XR for Business

By Alan Smithson from MetaVRseBusiness Technology Arts

XR for Business episodes

August 02, 2019 Dissecting Virtual Frogs with VictoryXR’s Steve Grubbs
These days,
more and more students can — and do — opt out of animal dissection
in science classes, and not just because formaldehyde smells awful.
As fewer kids are morally comfortable with chopping up an amphibian
in the name of their education, an alternative will be needed.
VictoryXR’s Steve Grubbs offers a solution through VR, and chats with
Alan about how XR can be used to enhance education in other ways,
too.
Alan: Today’s guest is Steve
Grubbs, founder and CEO of VictoryVR, one of the world leaders in
virtual reality educational product development. To date, they have
created over 240 unique VR experiences, spanning over 50 different
learning units, with educational partners like Carolina Biological
and Oxford University. They have been able to develop brand new
educational encounters for VR users around the globe. Steve is also a
member of YPO and was recently featured in an article entitled
Virtual Reality Is Transporting Students to the Next Frontier in
Science Education. You can learn more about Steve’s company at
VictoryXR.com. Steve, welcome to the show.
Steve: Alan, thanks for having
me. I appreciate it. We’ve been working in XR Technologies — first
virtual reality, and then augmented reality — since 2016. I first
tried to headset on near the end of 2015 and it struck me that this
type of technology would change the world. And so, we struck out and
decided that our field would be education. And so we dug in and
figured out how to do it, because at that point it was very difficult
to find people; you couldn’t just hire people off the street who knew
how to create virtual reality technology. We set to work figuring it
out. In September of 2016, I attended a group meeting with some folks
in Dallas, and then by January of 2017, we had our first major
product in a school. I felt pretty good that we were able to move
quickly on that first experience.
Alan: That’s incredible. Let me
ask you a quick question. What was the first experience that you
tried that inspired you to start VictoryVR?
Steve: Well, it was a MetaVRse
product that I downloaded to my phone some time, in Google Cardboard.
I am pretty sure I went to the iPhone store and tried a roller
coaster — and this had been a few years now. And then I tried The
New York Times 360 News reporting on my phone and they both were
great, amazing, cool, and so I said, this is something I want to be a
part of.
Alan: For those people that
don’t know you and VictoryVR, maybe just give us a 10,000-foot view
of your mission and why you’re doing what you’re doing, and where you
see the company going. Describe your company, the products, and the
platform that’s being used.
Steve: We believe that we can
change education in a positive way around the world. If you think
about it, for decades — I used to serve in the Iowa legislature, and
I was chairman of the Education Committee, and we spent a lot of time
addressing, how do we improve education? And there were a lot of
things we did on the input side, but at the end of the day, what we
all know is that if students love to learn, they love what they’re
learning — like all of us — then there’s no work in it; you just
love to do it, and you immerse yourself in it. We believe that XR
Technologies — VR and AR — are the solution to having students love
what they’re learning. So we’re creating as much content as possible,
aligned to standards, so that teachers can integrate it into their
lesson plans, or parents can just simply pull it off the shelf and
use it. I have a background in technology. I started my first tech
company in 1997, building web sites. I bought a book called “Web
Sites for Dummies,” read it over the weekend, and announced to
my friends I was a web site builder and–
Alan: Ha!
Steve: Since I was the only one
they knew, they really had no choice but to use me. And ever since
then, we’ve had an e-commerce company, Victory Store, and mobile app
starting in ’09. In 2016, moving into XR technologies was a natural
transition for us.
Alan: I noticed that one of the
modules that you guys have built is dissections in virtual reality.
Tell me how that came about.
Steve: By last summer — and my
annual University of Iowa fraternity gathering — one of my
fraternity brothers is a assistant superintendent of schools in the
Chicago area, and he was a former science teacher. And he said, “you
know what we need; there’s a law in Illinois that says students can
opt out of animal dissection, but we’re required to provide a viable
alternative, and there really aren’t any viable alternatives out
there that they’re really great.” So he said, “why don’t
you create that?” And I said, “that’s a brilliant use
case.” And we went back to my office on Monday, put my team to
work — and that was in July — by the start of the school year,
first week of September, we had a frog dissection completed and in
the marketplace. And that’s when Carolina Biological, the largest
provider of animal specimens for dissection, contacted us because
they had been looking for a digital product that could simulate what
happens in real life. Because in the United States — and I know this
is a trend around the world — 60 percent of students can opt out
these days. As that trend grows, someone needs to provide that
alternative. And I think those of us in the XR community are best
situated to do that.
Alan: So, this has really opened
up a whole new world of learning for students. What is the most
popular of all of the things that you guys have made? What is the one
that really resonates with students?
Steve: Well, always the most
popular is Adventures in Space, where you get to drive our version of
the Millennium Falcon. It’s a pretty cool product. With 48 different
science units — dissection and language learning are outside of
those — they all start from a place; you might be in a spaceship,
you might be in an underwater lab. There’s a lot of different places,
but Adventures in Space, you start out in a spaceship, and then you
travel around the universe to learn about black holes and quasars,
drop down and take a rover and drive around Mars and see the three
rovers that are down there that were left that… I guess one is
still working, that the United States has dropped on to Mars. It’s a
cool way to both learn and do it in an explorative way. Why wouldn’t
you love learning about a black hole if you can fly out to one, and
take a look at it and learn about it when you’re out there? This is
the type of learning that we believe changes the ballgame, and
creates a real love for science, and STEM technologies and STEM
learning.
Alan: Travelling to space is the
one that gets everybody’s attention.
Steve: It is. It’s also we
generally put that out there as a free download on the Windows Mixed
Reality store and Oculus as well as VIVE. And then if you’ve got a
Pico headset, you can also pick it up off of the VIVE Port store.
Alan: I was actually going to
ask you about distribution, and how you’re dealing with that. Most of
your distribution is through the VIVE Port platform? Or how does
it…?
Steve: It depends on how you
consider volume and distribution. We’re all trying to figure out the
business model — the revenue model — to make something like this
sustainable. It’s great to provide a product that can change the
world, but if it doesn’t have a sustainable revenue model, then it’s
not gonna change the world for very long. We upload our products to
all of the major stores, and then we also sell unlimited licenses to
schools. So, if a school would like a one-to-one setup with the
Oculus Go, where they buy 20 headsets, and then in addition to that,
they want a license to our content, we’ll sell them that package. But
then they might do dissection, which won’t work on an Oculus Go. It
needs a full 6DoF, Nvidia 1060 chip system. So they might have three
or four stations for that, and then buy a license to the dissection
product. So, between the licenses and what we get paid when people
download off the stores; that’s our revenue model, so far. Our hope
is to break even this year. We had a nice big bump at the beginning
of the year with Microsoft. We’re just continuing to put it together
a little here and a little there.
Alan: Excellent. It’s early
days, so how are you finding the uptake with schools? Are they
looking for a complete solution? Or do they want you to come in with
the hardware? With software? Do they want you to train them? How does
that look? And was it something that you find you have teams out
there getting schools onboard? Or is it happening naturally?
Steve: It’s a little bit of
everything, but let me address each of the parts individually. We
would rather just be in the software business. But, schools that come
to us want both a hardware, software, and platform solution. And so
we have to provide those things. And so we do. Having said that, some
schools already have their hardware. They’ll go to the Windows store
and download the content. Microsoft, in January paid us a sum of
money so that they could distribute half of our content for free
through their store. So, anyone who owns a Windows Mixed Reality
system in a school can download half of our content. But, there are
more schools currently that have an Oculus product, either the Rift
or the Go. And because of that, some will license it directly from
us, but most are going to the Oculus store and downloading content to
the headsets. That’s currently how it’s happening. You never know
what kind of hardware you’re going to find in a school. But most are
working for some consulting on how to put together the whole package.
And so that’s where we can step in; show them, here are the pluses
and minuses, the costs and the benefits, of a particular hardware.
Here’s what we can offer. You know, we have 52 different VR
experiences that cover middle school and high school. That’s been our
approach.
Steve: If you take all of the
schools — so, 100 percent of schools — what percentage do you think
of the schools (in the US, anyway) have a VR headset? Or are even
considering that? Is it 1 percent? 10 percent? What are you seeing?
Steve: You’re asking this
question; as we speak, I am pulling up our survey results. We
actually surveyed a fair number of teachers, and I will walk you
through the information on that question, because we know exactly —
or at least, from our survey — how many people have it. And it’s
more than you would think. But we expect by the end of this year, I
think it’s 50 percent of schools to have one level or another of some
VR in their classroom. Some schools have full systems, right? They’ve
bought 20 headsets for a classroom, while other schools have just a
little bit. So when we asked the question, “have you tested the
use of virtual reality or augmented reality to supplement current
classroom teaching?” Fourteen percent said “yes, a lot.”
Thirty-nine percent said “yes, a little.” That told us that
at least people are moving in the right direction. Then we asked
them, “do you think you would rather have a one-to-one solution
for the classroom — meaning each student in the class having a
headset — or a station-based approach? Twenty seven percent said
one-to-one. Twenty percent said station-based. Thirty six percent
said yes. Finally — and I don’t want to bore you with a lot of
statistics — but here’s the last question I’ll share: when we asked,
“do you already have hardware in your schools?” Twenty one
percent said they already have it. Seven percent said they would be
getting it this year. Twenty two percent said they would be giving it
next year. So, if you add those three together — it’s about 28+21…
so almost 50 percent, either this year or next year, expect to have
the hardware in their schools. Now, in the United States, that’s over
100,000 potential clients. And around the world, the adoption might
be a little bit behind that, but I know it’s growing rapidly.
Alan: The market adoption for
this in the United States, I think is actually ahead of the rest of
the world, with one exception, and I think that’s China. I’ve seen
some things coming out of China with HTC VIVE, and they’re really
focusing on bringing these systems into the schools. Are you seeing
many people in the US using the HTC products at all, or is it mostly
Oculus?
Steve: We see a lot of VIVE out
there, because the teachers who are true techies all started with the
VIVE, and then they would bring their experience with the VIVE into
schools. Oculus is by far the most well-adopted hardware. But VIVE
is… in fact, I can actually tell you the percentage is, I don’t
know why I’m guessing… in the United States, 12 percent have the
Oculus Rift, which has been out since 2016. Eleven percent have the
Oculus Go, which has been out for less than a year. So that was
really interesting to me, and that cost differential is just a big
deal; essentially, 23 percent. VIVE is 10 percent. Windows Mixed
Reality is 5.7 percent. And then Google Expeditions — which, you can
decide if that’s real VR or not — they’re at 31 percent.
Alan: So that’s Google
Cardboard.
Steve: Well, no. Google
Expeditions is different than Google Cardboard, but they’re close. I
mean, you know. It’s close to the same thing. But they have that
whole platform attached to it.
Alan: Yeah, so teachers can
start and stop the experiences.
Steve: Yeah.
Alan: So let me ask you another
question about the metrics. Are you seeing — from your experience in
students that are using this — are you seeing better metrics around
their testing scores? Or better uptake? What are the metrics around
measuring the success of virtual reality versus traditional means of
education?
Steve: That’s a good question
that we get all the time. We have not had a study done specifically
with our content. It’s something that we would like to have done,
it’s just time-consuming and costly, so it hasn’t been done yet. But,
having said that, there are other organizations and groups who have
done these studies. And what it shows is that there is a significant
increase in retention. On my LinkedIn page, I actually wrote an
article — and it’s a little bit old now, and I need to update the
article — but it’s called “The Data-Driven Case for Virtual
Reality Learning.” There’s been a lot of studies: Oklahoma
State, Pearson, HMH, UC Irvine — they’ve all done different studies.
And one study showed that there was a 14 percent increase in mean
test scores. Another study in China showed that there was a 90
percent pass rate from the group that learned in VR, while there is
only a 40 percent pass rate from the group that did not learn in VR.
So, pretty much every study shows that there’s either increased
retention, better test scores, better results, learning in virtual
reality. People always want to know that. I don’t think there’s
really a lot of debate whether people learn more when they’re in a
distraction-free, immersive environment. But still, it’s going to
take some time for that kind of adoption.
Alan: I think it’s interesting
that you said that last part of distraction-free, immersive
environment, and I think one of the things that — this podcast is
around the business applications — but this applies directly to
training in business, as well. If you take what you guys are learning
in the education side, and apply it to training of employees, and you
look at the fact that most training is done either digitally, through
a phone app or a web site. What people don’t understand is that
people’s phones are on them all the time. So you have this constant
distraction of second screening, and it takes people’s focus away.
When you’re in virtual reality, there’s no way to look at your phone;
you are completely immersed, and you’re in, 100 percent doing that. I
think just that focus alone makes it a much more powerful medium to
teach people.
Steve: Yeah, even if there were
no other benefit, just the distraction-free learning is a big piece
of that. We have a development company that does corporate training
VR for companies — we’ve done projects for two Fortune 500
companies; I can’t necessarily name them — but what they are looking
for is a way to… what we call, the RIDE theory. Any training where
they rarely have to do that training, whether it’s impossible to
train for it — so for example, like at a nuclear power plant, a
nuclear meltdown; it’s impossible to train for, except in a virtual
or textbook environment. Or maybe, for example, like an oil leak at
an underwater oil platform. These things are impossible to train for.
So that’s the “I.” “D” is dangerous. So, for
example, a power line that has come free due to a storm and is on the
ground then wet. That’s a dangerous training environment, but can be
done in virtual reality. And then finally, expensive. There are
certain things that are very expensive to train for, and you can
reduce the cost dramatically through virtual reality, and in some
cases, augmented reality. For businesses, if they keep that acronym
— RIDE — in mind, that’s a good way for them to create a framework
for decision making in which of their training areas could sustain
the expense of creating a VR version of it, versus those that maybe
you stick with what you’re doing now, with videotapes or reading or
person-to-person training.
Alan: What was the “R”
for? I apologize.
Steve: Rare.
Alan: Rare.
Steve: Sometimes you don’t have
time. When you take people into a training scenario, and you really
only have time to train them on the things they are going to
encounter the most. For example, restaurant training. There’s a lot
of things to train a new employee on, but having a heart attack and
rolling around on the ground is not something that happens very often
in a restaurant. So, it probably doesn’t receive training. That’s
something you could create in virtual reality. Various rare instances
that people can go and train for and know how to use the
defibrillator, or whatever the case might be.
Alan: One of the ones that’s
getting the most media attention is Walmart using virtual reality for
their training. And one of the things they’re training on is Black
Friday sales. Happens once a year. It’s madness. It’s mayhem. And
being able to train people how to manage that, this thing that only
happens once a year. You can’t really train for it. So it is rare,
and I get it; rare, impossible to train for, dangerous, or expensive
— RIDE, I think, is a really great acronym. I think that is a great
value proposition for everybody listening. So, thank you.
Steve: Yeah, and I didn’t come
up with it, but once I read it, I said, that’s perfect. And on the
Walmart side, big shout out to Andy Mathis at Oculus, who put that
whole deal together. Having Walmart in the ballgame really helps all
of us in this field.
Alan: Absolutely. I think it
also springboarded everybody to think about, “oh, wow, this can
be used for all sorts of different things.” It was a great thing
for the whole industry, and Oculus led that. But if it wasn’t for the
Facebook acquisition of Oculus, I don’t think there would be as many
companies… I don’t think this whole VR and a AR explosion would
have happened as quickly. It would have happened, just not as
quickly. I think that caught everybody’s attention.
Steve: Yeah, I think you’re
right. And having the big players involved certainly helps to drive
the process, but they certainly need small players like us,
VictoryXR, to help drive the content side.
Alan: I think the barriers to
entry with this are rapidly coming down, and one of the big ones is
content. And you guys seem to be hammering that one and nailing it
properly. So, hats off to you guys on that one.
Steve: Thank you.
Alan: What are some of the
challenges around, let’s say, a school wanting to bring this in? What
are the some of the things that school boards or schools individually
can start to think about and plan for, when they’re planning their
strategy? Say they want to say, “we want to buy 100 VR headsets,
but we know if we buy them, by the time they get shipped to us,
they’re going to be obsolete.” How does a school plan for that?
And what’s your advice around that?
Steve: Well, obsolescence really
isn’t an issue. Will there be a better widget on the market? Yes. But
when you buy a car, will a better car come out the next year? Yes.
But does it make your existing car obsolete? Absolutely not. Whatever
hardware schools purchase, the content is going to work just as well
on that hardware for years to come. And at the right time, one can
upgrade. But getting back to the challenges, the first challenge is
cost. You’re probably not going to spend less than $10,000 to get in.
Now, you could buy one Oculus headset with content for $500. So
there’s certainly the ability to dip your toe in the water and test
it out, for as little as $500. But to outfit one classroom they could
cart, that can be moved from classroom to classroom; you and spend a
minimum of $10,000. So that’s challenge number one. Having said that,
pretty much every school district, every school, has a technology
budget, and a curriculum budget. So it’s just a matter of
prioritization.
Challenge number two is integration
into the classroom. Most teachers are generally — like all of us —
there’s momentum, and they’re going to be moving in the same
direction, doing things the way they’ve been doing them for a long
time. So this requires a different level of work. There’s a certain
amount of hassle to get technology working, and to get it working for
every student and make sure they can all use it. So there’s some
challenges there. Professional development — training teachers — is
a big piece of it. We actually have a person on our staff, Rene
Gadelha. She’s a curriculum specialist. She formerly worked for
Pearson, she’s formerly a classroom teacher, she served on the school
board in two different states. She is the perfect person [for this].
And when somebody purchases our content, or they just want to hire
her to come in, she’ll fly in and do professional development around
virtual reality. That’s that’s our solution to problem number two. By
the way, our solution to problem number one is we also have a grant
writer on staff, who helps schools find grants, and helps them write
them, if need be.
Problem number three, it’s a problem
that’s coming down quickly. Initially, you had to have a very
high-end graphics computer. You basically to have a $1000 computer to
run a virtual reality system. And every school I went to said, “well,
we’ve got some really good computers. Can we just use those?” I
would have to say, “unfortunately, no.” And in fact, I
never found a school that had a computer with a 1060 Nvidia chip. So
it requires them to buy this high-end computer. Well, with the Oculus
Quest coming out soon — the VIVE Focus, the Oculus Go, the Pico
headsets — all of that is becoming less of an issue, if they want to
just buy a headset for $400-$600. People can do that now without
having to have the big computer attached.
Alan: Any other challenges? So,
you’ve covered costs, which you guys are mitigating with grants;
integration into the schools, which you guys are covering with
professional development; and then, the need for high-end equipment,
which — I think — the barrier to entry is being rapidly knocked
down by these standalone units that are coming out. Are there any
others that you found?
Steve: There are minor
challenges. Proper training in hygiene with headsets is important.
That’s just a small training issue that we need to be aware of, and
we need to teach. So, you know, if you get past those first three
issues… if there’s a fourth, it might be the amount of content out
there. But at this point, there’s quite a bit of content. Now, the
downside is, there’s a limited amount of standards-aligned content,
and schools really do look for it to be aligned to the NGSS, or
Canadian standards, or whatever the case might be. But there’s a lot
of content, and there’s enough standards-aligned content to alleviate
those issues. Do we have a lot in history and some of those things?
Not yet, but it’s on its way.
Alan: Amazing. What is one
experience that you, personally, would love to see in VR?
Steve: I would love to be able
to stand in the middle of the Battle of Gettysburg, and experience it
in true, simulated VR. And I don’t know if our graphics chips are
quite there yet, but they’re close. That is something that would be
just amazing to experience; different moments in history, while
standing right in the middle of them (and not getting killed, which
would be awesome as well).
Alan: [chuckles] Absolutely. We
don’t want that. Well, this has been phenomenal. We’ve learned tons
about the statistics and what people are using it for, how schools
are bringing this [to the classroom], barriers to entry, the
challenges, how to overcome these challenges. Is there anything else
that you think listeners would need to kickstart their foray into
bringing virtual and augmented reality into the classroom? Or into
their HR or training arm of the business?
