XR for Business

By Alan Smithson from MetaVRseBusiness Technology Arts

XR for Business episodes

August 14, 2019 Getting Fit with a VR Toolkit, and Other XR Tips with VRdōjō’s Michael Eichenseer
We talk a lot about the business use cases of XR on this podcast, but any good business comes with a great fitness plan or exercise room. XR is no different, and VRdōjō founder Michael Eichenseer runs Alan through a few of the cardiovascular benefits to the technology.
And that’s just the first six
minutes! Many other topics are touched on in this episode – virtual
writing spaces, remote assistance, spatial learning, his own XR
makerspace, and more.
Alan: Welcome to the show,
Michael, how are you doing? Pretty good. How are you? Fantastic.
Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It’s going to be
a really exciting one. Let’s tell everybody at home. What is your
vision for virtual augmented reality? Was the best virtual reality or
a AR experience is what is the best thing that you have done? And
explain to the listeners why that is so.
Michael: For me, it’s definitely
the fitness aspect of VR. As a gamer, I definitely enjoy the fact
that I can play a game, not be sitting the entire time, and
afterwards, I’ve burnt 500 calories, and feel really good about it
the next day. The research coming out in XR in reducing pain and
increasing motivation, to me, is fascinating.
Alan: There was a lot of medical
use cases coming up in pain reduction, using virtual reality for
pre-surgical — and also perisurgical — where you’re wearing a
headset to distract you. I know one of the things that blows my mind
is, my daughter, she’s 10 and she is terrified of needles. Like,
we’re talking blood-curdling screams from the nurse’s office. The
next time she goes, we’re gonna use VR to try to distract her while
they take blood, because it’s a stressful thing. And when somebody
goes into a surgery, being able to decrease their stress; it’s hard
to measure the success outcomes, but at the same time, just being
able to calm them is something that I think VR does really naturally.
You talked about exercising in VR. Give us some examples of some of
the ways people are using VR to exercise.
Michael: The boxing games are
pretty popular, and I definitely have to mention Beat Saber. That’s
probably the top one at the moment.
Alan: Basically, you have two
lightsabers in your hands, and you’ve got to swipe up and down, and
left and right, with your left and right hand, and dodge out of the
way of things. It is incredible.
Michael: It’s dancing.
Alan: Dancing and disco, and
it’s so good.
Michael: Yes, it’s really good.
You kind of lose track of time. I think that’s why it’s good that
it’s based on music; the song ends and you’re like, “oh, back to
reality a little bit.”.
Alan: Yeah, there’s a guy who
was playing, he lost 45 pounds playing Beat Saber.
Michael: Yes. I’ve actually met
a 68-year-old retiree who logs into VR every morning at 5:00 a.m.,
just to warm up for the day.
Alan: That’s incredible. What
does he play? What does he do?
Michael: Back when I met him, we
were playing a game called Smash Box Arena. It’s a multiplayer game,
kind of dodgeball. It’s defunct now, but there’s a lot of other games
like that. I think Rec Room is probably the number one out there,
where you can hop in — it’s a free game — and it’s cross-platform
and you see people in there at all times of the day.
Alan: I’ve played paintball in
there. It was a lot of fun.
Michael: Yep. That’s the game I
actually play competitively. That’s kind of my workout every day.
Alan: I’m so terrible at it.
What are the tricks? You gotta bounce from place to place, and it’s
just… it’s crazy.
Michael: Well, I think the trick
is the same with anything: Practice makes perfect. Playing with
people who challenge your skill set.
Alan: Speaking of that, talk to
us a little bit about how you’re challenging young minds and people
who are passionate in the space through your maker space, VRdōjō.
You are the voice of virtual reality in the Midwest. I can imagine
that there’s a huge hub of VR in Kansas City. Maybe speak to us about
what’s happening locally; what you’re doing to bring that hub
together?
Michael: I’m not sure if I’m the
voice. I definitely hope I’m helping. But my aim with VR… VR, to
me, can happen anywhere. And as much as I’m very happy that the
coasts are innovating as much as they are, I think there’s a huge
opportunity here in the Midwest. There’s a lot of talent here, and I
have heard from other people that even places like Kansas City
actually have quite a bit of VR happening — and I say VR, I mean XR,
AR; all of it. There’s a lot of, for example, architectural firms in
town, and they aren’t as flashy as a virtual sports or something, but
they’re all using VR for showing the buildings, or going to a client
and saying, “hey, would you like this room moved over here?
Would you like this equipment coming through this wall, or that
wall?” I think it’s use cases like that — that aren’t
necessarily flashy and public-facing — that a lot of companies are
using today. And I think in the next couple of years, everyone’s just
going to be using XR, and we’re going to wonder, “woah, woah,
where did that come from?”
Alan: In my last interview, we
were talking about 2019 as that year where it goes from, “you’re
doing VR — you’re ahead of the game, you’re a future company,”
to, “you’re not using VR? What’s wrong with you?”
Michael: Yeah, exactly. And one
of the… I don’t know how many names I should name, but there’s
definitely a large company here in KC that uses VR for training
employees. One example is retail employees. They actually build
virtual versions of their stores, and they might actually do that
when the store is not built yet. It might be two months out before
the store’s built, but they want to hire their people two months
early and give them two months of what’s essentially hands-on
training before their physical store even exists.
Alan: So what company is that?
Michael: I don’t know if I can
say.
Alan: okay. Maybe make an
introduction; we’ll have them on the show. They can talk about what
they’re doing and how it’s working. I would love that. Everybody’s
getting this interest in, “what can this technology do for my
business? How can I use it?” And we’ve talked about… just in
this very short, six-minute conversation that we’ve been in here,
you’ve talked about VR being used for design, and for
previsualization, and for training in retail. You were talking about
exercise and fitness. There’s so many. Personally, I think there’s no
facet of human communication that we won’t be touched by these
technologies. Where do you see the path forward for companies? How do
they get involved?
Michael: I guess I’d say if
you’re a business, and you aren’t at least thinking about XR in some
facet? You’re already behind.
Alan: That’s a pretty bold
statement.
Michael: Yep. [Laughs]. The last
place I worked was a fast casual food chain. I worked at their
technology headquarters, and we did technology training for the
employees. I started working on VR versions of things, so they could
reach in and grab the cables that they would have to unplug and plug
in, essentially saving the IT techs time on the phone by training the
employees as how to run their cafés.
Alan: Wow. It sounds like a
small thing, but when you consider the cost to send an IT person out
there just to plug something in that could have been done simply, and
I think one of the other things that people really haven’t fully
grasped is the see-what-I-see. or remote assistance; being able to
hold up your phone, show the person on the other end what you’re
looking at, and have them annotate on it. That alone is saving
millions of dollars right now.
Michael: It reduces stress. One
of the biggest things of being an IT support person is your stress
because you’re sitting in a cubicle all day. They’re stressed because
they’re dealing with customers, and technology isn’t necessarily
their #1 thing — that’s why they’re calling you. If you can give
them this, literally hands-on, “hey, take it out here. Plug it
in there.” And it’s not you trying to explain to them over the
phone. That’s a huge reduction in stress. Not to mention, like you
said, the reduction in travel is a huge reduction in cost. And it
starts out with a small conversations. But over the course of a year,
I can’t even imagine what the savings are for almost any-sized
company.
Alan: My last interview was
talking about how Boeing is using it, and these big enterprises are
using it pretty much everywhere now. They’ve realized the potential.
And when you start to see 25 to 35 to 40 percent reductions in times
it takes for people to learn, but also reduction of error rates
across the enterprise? I mean, the last few years have been really
funny, that people have been, “so what are other people doing,
and what’s their ROI, and how are they measuring success?” And
it’s been really hard because — as a developer — you’re like,
“well, I don’t know. We just make this stuff, and there’s not
very many people doing it, and we really don’t know the ROI yet.”
But I think we’ve kind of — in the last two years — put a lot of
POCs, a lot of effort, into building these demos and proofs of
concepts, developing these trials. And now, the data coming back is
way better than anybody could have ever imagined. So it’s not a
matter of, “hey, let’s do a POC!” It’s like, “let’s
roll this out, because we already know it works. Here’s the numbers
that other people are seeing. Let’s go.”
Michael: I think VR is already
here. XR. All of it. I spent some time at a free-roam VR arcade — I
help out there — and 90 percent of the people that come in have
never even touched VR before. And they’re not even gamers; they’re
just there to do something on the weekend. And when they leave,
they’re like, “holy crap, I did not know it was this far
[along]
.” And I tell all of them, the groundwork for XR has been
laid for decades. There was just a few key technologies that needed
to be fixed, and those technologies exist now. The only thing that’s
lacking is a design sense, because we just haven’t been designing for
it. When it comes to capabilities, it’s already there. There’s no
reason not to dive in, in my opinion.
Alan: The costs have come down
dramatically, even. You look back when commercial VR launched in
2016, and you needed a $1,500 graphics card… combine that with a
computer… then the headset; you’re at three grand before you even
start. Then you needed software, and the software didn’t exist yet,
so you had to make it. A company getting in 3 years ago would have
spent a couple hundred thousand dollars just to build something that
— by today’s standards — was kind of obsolete. But if you look at
where we are right now, a lot of those problems have been solved. We
even have headsets that are standalone. Everything’s built into the
headset. You don’t even need a computer. You’re absolutely right,
that the groundwork of XR has taken decades. But we’re — right now
— in the point where it’s ready to scale.
Michael: And this is why I’ve
been working on starting this dojo, or this VR maker space; because
the tools for building — there’s VRTK for Unity… there’s just all
these tools. Amazon Sumerian. You can dive in and start building for
VR with almost a $300 laptop and an Oculus Go. You can be less than a
thousand dollars in and create something usable; something that can
actually change the bottom line for your company.
Alan: There’s VR where you can
make the full thing in computer graphics, but there’s also 360
videos; being able to capture a training experience in 360 video, and
then add computer graphics on top of that. And then there’s companies
like STRIVR, who are doing this exact thing for Walmart and football
teams and other brands. I think just something so simple as a 360
video — which is very easy to capture now, the cameras are under
$5,000, and that’s for 8k cameras — and then being able to overlay
the data that you need. And the next generation of headsets that will
come out in the next 24 months will all have eye tracking and head
tracking. So, you know where people are looking; you can really get
an incredible amount of data back from the headsets, as well as
deliver the content to the viewer. So what are some of the most
impressive business cases that you’ve seen so far?
Michael: Most impressive
business cases, I think, go back to training. As I said, the fact
that you can have your store — that’s not even built yet — and
have, by time that store opens, a team of associates that literally
know everything — they know all the product details, they know how
to interact with various types of customers, where every product is
kept, where the extras are kept in back — and maybe they only
stepped into that store yesterday.
Alan: Yeah, that’s a pretty
incredible thing, to be able to train people on things that don’t
exist. One of my previous interviews was talking about… Neutral
Digital! They were talking about how the airlines are using VR to
show people planes that don’t exist yet. “Here’s the airplanes
of the future, and here’s what we’re gonna do, and here’s the first
class cabin,” you book your ticket. But then, they’re also able
to take that same asset, and then train the staff on the airplane
that’s coming in a couple of years, so that when the plane is
delivered, you don’t have to waste a second of ground time — because
for every day that you ground a plane, it’s $100,000. Being able to
do that is incredible.
Michael: Yeah. Most definitely.
And going back a step, you don’t even have to get that crazy with
your technology to use this. One of my previous jobs — the one where
I was building those immersive trainings — we were using Adobe
Captivate, which is a pretty standard training software, where you
make essentially interactive power points that save quiz data and
such to a swarm database. Whatever learning management system your
company uses, and you can throw together a training in about 10
minutes. One of the features they recently added is 360 photos or
videos, and then making those interactive, and it’s just as simple as
point and click. But to your point, that’s sometimes all you need.
You talked about these 8k cameras, or the 360 cameras. But I went
into one of the cafes with my smartphone — and yeah, it takes a
little longer — but I took a 360 photo just standing there, being
the tripod, and uploaded it and made a little training, and sent it
to my director of technology. I was like, “hey, look, this is
what we can do today.”
Alan: Wow, that’s incredible.
With a smartphone. It’s incredible. The technology path is moving so
fast that if you’d said, “hey, we want to make a five-minute
training thing” three years ago, you would have to print the 3D
mounts for the cameras, and go out there, film it, stitch it. Two
weeks later, you’d have the rough draft, and then, “you wanted
to put some CGI in there? Oh, yeah. There’s another three weeks of
work.” The tools that are popping up are really democratizing
virtual and augmented reality creation, and I think that’s what’s
really exciting. So, what are some of the tools that you’ve seen used
really effectively to create this content?
Michael: It would depend on your
use case. Is it marketing? Is it training? Unity is always my top
one. As someone who grew up as a game designer and player, I
definitely side towards Unity. I think that the tools that they have
are incredible. And if you’re going for full-immersive, Virtual
Reality Tool Kit is an open source tool kit that — out of the box —
everything just works. When it comes to augmented reality, you’re
gonna go more towards the marketing thing. The SNAP lenses alone are
crazy. Did you recently see SNAP’s location-based augmented reality,
where they’re augmenting entire buildings now? It’s incredible.
Alan: There’s been over 400,000
SNAP lenses created in the last couple years. SNAP is really the
leader in augmented reality.
Michael: Yeah, I think most
people that use SNAP know SNAP. They know filters. They see this cool
stuff. But they actually don’t know what augmented reality is, or
maybe have never even heard the term.
Alan: It’s very true. We get
caught up in all the terminology; SNAP just said, “look, we do
cool things with your camera.”.
Michael: Yes. And that’s all it
takes.
Alan: Yeah. You can try on
glasses. You can see a car in your living room. You can light up the
Eiffel Tower. It’s really interesting, what those guys are doing. And
they also announced voice-driven AR activations as well. So you can
talk to it.
Michael: Yes. Yeah. Audio
Augmented is another whole can of worms.
Alan: Absolutely. You were
saying that you captured 360 photos from your phone, and then were
able to create a very simple training exercise just from the
smartphone.
Michael: Yeah, and that was all
built in. I mean, the credit goes to Adobe for sure, for having the
stuff built into their technology already today. I’ve actually been
working with Silka Miesnieks. She’s head of emerging technologies
over at Adobe, and the things they’re working on are incredible. One
thing she’s trying to put together is something called the sensory
design group. Something I’ve mentioned — a couple of times, now —
is when it comes to the technology for AR/VR/XR, the technology’s
here. The tools are here. Now it’s a matter of, we need to get in and
actually use it. And they’re trying to establish a list of design
rules to kind of help further that process.
Alan: Adobe is introducing all
sorts of tools left and right. One of their announcements the other
day was this amazing ability to create 3D objects and 3D products,
and then have the back end to source and serve them up for
programmatic ads on Facebook, on Google. 3D on Web is really becoming
prevalent as well. We’re past that point of, “hey, can we make
this work?” Then it’s, “yes, we can make it work; how can
we use it?” And now it’s, “we can use it. We made it work.
Now, what are the limits of which we can push this technology in?”
One of my last interviews was with Anthony Vitillo, or Skarred Ghost.
We were talking about haptics, and how haptic vests and gloves can be
used across enterprise for simulation of training, but also scent
machines, and different spatial audio and things. So how do you see
the different senses being brought into virtual and augmented
reality?
Michael: One of the biggest
things that got me interested in spatial computing to begin with was
my own research into neuroscience, and the fact that our brains are
wired to remember spatial information. If you ever heard of “memory
palaces,” it’s an old technique they used to use back in the
days of Greek and Rome to remember anything. Now, it’s kind of seen
as just a fun thing to do; it can set your shopping list up in a 3-D
representation of your house in your head. But that’s where spatial
computing to me is so amazing, is that it’s keying in on something
that we’ve kind of ignored for years in a literature-based society —
we’re all about written words and numbers. But now with spatial
computing, we’ve opened up an entire new three-dimensional palette
for training, memorization, etc. And our brains were built to live in
a three-dimensional world, and now we can reach out and change this
world not only visually, but also — as you’re saying — once we have
these haptic technologies, you can actually change the way we
experience the world through audio and feeling.
Alan: It’s going to be really
incredible, what’s coming. I got the chance to use the Ultra Haptics,
[which]
is this device where it uses ultrasonic waves to give you the
sense of touch. And then there was another one, where I tried to put
these sensors on my finger, and I reached into a fire and I felt like
it burned me. I jumped back. I’ve got to try this thing called Vasco,
which is a scent machine that mounts to the bottom of your VR headset
that you can program — so, you program in Unity or Unreal. I reached
out, grab a cup of coffee. I smelled it, smelled like coffee. You go
