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Living in a Post-Scarcity World of Technology, with You Are Here Labs’ John Buzzell
We live in a three-dimensional world, and according to today’s guest — You Are Here Labs president John Buzzell — our computers are finally starting to catch up with that. John shoots the proverbial breeze with Alan on how spatial computing is going to fundamentally change our relationship with computers, and thus, our relationship with the world.
Alan: My name is Alan Smithson,
your host for the XR for Business Podcast. Today’s guest is a good
friend, John Buzzell from You Are Here Labs and You Are Here Agency.
John is an award winning 28 year veteran of the digital industry,
creating interactive experiences across augmented reality, virtual
reality, video games, mobile apps and numerous high volume websites.
To learn more about You Are Here Labs and You Are Here Agency, visit
yahagency.com. John, welcome to the show.
John: Thanks, Alan. Good to be
with you.
Alan: And of all the people
we’ve had on the show, you have a lot of experience in this field. I
mean, you built the AR Porsche visualizer where you could drop a
Porsche right in your living room and I actually have a photo of a
Porsche in my living room from your app.
John: [laughs] That’s great. You
know, that was an interesting project, because we started off on the
Hololens and it was a really interesting project. But at some point,
Porsche said this is a little too future for us at the moment and we
need something that the dealers and the salespeople can use without
fear. And so when ARKit popped up from Apple and they said surprise,
now everybody with an iPhone 6 and above and use augmented reality,
it really changed the game. And we very quickly converted that
experience from the Hololens to the humble iPad and it took off from
there. So we were really excited to have one of the first ARKit apps
that was really connected to a major company or brand. And I’m glad
you liked it, too. That’s cool.
Alan: It was really special. Can
people download it now still?
John: Well, no, they can’t. That
was about two years ago that we did it. And for all of us in
technology, who knows how fast it moves. Porsche is a global company
and they were very impressed with the innovation. And I think they
were excited to kind of pull it back to HQ and see what they could do
globally with it. And also our clients left for jobs at other
companies simultaneously. [laughs] So–
Alan: That’s the challenge in
technology, you’re working on a project with somebody, you’re all in
it, and then they leave. [laughs]
John: I mean, I think that’s one
of the neat things about emerging tech is, is it really can help
vault peoples careers into the next dimension, in the sense that
these technologies are so profound and they will affect the work that
we do and the way we live our lives for so long in the future, that
people that have this experience, it’s really great for them
individually.
Alan: You’ve been doing this a
while longer than myself, but I’ve been in early VR since 2014. And
I’ve noticed that a lot of the people that were just building demos
and stuff like that, now are running huge companies. HP and
Microsoft, they’re running huge departments in this, just because
they were early and learned how to do it. And they learned in a time
when there was no YouTube video on how to make AR, you had to just
kind of guess.
John: Yeah. I mean, my career
resembles that, in the sense that I got started doing interactive
marketing on diskettes before CD-ROM. Our friend Cathy Hackl says,
“Don’t talk about that, it makes you sound old!” but I
think the experience is worthy, because you see things change to
CD-ROM. You watch them change again to narrowband Internet. You see
them change a third time with broadband. You watch it change again
completely with mobile, and then of course with social. And now on to
this. The people that do have the experience, I think have more of a
long view, a different perspective, where they don’t see AR, VR, or
XR. They don’t see it as an adversary or a competitor to things like
5G or IOT or artificial intelligence, machine learning, what have
you. They really see AR and VR as the screen, because if you look at
these other technologies, they’re all ingredients. None of them is an
interface, with the slight exception of perhaps AI and voice. If
you’re able to understand AR and VR, how it’s used, it can really
propel your company and your own career.
Alan: So is it safe to say that
XR is the window to emerging technology?
John: I think so, although I
think it’s fun that we’ve been looking at glowing rectangles since
the first movie back in the 1800s, and now computing is kind of
broken through that window, right? No offence to Microsoft, but we’re
not living in Windows anymore. This technology is aerosolized now and
it can show up anywhere, in any way. And that’s one of the really
exciting things about augmented reality.
Alan: So a lot of people are
calling it “spatial computing.” You want to maybe give it
your– explain to people listening, what does that mean when we break
free from this? You talked about Porsche taking the Hololens and
saying “This is really awesome, but it’s a little bit too out
there, too advanced for us.” And taking it back to an iPad,
which is great, because everybody has it and has massive scale. By
the end of this year, there will be over 2 billion AR enabled
smartphones and devices in the world. So now you’ve got scale. What
does it mean for spatial computing and 3D everything?
John: For so long, we have dealt
with scarcity when it comes to technology. In the 40s, 50s, up
through the 70s, you had to go to a university campus or something
like that to have access to computing. Malcolm Gladwell says that
part of the reason that Bill Gates was so successful — he and Paul
Allen — is because they had summertime access to computers at a
local university.
Alan: And their parents
fundraised and put a computer in their school.
John: Yeah, absolutely. I mean,
part of the reason I got into it is we had a computer club in my
elementary school. And so that was a concentration of computers and
people that liked computers. It’s more rare today, because we don’t
really have a scarcity problem anymore. We tell people don’t text and
drive and we put giant iPads in the Teslas. We, say, got computers on
our refrigerators and we can have Alexa powered microwaves, and
computers aren’t scarce anymore. And so the idea of having to sit
down at a desk in a home office and log onto the Internet, I mean,
there was a a joke about that in the latest Avengers movie. Or no, it
was Captain Marvel, I guess. In any case, when we live with
technology and we’re in a post-scarcity world, what does that mean?
That means I don’t have to go looking for a screen. I don’t go have
to go looking for a device. And much in the way that the phone has
been in our pocket, having migrated from the desk to our backpack or
briefcase and into our pocket and now on our wrist, this slow motion
merger of computers and our brains. The next step is for our eyes.
And for a while we’re going to hold a phone or an iPad out in front
of our face. And then when our shoulders get tired, eventually Apple
and others will sell us this integrated with a pair of glasses that
don’t look too nerdy. As Matt Miesnieks — I don’t know how to say
his last name — but he made the good point that for now, people will
get paid at work to look dorky in these devices. Eventually everybody
will wear them, because they’ll become fashionable. So I think from a
business perspective, so much of what we do is repeated process. For
a trainee or for someone who’s working a long shift, or if they’re
working in a critical application like medicine, having that
attachment and that immersion in process can be really helpful, to
know that “Okay, well, if I’m doing an organ transplant, how far
away is that organ?” or if I’m waiting on the curb to catch an
Uber for my next meeting, “How far away is that? Am I going to
be late?” Or if I’m in the guts of a warehouse or manufacturing
facility, and I need to know what machine to go to next, “What’s
the machine, and which direction do I need to head?” So this is
something that we’re all doing right now, and it feels pretty
seamless to pull the phone out of our pocket or look down at a
tablet. But we’ll probably look back in just a few years and and
laugh at how quaint that seems, because now we’ll be getting it right
in our field of view.
Alan: It’s crazy. My friend
showed up at my house with a BlackBerry and I was like, “What is
that?” [laughs] We’re gonna be looking back. And my guess is ten
years, maybe 20. And we’ll say, “Do you remember the time when
we used to hold these little square boxes, and carry them around in
our pockets all the time?”
