Discover IKA The Future of User Interfaces with Carlos Mats and Donna Mitchell
Thrilled to introduce a visionary technologist, artist, and designer, Carlos Mats, as our guest. Carlos, the creator of IKA, joins us to delve into his groundbreaking project that's transforming the future of web interfaces as we know it. With an impressive journey that spans across the early days of Web 1.0 to the emerging realities of Web3, Carlos has combined his vast experience in design, technology, arts, and media to develop IKA. Imagine the real-life Jarvis with a three-dimensional conversational interface, designed to revolutionize how we interact with technology by seamlessly integrating AI capabilities.
About Carlos Mats:
20 years of international career as multidisciplinary designer, tech founder, keynote speaker, and award-winning artist. In 2004 founded Xchematic, an arts & technology studio as a main creative outlet, and in 2019 founded IKA, creating the "JARVIS" in real-life for project management, based in Silicon Valley. Accomplished entrepreneur, filmmaker, writer, director, photographer, professional diver, event producer.
Highlights:
•Artificial Intelligence with “IKA”, the “real-life JARVIS from Iron Man”, a Cognitive Immersive Productivity plataform, creators of the first AI Fashion Show / Collection in Latin America, “Colección LunarIA” with RCANO.
•Virtual Reality with “Honduras VR” app at the 7th, and 8th Ibero-American Design Biennial in Madrid, The Fringe Festival in Edinburgh, and a permanent installation at the MIN Museum (Museum for National Identity) in Tegucigalpa.
•Global Speaker for organizations including Google, Forbes, BBVA, and the University of Texas at Austin, with the conferences “Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)", "Raised by the Internet" and "The Metaverse".
•Cinema in Hollywood, director and writer of the short film “Vaenquish” produced in Amsterdam, winner of Best Cinematography and Best Editing, premiered at the Los Angeles Film School.
•Solo Art Exhibition in Austin titled “FLASH FORWARD” (Photography, Film, UX, Virtual Reality, Digital Art) at the Austin Motion Media Arts Center.
@carlosmats / carlosmats.com
X/Twitter: https://x.com/carlosmats_
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/xchematic
LinkedIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carlosmats/
TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/carlosmats
Connect with Donna Mitchell:
Podcast - https://www.PivotingToWeb3Podcast.com
Book an Event - https://www.DonnaPMitchell.com
Company - https://www.MitchellUniversalNetwork.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/donna-mitchell-a1700619
Instagram Professional: https://www.instagram.com/dpmitch11
Twitter/ X: https://www.twitter.com/dpmitch11
YouTube Channel - http://Web3GamePlan.com
What to learn more: Pivoting To Web3 | Top 100 Jargon Terms
What to learn more: Pivoting To Web3 | Top 100 Jargon Terms
00:00 - User Interface Evolution
03:49 - AI Revolution Alters Interfaces
09:37 - Task Management in Connected Systems
13:29 - Banking Automation with Voice AI
14:44 - "Blockchain UX and 3D Interfaces"
20:31 - IKA: Universal AGI User Experience
20:34 - Blockchain: Solution to Misinformation
25:03 - Corporate Innovation and Digital Transformation
27:39 - AI Content Overload's Impact on Art
Thanks for checking in the Pivoting to Web3 podcast. Go to pivoting the web3podcast.com to download and listen or web3 game plan to check out the videos. Thank you. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome, welcome, welcome, welcome to pivoting the web 3. And today we have Carlos Matz. And Carlos has a very diverse background. He has so much information and so much experience in design, technology, arts and media.
He's done quite a bit in regards to job Office Ika. And I'm gonna let him explain all the rest because he's got a lot going on and I'm excited to talk to him so I can learn exactly what he's doing and bringing to us today. So with that said, Carlos, say hello to your audience and ours and thank you for being on Pivoting to Web three.
Thank you. Donna, how are you? Thank you so much for, for your time and I'm, I'm pretty excited to, to be in your podcast. I am Carlos Mats. I am a technologist, artist, designer and the creator of Ika, which is basically the Jarvis in real life with a beautiful three dimensional conversational interface that looks like the interfaces that we see in science fiction movies. But we are in 2025 already, so we are already in the future. We already have those type of interfaces and capabilities. So yeah, I've been, you know, in innovation for 20 years. I started designing, you know, in the early web 1.0 times and then transitioned to web 2.0 and I got into VR.
