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Getting Fit with a VR Toolkit, and Other XR Tips with VRdōjō’s Michael Eichenseer
We talk a lot about the business use cases of XR on this podcast, but any good business comes with a great fitness plan or exercise room. XR is no different, and VRdōjō founder Michael Eichenseer runs Alan through a few of the cardiovascular benefits to the technology.
And that’s just the first six
minutes! Many other topics are touched on in this episode – virtual
writing spaces, remote assistance, spatial learning, his own XR
makerspace, and more.
Alan: Welcome to the show,
Michael, how are you doing? Pretty good. How are you? Fantastic.
Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It’s going to be
a really exciting one. Let’s tell everybody at home. What is your
vision for virtual augmented reality? Was the best virtual reality or
a AR experience is what is the best thing that you have done? And
explain to the listeners why that is so.
Michael: For me, it’s definitely
the fitness aspect of VR. As a gamer, I definitely enjoy the fact
that I can play a game, not be sitting the entire time, and
afterwards, I’ve burnt 500 calories, and feel really good about it
the next day. The research coming out in XR in reducing pain and
increasing motivation, to me, is fascinating.
Alan: There was a lot of medical
use cases coming up in pain reduction, using virtual reality for
pre-surgical — and also perisurgical — where you’re wearing a
headset to distract you. I know one of the things that blows my mind
is, my daughter, she’s 10 and she is terrified of needles. Like,
we’re talking blood-curdling screams from the nurse’s office. The
next time she goes, we’re gonna use VR to try to distract her while
they take blood, because it’s a stressful thing. And when somebody
goes into a surgery, being able to decrease their stress; it’s hard
to measure the success outcomes, but at the same time, just being
able to calm them is something that I think VR does really naturally.
You talked about exercising in VR. Give us some examples of some of
the ways people are using VR to exercise.
Michael: The boxing games are
pretty popular, and I definitely have to mention Beat Saber. That’s
probably the top one at the moment.
Alan: Basically, you have two
lightsabers in your hands, and you’ve got to swipe up and down, and
left and right, with your left and right hand, and dodge out of the
way of things. It is incredible.
Michael: It’s dancing.
Alan: Dancing and disco, and
it’s so good.
Michael: Yes, it’s really good.
You kind of lose track of time. I think that’s why it’s good that
it’s based on music; the song ends and you’re like, “oh, back to
reality a little bit.”.
Alan: Yeah, there’s a guy who
was playing, he lost 45 pounds playing Beat Saber.
Michael: Yes. I’ve actually met
a 68-year-old retiree who logs into VR every morning at 5:00 a.m.,
just to warm up for the day.
Alan: That’s incredible. What
does he play? What does he do?
Michael: Back when I met him, we
were playing a game called Smash Box Arena. It’s a multiplayer game,
kind of dodgeball. It’s defunct now, but there’s a lot of other games
like that. I think Rec Room is probably the number one out there,
where you can hop in — it’s a free game — and it’s cross-platform
and you see people in there at all times of the day.
Alan: I’ve played paintball in
there. It was a lot of fun.
Michael: Yep. That’s the game I
actually play competitively. That’s kind of my workout every day.
Alan: I’m so terrible at it.
What are the tricks? You gotta bounce from place to place, and it’s
just… it’s crazy.
Michael: Well, I think the trick
is the same with anything: Practice makes perfect. Playing with
people who challenge your skill set.
Alan: Speaking of that, talk to
us a little bit about how you’re challenging young minds and people
who are passionate in the space through your maker space, VRdōjō.
You are the voice of virtual reality in the Midwest. I can imagine
that there’s a huge hub of VR in Kansas City. Maybe speak to us about
what’s happening locally; what you’re doing to bring that hub
together?
Michael: I’m not sure if I’m the
voice. I definitely hope I’m helping. But my aim with VR… VR, to
me, can happen anywhere. And as much as I’m very happy that the
coasts are innovating as much as they are, I think there’s a huge
opportunity here in the Midwest. There’s a lot of talent here, and I
have heard from other people that even places like Kansas City
actually have quite a bit of VR happening — and I say VR, I mean XR,
AR; all of it. There’s a lot of, for example, architectural firms in
town, and they aren’t as flashy as a virtual sports or something, but
they’re all using VR for showing the buildings, or going to a client
and saying, “hey, would you like this room moved over here?
Would you like this equipment coming through this wall, or that
wall?” I think it’s use cases like that — that aren’t
necessarily flashy and public-facing — that a lot of companies are
using today. And I think in the next couple of years, everyone’s just
going to be using XR, and we’re going to wonder, “woah, woah,
where did that come from?”
Alan: In my last interview, we
were talking about 2019 as that year where it goes from, “you’re
doing VR — you’re ahead of the game, you’re a future company,”
to, “you’re not using VR? What’s wrong with you?”
Michael: Yeah, exactly. And one
of the… I don’t know how many names I should name, but there’s
definitely a large company here in KC that uses VR for training
employees. One example is retail employees. They actually build
virtual versions of their stores, and they might actually do that
when the store is not built yet. It might be two months out before
the store’s built, but they want to hire their people two months
early and give them two months of what’s essentially hands-on
training before their physical store even exists.
Alan: So what company is that?
Michael: I don’t know if I can
say.
Alan: okay. Maybe make an
introduction; we’ll have them on the show. They can talk about what
they’re doing and how it’s working. I would love that. Everybody’s
getting this interest in, “what can this technology do for my
business? How can I use it?” And we’ve talked about… just in
this very short, six-minute conversation that we’ve been in here,
you’ve talked about VR being used for design, and for
previsualization, and for training in retail. You were talking about
exercise and fitness. There’s so many. Personally, I think there’s no
facet of human communication that we won’t be touched by these
technologies. Where do you see the path forward for companies? How do
they get involved?
Michael: I guess I’d say if
you’re a business, and you aren’t at least thinking about XR in some
facet? You’re already behind.
Alan: That’s a pretty bold
statement.
Michael: Yep. [Laughs]. The last
place I worked was a fast casual food chain. I worked at their
technology headquarters, and we did technology training for the
employees. I started working on VR versions of things, so they could
reach in and grab the cables that they would have to unplug and plug
in, essentially saving the IT techs time on the phone by training the
employees as how to run their cafés.
Alan: Wow. It sounds like a
small thing, but when you consider the cost to send an IT person out
there just to plug something in that could have been done simply, and
I think one of the other things that people really haven’t fully
grasped is the see-what-I-see. or remote assistance; being able to
hold up your phone, show the person on the other end what you’re
looking at, and have them annotate on it. That alone is saving
millions of dollars right now.
