XR for Business

By Alan Smithson from MetaVRseBusiness Technology Arts

XR for Business episodes

September 02, 2019 One Part Geek, One Part Chic: XR Fashion with Electric Runway CEO Amanda Cosco
The technology we talk about on this
show is pretty cool, but what’s function without form, right?
Thankfully, there’s plenty of both to go around, as Electric Runway’s
founder Amanda Cosco drops by to talk about. TL;DR — there’s a lot
of cool ways to use XR to stay in-fashion, from virtual try-ons, to
AR-enabled hair colour-changing mirrors.
Alan: Today’s guest is a great
friend of mine; Amanda Cosco, CEO of Electric Runway. One part geek,
the other part chic; Amanda Cosco is a leading voice in the
intersection of fashion and technology. Through her work with
Electric Runway, Amanda is committed to bridging the gap between
these two seemingly opposite industries, to help humanize technology,
and help push the fashion industry into the future. In addition to
contributing to notable publications such as WWD, Toronto Star, and
Wearable, Amanda shares her insights through talks given on both
local and international stages. She’s made several radio and TV
appearances, including CBC’s The Goods and TVO’s The Agenda. She’s
been recognized as a top woman in wearable technology, as well as a
key thinker on the future of fashion. As a consultant, Amanda shares
her expertise in the innovation economy to help future-proof business
models and save her clients time and money. Amanda earned a master’s
degree of arts from Ryerson in Toronto, and prior to that she
graduated from York University. She holds a certificate of digital
media skills from OCAD University. And she’s the chair of the Fashion
and Business Management Professional Advisory Committee at Centennial
College, as well as the Board of Champions at the Bata Shoe Museum.
If you want to learn more about Amanda and her company, Electric
Runway, visit electricrunway.com. Amanda, welcome to the show.
Amanda: Thanks so much for
having me, Alan, and thanks for that kind introduction.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure.
I’m so excited. You are a leader in this industry. You’ve been in the
wearable space forever. Tell us how you got started in this.
Amanda: Well, Electric Runway
actually began with a future fashion runway show that I curated for
the Maker Festival in Toronto. So the brand very much has its roots
in performance and the actual runway, but it’s evolved over the
years. And I had been a part of the burgeoning wearable technology
scene in Toronto. And it wasn’t until I covered a technology festival
in Toronto and had the opportunity to interview a cyborg — a
self-identified cyborg — for the Globe and Mail and did a story on
him. It wasn’t until then that I realized that wearable computing is
absolutely going to change us, as humans. And that’s when I decided
to focus my career as a journalist and entrepreneur on technology on
the body. And that’s also the time that Electric Runway began. And it
quickly became the umbrella under which I do lots of speaking and
events and curation, in order to just bring everything together,
that’s going on in this exciting industry. And what’s really great
about it, is that being focused on fashion and beauty gives me a
really specific lens, through which I can view technological
innovations like augmented reality and virtual reality. So, rather
than trying to cover everything that’s happening in technology —
which is impossible these days, because technology is disrupting
every industry — I’m allowed to sit in this niche of fashion,
beauty, retail, consumer experiences and really just talk about how
emerging technologies are brushing elbows with these innovations.
Alan: Incredible. So you’ve seen
a lot of technologies in the fashion space. With respect to
virtual/augmented/mixed reality, I know you hosted an event — about
a year ago — I was at, and all of the mannequins had VR headsets on
them.
Amanda: Yeah, yeah. [laughs]
Alan: It’s incredible. They were
all decorated, all nice. They had like… it was like Bejeweled VR
headsets.
Amanda: Yeah. We were trying
to… well, it’s funny, that conference — it was called In-store,
and it was an immersive event on the future of retail — and we were
really trying to highlight the most prominent technologies that were
of interest to the retail industry, and they were augmented reality,
virtual reality, and artificial intelligence. And I had decided on
those themes in advance. And shortly after the event, Mark Zuckerberg
from Facebook got on stage at the Facebook annual conference. And he
said the three technologies that Facebook is going to be focusing on
in the coming years are augmented reality, virtual reality, and
artificial intelligence. So I guess Zuckerberg and I were on the same
wavelength that day. [laughs]
Alan: [laughs] Awesome. That’s
something that very few people can say.
Amanda: [laughs] Yeah.
Alan: So let me ask you a
question. What is one XR technology that you’ve seen really deployed
well? Because a lot of people listening to this podcast are retailers
that are thinking, “how can we leverage this technology?”
So, what are some of the things that you’ve seen, that have worked
really well?
Amanda: Yeah. So, of course,
we’ve seen a lot of gimmicks, right? So we saw Zara tried to have
augmented reality models in-store, where the consumer would have to
download an app and they’d be able to see this mini runway show.
We’ve seen lots of virtual mirrors and… a lot of the time it’s all
hype, right? When it comes down to, “what’s the return on
investment for this? How does it connect to your business goals?”
There’s a disconnect there.
But what we’re actually seeing is, when
it comes to fashion and beauty, there’s a strong data case to be made
for allowing consumers to try on things before they buy them, on
their live video, on their smartphone. And this augmented reality
technology can be embedded into your live video of your app, on your
smartphone or it can be embedded into the mirrors in your in-store
retail experience.
One example that comes to mind that I
covered early on, is Sephora’s collaboration with Toronto based
ModiFace. ModiFace, before it was acquired for L’Oreal, worked with
various beauty companies to embed AR technology into their mirrors
in-store, as well as into the apps on smartphones, so that people
could actually try on lipstick before they purchased it. And this was
a real great example of how augmented reality can connect to your
business goals, because of course, once you decided on the lipstick
that you liked, you could put it right in your cart. All of the
lipsticks were connected to an actual product in this Sephora store.
So you can imagine how much work went into categorizing and
cataloging the different colors and finishes of lipstick. And now
that’s connected to a shopping cart, so you can actually shop in
augmented reality without going into the store and having to try on
the lipstick. You can try it on at home and then it’s shipped to you
directly. So the try-before-you-buy experience is really exciting for
me. And I think that there’s a lot of potential in this area.
Alan: You know, it’s
interesting. I wrote an article about six months ago called Augmented
Reality’s First Killer App: VTOs, or Virtual Try-Ons. And I agree
with you 100 percent. If ModiFace — which is a Toronto based
company, and you’re based in Toronto as well — if ModiFace had
continued going the way they were going, they probably would have
been working with every single makeup company in the world. But
L’Oreal being the forward-thinking company that it is really made, —
in my opinion, — an amazing acquisition with buying ModiFace. And it
left Sephora and these other companies out in the cold, because they
took the technology with them.
Amanda: Yeah. And the beauty
industry is so competitive, and there’s so many new brands emerging
that are direct-to-consumer. For example, like Kylie Cosmetics and
with Kim Kardashian and her contour palette, there’s just absolutely
so much out there, and there’s so much competition that you need to
be digital first. You need to have a digital strategy in place. You
need to be able to connect with new consumers who are increasingly
mobile focused. So it wasn’t just a fun, “hey, I can make my
lips different colors.” It is that, but it’s connected to
commerce. So I do think it is the killer app. And like I said, I
think there’s a ton to be developed when it comes to trying on
clothes in the future.
Alan: I agree. I think that’s a
much more difficult problem. One of the things that I thought would
have been a really difficult problem, but you recorded a video — I
believe it was at CES — of you trying on a virtual try-on for hair
colors?
Amanda: Yeah, absolutely.
Alan: And that video went viral
— and I’ll
put it in the show notes, if anyone is interested — but yeah,
tell us how that happened.
Amanda: It seems it was my 15
minutes of Internet fame, but I got on the plane home from CES —
which is the annual technology conference in Las Vegas, Nevada, as
I’m sure your listeners know — and I got home and as I landed, my
phone was exploding with messages after I turned it off airplane
mode. My friends were saying, you’re on the front page of Reddit,
you’re on the front page of Imgur. And it was this video, as you
said, that I had recorded from the show floor at CES. I was at the
retail innovations area of CES, and it was a quieter area of the
show. But of course, with Electric Runway, we go in to technology
events and conferences looking for that fashion and beauty and
consumer experience angles. I was really interested in what they were
showcasing in the retail lounge. And yeah, there was this company and
it’s called Perfect Corp. That’s their real name — Perfect Corp. And
they were showing off this augmented reality technology that’s very
similar to the Sephora experience with ModiFace, which allowed you to
try the lipstick on. This was actually for trying different hair
colors, which I thought was really great because as a woman who’s
dyed her hair before, you’re always worried how is it going to look?
And with so many different hair colors being popular right now, like
pink and blue, you were able to really have a lot of fun with it. So
it was actually embedded into the mirror at the Perfect Corp booth.
And it’s called Beauty Cam app. And you can actually — again, on
your live video — try on the different hair color.
But what impressed so many people with
that was how accurate the tracking was. So, I have asymmetrical hair;
one side of my hair is short, the other is a little bit longer. So
with hair apps, I’ve seen a lot of like “coloring outside the
lines,” let’s call it. But this one was so on point. And as you
moved, you saw the color move with each individual strand of hair.
And it was so seamless that it looked like magic. And I really
believe that that’s why the video went so viral, was because it was
really just this moment of magic. And I really believe that when
technology works at it’s best, it feels like magic and it creates
that awe inspiring experience where you’re saying to yourself, “wow,
what else could I do with this technology or what else can be done?”
And this looks like The Matrix. It’s the future, you know? So I think
that’s why it was so viral, and why so many people decided to share
it. It was just that magical experience.
Alan: It was really cool. I know
I shared it, and it got thousands of views on LinkedIn.
So, we were talking about the mobile
smartphones and using AR from the phones or the camera feeds,
Snapchat’s using it extensively. Facebook’s got their Facebook face
filters and stuff. What about actual wearable glasses? What have you
seen? Is there anybody using that in the fashion world now? I know
one thing that I saw was Magic Leap partnered with H&M and…
Moshino?
Amanda: Moschino, yeah,
absolutely. So there’s a lot of experimentation in terms of smart
glasses in the fashion and beauty industry right now, for different
use cases. It kind of feels like how augmented or virtual reality was
maybe four years ago. With the smart glasses lots of companies are
trying to figure out how they can use this. And one of the
experiences, one that you mentioned, I recently saw at Collision
Conference in Toronto and H&M had partnered with the Magic Leap
to allow attendees to design their T-shirt in mixed reality using the
Magic Leap. So it’s kind of a playful, high tech take on the T-shirt
giveaway that you normally see at conferences. In this case,
attendees were fitted with a Magic Leap 1 and they had a blank canvas
— in this case, it was a black T-shirt — and they could pull in
different augmented reality elements and place them on the T-shirt
where they liked. And once they were ready, they were able to
actually print the T-shirt at the conference — they had a little
team of screen printers there — and they took the digital file and
made you a T-shirt in real time, right there while you waited. So you
got to say, like, I customized this T-shirt and it’s a great story.
H&M has this big sustainability initiative, where they’re
recycling lots of used clothing. And so lots of the T-shirts came
from that recycling program. It also positions them next to Magic
Leap, which is future, really, of mixed reality experiences.
I think it was a great campaign. It was
great for the users. It was great for awareness. And it really
provoked us to think about how the Magic Leap and other mixed reality
headsets can be used as a design tool.
Alan: Very cool, yeah. I
actually was at Collision and I tried the other demos and not that
one. I didn’t even know about it. Now I feel left out. Magic Leap,
what are we doing? We’ve got to get in there.
Amanda: I know. Well, Collision
Conference, again, was really big. I think it was a conference that
was bigger than most people expected for Toronto. And there’s so much
there that you really had to pick and choose what you did. Though, of
course, as soon as I saw fashion, I went right for it.
Alan: I saw “Healthcare in
Smart Cities” and went for that. I wish I’d got a T-shirt that I
designed in augmented reality. How cool is that?
Amanda: Yeah.
Alan: So what are some other
things that you’ve seen? I know you’ve been working on some stuff as
well. So I want to give you the opportunity to share those things. I
know some of them are probably still under NDA, but what are the
things that you’ve seen?
Amanda: Well, because Electric
Runway is half media and half consulting. So, we have a B2B side as
well as media arm — and on the media side, we’re really covering
everything that’s out there. And what I’ve seen, when I’m wearing my
journalist hat, is a lot of experimentation and play in mixed reality
with lots of companies just trying to see what’s going to work. And
again, separating what is a gimmick and what’s going to actually have
a long term effect. So we talked about the try-before-you-buy
experience. I’ve seen lots of merchandising tools that actually allow
in-store employees to use a headset to basically download information
about how a store should be merchandised, whether that’s a grocery
store or an apparel brand, which is a digital innovation compared to
the way it used to be done. It used to be that lead merchandiser
would have to go to all the different locations and make sure that
there was a uniformity to all of the different displays, so that
you’d have brand consistency, but now you can actually do this for
virtual reality where you’re showing how a store shelf or a display
window should look.
We’re also seeing in warehousing smart
glasses being used for the pickers, the people who are actually going
and getting those items that you’ve ordered on Amazon from the
warehouse and loading it into a cart to be shipped off. They’re able
to have that information displayed to them on a heads-up display like
the Vuzix to make them hands-free so that they can be more efficient
in their workflow. So it’s been not only on the design side, but on
this logistics and backend side in the fashion industry. And it’s
really exciting. You know, everything from store design, you just see
so many different potentials for improving the supply chain and
fashion, which is a huge pain point for a lot of people right now,
especially with retail getting faster and faster. The big factor for
people who are manufacturing now isn’t so much cost. It’s speed,
right? They want to be able to bring things to market quickly. And so
different companies like Li & Fung are experimenting with
bringing in augmented and virtual reality for speeding up the whole
process, the whole process that goes into bringing a T-shirt into
your home, so that it’s just more efficient and more direct.
Alan: Yeah. I was just at
LiveWorx — which is PTC’s conference — it’s mainly enterprise
solutions, so if you’re building a boat or you’re building a ship or
you’re building a military installation or something like that. But I
saw a lot of overlap with the fact that they’re using heads-up
displays for repairs. But the fact that these companies are starting
to look at them from a logistics standpoint, how do we just give
people better experiences when they’re picking and packing in
warehouses, things like that? So I think it’s really exciting. One of
the amazing things that I think we’ve only just scratched the surface
is is training. I know one of our interviews previous, Jonathan Moss
from Sprint, they’ve trained 30,000 people using augmented reality.
So they give every store employee the training on an iPhone or a
device and let them learn in three dimensions in augmented reality
about the services and products that they’re offering. And I think
this will be really, really amazing as we move into fashion. If you
look at every clerk in every retail store in the world has a
smartphone. How can we push better, more immersive type of content
for educating them on how to sell better to their customers?
Amanda: Yeah, absolutely. And to
inform the consumer more. Because one of the big conversations that’s
happening in the fashion industry right now is sustainability and
transparency. They’re kind of two separate conversations, but
underneath the same umbrella of ethical manufacturing. And you can
use augmented reality to help bring a product to life, to tell a
story about who made it or where it came from or the materials. And I
think that digitizing of goods, of actual material goods — exactly
as you’re saying — allows you to add this layer of content to a
consumable product, that we didn’t have the opportunity to before. So
it’s a really exciting time.
Alan: There was a client that
called us and they wanted to have 3D models of their shirts. And so
we modeled some shirts and some mockups for them. But the idea for
them was that they wanted to speed up the process from design to
prototype to purchase, because the current system, they design, they
prototype in — let’s say China or India, wherever it’s made — they
ship the prototype over physically by a plane. Then they take a look
at them, they make any changes, and then they send them back. And
this process can take six months, to design a T-shirt or design a
golf shirt or whatever it is. By using the 3D models and being able
to see it real time, I think it’s really a game changer for these
people.
Amanda: Yeah, and I believe at
Li & Fung, who is experimenting with Magic Leap for exactly that.
And that will cut down on their shipping costs. It will cut down on
the speed to market, which is very important. As I said, for most
retailers, it’s speed. That is the biggest factor for them, not cost.
So if you can streamline that process and make it more efficient in
the process, you know, you’re cutting down on the amount of trips
that a specific garment has to take overseas or a shipping container,
then you’re making a more sustainable product in the end. And we’re
not too far away from a world in which nothing is manufactured until
it’s consumed already. So reversing the whole supply chain model
using mixed reality by creating something custom and then only
manufacturing it once it’s been purchased, which will solve the
overstock problem that many retailers are experiencing.
Alan: Yeah, I think Zara has
kind of got the best hold on almost real-time development of
products, they use their managers in store to really identify trends
immediately and then they make just what they need for those stores.