You know, I'm even created a short film in Amsterdam. I'm basically fusing art and technology and that middle ground that fusion is basically what we do. And I created two companies through it. The first one, Schematic, when I was like 20 years old. And then the culmination of all that experience led me to create this new system called Ika, which is my new company. And yeah, that's a little bit about me.
So tell me a little bit more about Ika, your new company. How does that impact the evolution of web3? Or give us a little bit more or paint the picture for us exactly what Inca is. How do I pronounce it correctly? Oh, I did say it correctly. Tell us exactly the functionality, the capability, what does it do? Why is it important? Help us understand why you decided to start a new company.
Thank you. So in every technological revolution, the user interfaces change. We remember back in the days of dos when we had DOS and then we transitioned from that was only text, basically all the commands were in text. But you had a file system behind it, it's just that you can visualize it, right? But in your mind the hierarchy of your thought was that it was a file system. However, you couldn't see it until Windows and the Apple revolution of the personal computer happened, that you could actually visualize what that text meant in a graphical user interface way. That's the personal computer revolution where the user interface has changed. And then we have the mobile revolution where we have like companies like, you know, BlackBerry which are purely text, right? But there's a lot of meaning behind that text that was not realized until, you know, the iPhone came out. And all those ideas of apps and file system and like the interaction between all the systems, like materializing a beautiful user interface that multitouch that everybody just understood.
That's the second example of user interfaces changing when technology itself changes. And now we are on another wave, on the biggest wave maybe where we have the AI revolution and we're going to have to interface with computers and data very differently now. Like now we can talk to computers, we can talk to our systems and they understand, they are intelligent and they talk back and they have context of everything that goes on in our work and in our lives. So, and we still use them as chat, we still use them as text, right? So we're again back in the DOS era, back in the BlackBerry era. Now we're in the chat GPT era. That is the before, the real user interface era of artificial intelligence. So we're still in the before is what I'm trying to say.
Yes.
So Eka, we created the actor. That's what we did with ika. We created a beautiful user interface where you get the meaning of the three dimensional shape that it gives to the rest of your connection to your projects, to your tasks, to your databases, to your CRM, to your erp. You connect it to anything, to everything, and it creates the central brain for your company, right? So you can conversationally interact with your company directly. Like retrieving information that would have taken you and your place three and a half months to do it, or three weeks, you do it in 72 seconds. If you want to actually deploy some or execute some, some. Some program, you would have to wait six months to actually two months to plan it. ECA plans everything.
It has the connections with every ERCR, CRM and every database that you have connected it to and it executes it as well. So it became this artificial general intelligence user interface that we have created.
So with that said, first GUI is gui, the old term The GUI you had mentioned the user interface, that is the old term back from DOS days when DOS went into the next phase. Okay, so I know what you're talking about there. So I want to make sure that this is clear not only for myself, but everybody else out there that's learning at the end of the day. So now it sounds like what you've created has a lot of artificial intelligence and it can do so much very quickly. Is that like all these assistants we're seeing with AI and people creating GPTs and, and all the intelligence and the deep learning and machine learning and everything all together at once. And you can have different departments, but it's all artificial intelligence.
So imagine all that that you have just mentioned being the DOS era of AI, because it's all text. It doesn't have, you know, the context of where that text belongs to inside of the context of a project or where that information belongs to in the sense of the context of the hierarchy of a company. You would lose that context of everything when you only treat everything as just purely text. All these assistants are only text. What we have created is the shape of the meaning behind all those connections of data. So you see everything in three dimensions and I mean, I think it's better if I show you.
Yes, let's show.
Of course. So this is ica. Imagine your company like a brain, a live organism where each department is a node in this three dimensional shape and each synapse between departments is real time agents, AI agents working for you, or humans communicating between each other. So you can see everything in three dimensions, how they connect to each other and how they communicate with each other. That context you can go into marketing. You can see the sub departments are marketing here, the people that are there, tasks that are there. Right. So I can see everything three dimensionally and I can talk to it.
We are three dimensional features, we live in three dimensions. That's how our brain works. And we actually have developed this layer on top of that, which is language, where I can go, Ika, create a new task every Tuesday morning inside of marketing called Campaign review.
Here you go.
There you go. So it takes me to the marketing node and it opens up a timeline for that node and it creates a task that I told it in the recurrence that I told it. It's like a four dimensional gantt in this example.
