Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Share HR in XR, with BrainXchange’s Emily Friedman
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Share to email
Share to Facebook
Share to X
Or
HR in XR, with BrainXchange’s Emily Friedman
As the lead
writer and head of content at BrainXchange, Emily Friedman has had
ample chances to explore a lot of XR-related topics. She lets Alan
pick her brain about a few of them, from getting millennials
interested in trades, to democratizing knowledge, and how humanity
will enter The Cloud.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for
Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is
Emily Friedman from BrainXchange and Augmented World Expo. Emily
Friedman is a New York based enterprise immersive, wearable and
emerging technology advocate, journalist and facilitator. She’s Head
of Content and the lead writer at BrainXchange, lead journalist and
senior editor at Enterprisewear Blog, and head of marketing and
communications for Augmented World Expo USA and AWE EU. To learn more
about BrainXchange, you can visit brainxchange.com. And if you wanna
learn more about AWE or Augmented World Expo, you can visit
awexr.com.
Welcome to the show, Emily.
Emily: Thank you for having me.
Alan: Oh, it’s my absolute
pleasure. I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation,
because you are writing everyday – or, not everyday, but what, a
couple times a week? — on the enterprise wearables world. So maybe
just kind of give us an overview of what is BrainXchange and AWE.
Let’s start with that.
Emily: Ok, I wish I were
productive enough to write multiple articles a week. But there’s a
lot going on. BrainXchange, we started out as a boutique events
company, and we just happened to enter augmented reality at the right
time. It was 2015, right after Google Glass, quote/unquote failed.
And there were all these headlines, “Glasshole” articles. But if
you read between the lines, it was clear that smartglasses weren’t a
failure, and that enterprises were actually finding good use cases
for it. So today we provide events, content, and other services all
related to facilitating enterprise XR.
Alan: You know, I’ve been at AWE
a couple of times now. I lead the startup track this year. It’s an
important conference for virtual/augmented/mixed reality and some may
say it is the most important conference. It’s where everybody around
the world gathers in. And I made this comment that if the building
happened to collapse, basically the entire VR world would cease to
exist, and we’d have to start over again. It was an amazing
collection of some of the world’s smartest people working in this
technology and enterprise. They seem to be really driving this
technology forward. What are you seeing?
Emily: Well, as for AWE, I think
it’s a very important benchmarking event. Like you said, the entire
industry gets together at that one point. What we’re seeing — and
the reason we gravitated towards enterprise at first — is that
that’s where the money is. I mean, that’s where the money has to be
made, both for end users and the AR/VR companies themselves. At the
end of the day, we cater to the enterprises and we talk to them every
day. We get on the phone with Fortune 500 companies, the innovation
people and all these different companies every day. And we listen to
their pain points. AR/VR happens to offer a solution to a lot of
their pain points.
Alan: So what are some of the
pain points? Let’s unpack that.
Emily: Huge one is a shrinking
workforce, that creates this need to train faster, better. So as the
workforce ages — in manufacturing, I think the average age is like
40 to 50 now — and retires, not only do you need to attract new
talent; you need to train them. As a millennial, this is actually
pretty important to me. Learning a skill today just doesn’t get you
as far as it did half a century ago. Tech advances, business models
change, and much of what I learned in school, I feel like it’s
irrelevant. And for Gen Z, it’s going to be worse.
So the ability to learn new skills
effectively — to upscale, to rescale — is really important. Another
one is remote support. Those are probably the two most enthusiastic
applications today. For us, it was one of the earlier ones, just
being able to connect your team remotely. Lone worker in the field —
say a field service company’s fixing an air conditioner — can access
talent of experts at a home office, and give them a view of what
they’re seeing. And that’s just really powerful.
Alan: Awesome. So remote
support, for example. What is the problem? What is the underlying
problem? Because one of the things you mentioned is attract and train
new talent. I think the key is that attract, because kids today,
they’re waking up in the morning, they’re opening Instagram, they’re
like, “I want to be an Instagram celebrity.” We can’t all
be Insta-famous, but there’s a lot of jobs that are in trades that
are great, good paying jobs that young people just aren’t, maybe
they’re not even aware of it or they just don’t care. I know a lot of
parents push their kids to go to university, even though that if you
look at university now, we’ve got a trillion and a half dollars in
debt in the US from student debt. So trades are a real value to the
economy. And how do you attract and excite people about those jobs?
Emily: So, as for the field
service, remote support question; the pain point there is time. So
not having to do the job twice, you send one person out and then you
need to send another person out to help that first person. As far as
the trades, I think our education system hasn’t really kept up with
the economy, like the actual workplace, but it’s necessary.
Alan: And it’s actually almost
impossible for education systems. If you look at the way they were
designed, they were designed not to change. They were designed to be
steadfast in the face of change. And that, unfortunately, when you
enter into exponential growth phase of humanity, this becomes a real
problem.
Emily: Exactly. So I think that
it’s both. It’s that they’re not learning the skills they might need.
And by the way, trades jobs don’t have to be manual. They’re not low
skill, they’re high skill. And there are now often involving
technology.
Alan: Oh, absolutely.
Emily: In that way, I think our
education system hasn’t kept up. And I think you’re right. My
generation were not aware of the trades. And I think skilled trades
training has dropped off a lot.
Alan: We’re seeing– starting to
see some some new technologies, like VR and AR, that are starting to
bridge that gap. There’s a couple of companies making some really
interesting headway in virtual reality training, and I’ve tried a few
of them. Pretty impressive.
Emily: Yeah, exactly. So one
having appealing technology like AR/VR is definitely attractor.
There’s the other side of this, the other coin, which is that older
workers don’t have to retire, now that there is AR and VR, because
they’re still valuable to the organization, even if they can’t go
onto the factory floor or out into the field. I think there’s both
sides of that, and it’s really important to cater VR training and
adopting AR in order to collect and record all the inborn talent in
your company, and also to share that with new workers and help them
learn fast.
Alan: I had a chance to try this
at PTC LiveWorx recently. I put on a RealWear — it’s basically like
a heads-up display, it’s like having a tablet a foot from your face
and it bends out of the way when you don’t need it, you just flip it
up — and I was standing in a tractor. I pulled down the thing and it
walked me step by step how to change an air filter. And I’ve never
touched a tractor, ever. I don’t know anything about a tractor. I was
able to remove the air filter, check it, change it, replace it, close
it back up. And it was ready to go. And it was interesting because
what I was watching wasn’t some crazy AR overlay. What it was, was
just a video that was captured by an expert on the same device that I
was wearing to see it. It was impressive.
Emily: I mean, it can be as
simple as arrows in your field of view.
Alan: Yeah.
Emily: There’s a range, from
assisted reality all the way through mixed reality. RealWear’s a
great example. They’ve had some really large rollouts, which I think
is such a great sign for the space, and they’re going to be at EWTS.
Colgate, for example. I think BMW recently just rolled out RealWear
devices to a bunch of its plants. So they’re growing and definitely
the companies have matured. I think we’re at third, fourth generation
devices at this point and the software has matured.
Alan: Absolutely. I saw
something, I think three years ago at AWE, and it was a pick-and-pack
type of thing. We put on the glasses and it walks you through picking
things off shelf for distribution warehouses. And it was really bad.
It was laggy, it didn’t work, it was kind of crappy. And fast forward
this year, oh my God. It was like, millimeter accurate. It was just
intuitive. We’ve come a long way in a very, very short amount of
time, which I guess that lends itself to the word exponential growth.
Emily: Yeah. And I think EWTS
offers this opportunity from the start. We’ve kind of curated the
sponsors, the exhibitors at the event, making sure that they have
solutions that are ready to go today. I think it’s really valuable
for them to hear real end users, real enterprise end users on stage,
sharing their experiences, good and bad about their technology. And I
think it’s helped move some of that user experience issues,
ergonomics issues forward.
Alan: So you mentioned EWTS,
Enterprise Wearable Technology Summit in Dallas, Texas, correct?
Emily: Uh-huh.
Alan: So who are some of the
companies that are going to be attending this?
Emily: Well, it’s really the
Fortune 1000 makes up our audience. It’s primarily heavily enterprise
for the audience. Few are solution providers. But it’s been growing
every year, like you said, exponential growth. We have veteran
speakers at this point who return year after year to give us updates
about their experiences. Peggy Gulick from AGCO. Janelle Haines from
John Deere. Josh Shabtai from Lowe’s. Gary Binstock from Colgate,
who’s using RealWear. Dan Jost from Molson Coors is returning this
year, and it’s across the industry spectrum. Every industry, pretty
much.
Alan: I’m looking at the speaker
list here, it’s incredible. So if you want to know more about this,
it’s brainxchange.com and just look for EWTS, or just Google
“Enterprise Wearable Technology Summit”.
