XR for Business

XR for Business

By Alan Smithson from MetaVRseBusinessTechnologyArts
Download on the App Store

XR for Business episodes

  • XR Technologies in Service of the Human Experience, with Voices of VR Podcast’s Kent Bye – Part 2

    We pick up where we left off, with Part 2 of Alan’s interview with Kent Bye, host of the Voices of VR Podcast. In this half, the two VR podcast hosts discuss the ethics of XR, building a strong economic ecosystem for emerging technologies, the AR Cloud, and more.

    Alan: Coming up next on the XR

    for Business Podcast, we have part 2 of the interview with Kent Bye
    from the Voices Of VR podcast, the podcast that got me started in
    this industry.

    I’m actually one of the founding

    members of the Open Air Cloud Group and Kronos Group is is really
    kind of trying to pull together these standards for 3D, as well for
    e-commerce. I know there’s a group right now trying to standardize 3D
    objects for e-commerce and retail because right now it’s a dog’s
    breakfast. Facebook accepts glTFs, Hololens is FBX models, VR is
    usually OBJs. So you have all these different 3D file formats. None
    of them really work well together and you can’t– it’s not easy to
    convert one to the other. And then of course, Apple came along and
    created USDZ. Or in Canada, USDZed. It’s crazy right now to think
    that there’s fifteen different 3D model types and it’s kind of like
    we need to settle on the JPG of 3D, whatever that happens to be,
    which in my opinion is probably glTF. But I think we need to
    standardize that and just pick, it so that– can imagine trying to
    send a photo to somebody and you send it in one format. And we saw
    this 10 years ago on the Web, just– it was 10 different ways to send
    a photo in different formats. Your camera would take one format, and
    it wouldn’t work with your MacBook. I think the tolerance for
    interoperability, I think the world just demands interoperability
    now. And if you’re not building for that, well, then you’re going to
    end up like Facebook and get broken apart.

    Kent: Yeah. And I published a

    podcast with the managing director of Open AR Cloud, and one of the
    other founding members. And yeah, they were talking a lot about these
    various different issues. So, yeah, it’s something that you don’t see
    necessarily a lot of news on, until– unless you’re sort of deep into
    the weeds of helping design these protocols. But I did go to the
    Decentralized Web Summit last year, and one of the things that I saw
    was that there’s kind of like this pendulum that swings back and
    forth between the centralized systems and the decentralized systems.
    And I’d say that with cryptocurrency, with the containers being able
    take different aspects of a server and be able to push it out to the
    edge. We have it self-contained within either Kubernetes or Docker
    containers. And just in general, it’s kind of a movement away from
    centralized systems into more decentralized architectures.

    That’s a interesting trend that I think

    that paying attention to the rise of the decentralized web and what
    that is going to afford. I feel like it’s a lot more about open
    protocols and collaboration and having people collaborate in
    different ways. And that’s something that I’d say has been a little
    bit lacking within the VR and AR industry. I mean, there’s been a
    certain amount of not sharing of knowledge, but in terms of like real
    meaningful collaboration. There’s been a few things like OpenXR and
    WebXR are of the big standouts, as well as probably the Chromium
    browsers that a lot of different companies are working on. But in
    terms of specific things to grow an ecosystem, it’s been difficult
    for companies to figure out what does it mean to grow community and
    what it mean to grow an entire ecosystem that you may be a part of.
    And I feel like the cryptocurrency world has had to deal with that a
    little bit, in the sense that they’re creating these open protocols,
    and they have to prove that there’s a buy-in to people participating
    in these different protocols, and are going to be able to have these
    different use cases.

    And so I feel like there’s this

    metaphor of a blue ocean and a red ocean, where right now there’s so
    much opportunity for these immersive technologies that it’s really a
    chance for people to collaborate and to work with other people on
    these big initiatives, and that you could actually do a lot of really
    big important things together. And then eventually you’ll get to the
    it being a red ocean where in order for you get a client, you have to
    take it away from somebody else. With the blue ocean is that there’s
    such an abundance of opportunity that you getting business can
    actually help other people also getting business, just because it’s
    kind of promoting the overall industry in general. And so I feel like
    that there is a bit of like a real openness, but yet right now on the
    whole XR industry, there’s a bit of– with the launch of the Oculus
    Quest it’d starting to get locked down a lot more, they’re starting
    to be a little bit more of trying to grab and own different aspects
    of the platform. So I see we’re kind of in this shift moving more
    towards that kind of red ocean mindset, but yet still have a–

    Alan: It’s too early to be

    moving there.

    Kent: I know, it’s still– and

    that’s sort of why I wanted to bring up these kind of dynamics and
    tensions, because there is value of having a very good user
    experience with something like the Quest, or the iPhone, it’s also a
    very closed platform compared to, say, Android. But the user
    experience on the iPhone is arguably better than the Android. And the
    user experience in the Quest is gonna be better than pretty much any
    other competitor that’s out there at this point. And so we have
    something meaningful come from HTC Vive with the Focus, or Focus
    Plus. So I see that there’s this kind of pendulum that swings back
    and forth and that like, yes, we have the Quest. It’s gonna be more
    of a closed platform, but eventually there’s gonna be something that
    comes out there, that’s gonna be a little bit more open, and there’s
    gonna be new affordances that are given with that. So as people are
    trying to navigate this, I think it’s just important to kind of
    notice these big, large swings, whereas right now things are moving
    more towards the closed and more centralized, proprietary. But
    there’s also a lot of the future of technology that’s being developed
    right now is trying to support and sustain these completely
    decentralized systems.

    Alan: I hope we move to an open

    system, because just from a practical standpoint, if I’m wearing a
    pair of AR glasses and I’m walking down the street, I don’t want to
    have to close an app, open another one, get it to do whatever it is,
    and then close that one and go back to– I don’t have tabs. I just
    want everything to work seamlessly around me as I move through my
    life. And the only way to do that is through open systems.

    Kent: Yeah. How do you manage

    and maintain, if there is just one platform like the web, then on the
    web you have URL, which is you’re going to a location. But in the
    real world, you have a GPS with an altitude. So a geopositional–
    where you’re at in space and time, essentially. Well–

    Alan: Then they can use photo

    recognition or image recognition to really triangulate down to
    centimeters where you are.

    Kent: Yeah. So I think there’s a

    lot of stuff that’s still be fleshed out in terms of the AR cloud,
    the open AR cloud. I think it’s actually healthy to have a
    competition, and I don’t think it’s reasonable to only have open
    because you have to have what’s even possible. And usually what’s
    possible is defined by those closed systems. And sometimes there’s
    these different tradeoffs. Open source projects, they move slower,
    they’re more buggy, they have a worse user experience. And so you
    have more freedom and control. And some people, they opted run Linux
    because of that. But there’s a lot of people that decide to run a Mac
    or Windows, just because they don’t have to deal with all the
    thrashing. So I feel like there’s always going to be these tradeoffs
    between the closed and the open. I just want to promote whatever the
    polarity point is, because if it’s too much of one, then we need to
    have kind of the both to be able to be in this conversation of
    competition. I think it’s healthy to have those competitions and many
    different perspectives, but I tend to certainly be biased towards the
    open systems as well.

