don't mind and tell me who you

are, kind of a little bit of.

We just found out you graduated Princeton, so that's a connection that we have.

So from there, how would you tell your story as to how you ended up working with True Tennis VR?

Well there are two threads to that, right?

There's tennis and then there's technology and so-called career.

I graduated from Princeton with a degree in philosophy, which of course takes you into product

development.

You too?

I have a philosophy for myself.

Yes.

Then naturally you went there up to me tennis.

I hear you.

Well I immediately went into product development, invention, really.

And for many years I was inventing, there's another thread too.

There's a music thread.

We invented a lot of toys, a lot of high tech Christmas decorations.

The first musical greeting card.

If you ever look up Fisher prices, triple arcade tournament table, which was this enormous

thing, great fun.

Goodness.

Look up animated animations and animation art that moves in talks, work with all the major

studios, had a lot of fun.

More recently I ran, there was a company I co-founded many years ago.

In so-called Internet of Things, which means reading data from machines and objects rather than talk

to people.

This was electric energy, and I ran that for a few years and just finished up that assignment

as it were.

Free to concentrate on true tennis VR at this point.

The music piece, the music musical greeting card is also a little bit of musician and writes

pretty silly songs.

That was going to be my next question.

I have a music performance minor.

No kidding.

I like to think picture myself a musician a bit as well.

It's fun to hear.

Oh, this is good.

We're going to get along just fine.

Oh, yeah.

Good.

I love to listen to music.

There we go.

You're like, oh, that.

I'd love to listen to it.

My wife proved to me against all my understanding of the world that there is such a thing

as tone deafness.

Yeah, I can prove it to you.

I can do it.

Good.

I believe it now.

I didn't.

And yet my daughter sings like you can't believe so.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

It's a pretty powerful gene because both my kids are pretty tongue deaf, which is bad.

But I agree.

It can skip for sure.

Yes.

Yeah.

Not directly genetic, but we don't know.

So you got music, you got invention.

Yeah.

You end up doing tennis in Versailles, reality.

Right.

My dad played tennis and introduced us all to tennis.

And of course, we've been playing my brother and I.

And with my dad who's gone now.

I play a ton of tennis.

My brother's an excellent player.

I'm all right.

And as you can imagine, I created a strange game because I'm an inventor.

And so I actually play two hands both sides.

And I had to go through initially playing lefty and then switching to righty and then figuring

out the grips, which was, you know, have to be devised.

Got to figure it out.

It's not obvious.

The VR piece was fantastic.

My son, Max, he's quite a good tennis player.

Like you said, I wanted him to be nothing like me.

As you said, Bobby.

So he's got a terrific serve and really nice ground strikes.

The only similarity is he does play two hands both sides.

Wow.

But he got a longer arms than I do.

That's pretty good.

Play crosshanded or on one side.

But he's.

No, I keep the, you know, I can't swear what his grip is.

But I keep the right hand at the bottom of the racket.

So I just go take it.

So you play crosshanded off of one side.

Yes, exactly.

Off the floor.

Off what's so, my so cold for hand.

Yes.

Exactly.

I grew up with an a New Yorker as well.

Molly then Austrian.

And she made it to the quarterfiles of Wimbledon.

Her father is probably 90 now and still two in the world.

He's been two in the world since he was 40.

And you know, in the age group king, wonderful player, wonderful man.

But Molly was too handed one of the early, before Monica Cellesca's.

I'm old.

Yeah, well, I hear.

I mean, it's a great game.

If you have the, if you have the anticipation of Monica Cellesca, you can do great

damage with the control exactly.

So, but, but my son is a, is a, is a meta guy.

And, and he got me the, the headset while ago.

And we, I think we're playing ping pong on it.

And he said, and we sort of at the same moments that this would be fantastic as tennis.

And we started down the path and turned it into a little startup.

And we got a great team around us of just him helping out.

But a couple of other engineers and mechanical engineers and physicists.

Because that's, you know, it's one of the major things that that we've focused on because

their limitations to to the VR technology as it is, which are hard to overcome to get a

really tough quality simulation that, that a tennis player who plays it is going to enjoy playing.

I don't know if you may have experienced that already.

We have it.

And that's one of the things Bobby and I have been talking about.

