Aviation itself is one of humankind’s great technological marvels – something that can be easy to forget when we’re wedged between passengers in coach on some redeye flight. Neutral Digital’s Greg Caterer is using another one of our technological revelations – XR – to reinvent the airline industry, everything from designing aircraft, marketing at trade shows, and making the flight more comfortable for the passenger.
Alan: Today’s guest is Greg
Caterer. Greg is the chief operating officer at Neutral Digital, an
end-to-end immersive content creator, focusing on the luxury travel
sector. Neutral Digital is an aviation-focused content creation house
at the cutting edge of immersive interaction solutions; they deliver
augmented reality, virtual reality, digital design, architectural
visualization, in-flight entertainment solutions, and apps and
websites for the aviation industry. In a nutshell, they deliver
technology for clients’ campaigns. The Neutral Digital team consists
of professionals with a wide-ranging expertise in VR digital
experience, design, software development, and CGI production. Neutral
Digital can be found at neutral.digital. Welcome to the show, Greg.
Greg: Thank you very much, Alan.
Thanks for having me on the show.
Alan: My absolute pleasure. I’m
really excited to learn about the stuff you’re doing. I’ve seen some
of the videos, I’ve seen what you guys are doing; holy crap. It’s
really, really awesome, the stuff you’re doing.
Greg: Thank you. Yeah, it is.
We’re certainly very proud of all the work that we’ve been doing,
particularly since specializing in the aviation sector, and then
obviously more broadly, the travel sector as well. We feel as though
we get the chance to educate an industry, as well as creating and
selling a product, and really helping to define exactly how this
niche can use extended reality, and in particular, virtual reality
technology. So, yeah, we’re very proud of what we do.
Alan: So, okay — let’s get
right into this. One of the things that blew me away was the
photorealism that you guys have created of 3D models and virtual
environments, of being in an airplane. Maybe explain — if you can,
speak to brands that are using this; if you can’t, that’s fine — but
speak to what it is you’re building, and why that’s important.
And let’s unpack this, because if
you’re somebody who’s in the aviation world, this is a technology
that can be used right across your enterprise; from previsualization,
marketing, sales, training, remote assistance, remote collaboration
— it can be used everywhere. So, what is the focus of what you guys
have been doing, and what are the results that people are seeing?
Greg: You’re absolutely right
with your observation, Alan, about it. Especially the breadth of use
cases that this technology has.
So, there’s a lot in this. I’m going to
try and condense this down to a relatively concise answer. But
broadly speaking, because of the replicability and the repeatability
of everything that’s created in CG, we would build experiences that
focus on marketing, training, and design for airlines, the component
manufacturers, the training bodies, et cetera. Anybody who’s got
anything to do with aviation, whether it’s the high cost of
acquisition for the product itself, or whether something intensely
physical that needs to be shown off.
So, a really good use case — and one
of the main workstreams and strands that we tend to focus on — is
marketing. There’s a very, very big cost benefit to this, and also,
it calls out, perhaps, the benchmark technology that existed before
this, which may be — from the aviation sector’s point of view — a
little bit fell into the realms of “tech for tech’s sake,”
in a way. So we’ve taken this from a marketing point-of-view, and
I’ll talk about the Air Canada project — that was our very first and
biggest in this domain that we did a couple of years ago, in a minute
— the solves two really key problems.
First of all, by creating experiences
that focus on the airline experience itself – so, all of the
branding piece, what it’s actually like to be on board an aircraft
with a specific carrier — you can, for trade shows or for sale
centers, for example, we found that our technology really has its
home in solving a cost problem. Traditional methods of going about
the trade shows particularly, as the focus, would be to send a cabin
cross-section cutout — or indeed, physical seats — to trade shows
at great expense. That can cost anything up to $100,000-$120,000 per
trade show, depending on the complexity of the physical setup.
Alan: Wow!Hold on a sec. So, these
plane companies would bring, like, a section of the cabin? This is
insane. And now with virtual reality, what would the cost be to
deploy… to make everything, top to bottom, would be far less
than one tradeshow. Am I wrong?
Greg: No, you’re not wrong at
all. A little bit varies on the complexity of what it is that wants
to be shown off. But typically, these kinds of experiences in VR pay
for themselves against logistics costs and physical setup costs
within 1-2 trade shows. So not only do you get that benefit to the
costs of shipping — and this still happens a lot of the time, by the
way. This is still very much a method that a lot of airlines are
still preferring. But also, beyond that, it allows a user — as we
know, the full VR technology is extremely effective at doing — it
allows the user to feel completely immersed in the experience, and it
allows them to drive it as well, in the way that it’s built is the
same as the way that you build VR video games. We prefer the Unreal
Engine to build all of our expenses of this kind.
just pause for a second, and just touch on on that. You
mentioned Unreal Engine. Can you maybe explain to listeners who have
never heard of Unreal — maybe they’ve heard of Epic Games and
Fortnight, and they think “video games” or something like that —
can you explain how the game engines, or the development engines, are
being used to develop this type of content? Just just a quick
Greg: Yeah, sure. There are,
broadly speaking, two game engines that are used for this. There’s
Unreal, and then there’s Unity. Unity, we find, is extremely
effective for slightly more screen-based experiences. We have been
working in Unreal for a long time, and we’ve certainly built a team
around that. We’ve got a number of Unreal developers who work for us
here in-house, and they’re extremely experienced at what they do.