Michael: It reduces stress. One
of the biggest things of being an IT support person is your stress
because you’re sitting in a cubicle all day. They’re stressed because
they’re dealing with customers, and technology isn’t necessarily
their #1 thing — that’s why they’re calling you. If you can give
them this, literally hands-on, “hey, take it out here. Plug it
in there.” And it’s not you trying to explain to them over the
phone. That’s a huge reduction in stress. Not to mention, like you
said, the reduction in travel is a huge reduction in cost. And it
starts out with a small conversations. But over the course of a year,
I can’t even imagine what the savings are for almost any-sized
company.
Alan: My last interview was
talking about how Boeing is using it, and these big enterprises are
using it pretty much everywhere now. They’ve realized the potential.
And when you start to see 25 to 35 to 40 percent reductions in times
it takes for people to learn, but also reduction of error rates
across the enterprise? I mean, the last few years have been really
funny, that people have been, “so what are other people doing,
and what’s their ROI, and how are they measuring success?” And
it’s been really hard because — as a developer — you’re like,
“well, I don’t know. We just make this stuff, and there’s not
very many people doing it, and we really don’t know the ROI yet.”
But I think we’ve kind of — in the last two years — put a lot of
POCs, a lot of effort, into building these demos and proofs of
concepts, developing these trials. And now, the data coming back is
way better than anybody could have ever imagined. So it’s not a
matter of, “hey, let’s do a POC!” It’s like, “let’s
roll this out, because we already know it works. Here’s the numbers
that other people are seeing. Let’s go.”
Michael: I think VR is already
here. XR. All of it. I spent some time at a free-roam VR arcade — I
help out there — and 90 percent of the people that come in have
never even touched VR before. And they’re not even gamers; they’re
just there to do something on the weekend. And when they leave,
they’re like, “holy crap, I did not know it was this far
[along]
.” And I tell all of them, the groundwork for XR has been
laid for decades. There was just a few key technologies that needed
to be fixed, and those technologies exist now. The only thing that’s
lacking is a design sense, because we just haven’t been designing for
it. When it comes to capabilities, it’s already there. There’s no
reason not to dive in, in my opinion.
Alan: The costs have come down
dramatically, even. You look back when commercial VR launched in
2016, and you needed a $1,500 graphics card… combine that with a
computer… then the headset; you’re at three grand before you even
start. Then you needed software, and the software didn’t exist yet,
so you had to make it. A company getting in 3 years ago would have
spent a couple hundred thousand dollars just to build something that
— by today’s standards — was kind of obsolete. But if you look at
where we are right now, a lot of those problems have been solved. We
even have headsets that are standalone. Everything’s built into the
headset. You don’t even need a computer. You’re absolutely right,
that the groundwork of XR has taken decades. But we’re — right now
— in the point where it’s ready to scale.
Michael: And this is why I’ve
been working on starting this dojo, or this VR maker space; because
the tools for building — there’s VRTK for Unity… there’s just all
these tools. Amazon Sumerian. You can dive in and start building for
VR with almost a $300 laptop and an Oculus Go. You can be less than a
thousand dollars in and create something usable; something that can
actually change the bottom line for your company.
Alan: There’s VR where you can
make the full thing in computer graphics, but there’s also 360
videos; being able to capture a training experience in 360 video, and
then add computer graphics on top of that. And then there’s companies
like STRIVR, who are doing this exact thing for Walmart and football
teams and other brands. I think just something so simple as a 360
video — which is very easy to capture now, the cameras are under
$5,000, and that’s for 8k cameras — and then being able to overlay
the data that you need. And the next generation of headsets that will
come out in the next 24 months will all have eye tracking and head
tracking. So, you know where people are looking; you can really get
an incredible amount of data back from the headsets, as well as
deliver the content to the viewer. So what are some of the most
impressive business cases that you’ve seen so far?
Michael: Most impressive
business cases, I think, go back to training. As I said, the fact
that you can have your store — that’s not even built yet — and
have, by time that store opens, a team of associates that literally
know everything — they know all the product details, they know how
to interact with various types of customers, where every product is
kept, where the extras are kept in back — and maybe they only
stepped into that store yesterday.
Alan: Yeah, that’s a pretty
incredible thing, to be able to train people on things that don’t
exist. One of my previous interviews was talking about… Neutral
Digital! They were talking about how the airlines are using VR to
show people planes that don’t exist yet. “Here’s the airplanes
of the future, and here’s what we’re gonna do, and here’s the first
class cabin,” you book your ticket. But then, they’re also able
to take that same asset, and then train the staff on the airplane
that’s coming in a couple of years, so that when the plane is
delivered, you don’t have to waste a second of ground time — because
for every day that you ground a plane, it’s $100,000. Being able to
do that is incredible.
Michael: Yeah. Most definitely.
And going back a step, you don’t even have to get that crazy with
your technology to use this. One of my previous jobs — the one where
I was building those immersive trainings — we were using Adobe
Captivate, which is a pretty standard training software, where you
make essentially interactive power points that save quiz data and
such to a swarm database. Whatever learning management system your
company uses, and you can throw together a training in about 10
minutes. One of the features they recently added is 360 photos or
videos, and then making those interactive, and it’s just as simple as
point and click. But to your point, that’s sometimes all you need.
You talked about these 8k cameras, or the 360 cameras. But I went
into one of the cafes with my smartphone — and yeah, it takes a
little longer — but I took a 360 photo just standing there, being
the tripod, and uploaded it and made a little training, and sent it
to my director of technology. I was like, “hey, look, this is
what we can do today.”
Alan: Wow, that’s incredible.
With a smartphone. It’s incredible. The technology path is moving so
fast that if you’d said, “hey, we want to make a five-minute
training thing” three years ago, you would have to print the 3D
mounts for the cameras, and go out there, film it, stitch it. Two
weeks later, you’d have the rough draft, and then, “you wanted
to put some CGI in there? Oh, yeah. There’s another three weeks of
work.” The tools that are popping up are really democratizing
virtual and augmented reality creation, and I think that’s what’s
really exciting. So, what are some of the tools that you’ve seen used
really effectively to create this content?
Michael: It would depend on your
use case. Is it marketing? Is it training? Unity is always my top
one. As someone who grew up as a game designer and player, I
definitely side towards Unity. I think that the tools that they have
are incredible. And if you’re going for full-immersive, Virtual
Reality Tool Kit is an open source tool kit that — out of the box —
everything just works. When it comes to augmented reality, you’re
gonna go more towards the marketing thing. The SNAP lenses alone are
crazy. Did you recently see SNAP’s location-based augmented reality,
where they’re augmenting entire buildings now? It’s incredible.
Alan: There’s been over 400,000
SNAP lenses created in the last couple years. SNAP is really the
leader in augmented reality.
Michael: Yeah, I think most
people that use SNAP know SNAP. They know filters. They see this cool
stuff. But they actually don’t know what augmented reality is, or
maybe have never even heard the term.