Steve: So, definitely. We didn’t
talk about AR yet. And at the NSTA — which is in St. Louis, is the
National Science Teachers Association; I think it’s in about four
weeks — we will be rolling out our augmented reality products, and
they are so amazing right now. I know that that’s what I should be
saying, since I’m the founder, but I’m just telling you; they are so
cool. The first product we’ll roll out is textbook AR. In each
chapter of a book, there’s usually one really challenging concept —
like photosynthesis, or cellular regeneration. Whatever the difficult
topic is, what we are doing is creating an augmented reality
experience, so that you’re reading through a textbook, be it digital
or paper-based, and when you come to certain parts of the book, you
can hold your phone over it and a teacher will pop up. In our first
one, it was being able to look inside the human cell. You got a human
cell that pops up, and you can touch different pieces of it, and the
nucleus will come out, or the golgi will come out. And you can really
both see how they work, and hear a description of how they work.
But you really get this amazing
teaching tool through AR. We will also have an anatomy product, where
the parts of the body will rise from the human torso. And then you
can touch them and learn more about them. You can look at them in 3D,
and ultimately, you’ll be able to see a cross-section of them, look
inside them. And then we have one more product; I’m not announcing
quite yet, but it’s going to be amazing. So, we’re excited about
this, and we think that people at NSTA and elsewhere are just going
to love it.
Alan: I think you’re right. I
think this is going to be a really big thing. Now, is this something
that you’re aiming towards the tablets that are already in schools?
Or is this something that you’re aiming towards students using their
own devices? Or both?
Steve: It’s their own devices. I
mean, you could certainly use the tablets that are already in school,
assuming they are AR-enabled. But for the most part, if you have a
textbook — whatever form your textbook takes — you should be able
to whip out your phone, and hold it over certain parts of that
textbook, and have this special AR learning experience pop up. And
really, it makes learning more interesting and… “immersive”
is not really the right word, but it allows you to interact with that
learning, and that it could be a big game changer.
Alan: It’s very interesting that
you’re talking about this, because we interviewed Charlie Fink,
author of Metaverse and Convergence, and they are two books about
virtual and augmented reality that have AR-enabled parts of them. So
it’s really interesting that, this whole idea of bringing a static,
flat textbook to life using augmented reality is fantastic. And
something that we’ve been working on the background is a platform
that it would allow anybody to make their own interactions on this. I
think it’s very timely and I think it’s going to be really big for
textbooks.
Steve: It’s going to be huge. So
huge. Children’s storybooks, everything. I just think that this piece
of AR will grow quickly.
Alan: I agree with you 100
percent, and they say by the end of 2019, there will be over
2-billion AR-enabled smartphones on the market. So, I think the
market definitely has penetration, and it’s a lot larger than virtual
reality headsets. But, I think it’s that early thing that gets
everybody’s attention. And because the technologies are so similar,
it’s just a natural progression, from augmented reality to virtual
reality, and then eventually glasses and that sort of thing.
Steve: Absolutely. I’m with you
on that.
Alan: Well, Steve, is there any
problem in the world that you want to see solved with XR?
Steve: Well, there’s a lot of
problems. I’ve had the opportunity to travel around the world a lot,
and one of the things that we will get to do through XR is we will
get to spend time with people in other countries without travelling
to those countries. We’ll be able to interact in their communities in
ways that we never could before. And it will be cool, but it will
also bring the world together. The more you realize that the Chinese
are wonderful people — when I travel, you just see, people are
wonderful — and it will tear down barriers between countries, and I
think it will make the world a better place. Maybe I have my John
Lennon glasses on, but I just think that AR/VR have the possibility
to really break down barriers between groups of people.
Alan: I just want to ask you one
more question. What is one thing that you’ve seen in this industry
that you’ve been really blown away by? Because I mean, you’ve
probably seen a lot, and you guys have built a lot. What is something
that you’ve seen that just made you go, “wow, this is
incredible?”
Steve: There’s still so much.
When I was in Beijing and I first participated in multiplayer virtual
reality, and me and three buddies went on a spaceship and fought
aliens? That was the experience that blew me away more than anything
else in the world. Of our own experiences, the first time I picked up
our frog dissection — our floppy frog — that is the thing that
people are just blown away with, in our experiences, is just the
realism of what you’re experiencing, and the ability to interact with
your friends, and others that you may not know, inside VR. It just
blows my mind.
35 min
August 02, 2019 Dissecting Virtual Frogs with VictoryXR's Steve Grubbs
These days,
more and more students can -- and do -- opt out of animal dissection
in science classes, and not just because formaldehyde smells awful.
As fewer kids are morally comfortable with chopping up an amphibian
in the name of their education, an alternative will be needed.
VictoryXR's Steve Grubbs offers a solution through VR, and chats with
Alan about how XR can be used to enhance education in other ways,
too.
Alan: Today's guest is Steve
Grubbs, founder and CEO of VictoryVR, one of the world leaders in
virtual reality educational product development. To date, they have
created over 240 unique VR experiences, spanning over 50 different
learning units, with educational partners like Carolina Biological
and Oxford University. They have been able to develop brand new
educational encounters for VR users around the globe. Steve is also a
member of YPO and was recently featured in an article entitled
Virtual Reality Is Transporting Students to the Next Frontier in
Science Education. You can learn more about Steve's company at
VictoryXR.com. Steve, welcome to the show.
Steve: Alan, thanks for having
me. I appreciate it. We've been working in XR Technologies -- first
virtual reality, and then augmented reality -- since 2016. I first
tried to headset on near the end of 2015 and it struck me that this
type of technology would change the world. And so, we struck out and
decided that our field would be education. And so we dug in and
figured out how to do it, because at that point it was very difficult
to find people; you couldn't just hire people off the street who knew
how to create virtual reality technology. We set to work figuring it
out. In September of 2016, I attended a group meeting with some folks
in Dallas, and then by January of 2017, we had our first major
product in a school. I felt pretty good that we were able to move
quickly on that first experience.
Alan: That's incredible. Let me
ask you a quick question. What was the first experience that you
tried that inspired you to start VictoryVR?
Steve: Well, it was a MetaVRse
product that I downloaded to my phone some time, in Google Cardboard.
I am pretty sure I went to the iPhone store and tried a roller
coaster -- and this had been a few years now. And then I tried The
New York Times 360 News reporting on my phone and they both were
great, amazing, cool, and so I said, this is something I want to be a
part of.
Alan: For those people that
don't know you and VictoryVR, maybe just give us a 10,000-foot view
of your mission and why you're doing what you're doing, and where you
see the company going. Describe your company, the products, and the
platform that's being used.
Steve: We believe that we can
change education in a positive way around the world. If you think
about it, for decades -- I used to serve in the Iowa legislature, and
I was chairman of the Education Committee, and we spent a lot of time
addressing, how do we improve education? And there were a lot of
things we did on the input side, but at the end of the day, what we
all know is that if students love to learn, they love what they're
learning -- like all of us -- then there's no work in it; you just
love to do it, and you immerse yourself in it. We believe that XR
Technologies -- VR and AR -- are the solution to having students love
what they're learning. So we're creating as much content as possible,
aligned to standards, so that teachers can integrate it into their
lesson plans, or parents can just simply pull it off the shelf and
use it. I have a background in technology. I started my first tech
company in 1997, building web sites. I bought a book called "Web
Sites for Dummies," read it over the weekend, and announced to
my friends I was a web site builder and--
Alan: Ha!
Steve:
0 min
July 31, 2019 Getting — and Keeping — Your Attention in XR, with LumiereVR COO Alexander Haque
XR technologies
are undeniably a leap forward in humankind’s mechanical evolution.
But our brains – the way they work – haven’t quite evolved in pace
with them, so XR solutions are hardly solutions at all unless they
work within the confines of how we think and react. Alex Haque of
LumiereVR waxes philosophical about how to design XR with that in
mind.
Alan: Today’s guest is Alexander
Haque, the founder of RetinadVR, whose mission was to help pioneer
virtual and augmented reality through powerful data. RetinadVR was
acquired recently by LumiereVR, in July 2018. Alex is now the COO for
LumiereVR, which is bringing quality VR content to the masses through
masterful curation and distribution. You can learn more about Alex
and Lumiere by visiting LumiereVR.com. Alex, welcome to the show.
Alex: Hey, thank you so much for
having me, Alan. Pleasure to be here.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure.
Alex: Yeah, thanks for having
me. You’re one of my favorite LinkedIn personalities, and a fellow
Canadian! So I’m excited to talk shop with you.
Alan: Canadians are taking over
the VR scene in a big way. It’s really exciting. The purpose of this
podcast is to provide as much value to businesses and business owners
and people in companies that are looking to explore and expand on
virtual and mixed reality and augmented reality, and figure out how
these technologies can be used for them. So, perhaps let’s just take
a look back at RetinadVR; what you guys were doing there, and what
led you to what you’re doing now.
Alex: Right. Yeah. It’s a great
jump off point. So RetinadVR actually got started in Montreal in
2014. Our mission was, as you said at the beginning, was to bring VR
analytics and data to virtual reality. And what I mean by that is
understanding these new data points that can be interpreted from a VR
headset. And what we found is, understanding people’s movement in VR
is something that we can actually grab from a headset. And then
translating that into actionable insights was basically the mission
of the entire company for the last three years, up until the
acquisition. And things are very much still along that path, but a
little bit more, I guess, pigeon-holed into Lumiere -pecific use
cases for right now.
Alan: So maybe talk about
Lumiere and what you guys are doing there. I know you’ve done a
recent project with synchronizing a ton of headsets at a fairly
famous location. I’ll let you talk to that.
Alex: So we did about 250 VR
headsets, all synced up from Madison Square Garden for LumiereVR,
which brings that enterprise software to large venues and media
entertainment folks. MSG is a really good use case; museums,
aquariums, science centers, planetariums — those are really good
places where VR lives, [and] is complementary to an existing exhibit.
The example with Madison Square Garden, for instance, was they have a
90-minute tour within the venue. So, a lot of people don’t actually
know this — I think the international community knows this little
bit more — Madison Square Garden, I think, is in the top five or top
10 most-visited, most iconic places in New York City. And I didn’t
know this, being obviously, a Canadian hockey fan. I thought you just
show up to Madison Square Garden — a great, beautiful venue — and
you enjoy concert or a game, and you go home. But apparently what you
could do is, they have off-hours visits throughout the day that are
90 minutes that are called the All Access Tour. And they show you the
history of this is where Mohammad Ali boxed. This is where goalie
Henrik Lundqvist for the New York Rangers, here’s his, like,
million-dollar Swarovski 10-cut diamond goalie mask is. This is where
the Knicks played, and so on and so forth. And they give you a really
beautiful, all-encompassing tour. We were commissioned to bring a
five-minute VR experience that they had filmed, giving
behind-the-scenes look at the Rangers, the Knicks, and Billy Joel
live on stage in 360 VR. And basically, from anybody that’s powering
a VR experience, whether you’ve had experience with this or not, you
know that the user experience is really important.
What Lumiere did — in a nutshell —
was surface a much-easier user interface and user experience, by
bringing all the VR tech to an operator. So what I mean by that is,
instead of having every single person that would go through this
all-access tour — and the VR portion specifically — have to be
like, “what are you looking at? Do you see it? Did you click
play?” Anybody who’s run a VR event knows how horrible that is.
What we did is, we surfaced that to an iPad, and then a person can
just click play, and then all the VR headsets synchronize and play at
the exact same time, and then the show ends at the exact same time.
So it makes it a very seamless experience.
Alan: That, to me, is something
that… at the very beginning when VR was kicking off, when Samsung
did this huge presentation and they had hundreds — or probably a
thousand headsets — all synchronized. So you guys have taken that,
simplified it, and made it available as a standalone app. Is that
case?
Alex: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s
a service, then an app. I’d say right now, the goal is to make an
app-based where anybody and their dog, so to speak, can pick this up
and click play and have their own event to run. So what we did with
Pacific Science Center was a really good example of that. But the
reality is, is that we’re not there right now for the industry;
there’s still a lot of handholding to be done and there’s still no
consensus amongst which headset is kind of the iPod or iPhone right
now.
Alan: Got it.
Alex: We’re still making custom
experiences for everybody.
Alan: So does it work with the
Oculus Go?
Alex: It does. Yeah. We actually
have a pretty good relationship with the folks at Oculus.
Alan: I have to say, as somebody
who’s doing a podcast about the business use cases of XR
technologies…. this is glaringly obvious to me. But for those of
you who are listening, imagine going into a boardroom or a
presentation hall where you want to present to 10 people, 20 people,
100 people all at once, and you want them to have a fully-immersive
experience, where they’re not checking their phones, they’re not
paying attention to other things. They are fully immersed in the
content that you want to deliver to them. This seems like a natural
fit for that.
Alex: Oh, yeah, absolutely. The
presentation use case is one that we actually started with. So
Travis, who’s the founder of LumiereVR with Jenny, they had this
exact pain point when trying to present to investors and try them —
I’m sure you have this problem too, Alan; this is very familiar for
you — presenting something that’s as three dimensional and as
spatial as 360 VR, or 3D VR, and then putting it on a 2D screen and
being like, “look, you can touch this, I swear,” is very..
that’s the pain point in general. There’s nothing like putting VR on
someone’s head and letting them experience it for themselves.
Synchronizing that in a boardroom of two people, up to five, or ten,
or 500, is an amazing use case.
Alan: I think that’s something
that I think more companies are going to start to use. And of course,
they can reach out to at LumiereVR.com. But if you put this in, said,
“OK, what kind of industries would benefit from this the most?”
What do you think would benefit from this?
Alex: Well, I think what we
found success in so far is definitely what’s benefiting existing
aquariums, museums, planetariums; those who are already running
exhibits that, let’s say… I’ll give you a really good example. So
the Pacific Science Center, where they might not be able to have a
dolphin or whales anymore for ethical concerns ever since there’s
been a big backlash with a Netflix documentary that aired — called
Blackfish, I believe it was called, I don’t know if you saw that
documentary — but yeah, basically exposing how the mistreatment of
these marine life and aquatic life inside of these venues, there’s
been a massive public backlash against that kind of exhibit. So what
we did is, we partnered with the filmmakers of the Click Effect. The
Click Effect is a 360 video — it’s about a six minute piece from
2015, won a lot of awards — that showcased one of the first full
underwater 360 VR diving experiences with dolphins, and talking about
the clicking noise that a dolphin will make to communicate. And what
that does is, it puts you in a vantage point that you’d never
otherwise be able to see (unless you did some kind of deep sea diving
yourself, which a lot of people have not done), and it puts you
face-to-face with dolphins.
That experience, for families and
people of all ages, is one that resonates. It just… it makes a lot
of sense. And you don’t actually need to have an entire ecosystem now
— or economy — around bringing these wildlife out and taking them
out of their existing systems, shocking them, and then putting them
in this unnatural exhibit for people to watch and see. You can put
someone in a five-minute VR experience. That use case is
complimentary — or even, I guess, replacing an existing experience
that otherwise would be very difficult — is a really natural place
for VR to live. And same thing for Madison Square Garden. Right? It’s
a five-minute experience. It doesn’t have to be a whole big,
one-hour-long, crazy shebang. It just can be a five-minute thing that
lives next to an existing exhibit. So I’d say that that’s a really
good use case for right now.
Alan: Interesting. I think
another one is in the classrooms. I think there is a huge opportunity
here for teachers to be able to put VR on their students’ heads —
put down the phone, put a VR on — and then let them experience
things like being underwater, or going back in history, or into
space. These are wonderful experiences. But again, the problem that
you guys have solved is that problem of having a teacher or leader or
somebody manage that experience. And I think one of the things, as a
company that has done thousands of demos, that’s always the problem;
you put a VR headset on somebody, and heh… I don’t know how they
ever do it. There’s no buttons, and they end up in a different room,
and you’re like, “I don’t have any idea how you got there,”
and you can never tell where they are.
Alex: Right. So, “tell me
what you see, and… oh, my God. What did you hit? Tell me what you
see,” and then they’re like, “I see a screen. I’m in this
room–“
Alan: “I’m in a room!”
Alex: It’s incredible.
Alan: The worst is when you put
it on somebody’s head, and they sit there for five minutes, and they
don’t tell you that it hasn’t started playing.
Alex: Right. They’re expecting
you to hold their hands. That’s how we got started with the Pacific
Science Center, is exactly that. Travis was out in Seattle managing
this, and having anybody from a 13-year-old to a 90-year-old trying
VR for the first time — or even maybe a second or third time, it
doesn’t really matter — getting them settled in and bringing that
experience to them in a seamless way is actually very challenging.
And to your point, by the way, what you mentioned — Google
expeditions for the classroom — they started off by tackling that
problem of bringing VR and synchronizing it across headsets. But that
use case is… the EDU use case is one that is very near-and-dear to
me and how VR lives in a classroom. We’re actually working with North
Carolina State University, and one of the biggest reasons why they
can’t get it to take off in the classroom is — other than this one
evangelist, God bless his heart. And Mike, if you’re listening; thank
you for being a VR champion in Raleigh — but other than him, getting
this off to a professor that has to bring this to 10 students or 15
or 300 students in an auditorium symposium, it becomes a massive
challenge. It’s very stressful. So that use case that you mentioned
is a great one.
Alan: Awesome. So, I’m going to
look a little bit more specifics and challenges. So, you’ve got quite
a bit of experience in the analytic side, and really looking at,
“what are people doing?” What are some of the best
analytics or metrics that you’ve seen? What are some of the
experiences that people resonate most with? Are there any experiences
where people take the headset off middle-way through? What are some
of the best use cases, and the metrics around that? Are you finding
that people watch it all the way through? Do they look behind them?
What are you seeing?
Alex: Yeah, it’s a great
question, and one that… what I was alluding to at the beginning of
the podcast with Retinad and those kind of best practices for
advertisers and marketers is, there’s something called the “Cone
of Focus,” that I guess we coined within the industry, amongst
ourselves and VR artists that we worked with — so, folks that like
Jessica Brillhart over at Google’s Jump VR, who we were working with
in the early days — is figuring out, where do people actually look
within a VR headset? Where do they actually focus their attention? If
I have 10 important elements in one specific scene, is one of them is
more important than the other? How do I actually draw their attention
there? So to answer your question first, do people look behind them?
Mostly no. But if you can get them to look around and turn around,
what we found is that generally those experiences tend to be the most
valuable, in the sense that people don’t bounce from the experience
as much as they would in an experience that I call like “the
television screen” or “2D screen,” where they’re just
forced to look forward. That seems to be much less of a compelling VR
experience, because again, what’s the value of doing it in VR, if not
to make people move around?
The whole purpose of VR is to give
almost a lifelike simulation, if not give as close as a lifelike
simulation as you can. So one of the best practices that we found is
that getting a user to move around within the first five seconds is
instrumental to success, and to completion. So, if I have an audio
cue that comes from around me, that actually works out better than a
visual cue that I have no idea is behind me. So, audio is one of the
most important things from an analytics — or from our KPI, or key
metric — standpoint, from an artistic and cinematic point of view.
And even for marketers, right? If you’re trying to engage your
audience for that beautiful 30 seconds, and really make them engaged
throughout a 360 video or whatever kind of ad unit that you have?
Getting them to just move around and engage with your ad is just
instrumental within those first five seconds. Otherwise, you’ve lost
them.
Alan: Interesting. That’s so
interesting. So basically, using audio cues over visual cues in the
first five seconds of experience really sets the tone for where
people are going to look moving forward.
Alex: Right. That assumes that
the users in headset, has a decent pair of headphones on, or has
headphones or some audio at all. But in perfect circumstances, that
is absolutely true. And even for smartphone-driven magic window, like
360 “VR” type of stuff, that is very important. Audio is
very important.
Alan: Yeah, I think people don’t
realize the power of audio until it’s wrong. I remember, I did an
experience and I put the headphones on backwards, and so the voices
were coming from the wrong directions. And it just messed with my
head, and totally took me out of the experience altogether.
Alex: Yeah, that’s another
thing, right? From the user experience, stuff that Lumiere is
tackling is, how to get people to put on the headphones the right
way?