and you look at the grass; it smells like grass. So, the ability to
create scents, in addition to haptics and the visuals, (obviously),
and then the audio. This is really, really an exciting time to be in
the space, because there’s so many different aspects of it. You just
have to find what works for you. I think it can be very overwhelming
for businesses. What would you recommend for a business getting in
now, and how do they get to real ROI or real business use cases,
without getting caught up in the minutia of all of this stuff?
Because it’s easy to go down rabbit holes in this technology. What
advice would you give for businesses looking to get in this, to stay
really useful for them, rather than get caught in these rabbit holes?
Michael: There’s definitely a
lot of answers, but given how easy it is to dive in, if you have the
resources, I would say: get it one headset, and get yourself a —
whether it’s Unity, whether it’s Sumerian, whatever it is — and
whoever the techiest person is, have them try some stuff. Think,
“what’s the one thing we could train people with using VR?”
Or better yet, maybe marketing. “What can we put in a headset
that… maybe our sales guy could take this Oculus, go with him in a
suitcase when he goes on these sales meetings, and actually show
people the thing we’re building in full three dimensions.” Let
them reach out and touch it. Diving in in that way, I think, is the
way to go. That being said, because it’s so easy to dive in, there
are a lot of studios popping up everywhere that are very eager to
help companies get into this space. I see XR right now as the IT
revolution that hit businesses in the last couple of decades. I
worked at a steel mill one time, and that was the backend of the IT
wave was hitting that place, and that was an industrial complex in
the middle of nowhere, Arkansas. So XR is hitting that wave right
now, where it’s going to transform all businesses; either dive in
with the team you have — if you have the resources. If you don’t
have the resources internally, definitely be seeking out some of
these studios. Call out to them and say, “hey, we’d love to at
least talk to you about your thoughts on how you think XR could help
our business.” Talk to somebody who thinks about these things
daily, like perhaps yourself. And I’m sure you could come up with
ideas for most any business.
Alan: For the last few years, we
have literally done work in countless industries, from mining, to
food service, to hospitality, travel, tourism, training, education,
schools, seniors homes. And the result is always the same. Everybody
loves it, but it’s really creating those business use cases around
that. And because we’ve done so many things, it’s a little
overwhelming to us as well, because we can’t be everything to
everybody. But at the same time, it’s given us an incredible breadth
of knowledge that I think is really valuable to our customers. When
they come to us and say, “we have this problem we want solved,”
we can look at it from a very objective standpoint — “this is
the solution that works best for your needs” — and is not tied
to any one company. We’re not tied to Microsoft. We’re not tied to
Magic Leap. We’re not tied to Intel. We just know what the best
solutions are across the different industries. And bring those to
customers is the key, because there’s so much noise out there, and
there’s so many different solutions. It’s easy to get overwhelmed.
And if you bring in a studio who is really good at 360 video, guess
what they’re going to sell you. They’re going to sell you 360 video.
So I think it’s important to also understand that different studios
do different things, and you really need to focus on a strategy. So,
thank you for pointing that out.
Michael: Yeah, I think that guys
like us that have been thinking about XR for the last few years, it’s
very easy for us to come up with use cases. I think the best thing
about XR is the worst thing about XR, and it’s that it can literally
change everything. And to your point, it’s hard to pick, “what
do we use it for?” Because the truth is, pick anything, and the
answer will be, “we can figure out a way to use it.”
Alan: That’s the problem! We
used to have a tagline: “We do eVRything.” It’s great to do
everything, but it’s really hard to focus on those things. We’re
about to make a pretty big announcement, and it will allow us to
continue doing everything, but in a different way; one that will
serve a far greater community of people and businesses. So, pretty
excited about that. What do you see as the future of XR, and what is
the future as it pertains to business? What do you see coming up in
the future that really excites you?
Michael: One of the first things
that I thought about whenever I first drove into VR was productivity.
As a writer, I know that can be very easy to get distracted,
especially when you have three hours of writing ahead of you, or what
have you. Everyone tries to find a perfect place in the quiet cabin
in the woods, but there’s only so many quiet cabins in the woods.
Especially when you live downtown in a busy city. Where, in a VR
headset with augmented audio noise-cancelling headphones (that exist
today), and perhaps a keyboard; as a writer, I could go anywhere I
want. I can go to my happy place, and I can write. I also saw a
dissertation a few years ago that some student did, where he showed
the possibility of an in-VR workstation. So, instead of being limited
to two or three or however many monitors you have these days on your
desk, you could put screens in front of you, behind you, left or
right, any direction. And then at different focal lengths — the
human eye sees in, like, three natural focal lengths; really close
up, about six feet away, and then about 50 feet in front of them.
These are those three layers of natural viewpoints, and you could put
screens at all three of those layers in all directions, optimizing
for what information is most important. He theorized that you could
increase productivity by a minimum of 30 percent, if not upwards of
80 percent, depending on the job. And even if I told you, “oh,
if everyone had a VR headset at your IT company, you’ll increase
productivity by 10 percent per employee,” okay, 10 percent isn’t
a huge number. But 10 percent, times a 600-employee company? Well,
now we’re talking. That’s what got me excited in the first place. Not
to mention training, not to mention marketing, not to mention
everything else. I truly believe that XR is just a new interface to
technology, and therefore, it’s going to change everything.
Alan: Well, it’s interesting you
said that, because one of the interviews in the podcast — you can go
back and find it if you’re listening — is with the president of HTC
VIVE China, Alvin Wang Graylin, and something that they just
announced at their Vive Ecosystem Conference was multi-modal VR.
You’re gonna be able to do exactly what you said, and bring your
computer screen into VR. What they’ve also done is they’ve created
the ability for you to plug your headset into your PlayStation or
XBox or computer or television, and just take automatically, the
information from your 2D screen into your 3D world, and make it any
size. So, you could be working on an IMAX screen, rather than staring
at your 13-inch MacBook. There’s other companies doing that; big
screen VR, I know, is one of the killer apps right now. And one of
the things that they’re doing is, they thought it was going to be
more productivity. But what it turns out is a lot of people are just
using it to watch movies on a really big screen. The ability to sit
there, next to somebody, and have your girlfriend — who maybe is a
long-distance relationship, or your friends or whatever — you can
sit in the room together, have a conversation, while watching a movie
on an IMAX screen. Take that to productivity? Holy crap. I cannot
wait to have my 13-inch screen be an IMAX screen in front of me, so I
can actually look up rather than look down while I’m working. And I
think there’s going to be a lot of chiropractors out of work because
of this.
Michael: Yes. Yeah. And there’s
also notifications, right. Instead of the notification popping up,
and I’ve got to look away or whatever? I mean, it can literally pop
up between you and your screen without actually ocluding the screen
behind you. And little things like that add up over time.
Alan: I agree. It’s a shame that
there was one company really focused on the enterprise workstation
VR, and I can’t remember what they were called, but they were really
too early to the show. If they had made it past 2019, I think there
would be a market for it. That leads us into where VR is right now,
and AR. We’re really at that precipice of, “that’s an acceptable
technology. There’s lots of businesses using it. The results are
phenomenal, and the cost is being driven down to reasonable amounts.”
I personally think that 2019 is the breakout year of virtual and
augmented reality. What are your thoughts?
Michael: I honestly 100 percent
agree.
Alan: Well all right! If you
take into account the fact that, by the end of this year, there’ll be
probably 20-million VR headsets in the market. PlayStation is gonna
be 4.5-million sold. Oculus has sold a couple million. HTC VIVE sold
a couple million. I think we’re gonna reach… not critical mass yet,
with consumers, but definitely a critical mass in businesses. And
combine that with the fact that there’ll be over 2-billion — with a
B — smartphones that have augmented reality enabled on them right
away by the end of this year? You’ve got two-billion devices that can
do three-dimensional computing, and this is the tipping point.
Michael: I think a lot of people
discredit the gaming side of things, right? “Oh, they’re just
gamers with their gaming computers, what have you.” But the
average gamer is, what, like 40 years old now? You’ve got companies
like Valve who have just announced that they’re stepping into the
game, and they’ve got some pretty popular IPs to say the least. Yes,
it’s for gaming, but if you get all your gamers — who are probably
your employees; I’m guessing most of your employees, if you’re an IT
company anyway. At least your tech employees, probably — play games,
or have your employees be the evangelists for this XR wave that you
need to grab hold of.
Alan: I agree. I couldn’t agree
more. And I think a lot of game studios are doing some kind of
contract work on the side with enterprises because they have the
product pipelines. They know how to build AR, they know how to build
VR, and they’ve got skills to make gameified training as well. And I
think that’s going to be a huge part of all of this as we move
forward. One of the things that I wanted to bring up is that VR is
happening, and AR is happening, everywhere in the world. Literally
from Sydney, Australia to New York, L.A., everywhere in the world;
whether in Silicon Valley or small town in the Midwest. This is
happening everywhere. So maybe as a parting words, what are some
things that you really see as the fundamentals of getting involved in
this technology, especially from a business standpoint? What do you
think is the first step so you can harness this power immediately?
Michael: The first step is the
best thing and worst thing about spatial computing, and that is, the
only way to begin understanding it is to experience it. So my #1
recommendation to any company is to, whether it’s go out and buy a
headset, or if you’re the VR nerd at your company and you have a
headset at home, bring it in. Clean it off, of course. But have
everybody at the company take a look. Everybody put the goggles on.
Everybody put the glasses on. Play a demo. A simple demo is all it
takes. Whether it’s a game, or if you have an enterprise-level demo,
I think that that alone will get the ball rolling.
Alan: Couldn’t agree with you
more. Somebody explained it to me, “explaining VR to somebody
who has never tried it is like explaining the color red to a blind
person.” It is impossible. If you own a headset, your
responsibility is to make sure everybody tries it. Get it on
everybody’s head. I really want to thank you so much, Michael, for
taking the time. Michael, Eichenseer, thank you very much.
Michael: Thanks, Alan. I’m
excited to see what you’ve got cooking.
Alan: You can learn more about
our guest Michael Eichenseer and VRdōjō by visiting VRDojo.org.
33 min
August 14, 2019 Getting Fit with a VR Toolkit, and Other XR Tips with VRdōjō's Michael Eichenseer
We talk a lot about the business use cases of XR on this podcast, but any good business comes with a great fitness plan or exercise room. XR is no different, and VRdōjō founder Michael Eichenseer runs Alan through a few of the cardiovascular benefits to the technology.
And that's just the first six
minutes! Many other topics are touched on in this episode - virtual
writing spaces, remote assistance, spatial learning, his own XR
makerspace, and more.
Alan: Welcome to the show,
Michael, how are you doing? Pretty good. How are you? Fantastic.
Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It's going to be
a really exciting one. Let's tell everybody at home. What is your
vision for virtual augmented reality? Was the best virtual reality or
a AR experience is what is the best thing that you have done? And
explain to the listeners why that is so.
Michael: For me, it's definitely
the fitness aspect of VR. As a gamer, I definitely enjoy the fact
that I can play a game, not be sitting the entire time, and
afterwards, I've burnt 500 calories, and feel really good about it
the next day. The research coming out in XR in reducing pain and
increasing motivation, to me, is fascinating.
Alan: There was a lot of medical
use cases coming up in pain reduction, using virtual reality for
pre-surgical -- and also perisurgical -- where you're wearing a
headset to distract you. I know one of the things that blows my mind
is, my daughter, she's 10 and she is terrified of needles. Like,
we're talking blood-curdling screams from the nurse's office. The
next time she goes, we're gonna use VR to try to distract her while
they take blood, because it's a stressful thing. And when somebody
goes into a surgery, being able to decrease their stress; it's hard
to measure the success outcomes, but at the same time, just being
able to calm them is something that I think VR does really naturally.
You talked about exercising in VR. Give us some examples of some of
the ways people are using VR to exercise.
Michael: The boxing games are
pretty popular, and I definitely have to mention Beat Saber. That's
probably the top one at the moment.
Alan: Basically, you have two
lightsabers in your hands, and you've got to swipe up and down, and
left and right, with your left and right hand, and dodge out of the
way of things. It is incredible.
Michael: It's dancing.
Alan: Dancing and disco, and
it's so good.
Michael: Yes, it's really good.
You kind of lose track of time. I think that's why it's good that
it's based on music; the song ends and you're like, "oh, back to
reality a little bit.".
Alan: Yeah, there's a guy who
was playing, he lost 45 pounds playing Beat Saber.
Michael: Yes. I've actually met
a 68-year-old retiree who logs into VR every morning at 5:00 a.m.,
just to warm up for the day.
Alan: That's incredible. What
does he play? What does he do?
Michael: Back when I met him, we
were playing a game called Smash Box Arena. It's a multiplayer game,
kind of dodgeball. It's defunct now, but there's a lot of other games
like that. I think Rec Room is probably the number one out there,
where you can hop in -- it's a free game -- and it's cross-platform
and you see people in there at all times of the day.
Alan: I've played paintball in
there. It was a lot of fun.
Michael: Yep. That's the game I
actually play competitively. That's kind of my workout every day.
Alan: I'm so terrible at it.
What are the tric
0 min
August 12, 2019 Off to Digital Market We Go, with InContext Solutions’ Tracey Wiedmeyer
The power of XR will never be able to destroy the good ol‘ desire to go out and shop, but that doesn’t mean that XR couldn’t be used to improve the shopping experience. Tracey Wiedmeyer and Alan discuss a few ideas, from browsing the catch of the day in a VR tropical wonderland, to using VR and AR to test out retail layouts before you build them.
Alan: Today’s guest is Tracey
Wiedmeyer. Tracey is the chief technology officer and co-founder of
InContext Solutions. They’re delivering a mixed reality platform that
is the world’s largest brands and retailers are using to streamline
their merchandising process and go to market strategy much faster.
Tracey is also the former president of the VR/AR Association chapter
in Chicago, Milwaukee and a board member for the Information Research
Technology Institute at Sam Walton College of Business. Tracey is
also a member of the Forbes Technology Council. You can learn more
about InContext Solutions at www.incontextsolutions.com. With that,
I’d love to welcome to the show: Tracey Wiedmeyer.
Tracey: Hey Alan, glad to be
here.
Alan: My pleasure. I’m so
excited. This is a show I’ve been really waiting to do because you
guys have been using virtual and augmented reality, mixed reality to
help retailers preplan their stores, because right now a retailer, if
they want to design a new store, they literally have to build a
physical store, put all the shelves and build a mock store. And
you’re doing this through virtual/augmented reality, and the metrics
that you’re able to collect, keep maps, and where people are looking
and the amount of data that you’re able to collect from users in a
digital world versus a physical world is actually really quite
amazing. So maybe you can just talk about InContext Solutions and
what you’re doing for retailers.
Tracey: Sure, yeah. There was a
lot to bite off there. I’ll break it down little by little as we go
here. So I think you mentioned creating brand new physical stores.
There’s actually more retail stores today, more brick-and-mortar
stores than there were back in 2000 when the retail apocalypse
version 1 hit the street. You know, it was the end of
brick-and-mortar, everyone has gone digital. So I think there’s a lot
of stores being added today and most stores – but whether you’re a
centre store grocery retailer or fashion or apartment store – those
stores go through a regular reset on a period of time, whether that’s
every couple of years or longer than that. I think the nuance there
is actually at the brand level, you know, especially if we focus on
centre store grocery for a little bit here. The brands are actually
working with their retail partners multiple times a year to reset the
categories that you shop. So cereal, frozen foods, healthcare, baby
foods, all that sort of stuff are constantly going through some sort
of revision period, whether it’s… the old way’s every six months,
because that’s how long it takes them, and I’ll get into that in a
little bit. But they’re trying to get you to buy or notice one or two
more products on that journey to the shelf. We’re using virtual
technology now to basically facilitate that process; everything from
a brand new store, to which products go on the shelf, and how many of
them are stacked right to left and front to back. There’s a lot of
low hanging fruit in that process, and maybe I don’t know how much,
Alan, you know about what that process looks like today, or in the
past. What I’m going to do is tell you a little bit about where we’ve
come from.
A lot of brands and retailers have what
they call mock warehouses. They physically stage all their sets, what
every category is going to look like. And then they invite their
brand. You invite your retail partners into that center, which means
you got to physically travel or fly somewhere. And then they present
what they’re thinking. What is this going to look like if it’s
springtime? Now they’re thinking about, what is the fall going to
look like? They’ll physically stock out all the merchandise and then