Alan: It’s very true. We get
caught up in all the terminology; SNAP just said, “look, we do
cool things with your camera.”.
Michael: Yes. And that’s all it
takes.
Alan: Yeah. You can try on
glasses. You can see a car in your living room. You can light up the
Eiffel Tower. It’s really interesting, what those guys are doing. And
they also announced voice-driven AR activations as well. So you can
talk to it.
Michael: Yes. Yeah. Audio
Augmented is another whole can of worms.
Alan: Absolutely. You were
saying that you captured 360 photos from your phone, and then were
able to create a very simple training exercise just from the
smartphone.
Michael: Yeah, and that was all
built in. I mean, the credit goes to Adobe for sure, for having the
stuff built into their technology already today. I’ve actually been
working with Silka Miesnieks. She’s head of emerging technologies
over at Adobe, and the things they’re working on are incredible. One
thing she’s trying to put together is something called the sensory
design group. Something I’ve mentioned — a couple of times, now —
is when it comes to the technology for AR/VR/XR, the technology’s
here. The tools are here. Now it’s a matter of, we need to get in and
actually use it. And they’re trying to establish a list of design
rules to kind of help further that process.
Alan: Adobe is introducing all
sorts of tools left and right. One of their announcements the other
day was this amazing ability to create 3D objects and 3D products,
and then have the back end to source and serve them up for
programmatic ads on Facebook, on Google. 3D on Web is really becoming
prevalent as well. We’re past that point of, “hey, can we make
this work?” Then it’s, “yes, we can make it work; how can
we use it?” And now it’s, “we can use it. We made it work.
Now, what are the limits of which we can push this technology in?”
One of my last interviews was with Anthony Vitillo, or Skarred Ghost.
We were talking about haptics, and how haptic vests and gloves can be
used across enterprise for simulation of training, but also scent
machines, and different spatial audio and things. So how do you see
the different senses being brought into virtual and augmented
reality?
Michael: One of the biggest
things that got me interested in spatial computing to begin with was
my own research into neuroscience, and the fact that our brains are
wired to remember spatial information. If you ever heard of “memory
palaces,” it’s an old technique they used to use back in the
days of Greek and Rome to remember anything. Now, it’s kind of seen
as just a fun thing to do; it can set your shopping list up in a 3-D
representation of your house in your head. But that’s where spatial
computing to me is so amazing, is that it’s keying in on something
that we’ve kind of ignored for years in a literature-based society —
we’re all about written words and numbers. But now with spatial
computing, we’ve opened up an entire new three-dimensional palette
for training, memorization, etc. And our brains were built to live in
a three-dimensional world, and now we can reach out and change this
world not only visually, but also — as you’re saying — once we have
these haptic technologies, you can actually change the way we
experience the world through audio and feeling.
Alan: It’s going to be really
incredible, what’s coming. I got the chance to use the Ultra Haptics,
[which]
is this device where it uses ultrasonic waves to give you the
sense of touch. And then there was another one, where I tried to put
these sensors on my finger, and I reached into a fire and I felt like
it burned me. I jumped back. I’ve got to try this thing called Vasco,
which is a scent machine that mounts to the bottom of your VR headset
that you can program — so, you program in Unity or Unreal. I reached
out, grab a cup of coffee. I smelled it, smelled like coffee. You go
and you look at the grass; it smells like grass. So, the ability to
create scents, in addition to haptics and the visuals, (obviously),
and then the audio. This is really, really an exciting time to be in
the space, because there’s so many different aspects of it. You just
have to find what works for you. I think it can be very overwhelming
for businesses. What would you recommend for a business getting in
now, and how do they get to real ROI or real business use cases,
without getting caught up in the minutia of all of this stuff?
Because it’s easy to go down rabbit holes in this technology. What
advice would you give for businesses looking to get in this, to stay
really useful for them, rather than get caught in these rabbit holes?
Michael: There’s definitely a
lot of answers, but given how easy it is to dive in, if you have the
resources, I would say: get it one headset, and get yourself a —
whether it’s Unity, whether it’s Sumerian, whatever it is — and
whoever the techiest person is, have them try some stuff. Think,
“what’s the one thing we could train people with using VR?”
Or better yet, maybe marketing. “What can we put in a headset
that… maybe our sales guy could take this Oculus, go with him in a
suitcase when he goes on these sales meetings, and actually show
people the thing we’re building in full three dimensions.” Let
them reach out and touch it. Diving in in that way, I think, is the
way to go. That being said, because it’s so easy to dive in, there
are a lot of studios popping up everywhere that are very eager to
help companies get into this space. I see XR right now as the IT
revolution that hit businesses in the last couple of decades. I
worked at a steel mill one time, and that was the backend of the IT
wave was hitting that place, and that was an industrial complex in
the middle of nowhere, Arkansas. So XR is hitting that wave right
now, where it’s going to transform all businesses; either dive in
with the team you have — if you have the resources. If you don’t
have the resources internally, definitely be seeking out some of
these studios. Call out to them and say, “hey, we’d love to at
least talk to you about your thoughts on how you think XR could help
our business.” Talk to somebody who thinks about these things
daily, like perhaps yourself. And I’m sure you could come up with
ideas for most any business.
Alan: For the last few years, we
have literally done work in countless industries, from mining, to
food service, to hospitality, travel, tourism, training, education,
schools, seniors homes. And the result is always the same. Everybody
loves it, but it’s really creating those business use cases around
that. And because we’ve done so many things, it’s a little
overwhelming to us as well, because we can’t be everything to
everybody. But at the same time, it’s given us an incredible breadth
of knowledge that I think is really valuable to our customers. When
they come to us and say, “we have this problem we want solved,”
we can look at it from a very objective standpoint — “this is
the solution that works best for your needs” — and is not tied
to any one company. We’re not tied to Microsoft. We’re not tied to
Magic Leap. We’re not tied to Intel. We just know what the best
solutions are across the different industries. And bring those to
customers is the key, because there’s so much noise out there, and
there’s so many different solutions. It’s easy to get overwhelmed.
And if you bring in a studio who is really good at 360 video, guess
what they’re going to sell you. They’re going to sell you 360 video.
So I think it’s important to also understand that different studios
do different things, and you really need to focus on a strategy. So,
thank you for pointing that out.
Michael: Yeah, I think that guys
like us that have been thinking about XR for the last few years, it’s
very easy for us to come up with use cases. I think the best thing
about XR is the worst thing about XR, and it’s that it can literally
change everything. And to your point, it’s hard to pick, “what
do we use it for?” Because the truth is, pick anything, and the
answer will be, “we can figure out a way to use it.”