Emily: And it’s been fascinating
to have this point of view, to come at it from the enterprise point
of view, and really speaking with the enterprises every day. So Duke
Energy has been with us since the beginning. Boeing as well. And so
to see some of these become large rollouts, thousands of devices —
in Wal-Mart’s case, hundreds of thousands of devices — or standard
work tools like they are at DHL, that’s just standard. What you’re
saying, pick-and-pack software on smartglasses, that’s standard for
them now.
Alan: Wow.
Emily: And to see that is just
such a wonderful thing.
Alan: It’s interesting how it
goes from being this fringe technology to industry standard.
Emily: Yeah, it’s interesting
that that has remained cross-industry. We do tracks by industry, but
right now there’s only a certain number of– AR/VR has a certain
number of applications. And I think every business has a component
that it applies to. So whether that’s heads-up hands-free
information, remote expert, visualization, training, sales, that’s
pretty across the board. So I think this ability to network and learn
from other companies that are starting to bring this into their
company is really helping a lot.
Alan: Absolutely. You mentioned
different kind of aspects of this, and it looks like it’s every
industry. You got Pfizer. You’ve got AGCO, agricultural. Lowe’s,
retail. Dow, chemical. Wayfair, retail again. So what are the ways
these technologies, are these typically in the enterprise? Is this
something that they’re using in their warehouses? Is it something
they’re using to train? Is it something they’re using for marketing,
or are you seeing any one company that’s kind of using it for
everything? Or is it just kind of siloed right now, still?
Emily: Well, all of the above.
Alan: [laughs]
Emily: Companies are using this
for sales and marketing. And that’s actually not something that was
very prevalent a few years ago. It was really heavy on field
services, utilities, logistics, but it’s now coming into sales and
marketing. As consumers right now, we don’t really have access to
AR/VR tech. There isn’t really a great AR smartglasses for consumers
out there right now. And VR is expensive for most people, or they’re
unaware of it. But sales and marketing aspect allows companies to
give their customers a taste of AR/VR, because they can afford it.
That’s kind of new and that’s definitely a new feature of our event.
Like I said, we have veteran speakers and some of those speakers are
really– their use cases have evolved to multiple use cases. So I
know AGCO is using Google Glass all over.
Alan: Really? How are they using
that?
Emily: I’m not sure, because
that one’s kind of new. In a lot of companies, this replaces the need
for going back and forth to a computer, or looking down, or picking
up above. It’s really as simple as going hands-free. I think that’s
one of the most powerful aspects of wearables and smartglasses and VR
headsets.
Alan: It’s interesting. There’s
companies doing this. And the more they start to present their
findings, the more it becomes a no-brainer for this technology. I
believe it was Shelly Peterson from Lockheed Martin. I’m not sure if
she was one of your speakers, but– oh yeah, she spoke at AWE! That’s
right.
Emily: Yeah. And she’s also been
with EWTS since the beginning.
Alan: Brilliant mind. And one of
the things that she mentioned at this year’s AWE event was that
they’re seeing average 85 percent decreases in training times, and 25
to 50 percent increases in retention rates. And this is incredible.
Like, I don’t know that there’s any technology we’ve ever invented as
humans, that have that kind of impact on our bottom line.
Emily: And on our productivity.
Yeah, I think this is just really groundbreaking. This is the first
time you get to put yourself in someone else’s shoes for real. So
whether that’s putting yourself in another culture’s shoes or a job
that you’re trying to learn. It’s just so powerful, that firsthand
experience. And those numbers that Shelly gave, they’re not unique.
Lots of companies are getting numbers like that. And it is really
astonishing. But again, like I said, taking information out of
people’s hands and putting it in front of their face is just
incredibly powerful.
Alan: Yeah, it really is. And
the devices themselves are getting better by leaps and bounds as
well. There’s a bunch of new devices coming out every day, and the
field of view is getting better, the battery life is getting better.
It’s that exponential growth of hardware as well. And so I think it’s
this perfect storm of the timing being perfect for this technology to
impact every business.
Emily: It’s a shame, kind of. I
feel like every year has been the year of AR/VR.
Alan: [laughs] We’ve been trying
wolf a long time.
Emily: Yeah, exactly. I think
2018 was a little disappointing, in terms of the solutions
themselves..
Alan: I agree.
Emily: This year was the first
year I walked around AWE, and was just so impressed with the level of
the technology. This year is also EWTS’s biggest expo. And we back
our exhibitors, because we want these solutions to be ready to go. It
helps that a lot of the big companies, HTC, Oculus, Lenovo, they’re
pivoting to enterprise. So it’s just grown a lot.
Alan: It’s really amazing to
watch. My company, MetaVRse, we’ve been in the business side of
things. We’ve done that from day one. We looked at the business
applications of this technology first and foremost, because the way I
looked at it was like, “OK, this isn’t like a cell phone, where
it’s easy to put in everybody’s pocket and scale. This is something
that’s going to require a use case that you don’t mind looking like
an idiot with these glasses on your head.”
Emily: Right.
Alan: When you go back four
years, the glasses were huge, and they were connected to computers,
and they just weren’t something that would scale. And even the
Hololens, I mean, Hololens 1 is a great device, but man, you wouldn’t
want to wear that all day. But for an application specific, “I
need to look at this machine, fix this machine, get in and out
quickly.” That is a powerful, powerful piece of equipment. And
everybody goes “Oh, it’s $3,500, it’s too expensive. It’s never
gonna be a consumer hit.” It shouldn’t be a consumer hit. It
should be something that is used by enterprise, because $3,500 to
outfit a factory with one or two or ten of these devices is a drop in
the bucket to the downtime caused when these machines, these big
manufacturing machines are down. If you’re down for a day that’s
multimillions of dollars in downtime.
Emily: Exactly.
Alan: And if this device can
save that, then you’re winning.
Emily: Especially for an
airline. Having a plane out of commission is so costly. Time really
is money in business. And while I don’t think the use cases are
really there for consumers yet, and the devices aren’t quite there–
although I was really impressed with Unreal’s mixed reality glasses.
Alan: Oh, those are great.
Emily: But they’re not out yet.
So like we’re moving forward a little bit. But in enterprise, it’s
not just about getting inside of a machine and having these really
powerful visual images that help you get to know what you’re doing in
front of you. It’s also design, cutting down the design process, and
I think it will unleash new creativity from designers, whether that’s
engineers, builders, products. I think being able to create your
product in mixed reality is just going to have such an impact on that
process. It’s usually really long. If you think about a building
project, there are so many stakeholders in a building project. And
not everybody understands the plans, especially if it’s a public
building, and now you have to bring in people from local government.
It’s such an amazing way to quickly refine. It’s like testing out
things — refine and go, refine and go — and helping others to see
what your vision is.
Alan: We’re seeing similar
aspects in car companies, in aerospace and design. It’s really
incredible. Then you have companies like Spatial who are allowing
people to collaborate in augmented reality or mixed reality in
different spaces with people from around the world.
Emily: Yeah, it’s just an
incredible time saver and it’s more powerful. It’s easier to
understand something that’s in front of your face, something that you
can experience, and it cuts down on physical models. That’s really
where the time saving is.
Alan: Yeah.
Emily: It’s communication and
those physical models. Being able to iterate. It takes so much less
time. You don’t need those physical products. You don’t need to
return to a plan, and print something new, or get everyone together
again. It’s just an incredible time saver. I also think for designers
themselves, like I said, that it will unleash new forms of
creativity. And I think this is important as product cycles get
shorter. New products are coming out at a much faster rate and there
is a lot of connected products, too. So I think this has all been
just really great timing.
Alan: I agree. I’m going to
shift gears a little bit because one of the articles that you wrote
was talking about XR in HR.
Emily: Yes.
Alan: Or Human Resources. What
are some of the things you’re seeing in that? Because this is a
totally different way to use this technology,y so the technology
doesn’t change. You’re still using VR/AR/MR, same glasses, same
headset, same production methods. But a completely different use
case.
Emily: Yeah. So this still in
the pilot phase, I don’t think Fortune 500/1000 companies are here
yet, but I– reason I wrote about it is, it’s just, again, this is
the first time we’ve ever been able to step into someone else’s
shoes. You can form memories in VR. There’s been tons of studies at
Stanford. You can change behavior. For how long, I don’t really know.
And I’m looking forward to the studies that will be coming out in the
future. It’s just so powerful. And today, traditional HR like sexual
harassment training, unconscious bias training, it’s just not
effective.
Alan: So you talked about XR in
HR. There are companies working on this, there’s a company, I think
called Uptale? I want to say Uptale. They’ve created this experience
where you are an HR manager and you’re talking to somebody. And then
after you deliver your talk, you actually get to sit in the other
person’s eyes and look at yourself, giving you the advice back.