This is a video standing for project management.
Exactly. It's photography.
So how, how, how did you know to do and bring it all together like this? What, what training and what as you kept Progressing. And you kept learning. How did you know to tie it all together like this?
So thankfully I think my brain works three dimensionally. I look everything in a three dimensional way and a lot of our brains do the same. That's when I show eco to people is like that's how I think. I think into little buckets. Because for example, I can go into marketing, I can create a new note right here. So I can go into that node and deposit some stuff inside of that node and we can have Ika create nodes or show me my development task for the week.
Done.
Ask it to show you tasks. Create a new note like create a new note inside of sales called outbound node created. There you go. And you could create more nodes, you could add tasks to your notes or like add like definitions or if, if you connected to a CRM or an erp, it becomes way more powerful because you give it context. Right. So for example, this is going to be in Spanish, but I can ask it in. The response is going to be in Spanish, but this is a restaurant chain and you can ask it like the sales discrepancies of the days because all the chain is connected and you can go, ika, show me the sales discrepancies for today.
Estas son las escrepancias eventas de hoy.
So these are the all the chain of restaurants and the ones in red is have the sales discrepancies between how much they have sold and how much they actually have in cash. And you can see here the process that needs to be done to resolve that discrepancy. Step one, step two, everybody in real time, just communicating. You can go into the communications here. Ika, show me that process. The departments that are connected. So we have basically created the real life. Jarvis.
Like this is a clip that I'd like you to show you. This is the movie. Jarvis, you up? Well, you can start. Always. I'd like to open a new project File index as Mark 2. Shall I store this on the staff industry? Sit down on the trust right now.
Until further notice.
Why don't we just keep everything in my private server? Working on a secret project, are we, sir?
That was going to be my next question. All of this is private too. At the same time it's not out there in the open.
Exactly. Is this your data?
Is it still called firewall in the AI world when you separate firewalls or the protection, what is it called in today's web3?
In AI we call it a local agentic rag, local identic retrieval Augmented generation, basically. Okay, that's what we call it. So yeah, that's eco. We have created our three dimensional.
So this seems to me that this would take a lot of information and really you have your people, processes. Yeah, and everything you need right there.
Yeah, you have and you can really.
Give the best customer service no matter what you're doing.
Events, tasks, projects, people, bookmarks, files. You can connect your Google Drive to it and yeah, you can connect your Google Drive to it and then it's, and then it's going to present all your files down here as well and you can drag and drop your files and everything. You can ask it stuff. This is the history of prompts that you have it all the neurons because we call it neurons. These are like, it's like a brain. One of those nodes is. We call it neuron. So we can have sub neurons.
So does this work better with startups or established businesses? Make big brands smaller? What, who's, who's your, your main, your main customer? What's your ideal customer?
It's enterprise mostly. And who has come to, you know, to, you know, looking for us since they, you know, found out that we have, you know, launched in Silicon Valley and everything is the financial institutions. The, you know, unexpectedly, the hardest market to get into is the market that is really interested in Inka because they have, the bigger the company, the slower it moves and the less it innovates. And it's like a big slogging machine. So Eka automates through voice, you can just automate anything that you need if you connect it to the right information. And it's particularly enticing to big corporations. So we are working with banks right now. We're working with big banks that wonder their services just to be faster, basically.
So is there an opportunity with ICA and blockchain technology down the line somewhere?
Yes, absolutely, because Blockchain has a UX problem and eventually we're, we're going to have interfaces that are three dimensional, that are conversational, that take over any industry. So we can represent Blockchain inside of ica. And like, for example, this is the Central American bank for Economic Integration and it's connected to their public information and like everything that's on their website, anything that's on, you know, their public databases for transparency. And instead of going into, you know, pages and pages of PDF documents and website links, I can know, I can go like, which are the projects and services that were rendered for the country of Costa Rica for 2023, $101 million in 2020 23. And these are the projects that they gave those under $1 million to, which is this one. They spent a hundred thousand on this one. And 2022. We can go into the timeline to see it all.
This would have taken them a month and a half to research. And ICA just knows it, basically.
So does it work with. I'm curious about. I'm really curious about not only the AI piece, but if you start going into decentralization and the finance and the identity or lack of identity, it functions there as well. Once you're in that banking sphere, or do you already have to have the identity nailed down and established, all that.