    Alan: Well, I think it’s an

    interesting position in time where we are right now, where you talk
    about the blue ocean, red ocean. And up until now, I’ve seen just
    almost everybody in this industry collaborate with one another. We
    phone somebody, ask them for help, they’re able to offer it. And only
    recently have I realized that some companies, they’re not giving out
    their metrics around their success. So maybe they try VR training,
    for example, and they’re seeing some really good traction, but they
    won’t release it as a case study, because they’re seeing that as a
    technological advantage to their business. Others are, “Hey,
    let’s tell everybody this, because it will drive the price of
    developing this down for everybody and everybody will win.” So
    you kind of have both of those mindsets. Macy’s started using VR for
    furniture sales and they’re seeing an average — this average across
    one hundred stores — 54 percent increase in basket size and cart
    sizes using VR.

    Kent: Wow. The degree to which

    people are sharing this information, I think it’s always been
    variable. I think we’ve been in a very actually, if anything, a way
    more open time in the history of VR than we’ve ever had. Because all
    throughout the 90s, up until– Laval Virtual in France has been
    running for the last 21 years. And when I go to different academic
    conferences like the IEEEVR and talk to different academics, there’s
    been a very robust ecosystem of VR that’s been happening in Europe
    consistently over the last two decades plus in aerospace and
    automobile industries. But what I heard from academics was they don’t
    talk about it, because of that very reason and because it did give
    them a competitive advantage. So I still think that there is a
    certain amount of things that people won’t or can’t talk about.

    Right now in Hollywood there’s a lot of

    stuff that’s happening in virtual production. And I’ve done some
    interviews on that. But mostly there’s a lot of people that just
    aren’t talking about what’s happening in Hollywood and the changes
    that are happening, in part because it’s a little bit of trying to
    position yourself to be able to own the entire virtual production
    pipeline or the ecosystem there, because there’s already a lot of
    visual effects shops. And there’s been a sea change in terms of how
    visual effects are happening on set, probably starting at least with
    Ready Player One and Steven Spielberg with the extent to which that
    virtual reality technologies were being used on the set in Hollywood.
    So I feel like that there’s always gonna be those realms in which
    there’s gonna be things that are a little bit harder to get access
    to.

    Another big example is what’s happening

    in the military. It’s very difficult to have somebody from the
    military tell you specifically what they’re doing, because not only
    is it just– it starts to become a national security risk at that
    point. But it just gets harder to get specific details about what
    type of training is happening, but VR’s been funded since like the
    Sword of Damocles that DARPA has been involved with funding VR
    innovation and technologies consistently for the last 50+ years. And
    Tom Furness — one of the pioneers of VR — was in the Air Force, and
    at the same time as Ivan Sutherland was doing all of his pioneering
    work. But he was quietly working in the Air Force, doing all sorts of
    applications up until the late 80s. And then he went to go start the
    HITLab in Washington. But there’s still a lot that has likely been
    happening within the military realm, that we still have no idea
    what’s happening.

    So I feel like that’s a little bit par

    for the course. And I do as much as I can to find these people and
    talk to them. But I find any publicly traded company, it’s difficult
    for them to talk about things without getting approval from their PR,
    because it starts to then become a potential impact on their stock
    prices. And then you have this whole layer of public relations that
    has to help mediate that. And they’re pretty risk averse. So I feel
    like if you’re a startup company, there’s less risk. But I would
    personally encourage any company that’s working on stuff that want to
    talk about things — I usually solely focus on talking to people face
    to face at conference — so I encourage them to either come on your
    podcast to talk about it, or find me at a conference and I’d be more
    than willing to talk more about all the stuff that maybe isn’t
    getting a lot of other press coverage, because I do think it’s
    important to have these conversations. I mean, it’s why I do the
    podcast, because I feel like there’s so much value of being able to
    actually have a consistent conversation as to what’s happening, just
    to give people an access point to keep up to date as to how all this
    is unfolding.

    Alan: It’s happening and it’s

    happening fast. It’s funny, it’s happening slow and fast at the same
    time. When you started your podcast in… what, 2014?

    Kent: Yeah.

    Alan: When you started doing

    your first podcasts, I’m assuming that you thought things would
    happen faster than they did, and then they took longer. But then at
    the same time, they’re moving crazy fast. So I think investors, VCs
    got in really early and they had all this money and expecting these
    huge returns. And it wasn’t there. And then they kind of had these
    false starts. And we put the false starts are getting shorter and
    shorter in between each false start, which means we’re kind of coming
    to this crescendo of technology. So we’re excited.

    Kent: Well, if you look at the

    Gartner hype cycle, there’s a sort of the initial proof of concept,
    and then that has a certain level of hype of what is made possible.
    And then you have this real realization of like, “Oh, well,
    that’s what’s possible, but we’re a long ways away from that.”
    So then you have the trough of disillusionment and then you have the
    slow climb towards this kind of eventually the plateau of
    productivity. But I feel like VR has gone through two or three hike
    cycles. Since the 60s and then the 90s, it really had this huge hype
    cycle. And we’re we’re kind of in this arguably third or fourth wave
    of VR now. And I expect that– Gartner doesn’t even put virtual
    reality in its emerging technology, because it doesn’t really
    consider it to be emerging anymore. It’s now established.

    Alan: No. It emerged.

    Kent: It has emerged. And so

    it’s a proven technology that already has so many different
    compelling use cases, that it’s not even really considered emerging
    anymore in terms of the scope of technology, which is a great sign.
    And I think augmented reality has always been kind of trailing behind
    in terms of getting to that point of really being useful. I think AI
    combined with AR is gonna be helping push it.And so there’s these
    these dual innovations that are happening that are really going to
    get AR to that point. But looking at these different cycles and a big
    question in the consumer space is when is it gonna become mainstream?
    As I go to these different developer conferences, I go to Facebook
    F8, or Microsoft Build, or Google IO. These are like the major tech
    companies. And then there’s Amazon, they have Sumerian. You have
    Apple, with ARKit. Pretty much every major tech company right now is
    doing some foundational work, to be able to create this spatial
    computing paradigm shift. So for me, it’s not a matter of when, but
    it’s a matter of if.

