July 31, 2019

Getting — and Keeping — Your Attention in XR, with LumiereVR COO Alexander Haque

31 minutes

XR technologies

are undeniably a leap forward in humankind’s mechanical evolution.

But our brains – the way they work – haven’t quite evolved in pace

with them, so XR solutions are hardly solutions at all unless they

work within the confines of how we think and react. Alex Haque of

LumiereVR waxes philosophical about how to design XR with that in

mind.

Alan: Today’s guest is Alexander

Haque, the founder of RetinadVR, whose mission was to help pioneer

virtual and augmented reality through powerful data. RetinadVR was

acquired recently by LumiereVR, in July 2018. Alex is now the COO for

LumiereVR, which is bringing quality VR content to the masses through

masterful curation and distribution. You can learn more about Alex

and Lumiere by visiting LumiereVR.com. Alex, welcome to the show.

Alex: Hey, thank you so much for

having me, Alan. Pleasure to be here.

Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure.

Alex: Yeah, thanks for having

me. You’re one of my favorite LinkedIn personalities, and a fellow

Canadian! So I’m excited to talk shop with you.

Alan: Canadians are taking over

the VR scene in a big way. It’s really exciting. The purpose of this

podcast is to provide as much value to businesses and business owners

and people in companies that are looking to explore and expand on

virtual and mixed reality and augmented reality, and figure out how

these technologies can be used for them. So, perhaps let’s just take

a look back at RetinadVR; what you guys were doing there, and what

led you to what you’re doing now.

Alex: Right. Yeah. It’s a great

jump off point. So RetinadVR actually got started in Montreal in

2014. Our mission was, as you said at the beginning, was to bring VR

analytics and data to virtual reality. And what I mean by that is

understanding these new data points that can be interpreted from a VR

headset. And what we found is, understanding people’s movement in VR

is something that we can actually grab from a headset. And then

translating that into actionable insights was basically the mission

of the entire company for the last three years, up until the

acquisition. And things are very much still along that path, but a

little bit more, I guess, pigeon-holed into Lumiere -pecific use

cases for right now.

Alan: So maybe talk about

Lumiere and what you guys are doing there. I know you’ve done a

recent project with synchronizing a ton of headsets at a fairly

famous location. I’ll let you talk to that.

Alex: So we did about 250 VR

headsets, all synced up from Madison Square Garden for LumiereVR,

which brings that enterprise software to large venues and media

entertainment folks. MSG is a really good use case; museums,

aquariums, science centers, planetariums — those are really good

places where VR lives, [and] is complementary to an existing exhibit.

The example with Madison Square Garden, for instance, was they have a

90-minute tour within the venue. So, a lot of people don’t actually

know this — I think the international community knows this little

bit more — Madison Square Garden, I think, is in the top five or top

10 most-visited, most iconic places in New York City. And I didn’t

know this, being obviously, a Canadian hockey fan. I thought you just

show up to Madison Square Garden — a great, beautiful venue — and

you enjoy concert or a game, and you go home. But apparently what you

could do is, they have off-hours visits throughout the day that are

90 minutes that are called the All Access Tour. And they show you the

history of this is where Mohammad Ali boxed. This is where goalie

Henrik Lundqvist for the New York Rangers, here’s his, like,

million-dollar Swarovski 10-cut diamond goalie mask is. This is where

the Knicks played, and so on and so forth. And they give you a really

beautiful, all-encompassing tour. We were commissioned to bring a

five-minute VR experience that they had filmed, giving

behind-the-scenes look at the Rangers, the Knicks, and Billy Joel

live on stage in 360 VR. And basically, from anybody that’s powering

a VR experience, whether you’ve had experience with this or not, you

know that the user experience is really important.

What Lumiere did — in a nutshell —

was surface a much-easier user interface and user experience, by

bringing all the VR tech to an operator. So what I mean by that is,

instead of having every single person that would go through this

all-access tour — and the VR portion specifically — have to be

like, “what are you looking at? Do you see it? Did you click

play?” Anybody who’s run a VR event knows how horrible that is.