I gosh, gentlemen.

Well, the, the goggles are free.

One.

Right.

You've got to figure out, okay, how do we compare these VR systems?

Because there are a few out there.

And it isn't just the kind of thing of, okay, a few months ago I did this or a few months ago

I did that.

Bobby and I are scheming an idea to be able to come up with part of our industry day is we want

to bring in some of the VR systems.

Those that would be interested is I'd like to go from court one to court two to court three.

It's okay.

Here's true tennis VR.

Here's VR number two.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Oh, sure.

I just really compare them because as a tennis player, I will admit I am fully skeptical that

this is going to feel anything real.

I believe it yet.

And I really am looking forward because I, we've talked to the true believers of how good these

things are.

And whether or not Jack Sock tells me it's great, is not for me.

I need to know, okay, is this real?

Is this real meaning I can feel it?

And there's a, there's a special thing that the physicist, there's a magic you have to have.

If you're going to convince me in VR, that this is going to look even remotely like real

tennis, making it feel like real tennis.

I have no idea how that's going to work.

Right.

When you say, I mean, this, you've hit on critical questions there, right?

First of all, what's the point?

What's the idea of what we're doing?

We want to get lots of reps in.

We want to make sure that how you swing produces a recognizable result to a pretty degree of precision.

Pretty good degree of precision.

You don't want it to be like, oh, you open the racket face, you get kind of a slice.

You know what I mean?

You can drop shots and above all, it should require that if you are hitting with, you know,

it's really funny.

I'm looking, you're both up here.

And I'm looking at you right now, showing because you have the questions like it rhymes in a room.

You want to make it so that you know in your bones that if I use actually proper technique

say for the volley, that that will optimize the result, not that I can poke at it or something,

you know, people often people, the memory that people have of we tennis, for example,

is unbelievable.

Right.

Well, that was great.

But of course, you know, anything you did, you just take that little rectangular control, you

poke it, you get a beautiful result.

Then it going to happen to tennis at all.

Part of the simulation, of course, is using a racket.

And that if you don't, if your grips are everything in tennis and of course swing weight to a considerable

degree.

So we've got, we've got a pretty nifty racket.

And it's extremely engineered, meaning we kill ourselves on this thing in developing it.

It's, I mean, first of all, it's very, very durable, very easy, if I show you, you know,

you put the controller in here for a reason.

And we may be jumping ahead, you know, here's the actual quest to controller.

That's what used to be called the Oculus.

And you know, the headset is this guy.

You've seen this, your viewers, you haven't had a chance to play with any of it yet either, right?

No, I've not.

I put it on.

I got to walk through a space station at a friend's house.

That was about all I've expected, putting it on, that's as far as I got.

Okay.

It's a pretty, you know, it's really fascinating.

One of the things that happens is somebody, hey, hey, you want to try out virtual reality

tennis and they put the thing on and they're just minds are blown.

Well, the minds are initially blown just because virtual reality, I'll blow your mind.

Never mind whether, whether the particular implementation of tennis is any, any good yet.

Well, that's why the tennis and there's a whole different experience.

You feel like you're on a tennis court.

The quest to is a very important step in VR, this particular product because it's so cold inside

out, which means you don't need stanchions standing in the room to tell you, if you're

to tell it where it is, it figures out where it is in the room, you turn your head and it's

not like a computer screen where I'm going to turn my head and all the screens over there.

No, no, this is like I'm turning within the room up and down everywhere.

And it's fantastic.

I would say certainly within VR, it's revolutionary.

And there are a lot of apps it has.

Many of them, of course, are what I would call sort of native VR apps.

By app, everybody knows what an app is.

We have our phones, we download them, right?

And that's what any of these are.

The truth in it's VR is an app that plays with the true racket.

The thing about the thing about the app is it has to, it lives within the technological

limitations of the quest to.

And there are some, getting because the underlying software can implement physics, bouncing,

the ball travel, all of these things, to a certain degree.

And as I said, to a certain degree of realism and precision.

We got pretty obsessive about that and have as we did on the racket, I guess.

And I think what one of the two main things that distinguishes us is, apart from the racket,

is the realism.

I don't think it's pretty unusual.

I would argue even unique.

The physicists who worked on it, they push themselves.