Amanda: Yeah, yeah. I mean, Zara
is doing it. H&M is doing it. I’ve seen different companies that
are doing it with scanning technologies, to create a perfect pair of
denim for you, so that you’re not getting something off the rack, a
standard size 6 or whatever it is. You’re getting something that was
actually made for your body, which is a better product for you in the
long run because it fits better and customized to your liking. So
hopefully the idea for me is that the supply chain and everything
about the entire back end of the fashion industry can be made more
efficient with new emerging technologies. But the optimist in me
talking.
Alan: Well, I think it’s needed.
I mean, we’re growing as a society, as humanity. We’re growing
rapidly. And we’re reaching this point where everybody knows that the
environment is vital to our sustained life on this planet. And yet we
still are consuming more and more things. So I think in the near
future, these technologies, AI, VR, AR, if we just tweak them
slightly for sustainability, transparency, what you were mentioning
earlier, I think we can really continue this growth, but in a
sustainable and economically responsible way as well.
Amanda: Yeah, and you know what?
And a lot of people might not know this, but the fashion industry is
actually the second most polluting industry in the entire world, next
to oil and gas. So if there’s room for efficiency, there’s room for
technological innovation. It’s definitely, definitely there within
the fashion industry.
Alan: Wow, I didn’t know that.
Amanda: Yeah.
Alan: That’s crazy. Is there any
way to recycle clothes, for example? I’m wearing a sweater, I’m done
with it. I mean, obviously, Canada; we have second hand stores and
stuff like that. But is there any way to take that cotton in and
reuse it?
Amanda: Yes, certainly. I mean,
it depends if it is cotton, or if it’s viscose, or spandex; it
depends on the material. Certain materials break down and can go back
into the environment in a way that’s a lot easier than something like
a spandex, which can’t break down. So it really depends. And there’s
a lot to be said right now about the emerging trend of recommerce, so
selling your clothes and goods secondhand online before it’s broken
down and put back into the environment. So the answer is yes and no.
I mean, yes. Certainly there are ways of developing recycling systems
for fabric scraps, but not everything. It’s not like you can just
throw it all into a bin and voila, pops out a new–
Alan: I think that that’s the
problem, is that a lot of the fabrics that we wear on a daily basis
contain multiple different types of fabric.
Amanda: Yes.
Alan: People don’t realize that
when you buy a pair of jeans, and it’s got spandex and cotton and a
number of other things in it.
Amanda: Right, yeah, yeah. So
this conversation of the circular economy is very prominent right now
in the fashion industry, and a lot of brands and retailers are
thinking about how they can leverage new technologies to become more
efficient.
Alan: Absolutely. So we would be
remiss if we didn’t talk about the… I don’t know if you saw the
LeBron James Nike augmented reality experience, that was in the store
and LeBron kind of pops out of this poster and slam dunks. Did you
see that?
Amanda: I didn’t see it in
person. But I did see an article about it.
Alan: It’s incredible. Went
viral, got like a hundred million views.
Amanda: Yeah, it’s very cool the
way that you can now add content to fashion in a new way, just like
we were talking about before.
Alan: Absolutely. Have you seen
the T-shirts, where you can point your phone at the augmented reality
T-shirts, and it picks up the trigger and comes to life. I saw that
maybe three years ago, and I thought for sure this is gonna be a huge
thing, but it never really took off.
Amanda: I’ve seen some examples,
like Marks & Spencer has a kid line of dinosaurs and lions and
all the different animals, and they come to life and if you have two
of them, they kind of interact. So that’s a lot of fun for kids. I’ve
definitely seen augmented reality T-shirts that change over time. So
one day it’s going to trigger this experience, but the next day it’ll
be an entirely new experience.
Alan: Oh, that’s cool. What
brands are doing that?
Amanda: So there’s a company
called Drawsta out of California — I can’t remember specifically
where — but she’s working on a number of augmented reality T-shirts.
And yeah, it’s been increasingly an era of experimentation. But I
still think that, as you mentioned, we’re just scratching the surface
in terms of what’s possible and we’re just seeing what sticks now,
over time.
Alan: It’s going to be
interesting because I think– we all have phones. And so for the
foreseeable future, in the next five years anyway, we’ll be using our
phones. But I think there’s going to be a major cultural shift when
companies like Apple decide to bring AR glasses to the world and
maybe they do it in five years, maybe they do it in two years, we
don’t know. But when that comes, you’re going to wear glasses that
recognize the world around you and give you really incredible world
context experiences. And one thing that we didn’t touch on, which I’d
love to get your input on, is the ability to use computer vision to
understand products. So, for example, I pull out my phone, I go,
“hey, I really love your shirt.” I point my phone and take
a picture of it. And an AI algorithm uses computer vision and says,
“oh, that shirt is from H&M, you can buy it here.”
Amanda: Yeah.
Alan: And that’s all done real
time.
Amanda: Image recognition and
computer vision is definitely a huge thing for the fashion industry,
especially because clothing is so visual. So I’ve seen lots of
experimentation with Google and their new software to be able to not
only recognize a shirt but be able to serve you up suggestions for
where you can buy one similar. That connected commerce experience,
leveraging computer vision and then plugging it into “what else
is available on the Internet” is emerging. It’s burgeoning, and
it’s very exciting, especially for someone who likes to shop as much
as I do. But I didn’t learn this until I interviewed the lady who
just wrote a book on augmented reality for fashion — her name is
escaping me right now, but I will think of it by the end of this
anecdote — but anyway, she works for Google, and she was telling me
that the emergence of image recognition and reverse image search, it
actually came from a fashion moment.
I don’t know if you remember when J-Lo
wore that Versace dress to… I believe it was the Grammys, and it
was like a plunging-neck green dress and everyone was searching for
it online. That’s when Google actually decided that they were going
to create a reverse image look-up, so that you could search things
via image. And it’s interesting that a fashion moment kind of created
that technology.
And the name of the author, sorry…
“augmented reality for fashion book.”.. I’m Googling right
now. See, Google?
Alan: I was Googling the same
thing. I’m looking for it as well.
Amanda: It’s Leanne Luce! I just
remembered it, yeah. So, she’s written a whole book on augmented
reality for the fashion industry — or no, I’m sorry; artificial
intelligence for the fashion industry, because it speaks about the
computer visioning. She is much more educated on that than I am, but
if you’re interested in learning more about how that technology is
going to change the fashion industry, she has a whole chapter on
computer vision.
Alan: Oh, incredible. So it’s
called “Artificial
Intelligence for Fashion.”
Amanda: Yeah, it’s a great read.
Alan: Amazing. I will put it in
the show notes.
Amanda: Yeah.
Alan: Well, is there any last
things you want to talk about? I know you have a podcast and you’ve
done — what, you said a hundred and something episodes?
Amanda: Yeah. The Electric
Runway podcast is on its 115th episode and we interview the makers
and shakers that are forefronting fashion, beauty and consumer
experiences. The episodes are a one-on-one interview format. They run
about 20 minutes each and they’re available for free on iTunes,
SoundCloud and Stitcher.
32 min
September 02, 2019 One Part Geek, One Part Chic: XR Fashion with Electric Runway CEO Amanda Cosco
The technology we talk about on this
show is pretty cool, but what's function without form, right?
Thankfully, there's plenty of both to go around, as Electric Runway's
founder Amanda Cosco drops by to talk about. TL;DR -- there's a lot
of cool ways to use XR to stay in-fashion, from virtual try-ons, to
AR-enabled hair colour-changing mirrors.
Alan: Today's guest is a great
friend of mine; Amanda Cosco, CEO of Electric Runway. One part geek,
the other part chic; Amanda Cosco is a leading voice in the
intersection of fashion and technology. Through her work with
Electric Runway, Amanda is committed to bridging the gap between
these two seemingly opposite industries, to help humanize technology,
and help push the fashion industry into the future. In addition to
contributing to notable publications such as WWD, Toronto Star, and
Wearable, Amanda shares her insights through talks given on both
local and international stages. She's made several radio and TV
appearances, including CBC's The Goods and TVO’s The Agenda. She's
been recognized as a top woman in wearable technology, as well as a
key thinker on the future of fashion. As a consultant, Amanda shares
her expertise in the innovation economy to help future-proof business
models and save her clients time and money. Amanda earned a master's
degree of arts from Ryerson in Toronto, and prior to that she
graduated from York University. She holds a certificate of digital
media skills from OCAD University. And she's the chair of the Fashion
and Business Management Professional Advisory Committee at Centennial
College, as well as the Board of Champions at the Bata Shoe Museum.
If you want to learn more about Amanda and her company, Electric
Runway, visit electricrunway.com. Amanda, welcome to the show.
Amanda: Thanks so much for
having me, Alan, and thanks for that kind introduction.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure.
I'm so excited. You are a leader in this industry. You've been in the
wearable space forever. Tell us how you got started in this.
Amanda: Well, Electric Runway
actually began with a future fashion runway show that I curated for
the Maker Festival in Toronto. So the brand very much has its roots
in performance and the actual runway, but it's evolved over the
years. And I had been a part of the burgeoning wearable technology
scene in Toronto. And it wasn't until I covered a technology festival
in Toronto and had the opportunity to interview a cyborg -- a
self-identified cyborg -- for the Globe and Mail and did a story on
him. It wasn't until then that I realized that wearable computing is
absolutely going to change us, as humans. And that's when I decided
to focus my career as a journalist and entrepreneur on technology on
the body. And that's also the time that Electric Runway began. And it
quickly became the umbrella under which I do lots of speaking and
events and curation, in order to just bring everything together,
that's going on in this exciting industry. And what's really great
about it, is that being focused on fashion and beauty gives me a
really specific lens, through which I can view technological
innovations like augmented reality and virtual reality. So, rather
than trying to cover everything that's happening in technology --
which is impossible these days, because technology is disrupting
every industry -- I'm allowed to sit in this niche of fashion,
beauty, retail, consumer experiences and really just talk about how
emerging technologies are brushing elbows with these innovations.
Alan: Incredible. So you've seen
a lot of technologies in the fashion space. With respect to
virtual/augmented/mixed reality, I know you hosted an event -- about
a year ago -- I was at, and all of the mannequins had VR headsets on
them.
Amanda: Yeah, yeah. [laughs]
Alan: It's i
0 min
August 30, 2019 Navigating XR with We Are PHASE2’s Samantha Wolfe
Alan – and XRIgnite — isn’t the only XR shepherding game in town! Samantha Wolfe — who co-authored Marketing New Realities with previous XR for Business guest Cathy Hackl — drops by to share her own insights on how best to help brands, businesses, and campaigns venture into the XR minefield, and come out the other end unscathed.
Alan: Today’s guest is Samantha
Wolfe, managing partner at we are PHASE2. Samantha is a marketing and
branding strategist, focused on making “never done before”
a reality. Sam is a co-author of the book “Marketing New
Realities: An Introduction to Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
Marketing, Branding, and Communications,” and is a contributing
author to Charlie Fink’s book “Convergence: How the World Will
Be Painted With Data,” with a chapter focused on augmented
reality for brands. She also runs the largest marketing and branding
Facebook group focused on VR, AR, and MR, which has over 2,500
members. She’s a board member of the New York VR Expo and South by
Southwest Pitch, and has been on the judging panel for the Games of
Change Festival and the AWE Auggie Awards. To learn more about
Samantha, you can visit samanthagwolfe.com or wearephase2.com.
Samantha, welcome to the show.
Samantha: Hi, Alan. Good to be
here.
Alan: It’s so amazing to have
you on the show. We’ve known each other for a few years now, and we
keep seeing each other at different conferences, and it’s always fun.
I think the last time was AWE, but before that was CES. This year we
got to hang out in a glass booth; almost like a fishbowl in the
middle of CES.
Samantha: I think our picture
went up on Fox News or something like that.
Alan: Oh, did it really?
Samantha: Like, the two people
in the middle of the glass booth for VR Voice. And we had such a fun
conversation. I think Bob Fine was a little taken aback about how
excited the two of us got together. So I’m excited for this
conversation!
Alan: [laughs] This is gonna be
a great conversation. And for those of you who don’t know, Bob Fine
runs a wonderful podcast called VR Voice, so you can check that out
as well. Samantha, you’re the managing partner at we are PHASE2. So,
talk to us a bit about what is we are PHASE2, and what are you guys
doing? And then we’ll just have a conversation around the wonderful
marketing opportunities that virtual and augmented reality afford.
Samantha: Absolutely. The way I
like to talk about we are PHASE2 is that we are about marketing with
and for emerging technologies. We help companies who are in the
emerging tech space be able to market and communicate what they’re
doing, but we also have companies who want to market to and with
those emerging technologies. So if you’re an advertising agency or a
brand who says, you know, “we want to do something really
innovative,” and want to integrate — whether it be AR, VR, AI,
IoT — into what you’re doing, that you could come to us and we’ll
help you through that process. Or if you’re like, “You know
what? We need some developers to help work on this campaign that
we’re doing.” We’ll work with you as well. The other thing I’ve
said is marketing emerging technologies and emerging technology
marketing.
Alan: Emerging technology
marketing. I get it. So–
Samantha: It’s both ways.
[laughs]
Alan: Are you talking about
virtual/augmented/mixed reality, or are you guys also diving into
artificial intelligence and machine learning and IoT sensors and that
kind of stuff?
Samantha: Yes. It’s basically
anything that touches emerging tech in marketing. I end up being more
of the subject matter expert when it comes to VR and AR. But Jennifer
Usdan McBride — who’s one of the three managing partners in the
group — she has hit quite a number of more technologies beyond that.
She used to run Digital and Innovation for J. Walter Thompson, has
won Cannes Lions and has a super-impressive résumé, by far. I end
up talking about AR and VR and the technologies that are related to
it — which is, as you know, you end up getting into AI and machine
learning under that umbrella.
Alan: You can’t really have XR
without computer vision, machine learning–
Samantha: No…
Alan: Doesn’t really work
anymore. So we’re entering a new phase of technology.
Samantha: The general idea was
the fact that, it’s based on this idea that sometimes people have
that phase 1 of — whether it be an idea or a technology — then
phase 3 is success or lots of money. And then sometimes, they end up
forgetting the phase 2 in-between; of how to build it, grow it,
market it. And then we work with companies to figure that out.
Alan: We just recently launched
— as you know — the XR Ignite program as a community hub and
connector for startup studios and developers to connect with
corporate clients, and really prepare them for doing business with
these corporate clients. And it sounds like that’s similar to what
you guys are doing, on a one-off basis. So maybe there’s some great
synergies; we can feed each other some content.
Samantha: Absolutely. I’ve
learned in working this industry; I’m not just a connector. I think
you are someone in this [field], but a bit of a super connector. So
it’s just sort of like, “oh, you should meet this person and
that person, then do this and do that, and these are the ideas we can
bring in,” and it just ends up being ten ideas coming at you at
once, which — I think — you and I are similar in that respect.
Alan: Yeah, it’s a bit of a
problem, because you talk to a client and say, “hey, there’s
your problem. Here’s ten different ways to solve it.”
Samantha: Right.
Alan: That overwhelms people. So
I’ve had to have a buffer now in-between. When I meet with a
customer, I’m not allowed to tell them anything; I just listen. And
then I come back, I say to my team, “here’s a dozen ways to solve
the problem. Here’s all the ways we can service them. Here’s all the
different price points.” And then my team breaks it down into a
more palatable, easy-to-deliver [form], and then gives them a
good/better/best scenario, versus good/better/best/beyond/this and
that/everything.
Samantha: [laughs] It ends up
being similar, but I end up sort of doing it myself, because I’ve
found I’m a good editor. I end up just throwing everything down on a
page, and then editing it back, and then finding a pattern within
that, saying, “it’s ultimately about these three things.” I
just need to put it down, and then a day to back to revise and edit
it.
Alan: So, can you talk to us
about some of the companies you’re either working with, or some of
the projects you’ve done recently? Or… let’s talk about some
specifics here. What are some of the specific things that you and
your team are working on, or doing, or excited about?