Emily: Exactly.
Alan: What a powerful tool.
Other than video, you can record yourself in a video talking to a
camera. But talking to another person and being able to sit in that
person’s eyes and watch yourself, your body language, your eye
contact, everything. That’s crazy.
Emily: And it’s also, again, a
financial thing. Workplace discrimination costs businesses over
$60-billion a year. McKinsey has predicted that we could add
$12-trillion to the global GDP by simply advancing gender parity and
diversity in the workplace. So I’m really hoping these XR startups
that I’m seeing equal reality vantage point — Morgan Mercer is
really inspiring — I really hope this becomes more standard. But
again, there’s a lot of studies in all aspects of using AR/VR for any
kind of applications. There are studies that need to come out. Long
term effects. Does it really change your behavior? Can you be
traumatized in VR? Can you be bullied in VR? There’s a lot of work
left to do. But I think XR for HR is such a promising application.
Alan: I agree. One of the other.
There’s so many articles, if you’re listening and you want to learn
more about this stuff, Emily is a prolific writer and maybe you don’t
write once a week, but there is a lot of content here. One of them
that I was reading was “Home
on the VRange: Immersive Technology in Residential Retail.”
The reason why I picked up on that one is because we have a program
called XR Ignite, which is a community hub, an accelerator to connect
startup studios and developers with corporate clients. And we were
reviewing the applications this weekend and it’s been amazing. First
of all, we’ve had over a 130 applications in the last couple of
weeks, but one of them was this home AR app where you can take a 3D
CAD model of a building, of a house, drop it in your space, and then
you can walk around it. You can shrink it down to dollhouse size. You
can have it as full size. You could literally see what your new house
is going to look like, and not only see it, but walk through it, and
do that all using your phone. And eventually it’ll be a pair of
glasses, but for now, it’s the device in everybody’s pocket. And I
thought that was just an incredible tool for visualizing real estate.
So what other things have you seen?
Emily: Also in terms of real
estate, that was an early sales in marketing, real estate was pretty
quick to this game. And I think one of the reasons is that there are
CAD models, there is the CAD information, there is BIM. So they had
more of a foundation to create VR and AR experiences. I know right
now I’m looking for an apartment, I’m doing the hunt. I’m moving from
Manhattan to Brooklyn. And pictures are deceiving. So when it comes
to luxury items, or high ticket items, big ticket items, cars, luxury
goods, an apartment, furniture, things that are hard to return or you
can’t return it, you get stuck in your lease for a year. This adds a
whole new aspect that enables remote shopping for these kinds of
things.
Alan: One of the podcast
interviews I did today was with Mohamed Rajani from Macy’s, and
they’re using VR to give people the experience of seeing new
furniture, and the stats that they’re seeing are absolutely
incredible. I mean, you’ll have to check out the XR for Business
Podcast to find that link. But wow, the results are astronomically
high and they’ve rolled it out to over 100 stores now.
Emily: Yeah, and Lowe’s was
pretty quick, also.
Alan: Yeah, Lowe’s has been
working on this for a long time.
Emily: Wayfair speaking in our
event. I love the Lowe’s case, though, because it really gets at the
providing AR/VR to consumers, at a time when they can’t or won’t buy
it themselves. That’s a gateway to consumer AR/VR picking up. The
chance to experience AR/VR for yourself in a store to connect with
the brand, I think it’s gonna help the exposure problem. A lot of
people just haven’t been exposed to AR/VR.
Alan: I agree and I think I
really love what Lowe’s did with their training. I got to try it
at… maybe it was AWE, but I got to try one of their training
simulators and I was tiling a wall in a bathroom. I had to mix the
mortar, and then I had to– in my brain, I’ve done that. I’ve
actually tiled a wall. It may have been in virtual reality and
physically haven’t really tiled a wall. But in my mind, I’ve done
that.
Emily: You’ve formed a map for
it.
Alan: I did.
Emily: Yeah. [laughs] What’s
interesting also, there are work force facing applications and
customer facing applications. So Bose is one of those companies
that’s looking at this from all aspects.
Alan: They really are. They’ve
been working on this for a long time. I remember their original
caves, where they had these kind of markers all over the wall to
track where you were in 3D space. They’ve come a long, long way since
that.
Emily: Yeah. And I think what it
shows is that, like your example, learning how to tile a wall. It
democratizes knowledge and information. It’s going to shift jobs,
definitely. You can look at a video and watch a tutorial in front of
your face and fix your own sink. That’s gonna be one less job for the
plumber. So it’s interesting to see these shifts happening and how
putting information in consumers hands is really important. And
that’s actually a big part of real estate is putting the agent and
the buyer or renter on the same level, as far as being able to
picture an experience.
Alan: Yeah, indeed. One of the
articles that you wrote, and I think this cuts to the heart of why
we’re not seeing a wider adoption. I mean, you know, if you look at
the Fortune 1000 companies that are coming to BrainXchange events,
these are the early adopters. Let’s be honest. There’s thousands and
thousands of companies that haven’t even tried AR in their factories.
Emily: Yeah.
Alan: One of the articles you
wrote is Building
a Culture of Bottom-Up Innovation and how to get this adopted
within a company. So what are some of the tips that you would give to
people listening? How would they get started? How do they get that
foot in the door to find those use cases to really develop that,
internally or externally?
Emily: So this is something that
I’ve watched for five years, and this is a really, really strong
suggestion. Start with your workforce. Go to the users right away.
Oftentimes your end users, your workers probably created hacks for
themselves to make their job easier, that you’ve never considered.
They know what their pain points are. They know what they wish. For
big companies like GE, creating an innovation hub or something, where
workers can come every day, workers can come and try out new devices,
and there are lots of good ideas. That’s great. That is building a
culture of bottom-up innovation and it helps a lot with rollout.
You’re going to get less backlash from your employees. The other
aspect of this — and this is something I learned from Ron Bellows at
AIG — is a bottom-up culture also means that all departments kind of
have to start working together. You know, traditionally operations
and IT are very separate, IT and HR are very separate, EHS very
separate. And I think what this does is it brings together, everybody
got to be at the table to make it work.
Alan: I think one of the things
that’s really intriguing is the fact that the tools, both hardware
and software, are just getting so much easier to use.
Emily: Yeah.
Alan: A few years ago, we were
coding things in the hundreds of thousands that now we can do for the
tens of thousands.
Emily: Yeah, definitely.
Alan: And the costs are
dropping. There is also now way more people around that can do it.
That’s another thing that’s interesting is that now there are more
people that know how to build this stuff. So it’s not just 10 people
around the world that understand how to make this. It’s getting
there. But I think there’s going to be a shortage of talent. As more
and more companies realize, “We’re getting 60 percent cheaper
training or whatever and we’ve got to to ramp this up.” So one
of the reasons we started XR Ignite, again, was to help facilitate
acquisitions of small studios into these, because companies are going
to want to do this fast and they’re going to want to scale, we’re
already starting to see studios being acquired by Accenture and
Walmart acquired a studio. And so there is not just the technology
part of the hardware and the platforms, but also the studios that are
creating the content. How is that relationship all working between
platforms and studios and content providers and independent
developers and all of that?
Emily: So this is kind of one of
the things I was talking about when it came to attracting new talent.
Certain jobs are going away, but tech jobs are moving into the
skilled trades. Needing content creation is a way to get younger
professionals involved. As far as studios, AC companies had it really
easy, because they had all that information, that data, CAD models to
start with. One of the biggest hurdles for companies is where to get
the content. And if you’ve been using manuals, if you’ve been using
computers, spreadsheets and checklists, it’s hard. That is really
hard. So yeah, you do need a studio, but I think those applications
are slightly easier to create than like training or something
consumer facing. I’m hoping that as AR/VR becomes more and more
popular and the big companies like they’re creating tools that make
it easier for developers or anyone to build AR/VR experiences. Google
has some easy tools. Mozilla has easy tools. And as the big companies
come in, I think they’ll probably have their own services as well.
Like the cloud.
Alan: Yeah, I agree. Microsoft
has actually– it’s interesting, because the Hololens was in their
devices division and they actually moved it last year over to cloud.
So the Hololens is now a cloud product, which is interesting when you
think it’s a device, but it’s really a device that enables their
cloud, is really what it enables. And I think that’s where you’re
seeing the shift of like, “Wait a second. You know, these
headsets are great, but they’re just a tool to show data. And the
amount of data that they consume or generate is enormous.” It’s
got the telco companies and the cloud computing companies salivating
for what’s next.
Emily: Exactly.
Alan: Because once you get to 4K
TVs and 8K TVs, what’s next? And calculating spatial computing, being
able to put everything into 3D. That is a huge amount of data.