We find that the combination of the
ability to produce experiences that are both extremely
visually-complex and as photo-real as possible, along with the
interactive properties of using that engine, are extremely powerful
for these kinds of experiences. In the same way, like I said before,
as if you would build a video game VR using the Unreal Engine, that
really immerses the user. We find that that’s an extremely powerful
sensory tool, in the same way as fully interactive, fully immersive
gaming is to make the user feel like they’re somewhere else, and
that’s why we use this methodology.
Alan: Wonderful. Is there a cost
difference between using Unity versus Unreal? Or even finding
developers that are good for each of them? Is that a challenge for
different ones? I know the CEO of the Unity had mentioned, at one
point, that about 70 percent of all virtual and augmented reality was
built on Unity. And then somewhere else, I read a stat that 70
percent of all the
money is made on Unreal. So, is there…?
Greg: I didn’t realize that. I
think industry, generally, is still getting used to this a little
bit, because perhaps using this means of building these experiences
is still relatively new from the B2B point of view. So, access to
these skills, potentially, is still not quite as open and plentiful
and vast as it could yet be.
We haven’t found any difficulties in
accessing the right talent for this kind of thing. Like I say, all of
our guys in-house are extremely skilled. The blend of Unreal
development and Unity developers that we have is obviously something
that favors the Unreal Engine at the moment, because that’s the
engine that we typically build most of our experiences in. But I
think, as VR cements itself as a medium of communication for a number
of different sectors — and indeed, is a necessary business process,
which we at Neutral Digital firmly believe is going to be the case
within not so many years from now – obviously, as any industry goes
and builds itself up, I think access to those skills is going to
become a lot wider and a lot more freely available. But for now,
there’s good access to the right talent, and we at Neutral certainly
feel like we’ve picked pretty much the best of the bunch.
Alan: I’ll be honest. I’ve seen
a lot of VR and AR, and the stuff that you guys are doing… that’s
why I asked you to be on the show, because 1. It’s beautiful. It’s
really well done. But 2. You’re working with some really big brands.
Let’s look at how the brands are using this. You talked about
bringing it to trade shows. Can you describe specific projects,
goals, and KPIs — or key performance indicators — of what they’re
using to measure success with this?
Greg: Absolutely. So let’s use
the Air Canada example as the main one. They were our original client
in this domain: they approached us with a desire to go beyond the
physical infrastructure of trade shows, and create something a lot
more immersive that saves a lot of cost from logistics and having
these physical infrastructures in place, on the one hand. Secondly,
it went a little bit beyond 360 degree video, for example, in that,
for this kind of use case, 360 definitely has a really solid place,
but being able to build these experiences digitally means that you
can create something that’s first of all user-led, and then obviously
with that, it is extremely interactive.
So, they wanted to create something
that first of all could harness those cost savings, from being able
to just create an experience that was very moldable, very
multisensory. And then they also wanted to create something that went
a little bit beyond what the benchmark was at the time. The fact that
all of this technology and all these experiences — every asset that
you build in the Unreal Engine and use in this way — can be
replicated for other disciplines is also extremely powerful for
airlines, component manufacturers, aircraft manufacturers alike.
For example, we’re now starting to see
a very, very strong set of use cases in the training sphere; training
for cabin crew, and also training for ground operations, and then
design. The ability to collaboratively design a cabin without using
physical mockups until any designs — for example, of the entire
cabin, or even just an individual seat-by-seat design — has been
completely signed off by all parties involved in VR. We’re finding
that, from the marketing use case, it’s grown legs, in the way that
this can be used is really starting to define itself. And we’re
certainly seeing a snowball effect, in terms of the way that our
content is digested, and the kinds of expenses that we’re building.
mentioned 360, and for the people who are listening who don’t
understand the difference, virtual reality – basically, you’re
taking a scene and putting it into a headset and immersing somebody
in this complete environment. There are two types right now; there’s
what’s called three degrees of freedom, meaning you can look left,
look right, look up and down, but you can’t move in the space.
Then you have what’s called six degrees
of freedom, meaning [you can] look left, right, up and down, and then
move left, right, up and down. You have this real ability to move
around. Just that simple change really makes the immersion amplified
by factors of exponentials, and then adding controllers or the
ability to reach out and interact with things — maybe turn on the TV
or touch something — that just adds a whole new layer.