they have their retail partners go through and go, “well, this
looks good. Y’know, I don’t like that. Can we change this?” That
sort of thing. I think where virtual technologies really hit the mark
is that they’re doing this old, antiquated process every six months,
because it just physically takes that long to do. But if we can do
everything in virtual, and you can then introduce Xbox for retail
concepts, where you put a headset on your desktop and jump in a
virtual store together, no matter where you are in the world. Now you
can start to do that whole perpetual merchandising process much more
frequently. And that’s turned out to be a catalyst for not only doing
more than every six months, but integrating in exact feedback from
your customers, to figure out what’s going to hit the mark. Does that
resonate so far with you?
Alan: Yeah, I think to put it in
perspective, if companies are resetting every six months and going
through this process… we saw with Bell Helicopters, they designed a
helicopter and it took six years to design a helicopter. And in VR,
it took six months. Is that similar? People are being able to be more
frequent, have more data and travel less, I think is the big one as
well.
Tracey: Yeah, and they’re trying
to figure out what is going to hit that emotional note with their
customers, which means trends and interesting packaging and food
trends and merchandise, all that sort of stuff changes much more
frequently than every six months. And if they’re competing with
digital footprints, they’re A/B testing website changes, y’know,
multiple times a day. So how do you compete with that in a
brick-and-mortar world? You have to be more efficient at not only
creating innovative ideas, but then testing those with your customers
and then figure out which one is going to move the needle and rolling
that out. It could be higher sales, but it could also be less labour
involved. Even if you keep sales static, but you touch the shelf
less, there’s millions of dollars at stake.
Alan: Absolutely. One of the
things that I took from your website is a quote, it says “mixed
reality solutions can help you drive faster, smarter, more profitable
decisions at retail”. What are some of the customers that you’re
dealing with? What are some of the results that they’re seeing now,
that this technology has really unlocked?
Tracey: Yeah. So, I’ll give you
a retail example and then a brand example. On the retail side,
they’re testing every six months doing category resets and then
typically what they do is they’ll take a subset of their stores and
roll out this new innovative change to a handful of stores. In the
case that I’m going to talk about here, we did 1500 stores. A lot of
it was, I think about a third of their total store count. And what
they do is they let that idea sit and mellow for about 15 weeks and
then they gather the sales out of that subset of stores and then they
measure 15 weeks pre. So, what were the sales then? What are the
sales now? How did the tests… y’know, how did it do? And should we
roll it out to all the stores? Right? So 15 weeks is three and a half
months. We were able to do a side by side test in about seven days
with several thousand customers. And when we lined up the sales data
at the end of that 15 weeks – y’know, with the data we collected
virtually – was high-90 percent correlated.
What that means is 90, 96, 97 percent
of the time, consumers are doing the same thing in a virtual store
that they were doing in a real store because of the realism we can
achieve. The difference is, it didn’t take 15 weeks. It wasn’t
hundreds of thousand dollars just to roll it out. And you’re able to
then understand the levers we pull. Did it raise sales? Did it keep
sales static, but you touch the shelf less? Or does it just
strengthen your decision? You’ll look many times through our
platform, customers are making the decision to not do anything
because if sales stay the same, but you got to touch the shelf, why
even make the change?
Alan: Why bother? Yeah.
Tracey: Yeah.
Alan: You saved yourself
hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars doing a test that
you would have done and you would have maybe even decreased sales by
making those mistakes,
Tracey: Correct. Some of the
most egregious steps that we have, 85 percent of the time that
retailers are touching the shelf, there’s not a change. They just do
it because they’ve always done it that way. So you can think of the
cost and labor involved there. One other example would be on the
brand side.
Alan: What did you say, 85
percent don’t make a change?
Tracey: Yes.
Alan: Wow. So they are trying
things and 85 percent of the time it’s not making any difference.
Tracey: Yeah. Yep.
Alan: Wow.
Tracey: 85 percent of time.
Either it’s stagnant or it actually, like you said, it lowers sales.
So only in that 15 percent of the time are you actually moving the
needle.
Alan: Let’s just stop for a
second. So [chuckles] using your system, InContext Solutions, your
ShopperMX — or whatever system you’re using — a retailer with 96
percent, high-90 accuracy, can run as many tests as they want — with
very little costs associated with it, comparatively — and get the
same data as they would in months in a matter of days. That’s what
I’m hearing?
Tracey: Yes, precisely.
Alan: Why? I’m just trying to
wrap my head around why every retailer doesn’t do this now.
Tracey: That’s a great question.
I think the largest impediment we see is we’re competing with human
processes. One of the things I always tell our teams is if we were
replacing a CRM, there’s a well-defined market there. And, you know,
you’re replacing CRM. This is what you have today, this is where
you’re getting tomorrow. Maybe you’re playing on a cost level or
whatever it is. When you’re competing with human processes in an
organization that’s got 50 years of legacy workflows and processes
wrapped in their human capital. It’s a different process. I mean,
you’re looking at the hype curve where you’ve got the forward
leaners, right. And they’re already well into these technologies.
They’ve been using them for five to ten years. You’ve got people who
are starting to think about it, and what does that mean for the
organization. Then you have basically “put your head in the sand
and let me just continue to do it the way we have been doing it”.
And we all know where that path ends. That’s most of the time what we
compete with, is how do you institute some sort of organizational
change to wrap around this process to make you successful?
Alan: It’s mind-boggling,
because even companies that say we’ve got all these employees and
we’re loyal to our employees, we don’t want to put this technology in
because it’s going to replace them. The problem that I see is that if
they don’t put these technologies in place, those people are gonna be
out of a job because the whole company is gonna fold because we won’t
be able to stay competitive. If you have a large retailer that is
using this technology and you have a large retailer that isn’t, there
is going to be a dramatic difference in the success rates.
Tracey: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I think that’s key to point that out. And the way we always think
about this is, there’s this huge trend in retail to think about your
customer experience. I call them brand memories or emotional notes.
How do you get your customer to come back to your store? So instead
of focusing your labor force on stocking the shelves and touching the
shelves when it may not make a difference. Instead of saying those
people are gonna be out of a job, why not refocus those to worry
about your customer more? That’s where the opportunity exists is how
can you deploy your labor in a way that is really going to matter to
your customer and make that journey and that experience much more
impactful, memorable.
Alan: I used to hate — I still
don’t like it — but I used to hate grocery shopping. And it wasn’t
so much that I didn’t enjoy walking up and down the aisles. It was
because either the music is crap or the lighting is bad. Being able
to have a system like this where you could — literally — you could
change the lighting, you could put a drop ceiling in, you could trial
these different things and see the comfort levels of people in
different scenarios, because something as subtle as changing the
lighting could be a huge impact in the customer experience or the
customer emotion and them shopping. And that’s not something you’re
focused on when you’re focused on which product goes at which height
and that sort of thing.
Tracey: Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.
Some retailers are leading the way there. Mariano’s is a chain here
in Chicago that’s done it right, and they’ve leading the way there.
But you can shop while you have a glass of wine and somebody is
playing piano in the background.
Alan: Why do I have to go to a
sterile place to buy my groceries?
Tracey: Right. Exactly. And
that’s why a lot of them are opening up food courts and things like
that, where you can buy the food. Sit down, have a meal. It becomes a
destination, a memory. Even Tesco, I think, has done this for a
number of years already. But you can have your nails done in the
middle of the grocery store while your cart sits there, docked off to
the side. All because the wrapping that experience around, just
putting products in the basket.
Alan: I think one of the most
incredible things that we have coming is… I don’t want to say
removing the retail altogether, but you guys have a system that
people at home — as these headsets become more prevalent and people
in VR — you’re gonna be able to shop from your house, exactly like
how you would walk up and down the aisles and get the same experience
of shopping and finding new things. And because, I think, product
discovery is part of the whole physical shopping experience. But in
VR, you’re going to be able to say, “hey, show me hot sauces.”
And instead of having a rack of hot sauces that has maybe 100 things,
you can have 10,000 hot sauces and you could have a dial of heat
versus very, very mild, very hot. Is that something you guys are
thinking about in the future; how do we help our retailers use the
digital aspect as a direct-to-consumer method? Or is that strictly
physical retail?
Tracey: It’s both. I mean, we’ve
kept our eye on that market. There’s a couple of things working in
our favor and there’s a couple of things that I think you have to
develop yet. I mean, in working in our favor, as you know, a number
of headsets — headset plural for Asian — lower cost headset. All
those things might be a little longer tail, but you’re starting to
see some of that stuff. If a headset’s half the price of an iPhone,
everybody might have four or five in their house. So you’re right
there.
Alan: The Oculus Quest is coming
out next week at [Facebook] F8, and it’s full six degrees of freedom.
Standalone; you don’t need a computer, you just put on the headset.
You have two controllers, so you have your hands. You don’t need to
set up a room. You don’t need scanners and base stations to set up
around your room. You put on the headset, you can walk around, you
can move around, and it’s $399.
Tracey: Precisely. And that’ll
continue. Some of the things that have to be figured out yet are, if
you’re a brand, there’s a lot of opportunity there to go
direct-to-consumer; there’s been Dollar Shave Club, and a few of
these other places that have done that with a lot of success. How do
you enable a brand to go direct-to-consumer in a way that makes
sense? I think we’ve got to figure that out. Then, if you’re a
retailer, same type of thing. Retailers have a lot of brand equity
wrapped up in brick-and-mortar. How do you replicate that in a
virtual experience? Now, the way we think about that is you need an
experience that’s magnitudes 10x better than what it is to walk into
the store, or people just aren’t going to do it. The difference is,
the average brick-and-mortar grocery store now has 40,000 SKUs, and
the average household buys 268 of those a year. So, a fraction of
those are things that I would ever be, or you would ever be,
interested in. But if there is a way to present and merchandise those
in a way that makes the experience much more engaging for me, and I
can still experience, and I’m curious about new products that’s at my
fingertips, but the experience is narrowed down, so all the things I
would never consider are gone — I think that’s a possibility.
And then I think that the stepping
stone into the future, as you start to develop an artificial
intelligence with personality, is with the products themselves; they
can tell you about themselves. You can pull in all sorts of other
information that you might not have available inside of the
brick-and-mortar, even if it’s on your cell phone. There’s a lot of
ways there where you have “Alan’s Own Virtual Store,”
that’s got beer, cereal and TVs… or whatever that shopping trip
looks like, you have that ability, as long as the content is there
before you.
Alan: One of the things that I
always thought would be really cool is, I love grocery shopping in
the fresh vegetables and stuff, but would it be cool if I could go
and look at the fresh vegetables? Or maybe it’s fish or something,
and I’m standing by a seaside looking at a fish market. You know what
I mean?
Tracey: Yeah.
Alan: Like, why do we have to
be…? Because everybody — especially in virtual reality retail —
they seem to be recreating retail stores. If I wanted that, I’d just
go to the retail store. Put me on a beach, standing next to the
fishing village where I get the sounds and sights, and I go choose my
fish and it comes delivered by whatever.
Tracey: We did an experience a
couple of years ago and unveiled it at the National Retail Federation
Conference. Intel was part of it. Basically, we worked with Columbia;
they make tents, and one of the biggest gripes is the tents on a
showroom floor, you can only fit three or four [people inside]
because of floor space. So we created a VR experience that would
allow you to go to the top of Mt. Everest and see a camp site that’s
got lots of different tents, allow you to crawl in them, look at,
play around with them, understand really what they’re going to look
like, how they perform, all that–
Alan: How many people can fit in
it? [laughs] Because this thing says six person, but I can fit me and
my dog. [laughs]
Tracey: Yeah, exactly. So you
start to think about just the inventory that would be available. And
now with Prime one-day and two-day shipping, to order an experience
where you’re confident what you’re going to get and have it show up
the next day or two is… it’s kind of the norm now.
Alan: I’m actually running a
panel at AWE this year with the head of VR for Macy’s, and they
implemented VR furniture shopping in six of their stores. In those
six stores, they saw a 65 percent increase in order size and less
than 2 percent return rates. So rather than scale it out to 10 stores
and then 20 stores, they just took it right to 100 different stores.
There’s a hundred Macy’s across America that have VR now. And one of
the things that stuck with me is that, building a furniture display
store within a Macy’s cost about half a million dollars; building the
VR part of it is under $50,000. So there’s your 10x return. Not to
mention they’re now seeing across their entire hundred stores a 45
percent increase, versus non-VR.
Tracey: Yeah. That’s amazing.
Alan: These are not trivial
numbers.
Tracey: It goes back to the
different levers; whether it’s brand awareness, higher sales or
again, if you have less returns, that’s a huge impact. The
interesting thing there is when you’re trying to create these impulse
purchases, you have literally an infinite inventory available to help
drive awareness and impulse and upsell that you wouldn’t necessarily
have in brick-and-mortar as well.
Alan: If you can speak to maybe
some of the specifics around the Columbia tent, did they use it? Did
it show positive returns? What was the ROI, if there was one?
Tracey: We never ended up
rolling that one out. That was more of, “hey, here’s what the
future could look like with a real life use case” there. That
was two years ago. Even so, things have changed quite a bit now. Two
and a half–
Alan: You ought to dust that one
off.
Tracey: Yeah, exactly. We could
kind of see where the future is headed. And again, we’re sort of
monitoring the headset adoption, and we could have the best content
even today. But if there’s no consumers there, it’s sort of a chicken
and the egg. Who’s going to pay for it? Who’s going to see the value?
Who’s going to take advantage of it?
Alan: Absolutely. Mountain
Equipment Co-op, which is a Canadian outdoors store, they just
introduced augmented reality visualizer for their tents, actually. So
you can now pull out your phone, see the tent in your space using
ARKit, an ARCore. It’s looking through the lens of a phone and a
device that is in the hands of billions of people. A lot of consumers
have a smartphone — I would venture to say all of them — and the
technologies behind building something in VR and building something
in AR are quite similar. You can build in Unity, it’s the same thing.
One of the things that we’ve been telling our customers is, look,
when you build something for… maybe it’s for training; that same
asset can be used for retail, it can be used for training, it can be
used for a number of different aspects within the organization. And
you guys are building stores that are complete replications of a
retail store; have they thought to maybe use these assets in
different ways?
Tracey: Yeah, I think they’re
starting to. It’s one of the value props we always try to instill is,
if you’re going to create the 3D content — individual items — you
want to leverage those in as many places as you can. Not only from
B2B planning to win brands and retailers, but possibly your
e-commerce site for an in-depth rotation of the product, or future
state AR/VR when the headsets are there. You’re absolutely right. The
content cost is coming down. It’s been one of those historical
impediments; “where are you going to get the content from? Do
you have enough images to recreate it?” And those things are
getting better as well.
Alan: Yeah, we’re seeing a
revolution with 3D modelers and sites like TurboSquid and Sketchfab
and these kind of sites, where they’re taking the world’s content
creators and giving them an outlet to sell their content. Three years
ago, even just to make one 3D asset was in the hundreds of dollars.
And it’s now, I would assume, sub-hundred dollars, depending on what
the object is. And the photorealism is getting there as well. Before,
we started working on a watch, and we’ve had the same watch for like
three years — it looked so cartoonish and crap before — and now
we’ve got it looking completely photorealistic. Took us three years
to get there, but now we’ve got a formula for it.
Tracey: Yeah, exact for us.
We’ve been doing this for 10 years. We started in 2009 before really
headsets were hitting the market. So we’ve got more of a general form
factor grocery items; bags, bottles, boxes, pouches, canisters — we
can create those on the fly, with some dimensions and images using
computer vision. So we’ve got that. I think where we’re starting to
look out is things like apparel and fashion. If you’ve got a blouse
or a button-down shirt, you don’t need just a shirt. You want the
shirt on a mannequin, you want it hanging, and you want it folded.
Alan: You need the Olympic data;
you need it to flow, and what does that fabric look like, versus this
one?
Tracey: Yeah. We’re using some
depth sensing cameras to be able to scan that on a mannequin, and
then use machine learning to take the mannequin out of the garment,
essentially. And from there, we can hang and fold it, and you get
three or four different representations of it with a two-to-three
minute scan. We have to continually think about how to make content