What we did is, we surfaced that to an iPad, and then a person can

just click play, and then all the VR headsets synchronize and play at

the exact same time, and then the show ends at the exact same time.

So it makes it a very seamless experience.

Alan: That, to me, is something

that… at the very beginning when VR was kicking off, when Samsung

did this huge presentation and they had hundreds — or probably a

thousand headsets — all synchronized. So you guys have taken that,

simplified it, and made it available as a standalone app. Is that

case?

Alex: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s

a service, then an app. I’d say right now, the goal is to make an

app-based where anybody and their dog, so to speak, can pick this up

and click play and have their own event to run. So what we did with

Pacific Science Center was a really good example of that. But the

reality is, is that we’re not there right now for the industry;

there’s still a lot of handholding to be done and there’s still no

consensus amongst which headset is kind of the iPod or iPhone right

now.

Alan: Got it.

Alex: We’re still making custom

experiences for everybody.

Alan: So does it work with the

Oculus Go?

Alex: It does. Yeah. We actually

have a pretty good relationship with the folks at Oculus.

Alan: I have to say, as somebody

who’s doing a podcast about the business use cases of XR

technologies…. this is glaringly obvious to me. But for those of

you who are listening, imagine going into a boardroom or a

presentation hall where you want to present to 10 people, 20 people,

100 people all at once, and you want them to have a fully-immersive

experience, where they’re not checking their phones, they’re not

paying attention to other things. They are fully immersed in the

content that you want to deliver to them. This seems like a natural

fit for that.

Alex: Oh, yeah, absolutely. The

presentation use case is one that we actually started with. So

Travis, who’s the founder of LumiereVR with Jenny, they had this

exact pain point when trying to present to investors and try them —

I’m sure you have this problem too, Alan; this is very familiar for

you — presenting something that’s as three dimensional and as

spatial as 360 VR, or 3D VR, and then putting it on a 2D screen and

being like, “look, you can touch this, I swear,” is very..

that’s the pain point in general. There’s nothing like putting VR on

someone’s head and letting them experience it for themselves.

Synchronizing that in a boardroom of two people, up to five, or ten,

or 500, is an amazing use case.

Alan: I think that’s something

that I think more companies are going to start to use. And of course,

they can reach out to at LumiereVR.com. But if you put this in, said,

“OK, what kind of industries would benefit from this the most?”

What do you think would benefit from this?

Alex: Well, I think what we

found success in so far is definitely what’s benefiting existing

aquariums, museums, planetariums; those who are already running

exhibits that, let’s say… I’ll give you a really good example. So

the Pacific Science Center, where they might not be able to have a

dolphin or whales anymore for ethical concerns ever since there’s

been a big backlash with a Netflix documentary that aired — called

Blackfish, I believe it was called, I don’t know if you saw that

documentary — but yeah, basically exposing how the mistreatment of

these marine life and aquatic life inside of these venues, there’s

been a massive public backlash against that kind of exhibit. So what

we did is, we partnered with the filmmakers of the Click Effect. The

Click Effect is a 360 video — it’s about a six minute piece from

2015, won a lot of awards — that showcased one of the first full

underwater 360 VR diving experiences with dolphins, and talking about

the clicking noise that a dolphin will make to communicate. And what

that does is, it puts you in a vantage point that you’d never

otherwise be able to see (unless you did some kind of deep sea diving

yourself, which a lot of people have not done), and it puts you

face-to-face with dolphins.

That experience, for families and

people of all ages, is one that resonates. It just… it makes a lot

of sense. And you don’t actually need to have an entire ecosystem now

— or economy — around bringing these wildlife out and taking them

out of their existing systems, shocking them, and then putting them

in this unnatural exhibit for people to watch and see. You can put

someone in a five-minute VR experience. That use case is

complimentary — or even, I guess, replacing an existing experience

that otherwise would be very difficult — is a really natural place

for VR to live. And same thing for Madison Square Garden. Right? It’s

a five-minute experience. It doesn’t have to be a whole big,

one-hour-long, crazy shebang. It just can be a five-minute thing that

lives next to an existing exhibit. So I’d say that that’s a really

good use case for right now.