John: Well, yeah. And I think
people naturally react with a healthy amount of skepticism for this,
because a lot of people have just now gotten adjusted to smartphones.
But it’s funny you bring up BlackBerry. I had a BlackBerry 10 years
ago. It was a smartphone, had a screen and a bunch of keys on it. But
yeah, it feels so antiquated now. All the technologies that we would
need for these glasses exist today. It’s not able to be made cheaply
enough. Or perhaps the battery life wouldn’t be able to be as long.
But if you wanted to have a next-gen experience for a few minutes,
that experience can be had. So it’s really a question now is do you
want to subsidize as an OEM these devices to make it more affordable
and to spur adoption? Or do you want to kind of squeeze a little bit
more cash out of the current category, the way that smartphone
manufacturers are? I think we’re on the cusp of a change there.
Alan: I think you’re seeing it
with product like Hololens 2, where they could have brought the price
down, for sure. I mean, it doesn’t cost them $3,000 to make this
thing. And maybe they said, “No, we’re gonna keep this at an
enterprise price of $3,500.” And I think it’s the right thing to
do, because people think “Oh, it’s too expensive.” Well,
this isn’t for everyday use. This isn’t for somebody playing video
games. This is for industrial applications where you can either have
remote assistance, see-what-I-see training on the job, instruction
manuals, that type of thing, which are driving real business values.
Jonathan Moss from Sprint was talking about how they used just tablet
based AR for training. And they’ve been keeping some different KPI
metrics, and they’ve made millions of dollars in sales and they’ve
saved millions and dollars in travel, simply by using this AR
education. They’ve been tracking it. And I said, “Well, how much
did it cost?” And he said, “Oh, between a 100 and 200
thousand.” It’s astronomical numbers in savings and profit here.
So I want to dig into a little bit more of the industries and
companies that You Are Here Labs is serving and what you guys are
doing. You want to maybe talk about the different industries and
companies that you’ve been serving lately, and what you guys are
working on?
John: Sure. And if I can try to
tie into your last comment, we really have that same practical world
view. You and I were joking before we started recording this podcast,
that we had better not get into all of the technical gobbledygook
that so many people are very precious about with these devices. The
devices are coming out constantly. Some of them are even being
subsidized to spur increased adoption, and they’ll continue to come
out for some time. I mean, people are getting new TV’s all the time
now, whereas previously they held onto TV’s for a decade. So we take
the long view. We focus on the practical side. We see if this
technology is going to be around for more than twenty five years,
what do you do? Because buying a consumption device isn’t going to
get it done. Buying a guitar doesn’t make you a good guitar player,
you’ve got to practice and prepare. So we work across industries
really quite a few, including automotive, commercial real estate,
construction, consumer packaged goods, energy and oil, food and
beverage, heating and cooling, manufacturing tools, transit, a whole
bunch of different industries. But we’re really try to pull one
thread through — and I think your audience will like this — which
is that we focus on delivering results quickly and over time. And
what I mean by that is that we help companies understand what these
technologies are. We help them explore how they fit into their
business, including the critical applications that their workers go
through. And then we help them figure out how to integrate and scale
those solutions over time in responsible ways. Because all of us,
you, me, and everybody else that’s been on this podcast and more,
we’re all stewards of this fledgling medium. And we want to see it
succeed, not just for us as individuals, but as a whole. And so
hopefully that answers your question.
Alan: Absolutely. And you kind
of touched on something that really resonates with me, especially
with this podcast. I do this podcast just out of a labor of love to
try to promote it and give people that are listening the idea of, I
can invest in this and it will give me a return, because I think
there’s been so much hype around VR and AR for gaming and for this.
And oh, we’re in the trough of disillusionment. We’re not in the
trough of disillusionment. If you, three years ago, put a million
dollars into a company expecting they were gonna be a billion dollar
company by now, yeah, you’re disillusioned. However, if you thought
we’re going to invest a million dollars and start to solve real
problems within industry, you’re doing all right right now.
John: Yeah.
Alan: And you have clearly
figured that out. And we did the same thing. We took this view of,
what are the results we can deliver now versus in the future. Caspar
Thykier from Zappar got a really great point. He’s like, “Yes,
we can talk about WebAR, we can talk about when glasses come, we can
talk about all these future things. But why don’t we just make things
that are existing and capable right now?” The technology that
exists right now in AR and VR is so spectacularly amazing, that we
should be focusing on it now, not a year down the road or five years
down the road.
John: Yeah, absolutely. I mean,
if you’re in an industry where you have physical objects, widgets,
car tires, surgical equipment, tractors, anything really at all —
anything that’s not kind of abstract or ephemeral — then you need to
be investing right now on the tools and the skills to translate that
into digital. The web was kind of quaint until digital cameras and
flatbed scanners got inexpensive, and then suddenly you could have an
eBay, because you could show grandma’s old jewelry that you wanted to
sell. Although that’s kind of sad that you’d sell grandma’s jewelry,
but you could. [laughs] And we’re in a similar space right now with
XR, in that the tools for creating a digital version of physical
objects have never been cheaper. They’ve never been easier to use.
And a lot of businesses spend tens, hundreds of millions of dollars
schlepping around big, heavy, dangerous stuff to trade shows, to
customer events, to do demos. And it doesn’t have to be that way
anymore. There is a web conference style transformation going on,
where you can configure and sell a car without the car.
Alan: Yep.
John: You can imagine how dental
equipment would go into a dental hygienist office, without bringing
any of the equipment. You can decide how much concrete you need for a
giant office complex, without any surveyors. So there are so many use
cases now in business where people can start saving or making money
with AR and VR. I would love to see more people embrace that.
Alan: The great thing is there’s
lots of– when we started a few years ago, there was nobody that
could do this stuff. Literally nobody.
John: Right.
Alan: Colleges are starting to
roll out programs, and there’s a lot more information online. So
people are learning it. And even companies. What we’re doing now,
we’re finding companies want to bring a lot of the stuff in-house.
And so what we’re doing is consulting on how can they build the team
without building a huge team, or whether you need a 3D model or maybe
you need a Unity expert. What are some of the people on your team
that built out your round team, that you guys use on a project like
the Porsche one?
John: Yeah, I mean, I think the
work — like you said — has gotten– for those of us who have been
in the industry for a little while, it’s certainly gotten more
strategic. We’ve moved from an era of “Can we do that?” to
more of an opportunity to ask, “Should we do that?” And so
we definitely have a lot of people that speak XR strategy here in our
team, that can consult with various companies in their embrace of
spatial computing or XR or whatever you want to call it, to help them
find the best opportunities to do first. And the ones to save for
later. And so that’s an important part of what we offer. Similarly,
we have some very bright software developers, people that come from
the game development industry that understand the different engines
— Unity and Unreal being the two most popular — and try to work
that across different devices. We do projects on the Go. We do them
on the Hololens. We do them on the Vive and Rift. We do projects on
iOS and Android. We do projects on the Magic Leap. We really– we
don’t specify devices to people. So you need a versatile team of
developers for that. We have technical art directors that — for
those maybe who don’t understand game engines as much — there’s a
real skill into doing special effects — whether that be lighting or
texturing or particles — to make augmented reality graphics fit into
the real world better. You’d be surprised how hard it is. And then
finally, we really rely on a group of engineers to do 3D scanning,
volumetric and photogrammetry capture, project management and QA. So
it’s a lot of the same roles from other types of software
development, but with some specialties as well.