Samantha: Well, the thing that’s
been interesting is that… I’ve signed so many NDAs recently, so I
end up having to talk a little bit more in generalities. Often
because — you know — you work with an emerging tech company, and
they don’t necessarily want everybody to know what they’re doing,
until they’re ready to explain it. So there’s some on both…
actually, there’s so many… we’ve worked with some companies to —
say, they are doing amazing technological breakthroughs, and yet
people on the other side of the desk that they’re pitching to, or in
the universe — the social media universe — they just aren’t getting
the recognition that they should. So we work with them to just say,
“What is it that makes you unique? And what is it that your
customers want to hear from you?” So we sort of break that down
into easy bite-size pieces, for them to communicate, and hat we’re
repping [them]. One of those projects that — we’ve done it a few
times over now, also, working with a couple different companies that
are larger, you would know them — name brands that are wanting to
work with VR and AR developers to actually create a platform and a
community for themselves. I wish I could say their names, but I can’t
say. We’ve also worked with a healthcare company that wanted to
prototype something, to be able to communicate better with the
doctors that are their customers. And then we’ve worked with some
agencies, too, who are trying to sort of articulate what it is that
they want to be selling to their clients, and their customers, to be
more innovative and on the cutting-edge.
Alan: Let’s talk about
specifics. There’s got to be some specifics here. What are the things
that are really moving the needle for customers?
Samantha: Well, I think that a
lot of companies go in wanting to have the biggest, best, more
fanciest technologies. And sometimes, it ends up being more about a
question of what their audience really wants, and what their budget
allows. We were talking about it at Augmented World Expo. Like right
now, in the state of innovation, when it comes to VR and AR, it is
really about managing both immersion versus reach. We can’t — right
now — do both. It’s sort of one or the other. You can have a highly,
highly immersive, high-end VR experience; but then, you’re not really
going to get that distribution that you’re looking for, unless you
already have a event that you can showcase that, or you’ve sort of
built in a certain distribution part of your campaign. But in terms
of reach, you can partner or do something with a Snapchat or
Facebook, which is going to get you that reach; but the immersion
levels aren’t quite there. So, you have to have either one or the
other, or build into your budget, both.
Alan: Interesting. So, you
mentioned Snapchat, and Snapchat is by far the largest augmented
reality platform — and they don’t even mention the word AR or
augmented reality in anything they do; it’s just a lens, right? So
you’re either looking at a lens and seeing yourself, or you’re
looking at a lens and seeing the world. What are some of the
experiences — because right now — it used to be if you wanted to
make a face filter and add a pair of sunglasses, this was tens of
thousands of dollars, and it would take six months, and blah blah
blah. You can build a face filter now in 15 minutes using their lens
studio. So, how has that changed the landscape?
Samantha: Basically, it allowed
so many more developers to be able to have access, to be able to have
these tools. Then, it becomes a bit more ubiquitous in terms of what
is possible. And then it becomes this sort of, “who’s the best
out there,” in terms of creating the actual assets. And that’s
where having that sort of networking filter, because you could –
literally — a lot of the innovation teams that I’ve talked to, who
are working with brands, are working with agencies, will say, “oh,
yeah, I have all these companies come in and talk to me about what’s
possible,” but it becomes about, what are the best opportunities
for the technology? What are the best interactions? What are the best
uses? How to get the word out to allow people to use it?
It’s becoming harder and harder to
break through with just a face filter, or an emoji, or an animoji. It
goes back to the basics of marketing and advertising again; it’s not
about tech for tech’s sake, right? I mean, that’s where you need to
have the teams that have been doing it a while, to understand where
you’re going, to get the value out of it; the purpose for doing it.
Alan: If we were to break it
down for people — let’s assume we’re talking to a marketing
department — they want to start using these technologies. How would
they get started?
Samantha: Well, I think the one
thing that people have to do, is to try it first. If you try
it, you start playing with it. I mean, that’s sort of how I got
started with it; you just sort of start downloading things. You start
realizing that there’s a lot of out there, where you sort of go, “why
did they make this?” Or, “why do I need to come back and
use it again?” And I think that that’s almost the first step in
all the process.
Cathy Hackl — who’s at Magic Leap —
and I wrote about Marketing New Realities about a year and a half
ago. That was to allow marketers to start understanding that, once
you get over all the acronyms and some spatial thinking or whatever,
that it’s really back to the basics of the marketing and branding and
positioning and communication. After that… I mean, for me, it ends
up being like, “who are your users? What do they do? What are
they doing now? How have you already been engaging with your
customers? What are they expecting of you?” And then, how can you
use AR and VR or maybe a new technology to be able to augment that,
and supplement that, and complement that? So it’s not just creating
technology because you’re like, “oh, we should do this VR; we
saw our competitors did this VR experience.” But it becomes,
“how are we engaging with our target audience in a deeper, more
meaningful way? And an ongoing way.”
I think that that’s where a lot of
companies get tripped up; whether it be a tech company [that] gets
tripped up, or outside of tech company, is that they tend to go,
“we’re going to create this one thing; it’s going to be great,”
and then you just sort of forget it after launch. What some of the
companies in the space are starting to be able to realize is that, it
becomes an ongoing relationship. AR is sort of an ongoing
relationship. VR might be a very deep and intimate one in a very
short period of time — at least where it stands now — but AR is
sort of ongoing, in the sense that social media is ongoing; a website
is ongoing. AR can be ongoing, and needs sort of updates and new
experiences over time. So, you have to start thinking in that way of
the supplement/complement. You can have something where you are
launching something that is new and exciting for AR. But to do it
just once, with a very short engagement, is really doing the
technology a disservice, and doing the company a disservice as well.
Alan: I think we’ve seen a lot
of really cool one-offs. One of the VR ones that I’ve seen was the
Jack Ryan launch, where they put you in VR and — I think it was
launched at South by Southwest this year — and send you down a zip
line in virtual reality. Like, you’re wearing VR on a physical zip
line, zipping down. Like, that’s insane. That probably cost a million
bucks; but it was a one-off.
But I think one of the things that was
underestimated, especially in the early days a couple of years ago —
now, not so much, because there’s a lot more of it — but the earned
media around using VR for these things. Topshop did a VR slide where
you’re in the store, you put the VR and you slide down a slide
like… it’s so gimmicky and dumb. Yet, they got world-renowned
experiences out of it. And back in the day four years ago, Marriott
did this thing in Times Square, where they had a transporter pod; you
stood in this pod, put on a headset, and you’re transported somewhere
else in the world. And all they were doing is was showing 360 video.
And that was enough to garner them massive global media attention.
They got hundreds of millions of media impressions out of that, and
they’re still getting media impressions out of it.
But I think the bar is being set really
high now. I mean, that Jack Ryan thing set the bar even higher. And
we’re starting to see the creative agencies dive into this. And the
creative agencies are going, “okay, well, we’ve tried this. What
about this?” And one of the things that I saw in AR that just
blew my mind — I think it blew everybody’s mind — was the Burger
King thing where you take your phone, you point it at any of their
competitors’ branding, and it catches on fire and says “flame
broiled is better; here’s a free Whopper.” I think technology
for the technology’s sake is not enough anymore. It used to be. But
now we’re into that point where people are demanding really cool
things. The question I have is, what are some of the cool things
you’ve seen that has made you go, “wow, that’s amazing”?
Samantha: What you were just
talking about is a little bit of what we used to say, “AR or VR
just for PR,” right? I mean, there’s always the cool and
exciting thing for launch, but–
Alan: Well, some of it is making
fun of VR, like the Chick-Fil-A thing where they put VR on cows. I
mean, that’s not even real VR, but it’s funny as hell.
Samantha: [laughs] Yeah, I know
the team that worked on it. I did an event where I had them come and
talk, so I think–
Alan: Well, a question I have
is; what were they showing the cows?
Samantha: [laughs] Exactly. I
think that there’s so much… VR and AR started getting you sort of
questioning about your own personal understanding of what the world
is and what’s possible. I think that there tends to be a bit of that
anthropomorphizing of, like, putting headsets on different animals
because you’re like, “well, what would they think? What would
they do?”
Alan: “Chicken VR! I’m free
range now!”
Samantha: [laughs] Exactly. What
was really fun; I partnered with Augmented World Expo this year. They
were doing their first marketing track, and I was really able to sort
of dig into what’s going on there; what are the best-in-class
examples, what is possible with the technology? I mean, I think about
it every day. The fun thing about the Facebook group — that’s the
VR/AR/MR marketing and branding — is that I literally am thinking
about these things all day long. [laughs] But I had a couple of
people on my panel, that I thought, their companies; I’d reach out to
them — hadn’t met them before — but reached out to them, because I
thought that they were doing some amazing things. And one with the
Zappar with 7-Eleven. And the other was the team that did the Sleep
Number. And the Zappar 7-Eleven, I thought was really fun because
they had created this sort of ecosystem within 7-Eleven, where you
had a reason to go back and continually engage with their app. I
haven’t seen that. I mean, Snapchat has done that a little bit.
They’ve done some Nike things, which are really neat, which are
geolocated experiences.
Alan: Did you see the LeBron
James poster? I believe it was Trigger Global, who did that one.
Samantha: I mean, these are some
of the coolest companies out there, for sure. But I think it’s just a
little bit of a tipping point of what’s possible. Whereas some of the
decision makers are still seeing the QR codes that launch a video.
And that’s not quite enough.
Alan: Although – although,
I will preface this — I have seen activations where a newspaper —
and their target audience is families and maybe some elderly people
as well — and they created AR experiences built into the newspaper.
And you would see senior citizens pull their phone out and kind of go
like a scavenger hunt through the newspaper. They would look for the
little AR symbol, and it would bring them enriched content locked to
the page, and it was like bringing the page together. And they’re
seeing really, really good numbers; excellent uptake from the users,
and their advertisers like it, because now you’re able to add some
additional content. But they focused on just enhancing the digital
print first. And I thought that was not something that every magazine
in the world will do. But I thought it was a good use case. And the
newspaper itself has expanded to, I think, 88 different newspapers,
so… it’s successful.
Samantha: From a print and
magazine [perspective], I think that AR is a great thing to be able
to supplement campaigns. I think it’s just that if it’s only, “you
launch a video and there’s just a video,” I tend to want to push
the boundaries of things and see, you know, “is there a way to
make it interactive? Is there a way to make it updated? Is there a
way to connect it to other parts of the campaign?” I guess
that’s where I come from, because I feel like if you’re just going
into a room and then you have a few trigger points and all they’re
doing is launching videos, you have to sort of go, “would you
want to do that? What’s going to make you download something?” I
remember one of the panels at a debut there was the woman from PGA.
So she’s in an interesting situation, because AR would be amazing if
it could be able to track where the ball is and give more information
to the technology. But she said on site, you can’t get somebody to
download an app because there’s just not enough. So that’s where
entering a 5G is possible.
Alan: I know Trigger Global,
they were putting sensors in hockey players, and then in the puck. I
think that’s really cool where you can recreate the entire hockey
arena on your coffee table. It’s not going to replace watching the
sport. People are like, “oh, you know, I can put AR and watch it
in AR.” You’re not going to hold your phone up, even if it’s in
glasses. You’re going to want to watch the sports as they appear on
your 4K television. But, how cool would it be to put the game on the
table, and see the replay in augmented reality? That’s interesting.
Or maybe play a game with some other people, while you’re in the
middle of the game.
Samantha: Well, I think that
it’s also that you end up taking that in and you take something
that– what, like Eye Candy Lab does in terms of the video
recognition. If you do the connecting of multiple technologies, so if
you end up doing something where you have a Trigger, you have an Eye
Candy Lab, if you have sort of multiple– you have a Snapchat, you
go, “how do all of these connect together and how do they create
a sort of cohesive campaign?” It’s changing the way I’ve done a
lot of integrated marketing campaigns. And it used to be that you go,
“okay, here’s the radio campaign, here’s the print campaign,
here’s the TV campaign, we’re gonna have some events.” Now it’s
so much more complicated than that, because not only can you do that,
but then you also go, what’s your stack of technological
capabilities, and how does that help your overall campaign over time?
Alan: Absolutely. So what are
some of the metrics that you’re seeing? How are people measuring the
success of this campaign?
Samantha: Well, the thing that I
keep on saying is that when it comes to AR and VR, it’s really about
the word “engagement.” I actually wrote a post once saying,
“engagement used to be further defined and quantified.” It
does end up varying based on company and based on campaign. Like,
what does engagement mean to you? And you sort of have to define that
success metric for yourself. Is it that you want people to go out and
talk about a product, recommend a product, repost something? Is it
that you want to get more inbound leads if you’re more of a B2B
situation that you want? I personally end up dealing with more of the
tech companies, whereas my partners end up dealing a little bit more
with the brands and agencies. But a lot of companies come to me,
they’re like, “I need to be able to talk on panels and be
considered a thought leader and have a article in a trade magazine.”
What is it that you’re trying to accomplish? And then how do we
figure out how to get you there and what’s the path to to get you
there?
Alan: Let’s talk about the
difference between VR, AR, and MR; virtual reality, mixed reality,
augmented reality. Where do you see them fitting into different
marketing campaigns?
Samantha: You know, I get asked
this question a lot. I mean, AR is almost that must-do. You have to
figure it out. It’s a little bit of when people were launching
websites and people were like, “oh, I don’t need to launch a
website.” And now it’s like, “okay, what’s your AR
strategy” needs to be just sort of a basic campaign, basic
discussion you need to have internally. Mixed reality, I feel like
people are using that a little bit less. I mean, I think that that’s
almost under the AR umbrella. I think when it comes to, if you have a
B2B launch where you’re going to have some sales, people are going in
and talking to your customers directly and they can bring a headset,
that that’s where you can bring in mixed reality, at least at this
juncture.
VR…and I think that that is a little
bit – again — thinking almost first of “where are you going
to be? Where is this going to be?” Eventually, if the goal is to
create branded content that is going to reach a higher-end,
forward-thinking design audience, and you want to have it in a film
festival or sort of overlapping with a film festival audience, then
you go, “okay, maybe we need to do VR,” or, you know you’re
going to have a series of events nationwide or globally, and then you
go, “okay, now we need to integrate VR into what you’re doing.”
I think what’s going to be fun is seeing even post-holiday shopping,
and what the Quest is going to do for distribution. And then you can
start thinking immersion versus reach; sort of pull in one direction
versus the other is going to be less of a pull? It’s going to be,
“you can get immersion and reach,” when VR is even further
distributed.
Alan: So, Samantha, you wrote
the book Marketing New Realities. How can people get a copy that
book?
Samantha: Amazon!
Alan: Oh, perfect.
Samantha: Yeah, if you just do
“Marketing New Realities” on Amazon, you can find that and
get either a digital copy or a hard copy. And then obviously Charlie
Fink’s book–
Alan: “Convergence.”
Samantha: I wrote the
advertising chapter in that. And that is a must-read for anybody
inside or outside the business. From a marketing standpoint
especially. You know, even people outside of marketing have said that
they’ve found that our Marketing New Realities book to be really
helpful as well.
Alan: Yeah. I actually wrote a
piece in Charlie Fink’s “Convergence,” as well.
Samantha: Right! The chapters in
there with the XR Ignite. It’s such an amazing industry to be a part
of, with true innovators. And I mean, you’re a definitely a
powerhouse within that, Alan, for sure.
Alan: Thanks. I work really
hard.
Samantha: Yes, that is very
clear. For sure.
Alan: Since you brought up XR
Ignite, I will give it a plug. If there’s any studios, startups, or
developers that are looking for help connecting with brands and
corporations — in marketing or training or anything in any industry
— you can go to XRignite.com and sign up there. We’re building a
community that connects the best startup studios and developers with
the best corporations in the world, and really creating that open
dialogue community where they can learn about the technology, how to
deploy it. And this podcast is kind of part of that holistic approach
to really mentoring the industry on how to grow. So it’s been an
exciting part. As of today, I think we’ve had 140 or 135 applications
for XR Ignite.
And, as of this morning, the XR for
Business Podcast actually reached 10,000 listeners.
Samantha: Congratulations. I’m
sure that just the beginning.
Alan: It’s just the beginning.
We’ve only been doing it for 30 days, so…
Samantha: [laughs].
Alan: 10,000 listeners in the
last 30 days, which is pretty impressive.
Samantha: That’s great.
Alan: Hopefully that grows to
hundreds of thousands and we can inspire everybody.
So my last question, Samantha: what is
one problem in the world that you want to see solved using XR
technologies?
Samantha: One problem in the
world. Oh, my goodness. There are so many problems with the world
that I would love to solve. I think that AR and VR is ultimately
about connection. It’s about connecting people to each other, sort of
through augmented reality; connecting people to the world; connecting
people to brands, to marketers, to other people’s experiences. It
really just creates a whole new level of engagement and connection,
that it’s just inspiring. And people haven’t tried or played with AR
and VR, there’s so much to do and experience that, it’s really quite
awesome, and everyone just needs to start working on it.