It's great. They're both astrophysicists, which I like the joke means they're experts at spheres

moving through space.

In this case, fuzz a yellow one.

There you go.

In that case, yeah, that's a good couple of guys to have.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You have.

And that kind of so much fun.

And I'm really looking forward to getting a chance to play with all this because the concept

has got to be so difficult to create.

If you don't know what you're doing, it sounds like you've done a good job of getting the

right team around you, getting the right people around you to say, okay, I'm not an astrophysicist.

So I can't do this.

And then I need to technologist to do that.

It's not just me as an inventor going, okay, cool.

I'm going to put a stick on a hula hoop and let's go.

We're going to do it, right?

These are these are great points.

I mean, I'll tell you that for example in developing the racket because I've developed

a hundred to products.

Many of them electronic, but all of them requiring some degree of mechanics too.

And I know who to engage with, how to make these things, what sort of criteria means, oh,

this is good, this is acceptable for users, for consumers.

The big thing with this is you have to make as much of it transparent to the user's

possible.

I'm not looking for somebody to become a technology expert and what's critical is I was distinguishing

a native app from something else.

The big thing here is that our app, true tennis VR is intended to take you from there and

not to stay there, not to live there, yet onto a tennis court.

That's where it's aiming all the time.

The reps you get here should benefit what you're doing on the tennis court.

Maybe some for reaction, maybe some for accuracy, always for a good swing, et cetera.

The one thing you mentioned how it feels.

So you're holding a racket, I get the right grip.

That's my backhand grip, that's my forehand grip.

The one thing you don't get really convincingly from this is the impact of the ball, right?

That is a different class of physics problem.

There's an argument that what I call the lemons to eliminate argument, which they say, if you

got lemons, make lemonade.

What are we doing when we do shadow swings?

We're practicing a proper swing and acceleration, et cetera.

Well here's a whole class of shadow swings everybody can do with a ball, right?

The result that is insisting itself on proper technique.

You see what I mean?

So, I want to impact, I want to swing through the ball.

That's what you guys are always telling me, right?

When you're the ball, don't pull up, don't tense for the moment of contact, right?

So that's the argument for not going toward looking for that impact and saying, that's

one for.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I mean, this is the target for that, which is, okay, you're doing your shadow swings.

Don't come to me wondering when we're coming out with the impact feeling, that's not, that's

not.

If we've done a lot of research on that and we have paths, but I would say the real point

is I'm joking when I say lemons to lemonade, it's irrationalizing, right?

Oh, we don't have it, but it's in fact great, you know?

What I'm really saying is it's not something we're rushing toward because there's so

much benefit to be gained from doing what we're doing.

And no reason to get it wrong.

Well, that's for sure.

That's, that's a great point.

Because I think we're, I think we're looking at it and say, okay, well, if I do this, this just,

you know, what, no, you're not there yet.

Yeah.

If you generate that say, we've got the impact down and we don't think you're there yet, you

lose credibility.

So from your point of view, hey, look, this is shadow swings.

It's going to give you a result.

You will, when we have an impact, cons, when we can create that impact, and it's right, then

we will let you know.

But we're not just, this is recorded.

I don't have to write that down for my own newsletter.

You are welcome to use it.

I'll write that.

Because that's what we, that's what we've been looking to hear because there's always something

out there.

And it's another question I want to ask about how you're promoting because everybody goes

out says, we've got this new product.

It's amazing.

It's the greatest thing ever.

Here, we've hired a famous person to tell you how much they love it.

But okay, well, I mentioned Jack Socker earlier, right?

He's a guy I've seen with the goggles on and do it his thing.

I'm like, okay, well, I get it.

But you're being paid to do that.

So there's a little bit of, do you really love it?

Can I have an off-the-record conversation with Jack Socker and find out what he really thinks?

But in this case, it is the feeling that says, okay, here's what we've created.

Here's why.

Here's how we're promoting.

Are you promoting this as a, not as a coaching tool or are you promoting this as a practice tool?

Is this something for me to get my steps in?

Just doesn't really matter.

I need to go out and do some swings and get some exercise.

What's your target?

We've got our target market here in Atlanta.

I do many, three things, right?

That all are, well, we're after.

It's a sentiment right now, right now.