Alan: I get this question all
the time. Who do I need on my team for this? And my first reaction is
“just hire us and we’ll deal with it for you.”
John: [laughs]
Alan: The second thing is you
need a big team. You need somebody who understands Unreal or Unity.
You need a 3D modeller, you need somebody that understands the
textures. You mentioned making things look real in the real world.
And you’ve entered into the spatial computing era where we’re not
creating something on your phone. We’re creating something on your
phone that has to look real in the real world, despite the different
leading changes and that sort of thing. So if you have your car
sitting in a parking lot next to another car in the shadows, pointing
one direction for real and the other direction, because that’s how
you built it. That’s really weird.
John: You’re talking about a
level of polish that’s possible that really makes apps shine. If
you’re using this for business and you’re trying to sell a bulldozer
or you’re trying to teach someone how to repair a bulldozer, if you
can make it look real, your trainee or your customer, your prospect
can forget that they’re looking at a simulation and focus on what
you’re really trying to tell them. We put great care into making sure
that things look as real as possible, so that you keep that
suspension of disbelief, like they talk about in the movies.
Eventually, this stuff will be so easy, it’ll just happen magically.
You don’t have to worry about lighting or animation. But for now,
there’s a bit of skill and that’s where it can help to partner, as
opposed to having somebody on your team.
Alan: I really love what you
just said. People, because it’s so real, they can forget that it’s a
simulation and focus on the key messaging. And that’s so vital for a
number of things, sales and marketing, but also training and
upskilling. You’ve done a number of things here. What are some of the
real life data metrics, analytics, specific KPIs? What have you guys
seen as those things? How are people measuring their success?
John: Yeah, I would put that–
I’ll actually answer that in two parts. There’s what our customers
care about. And then there’s what we’re looking at. I think, for the
customers, they measure success in a variety of ways. For people that
are still struggling a little bit with their digital transformation,
maybe they finally got their mobile app out recently, or they’re
proud of their website, which is great. Everybody needs to get there.
Success for them can be as humble as just executing a proof of
concept, or pulling together innovation budget from other parts of
the company. It may be getting some employee or market validation. I
would say for the intermediate clients, that they’re maybe comparing
XR solutions to other methods, comparing traffic or lead generation
and retention. That’s what they’re worried about. And then our
advanced clients are really beginning to unearth deeper insights,
based on usage data from these experiences. And that kind of more
closely mirrors what we look at, which is we’re looking at numbers of
users, length and depth of engagement, repeat use. Are they sharing
this experience if they can? Does that converge to lead capture or
commerce for enterprise training? The names are different, but it’s
pretty similar that they’re looking for higher enrolment, time on
task, quality, how well they’re scoring, and what do they retain. So
we use, behind the scenes, everything from head position, eye
tracking, looking at the difference between where they’re holding a
VR controller to where they may end up, as a measure of kind of
intuition. It’s not as tight and concise as it is in other media yet,
but it’s moving there fast. And I think as different companies
embrace these technologies, they’re getting more sophisticated ways
to measure success. Does that answer your question?
Alan: Yes. I have literally
nothing else to add.
John: [laughs] We’ve hung out
too much, right?
Alan: We really have. I want to
talk about specifics. Give us an example of a case study that you
want to share.
John: Apologies in advance, I’m
going to have to kind of thread the needle here to not mention
specifics, but I think there’s some lessons to be learned. We’re in
phase two of a project or a major infrastructure organization, and
they deal with almost 10 million citizens per day in the execution of
their service. And a lot of the equipment that they use to serve
these people is antiquated. I mean, some of it is older than 50 years
old. They’re in a real situation where they need to improve the way
they do things, but they also need to continually replenish the staff
that services this infrastructure, because some people are retiring
and it gets expensive to keep them around. It’s nice work if you can
get it, though. So in any case, we were brought in to create training
materials using augmented reality and virtual reality, but there was
no digital objects to start from. And just like we said earlier, that
web got pretty great when you had digital cameras and cheap flatbed
scanners. There’s finally technology to use to digitize real objects.
And so we got in, scanned a lot of these objects, digitized them,
made them ready for mobile devices, delivered over 3G, 4G, 5G, Wi-Fi,
what have you, and started assembling lessons, working with their
subject matter experts. They have a training program right now that
takes a half a year. And we think we can get a really serious
reduction in that. And we’re starting to see really promising results
in early trials. So for them, it was pulling them out of the 1900s
and really preparing them for the next hundred years. Smart training
can be delivered on any device, in any location, and really across a
range of different skills. So we employed a lot of versatility. We
had to be very nimble on this project to react to different changes.
And we learned a lot. I think they did, too.
Alan: What are some of the early
metrics? Because we’re seeing decreases in training times, dramatic
decreases. You mentioned six months training. My guess is you could
probably get that training down to about 45 days using this
technology.
John: It’s really dramatic.
There’s– I’m going to mangle this old adage, but it’s something
like, “I remember a little of what I see, less of what I hear,
but I remember almost everything that I do.” And in that way,
these people can gather around– currently gather around a big, heavy
piece of equipment. It takes two hours to take it apart. Not
everybody can see what’s going on. And maybe they’ll get a chance to
ask a question and it better be a good one. But with this technology,
everyone can be there all at the same time, moving at their own pace,
asking questions, looking at things from any angle on their own. And
no one has to scratch up their knuckles or injure themselves. Nobody
drops a 400 pound piece of cast iron on their toe. We’re seeing a lot
better retention. We’re seeing faster moves through the curriculum,
with people being able to go through it more often. So I agree with
you. We should be getting hard numbers on that soon. And if I can
share them, I will. But at the moment, we’re already starting to see
giant gains from an industry that’s been doing things the same way
for almost 100 years.
Alan: I get excited about this,
because I see that this type of technology as being the thing that
democratizes education across the world. We’ve got smartphones which
are doing a fantastic job providing the information quickly, but
immersive technologies have been able to do something, and also just
see it in three dimensions. You mentioned being able to see a machine
or whatever and pulling it apart. When you’re in virtual reality and
you make a mistake, there’s no consequence that anybody else can see.
You make a mistake and you can make as many mistakes as you want. And
humans learn through error, we learn by making mistakes. Being able
to make mistakes in a completely private and consequence-free
environment, that reinforces learning at a different level.
John: Yeah, and not only that —
which I love your point — but in addition to that, the software can
be watching you and making suggestions. “We’ve noticed you’re
having a little trouble with this. Would you like to go back and
repeat this part of the training?” There was a particular thing
that we did on this last project, where you were supposed to take
apart a complicated system of parts that all went together in
different ways. Some were threaded, some were slipped into place,
some were bolted down and watching people being — to your point —
being able to try to figure this out. They were learning in a way
that a classroom lecture or a video would never get done. Education,
whether that’s educating somebody about your product, or educating
employees about working with central equipment, or educating
practitioners about compliance and safety, it’s all communication.
And one of the reasons that I’m so amazed and in awe of this
technology is it’s really bringing together all of the progress that
I’ve seen over the course of 30 years working in the industry. It’s
really going to be profound for people.