Emily: Yeah. We’re gonna need
consortiums, whether that’s in the form of an Amazon type company or
Google or Facebook stepping in. We’re going to need that. I also see
AR/VR devices like Hololens is the way that the human being is
brought into industry 4.0. It’s how we’re connected to all this
digital transformation and IoT that’s going on. It’s how we enter the
cloud. So I think in addition to content creation, there are going to
be a lot of data analytics jobs that are needed.
Alan: Oh my goodness, it’s going
to be crazy. One of the things that I heard at a conference once was
based on eye tracking, head position, pose estimation, how you move,
how you– they can even tell how you’re breathing by the way your
head moves, because when you breathe you kind of move ever so
slightly. We have sub-millimeter accuracy head tracking and eye
tracking. We’ve never had that kind of data, no matter what we’ve
done. We can study people left and right, but we’ve never been able
to study them at that micro level until now. And one of the speakers
said Google will know that you’re gay before you are, because of what
you look at.
Emily: Yes.
Alan: It’s an interesting
thought. But what will this unlock when we know everything about the
intent of a person before they do?
Emily: Yes. I’m not trying to
get political, but our government really does need to enter the
picture. I kind of operate on the fact that Google knows everything
about me. But like you said, with wearable technology, putting things
on our faces, the information that we’re giving becomes way more
personal and way more sensitive. There’s good and bad to all of it. I
think this is going to need policing. Facebook needs policing anyway.
The other side is that we’re learning things and changing assumptions
we had in the past. So Accenture worked with Kellogg’s, I think on
product placement and they did this. They tracked people’s eyes and
how their head moves, and they found that like everything they
thought about where to put a cereal box in a grocery store was wrong.
Alan: Wow.
Emily: So I think it opened up
these great opportunities to get more in touch with human behavior.
But it’s also creepy.
Alan: [laughs] It definitely has
this Orwellian feel to it that. Wait a second. We’ve already given
all of our data to Google. Let’s be honest. I use Drive, I use Gmail.
So they know everything about my buying habits. They know everything,
between Google and Amazon they probably know everything about me. We
don’t even go shopping any more, things just come to the house. But
they still don’t know about my personal life. Well, I guess we have a
Google Home and an Alexa in our house, so I’m sure they do know about
our personal life. The question becomes, do we trust them? And so far
we do, Facebook being the one. They just got slapped with a
$5-billion fine because of privacy violations.
Emily: Yeah.
Alan: So I think governments
really need to step in, especially in the age of AI when you can–
it’s one thing to know this information about an individual. It’s
another thing to act on it, and to be able to take that information
and make it relevant. Right now, I think we’re still in that phase
of, “We collect all this information, shit tons of it. But to be
honest, we can’t use half of it, because we don’t even know how to
process it.” So while we’re collecting data, there’s huge
amounts of data that we don’t use. Companies– the Age of Big Data, a
few years ago, “Oh, big data, we’ve got to collect everything.”
And then they realize, “Oh my God, we collected all this data.
We don’t know what to do with it.” So I think AI will solve that
problem, but also create some real privacy and security issues.
Emily: It’s also frightening to
think about the fact that all this data we’re collecting, if we run
it through AI, they could be used to make major decisions that affect
our lives. And we don’t really understand the data right now. So I
actually just read a really interesting book called “Invisible
Woman: Data Bias In a World Designed For Men”, I think. And one
of the examples was Amazon traded this AI tool for hiring. The
information that they put into the system was the last 10 years of
resumes that were submitted to them. This was for a technical
position like a developer or something. What ended up happening was
the system was biased against women because–
Alan: The system was.
Emily: Yeah. Because the tech
world is notoriously male dominated. And so if you’re looking at the
last 10 years, most of the resumes are going to be from that. So they
had to shut it down. So there’s things like that, that are a little
frightening to me. Policing is one thing, like policing our privacy
and getting government involved. Hacking is crazy. That scares me,
that’s what keeps me up at night. Our information is constantly being
stolen and preventing the use of data for the wrong unintended
reasons. So understanding the data is a big part of this.
Alan: Yeah, no kidding. Wow. We
could discuss this forever, I’m sure. I think we both realize that
the potential for unlocking humanity’s potential is unlimited, but
the potential for it to fall into the wrong hands — not even the
wrong hands but the wrong actors within certain subsets of brands and
companies — really becomes a challenge. And we also have the
unintended consequences of depression and antisocial behaviors and
stuff like this. And there are unintended consequences of an always
on computing platform that is glued to our face.
Emily: And that’s really dumb. I
mean, there aren’t studies yet.
Alan: No, we don’t know.
Emily: It’ll take a generation
for us to get really meaningful insight into some of those.
Alan: We’ve only had smartphones
for 11 years.
Emily: Yeah.
Alan: We are already realizing,
“Oh shit, this is not good for us.” We need to take a break
and turn off our notifications. I actually wrote an article, “11
Ways to Reduce Smartphone Related Stress” because I was
researching for myself and my kids and my wife were, you know, how do
we cut back on looking at the phone all the time? And my biggest
thing was turning off all the notifications and sounds. I just turned
off, blanketed everything. And when you have glasses in the future,
we’re gonna be wearing glasses where the whole world is our computer.
How do we select for what we want to see, what we don’t want to see
and when? So I think there’s a huge road, and I’m kind of glad
enterprise is leading this versus diving right into the consumer
market.
Emily: Yeah, I agree. And it’s
for that kind of reason. In a way, it’s almost like a controlled
environment. You’re not just releasing AR/VR into the wild.
Enterprises are actually finding ways to use it. They’re working with
IT to secure the information, even things like hygiene, passing a
device from one worker to another. Those are things that are gonna be
worked out, thankfully, in enterprise first.
Alan: Yeah, I mean, we’ve been
doing demos since 2015 and we’ve done probably 500 events, so
thousands and thousands of people putting on these headsets and we
started off with replaceable covers and all this stuff. And we
finally got to the point where for VR and AR we use these VR covers
that have like a leatherette and then we just wipe them with alcohol.
And I mean it has a little bit of a smell to it, but at least you
know it’s clean. There’s nothing growing on that thing. But yeah.
These are all really interesting challenges that– the big one that
was just evident, or became evident is the security of the platforms
is non-existent. I mean, three of the major collaboration platforms
got hacked a couple of weeks ago.
Emily: Yeah, I read that.
Alan: We need to figure these
things out and they’re going to figure it out. I mean, this is what
technology does. We find a problem, we solve it. So I’m really
excited about it. Yeah. We could go on forever, but we’re we’re
running out of time. So I want to ask you one last question. And
first of all, thank you so much for being on the show, Emily. It’s
been an amazing conversation. What is one problem in the world that
you want to see solved using XR technologies?
Emily: Good question. I want to
see XR help women in the workforce. So if XR is the future of
training, it’s the future of learning, it’s potentially the future of
our education system. And it has this great potential to democratize
information and skills. I would hope it could be leveraged to address
inequalities in the workplace. At the same time, I want to see XR
companies pay more attention to the user experience for women. I
personally find a lot of VR devices uncomfortable. I’m not alone,
I’ve spoken with many women who work in AR/VR. This is the future of
training and I believe it is. And you believe it is. So user
experience for women cannot be inferior to that of men. Again, we’re
talking about wearable technology. It’s incredibly intimate. And
optics. Men and women don’t perceive depth the same way. So these
kinds of things I’d like to see XR companies pay attention to and
physiological differences, different ways that we perceive depth.
That’s important and I haven’t seen that brought in yet.
Alan: It’s an interesting point.
I believe there’s a reason behind that. Most of the technology
hardware is designed by men and I don’t know why that is. It just
doesn’t seem like– it almost seems like they need to hire female
designers to finish the product, like you got the product to working,
it’s good. OK. Now let’s have somebody with an eye for design and an
eye for comfort across both sexes and all sizes. It’s a hard problem
to solve when you have 95 percent of the people working on the
problem are men. It’s an issue, for all the women listening, if you
want to get an understanding of what this industry is like, go to CES
in January and you’ll be in a literal sea of men. It’s kind of
ridiculous actually, but I think it’s getting better, and more and
more women are warming up to tech and it’s slow, but I think we can
get there.
Emily: Yeah, there should be a
woman in the room whenever any design decision is made.
Alan: There should be a woman on
the board of every company.
Emily: Yeah.
Alan: One, minimum. And if we
did that we would– and, we should only have women world leaders,
because that would eliminate a lot of the ego and bullshit and war.
Emily: I would love that.
Alan: Wouldn’t that be great, if
we just made women the leaders of the world? There would be no war.
We would cancel all military actions and all military spending and
apply that to education and food. And here’s to hoping that happens
in the future.