[…]
Alan: Oh no, I just… I just
did the whole outro, and was on mute! [both laugh]
31 min
August 30, 2019 Navigating XR with We Are PHASE2's Samantha Wolfe
Alan – and XRIgnite -- isn't the only XR shepherding game in town! Samantha Wolfe -- who co-authored Marketing New Realities with previous XR for Business guest Cathy Hackl -- drops by to share her own insights on how best to help brands, businesses, and campaigns venture into the XR minefield, and come out the other end unscathed.
Alan: Today's guest is Samantha
Wolfe, managing partner at we are PHASE2. Samantha is a marketing and
branding strategist, focused on making "never done before"
a reality. Sam is a co-author of the book "Marketing New
Realities: An Introduction to Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality
Marketing, Branding, and Communications," and is a contributing
author to Charlie Fink's book "Convergence: How the World Will
Be Painted With Data," with a chapter focused on augmented
reality for brands. She also runs the largest marketing and branding
Facebook group focused on VR, AR, and MR, which has over 2,500
members. She's a board member of the New York VR Expo and South by
Southwest Pitch, and has been on the judging panel for the Games of
Change Festival and the AWE Auggie Awards. To learn more about
Samantha, you can visit samanthagwolfe.com or wearephase2.com.
Samantha, welcome to the show.
Samantha: Hi, Alan. Good to be
here.
Alan: It's so amazing to have
you on the show. We've known each other for a few years now, and we
keep seeing each other at different conferences, and it's always fun.
I think the last time was AWE, but before that was CES. This year we
got to hang out in a glass booth; almost like a fishbowl in the
middle of CES.
Samantha: I think our picture
went up on Fox News or something like that.
Alan: Oh, did it really?
Samantha: Like, the two people
in the middle of the glass booth for VR Voice. And we had such a fun
conversation. I think Bob Fine was a little taken aback about how
excited the two of us got together. So I'm excited for this
conversation!
Alan: [laughs] This is gonna be
a great conversation. And for those of you who don't know, Bob Fine
runs a wonderful podcast called VR Voice, so you can check that out
as well. Samantha, you're the managing partner at we are PHASE2. So,
talk to us a bit about what is we are PHASE2, and what are you guys
doing? And then we'll just have a conversation around the wonderful
marketing opportunities that virtual and augmented reality afford.
Samantha: Absolutely. The way I
like to talk about we are PHASE2 is that we are about marketing with
and for emerging technologies. We help companies who are in the
emerging tech space be able to market and communicate what they're
doing, but we also have companies who want to market to and with
those emerging technologies. So if you're an advertising agency or a
brand who says, you know, "we want to do something really
innovative," and want to integrate -- whether it be AR, VR, AI,
IoT -- into what you're doing, that you could come to us and we'll
help you through that process. Or if you're like, "You know
what? We need some developers to help work on this campaign that
we're doing." We'll work with you as well. The other thing I've
said is marketing emerging technologies and emerging technology
marketing.
Alan: Emerging technology
marketing. I get it. So--
Samantha: It's both ways.
[laughs]
Alan: Are you talking about
virtual/augmented/mixed reality, or are you guys also diving into
artificial intelligence and machine learning and IoT sensors and that
kind of stuff?
Samantha: Yes. It's basically
anything that touches emerging tech in marketing. I end up being more
of the subject matter expert when it comes to VR and AR. But Jennifer
Usdan McBride -
0 min
August 29, 2019XR in Education, Healthcare, Policing and Social Media (XR News 8/25/19)
Welcome to the second episode of the XR for Business News podcast, the show where our host, Alan, provides a quick rundown of the week’s top XR news stories!
This week’s XR use cases range from educating children and training police officers, to turning Snoop Dogg into an AR character in Snapchat filters, with many others in between.
A new study shows that VR significantly reduces pain versus an active control condition in hospitalized patients.
The marine electronics market is embracing AR to enhance sailing safety
VR is being used to train police officers to better understand those with mental illness
Mountain Equipment Co-Op is using AR to enhance the retail experience
Wonderscope’s latest AR reading experience teaches kids how to handle bullies
Singularity University announces VR training program and on-demand classes at 2019 Global Summit
Snoop Dogg becomes a Snapchat AR character to promote his latest record
Terry Fabrics creates app allowing customers to preview window coverings in AR
YouTube introduces AR virtual try-ons starting with lipstick
8 min
August 29, 2019 XR in Education, Healthcare, Policing and Social Media (XR News 8/25/19)
Welcome to the second episode of the XR for Business News podcast, the show where our host, Alan, provides a quick rundown of the week's top XR news stories!
This week's XR use cases range from educating children and training police officers, to turning Snoop Dogg into an AR character in Snapchat filters, with many others in between.
A new study shows that VR significantly reduces pain versus an active control condition in hospitalized patients. The marine electronics market is embracing AR to enhance sailing safety VR is being used to train police officers to better understand those with mental illnessMountain Equipment Co-Op is using AR to enhance the retail experienceWonderscope’s latest AR reading experience teaches kids how to handle bulliesSingularity University announces VR training program and on-demand classes at 2019 Global SummitSnoop Dogg becomes a Snapchat AR character to promote his latest recordTerry Fabrics creates app allowing customers to preview window coverings in ARYouTube introduces AR virtual try-ons starting with lipstick
0 min
August 28, 2019 Save Me a Seat in meetingRoom, with Jonny Cosgrove
A plain room
with a table, a few chairs, and a whiteboard has never sounded
so…futuristic! But that’s one way to describe the technology behind
meetingRoom, a VR space, where colleagues from around the world can
gather and discuss business as if they were all in the same, plain
ol’ multi-purpose room!
meetingRoom CEO
Jonny Cosgrove does a better job of describing it, so take a listen!
Alan: Today’s guest is Jonny
Cosgrove, founder and CEO at meetingRoom.io. Jonny is responsible for
creating a new collaboration platform that allows anybody from
multiple devices to be in one room and collaborate together. Jonny
started his career volunteering and doing activism, before moving
into events, marketing, and technology, operating in Dublin and
Boston. He completed his MBA at Trinity College, Dublin, and began
building the future of work, with a focus on sustainability,
collaboration, and emerging technologies. You can learn more about
Jonny and his team at meetingRoom.io.
Jonny, welcome to the show.
Jonny: Thanks for having me.
Alan: Oh, it’s my absolute
pleasure, Jonny. We’ve known each other quite a long time, through
the VR/AR Association and through great calls like this. We’ve met in
meetingRoom, and I’m really, really excited to share with the world
what you guys are working on, because the work that you guys are
doing is really pioneering how people will meet in the future — in
now, not even in the future, but right now — how people are meeting
and collaborating. And I think, as we move to a world where we start
to really think about travel — not just international travel — but
travel to and from work, having people drive two hours to work, back
and forth every day. It’s really inefficient, and it’s a real time
suck for everybody. Not to mention, creating disastrous effects for
the environment, as well. So let’s dive into this. Explain who you
are, and your company, and what does meetingRoom do?
Jonny: No problem at all. So I
agree. Pollution sucks. Unnecessary commutes absolutely suck. What
we’re trying to do is make sure the collaboration is easier. One
thing we found everyone can agree on is that collaboration is easier
and more effective when teams work together in the same place. So,
meetingRoom is a service that allows people to work with each other,
using familiar meeting room facilities — like whiteboards — in a
virtual environment, from anywhere. We’ve made this accessible from
anywhere. We made it secure, and we’ve made these places in the
spaces persistent. So, when you write in a whiteboard and you return
next week, it’s still there, just like in real life. And what we
found is, that it allows employees to feel a higher level of
immersive engagement with what’s happening in the actual meeting. It
keeps you focused in that time — in that moment — and lets you have
more effective meetings. Even though employees are spread all over
the world.
Alan: You mentioned something…
heh heh, I thought it was funny because as you said, “Oh, yeah,
you know, you put all your notes on the whiteboard and just like the
real world, they’re there when you come back.” I was thinking,
no, that’s exactly the opposite of the real world!
Jonny: [laughs]
Alan: Somebody’s erased all your
notes, and you’re like, “no! I didn’t take a picture of it!”
Jonny: Thank you for helping me
explain it. So, one of the thingsthat
actually happens a lot is that exact issue. That’s one of our own
internal metrics; we’re working to get this through this
point, “how are you using their internal rooms existing today,”
if you’re working in-house, or how do you work remotely as it is
right now? And one of the biggest problems was the work you do in
that time, that space, on that Skype call, on that Zoom — whatever
it might be — it disappears into that time. Unless someone’s been
taking fantastic notes, it doesn’t come out — and that’s something
that we get onto later, but note taking VR is lots of fun.
What we found that worked pretty well
was, being able to add simple things like working this into your
workflow. So, if you work on a whiteboard in meetingRoom, you can
save out that whiteboard for work later. You can copy and paste it
into your Slack notes, you can copy paste into an email; whatever
your existing flow, it’s just there. Or you want to add it to your
G-Remotes? All those little bits and pieces come together so that
it’s much easier to get context around a conversation, but also just
letting people have good, proper conversations and remove that extra
asynchronous conversation. Slack is great, but you’ve got to be
disciplined.
Alan: Yeah, I can imagine. Slack
gets crazy sometimes, you got a bunch of channels and all of a sudden
you go away for a weekend and come back and “you have 50 new
messages.” Sometimes it’s just a couple of people that have gone
off on a conversation.
With meetingRoom, what are features
that are being used the most? What is it that people are using it
for, with great results?
Jonny: One thing – as you were
saying, you broke up slightly, but I caught it, so this call’s
actually a good demonstration – one of the things we do, from a
technical point of view, is we do things very basically. We’re a
low-tech solution, rather than a high-tech solution. I know the
minute you hear “VR,” people think you need 5G. For us, though,
we’ve taken a step back and said, “how can we use today’s
technology really effectively?” And yes, we’ll take on board more
of that as it comes. But that means this works on 3G calls. A
meetingRoom call uses 90 percent less bandwidth than something like
Skype for Business. We’ve done tests against this. We’ve actually
just been published in spring earlier on this year. But in terms of
what we focus on, it’s having a good meeting experience. That’s what
people do in there. They’ve got a table, they’ve got a whiteboard,
they’ve got a collaboration wall with sticky notes, and they’ve got a
reference wall for sticking their agenda up and setting a timer. So
they actually get through these meetings effectively.
Our dream isn’t to have you sitting in
VR all day. It’s to have effective – say, if you’re doing daily
sinkholes or scrums or whatever you call them in your industry —
you’re in there for 15 minutes a day, and it’s the most effective way
of you passing that information together, so that you’re not having
to live on a Friday afternoon in a Slack or an email thread. You’re
getting in, chatting it out, getting everyone on the same page, and
then getting back to work.
Alan: There’s so many tools out
there that extend our workday and really help us collaborate. But at
the same time, as you leave your office, the Slack notifications
never end. And I think one of the things that VR does well is
eliminate distractions. I’ve said this before, when you’re in VR, you
can’t be on your phone, you can’t be doing other things. So, you get
somebody’s 100 percent attention.
Jonny: Yeah. Even building on
that; for us, it links in with our own… everyone has their driving
values, and for us, adding some simple things — aside from the
economical and the ecological points of view — we can save the world
if we’re a bit more effective in how we all met in person. And
remember; AR travel is only beginning. It’s moving into the whole
world, having access to AR travel, and that’s going to grow
exponentially over the next few years, if we don’t actually take on
board. That being said, I’m not saying it’s not that you can’t
travel. It’s much more case of we need to do it more effectively,
especially from a business point of view. But for meeting room, it’s
about enabling–
Alan: Hold on, hold on.
Jonny: Go ahead.
Alan: The reality is, anybody
who’s travelled for business realizes that business travel is great
when you’re 20.
Jonny: [laughs]
Alan: Any more, you’re going,
“okay, I don’t really want to get on an airplane, fly for a
whole day, get to a meeting for a two-hour meeting, get on a plane,
and fly all the way back”.
Jonny: That’s it.
Alan: Travel for vacation, when
you’re with your family at the beach, or traveling in the world or
something? Awesome. Travel to go to a three-hour meeting? Not so
much.
Jonny: Business travel used to
be a perk; now, it’s a nuisance. If you’re under 30, you get paid to
travel. If you’re over 30, you’re paying to make sure the family get
a bit of extra travel. Then there’s some good metrics there; it’s a
good understanding when you’re talking to someone, trying to say
you’re going to remove air travel from their life. You might be
talking to the wrong person who loves that perk, and it still is a
perk for them. But in terms of for us, the one driving point –
again — a lot of the XR/VR world is very much about, “you’re going
to live in here forever.” You’re not. That will come at some point.
But — [chuckles] — for some people. Personally, I love the real
world, and I would like to augment that, more than take it away.
But for us, you’re always gonna eat the
meat. Sorry, that’s an answer to your question: we’re not getting rid
of physical meetings, overall. That’s not our drive. Our drive is to
replace the physical office as the primary means of business
collaboration over the next decade. And that is something that we
feel is achievable. But it’s also taken into account that you’re
always going to eat the meat. Deals are done in person, and that’s
going to get more brilliant — in the digital sense — over the next
few years. But again, real world collaboration is there for an
important reason. Even from an education point of view. Which isn’t
one of our primary markets, we do deal with a lot of education
institutions. And the point we see is, you’re always going to have
educational institutions; they’ll change in how the distribute
information, but one of the basic building blocks of humans is
they’re social. So for me and our company, we’re not trying to drive
you to stop being social. We’re trying to drive that they’ll actually
get to the more important things and find that balance.
Alan: Yeah, I think really, when
it comes down to it; business travel — deals — are not really ever
done in a boardroom.
Jonny: They’re done before.
Alan: They’re not really done in
a boardroom. They’re in a bar late at night, at the end of a
conference. Or over a nice dinner. On the golf course. Deals are done
when we are socially working together, and we feel comfortable with
the other people. That’s one of the things that VR can’t do, and it
never will do. But being able to get the meat and potatoes of the
meeting — the technical side — and bring them together and say,
“okay, let’s all work through this deal.” Then, because the
deal’s probably already been negotiated from a very high level — on
the golf course, or at a dinner or whatever — it’s like, “okay,
we’re going to do business together. This is what it’s going to look
like that. Now, let’s bring our teams together to figure out how this
actually works.”
Jonny: Yeah. And with that in
mind, I suppose one of the things that we really focus on — from the
business side, as well as with the product — is allowing and
enabling equal participation. Making sure everyone gets to
participate, engage. and facilitate. Everyone can unlock that
productivity. If people aren’t great at doing video calls, or a
face-to-face — they’re both learned skills — this can be an easier
way to get everyone in and breaking down those cultural divides to
say, “right, different opinions drive sustainability of business,”
and making sure that everyone has the ability to actually have an
equal way of saying that. That’s what drives us.
I do think that I would agree
completely; the deal is done before you get there. But it’s making
sure that, by the time you get there, the deal is done. Things can
fall apart if you leave it until you see each other in person. For
anyone listening — I suppose from the C-suite — who’s worrying
about their group trips going away: I think, if anything, it would
improve the return on investment from those trips in the future.
Alan: It really will, honestly,
because a lot of times, we’ll spend money flying people to a meeting
around the world… and they really don’t have to be there. And
that’s something that I’ve noticed; fly a technical person around to
a sales meeting to present to the sales team. And it’s like, okay,
that technical person presented for an hour, and you’ve just spent X
amount to: fly them there, to house them for the three days or four
days of the meeting. And really, they were only there for a one-hour
meeting.
Jonny: You have no idea how many
times I’ve been on the end of the call, especially the last few
months as we’ve been releasing our more open version — we just
released our open beta — so finally getting used to be able say,
“our product’s ready, it’s out there!” But in terms of saying,
“oh, no, we don’t need to hop on a flight and get to you. Let’s
just get in the room. That’s the best way of testing this out. I
don’t need to talk to you about the product; let’s get in there and
talk in there.” And the results from that are — from a user
testing point of view — so much fun, in a short sentence. But in
terms of from a proof point, it’s a great way of seeing, are people
ready for this or not? I think we’ve moved beyond the early, early
innovators. I think we’re into the fast follower stage, where a lot
of people are seeing all good work done. Remember, this isn’t just
work from the last three-to-five years, which I think people tend to
forget. There was so much activity in the oughties. There was so much
activity in the 90s. And the tech has been around since the 60s,
which we all know well and good. But in terms of picking up on use
cases that were just maybe a little bit early, and picking how we can
go forward? Our philosophy is, every company has a meetings universe,
and all we’re trying to do is take up a certain part of that. You’re
not trying to take over the whole lot. You’re just trying to come in
and say, “we can fix this problem now for you really, really well.”