It's essentially a simulation and as accurate and great feeling with the exception of the impact

as can be.

And what we've done, we're not doing that much promotion because you discovered us, for example.

And we have a little growth curve because what we want right now, and that's why we're

not charging for the use of the software, for example.

We do charge pretty, pretty attractive price for the racket.

It's $50, which is, yeah, where it's kind of, kind of,

goofy, but we want people to be able to use it.

And what we want is their comments.

And we have a nice little community of users who I talk to all the time as a result.

Where do you have that?

Say again, where are you talking to me out by email?

Oh, gosh, okay.

So you said community of users and we hang out with enough gems here that are you on Discord?

Or where are you?

I don't know.

Not Discord yet, right?

You guys made a really interesting point.

You've brought it up just now, then, Sean, about Gen Z's.

You, I think one of your recent podcasts because you mentioned games got to get younger.

There were two obstacles to that.

One is what one called practice and the other is access.

What we've got here is a technology.

Obviously, we were just off the Nurel, they're getting a four year old.

So 14 or 15 year old is going to be real comfortable in VR.

And once they're told, hey, that's the thing that you're doing.

This is going to make you a tennis player.

We would what we're aiming at is becoming just a great way to learn to play real tennis on a real

court.

I like that.

That's the target of growing the sport.

I think there was a good one.

Yeah, that is, quote Bobby Bobby's quoted as saying, you know, we spent too much time promoting

a player or the players as opposed to promoting the sport.

And I know Bobby's just as excited as I am to at some point, but one of these goggles on.

Well, first of all, I want everybody out there to know for the next week, I'm going

to be talking like this and drinking my coffee different because I've been drinking.

Listen to that.

I can college again.

I just left Texas.

I went back to New York for the summer.

And now I come back to Texas with a much more creative vocabulary.

So I already see the problems from this conversation.

There is more has come up.

Where is my vocabulary been creative or colorful?

I think that's just implicit, Bobby.

So I'm going to be bad for the next week.

I'm apologizing ahead of time because I've been triggered.

Now, love what you're saying is, and you are the first person, this is the third virtual

company we spoke into that is actually even brought up the fact that it's not going to

feel the same way.

So we definitely appreciate that fact because that was one of the big things.

I'm all about the shadow swings.

I think it's great.

I think it's a great way to introduce the sport.

We talk about it all this time using the word technology and accessibility.

So love the fact that that's what we're going toward.

Love the fact introducing to a four year old like we introduced any other video game that they

want to take the next step because hey, it four years old, it's not enjoyable game.

You're either doing something you're doing with a parent because you love the parent.

It's not because you love tennis.

You're hanging out with your parent.

And that's a misconception that a lot of people have up the grades.

They never were playing tennis.

They were playing with their parent Jimmy.

And I was hanging with his mother.

He didn't know about tennis at four years old.

So yeah, I love the perspective of which you're taking it from.

But my first question always how heavy is the racket?

Because you brought up we and I laugh because a lot of people got hurt playing we because

the racket was so light that they would swing too hard and they walk out the next

day saying God, my elbows kill me.

So where's the racket as far as weight?

And is the actual weight of it, which has to of course include the controller is about 13 ounces.

So fantastic.

It's fine.

The one thing that you got to keep in mind is there's a difference between swing weight and

actual net weight, right?

Because you could put the thing on a scale.

You could put all of the 13 ounces down here.

You got a headache, right?

Right.

But that's not where it is.

We've tried to place the center of mass as close to a real racket as possible, given the

other constraints.

Right.

Well, that's, I mean, in racket's have changed.

Most of a meekle bounced down.

I mean, Wilson was notorious historically making a heavy racket and they got out of the business.

Everybody's pretty equal because of the way the game is played.

So that's great.

So now, if you brought it up and I'm no mathematician, I'm not even going to pretend.

Can mathematics help simulate swing speed with the weight of the racket to get you an idea,

even though you might not necessarily feel how hard you're hitting it.

Could you mathematically extrapolate and say, well, this is we're in an area of this is what you'd

be seeing?

Yeah, of course, that's exactly what we're doing.

I mean, that's a little much of what we've concentrated on.

You know, without that, I don't know where the simulation is.

Again, you want to, for whatever the swing is, you want the result, where the ball goes,

how much spin it has on it, what direction is this?