Alan: I know this is a question
that I get from listeners all the time, and it’s a simple one, how
much this stuff cost? What is our initial outlay? And maybe instead
of just saying this particular one costs, let’s talk about how to
budget, like how can a company from the first minute they meet with
you to rolling out some project like this, what are kind of the steps
and what does the process look like from your standpoint, that you’ve
seen work really well?
John: There’s an XR or AR/VR
solution for every budget. And I’m not saying that as a dodge, or to
be slippery in any way. I think that… look, if your budget is
$5,000, pay somebody that’s an expert in the industry to come talk to
you for a little while. Have them explain their perspectives on the
industry, have them maybe do a little bit of light brainstorming with
you for use cases that make sense for your industry or your company,
your category. If you have $50,000, maybe think about doing a proof
of concept, where you ingrain yourself with real requirements. You do
either a lightweight series of experiments on a particular idea, or
maybe you create a horse race, where you take three different
experiments and you try to see which one is most successful and then
learn from why. If you have $250,000, you’re probably further into
it, having already spent money at the lower levels. But that’s really
when you want to start thinking about doing an integration test or
maybe scaling up a team. And of course it goes on from there. People
can– a buddy tells me, “We can make this as complicated as you
want, John.” [chuckles] But yeah, I think there’s ways for
people to get involved. The most important thing is to understand
that we’re visual creatures and we live in a physical,
three-dimensional world. Computers can finally live alongside with
us, and that can bring just-in-time education, or marketing, for so
many different things. And we don’t have to look at a computer and
try to figure out, “Well, where’s the button for this or that?”
You know, there’s this is great scene in The Matrix from 20 years ago
— which is kind of amazing because it still feels futuristic —
where the main character, Neo, kind of laughably plugs something into
his head and he says “I know kung-fu,” but the idea of
just-in-time education is already here. I mean, if you look at how
many lives an AED — an Automated Emergency Defibrillator — how many
heart attack victims have been saved with those devices, because
somebody got just-in-time education? We can all walk around being
just-in-time experts for any number of things. Administering first
aid, or teaching somebody how to work for a particular problem. And
we’re going to be able to deliver that in a way that’s more seamless
and more compelling than ever before. And I think that’s– you need
to think about your business in a way of like, what is a real
business problem or delivering just-in-time training or education
along with 3D objects would be helpful? And there’s probably a whole
lot of them.
Alan: What is the most important
thing that businesses can do right now to leverage this power of XR?
John: Companies need to do more
— and I’ll get specific in a second — but if you’re not already
spending time or money or both on XR, you’re helping your
competitors. The largest companies in the world have decided that
this is what comes after the smartphone. They’ve seen the smartphone
sales start to plateau. People probably aren’t going to pay more than
a thousand bucks for a smartphone. So what are they going to do next,
to keep us all buying new devices? And if you look at IoT, AI, cloud
computing, and big data crypto, if you look at a 5G — all the
technologies out there — they’re mostly ingredients. We’re visual
creatures. We need a screen and the AR, and VR, XR, spatial computing
— whatever you want to call it — this is how we’re going to
interface with the future of computers.
So companies need to do more.
Businesses need to recognize that this is really serious for their
marketing and training, but also kind of their workplace tools,
workforce development. It’s not a competitor to any of these other
technologies. It is what brings them all together. So if it’s the
evolution of computing and the successor to the smartphone, if you
haven’t started experimenting with this tech yet, you’re falling
behind. So I think if you’re a beginner, you need to do more, attend
to conference, hire one person, do a proof of concept with a local
agency. If you’re intermediate, maybe strengthen your teams and your
partnerships. Try to figure out, “well, OK, so we have a lot of
3D. Let’s scan some something and see what we can do with it.”
If you’re an advanced user, people need to do more integrations, need
to polish their skills, build their teams because the future is going
to be 3D. It’s going to be contextual and it’s going to be spatially
aware. So I think just simple answer would be to more than what
you’re doing now, because this is rapidly approaching. And I see
across industries, companies that are probably competitors of your
listeners already investing lots to learn how to make the most of
this tech.
Alan: This technology; once you
try it, you unlock Pandora’s Box. You’re like, “oh, wait a
second, we just saved $100,000 not flying people around [the world].
We could have a meeting and it was more productive because people
can’t be looking at their smartphones while they’re in VR.
John: I think that’s the best
business case for XR, honestly; shortening and improving logistical
challenges for companies. When the web came out, people in the
magazine and trade show industries were pretty fearful — and with
good reason. And you know, there’s still trade shows and there’s
still magazines, but people do a lot of business online. Similarly,
the opportunity — and there’s some companies with products already
in the market for this — the opportunity to work across devices and
across distance and time to allow people to collaborate and not just
have a web conference where you’re looking at slides, but really, to
manipulate. “What if we put this thing over here? What if this
was smaller? Can we make this out of carbon fiber?” We have
those experiences in our lab. Companies like Spatial or Glue. You can
go take a look at the future for that right now. And I think it’s
going to be profound. You won’t have to go to the office to work. You
won’t have to travel to Hong Kong to have the meeting. You won’t have
to go to Palo Alto to have a design session. You’ll be able to just
put on a headset or hold up a device and do it right there. It’s
happening today and it just hasn’t been deployed at scale.
Alan: We’ve only just unlocked
it and being being able to present and bring knowledge around the
world without having to get on a plane to travel, because let’s be
honest, travel’s fun business travel not so much.
John: Yeah. I mean, I think
you’re already living in that future. There’s this great quote from
William Gibson, a fantastic science fiction writer, and he says The
future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.
Alan: It’s true.
John: You’re already living in
that future. Right.
Alan: And to be honest, let’s be
fair. There are still challenges. It’s still not the perfect solution
yet, but it’s very close.
John: If you can think of how
many web conference tools there are out there, from Blue Jeans to
Hangouts to WebEx. Slack has theirs; Skype has theirs. There are
going to be so many of the companies that can do this. Like I said,
we have it running in our lab. It is going to be transformative for
people when it comes time to renew your expensive office lease. And
you’ve already got maybe 30-40 percent of your workers working
remotely. You begin to think of, “gosh, is it worth all that
money per square foot?”.
Alan: Yeah.
John: I’ve had conversations
with people in the banking industry that said, “you know, what
about virtual branches? We spend a lot of money on branches. Could we
start off in VR chat where you’re interacting with an A.I. and then
you get escalated to a real person on the other end of the line?”
Absolutely. The technology exists. It’s just spreading out.
Alan: Absolutely
John: So that’s exciting.
Alan: So my final question, what
problem in the world do you want to see solved using XR technologies?
John: Well, I said earlier —
and may have spent one of my good answers on The Matrix example —
but having just-in-time education where average human beings like us
could be activated or mobilized to do super-heroic type things on
demand. I would love to see that, because humanity needs a lot of
help right now. But, you know, I have a couple daughters, and maybe
closer to home for me is with all the money that’s spent moving our
carbon bodies around from home to work to an airport to another place
to another office. I would really love to see spatial computing and
XR helping with climate change. I think that logistically we’re
smarter than… we’re still operating with 19th century technology to
get around in a lot of ways, and we can do better. And I think that
XR offers a chance for all of us to be more efficient and more
powerful on what we do.
