The VR experience Firing Barry by Talespin is getting a lot of press lately, and on the surface, it may look like a slightly uncanny valley way to train someone how to give an old fella the can. But Talespin CEO Kyle Jackson tells Alan it’s more than that; it’s a tool to help humans flex their core competencies in everything from leadership skills to confidence-building. 

Alan: Hey, everybody, Alan

Smithson here, the XR for Business Podcast. Coming up next, Kyle

Jackson, founder of Talespin. You may have seen Barry the virtual

human that you can fire in real life. We'll be talking to them about

their enterprise software solutions that leverage immersive

technology to transform the way global workforces, learn, work,, and

collaborate. We'll also be discussing how you can use immersive

technologies as an assessment tool to better prepare your workforce

for exponential growth. All that and more on the XR for Business

Podcast. Kyle, welcome to the show, my friend.

Kyle: Hey. Thanks, Alan. Thanks

for having me.

Alan: Oh, it's so exciting. Ever

since I saw the video that popped up of Barry, the lovable older

gentleman avatar that you can fire. How did that come about? Tell us

about Talespin, and how did you get here, where you are now?

Kyle: Yeah, Barry became famous

very quickly, because it's such an ironic idea. And that's really

what I think caught people's attention; the idea that you could use

virtual humans for soft skills training was something that just

seemed sci-fi and ironic. But then once you started to peel back the

layers of it, it just starts to make a lot of sense.So how we got

there, was we started looking at all of the future skills gaps,

surveys, research, everything that was surfacing from the Shift

Commission, to the World Economic Forum, to McKinsey Global

Institute. And we just kept seeing -- obviously opposite AI and

automation and robotics, all the things that are going on one side of

technology -- that there was this increasing index toward soft skills

for some of the most underserved areas for businesses going forward.

We're building this platform which is supposed to help transfer

skills and really align us to the future of work. And every single

survey says soft skills is one of the things we should be looking at.

And we went, "Wow, is there anything we can do there?" The

thing that was most important for us in thinking about that was we

have to hit emotional realism to do this. This isn't like a

point-and-click replacement. It needs to be something that when I'm

sitting in there and I'm opposite Barry or any other virtual human

now, that I believe the emotions and the frustration and all the

things that are thrown at me. And to do that kind of at scale. From

both an assessment standpoint, content, and deployment to large

companies.

Alan: So how did you guys

overcome the Uncanny Valley of Barry? I've seen so many human avatars

that are almost there, but they got that creepy feeling. And if

you're going for emotional realism, creepy is not what you want on

the delivery side.

Kyle: No. Well, we kind of

pulled up short in our opinion. So we were pushing further than where

we landed. And you can get to even more photo-real than Barry is. But

soon as you do, you start to push over that ledge and it starts to

really be creepy. We're kind of right in the sweet spot of north of

Pixar, but not hitting realism. And that seems to work. We focused a

lot on micro-expressions and figuring out like a programmatic way to

add a lot of micro-expression to the silent moments too, because I

think one of the things that technologists immediately do is we had

to figure out how to do animation systems, lip sync systems and

things like that for when people are talking, but especially in soft

skills, a good majority of the hairy stuff is the unspoken. And so we