creation as easy and as inexpensive as possible to leverage these
types of platforms.
Alan: Absolutely. I think that
was one of the biggest challenges over the last few years, was…
well, put it this way: Amazon has 1.5 billion products for sale on
Amazon. And over the next 10 years, every single one is going to have
to be sold in 3D somehow. How do you take a billion products, and
convert them to 3D? You nailed it by saying computer vision and
machine learning. That’s the future of where it’s going. There won’t
be physical photographs of product shots anymore. I think it’s all
going to move digital.
Tracey: Yeah. Yeah, and you’re
starting to see some cooperation between retailers and brands now,
where at the very beginning of creating a product — I don’t care if
it’s a coffee mug or a shirt or anything — you typically have some
sort of CAD drawing of that. The end designer for that item is using
some sort of CAD program. The problem has been, it’s been siloed off
into one area of an organization, and maybe the format doesn’t
integrate well with anything else. Now, by the time you get that
product on shelf, a lot of those details are lost or even
non-existent. You’re starting to see some real cooperation. Everybody
can see the future of, how do we follow that digital item’s journey
from inception in someone’s mind all the way to the shelf, and allow
this proliferation of formats and details that everybody can
leverage. You see Khronos now having that 3D commerce exploratory
group, which I hope — and I’m sure — will turn into a full-working
group. It’s because everybody can see that cooperation benefits
everyone.
Alan: This is an important
point. I want to just emphasize it, because even if you created a 3D
model… let’s say, for example, you create a 3D model of a shirt in
OBJ, which is a 3D model format. If you want to drop that into
Facebook, it won’t work. You want to drop it into Snapchat, it won’t
work. If you want to drop it on the web, it won’t work. So
standardizing the 3D models that everybody uses; There’s OBJ, there’s
glTF, there’s FDX, there’s now USDZ with Apple. There’s all these
different formats, and they all have different abilities. Some look
more photorealistic, some don’t. Some are larger files, some are
smaller. And by this Khronos group, which is a group that organizes
3D model… I guess visuals, and computer compression and stuff like
that. They’re a group that consolidates the industry, things like
MP4s and stuff like that. But really, by them standardizing this,
it’s going to unlock true 3D commerce, because unless we can figure
out how to make one model that works across all platforms, it’s still
going to be a very cost-prohibitive exercise for retailers and
brands.
Tracey: Yeah. If you think about
the analog as sort of the JPEG of 15 to 25 years ago; imagine if you
had 10 different flavors of what an image was, and everybody picked
one and they weren’t interoperable. I think that’s where we are now
with 3D, across the web and all these other platforms.
Alan: We’ve spent an exorbitant
amount of time trying to make things look photorealistic on WebAR,
and we just got everything working. We finally got WebAR working, and
then Apple shut down the cameras, and I was like, “what?”
So, Apple’s kind of this outlier messing with everybody’s mojo here,
but they are big enough that they can do that. I think hopefully
Khronos Group is able to bring Apple into the fold, because
otherwise, we’re going to have to have some sort of universal
converter for them, which there’re already converters popping up,
but–
Tracey: Yeah, and one of the
things we’ve had to invest in before these initiatives got going is
this kind of content pipeline, that takes raw content and any number
of the various formats and can transcode those; the MobileWeb, FDX,
OBJ, DAE, all the various flavors. It’s been painful, because even
within some of those standards, you have a wide leeway of creativity
to build something slightly different that you might not anticipate.
We’re looking forward to when there is maybe one or two different
formats that rule this, instead of 10 or 15 that are out there now.
Alan: It even gets crazier.
Within OBJ, you’ve got texture files and it gets crazy, the amount of
details that these things have. And you need them. But like you said,
being able to standardize this and that will also allow for marketers
to have a better understanding of how they can use these 3D assets
across multiple business units. The guys in Ecom can use the same
models as the people — or maybe in your case — setting up a store
visualizer, right? So you’re in VR, it looks beautiful; then, taking
that exact same thing, make it available as a 3D object on a web
commerce browser, and then being able to drop that and see yourself
in AR wearing that thing. Having that full content management stack
is going to be very important.
Tracey: Even if there is one
single source of truth for a 3D object — I’m sure you know, as you
get into the headset and you got to run 90 frames a second or 60, at
least to make it an enjoyable experience, draw calls and all the
other technical side of how that texture map is laid out, PBR — all
sorts of things could impact performance. You almost need to be able
to, within maybe a small band, make sure that thing runs, performing
across MobileWeb, headsets, or all the different capabilities.
Alan: Yeah, we’re not quite
there yet. [laughs]
Tracey: Absolutely, yeah.
Alan: I’m just thinking like, oh
my god, we have so much work to do. [laughs] It’s the work that
companies like InContext Solutions are doing that is really
pioneering and paving the way for retailers and brands to really
start leveraging the full power of spatial computing.
Tracey: Yeah, absolutely. I
mean, there’s a number of things working in our favor there — and
Moore’s Law, if you will — against some of these initiatives. And
we’ll get there. We’re trying to look at how fast it’s going to be.
The first Oculus was… out in, what, early 2012? So we’re seven
years into this journey already. And it might take another two,
three, five, seven years to see some of these things come out. But
with all the investment of the Apples, the Microsofts, the Googles,
the Facebooks, the Amazon. I mean, there’s no doubt in my mind that
we’re gonna get there.
Alan: Yeah. I mean, if Amazon
hired a few hundred 3D modellers, Apple’s hired a thousand AR
developers. Wal-Mart just rolled out 17,000 VR headsets to train
their staff. The big companies get it. They did a couple of POCs a
few years ago. They went, “oh, wow. This increased our training
retentions by 25 percent.” That’s not an inconsequential number.
Macy’s: “increased our sales basket size by 45 percent on
average, and decreased our return rates to 2 percent.” These are
crazy statistics, and the companies that are getting in now are gonna
have such a big advantage over those who are putting it off. And then
one of the things that I keep reiterating on the show is that, you
have to utilize what’s existing now. When we advise companies, we
advise them not just on, “here’s an AR thing that you could do,”
but we look at it from a holistic standpoint. What can you use this
technology for in your training? In your internal training? In your
your marketing? And your sales, and all of these things? I
interviewed the CEO — Caspar Thykier — of Zappar, the AR platform,
and he said, “live within what this technology can do right now,
while planning for the future”. So, use the technology that
exists currently, because it’s still amazing. Don’t keep looking to
the future as, “oh, when it comes, we’ll do it.” It’s here
now; leverage the technology now, and look to the future of what’s
possible in the future.
Tracey: Yeah. History really
hasn’t been kind to those… we look at the last computing platform
like this, you could consider mobile. Those that adopted mobile late?
There was real consequences there. I mean, it’s the same thing with
even the talent required to create. And now you mentioned 3D
modellers. You also have 3D engineers,and the gaming engineers that
bring these experiences to life. Twelve years ago, there wasn’t a
mobile developer. Now you think about another five to six years in
the future. Like, there is a dearth of need there, for 3D developers
and 3D modelers creating efficient, inexpensive content. We haven’t
been through this maybe for VR, but we’ve been through this paradigm
before.
Alan: Absolutely. And 12 years
ago, app developer wasn’t a job, at all. It wasn’t even a
consideration. And now there’s millions and millions of app
developers. And five years ago, VR/AR wasn’t a job. VR developers, AR
developers, it wasn’t a job. And now there’s maybe a hundred thousand
out there; maybe less, maybe a little more. But in five years from
now, that is one of the jobs of the future.
Tracey: Yeah. That’s why I think
it’s important. You mentioned VR/AR associations. They’ve got a lot
of different programs with universities and students to help seed
that work. But I think that it’s very important to invest in the
future that way, just to help flourish. Because at some point, it
becomes a bottleneck. Every company out there, in my mind, has to be
a software company in the future, and the talent isn’t there. There’s
gonna be a lot of falling at the waysides.
Alan: Well, I think that’s where
VR/AR can actually solve a lot of that, too, because we can
hyper-accelerate education by using these tools to upskill and
reskill people. I read a stat that 65 percent of Grade 1 children
will graduate into jobs that don’t exist. And I think we’re gonna
need to start rejigging education as a whole. That’s my long-term
goal, to create a new education platform using every piece of
technology that we’re building now, with the one focus of just
hyper-accelerating education. On that note, what problem in the world
do you want to see solved with XR Technologies?
Tracey: It’s basic and I’ve sort
of alluded to it at this point, but there’s just so much inefficient
work done and time wasted, frankly, by having to fly people all over
the place. Have a meeting here, wait to get people in a central
location. And there might be times where that’s warranted and
required. But when you try out some of these demos? I mean, I did a
demo with the Wild platform last week and–
Alan: I love that, I love that.
That looks amazing.
Tracey: Yeah. We had a couple of
people across the country on our teams join in. When I’m inside the
experience, and I’m next to somebody, and I can hear them in my
headset? There were times where I felt like I was physically going to
bump into them. That’s how real it felt.
Alan: [laughs] Yeah.
Tracey: When you get to that
level of immersion, there’s no reason you can’t become more efficient
at that process. And there’s a lot of derivative benefits; flying
people as a lot of costs, but you think of the climate change and
pollution on airlines? I mean, there’s a lot of different, derivative
effects there. Even bringing people closer is such an immense benefit
there.
Alan: Absolutely. People aren’t
gonna stop flying. They’re just going to start flying for vacations
rather than work.
Tracey: [laughs] Right.
Alan: I don’t know about you,
but as a businessperson, I’ve traveled the world and everything’s
all, you know, you’re here and now you’re there. It really sucks,
traveling for business.
Tracey: It does.
Alan: Two days later, you’re in
your destination. You’re exhausted. You haven’t showered. And you’ve
got to go to a meeting. You finish the meeting. You get on by plane
and do the whole thing over. It sucks.
Tracey: Yeah, I agree. I agree.
Alan: But getting on a plane to
go to a beach…
Tracey: I can get behind that.
Alan: Well, I want to thank you
so much for joining us on this podcast, Tracey. It’s been really
amazing. Is there anything else you want to share with the audience?
Tracey: We have the latest
generation of our platform; just launched a few weeks ago. One of the
things we’re doing is sort of leveraging the historical knowledge.
We’ve been playing with headsets since 2012. I’ve mentioned the
content pipeline. So, how do you watch content from the Web to use in
simulation, and the headset, and then make that seamless? If you’re
working on your desktop and you have a headset connected, you might
want to jump into the VR experience and see what it looks like for
your customers. We’re enabling that with push-button VR. And again,
the content being transcoded to high res, low res, different levels
of details; all that sort of stuff is something we think we’ve nailed
with all the content. We’re excited to see where our customers take
that. Then again, we’re not abandoning any of the mobile capabilities
we have, and leaning into that as well. And I would just sort of echo
what you said before; if things aren’t perfect today, there’s no
reason not to try it, because there’s still an immense cost savings
or upside potential by just dabbling, and there’s ways to get started
for very little cost. And please, keep your head wrapped around what
the future could hold.
38 min
August 12, 2019 Off to Digital Market We Go, with InContext Solutions' Tracey Wiedmeyer
The power of XR will never be able to destroy the good ol' desire to go out and shop, but that doesn't mean that XR couldn't be used to improve the shopping experience. Tracey Wiedmeyer and Alan discuss a few ideas, from browsing the catch of the day in a VR tropical wonderland, to using VR and AR to test out retail layouts before you build them.
Alan: Today's guest is Tracey
Wiedmeyer. Tracey is the chief technology officer and co-founder of
InContext Solutions. They're delivering a mixed reality platform that
is the world's largest brands and retailers are using to streamline
their merchandising process and go to market strategy much faster.
Tracey is also the former president of the VR/AR Association chapter
in Chicago, Milwaukee and a board member for the Information Research
Technology Institute at Sam Walton College of Business. Tracey is
also a member of the Forbes Technology Council. You can learn more
about InContext Solutions at www.incontextsolutions.com. With that,
I'd love to welcome to the show: Tracey Wiedmeyer.
Tracey: Hey Alan, glad to be
here.
Alan: My pleasure. I'm so
excited. This is a show I've been really waiting to do because you
guys have been using virtual and augmented reality, mixed reality to
help retailers preplan their stores, because right now a retailer, if
they want to design a new store, they literally have to build a
physical store, put all the shelves and build a mock store. And
you're doing this through virtual/augmented reality, and the metrics
that you're able to collect, keep maps, and where people are looking
and the amount of data that you're able to collect from users in a
digital world versus a physical world is actually really quite
amazing. So maybe you can just talk about InContext Solutions and
what you're doing for retailers.
Tracey: Sure, yeah. There was a
lot to bite off there. I'll break it down little by little as we go
here. So I think you mentioned creating brand new physical stores.
There's actually more retail stores today, more brick-and-mortar
stores than there were back in 2000 when the retail apocalypse
version 1 hit the street. You know, it was the end of
brick-and-mortar, everyone has gone digital. So I think there's a lot
of stores being added today and most stores - but whether you're a
centre store grocery retailer or fashion or apartment store - those
stores go through a regular reset on a period of time, whether that's
every couple of years or longer than that. I think the nuance there
is actually at the brand level, you know, especially if we focus on
centre store grocery for a little bit here. The brands are actually
working with their retail partners multiple times a year to reset the
categories that you shop. So cereal, frozen foods, healthcare, baby
foods, all that sort of stuff are constantly going through some sort
of revision period, whether it's... the old way's every six months,
because that's how long it takes them, and I'll get into that in a
little bit. But they're trying to get you to buy or notice one or two
more products on that journey to the shelf. We're using virtual
technology now to basically facilitate that process; everything from
a brand new store, to which products go on the shelf, and how many of
them are stacked right to left and front to back. There's a lot of
low hanging fruit in that process, and maybe I don't know how much,
Alan, you know about what that process looks like today, or in the
past. What I'm going to do is tell you a little bit about where we've
come from.
A lot of brands and retailers have what
they call mock warehouses. They physically stage all their sets, what
every category is going to look like. And then they invite their
brand. You invite your r
0 min
August 09, 2019 Becoming an XR Iron Man with Praemo’s Paul Boris
Tony Stark’s flashy, nanotech gold-titanum suit of armour might be a thing of fantasy, but some of his other powers are on the cusp of reality, with the power of the Internet of Things. Praemo Board of Director’s member Paul Boris uses his years of experience in the XR space to explain how such a marvel of computing could be possible.
38 min
August 09, 2019 Becoming an XR Iron Man with Praemo's Paul Boris
Tony Stark's flashy, nanotech gold-titanum suit of armour might be a thing of fantasy, but some of his other powers are on the cusp of reality, with the power of the Internet of Things. Praemo Board of Director's member Paul Boris uses his years of experience in the XR space to explain how such a marvel of computing could be possible.
0 min
August 07, 2019 Retraining for a Post-Retirement World with VRVoice’s Bob Fine
A good friend
of Alan’s, publisher of the online XR news publication, VR Voice,
drops by the show for a general chat about the future of the space,
including the potential for XR to help train workers in a future
where retirement is less common, saving money by designing hospitals
in VR before brick meets mortar, the video game crash of 1983, and a
little Fruit Ninja.
Alan: Today’s guest is a good
friend of mine, Bob Fine. In 2011, Bob launched the only printed
magazine covering social media, The Social Media Monthly. In January
2014, he launched his second print titled The Startup Monthly in May
2016, he launched — what I love — VRVoice.co, a content vertical on
all things virtual reality. In addition to his publishing endeavors,
Bob continues to provide I.T. strategic planning consulting services
to both private sector and non-profit communities. Bob has over 10
years of additional work experience as a systems and sales engineer
with various companies, including CMGi, Hughes Network, IOWave and
Raytheon, as well as two of his own consulting companies, Geoplan and
the Cool Blue Company. I want to have a warm welcome; thank you, Bob,
for joining us on the show today.
Bob: Alan, thanks very much for
having me. I’m honored to be one of your guests.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure
and honor to have you on the show. I’ve met with you many times.
You’ve actually shared some CES stories, and we’ve been in a little
glass booth in CES together. That was wonderful. You have your own
podcast and news outlet, talking about all things virtual reality,
VRVoice. That is been amazing, and you’ve been a great influencer in
the space, so thank you.
Bob: Well, I appreciate that.
Alan: So the first question I
love to ask everybody is, what is the best VR/AR/XR experiences — or
what are some of the best experiences — that you’ve had so far?
Bob: You know, I guess from my
perspective; I’m a longtime video gamer. I just went to PAX East on
Friday, up in Boston. I was my first PAX event. And if you’re not
familiar, that’s the Penny Arcade conference. Huge, huge gaming
conference. It makes E3 look minuscule. And I’m old enough where I
started with an Atari 2600. One my the reasons I started looking at