When people are in virtual reality and
they’re able to interact with the world around them, it’s as much a
memory as a real memory of doing something. I remember one of my
first experiences: I went into a human heart — actually walked
around inside a human heart. I will, for the rest of my
life, never forget that — I feel like I walked into a human heart;
very much the way that you guys are making people feel like they’re
sitting in a beautiful, first-class lounge of an airline.
Greg: It’s amazing you mentioned
that as well, Alan, because there’s a piece of research that’s been
done by the National Training Laboratory, which has found that
retention rates — speaking of learning — for lecture-style
learning, for example, are roughly at 5 percent across the board; and
in reading, rates at roughly about 10 percent; whereas VR, as a
medium of communication and learning, scored a retention rate of 75
percent, which is only just below the idea of teaching others as a
means of learning something or retaining information. So in that
sense, it’s no accident that VR is already being rolled out as a
really cool part of the syllabus in a lot of schools here in the UK,
Alan: It’s no surprise to me,
because the first time I tried virtual reality — the very first time
— I put it on my head, and there’s a guy called Chris Milk who
showed me. I put it on, and I was standing on stage next to Beck in a
concert hall, looking around from a first-person view. I was on
stage! It was just this kind of “aha!” moment, and it was
in that moment that I had what most people in this industry have —
that epiphany moment, and they get into the industry right away —
because I realized that this is more than just entertainment. It’s
more than just videos, or being on stage. This is the future of human
communications.
If you take it one step further, it’s
obviously the future of education. Because if I can put you in a
lecture, and you remember 5 percent; give you a book, you read, 10.
Okay. That’s 15 percent retention. But if I put you in VR, and give
you an experience that you actually do?
At 75 percent retention rates, that is off the charts. And if you
take that into enterprise for training, you cannot fight that, and
you can’t argue against it. There’s no way, shape or form… there’s
no cost that will come close to offsetting that type of engagement,
that type of retention.
I personally see the future of all
education and training as virtual and augmented reality — mixed
reality — as we move to the glasses in the next five years. Boeing
is seeing a 25 percent decrease in the time it takes workers to do
complex tasks like wiring, harnesses, stuff like that, using heads-up
displays. But more importantly, they’re seeing near-zero error rates.
When you combine the increase in retention rates, decrease in error
rates, this is something that the whole world must get on. And they
will. And it’s happening, as you know: it’s 2019, it’s starting to
blow up like crazy.
So let me ask you: what are some of the
major challenges that you guys faced when you were starting? What are
the challenges that people just starting out now are going to face?
challenges that we face, I think, is in terms of educating these
sectors to a set of use cases and benefits, at the same time as
building and selling a product. Because this way of doing things —
especially for a sector like aviation — potentially is still
relatively new, we find that, in order to convince of the
compellingness or the coherence of the product, we need first to
educate as to what it’s actually doing.
I think that challenge comes from a
preconception — a totally understandable and natural preconception
— this is, in various forms, an industry has been around for a
little while. But 360 technology’s been around for quite some time.
The perceptions of it are that, perhaps, people don’t necessarily
understand exactly which pieces of their business process it can
benefit just yet. Although, like you say, this is very, very quickly
going to become cemented as something absolutely necessary within the
business process, across the board, across all spectra.
So, that’s one challenge: helping
people to see exactly what the use cases are, what the financial
benefit can be. Because when you think of marketing experiences, for
example — this being one of the biggest chunks of the types of work
that we tend to take on — aside from the soft benefit of an airline
working with us on the projects and starting to use it at a major
trade show they’re there to sponsor, and seeing thousands of people
go through the experience in a weekend. They’re compelled by, for
example, seeing somebody within a pod have, effectively, a game-style
— very fun, very memorable — experience within an Oculus Rift
headset, the entire experience being reflected on the screen. That’s
got a lot of pull. But at the moment, other than recording the number
of people who go through it, and then using that as a KPI, it’s quite
hard to see the exact tangible benefits of a case.
By implementing VR, I’m going to see
purchase consideration, number of flights booked — if I’m an airline
— increased by X, or the popularity of this route increased by Y
percent, for example. That’s still something that we’re a little bit
Alan: It’s interesting you say
that, because when we first started selling this, the first question
out of customers’ minds was, “who else is doing it, and what is the
ROI?” You’re like, “nobody, and we have no idea; still want to
spend $10,000?” Man, it is really expensive.
Greg: That’s so true. And
therefore — just going back to the educational piece of what we’re
trying to help a sector to understand is — from a cost/benefit point
of view, and from an immersion point of view, the weight of this
changes again. The way that you can, at the same time, save a whole
heap of costs on things. Like grounding planes, for example. If we
look at this from a training perspective, depending on the aircraft,
it can easily cost up to $150 K to ground a plane for enough time to
enact training on the cabin crew. Again, that’s one of the use cases
whereby having a VR experience would pay for itself really, really
quickly.