View all episodes
By Alan Smithson from MetaVRse
4.5
1212 ratings
We live in a three-dimensional world, and according to today’s guest — You Are Here Labs president John Buzzell — our computers are finally starting to catch up with that. John shoots the proverbial breeze with Alan on how spatial computing is going to fundamentally change our relationship with computers, and thus, our relationship with the world.
Alan: My name is Alan Smithson,
your host for the XR for Business Podcast. Today’s guest is a good
friend, John Buzzell from You Are Here Labs and You Are Here Agency.
John is an award winning 28 year veteran of the digital industry,
creating interactive experiences across augmented reality, virtual
reality, video games, mobile apps and numerous high volume websites.
To learn more about You Are Here Labs and You Are Here Agency, visit
yahagency.com. John, welcome to the show.
John: Thanks, Alan. Good to be
with you.
Alan: And of all the people
we’ve had on the show, you have a lot of experience in this field. I
mean, you built the AR Porsche visualizer where you could drop a
Porsche right in your living room and I actually have a photo of a
Porsche in my living room from your app.
John: [laughs] That’s great. You
know, that was an interesting project, because we started off on the
Hololens and it was a really interesting project. But at some point,
Porsche said this is a little too future for us at the moment and we
need something that the dealers and the salespeople can use without
fear. And so when ARKit popped up from Apple and they said surprise,
now everybody with an iPhone 6 and above and use augmented reality,
it really changed the game. And we very quickly converted that
experience from the Hololens to the humble iPad and it took off from
there. So we were really excited to have one of the first ARKit apps
that was really connected to a major company or brand. And I’m glad
you liked it, too. That’s cool.
Alan: It was really special. Can
people download it now still?
John: Well, no, they can’t. That
was about two years ago that we did it. And for all of us in
technology, who knows how fast it moves. Porsche is a global company
and they were very impressed with the innovation. And I think they
were excited to kind of pull it back to HQ and see what they could do
globally with it. And also our clients left for jobs at other
companies simultaneously. [laughs] So–
Alan: That’s the challenge in
technology, you’re working on a project with somebody, you’re all in
it, and then they leave. [laughs]
John: I mean, I think that’s one
of the neat things about emerging tech is, is it really can help
vault peoples careers into the next dimension, in the sense that
these technologies are so profound and they will affect the work that
we do and the way we live our lives for so long in the future, that
people that have this experience, it’s really great for them
individually.
Alan: You’ve been doing this a
while longer than myself, but I’ve been in early VR since 2014. And
I’ve noticed that a lot of the people that were just building demos
and stuff like that, now are running huge companies. HP and
Microsoft, they’re running huge departments in this, just because
they were early and learned how to do it. And they learned in a time
when there was no YouTube video on how to make AR, you had to just
kind of guess.
John: Yeah. I mean, my career
resembles that, in the sense that I got started doing interactive
marketing on diskettes before CD-ROM. Our friend Cathy Hackl says,
“Don’t talk about that, it makes you sound old!” but I
think the experience is worthy, because you see things change to
CD-ROM. You watch them change again to narrowband Internet. You see
them change a third time with broadband. You watch it change again
completely with mobile, and then of course with social. And now on to
this. The people that do have the experience, I think have more of a
long view, a different perspective, where they don’t see AR, VR, or
XR. They don’t see it as an adversary or a competitor to things like
5G or IOT or artificial intelligence, machine learning, what have
you. They really see AR and VR as the screen, because if you look at
these other technologies, they’re all ingredients. None of them is an
interface, with the slight exception of perhaps AI and voice. If
you’re able to understand AR and VR, how it’s used, it can really
propel your company and your own career.
Alan: So is it safe to say that
XR is the window to emerging technology?
John: I think so, although I
think it’s fun that we’ve been looking at glowing rectangles since
the first movie back in the 1800s, and now computing is kind of
broken through that window, right? No offence to Microsoft, but we’re
not living in Windows anymore. This technology is aerosolized now and
it can show up anywhere, in any way. And that’s one of the really
exciting things about augmented reality.
Alan: So a lot of people are
calling it “spatial computing.” You want to maybe give it
your– explain to people listening, what does that mean when we break
free from this? You talked about Porsche taking the Hololens and
saying “This is really awesome, but it’s a little bit too out
there, too advanced for us.” And taking it back to an iPad,
which is great, because everybody has it and has massive scale. By
the end of this year, there will be over 2 billion AR enabled
smartphones and devices in the world. So now you’ve got scale. What
does it mean for spatial computing and 3D everything?
John: For so long, we have dealt
with scarcity when it comes to technology. In the 40s, 50s, up
through the 70s, you had to go to a university campus or something
like that to have access to computing. Malcolm Gladwell says that
part of the reason that Bill Gates was so successful — he and Paul
Allen — is because they had summertime access to computers at a
local university.
Alan: And their parents
fundraised and put a computer in their school.
John: Yeah, absolutely. I mean,
part of the reason I got into it is we had a computer club in my
elementary school. And so that was a concentration of computers and
people that liked computers. It’s more rare today, because we don’t
really have a scarcity problem anymore. We tell people don’t text and
drive and we put giant iPads in the Teslas. We, say, got computers on
our refrigerators and we can have Alexa powered microwaves, and
computers aren’t scarce anymore. And so the idea of having to sit
down at a desk in a home office and log onto the Internet, I mean,
there was a a joke about that in the latest Avengers movie. Or no, it
was Captain Marvel, I guess. In any case, when we live with
technology and we’re in a post-scarcity world, what does that mean?
That means I don’t have to go looking for a screen. I don’t go have
to go looking for a device. And much in the way that the phone has
been in our pocket, having migrated from the desk to our backpack or
briefcase and into our pocket and now on our wrist, this slow motion
merger of computers and our brains. The next step is for our eyes.
And for a while we’re going to hold a phone or an iPad out in front
of our face. And then when our shoulders get tired, eventually Apple
and others will sell us this integrated with a pair of glasses that
don’t look too nerdy. As Matt Miesnieks — I don’t know how to say
his last name — but he made the good point that for now, people will
get paid at work to look dorky in these devices. Eventually everybody
will wear them, because they’ll become fashionable. So I think from a
business perspective, so much of what we do is repeated process. For
a trainee or for someone who’s working a long shift, or if they’re
working in a critical application like medicine, having that
attachment and that immersion in process can be really helpful, to
know that “Okay, well, if I’m doing an organ transplant, how far
away is that organ?” or if I’m waiting on the curb to catch an
Uber for my next meeting, “How far away is that? Am I going to
be late?” Or if I’m in the guts of a warehouse or manufacturing
facility, and I need to know what machine to go to next, “What’s
the machine, and which direction do I need to head?” So this is
something that we’re all doing right now, and it feels pretty
seamless to pull the phone out of our pocket or look down at a
tablet. But we’ll probably look back in just a few years and and
laugh at how quaint that seems, because now we’ll be getting it right
in our field of view.
Alan: It’s crazy. My friend
showed up at my house with a BlackBerry and I was like, “What is
that?” [laughs] We’re gonna be looking back. And my guess is ten
years, maybe 20. And we’ll say, “Do you remember the time when
we used to hold these little square boxes, and carry them around in
our pockets all the time?”