    And part of the reason why I say that

    is because some of the most interesting and most difficult problems
    are still in the realm of spatial computing, artificial intelligence,
    the blending of artificial intelligence with spatial computing,
    because you could start to create virtual environments that are able
    to train AI neural networks that end up being the exact same neural
    network architecture and weightings. So you can train a robot in VR,
    and then take that same training and put it into an actual robot. And
    you’re able to then basically do an accelerated version of spatial
    training for some of these objects. Doing that a lot for–

    Alan: Wow, I never thought of

    that.

    Kent: –for doing for cars,

    training these self-driving cars and whatnot. And you’d be able to–
    and you’re able to accelerate it, because it’s sort of a real time
    environment, you’re able to do these virtual simulations. And so
    because of that, there’s kind of like this sisterhood of experiential
    technologies between artificial intelligence and virtual and
    augmented reality. Because of that, there’s kind of a co-evolution
    that’s happening. You start to see some of these use cases for
    virtual reality drive the need to push computer vision or push pose
    detection or doing the tracking algorithms. I mean, just from what
    the Quest is able to do as a self-contained VR headset, that is in a
    large part for a lot of the AI innovations that a lot of those
    algorithms may have not even existed like five years ago in terms of
    the deep reinforcement learning and deep learning approaches to
    computer vision that have been innovated, but in having these huge,
    huge breakthroughs. So those huge breakthroughs are actually being
    applied and deployed into these immersive technologies.

    So for me, I just see that it’s not a

    matter of if but but when. And I tend put it around like 2025 is when
    I feel that’s gonna be sort of a critical mass when all of these
    things are just gonna be completely all over the place. It’s gonna be
    a little bit of like how we’ve been about five years in. I’ve been
    doing the podcast a May 19th, 2014 as I went into the Silicon Valley
    Virtual Reality conference. We’re coming up on five years from that.
    So another five or six years from now, I feel like it’s gonna be a
    similar to– we went from the Oculus DK1, the first developer kit —
    3DOF, really low res, screen door, kind of made you motion sick — to
    now all of a sudden a self-contained, very high resolution, six
    degree of freedom, self-contained, tetherless virtual reality system
    that you can take on the go. And that’s like an enormous– for
    anybody that’s in the VR industry it’s taken forever. But on that
    relatively anthropological scale of humanity, that’s really fast. And
    what the innovations that we’re gonna see for the next five years I
    think are going to be just as impressive.

    Alan: Yeah, I think it’s just

    going to get faster and faster. And I never even thought about neural
    nets for vehicles using virtual environments to train the neural net.
    It’s just it’s this kind of crazy exponential feedback loop which
    will just make the technology faster and faster and faster. And the
    singularity might be the point where computers are out-thinking
    mankind, but I see it as kind of the point where all of these
    technologies into the exponential phase, where it just goes straight
    up. And you say kind of 2025 when they all converge. Think about it,
    even if it’s 2030, that’s 10 years away from now. And we can’t even
    remotely fathom what the world will be like in the next 10 years.

    Kent: Well so that that’s where

    I disagree. And the reason why I disagree is because you have to look
    at it through the human experience. And I feel like the human
    experience is, there’s certain things that we know are going to be a
    part of the human experience and that these technologies are in
    service of the human experience. And so whether it’s like having
    entertainment, dealing with medical issues, connecting to your
    partners, dealing with grief, or connecting to your sense of deeper
    purpose, or spirituality, or religion, or philosophy, what we do for
    our careers and our work, what we’re doing and how we connect to our
    friends and our family, being able to deal with isolation and to not
    feel exiled and to feel connected, the way that we express our
    identity, the way that we have commerce and exchange value with each
    other, the way we communicate with each other, or we learn and we
    teach each other, higher education as well. And then being able to
    connect to our home and family.

    That’s a spectrum where I could be

    pretty sure that the human experience is still going to involve all
    of those things and that if anything, the augmented and virtual
    reality technologies are going to still augment what it means to be
    human. And in fact, it may expand the whole sensory input of of all
    the different ways in which we can experience things, because it’s a
    big thing about expanding our senses. And if we are the essence of
    the human experience, this synthesis of all of our sensory input,
    then VR affords us to put new sensory input that we could never have.
    So we can start to develop completely new senses that we didn’t have
    before. And people have already been able to do that by turning their
    torso into an ear, by rewiring, taking audio sounds, transmitting it
    to a different haptic feedback onto your body. And then if you can’t
    hear, you can get that data information that is getting into your
    brain that’s in the same data structure as what the cochlear would be
    presenting. And your brain kind of figures it out. Your brain is very
    plastic in being able to take input from just about any source, as
    long as it’s in the right format. And the brain can start to discern
    those signals, then you start to expand senses and augment senses.

    So I feel like that’s a realm where we

    don’t quite know what’s possible is, what’s the full human potential.
    But I do think that we’re going to still have the fundamental aspects
    of the human experience that have never changed. And that’s why I
    tend to look at technology through the lens of the human experience,
    rather than through the lens of technology itself. Because, yes,
    there are going to be all these amazing technological advances. And I
    don’t necessarily see technologies ever going to be able to achieve
    the same level of consciousness and human awareness as a human.
    That’s debatable, as to whether or not we’re going to have hard AI,
    but for me, I tend to say that human consciousness is something
    that’s very unique to humans, and that it’s emergent from our organic
    bodies and our life experiences.

    It’s going to take a long time and

    there might be ways of mimicking it, but it’s gonna be kind of like
    just mouthing of those emotions rather than the full experience of
    those emotions by the technology or the AI. So that’s at least how I
    think about it. And I think by doing that, it sort of re-centers it
    through the lens of the human experience and puts the humans first,
    because the risk of thinking that the technology is going to be
    smarter than us, is that you start to create this hierarchy where
    we’re in service to the technology, which I think is not the point. I
    think that the technologies always needs to be in service of humans.
    And if it’s not, then something has gone seriously wrong.

    Alan: Well, I think the problem

    isn’t that the technology will be in the service of technology, it
    will be that the technology will be employed by a very small few to
    leverage its potential against other humans. And that’s the problem.
    It’s never gonna be the technology that overtakes us, it’s that some
    people will have control of such vast amounts of technology that
    they’ll be able to take advantage of the rest of humanity. That’s
    what I worry about.

    Kent: Yeah. That’s a huge thing

    that I worry about as well, because I do– I totally agree with that.
    And I do think that both virtual and augmented reality as well as
    artificial intelligence — as well as all of these other exponential
    technologies, frankly — they are forcing us into a paradigm shift,
    where it’s like a reflection over things that are not working, and
    that we have to kind of upgrade our operating system for how we
    relate to each other, the type of decisions we make, the way that we
    run our economies, the way that value is exchanged. At so many
    different levels, there’s a re-evaluation. If we have all the thing,
    all the existing structures, then we are going to create this
    situation where these big major companies basically have complete and
    total control over everything, which I think is a huge danger, which
    I think we’re on that trajectory. But that’s why I advocate so
    strongly for these decentralized systems, because we need these other
    open decentralized alternatives, so that we don’t have these handful
    of small companies that are controlling everything.