Is going to be a layer of abstraction. Users were not. As long as you have biometrics in your device, all that is going to be abstracted away. So we're not going to worry about identity because everything is going to be biometrically and signed by blockchain.
I mean, this is exciting. In some ways. It reminds me of there's a couple of platforms that I've seen with AI and they have the various assistants. But it seems like this does more than just break off into hr, research and development, operations, customer service. This does a lot more than that. It can go deeper.
Exactly. It's the next evolution of artificial intelligence user interface. It's not chatbots. This is the next step.
So the nodes, you can create the nodes. And are there many different ways to create the nodes and functionalities and capabilities?
Yeah. So you can create nodes here, like Node Donna. You can go into that node and can create tasks here like task podcast. And then I can actually ask it to research. For example, I can go like research how to Launch a successful Web3 podcast that caters to the innovate innovation innovation crowd in New York. With this information, generate a project with high priority for one month starting next week and assign Carlos Mats inside of sales. So I'm creating the whole prompt for it. Just like that.
We can go down generating your project.
Then it's going to go out and agents are going to go research. Think what you told it to research with its knowledge and information. And then there you go. Week two, set up necessary technical week four. And then when it's done doing the research, it's going to start generating the actual step by step in the timeline.
Will it do the podcast too?
Web3 podcast launch tasks, subtasks. Check it out. Doing everything. Technical setup, content creation, record episodes, edit, marketing strategy, podcast launch. Check it out. It's doing everything.
Oh my goodness. Project has been generated.
Yep, that's it.
It was less than 60 seconds.
Yes.
So with all of this, is there, is there something else you want to show us before we go back to.
Yeah, no. Like this, I've shown you the product. You can go as deep as you want. The marketing strategy, you can auto generate your marketing strategy right here and it's going to give you all the subtasks you have to do and then agents are actually going to help you with those subtasks to execute them.
So could a small solopreneur use something like this or would this would be unrealistic.
The base.
Who's it for? Nonprofits, brand enterprise you mentioned. But for those, those that are listening with other types of businesses who can, who can really use this like now, today.
So we believe that ICA is the, you know, AGI ux because I, we feel like it's universal. You can basically represent anything and everything in four dimensions with language on top, which is our reality. That's how we interact. So when we three dimensional buckets and then each bucket has a timeline, you know, has a timeline. And then on top of it you have some stats as well, you know, and buckets you can drag and drop. It becomes really intuitive and you can talk to it. So it caters to any industry. You can connect it to your CRM, your erp, your database, you can upload documents to it, you can connect your Google Drive to it, you can connect your Google Calendar to it.
It's the universal interface for everything that you're going to do from now on.
That is outstanding. So it's, it's, it's. And it's almost quite human like it seems to me. It's like. Yes, it's, I'm stunned.
Thank you. Thank you.
So, so, so everybody's worried about their jobs, they're worried about the labor and being replaced. And at the end of the day I don't see it as being replaced. I see it as an enhancement of who you are.
Exactly.
And with that enhanced you are the productivity, quality, the functionality and the capability changes to new levels which recreates a different world of output inputs and just quality of life. So what do you see as the downside to this? Not your product.
Oh, but two, artificial intelligence is, you know, it's a tool that you can use for harm and it's a tool that you can use for good. Just like a knife, basically. You can, you know, do really nasty stuff with a knife or you could also cook dinner for your family. The same way artificial intelligence can be used in the tamest of ways can be super destructive. I just saw a video of world leaders being shaking hands and then suddenly fighting. And then that was all AI generated. And you would not distinguish it from reality. If you saw that on your timeline and you saw two world leaders going at it inside of what would seem a very official setting.
And it looks real, it looks so real, you would share it. You will be like, what's going on? And false information travels faster than real information. And also of course, inflammatory information and polarizing information and radicalizing information. All that travels faster than actual truth. And now artificial intelligence has given us the ultimate machine to creating any type of video and any type of audio and any type of, you know, content that is 100% indistinguishable from actual reality. So here's where Web3 comes to the rescue and blockchain technology comes to the rescue. Every single piece of information that you are going to be seeing in the Internet, you have to immediately assume that it is false until we develop some type of way that we can sign our content that we put out in the world, signed in a very secure cryptographic way, a great way. And guess what? Blockchain is perfect for that.
So I think that every content that we put out and corporations go out will eventually we'll have to develop a blockchain based verification system so that we know that that piece of information comes from the actual source. Otherwise you need to assume that everything is false. So AI just facilitated that shift.