Alan: What are some of the use
cases? I’ve talked to other collaboration platforms that are out
there. There’s The Wild, there’s Spatial. They all have their
different spin on it. What are the use cases that you guys feel that
meetingRoom is uniquely positioned to take advantage of? I know one
of the things you mentioned earlier was smaller groups.
Jonny: We haven’t got our
virtual pizza in there to do the test just yet, but letting [in]
enough people who could share a pizza. And going from that old rule,
which is keeping small groups and small sessions.
Right now, up to 12 people can join a
room from our standard offering. We can go a little bit higher when
people request it. But right now, if you go to the website, that’s
how many you can get in there on the standard plan. And what we focus
on is internal meetings. We’re not trying to come in on the sales
front and that. People do hack our own system for doing different
things. “Yeah, we’d love to use this for sales and customer calls.”
Yeah, sure, use your room for whatever you want. Our business model
is probably close to something like WeWork or Regus, in terms of the
space you’re going for. And when it comes down to what they’re using
it for; it’s daily meetings, it’s weekly scheduled meetings, it’s
regular meetings, and it’s very much at that decision-maker level.
There’s great tools out there for doing
screen sharing. There’s great tools out there for doing lectures.
There’s great tools for training specific things, and also on those
bespoke training end other things. But for us, if you’re just looking
to come in and work through an agenda, and set a timer to make sure
you all get in there in time, and pass that information, that’s where
we fit in. And also, I think the big thing is that we work on every
platform. We work the same on your iOS device as you do in your
Oculus Quest. Obviously, inputs are a little different in your head’s
in a VR headset, but for us, it’s having the same ability across all
the platforms. So, having a table, having a whiteboard, having a
collaboration wall with sticky notes, and having that agenda and
timer, so that you can just get to work.
Alan: Now, are companies able to
change the look at the room? Or do you have different templates?
Different looks and feels? Can they brand the room, so that it feels
more to their corporate branding?
Jonny: Yes. We do a lot of that
with the older enterprise clients at the moment. We are going to be
bringing some fun releases coming over the next few months, to let
more users do that. But for now, the way we usually have people brand
their room is, they set up a sticky board in the way that suits their
business. They set up their whiteboard with the templates they want,
or with their own agenda items. And they use a PDF wall for bringing
in presentations or whatever they’re doing. That’s where it starts
off. I’ve seen a lot of logos that are about 10 feet tall in there;
quite fun. [laughs]
Alan: They’re all pixelated.
Jonny: [laughs] Well, what we
really try to do actually, I suppose, is… it’s very much like a
coworking space. We’re there to help people get through there, as
much as just use the software. So making sure that there’s guidelines
on how to get the best use, as it is today. Because what we see an
awful lot of is people acting like the world’s changed already. And
you and I both know from all of our conversations and — one of the
funny ones, actually, is that I remember my old beta room, which I
had to retire for this new release. And it’s weird saying goodbye to
the room you built your company in, but it comes down to bringing
people through in a realistic way and saying, “look, let’s get you
started in the right way. Let’s map out the process to get to
deployment.” And again, a lot of the time it comes back to, “oh,
here’s our tech, it’s great.” For us, we know that for the clients
we work with, it’s bringing it through and bringing this throughout
the organization, as opposed to just expecting it all to work, out
the gate.
Alan: One of the other podcasts
I recently did, we were talking about [how] this is no longer a
technology problem; it’s an adoption problem.
Jonny: It’s funny you say that.
So, everyone talks about the mom test. If you can sell it your mom,
that great. But you’ve got to sell it to clients. For us, we’re
looking at, it’s a case of going, “it’s the adoption test.” It’s
“will you bring this thing home for the next 18 months?”
Because that’s the one way you’re going in to make sure this thing —
like any system, like, look at how Slack and Microsoft Teams have
been pushing that the last three or four years — it takes time for
these things to get through.
I used my old man as an example; he’s
brilliant with his iPad. I bought him an iPhone for the last 10 years
for Christmas. And they’re expensive bricks, because Apple didn’t
train him how to use his iPhone; they trained him to use the iPad.
He’s brilliant with his iPad. The same thing comes in with this kind
of thing. Part of why we would have — not just because my old man,
because Apple is such a great job to train people how to use
technology — iPads are a useful part of the day. For us, one of our
first engagements is usually me and Eddie coming in from a quest, and
meeting a C-suite executive in a blue chip company, on the device
they use every day. So, making sure that it’s a simple and easy for
anybody getting in, not just your engineers. Not just your software
developers. They’re some of my favorite people to get in a room with,
because my user testing with that group, versus with a C-suite
audience, is completely different. We make sure we just…keep
focused around making sure people can work more effectively. Back to
our own values of participation, and making sure everyone has the
equal opportunity — from any device.
Alan: So, explain to me the
typical onboarding. A customer says, “okay, I want to start
using this; I want to run my weekly sales scrum meeting in
meetingRoom.io. What’s my path to getting up and running?”
Jonny: I’ll call it a sign up to
a “ping-pong” meeting. A ping-pong meeting is, every company has
their first meeting in any of these tools, whether it’s Skype, Zoom,
or meetingRoom; you’ll play around, and you’ll try and push your
limits. That’s a great first meeting to have, especially in a room
like ours, because you’ve got a whiteboard to play with. And you’ve
got different things you can do, which are great fun. Getting
started, you go to our website. You sign up, just there on the front
page. What will happen then is,ou get access straight away into the
open beta. You can invite your team. That’s the first thing I’ll tell
you to do. And then you enter into, I suppose, our onboarding
process. Our process is talking to myself along the way to try and
understand — and my team, obviously; I do my best to actually get in
what every client comes through at some point in the early part of
the journey — and making sure that we fit a program around it. Just
getting that first team meeting in there is key. It’s absolutely key
to make sure everyone is in there and has their first meeting as a
group. Because obviously, we’re a group conversation app. It’s not
for you, one-on-one, to go in and while the day away; it’s for you to
be able to have effective meetings.
What we’ve done with that is we’ve
actually built up a number of little resources — I’ll call them
“presents” for now — but you get stuff like a “how to
copy and paste this in and get this going for your whole team,”
from an agenda point of view. We also get different items, like an
agenda that works really well with the room, and how to set up
different parts of it along the way. That’s if you’re coming in as
one small team, to try this out and see what’s going on. And then we
work to see how can we get into a wider part of the organization.
In particular, I love talking with IT
and risk departments, because we’ve built for that requirement; we’re
built for the enterprise. We’re not a social app suddenly jumping
into the enterprise space. We spent a bit longer getting our product
together than others might have who jumped in this, because we wanted
to make sure it hit all the compliance — from your GDPR, to
different bits and pieces of brand regulation — and making sure that
it’s easy to get through your process, because that’s one of the
biggest problems, back to your adoption item. It’s easy to want
something. It’s hard to make sure it stays with you.
Alan: This has come up on the
podcast, where you have adoption — you have buy-in from the C-suite
— and they’re like, “okay, we’re going to execute on this.”
Walmart’s a prime example; they rolled out 17,000 headsets without a
way to update them.
Jonny: Oh-ho!
Alan: I’m sure they’ve figured
it out now. I interviewed PWC’s Jeremy Dalton and they built a
presentation to 275 people in VR simultaneously — and I actually
happened to be there, because it was in Toronto. After the event, all
the executives went out for coffee or whatever, and then there was a
team of 15 people collecting all the VR headsets and then putting
them in a room, and there was literally a pile — five feet high —
of headsets. Just, they piled them onto a pile, and then one-by-one,
they had to go through and put them in the right boxes. It was a
substantial amount of work and just the device management alone on
rolling it out on that scale. I think there are still some challenges
around there.
Jonny: Well, that’s it. I mean,
like, look; we’ve had requests to roll this out to 300,000 people,
and we’ve said no, because there’s a lot of parts to that. Now, this
is a bit earlier in our days, but this is a point where all this is
becoming an awful lot simpler. And the suppliers are doing a great
job of getting enterprise ready, and pushing that from a device
management point of view. From getting failure-proof devices, and the
likes of any of the standalone devices are getting very — when I say
point of failure, I come from a hardware background as well, which I
don’t talk about as much as I should — where if it was still
connected to a PC? It was a great prototype. There’s some awesome
stuff happening, say, in the automotive space. But as soon as that
goes into stuff like the Quest and the Focus being able to handle
that at scale, people will move to that. We’ve seen huge jumps around
that already. It has to be, “how easy can you get this out there?
And can you actually get us through a program of work getting this
installed in an organization, not just in one team?” And that’s
something we pride ourselves on doing.
Alan: From an adoption
standpoint in a company, having a VIVE or a Rift, and then having a
computer system — however small, you get them pretty small now —
but being able to set that up, install Steam or install the Oculus
Store, and then every time you go to use it, there’s enough
[garbled]
.
Jonny: If it takes as long a
sentence for either of us to get people going on a PCVR, it’s got to
be a bloody good use case, and really valuable. I’m at least 90+ days
using a Quest every day, and using it for both work and play. And —
as you well know — I’m a fanboy of PCVR, because I’m a gamer. But in
terms of everyday life? Yeah, I use my Quest every day, because it’s
easy to get in and out of. And it has all those things that I want it
to do, including meetingRoom, so that it fulfills my need. And that’s
what you’re trying to do with a device: provide a more convenient
solution to what’s already there, as opposed to trying to force it
in.
Alan: Agreed. So, meetingRoom
works on Quest now?
Jonny: Yes! So, we’re having
lots of fun. We’ve announced it will be releasing later in the fall,
with the enterprise and other things.It’s a dream. [laughs]
To put it shortly.
And people can get started right away
with our beta version. They just need to take out a form on the
website where you sign up, and we can get started there. I thought
the last important point, which is kind of an exciting time; one of
the big differences is we also have a web application — not WebXR,
but an actual web application — to manage how you do everything.
Right now, it’s really basic. For our beta, you can do invite teams,
you can upload your documents you need in there. What we’re doing
right now is engaging our community in a big way; building our next
iteration of the dashboard. So, really looking forward to over the
next two-three months, having that. Essentially anyone who gets in
touch now can have a big impact on that because again, that’s
customer-led as opposed to… we had to build our first room and get
the infrastructure together. Now we’re making it easier for people to
manage all these meetings. I know personally, I’m in a lot of rooms.
So first-hand, I get to see what happens when suddenly, “oh, I’m
in 30 or 40 different rooms on this account. Right.” [laughs]
Same way you’re talking about the poor person in Walmart who have to
maybe individually update 17,000 different headsets — which, as I
said, it gives me coils.
But again, for us, it’s making sure all
that is nice and simple. It’s making sure it’s wrapped together in
more. So again, say we treat enterprise clients a certain way. We
have startups who are going through our own journey, which is
building a business in the cloud. Forget your garages, your
hackathons — I built businesses in both, and they’re great fun. But
for me, any business going forward, I get to actually build in the
cloud. Obviously, building in meetingRoom is great fun. But for us,
what we didn’t have at the beginning was the tool we have today. So
we had a lot of gaps, we had to kind of realize, “oh, we haven’t
built that thing on the whiteboard yet. Oh, that’s really difficult
to do.” That’s been ironed out. As I was saying earlier on, we had
to retire our original room. We’ve just brought in the designers to
upgrade the room. It was very odd saying goodbye to it. At least on a
daily basis. It’s like, “oh, I’m in the wrong room.”
Alan: Hidden Easter egg.
Jonny: [laughs] At some point
there’ll be a retrofit, I’m sure. I want it back. I liked it.
[laughs]
But again, this is our first room of many. We’re really
core-focused, and we do have a lot of different custom builds, like
people making digital twins of existing services and doing a lot of
really interesting stuff. So again, we built a platform. The first
part of that is our meetingRoom, and letting people actually get in
the plan every day.
But as you know, everyone is trying to
get their heads around what they’re going to do next in VR and what
can they do in XR to either be the first in something, not just for
gimmick’s sake, but actually, hey, “we can make a fundamental
change to our business. We can make ourselves more sustainable over
the next 20 years, forget the next two or three.” It’s actually
making sure that we can do stuff today and we can amplify that over
time. And 2019 is going to be… everyone’s called 2019 the big year
— every year’s a big year for VR and XR. And that’s fine and dandy.
For me, I see this as the first year of true deployments into
everyday use cases, beyond the very bespoke things. We’re talking
about where every kid’s gonna want Beat Saber for Christmas. That’s
fine. But at the same time, from a C-suite point of view, it’s now at
that point where it actually makes sense. You’re not having to lug
around a PC and connect three cables worth of gear, along with all
those different updates to come along. Now it’s simple plug and play.
Alan: Absolutely. It’s easy to
deploy. I think the Quest was a game changer. The Focus, again; being
able to come in at a 10X cheaper device with no computer, no wires,
no nothing, being able to put it on. Look, everything that I’ve seen
is like, “yeah, we can stand up,” or, “we can wave our hands
around or we can do all these things.” The real practical use cases
where people are going to really dig in to using VR on a daily basis,
they’re going to be sitting at their desk. They’re not be standing
up, waving their hands around like idiots. They’ll be sitting at the
desk, going into a meeting — maybe they’re on a beach, maybe they
want to see their giant screens in front of them, whatever it is —
but it’s going to be them sitting down, doing what they typically do,
because how many times are you in a meeting where you’re all standing
up?
Jonny: [laughs] It’s funny.
Like, even we sometimes do find ourselves standing up more because
we’re using these things. But for me, what that actually means in
real life — and this is also linked with using stuff like Rec Room
and other bits and pieces every other day — but I’ve dropped like 30
kilos since I began the business. I was too big then — I’m still too
big now — but without actually trying, I’ve been able to be a little
bit healthier. That is not a direct reason just because of VR. But it
gets you thinking about how you approach your day, about how you do
everything.
But, I suppose in terms of the future
of XR/VR, as it pertains to the business end of things, I do think
it’s the future of business and social. I do think that it’s going to
change how we do everything over the next 10 years — not just driven
by climate change, not just driven by cost controls– but by
preference. We did a paper — our first week in business, we went out
and tried to kill the business — we got to client to pay us to
compare Skype for Business versus VR. Really, really simple. We said
going in, video communications versus VR. This the question we are
going to get asked, and we always get asked, and we will always get
asked about it.
It came down to some really simple bits
and pieces; like engagements, like excitement, and again, focused.
Linked in with those lovely bits and pieces — remember, this was
also our prototype day zero (and we’re always in day zero) — but
this was the proper first version. In a study of a hundred people,
which got published in spring early on this year, we beat out Skype
for Business. It was actually one of the suppliers who pointed out to
us, “guys, that’s bloody amazing. You put 20 quid into this product
in comparison to, say, $20-billion into Skype,” which is now, from
a business point of view, moulding back into Teams. So it was very
interesting, even on that first Pepsi-Cola test, to see it coming
through.
What I’m most excited about within that
is it pulling us out of that Wild West. We’ve had digital twins since
my first Facebook or Bebo account. That was my first digital twin. I
know Metaverse is close to your own heart, and we’ve had a Metaverse
since the Internet turned on. What we’re doing right now is
visualizing and virtualizing all that, which is awesome. But we know
how that can go if we go too much into living in there. I think South
Park covered it [laughs]. But in terms of actually getting us there
right now, it’s about balance and keeping everyone nice and on the
same page. And that’s what my hope is for the future of all this.
Alan: Well, you talked about web
apps and being able to upload documents. What is the document that
you can upload natively? Can I grab my team’s stuff? Or can I grab
PDFs? Or can you grab PowerPoint or Google slides?
Jonny: Because this is open beta
— and we know we’re actually rebuilding all of this currently — we
decided to start with something really basic and go with PDFs,
because that what we’ve found — with users in over 50 countries —
was the obvious most common document that’s used for these kind of
meetings. And what we said was, we’re going to bring in our different
sources over the next few months because, again, when it comes to
enterprise, you don’t have to get people to sign up to get all of our
stuff through the risk and requirements. They’ve already done that
with a lot of their services. We built the infrastructure. So imagine
you’re coming to me and I worked in Regus, and you want to build the
perfect room in physical life; that no one ever removes your sticky
notes from the wall — that issue that, we actually have a few
clients, that answers the issue for them. It’s kind of funny — and
they can leave it there for all time, if they want. The point is,
that you can come in and you can get to work right away with it.
Alan: You can import PDFs. What
else?