    Alan: Well, I think we’re we’re

    already in that position where we’ve got Apple, Google, Facebook,
    Amazon, Walmart. These companies are arguably larger than most
    states, most countries in the world and their GDP. And so the
    influence and power that they hold are astronomical. And the
    distribution of wealth is actually narrowing. It’s getting worse. And
    I think we need a complete reset of a lot of different things. And my
    purpose in life is to inspire and educate future leaders to think and
    act in a socially, economically, and environmentally responsible way.
    Because the way we continue to do our business, if we don’t
    fundamentally look at things from the three fundamentals of social,
    economic, and environmental and start evaluating our businesses based
    on those, rather than just the one value of measure — and that’s
    economic — then I think we’re going to run into a brick wall with
    the earth itself, the planet itself. And people are like, “Oh,
    we’ll move to Mars.” Why the hell would you want to move to
    Mars? We have a perfectly good planet right here.

    We have to take care of one another and

    this planet, as one unit. And I think these technologies will start
    to strip away at the idea of borders. And they will either make them
    stronger or they’ll actually make them less impactful, because at the
    end of the day, we’re all humans and we’re all here to work together
    as one entity. And I think virtual and augmented reality and
    artificial intelligence really have the potential to give us that one
    thing that I think is the greatest existential risk we’ve ever faced.
    And that’s the lack of education as we move into exponential
    technologies. And with that, I want to I want to just ask you the
    question that you ask everybody at the end of your podcast. I’m going
    to ask it here, because I think it’s a fitting tribute to the Voices
    Of VR podcast, which if you’re listening to this podcast, you made it
    this far, then you will absolutely love the Voices Of VR podcast. In
    your opinion, Kent, what is the ultimate potential of virtual
    reality?

    Kent: Well, I think at the

    heart, what virtual and augmented reality technologies allow us to do
    is to connect more to ourselves, connect more to each other, connect
    more to the planet, and to connect at all levels of reality. I feel
    like there’s gonna be a certain level of self-awareness and
    contemplation, where we were just kind of talking about all these
    different moral dilemmas. And the thing about VR and AR is that it’s
    like the world’s most liberating education platform, that’s going to
    unlock all this human potential that we didn’t even know was
    possible. But it’s also the world’s worst surveillance technology,
    especially if it’s in the wrong hands. So I feel like it’s in this
    really strange position. For anybody that’s in VR and AR is that you
    are dealing with these huge major companies, that may or may not have
    your best interests in mind. And so you see all this deep potential
    for what’s possible. But yet at the same time, there’s so many
    ethical and moral compromises that the existing business models of
    surveillance capitalism have.

    But I feel like that’s a sign of the

    times, is like these moral dilemmas where you, everybody has to
    navigate their own ethical framework for how they’re going to
    participate in bringing about change. And for me, I’ve decided to try
    to embrace the technology rather than reject it, because I feel like
    the potential for what amazing things it’s going to allow us to do,
    that potential is just so exciting that I feel like we’re going to
    have to create new things that don’t exist right now. Because one of
    the things that I asked one of the co-founders of the Internet, Vint
    Cerf. I ran into him at the Decentralized Web Summit and I was really
    curious, because he works at Google. I was like challenging him, I
    was like, “Hey, Vint, don’t you think that Google should stop
    maybe doing some of this surveillance capitalism? Because it’s really
    a pernicious business model.” And his response is really
    interesting, because he was like, you know, he’s somebody who helped
    invent the Internet and he’s deciding to work with Google. Why?

    Alan: Because he can make more

    difference within than without.

    Kent: Well, he sees that

    Google’s been able to provide universal access to human knowledge for
    free to everybody in the world. And they do that. They actually do do
    that. And if you can find him another way to pay for that at scale,
    then go ahead and do that and compete with them. At this point,
    nobody has thought of that yet. And I feel like that is a huge
    opportunity. But there’s also a huge challenge, because there’s all
    sorts of economies of scale that happen with having centralized power
    like that. And it really what it takes is a huge consciousness
    transformation for people to start to collaborate. And if we are
    going to have something that’s going to be an antidote to these big
    major companies, we’re gonna have to work together. We’re going to
    have to collaborate and work together.

    Talking to Anand Agarawala from

    Spatial, he said “The big thing that they see in Spatial is to
    think about when you’re looking at a basketball team or a hockey
    team, and they’re all in synchrony with each other and they’re
    collaborating, but they’re not speaking. They’re just speaking
    nonverbally with their bodies. Then the spatial computing
    technologies is going to be able to enable that for humans at scale.”
    So what is it going to mean for us to be able to actually work
    together and build things that would be impossible for us to build on
    our own? That’s a true potential. And then the reason why we can’t
    think of the business model yet is because we haven’t seen what’s
    possible when we have people at scale being able to work and
    collaborate with each other. And I feel like that’s what the AR and
    VR technologies are going to enable. And that once we see that, then
    we’re going to maybe find out some of these completely new paradigms
    that we’re in the midst of needing.

    Because frankly, I feel like we’re on a

    brink of cultural and economic collapse on so many levels. I mean,
    sort of the haves and have nots and the different polarizations that
    are happening in our world are getting so extreme, that we really
    need some ways that we can find common ground and work together. And
    I feel like if things do come to pass where there’s some sort of a
    crisis point, then it’s going to be through these new emerging
    technologies, the VR, and AR, and AI, cryptocurrencies. The
    technological architecture actually affords completely new ways of
    doing things that have never been possible before. And that the thing
    that is really going to shift for that is human consciousness, both
    at an individual and collective layer. So I see that there’s this
    huge philosophical and cultural and economic shifts that need to
    happen and that VR and AI and AR all arriving just in time on the
    brink of collapse, because we’re going to need all the potentials of
    what these technologies can do to be able to form a future that
    really works for everybody.

    Alan: It’s interesting that you

    say that, because I’ve been working on something that I’ve never
    really talked about to many people, but I’ll share it here because I
    see these technologies exactly what you said. They will be able to
    kind of, I don’t say “save us” because that’s not the right
    word. But they will be able to unlock empathy at a scale and
    collaboration at a scale that we’ve never been able to understand.
    And I actually just wrote an article about “can virtual and
    augmented reality democratize education?” And really, what I’ve
    been working on is a completely new education system from the ground
    up that basically scraps the entire– not scraps it, but just
    utilizes it. So you already have an existing education system that
    teaches math and science and geography and these kind of
    transactional skillsets. But what we’re missing is more of the soft
    skill sets, the mindset skill sets that really will unlock our full
    potential as humans. Things like gratitude, mindfulness, creative
    problem solving.