Alan: Interesting. I think

another one is in the classrooms. I think there is a huge opportunity

here for teachers to be able to put VR on their students’ heads —

put down the phone, put a VR on — and then let them experience

things like being underwater, or going back in history, or into

space. These are wonderful experiences. But again, the problem that

you guys have solved is that problem of having a teacher or leader or

somebody manage that experience. And I think one of the things, as a

company that has done thousands of demos, that’s always the problem;

you put a VR headset on somebody, and heh… I don’t know how they

ever do it. There’s no buttons, and they end up in a different room,

and you’re like, “I don’t have any idea how you got there,”

and you can never tell where they are.

Alex: Right. So, “tell me

what you see, and… oh, my God. What did you hit? Tell me what you

see,” and then they’re like, “I see a screen. I’m in this

room–“

Alan: “I’m in a room!”

Alex: It’s incredible.

Alan: The worst is when you put

it on somebody’s head, and they sit there for five minutes, and they

don’t tell you that it hasn’t started playing.

Alex: Right. They’re expecting

you to hold their hands. That’s how we got started with the Pacific

Science Center, is exactly that. Travis was out in Seattle managing

this, and having anybody from a 13-year-old to a 90-year-old trying

VR for the first time — or even maybe a second or third time, it

doesn’t really matter — getting them settled in and bringing that

experience to them in a seamless way is actually very challenging.

And to your point, by the way, what you mentioned — Google

expeditions for the classroom — they started off by tackling that

problem of bringing VR and synchronizing it across headsets. But that

use case is… the EDU use case is one that is very near-and-dear to

me and how VR lives in a classroom. We’re actually working with North

Carolina State University, and one of the biggest reasons why they

can’t get it to take off in the classroom is — other than this one

evangelist, God bless his heart. And Mike, if you’re listening; thank

you for being a VR champion in Raleigh — but other than him, getting

this off to a professor that has to bring this to 10 students or 15

or 300 students in an auditorium symposium, it becomes a massive

challenge. It’s very stressful. So that use case that you mentioned

is a great one.

Alan: Awesome. So, I’m going to

look a little bit more specifics and challenges. So, you’ve got quite

a bit of experience in the analytic side, and really looking at,

“what are people doing?” What are some of the best

analytics or metrics that you’ve seen? What are some of the

experiences that people resonate most with? Are there any experiences

where people take the headset off middle-way through? What are some

of the best use cases, and the metrics around that? Are you finding

that people watch it all the way through? Do they look behind them?

What are you seeing?

Alex: Yeah, it’s a great

question, and one that… what I was alluding to at the beginning of

the podcast with Retinad and those kind of best practices for

advertisers and marketers is, there’s something called the “Cone

of Focus,” that I guess we coined within the industry, amongst

ourselves and VR artists that we worked with — so, folks that like

Jessica Brillhart over at Google’s Jump VR, who we were working with

in the early days — is figuring out, where do people actually look

within a VR headset? Where do they actually focus their attention? If

I have 10 important elements in one specific scene, is one of them is

more important than the other? How do I actually draw their attention

there? So to answer your question first, do people look behind them?

Mostly no. But if you can get them to look around and turn around,

what we found is that generally those experiences tend to be the most

valuable, in the sense that people don’t bounce from the experience

as much as they would in an experience that I call like “the

television screen” or “2D screen,” where they’re just

forced to look forward. That seems to be much less of a compelling VR

experience, because again, what’s the value of doing it in VR, if not

to make people move around?

The whole purpose of VR is to give

almost a lifelike simulation, if not give as close as a lifelike

simulation as you can. So one of the best practices that we found is

that getting a user to move around within the first five seconds is

instrumental to success, and to completion. So, if I have an audio

cue that comes from around me, that actually works out better than a

visual cue that I have no idea is behind me. So, audio is one of the

most important things from an analytics — or from our KPI, or key

metric — standpoint, from an artistic and cinematic point of view.