Alan: Big “R!” Big
“L!” I don’t know, what else can you do? What are some of
the other challenges you guys have faced? The reason why I’m asking
these questions is because, if I’m a business operator or somebody in
marketing or in sales or HR or training, and I want to start using VR
in my business, what are some of the challenges that you guys have
experienced that you can share, that would help somebody avoid them
in the future? Or at least skip past them?
Alex: Yeah, I guess it’s funny,
because the company — Lumiere — was born out of all those issues.
Travis and Jenny are filmmakers and cinematographers first, more so
than they are technologists, and I think Travis is a technologist,
and Jenny as an artist; that marriage between those two founders is a
great one, between those skill sets. And it was this platform that is
the Lumiere LB synchronized software that was built almost came out
of accidental experiment. And that was because they were bringing
film first to the Pacific Science Center. That was the real
challenge, right? “How do I actually create a VR activation”
was the first order of problems that they were trying to solve. What
they realized was, again, the second order of problems is running a
great user experience was actually the first order problems. And if
you couldn’t get that to work first and foremost, then everything
else was a much smaller problem. It almost became, “why do I
need VR if it’s this complicated?”
Alan: It’s interesting that you
say that, because I think the industry as a whole went through this
phase of really trying to figure out, “can we make this work?
How do we make it work? It’s working — now what do we do with it?”.
Alex: Right.
Alan: That’s really the phases
that we’ve gone through as an industry.
Alex: I think you had an
opportunity to try the Hololens 2. And when they came on stage —
what, Mobile World Congress has already been a month now? — in
Barcelona. What they were saying was, “we’re now excited to
introduce the natural user interface,” and it’s called like
“intuitive gesture control.” And it’s just your hands. Just
seeing a technologist refer to hands as this natural gesture
interface is hilarious. Yeah, it’s exactly what you said. How does VR
get past its weird, awkward adolescence? It’s literally just by
eliminating these annoying controllers and all these annoying
interfaces that seem really cool when you’re developing them, but
then when we give them to my mom or dad, or your mom or dad, and it’s
just like, “what? What am I supposed to do?”.
Alan: I can’t tell you that the
number of Hololens demos where people just can’t figure out just the
simple click thing.
Alex: Yeah, oh God. The thumb
and index finger?
Alan: Yeah…it was a great
idea, and I’m like, “click a mouse! No, but stick your finger up
straight! Ah!” So I feel your pain on that one. So I’m going to
shift gears a second here, because I really want to pick your brain
about something. What do you think is the most important thing that
businesses can do now to start leveraging the power of XR — meaning
virtual/augmented/mixed realities?
Alex: Talk to people like you,
honestly. I say not tongue-in-cheek; I’m being very quite honest. I
think within the industry, we think the industry itself has grown up,
because we’ve been so close to it and near-and-dear for the last..
what is this, version 3, or 4, of VR/AR? Growing up over the last few
decades? So I think just understanding, “what are the actual use
cases that my business can implement today,” as opposed to
treating this kind of like a futuristic thing. VR, when I speak to
clients, sound like quote-unquote — the killer word — “interesting”
or “cool” or “fun,” but they don’t actually know
what the use case would be. And if they do, then it becomes a very
complex product. So starting with something really simple of a use
case, identifying it, and then having people like yourself —
consultants — come in and, say, identify those problematic areas of
a business right now, or areas that aren’t necessarily cause for
concern, but can be updated. A really good example is that’s a
STRIVR, right? Their 17,000 Oculus Go activations across every single
Walmart across America. How important is employee training? Somebody
probably has the exact number in dollars and cents about how big of a
problem making sure your workforce is well-trained for the future —
or even for right now — is. But, probably in the billions.
Alan: In the billions, for sure.
Alex: But how much is that pain
actually felt and quantified, and how much of it is a business
problem today? I don’t know. It could be different for different
businesses. Clearly, Walmart identified that as a must-have problem
and put in, I think, the single largest order of VR headsets. Right?
I think 17,000 is the number to beat.
Alan: Yeah, it’s funny, it was
brought up in the last podcast, that Andy Mathis from Oculus kind of
brokered that whole deal. We were talking on the last podcast about
the reasons why you would use VR for training, and those reasons are
when training for something is rare — so it’s a rarity. So, for
example, Walmart trains for Black Friday; it happens once a year, so
it’s a rare event that they want to train for. The other thing is
that it’s impossible to train for. Let’s say you’re a nuclear reactor
and you need to train on what happens when there’s a problem. And
dangerous environment — training people on underground wells or
whatever; training them places that is dangerous to train in. And
then the fourth one is expensive. And so if you look at it from rare,
impossible to train for, dangerous environments, and expensive, you
come up with an acronym of RIDE. So, that came up.
Alex: I love that.
Alan: Yeah! Me too. And there I
thought, man, this is really great. That was from Steve Grubbs at
Victory VR. It’s VictoryXR.com.
Alex: Well, I’ll steal what he
said! Just copy & paste it right now.
Alan: But I really also like
your comment of the Cone of Focus, meaning when you put your headset
on people — or, if you look at statistics of 360 videos in general
— most people just stare straight in front of them, if there’s no
reason for them to turn around. And I know from my first VR
experience, I put on the headset, and my mouth was probably wide
open. I was like, “oh my God, this is amazing.” And then
somebody — thank God — grabbed me by the shoulders and just turned
me around in a circle. And then I realized like, “oh, my God,
it’s all around me.” So I have this “wow!” moment. But
I think the Cone of Focus is a real thing. I’ve never heard it called
that until now. But it’s definitely true.
Alex: But, think about that for
most people. I think you’re an early adopter of most technologies.
For you, to be grabbed and turned around, that doesn’t necessarily
break your sense of presence. But how do you get that without needing
to physically shove someone, or push them around? And becomes the
biggest–
Alan: And that’s where you come
up with your audio cues. I thought that was a great solution to that
problem.
Alex: Oh, yeah, positional
audio, right? So the Dolby Atmos tool kit, or the Facebook 360 tool
kit; all that spatial audio stuff. It’s so important, and and so
widely overlooked by the industry. It’s mind-blowing. A lot more
attention needs to be paid to that.
Alan: So I’m gonna ask you a
personal question. What is the best business use case of XR that
you’ve seen?
Alex: Oh, it’s a good question.
Outside of our stuff and your stuff? I’d have to say… honestly,
looking back to the enterprise training stuff, I’d say that that’s
probably the best use case. So… actually, I’ll switch gears. We
spoke about it, so I’ll talk about social VR. One of the best use
cases, I think, is, how do you and I have this meeting? How you do
you and I have this podcast in VR? How do we make it feel like we’re
actually sitting face-to-face and having this interview, looking each
other? Getting that surreal moment of looking each other left eye to
left eye, and actually empathizing, connecting with each other? What
Facebook just powered with their lifelike avatars… did you see
that, by any chance? What they announced from their R&D lab?
Alan: Yeah, it’s pretty awesome.
Alex: It’s crazy.
Alan: So, like, they managed to
take avatars, and kick them over the uncanny valley. Which is —
especially humans and the human avatars — get closer and closer to
photo realism, they get actually further and further away. So if you
and I meet in a VR experience, and we’re both cartoons, we accept it.
We’re like, “oh, you’re a cartoon, I’m a cartoon.” But as
we get closer to looking photo-real, there’s certain nuances about
real people that are missed on virtual avatars. Maybe the wink, or
how the face moves, or how… mostly, when they’re talking. And so,
you get this kind of creepy effect and that’s called the uncanny
valley. What Facebook has done with their new real-time algorithms is
they’ve just like made it look real. They’ve just skipped that whole
thing. It’s incredible.
Alex: Yeah. Oh, yeah, it’s
beautiful. So that, from a consumer’s perspective, it is tremendous.
But from an enterprise perspective, I think it’s actually even
bigger. You and I’d be able to troubleshoot a problem becomes much
more lifelike and human, in that sense. Being able to connect with
each other over a presentation, so we’re not just some janky avatar
in a VR headset; it actually becomes our lifelike representations.
That, for enterprise and for a business solution, becomes so
important, and becomes the entire value proposition, and is the
underpinning — the linchpin — to this entire industry. It’s like,
“why VR/why AR/XR,” whatever you want to call it. It
becomes that, right? It’s, “I can transport myself anywhere in
the world and make it feel as if I’m there, so I don’t need to jump
on a flight to do consulting anymore.” Like, the consulting
industry, I think, is going to change in a massive way because of
that.
I even had an advisor — my brother
works at Uber, in the Autonomous Driving division — and we’d like to
have this “what’s cooler?” debate sometimes between
brothers — and one of my advisors sat him down and was like,
“listen; VR is going to completely displace your industry,
because no one’s going to even drive cars in the future.” Like,
there’s going to be no use to even meet each other with cars anymore
— like, the completely crazy, extremist futuristic view. I don’t
think we’ll ever become that extreme, but I think it will help to
make a human connection. Just, something everyday that… my father
could be in India, I could be talking to him. So that type of stuff,
from a social and consumer and enterprise use case, is just huge.
Alan: I agree, and there’s one
company in particular that’s doing that in mixed reality called
Spatial, and I really love what they’re doing. They’ve agreed to be
on the show as well. So, I’m looking forward to learning about what
their plans are. They’ve basically taken virtual avatars from a photo
— so they can take your Facebook photo, turn you into an avatar, and
then you can see your avatar in 3D space — and using the Hololens or
Magic Leap, you can actually reach out and use those digits on your
hands to actually interact with things. And it’s really impressive
what they’re doing.
Alex: Podcast using Spatial.
Isn’t that amazing? Wouldn’t that be so cool? I’m in your living room
right now or whatever. That stuff is the real promise, and I’m
excited for that to become a reality.
Alan: Let me ask you a quick
question, here; what problem in the world do you want to see solved
using XR technologies?
Alex: That’s a great question.
And I think VR for good is something I really care about. Everything
that Chris Milk talks about; VR being the empathy machine. For the
folks in the industry, it’s maybe a tired sentence. But for most
people that haven’t heard that term, it’s just, how do you use VR for
good and to connect with each other, and understand really, another
person’s perspective. When I wear a headset, I am transported to
Syria, or a place in the world that’s going under very challenging
political climate right now, to say the least. And hearing a story
from a native who’s out there, and their perspective on what they are
going through — or have gone through — I think just helps us become
better people. I think a lot of social issues today, it comes from a
stance of ignorance or non-understanding; if there is something about
VR that I’m most excited about — and AR — it’s being able to
connect each other from that perspective. A lot of people, sometimes
you just can’t communicate because of language. But if I put a VR
headset on you and transport you to my reality that I experience
every day? There’s a lot of companies that are doing a really good
job of tackling that issue right now.
Things like sexual discrimination in
the workplace — what does it feel like when someone superior in a
position of power is interviewing you, or sitting you down,
questioning you? What does that feel like from a superior point of
view? So, a superior puts on the headset and then does that interview
and then watches themselves conduct an interview. It can become very
eye-opening, because a lot of the actions that you’re doing, you
might not realize that those are behaviors that, “oh, I didn’t
realize I looked like that, or I was conveying that message.” Or
when you sit in the position of, let’s say, the interviewee, or
somebody who’s not necessarily in a position of power in that
instance, and you observe the world from that lens. You can empathize
like, “holy crap, this is what this looks like? This is what
this feels like?” And of course, you can throw stones my way for
whatever you want. Say, “well, how could you actually
empathize?” Well, I think I challenged people to try that. The
science is there, too.
Alan: It’s interesting that you
mentioned Chris Milk, because — just a quick story — he kind of
coined the phrase “virtual reality is the empathy machine,”
and he basically brought a Syrian refugee camp into the United
Nations in VR and made everybody watch this. And it spawned a number
of donations, and some really powerful people rallying around that.
And it was really wonderful. And just a little aside; Chris Milk was
the first person to ever show me VR.
Alex: No way!
Alan: The first time I saw the
VR.
Alex: No way. That’s awesome.
Alan: Yeah. It was incredible.
And that was the moment where I had this “aha” moment where
I thought, “oh, my God, this is going to be the future of human
communication. This is how we connect the world together.” And
it really is doing that.
Alex: That’s a pretty cool badge
you get to wear. “Mission Accomplished: Chris Milk Was the
Person Who Made Me try VR First.” That’s really cool.
Alan: And it was funny, because
it was Robert Scoble and myself at Curiosity Camp, which is put on by
Eric Schmidt from Google. So it was like this tech wonderland in the
middle of the forest.
Alex: Wow. That’s a story you
get to tell your kids. That’s awesome. That’s incredible.
Alan: Indeed.
Alex: Or grandkids!
Alan: And here’s the other
thing. I can capture myself volumetrically, and provide that as a
digital version of myself for my children when they’re [older]. They
can go in and have — perhaps — an AI-driven conversation with me,
long after I’m gone, maybe. Being able to store ourselves in the
virtual world. I don’t know.
Alex: I love that stuff. Yeah. I
don’t know about the part. That’s maybe a different podcast.
Alan: That’s a totally different
podcast. I’m actually going to be taking a couple of hundred
photographs of my daughters’ bedrooms, so that we can create them
volumetrically, and then they can go in their bedrooms when they’re
20, 30, 40 years old; they can go in their actual bedrooms from when
they were 10 and 14.
Alex: Wow. Yeah. Preserving
history with these artifacts is another amazing use case; aside from
connecting us right now, being able to basically do time travel, as
well, this equates to. It is probably the coolest use case. Yeah.
That’s a great one.
Alan: Well, Alex, I really want
to thank you for taking the time. Is there anything else you want to
say to close this off? To listeners who are listening? We’ve talked
about VR. We’ve talked about using groups of VR headsets to get your
message across. We’ve talked about using it in planetariums and
science centers and museums. We’ve talked about the Cone of Focus,
getting people to turn around in the first five seconds using audio
cues. We’ve talked about avatars and the power of that. Using VR for
good. Is there anything else you want to leave listeners with?
Alex: Yeah, I’d say that if
you’re in an enterprise right now — a Fortune 500, Fortune 1000, or
even a small business, doesn’t really matter — if you’re thinking
about how do I use this today? Don’t be shy. There’s definitely a use
case that you have that XR can transform. I implore you to reach out
to myself or to Alan and connect. We’ve seen it all, I think, within
the industry. And if we don’t have the answer, we definitely know
companies that will be able to provide an answer. I really implore
companies to start asking those questions and become digitally
prepared, because you don’t want it to pass you over, and then be
looking back and you’re like, “damn it! Should’ve listened to
that podcast.”
Alan: Haha! Nobody wants to be
blockbuster.
Alex: Yes. Nobody wants to be
blockbuster, that’s for sure.
32 min
July 31, 2019 Getting -- and Keeping -- Your Attention in XR, with LumiereVR COO Alexander Haque
XR technologies
are undeniably a leap forward in humankind's mechanical evolution.
But our brains - the way they work - haven't quite evolved in pace
with them, so XR solutions are hardly solutions at all unless they
work within the confines of how we think and react. Alex Haque of
LumiereVR waxes philosophical about how to design XR with that in
mind.
Alan: Today's guest is Alexander
Haque, the founder of RetinadVR, whose mission was to help pioneer
virtual and augmented reality through powerful data. RetinadVR was
acquired recently by LumiereVR, in July 2018. Alex is now the COO for
LumiereVR, which is bringing quality VR content to the masses through
masterful curation and distribution. You can learn more about Alex
and Lumiere by visiting LumiereVR.com. Alex, welcome to the show.
Alex: Hey, thank you so much for
having me, Alan. Pleasure to be here.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure.
Alex: Yeah, thanks for having
me. You're one of my favorite LinkedIn personalities, and a fellow
Canadian! So I'm excited to talk shop with you.
Alan: Canadians are taking over
the VR scene in a big way. It's really exciting. The purpose of this
podcast is to provide as much value to businesses and business owners
and people in companies that are looking to explore and expand on
virtual and mixed reality and augmented reality, and figure out how
these technologies can be used for them. So, perhaps let's just take
a look back at RetinadVR; what you guys were doing there, and what
led you to what you're doing now.
Alex: Right. Yeah. It's a great
jump off point. So RetinadVR actually got started in Montreal in
2014. Our mission was, as you said at the beginning, was to bring VR
analytics and data to virtual reality. And what I mean by that is
understanding these new data points that can be interpreted from a VR
headset. And what we found is, understanding people's movement in VR
is something that we can actually grab from a headset. And then
translating that into actionable insights was basically the mission
of the entire company for the last three years, up until the
acquisition. And things are very much still along that path, but a
little bit more, I guess, pigeon-holed into Lumiere -pecific use
cases for right now.
Alan: So maybe talk about
Lumiere and what you guys are doing there. I know you've done a
recent project with synchronizing a ton of headsets at a fairly
famous location. I'll let you talk to that.
Alex: So we did about 250 VR
headsets, all synced up from Madison Square Garden for LumiereVR,
which brings that enterprise software to large venues and media
entertainment folks. MSG is a really good use case; museums,
aquariums, science centers, planetariums -- those are really good
places where VR lives, [and] is complementary to an existing exhibit.
The example with Madison Square Garden, for instance, was they have a
90-minute tour within the venue. So, a lot of people don't actually
know this -- I think the international community knows this little
bit more -- Madison Square Garden, I think, is in the top five or top
10 most-visited, most iconic places in New York City. And I didn't
know this, being obviously, a Canadian hockey fan. I thought you just
show up to Madison Square Garden -- a great, beautiful venue -- and
you enjoy concert or a game, and you go home. But apparently what you
could do is, they have off-hours visits throughout the day that are
90 minutes that are called the All Access Tour. And they show you the
history of this is where Mohammad Ali boxed. This is where goalie
Henrik Lundqvist for the New York Rangers, here's his, like,
million-dollar Swarovski 10-cut diamond goalie mask is. This is where
the Knicks played, and so on and so forth. And they give you a really
beautiful, all-encomp
0 min
July 29, 2019 Making Holograms a Reality Through Volumetric Capture, with Intel’s Raj Puran
Princess Leia’s
desperate holographic plea to Obi-Wan Kenobi might have been a vision
of the far flung future in 1977, but today, volumetric capture is
making that a reality. Using cameras and the AR cloud to map and
replicate an object in three-dimensional space, volumetric capture
has lots of practical use cases – Raj and Alan talk about a bunch of
them.
Alan: Today’s guest is Raj
Puran, director of client XR Business Development and Partnerships at
Intel. Raj is a 25-year veteran of the semiconductor and software
industry with Intel Corp. He is currently director of Business
Development and Strategic Partnerships, focusing on growth areas of
compute in virtual, augmented, and extended realities. Raj has spent
the last four years of his tenure on building business opportunities,
use cases, experiential marketing with partnerships in location-based
entertainment, museums, education and other commercial XR segments.
Prior to moving into business development, Raj has held several
positions in I.T. systems, engineering, data center engineering,
information security, network and cellular IP development, ERP
business engineering, and Healthcare Solutions Development Budget
leads opportunities for his customers and partners to utilize
exciting and intense compute power in the immersive technology and XR
landscape. Through a collective ecosystem of compute-focused
processing, storage, sensing technology, data processing, content
creation solutions, and new innovations in the area of wireless VR,
AR, 5G, artificial intelligence, volumetric capture, and immersive
sports available from Intel. To learn more about Intel, visit
Intel.com. Raj, I’m very excited to welcome to the show. Thank you so
much for coming on.
Raj: Alan, thanks for having me.
It’s a pleasure to speak to you again.
Alan: It’s really amazing. The
last time we saw each other was at the Mixed Reality Marketing Summit
in New York City, which was a really amazing conference. It was kind
of like an un-conference. It was in the basement of the National
Geographic exhibit, where you could walk around and see all sorts of
amazing things. And in the basement of this center was some of the
brightest minds in XR Technologies getting together to discuss the
marketing capabilities. And I know you have worked on everything from
the marketing side to education side. Tell us, what are you doing at
Intel to drive XR forward?
Raj: Yeah, I think the biggest
thing for us is we are known as a PC platform company, but I think
we’re bigger than that, obviously. We’re doing things in the area of
volumetric capture. We’re working on a portable volumetric solutions
like RealSense sensing solutions, which allows you to create really
elaborate programs around immersive media and immersive experiences.