Jonny: So right now you can
import PDFs, and we have a number of custom builds running stuff like
bringing in 360 site imaging. We have stuff like bringing in
different 3D models, but our focus is always on doing in a
low-bandwidth way. So we very much work with clients who might have
places working from one distant part of the world, down into a
Central European office. And you’ve got to make it nice and simple
for everyone to be able to partake in that conversation the same way.
So bringing in a 360 site means they can make impact from abroad. But
for now, what you can do from the basic — if you sign up on the
website today — you can bring in PDFs. If you want to go beyond
that, just drop us a line and we’ll get in a room, we’ll go through
it with you. But that’s going to be a big part of the next step. Got
a big release in about three months time and that’s going to be…
I’m pretty excited about that. [laughs]
Alan: Fantastic. Yeah, because I
can see people, once they get the ability to import PDFs and get
that, they’re going to go, “okay, well, I want to import
PowerPoint slides,” because people love their PowerPoint. I
don’t know why.
Jonny: Not going anywhere.
Alan: Being able to, like you
said, import a 360 image. So saying, “I’m in the middle of my
PowerPoint, I’m in my next slide, I click it and then all of a sudden
I’m no longer in a meeting room. I’m in a 360 image,” because let’s
be honest, 360 photography is not being leveraged nearly as much as
it could be in all sorts of different ways. The 360 photo gives you
so much information about a space. If you’re talking about
manufacturing, you could literally have somebody in the manufacturing
[sector]
stick a 360 camera on a stand, take a picture. The photos
are not very large anymore. You can upload that right in there.
Everybody across the organization can stand where that camera was,
look around and say, “okay, you see how this information is coming
off of this machine or whatever,” and you can discuss that in a
realistic environment. It transports them.
Jonny: And a key part of that is
making sure that you can bring it out of there afterwards, so it’s
not all just lost in that one moment. I’ll put it this way: I love
writing in 3D. For me, because I can go to the angle I know I need to
be at to see what’s going on there. But when it comes down to it, we
found sticky notes actually work an awful lot better. And our sticky
notes are actually 2D first, so you type in something at the moment.
We are adding in VR support for that in a while. But because so many
users come in from different platforms, we made this for our users
first. Our users are teams in blue chips, SME, start-ups. We have a
lovely wide berth of people with very specific use cases, but in
terms of actually getting it in there, it’s got to be something you
can bring out into the real world, because otherwise it gets lost in
workflows. If it can’t fit into your audit trail, it’s not gonna
happen in the enterprise.
Alan: You mentioned audit trail.
So, I want to unlock a couple of things here. What are some of the
data metrics/analytics that you are capturing or are able to capture
from this, that would be able to be used maybe for training, or for
whatever?
Jonny: Yes. So we go with
privacy first. These are encrypted rooms. We do basic things with
collecting obvious usage data to make sure it’s better. But tracking,
all that kind of thing, we’re doing our best to leave that with the
user. So we do also some on-premise deployments in that. Obviously,
we work with companies where security matters, and we make sure we’re
GDPR compliant. We make sure that we hit with the regulatory
requirements for each industry we go in with, and we very much go
through that nearly at the beginning of the project, because that’s a
key thing for people to understand. As we said, the whole industry
has come forward leaps and bounds, but, say, two years ago? You
couldn’t do all of the things you need to do, because the enterprise
deployment wasn’t there. And for us, it’s very much a handholding
experience to get people through that and to make sure that you’re
not getting a senior management team brought in to have the risk or
IT team come back and say, “okay, guys, that’s not feasible.”
We make sure that we lead them back to
their encrypted rooms first and foremost, because – again — this
is business conversation. It’s not even like your social apps, where
you’re living on Facebook, or you’re living on one of these different
things, where it’s expected that these things are part of doing
business. But when it comes to, “I’m paying for a secure space
to come in to have a private conversation, and we might be a
boardroom of a Fortune 500 company,” that’s information they don’t
want going outside of the room, in the same way as they do in real
life. So we follow the premise of “do it how you do it in real
life” and keep it secure.
Alan: Now, is there any metrics
that — let’s say, for example — the executive team would have
access to? Maybe it’s as simple as–
Jonny: Oh, of course! Sorry.
From an internal. I’m talking about from the external, apologies.
From the internal point of view, what we’re doing is building up some
very good reporting system. And again, that’s part of what I will be
excited about in the next while. But making sure that you can see
simple things as “Alan and Jonny are working on this project for
three months,” “Alan and Jonny talk for the first two months, and
then they stop talking.” We don’t know exactly what they’re talking
about, word-for-word, but we know that they stop talking and suddenly
the project went off-rails. That’s the kind of performance and impact
I want people to get from this kind of stuff over time, and make sure
that people can actually take action.
Originally, I would have studied around
behavioral economics — I was a history and politics dropout —
originally went over to Harvard for summer school and fell in love
with arguing about behavioral economics. And one of the biggest
things that happened over — I used to have trouble with my MBA, I
used to be terrible — in terms of giving out about — this is all
qualitative versus quantitative data — if you’re talking about
biases and heuristics, and obviously those are huge talking points in
today’s age, and what has frustrated me over time is a lot of this is
still qualitative. You might have a thousand people looking at one
meeting happening and figuring all the different movements, but it’s
not data-led. So, trying to build a better understanding of how
meetings work and how they can be more effective? In a future
meetingRoom, I might get a notification saying, “all right,
finish the meeting early.” Why? “Because everyone’s head’s
tipping. They’re tired. It’s Friday and it’s ten to five. Give
everyone 10 minutes of freedom.” [laughs] They’re the parts that I
want to hear back from people over time. But as it starts right now,
I’m already getting lovely things like, “you got rid of my Friday
afternoon email thread. Thank you.” [laughs] Small little things
like that are the parts… I know it sounds geeky, but that’s what
gets me excited.
Alan: It’s so small, but it is a
really big win.
Jonny: I’ll definitely link you
on as well; there was a great piece in The New Yorker recently about
asynchronous versus synchronous conversations. And I live in Ireland.
We live in a place where we got to do 2 percent to 6 percent GDP. We
don’t do a nice & neat 4 percent; it’s out on the night out or
hung over. But in terms of how people want to approach things, it’s
nice and consistent. That’s what’s going to come from this stuff
going for all asynchronous and all synchronous. It’s a good healthy
mesh. And this lets you — as you’re saying at the beginning — it
lets you do all those technical things in between. And what VR as a
whole — I mean, every experience I hear about is “we can do
what we can’t do in real life together.” And there’s so many things
that come from us. But for us, it’s about staying focused, giving
that solution that lets you have what you need in real life and doing
those things. Really, really simple stuff. But it’s making sure you
can do with the device that exists today, rather than what exists
tomorrow.
Alan: So, I want to just
reiterate that this is still early days in this technology, but we’re
rounding that corner where the devices are easy to use. The platforms
are now up and ready. You got meetingRoom.io that you can just sign
up, you can have it multi-device. And I think this is key. You guys
have realized this as well, that some people are going to enter from
an iPad. Some people are going to enter from web. Some people are
going to put on a VR headset. Some people in the future will put on
an AR headset. Being able to have that consistency of quality of
meeting regardless of the device is essential. And I think you guys
are really on your way to do that.
What are some of the best business use
cases of this technology that you’ve seen that people are using it
for? What parts of a company are using this most now?
Jonny: That’s a good way to put
it, actually. I’ll address the last point, because I think that’s the
one that you can really answer at the moment. It’s gone beyond the
test case. There’s not one thing in particular that’s driving this
forward. It’s everything’s come together. It’s communities like what
you’re doing and coming together and actually pushing the agenda;
both online, but also getting into companies and talking this
through. And it’s the ecosystem I’m seeing building, is driving it
forward.
On the enterprise end, I’m seeing a lot
more interest in our specific area, not just meetingRoom. But people
are coming in and saying, “look, we’re going beyond tire kicking.
We’re looking for an active solution to implement,” as opposed to
what I would have seen for the first timer company — which we fully
expected, as we were still connected to PCs — where it hit for
automotive really well. And now I think other things like that —
industry-led things — the same stuff that kept the VR dream alive
for the last two decades. Same with energy.
But again, back to where I’m seeing
current trends. Everyone needs to plan out what they’re doing next.
And it generally starts with a whiteboard. So our system is
well-suited, obviously, but that’s where I see people trying to get
in, trying to understand, “how can I use this for training beyond
bespoke service?” Obviously, in our world, a PDF is a PowerPoint
and it works very well right now; you don’t need to do any bespoke
work. You can do your first trial with all the resources you have
today. And that’s the number one tool which I see coming through.
People realizing we don’t have to reinvent the wheel. We already have
a training process. We already have a way that we do regular
meetings. So again, where I throw my hands up to go “we’re a
really great fit for that.” But it’s not a case of — we always try
and divert both ourselves and clients away from it — don’t try and
make something brand new. Don’t try and reinvent the wheel. No one
wants to be first, but sometimes you’ve got to be in the first few.
And it’s just a case of putting something small and manageable
together, and getting some good internal case studies going together.
And again, we’ve got a team based in academia where we transfer that
into industry with saying, “let’s get some proof points around
this.” And they’re the trends that are driving this most forward:
people want real use cases. They don’t want flashy gimmicks.
Alan: Right. Couldn’t agree
more.
Jonny: And as makers in this
space, no one wants to work with gimmicks; that can kill your
company. And any other startups who are working in this space, or
getting into the space: take advantage of what was different when we
started off. The ecosystem even from a development point of view is
totally different. But you got to build your moat up. What is
different about you if you said your name outloud? What is different
about you versus other people? So if you replaced your own name with
a competitive name, is it understandable that you make different
things? Because there’s a lot of people building Word out there.
There’s a lot of people building Notepad. There’s a lot of people
building Excel. Knowing what you want to be when you grow up is a
good way to start.
Alan: So, with that, I’m going
to ask you my final question. What problem in the world do you want
to see solved with XR technologies?
Jonny: [laughs] Ok, I’m biased,
but transport and mobility. As I said earlier on, not that we’re
going to replace everything. It’s just that we can use our resources
in such a more effective way. And I think that genuinely. This is why
I worked in blockchain before with Freeman as an engineer. I worked
in it when it was technology, and people were using it to use that
technology… whatever it’s turned into now at the moment. You don’t
want to be looking for a solution. You want to actually have
something that fits that problem. And that’s what I feel; XR goes
right now for mobility. I think the 5G is a fantastic use case to
show where this all can go. I know yourself and Julie do some awesome
work with showing “here’s how not to do a 5G experience,”
which I think is a great one. In terms of showing what is here today
and showing what can be, we have that here on our tippy tongues.
We’ve already started that, with what we see in the current trends
around remote work. Everyone, once you go beyond one office building,
is working remotely to a certain point, and linking that in with
knowing what infrastructure we have now — the movements over in the
US and all over Europe — around reclaiming rural to a certain point.
I live in Ireland, so homelessness and
house prices are always on the tip of our tongues, unfortunately. And
it’s something that we have a great international community coming
into Ireland, and we have a better way of doing things to actually
push this forward. And I think, again, XR/VR; all these things
actually help alleviate these issues, where cities are a technology
as well. And right now we’re building 20 New Yorks a year. That’s
fine. But it’s hard to replicate London. It’s hard to replicate all
these things working. And I think that what we can do is reclaim our
rural with a lot of what XR is going to do. It’s not something
everyone in XR would talk about so much. But in my world, where
collaboration is king, I live in a country where everyone already
wants to work in Ireland and it’s fantastic. We have some of the best
countries in the world who are coming in, thanks to the likes of EI
and the IDA — that’s Enterprise Ireland and the IDA. And it’s just a
really simple case to go, people want to work here, and we want make
sure it’s really easy to live here as well.
That’s where these things unlock — not
just for Ireland, but for every location. Canada — by the way,
“cross-province” has become part of my vernacular because
we work with so many people in Canada now — and I think it’s also
seeing how cultures align so well. You know, again, short answer:
mobility gets changed by this. It gets flipped on its head. We’re
seeing that with drones. We’re seeing that with air travel. We’re
seeing all these things happening across the board, in terms of how
people are moving differently and how people are taking the boat
instead of taking a plane. I think that’s awesome to hear. That we’re
looking at how we can actually not just push one type of technology,
but the whole mix.
I do think that XR is a catalyst to
help us rethink sitting in an airplane. Will I be in my Quest not
just for a photo on Twitter, but actually handling one or two of my
meetings that way, because it’s better use of my time? Or is it just
somewhere I’m collecting my notes on a whiteboard for when I see the
client the next time I see them? All these things come together that,
again: mobility is about to change. I think it’s an exciting time to
be part of something so interesting.
44 min
August 28, 2019 Save Me a Seat in meetingRoom, with Jonny Cosgrove
A plain room
with a table, a few chairs, and a whiteboard has never sounded
so…futuristic! But that's one way to describe the technology behind
meetingRoom, a VR space, where colleagues from around the world can
gather and discuss business as if they were all in the same, plain
ol' multi-purpose room!
meetingRoom CEO
Jonny Cosgrove does a better job of describing it, so take a listen!
Alan: Today's guest is Jonny
Cosgrove, founder and CEO at meetingRoom.io. Jonny is responsible for
creating a new collaboration platform that allows anybody from
multiple devices to be in one room and collaborate together. Jonny
started his career volunteering and doing activism, before moving
into events, marketing, and technology, operating in Dublin and
Boston. He completed his MBA at Trinity College, Dublin, and began
building the future of work, with a focus on sustainability,
collaboration, and emerging technologies. You can learn more about
Jonny and his team at meetingRoom.io.
Jonny, welcome to the show.
Jonny: Thanks for having me.
Alan: Oh, it's my absolute
pleasure, Jonny. We've known each other quite a long time, through
the VR/AR Association and through great calls like this. We've met in
meetingRoom, and I'm really, really excited to share with the world
what you guys are working on, because the work that you guys are
doing is really pioneering how people will meet in the future -- in
now, not even in the future, but right now -- how people are meeting
and collaborating. And I think, as we move to a world where we start
to really think about travel -- not just international travel -- but
travel to and from work, having people drive two hours to work, back
and forth every day. It's really inefficient, and it's a real time
suck for everybody. Not to mention, creating disastrous effects for
the environment, as well. So let's dive into this. Explain who you
are, and your company, and what does meetingRoom do?
Jonny: No problem at all. So I
agree. Pollution sucks. Unnecessary commutes absolutely suck. What
we're trying to do is make sure the collaboration is easier. One
thing we found everyone can agree on is that collaboration is easier
and more effective when teams work together in the same place. So,
meetingRoom is a service that allows people to work with each other,
using familiar meeting room facilities -- like whiteboards -- in a
virtual environment, from anywhere. We've made this accessible from
anywhere. We made it secure, and we've made these places in the
spaces persistent. So, when you write in a whiteboard and you return
next week, it's still there, just like in real life. And what we
found is, that it allows employees to feel a higher level of
immersive engagement with what's happening in the actual meeting. It
keeps you focused in that time -- in that moment -- and lets you have
more effective meetings. Even though employees are spread all over
the world.
Alan: You mentioned something...
heh heh, I thought it was funny because as you said, "Oh, yeah,
you know, you put all your notes on the whiteboard and just like the
real world, they're there when you come back." I was thinking,
no, that's exactly the opposite of the real world!
Jonny: [laughs]
Alan: Somebody's erased all your
notes, and you're like, “no! I didn't take a picture of it!”
Jonny: Thank you for helping me
explain it. So, one of the thingsthat
actually happens a lot is that exact issue. That's one of our own
internal metrics; we're working to get this through this
point, “how are you using their internal rooms existing today,”
if you're working in-house, or how do you work remotely as it is
right now? And one of the biggest problems was the work you do in
that time, that space, on that Skype call,
0 min
August 26, 2019 Meet & Greet in AR, with Spatial’s Jacob Loewenstein
Last episode was all about the value of VR in creating virtual
meeting spaces; today, we’re looking at AR. As Jacob Loewenstein from
Spatial explains, both have their advantages in an enterprise
setting, but AR is best suited for people collaborating together in
the same room. Listen to this edition of XR for Business to find out
why.
