August 23, 2019

Meeting in the Flesh in XR, with Glue’s Kalle Saarikannas

31 minutes

Some people find VR to be a solitary experience – too lonely to ever really be a place that humans can feel comfortable in. Well, tell that to Alan, when he met today’s guest – Kalle Saarikannas from Glue – in Glue’s virtual reality chatroom. Despite being continents apart, it felt like they were face-to-face. Kalle sits down again with Alan – this time, without the avatars – to explain why he wants to make Glue a household name.

Alan: Today’s guest is Kalle

Saarikannas, business development manager for Glue, a new

collaboration platform — and I’ll let him talk more about it — but

Kalle is a 26-year-old combination of curiosity for emerging

technology and commercial sense, making innovations a reality. Glue

is a multi-user, multi-device, virtual reality hosting platform that

is redefining the future of remote collaboration. Prior to Glue, the

pioneer of XR remote collaboration, Kalle was working closely with

intelligent packaging, RFID sensor tech, mobile augmented reality,

and RFID solutions for B2B and Consumer Engagement Solutions. He’s

built a strong, built-in entrepreneurial mindset, and established his

first business at age 15. He has a master’s degree in business

management from Hanken School of Economics, and an expression of his

interest towards XR technology. He wrote a master’s thesis about XR

tech, “Immersive Virtual Reality and Training, Using VR in the

Facilitation of Learning.” His free time is spent volunteer

firefighting in Helsinki, Finland. To learn more about Kalle and

Glue, you can visit www.glue.work. Kalle, welcome to the show; so

excited to have you.

Kalle: Yeah. Thank you, Alan,

for having me on — and Glue — in the show.

Alan: It’s really wonderful. I

had the opportunity to try your platform back in New York during…

there was a conference, I can’t remember what the conference was, but

we we’re speaking at it, and I got an amazing chance to meet with

your colleague, Jani. And he got to show me the Glue platform —

which, for the people listening — imagine putting on a VR headset,

and it doesn’t have to be the most fancy headset. They’ll work with

all of them. You put it on, and now you’re standing in a room. Like,

you and I had a conversation — you were in Finland, I was in New

York — and we had a conversation as if we were standing in the same

room together.

Kalle: Yeah, I remember that. It

was quite fascinating to me, too. For the first time in virtual

reality, we were having an eye contact with each other, although we

were some 4,000 miles apart, in different continents.

Alan: It’s really cool. So,

maybe describe the Glue platform, and what your vision is for this.

Kalle: As you mentioned in the

intro, Glue is a software; a system for live mobile device virtual

reality collaboration. We’re not just a virtual reality platform, but

we also support desktop users, mobile phones, iPads, and we provide a

whole service for having meetings in virtual environments. Basically,

our business model is that we are building a platform which operates

in a software as a service model, by offering the client access to

persistent virtual spaces that can be customized to the needs of the

client. Let’s say a enterprise wants to — that has a lot of remote

meetings using traditional remote softwares, such as Skype for

Business or Google Hangouts, which are based on two-dimensional

screens. You’re having video calls, you can see the other from the

camera — instead of that, we offer three-dimensional virtual spaces,

that you can really feel the presence of other people, although you

are sitting on a different continent, miles apart.

Alan: It’s one of those things

where describing virtual reality to people that haven’t tried it is

like describing the color red to a blind person. It really doesn’t

work. The way I explain this to people is — even people who’ve tried

virtual reality and said, “oh, you know, this is great, but it’s

very isolating” — when I was in Glue, the last thing I was

thinking was isolating, because I was in the room. I was standing

next to you. We were having a conversation. I was looking at you. You

were looking at me. We’re a little bit cartoonish as our avatars, but

I’m assuming — over time — that will become more realistic. But

really, I felt like I met you. I felt like I was there in the room

with you. We looked at an engine; we pulled it apart, we put it back

together. You created these beautiful different environments. And one

of the things that I think for businesses, there’s a lot of meetings

that happen that don’t necessarily need somebody to jump on a plane,

but that just seems to be the best way to get that done. We’ve all

use Skype and these types of video conferencing, but they’re missing

that personal touch. I had Jacob Loewenstein on from Spatial, talking

about their collaboration platform, but theirs is more AR. How does

yours differ, VR versus AR? And why would somebody choose one over

the other?