And even for marketers, right? If you’re trying to engage your

audience for that beautiful 30 seconds, and really make them engaged

throughout a 360 video or whatever kind of ad unit that you have?

Getting them to just move around and engage with your ad is just

instrumental within those first five seconds. Otherwise, you’ve lost

them.

Alan: Interesting. That’s so

interesting. So basically, using audio cues over visual cues in the

first five seconds of experience really sets the tone for where

people are going to look moving forward.

Alex: Right. That assumes that

the users in headset, has a decent pair of headphones on, or has

headphones or some audio at all. But in perfect circumstances, that

is absolutely true. And even for smartphone-driven magic window, like

360 “VR” type of stuff, that is very important. Audio is

very important.

Alan: Yeah, I think people don’t

realize the power of audio until it’s wrong. I remember, I did an

experience and I put the headphones on backwards, and so the voices

were coming from the wrong directions. And it just messed with my

head, and totally took me out of the experience altogether.

Alex: Yeah, that’s another

thing, right? From the user experience, stuff that Lumiere is

tackling is, how to get people to put on the headphones the right

way?

Alan: Big “R!” Big

“L!” I don’t know, what else can you do? What are some of

the other challenges you guys have faced? The reason why I’m asking

these questions is because, if I’m a business operator or somebody in

marketing or in sales or HR or training, and I want to start using VR

in my business, what are some of the challenges that you guys have

experienced that you can share, that would help somebody avoid them

in the future? Or at least skip past them?

Alex: Yeah, I guess it’s funny,

because the company — Lumiere — was born out of all those issues.

Travis and Jenny are filmmakers and cinematographers first, more so

than they are technologists, and I think Travis is a technologist,

and Jenny as an artist; that marriage between those two founders is a

great one, between those skill sets. And it was this platform that is

the Lumiere LB synchronized software that was built almost came out

of accidental experiment. And that was because they were bringing

film first to the Pacific Science Center. That was the real

challenge, right? “How do I actually create a VR activation”

was the first order of problems that they were trying to solve. What

they realized was, again, the second order of problems is running a

great user experience was actually the first order problems. And if

you couldn’t get that to work first and foremost, then everything

else was a much smaller problem. It almost became, “why do I

need VR if it’s this complicated?”

Alan: It’s interesting that you

say that, because I think the industry as a whole went through this

phase of really trying to figure out, “can we make this work?

How do we make it work? It’s working — now what do we do with it?”.

Alex: Right.

Alan: That’s really the phases

that we’ve gone through as an industry.

Alex: I think you had an

opportunity to try the Hololens 2. And when they came on stage —

what, Mobile World Congress has already been a month now? — in

Barcelona. What they were saying was, “we’re now excited to

introduce the natural user interface,” and it’s called like

“intuitive gesture control.” And it’s just your hands. Just

seeing a technologist refer to hands as this natural gesture

interface is hilarious. Yeah, it’s exactly what you said. How does VR

get past its weird, awkward adolescence? It’s literally just by

eliminating these annoying controllers and all these annoying

interfaces that seem really cool when you’re developing them, but

then when we give them to my mom or dad, or your mom or dad, and it’s

just like, “what? What am I supposed to do?”.

Alan: I can’t tell you that the

number of Hololens demos where people just can’t figure out just the

simple click thing.

Alex: Yeah, oh God. The thumb

and index finger?

Alan: Yeah…it was a great

idea, and I’m like, “click a mouse! No, but stick your finger up

straight! Ah!” So I feel your pain on that one. So I’m going to

shift gears a second here, because I really want to pick your brain

about something. What do you think is the most important thing that

businesses can do now to start leveraging the power of XR — meaning

virtual/augmented/mixed realities?