We got side spin tops, well, you know, everything.

You know, there's, of course, you know, the way a ball travels through the air is important.

And all of that is included.

So yes, is the answer, of course.

Fantastic.

And how much space do you need?

Depends on the particular routine you're doing, each one identifies it.

You know, you can usually get away with about six, six front to back and eight wide.

Or is better, you'll feel less constrained.

You want to harm the cat or break, break a lamp.

You're inside.

No oops is right.

And then, so do you give any feedback on the physical exertion side?

I mean, not just the tennis, but a lot of people, Peloton, you know, just the actual experience

where you could actually, you know, how many steps, what kind of calories do you do anything

on those lines?

Good question, even a good suggestion.

No, we haven't yet.

But I will tell you, it's really interesting.

The better, the better player that uses it, the quicker they become sweaty using it.

It's really interesting because of their insistence upon executing every piece of the physical

movement correctly.

That I mean, you know, it's in grain.

They can't help it.

Fascinating.

So for now, we can basically just attach it to our Apple watch or lace clips or whatever we have

on there that we can work out and track it, that be really cool to have that part of your

technology as well as it at some point.

Yeah, we have not done that.

But that is certainly something that's worth doing because I, you know, I'm glad you brought

that up.

I made a note of it earlier for exercise, this thing's fantastic.

I mean, repeating tennis strokes is good exercise.

Yeah, we've talked about that because that's part of what we believe the market here is,

it's, okay, maybe it's not the elite player that's jumping into this every time.

Maybe that's not the only target because we've got the kids that are playing video games and

now they're getting their exercise.

But I think a parent might look in and the kid goes to bed and the parents sneak in and

grab in the kids toy.

I'm going to go in the garage.

I'm going to get myself some exercise, get some reps in before my match in the morning.

That's exactly right.

And I mean, one of the tools, one of the great uses for this as a tool is warming up.

You can get some really concentrated, concentrated time in doing a lot of hits.

I mean, 10 minutes of this thing is fantastic.

I know people have done it for an hour.

I think that's, that's a good chunk.

But, but the exercise piece of it and the warmup for being on the court is fantastic.

Yeah, we thought of a few ways this could do well because one of our targets is to get this

information to Metro Atlanta specifically.

So we've always got Metro Atlanta and the style of tennis player that we have here in mind

when we have conversations like this and it's not even just the tennis player.

I mean, take we tennis aside plenty of kids were learning how to keep score and that's a

question.

I looked into the software specifically, is this drill related?

Do I have the ability to play against a friend or a robot or be able to, is there any of that yet?

Not yet.

Okay.

We've, you know, we've concentrated on the simulation aspect.

There's a little robot who's a cute little robot.

His name is Woody because as you, I don't know if you look website where Mark Woodford is

associated with this.

He's a, you know, don't know him personally.

No, but we know we know of him certainly.

Yeah, he's a spectacular guy.

He's extraordinary and he's been a great help in a million ways and, you know, working through

a lot of the routines and performance.

To that point, I wouldn't argue for example, there's some world-class player living

right now, a world-class player playing at the top of the game is going to use this to work

on his strokes certainly not.

And that goes to some extent to the limitations of the hardware of the headset.

This is really good from, you know, beginner to 455.0.

Yeah, and that's, and that's so much fun because we're trying to figure out where this goes.

Is everybody talks about affordability and accessibility in all those terms?

We have a different view of some of those things here in Atlanta because tennis here is mostly

free.

And so when we have that question, especially coming out of New Jersey or New York and New

England side or the California side of tennis, especially what in Chicago area of there where

the weather doesn't allow you to play all the time, you need indoor courts.

Tennis gets expensive in other places, but it's relatively free here.

So a little bit of the argument of saying, "Hey, we're making it more accessible."

From our point of view, that's a rain day or the twice a year that you don't want to go outside

because it's below 30 degrees, right?

But in this case, it's such a great addition to what we can offer because as an example,

my tennis for children business offers rain day workouts for our beginner kids.

And I don't know that we're going to get every kid in, you know, in a $400 set of goggles

with all the stuff because that's actually making it more expensive from an Atlanta point

of view. But if you've already got it, which a lot of these families do, it really be wonderful.