VR again in 2016 was because of that video gaming interest. When you
ask me my best experiences right now, I’m going to kind of… I’m
thinking about some of the early games that that I played, that gave
me that “woah” moment. As I’m thinking back to it now, this
was actually on HTC VIVE — first gen, which was only maybe 3, 4
years ago now — and I was so impressed with the first generation of
hardware that I was like, “well, this is ready for prime time.”
The prices might still be a little bit high, but the quality of the
gaming was there already. Just two off top my head is the VR version
of Fruit Ninja, which I’ve personally put about 400-500 people
through, because it’s one of the best and fastest experiences I think
you can give somebody that’s never tried VR, but you can give to
anybody whether they’re five years old or ninety five years old.
Alan: Slicing fruit in VR is
magical, and the fact that they have the haptic feedback to the
controller is just… [implied Chef Kiss]. You’re right, it is a
magical experience.
Bob: The other game that I was
really getting addicted to was Space Pirates, which I think is still
just a brilliant early video game that demonstrates the quick and
easy access to VR. It’s kind of like the space invaders of AR, I
think, in terms of what those early games that caught fire and was
easy to pick up and everybody loved.
Alan: “Space Pirate
Trainer.” Is that what it is?
Bob: I think, yeah, that’s
right. That’s right. I’ve been traveling and it’s been kind of
non-stop for the last couple months. I’m actually looking forward to
today, because my life gets to slow down a little bit. And I’ve been
catching up a little bit on the news. We had a big conference earlier
in March. And then right after, I went to Laval Virtual in France.
Alan: Oh wow.
Bob: That was great. It was a
great experience. The largest VR event in France; maybe in Europe,
even. And what was also amazing, which was unclear to me, was that
conference has been around for over 20 years. It was the 21st or 22nd
year this year, that they’ve been focusing on VR. So they’ve been
having conferences about VR for 20 years before the DK1.
Alan: That’s incredible.
Bob: These guys have been around
for a while. It was just a very great event. Great place to meet
people, a little bit off the beaten path. It’s about three and half
hours west of Paris. It was a great, great experience.
Alan: So, because this is a
podcast focused on the business applications and enterprise
applications of this technology, what did you see at Laval that stood
out as a must-have for businesses?
Bob: Well, actually, what was
interesting for me being at Laval is, I put on a — for the first
time — a VR architecture event… actually, over a year ago, now;
this was January 2018. We had good participation. But it was hard for
me to get a feel for where architecture uptake was, from a VR
perspective, in the US. At Laval — at least from what I could see,
especially from the number of exhibitors and the focus —
architecture and design and enterprise planning, it’s a huge business
area within Europe right now. A lot of companies focusing on it. A
lot of companies picking up on it. One of the things that was demoed
there, there was a presentation from Microsoft about the new Hololens
2. And Trimble announced — and has — an all-in-one headset based on
the Hololens for the maintenance industry, managing cable lines or
oil pipelines. A lot of outdoor, hard maintenance work.
Alan: That’s called the XR 10,
right? Is that the one?
Bob: I don’t know if that’s the
name or not.
Alan: Hardhats with Hololens 2
built in?
Bob: I think they launched in
the Hololens 1, and then I think it’s geared to come out in the
Hololens 2 right away.
Alan: Yeah, it’s pretty
impressive. One of the announcements that Hololens made at WMC this
year was, they announced that they’re making a system where you can
mod it — you can actually make modifications — and they will
support the modifications for businesses. Which is pretty amazing,
because who knows how these technologies are going to be used? Maybe
they need a hardhat; maybe they need a scuba mask. Who knows? Being
able to be open to those changes and foster them, because if one user
needs them, I’m sure tons of them will.
Bob: I think Trimble is one of
those first partnerships for them, because it was integrated with
hardhat. So it’s hard hat with a Hololens 1 piece. I could picture
people out on the street with these less than twelve months.
Alan: One of the startups that
we’re helping, they’re looking at taking CAD diagrams, blueprints,
and then importing them into the real world so you can stand in a
construction site, and see the blueprints overlaid on top in the
exact position of where they should be. The reason that’s important
is because there’s about $30-billion lost every year in construction
rework. And that’s just in North America. It’s $30-billion in doing
things twice, where, if you can wear this headset, you can look up in
the rafters and say, “OK, well, the HVAC system’s off by a
foot.” You can annotate on it, and send it back to the
blueprints real-time. And everybody has a real-time path of what’s
happening.
Bob: That’s the great segue to
one of the presentations I’m remembering now from Laval, which was
a… I can’t think of the startup’s name off top my head, but they
were a European company that focused on hospital architecture design,
and they had an ROI presentation showing that, by designing the
operating room in VR first, and having the client be able to review
it multiple times, walk through it, figure out what’s going to work
and what’s not going to work, from an operations perspective within
the OR; Where did the nurses stand? Where do objects get handed from
nurse to doctor? And so forth. And then, being able to figure out
beforehand those bottlenecks, because they definitely demonstrated
that there was a huge amount of money spent on… they said — on
average — each time they did a physical build of a hospital or an
OR, they had to do a refurb four or five times, and each of those
refurbs costing, like, half a million dollars or something like that.
Alan: If you look at it from
that lens, even if you do one refurb, that’s half a million dollars.
You can buy a lot of VR and AR headsets with that kind of money.
Bob: Yeah. And with the use of
doing it through VR — not necessarily perfecting the process, or
catching everything only from that — but they definitely reduce
their costs by… I think they got down to maybe one or two revisions
that were necessary, instead of the average of four or five. I mean,
you think about building something, and then having to go back four
or five times to reconfigure it, because you didn’t get it right the
first time?
Alan: Let’s pack that in a
strictly numbers standpoint. Let’s assume each revision’s half a
million dollars; they do four revisions, that’s $2-million.
Bob: Yeah.
Alan: A VR headset and a full
computer… let’s say you buy 10 of them. Right? So, five grand a
pop. Maybe you need five grand, maybe you don’t. But let’s call it
$5,000 a pop. So, for $50,000, you just saved a million dollars. What
is that, about a 20 x return?
Bob: Yeah.
Alan: These are not trivial
numbers. These are massive savings. By just thinking about how you
can use this technology to prevent, rework, or eliminate one of the
revisions; you just saved millions of dollars from something that is
a marginal cost.
Bob: I know that’s one of the
main reasons why the automotive industry is one of the very early,
big adopters and investors in the hardware and software. The amount
of money that they can save on having to physically do a build of a
design — a first iteration of a car, what have you — I mean, that’s
millions of dollars of time in labor that they can save if they can
learn as much as they can through a VR simulation of the car.
Alan: My previous guest today
was Elizabeth Baron from Ford. In her 20 years or 30 years working in
immersion within Ford, they came up with what they called the Tenets
of Immersion. I’ll read them out, because I think it’s worth
repeating. How quickly and easily you can become immersed. So, when
you walk in and someone puts a headset on you, how quickly do you go
from standing outside the room, to being fully immersed? Simulating
any potential area, whether it be on a racetrack, or in a design
studio; being able to change the environment. Making sure the
hardware is simple, unobtrusive, and acts naturally and feels
natural. So, even reaching over your hands, stuff like that, it has
to be realistic. It has to be real-time. The next one is
collaboration, and then their last one is full scale; being able to
see the vehicle at full scale. Those were the Tenets of Immersion.
And when you hit on automotive, I was like, “wow. Exactly.”
Bob: Continuing on your thought
there, my specialization and focus is in the VR and health care
sector. There’s been quite a lot of studies done in the last couple
of years, and data developed, where the time for immersion — at this
stage with the technology — is under 60 seconds. It takes, depending
on the application or whatever, but for the most part, people become
acclimated in less than a minute in VR, feeling fully immersed in a
different environment in a very, very short amount time.
Alan: You go from standing in a room to standing on the moon in 60 seconds or less.
Bob: Right. Where you’ve been
transported both emotionally and physically. You’re having an
out-of-body-experience. It takes place that quickly.
Alan: So, because your specialty
is in VR and health care, let’s start talking about that. I’ve seen
hundreds of articles — maybe thousands of articles, now — on how VR
is being used — VR and AR, really — for everything from anatomy
training, right through to CT visualization, and then surgical
assist. What are some of the things that you’ve seen that health care
professionals and students are using to leverage this technology to
better their performance?
Bob: Well, from my perspective,
and one of the reasons I’ve decided to make this the area of our
focus is for a number of reasons. One, working in the healthcare
sector, at the end of the day, there’s a betterment for people’s
health and wellness, and there’s a social good aspect to working in
that sector. Not that I’m saying in other sectors, you can’t find
that. But it comes quickly with the health care sector. And what’s
really interesting is the amount of applications and development
that’s happening not only at the practitioner level in terms of
surgeons, nurses, clinicians; but also at the patient level, in terms
of mental rehabilitation or physical rehabilitation, or early stuff
happening with helping to diagnose. But also… whether “treat”
is the right word at this point, but dealing with people that have
Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, that some rehabilitation mechanisms to
help lessen the effects, and just help people have a better quality
of life.
But the other thing about health care
— and I’m sure you’re aware of this, and in Canada, it’s… well,
maybe a little bit more simplified — but in the United States, it’s
a really, really complicated market. And there’s so many different
aspects to it that have to be worked through to have a successful
product. It’s a different beast than other for-profit sectors, but
that’s one of the reasons why — and I can’t remember if I shared
this back at CES or not — but we’ve recently launched the
International Virtual Reality and Healthcare Association —
ivrha.org; the website will be up later this week, actually — but we
have over 30 organizations for the launch, and the focus is to help
support the growth of the sector, support the companies involved, but
also help figure out what mechanisms are needed to facilitate getting
products and applications in the marketplace faster. But again, it
varies depending on the type of application, because some things
require regulatory approval. Some things don’t. And how do things get
paid for by insurers, and so forth. It’s an interesting, complicated
space to be in right now.
Alan: Yeah. There’s so much that
can be done, and also so many challenges to be overcome. But I think
— as they say — where there’s a will, there’s a way. The upside
potential of this technology is so vast and so important, I believe
it’s just gonna become one of the other tools that physicians,
surgeons, and nurses have in their disposal. And some of the amazing
use cases that I’ve seen are not even in the surgical room. One of
the things I saw that was really wonderful, was out of Sick Kids
Toronto Hospital, where they took a 360 camera and they put it on a
gurney, and they basically talked to the camera as if it was a
patient and walked them down the hall through to the surgery, and
allowed kids to watch in VR what it would be like — or what it will
be like — before their surgeries. They’ve already been down the
hall; they know what to expect. They’re not nervous going into a room
with all silver stainless steel furniture. They understand what’s
going to happen, and by decreasing their stress before they go in for
surgery, it’s actually increasing their outcomes. And that’s just one
of a million use cases that I’ve seen–
Bob: And not just for children,
but for adults as well. You’re going to go under a bypass, or have
some kind of serious surgery? It is an opportunity for the physician
to walk you through what they’re going to do, and it does lessen your
apprehensiveness and your stress. And stress is a significant
physical and mental negative effect on your health and well-being.
Where you can decrease that, in any situation, is a benefit.
Alan: Decreasing stress is
definitely a benefit, but one of the other things that I keep seeing
is the ability for virtual reality to decrease the amount of opioid
usage. Sometimes upwards as high as 25 percent in very painful
procedures, we’re able to give distraction therapy using VR. I have a
daughter, she’s 10, and she is literally terrified of needles. Like,
she is the kid that you do not want in the hospital at all; they have
to chase her down the hall. This group created a VR experience where
you’re wearing the VR headset, and it’s this magical fairy, and
there’s a whole story, and then they give you the needle before you
even know what happened. And I think this is really some amazing
technology. So you’ve got preparation for surgery; you’ve got
distraction therapies to decrease opioid usage; you’ve got physicians
using it for pre-visualization and pre-seeing a surgery; you’ve got
pharmaceutical companies teaching people with it. Like, it’s
unlimited, what this is going to bring to medicine.
Bob: The issue within health
care, and part of the… I won’t say “problem,” but
impediment, is anecdotal evidence is not always enough. Where a lot
of these applications are showing early successes for the larger
parts of the industry to adopt it, they want to see clinical data,
and clinical data takes time. Which is all good and necessary. It’s
trying to figure out how to expedite those clinical trials, and bring
the data to the forefront faster. That’s one of the goals with the
association. If I can take us in a slightly different direction,
during our prep beforehand, you were talking about, “where are
the opportunities?” And something that I’ve been sharing in my
presentations the last couple of months is — and actually I just I
read another statistic just from an article today that made me think
about it again — I had the chance to attend a conference in
Washington in December called the Longevity Conference, and it’s all
about the aging community. Not just the elderly, but older working
people. And the AARP, — which is the largest.. I think, the largest
nonprofit in the United States, with 50-million members, The American
Association of Retired Persons — shared a statistic which was very
sobering, which is, in about 10 or 15 years, the majority of the
population of the United States will be of the age 50 and over. That
will be the largest part of the population.
Alan: Wow.
Bob: One of the other sobering
statistics that I just read from an article today — and I’m trying
to remember… oh, it was a survey from MetLife — noted that’s
something like a 15 percent increase of people having to postpone to
retirement because of finances.
Alan: Wow. That’s an incredible
number. Holy moly!
Bob: So what all this means,
though, is that all of us — the vast majority of us — as we get
older, will not be retiring at 65. I don’t personally believe in the
notion of retirement anyway, but–.
Alan: Freedom 55 was a lie!
Bob: — but many of us are going
to have to work, just to pay bills and cover health insurance and all
these things, until our 70s and maybe even 80s. But this is what I
believe is the billion-dollar opportunity that the VR industry is
missing right now. Training in VR is one of the big applications and
opportunities, and that’s where a lot of investment is happening. But
it’s happening more from a traditional, “let’s train our
existing staff; let’s improve how we onboard people; let’s improve
skill sets,” where the opportunity is with VR — and there’s
money for this — is, “how do we retrain an aging population?
People that are going into their second, maybe even third careers?
How do we retrain our workforce to be efficient?” At least here
in the United States. Retraining has not really been all that
successful. There’s lots of money invested in it. The government
spent millions and billions of dollars on it at different levels. But
it hasn’t really achieved the outcomes that people have been wanting.
And there’s a huge opportunity for VR companies to try to work with
both local and state/province governments. Right now, what I think we
need is a successful pilot, where there is a retraining opportunity
for a particular field or company, where there are job opportunities
and needs, and to demonstrate that VR can be a successful tool in
attaining that retraining. Because again, and from the studies that
are out there, retention in VR is much, much higher than in other
forms or traditional learning.
Alan: Absolutely. One of the
stats that came out of my conversation with the president of HTC,
Alvin Wang Graylin; they did a quick study with some students, and
they saw a six times increase in the concentration levels of those
students. And another study they did with soccer stars; they were
young students that are at the top tier soccer players. When they
enlisted VR training as part of their training, they did two teams
with two teams without. The teams without had a 5 percent increase;
the teams with VR training had a 36 percent increase in their
performance. So training is the magical use case for
virtual/augmented reality, and I think right across any enterprise,
that is going to be more and more applicable.
Bob: I got to tell you, 2019 is
turning out to be an extremely exciting year, from a hardware
perspective. The number of announcements that have been coming out in
the last four to six weeks from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona,
and the Game Developers Conference the other week in San Fran;
there’s a lot of products coming out, which is good for the
marketplace, too. It’ll bring prices down over time, but there’s a
lot of interesting stuff happening. I finally — finally, after a
year and a half — I got to try out the Magic Leap in Laval, and it
was a good experience. It’s an interesting first gen product.
Alan: What do you try it?
Bob: What did I try, in terms of
the application?
Alan: Yeah.
Bob: It was kind of a model simulator. You could take a look at a car engine, and spin it around in 360, zoom in and out, and look at it from different perspectives. But, [with] the ability to do that with other people in it at the same time. They had an add-on where a second person or third person could look at it through a tablet, and have the same perspective from a different angle, while one person’s in a headset.
Alan: You’re going to see a lot