Not only that, but in grounding a plane
to give training – typically, that’s for educating, let’s say,
cabin crew on a piece of the experience that might be relatively
administrative — something that they could definitely do in a more
fun way more easily in VR; it doesn’t need to be a particularly
complex scenario, necessarily. By having training so scalable, you
can deploy training to wherever you can put an Oculus Rift and a
laptop. Saves on costs, means that people can digest top-up training
all the time.
One of our biggest things at Neutral is
that — in focusing on the aviation sector — one of our real primary
goals, with all of our clients across the board, is to improve the
passenger experience, through various different means. With training,
for example, you’re delivering top-up training, or complementary
training, or on-the-side training from the physical aircraft piece.
That allows cabin crew as part of their six-week journey, at the
beginning of their training course, to get even more familiar than
they would otherwise be able to with various different processes that
they need to go through in flight. That would help to improve the
passenger experience from a design point of view, you’re designing
better spaces for them. From a marketing point of view, in helping to
understand exactly what experience they’re going to be having when
they’re on board with you guys in a really, really fun way.
It’s largely about educating them. I
personally give quite a lot of talks around this subject, to
aviation-focused trade shows and that kind of thing. Beyond that,
obviously, it’s selling the product itself, but it’s been described
to me recently – and I don’t know if you’d agree with this, Alan,
as an XR expert — as being a bit like skiing. It’s something that’s
actually quite hard to describe to people in words what it feels
like, and what it does. And people’s minds typically start to whir
and buzz and really think of all the possibilities, once they’ve
experienced something in VR properly. I think we find that in pretty
much 100 percent of cases, whereby we’re giving demos or we’re at
trade shows, for example. It’s really about experiencing and feeling
Alan: No, I couldn’t agree more.
One of the things that you just touched on a second ago that really
made me think, “wow, this is amazing,” is that you’re using
these… you’re partnered with the airlines, and you say, “here,
we’re going to create this experience for your marketing and your
trade shows. That same experience, we’re going to alter slightly, and
use it for your training. That same experience can be used for
training for new employees, can be training for specific parts of the
airline.” They don’t have to recreate everything from scratch. They
just can add onto these modules. That’s a really powerful thing,
especially in technology. It’s very rare when you can take one asset
and start reusing it across the enterprise.
Greg: Oh, 100 percent. That’s
also one of the benefits that we find a building these experiences in
full CG over 360, is that you’ve got the ability to stack on top,
take away, change, chop-and-change as you go. Whereas with the 360
experience, for example — not wanting to, by any means, dumb down
the benefits that they have and how fun they can be, of course — one
thing you do miss out on is the fact that, if you want to change
anything, it’s video-based, so you need to start again. You’re right
back to the beginning.
We find that working with a lot of
clients, as soon as they need to do anything from… there’s been an
amenity kit update in a certain class on board, for example. That’s
an individual asset, that in itself can be changed enormously easy,
and then just re-aggregated into the experience. The ease of being
able to keep current with what exactly it is that anybody deploying
these kinds of experiences wants to show is incredibly powerful.
And yes, like you say, the ability to
replicate the use cases, once you’ve got a base asset in your library
— in the form of an aircraft, for example — you can just as easily
create a marketing experience onboard a virtualized A350-1000 as you
can a training one. It’s very, very powerful indeed.
Alan: It really is. So, I know
what’s going to happen. People are going to ask questions like, “how
many people?” “What does it take to build up something like
this?” When somebody calls you and they say, “we have a new
airplane, we want to make a marketing experience,” and you say to
them, “OK, well, we’re going to make this for you.” How long is
it going to take for the guys to build it? What are the costs
surrounding this? What are some of the things that you need from a
customer to get building on this?
timelines for — let’s say, for example — an experience that
incorporates an exterior element, where there’s a specific aircraft
involved, and is an interactive outside piece, maybe celebrating
various deliveries, and then maybe two or three classes on board,
with a very, very coherent storyboard — I’ll touch on that again in
a second as well, but we firmly believe that storyboard holds
paramount importance to the relevance of the experience, and its
ability to achieve a business goal. I’d love to talk about that more
in a second — to integrate and experience that does that and really
shows off the brand in the best possible way.
That takes about 12 to 16 weeks,
typically. In terms of cost, it’s very variable. It’s hard to put a
specific cost on on any kind of work.
Alan: What are some of the
variables? Give us a range: is this a quarter million to a million?