So okay, everybody put on your, put on your meta quest two, is that, did I get that right?

Met a quest?

Well, yes.

At some point, I'm going to have all this ready to go.

And I'll be competent with the conversation.

But then do your shadow swings and that's one of those things.

Step, pivot, forehand, step, you know, split step, pivot.

All those things that we just would love the kids would be even more excited doing it without their

physical tennis racket in this case because the parents are less scared they're going to break

a land.

Well, yeah.

And that's called homework.

Yep.

Right.

Exactly what we call it.

And here's a case where you can assign it.

And you said you do your homework.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Tough homework, though.

I wish my homework had been like that, right?

Exactly.

I've got a lot of time to go to school.

Bob, you got anything else?

I want to run to my--

Yeah, I mean, that's quite a lot.

I was just looking at the video because the other question I had is trying, is there a component

where they can watch themselves after they've participated?

There, yeah, there's a way, it's an interesting thing.

You can, there's a thing called casting.

And I suppose you can record that too.

You can record the entire thing.

Okay.

There are some buttons you got to push.

It's not that isn't the most user-friendly.

You could record users, health internally.

We have not done anything to implement that as-- but that's an interesting suggestion too.

There's also a way to project it on G&TV.

But that can have-- that can slow the whole system down.

It's a sub-computeing resources.

I just want to get from a coaching standpoint.

As I tell, we deal a lot with adults that as an adult, you do lose out on the-- actually

watching other players.

Growing up in New York, we had certain court hours.

The club would open up Saturday morning, four is early and it was for free.

We were allowed to hang out until 12 o'clock.

If you know, a card happened to open up, we could run down and get 10 more minutes, 15 more

minutes hitting.

But we had to watch a lot of tennis.

And adults don't.

They show up, they play, and they leave.

And I love the fact that when you play, you see the spacing.

First of all, so you start the idea of training on another object.

I think we take for granted, but people don't realize that they spend so much time focusing

part of the progression and a player is learning that there's somebody besides you on the

court.

You're still on the hit the ball phase.

I think that's a society problem.

Yeah, you're probably right, exactly.

But that's the other part that they're going to get the extra reps in a fun environment, exposing

you to something that they don't take enough responsibility for.

Well, I would say part of my answer to that is stay tuned.

We believe that as a tool for coaching, this is a big deal.

Yeah, for accountability of making good use.

It's like anything.

I've shown my instruments piano.

So what I do when I was a kid, I had to listen on Saturday morning or whatever it is.

Did I practice until the next Saturday morning?

No.

What is the point?

Yes.

I was truly.

And in order to get proficient, you have to practice.

In order to practice, you have to love.

I had a daughter who singing became her instrument because piano was difficult.

I'm like, of course, it's difficult.

If it was easy, everybody would play piano.

But you're going to be glad that you have this rudimentary knowledge later in life.

Again, when you're talking to a child later in life is tomorrow.

So it kind of gets lost in the translation.

But there's a lot of truth.

This is the more fun we can make it, the more likely they're going to gravitate and pick it up

to it.

There's definitely a fuse.

And you think, like you said, the warm up alone, whether it be jumping, rope, we all in

the benefits of static versus dynamic.

You see, you still see it.

People go out there and do static stretches.

You're going to hurt yourself.

Do dynamic first.

Get lost then come back.

But this is the way they were trained.

All these things, you wouldn't have to say it anymore.

People just pick it up.

I'm going to go hit my headset for 15 minutes.

I'm going to walk on the court and sweat.

Think about a boxer.

They never walked out, not sweating.

They would do a workout before they got the ring because you got a break as sweat before

you go compete.

And this is just going to help.

Yeah, that's these are great points.

I certainly, this is what you do.

Feel free to use them.

I love it.

Yeah.

What's coming up next, Mark?

What do you have?

Well, we're expanding a lot of things.

We're in terms of visualizations, facilitation, and coaching.

I won't go beyond that.

But we see it as a, look, this is a platform for learning tennis.

What we had to do was perfect our platform.

And it's pretty good.

Close right now.

So nice.

I like that transparency.

As Bobby says, it's transparency.

It's humility.

It says, this is where we are.

This is what we are now.

We're not trying to take over the world.

We're going to get this piece right.