John: Well, yeah. And I think
people naturally react with a healthy amount of skepticism for this,
because a lot of people have just now gotten adjusted to smartphones.
But it’s funny you bring up BlackBerry. I had a BlackBerry 10 years
ago. It was a smartphone, had a screen and a bunch of keys on it. But
yeah, it feels so antiquated now. All the technologies that we would
need for these glasses exist today. It’s not able to be made cheaply
enough. Or perhaps the battery life wouldn’t be able to be as long.
But if you wanted to have a next-gen experience for a few minutes,
that experience can be had. So it’s really a question now is do you
want to subsidize as an OEM these devices to make it more affordable
and to spur adoption? Or do you want to kind of squeeze a little bit
more cash out of the current category, the way that smartphone
manufacturers are? I think we’re on the cusp of a change there.
Alan: I think you’re seeing it
with product like Hololens 2, where they could have brought the price
down, for sure. I mean, it doesn’t cost them $3,000 to make this
thing. And maybe they said, “No, we’re gonna keep this at an
enterprise price of $3,500.” And I think it’s the right thing to
do, because people think “Oh, it’s too expensive.” Well,
this isn’t for everyday use. This isn’t for somebody playing video
games. This is for industrial applications where you can either have
remote assistance, see-what-I-see training on the job, instruction
manuals, that type of thing, which are driving real business values.
Jonathan Moss from Sprint was talking about how they used just tablet
based AR for training. And they’ve been keeping some different KPI
metrics, and they’ve made millions of dollars in sales and they’ve
saved millions and dollars in travel, simply by using this AR
education. They’ve been tracking it. And I said, “Well, how much
did it cost?” And he said, “Oh, between a 100 and 200
thousand.” It’s astronomical numbers in savings and profit here.
So I want to dig into a little bit more of the industries and
companies that You Are Here Labs is serving and what you guys are
doing. You want to maybe talk about the different industries and
companies that you’ve been serving lately, and what you guys are
working on?
John: Sure. And if I can try to
tie into your last comment, we really have that same practical world
view. You and I were joking before we started recording this podcast,
that we had better not get into all of the technical gobbledygook
that so many people are very precious about with these devices. The
devices are coming out constantly. Some of them are even being
subsidized to spur increased adoption, and they’ll continue to come
out for some time. I mean, people are getting new TV’s all the time
now, whereas previously they held onto TV’s for a decade. So we take
the long view. We focus on the practical side. We see if this
technology is going to be around for more than twenty five years,
what do you do? Because buying a consumption device isn’t going to
get it done. Buying a guitar doesn’t make you a good guitar player,
you’ve got to practice and prepare. So we work across industries
really quite a few, including automotive, commercial real estate,
construction, consumer packaged goods, energy and oil, food and
beverage, heating and cooling, manufacturing tools, transit, a whole
bunch of different industries. But we’re really try to pull one
thread through — and I think your audience will like this — which
is that we focus on delivering results quickly and over time. And
what I mean by that is that we help companies understand what these
technologies are. We help them explore how they fit into their
business, including the critical applications that their workers go
through. And then we help them figure out how to integrate and scale
those solutions over time in responsible ways. Because all of us,
you, me, and everybody else that’s been on this podcast and more,
we’re all stewards of this fledgling medium. And we want to see it
succeed, not just for us as individuals, but as a whole. And so
hopefully that answers your question.
Alan: Absolutely. And you kind
of touched on something that really resonates with me, especially
with this podcast. I do this podcast just out of a labor of love to
try to promote it and give people that are listening the idea of, I
can invest in this and it will give me a return, because I think
there’s been so much hype around VR and AR for gaming and for this.
And oh, we’re in the trough of disillusionment. We’re not in the
trough of disillusionment. If you, three years ago, put a million
dollars into a company expecting they were gonna be a billion dollar
company by now, yeah, you’re disillusioned. However, if you thought
we’re going to invest a million dollars and start to solve real
problems within industry, you’re doing all right right now.
John: Yeah.
Alan: And you have clearly
figured that out. And we did the same thing. We took this view of,
what are the results we can deliver now versus in the future. Caspar
Thykier from Zappar got a really great point. He’s like, “Yes,
we can talk about WebAR, we can talk about when glasses come, we can
talk about all these future things. But why don’t we just make things
that are existing and capable right now?” The technology that
exists right now in AR and VR is so spectacularly amazing, that we
should be focusing on it now, not a year down the road or five years
down the road.
John: Yeah, absolutely. I mean,
if you’re in an industry where you have physical objects, widgets,
car tires, surgical equipment, tractors, anything really at all —
anything that’s not kind of abstract or ephemeral — then you need to
be investing right now on the tools and the skills to translate that
into digital. The web was kind of quaint until digital cameras and
flatbed scanners got inexpensive, and then suddenly you could have an
eBay, because you could show grandma’s old jewelry that you wanted to
sell. Although that’s kind of sad that you’d sell grandma’s jewelry,
but you could. [laughs] And we’re in a similar space right now with
XR, in that the tools for creating a digital version of physical
objects have never been cheaper. They’ve never been easier to use.
And a lot of businesses spend tens, hundreds of millions of dollars
schlepping around big, heavy, dangerous stuff to trade shows, to
customer events, to do demos. And it doesn’t have to be that way
anymore. There is a web conference style transformation going on,
where you can configure and sell a car without the car.
Alan: Yep.
John: You can imagine how dental
equipment would go into a dental hygienist office, without bringing
any of the equipment. You can decide how much concrete you need for a
giant office complex, without any surveyors. So there are so many use
cases now in business where people can start saving or making money
with AR and VR. I would love to see more people embrace that.
Alan: The great thing is there’s
lots of– when we started a few years ago, there was nobody that
could do this stuff. Literally nobody.
John: Right.
Alan: Colleges are starting to
roll out programs, and there’s a lot more information online. So
people are learning it. And even companies. What we’re doing now,
we’re finding companies want to bring a lot of the stuff in-house.
And so what we’re doing is consulting on how can they build the team
without building a huge team, or whether you need a 3D model or maybe
you need a Unity expert. What are some of the people on your team
that built out your round team, that you guys use on a project like
the Porsche one?
John: Yeah, I mean, I think the
work — like you said — has gotten– for those of us who have been
in the industry for a little while, it’s certainly gotten more
strategic. We’ve moved from an era of “Can we do that?” to
more of an opportunity to ask, “Should we do that?” And so
we definitely have a lot of people that speak XR strategy here in our
team, that can consult with various companies in their embrace of
spatial computing or XR or whatever you want to call it, to help them
find the best opportunities to do first. And the ones to save for
later. And so that’s an important part of what we offer. Similarly,
we have some very bright software developers, people that come from
the game development industry that understand the different engines
— Unity and Unreal being the two most popular — and try to work
that across different devices. We do projects on the Go. We do them
on the Hololens. We do them on the Vive and Rift. We do projects on
iOS and Android. We do projects on the Magic Leap. We really– we
don’t specify devices to people. So you need a versatile team of
developers for that. We have technical art directors that — for
those maybe who don’t understand game engines as much — there’s a
real skill into doing special effects — whether that be lighting or
texturing or particles — to make augmented reality graphics fit into
the real world better. You’d be surprised how hard it is. And then
finally, we really rely on a group of engineers to do 3D scanning,
volumetric and photogrammetry capture, project management and QA. So
it’s a lot of the same roles from other types of software
development, but with some specialties as well.