    These are things that if we don’t start

    teaching those– skills so simple as financial management. For
    whatever reason, we don’t really teach financial management in any
    level of school. And it’s kind of a leftover from slavery days, where
    we didn’t give anybody education, we kept it from them because it
    kept them in check. And keeping financial education from people —
    especially kids — keeps them in check and then they go get a job and
    they work, and they’re on this treadmill working for slave labor. And
    there’s got to be a point where we start to unlock the education of
    success principles, rather than something you can look up in your
    phone. Because Snapchat now has a filter where I can put my phone at
    a math equation, it’ll solve it for me. So there’s certain
    transactional skillsets that are not overly necessary in today’s
    fully connected world.

    But the fundamentals of success, being

    able to focus yourself, meditate, communicate with other people,
    these are fundamental. And goal setting and marketing communications,
    being able to create products and services that serve humanity. And
    instead of asking children what job they want to get. We need to be
    asking what problem do you want to solve? Or what do you want to give
    back to humanity? And I think that is the fundamental shift that
    needs to happen, and these technologies can deliver that.

    Kent: Yes, it’s going to be

    opening up right now. If you can listen to someone lecture at you and
    you learn really well, you can do great in school. But if you’re an
    active learner, if you need to have an experience, if you need to
    play around with things, if you need a story, if you need to be
    emotionally engaged, there’s so many different learning temperaments
    that are not being served right now by the current educational
    system. So I do think that there’s going to be a complete revolution
    for education. And yeah, I feel like for me, I’ve recorded well over
    1,100 interviews at this point, focusing a deep dive into the kind of
    the evolution of thought within a very specific technological
    community for the last five years. And I feel hampered by the
    linearity of an RSS feed for how people consume that information,
    because I will go and record 15 to 30 interviews over the course of a
    few days, and I’ll come back and people can only really listen to a
    couple of them.

    But what would it look like to go into

    a spatialized memory palace, to be able to actually have an
    architecture that represents the knowledge that has been captured?
    And if there’s AI to help automatically transcribe it, and to come up
    and perhaps find these different links between information, then you
    start to see how you have these memory palaces, where people can go
    and have an interactive learning experience. Like going to the
    Exploratorium in San Francisco, you can learn all about physics and
    these different, more active interactive games that allows you to
    learn about things. And I feel like all of education is going to be
    turning into that. So, yeah, I feel like we’re right on the cusp of
    how these spatial computing technologies are going to transform all
    dimensions of our reality.

    And what I’m seeing is this trend of

    cross-disciplinary collaboration. So people from all sorts of
    different disciplines starting to work together. Whether it’s people
    from the psychedelic culture with meditators on top of immersive
    technologists. Trying to look at things through the lens of human
    experience, to be able to then maybe create a virtual reality
    application to be able to then modulate someone else’s human
    experience, to eventually help transform and help them grow. And the
    same thing for this sort of workshop that I’m going to — it’s gonna
    be in York City — it’s gonna have these cutting-edge neuroscientists
    that understand human perception, working with game designers who
    really understand human agency. And the game designers are going to
    be able to learn from the neuroscientists, to know how to better
    modulate the human attention and perception based upon what
    neuroscientists know about human perception. And then the game
    designer is going to be able to help design experiments that are
    gonna help the neuroscientists learn a lot more about the nature of
    the mind.

    So I feel like there is this kind of

    fusion of all these different disciplines that are happening right
    now, and it’s all being seen through these immersive technologies. It
    could be that the human experience ends up being the lingua franca
    between all these different domains. And that’s what I find really
    exciting, is because we need to have those philosophical frameworks
    to help understand how we can pull these things together, because we
    have had a very siloed, sort of reductive way of approaching life.
    And I feel like this shift that we’re moving into right now is trying
    to synthesize all these things together and bring all these different
    component parts together and to sort of synthesize it through the
    lens of human experience.

    And for me, that is so exciting to

    cover, because it allows me to basically talk to just about anybody.
    It can end up being about VR, because it’s about human experience.
    And that’s if anybody is in this realm, there’s a boundless a ways
    that you can start to learn about pretty much every different domain.
    So if you are a lifelong learner, you can learn about game design, or
    architecture, or colors, or human stories, or education. There’s
    just– it’s just unlimited. Both VR and AR and AI are just– if you
    like to learn, then this is a great place to be right now.

    Alan: Yep. When I got into this industry, I had no idea what to build. So we built everything. We actually came up with the moniker, “We do eVRything.” [chuckles] That’s not the best for business model, but it does keep things interesting, that’s for sure. [chuckles] I want to thank you so much, Kent, for taking the time on this podcast. It’s been absolutely wonderful speaking with you.

    Kent: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me, Alan. And I should also just send a shout out to my Patreon members. I am a listener supported podcast. And so if you want to support the work that I’m doing, you can support me at patreon.com/voicesofvr. Thanks a lot.

    Alan: And that concludes part 2 of the XR for Business Podcast with guest Kent Bye from the Voices Of VR podcast. Make sure you check out part 1 of this episode for more information about all things XR related with Mr. Kent Bye.