Or $100,000 to half a million? What is the range, and what are some
of the variables that people need to think about? Photo realism
versus AI-driven avatars. What are some of the things that drive the
Greg: Complexity of storyboard
is probably one of the biggest things; the way you want the
experience to pan out. So, how gameified it is, for example. So we
created something very, very cool with Cathay Pacific last year, for
example, to celebrate the arrival of the A350-1000 into their fleet,
and the opening of the new Hong Kong-Washington route which, again,
was launched to a really, really cool trade show called Wine &
Dine in Hong Kong last October. That has a gameified element in it
where, for example, the user gets to role play as a member of cabin
crew, which makes them feel a whole lot closer to the brand, really
conveys the warmth of the Cathay brand, that kind of thing.
That’s a relatively complex experience.
It could just be, for example, that we’re working with somebody to
celebrate the arrival of a new cabin layout in a certain class, or a
new seat. Those are the kinds of things that add variables in the
number of assets as well, and is obviously a pretty
heavily-influencing factor. In terms of the cost ranges…
unhelpfully, Alan, it’s pretty much any of the above that you just
mentioned, in terms of cost brackets, depending on the complexity of
Alan: What would be the minimum
entry point? So my guess is — and I don’t know your business — my
guess is between $100,000-$200,000, would be the entry to do
Greg: Yeah, I think an entry
piece where you’re looking at celebrating something pretty specific
would be towards the lower end of those two figures. It would be more
like around the $100K-mark than it would the $200K-mark.
On average we tend to say that, for
example, if you creating a marketing experience with us that
celebrates the same kinds of things that you would normally want to
bring out at a trade show, and you want to do it in such a way as
you’re not making your visitors sit in it just in a seat, still with
the trade show environment surrounding them, such they can’t really
tell that they’re meant to be on board an aircraft necessarily: these
kinds of things typically pay for themselves within one to two trade
Alan: Yeah, absolutely. And then
the ability to reuse assets, that’s vital.
something that I’ve not touched on with any other guest on the show;
what about the earned media that these companies are getting, by
being forward leading and forward-thinking on this? Some of the
earned media that some of these brands are getting far outweighs the
cost of even developing this. So, they spend a quarter-million
dollars, and then they get $10-million in earned media. Is that in
line with what you guys are seeing?
Greg: Totally, 100 percent. So a
couple of examples against that, Air Canada being the most current
one right now. There is shortly to be an Epic Games case study on the
experience that they’ve built with us — or maybe all of the
experiences that they’ve built with us — across the entire spectrum
of aircraft with which we worked with them, and we worked with them
on three aircraft. That’ll generate enormously good PR, perhaps in
circles that, without doing VR experience, wouldn’t have been perhaps
quite so forthcoming. It’s definitely something that is going to help
the Air Canada brand, to really cement itself as being one that
invests in innovation, and beyond that — and indeed as a consequence
of that — has the passenger experience and the comfort of the
passenger rights at the front of its thinking all the time.
That’s definitely a very big PR benefit
to this. It shows the brand as being an investor in tech, and
investor in innovation, and importantly, a brand that knows how to
use tech for good, for the benefit of the passenger. With Cathay, for
example, at the Wine & Dine show, where they released this
experience the first time last year — whereby they were prize
giveaways around this as well, being able to win a place on that
flight from Hong Kong to Washington — we really found that the
softer benefits of people being able to walk past a really cool
stand, which was meant to be the the front of an A350-1000 cut off,
with a glass panel at the back of it, with the experiences going on
inside, and with the TV screen pointing outwards to attract more
people into the queue, it really got people’s creative juices
flowing. It really got people feeling excited, in the same way as
they would if they were going into a traditionally B2C-focused VR
experience. Perhaps you can compare it to something along the lines
of Secrets of the Empire, the Star Wars experience — that I believe
his company in Toronto, actually — it’s that kind of emotion that
it’s calling on, and that kind of PR value as showing off the brand,
as being an investor in tech, and the brand that’s seeing this with
the communication medium that it’s going to be across the board very
soon. They’re showing themselves as early adopters, real innovators
in this space, and that brings with it enormous PR value, of course.
Alan: It’s interesting that you
say early adopters – and I think brands that are getting it now are
still early adopters. But by the end of 2019, this is just going to
be the way you do business. We’re going to go away from, “you’re
technologically advanced because you’re using VR/AR,” to, “you’re
not using VR/AR? What’s wrong with you?”
really think we’re on the cusp of that. I think you’re
absolutely right. You could well be right on the money and saying
it’s going to be within 2019. We’re certainly starting to see a
snowball effect, and we’re really now starting to see the more
projects that we work on really call to a specific use case, and the
more brands are starting to approach us really understanding what the
benefits are. I think once that has reached its tipping point, then
this medium, this business process, will show itself as being as
vital as we know it’s going to be very, very quickly.