Alan: That’s the problem! We
used to have a tagline: “We do eVRything.” It’s great to do
everything, but it’s really hard to focus on those things. We’re
about to make a pretty big announcement, and it will allow us to
continue doing everything, but in a different way; one that will
serve a far greater community of people and businesses. So, pretty
excited about that. What do you see as the future of XR, and what is
the future as it pertains to business? What do you see coming up in
the future that really excites you?
Michael: One of the first things
that I thought about whenever I first drove into VR was productivity.
As a writer, I know that can be very easy to get distracted,
especially when you have three hours of writing ahead of you, or what
have you. Everyone tries to find a perfect place in the quiet cabin
in the woods, but there’s only so many quiet cabins in the woods.
Especially when you live downtown in a busy city. Where, in a VR
headset with augmented audio noise-cancelling headphones (that exist
today), and perhaps a keyboard; as a writer, I could go anywhere I
want. I can go to my happy place, and I can write. I also saw a
dissertation a few years ago that some student did, where he showed
the possibility of an in-VR workstation. So, instead of being limited
to two or three or however many monitors you have these days on your
desk, you could put screens in front of you, behind you, left or
right, any direction. And then at different focal lengths — the
human eye sees in, like, three natural focal lengths; really close
up, about six feet away, and then about 50 feet in front of them.
These are those three layers of natural viewpoints, and you could put
screens at all three of those layers in all directions, optimizing
for what information is most important. He theorized that you could
increase productivity by a minimum of 30 percent, if not upwards of
80 percent, depending on the job. And even if I told you, “oh,
if everyone had a VR headset at your IT company, you’ll increase
productivity by 10 percent per employee,” okay, 10 percent isn’t
a huge number. But 10 percent, times a 600-employee company? Well,
now we’re talking. That’s what got me excited in the first place. Not
to mention training, not to mention marketing, not to mention
everything else. I truly believe that XR is just a new interface to
technology, and therefore, it’s going to change everything.
Alan: Well, it’s interesting you
said that, because one of the interviews in the podcast — you can go
back and find it if you’re listening — is with the president of HTC
VIVE China, Alvin Wang Graylin, and something that they just
announced at their Vive Ecosystem Conference was multi-modal VR.
You’re gonna be able to do exactly what you said, and bring your
computer screen into VR. What they’ve also done is they’ve created
the ability for you to plug your headset into your PlayStation or
XBox or computer or television, and just take automatically, the
information from your 2D screen into your 3D world, and make it any
size. So, you could be working on an IMAX screen, rather than staring
at your 13-inch MacBook. There’s other companies doing that; big
screen VR, I know, is one of the killer apps right now. And one of
the things that they’re doing is, they thought it was going to be
more productivity. But what it turns out is a lot of people are just
using it to watch movies on a really big screen. The ability to sit
there, next to somebody, and have your girlfriend — who maybe is a
long-distance relationship, or your friends or whatever — you can
sit in the room together, have a conversation, while watching a movie
on an IMAX screen. Take that to productivity? Holy crap. I cannot
wait to have my 13-inch screen be an IMAX screen in front of me, so I
can actually look up rather than look down while I’m working. And I
think there’s going to be a lot of chiropractors out of work because
of this.
Michael: Yes. Yeah. And there’s
also notifications, right. Instead of the notification popping up,
and I’ve got to look away or whatever? I mean, it can literally pop
up between you and your screen without actually ocluding the screen
behind you. And little things like that add up over time.
Alan: I agree. It’s a shame that
there was one company really focused on the enterprise workstation
VR, and I can’t remember what they were called, but they were really
too early to the show. If they had made it past 2019, I think there
would be a market for it. That leads us into where VR is right now,
and AR. We’re really at that precipice of, “that’s an acceptable
technology. There’s lots of businesses using it. The results are
phenomenal, and the cost is being driven down to reasonable amounts.”
I personally think that 2019 is the breakout year of virtual and
augmented reality. What are your thoughts?
Michael: I honestly 100 percent
agree.
Alan: Well all right! If you
take into account the fact that, by the end of this year, there’ll be
probably 20-million VR headsets in the market. PlayStation is gonna
be 4.5-million sold. Oculus has sold a couple million. HTC VIVE sold
a couple million. I think we’re gonna reach… not critical mass yet,
with consumers, but definitely a critical mass in businesses. And
combine that with the fact that there’ll be over 2-billion — with a
B — smartphones that have augmented reality enabled on them right
away by the end of this year? You’ve got two-billion devices that can
do three-dimensional computing, and this is the tipping point.
Michael: I think a lot of people
discredit the gaming side of things, right? “Oh, they’re just
gamers with their gaming computers, what have you.” But the
average gamer is, what, like 40 years old now? You’ve got companies
like Valve who have just announced that they’re stepping into the
game, and they’ve got some pretty popular IPs to say the least. Yes,
it’s for gaming, but if you get all your gamers — who are probably
your employees; I’m guessing most of your employees, if you’re an IT
company anyway. At least your tech employees, probably — play games,
or have your employees be the evangelists for this XR wave that you
need to grab hold of.
Alan: I agree. I couldn’t agree
more. And I think a lot of game studios are doing some kind of
contract work on the side with enterprises because they have the
product pipelines. They know how to build AR, they know how to build
VR, and they’ve got skills to make gameified training as well. And I
think that’s going to be a huge part of all of this as we move
forward. One of the things that I wanted to bring up is that VR is
happening, and AR is happening, everywhere in the world. Literally
from Sydney, Australia to New York, L.A., everywhere in the world;
whether in Silicon Valley or small town in the Midwest. This is
happening everywhere. So maybe as a parting words, what are some
things that you really see as the fundamentals of getting involved in
this technology, especially from a business standpoint? What do you
think is the first step so you can harness this power immediately?
Michael: The first step is the
best thing and worst thing about spatial computing, and that is, the
only way to begin understanding it is to experience it. So my #1
recommendation to any company is to, whether it’s go out and buy a
headset, or if you’re the VR nerd at your company and you have a
headset at home, bring it in. Clean it off, of course. But have
everybody at the company take a look. Everybody put the goggles on.
Everybody put the glasses on. Play a demo. A simple demo is all it
takes. Whether it’s a game, or if you have an enterprise-level demo,
I think that that alone will get the ball rolling.
Alan: Couldn’t agree with you
more. Somebody explained it to me, “explaining VR to somebody
who has never tried it is like explaining the color red to a blind
person.” It is impossible. If you own a headset, your
responsibility is to make sure everybody tries it. Get it on
everybody’s head. I really want to thank you so much, Michael, for
taking the time. Michael, Eichenseer, thank you very much.
Michael: Thanks, Alan. I’m
excited to see what you’ve got cooking.
Alan: You can learn more about
our guest Michael Eichenseer and VRdōjō by visiting VRDojo.org.