Alex: Talk to people like you,

honestly. I say not tongue-in-cheek; I’m being very quite honest. I

think within the industry, we think the industry itself has grown up,

because we’ve been so close to it and near-and-dear for the last..

what is this, version 3, or 4, of VR/AR? Growing up over the last few

decades? So I think just understanding, “what are the actual use

cases that my business can implement today,” as opposed to

treating this kind of like a futuristic thing. VR, when I speak to

clients, sound like quote-unquote — the killer word — “interesting”

or “cool” or “fun,” but they don’t actually know

what the use case would be. And if they do, then it becomes a very

complex product. So starting with something really simple of a use

case, identifying it, and then having people like yourself —

consultants — come in and, say, identify those problematic areas of

a business right now, or areas that aren’t necessarily cause for

concern, but can be updated. A really good example is that’s a

STRIVR, right? Their 17,000 Oculus Go activations across every single

Walmart across America. How important is employee training? Somebody

probably has the exact number in dollars and cents about how big of a

problem making sure your workforce is well-trained for the future —

or even for right now — is. But, probably in the billions.

Alan: In the billions, for sure.

Alex: But how much is that pain

actually felt and quantified, and how much of it is a business

problem today? I don’t know. It could be different for different

businesses. Clearly, Walmart identified that as a must-have problem

and put in, I think, the single largest order of VR headsets. Right?

I think 17,000 is the number to beat.

Alan: Yeah, it’s funny, it was

brought up in the last podcast, that Andy Mathis from Oculus kind of

brokered that whole deal. We were talking on the last podcast about

the reasons why you would use VR for training, and those reasons are

when training for something is rare — so it’s a rarity. So, for

example, Walmart trains for Black Friday; it happens once a year, so

it’s a rare event that they want to train for. The other thing is

that it’s impossible to train for. Let’s say you’re a nuclear reactor

and you need to train on what happens when there’s a problem. And

dangerous environment — training people on underground wells or

whatever; training them places that is dangerous to train in. And

then the fourth one is expensive. And so if you look at it from rare,

impossible to train for, dangerous environments, and expensive, you

come up with an acronym of RIDE. So, that came up.

Alex: I love that.

Alan: Yeah! Me too. And there I

thought, man, this is really great. That was from Steve Grubbs at

Victory VR. It’s VictoryXR.com.

Alex: Well, I’ll steal what he

said! Just copy & paste it right now.

Alan: But I really also like

your comment of the Cone of Focus, meaning when you put your headset

on people — or, if you look at statistics of 360 videos in general

— most people just stare straight in front of them, if there’s no

reason for them to turn around. And I know from my first VR

experience, I put on the headset, and my mouth was probably wide

open. I was like, “oh my God, this is amazing.” And then

somebody — thank God — grabbed me by the shoulders and just turned

me around in a circle. And then I realized like, “oh, my God,

it’s all around me.” So I have this “wow!” moment. But

I think the Cone of Focus is a real thing. I’ve never heard it called

that until now. But it’s definitely true.

Alex: But, think about that for

most people. I think you’re an early adopter of most technologies.

For you, to be grabbed and turned around, that doesn’t necessarily

break your sense of presence. But how do you get that without needing

to physically shove someone, or push them around? And becomes the

biggest–

Alan: And that’s where you come

up with your audio cues. I thought that was a great solution to that

problem.

Alex: Oh, yeah, positional

audio, right? So the Dolby Atmos tool kit, or the Facebook 360 tool

kit; all that spatial audio stuff. It’s so important, and and so

widely overlooked by the industry. It’s mind-blowing. A lot more

attention needs to be paid to that.

Alan: So I’m gonna ask you a

personal question. What is the best business use case of XR that

you’ve seen?

Alex: Oh, it’s a good question.

Outside of our stuff and your stuff? I’d have to say… honestly,

looking back to the enterprise training stuff, I’d say that that’s

probably the best use case. So… actually, I’ll switch gears. We

spoke about it, so I’ll talk about social VR. One of the best use

cases, I think, is, how do you and I have this meeting? How you do

you and I have this podcast in VR? How do we make it feel like we’re

actually sitting face-to-face and having this interview, looking each

other? Getting that surreal moment of looking each other left eye to

left eye, and actually empathizing, connecting with each other? What

Facebook just powered with their lifelike avatars… did you see

that, by any chance? What they announced from their R&D lab?

Alan: Yeah, it’s pretty awesome.