Kalle: As you mentioned, we’ve

been focusing on on VR — virtual reality — which basically means

that you have your headset on, and the whole environment you see is

computer-generated, and it gives a lot of possibilities compared to a

AR. Whereas AR — augmented reality — you basically use the

surroundings you are in. So, the office room that you are in. Or your

home. You basically use that space, and add digital content on top of

it. Whereas in VR, everything you see — your whole line of sight —

is computer-generated. It gives you vast possibilities to create

basically everything. It’s not dependent on the actual surroundings

you are sitting on.

Alan: So basically, what you’re

saying is I could be in a gym in New York–

Kalle: As you were.

Alan: [Laughs]

Kalle: When we had the meeting,

I was at our office in Helsinki, and I saw the pictures Jani posted,

that you were at the hotel gym, using the hotel Wi-Fi, which — as we

know — are not that stable, usually, the free Wi-Fi. And we had the

meeting, using the hotel Wi-Fi in New York, 4,000-5,000 miles away.

And we walked, using Glue’s advanced multi-user technology, in the

same virtual space. Although you were standing at the gym in New York

City.

Alan: I will put a photo in the

show notes. I’ll find a photo.

Kalle: Yeah, it’s hard to

explain otherwise.

Alan: Yeah, it was great! I

mean, the room was double-booked, and so we just literally went into

the gym. I put on the headset… but because it’s so immersive, I

forgot that I was in the gym. I felt like I was in this beautiful

room overlooking the mountains, because you’ve created these

beautiful environments. So… let’s say, for example, we want to

create a custom environment. What’s required to get somebody up and

running? What’s required? What do people need?

Kalle: First of all, I could

give a short intro about our approach to our product, and Glue in

general. Basically, our vision for Glue in the future is that Glue is

going to be a platform for virtual reality; especially virtual

reality with multiple users. So, a multi-user platform. At this

stage, we have done customized content for our companies, for

clients. For instance, we’ve done them a certain virtual spaces, and

then simulated training scenarios. Digital twins, which basically

means that we have created a factory — for instance — in VR. But

the big picture in the future; the plan is that Glue is going to be a

platform that others can use. Any company that is working with 3D

animation and 3D assets can use our technology, and build on top of

that technology. We’re not aiming to become a project house for

companies, but a platform — or, the way to create VR content in the

future. So at this stage, we do customized client work as well. But

in the future, we want to collaborate with different businesses that

currently create XR solutions, by enabling them to use our technology

to bring many participants into the same virtual space. Because

accessing VR is pretty lonely, doing it solo by yourself. That’s

something that we want to get rid of in the future, and be there

together.

Alan: The one thing that I

really found interesting — beyond being in a virtual space — is the

fact that you’ve also allowed people to access the meeting from their

smartphone, or tablet, or computer. If you don’t have a VR headset,

you can still participate in these experiences. And it feels very

much like… Second Life. It feels like Second Life.

Kalle: Well, obviously, the fact

is that the penetration of VR headset is not that big at the moment,

but we’ve seen the same development with smartphones over the last

decade or so. So we know that we can expect that VR is becoming

mainstream all the time as we speak, but we will also want to keep

the possibility to access our platform and the meetings using

handheld devices. So basically, we would be sitting on a bus with

your headphones on, and be in the same meeting using your phone. And

when you get to your office or your home, you can then put on a VR

headset, and then to be even more immersed, obviously, than using a

phone or an iPad. You don’t have the same functionality as you have

using a VR headset, and that is something that we recognize. We’re

developing a certain special set of different tools, depending on

which device are you using. We want to make Glue a universal platform

that can be accessed no matter which product you’re using, or which

kind of type of device.