View all episodes
By Alan Smithson from MetaVRse
4.5
1212 ratings
We talk a lot about the business use cases of XR on this podcast, but any good business comes with a great fitness plan or exercise room. XR is no different, and VRdōjō founder Michael Eichenseer runs Alan through a few of the cardiovascular benefits to the technology.
And that’s just the first six
minutes! Many other topics are touched on in this episode – virtual
writing spaces, remote assistance, spatial learning, his own XR
makerspace, and more.
Alan: Welcome to the show,
Michael, how are you doing? Pretty good. How are you? Fantastic.
Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It’s going to be
a really exciting one. Let’s tell everybody at home. What is your
vision for virtual augmented reality? Was the best virtual reality or
a AR experience is what is the best thing that you have done? And
explain to the listeners why that is so.
Michael: For me, it’s definitely
the fitness aspect of VR. As a gamer, I definitely enjoy the fact
that I can play a game, not be sitting the entire time, and
afterwards, I’ve burnt 500 calories, and feel really good about it
the next day. The research coming out in XR in reducing pain and
increasing motivation, to me, is fascinating.
Alan: There was a lot of medical
use cases coming up in pain reduction, using virtual reality for
pre-surgical — and also perisurgical — where you’re wearing a
headset to distract you. I know one of the things that blows my mind
is, my daughter, she’s 10 and she is terrified of needles. Like,
we’re talking blood-curdling screams from the nurse’s office. The
next time she goes, we’re gonna use VR to try to distract her while
they take blood, because it’s a stressful thing. And when somebody
goes into a surgery, being able to decrease their stress; it’s hard
to measure the success outcomes, but at the same time, just being
able to calm them is something that I think VR does really naturally.
You talked about exercising in VR. Give us some examples of some of
the ways people are using VR to exercise.
Michael: The boxing games are
pretty popular, and I definitely have to mention Beat Saber. That’s
probably the top one at the moment.
Alan: Basically, you have two
lightsabers in your hands, and you’ve got to swipe up and down, and
left and right, with your left and right hand, and dodge out of the
way of things. It is incredible.
Michael: It’s dancing.
Alan: Dancing and disco, and
it’s so good.
Michael: Yes, it’s really good.
You kind of lose track of time. I think that’s why it’s good that
it’s based on music; the song ends and you’re like, “oh, back to
reality a little bit.”.
Alan: Yeah, there’s a guy who
was playing, he lost 45 pounds playing Beat Saber.
Michael: Yes. I’ve actually met
a 68-year-old retiree who logs into VR every morning at 5:00 a.m.,
just to warm up for the day.
Alan: That’s incredible. What
does he play? What does he do?
Michael: Back when I met him, we
were playing a game called Smash Box Arena. It’s a multiplayer game,
kind of dodgeball. It’s defunct now, but there’s a lot of other games
like that. I think Rec Room is probably the number one out there,
where you can hop in — it’s a free game — and it’s cross-platform
and you see people in there at all times of the day.
Alan: I’ve played paintball in
there. It was a lot of fun.
Michael: Yep. That’s the game I
actually play competitively. That’s kind of my workout every day.
Alan: I’m so terrible at it.
What are the tricks? You gotta bounce from place to place, and it’s
just… it’s crazy.
Michael: Well, I think the trick
is the same with anything: Practice makes perfect. Playing with
people who challenge your skill set.
Alan: Speaking of that, talk to
us a little bit about how you’re challenging young minds and people
who are passionate in the space through your maker space, VRdōjō.
You are the voice of virtual reality in the Midwest. I can imagine
that there’s a huge hub of VR in Kansas City. Maybe speak to us about
what’s happening locally; what you’re doing to bring that hub
together?
Michael: I’m not sure if I’m the
voice. I definitely hope I’m helping. But my aim with VR… VR, to
me, can happen anywhere. And as much as I’m very happy that the
coasts are innovating as much as they are, I think there’s a huge
opportunity here in the Midwest. There’s a lot of talent here, and I
have heard from other people that even places like Kansas City
actually have quite a bit of VR happening — and I say VR, I mean XR,
AR; all of it. There’s a lot of, for example, architectural firms in
town, and they aren’t as flashy as a virtual sports or something, but
they’re all using VR for showing the buildings, or going to a client
and saying, “hey, would you like this room moved over here?
Would you like this equipment coming through this wall, or that
wall?” I think it’s use cases like that — that aren’t
necessarily flashy and public-facing — that a lot of companies are
using today. And I think in the next couple of years, everyone’s just
going to be using XR, and we’re going to wonder, “woah, woah,
where did that come from?”
Alan: In my last interview, we
were talking about 2019 as that year where it goes from, “you’re
doing VR — you’re ahead of the game, you’re a future company,”
to, “you’re not using VR? What’s wrong with you?”
Michael: Yeah, exactly. And one
of the… I don’t know how many names I should name, but there’s
definitely a large company here in KC that uses VR for training
employees. One example is retail employees. They actually build
virtual versions of their stores, and they might actually do that
when the store is not built yet. It might be two months out before
the store’s built, but they want to hire their people two months
early and give them two months of what’s essentially hands-on
training before their physical store even exists.
Alan: So what company is that?
Michael: I don’t know if I can
say.
Alan: okay. Maybe make an
introduction; we’ll have them on the show. They can talk about what
they’re doing and how it’s working. I would love that. Everybody’s
getting this interest in, “what can this technology do for my
business? How can I use it?” And we’ve talked about… just in
this very short, six-minute conversation that we’ve been in here,
you’ve talked about VR being used for design, and for
previsualization, and for training in retail. You were talking about
exercise and fitness. There’s so many. Personally, I think there’s no
facet of human communication that we won’t be touched by these
technologies. Where do you see the path forward for companies? How do
they get involved?
Michael: I guess I’d say if
you’re a business, and you aren’t at least thinking about XR in some
facet? You’re already behind.
Alan: That’s a pretty bold
statement.
Michael: Yep. [Laughs]. The last
place I worked was a fast casual food chain. I worked at their
technology headquarters, and we did technology training for the
employees. I started working on VR versions of things, so they could
reach in and grab the cables that they would have to unplug and plug
in, essentially saving the IT techs time on the phone by training the
employees as how to run their cafés.
Alan: Wow. It sounds like a
small thing, but when you consider the cost to send an IT person out
there just to plug something in that could have been done simply, and
I think one of the other things that people really haven’t fully
grasped is the see-what-I-see. or remote assistance; being able to
hold up your phone, show the person on the other end what you’re
looking at, and have them annotate on it. That alone is saving
millions of dollars right now.