Alan: Today’s guest is Jacob Lowenstein, VP of Business Development and Strategy at Spatial. Spatial’s mission is to empower people to be more connected, creative, and productive. Organizations are increasingly distributed across offices and information doesn’t flow easily; success depends on people working together. Their first product enables people to collaborate anywhere with AR. The founders have deep backgrounds in 3D user interfaces. Co-founder Anand Agarawala sold his previous startup, BumpTop — a 3D physics multi-touch desktop — to Google, and also demoed this in a TED Talk. Co-founder Jinha Lee developed pioneering AR interfaces at MIT, Microsoft, and Samsung and then also showed them at a TED talk. They are a passionate team of 3D designers, VR and AR experts based in New York and San Francisco. Our guest today, Jacob, has also been a partner at Samsung NEXT. And I’m really, really excited, because Spatial has raised a seed round from such amazing investors as Inovia Capital, Expa, Lerer Hippeau, Leaders Fund, and Samsung NEXT. To learn more about Spatial, you can visit spatial.is.
Jacob, welcome to the show.
Jacob: Hey, it’s great to be
here. Thanks so much for having me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure.
We had an awesome opportunity to meet at Charlie Fink’s exclusive
dinner at CES this year, and I was really blown away by the warmth
and passion that you bring. And so I want to just thank you for
taking the time to jump on the show with me.
Jacob: I had a blast at that
dinner, and I believe we both had delicious Indian food together.
Shout out to Charlie for organizing that. I met a ton of wonderful
people, and the compliment goes right back in the other direction. I
mean, you have been at this for a while as such a positive and
fundamental figure, helping shed attention and light on the projects
in the space that matter and that are moving the needle. And frankly,
you’ve been moving the needle yourself, and have been a builder in
this space for some time. And so I’m excited to chat with you, and
happy to answer any and all questions.
Alan: Well, on that note — and
I thank you for that — tell me about Spatial. I know about it, but
for the people listening — really, you guys have built enormously
powerful tools. So, maybe give us the idea of what Spatial is, and
how it’s being used.
Jacob: Totally. So, I’m going to
give you the headline, and I think the backstory is a little bit
illuminating. I know you spoke a bit about that already, but I’m
going to dive deeper. But the headline is that Spatial enables people
to collaborate from anywhere with augmented reality. And the idea is,
essentially, we’re all big believers in the VR and AR space. I
imagine folks that listen to this podcast are, or are trying to learn
to be. And if you’ve done a lot of demos in VR/AR, you’ve probably
encountered the same phenomenon, which is; you get someone to put on
the headset and they say, “Oh wow, this is cool,” and they
smile and they compliment you, and you probably never hear from them
again. And it’s because most demos — in VR and AR — frankly, are
not that useful, and they wouldn’t really generate particular impact
for an enterprise or any given organization. One of the underlying
motivations of Spatial was to say, instead of being trapped in this
like, “OG experimental” phase of VR and AR, could we actually
build something that we felt provided real utility for enterprises?
And the way that we arrived at what we do — which is essentially
enabling teams and companies that are distributed around the world to
work together as if they were in the same room – was, we went back
to fundamentals.
Anand and Jinha are two of the leading
3D interface designers in the world. And Anand, he built this first
company called BumpTop, that he gave his TED Talk on. What BumpTop
really was; it was AR before AR. Even before there were touch screens
in phones, Anand was asking the question, “how can we use the
touch screen to enable people to more intuitively interact with
information, and really, to interact with information the same way
they interact with objects in the real world?” After he gave his
TED Talk on it, there’s interest from Apple, and Google ended up
buying his company. The idea being, Andy Rubin felt that Android and
the mobile phone could really transform how people interact with
information, how they communicate with one another. And Jinha,
several years later, gave a TED Talk. At that time, he was getting
his PhD at the MIT Media Lab, but he shared a very common passion
with Anand, which was this idea of blending the digital world and the
real world. And so Jinha received a ton of acclaim while he was at
MIT, for his research on this idea of the tangible pixel. That was
the idea of blending the digital and real world. And Jinha built the
world’s first desktop AR computer, which he called SpaceTop. He
actually kind of named it SpaceTop as an homage to BumpTop, even
though he had never met Anand. So when he gave his TED Talk in 2013,
he showed off these prototypes and showed off the work, and he met
Anand, and they both realized that they were spirit animals.
The funny thing was that they wanted to
work together then and there. But Jinha had to go do his military
service in Korea, and it ended up being that he worked out this
special deal where he did it as a research fellow at Samsung. So
Jinha built all these prototypes as the lead 3D interface designer
for Samsung’s TV business unit, transformed how Samsung thought about
interfaces. And Jinha started to really think about how he could
change interfaces to enable people to access information anywhere,
interact with it more intuitively, and even better connect people.
And when Jinha finished up at Samsung, AR had sort of started
catching on in earnest. It was around 2015, the first Hololens had
come out. Jinha had worked at Microsoft Research and he had offers to
go back to Microsoft Research and Google and all these other
companies and do serious hefty work for them on AR. But Anand had had
this original idea, which was basically to try and build the Android
for AR. That was where Spatial kind of started.
Alan: That’s adventurous.
Jacob: That’s very adventurous.
And they did a ton of experimentation. And what they realized was
they felt that they were getting themselves a little bit down this
path of… ingenious experimentation, sort of eye-opening bits and
pieces. But they didn’t feel like the industry was ready for
something that was that expansive. So instead they said, “well,
what can we take from our experiments, that feels like it’s actually
onto something, that’ll be really useful?” So they went back to
the fundamentals of, “what does AR really do for a user, and
what are their particular pain points that people are having?”
What they realized was the following: firstly, in the
crossing-the-chasm sort of path, it became clear to us that
enterprise is where this was all going to get started, because
enterprise folks were feeling the same pain points as consumers, but
there were pillars in place that would make it easier for enterprises
to adopt AR versus consumers, in terms of having a greater
willingness to pay relative to the ROI they could get. Because AR was
going to be expensive in the early going. And the pain was more
pronounced and identified in enterprise level than it was at a
consumer level, which enterprises were far more well aware of the
problems they were having — that AR could solve — than consumers
were. That’s where this “a-ha” moment came to say, well, it seems
really clear that the biggest problem that enterprises are having —
that other technologies are no longer moving the needle on — are
enterprise. And I reference other technologies, because one really
important thing was that AR not only has to do a good job at solving
the problem, but has to do a better job than other technologies, or
even just fundamentally human ways of solving it.
Alan: So, what is the problem?
Jacob: The problem is that
companies are distributed — they have people all over the world —
that need to work together, yet they can’t do it well. They have a
couple of tools available to them that move the needle a bit. Things
like voice or video chat. But as you go beyond having just a handful
of people interacting, and as you go beyond trying to collaborate on
one single piece of information, those tools break down. If you look
at the size of the video conferencing market, estimates put it like
$20- to $30-billion. And you look at the size of the business travel
market, which is $1.3-trillion and growing, it’s very, very clear
that people still have a very strong preference to be in the same
room with one another in order to effectively collaborate.
And travelling sucks. It’s expensive.
Alan: It’s funny, because we’ve
done 25 episodes, and there’s been at least five episodes where we
talk about the fact that virtual and augmented reality allows you to
travel and transport and collaborate with people without travelling.
Because travelling to the beach with your family? Awesome. Travelling
to a boardroom for a one-hour meeting? Not so much.
Jacob: It’s horrendous. I mean,
listen: I’m not going to make the case that AR is going to eliminate
all forms of travel. There are forms of travel that are still
enjoyable or useful. And in the short and medium term, we’re under no
illusion that a lot of business travel is this ritualistic form of
relationship building, where the very fact that I’m willing to
sacrifice to see you is some sort of signifier of the importance of
the relationship. That’s going to continue to happen. But there’s so
much frivolous travel that happens for interactions that could so
easily be done in AR. We think that it would become very obvious and
very easy, very quickly, for people to elect to travel this way than
taking hours and hours and hours out of their life, sitting on this
uncomfortable aluminum tube where people get sick and they hurt their
backs and their legs get really, really cramped up. If you told
someone they could avoid all that and do it in AR, I think people
would be very interested. And the signal to us so far has been that,
“hell yeah!”
Alan: Give us an example of this
Spatial augmented reality, and why does it better in augmented
reality versus virtual reality? Why would I want that? Or, is this
maybe something that can be bridged across both, when you need a
fully-immersive space versus that? Why would somebody use this over
VR?
Jacob: It’s a great question.
The short answer is, is that our goal is to enable people to choose
what they want in the medium and long term. In the short term, our
observations are the following: each medium has its own advantages or
disadvantages. We feel that augmented reality — particularly in
enterprise, for the use cases that we’re talking about now — has the
following advantages. Number one: people are not quote unquote
isolated. They continue to see the real world around them. And
relatedly, they can also continue to see their other devices while
they’re working in the media. We felt that just from a pure comfort
perspective, we were hearing from a lot of folks in Enterprise that
there was discomfort, not seeing their environment. There was
frustration at not being able to see their other devices. And thirdly
— and this is actually very important — in a lot of enterprise
collaboration scenarios, you tend to have a mix of people that are
not just entirely remote, but also people that are physically in the
same space together, that want to work together. And those people
found it kind of awkward that they were sitting next to another human
being, but couldn’t actually see that real person even though they
were sitting next to them.
Alan: There it is right there.
Being in virtual reality, if you’re across the country or around the
world, that’s great. But if you’re standing in the same room together
and putting on VR headsets — even though you’re standing in the same
room — doesn’t make sense.
Jacob: Absolutely. But to your
other point, we do intend to experiment and support VR over time,
because we do feel that in certain circumstances, it is beneficial to
be in an entirely virtual space. In particular, the thing we’re
hearing more and more is for workers that are entirely remote — and
that’s actually increasingly common either because people are
freelancing more and more, or because businesses are becoming more
comfortable with remote work — there is an increasing demand for
people to feel like they are in a certain space. And more and more
often we’re hearing, either people want to feel like they’re in what
we call “the center of gravity,” which may be the space where
most of the people are collaborating from.
So, for example, if I am joining a
board meeting and eight people are in one space, and I happen to be
remote in an entirely different space, it makes me feel more
connected with that group in that environment, if I’m in a simulated
or streamed board room. Or in some other instances, that location
that I see around me in the virtual space may have some real
relevance to the task at hand. For example, if I’m going through some
sort of instruction or training exercise where my environment really
matters, then we can understand why it might be important to jump
into a VR headset and limit the distraction from the real environment
around me, and replace it with an entirely virtual environment.
Now, in Spatial — and your friend, Mr.
Jonathan Moss, amazing human being who we were talking about before
we started — they’re in trial with us, and doing some work in
Spatial. And one actually really interesting thing that they’ve
achieved — and this wasn’t even something that we had thought of,
but they used our platform in a pretty interesting way — is they
actually load up a Sprint room, and they actually achieve a pretty
remarkable mixed reality effect in the Hololens, where they load up a
life-sized Sprint store. And you actually– even though you’re in AR
— you still sort of feel like you are in a virtual space. It’s hard
to describe, because you kind of have to try it. But we’ve actually
started achieving a sort of MR effect, where you can still see the
world around you, but it’s without full occlusion, so you still see
through it in a semi-transparent way; the real Sprint store, overlaid
on the world around you. So, you’re not cut off from the world.
You’re not cut off from people that are in the same room with you.
You’re also not in this entirely isolated state as well.
Alan: We did an experiment a
little while ago, about how to sell running shoes in mixed reality;
so, in the Hololens. We brought the shoes in, and it was cool to see
shoes in the room. But then we said, “Well, what if we change
the environment? It’s not your living room, but it’s now a basketball
court?” So we actually did exactly what you’re saying, and built
this box around you; that you’re in a basketball court, the sounds of
playing. And then it wasn’t that I was on the basketball court. It
was around me. The sounds were there. I could see the basketball
court. But the shoes were there, and it just changed the whole
context.
Jacob: Right on. And there are
these UX innovations. We try and develop some of them from the ground
up, but some of them just happen through experimentation. And that’s
the joy of working with our customers.
I should also give another example.
Mattel is our biggest customer, and it was such a nice lock-and-key
fit for what they were looking for, and what we could provide,
because they have folks in Southern California and Buffalo (where
Fisher-Price is located), and in China, and they have this value
chain in terms of how they develop and create toys that involves
brainstorming and engineering and manufacturing planning. It’s this
lifecycle of the product that spans across multiple sites, where
people really need to work closely together, and the friction that
exists in that current process that results from people having to
travel — or having to work in 2D in video conferencing — is really
painful.
So you can imagine that being able to
transport anywhere with AR and feel like you’re in the same room with
people. Beyond just what it does from a communications perspective,
but what it does from a relationship building perspective — just in
terms of how humans bond around one another — smooths out working
together enough. And then on top of that, the fact that they can then
brainstorm in Spatial. So we have a feature that we call ThoughtFlow,
where you can literally just throw up your fingers, speak out what
you’re thinking of and visualize that information immediately and
organize it on walls. So, you can brainstorm within Spatial, they can
start to bring in their designs, or even using our new Hololens
features, animate and draw within Spatial.
I have to give myself a little bit of a
self-shoutout, because we were just on stage with Satya Nadella for
the second time at Microsoft Build, which is their big developer
conference. It was in Seattle, and we demonstrated the next step in
our collaboration with Microsoft, which is not just developing more
features that are native to Hololens 2 — which, in this case,
included being able to draw just with your fingertips, having full
hand tracking and eye tracking so the avatars really come to life –
we’re actually doing really, really deep integration with the
Microsoft graph. And this is a really important point: if AR lives
separately from the existing ways that you collaborate not in AR,
there will be a wall of friction that will prevent organizations or
enterprises from wanting to adopt it. And I’m speaking to those that
are listening that are thinking like, “yeah, this all sounds
well and good, but I already have all these existing software tools.
This sounds like a nightmare to have to adopt some other thing.”
The really cool thing about Spatial is that you can jump into a
Spatial collaboration straight from your existing collaboration
tools.
Here’s what that looks like; I could be
working in Microsoft Teams, and we could be sharing information,
typing, doing video chat, and we might decide, “oh, well, we
need to get into holographic here to really start to do things like
annotate on a 3D model or visualize all the information we just
loaded up”. Instead of having to jump into a headset and go
through this weird system of uploading files that have some other
login, we can literally use your active directory login. You can
generate a QR code. You just look at the QR code through your
headset. It detects your eyes — basically does eye scanning — to
verify who you are, and you’re instantly in Spatial with all the
information you were just working on, immediately visualized; your
avatar, everything that you were working on, all ready to go.
Alan: [makes explosion sound]
That was my head just exploding.
Jacob: People are always like,
“BS — there’s no way”. So the demo we did at Microsoft
Build on-stage with Satya was live; a fully-live demo of everything
we did. And then on top of that — just to prove even more that this
was real — we were open for demos for a couple of days to the public
at Build, where they got to try it for themselves. We’re reaching
that level of frictionless experience, that easy-to-integrate with
the existing ways you collaborate. And oh, by the way, lucky us; it
happens to be that the Microsoft Graph and the Microsoft stack is
already being used by most Fortune 1000 companies, anyway. We’re
integrating the stack that most these big companies are already
using.
Alan: About a year ago, the
Hololens moved from the devices division of the company over to the
Azure cloud computing side of the company. That was the precursor to
this. I believe Microsoft also saw this as, “hey, Hololens is
cool as a standalone tool, but if it integrates with everything, then
it’s a real enterprise tool.” And you guys have taken full
advantage of that.
Jacob: I can’t speak for
Microsoft, but I think anything I’m about to summarize is probably
already out there in some form, from comments they’ve already given.
But I think that’s exactly right. And I think that Microsoft’s vision
for AR is that it is this interface that allows you to access
information that lives anywhere, on any device. And the connective
tissue that enables that are these series of Azure services that they
offer, whether it’s pure Azure Cloud or some other Azure services
that allow you to then go and load up or interact with that
information in an effective way. I do think that that’s Microsoft’s
vision. And I think that they’re building these groundbreaking
devices like the Hololens 1 or 2 to accelerate the space. But in the
near future, when lots of different companies are producing these AR
headsets, I presume that Microsoft is just going to try and be
essentially the fundamental OS layer and cloud layer that provides
all the services that enable you to just collaborate effectively.
Alan: Well, you’re already
seeing that with Microsoft giving their entire tech stack to their
mixed reality partners. So they’ve said, “okay, here’s all the
tech we have in the Hololens,” and they’ve licensed that out to
HP and Lenovo and Dell so that they can make the hardware. You’re
already seeing that distribution of the technology from a hardware
standpoint, all running on the Microsoft Azure stack. It’s a really
smart plan.
Jacob: But if you just look at
how they work with developers, and in terms of the mixed reality tool
kit, and the early access to Azure services that they’re offering —
I mean, they’re really trying to empower developers to build the
future of AR. And they just want to offer these fundamental services.