Alan: That’s awesome. It’s going

to be powerful, oh, my goodness.

Kalle: Yeah.

Alan: You mentioned that there’s

a bunch of new features and improvements since I tried it in New

York, and I can’t wait to try out the new features. What are some of

the industries that you are targeting with this? Or, what are the

industries that you’re seeing starting to take an interest in this

technology at the moment?

Kalle: We’ve been developing

Glue for the past two years or so. The technology is largely built by

ourselves in-house. We’re a company of roughly 30 people strong in

Helsinki, Finland. At this stage, we’re collaborating with large

enterprises, working with various industries. There’s pilot cases,

including customized training scenarios, specific scenarios created

for corporate communication purposes, and even historical

reenactments brought alive with this technology. And the core of all

these different cases is the multi-use AR functionality. At this

stage we’re currently in, we’re exploring different industries and

different use cases for this technology, to find that the best

industry to serve with this technology. As we both know, there’s so

many different possibilities with XR technology.

Alan: Yeah. I think that’s a

problem for startups in this industry in general, is that you build a

product that could literally be sold to automotive, mining,

engineering, design, architectural, medical — you name it. Every

single industry can benefit from this technology. So, where do you

start? And where do you start to sell that? Which is one of the

reasons why we started this podcast. There’s so much education that

needs to be done, so that businesses that are listening — or even if

you’re in health care and you want to have remote collaboration

meetings — you can reach out to Kalle and the team at Glue, and

start using this technology immediately. If you’re in, let’s say, oil

and gas, and you want to have meetings — talk about the next

pipeline or whatever it is — the use cases in the industries are

unlimited. I think you’re only limited by the amount of bandwidth you

have for sales, unfortunately.

Kalle: And obviously the core of

Glue is a remote meetings — the actual meetings taking place — and

we have focused on human-to-human communication using the technology.

But you mentioned, for instance, doctors and the healthcare industry.

We’ve actually done simulation trainings based on Glue’s technology.

For instance, there’s a simulation training for teams of doctors and

nurses to practice crucial — sometimes even life-threatening —

patients scenarios. And with this kind of technology — having the

possibility to bring multiple users to the same virtual space — we

can actually create simulation trainings for teams of doctors and

nurses. Because obviously, when you’re a surgeon doing a surgery for

instance, you’re not there alone. It wouldn’t make any sense to use

XR technology alone, because in the actual situation, you are there

together with the nurses and your colleagues. We actually had that

kind of project underway currently.

And you mentioned also the mining

industries, and those heavy industries. Using our technology, we can

create, for instance, a digital twin of a large factory. And once

again, you can go there together with your colleagues that might be

sitting across the world, in a completely different continent, by

just putting the VR headset on. There’s a lot of different use cases

for the platform, for Glue. But the main thing is our platform —

whatever we do with the platform — is that you can share the

experience with others. The multi-user kind of functionality is the

core which stays throughout, whether it’s just remote meetings, or

simulation training, or a digital twin production.

Alan: You mentioned digital

twins, and one of the things that came to mind was a manufacturing

facility. You could take a LIDAR scanner or a laser scanner, go in,

capture a digital twin of the actual facility. Can you drop that into

the Glue platform, and then have a meeting in that facility?

Kalle: Yeah. Actually, what

we’re now exploring is a technology called Matterport. I think it’s

kind of a 360 camera that you put in an actual space — for instance,

an apartment — it takes a 360 degree picture of the space. Then you

move it a bit, and it stitches together all the pictures, and it

creates a 360 picture with all the depth as well. So basically, you

can create — with this kind of technology — true 6DoF virtual

spaces. So with this technology, we’ve actually been able to scan a

space. Last week, we actually scanned our office with this

technology, and then we can bring this scanned apartment to Glue. In

the future, we can go through aN apartment, for instance, or it can

be a factory. Using these optimized 360-degree cameras to scan the

space, and then bring it to our multi-user platform. This scanned

space can be used as any VR space. It can be many participants in the

space, and it gives vast possibilities for industries that are

working with older locations. Obviously, when you have a new

apartment, you have usually the building information models, and you

have a digital footprint of the design available. But when you’re

working with apartment that was built a hundred years ago, you need

to be able to somehow scan it — to make it a digital version of it.