Alex: It’s crazy.

Alan: So, like, they managed to

take avatars, and kick them over the uncanny valley. Which is —

especially humans and the human avatars — get closer and closer to

photo realism, they get actually further and further away. So if you

and I meet in a VR experience, and we’re both cartoons, we accept it.

We’re like, “oh, you’re a cartoon, I’m a cartoon.” But as

we get closer to looking photo-real, there’s certain nuances about

real people that are missed on virtual avatars. Maybe the wink, or

how the face moves, or how… mostly, when they’re talking. And so,

you get this kind of creepy effect and that’s called the uncanny

valley. What Facebook has done with their new real-time algorithms is

they’ve just like made it look real. They’ve just skipped that whole

thing. It’s incredible.

Alex: Yeah. Oh, yeah, it’s

beautiful. So that, from a consumer’s perspective, it is tremendous.

But from an enterprise perspective, I think it’s actually even

bigger. You and I’d be able to troubleshoot a problem becomes much

more lifelike and human, in that sense. Being able to connect with

each other over a presentation, so we’re not just some janky avatar

in a VR headset; it actually becomes our lifelike representations.

That, for enterprise and for a business solution, becomes so

important, and becomes the entire value proposition, and is the

underpinning — the linchpin — to this entire industry. It’s like,

“why VR/why AR/XR,” whatever you want to call it. It

becomes that, right? It’s, “I can transport myself anywhere in

the world and make it feel as if I’m there, so I don’t need to jump

on a flight to do consulting anymore.” Like, the consulting

industry, I think, is going to change in a massive way because of

that.

I even had an advisor — my brother

works at Uber, in the Autonomous Driving division — and we’d like to

have this “what’s cooler?” debate sometimes between

brothers — and one of my advisors sat him down and was like,

“listen; VR is going to completely displace your industry,

because no one’s going to even drive cars in the future.” Like,

there’s going to be no use to even meet each other with cars anymore

— like, the completely crazy, extremist futuristic view. I don’t

think we’ll ever become that extreme, but I think it will help to

make a human connection. Just, something everyday that… my father

could be in India, I could be talking to him. So that type of stuff,

from a social and consumer and enterprise use case, is just huge.

Alan: I agree, and there’s one

company in particular that’s doing that in mixed reality called

Spatial, and I really love what they’re doing. They’ve agreed to be

on the show as well. So, I’m looking forward to learning about what

their plans are. They’ve basically taken virtual avatars from a photo

— so they can take your Facebook photo, turn you into an avatar, and

then you can see your avatar in 3D space — and using the Hololens or

Magic Leap, you can actually reach out and use those digits on your

hands to actually interact with things. And it’s really impressive

what they’re doing.

Alex: Podcast using Spatial.

Isn’t that amazing? Wouldn’t that be so cool? I’m in your living room

right now or whatever. That stuff is the real promise, and I’m

excited for that to become a reality.

Alan: Let me ask you a quick

question, here; what problem in the world do you want to see solved

using XR technologies?

Alex: That’s a great question.

And I think VR for good is something I really care about. Everything

that Chris Milk talks about; VR being the empathy machine. For the

folks in the industry, it’s maybe a tired sentence. But for most

people that haven’t heard that term, it’s just, how do you use VR for

good and to connect with each other, and understand really, another

person’s perspective. When I wear a headset, I am transported to

Syria, or a place in the world that’s going under very challenging

political climate right now, to say the least. And hearing a story

from a native who’s out there, and their perspective on what they are

going through — or have gone through — I think just helps us become

better people. I think a lot of social issues today, it comes from a

stance of ignorance or non-understanding; if there is something about

VR that I’m most excited about — and AR — it’s being able to

connect each other from that perspective. A lot of people, sometimes

you just can’t communicate because of language. But if I put a VR

headset on you and transport you to my reality that I experience

every day? There’s a lot of companies that are doing a really good

job of tackling that issue right now.