That sounds like me. A lot of times I think everything is false. I don't trust what I see and I believe half of what I hear. And I remember somebody telling me that way back in the day and it seems to be coming true today.
It is already too.
When you look at what's happening with AI and your developments in your company, what type of partnerships and alliances are you looking for? What really fits for you right now?
Right now, the partnerships that we're looking for are, well, number one, corporate partnerships. We always like to work with companies that have an innovation department and ICA is perfect for the transformation of their digital strategy or digital transformation for, you know, not only company wide, but corporation wide, because we have been in the space since before OpenAI blew up, obviously. So we actually formed ICA the day after OpenAI was registered back in 2015. We were like, oh, there's going to be a shift coming because we saw the signals and we created IKA in 2017. So two years after Eco OpenAI was funded, we knew that we're going to need a new type of interface for this future. We imagine 2030. Like, what we did is like, okay, this is the shift that we're seeing where everything is going to go. Artificial intelligence, we're going to be able to talk to it.
And not only that, but, you know, screens are going to go away. You know, everything that you have in your hand that has a screen or a computer or a tv, all that is going to go away. Because eventually we're going to have augmented reality spectacles that are fashionable, that are lightweight, and they are, you know, a fashion statement. And as a matter of fact, like ces, just a week ago was the CES of AR glasses. Like, you saw a huge amount of new air glasses that are just popping up everywhere. Because we're reaching that tipping point where this technology is becoming. Like, we can. We are able to miniaturize all the components now, and we find new techniques of displaying information directly into your eye without the need of displaying something, you know, bouncing off of something else or just putting like.
No, we're figuring it out how to put actual images into retina. And by 2030, that's going to be our main input, you know, of, of technology. You're going to see holograms.
Everyone that I have talked to and all the platforms I have either visited or use or try to vet, I am really stunned by the functionality and the time and the efficiency and everything that it can do. With you having a design technology, art, what do you think is going to end up happening with art right now? Going into that space with all the technology and AI digital art is changing so fast as well. Where do you see that going is good?
So of course we're going to be flooded with AI slop, like we call it like, which is easily shareable and generated AI images and videos that just going to cater for every single demographic, every single niche. So it's going to be a tsunami of fake AI contact that's going to cater to any, you know, type of, you know, inclination or hobby or whatever interest that you have. You're going to have all the generated imagery from non humans or humans that you would want. And so I think that that would make human art more valuable because it's going to be a rarity, like, it's going to be rare that you see. Like a painting is going to be way more precious. It's like, oh, this was generated by human intelligence, by human creativity. It was not trained on all the combined generations of human creativity that we have on record and outputted Something that basically was based from that. Like, it was original, even though.
Even though we also work that way. Like, all of our inspiration, all of our creativity, all of our originality came from something before, like, you know, artists influencing other artists. And like, I know that my art has been influenced from my idols. So in a sense, like, artificial intelligence works just like our brain works. They, you know, learn what has come before and we remix it and we create new stuff. And in that process, we create unique stuff. So that's basically what the AI is going to be great for. Those hallucinations that it creates can be really useful in discovering new stuff.
So right now we, like, there's been a hell of a breakthroughs lately because hallucinations have. Can now predict new proteins that's super useful for humanity. So we can create new drugs that target specific diseases or prevent them. With AI we just discovered, we hallucinated a new way of entangling photons that don't need all the setup that we needed before. It's just like more natural and more and more fundamental. We're like, okay, we didn't know this. So AI is connecting the parts of the pattern that we cannot see, basically. And those are called hallucinations.
It's imagining stuff. So hallucinations are great for discovery. However, AI art, I think it's going to become way more precious because it's going to come from or organic creativity, and that's going to be more rare coming forward.
00:30:31 - 00:31:05Exclude
It's about time, and I'm glad you showed it to pivoting the Web3 podcast and the audience, and it's going to probably end up on another platform as well that I'm working on. So everyone listening? Good. Heads up, and we'll be talking to you soon. And thank you, Carlos. Thank you, Carlos Matz, for visiting us and we're Shaping Tomorrow Together. Thanks for checking in the Pivoting the Web 3 podcast. Go to pivotingtheweb3podcast.com to download and listen or web3game plan to check out the videos. Thank you.
We're Shaping Tomorrow Together.