And that is something that we’re currently exploring.

Alan: Incredible.

Kalle: Again, it offers quite nice possibilities to scan existing spaces and enable it to be accessed with multi-user technology.

Alan: One of the companies that

we work with, RealityVirtual, they do real quality photogrammetry of

places. So they’ll go, and take thousands of photos of a place,

convert that to a digital aspect, take away the lighting sources, and

allow you to relight it. So, you could take a museum, capture the

whole thing, relight it; you could then walk through the museum with

a flashlight, or you could relight it with disco lighting — whatever

you want it. But giving people the understanding of exact one-to-one

experience, and then having the Glue platform to… you know, “glue”

it all together, and allow people to experience it multi-user. That’s

really what sets it off. Because standing in a museum, looking at

some art by yourself is nice. It’s beautiful. But being able to

collaborate with people, and go to an art show together is going to

be magical.

Kalle: Yeah, and actually, as an

example of museum, we did a large project in Finland called Virtual

Turku in 1812. Turku is one of the biggest cities and the oldest

cities in Finland, and there was a devastating large fire in the city

in 1827, which basically destroyed large parts of the city center. We

decided to take the task together with the Museum of Turku, and

recreate a city center before the fire, using those multi-user

technologies. We created a virtual replica of the city center before

the fire, and we actually had guided tours with tour guides that

would otherwise be using pictures and traditional mediums. They used

Glue, and had guided tours using our platform, with people walking

through in the city center that burned 200 years ago.

Alan: Wow.

Kalle: It was so popular in

Finland that it was — I think — all the spaces were reserved within

the first hour when it became available.

Alan: That’s incredible. But

here’s the thing is… what people don’t understand is, as VR

headsets become more prevalent and it’s just something you have at

home ( [laughs] I’ve got two-dozen, although I am a little bit of an

outlier). But as they become more prevalent, where you don’t have to

hook it up to a computer, and you don’t have to wait for windows

updates and all the stuff — you just pick it up and you can start

experiencing things — you can say to your parents or grandparents,

“you want to go check out that art gallery today,” and hop

in Glue. And now we’re in the art gallery together, and share those

experiences across borders. One of the things that I think is going

to be really perfect for VR in general — and it’s not B2B, it has

nothing to do with XR for business — but, bringing these experiences

into retirement homes. Into places where people have very limited

mobility. Hospitals, or long-term care facilities, where having that

one hour of escapism or reprieve from the doldrums of just generic

walls all day can be the difference between a good quality of life

and not. And I think, being able to do that collaboratively with

family members is going to be just a beautiful experience.

Kalle: Yeah. Not just old

people, but also people with disabilities. I think there’s been a lot

of cases where social VR platforms have given people a possibility to

have discussions and meet other peoples online, using this XR

technology. Obviously we’re focusing on B2B — so basically,

companies an NGOs and those kind of things — but social VR platforms

that are focused on the consumers have had really nice results with

people that might have disabilities otherwise, and meeting people in

the real world. There’s a lot of different benefits with this kind of

technology.

Alan: So with that, we’ll move

back to B2B, because there’s so many use cases for this. But I want

to talk to you about the ones that you’re really focused on, which is

the B2B market. That meeting market. What are some of the challenges

that businesses are facing when looking to do this? What are the

barriers to entry?