Things like sexual discrimination in

the workplace — what does it feel like when someone superior in a

position of power is interviewing you, or sitting you down,

questioning you? What does that feel like from a superior point of

view? So, a superior puts on the headset and then does that interview

and then watches themselves conduct an interview. It can become very

eye-opening, because a lot of the actions that you’re doing, you

might not realize that those are behaviors that, “oh, I didn’t

realize I looked like that, or I was conveying that message.” Or

when you sit in the position of, let’s say, the interviewee, or

somebody who’s not necessarily in a position of power in that

instance, and you observe the world from that lens. You can empathize

like, “holy crap, this is what this looks like? This is what

this feels like?” And of course, you can throw stones my way for

whatever you want. Say, “well, how could you actually

empathize?” Well, I think I challenged people to try that. The

science is there, too.

Alan: It’s interesting that you

mentioned Chris Milk, because — just a quick story — he kind of

coined the phrase “virtual reality is the empathy machine,”

and he basically brought a Syrian refugee camp into the United

Nations in VR and made everybody watch this. And it spawned a number

of donations, and some really powerful people rallying around that.

And it was really wonderful. And just a little aside; Chris Milk was

the first person to ever show me VR.

Alex: No way!

Alan: The first time I saw the

VR.

Alex: No way. That’s awesome.

Alan: Yeah. It was incredible.

And that was the moment where I had this “aha” moment where

I thought, “oh, my God, this is going to be the future of human

communication. This is how we connect the world together.” And

it really is doing that.

Alex: That’s a pretty cool badge

you get to wear. “Mission Accomplished: Chris Milk Was the

Person Who Made Me try VR First.” That’s really cool.

Alan: And it was funny, because

it was Robert Scoble and myself at Curiosity Camp, which is put on by

Eric Schmidt from Google. So it was like this tech wonderland in the

middle of the forest.

Alex: Wow. That’s a story you

get to tell your kids. That’s awesome. That’s incredible.

Alan: Indeed.

Alex: Or grandkids!

Alan: And here’s the other

thing. I can capture myself volumetrically, and provide that as a

digital version of myself for my children when they’re [older]. They

can go in and have — perhaps — an AI-driven conversation with me,

long after I’m gone, maybe. Being able to store ourselves in the

virtual world. I don’t know.

Alex: I love that stuff. Yeah. I

don’t know about the part. That’s maybe a different podcast.

Alan: That’s a totally different

podcast. I’m actually going to be taking a couple of hundred

photographs of my daughters’ bedrooms, so that we can create them

volumetrically, and then they can go in their bedrooms when they’re

20, 30, 40 years old; they can go in their actual bedrooms from when

they were 10 and 14.

Alex: Wow. Yeah. Preserving

history with these artifacts is another amazing use case; aside from

connecting us right now, being able to basically do time travel, as

well, this equates to. It is probably the coolest use case. Yeah.

That’s a great one.

Alan: Well, Alex, I really want

to thank you for taking the time. Is there anything else you want to

say to close this off? To listeners who are listening? We’ve talked

about VR. We’ve talked about using groups of VR headsets to get your

message across. We’ve talked about using it in planetariums and

science centers and museums. We’ve talked about the Cone of Focus,

getting people to turn around in the first five seconds using audio

cues. We’ve talked about avatars and the power of that. Using VR for

good. Is there anything else you want to leave listeners with?

Alex: Yeah, I’d say that if

you’re in an enterprise right now — a Fortune 500, Fortune 1000, or

even a small business, doesn’t really matter — if you’re thinking

about how do I use this today? Don’t be shy. There’s definitely a use

case that you have that XR can transform. I implore you to reach out

to myself or to Alan and connect. We’ve seen it all, I think, within

the industry. And if we don’t have the answer, we definitely know

companies that will be able to provide an answer. I really implore

companies to start asking those questions and become digitally

prepared, because you don’t want it to pass you over, and then be

looking back and you’re like, “damn it! Should’ve listened to

that podcast.”

Alan: Haha! Nobody wants to be

blockbuster.

Alex: Yes. Nobody wants to be

blockbuster, that’s for sure.

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By Alan Smithson from MetaVRse

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