Alan: I get this question all
the time. Who do I need on my team for this? And my first reaction is
“just hire us and we’ll deal with it for you.”
John: [laughs]
Alan: The second thing is you
need a big team. You need somebody who understands Unreal or Unity.
You need a 3D modeller, you need somebody that understands the
textures. You mentioned making things look real in the real world.
And you’ve entered into the spatial computing era where we’re not
creating something on your phone. We’re creating something on your
phone that has to look real in the real world, despite the different
leading changes and that sort of thing. So if you have your car
sitting in a parking lot next to another car in the shadows, pointing
one direction for real and the other direction, because that’s how
you built it. That’s really weird.
John: You’re talking about a
level of polish that’s possible that really makes apps shine. If
you’re using this for business and you’re trying to sell a bulldozer
or you’re trying to teach someone how to repair a bulldozer, if you
can make it look real, your trainee or your customer, your prospect
can forget that they’re looking at a simulation and focus on what
you’re really trying to tell them. We put great care into making sure
that things look as real as possible, so that you keep that
suspension of disbelief, like they talk about in the movies.
Eventually, this stuff will be so easy, it’ll just happen magically.
You don’t have to worry about lighting or animation. But for now,
there’s a bit of skill and that’s where it can help to partner, as
opposed to having somebody on your team.
Alan: I really love what you
just said. People, because it’s so real, they can forget that it’s a
simulation and focus on the key messaging. And that’s so vital for a
number of things, sales and marketing, but also training and
upskilling. You’ve done a number of things here. What are some of the
real life data metrics, analytics, specific KPIs? What have you guys
seen as those things? How are people measuring their success?
John: Yeah, I would put that–
I’ll actually answer that in two parts. There’s what our customers
care about. And then there’s what we’re looking at. I think, for the
customers, they measure success in a variety of ways. For people that
are still struggling a little bit with their digital transformation,
maybe they finally got their mobile app out recently, or they’re
proud of their website, which is great. Everybody needs to get there.
Success for them can be as humble as just executing a proof of
concept, or pulling together innovation budget from other parts of
the company. It may be getting some employee or market validation. I
would say for the intermediate clients, that they’re maybe comparing
XR solutions to other methods, comparing traffic or lead generation
and retention. That’s what they’re worried about. And then our
advanced clients are really beginning to unearth deeper insights,
based on usage data from these experiences. And that kind of more
closely mirrors what we look at, which is we’re looking at numbers of
users, length and depth of engagement, repeat use. Are they sharing
this experience if they can? Does that converge to lead capture or
commerce for enterprise training? The names are different, but it’s
pretty similar that they’re looking for higher enrolment, time on
task, quality, how well they’re scoring, and what do they retain. So
we use, behind the scenes, everything from head position, eye
tracking, looking at the difference between where they’re holding a
VR controller to where they may end up, as a measure of kind of
intuition. It’s not as tight and concise as it is in other media yet,
but it’s moving there fast. And I think as different companies
embrace these technologies, they’re getting more sophisticated ways
to measure success. Does that answer your question?
Alan: Yes. I have literally
nothing else to add.
John: [laughs] We’ve hung out
too much, right?
Alan: We really have. I want to
talk about specifics. Give us an example of a case study that you
want to share.
John: Apologies in advance, I’m
going to have to kind of thread the needle here to not mention
specifics, but I think there’s some lessons to be learned. We’re in
phase two of a project or a major infrastructure organization, and
they deal with almost 10 million citizens per day in the execution of
their service. And a lot of the equipment that they use to serve
these people is antiquated. I mean, some of it is older than 50 years
old. They’re in a real situation where they need to improve the way
they do things, but they also need to continually replenish the staff
that services this infrastructure, because some people are retiring
and it gets expensive to keep them around. It’s nice work if you can
get it, though. So in any case, we were brought in to create training
materials using augmented reality and virtual reality, but there was
no digital objects to start from. And just like we said earlier, that
web got pretty great when you had digital cameras and cheap flatbed
scanners. There’s finally technology to use to digitize real objects.
And so we got in, scanned a lot of these objects, digitized them,
made them ready for mobile devices, delivered over 3G, 4G, 5G, Wi-Fi,
what have you, and started assembling lessons, working with their
subject matter experts. They have a training program right now that
takes a half a year. And we think we can get a really serious
reduction in that. And we’re starting to see really promising results
in early trials. So for them, it was pulling them out of the 1900s
and really preparing them for the next hundred years. Smart training
can be delivered on any device, in any location, and really across a
range of different skills. So we employed a lot of versatility. We
had to be very nimble on this project to react to different changes.
And we learned a lot. I think they did, too.
Alan: What are some of the early
metrics? Because we’re seeing decreases in training times, dramatic
decreases. You mentioned six months training. My guess is you could
probably get that training down to about 45 days using this
technology.
John: It’s really dramatic.
There’s– I’m going to mangle this old adage, but it’s something
like, “I remember a little of what I see, less of what I hear,
but I remember almost everything that I do.” And in that way,
these people can gather around– currently gather around a big, heavy
piece of equipment. It takes two hours to take it apart. Not
everybody can see what’s going on. And maybe they’ll get a chance to
ask a question and it better be a good one. But with this technology,
everyone can be there all at the same time, moving at their own pace,
asking questions, looking at things from any angle on their own. And
no one has to scratch up their knuckles or injure themselves. Nobody
drops a 400 pound piece of cast iron on their toe. We’re seeing a lot
better retention. We’re seeing faster moves through the curriculum,
with people being able to go through it more often. So I agree with
you. We should be getting hard numbers on that soon. And if I can
share them, I will. But at the moment, we’re already starting to see
giant gains from an industry that’s been doing things the same way
for almost 100 years.
Alan: I get excited about this,
because I see that this type of technology as being the thing that
democratizes education across the world. We’ve got smartphones which
are doing a fantastic job providing the information quickly, but
immersive technologies have been able to do something, and also just
see it in three dimensions. You mentioned being able to see a machine
or whatever and pulling it apart. When you’re in virtual reality and
you make a mistake, there’s no consequence that anybody else can see.
You make a mistake and you can make as many mistakes as you want. And
humans learn through error, we learn by making mistakes. Being able
to make mistakes in a completely private and consequence-free
environment, that reinforces learning at a different level.
John: Yeah, and not only that —
which I love your point — but in addition to that, the software can
be watching you and making suggestions. “We’ve noticed you’re
having a little trouble with this. Would you like to go back and
repeat this part of the training?” There was a particular thing
that we did on this last project, where you were supposed to take
apart a complicated system of parts that all went together in
different ways. Some were threaded, some were slipped into place,
some were bolted down and watching people being — to your point —
being able to try to figure this out. They were learning in a way
that a classroom lecture or a video would never get done. Education,
whether that’s educating somebody about your product, or educating
employees about working with central equipment, or educating
practitioners about compliance and safety, it’s all communication.
And one of the reasons that I’m so amazed and in awe of this
technology is it’s really bringing together all of the progress that
I’ve seen over the course of 30 years working in the industry. It’s
really going to be profound for people.