Kalle: I think in general and

looking at the XR industry — and especially to remote collaboration

— one of the hurdles that still has been a problem (that isn’t

really a problem) is that many companies don’t understand that the

technology is already there. That they don’t acknowledge that it is

possible to have those kind of meetings that we had already in

October, between Helsinki and you in New York. That’s not sci-fi

anymore. It’s already here. But we need to educate companies to

understand that the technology is already available. As you

mentioned, it’s really hard to understand and believe if you haven’t

really tried to technology. So, we need to give as many people as

possible possibilities to try, to believe the technology. Because all

the people that have tried our platform and our technology have been

completely amazed by it. It’s really hard to explain without giving

them an actual trial of the technology.

Alan: It really is.

Kalle: The world is moving so

fast, that there is simply so much innovation going on that, if

you’re not within the industry, it might be that you don’t recognize

all the possibilities. It’s really possible today. So those companies

that are innovative, and brave to take the first step, are the ones

that are going to end up being the winners. Innovation is constant,

and you can’t deny it.

Alan: It’s moving faster and

faster and faster. I did a TED talk recently talking about the

marriage of education and technology, and how we’re entering into the

exponential age of humanity. How spatial computing, virtual/augmented

reality, artificial intelligence, IOT, 5G, quantum computers — every

one of these subsets on their own is revolutionary, moving the needle

forward. But when you combine them together, and you start seeing

augmented reality and block chain and artificial intelligence all

running with a 5G back end, you realize that these technologies

aren’t siloed. They’re all just going to be one part of our

day-to-day lives, and they’re coalescing at the exact same time.

Which — as humans — we’re very good at thinking in linear thought,

“if I do this, then I grow by 10 percent, or 20 percent,”

or whatever. We don’t really think in terms of exponentials, meaning,

“if I do this, I’ll grow by 2000 percent.”.

We’re just about to enter this

exponential phase of humanity, where things speed up much, much

faster. I think we need to look at platforms like Glue as a solution

to things like unnecessary business travel. If you look at nothing

else except for unnecessary business travel, that is a huge drain on

our resources. And most people don’t like flying around for business.

It’s great to go to a conference, that’s fine. But if you just need

to fly around the world for a meeting, that’s just crazy. And I know

nobody in business that I’ve ever talked to is like, “yeah, I

love getting on a plane for a one-hour meeting!” Said nobody,

ever. You’re solving not only a problem of business communications,

but also an environmental problem. If you look at it from that

standpoint — that Glue can really decrease business travel, and

that’s a direct cost, and it’s more effective than something like

Skype — it is not even close. It’s just leaps and bounds better.

It’s just a matter of time, if the headsets are becoming less

expensive, so the cost to experiment is less… do you guys have a

free trial of Glue?

Kalle: Yeah, obviously, we’ve

been — as said — at this stage, we’re collaborating with different

large enterprises within different industries. So at this stage, it’s

not commercially available on our websites, but it’s more

case-to-case, because at this stage we want to gather structured

feedback from the clients that are using Glue. At this stage, we

really want to develop the product and be a product, then be ready to

commercially ship the product at a later stage.

So, yeah, there’s trials. Trials can be

made. And we’ve let a bunch of people to have trials for a couple of

months, to gather feedback on how they are using the platform,

because we’re still kind of looking at what is the best way to

utilize this technology. Because, as you mentioned, there’s so many

different ways of using this technology. It can be remote meetings —

just basic white collar meetings — which are based on

two-dimensional assets of just, for instance, a company sales

meeting, which is basically based on figures and numbers. Whereas it

could be also a product lifespan, which is then basically the whole

lifespan from designing the product, to validating the product, to

eventually launching the product. And everything can be done in our

VR platform.

Alan: Incredible.

Kalle: Feel free to be in

contact with the trials. We would be happy to have discussions.

Alan: So, people listening: you

can sign up for trials. I think now is a great time to sign up,

because not only do you get an early access to what’s coming in the

future, but you also get the development team listening to what you

want, and what you need, as a first adopter of this technology.

Companies have the ability to actually give you feedback. That’s

incredible.