    39 min
  • XR Technologies in Service of the Human Experience, with Voices of VR Podcast's Kent Bye - Part 2
    We pick up where we left off, with Part 2 of Alan's interview with Kent Bye, host of the Voices of VR Podcast. In this half, the two VR podcast hosts discuss the ethics of XR, building a strong economic ecosystem for emerging technologies, the AR Cloud, and more.
    Alan: Coming up next on the XR
    for Business Podcast, we have part 2 of the interview with Kent Bye
    from the Voices Of VR podcast, the podcast that got me started in
    this industry.
    I'm actually one of the founding
    members of the Open Air Cloud Group and Kronos Group is is really
    kind of trying to pull together these standards for 3D, as well for
    e-commerce. I know there's a group right now trying to standardize 3D
    objects for e-commerce and retail because right now it's a dog's
    breakfast. Facebook accepts glTFs, Hololens is FBX models, VR is
    usually OBJs. So you have all these different 3D file formats. None
    of them really work well together and you can't-- it's not easy to
    convert one to the other. And then of course, Apple came along and
    created USDZ. Or in Canada, USDZed. It's crazy right now to think
    that there's fifteen different 3D model types and it's kind of like
    we need to settle on the JPG of 3D, whatever that happens to be,
    which in my opinion is probably glTF. But I think we need to
    standardize that and just pick, it so that-- can imagine trying to
    send a photo to somebody and you send it in one format. And we saw
    this 10 years ago on the Web, just-- it was 10 different ways to send
    a photo in different formats. Your camera would take one format, and
    it wouldn't work with your MacBook. I think the tolerance for
    interoperability, I think the world just demands interoperability
    now. And if you're not building for that, well, then you're going to
    end up like Facebook and get broken apart.
    Kent: Yeah. And I published a
    podcast with the managing director of Open AR Cloud, and one of the
    other founding members. And yeah, they were talking a lot about these
    various different issues. So, yeah, it's something that you don't see
    necessarily a lot of news on, until-- unless you're sort of deep into
    the weeds of helping design these protocols. But I did go to the
    Decentralized Web Summit last year, and one of the things that I saw
    was that there's kind of like this pendulum that swings back and
    forth between the centralized systems and the decentralized systems.
    And I'd say that with cryptocurrency, with the containers being able
    take different aspects of a server and be able to push it out to the
    edge. We have it self-contained within either Kubernetes or Docker
    containers. And just in general, it's kind of a movement away from
    centralized systems into more decentralized architectures.
    That's a interesting trend that I think
    that paying attention to the rise of the decentralized web and what
    that is going to afford. I feel like it's a lot more about open
    protocols and collaboration and having people collaborate in
    different ways. And that's something that I'd say has been a little
    bit lacking within the VR and AR industry. I mean, there's been a
    certain amount of not sharing of knowledge, but in terms of like real
    meaningful collaboration. There's been a few things like OpenXR and
    WebXR are of the big standouts, as well as probably the Chromium
    browsers that a lot of different companies are working on. But in
    terms of specific things to grow an ecosystem, it's been difficult
    for companies to figure out what does it mean to grow community and
    what it mean to grow an entire ecosystem that you may be a part of.
    And I feel like the cryptocurrency world has had to deal with that a
    little bit, in the sense that they're creating these open protocols,
    and they have to prove that there's a buy-in to people participating
    in these different protocols, and are going to be able to have these
    different use cases.
    And so I feel like there's this
    metaphor of a blue ocean and a red oc
    39 min
  • XR Podcast Hosts Unite, with Voices of VR Podcast’s Kent Bye – Part 1

    One of Alan’s biggest inspirations to start XR for Business was the prolific catalogue of Kent Bye, who has released 884 recordings for his VR-centric podcast, Voices of VR. Alan has Kent on the show for a chat that was too big for one episode! Check out Part 2 later this week.

    Alan: Hey, everyone, Alan

    Smithson here, the XR for Business Podcast. Coming up next, we have
    part one of a two part series, with the one and only Kent Bye from
    Voices Of VR. Kent Bye is a truly revolutionary person and he has
    recorded over 1,100 episodes of the Voices Of VR podcast. And we are
    really lucky to have him on the show. And this is two parts, because
    it goes on and on. Welcome to Part 1 of the XR for Business Podcast,
    with Kent Bye from the Voices Of VR podcast.

    Kent has been able to speak peer to

    peer with VR developers, cultivating an audience of leading VR
    creators who consider the Voices Of VR podcast a must listen, and I
    have to agree. He’s currently working on a book answering the
    question he closes with every interview he does, “What is the
    ultimate potential of VR?” To learn more about the Voices Of VR
    and sign up for the podcast. it’s voicesofVR.com.
    And with that, I want to welcome an instrumental person to my
    knowledge and information of this industry. Mr. Kent Buy, it’s really
    a pleasure to have you on the show.

    Kent: Hey, Alan. It’s great to

    be here. Thanks for having me.

    Alan: Oh, thank you so much. I

    listen to probably the first two or three hundred episodes of your
    podcast, and I went from knowing literally nothing about this
    industry to knowing a lot. And it’s those insights that you’re able
    to pull out from the industry that’s just amazing. So thank you for
    being the voice of this industry.

    Kent: Yeah. And when I started

    the podcast, I wanted to learn about what was happening in the
    industry. And so I felt like one of the best ways to do that was to
    go to these different conferences, and to talk to the people who were
    on the front lines of creating these different experiences. And so at
    this point, I think I’ve recorded over 1,100 different interviews and
    have published over 760 of them so far. So it’s about for every two
    interviews I publish, I have like another interview that I haven’t.
    So I just feel like it’s important to be on the front lines, going to
    these gatherings where the community’s coming together and to just be
    talking to people and see what they’re saying. See what the power of
    this new medium is.

    Alan: I had the honor of being

    interviewed by you at one of these conferences. I don’t know if it
    ever got published, but it was an honor anyway just to speak with you
    on the subject. But you get to talk to literally everybody, anybody
    who’s anybody in this industry. And it’s really an amazing experience
    to listen to these podcasts. And you really go deep into the
    technology of it, the listeners of this podcast are more maybe in the
    business, maybe they’re not really into VR. What are some of the
    business use cases that you’ve seen from these people that you’ve
    been interviewing that made you go, “Wow, this is incredible?”

    Kent: Well, first of all,

    virtual and augmented reality as a medium is a new paradigm of
    computing: spatial computing. And I think one metaphor to think about
    is how we usually enter into the computer is by pushing buttons and
    moving a mouse around. And it’s almost like we have to translate our
    thoughts into a very linear interface in order to interact with
    computing. And it’s usually also in a 2D space, so a lot of times
    interacting and designing for 3D spaces. And so there’s kind of like
    this weird translation that you have to do all these abstractions in
    order to do computing. So I feel like one of the big trends that’s
    happening right now is that with spatial computing, it’s becoming a
    lot more natural and lot more intuitive.

    And so anybody that’s doing design and

    3D objects, it’s almost like a no-brainer, whether it’s in
    architecture, or designing 3D objects, or big aerospace, airplanes,
    cars. All these different people who are making these 3D objects in
    these CAD programs, there’s just something that you can make design
    decisions lot faster when you’re actually immersed into this space.
    And you don’t have to spend all this money to prototype these things
    out. So you see a lot of it in architecture, engineering,
    construction. But what I’m really excited about is these other
    aspects of natural communication. So how is AI going to be combined
    with these spatial computing platforms, being able to detect what
    we’re looking at with a Hololens 2, and to be able to then speak
    these different affordances and actions. We’re going to get to the
    point where you can just say something and just speak, much more like
    you would interface with other humans. And I think the computer
    technology is gonna become better and better at being able to detect
    what we are intending, what we’re saying.

    I said the other huge area that we’re

    seeing just enormous amount of applications is in training. And
    really when you’re training, you really want to ideally do it
    yourself and be immersed into the context of the environment, to have
    all the emotions that are coming up when you’re under pressure to
    make a decision. But to be also embedded into a context that is
    mimicking what the real world situation is. And then you have to make
    choices and take action. And the action that you’re taking within VR
    is often very similar to those same embodied interactions that you
    may be doing in real life. So I feel like there’s so much of a
    mirroring of what’s happening in these virtual worlds that the
    training applications are just incredible, in terms of whether it’s a
    surgical simulation or Walmart’s using it to train for different
    employees. Elite sport athletes can do lots of different repetitions
    and be able to train themselves to have a level of situational
    awareness.