Alan: I know this is a question
that I get from listeners all the time, and it’s a simple one, how
much this stuff cost? What is our initial outlay? And maybe instead
of just saying this particular one costs, let’s talk about how to
budget, like how can a company from the first minute they meet with
you to rolling out some project like this, what are kind of the steps
and what does the process look like from your standpoint, that you’ve
seen work really well?
John: There’s an XR or AR/VR
solution for every budget. And I’m not saying that as a dodge, or to
be slippery in any way. I think that… look, if your budget is
$5,000, pay somebody that’s an expert in the industry to come talk to
you for a little while. Have them explain their perspectives on the
industry, have them maybe do a little bit of light brainstorming with
you for use cases that make sense for your industry or your company,
your category. If you have $50,000, maybe think about doing a proof
of concept, where you ingrain yourself with real requirements. You do
either a lightweight series of experiments on a particular idea, or
maybe you create a horse race, where you take three different
experiments and you try to see which one is most successful and then
learn from why. If you have $250,000, you’re probably further into
it, having already spent money at the lower levels. But that’s really
when you want to start thinking about doing an integration test or
maybe scaling up a team. And of course it goes on from there. People
can– a buddy tells me, “We can make this as complicated as you
want, John.” [chuckles] But yeah, I think there’s ways for
people to get involved. The most important thing is to understand
that we’re visual creatures and we live in a physical,
three-dimensional world. Computers can finally live alongside with
us, and that can bring just-in-time education, or marketing, for so
many different things. And we don’t have to look at a computer and
try to figure out, “Well, where’s the button for this or that?”
You know, there’s this is great scene in The Matrix from 20 years ago
— which is kind of amazing because it still feels futuristic —
where the main character, Neo, kind of laughably plugs something into
his head and he says “I know kung-fu,” but the idea of
just-in-time education is already here. I mean, if you look at how
many lives an AED — an Automated Emergency Defibrillator — how many
heart attack victims have been saved with those devices, because
somebody got just-in-time education? We can all walk around being
just-in-time experts for any number of things. Administering first
aid, or teaching somebody how to work for a particular problem. And
we’re going to be able to deliver that in a way that’s more seamless
and more compelling than ever before. And I think that’s– you need
to think about your business in a way of like, what is a real
business problem or delivering just-in-time training or education
along with 3D objects would be helpful? And there’s probably a whole
lot of them.
Alan: What is the most important
thing that businesses can do right now to leverage this power of XR?
John: Companies need to do more
— and I’ll get specific in a second — but if you’re not already
spending time or money or both on XR, you’re helping your
competitors. The largest companies in the world have decided that
this is what comes after the smartphone. They’ve seen the smartphone
sales start to plateau. People probably aren’t going to pay more than
a thousand bucks for a smartphone. So what are they going to do next,
to keep us all buying new devices? And if you look at IoT, AI, cloud
computing, and big data crypto, if you look at a 5G — all the
technologies out there — they’re mostly ingredients. We’re visual
creatures. We need a screen and the AR, and VR, XR, spatial computing
— whatever you want to call it — this is how we’re going to
interface with the future of computers.
So companies need to do more.
Businesses need to recognize that this is really serious for their
marketing and training, but also kind of their workplace tools,
workforce development. It’s not a competitor to any of these other
technologies. It is what brings them all together. So if it’s the
evolution of computing and the successor to the smartphone, if you
haven’t started experimenting with this tech yet, you’re falling
behind. So I think if you’re a beginner, you need to do more, attend
to conference, hire one person, do a proof of concept with a local
agency. If you’re intermediate, maybe strengthen your teams and your
partnerships. Try to figure out, “well, OK, so we have a lot of
3D. Let’s scan some something and see what we can do with it.”
If you’re an advanced user, people need to do more integrations, need
to polish their skills, build their teams because the future is going
to be 3D. It’s going to be contextual and it’s going to be spatially
aware. So I think just simple answer would be to more than what
you’re doing now, because this is rapidly approaching. And I see
across industries, companies that are probably competitors of your
listeners already investing lots to learn how to make the most of
this tech.
Alan: This technology; once you
try it, you unlock Pandora’s Box. You’re like, “oh, wait a
second, we just saved $100,000 not flying people around [the world].
We could have a meeting and it was more productive because people
can’t be looking at their smartphones while they’re in VR.
John: I think that’s the best
business case for XR, honestly; shortening and improving logistical
challenges for companies. When the web came out, people in the
magazine and trade show industries were pretty fearful — and with
good reason. And you know, there’s still trade shows and there’s
still magazines, but people do a lot of business online. Similarly,
the opportunity — and there’s some companies with products already
in the market for this — the opportunity to work across devices and
across distance and time to allow people to collaborate and not just
have a web conference where you’re looking at slides, but really, to
manipulate. “What if we put this thing over here? What if this
was smaller? Can we make this out of carbon fiber?” We have
those experiences in our lab. Companies like Spatial or Glue. You can
go take a look at the future for that right now. And I think it’s
going to be profound. You won’t have to go to the office to work. You
won’t have to travel to Hong Kong to have the meeting. You won’t have
to go to Palo Alto to have a design session. You’ll be able to just
put on a headset or hold up a device and do it right there. It’s
happening today and it just hasn’t been deployed at scale.
Alan: We’ve only just unlocked
it and being being able to present and bring knowledge around the
world without having to get on a plane to travel, because let’s be
honest, travel’s fun business travel not so much.
John: Yeah. I mean, I think
you’re already living in that future. There’s this great quote from
William Gibson, a fantastic science fiction writer, and he says The
future is already here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.
Alan: It’s true.
John: You’re already living in
that future. Right.
Alan: And to be honest, let’s be
fair. There are still challenges. It’s still not the perfect solution
yet, but it’s very close.
John: If you can think of how
many web conference tools there are out there, from Blue Jeans to
Hangouts to WebEx. Slack has theirs; Skype has theirs. There are
going to be so many of the companies that can do this. Like I said,
we have it running in our lab. It is going to be transformative for
people when it comes time to renew your expensive office lease. And
you’ve already got maybe 30-40 percent of your workers working
remotely. You begin to think of, “gosh, is it worth all that
money per square foot?”.
Alan: Yeah.
John: I’ve had conversations
with people in the banking industry that said, “you know, what
about virtual branches? We spend a lot of money on branches. Could we
start off in VR chat where you’re interacting with an A.I. and then
you get escalated to a real person on the other end of the line?”
Absolutely. The technology exists. It’s just spreading out.
Alan: Absolutely
John: So that’s exciting.
Alan: So my final question, what
problem in the world do you want to see solved using XR technologies?
John: Well, I said earlier —
and may have spent one of my good answers on The Matrix example —
but having just-in-time education where average human beings like us
could be activated or mobilized to do super-heroic type things on
demand. I would love to see that, because humanity needs a lot of
help right now. But, you know, I have a couple daughters, and maybe
closer to home for me is with all the money that’s spent moving our
carbon bodies around from home to work to an airport to another place
to another office. I would really love to see spatial computing and
XR helping with climate change. I think that logistically we’re
smarter than… we’re still operating with 19th century technology to
get around in a lot of ways, and we can do better. And I think that
XR offers a chance for all of us to be more efficient and more
powerful on what we do.