Michael: It reduces stress. One
of the biggest things of being an IT support person is your stress
because you’re sitting in a cubicle all day. They’re stressed because
they’re dealing with customers, and technology isn’t necessarily
their #1 thing — that’s why they’re calling you. If you can give
them this, literally hands-on, “hey, take it out here. Plug it
in there.” And it’s not you trying to explain to them over the
phone. That’s a huge reduction in stress. Not to mention, like you
said, the reduction in travel is a huge reduction in cost. And it
starts out with a small conversations. But over the course of a year,
I can’t even imagine what the savings are for almost any-sized
company.
Alan: My last interview was
talking about how Boeing is using it, and these big enterprises are
using it pretty much everywhere now. They’ve realized the potential.
And when you start to see 25 to 35 to 40 percent reductions in times
it takes for people to learn, but also reduction of error rates
across the enterprise? I mean, the last few years have been really
funny, that people have been, “so what are other people doing,
and what’s their ROI, and how are they measuring success?” And
it’s been really hard because — as a developer — you’re like,
“well, I don’t know. We just make this stuff, and there’s not
very many people doing it, and we really don’t know the ROI yet.”
But I think we’ve kind of — in the last two years — put a lot of
POCs, a lot of effort, into building these demos and proofs of
concepts, developing these trials. And now, the data coming back is
way better than anybody could have ever imagined. So it’s not a
matter of, “hey, let’s do a POC!” It’s like, “let’s
roll this out, because we already know it works. Here’s the numbers
that other people are seeing. Let’s go.”
Michael: I think VR is already
here. XR. All of it. I spent some time at a free-roam VR arcade — I
help out there — and 90 percent of the people that come in have
never even touched VR before. And they’re not even gamers; they’re
just there to do something on the weekend. And when they leave,
they’re like, “holy crap, I did not know it was this far
[along]
.” And I tell all of them, the groundwork for XR has been
laid for decades. There was just a few key technologies that needed
to be fixed, and those technologies exist now. The only thing that’s
lacking is a design sense, because we just haven’t been designing for
it. When it comes to capabilities, it’s already there. There’s no
reason not to dive in, in my opinion.
Alan: The costs have come down
dramatically, even. You look back when commercial VR launched in
2016, and you needed a $1,500 graphics card… combine that with a
computer… then the headset; you’re at three grand before you even
start. Then you needed software, and the software didn’t exist yet,
so you had to make it. A company getting in 3 years ago would have
spent a couple hundred thousand dollars just to build something that
— by today’s standards — was kind of obsolete. But if you look at
where we are right now, a lot of those problems have been solved. We
even have headsets that are standalone. Everything’s built into the
headset. You don’t even need a computer. You’re absolutely right,
that the groundwork of XR has taken decades. But we’re — right now
— in the point where it’s ready to scale.
Michael: And this is why I’ve
been working on starting this dojo, or this VR maker space; because
the tools for building — there’s VRTK for Unity… there’s just all
these tools. Amazon Sumerian. You can dive in and start building for
VR with almost a $300 laptop and an Oculus Go. You can be less than a
thousand dollars in and create something usable; something that can
actually change the bottom line for your company.
Alan: There’s VR where you can
make the full thing in computer graphics, but there’s also 360
videos; being able to capture a training experience in 360 video, and
then add computer graphics on top of that. And then there’s companies
like STRIVR, who are doing this exact thing for Walmart and football
teams and other brands. I think just something so simple as a 360
video — which is very easy to capture now, the cameras are under
$5,000, and that’s for 8k cameras — and then being able to overlay
the data that you need. And the next generation of headsets that will
come out in the next 24 months will all have eye tracking and head
tracking. So, you know where people are looking; you can really get
an incredible amount of data back from the headsets, as well as
deliver the content to the viewer. So what are some of the most
impressive business cases that you’ve seen so far?
Michael: Most impressive
business cases, I think, go back to training. As I said, the fact
that you can have your store — that’s not even built yet — and
have, by time that store opens, a team of associates that literally
know everything — they know all the product details, they know how
to interact with various types of customers, where every product is
kept, where the extras are kept in back — and maybe they only
stepped into that store yesterday.
Alan: Yeah, that’s a pretty
incredible thing, to be able to train people on things that don’t
exist. One of my previous interviews was talking about… Neutral
Digital! They were talking about how the airlines are using VR to
show people planes that don’t exist yet. “Here’s the airplanes
of the future, and here’s what we’re gonna do, and here’s the first
class cabin,” you book your ticket. But then, they’re also able
to take that same asset, and then train the staff on the airplane
that’s coming in a couple of years, so that when the plane is
delivered, you don’t have to waste a second of ground time — because
for every day that you ground a plane, it’s $100,000. Being able to
do that is incredible.
Michael: Yeah. Most definitely.
And going back a step, you don’t even have to get that crazy with
your technology to use this. One of my previous jobs — the one where
I was building those immersive trainings — we were using Adobe
Captivate, which is a pretty standard training software, where you
make essentially interactive power points that save quiz data and
such to a swarm database. Whatever learning management system your
company uses, and you can throw together a training in about 10
minutes. One of the features they recently added is 360 photos or
videos, and then making those interactive, and it’s just as simple as
point and click. But to your point, that’s sometimes all you need.
You talked about these 8k cameras, or the 360 cameras. But I went
into one of the cafes with my smartphone — and yeah, it takes a
little longer — but I took a 360 photo just standing there, being
the tripod, and uploaded it and made a little training, and sent it
to my director of technology. I was like, “hey, look, this is
what we can do today.”
Alan: Wow, that’s incredible.
With a smartphone. It’s incredible. The technology path is moving so
fast that if you’d said, “hey, we want to make a five-minute
training thing” three years ago, you would have to print the 3D
mounts for the cameras, and go out there, film it, stitch it. Two
weeks later, you’d have the rough draft, and then, “you wanted
to put some CGI in there? Oh, yeah. There’s another three weeks of
work.” The tools that are popping up are really democratizing
virtual and augmented reality creation, and I think that’s what’s
really exciting. So, what are some of the tools that you’ve seen used
really effectively to create this content?
Michael: It would depend on your
use case. Is it marketing? Is it training? Unity is always my top
one. As someone who grew up as a game designer and player, I
definitely side towards Unity. I think that the tools that they have
are incredible. And if you’re going for full-immersive, Virtual
Reality Tool Kit is an open source tool kit that — out of the box —
everything just works. When it comes to augmented reality, you’re
gonna go more towards the marketing thing. The SNAP lenses alone are
crazy. Did you recently see SNAP’s location-based augmented reality,
where they’re augmenting entire buildings now? It’s incredible.
Alan: There’s been over 400,000
SNAP lenses created in the last couple years. SNAP is really the
leader in augmented reality.
Michael: Yeah, I think most
people that use SNAP know SNAP. They know filters. They see this cool
stuff. But they actually don’t know what augmented reality is, or
maybe have never even heard the term.