Alan: Let’s unpack that one
thing. What do you mean by volumetric capture?
Raj: Volumetric capture has
generally been where you place a subject or an object or a person in
a series of cameras, right? So this is basically a room; an array of
cameras are set up, and the subject is in the center point of that
array of cameras. And essentially, a singular object is captured, and
then it’s — utilizing point cloud and the camera data — you
essentially create a 3D object, right? That could be a 3D rendering
of said person, or object, or whatever that subject may be. And you
are able to then utilize that; whether you utilize it in a 2D
production or 3D production like VR, you can then utilize that to be
used as holograms, or virtual characters, or so forth.
Alan: So being able to create
recreate the Star Wars little hologram thing.
Raj: Absolutely. And that’s one
of the use cases, right? So, holograms; a pretty exciting use case
for something like that. But, you can also think of it as, if you
wanted to create narratives or storylines, or if you wanted to create
a series of interactions that somebody inside of a headset or an AR
device could interact with, you would utilize volumetric capture
capability to create that character. It’s the difference between, do
you want to spend a lot of time rendering a 3D character? Now, in my
personal, humble opinion, with the technology now today with 3D
modeling tools and so forth, and things like facial mapping and all
that that’s going on in the media industry, rendering that 3D person
— much like we see in the high-end games today –is really exciting.
And I think that’s really cool.
Alan: But it’s very expensive.
Raj: It’s very expensive. Very
expensive.
Alan: You know, I met with a
company last week that has a solution to drive the cost down, and to
put it in perspective, you’re talking, like, for triple A
game-rendered avatars, you’re looking at like $10,000 a second. It’s
obscene.
Raj: It’s incredibly expensive.
Now, I will say this, Alan; it’s not unlike those prices in
volumetric capture, as well. Right? I think where we’re at today is,
there’s these amazing technologies — like volumetric capture
capabilities and the ability to render those as 3D characters and 3D
objects — over time, what a company like Intel and perhaps others
are trying to do is say, “hey, how do we package solutions, and
how do we build silicon and technology that will allow anybody to
essentially create said 3D object or 3D character? Why do we need a
big studio, or a big stage to do that, when we can do that on a
personal level?” So those are things, like our RealSense
technology, that we’re working on that will one day allow everybody
sitting at their desks to have a capture of themselves, to be able to
use for things like 3D telepresence and so forth. And we’re already
working in that space. We’ve done some things.
Alan: Yeah, I was going to say
that these are things that you’ve been working on for years. The
RealSense cameras are not new, by any stretch.
Raj: No.
Alan: But they’re getting so
much faster and better. I just want to talk about, I got the chance
to see your former CEO at CES last year, talking about this
volumetric capture stage. Can you talk to this crazy volumetric
capture stage? And it was, what he showed was a fully-volumetric
scene, captured by hundreds of cameras, meaning the scene’s going
around… imagine watching the movie, but now, you can watch the
movie from the eyes of the star, or you can watch it from a window,
or you can literally move anywhere in the scene, very similar to when
you see the football players, and they pan around the whole thing, so
you can see the view of the quarterback; that kind of thing. And it
was a million dollars for 30 seconds.
Raj: [laughs] It’s very
expensive, there’s no doubt. But I think — again — these are early
innovations, which is just really exciting, because they’re so
powerful today. But I think definitely, where we’ve moved on from
individualized volumetric capture is this capture of large
footprints. Right? So, for example, you can pretty much set up in the
living room. You could set up an individualized volumetric capture,
where you’re capturing just a singular object, or a singular person.
The large-format volumetric capture that we have at our Intel studios
in Manhattan Beach is, essentially, this giant arena that is set up
to be able to capture an entire scene, which includes the various
props and the various characters and objects and so forth, to where
you can actually — one time — capture a whole series of things in
one take, utilizing a voxel technology. Right? So essentially the
voxels are able to create depth and space between all the individual
characters, so you don’t have to individually grab characters, and
then put them into the scene. You can actually grab the scene in the
format that the cameras are set up to capture all that information,
and then once that data is fed into the point cloud, you can choose
to utilize the entire scenery, or you can extract bits and pieces
from it, to be able to create other scenes. So…
Alan: This is next-level
Hollywood.
Raj: Yeah. What we’re trying to
do today is to help the media and the Hollywood industry realize how
they can utilize such said technology to do this new form of
storytelling in the form of 3D immersive storytelling. So I think
we’re helping them understand and learn and be able to utilize
technology as we have with our True View capability, which is what
we’ve been using in the sports arena for quite a while. Now, that’s
available for 3D immersive filmmaking.
Alan: Let’s look at this as a
practical use case. For example, as a business, maybe a business is
not going to be making Hollywood-level videos that you can wander
around inside. But maybe they want to use this for training —
volumetric training of things. What are some of the use cases? I know
the RealSense cameras — which are fairly small, they’re the size of
a cell phone — these cameras are getting smaller, faster, better.
Are people using these for also 3D asset capture? So, for example, I
have some products that I sell on Shopify; I want to take them and
put them into 3D and utilize Shopify’s 3D platform. Is that some of
the stuff that’s being used now?
Raj: Yeah, very much so. I mean,
my wonderful colleague, Suzanne Leibrick, has done some significant
work around how you can utilize one, to two, to many of these
RealSense cameras; to be able to capture an object in 3D and then be
able to create an asset that can be used in shopping, or it can be
used in training. For example, you can utilize a RealSense camera to
grab a little bit of depth. So, for example, James George and his
team over at Scatter has basically created this plugin that allows
you to use a RealSense camera and create this point cloud version of
yourself, for example, and inject that into a collaboration tool, or
a filmmaking application.
Alan: Is it real-time? Or are
they capturing and then–
Raj: Not all tools are real-time
yet, per se, right? Some of them are.
Alan: But that’s where it’s
going. That’s where the idea is, that you’re gonna be able to have
two of these RealSense cameras, volumetrically project yourself into
a business meeting, or a lecture hall, or something.
Raj: That’s a great use case.
Right? And that’s the hope and the dream for us. And the capability
certainly there, and there’s drastic improvements being made on the
cadence on a daily basis, it seems like. But the whole idea is that,
one day the pinhole cameras that we see on our laptops, for example,
will be able to create a depth version of us, and inject that into —
whether it be a collaboration experience, whether it be a training
scenario, whether it be Twitch streaming and things like that —
those are applications that you can use that for. That’s already
starting to happen today. And again, over time they will continue to
improve. But for the large-scale volumetric, let’s take a big
company, right? Let’s say a big company that’s involved in oil and
gas, for example, may want to do a very classic scenario example,
where they have perhaps consequence training.
As you know, there’s many industries
out there that have very hazardous experiences that the employees
have to go through; that they have to learn about, so that they’re
safe on the job, and they’re continuing to be safe with their fellow
employees. And a lot of times, that’s not easily conveyed in a 2D
environment. Merely looking at PowerPoint slides or even video is
great, but going through the motion of experiencing that? Now, the
last thing you want is as a major companies to have your employee go
through a catastrophic training example in the real time. Right? You
definitely don’t want that.
Alan: You don’t want them
learning on the job when–
Raj: OJT is not really a good
thing in a scenario like that. Right? On the job training.
Alan: We just got approached by
a nuclear facility, and they want to train people because, if things
go wrong… they have to be able to train for it, and they can’t,
now. They train using paper-based or electronic-based learning.
Raj: Yeah.
Alan: And this is people
experiential learning.
So imagine if you could create the
entire rig, and virtualize that, and then have the people and so
forth all captured within volumetric. Now, what you’re going to do is
you can use a little bit of this large-scale volumetric — like we
have at Intel studios — but you’d also take 3D rendering into
account. And what you come up with is a very comprehensive package
that allows you to do consequential training. Right? Or catastrophic
training.
Alan: Interesting.
Raj: Which is really exciting.
Being able to simulate hazardous environments without putting anybody
in harm’s way during a training scenario or training exercise is the
ideal situation. I’ve found one use case very compelling and very
exciting, and I’ve talked about it numerous times. There was a
division of the Coast Guard that was doing training on
search-and-rescue simulations. They had a helicopter that was on a
gimbal, and the SAR team — the Search And Rescue team — were
wearing VR headsets built into their helmets, and they could simulate
the environment in a very high seas environment. What would you do?
How would the helicopter pitch in and so forth? I thought that was so
fascinating, because the amount of taxpayer dollars that go into
going out and doing training with the physical assets — with the
physical helicopters and the physical resources — but also the
danger that comes with–
Alan: The danger is real danger.
Raj: Absolutely. And these are
wonderful human beings that — take into account — that they’re
putting their life on the line to rescue others. Can we put them
through training without putting them through those scenarios, and
risking their lives in just the training aspect of it? I think there
are just so many ways and so many implications of what XR, VR, AR —
all these things — can do for the commercial landscape, especially
around training and simulation. That is going to be amazing. I
remember years ago — I think it was probably, I want to say about
five years ago — we had a Unity session in our office, where we did
Unity development basics, and we invited a lot of companies from the
area in Austin to come to our office, and we would run a Unity
training session around 2D/3D asset development. And at the time,
there was an oil and gas company that had sent their employees over,
one of them being their business guy, the other one being their
developer. And they brought up an interesting use case, which — back
then — was that they supplied tablets to their employees, their new
employees, to play a game. And that game was, “what happens if?”
so, you have this area where you have a major blow out; how do you
utilize the blowout preventer, and things like that, at a refinery?
They said that the level of retention
on the tablet was much better than the traditional video and
PowerPoint training. However, their one biggest concern on that
tablet was that it was so gameified, that it was, “do they take
it seriously, or are they just playing a game in their minds?”
Right? The employees?
Alan: Yeah… but I think people
take their games very seriously.
Raj: Oh, they do. Without a
doubt. I think it also becomes, do you make sure that you always win?
Right? That kind of thing, which is always good in and of itself. But
I think when you start to put things in a more realistic scenario —
virtual reality, augmented reality; the key word there being reality
— when you can virtualize the reality, to where people have more
empathy, and a strong desire to make sure that they’re really good at
what they’re doing, so that their fellow employees’ lives are not at
stake. That becomes very serious at that point.
Raj: We really talk about
life-threatening training, but training of all sorts can leverage
this technology. It doesn’t have to be life-threatening technology.
And I think one of the things that as we start to move into a time
where a lot of people are starting to retire from the workforce, it
all sorts of aspects of the workforce — from truck driving to
manufacturing to you name it — there’s a lot of people retiring.
Raj: There’s various things
where we need more operators. Unfortunately, in the time that we live
in, Alan, certain jobs are not appealing anymore. Right? Because some
people are looking for certain types of prestige in what they do as
an employee. But there is such an important and necessary demand for
people who have a skill and a trade and a capability; things like
crane operators and heavy equipment operators. There’s sort of few
and far between these days. And so, the demand has definitely gone
up. But how do you get folks that make a pivot into, “hey, I’m
going to go become this heavy equipment operator.” How do you
get them trained very quickly?
Alan: I got to give a shout out,
because we’re investing in a company right now called UP360, and they
do exactly that. They’ve taken heavy machinery operating — their
first module was an excavator. You go in VR and you learn how to run
it; everything, from turning on the key, to turning on the fan,
radioing, to controlling the bucket, and all of these things. And you
have to go and scoop some rocks into a bucket. When I first did, I
knocked out some people. So it… [chuckles] it allows you to safely
make mistakes while you learn. But one of the things we’re going to
do is we’re going to run my kids — my kids are 11 and 14 — and
we’re going to run them through this training. We’re going to make
them proficient in VR and then we’re gonna take them and put them on
a real excavator.
Raj: Yeah.
Alan: And see if they can manage
it.
Raj: That’s spectacular. I mean,
you want to make the mistake I made, right? Which is, I live on a
fairly large swath of land here in Texas, and I needed to move, rocks
and I needed to grade my property. So I just went down to the local
place and rented a Bobcat and had it delivered. And of course, you
know, I’ve never been on a Bobcat before, but I thought that if I
can–
Alan: How hard can it be?
Raj: I can run my zero-turn
mower; it should be pretty easy. Needless to say, I think it cost me
an additional $3,000 that I had to go pay somebody else to correct my
mistakes. Right? So, moral of the story; if you’ve never been on a
Bobcat, make sure you go through some form of training prior to that.
So, had I had a VR simulator, I probably saved myself a lot of money.
So, trial and error.
Alan: Yeah. Right? It’s funny,
because — I think it was Ryan from VRScout — he went and did the
crane training about two years ago. He went in and they trained him
in VR on a crane simulator, and he went through the whole training —
spent about an hour in VR — then they took him outside and put him
on a real crane. And he was able to operate the real crane within the
safety guidelines. Within one hour of training.
Raj: It is amazing what is
coming out of the use of technology in the immersive space. Immersive
tech like VR, and even gaming. We actually have very young Grand Prix
racers who are now… I can’t even remember the young man’s name —
who was a video gamer, and he ended up racing for Nissan and LaMonde.
Alan: I know; it’s crazy.
Raj: It’s fascinating, the
adaptation that we can make–
Raj: –from a video game to the
real world.
Raj: Yeah. Yeah. So, they called
it Virtual to Real Racing, which is what Nissan was doing with their
GTR series, and yeah, it’s just fascinating, man; I can’t get over
[it]
. I think that’s an area that will start to see things like
motorsports definitely take advantage of this and utilize the
simulation environment a little bit more. I think the difference was
that people were using simulation, but they were very expensive,
grand-scale, at-the-facility deployment. Versus today, you can go buy
a wheel and a headset, and you can set up in your living room and
suddenly, you’re getting a feel of how a Formula One car — or a
Formula E, or a LaMonde-type vehicle — would perform.
Alan: We actually have a racing
car at the office. A racing simulator.
Raj: Yeah.
Alan: Because why wouldn’t you?
Raj: Of course, I think I have
space in my lab for one now, so who knows? I’m nearing that
milestone, myself.
Raj: There’s a ton of different
technologies that Intel is working on that kind of power the back end
of this stuff. And, they’re maybe not focused around the headsets and
stuff, but you guys even dabbled in the headsets and built a
reference design.
Raj: Yeah.
Alan: What are some of the new
technologies that Intel’s building that are going to enable immersive
computing, or spatial computing, and really unlock the value for
enterprise clients?
Raj: When we start to look at…
and this is an interesting place for us, right? As a company, we have
always created some of the key and core technologies that go into an
end device, or an end product. In the case of the previous product —
Alloy — that we did as a reference design, that was one of the few
times we’d actually created a fully-hatched device to be used as a
reference design in the VR space. And it was great. And we learned a
lot of things from it. We learned a lot. We had some key learnings
and some key takeaways from that. What we found was that, for us as a
business, hitting all those other touch points was far more
important. Right? Making sure that the folks that were creating the
content and the experiences were better served; making sure that the
development of cloud delivery mechanisms and cloud technology was
going to serve the community better; and also, increasing the compute
capability for really high-end renderings and so forth — and
delivering it fast — was also necessary. But I think one of the key
areas that we’re going to see advancement in, that’s gonna be super
important for the XR industry, is going to be around 5G.
Alan: I literally just wrote —
as you were talking, you said, “increased compute for rendering
— I wrote “5G” and put a box around it.
Raj: Yeah.
Alan: And you just said 5G;
let’s unpack this. What can people expect? Because all the telcos are
investing a ton of money in building these 5G towers, bringing 5G.
We’re gonna have phones that are 100 times faster. What does that
mean?
Raj: You’re going to be looking
at a pipeline that’s so necessary for the throughput. I think one of
the things that we tend to forget — because there’s always races to
the bottom, and there’s always this notion that we need to make it
smaller and faster and so forth — in the case of XR, one of the
things that tends to get lost in small packaging, right? Whether it’s
small network, or small device, is the fidelity and the intensity of
which we need to consume these content. We’re actually trying to
replace our current reality. And not replace it in the sense that…
it’s more of an augmentation. It’s, “my current reality doesn’t
serve my need to go do something. I need to be in this augmented or
this virtual reality. And in order to do that, I have to have that
capability served to my headset device.” Right? Today, the
highest fidelity is attached to the PC. We know that; the highest
fidelity is attached to the PC. There’s devices coming out that are
going to untether — and obviously, we’ve done work to deliver that
content wirelessly from a PC to an HTC VIVE headset — but
universally, across the board, we want to be able to pick up a device
and have that content either wirelessly transmitted from our local
endpoint — such as a PC — or wirelessly delivered to our headset,
like we’re seeing with Oculus Go and Oculus Quest. Even though
there’s a gate on fidelity today, we don’t want that gate to exist
down in the future.
So what we want to do is increase the
pipe, right? Increase the bandwidth and increase the capability, so
that you can pre-render and deliver things to the headset at a very
fast pace, and at a significantly wider bandwidth, so that you don’t
have those issues with fidelity any longer. Now, for us, that isn’t
just about XR; that’s across the board. That’s gaming. That’s media,
that’s data. Everything we want to be able to do, we want to be able
to do it untethered. Now, I have a fully-gigabit network in my home,
and I am wired to utilize that. Now, I’ve got expensive equipment
that I’ve put in my home to be able to give me up to a gigabit on the
wireless. But again, that pipe is still small, compared to what our
needs are going to be in the future. And as we start to grow on those
needs and there’s a dependency on those needs, to be able to make
decisions at a faster clip, to be able to see things like artificial
intelligence work on our behalf; those are technologies that are
going to require significantly larger bandwidth. And as we as humans
have a higher demand for fidelity — not just in XR, but in our
sports and our TV watching and our films that we consume — having
all of that, without having to plunk down a bunch of wires anywhere
and have it on the go. My favorite thing to do is, if I have to cover
Boston and New York, I love taking the train, right? Because I can
sit and work. I can see the scenes and so forth. I wish I had the
bandwidth. If you look at where we are on… the one thing I
absolutely hate doing is trying to work on an aircraft. Right? It is
daunting, because you’re sitting there waiting for things to
[connect]
. But if you think about it, Alan; that speed is what we
used to operate on on a daily basis.
Alan: I know! I tried to explain
to my kids the dial-up modem. [imitates dial-up modem, laughs].
Raj: So you’ve seen the
evolution of where we’ve come, from where we were, on the bandwidth
and the speed and the availability. And that’s just going to
exponentially have to get larger and faster over time.
Alan: But the crazy thing is,
unless you have to experience that kind of slow-moving data, unless
you have to actually experience that — again — we just take it for
granted, that things just should move really fast.
Raj: Yes, of course.
Alan: Today’s kids being raised
now are handed an iPad when they’re three years old, and they expect
to have access to the world’s knowledge instantly, wherever they are,
whenever they are. And so one thing that I don’t think people really
think about is, when we moved to a AR glasses, or when we move to
devices that we wear on our face for spatial computing, we have to
collect as much or more data about the environment we’re in to be
able to protect the data in context to the world. And people forget
the collection of the data is as important as the projection of the
data.
Raj: I think that’s critical
today, right? Because we are still in consumption mode as we go about
our day-to-day business. Now, it’s not until we sit down somewhere
and do something that the data is bi-directional. I think for the
most part, in our day-to-day lives, it’s uni-directional; meaning
that, we consume if we demand it. As devices become part of our
fabric, in that they collect data and they send up data and process
it for us in real-time and bring some result of that data back to us,
the bi-directional nature of data and how it gets processed and
consumed is going to change significantly over time. And I think that
as we start to get into this more and more spatial computing, where
we are reliant on XR glasses and some form of augmented information
being projected — whether it’s from the phone to the glasses. And
let’s not forget, sometimes it may be that our phone is going to be
the end point and then it will just render into our glasses and so
forth. And I think that’s probably more in the near future than the
glasses itself doing that as a standalone.
Alan: Yeah, I think so as well.
Companies like Magic Leap and Hololens, those are great devices where
most of the compute is done on the headset… well Magic Leap is
actually done on a pack that’s wired in. And that pack doesn’t
necessarily — it’s just an android pack — so it doesn’t necessarily
have to be a standalone thing. It could be your phone. And I think
nobody really knows what Apple is working on. Maybe you do, but…
Raj: I’m certainly not privy to
such information. I wish I was that special, but I’m not [laughs].