Alan: I want to talk about one
other thing that I saw that you guys are doing. It’s not in VR. It’s
not in AR. It’s actually in 3D on Web. What you’ve done is taken the
same asset that you put people in VR on, and brought it onto Web in a
3D player environment, so people can spin the plane around and look
at the plane from different aspects. Talk to us about that type of
idea — of using this asset for a web-based experience, or a mobile
experience as well, because it’s not all about just having it on your
face as a headset at a trade show. This is something that can scale
to their website, and to millions and millions of people.
By the end of 2019, there will be over
two billion smartphones that will be AR-enabled. That’s a lot of
people that will have powerful AR in the pocket of their jeans, being
able to pull out their phone, and maybe drop a 747 in their driveway.
Greg: You’re absolutely right.
I’ve seen some really cool experiences in the automotive sector that
do that. I know BMW got one for the i8 as well, where you can drop
one in front of your face in the driveway. That’s obviously something
that is extremely useful for tech that they know that consumers have
because we have a Lamborghini one — I’m going to drop a Lamborghini
in my living room, take a picture, and I’ll put it in the show notes
Greg: That’s a great idea. I
know McLaren have got a really good experience in that regard as
well. They built something really cool in VR as well, that’s more of
a configurator setup. But there’s a lot going on in the automotive
space as well, which I think is an entire other podcast in itself,
potentially, material-wise.
But from an aviation point of view and
these complementary assets — these extra assets that you can get
from the experience, you’re absolutely right. Whilst we’re in a day
and age where hardware, such as the Oculus Rift, the upcoming Oculus
Quest, for example, the HTC Vive, are much more applicable piece of
hardware for businesses to buy and use for trade show use cases, for
example, where you put a lot of for people going through the same
device. And it’s really important to be able to scale these
experiences out to what consumers can currently tap into from the
comfort of their own homes.
One of the beauties of having both
incredibly interactive and demonstrative experiences, as well as
incredible visuals, one of the best things that that does, it means
that we can boil down assets — boil down slices of the experience
from the VR experience itself — that can be used on marketing
channels, websites, YouTube channels, Vimeo channels, for example, to
allow the consumer at home to access this through different devices,
and to still have much of the same exploratory benefits of the
experience we create without necessarily having the access to the
hardware that the experience itself was built for in the first place.
Whilst the hardware market is where it is, and whilst it’s obviously
not something that everybody’s got access to all the time for price
or the ability to put it up in a home, all those kinds of things are
there. Obviously, it’s not reached 100 percent mass adoption just
yet. It’s really powerful for brands to be able to have that.
One of the most recent projects that we
completed, we had the pleasure of working with British Airways last
few months, around the release of their new Club Suite offering for
the A350 aircraft. A large chunk of the benefit beyond the
familiarization piece, of course, was the fact that those assets can
be used in marketing channels, can be used to spread awareness about
and generate appetite for a really, really exciting development for
them. Also, as part of their 100-year anniversary, and very much as a
traditional marketing piece that had these extra 360 video pieces
built into it from the assets we created, and the ability to, again,
show themselves as being an investor in tech and demonstrate this
class that obviously doesn’t physically yet exist, but will do very
soon. Having built it in VR, it’s now important for us to to work
with them to be able to get it out into the public domain. And that’s
exactly what these assets are used for. It’s definitely something
Alan: So, moving a little bit
along, what I would ask you is: what’s one of the best XR experiences
that you’ve ever had personally? It can be within your company or
outside. But what is a thing that you did that was like, wow? what
head of VR, Sergio, who’s got an incredible amount of industry
knowledge and been through an incredible number of experiences like
this would a hundred percent agree with me on this: The Secrets of
the Empire Star Wars experiences is pretty much streets ahead, in
terms of everything that I’ve experienced. And this is very much my
B2C point of view, obviously. It spent a little time here in London,
in Westfield. The ability to do exactly what XR is meant to do, in
the sense that it transports your mind to a completely different
reality and makes you genuinely convinced that you’re somewhere else,
and taking part in a different set of activities, and opens up a
whole number of possibilities of different kinds of interactions. You
can have different worlds you inhabit, combined with the way that it
interacts with physical assets. For example, there’s a piece at the
beginning, where you can pick up a gun as the start of your mission,
and there’s a physical gun in front of you, as well as being in the
VR experience — the way that the physical world and the virtual
world have been meshed and embedded together is mind-blowingly
powerful. As far as anything I’ve experienced, that’s definitely
right at the top for now.
Alan: That’s the Void, right?
Greg: Yes. Yes, it is the Void.
Alan: That’s the Void, and they’re in a number of different cities. There’s one in New York. It’s a Utah-based company called The Void. And I think it’s thevoid.com. I’m pretty sure it is. There’s one in Toronto. There’s actually two in Toronto, believe it or not; we’re the only city in the world to have two. They have a bunch of different experiences: Ghostbusters, Star Wars, Wreck-It Ralph, where you’re actually going in in the Wreck-It Ralph world. So that’s an incredible experience, and you’re not the first person to say that as well. So I think the guys at the Void have really done a great job at bringing the magic into VR and put haptic floors, scent machines — they’ve hijacked all your senses. And I think that’s really important.