Alan: It’s very true. We get
caught up in all the terminology; SNAP just said, “look, we do
cool things with your camera.”.
Michael: Yes. And that’s all it
takes.
Alan: Yeah. You can try on
glasses. You can see a car in your living room. You can light up the
Eiffel Tower. It’s really interesting, what those guys are doing. And
they also announced voice-driven AR activations as well. So you can
talk to it.
Michael: Yes. Yeah. Audio
Augmented is another whole can of worms.
Alan: Absolutely. You were
saying that you captured 360 photos from your phone, and then were
able to create a very simple training exercise just from the
smartphone.
Michael: Yeah, and that was all
built in. I mean, the credit goes to Adobe for sure, for having the
stuff built into their technology already today. I’ve actually been
working with Silka Miesnieks. She’s head of emerging technologies
over at Adobe, and the things they’re working on are incredible. One
thing she’s trying to put together is something called the sensory
design group. Something I’ve mentioned — a couple of times, now —
is when it comes to the technology for AR/VR/XR, the technology’s
here. The tools are here. Now it’s a matter of, we need to get in and
actually use it. And they’re trying to establish a list of design
rules to kind of help further that process.
Alan: Adobe is introducing all
sorts of tools left and right. One of their announcements the other
day was this amazing ability to create 3D objects and 3D products,
and then have the back end to source and serve them up for
programmatic ads on Facebook, on Google. 3D on Web is really becoming
prevalent as well. We’re past that point of, “hey, can we make
this work?” Then it’s, “yes, we can make it work; how can
we use it?” And now it’s, “we can use it. We made it work.
Now, what are the limits of which we can push this technology in?”
One of my last interviews was with Anthony Vitillo, or Skarred Ghost.
We were talking about haptics, and how haptic vests and gloves can be
used across enterprise for simulation of training, but also scent
machines, and different spatial audio and things. So how do you see
the different senses being brought into virtual and augmented
reality?
Michael: One of the biggest
things that got me interested in spatial computing to begin with was
my own research into neuroscience, and the fact that our brains are
wired to remember spatial information. If you ever heard of “memory
palaces,” it’s an old technique they used to use back in the
days of Greek and Rome to remember anything. Now, it’s kind of seen
as just a fun thing to do; it can set your shopping list up in a 3-D
representation of your house in your head. But that’s where spatial
computing to me is so amazing, is that it’s keying in on something
that we’ve kind of ignored for years in a literature-based society —
we’re all about written words and numbers. But now with spatial
computing, we’ve opened up an entire new three-dimensional palette
for training, memorization, etc. And our brains were built to live in
a three-dimensional world, and now we can reach out and change this
world not only visually, but also — as you’re saying — once we have
these haptic technologies, you can actually change the way we
experience the world through audio and feeling.
Alan: It’s going to be really
incredible, what’s coming. I got the chance to use the Ultra Haptics,
[which]
is this device where it uses ultrasonic waves to give you the
sense of touch. And then there was another one, where I tried to put
these sensors on my finger, and I reached into a fire and I felt like
it burned me. I jumped back. I’ve got to try this thing called Vasco,
which is a scent machine that mounts to the bottom of your VR headset
that you can program — so, you program in Unity or Unreal. I reached
out, grab a cup of coffee. I smelled it, smelled like coffee. You go
and you look at the grass; it smells like grass. So, the ability to
create scents, in addition to haptics and the visuals, (obviously),
and then the audio. This is really, really an exciting time to be in
the space, because there’s so many different aspects of it. You just
have to find what works for you. I think it can be very overwhelming
for businesses. What would you recommend for a business getting in
now, and how do they get to real ROI or real business use cases,
without getting caught up in the minutia of all of this stuff?
Because it’s easy to go down rabbit holes in this technology. What
advice would you give for businesses looking to get in this, to stay
really useful for them, rather than get caught in these rabbit holes?
Michael: There’s definitely a
lot of answers, but given how easy it is to dive in, if you have the
resources, I would say: get it one headset, and get yourself a —
whether it’s Unity, whether it’s Sumerian, whatever it is — and
whoever the techiest person is, have them try some stuff. Think,
“what’s the one thing we could train people with using VR?”
Or better yet, maybe marketing. “What can we put in a headset
that… maybe our sales guy could take this Oculus, go with him in a
suitcase when he goes on these sales meetings, and actually show
people the thing we’re building in full three dimensions.” Let
them reach out and touch it. Diving in in that way, I think, is the
way to go. That being said, because it’s so easy to dive in, there
are a lot of studios popping up everywhere that are very eager to
help companies get into this space. I see XR right now as the IT
revolution that hit businesses in the last couple of decades. I
worked at a steel mill one time, and that was the backend of the IT
wave was hitting that place, and that was an industrial complex in
the middle of nowhere, Arkansas. So XR is hitting that wave right
now, where it’s going to transform all businesses; either dive in
with the team you have — if you have the resources. If you don’t
have the resources internally, definitely be seeking out some of
these studios. Call out to them and say, “hey, we’d love to at
least talk to you about your thoughts on how you think XR could help
our business.” Talk to somebody who thinks about these things
daily, like perhaps yourself. And I’m sure you could come up with
ideas for most any business.
Alan: For the last few years, we
have literally done work in countless industries, from mining, to
food service, to hospitality, travel, tourism, training, education,
schools, seniors homes. And the result is always the same. Everybody
loves it, but it’s really creating those business use cases around
that. And because we’ve done so many things, it’s a little
overwhelming to us as well, because we can’t be everything to
everybody. But at the same time, it’s given us an incredible breadth
of knowledge that I think is really valuable to our customers. When
they come to us and say, “we have this problem we want solved,”
we can look at it from a very objective standpoint — “this is
the solution that works best for your needs” — and is not tied
to any one company. We’re not tied to Microsoft. We’re not tied to
Magic Leap. We’re not tied to Intel. We just know what the best
solutions are across the different industries. And bring those to
customers is the key, because there’s so much noise out there, and
there’s so many different solutions. It’s easy to get overwhelmed.
And if you bring in a studio who is really good at 360 video, guess
what they’re going to sell you. They’re going to sell you 360 video.
So I think it’s important to also understand that different studios
do different things, and you really need to focus on a strategy. So,
thank you for pointing that out.
Michael: Yeah, I think that guys
like us that have been thinking about XR for the last few years, it’s
very easy for us to come up with use cases. I think the best thing
about XR is the worst thing about XR, and it’s that it can literally
change everything. And to your point, it’s hard to pick, “what
do we use it for?” Because the truth is, pick anything, and the
answer will be, “we can figure out a way to use it.”