Total pleasure working with Microsoft on that front, and it’s
convenient for us that Microsoft is already the biggest show in town,
in terms of enterprise services for these companies. It means that
not only is it just a pleasure working with a good partner, but it
also helps us get ready and up to snuff to work with all these big
companies anyway.
Alan: It gives you global scale
almost instantly, which is fantastic.
Jacob: But it’s also worth
noting that Spatial is a cross-platform company. I say this
simultaneously, which is; Microsoft’s an incredible partner, but we
also know that there are other great companies helping make AR
reality out there. And so we have our Magic Leap build coming out
very soon. That’s really exciting. And obviously the Magic Leap 1 is
a tremendous device and we’re excited about Magic Leap as they
continue to push the space. And I can’t talk publicly about it yet,
but we’re also working from some other big partners — big names —
that are building hardware and building platforms in this space,
because we think that a lot of people have good ideas about AR.
Alan: There is going to be some
amazing stuff coming out. I just got invited to an event at AWE where
it’s — a company that you wouldn’t think of — is gonna be launching
something in AR. They’re coming out of the woodwork!
Jacob: Well, for sure. And they
have to. We used to talk about this at Samsung all the time, which
is; whether it’s glasses or a contact lens, until you get to some
sort of deep neural uplink? To some extent, AR is the last medium.
And there are going to be a lot of different house terms for how you
plug into that medium. But this type of visual interfaces is kind of
the last interface. I think a lot of companies realized that, if they
don’t own some piece of it, they’re going to be locked out forever,
because AR is going to be computing, period. Like, we’re not going to
be talking about AR at some point; it’s just going to be computing.
Alan: I keep saying to people:
within the next 10 years, we’re going to look back and say, “wow, I
can’t believe we used to look at these flat screens all the time, and
we carried around a phone.” It’ll be slow and it’ll take longer
than most people anticipate. Then all of a sudden one day, we’ll be
wearing a pair of glasses that does everything for us, and the whole
world is now our computer, and we just don’t know any better. It’s
like picking up a BlackBerry now. It feels… obsolete.
Jacob: That’s right. To that
point, it’s really important for the big companies that are trying to
produce things in the space, because… listen: you’re not going to
have a cell phone, you’re not going to have a TV. Like, all these
devices that some big tech companies produce. You’re not going to
have a monitor. I mean, the Hololens 2 is already doing like 2K in
each eye, which is basically almost at the resolution your monitor’s
already at. Why would you own a monitor, if you just put on a pair of
glasses that’s really comfortable, wear it for a while and by the
way, have a ton of different monitors and be able to paint the world
— to borrow Charlie Fink’s phrase — paint the world with data,
paint the world with information? It’s a better offering for users.
And actually, we talk about this at Spatial all the time. We have
this feature that we haven’t really shown publicly yet, which is
essentially this infinite desktop feature. And I do think that that’s
also going to be a big part of the story of what pulls people into
AR. I think AR — in the initial going — is going to be very
fundamentally about only a few features, particularly head-mounted
AR. And we think that it’s probably going to be some combination of
single player mode, where you just can visualize a ton of information
with the same fidelity that you would look at your monitor, but just
don’t have to have a bunch of monitors. And then we think the
combination of that, plus being able to collaborate very seamlessly,
natively, in 3D on information — that combination probably surpasses
what people could do with lots of different devices and other
mediums. And it brings them together under one umbrella.
That’s a very compelling offering for
people. You have all your information sort of under one umbrella.
Then, once it’s already convenient enough to just jump into AR, then
it’s going to be a lot more convenient to start bringing all the
other apps natively into AR, because you’re already in the
experience. And that’s kind of how it happened in mobile, right? It’s
like, I started using my phone for one thing, which is essentially
email and maybe taking a photo and using my calculator. And then it
started becoming a pain in the butt to use my phone for one thing,
and my desktop for other things. And so there are a lot of things we
do on our phone that’s kind of better to do on a laptop or desktop,
but because the phone already has this gravitational pull for the
things that really matter, I just start doing the mobile version of
it over and over, and I think that’s what transition starts to look
like in AR.
Alan: Yeah, Google Drive. Google
Drive on a mobile. It’s not fun, but it gets the job done.
Jacob: Exactly.
Alan: One of the things that I
saw — and I’m not sure what video it was — and this kind of blew my
mind, because a lot of companies, they’ll bring everybody together
and they’ll create a war room — they say war room — but getting
together, putting all your ideas on the walls, putting your sticky
notes up, and you’re really just brainstorming and coming up with
collaborative ideas, bringing in photos, printing them off, stick
them on the wall, and you create this room full of all your ideas.
But then, somebody else has the room booked. You’ve got to pull all
the stuff down and you end up taking some pictures, hopefully
somebody makes some notes. With Spatial, you can create this war
room, hit save — or it probably automatically saves — and then
automatically come back anytime you want, into the exact room and
look at the war room.
Jacob: That’s right.
Alan: That, to me, for marketing
companies, is going to be a game-changer.
Jacob: 100 percent. And by the
way, like, yeah, you can come back into the same physical room, or
any physical room and just remap that information to existing
surroundings.
Here’s an interesting little anecdote.
One of the things we think about a lot actually is PowerPoint. The
story of PowerPoint is essentially, if you think about the early 90s
and how people did presentations, most people didn’t put together
robust presentations to have meetings. For really, really big deal
things, you might put together some slides and get some people who
can draw to do it, or you might use some early presentation software
to put it together. But most people weren’t great at using that. And
so it was a special thing.
Then what happened was some of these
Microsoft Office tools came out — like PowerPoint — and they
embedded within certain groups of people. Like, MBAs going to
consulting companies, and the MBA has basically started figuring out,
“wow, actually, I could start preparing all sorts of meetings in
slide presentation. And it actually makes it a lot easier for me to
communicate the points I want to communicate in a manner that
encourages recall.” And that draws attention and does all these
things that actually, at the end of the day, make people just
recognize the work you’re actually doing and recognize the message
you’re trying to promulgate.
So what was originally a somewhat niche
activity grew in popularity, because the barrier to entry to doing it
diminished. So presentation went from a special thing to a very
common thing. And part of our intuition is that we think something
similar can happen with war rooming. Where right now, companies —
for some specific task — they’re always going to set up this type of
design thinking kind of room. And it’s kind of difficult to do. You
have to take all these post-its, and you put stuff on the wall, then
you have to reserve the room for a couple of days. All these things
you just said. We’re saying, well, yes, for the people that are
already doing that, certainly this is like bullseye for them. It’s so
much better, they could take that room wherever they go; the Hololens
sits in their backpack. It’s not limited to one room anymore. And
they don’t have to physically use any of these tools. They can just
use their fingertips and flick things onto the wall and it’s just so
much easier.
But the other thing we’re trying to say
is, if the barrier to entry to that type of exercise was insanely
low, would that type of thinking become way more popular within
organizations, and become a whole new way to conduct meetings?
Because right now, most people are kind of lazy about how they run
meetings. If someone even puts together an agenda, it’s like, “wow
— 10 points for Gryffindor.” And then if you put together a
PowerPoint, you know, “my god; promotion”.
Alan: We have a policy. We will
not have a meeting without an agenda.
Jacob: Well, exactly. But if
those are the only tools you have to run a meeting, it’s kind of bare
bones. At the end of the day, all this brainstorming conversation
happens. And the best you can hope for is that someone is taking some
notes and sent them out. And then maybe two people look at that
notes. But most people, never again. This idea of being able to
manifest information — put it on the walls, use your physical space
to organize that information — and then be able to return to it is
pretty wild. If you can make it really easy to run a meeting that
way, companies are going to find that it’s just a much more effective
way to run a meeting. People are going to take away a lot more.
They’re going to return to it. And it’s going to make the bang for
your buck of a meeting that much more pronounced.
Part of what we’re hoping is for, when
we’re creating in this design thinking room; it’s not perfectly
analogous to the PowerPoint, but we’re hoping the crossover in terms
of impact — similar impact — is similar. And by the way, we’re
continuing to experiment with a lot more use cases for Spatial, and a
lot more different kinds of meetings. So we’re definitely trying to
get deeper into what else is improved by having that Spatial
interface, or being able to intuitively, innately interact with 3D
information without having to translate it from a 2D interface into
your native way you process information, which is in 3D. And we think
the potential is limitless.
Alan: It really is. So, let’s
get down to some practicals here, because I think people are assuming
that this is some pie-in-the-sky, “this may be something we’ll do
in 10 years from now”. But the stuff that you guys are working
on, companies are using it right now. You mentioned Mattel. You
mentioned Sprint, and our friend Jonathan Moss. (Shout out to
Jonathan!) Really, what is the timeline around this, and what are
some of the costs involved? What are the key performance indicators
that you’re using with your customers to figure out what is the value
being generated here? What are the costs? What are the ROIs, and what
is it gonna take for a company to start using Spatial now?
Jacob: The good news is it’s
extremely easy. And relative to the ROI, not expensive. So here’s how
it works. First and foremost, Spatial’s cross-platform. We actually
even have a phone and web app that you can use, even if you don’t
have headsets, which makes it really easy to adopt. Because
companies, enterprises; it takes some time to adopt headsets in
significant number. So, knowing that no one’s going to be left out of
the experience is pretty important to them. You’re gonna need some
headsets, whether it’s Hololens 1 or 2, or Magic Leap 1, to have the
experience. And so companies need to come to terms with buying those
headsets. And so that’s the first cost–
Alan: Is Spatial available on
Hololens 1?
Jacob: We are in Hololens 1. You
can download us today, we’re in the [Microsoft] Store and we’ll give
you a trial account, willy-nilly.
Alan: I’m going to get it right
now.
Jacob: Yeah, absolutely.
Alan: While we’re on this call.
While I’m listening, I’m going to pull it up.
Jacob: Yeah, Spatial, just
search that at the Microsoft Store in the Hololens. The other really
cool thing is that — and by the way, we’ll need to set you up with
an account, which, while I’m good at multitasking, I’m not great at
doing that while we’re doing it, but I’ll set that up right after
this podcast is over — the next thing is, the Microsoft Graph
integration is pretty seamless. If you have Microsoft Teams, go under
the integration, that’s super easy. But all you need to do is just
download Spatial. We’re in the store. Email us, we’ll set you up with
accounts.
In terms of what it costs, it’s quite
reasonable. One single telepresence room from companies like Cisco or
some other companies costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. For the
same price, you can basically roll out Spatial for your entire
organization with unlimited accounts. If you can justify the ROI,
which most of these big companies do for one of these single rooms —
which is, by the way, only in one location; no one knows how to use
it, and basically, you have to get people to travel to the location
just to use it. The fact that you can use Spatial on any of these
headsets, anywhere in the world, it’s just a far stronger value
proposition.
And then in terms of how you measure
the impact? Well, that’s also pretty easy from our part. Some
companies have very specific KPIs depending on what their specific
use cases. But the general, KPIs are essentially just, if you look at
the number of meetings that you’re conducting in Spatial, you can
take a pretty reasonable average of what the cost would be to do that
meeting and travel for that meeting. And it’s usually some
combination of X hundreds of dollars for airfare. You’d have to look
at the averages for organization, X hundreds of dollars for your
hotel, X hundreds of dollars spent on meal, tens or a hundred dollars
spent on your rideshare. And what you are basically finding, I
mean… the company — I can’t disclose this, but one of the
companies we’re in trial with — they do this research collaboration.
For this one type of meeting — they use this for multiple types of
meetings — but for one specific type of meeting, they do this
research collaboration in Spatial. You do that once a quarter for
this research team that’s located at around the world. That’s $40,000
in travel costs for one meeting. So you do that four times a year for
just one meeting, you’re already basically paying Spatial back, as
is. So if you roll this out even a little bit more scale than within
your organization, the payback you get on it is insane, in terms of
just travel savings.
The other general KPI we’ll do is we’ll
just do a type of net promoter score, just for people to vote on, and
tell you whether this is having actual impact and moving the needle,
in terms of their effectiveness of meetings. And they’ll vote on that
frequently, just to let you know the quality of meetings. That’s more
of a qualitative measure. But between those real travel cost savings,
and between the qualitative measure where people are weighing in on
whether this is better or not, the signal is very clear that Spatial
is enormously helpful for organizations. It’s extremely easy to
setup. It’s very, very reasonably priced. And then, when they
actually start using it, it’s an “a-ha” moment of, “oh, wow,
I’m having not just a meeting that’s as effective as an in-person
meeting, but a meeting that far surpasses that. Because in an
in-person meeting, I don’t have the ability to bring in people from
anywhere. I don’t have the ability to manifest any information at my
fingertips — 2D or 3D — and place it on the wall. I don’t have the
ability to annotate at my fingertips and draw and basically
communicate in these very precise ways. When I’m in person, all I can
do is just talk at you.” And so all that has added up to a real
transformation collaboration.
I would end with; we’re not a future
concept. We are real and available today. Enterprises right now,
we’re exclusively working with Fortune 1000 companies. We’re actually
going to be opening up soon and putting out a Spatial free trial
version — just out there, for anyone to use. If you’re a Fortune
1000 company, reach out to us today. And if you’re not and you’re
still clamoring to use us, the good news is we’re going to be opening
up pretty soon. So watch out for us. Hopefully by the fall, we’ll
have that out there for multiple folks to use.
Alan: I’m actually downloading
Spatial. It is 154 megabyte file. So, very small file, too.
Jacob: Yeah, yeah. A lot of hard
work went into optimizing that. We do a pretty interesting split
between work on the device and in the cloud.
39 min
August 26, 2019 Meet & Greet in AR, with Spatial's Jacob Loewenstein
Last episode was all about the value of VR in creating virtual
meeting spaces; today, we're looking at AR. As Jacob Loewenstein from
Spatial explains, both have their advantages in an enterprise
setting, but AR is best suited for people collaborating together in
the same room. Listen to this edition of XR for Business to find out
why.
Alan: Today's guest is Jacob Lowenstein, VP of Business Development and Strategy at Spatial. Spatial's mission is to empower people to be more connected, creative, and productive. Organizations are increasingly distributed across offices and information doesn't flow easily; success depends on people working together. Their first product enables people to collaborate anywhere with AR. The founders have deep backgrounds in 3D user interfaces. Co-founder Anand Agarawala sold his previous startup, BumpTop -- a 3D physics multi-touch desktop -- to Google, and also demoed this in a TED Talk. Co-founder Jinha Lee developed pioneering AR interfaces at MIT, Microsoft, and Samsung and then also showed them at a TED talk. They are a passionate team of 3D designers, VR and AR experts based in New York and San Francisco. Our guest today, Jacob, has also been a partner at Samsung NEXT. And I'm really, really excited, because Spatial has raised a seed round from such amazing investors as Inovia Capital, Expa, Lerer Hippeau, Leaders Fund, and Samsung NEXT. To learn more about Spatial, you can visit spatial.is.
Jacob, welcome to the show.
Jacob: Hey, it's great to be
here. Thanks so much for having me.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure.
We had an awesome opportunity to meet at Charlie Fink's exclusive
dinner at CES this year, and I was really blown away by the warmth
and passion that you bring. And so I want to just thank you for
taking the time to jump on the show with me.
Jacob: I had a blast at that
dinner, and I believe we both had delicious Indian food together.
Shout out to Charlie for organizing that. I met a ton of wonderful
people, and the compliment goes right back in the other direction. I
mean, you have been at this for a while as such a positive and
fundamental figure, helping shed attention and light on the projects
in the space that matter and that are moving the needle. And frankly,
you've been moving the needle yourself, and have been a builder in
this space for some time. And so I'm excited to chat with you, and
happy to answer any and all questions.
Alan: Well, on that note -- and
I thank you for that -- tell me about Spatial. I know about it, but
for the people listening -- really, you guys have built enormously
powerful tools. So, maybe give us the idea of what Spatial is, and
how it's being used.
Jacob: Totally. So, I'm going to
give you the headline, and I think the backstory is a little bit
illuminating. I know you spoke a bit about that already, but I'm
going to dive deeper. But the headline is that Spatial enables people
to collaborate from anywhere with augmented reality. And the idea is,
essentially, we're all big believers in the VR and AR space. I
imagine folks that listen to this podcast are, or are trying to learn
to be. And if you've done a lot of demos in VR/AR, you've probably
encountered the same phenomenon, which is; you get someone to put on
the headset and they say, "Oh wow, this is cool," and they
smile and they compliment you, and you probably never hear from them
again. And it's because most demos -- in VR and AR -- frankly, are
not that useful, and they wouldn't really generate particular impact
for an ente
0 min

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