Emily: Definitely.
View all episodes
By Alan Smithson from MetaVRse
4.5
1212 ratings
As the lead
writer and head of content at BrainXchange, Emily Friedman has had
ample chances to explore a lot of XR-related topics. She lets Alan
pick her brain about a few of them, from getting millennials
interested in trades, to democratizing knowledge, and how humanity
will enter The Cloud.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for
Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is
Emily Friedman from BrainXchange and Augmented World Expo. Emily
Friedman is a New York based enterprise immersive, wearable and
emerging technology advocate, journalist and facilitator. She’s Head
of Content and the lead writer at BrainXchange, lead journalist and
senior editor at Enterprisewear Blog, and head of marketing and
communications for Augmented World Expo USA and AWE EU. To learn more
about BrainXchange, you can visit brainxchange.com. And if you wanna
learn more about AWE or Augmented World Expo, you can visit
awexr.com.
Welcome to the show, Emily.
Emily: Thank you for having me.
Alan: Oh, it’s my absolute
pleasure. I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation,
because you are writing everyday – or, not everyday, but what, a
couple times a week? — on the enterprise wearables world. So maybe
just kind of give us an overview of what is BrainXchange and AWE.
Let’s start with that.
Emily: Ok, I wish I were
productive enough to write multiple articles a week. But there’s a
lot going on. BrainXchange, we started out as a boutique events
company, and we just happened to enter augmented reality at the right
time. It was 2015, right after Google Glass, quote/unquote failed.
And there were all these headlines, “Glasshole” articles. But if
you read between the lines, it was clear that smartglasses weren’t a
failure, and that enterprises were actually finding good use cases
for it. So today we provide events, content, and other services all
related to facilitating enterprise XR.
Alan: You know, I’ve been at AWE
a couple of times now. I lead the startup track this year. It’s an
important conference for virtual/augmented/mixed reality and some may
say it is the most important conference. It’s where everybody around
the world gathers in. And I made this comment that if the building
happened to collapse, basically the entire VR world would cease to
exist, and we’d have to start over again. It was an amazing
collection of some of the world’s smartest people working in this
technology and enterprise. They seem to be really driving this
technology forward. What are you seeing?
Emily: Well, as for AWE, I think
it’s a very important benchmarking event. Like you said, the entire
industry gets together at that one point. What we’re seeing — and
the reason we gravitated towards enterprise at first — is that
that’s where the money is. I mean, that’s where the money has to be
made, both for end users and the AR/VR companies themselves. At the
end of the day, we cater to the enterprises and we talk to them every
day. We get on the phone with Fortune 500 companies, the innovation
people and all these different companies every day. And we listen to
their pain points. AR/VR happens to offer a solution to a lot of
their pain points.
Alan: So what are some of the
pain points? Let’s unpack that.
Emily: Huge one is a shrinking
workforce, that creates this need to train faster, better. So as the
workforce ages — in manufacturing, I think the average age is like
40 to 50 now — and retires, not only do you need to attract new
talent; you need to train them. As a millennial, this is actually
pretty important to me. Learning a skill today just doesn’t get you
as far as it did half a century ago. Tech advances, business models
change, and much of what I learned in school, I feel like it’s
irrelevant. And for Gen Z, it’s going to be worse.
So the ability to learn new skills
effectively — to upscale, to rescale — is really important. Another
one is remote support. Those are probably the two most enthusiastic
applications today. For us, it was one of the earlier ones, just
being able to connect your team remotely. Lone worker in the field —
say a field service company’s fixing an air conditioner — can access
talent of experts at a home office, and give them a view of what
they’re seeing. And that’s just really powerful.
Alan: Awesome. So remote
support, for example. What is the problem? What is the underlying
problem? Because one of the things you mentioned is attract and train
new talent. I think the key is that attract, because kids today,
they’re waking up in the morning, they’re opening Instagram, they’re
like, “I want to be an Instagram celebrity.” We can’t all
be Insta-famous, but there’s a lot of jobs that are in trades that
are great, good paying jobs that young people just aren’t, maybe
they’re not even aware of it or they just don’t care. I know a lot of
parents push their kids to go to university, even though that if you
look at university now, we’ve got a trillion and a half dollars in
debt in the US from student debt. So trades are a real value to the
economy. And how do you attract and excite people about those jobs?
Emily: So, as for the field
service, remote support question; the pain point there is time. So
not having to do the job twice, you send one person out and then you
need to send another person out to help that first person. As far as
the trades, I think our education system hasn’t really kept up with
the economy, like the actual workplace, but it’s necessary.
Alan: And it’s actually almost
impossible for education systems. If you look at the way they were
designed, they were designed not to change. They were designed to be
steadfast in the face of change. And that, unfortunately, when you
enter into exponential growth phase of humanity, this becomes a real
problem.
Emily: Exactly. So I think that
it’s both. It’s that they’re not learning the skills they might need.
And by the way, trades jobs don’t have to be manual. They’re not low
skill, they’re high skill. And there are now often involving
technology.
Alan: Oh, absolutely.
Emily: In that way, I think our
education system hasn’t kept up. And I think you’re right. My
generation were not aware of the trades. And I think skilled trades
training has dropped off a lot.
Alan: We’re seeing– starting to
see some some new technologies, like VR and AR, that are starting to
bridge that gap. There’s a couple of companies making some really
interesting headway in virtual reality training, and I’ve tried a few
of them. Pretty impressive.
Emily: Yeah, exactly. So one
having appealing technology like AR/VR is definitely attractor.
There’s the other side of this, the other coin, which is that older
workers don’t have to retire, now that there is AR and VR, because
they’re still valuable to the organization, even if they can’t go
onto the factory floor or out into the field. I think there’s both
sides of that, and it’s really important to cater VR training and
adopting AR in order to collect and record all the inborn talent in
your company, and also to share that with new workers and help them
learn fast.
Alan: I had a chance to try this
at PTC LiveWorx recently. I put on a RealWear — it’s basically like
a heads-up display, it’s like having a tablet a foot from your face
and it bends out of the way when you don’t need it, you just flip it
up — and I was standing in a tractor. I pulled down the thing and it
walked me step by step how to change an air filter. And I’ve never
touched a tractor, ever. I don’t know anything about a tractor. I was
able to remove the air filter, check it, change it, replace it, close
it back up. And it was ready to go. And it was interesting because
what I was watching wasn’t some crazy AR overlay. What it was, was
just a video that was captured by an expert on the same device that I
was wearing to see it. It was impressive.
Emily: I mean, it can be as
simple as arrows in your field of view.
Alan: Yeah.
Emily: There’s a range, from
assisted reality all the way through mixed reality. RealWear’s a
great example. They’ve had some really large rollouts, which I think
is such a great sign for the space, and they’re going to be at EWTS.
Colgate, for example. I think BMW recently just rolled out RealWear
devices to a bunch of its plants. So they’re growing and definitely
the companies have matured. I think we’re at third, fourth generation
devices at this point and the software has matured.
Alan: Absolutely. I saw
something, I think three years ago at AWE, and it was a pick-and-pack
type of thing. We put on the glasses and it walks you through picking
things off shelf for distribution warehouses. And it was really bad.
It was laggy, it didn’t work, it was kind of crappy. And fast forward
this year, oh my God. It was like, millimeter accurate. It was just
intuitive. We’ve come a long way in a very, very short amount of
time, which I guess that lends itself to the word exponential growth.
Emily: Yeah. And I think EWTS
offers this opportunity from the start. We’ve kind of curated the
sponsors, the exhibitors at the event, making sure that they have
solutions that are ready to go today. I think it’s really valuable
for them to hear real end users, real enterprise end users on stage,
sharing their experiences, good and bad about their technology. And I
think it’s helped move some of that user experience issues,
ergonomics issues forward.
Alan: So you mentioned EWTS,
Enterprise Wearable Technology Summit in Dallas, Texas, correct?
Emily: Uh-huh.
Alan: So who are some of the
companies that are going to be attending this?
Emily: Well, it’s really the
Fortune 1000 makes up our audience. It’s primarily heavily enterprise
for the audience. Few are solution providers. But it’s been growing
every year, like you said, exponential growth. We have veteran
speakers at this point who return year after year to give us updates
about their experiences. Peggy Gulick from AGCO. Janelle Haines from
John Deere. Josh Shabtai from Lowe’s. Gary Binstock from Colgate,
who’s using RealWear. Dan Jost from Molson Coors is returning this
year, and it’s across the industry spectrum. Every industry, pretty
much.
Alan: I’m looking at the speaker
list here, it’s incredible. So if you want to know more about this,
it’s brainxchange.com and just look for EWTS, or just Google
“Enterprise Wearable Technology Summit”.