And the next steps will let you know when we're there.

There's not a lot of grandiose claims.

Oh, we will be allowed to take over the world then.

Yes, absolutely.

Okay.

But take us with you.

Yeah, all right.

You can let me know when I'm ready to take over the world.

Yeah, we'll let you know.

Then you take a cold.

I'll call you tomorrow.

Mark, I noticed Sean is kind of a lot more animated through the course of this

conversation too.

You see the hands are flying.

I guess talking about.

Oh, see, but you know, this is where New York meets me to Italian.

Yeah.

My wife is Italian.

So I'm IBM Italian by marriage.

Yes.

This is the same smart.

Like I've got my Ecuadorian flag hanging up, right?

You got the Italy flag.

See, it's smart man.

I like that.

So I'm going to use that smart.

And I'm going to ask you the question, which is our favorite question.

Well, it's my favorite question.

And coming from your experience as a player, as an inventor, and as a tennis fanatic, I think

is what you call yourself.

A tennis nut sometimes.

It's not.

If you were king of tennis and you could change anything or adjust anything or invent anything,

you were king of tennis for a day or however long it took, is there anything you would change

about tennis today?

There are some really intractable international conflicts.

And I would say the tennis governance with the Tower of Babel model that they seem to have

is a big thing that we'd all want to change.

Because there are so many participants.

And I think that it'd be-- and you look at the things that pop up to try to solve all of the

problems for, I would say, you know, starting with the players who are they--that's

all in doubt that they've got to live with this stuff.

And I would say tennis governance, I know they make efforts.

These are all expert and caring people who want to do the best thing.

But boy, boy, from what I've seen, if a king of tennis, well, and have to be smart enough

to figure it out too.

But I think I'd start there.

I appreciate the humility again.

And when you say-- and I'll push your little say, OK, well, you say tennis governance.

Are you talking United States?

Are you talking global?

All world.

This is an international sport.

People are in diverse parts of the world overnight.

They could lose today.

And, you know, two days later, they have to be on a court again.

I'm different surface.

It's unbelievable.

Very true.

Yeah, for what we witnessed, the effort and commitment of these kids is unbelievable.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, we'll follow up because we want to have you back, especially

as your path with true tennis VR.

I'm sure it's true tennisbr.com for anybody listening.

That's exactly true spelled TRE.

TRE, yep.

So true tennis, your path with true tennis takes you long.

We want to bring you back and find out where you end up because again, you're taking us

with you.

Let me ask you more, obviously, you're aware of your competitors.

I mean, you're just my nature.

So we want everybody to succeed in a perfect world.

If you've spoken in different people of taking different approaches.

And like I said, yours is refreshing and with what you've come across to us.

Do you see the possibility for combinations?

I mean, does the technology match?

Because I know one person's taking a completely different angle competitive.

They want to do worldwide tournaments.

And again, it all comes back to I've had people try to get into the beverage space.

And I'm like, yeah, you talked to anybody.

There's one question.

It's a taste good.

Forget about everything else.

It doesn't taste good.

I don't care if it's most that we've started about apple cider vinegar.

You know, it's the healthiest thing in the world.

I'm not drinking it because you can't.

It's horrible.

So if the product doesn't produce, you can have all the aspirations.

So you know, speak to that if you don't mind.

Well, I want to say two things.

I mean, you basically went to the most important issue, which is, you want to make a new soda.

As it tastes, that's the, that's the, that's the count called foundation.

Right, what's the most important thing about a drink?

I mean, what's the most important thing about reproducing tennis in a technical, you know,

artificial setting.

And what you got to realize is this is a really weird problem.

In virtual reality, there's nothing there.

If you throw a ball, it means nothing.

This is a completely, you have to reproduce every moment of, of everything in there.

Build the foundation.

The other thing I would say, though, is as as an inventor, as an entrepreneur, I appreciate

an anybody who's sticking it out there and trying, building something and trying to make

it work.

So hats off to them.

I think, you know, our approach, I think is, is a wise approach.

But that would be my, that would be my response.

Well, there you have it.

We want to thank Rejovenate for use of the studio and be sure to hit that follow button.

Also, we've been nominated for a podcast award, the best tennis podcast.

For more about that, check the show notes.

And with that, we're out.

See you next time.

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