    I’d say those are the big ones that I’m

    seeing right now. In the future I expect to see a lot more
    information visualization, data visualization, finding completely new
    ways to analyze data, symbolically and spatially. I think there’s a
    lot of work that can still be done. But a lot of things that I think
    about also is just like flow states, like what does it mean to work
    and how can you cultivate the deepest flow state that you possibly
    can, so that when you’re working you’re just not having the
    technology get in your way, but you’re having technology amplify what
    you’re able to do. So another big area that I’m seeing sort of early
    indication with, especially when I went to the Laval Virtual in
    France — it’s an expo that’s going for the last 21 years — this
    concept of open innovation. So collaboration and communication.
    Remote assist is another sort of separate thing. But in terms of
    innovation, what is the keys of innovation? And I think a big part of
    it is being able to openly share and ideate and brainstorm and tap
    into the more creative aspects of what you’re doing.

    And so I’m seeing a lot of– like

    Desart Systems was working on some specific products for open
    innovation, which I’m excited about because a lot of what you’re
    seeing with augmented reality is for people who are first line
    workers. So people who are in factory floors, or people who are
    meeting assistance for remote collaboration, or the people who are on
    the grounds physically doing these different actions, whether it’s on
    a construction site or a factory floor. So a lot of the use cases for
    the Hololens have been very much in that realm. But I’m also really
    interested in terms of knowledge work, like what does it mean to be
    able to collaborate with other people and to lower all the barriers?

    Alan: We had Jacob Lowenstein

    from Spatial on the show.

    Kent: Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah, I

    just talked to Anand [Agarawala] — who’s the CEO of Spatial — and
    saw the demo and just did a whole breakdown of all what they’re doing
    with Spatial.

    Alan: Well, that speaks to

    exactly what you were saying; design work and collaboration and
    higher level work collaboration in augmented reality.

    Kent: Yeah, I think that it’s

    still very early, but just– it’s also very early in terms of having
    this completely new paradigm for how you do spatial computing. I
    think there’s going to be a mix of sort of a, flashy Hollywood things
    that you see where the famous like Minority Report, where you’re kind
    of going through these different interfaces. That looks great, but it
    doesn’t always feel great if you have to do that for eight hours a
    day.

    Alan: Yeah.

    Kent: I think the key

    breakthrough is gonna be when you’re able to just not think about it,
    and kind of naturally move your body and be able to interface with
    computing with your full body. Because there’s this neuroscience
    concept, it’s called embodied cognition. And what that means is that
    we don’t just think with our minds, we think with our entire bodies.
    And so what does it mean to actually get your body engaged and moving
    around? It actually makes you think better. And anybody who likes to
    take meetings while they’re walking, you may find that you may have a
    different way of brainstorming and ideating when you’re actually in
    motion with another person. I think that spatial computing is
    actually going to be leveraging a lot of those different types of
    concepts, in that we spent a lot of time very stagnant and sitting in
    our desk. But a lot of the affordances of VR when you’re actually
    moving your body around, it actually is tapping into deeper levels of
    the way that you think. So I think that there’s gonna be huge
    potential for what’s it mean to be able to tap into that?

    Alan: Absolutely. It’s really an

    exciting time. I– personally I do walking meetings all the time. And
    I can tell you, it just– it’s not the same to have a phone meeting
    or seated meeting when you’re walking that just sparks something. And
    I know Steve Jobs was a big advocate of walking meetings. So there
    must be something to it.

    Kent: Yeah. And I think that I’m

    starting to see that spatial computing is going to be tapping into
    that. I’d also throw out there, that there’s supposed AR frames.

    Alan: Yeah.

    Kent: And I expect people going

    to be wearing like these sunglasses that are kind of shooting spatial
    audio into your ears, but being able to tie with your phone, getting
    GPS, and being able to — basically — detect which direction you’re
    looking at. There’s gonna be a lot of innovation that happens in just
    overlaying layers of audio on top of reality. We’ll eventually have
    digital objects on top of reality, but I think there’s a lot of
    innovation that’s happening, at least in the storytelling around,
    where when I go to these different film festivals, I kind of see what
    the storytelling potential is with these mediums. And I feel like
    there’s going to be this great convergence at some point in terms of
    figuring out how to engage people within a story to help teach them
    these different concepts. And I think that’s kind of like the next
    frontier of what is the blending of the storytelling affordances of
    VR on top of like the gamification game elements. You kind of have
    Hollywood mashed up with the game developer community, and VR is like
    this melting pot of all these different disciplines.

    And so that’s what makes it so

    fascinating to me, is that you get people from every different domain
    has something to say about VR and AR, because it’s all about
    modulating the human experience. So I think we’re in this kind of
    very early Wild West era, where there’s not a lot of very specific
    best practices or experiential design theories that have been well
    established, and so you kind of have to figure it out on your own.
    But I feel like there’s enough proof of concepts to show that it’s
    effective. But to really tap into the deep ultimate potential, I
    think we’re still quite a ways of doing that. But one of the sort of
    dark horses — I’d say — for the enterprise is that there’s going to
    be an element of story and storytelling there, to really fully engage
    people. And I think we’re still very early in that era. Like with
    film, there is a cinema of attractions, where they were still trying
    to really figure out the language of the medium. I feel like we’re in
    a very similar spot, where they haven’t really figured out all the
    different affordances of the language that you use for spatial
    computing. It’s kind of an exciting time, just because there’s a lot
    of experiments to be done and a lot of stuff that still needs to be
    figured out.

    Alan: It’s true. We see it every

    day, where things– I actually came up with this quote, “How do
    you disrupt an industry constantly disrupting itself?” And every
    day something comes on the news in virtual and augmented reality that
    flips the industry on its head. I mean, the introduction of ARKit and
    ARCore probably put 200 startups out of business. And we’re seeing
    these kind of rapid advances in technology. We’ve got AR platforms
    being hosted by Amazon, by Facebook, by Snapchat, where you can
    develop your own AR lenses. Anybody can do this, not just developers.
    So I think there’s going to be a democratization on the creation
    side, as well as this expansion on the enterprise side, which will —
    in my opinion — drive the consumer market forward.