Emily: And it’s been fascinating
to have this point of view, to come at it from the enterprise point
of view, and really speaking with the enterprises every day. So Duke
Energy has been with us since the beginning. Boeing as well. And so
to see some of these become large rollouts, thousands of devices —
in Wal-Mart’s case, hundreds of thousands of devices — or standard
work tools like they are at DHL, that’s just standard. What you’re
saying, pick-and-pack software on smartglasses, that’s standard for
them now.
Alan: Wow.
Emily: And to see that is just
such a wonderful thing.
Alan: It’s interesting how it
goes from being this fringe technology to industry standard.
Emily: Yeah, it’s interesting
that that has remained cross-industry. We do tracks by industry, but
right now there’s only a certain number of– AR/VR has a certain
number of applications. And I think every business has a component
that it applies to. So whether that’s heads-up hands-free
information, remote expert, visualization, training, sales, that’s
pretty across the board. So I think this ability to network and learn
from other companies that are starting to bring this into their
company is really helping a lot.
Alan: Absolutely. You mentioned
different kind of aspects of this, and it looks like it’s every
industry. You got Pfizer. You’ve got AGCO, agricultural. Lowe’s,
retail. Dow, chemical. Wayfair, retail again. So what are the ways
these technologies, are these typically in the enterprise? Is this
something that they’re using in their warehouses? Is it something
they’re using to train? Is it something they’re using for marketing,
or are you seeing any one company that’s kind of using it for
everything? Or is it just kind of siloed right now, still?
Emily: Well, all of the above.
Alan: [laughs]
Emily: Companies are using this
for sales and marketing. And that’s actually not something that was
very prevalent a few years ago. It was really heavy on field
services, utilities, logistics, but it’s now coming into sales and
marketing. As consumers right now, we don’t really have access to
AR/VR tech. There isn’t really a great AR smartglasses for consumers
out there right now. And VR is expensive for most people, or they’re
unaware of it. But sales and marketing aspect allows companies to
give their customers a taste of AR/VR, because they can afford it.
That’s kind of new and that’s definitely a new feature of our event.
Like I said, we have veteran speakers and some of those speakers are
really– their use cases have evolved to multiple use cases. So I
know AGCO is using Google Glass all over.
Alan: Really? How are they using
that?
Emily: I’m not sure, because
that one’s kind of new. In a lot of companies, this replaces the need
for going back and forth to a computer, or looking down, or picking
up above. It’s really as simple as going hands-free. I think that’s
one of the most powerful aspects of wearables and smartglasses and VR
headsets.
Alan: It’s interesting. There’s
companies doing this. And the more they start to present their
findings, the more it becomes a no-brainer for this technology. I
believe it was Shelly Peterson from Lockheed Martin. I’m not sure if
she was one of your speakers, but– oh yeah, she spoke at AWE! That’s
right.
Emily: Yeah. And she’s also been
with EWTS since the beginning.
Alan: Brilliant mind. And one of
the things that she mentioned at this year’s AWE event was that
they’re seeing average 85 percent decreases in training times, and 25
to 50 percent increases in retention rates. And this is incredible.
Like, I don’t know that there’s any technology we’ve ever invented as
humans, that have that kind of impact on our bottom line.
Emily: And on our productivity.
Yeah, I think this is just really groundbreaking. This is the first
time you get to put yourself in someone else’s shoes for real. So
whether that’s putting yourself in another culture’s shoes or a job
that you’re trying to learn. It’s just so powerful, that firsthand
experience. And those numbers that Shelly gave, they’re not unique.
Lots of companies are getting numbers like that. And it is really
astonishing. But again, like I said, taking information out of
people’s hands and putting it in front of their face is just
incredibly powerful.
Alan: Yeah, it really is. And
the devices themselves are getting better by leaps and bounds as
well. There’s a bunch of new devices coming out every day, and the
field of view is getting better, the battery life is getting better.
It’s that exponential growth of hardware as well. And so I think it’s
this perfect storm of the timing being perfect for this technology to
impact every business.
Emily: It’s a shame, kind of. I
feel like every year has been the year of AR/VR.
Alan: [laughs] We’ve been trying
wolf a long time.
Emily: Yeah, exactly. I think
2018 was a little disappointing, in terms of the solutions
themselves..
Alan: I agree.
Emily: This year was the first
year I walked around AWE, and was just so impressed with the level of
the technology. This year is also EWTS’s biggest expo. And we back
our exhibitors, because we want these solutions to be ready to go. It
helps that a lot of the big companies, HTC, Oculus, Lenovo, they’re
pivoting to enterprise. So it’s just grown a lot.
Alan: It’s really amazing to
watch. My company, MetaVRse, we’ve been in the business side of
things. We’ve done that from day one. We looked at the business
applications of this technology first and foremost, because the way I
looked at it was like, “OK, this isn’t like a cell phone, where
it’s easy to put in everybody’s pocket and scale. This is something
that’s going to require a use case that you don’t mind looking like
an idiot with these glasses on your head.”
Emily: Right.
Alan: When you go back four
years, the glasses were huge, and they were connected to computers,
and they just weren’t something that would scale. And even the
Hololens, I mean, Hololens 1 is a great device, but man, you wouldn’t
want to wear that all day. But for an application specific, “I
need to look at this machine, fix this machine, get in and out
quickly.” That is a powerful, powerful piece of equipment. And
everybody goes “Oh, it’s $3,500, it’s too expensive. It’s never
gonna be a consumer hit.” It shouldn’t be a consumer hit. It
should be something that is used by enterprise, because $3,500 to
outfit a factory with one or two or ten of these devices is a drop in
the bucket to the downtime caused when these machines, these big
manufacturing machines are down. If you’re down for a day that’s
multimillions of dollars in downtime.
Emily: Exactly.
Alan: And if this device can
save that, then you’re winning.
Emily: Especially for an
airline. Having a plane out of commission is so costly. Time really
is money in business. And while I don’t think the use cases are
really there for consumers yet, and the devices aren’t quite there–
although I was really impressed with Unreal’s mixed reality glasses.
Alan: Oh, those are great.
Emily: But they’re not out yet.
So like we’re moving forward a little bit. But in enterprise, it’s
not just about getting inside of a machine and having these really
powerful visual images that help you get to know what you’re doing in
front of you. It’s also design, cutting down the design process, and
I think it will unleash new creativity from designers, whether that’s
engineers, builders, products. I think being able to create your
product in mixed reality is just going to have such an impact on that
process. It’s usually really long. If you think about a building
project, there are so many stakeholders in a building project. And
not everybody understands the plans, especially if it’s a public
building, and now you have to bring in people from local government.
It’s such an amazing way to quickly refine. It’s like testing out
things — refine and go, refine and go — and helping others to see
what your vision is.
Alan: We’re seeing similar
aspects in car companies, in aerospace and design. It’s really
incredible. Then you have companies like Spatial who are allowing
people to collaborate in augmented reality or mixed reality in
different spaces with people from around the world.
Emily: Yeah, it’s just an
incredible time saver and it’s more powerful. It’s easier to
understand something that’s in front of your face, something that you
can experience, and it cuts down on physical models. That’s really
where the time saving is.
Alan: Yeah.
Emily: It’s communication and
those physical models. Being able to iterate. It takes so much less
time. You don’t need those physical products. You don’t need to
return to a plan, and print something new, or get everyone together
again. It’s just an incredible time saver. I also think for designers
themselves, like I said, that it will unleash new forms of
creativity. And I think this is important as product cycles get
shorter. New products are coming out at a much faster rate and there
is a lot of connected products, too. So I think this has all been
just really great timing.
Alan: I agree. I’m going to
shift gears a little bit because one of the articles that you wrote
was talking about XR in HR.
Emily: Yes.
Alan: Or Human Resources. What
are some of the things you’re seeing in that? Because this is a
totally different way to use this technology,y so the technology
doesn’t change. You’re still using VR/AR/MR, same glasses, same
headset, same production methods. But a completely different use
case.
Emily: Yeah. So this still in
the pilot phase, I don’t think Fortune 500/1000 companies are here
yet, but I– reason I wrote about it is, it’s just, again, this is
the first time we’ve ever been able to step into someone else’s
shoes. You can form memories in VR. There’s been tons of studies at
Stanford. You can change behavior. For how long, I don’t really know.
And I’m looking forward to the studies that will be coming out in the
future. It’s just so powerful. And today, traditional HR like sexual
harassment training, unconscious bias training, it’s just not
effective.
Alan: So you talked about XR in
HR. There are companies working on this, there’s a company, I think
called Uptale? I want to say Uptale. They’ve created this experience
where you are an HR manager and you’re talking to somebody. And then
after you deliver your talk, you actually get to sit in the other
person’s eyes and look at yourself, giving you the advice back.