Alan: But I’m certain they’re
working on a pair of glasses that you wear them, and your phone is
the compute pack. Because why would we make something that’s
completely standalone for the foreseeable future, we’re still going
to have phones in our pockets? So why not leverage the power of that?
And with 5G and being able to use this cloud compute, or edge
computing, meaning you now have the ability to have high-powered
rendering farms at your disposal through the cloud.
Raj: Yeah.
Alan: You don’t need to have the
rendering on your phone. You need of the rendering availability to
you.
Raj: I always loved, there
was… I can’t remember the exact commercial, but there was a
commercial that talked about moving at the speed of business.
Alan: I love it.
Raj: And I love that slogan,
“moving at the speed of business.” Because we’re going to
see an evolution in how business is conducted. I think one of the key
things was, as I’m sitting here in my office and watching UPS deliver
the package I ordered yesterday from Amazon. You and I, when we were
younger, Alan, and we used to go through a catalog and order
something; we used to wait days. Days on days on days. Sometimes,
we’d order that video game, and it would take almost a month to get
there.
Alan: You checked the door every
day.
Raj: Yeah. I remember, with my
own money, I bought my very own skateboard, and I was just… it took
three weeks to get to me.
Alan: Uhg. Painful!
Raj: And those three weeks were
probably the most painful three weeks ever, as a youngster who was so
into this sport of skateboarding, I just wanted to be like my buddies
who had gotten their rigs already. And it was just like, waiting
those additional three weeks was just insane. But now…
Alan: Now, if it doesn’t come
this afternoon, we’ve got problems!
Raj: I have five kids, Alan. And
it was funny, you were talking about the speed at which they consume
on their iPods. I remember when the local-area AT&T had severed a
line or something, and it was a two hour downtime for them to quickly
get that back up and running. Those two hours, it was hilarious to
watch my kids just squirming, because it was two hours of no Wi-Fi
connectivity. We’re progressing. We’re moving on. We’re becoming a
part of a symbiotic relationship between technology and man, which
hasn’t always been there. I think it’s gotten better over time.
Alan: I was at a talk recently,
talking about the relationship between technology and humans. We talk
about the fact that it hasn’t always been there, but it really has.
Clothing is a form of manmade technology.
Raj: Absolutely.
Alan: We take it for granted,
but would you walk out to your house naked? No. It’s the same with
your phone now. You wouldn’t out of your house without your phone.
It’s just, we’re adding more layers of it. And the internal
combustion engine; try going a day without one.
Raj: Yeah, and look at where
that’s going. When we look at the speed and efficiency that electric
vehicles are now providing. One of the most fascinating things to me
was to sit down with the folks from Formula E. They’re the electric
car racing series, and they were talking about how they utilize blue
algae from the ocean to create the power that drives the cells. So
they’re trying to be the most highly sustainable program to create
electric fuel for these race cars. And when you look at their entire
chain of delivery of fuel, the dependency on these fossil fuels are
— other than what’s coming out naturally from the ocean — is
changing rapidly. We are in a time and a space in our existence that
is unlike anything we have ever seen. And it’s doubling at a rate
that we couldn’t have imagined years ago. Right? And so we’re seeing
a lot of these technologies, and XR is such a huge area in that
space, because it serves such a great purpose for anybody in the
design space of things like this. Right? You can virtually design and
test and put into practice some of these methods utilizing XR today.
Alan: One of the examples that
HTC VIVE was promoting when we had Alvin Wang Greylin on the show was
talking about how a Bell helicopters designed a brand-new helicopter
in six months. And that process normally takes four years.
Raj: It’s crazy. I mean, it’s
insane what you can do. I mean, you look at concept cars. I have
several friends who worked in the automotive industry, and when you
model a concept car — just to do the exterior modeling — it’s all
done through clay, traditionally. The interior modelling has been 2D
designs. There’s never been a marriage of that exterior clay model
and the interior 2D designs in a visual medium, other than building
the car itself. Right? And there hasn’t been a marriage of that.
Today, you can now concept the entire vehicle — to the point where
you can open the door and sit inside of it — and you’re in a
headset. You’re not actually in the vehicle. I think that’s a very
telling story of where this is moving onto.
Alan: Elizabeth Baron from Ford
was on the show, and she was saying that every executive around the
world views every new car in VR before it goes to production.
Raj: I mean, it’s there. It’s
happening. It is a viable tool for the industry. Look at the building
industry. I mean, I love what somebody like BDX is doing. And they’re
right here in my backyard here in Austin. They’re a visualization
company for a vast array of homebuilders throughout the United
States. And they were like, “hey, VR is the thing, man. It’s
something that we have to embrace, because builders aren’t going to
put up every model in their portfolio of homes everywhere.”
Right? They’re going to build one. They’re going to build two. They
might do a row of homes and build three or four. But their portfolio
consists of over a dozen different models. How do you sell a home
that your customer may be on the fence about — no pun intended —
whether they want to buy that house? They’re concerned about the
build and construction and function for their family. What if right
in the sales office, you can just walk them through that house?
Right? They won’t physically do it, they can virtually do it and get
a good look and feel of what their new family home would look like,
and be able to have an easier approach to making that decision.
That’s an invaluable tool for the sales team and for the sales force
that’s looking to close a deal, and it’s the same thing for the
building & construction industry, for major buildings. I mean,
you look at the rate at which right here in Austin, the skyline used
to never look like the way it looks like [now]. Ten years ago, there
were small buildings, maybe five, six storeys at max. And now the
skyline is dotted with these big highrises.
Well, how do you go through and look at
a schematic, or an architectural diagram and say, “yeah, you
know what, I’m happy with what I’m seeing.” And then as the
construction goes on, there are numerous function and cosmetic
changes that have to happen. There are so many companies working in
the AC visualization space that allows architecture teams to be able
to convert their renderings into 3D models that buyers can go through
and be able to see stadiums, for example. I was just in Vegas at the
Experiential Marketing Summit, and as I was driving to it, I was
seeing the new home of the soon-to-be Las Vegas Raiders going up. And
I thought, man, how great would it be? Or has it been we? I don’t
know per se, but what if the owners and the administrative staff at
the team could see what their future stadium would look and feel
like, even with people in it?
Alan: What’s it gonna look like
at 50 percent occupancy versus a hundred percent?
Raj: How do you maximize your
throughput on concessions? I think one of the biggest things we’ve
seen in stadiums in the past is where a lot of people just don’t get
up out of the seat to go buy goods and services, because it’s just
kind of like, “OK, well, this is gonna be a nightmare to go
through and then come back and get to my seat.” What if you
could actually run scenarios and figure out where would be the best
placement of stores and concession stands, to maximize the dollar
input coming from fans who really do want to go get a hot dog and a
beer or something like that? Right? But they’re not willing to do
that because it’s just too inconvenient.
Alan: There’s so many ways you
could use technology even like to go back to… I’m not usually
promoting products specifically, but the RealSense sensors having a
one RealSense camera over each of the vendors could give anybody the
ability to say, here’s the shortest line up to get a hot dog.
Raj: Yeah, exactly.
Alan: “I want to get a hot
dog. Okay, well, here; go to this lineup, because this one’s only got
two people. This one’s got 50.”
Raj: Can you imagine if, again,
that symbiotic relationship between the technology sitting at the
concession stands and you, the user, because it’s feeding you real
time data to your phone? It’s the inconvenience that we’re up against
now. Right? It isn’t that there isn’t enough concession stands. It’s
that there are more people, and there are more people enjoying a ball
game or an event or so forth. And so, as that continues to grow and
as people put on more events and those events continue to grow in
popularity, you’re going to get more people to your location. And
again, location-based VR is another area where the more you have
growth in these concessions, you want to know, hey, “if I go
there today, will I ever get a chance to participate, or will it be
too much of a burden to go and buy a souvenir or a hat or some food
or whatever it may be?” We’re starting to see that and in
theaters, too, now. Right? You can now go on an app, pick your seats
before you even get to the theater, and in some theaters you can even
preorder your food and have it delivered right to your seat when you
get there. I mean, that’s insane. It’s cool. It’s exciting.
Alan: It’s pretty cool.
Raj: But it’s happening. Right?
And it’s happening at that pace. So–
Alan: What kind of world do we
live in?
Raj: Those things like 5G, AI,
RealSense; all these things are going to play a factor in how we move
into the experiential economy even more.
Alan: Let me ask you a question.
My personal mission in life is to inspire and educate future leaders
to think and act in a socially, economically, and environmentally
sustainable way. And I got into VR and AR because I saw an
opportunity to educate — to democratize education — and to create
new types of education. We don’t… math and science and geography,
our school systems do a great job at teaching those things. But where
they fail is in basic success principles, such as mindfulness and
gratitude and positivity and purpose, and also things like financial
planning, management, communication skills, marketing, sales. These
are all fundamentals to successful people. And I see these
technologies as a way to hyper-accelerate that. You guys have done a
lot in education; in fact, you just won an award, the X-Awards, which
is experiential marketing awards for best mobile marketing tour.
Maybe you can talk about that? It was the tech learning lab, and talk
about what you guys are doing in the education sphere, and how Intel
is bringing this technology to the students and what that looks like.
Raj: One of the great things
about my job and what I do at Intel is, we’re very purposeful about
things. Right? We’re very purposeful about unlocking capabilities in
the technology. And then sometimes, in that process of being
purposeful of unlocking capability, we run into happy little
accidents, or happy little explorations that we’re like, “huh?
That’s really not what we thought of.” And so we should do
something about that. So in this particular case, I’m going to go
back a little bit. We had been approached to look at AR and VR for
our SSD technology called Octane. This is much faster than your
traditional SSD technology. And the whole idea was, can we go to a
museum and scan — or do something — with photogrammetry for
example, of one of their artifacts or paintings? So we put out a
feeler to a couple of friends that we had, and it just so happened
that Smithsonian American Art Museum was one of those that responded
and said, “hey, let’s talk.” And so it started off as we
were going to do a workload analysis and proof point on 3D rendering
through the Octane, SSD, and how fast we would see the difference
between the two. Previous generation versus this new Octane SSD. OK,
put that aside. We began to walk through the museum with
then-director Betsy Brown and deputy director Rachel Allen, and also
head of digital and so forth, Sara Snyder. Anyway, the three of us —
myself photogrammetrist Greg Downing, and my producer friend Peter
Martin — the three of us were walking with the three of them, and
what we got was a very one-on-one education about the museum, and
about individual artists, and about curation, and about the process
in which the museum puts things together. It was very educational.
Suddenly it pivoted from, “hey, we need to go prove this
technology out,” to, “we now have this story, this very
important information about the museum. How do we then put that in
to… how do we make that subject matter? How do we make that the
experience that is enriching?” Right? So what we wanted to do is
say, “hey, this is more about about enrichment than it is about
proving out a workload. We can do that as a byproduct.” That was
no big deal. But being able to enrich the user was far more
important.
So then we embarked on this journey of
trying to move the Smithsonian American Art into this place of
exploring XR and exploring AR and VR and so forth. And what came out
of that was a very amazing campaign around this curation called No
Spectators. As we started to explore and unpack how people utilized
the content to learn — how did they learn about the curators? How
did they learn about the museum? How did they learn about the art and
artifacts? — we found that when anybody got inside the headset, the
retention of that information had a high value and they would come
out of it and there would be a big smile on their face. “Oh, my
gosh, this is amazing. And I can’t believe it was able to come to
me.” The next step in that was, well, why don’t we take this on
the road? Why don’t we take these museum experiences? Why don’t we
find some other educational experiences — which we found with our
partners over at VictoryVR, Steve Grubbs.
Alan: He was on the on the show!
Raj: Yes, Steve’s a great guy.
Right? And Steve’s so gung-ho, man. He’s so excited about this space
and what he’s doing. I love heroic people like Steve Grubbs. Because
they go, “look, I’m doing this. I know this is important. I know
this is necessary and I’m going to go for it.” And so we
partnered with him and we also partnered with HP, which provided all
the equipment, as well as HTC on the headsets. We also had Oculus
participate, which was great. “Who’s this wonderful…? Hey, we
are Switzerland. Let’s go do something together, to really educate
teachers and students about what VR is.” Right? It’s not just
about playing video games or looking at 360 videos. It’s so much more
than that. We really partnered in with Infinity Marketing, who’s been
our great agency partner on bringing to life crazy ideas and
activations. We wanted to hit up 16 locations we wanted to get to. I
think we went to 12 schools. We went to four affiliate museums of the
Smithsonian Institution, and we did truck stops and we brought out
hundreds of kids and teachers and principals and administrative staff
and really just opened up this truck. It was this big cargo container
truck that sort of transformed into this tech lab. And we ushered a
ton of students and teachers through it. And not only do we show them
experiential enrichment through the museum type experiences, but we
also gave them hands-on learning tools, like being able to dissect a
frog.
I think one of the great things that
one of the teachers came and told me was, “we have to do the
frog thing because it’s so necessary for our science classes. But 1.
it’s expensive to get the frogs, and 2. its smells. And the kids hate
it. We hate it. But the virtual one was so much fun and so close to
the real thing that a lot of them were asking, hey, how can I just
replace this? Even if all I did was replace the frog dissection in my
science class, it would be worth it.” Right?
Alan: Yep. And there’s so much
more that can be unlocked in the school systems using this
technology. When I say we’ve only scratched the surface, it’s
literally like, there’s so many things that can be brought into a
classroom. You can bring the world into a classroom.
Raj: In this particular
instance, while VR was the center point because we did have quite a
few workstations out there that are doing — by the way, a shout out
to HTC, because had it not been for their new Base Station 2.0
capability, we wouldn’t be able to have the number of headsets that
we had inside of a truck; wouldn’t have been possible.
Alan: The crazy thing is, Alvin
was telling me that the new Base Stations that are coming out — Base
Stations, for those people that don’t know, are the outside sensors
pointing into the headsets to triangulate where each of the headsets
is — they’ve got these new sensors that can detect up to 40 headsets
simultaneously of the VIVE Focus, which is the standalone unit. It
doesn’t require a computer. So you can have up to 40 people in a
warehouse-sized space, and the space that they pick up is like the
size of two football fields. It’s insane.
Raj: Yeah. Could you imagine
doing training for big corporate-type environments, doing simulation
for corporate-type environments — doing warehouse training, for
example — if you want to get a team of people spun up on how to run
and operate and maintain a warehouse. This is the thing, Alan. Right?
We do these explorations in various different segments like
education, like training, like working with Bell, for example, to be
able to train their future pilots. Working with automotive to help
design vehicles and so forth. Again, the symbiosis there, they all
intertwine and lead to the use and the capability to really serve
each other. It’s not as much of a segmented approach as we think it
is. It’s actually different segments that it applies to, but the
totality of what we’re looking at is something that’s all-serving,
which is why I think XR super important the commercial landscape,
because it can do many things.
Alan: Agreed; I couldn’t agree
more. I want to thank you for your time and agreeing to be on this
podcast; I’m sure everybody listening has been very grateful for you
taking the time to share this. We can feel your passion through the
podcast. And so, I can ask you one final question.
Raj: Sure.
Alan: What problem in the world
do you want to see solved with XR Technologies?
Raj: You know, probably the
thing that I’m most passionate about is the healthcare industry. To
be honest with you… there was a documentary that I watched on…I
think it was Netflix… and it was about a man who bought a bunch of
iPods and he took them to nursing homes, where you had a lot of
elderly folks who’re either suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s or
had traumatic brain injuries and so forth. And when these individuals
would put on the headphones and listen to music from their genre,
suddenly their brain started firing off. They were able to recall
things that they had never spoken about to their caregivers and so
forth. And what we’re seeing with VR today is that is starting to
happen. We can utilize VR to remap nerves, to remap brain function to
those nerves. We’re seeing that happen out of Brazil, for example.
We’re seeing opiate addiction being reduced through the use of VR.
Everything from surgical procedures being mapped out — a high level
of success on surgical procedures, we’ve seen through our partners at
Surgical Theater. I think that’s a huge area that hasn’t quite been
unlocked yet, and that’s the thing that excites me the most.
Alan: Well, I’m sure there will
be countless scenarios in which RealSense cameras and Intel parts are
being used across all parts of healthcare as we move into spatial
computing as a complete platform for the future of computing. So,
thank you so much.
Raj: Yeah. One day at a time,
and many leaps forward as they come, right? That’s how we’ll continue
to keep driving innovation.
51 min
July 29, 2019 Making Holograms a Reality Through Volumetric Capture, with Intel's Raj Puran
Princess Leia's
desperate holographic plea to Obi-Wan Kenobi might have been a vision
of the far flung future in 1977, but today, volumetric capture is
making that a reality. Using cameras and the AR cloud to map and
replicate an object in three-dimensional space, volumetric capture
has lots of practical use cases - Raj and Alan talk about a bunch of
them.
Alan: Today's guest is Raj
Puran, director of client XR Business Development and Partnerships at
Intel. Raj is a 25-year veteran of the semiconductor and software
industry with Intel Corp. He is currently director of Business
Development and Strategic Partnerships, focusing on growth areas of
compute in virtual, augmented, and extended realities. Raj has spent
the last four years of his tenure on building business opportunities,
use cases, experiential marketing with partnerships in location-based
entertainment, museums, education and other commercial XR segments.
Prior to moving into business development, Raj has held several
positions in I.T. systems, engineering, data center engineering,
information security, network and cellular IP development, ERP
business engineering, and Healthcare Solutions Development Budget
leads opportunities for his customers and partners to utilize
exciting and intense compute power in the immersive technology and XR
landscape. Through a collective ecosystem of compute-focused
processing, storage, sensing technology, data processing, content
creation solutions, and new innovations in the area of wireless VR,
AR, 5G, artificial intelligence, volumetric capture, and immersive
sports available from Intel. To learn more about Intel, visit
Intel.com. Raj, I'm very excited to welcome to the show. Thank you so
much for coming on.
Raj: Alan, thanks for having me.
It's a pleasure to speak to you again.
Alan: It's really amazing. The
last time we saw each other was at the Mixed Reality Marketing Summit
in New York City, which was a really amazing conference. It was kind
of like an un-conference. It was in the basement of the National
Geographic exhibit, where you could walk around and see all sorts of
amazing things. And in the basement of this center was some of the
brightest minds in XR Technologies getting together to discuss the
marketing capabilities. And I know you have worked on everything from
the marketing side to education side. Tell us, what are you doing at
Intel to drive XR forward?
Raj: Yeah, I think the biggest
thing for us is we are known as a PC platform company, but I think
we're bigger than that, obviously. We're doing things in the area of
volumetric capture. We're working on a portable volumetric solutions
like RealSense sensing solutions, which allows you to create really
elaborate programs around immersive media and immersive experiences.
Alan: Let's unpack that one
thing. What do you mean by volumetric capture?
Raj: Volumetric capture has
generally been where you place a subject or an object or a person in
a series of cameras, right? So this is basically a room; an array of
cameras are set up, and the subject is in the center point of that
array of cameras. And essentially, a singular object is captured, and
then it's -- utilizing point cloud and the camera data -- you
essentially create a 3D object, right? That could be a 3D rendering
of said person, or object, or whatever that subject may be. And you
are able to then utilize that; whether you utilize it in a 2D
production or 3D production like VR, you can then utilize that to be
used as holograms, or virtual characters, or so forth.
Alan: So being able to create
recreate the Star Wars little hologram thing.
Raj: Absolutely. And that's one
of the use cases, right? So, holograms; a pretty exciting use case
for something like that. But, you can also th
0 min
July 26, 2019 Building the Foundation of The Spatial Web, with VERSES founder Gabriel Rene
The web page is
a deceptively simple invention, but its creation — and more
importantly, its cross-programmability — made the World Wide Web the
technological powerhouse it has become. Gabriel Rene founded VERSES
to encourage similar similar developments in spacial computing.