more of that. Microsoft with their Hololens 2, they’ve actually moved
their Hololens from the devices division of the company to Azure,
which is their cloud computing. And what they’ve realized is that
these devices don’t really work without edge computing. We need to be
able to push information back and forth from these devices to the
cloud, and doing it real-time collaboratively is really going to be a
magical scenario.
Bob: Well, I’m starting to see
something interesting happen. And to be very honest with you, I’m
thinking this through as I’m talking about it. Personally, I have
some concerns about the cost of the Hololens and the Magic Leap
devices at this time. Not that I don’t think they’re worth the amount
of money that they’re being asked. I’m just worried about it from a
market penetration perspective. But, as I’ve been thinking about this
— and something that I think just dawned on me just now — is I’m
seeing a very strong parallel with what happened with the early PC
market, and the early gaming market in the early/mid-80s. If you
think about console gaming — and we’re going back to now the Atari
2600 that I started with, and Intellivision and ColecoVision, (I’m
sure you remember all these), the first Nintendo–
Alan: Burger Time!
Bob: Burger Time, awesome game. One of my favorites. These were aimed at families and gamers and households, and they were reasonably affordable units; $200-$300. That was something people could afford for Christmas. And it influenced an entire generation, including me, in terms of what I became interested in and what I want to work in. And I see that right now, Oculus is filling that void. Well, not just Oculus; PlayStation with the PSVR, and very soon, Valve is coming out with their own headset next month. So, there is this part of the VR sector that I’m now seeing focused on the end user consumer gamer. And then there’s this whole other part of the industry, which includes HTC and Microsoft and Magic Leap, which is focused on the enterprise. Now I’m alluding to the $2,000 PC from the mid 80s, which was high-high-end, what you needed in your workplace. And maybe a consumer could afford that, maybe they couldn’t. Then there was a convergence had happened over the next 10 years, where both the gaming hardware and the PCs kind of came into a middle pricing range, between that $500-$1,500 price range. I guess I’m starting to see a similar parallel track, in terms of the VR industry today, to what happened with PCs and gaming consoles 30 years ago.
Alan: At $3,500, it seems like
“wow, nobody will ever buy that.” But for businesses and
enterprise, that’s a drop in the bucket; literally nothing, if you’re
saving millions of dollars.
Bob: Right. Going back to our
earlier examples, if you’re investing $50,000 in hardware, and able
to save half a billion your first time out, it’s a no-brainer.
Alan: Yeah. One of the big things that came out of Hololens 2’s announcements this year was they’re making things available right out of the box. Whether in design, you can upload your sketch ups, you can upload your .bim files or CAD models; whatever it is you’re working on, they have programs right out of the box that bring value. Whereas the Hololens 1, it was like, “here’s a Hololens and here’s a development kit that is kind of half-baked. But you know, you can guess and try some things?” I think version 2 is going to be a moment where enterprises buy this device, and are able to generate value from it immediately. I think that is the game-changer.
Bob: I think, where maybe
there’s a little struggle, is the enterprise figuring out what they
do with it from Day One. I don’t think it’s clear for companies to
figure out, “okay, we know that we can get value out of this,
but we’re not quite sure how to do that.” We don’t have the
Lotus 1-2-3 program that is the killer app just yet, at least for
enterprise; that is a must-have, out-of-the-box for everybody. I
think, unfortunately, they’re having to adjust it to their particular
use case and need, and maybe some of that’s out-of-the-box. It takes
a little bit of figuring out, though.
Alan: Yeah, I mean, there’s
legacy issues and stuff. But what I’m seeing in the market is that
this stuff’s just moving really, really fast. The fact that it’s
moving this fast is really encouraging. It’s also scary, because you
invest in some technology, and then all of a sudden that’s obsolete.
But I think you can futureproof your content strategies as you
develop these things, especially in VR training. For example, if you
start to use 8k cameras instead of 4k, then you’re creating content
that’s above and beyond what the current headsets are capable of. But
they’ll catch up, and your content will be future-proof.
Bob: Yeah, definitely.
Alan: So let me ask you, Bob;
what is one of the most impressive business use cases of XR
technologies that you’ve seen?
Bob: Now you’re putting me on
the spot.
Alan: That’s the point!
Bob: One of the best use
cases… Well, I think the killer app is training right now. If we
think about education in the United States, at the high school/middle
school level, we’re struggling. It’s no surprise, and there’s no
hidden facts that the United States is not number one in reading or
math. I don’t even think we’re in the top 10, necessarily. We are
struggling keeping their focus. VR is a winning scenario for this,
right now. You even mentioned a couple examples, where the retention
and increased performance is a 5-6x improvement. That’s the biggest
opportunity right now. It’s getting it in the hands of people and
teachers and practitioners. Talking on that point, Merge VR — which
is an AR hardware/software platform — has completely taken off in
the education market. They completely changed their business model.
In the beginning, they were focused a little bit more on consumer and
such, but because they have actually a very cost-effective,
entry-level product that students and teachers and schools can afford
right now, they are getting insane uptake, and teachers are able to
teach content and engage students in a much more captivating way. And
they’re seeing great results with it.
Alan: The Merge guys. I traveled
to China with them, and the MERGE Cube is… it’s so elegant. It’s a
3″x 3″ foam cube with some markers on the side, and if you
pull your phone out, it comes to life and it can be everything, from
a fish chasing some sushi, to a human heart or a skull in your hand.
If you put it into Google Cardboard mode, where you put the phone
into a viewer, this cube comes to life in your hands, and they’ve
done it really elegantly. So, they’ve let people program for it.
We’ve made some retail things for it, but it’s a beautiful, elegant
solution. Really simple.
Bob: You just mentioned Google
Cardboard, and actually, something that I was looking at earlier
today, that Nintendo [Labo] — is it “LAY-boh?” LAH-bo? —
VR kit is coming out in two weeks. And even though this is not
necessarily Oculus Rift or HTC quality, it’s a brilliant move by
Nintendo, and it’s going to be a mass adoption; an introduction of
VR/AR to an entire generation, in the next 18 to 24 months. The
Switch has taken off as a huge, huge success as a console. It’s going
to be a very fast introduction, and people will get familiar with VR
much, much more over the next 12 to 18 months.
Alan: I agree. I think it’s
going to be a race to the top. A stat that I like to share with
people is that, over the next 12 months, we’re going to see 2-billion
smartphone devices that have AR enabled in them. And over the next
five years or six years — between now and 2025 — there’s going to
be a trillion dollars in value created through virtual, augmented,
and mixed reality. The market cap is going to be massive. It’s a
matter of harnessing that value for your company.
Bob: When did you go to China?
Alan: In June last year.
Bob: Okay. And what did you take
away from China?
Alan: Couple of things. The
Chinese market is much bigger than the American market. They just
have so many more people. They have 300-million people — the entire
population of the US — in the middle- to upper-middle-class. In
America, you’ve got 300 million people; you’ve got a few people at
the very top, a middle class, and then people at the bottom. China’s
really becoming a new world superpower… I guess I can’t really say
“new,” but they’re really dominating, and they have their
own agenda, and they’re working really hard. And 99 percent of the VR
headsets in the world are made in China.
Bob: Do you see opportunity now,
for American and Canadian companies, in VR/AR in China?
Alan: I really do. I think
there’s going to be some great opportunities in retail. I know
Alibaba just acquired an Israeli company last week.
Bob: I recall that.
Alan: I think there’s going to
be opportunities in retail, and education. VIVE is doing some really
amazing things in education, and bringing multiple headsets to
classrooms. When you’ve got, like, 300 people all wearing a headset
in a classroom, that’s pretty impressive. And one of the things that
HTC just announced at their VIVE Conference in China; they have a new
headset coming out, the VIVE Focus Plus, which has 6DoF, meaning you
can look up, down, left, right, and then move in those directions.
It’s got multi-modal VR. So, you’re able to plug it into a console,
and see the screen from the consoles. You could play your PlayStation
games in VR, on a huge IMAX-sized screen. The other thing that
they’ve got coming is eye tracking for their VIVE. The other thing
that I thought was really cool — I’ve never seen it, but I can’t
wait to try it — is they’ve created a multi-user system using the
VIVE Focus, where they can have up to 40 devices non-tethered. So no
backpacks, nothing. You just put on the headset and go with four
trackers that covers 900,000 square feet, which is four football
fields.
Bob: Wow.
Alan: Free-roam VR, for up to 40
people in a 900,000 square foot-sized space.
Bob: That’s interesting.
Alan: Right? I was like, “oh,
OK. This is big.” So I think there’s gonna be some big, big
things coming from these standalone headsets.
Bob: Fantastic.
Alan: So, Bob, one last question
for you; what do you see for the future of virtual/augmented/mixed
reality — or XR — as it pertains to business?
Bob: Well, I think — just based
on most of our discussion — it’s the next computing platform. Again,
I think why you and I have been interested in it from a very early
perspective; we went from VAX/VMS systems in the 70s-80s, to the PC
generation, to mobile. And now, we are seeing AR and VR, which is
going to be integrated in so many ways that people can’t even imagine
right now. AR is going to take a form where it’s going to impact
every piece of our business and daily lives. You’re going to see a
AR-integrated into windows — the screen of your windshield, of your
car, your glasses — and whatever version that takes. And we’re going
to have this new access to information that we never had before. It’s
going to be a platform that replaces — complements — our existing
life of PCs and iPads and phones. It’s not a matter of if; it’s a
matter of when. And we’re starting to see it. And 2019 is becoming a
turning point in a hardware perspective. It’s just more important for
people to get up to speed now, instead of playing catch-up three or
four years from now. And if you want to be ahead of the curve and
helping your company, at least start thinking ahead for next year or
the year after. Now is the time to start understanding the platforms,
the marketplace, the opportunities, and maybe starting small. Find a
small win, from an application perspective, and then propose
something larger.
Alan: I think that is very sage
advice. And on that note, I want to say a huge thank you for joining
me on the XR for Business Podcast.
Bob: Alan, thank you very much.
It’s been a pleasure. I’m glad to see you doing this. I think it’s
extremely important for the enterprise. You’re definitely filling a
void, and you’re a leading voice in the space.
38 min
August 07, 2019 Retraining for a Post-Retirement World with VRVoice's Bob Fine
A good friend
of Alan's, publisher of the online XR news publication, VR Voice,
drops by the show for a general chat about the future of the space,
including the potential for XR to help train workers in a future
where retirement is less common, saving money by designing hospitals
in VR before brick meets mortar, the video game crash of 1983, and a
little Fruit Ninja.
Alan: Today's guest is a good
friend of mine, Bob Fine. In 2011, Bob launched the only printed
magazine covering social media, The Social Media Monthly. In January
2014, he launched his second print titled The Startup Monthly in May
2016, he launched -- what I love -- VRVoice.co, a content vertical on
all things virtual reality. In addition to his publishing endeavors,
Bob continues to provide I.T. strategic planning consulting services
to both private sector and non-profit communities. Bob has over 10
years of additional work experience as a systems and sales engineer
with various companies, including CMGi, Hughes Network, IOWave and
Raytheon, as well as two of his own consulting companies, Geoplan and
the Cool Blue Company. I want to have a warm welcome; thank you, Bob,
for joining us on the show today.
Bob: Alan, thanks very much for
having me. I'm honored to be one of your guests.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure
and honor to have you on the show. I've met with you many times.
You've actually shared some CES stories, and we've been in a little
glass booth in CES together. That was wonderful. You have your own
podcast and news outlet, talking about all things virtual reality,
VRVoice. That is been amazing, and you've been a great influencer in
the space, so thank you.
Bob: Well, I appreciate that.
Alan: So the first question I
love to ask everybody is, what is the best VR/AR/XR experiences -- or
what are some of the best experiences -- that you've had so far?
Bob: You know, I guess from my
perspective; I'm a longtime video gamer. I just went to PAX East on
Friday, up in Boston. I was my first PAX event. And if you're not
familiar, that's the Penny Arcade conference. Huge, huge gaming
conference. It makes E3 look minuscule. And I'm old enough where I
started with an Atari 2600. One my the reasons I started looking at
VR again in 2016 was because of that video gaming interest. When you
ask me my best experiences right now, I'm going to kind of... I'm
thinking about some of the early games that that I played, that gave
me that "woah" moment. As I'm thinking back to it now, this
was actually on HTC VIVE -- first gen, which was only maybe 3, 4
years ago now -- and I was so impressed with the first generation of
hardware that I was like, "well, this is ready for prime time."
The prices might still be a little bit high, but the quality of the
gaming was there already. Just two off top my head is the VR version
of Fruit Ninja, which I've personally put about 400-500 people
through, because it's one of the best and fastest experiences I think
you can give somebody that's never tried VR, but you can give to
anybody whether they're five years old or ninety five years old.
Alan: Slicing fruit in VR is
magical, and the fact that they have the haptic feedback to the
controller is just... [implied Chef Kiss]. You're right, it is a
magical experience.
Bob: The other game that I was
really getting addicted to was Space Pirates, which I think is still
just a brilliant early video game that demonstrates the quick and
easy access to VR. It's kind of like the space invaders of AR, I
think, in terms of what those early games that caught fire and was
easy to pick up and everybody loved.
Alan: "Space Pirate
Trainer." Is that what it is?
Bob: I think, yeah, that's
right. That's right. I've been travelin
0 min
August 05, 2019 Getting the ROI out of XR, with Sector 5 Digital's Cameron Ayres
Alan and his
guests often espouse investing in XR on this podcast, but that comes
with the implicit understanding that you should expect a return on
that investment. Cameron Ayres from Sector 5 Digital discusses
strategies for maximizing that ROI.
Alan: Today's guest is Cameron
Ayres, the director of innovation at Sector 5 Digital, a digital
agency specializing in augmented reality and virtual reality
applications for the enterprise. His primary role is developing the
strategy and implementation of emerging technology, to best enhance
digital projects. Sector 5 Digital helps companies transform their
brands by creating brilliant digital content for marketing,
communications, sales, and entertainment. Clients include many
Fortune 100 clients, including American Airlines, Bell, IBM, Intel,
and many more. You can learn more about Cameron and Sector 5 at
Sector5Digital.com. Cameron, welcome to the show.
Cameron: Thanks for having me,
Alan.
Alan: My pleasure. I'm so
looking forward to this. Some of the stuff you guys are doing is
mind-blowing. I had a chance to look at some of the things you're
doing -- bringing Bellll helicopters, their new drones, to VR, and
allowing people to experience these. You've done work with airlines,
with car companies, with Harry Potter. Describe what Sector 5 digital
does, and some of the projects and things that you're most proud of.
Cameron: Sure. At a high level,
what we focus on is coming into these companies that are doing a lot
of great work, but they just want to kick it up to the next notch.
They want to tell stories in a new way. They want to increase their
ROI, is the bottom line to a lot of it. "How can we do things
faster, with exerting less effort and less man hours?" That's
where virtual reality, and augmented reality, and a lot of other
different media come into play. We come in and we'll actually sit
down and brainstorm around, "what are the problems, and how can
we come up with solutions?" And it's funny how many clients
you'll interact with that come to you with a solution. "We want
a hologram," or "we want virtual reality." But what we
specialize in is taking a step back and saying, "let's do a deep
dive. Let's talk about what virtual reality accomplishes, and if that
is the best medium." And then, if it is, we can move forward
with brainstorming. But it's so important to not fall into the trap
nowadays, of trying to make the next gimmick... or, to do it just
because the technology's cool. Let's do it with a sense of purpose.
A lot of what I do is try to take new
and emerging technology -- obviously right now, VR/AR/XR; all that
falls into it -- and using that to enhance messaging and
storytelling, training, simulation, all of that type of stuff. It
boils down to two words for me, which is "presence" and
"experience." You have the presence, for things like
training, for things like real-time engineering. You really feel like
you're there. Then you have the experience side of it, which is more
the storytelling, the marketing; let me actually go on a mission, and
something that doesn't exist yet, and get a feeling for how that's
going to change warfare, how that's going to change my ride to work
every day. A lot of it focuses around messaging, storytelling, and
training.
Alan: You've done everything
from -- like you said -- storytelling and training. What are the big,
open spaces for companies? Let's say you're a medium-sized business.
You see XR, you're going, "well, I have no idea where to get
started." What is that low-hanging fruit for businesses to get
involved, and just start with this technology?
Cameron: I've noticed that --
and this is a bit of a sideways way to look at it -- I've noticed
that, with companies that come in and they're looking to dip their
toe into virtual reality or augmen
0 min
August 05, 2019 Getting the ROI out of XR, with Sector 5 Digital's Cameron Ayres
Alan and his guests often espouse investing in XR on this podcast, but that comes with the implicit understanding that you should expect a return on that investment. Cameron Ayres from Sector 5 Digital discusses strategies for maximizing that ROI.