Emily: Exactly.
Alan: What a powerful tool.
Other than video, you can record yourself in a video talking to a
camera. But talking to another person and being able to sit in that
person’s eyes and watch yourself, your body language, your eye
contact, everything. That’s crazy.
Emily: And it’s also, again, a
financial thing. Workplace discrimination costs businesses over
$60-billion a year. McKinsey has predicted that we could add
$12-trillion to the global GDP by simply advancing gender parity and
diversity in the workplace. So I’m really hoping these XR startups
that I’m seeing equal reality vantage point — Morgan Mercer is
really inspiring — I really hope this becomes more standard. But
again, there’s a lot of studies in all aspects of using AR/VR for any
kind of applications. There are studies that need to come out. Long
term effects. Does it really change your behavior? Can you be
traumatized in VR? Can you be bullied in VR? There’s a lot of work
left to do. But I think XR for HR is such a promising application.
Alan: I agree. One of the other.
There’s so many articles, if you’re listening and you want to learn
more about this stuff, Emily is a prolific writer and maybe you don’t
write once a week, but there is a lot of content here. One of them
that I was reading was “Home
on the VRange: Immersive Technology in Residential Retail.”
The reason why I picked up on that one is because we have a program
called XR Ignite, which is a community hub, an accelerator to connect
startup studios and developers with corporate clients. And we were
reviewing the applications this weekend and it’s been amazing. First
of all, we’ve had over a 130 applications in the last couple of
weeks, but one of them was this home AR app where you can take a 3D
CAD model of a building, of a house, drop it in your space, and then
you can walk around it. You can shrink it down to dollhouse size. You
can have it as full size. You could literally see what your new house
is going to look like, and not only see it, but walk through it, and
do that all using your phone. And eventually it’ll be a pair of
glasses, but for now, it’s the device in everybody’s pocket. And I
thought that was just an incredible tool for visualizing real estate.
So what other things have you seen?
Emily: Also in terms of real
estate, that was an early sales in marketing, real estate was pretty
quick to this game. And I think one of the reasons is that there are
CAD models, there is the CAD information, there is BIM. So they had
more of a foundation to create VR and AR experiences. I know right
now I’m looking for an apartment, I’m doing the hunt. I’m moving from
Manhattan to Brooklyn. And pictures are deceiving. So when it comes
to luxury items, or high ticket items, big ticket items, cars, luxury
goods, an apartment, furniture, things that are hard to return or you
can’t return it, you get stuck in your lease for a year. This adds a
whole new aspect that enables remote shopping for these kinds of
things.
Alan: One of the podcast
interviews I did today was with Mohamed Rajani from Macy’s, and
they’re using VR to give people the experience of seeing new
furniture, and the stats that they’re seeing are absolutely
incredible. I mean, you’ll have to check out the XR for Business
Podcast to find that link. But wow, the results are astronomically
high and they’ve rolled it out to over 100 stores now.
Emily: Yeah, and Lowe’s was
pretty quick, also.
Alan: Yeah, Lowe’s has been
working on this for a long time.
Emily: Wayfair speaking in our
event. I love the Lowe’s case, though, because it really gets at the
providing AR/VR to consumers, at a time when they can’t or won’t buy
it themselves. That’s a gateway to consumer AR/VR picking up. The
chance to experience AR/VR for yourself in a store to connect with
the brand, I think it’s gonna help the exposure problem. A lot of
people just haven’t been exposed to AR/VR.
Alan: I agree and I think I
really love what Lowe’s did with their training. I got to try it
at… maybe it was AWE, but I got to try one of their training
simulators and I was tiling a wall in a bathroom. I had to mix the
mortar, and then I had to– in my brain, I’ve done that. I’ve
actually tiled a wall. It may have been in virtual reality and
physically haven’t really tiled a wall. But in my mind, I’ve done
that.
Emily: You’ve formed a map for
it.
Alan: I did.
Emily: Yeah. [laughs] What’s
interesting also, there are work force facing applications and
customer facing applications. So Bose is one of those companies
that’s looking at this from all aspects.
Alan: They really are. They’ve
been working on this for a long time. I remember their original
caves, where they had these kind of markers all over the wall to
track where you were in 3D space. They’ve come a long, long way since
that.
Emily: Yeah. And I think what it
shows is that, like your example, learning how to tile a wall. It
democratizes knowledge and information. It’s going to shift jobs,
definitely. You can look at a video and watch a tutorial in front of
your face and fix your own sink. That’s gonna be one less job for the
plumber. So it’s interesting to see these shifts happening and how
putting information in consumers hands is really important. And
that’s actually a big part of real estate is putting the agent and
the buyer or renter on the same level, as far as being able to
picture an experience.
Alan: Yeah, indeed. One of the
articles that you wrote, and I think this cuts to the heart of why
we’re not seeing a wider adoption. I mean, you know, if you look at
the Fortune 1000 companies that are coming to BrainXchange events,
these are the early adopters. Let’s be honest. There’s thousands and
thousands of companies that haven’t even tried AR in their factories.
Emily: Yeah.
Alan: One of the articles you
wrote is Building
a Culture of Bottom-Up Innovation and how to get this adopted
within a company. So what are some of the tips that you would give to
people listening? How would they get started? How do they get that
foot in the door to find those use cases to really develop that,
internally or externally?
Emily: So this is something that
I’ve watched for five years, and this is a really, really strong
suggestion. Start with your workforce. Go to the users right away.
Oftentimes your end users, your workers probably created hacks for
themselves to make their job easier, that you’ve never considered.
They know what their pain points are. They know what they wish. For
big companies like GE, creating an innovation hub or something, where
workers can come every day, workers can come and try out new devices,
and there are lots of good ideas. That’s great. That is building a
culture of bottom-up innovation and it helps a lot with rollout.
You’re going to get less backlash from your employees. The other
aspect of this — and this is something I learned from Ron Bellows at
AIG — is a bottom-up culture also means that all departments kind of
have to start working together. You know, traditionally operations
and IT are very separate, IT and HR are very separate, EHS very
separate. And I think what this does is it brings together, everybody
got to be at the table to make it work.
Alan: I think one of the things
that’s really intriguing is the fact that the tools, both hardware
and software, are just getting so much easier to use.
Emily: Yeah.
Alan: A few years ago, we were
coding things in the hundreds of thousands that now we can do for the
tens of thousands.
Emily: Yeah, definitely.
Alan: And the costs are
dropping. There is also now way more people around that can do it.
That’s another thing that’s interesting is that now there are more
people that know how to build this stuff. So it’s not just 10 people
around the world that understand how to make this. It’s getting
there. But I think there’s going to be a shortage of talent. As more
and more companies realize, “We’re getting 60 percent cheaper
training or whatever and we’ve got to to ramp this up.” So one
of the reasons we started XR Ignite, again, was to help facilitate
acquisitions of small studios into these, because companies are going
to want to do this fast and they’re going to want to scale, we’re
already starting to see studios being acquired by Accenture and
Walmart acquired a studio. And so there is not just the technology
part of the hardware and the platforms, but also the studios that are
creating the content. How is that relationship all working between
platforms and studios and content providers and independent
developers and all of that?
Emily: So this is kind of one of
the things I was talking about when it came to attracting new talent.
Certain jobs are going away, but tech jobs are moving into the
skilled trades. Needing content creation is a way to get younger
professionals involved. As far as studios, AC companies had it really
easy, because they had all that information, that data, CAD models to
start with. One of the biggest hurdles for companies is where to get
the content. And if you’ve been using manuals, if you’ve been using
computers, spreadsheets and checklists, it’s hard. That is really
hard. So yeah, you do need a studio, but I think those applications
are slightly easier to create than like training or something
consumer facing. I’m hoping that as AR/VR becomes more and more
popular and the big companies like they’re creating tools that make
it easier for developers or anyone to build AR/VR experiences. Google
has some easy tools. Mozilla has easy tools. And as the big companies
come in, I think they’ll probably have their own services as well.
Like the cloud.
Alan: Yeah, I agree. Microsoft
has actually– it’s interesting, because the Hololens was in their
devices division and they actually moved it last year over to cloud.
So the Hololens is now a cloud product, which is interesting when you
think it’s a device, but it’s really a device that enables their
cloud, is really what it enables. And I think that’s where you’re
seeing the shift of like, “Wait a second. You know, these
headsets are great, but they’re just a tool to show data. And the
amount of data that they consume or generate is enormous.” It’s
got the telco companies and the cloud computing companies salivating
for what’s next.
Emily: Exactly.
Alan: Because once you get to 4K
TVs and 8K TVs, what’s next? And calculating spatial computing, being
able to put everything into 3D. That is a huge amount of data.