Do you guys use anything other than visuals and audio? Have you used haptics or scent machines or anything like that?
Greg: Yeah. We have. To a
relatively simplified degree, we do use haptics to demonstrate touch,
and pick up, and various different actions within a lot of our
airline-focused experiences. One of the reasons why we haven’t gone
too much further with that just yet, and rather used as a mechanism
to demonstrate what it would feel like to pick something up in the
physical world, is because of the wide variety of different people
who are going through these kinds of experiences – and I want to
talk about The Void a bit more in that sense in a second, because
creating content like that and experiences like that is enormously
helpful and just generally increasing the awareness of what VR can
do, and it’s something that’s going to help all content creators
across the board to be able to communicate their message more
clearly.
One of the things that we really focus
on with abilities experiences is making it is as intuitive and as
simple as it possibly can be for the user; not adding too many
buttons and bells and whistles, making the instructions really clear,
really highlighting the interactions that there are, but not
including too much so as to confuse or overwhelm the user. But
certainly to the extent that we can without over complicating things
and really helping the user to intuitively use what we build. And we
have integrated set pieces of haptic response within the Oculus Rift
controllers for pieces of the experiences that we build, yes. I think
that’s definitely a whole heap more potential for that, as the
industry grows and consciousness towards this means of doing things.
Alan: I’m just going to throw
this out, because you talked about the best experience you had. But
what is the most impressive business use case that you’ve seen so
far? What is the one thing that you go, wow, I never thought of that,
but wow, that is a really good business use case?
Greg: That’s a really good
question. To be honest, we’re at the stage in the industry where
there’s a whole lot of impressive experiences out there. And having a
tour of the Epic Games studio last year was really something that —
I’d only recently joined the digital by this stage — that was really
an educational day for me.
There’s not really an individual one.
I’m disappointing the going to have to offer that in my answer. The
space, however, where I feel like the most impressive
across-the-board B2B technology is currently existing is in
automotive. A very obvious use case and very obvious extension to
what previously existed where VR would find its home would be
configurators; would be in building a luxury car from the ground up.
I know McLaren got something like this. Toyota have got something
that’s really cool along these lines as well. It’ss the ability to
really feel as though you’re in the room with that car.
You mentioned the idea of using AR to
place a Lamborghini on your driveway. I’ve seen the BMW i8 experience
as well, which is extremely powerful. I really feel as though, in VR,
you can go even a step beyond that, and within whatever space you
want to place it in — whatever environment you want to place it in
— to be able to be really close up to a super luxury vehicle, to
take it apart using interactive VR, to examine different elements of
it, to see how it’s built from the ground up. I’ve seen experiences
where you can explode the car, if you will, out, so you can examine
every single tiny detailed component of what makes up the beautiful
thing that you see in front of you, and then zoom it all back
together, and just see how it meshes together and works as a system,
is incredibly powerful. I think a lot of the most powerful B2B
visuals, the most powerful means of really getting a market excited
about a product, a lot of that exists within automotive. It’s a
really, really impressive space we’re moving up to right now.
Alan: It’s interesting you
mentioned that, because one of our previous guests on the show was
Elizabeth Baron, who was the head of VR for Ford Motor Company in
Detroit for the last 20 years. She has seen everything, from CAVE
systems, to early VR headsets, to multi-million dollar experimental
headsets. They even built one with magnetic tracking. But if you can
imagine magnetic tracking, you can’t have any metal. So they built an
entire cockpit out of wood.
Alan: The great thing about the
way VR is being used at Ford is they’re actually using it for design
first. They’ll bring the car in, they’ll have design meetings.
They’ll look at different aspects of the car real-time, and then
management will come in — in virtual reality from around the world
— and look at the vehicle from all angles, different lighting.
They’ve got real-time ray tracing, meaning the lighting bounces off
the car the right way. They’ve got emulators where you can drive the
cars, and then, that same asset that they’re using for design — once
that car’s designed and approved by everybody and they know they’re
going to go to build with it — now, you can take that and use it as
a marketing asset. They’re doing the same thing you guys are doing
with airlines, only with cars, and reusing those assets for marketing
and sales distribution. One of the coolest things I saw was Jaguar
using VR to sell cars that wouldn’t be ready for three years.
Greg: That’s insane. That’s
absolutely the power of it. The ability to generate an appetite for
something that, otherwise, you would only have sketches or words to
be able to describe these things in. Bravo to Ford; that’s a
fantastic use case and especially the ability to bring, like you say,
upper management in from remote parts of the world and co-design and
co-approve this thing before it’s even been physically created, and
then reuse that asset for various different purposes. How powerful is
that, in terms of being able to save on costs? In terms of being able
to save on logistics, and people having to be in the same space in
order to be able to save on physical prototyping of components? Or
indeed, the entire vehicle? And in order to make the experience fun,
hyper-visual, hyper-interactive, and make you feel like you’re right
next to the actual vehicle, when it doesn’t exist yet!