Alan: Today’s guest is Gabriel
Rene, an architect and founder of The VERSES Foundation. He’s a
technologist, entrepreneur, researcher, media and music producer,
whose 25-year career in the technology, telecom and entertainment
industry has granted him the knowledge and experience to consistently
invent unique business verticals, and to navigate the novel
challenges of the emerging global digital entertainment, marketing,
e-com, mobile and spatial technology markets. aAs a deep technology
pioneer, mobile executive, and corporate strategist, Gabriel has
built multiple innovative technology companies, developed
groundbreaking enterprise and consumer software, and forged strategic
partnerships with multiple Fortune 50 companies. Rene has worked with
— and advised some of — the world’s largest brands, spanning media
conglomerates, telcos, media manufacturers, mobile manufacturers,
governments, and major brands. As a C-level executive founder, he has
demonstrated unique leadership, strategic and operational
capabilities in growing businesses from zero to $25-million in annual
revenues. As an advisor and board member, he has helped multiple
startups and founders navigate their way to success. Gabriel serves
as the executive director of the VERSES Foundation, an organization
at the intersection of Block Chain, Virtual Reality, and Artificial
Intelligence technologies designed to power Web 3.0 and dedicated to
the interoperable adoption of spatial technologies across every major
industry. As the founder and executive director of VERSES, the Global
Advisory Board Member and co-chair of the AR Cloud Committee, and a
founding member of the Open AR Cloud. With that, I want to welcome
Gabriel Rene. Thank you for joining us on the show.
Gabriel: Thank you, Alan. It’s a
pleasure to be here.
Alan: Where can people find you
online if they want to look into it?
Gabriel: Well, if it’s me
personally, you can find me @GabrielRene at LinkedIn, and you can
also find me on Twitter under the same name. And then with VERSES,
you can go to VERSES.io to get all the latest information on us.
Alan: So let’s unpack this. Tell
me what you’re doing at VERSES right now, and I want to get the full
understanding of what is VERSES, and why it’s important for people
listening.
Gabriel: So I guess the first
place to start is way back in 1990 or so. There was a young, talented
researcher by the name of Tim Berners-Lee, who was working at the
CERN Institute, and he was developing a new set of technologies which
have come to be known as the World Wide Web protocols. So those are
all the HTTP, which was hypertext transfer protocol, and HTML, which
is a hypertext markup language. That, combined with a browser, which
he developed as an open source standard, and on top of the domain
structure that had been pre-existing — which we’d been using from
the email era of .coms and .edu, .org, etc. — he created this you
URL format, which essentially made pages programmable, gave us the
ability to link content on those pages, and the ability to network
those pages. This, of course, became the World Wide Web.
The majority of our technologies and
power and advantages and capability today, whether in business or
personal lives, in public or private sector, come from the benefits
of these core protocols that enable the network. But it’s
fundamentally a network of pages and text and media. And now, with
the dawn of new interfaces that come with XR technologies —
particularly augmented reality for the real world, or more for the
physical world, and VR more for a digital world — we need a new set
of protocols that enable us to essentially, instead of creating web
pages, create web spaces; a programming language for spaces, if you
will. We need a way to connect those spaces, so we can teleport
objects, content, and information between them, much like we do with
links and media content today on the web, which we call hyperspace
transfer protocol, or HSTP. Our nonprofit Foundation is developing
and maintaining these open source spatial domain and protocol
standards, and using them to connect all of the various emerging
technologies that we feel are part of this Web 3.0 architecture,
which we call the spatial web.
Alan: All right. So… you used
a lot of terminology there. Let’s break it down for people. What
would a use case be for a business to use the spatial web?
Gabriel: It’s it’s one of the
hardest questions to ask, because–
Alan: I’m full of the hard
questions, my friend. This is not a podcast for amateurs; you are a
professional in the space. If anybody can explain it, I have faith in
you, my friend.
Gabriel: Well, if we’re talking
about XR for business, let’s talk about the long term value of XR as
opposed to the value today. We’ll certainly circle back around and
talk about the practicalities, the importance of certain applications
today, but let’s talk about the long term benefits.
Alan: Love it.
Gabriel: So, when we think about
spatial technologies as they relate to business, just like the web
technologies of today or the Internet technology we’ve been using for
a while, they give us the advantage of something we call network
effects. Network effects are the ability to connect to other parties,
whether that’s inside our organizations or outside of our
organizations; across many different spheres. The power of those
communication technologies come by virtue of a protocol, and
protocols are basically just a recipe — or format — for coming up
with some sort of structure for how parties can communicate. So, the
idea that spatial computing itself is a new form of computer; at one
point, we used to drive horses and carriages around, and then the
emergence of the automobile came about. But the roads were still mud
and dirt roads. So it’s really difficult to actually get from Point A
to Point B with a car. When the ability to create standardized cement
and asphalt roads emerged, that sort of format and standard for that
enabled cars to then navigate between Point A and Point B very, very
quickly.
Obviously, this transformed things,
like our mail service and our messaging service; our postal service.
The basis for protocols — whether they’re roads for cars, whether
they’re are cables for electricity, whether it’s the Internet and web
protocols that we use today — create an effect where we’re able to
network and communicate with each other at scale. So specifically, as
it relates to augmented and virtual reality content; today, there is
no ability for you to send me an augmented reality object — let’s
say an architectural diagram. You and I cannot collaborate with it
from two different parts of the world in VR without being in the same
app. Furthermore, we can’t then teleport it to, say, the boss’s
corner office of his twenty-third-floor building in New York. Because
there is no spatial address for that location. So what you need to be
able to do is, for any form of network, you need to have a standard
for an address, whether that’s a home address, whether it’s a
telephone number, or radio number, or what we call web addresses. We
create spatial addresses that suddenly allow you to teleport objects
and information. Now, the other thing that’s critically important
is–
Alan: Just, sorry, just to
interject for one second. This isn’t just an address of a street.
This is three dimensional.
Gabriel: Correct.
Alan: So this could be a space
in the air.
Gabriel: Yeah. So, imagine a
spatial coordinate. That would be a three-dimensional point in space.
If I want to get to a building, I can follow the roads and it can get
me from Point A to Point B, but it’s essentially a two dimensional
map that I’m using. If I want to get something to someone in a
particular location in space, I don’t have a digital address for
that. And so part of what VERSES does is it makes that address
available, and then makes it so that a physical building or location
can be part of what we would call a “spatial domain,” and a
spatial domain is just like a web domain today. If you have control
over that domain, then you get to control the rights and permissions
within that space, as it relates to digital content, digital
information, and even robotics and other IoT devices.
Alan: Everybody would have to
buy into this.
Gabriel: That’s correct. The
ultimate value here is, how do you create standard methodology and
format for interactions in space, whether it’s for a human or for a
robot? And then how do you create rights and permissions that can
become standardized with respect to how content can be accessed in a
space as opposed to a page.
Alan: I just want to give people
a picture of this. This actually came up in a conversation around the
legal aspects of augmented reality and how Burger King recently did a
marketing campaign where you could take your phone and point their
app at McDonald’s or the competitor ad, and it would catch on fire in
AR and then give you a coupon or something. But then the legal
question came of, well, who owns the digital space around that
billboard, or around that poster?
Gabriel: Yeah.
Alan: This is exactly what
you’re talking about; being able to identify digital space in three
dimensions, and apply it or assign it to somebody.
Gabriel: Yeah, exactly. So,
there’s two levels. One is kind of around rights and permissions and
policy around what we might call spatial content. But again, imagine
spatial content is really digital information in space; information
of what a drone can do, or an automated vehicle or a robot, is
actually also information in space. So, you can control the flight
path of drones, or where automated cars can and cannot park, or
whether charges need to occur if they go from Point A to Point B. The
same functionality enables a user to not just have a
permissions-based restrictions, but really, what they’re supposed to
do. The ability to have field workers across any industry —
construction, warehouses, logistics, etc. — actually follow digital
information as, like, arrows in space that might route them. For
example, in a warehouse, instead of a pick-and-pack worker looking at
a nine-digit code on their screen and trying to find that box in
space, you can actually just have a marker right on the box itself.
They can look through an iPhone — which uses ARKit now — or a Magic
Leap headset, or a Microsoft Hololens headset or the other smart
glasses that’ll be coming, and that worker now can just follow that
arrow right to that location, pick that object, and move it from
Point A to Point B from, let’s say, the pick-and-pack area to the
dock, and then registering that interaction back into the warehouse
management system. But interestingly enough, it also allows you to
walk into a retail location, be identified spatially, pick up a 7Up
can, and walk out of the location and have it trigger and
transaction. This same functionality enables all kinds of different
use cases.
Alan: Indeed; this is some deep
stuff, here. This really will impact everything we do.
Gabriel: Yes, in the same way
that the web technologies really transformed our world. I mean, you
could look at it as the power of computing on one level — spatial
computing — but on the other level, you need to look at the power of
networks, which would be spatial networking. So in one sense, we
often tend to look through the lens of computers. We go back and we
look at the PC Revolution, which was incredibly powerful. But it
really wasn’t until those became connected to other networks, like
the World Wide Web or like the Internet, that we got these network
effects, where we add value to each other by virtue of our our
ability to communicate and share. That’s where we are right now.
Spatial computing is just creating the
PCs of this spatial web era. But in order to get a spatial web, we
need a way to have a spatial network protocol, much like the World
Wide Web protocols or the Internet protocols that are designed for
three dimensional space, that are designed with the sort of rights
and permissions that deal with privacy and security issues that we’re
lacking in Web 2.0, that will then get us the most benefit from the
Internet of Things. And from AI, and edge computing and spatial
transactions and all these other wonderful sci-fi functions that we’d
like to have.
Alan: Sounds like a very, very
good use case for the block chain.
Gabriel: It is. In the Internet
of Things sort of industry 4.0 narrative, which Deloitte and McKinsey
and Gartner and Accenture and others are really promoting as this key
era of digital transformation for all businesses. They refer to
something called a digital twin. Are you familiar with this term?
Alan: Actually, I am. We
actually had the head of VR for Shell on today, and we were talking
about digital twins of oil rigs; how it will create a digital twin in
order to test, what if we have to replace this big piece of
machinery? They create a digital twin, and they’ll remove it
digitally and say, “oh, okay, well, it fits coming out, but the
new one going in is going to hit these pipes.” Doing that
digitally, allowed them to pre-visualize that. That was one of the
use cases that came up today in the conversation. So, maybe you can
unpack it a bit.
Gabriel: Digital twin is
essentially a three-dimensional visualization of a physical world
thing or location, and may contain the processes involved in it. For
example, the most traditional use is you have a number of sensors on
something, let’s say an engine in a car. Those sensors, then, are
giving you information about temperature and speed and potentially
the amount of fluids. And right now we look at like a dashboard or
sort of dials and numbers. A digital twin of that would actually just
show the engine. We’d see that information projected into the engine:
“Oh, the engine’s getting hot, but it’s one particular area
that’s getting hot. In fact, it’s one part that’s getting hot.”
Now that lets you as the owner, or even a third party, be able to
access that information, whether it’s in a test environment inside of
Toyota, or if it’s in a maintenance capacity. Suddenly you’ve got
this three-dimensional visualization that you can think of as a real
time soft copy of a physical thing. Not to go too far out, but with
these concepts of the AR Cloud where you have a digital twin of
everything and everyone in the world — where you’ve got essentially
a real time soft copy of the world in three-dimensions, right? Sort
of a three-dimensional mesh of everything, or as Charlie Fink likes
to say, “painting the world with data.” The problem about
thinking of it through this lens of visualization or projection
technologies only, is that it turns out a lot of really important
information is tied to our physical environment.
For example, that engine. The question
really becomes, “am I looking at the right engine or is this the
copy?” The data associated with the identity of that part: is it
accurate? And who should have permissions, or the ability to access
that information? Who can move it? Who can update it? Who can share
it? Block chain becomes a very powerful — or, let’s call it
distributed ledger technologies, which includes block chain, but also
includes several other approaches to what we call a trusted data
layer for the spatial web — it becomes a real requirement in certain
cases where you want to have proof that the history of the
information associated with that digital twin has a unique,
verifiable I.D., all of the behaviors and activities around it can be
permissioned and rights can be associated with it, and even
transactions can be attached to it using crypto currencies or other
form of digital payments. Block chains takes digital twins and turns
them into smart twins; they become smart assets and digital twins
sort of merging together. Now you’ve got verifiable data, and this
becomes very critical when we start to look at industrial
environments or high-transactional environments. We want to rely on
those data sets. And it also allows them to be shareable. Now you’ve
got a single source of truth for the data around this
three-dimensional object.
Alan: Very interesting. If we’re
looking at these digital twins of things in the world, for example —
and I make this comment when I do speaking engagements — that every
single thing in the world is going to need a digital version of it.
Like, everything. From a pair shoes, to a coffeemaker, to everything.
Everything will have a 3D version of it. One of the things that we’ve
been working on is content management, or digital asset management
system, for retailers to deal with the fact that every product that
they sell is going to need to be shown in 3D. So, how do you impress
upon people that this is coming in? And what are the timelines around
this? Is this something that’s 20 years out, or is this something
that — I know from my theories, but I would love to hear your idea
of when do you think this is going to be something that every company
needs?
Gabriel: Well, I would say that
right now, if you’re a company that deals with the physical activity
of people moving objects in three dimensional space, whether this is
in a warehouse, whether this is in a retail environment, whether this
is a supply chain, you can begin — and should begin — using these
technologies immediately. The test that we’ve been doing here in Los
Angeles in some local warehouses, where we’re able to create these
spatial workflows, tasking and routing functionality, practically
doubles the amount of time it takes for even a seasoned to
pick-and-pack worker to be able to do X number of picks in a given
day. That’s with holding a phone with one hand. So, as we begin to
work with Magic Leap and Hololens and some of these others, and
you’re able to do hands-free, and the headsets become able to be worn
for longer periods, et cetera, et cetera, we expect that to increase
over time. But right now, today, those kinds of advantages exist.
There are other companies, you know, working on spatial
visualization.
Alan: One of the things I saw at
AWE — actually, I think it was two years ago — was a company that
helped pick-and-pack workers to better stack and pack a pallet. And
it sounds very trivial, but you consider; pallets go in the back of
trucks, and if they’re not completely full, you’re wasting a lot of
volume space. And if they’re not packed efficiently… nobody’s going
to unpack a pallet just to make sure that, you know, an extra box
could fit on there. But if you could look at the pallet and see
digitally where the best angle of the boxes or items would be to
maximize that space, we could save a lot of transportation costs.
Gabriel: This is exactly what
you were just talking about earlier with the digital twin… was it
an oil plant or oil rig.
Alan: Yeah, an oil rig.
Gabriel: Yeah. So they were
running a simulation inside of a digital twin of, “we want to
move this object from here to here. What’s easiest path, or how will
it fit?” It’s the exact same spatial question as, “where
should these boxes go and in what order?” It’s really the
gamification of reality. The difference in that case is, you’re
projecting that information into the physical world and using it as a
way to actually fulfill the workflow or the activity, which is really
profound, when you realize the implications of this across any
physical activity.
Alan: It’s crazy that this can
be used for moving a $100-million manufacturing machine–.
Gabriel: That’s right.
Alan: –or a $10 box. And the
value is still there, because there’s a value across every single
part of the enterprise.
Gabriel: That’s right. And
what’s also fascinating is that this reduces error rates to near
zero, because — provided your data is accurate — there is just no
excuse for picking the wrong box. Right? I think Ori Inbar has made
some suggestions about the benefits of the AR Cloud as adding
trillions of dollars to the global economy over the next several
decades. I actually think he’s wrong. I think he’s off by a
significant exponential margin, because when you start to add the
benefits and the functionality of those activities, and then you
start to make those activities themselves transactional, it’s
probably an entirely new era. You know, we did go from 10-trillion
dollars in the 1950s global GDP — about when digital transformation
started — to nearly 100-trillion now, in about 70 years. You can see
over the next two or three decades, there is a likelihood of even an
accelerated, exponential growth of GDP. Of course, I think a lot of
us would like to see global markers for health beyond mere economic
numbers, but that certainly would help.
Alan: It would be great if we
could — I explained to you my mission, to inspire and educate future
leaders to think in a socially, economically and
environmentally-sustainable way. It’s taken me decades to articulate
that one specific mission, because businesses are measured by one
measure only, and that’s profitability. We need to start thinking
about, how do we compensate businesses for the social, environmental
and economic aspects of their business? And in equal thirds, because
without the environmental sustainability, we’re all going to die
anyway. And if we don’t have the social responsibility of it, then
what’s the point of creating these efficiencies if it’s just going to
make people be unemployed, and we have no economy, nobody can spend
any money anyway? So, we really have to think of all three together,
and we need to — I don’t know how — but we need to somehow change
the way we measure the value of companies. And I think, yeah… I
don’t know how to get there yet, but I think it’s true education of
the next generations, in my opinion.
Gabriel: Oh, that is clearly a
critical part, and thank you, for your dedication to that aspect of
it, Alan. You know, it’s hard to ignore that today is Earth Day. As
we sit here, we’re faced with an existential threat that a certain
proportion of the population is able to acknowledge, and another
portion is simply ignoring. And sadly, too few of our leaders fall
into that second camp. You said a sentence that we use a lot at
VERSES, which is kind of a famous quote from Peter Drucker, which is
that we can’t manage what we can’t measure. So the power of spatial
computing technologies is that we begin to measure — I want to make
a quick statement here. Sometimes when I say spatial, I don’t mean
just XR. IoT is providing spatial information. All of the–
Alan: Spacial audio; being able
to walk down the street and have audio cues guide you. It can be
sent.
Gabriel: That’s right. And even
the ability to just do an Amazon Go-like transaction is actually a
spatial transaction. So, spacial is the trend of the entire industry
4.0 era. I mean, you can even see the term as it relates to edge
compute or ubiquitous AI, or decentralized distributed computing
blocking. Obviously, the spatial computing aspect of XR. But but the
important part I’d like to note is that as we’re using all of those
technologies, now we’re able to measure in reliable ways where we can
trust the data, what’s taking place in the world. So whether you
start to look at mining facilities and doing Lidar scans of mining
facilities, and able to then have that information be available,
shareable, even the information that will come from the apps of the
future become our appliances. Right?
Alan: I got to stop you for one
second, because you mentioned mining, and we’ve worked with some of
the biggest mining companies in the world. Michelle Ash used to be
the head of innovation for Barrick Gold. And in one of her talks —
this is one of the reasons why we started working with them — she
mentioned something about the accuracy of being able to take the
measurements; so, they drill down and they take core samples. Within
a very good margin, they know how much gold is in a certain area of
land. She mentioned, maybe in the near future, being able to just
know that information and visualize it in spatial computing ways to
show investors, here’s where the gold is; the safest place to store
that gold is in the ground. So, let’s not dig one ton of rock out for
every gram of gold, and let’s focus on keeping it where it is — it’s
safe there, we know where it is when we need it — but really, does
the world — as humanity — do we as people need more gold dug out of
the ground?
The answer is no, we don’t. We have
tons and tons of gold sitting in storage lockers that can be used for
industrial applications, or jewelry or whatever. We don’t need to dig
more out. If we can fundamentally use spatial computing and spatial
visualization for investing in things that we don’t actually need to
dig out of the ground, I thought that was a really unique way to
position it.
Gabriel: Absolutely. Who did you
say that you spoke with? Was that at Barrick?
Alan: Yeah, Barrick Gold.
Michelle Ash.
Gabriel: I don’t know if it was
Michelle, but I was speaking at an event last year that XPRIZE and
Peter Diamandis was doing with Deloitte. I spoke to someone from
Barrick about the exact same thing.
Alan: That would’ve been
Michelle for sure.
Gabriel: Yeah. Michelle Ash, is
that it?
Alan: Yep.
Gabriel: But what’s fascinating
about that is, the other thing that you need there is you really then
need distributed ledger technology to validate the numbers. The goal.
Alan: Yep.
Gabriel: But there’s kind of two
levels of validation there. Show me the spatial thing; show me where
exactly we’re talking about. Then give me the data and way that I
know has been tampered with. So, you can see that the two together
become really powerful ways of rethinking about what we extract, how
we extract it, and how we use it. And over time, as we begin to use
personal IoT sensors and wearables, everything that we are doing
becomes tracked, so the ability to now manage the world in an
entirely different way — whether it’s our businesses or our lives or
our ecological resources — becomes possible, but only because we
begin to spatially network all these technologies, not because
they’re computers by themselves.