Alan: Today's guest is Cameron Ayres, the director of innovation at Sector 5 Digital, a digital agency specializing in augmented reality and virtual reality applications for the enterprise. His primary role is developing the strategy and implementation of emerging technology, to best enhance digital projects. Sector 5 Digital helps companies transform their brands by creating brilliant digital content for marketing, communications, sales, and entertainment. Clients include many Fortune 100 clients, including American Airlines, Bell, IBM, Intel, and many more. You can learn more about Cameron and Sector 5 at Sector5Digital.com. Cameron, welcome to the show.

Cameron: Thanks for having me, Alan.

Alan: My pleasure. I'm so looking forward to this. Some of the stuff you guys are doing is mind-blowing. I had a chance to look at some of the things you're doing -- bringing Bell helicopters, their new drones, to VR, and allowing people to experience these. You've done work with airlines, with car companies, with Harry Potter. Describe what Sector 5 digital does, and some of the projects and things that you're most proud of.

Cameron: Sure. At a high level, what we focus on is coming into these companies that are doing a lot of great work, but they just want to kick it up to the next notch. They want to tell stories in a new way. They want to increase their ROI, is the bottom line to a lot of it. "How can we do things faster, with exerting less effort and less man hours?" That's where virtual reality, and augmented reality, and a lot of other different media come into play. We come in and we'll actually sit down and brainstorm around, "what are the problems, and how can we come up with solutions?" And it's funny how many clients you'll interact with that come to you with a solution. "We want a hologram," or "we want virtual reality." But what we specialize in is taking a step back and saying, "let's do a deep dive. Let's talk about what virtual reality accomplishes, and if that is the best medium." And then, if it is, we can move forward with brainstorming. But it's so important to not fall into the trap nowadays, of trying to make the next gimmick... or, to do it just because the technology's cool. Let's do it with a sense of purpose.

A lot of what I do is try to take new and emerging technology -- obviously right now, VR/AR/XR; all that falls into it -- and using that to enhance messaging and storytelling, training, simulation, all of that type of stuff. It boils down to two words for me, which is "presence" and "experience." You have the presence, for things like training, for things like real-time engineering. You really feel like you're there. Then you have the experience side of it, which is more the storytelling, the marketing; let me actually go on a mission, and something that doesn't exist yet, and get a feeling for how that's going to change warfare, how that's going to change my ride to work every day. A lot of it focuses around messaging, storytelling, and training.

Alan: You've done everything from -- like you said -- storytelling and training. What are the big, open spaces for companies? Let's say you're a medium-sized business. You see XR, you're going, "well, I have no idea where to get started." What is that low-hanging fruit for businesses to get involved, and just start with this technology?

Cameron: I've noticed that -- and this is a bit of a sideways way to look at it -- I've noticed that, with companies that come in and they're looking to dip their toe into virtual reality or augmented reality, that sometimes they fall into the trap of investing so much into the hardware. The software suffers because the budget is taken from that. I feel like some products, such as Google Cardboard, and some of the lower-end pieces of hardware, have actually done more harm than good to the reputation of virtual reality. People get in it, and they see, "this as a medium-to-low-quality image or video that I'm sitting in," and there's not much interaction if it's a Google Cardboard. That's one thing I would stress; if you're a medium-sized company looking at emerging technology as a whole, any bit of XR -- it's all about ROI. How do you bring back the investment that you're making into the technology; into something that's going to pay you back 5-, 10-, 15-fold in the future? Some of the ways of doing that is the marketing and storytelling, where you travel through a destination that you normally couldn't do. It could be something as simple as a neat 360 factory tour. But it's so important that it's done in a tasteful and high-quality way. It ruins not only the reputation of the company, but of the reputation of what virtual reality is doing today.

There are plenty of products like the Oculus Go, which is just a few hundred dollars, that give you more of a robust kit than something like a Google Cardboard, where you can dip your toe in. One of the coolest examples that I think of, which may not apply to the everyday medium-sized company, is training in a way that is location-agnostic, and it could even be marketing; meaning, you could have a salesman or a lead engineer in Dallas, and you could have another engineer in Detroit. The way that VR works, you can both be in the same virtual environment, working on the same virtual engine, and actually doing call-outs and instructing each other. You're not paying for a hotel, you're not paying for flights to get someone to come down for a day when, instead they can spend three-to-four hours together with each other each day over the course of a week, and never get out of their office. It brings a lot of value in those ways, but the bottom line always gets back to ROI; how is this going to drive more money than you're going to invest into it in the long run?

Alan: My next question was actually, "describe the way you measure success; goals, key performance indicators, and ROI -- what is the typical measurement of this, for brands?"

Cameron: A lot of the ability to take ROI, and how much money is saved and how much time is saved, gets down to, "where are we going? And where did we come from?" I'll give an example in automotive and aerospace. There's a common practice that's been around for a while where, in building mockups or aircraft, that the first iterations might be built out physically with, let's say 2x4s, or really, any type of physical implementation. You can imagine the amount of time that it would take to build a physical cockpit, or a car that you would sit inside of, and -- say -- a test pilot would sit inside and look around, and they can say, "well, this doesn't feel quite right. I need the seat to come back a little bit, I don't really like where the cyclic or the collective are placed," in an example of a helicopter. Now you need to go back, and you need to not only redesign, but then you have to rebuild, and so on and so forth. It becomes this really long feedback loop. Virtual reality: you can see the immediate return on investment, because we take that super long feedback loop, and now a test pilot can come in and sit inside of a virtual helicopter, and they'll actually be able to, in real-time, communicate with me or another one of our engineers and say, "I don't really like this. I need you to cut the glass back a bit because I don't have good visibility over the shoulder."

So all of a sudden, in real-time, we make that change, and then save out the edited model that they're now interacting with. Because we've done that, we've just cut down the feedback loop monumentally, so that you don't have to fabricate a single physical piece until the model is signed off and the design is locked and it's gotten all of the proper signatures and thumbs up that it's going to need. To me, it's about time, and what kind of time can we save people? One of our projects -- I'll say briefly -- last year was the Bell Air Taxi; this year, we talked about the Bell Nexus. I really love the messaging that their V.P. of Innovation Scott Drennan has talked about around it, which is not to think about some of these things as a helicopter, or an air taxi, or whatever you want to call it. It's almost like it's a time machine, because it's giving you time back in your day. It's about, what does that commute mean to you? At the end of the day, time is the most precious thing. That is the measurement of success, is how much time can we give back to you, to prioritize other things in your life that you want to take care of, or other things that your job need to get taken care of? And how can we use emerging technology to do that?

Alan: Well, that's... I mean, I was making notes, here. "Time is the ultimate measurement of ROI.".

Cameron: Absolutely.

Alan: I'm going to quote you on that. Speaking of time, you mentioned Bell. This got some press, because HTC VIVE released a press release with Bell, saying that their latest helicopter was created 10 times faster using VR, and you guys were the company doing that. This is a monumental shift. We're not talking, "we designed it better with a new software." This is like, a whole new way of designing. If you look at this from that standpoint, this is a 10x return. What other technologies that we have seen, other than the Internet, and maybe mobile phones, telephone, TV... like, this is not just another app. This is an entire new way of doing things. It's really amazing what you guys are doing, and the fact that you guys have been able to create time out of nothing.

Cameron: It's very cool, too, because there's some stuff that I know we'll be talking about in the upcoming months. But we take that whole idea too, and now we're even applying it to our own internal design process. And that's something too, is stressing how important all this technology is for... I mean, really, any industry. But now, we're able to take it, and instead of having our concept artist draw on a sheet of paper, now they're getting inside a virtual reality application and sketching in 3D, which now makes us faster, because then that 3D model comes out and it's already a skeleton for us to start modeling off of it. It's incredible when you start digging into these technologies, the amount of applications that they're going to have for everyone in every industry.

Alan: What do you think are the low-hanging fruit for industries in this type of technology? What are the things that are easiest for brands to do right now, that they can get their foot in the door with this?

Cameron: So there's one really cool example, that I'm actually working on a few projects internally, just kind of having fun with some of the new technology. There are two relatively new pieces of AR toolkits, called ARKit and ARCore for iOS and Android. Essentially, it takes the most brilliant idea and essentially exposes it to all of the developers, and that idea is that -- while VR is having somewhat of an issue with the mainstream consumer, because most people don't have a virtual reality headset -- it flips that on its head with a AR and says, "but wait a second, everyone in the world (or rather, a majority of people) own some type of device that could see something through a camera screen." We're taking that, and essentially -- because people have these devices in their pocket already -- we can capitalize on that, and you can build something at a very reasonable, low cost. That's a simple augmented reality app. What you do is have someone pull out their phone, and... let's say you just want to give your business card a bit more pop. If you're in the business of selling, let's say, belts and tensioners -- I mean, it could literally be anything; you might think that's a boring topic, but it doesn't need to be -- you put your business card down on the table, you pull your phone out, and you look at your business card. All of a sudden, one of your key products animates out and then tells the story about what this does for people, and does a few callouts about how does this actually work. And that's something really quick that leaves a lasting impression.

Alan: We've been working on a platform that will allow anybody to create an augmented reality experience on any print, themselves.

Cameron: Absolutely. And that's another key there, too, is when you say "print," I don't want to limit it to business cards either. Anything that you can print and graphic on--

Alan: Business cards to billboards.

Cameron: Exactly. The main thing is, what's your utility around having the object? Is it something that is just there as a gimmick? Or that someone's going to use once and throw away? Or is it something that they'll keep around, and maybe have on their desk, or maybe be on a billboard that they see when they're walking to the office every day? So it's a lot about the utility of augmented reality right then and there, but then, how is it going to stay around, to then be used to be a neat thing for them to show their coworkers later on that day?

Alan: One of the things that I saw that was really cool -- and I brought this up in a different podcast -- was the LeBron James poster, where you point your phone using Snapchat, and LeBron James comes out of the poster and slam dunks a basketball right in front of me in three dimensions. We're only scratching the surface of what's possible with ARKit and ARCore. I love the fact that you guys are shifting focuses not from VR, but including a AR, as well.

Cameron: Absolutely. And they did a great job with that LeBron activation, too. It was so purposeful. It wasn't, you hold up an AR device, and all of a sudden, this video plays over LeBron saying hi, or anything that would feel kind of gimmicky and not as impactful. But it's that the entire mural comes to life, and he jumps out of it and slam dunks it. That, to me, is the messaging and the storytelling. It's so important to have something that is not a gimmick. If you're going to have LeBron do a slam dunk, don't have a video that's just pinned to a wall when you move your phone around; have him jump out of that wall and dunk right above you. That's what's impactful.

Alan: Absolutely. And that's not to discount the fact that adding videos to print may be interesting, as well. We have one client who have unfettered access to creating augmented reality experiences, and their default is just adding videos. And their customer base is actually pretty accepting of that. They don't want 3D, they just want to add a video and add that extra spiciness to their print. I think it's going to be the full gamut; we've only just started to figure out what can be done and what people will do with it. Everything from automobile manuals to textbooks.

Cameron: Absolutely. And that gets back to to the start of our conversation; it's all about taking a step back. Who's the target market, and who's going to want to engage with what type of media? There's so many different solutions now for the everyday developer. You have a giant toolkit, and there are so many solutions that will fit for every different type of customer.

Alan: Maybe you can discuss some of those solutions. A lot of companies that we're seeing and we're consulting with, they're starting to look to build their own internal teams. They're hiring a Unity developer or a 3D modeller. It's not something that every company will do. But at the same time, for those companies that do have that and really want to bring things in-house, what are some of the tools that you're seeing -- besides ARKit, ARCore, and Unity -- that are standing out to you?

Cameron: So, I'll start with the software side of it. What we're seeing is really impactful for various industries. Really, in architecture, I feel like it's stood out, that you're able to go in and walk through an entire model, or an entire warehouse, or an entire stadium; who knows what it could be? And make real-time changes to materials, and get a perspective of everything. We've talked to a variety of folks that are in the architectural engineering sector, and whether it's virtual or augmented reality, being able to visualize things that don't exist yet is so absolutely key to a lot of these industries. And you're seeing things too, like being able to -- with augmented reality -- try on a watch or a shoe. It's funny, I had this conversation on LinkedIn the other day -- I think it might have been with you, -- with Amazon actually implementing new software around 3D scans for people, where instead of having to necessarily order clothing online that you don't know if it's going to fit you, you might be able to go into -- in the future -- a brick-and-mortar Amazon store, get a 3D scan of your body, and now all of a sudden, the physics that exist within whatever engine is being used [in] web at that time can show you exactly how that cloth is going to fit around your shape of body.

Alan: There's actually a company -- and I cannot remember for the life of me -- they send you a suit, and the suit's got a bunch of dots on it. By using computer vision to measure how the dots fit and how they look on you, they can tell within 5 percent of your body size.

Cameron: Wow.

Alan: They can literally ship you this fabric; you put it on, and you take a picture of it, upload it, from front to back. And now they've got an accurate size of who you are.

Cameron: I was going to mention one other thing as far as hardware, in regards to what we're up to nowadays. We found a really neat solution for virtual reality, but really more of a trainer for any size of group, that goes all the way back to old 3D screens. And it's funny, because 3D televisions are almost archaic. People rarely will go buy a 3D television. But you look at it, and the technology is actually pretty great. And if you repurpose it in a way that makes sense, instead of trying to add a gimmick to a commercial film, and you make it so that you can add a layer to a training simulation for a group of... surgeons (it could be a group of anyone), but now everyone in the audience is able to put on a pair of glasses, and watch a 3D experience that the lecturer or the trainer can go through and control at their own pace. Now you're adding something that, again, is experiential. It's memorable and it actually adds something, if you need that depth in the way that you're going to train someone. So there's a lot of hardware that's awesome, because it's coming out and it's brand new -- the VR and the haptic space and whatnot -- but I'm always cautious with seeing how many products are out there, and some of it might be this vaporware; you never know if it's a lot of smoke and mirrors.

Alan: How many things have you bought on Kickstarter?

Cameron: Exactly! And I could name a couple, but I'll save them the embarrassment. But there are a few that were, just, really disappointing. But then you look at some of these older technologies that can be revitalized and repurposed in a way that is incredibly impactful.

Alan: I think one of the ones is doing that amazingly is a company out of San Francisco called zSpace.

Cameron: Exactly. We actually have one of their products in our office that we've created a demo for. And it's it's essentially... it's almost a single-person version of what I was mentioning with the 3D, and that it actually shifts perspective, based on where the user's head is. And it works great, almost like a VR without the headset on. And it does it in this really brilliant way that feels a lot less confined to them necessarily having a headset on. And it's great for learning environments. It's just one of those things where you've got to find the right peg for the right hole. A lot of our clients that we've had in and we've shown that type of product; it's either they want to go forward with that and they love it, and then we make something awesome with them; or, a few others are saying, "well, we really want five, 10, maybe 100 people to watch it at once." In which case, you just need to finagle it and see what the right solution is for that client.

Alan: I think the zSpace thing could be used for retail on location. "Check this thing out!" There's so many ways these technologies can be used. We've only scratched the surface. Speaking of that, what is one of the projects that you've worked on that you are most proud of? When you have a client come in, and you're like, "this is one we did."

Cameron: So there are a couple, and I'll limit myself to two, so I don't take up the whole amount of time that we have with them. But there's one that I'm particularly proud of, because I feel like it is really a game-changer in the industry. And then another that I'm particularly proud of, because of just how much time and effort went into it. The first one is some of the work that I've done with American Airlines. We've fundamentally changed how 3D assets are reused, and specifically the "reused" part of that. You can commission someone to make a pretty CGI image, or a 360 lookaround, and that's great. You'll have a good experience, and you'll use that to its purpose. But then what about that asset that's been made, that's now being looked at? How can you reuse that and get more ROI out of it? Again, measuring how much time do I have to spend of my day getting new assets from new agencies, et cetera, and what can we reuse that we've already made? What we did is, we have quite a few CGI interiors of a few different planes, and we created a new microsite that allows you to go through all of these CGI interiors that were created -- for completely separate reasons and other shoots and things like that -- on green screen. But now, you can explore them in an interactive, animated, 360 lookaround. And this is live on an American web site right now.

Alan: I was on it earlier today, actually; it's awesome. You can find it on Sector5digital.com in their work, but it's really amazing. Click the button. Now you've got a plane that's kind of flying -- it's a little bit of motion -- but then you hover your mouse around it, and you can see the first class, business class, regular. And when you click on it, it now takes you into fully three-dimensional space of the first class cabin, and you're sitting in a seat, and you can look around. You can go to the bar, you can do these things. And I thought it was amazing, actually, I was gonna bring it up. The interesting thing that you mentioned is reusing these 3D assets; one of the things that we started working on -- and we'll be bringing this out next year -- is a content and digital asset management system for spatial computing. As more and more companies have these 3D assets... again, that 3D asset of the plane. You probably had to make some changes to make it work on Web versus VR, versus AR, right? What people don't realize -- and this is a learning lesson for all of us -- is that there's different file formats, and there's no standardization right now. So, being able to use that asset across Web and Snapchat and Facebook and, in the future, LinkedIn and Instagram, and also on VR and a AR and Hololens and Magic Leap; being able to use that across everything. These things are not cheap to make. Making a 3D asset of a plane in photo realism is not an inexpensive endeavor, I would think.

Cameron: Absolutely. You hit the nail on the head with that; that's one of the things that we do pride ourselves on. You have to be able to build things that are going to be redeployed. Otherwise, it's a one-off, and it's just a lot of costs for something that you don't get a lot of mileage out of. If you're going to build, let's say, a virtual set: turn it into an online microsite, and then turn it into a Super Bowl commercial (like we have in the past). You can get so much mileage out of any of these assets. And that brings up my second-favorite example of what we've been up to lately. We actually won Wired's Best of CES in the Transportation category at CES this year. And that was in our work with Bell. It was really cool because we had three different activations there, and they were all using different technologies, but all of them were using some assets and communicating in special ways that made it work really dynamically.