Emily: Yeah. We’re gonna need
consortiums, whether that’s in the form of an Amazon type company or
Google or Facebook stepping in. We’re going to need that. I also see
AR/VR devices like Hololens is the way that the human being is
brought into industry 4.0. It’s how we’re connected to all this
digital transformation and IoT that’s going on. It’s how we enter the
cloud. So I think in addition to content creation, there are going to
be a lot of data analytics jobs that are needed.
Alan: Oh my goodness, it’s going
to be crazy. One of the things that I heard at a conference once was
based on eye tracking, head position, pose estimation, how you move,
how you– they can even tell how you’re breathing by the way your
head moves, because when you breathe you kind of move ever so
slightly. We have sub-millimeter accuracy head tracking and eye
tracking. We’ve never had that kind of data, no matter what we’ve
done. We can study people left and right, but we’ve never been able
to study them at that micro level until now. And one of the speakers
said Google will know that you’re gay before you are, because of what
you look at.
Emily: Yes.
Alan: It’s an interesting
thought. But what will this unlock when we know everything about the
intent of a person before they do?
Emily: Yes. I’m not trying to
get political, but our government really does need to enter the
picture. I kind of operate on the fact that Google knows everything
about me. But like you said, with wearable technology, putting things
on our faces, the information that we’re giving becomes way more
personal and way more sensitive. There’s good and bad to all of it. I
think this is going to need policing. Facebook needs policing anyway.
The other side is that we’re learning things and changing assumptions
we had in the past. So Accenture worked with Kellogg’s, I think on
product placement and they did this. They tracked people’s eyes and
how their head moves, and they found that like everything they
thought about where to put a cereal box in a grocery store was wrong.
Alan: Wow.
Emily: So I think it opened up
these great opportunities to get more in touch with human behavior.
But it’s also creepy.
Alan: [laughs] It definitely has
this Orwellian feel to it that. Wait a second. We’ve already given
all of our data to Google. Let’s be honest. I use Drive, I use Gmail.
So they know everything about my buying habits. They know everything,
between Google and Amazon they probably know everything about me. We
don’t even go shopping any more, things just come to the house. But
they still don’t know about my personal life. Well, I guess we have a
Google Home and an Alexa in our house, so I’m sure they do know about
our personal life. The question becomes, do we trust them? And so far
we do, Facebook being the one. They just got slapped with a
$5-billion fine because of privacy violations.
Emily: Yeah.
Alan: So I think governments
really need to step in, especially in the age of AI when you can–
it’s one thing to know this information about an individual. It’s
another thing to act on it, and to be able to take that information
and make it relevant. Right now, I think we’re still in that phase
of, “We collect all this information, shit tons of it. But to be
honest, we can’t use half of it, because we don’t even know how to
process it.” So while we’re collecting data, there’s huge
amounts of data that we don’t use. Companies– the Age of Big Data, a
few years ago, “Oh, big data, we’ve got to collect everything.”
And then they realize, “Oh my God, we collected all this data.
We don’t know what to do with it.” So I think AI will solve that
problem, but also create some real privacy and security issues.
Emily: It’s also frightening to
think about the fact that all this data we’re collecting, if we run
it through AI, they could be used to make major decisions that affect
our lives. And we don’t really understand the data right now. So I
actually just read a really interesting book called “Invisible
Woman: Data Bias In a World Designed For Men”, I think. And one
of the examples was Amazon traded this AI tool for hiring. The
information that they put into the system was the last 10 years of
resumes that were submitted to them. This was for a technical
position like a developer or something. What ended up happening was
the system was biased against women because–
Alan: The system was.
Emily: Yeah. Because the tech
world is notoriously male dominated. And so if you’re looking at the
last 10 years, most of the resumes are going to be from that. So they
had to shut it down. So there’s things like that, that are a little
frightening to me. Policing is one thing, like policing our privacy
and getting government involved. Hacking is crazy. That scares me,
that’s what keeps me up at night. Our information is constantly being
stolen and preventing the use of data for the wrong unintended
reasons. So understanding the data is a big part of this.
Alan: Yeah, no kidding. Wow. We
could discuss this forever, I’m sure. I think we both realize that
the potential for unlocking humanity’s potential is unlimited, but
the potential for it to fall into the wrong hands — not even the
wrong hands but the wrong actors within certain subsets of brands and
companies — really becomes a challenge. And we also have the
unintended consequences of depression and antisocial behaviors and
stuff like this. And there are unintended consequences of an always
on computing platform that is glued to our face.
Emily: And that’s really dumb. I
mean, there aren’t studies yet.
Alan: No, we don’t know.
Emily: It’ll take a generation
for us to get really meaningful insight into some of those.
Alan: We’ve only had smartphones
for 11 years.
Emily: Yeah.
Alan: We are already realizing,
“Oh shit, this is not good for us.” We need to take a break
and turn off our notifications. I actually wrote an article, “11
Ways to Reduce Smartphone Related Stress” because I was
researching for myself and my kids and my wife were, you know, how do
we cut back on looking at the phone all the time? And my biggest
thing was turning off all the notifications and sounds. I just turned
off, blanketed everything. And when you have glasses in the future,
we’re gonna be wearing glasses where the whole world is our computer.
How do we select for what we want to see, what we don’t want to see
and when? So I think there’s a huge road, and I’m kind of glad
enterprise is leading this versus diving right into the consumer
market.
Emily: Yeah, I agree. And it’s
for that kind of reason. In a way, it’s almost like a controlled
environment. You’re not just releasing AR/VR into the wild.
Enterprises are actually finding ways to use it. They’re working with
IT to secure the information, even things like hygiene, passing a
device from one worker to another. Those are things that are gonna be
worked out, thankfully, in enterprise first.
Alan: Yeah, I mean, we’ve been
doing demos since 2015 and we’ve done probably 500 events, so
thousands and thousands of people putting on these headsets and we
started off with replaceable covers and all this stuff. And we
finally got to the point where for VR and AR we use these VR covers
that have like a leatherette and then we just wipe them with alcohol.
And I mean it has a little bit of a smell to it, but at least you
know it’s clean. There’s nothing growing on that thing. But yeah.
These are all really interesting challenges that– the big one that
was just evident, or became evident is the security of the platforms
is non-existent. I mean, three of the major collaboration platforms
got hacked a couple of weeks ago.
Emily: Yeah, I read that.
Alan: We need to figure these
things out and they’re going to figure it out. I mean, this is what
technology does. We find a problem, we solve it. So I’m really
excited about it. Yeah. We could go on forever, but we’re we’re
running out of time. So I want to ask you one last question. And
first of all, thank you so much for being on the show, Emily. It’s
been an amazing conversation. What is one problem in the world that
you want to see solved using XR technologies?
Emily: Good question. I want to
see XR help women in the workforce. So if XR is the future of
training, it’s the future of learning, it’s potentially the future of
our education system. And it has this great potential to democratize
information and skills. I would hope it could be leveraged to address
inequalities in the workplace. At the same time, I want to see XR
companies pay more attention to the user experience for women. I
personally find a lot of VR devices uncomfortable. I’m not alone,
I’ve spoken with many women who work in AR/VR. This is the future of
training and I believe it is. And you believe it is. So user
experience for women cannot be inferior to that of men. Again, we’re
talking about wearable technology. It’s incredibly intimate. And
optics. Men and women don’t perceive depth the same way. So these
kinds of things I’d like to see XR companies pay attention to and
physiological differences, different ways that we perceive depth.
That’s important and I haven’t seen that brought in yet.
Alan: It’s an interesting point.
I believe there’s a reason behind that. Most of the technology
hardware is designed by men and I don’t know why that is. It just
doesn’t seem like– it almost seems like they need to hire female
designers to finish the product, like you got the product to working,
it’s good. OK. Now let’s have somebody with an eye for design and an
eye for comfort across both sexes and all sizes. It’s a hard problem
to solve when you have 95 percent of the people working on the
problem are men. It’s an issue, for all the women listening, if you
want to get an understanding of what this industry is like, go to CES
in January and you’ll be in a literal sea of men. It’s kind of
ridiculous actually, but I think it’s getting better, and more and
more women are warming up to tech and it’s slow, but I think we can
get there.
Emily: Yeah, there should be a
woman in the room whenever any design decision is made.
Alan: There should be a woman on
the board of every company.
Emily: Yeah.
Alan: One, minimum. And if we
did that we would– and, we should only have women world leaders,
because that would eliminate a lot of the ego and bullshit and war.
Emily: I would love that.
Alan: Wouldn’t that be great, if
we just made women the leaders of the world? There would be no war.
We would cancel all military actions and all military spending and
apply that to education and food. And here’s to hoping that happens
in the future.
Emily: Definitely.