Alan: Interesting. Yeah, I think
it’s going to open up incredible possibilities. Right now, mining
companies, for example, they have a formula. If they know that if
they dig a certain amount of rock out based on their studies, they’ll
get a certain amount of gold. But at what point does recycling gold
from old electronics actually become more cost-effective than digging
it out of rock? At what point can we start to really look at what
we’ve already extracted, and how do we recycle that? And I think if
you can track the materials down to that level — like, we got this
much gold out of recycling from recycled electronics versus digging
it into the ground — and that goes into the full score of the
environmental score of a company making those electronics? That’s
what you’re talking about, right?
Gabriel: What we’d like to know
is that that data’s both accurate and can be relied upon; it can’t be
tampered with. And then it also makes it shareable, but it also makes
that data itself monetizeable.
Alan: Ah.
Gabriel: So now you can create
data marketplaces, and actually incentivize people to then share that
information. This is a lot of these sort of open data formats, or
things that are happening. Like, here in Los Angeles, there’s an
entire open data open map project that’s in partnership with Esri,
which is one of our partners, that is allowing all this public
information to be presentable and usable and remixable and able to be
analyzed by the public. And as we start to think about the entire
planet as a single ecosystem, which clearly it is, but we haven’t
been thinking of it that way very well.
Alan: No, we still think in
terms of countries for some reason.
Gabriel: Well, I think, you
know, it’s that… yeah. Nation states and platforms are the same
thing, and today’s platforms and larger than some of our nation
states. So it is now time to come to the realization that these are
single ecosystems, and ecosystems trade. They trade carbon, they
trade nitrogen, they trade air, they trade water. This is how nature
naturally works. I think we’ve just gotten to the point now where our
technologies are able to digitally do what nature’s been doing for
billions of years.
Alan: Yeah, it’s… it’s so
vast, and it’s so hard for people to wrap their heads around. So
let’s take it back to what people can do now to leverage these
technologies in their current business. Because, we’ve talked way out
there on how spatial computing is going to allow Internet of Things
sensors to provide real-time data in a reliable manner that will
really allow all businesses to reduce their carbon footprints, their
impact socially and environmentally, but also their bottom line.
Their economics.
Gabriel: While increasing
profit.
Alan: At the end of the day,
until we change how we measure companies, they’re measured based on
profit. I’ve had so many different interviews on this podcast, and
the one major one that comes out every single time is training. You
cannot dispute the fact that virtual and augmented reality training
makes good business sense. What are some of the other use cases
outside of that?
Gabriel: Well, I actually think
the number one use case, which we’ll see emerge over the next decade
— which I think is roughly the timeline for transition from mobile
to spatial; not a complete conversion, but rather the dominant
interface, and that’s not that long period of time, especially in the
enterprise space — the number one thing will actually be spatial
workflow management. So the real problem we have just from a
practical day-to-day business challenge is that most businesses are
operational, meaning that they have physical activities that take
place; in a field, in an office, in a building, in a logistics
capacity. Right now, those, you can train people in VR, which is
wonderful to be able to do that.
We’ve seen some wonderful work coming
out around the Hololens 2, which looks at like scale, you’ll be able
to have sort of the ability to have that training be on the object
itself, because you can project the information onto that piece of
equipment itself. “You push this button, then pull this lever,
then…” and so you go from this sort of virtual environment,
which is 100 percent safe, to then like an environment where they’re
actually interfacing with the physical object by projecting the
digital twin onto it and then walking through a series of steps.
That’s wonderful. That’s super powerful.
Alan: I got to stop you because
I learned something in my last podcast. The company, a AR-Experts,
they were building digital twins and overlaying them on top of
physical objects, and then creating the digital overlay. They
realized that most people that are actually working on this would
prefer not to have the whole physical or digital overlay on top; just
the information they need on top of it, which is interesting because
they were making a full, beautiful, replicated digital twin of the
object and overlaying it on top of that. But they’re like, “we
can’t see the real one; take that thing out of the way.”
Gabriel: I think that, for the
time being, a lot of the challenges will be around the UX. We don’t
know what the optimal UX is in three-dimensional space with regard to
physical things. And I think people like, you know, Timoni West and
others at Unity are doing great work around exploring what those
spatial digital interactions and user experiences really need to be
over time. I mean, if we look back at the history of digital maps —
MapQuest days — used to give us the entire list of 20 turns, and
you have to keep going back, figure out which turn you’re supposed to
be on, find the number, not crash, then okay, now I make a right turn
in 250 yards. Then with Google Maps, it gives us a better option,
where we can see the path. But even then, what’s most useful is
actually the audio, because it just gives you what you need when you
need it. And spatial will probably have to do something very similar.
I don’t need to know the next five steps or the next four objects.
Just give me the next one and then the next one. And the thing is
that in the world of video games, we figured all this out. We just
haven’t been able to apply it to the world. But when we do, I believe
that we’re going to see just enormous efficiency gains, improvement,
retention, and the profit margins are just going to go through the
roof.
The interesting challenge there is that
as we’re augmenting humans with this digital information — these new
sort of spatial workflows and tasking — it does also pave the road
to robotic automation. So there is a number of questions that come up
around, how humans and robots work together in the same spaces? What
happens when automation replaces humans? And obviously, there are
larger ethical and economic and regulatory considerations that have
to happen around all of this. But as a business, immediately, you can
start to see advantages. And my argument is get out there and start
making mistakes first. The ones that learn from these mistakes are
going to be the ones that dominate in the next decade. For example,
in the warehouse space, we’re projecting a 45 percent profit margin
increase from the ability to do spatial workflow picking at scale.
And I can tell you right now that that is a competitive logistics
industry. And if you’re not keeping up with technology, with the
spatial transformation, you’re likely to be unable to compete in the
next decade.
Alan: That’s a pretty bold
statement.
Gabriel: Well, we’re testing it
live. We’re seeing it every day right now.
Alan: I know. That’s why I said
it’s a bold statement. I didn’t dispute it! I’ve seen it all. We’re
doing the test, too, and it’s like, training alone is in the order of
50 to 75 percent better training retention rates, and like near zero
error rates when you’re using real-time AR. So when you’re saying a
45 percent increase in productivity and profit, it sounds ridiculous.
Like, if you take any enterprise and say, “we’re going to
increase your profits by 4 percent,” they would bend over
backwards.
Gabriel: Yeah.
Alan: When you say, “well,
here’s a solution that’s going to increase by 45 percent,” they
don’t even… they can’t even fathom it.
Gabriel: Yes. I think that for
the next couple years, we’re going to see the sort of stutter effects
of businesses trying to figure out when to invest, when to begin
testing, what to do. And the headsets are kind of working okay. The
software is pretty good. The integrations into their traditional
systems are just beginning to exist — that’s some of the work we’re
doing now. But it is not easy to get on board. The on ramp is not
great. And the argument — the business case — is kind of there. But
the ability to realize it feels a little ephemeral. But I believe
that, shortly thereafter, we’re going to see the thing hit a knee and
start to skyrocket, as more and more use cases come to light and more
and more companies start to gain benefits. We’ve seen this before. We
saw it with the Web. We saw it with the power of a Web page. “Why
would I want a Web page? We’re in the phone book; promoting in the
newspaper.” And then we saw the same thing happen again with
social. “Why do I as a business, need to talk to my customers?
Well, this makes no sense. We’ve got a customer service team. I don’t
need Twitter. I don’t need a Facebook page.” And we saw it again
with mobile. “Why do I have to reformat my site so that it’s
smaller? No one’s going to look,” and what have it.
Every company that began to drive and
acclimate to that new atmosphere of digital transformation became the
winners. And Facebook figured out quickly that they needed to be
mobile first. And that’s one of the reasons they dominated. Spatial
is just the next step; it’s the logical step. It’s where billions of
dollars and interface value are being invested. So, it’s really just
up to your listeners today to work with companies like MetaVRse and
VERSES and others to try to figure out what those early pilots are.
Get out there, break a couple eggs, and figure out how to make
spacial web scramble.
Alan: I love it. Make some
scrambled eggs. I love it! Oh, man. Is there anything else? We’ve
talked about a lot here. I always ask this question: What problem in
the world do you want to see solved using XR and spatial web?
Gabriel: Well, we believe that
we are standing at a fork in the road — a generational fork in the
road — and that this generation, in effect, has one of the most
amazing challenges in the history of the species. And it really comes
down to, we are facing existential-level threats with climate change,
the depletion of our environmental resources, the devastation of both
the plant and animal kingdoms, our coral reefs. I mean, today is
Earth Day. These are things we think about for maybe a day, and then
we go back to all of the behaviors that are continuing [the
problems]. The result of which occurred because of our rapid growth
in the industrial era, through our inventions and technologies. We
need to now look forward and take this option for a second path,
which isn’t the end of the species, but is a — for the first time —
the ability to have a civilization 5.0; a global civilization that
works together, that starts to treat the resources of the planet as a
single ecosystem.
And these technologies at scale have
come with risks. We’re looking at 50 billion cameras out here in the
next decade or so. There’ll be a billion drones. There’ll be AI
embedded into everything. Sensors picking up levels of mood tracking
and facial recognition and pupil dilation, and all kinds of personal
and private information. We could make far worse mistakes than we’ve
made for the last hundred and fifty years with these powerful
exponential technologies. So the choice that we really have, and the
choice that we’ve founded VERSES to help support, is to use these
technologies — this sort of digital tidal wave — to solve the
physical, rising tide of planetary devastation, in order to not just
solve the problems of the last 150 years, but to paint a new picture
of a future that isn’t just a Black Mirror future, but is a white
mirror future; where we are taking care of our planet and each other,
where we’re all benefiting from the network effects of economies that
are more equitable, and that we maintain our privacy and security and
trust at scale.
I want a really cool sci-fi future that
doesn’t look like the dystopian sci-fi novels and stories and films
that we’re used to, and I think we need to start talking about what
that future looks like. So, we’re incredibly grateful to people like
you and others in the space that are having these conversations, and
starting to pick apart these stories, so that we can tell these
stories to each other. Because, frankly, that’s the kind of world
that we’d like to build.
Alan: Well, what else can we
say? Gabriel, thank you so much for joining me on the show.
Gabriel: It’s been an honor,
Alan. Thank you very much.
40 min
July 26, 2019 Building the Foundation of The Spatial Web, with VERSES founder Gabriel Rene
The web page is
a deceptively simple invention, but its creation -- and more
importantly, its cross-programmability -- made the World Wide Web the
technological powerhouse it has become. Gabriel Rene founded VERSES
to encourage similar similar developments in spacial computing.
Alan: Today's guest is Gabriel
Rene, an architect and founder of The VERSES Foundation. He's a
technologist, entrepreneur, researcher, media and music producer,
whose 25-year career in the technology, telecom and entertainment
industry has granted him the knowledge and experience to consistently
invent unique business verticals, and to navigate the novel
challenges of the emerging global digital entertainment, marketing,
e-com, mobile and spatial technology markets. aAs a deep technology
pioneer, mobile executive, and corporate strategist, Gabriel has
built multiple innovative technology companies, developed
groundbreaking enterprise and consumer software, and forged strategic
partnerships with multiple Fortune 50 companies. Rene has worked with
-- and advised some of -- the world's largest brands, spanning media
conglomerates, telcos, media manufacturers, mobile manufacturers,
governments, and major brands. As a C-level executive founder, he has
demonstrated unique leadership, strategic and operational
capabilities in growing businesses from zero to $25-million in annual
revenues. As an advisor and board member, he has helped multiple
startups and founders navigate their way to success. Gabriel serves
as the executive director of the VERSES Foundation, an organization
at the intersection of Block Chain, Virtual Reality, and Artificial
Intelligence technologies designed to power Web 3.0 and dedicated to
the interoperable adoption of spatial technologies across every major
industry. As the founder and executive director of VERSES, the Global
Advisory Board Member and co-chair of the AR Cloud Committee, and a
founding member of the Open AR Cloud. With that, I want to welcome
Gabriel Rene. Thank you for joining us on the show.
Gabriel: Thank you, Alan. It's a
pleasure to be here.
Alan: Where can people find you
online if they want to look into it?
Gabriel: Well, if it's me
personally, you can find me @GabrielRene at LinkedIn, and you can
also find me on Twitter under the same name. And then with VERSES,
you can go to VERSES.io to get all the latest information on us.
Alan: So let's unpack this. Tell
me what you're doing at VERSES right now, and I want to get the full
understanding of what is VERSES, and why it's important for people
listening.
Gabriel: So I guess the first
place to start is way back in 1990 or so. There was a young, talented
researcher by the name of Tim Berners-Lee, who was working at the
CERN Institute, and he was developing a new set of technologies which
have come to be known as the World Wide Web protocols. So those are
all the HTTP, which was hypertext transfer protocol, and HTML, which
is a hypertext markup language. That, combined with a browser, which
he developed as an open source standard, and on top of the domain
structure that had been pre-existing -- which we'd been using from
the email era of .coms and .edu, .org, etc. -- he created this you
URL format, which essentially made pages programmable, gave us the
ability to link content on those pages, and the ability to network
those pages. This, of course, became the World Wide Web.
The majority of our technologies and
power and advantages and capability today, whether in business or
personal lives, in public or private sector, come from the benefits
of these core protocols that enable the network. But it's
fundamentally a network of pages and text and media. And now, with
the dawn of new interfaces that come with XR technologies --
particularly augmented reality for the real world, or more
0 min
July 24, 2019 Augmented Birthday Parties and Virtual Reality Field Trips with Centertec’s Bill Tustin
Chicken Waffle!
Now that we have your attention, check out this episode of XR for
Business. Centertec CEO Bill Tustin joins Alan to talk location-based
VR “retail-tainment.” Fun, exciting XR technologies are
revitalizing America’s malls, and taking kids on field trips across
the stars or through the pyramids; places they could never go in real
life.
Alan: Today’s guest is Bill
Tustin. Bill has owned a location-based VR location for over three
years. He’s worked for 25 years in the casino banking industry,
teaching them how to implement technologies that increase their
revenues, create great customer experiences and have fantastic ROI.
He has used that experience to create a successful location-based VR
place with multiple revenue sources, including XR educational content
and XR programs. His company just made a seed investment in Chicken
Waffle — crazy name! — but it’s an XR solution provider that
develops innovative solutions with high-quality branded experiences.
They’ve created many enterprise experiences in a world for an amazing
list of partners and clients. [You can learn more about Bill’s
business at www.centertec.com].
They’re working on all sorts of really cool IP, and I want to welcome
to the show: Bill Tustin. Thanks for joining me.
Bill: Thank you.
Alan: Thank you so much. You’ve
been working in VR a long time. What are some of the best experiences
you’ve seen, and what drives you to do what you’re doing?
Bill: Really? The smiles on
people’s faces. We work with a lot of children, and the children and
the teachers are very excited about learning about VR, experiencing
VR. Just, customers’ experiences has been great for the last few
years.
Alan: Awesome. You say you were
working with children. Is this just location-based entertainment? Or,
what are you finding is something that… what is resonating with
everybody?
Bill: From the educational
aspect of it, where they can go and experience a visual education
experience? The teachers actually have been really excited about it;
just the fact that they can go, like, for example, to the civil war,
and experience of battle with great artwork. It educates some really,
really well. Especially the younger they are, the more they get
excited about it.
Alan: So, what’s one of the best
XR, or VR/AR, experiences that you’ve ever had?
Bill: Well, for children? Space.
Anything with space, they get really excited about. Anything
underwater. These are all experiences that they can’t experience in
real life. You can’t experience space right now — I mean, hopefully
in the future you will — and most people don’t really go scuba
diving, especially kids. So, they’re going to really experience
underwater adventures, or Space Adventures. And then, on the
education aspect, we work very closely with the schools on exactly
what they’re teaching them, so the education aspect of it is in on
the experience.
Alan: Interesting. You made an
investment in Chicken Waffle. Can you maybe tell us what’s… what’s
Chicken Waffle? As soon as I heard the name, I was like, “what
the heck is a Chicken Waffle?”
Bill: The founder of Chicken
Waffle actually co-founded TheWaveVR. He actually still owns
TheWaveVR, which became a very big social media music platform. One
of the reasons why we invested in them is, we saw a need in the
education field, where just the content that was there wasn’t really
up to par for the children. They really wanted to have more
interactive experiences. It just seemed like a lot of educational
stuff that exists right now in VR/XR/AR is just real basic. So, we
decided that we needed to make our own content with certain partners
that we’re working with. And they were the right company when we
checked around; everybody kept on referring to them. Their name came
up constantly, that they were the right company to partner with.
Alan: So what kind of content
are you guys making, then?
Bill: A lot of things that they
do are for clients, so I can’t really say names. But to give an
example, they’re working on a major museum project, where there’s 20
geo points and it’s a civil war experience. They basically walk
around on the battlefield — the kids and families, we have a walk on
a battlefield — and through AR, be able to experience the civil war
at the exact points where the action happened on this battlefield.
So, that’s an exciting project that they’re working on. We’re also
talking to the client about us using that type of experience in a VR
experience that we can also bring to schools. As it relates to
museums and these type of establishments, it’s great when the schools
are around them, but they spend quite a lot… like, this client is
spending over half a million dollars just on artwork alone. And
they’re basically only going to get schools and families that —
while they’re major, I mean, people do travel very far for them —
but the schools only travel about an hour on a field trip. So, just a
partnership with them, and Chicken Waffle will make it to be able to
bring it to the LBE [location-based experience], depending on what
you want to call it. That type in a VR experience would be real
exciting.
Alan: The whole idea of being
able to take field trips really far — going to the pyramids in Egypt
— that’s not really something that most schools (or any schools),
you know, “let’s get a flight and fly halfway around the world
to go see something.” But in VR, you really can do that, and you
can go anywhere in the world instantly. I think it’s really gonna be
great for that. And I think it’s hopefully going to create new bonds
amongst children and people around the world. You know, one of the
most transformative moments I had in VR was the first time I went in
Altspace and I realized that there were other people in the space,
talking to me. That was a game-changer.
Bill: Yeah, actually, that’s
what we discovered. The children do want to interact with each other.
It’s funny that you just brought up Egypt, because we just had 120
third graders come in to our location, and that was one of the
requirements; teaching them about pyramids. So we actually had a VR
experience where they wandered through one of the permits. It was
like a 360 video, interactive experience. And the third graders loved
it. There would be no other way for them to do it, except in VR or
AR. I mean, literally, it was 120 third graders — four third grade
classes — and they loved it.
Alan: Are you seeing that 360
video is something that people are resonating with? Or is it more the
interactive content that is getting people’s attention?
Bill: It’s interactive. The 360 video, they get bored very quickly; 360 video is just TV in VR. I mean, in my mind, it’s when they could touch things. Like, they go to the Egyptian pyramids, and be able to pick something up — that’s really resonates with the children. The way they could be avatars of different people, and they could see each other when they interact with each other. That’s really where it’s having to. That’s another reason — that’s our main reason — for making a seed investment in Chicken Waffle. They’re able to do that social interactive experience with great artwork.
Alan: It’s pretty exciting, I
think, being able to interact. One of the things that I got to do was
drive an excavator in virtual reality, and I’ve never been in one
before. I started it up and it explained to me how to drive it, and
how to use the bucket and everything. And it’s funny, because I was
in it for maybe 20 minutes driving around. And I feel — I mean, I
haven’t tried it yet — but I feel like I could go and drive an
excavator now. I probably wouldn’t be very good at it, but I could do
it. I know what the handles do, and I know which… I feel like I’ve
driven that thing. And it’s really interesting, how you can give
people incredible experiences and trainings, long before they’ve even
got to the place of where they’re what they’re doing. So I think it
holds tremendous value there.
Bill: Yeah, yeah, I know.