Alan: That’s the problem! We
used to have a tagline: “We do eVRything.” It’s great to do
everything, but it’s really hard to focus on those things. We’re
about to make a pretty big announcement, and it will allow us to
continue doing everything, but in a different way; one that will
serve a far greater community of people and businesses. So, pretty
excited about that. What do you see as the future of XR, and what is
the future as it pertains to business? What do you see coming up in
the future that really excites you?
Michael: One of the first things
that I thought about whenever I first drove into VR was productivity.
As a writer, I know that can be very easy to get distracted,
especially when you have three hours of writing ahead of you, or what
have you. Everyone tries to find a perfect place in the quiet cabin
in the woods, but there’s only so many quiet cabins in the woods.
Especially when you live downtown in a busy city. Where, in a VR
headset with augmented audio noise-cancelling headphones (that exist
today), and perhaps a keyboard; as a writer, I could go anywhere I
want. I can go to my happy place, and I can write. I also saw a
dissertation a few years ago that some student did, where he showed
the possibility of an in-VR workstation. So, instead of being limited
to two or three or however many monitors you have these days on your
desk, you could put screens in front of you, behind you, left or
right, any direction. And then at different focal lengths — the
human eye sees in, like, three natural focal lengths; really close
up, about six feet away, and then about 50 feet in front of them.
These are those three layers of natural viewpoints, and you could put
screens at all three of those layers in all directions, optimizing
for what information is most important. He theorized that you could
increase productivity by a minimum of 30 percent, if not upwards of
80 percent, depending on the job. And even if I told you, “oh,
if everyone had a VR headset at your IT company, you’ll increase
productivity by 10 percent per employee,” okay, 10 percent isn’t
a huge number. But 10 percent, times a 600-employee company? Well,
now we’re talking. That’s what got me excited in the first place. Not
to mention training, not to mention marketing, not to mention
everything else. I truly believe that XR is just a new interface to
technology, and therefore, it’s going to change everything.
Alan: Well, it’s interesting you
said that, because one of the interviews in the podcast — you can go
back and find it if you’re listening — is with the president of HTC
VIVE China, Alvin Wang Graylin, and something that they just
announced at their Vive Ecosystem Conference was multi-modal VR.
You’re gonna be able to do exactly what you said, and bring your
computer screen into VR. What they’ve also done is they’ve created
the ability for you to plug your headset into your PlayStation or
XBox or computer or television, and just take automatically, the
information from your 2D screen into your 3D world, and make it any
size. So, you could be working on an IMAX screen, rather than staring
at your 13-inch MacBook. There’s other companies doing that; big
screen VR, I know, is one of the killer apps right now. And one of
the things that they’re doing is, they thought it was going to be
more productivity. But what it turns out is a lot of people are just
using it to watch movies on a really big screen. The ability to sit
there, next to somebody, and have your girlfriend — who maybe is a
long-distance relationship, or your friends or whatever — you can
sit in the room together, have a conversation, while watching a movie
on an IMAX screen. Take that to productivity? Holy crap. I cannot
wait to have my 13-inch screen be an IMAX screen in front of me, so I
can actually look up rather than look down while I’m working. And I
think there’s going to be a lot of chiropractors out of work because
of this.
Michael: Yes. Yeah. And there’s
also notifications, right. Instead of the notification popping up,
and I’ve got to look away or whatever? I mean, it can literally pop
up between you and your screen without actually ocluding the screen
behind you. And little things like that add up over time.
Alan: I agree. It’s a shame that
there was one company really focused on the enterprise workstation
VR, and I can’t remember what they were called, but they were really
too early to the show. If they had made it past 2019, I think there
would be a market for it. That leads us into where VR is right now,
and AR. We’re really at that precipice of, “that’s an acceptable
technology. There’s lots of businesses using it. The results are
phenomenal, and the cost is being driven down to reasonable amounts.”
I personally think that 2019 is the breakout year of virtual and
augmented reality. What are your thoughts?
Michael: I honestly 100 percent
agree.
Alan: Well all right! If you
take into account the fact that, by the end of this year, there’ll be
probably 20-million VR headsets in the market. PlayStation is gonna
be 4.5-million sold. Oculus has sold a couple million. HTC VIVE sold
a couple million. I think we’re gonna reach… not critical mass yet,
with consumers, but definitely a critical mass in businesses. And
combine that with the fact that there’ll be over 2-billion — with a
B — smartphones that have augmented reality enabled on them right
away by the end of this year? You’ve got two-billion devices that can
do three-dimensional computing, and this is the tipping point.
Michael: I think a lot of people
discredit the gaming side of things, right? “Oh, they’re just
gamers with their gaming computers, what have you.” But the
average gamer is, what, like 40 years old now? You’ve got companies
like Valve who have just announced that they’re stepping into the
game, and they’ve got some pretty popular IPs to say the least. Yes,
it’s for gaming, but if you get all your gamers — who are probably
your employees; I’m guessing most of your employees, if you’re an IT
company anyway. At least your tech employees, probably — play games,
or have your employees be the evangelists for this XR wave that you
need to grab hold of.
Alan: I agree. I couldn’t agree
more. And I think a lot of game studios are doing some kind of
contract work on the side with enterprises because they have the
product pipelines. They know how to build AR, they know how to build
VR, and they’ve got skills to make gameified training as well. And I
think that’s going to be a huge part of all of this as we move
forward. One of the things that I wanted to bring up is that VR is
happening, and AR is happening, everywhere in the world. Literally
from Sydney, Australia to New York, L.A., everywhere in the world;
whether in Silicon Valley or small town in the Midwest. This is
happening everywhere. So maybe as a parting words, what are some
things that you really see as the fundamentals of getting involved in
this technology, especially from a business standpoint? What do you
think is the first step so you can harness this power immediately?
Michael: The first step is the
best thing and worst thing about spatial computing, and that is, the
only way to begin understanding it is to experience it. So my #1
recommendation to any company is to, whether it’s go out and buy a
headset, or if you’re the VR nerd at your company and you have a
headset at home, bring it in. Clean it off, of course. But have
everybody at the company take a look. Everybody put the goggles on.
Everybody put the glasses on. Play a demo. A simple demo is all it
takes. Whether it’s a game, or if you have an enterprise-level demo,
I think that that alone will get the ball rolling.
Alan: Couldn’t agree with you
more. Somebody explained it to me, “explaining VR to somebody
who has never tried it is like explaining the color red to a blind
person.” It is impossible. If you own a headset, your
responsibility is to make sure everybody tries it. Get it on
everybody’s head. I really want to thank you so much, Michael, for
taking the time. Michael, Eichenseer, thank you very much.
Michael: Thanks, Alan. I’m
excited to see what you’ve got cooking.
Alan: You can learn more about
our guest Michael Eichenseer and VRdōjō by visiting VRDojo.org.