Alan: Yeah, I know it’s crazy.
Alan: It’s here’s another crazy
one. HTC has been promoting this; Bell Helicopters just designed a
new, future-age helicopter. It normally takes them 2-3 years to
develop a helicopter. They built the whole thing in virtual reality
in six months.
Alan: So they saved a 10 times
increase in productivity.
Greg: Exactly. And that’s an
asset to an experience that they’ve built that’s never going to
become defunct. If there are any changes required to that base
helicopter model, for example, they can be made. They can be made in
real-time, and they’re going to be able to use that for a variety of
different purposes going forward, which is just not something they’d
have access to with a physical mockup.
When I first joined Neutral, I hadn’t
had a massive amount of exposure to VR that just yet, so there was a
lot of learning to be done, a lot of upscaling in the first month or
so. I really saw, from having seen some unusual experiences before I
actually joined the company, I really saw this as being about as
close to teleportation as you can get. And I know that’s a very
childlike, somewhat basic way of describing what VR does. But it’s
got the same kind of multi-dimensional transportative benefits to it,
and abilities to it, that can genuinely make you feel like you’re
completely somewhere else, and can genuinely make you feel like
you’re next to something that doesn’t actually exist in reality, but
really tricks your brain, convinces your brain into thinking that it
does. It’s so powerful, and it really is. Have you read the book, The
Fourth Transformation, by Robert Scoble?
Alan: I have. Robert actually is
going to be a guest on the show, as well.
Greg: Noway. Well, that’s one of the things that I read as part of my
upscaling before I joined this company.
Alan: You‘ve got to get Charlie
Fink’s Convergence as well. And Charlie Fink’s Metaverse, even though
he’s spelled MetaVRse wrong. Oh, no.
no! He put an E between the V and the R, I take it.
Alan: What the heck was he
Greg: I’m sorry to hear that.
Alan: I was actually one of the
contributing authors to Convergence. I know Robert, and I know
Charlie, very well. Robert and I have geeked out many a times, and as
a matter of fact, the first VR experience I ever did with Chris Milk
with it, that concert was with Robert Scoble.
Greg: Oh, no way. Amazing.
Alan: We both tried it together
at the Curiosity Camp, was Eric Schmidt’s camp for tech people?
Greg: Geez. No way. That’s so
cool.
Alan: That was my introduction
to VR. So I feel very blessed to have been brought into this world by
the fathers of the industry.
Greg: Yeah. People of that sort
of caliber. That’s really amazing. What an intro.
Alan: Yeah, no kidding. I dove
in headfirst and it’s been an incredible run.
So let’s let’s shift gears to ask one
final question, then we’ll recap. This has been an amazing interview
so far, and I really want to get your insights on this next part.
What do you see for the future of VR/AR and XR as it pertains to
business? What do you see the future is?
Greg: I 100 percent agree with
an observation that you made earlier, that potentially, by the end of
2019 — or indeed, whenever this is going to happen; it’s a matter of
when, not if — that VR is going to be something that businesses
simply need as a core business process. Whether that be for
communication purposes, or whether it be for familiarization with a
product internally, or for training purposes, or for using as part of
a consultative engagement with a client. If you’re a large
consultancy, for example, I think clients are going to release and
start seeing the need for this. And those who create projects and
business, and work collaboratively with their own clients, will need
to start integrating this into their own business processes in time.
It’s going to be an incredibly core part of innovation centers at
large companies, and business processes, and the product development
lifecycle — for all sizes of business — within whatever timeframe
that may be. I think, certainly, within five years — a little bit
contingent on the hardware market and developments therein, a little
bit on the number of content creators out there really focusing on
specialism and really honing in on having very specific skill sets. I
think it’s really largely about that.
I think it maybe is looking like it’s
going to be a relatively fragmented marketplace from the content
creator’s point of view, which I think is why it’s so important to
specialize, to retain a sense of serious definition, potentially.
Although, there are obviously lots of lots of agencies out there
doing a more generalist approach really, really well. So perhaps I’m
completely wrong with that. But I think it’s going to be something
that within the not-so-distant future is going to be an opportunity
cost if you don’t have it; it’s going to be a much more rare
state of affairs that the company doesn’t use VR, AR, or any of the
extended realities, the mixed realities, in some capacity for
something. I know that that’s a very sweeping answer, but I very much
passionately believe that this is indeed exactly as a Scoble
describes it in his book; that it’s going to be the industry
revolution that the smartphone was in so many ways. It’s going to
become 100 percent necessary for business.