You mentioned design

meetings/collaborations, but then also, taking that exact same

platform, and you design a car in virtual reality. The management

sees it, approves it. Your designers go in there and then make some

changes in design, and then all of a sudden, now you can use it on

the retail side, and customers can now go in and look at this car.

There’s so many possibilities. It’s unbelievable. Is there anything

else you want people to learn about the Glue platform?

Kalle: As mentioned, the goal is

to create a platform; a platform that other XR houses, that are now

currently building projects — can be marketing purposes or different

cases for client companies — we want to reach out for those

companies as well. I said we’ve been building this technology for the

past two years with a team of roughly 30 people. So, it’s taken quite

many hours to build the multi-user technology to be as robust and

solid as it is today. So, we want to reach out to different companies

working with AR and VR projects to become a part of our ecosystem, so

that we can provide them our platform, that they can use to provide

multi-user experiences to their clients in the future. It doesn’t

make any sense that everybody uses two years to build a multi-user

platform, whereas it makes more sense to use a platform that can be

used to build on top of. As said, we want to be scalable, and in the

future, we simply cannot make all the customized projects and all the

cases we would like to do. As you mentioned, we don’t have the

bandwidth in sales and development to do everything, so we want to

collaborate with other actors in this space.

Alan: The question asks; what

kind of background — what kind of environment — should we create?

We’re going to get creative on this one.

Kalle: Yeah, maybe something

regarding the Canadian nature. It’s pretty nice, and there’s a lot of

similarities with the Finnish nature as well.

Alan: I think so. We’re just

great people. We just want to be helpful.

Kalle: Yeah, for sure.

Alan: What problem in the world

do you want to see solved using XR? It doesn’t have to be Glue

specifically, but what problem in the world do you want to see solved

using XR technologies?

Kalle: When you mentioned about

environmental issues, obviously this kind of technology can be used

quite well to reduce the amount of flying and travelling, because

using advanced, multi-user XR technologies you can basically teleport

your… I wouldn’t say “existence,” because it’s not a

similar teleportation as in Star Trek (at least not yet). But

basically, you can have the same functionalities as you would in a

meeting that you would be physically face-to-face with another

person. With virtual collaboration and remote presence of having

multiple users in the same virtual space, you can reduce the amount

of flying, which then directly helps to cope with global warming,

which is a megatrend that affects all of us. It’s a global

phenomenon. We need to act to slow it down. So with XR technology, we

have a completely new medium. A three-dimensional spatial medium that

we can use to achieve completely new dimensions of collaboration —

even better collaboration compared to a face-to-face meeting that you

have with anyone. You still have, for instance, gravity. Using a

computer-generated environment such as virtual reality, we can erase

the gravity. So basically, you can have a car engine in your hand,

and you can just leave it on the height of your head if you wish to

do so.

Alan: That’s amazing; if you’re

standing in-person, looking at a car engine that weighs a thousand

pounds, you can’t flip it upside down and look at the bottom. But you

can do that in VR/AR.

Kalle: Obviously, because

everything is generated by computer, so we don’t really have any

limitations. So when you think about it, that we can — using

platforms such as Glue — we can reduce the amount of flying. It

reduces the CO2 emissions, and it helps to fight global warming and

environmental change, and simultaneously provides you the possibly to

be a Superman and lift a thousand-pound engine on top of your head.

With these, it’s pretty clear in my opinion that this kind of

technology is going to revolutionize how we communicate as a species.

Alan: I agree. Most people try

it on, they go, “this is a great video game platform,” or

“this is a great concert platform,” whatever. My first

immediate thought was, “this is the future of human

communications.” And I stand by that. Great to hear that

somebody else thinks like that, too. I’m not just crazy!

Kalle: We wouldn’t have used

that much man hours to build a platform, and focus on the platform,

if people didn’t believe this is the way to go, and the future of

human communication. There’s so many benefits, using this kind of

technology.

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