Chicken Waffle’s actually done work for one of the clients. Hopefully
it’s not an NDA with them; it’s Exxon Mobile, and they’ve done a lot
of safety training with them. They’re also working with a franchise
Asian restaurant, where they’re doing the training for the
franchisees on the rice cooker, which is another safety — you know
how — to properly get this rice cooker to work. So you’re right. You
are correct. It’s really a great way to do training — especially
safety training — in VR. And you could actually have emergency-type
situations where you could evaluate that safety training.
Alan: Are you guys doing
anything with a AR at all? Mobile phone-based augmented reality?
Bill: Yeah, we actually have
four Magic Leaps. Magic Leap just met with Chicken Waffle. They’ve
actually changed their API because they’re… I don’t know if I want
to say, I’m sorry [laughs]. But it’s actually going to be an open
source thing that we’ve just recently did for Magic Leap. So we are
working with Magic Leap in an AR capacity. A lot of it’s
confidential, but we are doing certain things.
Alan: It’s pretty exciting, when
spatial computing comes into your living room. It’s all around you,
and it kind of takes… it hijacks the space that you’re in, and
really gives you this opportunity to augment the world you’re already
in. I think the immersion slider from your reality — or the real
world you’re in — to full virtual reality. I think the ability to
blend and go in and out of that is gonna be really magical. I’m
really excited to see what you guys do on that.
Bill: Yeah. They’ve actually
done a lot of work on the MERGE Cube. Mostly the API, most of the
MERGE Cube has been done by them. A lot of AR work, actually.
Alan: I love it. The Merge Cube
is a small, foam cube that has tracking markers on it, that you can
point [at with] your phone. The cube can be a sushi game, where
you’re a fish trying to eat sushi one minute; it can be a camp fire
the next minute; it can be a trippy cube. It can be a human heart.
There’s all sorts of things; they have an open API, so that
programmers can make all sorts of really cool experiences on it. And
I think they’ve done a really good job at taking “phone,”
and matching it with a very inexpensive “toy” or “tool,”
and creating unlimited possibilities on this thing called the MERGE
Cube. So, really exciting. I had the opportunity to travel to China
with the principals. It was really cool. In your experience, what has
been the path that businesses have taken to get to the point where
they’re ready to invest in this technology? Because — let’s be
honest — it’s not the least expensive technologies out there. So
what is the path to getting a company excited? Getting them bought
in? Is it proof of concepts, then rolling it out? What is the path
that you’ve seen that businesses are taking?
Bill: When I speak to business
leaders, it really depends on the type. I recently spoke at the
retail show in New York, and they’re very interested on the ROI in
the retail environment. When you make an investment — and it’s a
large investment, especially if you’re doing a custom AR/VR
application — what’s the type of ROI there is? One of the things
they mentioned to me was they love my story about, um, there’s
actually a toy store in Prague, where they had a backpack AR system
in the basement — so, it was a space that wasn’t really being used.
They’ve had a very large increase of sales at the store, because
people come there to do the AR, and then they go shopping. Over at
Centertec, we’re in one of the largest malls in the world, Simon Mall
— and we all working with them on some other locations — and we
bring people to their mall. I mean, everybody says the malls are
dead, but the average mall customer spends $108. So, you can get him
into the mall — statistically speaking — they’re going to spend
$108. So, VR and AR — I mean, like an AR scavenger hunt — there’s a
lot of things you could do, especially in retail and businesses, to
get a really nice ROI. And they’re looking for partners that can
explain that ROI to them, because, you know, it’s a capital expense.
Alan: Absolutely. So, the work
you’re doing with Simon, you do have a location set up in their
malls, now?
Bill: We’ve been in a Simon mall
for three years. They’ve talked about a lot of other VR companies
that now… I’m going to use the word “left,” but have gone
out of business. We’re now going into one of their outlet malls,
which is an agreement with them — it’s more of a partnership — and
that outlet mall gets 8-million people per year, and they have 45
locations that they want us to roll into.
Alan: That’s incredible.
Bill: We’re listening to our own
ROI on that; gotta take baby steps.
Alan: That’s an incredible use
case. I think malls are slowly changing — the face of retail is
changing, really — and it’s going from a place where people, they
went for entertainment, and to pass the time, and to shop. But I
think it’s more moving towards this “retail-tainment,”
where people go there for social experiences. A lot of the malls here
in Canada have — obviously they have movie theaters — but they have
arcades, and stuff like this. And I think VR and AR lend themselves
very nicely to these locations. And you’re absolutely right; for
every extra minute average that a mall like Simon Malls has, you’re
talking millions of dollars in revenue for every average minute that
a customer spends in the locations. So, it’s a great way for public
spaces to be reunified and revitalized.
Bill: You get the customer back
in the mall. I mean, they actually reported to us — they they were
studying it — some of the merchants buy us, their sales doubled.
Because of the amount of people that we brought into the mall. The
first mall we in, it was kind of… I don’t use the word “dead
mall.” They wouldn’t like that word. But what I would say, it
wasn’t a triple-A mall. We were underneath the staircase. On a
Saturday, we’re packed, and the mall’s empty. My partner loves to
take photos of that. But the merchants stand by us. Their sales have
gone up, so they’re very happy with that; that leads to them giving
us a better real estate deal. We have more of a partnership than us
paying them rent. I joke around, that they should pay me.
Alan: [laughs] I don’t know
about that! But yeah, I think it’s a great opportunity for everybody
involved. For sure.
Bill: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, they
realize that I’m an asset to their mall. It’s more of me not
expanding. I mean, I think they would put us in every single mall
that I was willing to do it.
Alan: What are some of the most
impressive business use cases of this technology that you’ve seen so
far? You know, something that we’ve tried and said, wow, that is
really impressive.
Bill: Well, you know, one thing
I was surprised with last week was a woman approached me — I was in
my center — and said, “are you the owner?” And I said
yeah. I don’t want to, you know, promote it too much, but she’s got
cancer, and she’s been come into our place; she bought a membership.
And she’s actually a nurse, and she had a lot of anger issues with
her getting cancer. She started crying to me, telling me how great
our place was, and it saved her marriage, because she had a lot of
anger over it, and she’s actually playing a boxing game. She just
comes in, and, you know… and we’re not pushing her. She did it on
her own. It’s been great therapy for her, just coming in and letting
her aggression out in VR. It was very interesting, listening to her
talk about that. That was probably one of my most interesting
experiences I’ve had.
Alan: It’s funny how… I’ve
actually been recording and keeping track of all the different use
cases in business, and medical, and health, and automotive, airlines,
you name it. And only recently, in the last two weeks, I had to make
a new folder: virtual and augmented reality for mental health. We’re
seeing all sorts of incredible statistics around this technology
being used for mental health, or autism. They’re being able to take
kids who are quite a ways over on the spectrum, that don’t socialize
well, and really understand their their social cues, and get them
used to making eye contact with people in a virtual space, so that
when they are in the real world, they’re kind of more understood.
Because I don’t think somebody with autism is at a disadvantage; we
just never figured out a way to harness their genius. I think these
technologies really unlock that, so it’s really exciting.
Bill: It’s funny you brought
that up. We just booked an autism — they just booked five days in
May; they came in last year — an autism group. Literally, they
booked their whole school’s field trips. The kids love VR. The only
thing that annoys me about it is, I go to a lot of shows, and they
have special autism programs. And honestly, they’re fine on a regular
games! They just want to be treated like regular people. They’re
great with all the regular games. They don’t need special games.
They’re fine with what exists.
Alan: I agree, and I think our
school systems were designed to take kind of the bell curve, and
educate the bell curve as much as possible. When you get people on
either side of the bell curve, the system starts to break down and
goes, “well, you know, you don’t fit into our system, so you
must be an outsider.” I think it’s going to see a huge pivot in
education in the next little bit, as we start to introduce
technologies like artificial intelligence, to really study and
understand how these students think, what drives them, and what
they’re interested in. You can teach a group of 30 kids science —
I’d say 10 of them are interested in science, 20 of them don’t care,
and we’re still pushing them into that? So I think personalized
education is really going to unlock a whole new way for which we
educate entire populations. I think if we can figure that out…
like, if you look at Netflix, they use AI algorithms to give you
better movies to watch. So why aren’t we using that for education?
And I think we’re gonna see that very, very soon.
Bill: Yeah. I mean, we work with
girls who code. They come in once a week to a place, and it’s just
amazing, the skill sets that they have. As relates to programming,
some of the things I’ve seen them create — programming — when we
work together. They call it teacher bias, too; especially when it
comes to girls, with coding and science. And the teachers don’t mean
to do it, but they kinda push these young girls into things they
shouldn’t be pushed into, because they think that’s what they need to
do. And when you just let them be free and they explore and they
learn, it’s amazing.
Alan: It really is. Education is
it’s an interesting thing; if you look at it from a market size, it’s
a $4-trillion industry. It’s four times the size of Amazon. And if
you look at it that way, we’re seeing a tectonic shift in the way
education happens, and the way it moves forward. I think virtual
augmented reality are really going to be a central role in doing
that.
Bill: Yeah, if it’s implemented
correctly. We’ve been to over 100 schools. We’ve worked a lot with
schools. I’m amazed, where they’ll have VR equipment there — I went
to one college, and Microsoft gave them a bunch of Hololenses — and
they were just thrown into a corner, because nobody from Microsoft
ever came down and showed them how to use it, how to implement it.
They have these $4,000 Hololenses sitting in the corner, not being
used. I was there with my VR stuff, and I saw them there; they were
asking me about them. I said, “where’d you get them?” And
they said, Parsons gave it to them through Microsoft, but no one ever
showed them anything. So, it needs to be implemented correctly. You
just can’t hand people all that equipment and say, “bye!”
You know, it needs to be executed correctly. Content needs to
correct. It’s just not giving them hardware and saying, “figure
it out yourself.”
Alan: I agree. I think there’s a
couple things that need to happen. The hardware is gonna just keep
evolving, and that’s fine. But I think it’s more on the platform
side, and really creating content that is uniform across multiple
headsets, and easy for a facilitator or a teacher to bring to the
students in a way that makes sense. But to your point; without
training, without getting these people ready to go, it’s kind of
useless. It’s like, “here’s a bunch of VR,” and if you
don’t train them and don’t get people… you need one champion — at
least — in every school. I think a very important.
Bill: The teachers, and the
students, and the school administrators, they are very interested in
VR. I mean, they get it. The ones who don’t get it, I see more social
media — people attacking me about kids, man, and headsets. And I’m
like, *sigh* — the people who aren’t there are the ones who aren’t
getting it, you know? And that’s always a problem with education: the
people who don’t know think they’re the experts.
Alan: Absolutely. I think this
comes up a lot. VR is something you just have to try. Same with AR.
You put it on; you have to try it. And once you see it, you get it.
You’re like, “oh, this makes perfect sense. I get it now.”
And it’s one of those things that, if you don’t put it on your head,
you’ll never really know what you’re missing.
Bill: Yeah, yeah. I’m also
amazed by, you know… I tell this story. I went to Villanova
University, and I asked how many people in that class did VR. Only
three of the college students raised their hand. That was on a
Friday. Then on Monday, we went to an elementary school, and it was
all third graders. I asked them how many did VR; every single one of
them raised their hands. And that really shocked me. It really tells
me something with older people, that they aren’t willing to try VR,
or there’s something going on there. That really opened my eyes to,
“wow.” I mean, there’s such a drastic difference. But when
the Villanova kids did the VR, they loved it. So it’s almost like
they had a kind of negativity towards VR? I think a lot of it has to
do with the type of VR content that they tried in the past. They
maybe had a bad experience, so they don’t want to try it. What’s
great is, the young kids are all doing it. I mean, everybody says,
“you guys are doing [VR with] young kids?” I’m like, “well,
that’s who’s playing VR.” But they’re gonna get older.
Alan: Yeah, I think so. And it’s
it’s like anything. I don’t know about you, but I’m not… no, I am
on Snapchat, but very barely. But if you if you miss the Snapchat
thing, or you’re a little bit too old, you know, you go on Snapchat,
you’re like, “what is this dumb thing? What do you mean, I can’t
save my photos? What the heck?” So I think there’s definitely a
generation gap. And we’ve noticed when we’re doing Hololens demos,
that adults — almost anybody over 40 — has a hard time with the
gestures to click — the bloom and all that — almost everybody over
40 has a problem with that. Everybody under 20 that we’ve put it on
instantly gets it. Like, within seconds. We put it on, show them the
commands, and then that’s it. They’re off to the races. They’re
running around doing their thing. One of the challenges that we keep
seeing — and I’m seeing it right across the board — is the
facilitator controls; being able to control experiences, and know
what somebody is in. When somebody is in VR, you can’t really see
what they’re doing; being able to have facilitator controls is
important as well, so that a teacher could lead a class of 30
students through a pyramid discovery, and know where they are, and
kind of speak to that as well.
Bill: That’s 100 percent
correct. They need a teacher established… well, I wouldn’t even
call it a teacher established. We guide people in our VR center. We
don’t let them guide themselves, because of different experiences are
different. You need any to guide people right now.
Alan: Agreed.
Bill: I think you always need [a
guide], because it’s always going to be different controllers,
different ways of doing it. It’s a guide. Definitely.
Alan: Absolutely. What do you
see as the future for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, as it
pertains to business and education? What is the future?
Bill: There’s so much coming at
me lately, with all the new headsets! Huh, wow… definitely,
interactive VR experiences where everybody wants to be avatars. I
mean, if you just look at Fortnite and Apex Legends, everybody wants
to be an avatar. Nobody wants to be themselves. Everybody wants to
interact. People are craving social experiences, even though they
don’t want to admit it. Everybody’s so connected nowadays. It’s like
children want to be social, but they don’t want to be social. I mean,
if that makes any sense.
Alan: Actually, I have a perfect
example of that. My daughter, we went to the mall and we’re walking
— she’s 14, so she’s a teenager — and she’s said, “all my
friends are at the mall.” So, do you see them? She goes, “no,
no, no. I see they’re on Snapchat. I can see they’re at the mall.”
Oh, OK, cool. Whatever. Then she saw her friends from across the room
and she’s like, “oh, there’s my friends!” I said, “well,
go over and say hi.” “No, no, no, no, no. Oh, I can’t do
that.” [Snicker] They’re your friends on Snapchat; you’re
standing in a shared space in the real world; and you don’t want to
go over and say hi? What?
Bill: She would’ve with an
avatar. An avatar would interact with them. It’s funny, the girls
like to be boys; the boys like to be girl avatars. I could take
another story. We used a lot of trampoline instalments when we first
opened, because those trampoline parks are very, very popular. One of
the things they discovered is almost half the people don’t jump on
the trampolines when they pay to get in. They go there, they stand in
line. And what the girls, she’ll stand behind a boy she thinks is
cute. But when it’s time for her to get on the dodgeball court,
she’ll bail out. It’s all about the wait in line. About queueing the
people up; it’s kind of like why we go to bars. The popular bars have
discovered that the whole social scene. It’s why we go to
restaurants; we go to look at other people at restaurants — we all
can eat at home! My wife is a very good cook. We’re human beings.
We’re tribal and we crave social experiences. We just don’t want to
admit to it. VR really helps with that, and so does AR.
Alan: I think the social aspects
of it… there’s all sorts of really great social experiences coming
out. You’ve got VRChat, Altbase, Facebook Spaces, High Fidelity,
Sensar. There’s a number of these experiences coming out, where not
only can you choose your avatar and what your representation is to
the world, but you can also choose the world you are going to
communicate in. You can make these virtual worlds. I think it’s just
gonna be spectacular. It’s very Ready Player One.
Bill: Yeah. Yeah, are you really
talking to another person? Or is it AI you’re talking to?
Alan: That’s a whole next
question, for sure.
Bill: Or a deep thing, like who
you really fall in love with. It could be an AI character.
Alan: I think that’s going to be
a real thing, man; AI-driven avatars are gonna be a thing. And we’re
getting close to photorealistic avatars, as well.
Bill: Yeah, yeah. But
definitely, people are interested in VR. It’s happening. I mean, you
just go to a Centertec on a Saturday/Sunday; we’re packed. Schools
are coming in during the week; camps are coming in; autism groups are
coming in; people for medical reasons coming in. I think that’s why
LBVR and LBE is so successful in VR right now. They don’t want to do
it at home. They want to go out and do it. It’s like the movies.
People go to the movies, and they watch TV at home. So I think
there’s a place for both. I think an LBE, it’s definitely in the
social experience, and the educational experience, and at home would
just be more like watching TV. Maybe 360 videos. But definitely,
interactive is an LBE.
Alan: Well, is there any other
closing remarks before we wrap this awesome episode of the XR for
Business Podcast?
Bill: Nah. VR and AR has a great
future. I believe they can combine with esports. I mean, actually, I
believe education, VR, AR, and esports are all going to clash and
come one. And it’s happening.
Alan: I agree. I think people
crave challenge; and VR, it can open worlds of challenges that we
never even thought of. And I’m really excited. The headsets are
getting better. They’re actually becoming untethered. There’s so many
technological advancements coming at us faster than we can read about
them. There’s haptic gloves. There’s haptic suits. There’s the suits
that give you cold and hot. There’s scent machines; we’re really
trying to hijack all of the senses. And I think it’s an exciting time
to be in this industry.
30 min
July 24, 2019 Augmented Birthday Parties and Virtual Reality Field Trips with Centertec's Bill Tustin
Chicken Waffle!
Now that we have your attention, check out this episode of XR for
Business. Centertec CEO Bill Tustin joins Alan to talk location-based
VR "retail-tainment." Fun, exciting XR technologies are
revitalizing America's malls, and taking kids on field trips across
the stars or through the pyramids; places they could never go in real
life.
Alan: Today's guest is Bill
Tustin. Bill has owned a location-based VR location for over three
years. He's worked for 25 years in the casino banking industry,
teaching them how to implement technologies that increase their
revenues, create great customer experiences and have fantastic ROI.
He has used that experience to create a successful location-based VR
place with multiple revenue sources, including XR educational content
and XR programs. His company just made a seed investment in Chicken
Waffle -- crazy name! -- but it's an XR solution provider that
develops innovative solutions with high-quality branded experiences.
They've created many enterprise experiences in a world for an amazing
list of partners and clients. [You can learn more about Bill's
business at www.centertec.com].
They're working on all sorts of really cool IP, and I want to welcome
to the show: Bill Tustin. Thanks for joining me.
Bill: Thank you.
Alan: Thank you so much. You've
been working in VR a long time. What are some of the best experiences
you've seen, and what drives you to do what you're doing?
Bill: Really? The smiles on
people's faces. We work with a lot of children, and the children and
the teachers are very excited about learning about VR, experiencing
VR. Just, customers' experiences has been great for the last few
years.
Alan: Awesome. You say you were
working with children. Is this just location-based entertainment? Or,
what are you finding is something that... what is resonating with
everybody?
Bill: From the educational
aspect of it, where they can go and experience a visual education
experience? The teachers actually have been really excited about it;
just the fact that they can go, like, for example, to the civil war,
and experience of battle with great artwork. It educates some really,
really well. Especially the younger they are, the more they get
excited about it.
Alan: So, what's one of the best
XR, or VR/AR, experiences that you've ever had?
Bill: Well, for children? Space.
Anything with space, they get really excited about. Anything
underwater. These are all experiences that they can't experience in
real life. You can't experience space right now -- I mean, hopefully
in the future you will -- and most people don't really go scuba
diving, especially kids. So, they're going to really experience
underwater adventures, or Space Adventures. And then, on the
education aspect, we work very closely with the schools on exactly
what they're teaching them, so the education aspect of it is in on
the experience.
Alan: Interesting. You made an
investment in Chicken Waffle. Can you maybe tell us what's... what's
Chicken Waffle? As soon as I heard the name, I was like, "what
the heck is a Chicken Waffle?"
Bill: The founder of Chicken
Waffle actually co-founded TheWaveVR. He actually still owns
TheWaveVR, which became a very big social media music platform. One
of the reasons why we invested in them is, we saw a need in the
education field, where just the content that was there wasn't really
up to par for the children. They really wanted to have more
interactive experiences. It just seemed like a lot of educational
stuff that exists right now in VR/XR/AR is just real basic. So, we
decided that we needed to make our own content with certain partners
that we're working with. And the
0 min

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