The main area that I was in charge of, and really led the development and the creative side of, was called Future Flight Controls. It's a fully-interactive, virtual reality motion-based flight simulator, where you fly right down the Las Vegas strip. And it's just this incredibly engaging experience. You earn a high score, and you get on the leader board, and everyone gets so competitive. It's just the most fun. But on the back end, what we're doing is collecting as much data as possible to find out which of these three flight controls that we brought to CES is actually going to be easiest for the average user to fly. Because in the future, if you have hundreds of air taxis, you're going to need a much lower barrier to entry than a typical pilot going through years of training right now, as someone that needs to be equipped and able to possibly handle any type of flight maneuver going forward. So it's interesting to run all of these tests. On the front, it's all education and entertainment,and on the back, it's all data analytics and really potent information that helps drive the future of flight as we know it.

Going off of that, too, we had another experience in the same booth with an augmented reality application, and this is another one that I'd really strongly recommend towards that medium-level business that's looking to dip their toe into AR/VR. And this one, it's great; you pick up an iPad and you pick if you want to see the story of how the Bell Nexus -- which is their on-demand mobility solution that they unveiled at CES -- if you want to see how it handles logistics, or if you want to see how it handles moving people across the city, depending on which one of those you select on the iPad, you then watch an entire story unfold on the table in front of you, about how this family gets on the Nexus to make it to the airport in time. Or about how this logistics carrier actually gets their package to the proper reseller in a good amount of time. And that was a really cool way to tell the story.

Then the last thing that we had was a bit of AR, but using a lot of different cameras that were set up all around the booth. And we actually had -- again, it was Scott Drennan, their V.P. of Innovation -- up on stage, giving a speech about the Nexus and talking about their partners and who's done what on it. And we were able to cut between all the cameras in the booth, but in a real-time, overlay on top of the physical aircraft in the booth, all the stories happening as Scott was talking about people making it to wherever they need to go on time with their family. All this, and then an augmented reality family walks up and gets inside the Nexus that takes off. Or if he's talking about one of their partners like Safran, you can actually show the internal components of the aircraft. It's just incredible to add that extra level of narrative, because that alone, you see a lot of people coming up and they'll listen to a talk at CES and they're engaged and they're loving it. But then all of a sudden, you see the rotors start to rotate, or you see an animated family get in. And that's when all the phones come out; everyone starts recording. That's when the viral social sharing starts coming in, is when you have something that everyone in the crowd can see. It all the sudden becomes a really special moment that people are going to see on LinkedIn or Facebook or wherever and say, "damn, I really wish I was there."

Alan: I was actually lucky enough -- fortunate enough -- to be at CES this year, and everybody wanted to know my input on what was the hot thing in VR and AR. The hottest thing at CES this year was the Bell Nexus helicopter. It looks like something out of Avatar! It's massive and it just this show-stopping beautiful piece of giant hardware that has rotating rotors that light up. It's mind-blowing. So, if you haven't seen it, take a look online. It's the Bell Nexus helicopter that was unveiled at CES this year; it is a show-stopper. And basically, the idea is that you can transport... what is it, six or eight people, or something like that?

Cameron: Yeah. So, this one -- and I don't want to step on any toes on Bell's end -- but right now it's configuration of 1-2-2. So, you have one seat in the front, and then four passengers. And the idea -- as long as I'm OK with saying this -- is that essentially, the front seat is a pilot/flight safety officer, but someone that is more equipped to take the reins and the controls, should the need arise. But over time, eventually [the plan is] for it to be an autonomous aircraft.

Alan: Yeah, I think they mentioned that. I don't think you're overstepping at all. I think that was definitely the messaging that they drove home at CES, is that this thing will do all the piloting for you. But for now, we've got a stick to make people feel more comfortable.

Cameron: Absolutely. And thanks again for the nice words. That's incredible to hear.

Alan: No, it's fantastic. I love the work you guys are doing. Now, let's get into some details here. A lot of people are asking, "well, it's OK for Bell Helicopter, because they lots of money," or whatever. What does something like these things cost? What are you guys seeing as far as costs are concerned? And what do these experiences range from, so that people can budget for them?

Cameron: It's one of those things that -- I know this isn't an interesting answer -- but it's essentially the chicken or the egg. There are so many ways to implement emerging technology that suit different budgets, so I know that we can come up with a solution for any range. I think a good ballpark for most people, just to stomach it immediately and get over that hump, is probably looking at an interactive virtual reality or augmented reality experience, probably beginning in the $25,000-$50,000 range. Really, it all depends on the scalability; how many levels do you want? How many environments do you want to be able to go into? How much messaging do you want to tell? It gets down to how many days will it take a modeller to model? How many days will a programmer need to program? Et cetera. So it just all scales up from their end, really, how you'd want to go. I feel like a good base level is in that range.

But if you're looking more into the $10,000-$15,000, I feel like at that level, it's possible. But I would almost advise for that type of getting bang-for-your-buck, that you'd be better-suited to get something like a really well-crafted CGI image or maybe some short video work. That's the one thing I don't want to undersell, is that it is an investment to go into emerging technology. But it is so important that, when it is done, that the investment is made and that it's not made half-heartedly. That's when you end up with a product that the client is kind of okay with, and the consumers take it okay, but it isn't a great deal for everyone involved. It's important to know when you go in that if you invest the right amount, and you wholeheartedly believe that this is going to help your company, then that is what's going to happen. So I just want to make sure that I put that out there.

Alan: No, absolutely. I think that's great advice. I think companies are dipping their toes. They're starting to do proof of concepts. And this range of $25k to $50k to get started is what we're seeing as well. It's kind of the bare minimum to get going. Certain things are really helping; Unity's assets store is getting filled with really amazing content that you can buy for less. There's also 360 videos where you can now buy, 360 stock photos from a company like Blend Media, and also 3D assets on CGTrader or Sketchfab. There's places where you can now start to buy this 3D content. The barrier to entry is dropping dramatically. I think if I would have asked you this question three years ago, it would have been $250k to $500k.

Cameron: No, absolutely. You're 100 percent on that. Even when it gets to things, like you were saying, the CGTrader and the assets, it is so important to partner yourself and align yourself with a group that knows the landscape. It's so easy to jump into something that looks really sexy and new, and either spend way too much and not get enough, or to just get something that's way off-base of what your target was initially. And that's where I feel like folks like you and I can come in, and help people make sure that they're staying on-track with what their objectives are, and if this is the right way to go about it, and how to maximize your return based on what you have the budget to provide.

Alan: One of the things that we've been very careful to do as we're advising clients is to keep platform-agnostic. We've been approached by some of the bigger headset manufacturers -- Microsoft, Hololens and Magic Leap -- to build exclusively for them. But if you were advising a dozen different companies, and you're advising them on their XR strategy, it can be anything from a mobile phone -- and maybe that's good enough, to just put some 3D content on a mobile phone and push it out -- vs. creating a multimillion dollar solution on a Hololens. It gets to the point where what is right and what is the best thing for the customer, and keeping a platform- and hardware-agnostic opinion of this, really has served us well in being able to serve many different types of customers.

Cameron: Yeah, definitely, that's our goal as well. And I was really happy to see at GDC this year -- unfortunately, I couldn't attend, but I watched quite a few of the talks -- and there was actually a lot of talk about cross-platform development, and how we're going to be able to start building one type of output for VR, and have that associate with all of the different headsets. You've got all these players, like the Windows headsets, and the VIVE, and the Oculus, that are all coming out with different products, that all have different pros and cons. At the end of the day, when you can reduce the amount of time it takes a creative studio to repurpose or reprogram something for simply a different type of output, the less you're gonna have to spend overall on the product. So it's better around for everybody.

Alan: It's funny you said that, because I got an email this morning talking about the open XR cloud, and basically, it's a group of different companies -- I think Microsoft, Oculus, HTC -- everybody got together and said, "we're making these apps. The distribution needs to be standardized, so that when I push one app, it can be used in Microsoft; it can be used in HTC VIVE; it can be used with an Oculus." It becomes less onerous on the customer and their development team to build it and push it out. Let's say, for example, you push out something for the Oculus Go today and then tomorrow you can't buy the Oculus Go; well, maybe you have to reinvent the whole thing and start over again. But I think if we can standardize these, it'll really, really help. One of the things that I see as important is also creating some global standardization around letting people know what is AR. So, for example, if you're reading a textbook, how do you know what page is AR? Charlie Fink was the first episode of the XR for Business Podcast, and we're talking about his book Convergence, that is fully AR-enabled; you take your phone and point it [at Charlie's book]. But throughout he thing, it just says "marker" on it. So you know it's a marker, but there's got to be some sort of standardization, so that if I'm seeing something, I know -- like a QR code -- that is in an AR experience; I pull up my phone, I open my camera, and it automatically downloads the app or takes me to the website or whatever. A standardised QR code for augmented reality. I think that's something that is really necessary.

Cameron: Absolutely. I've actually got a copy of that book that arrives tomorrow. I cannot wait to get my hands on it.

Alan: Yeah, it's amazing. I have a section that I wrote in there, too.

Cameron: Nicely done. Just looking at the images of it, I'm very excited to see it myself, and to show clients the potential of what a simple book turns into when you start applying these emerging technologies.

Alan: In the AR stuff -- and it is actually really cool -- because what Charlie did was he worked with the partners and the people who helped author of the book and the sponsors and said, "add your own AR." There's something from Magic Leap in there, and there's... I won't spoil it for people, but some really cool stuff. It's like hidden Easter eggs within a paper book. So what is the best business use case that you have seen in XR?

Cameron: I'm a bit biased here. I just jump to Bell whenever I hear "best business case" because of the sheer ROI. Because we've already talked about that story, I want to take a step back and look at... it's business, but it's also a few other things, and that's what I had a large passion for, going through the MFA program and all that, is how we're using a lot of this technology to revamp the medicine, the healthcare, the psychology industries. That, to me, is not necessarily looking at dollars and cents. It's time. It's how much time can people have healthy and happy with their loved ones? I feel like it's just as important to talk about as it is a dollar sign ROI.

I've seen quite a few things in a lot of my studies. There's really neat studies; they get into exposure therapy, and a few other technologies and methodologies that go into how to treat post-traumatic stress disorder. How to work with a child who's autistic that can get into a virtual environment, put a headset on, and walk in and engage in a room full of people. That is ordinarily terrifying, but because we've taken away a lot of the social stigma and the permanent consequences of reputation or fear, that it allows people to -- over time -- take more risk. You look at that, and all of a sudden, you start applying it to dementia. How can we help with reliving past memories? Then you get into things like addiction; how can we start to work to curb the appetite of smoking? And it gets into a slippery slope here, because... I don't mean to go to off track, but you look at examples of people that do want to stop smoking, and they come to a company that's created virtual environments to do so. It starts you down the path of, if there's a company that has the capability to stop you from a craving, could we -- if it was the intention of the company -- create some type of experience that would create a craving for McDonald's? Or for Coca-Cola? It takes you down this kind of scary wormhole of a lot of these virtual environments, and a lot of the digital world as we know it not really being well-navigated yet, especially when it comes to legislation.

It's gonna be so fascinating to see the next five, 10, 15 years around who's at fault, if someone goes into a virtual reality experience, and comes out of it and has an attitude, and drives a car and maybe hits somebody. It's all that type of stuff that I feel like it really has to be talked about at some point. And I'm aware I'm way off track of the original question, but really, that to me is, a lot of the health care and the psychology aspect of it is the biggest ROI that personally, to me, means something. My whole family's military, and that's what initially set me down the path of looking into post-traumatic stress disorder. The amount of veterans that commit suicide daily is in the 20s. If I could use my entire career to bring that number down by one. That, to me, is the ROI that I'm looking for.

Alan: No, you're absolutely right, I was just trying to Google DeepMind VR -- one of the researchers, there's a professor that's been working in PTSD treatment using virtual reality -- and I'll put it in the show notes. But you're absolutely right that there is a huge need for that. And I think the more we move forward with digital technologies in general, I think we're going to see this trend towards healthy mentalities and using these technologies for that [grow]. It's too easy for militaries, or private factions, to use this technology for brainwashing. I actually sit on the IEEE [Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers] Ethics for Mixed Reality Committee, and some of the things we've discussed are, who owns the digital space around you? Do you have control? Who owns the eye tracking data? People don't understand; once you have eye tracking in these glasses.... the thing that somebody mentioned was, if Google's tracking your eye tracking, they'll be able to know that you're gay before you are, by what you're looking at and how you look at it. These little subtleties, people aren't considering. And I think we as an industry really need to consider these things. And I think you're bang on; it can be used for great things, but it could also be used for not-so-great things.

Cameron: Absolutely. And I dug into that -- actually, [for] one of my thesis papers back in the master's program -- that was one of the fascinating things is that I looked into; the term that's kind of taboo, called "subliminal messaging." And it seems like it was wildly... like, it was discredited, essentially, in the '90s, as being something that is not a legitimate source of controlling a population. And now that we have this new media we have -- especially virtual reality, because it's so immersive and you have so much presence and agency when you're in these environments -- that, okay, maybe if you flash an image in front of me every once in a while, it might not create a certain desired outcome. But what if -- now that you have control of my periphery as well as my main vision -- in my peripheral vision, you can set an image out there that just stays there. And no matter how hard I try to look at it, I'm never going to be able to see it. But it is influencing me. It's fascinating. I could talk with you for hours about the ethics around it, but I find it all.... there are going to be a lot of lawyers that are going to do very well, specifically in digital litigation.

Alan: Dr. Skip Rizzo is the one behind Bravemind, is what it's called, which is the VR simulators for PTSD. I wanted to just put that in there: Bravemind, Dr. Skip Rizzo. It's interesting that you brought up the legal ramifications, because this week, the Virtual and Augmented Reality Association, Toronto chapter,is hosting VR and a AR: Through the Legal Lens.

Cameron: Ah.

Alan: It's the first one that Toronto sold out, and I think people are really interested to know, who owns the 3D digital space? What are the digital ramifications, and what are our liabilities? I think it's really important to dig into this now; we're really early in this technology, but it's never too early to think about ethics.

Cameron: Absolutely.

Alan: So with that, what problem in the world do you want to see solved using XR technologies?

Cameron: So, besides the things that we have talked about, I think my biggest passion here -- and I know it's one of yours as well -- is education. Not just education for better public school systems in the US. I want a school that has ten dollars of budget to be able to, over the next year, be able to purchase something -- anything -- that could help students to, essentially, go someplace they could never go. Look at a small school in the Congo, a place where children may never get to go and actually see the Great Barrier Reef in their entire lifetime, and being able to expose them to that. And actually--

Alan: It might not even be there in our lifetime.

Cameron: Yeah, that's a damn good point. Just being able to take people to places that they can't go, which to me, is about education, and it's about everyone getting a chance to see how amazing the world is. But it's also... it gets back into medical care and psychology. If you can take someone to that quiet, special place in their mind, and help them with visual aids, or can you help them over time by being in an environment that they don't want to currently be in? And then, also looking into hospice care and things like that, where people can't physically move around, but you give them this sense of relief. I wouldn't even be able to quantify. It's something that's so important, that people can escape. But it's also something that ties back to our previous conversation of, if people are able to escape consistently, it can obviously be used for a lot of good. But are we starting to go down the path of Surrogates with Bruce Willis, where everyone just stays home and goes into the body of AI and walks out and engages with the world, because they don't want to anymore? It's fascinating, because the biggest potential and the biggest pro of XR, to me, is the biggest potential con for society.

For example, if I go to Japan and I put on AR glasses and I walk out, and it automatically translates all of the signs for me as I'm walking down the street, it's incredible. That would be life-changing. But now, because I'm not having to work with conversing with people in the street to ask where I'm going, or I'm not having the work to learn Japanese, am I therefore exerting less effort to understand culture, and to try to be more cultured myself? That's kind of... the joke that I make sometimes is, I just hope that we don't turn out like the civilization in WALL·E, where everyone is overweight and just flying around, because these technological advances allow us to exert less effort. So, the important thing is just that we -- as a society -- stay aware of that, and realize that we need to be using all of these advancements to help us use our effort even more so, in ways that can help people tenfold because the technology enables it.

Alan: I think it falls fully in line with my personal mission, which is to inspire and educate future leaders to think in a socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable way. I want to thank you very much for being on the show.

Cameron: Thank you so much for having me, Alan.
46 min

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