    Kent: Yeah, I feel like VR and

    AR is such an interesting realm to cover, just because it’s helping
    define what the human experience is and all the different contexts
    that we have. Because there are going to be entertainment
    applications, medical applications, and ways to communicate with our
    partners — whether it’s our romantic partners or business partners
    — being able to deal with death and grieving, spirituality
    applications in terms of connecting to myth and story and philosophy,
    but also our career and what we’re using in our jobs, connecting to
    friends and family, dealing with isolation or neurodegenerative
    diseases. Expression of identity is a huge thing with the facial
    filters, and I’ve seen that a lot more in the consumer space. But the
    different ways that we have virtual embodiment, and what does it mean
    to take on different characters and different bodies, and financial
    like virtual economies, as well as communication and education, and
    connecting to home and family. So I feel like there’s all these
    different specific contexts that they each are going to teach us
    something new about what it means to be human.

    And I’d say that the difference between

    VR and AR through this lens of context is with VR, you’re able to
    completely shift your context. So you may be at home, but you’re all
    of a sudden now you’re completely embedded within an office meeting
    and now you’re at work. So you’re kind of be able to do this huge
    context switch. But with AR, it’s less about doing a complete context
    switch, because if you’re at home, you’re already at home and you may
    be able to overlay different people inside of your existing context,
    but you’re still in that center of gravity, of whatever context you
    happen to be in. So I’d see that with AR, you’re gonna be still
    embedded and grounded into whatever context you are, but you’re able
    to kind of pull things in. I think it’s gonna be harder to do a
    complete context shift with AR, but as AR and VR start to eventually
    converge, maybe you will see that a little bit more. But that’s at
    least some of the ways that I’m seeing a little bit of the
    differences for.

    For example, if you want to do an

    architectural visualization, it may be better to do that in VR,
    because you’re able to completely shift your context and be
    completely immersed with that environment. But if you’re trying to
    look and have a group conversation with five different people about a
    3D object, maybe you want to have that in AR — especially if you’re
    co-located with each other in the same room — so you can have all
    the affordances of body language and communication that we all have.
    But if you still want to talk about these virtual objects and maybe
    having either a Hololens on your head and maybe there’s some tablet’s
    where there’s different ways of accessing and annotating these
    different 3D objects. So those are some of the different use cases
    that I am seeing, at least at this point.

    Alan: Yeah, it’s interesting.

    Jacob from Spatial was mentioning about– because I asked him “Why
    wouldn’t somebody just put VR on and go into a collaboration room?”
    And their response actually, I hadn’t considered was: when you’re in
    a group — let’s say you’re four people in an office, and you’re face
    to face — you still want to see those people. You don’t want to be
    in four different VR headsets even though you’re in the same room. It
    would be weird. Whereas you can also then have the four people that
    are in the room, and have a fifth person who is somewhere else in the
    world kind of beaming in,, and those four people then beaming out to
    them. It really creates this feeling of community and a lot of times
    you also want to be able to see other devices while you’re in there.
    And we’re getting to the point where we’re going to be able to port
    our devices into VR, our computer screens and our phone screen or
    whatever, but we’re not quite there yet.

    Kent: It reminds me of– I have

    gone to Microsoft Build for the last three years, and that’s a good
    place to kind of see some of the AR demos that are there in terms of
    the partners with Microsoft. And so with some of the demos that I’ve
    seen there were for people who were doing sales for say, medical
    equipment. Sometimes the medical equipment is very specific to the
    context of a specific room. And so I think people who are doing sales
    would be able to look at the existing context of a room and start to
    overlay these digital objects on that room, but still have that face
    to face interaction. And especially with the Hololens 2, where you
    can kind of flip up the visor if you want to look people directly in
    the eye. But I feel like just in talking to different people, the
    sales increase in terms of being able to have them see what it was
    actually going to look like in that context. It also just– Lowe’s
    and these different companies that when you go to like Home Depot or
    Lowe’s, they’ll do these whole build outs of an entire kitchen.

    But oftentimes you may have a very

    specific thing you’re looking for and you want to know what that
    looks like in the context of your kitchen. So being able to detect
    your space in your context and then put that object — whether it’s a
    refrigerator or whatever it is — into your– into that context, it
    lowers the cognitive load of imagination, because it actually is very
    difficult for you to imagine what it’s going to look like. And you
    have to kind of just see it before you really know whether it’s going
    to work or not. And if you can do that and preserve that existing
    context and then lay the object in there, I think that’s another huge
    use case that I’m seeing. Whether it’s selling medical equipment or
    selling kitchen equipment for home renovation, there’s some of the
    unique affordances of AR as a medium.

    Alan: And the great thing about

    that is that that’ll work on any device, that’ll work on your phone.
    And by the end of this year, there’ll be over 2 billion smartphones
    that are AR enabled with ARKit and ARCore. And so you’ll be able to
    put a fridge in your kitchen in context in the right size and see if
    it fits. Then you can drop a car in your driveway and take a picture
    of your new car. So I think there’s gonna be a huge push towards kind
    of three dimensional retail and e-commerce with these mobile devices,
    and that you don’t even need a headset for that. You can use the
    device that’s in everybody’s hands. And it’s not the same experience,
    but it doesn’t have to be in those cases.

    Kent: There’s a interesting

    point that came up in my mind, as you were saying some of that. And
    that’s that I think a lot of enterprises, they need to see a lot of
    numbers in terms of the improvement of how much more efficient things
    are. And people like Accenture, they’ve been certainly coming up with
    a lot of those different quantitative studies, and I think a lot of
    companies would want to see that. What is the return of investment
    for jumping into immersive? And I think those are important to be
    able make those decisions. I think it’s also important to point out
    that there’s a lot of benefits for spatial computing that maybe never
    be able to be quantified with a specific number. There’s a certain
    quality of experience that happens, that I feel like there’s a whole
    realm of the usefulness of these spatial computing technologies that
    it’s going to be more behavior and cultural shifts in order to use
    these technologies. And specifically what I mean is that we kind of
    live in an information environment right now, where we really want
    fast bite-size information, on the level of tweets. And I kind of see
    spatial computing as the antithesis of that, because it’s very
    difficult to hop into a virtual reality experience for a few minutes,
    although I will say–

    Alan: It’s impossible to hop in

    *in* a few minutes. Every time I go to use mine, I’ve got to wait for
    all the updates. [laughs]

    Kent: Yeah, there’s all sorts of

    thresholds. I mean, I will say that with Oculus Quest that’s changing
    for me. I’ve had early access to the Quest. And I do think that the
    Quest is gonna be revolutionary in terms of making it easier for
    people to hop in.

    Alan: Oh, I can’t wait.

    Kent: The focus of Oculus has

    been much more on gaming rather than productivity applications, but
    they still have a number different productivity applications that are
    coming out. Whether that’s going to be Tilt Brush for doing rough
    prototyping or Gravity Sketch. And we’ll have to wait to see what
    other enterprise applications come out. But I do expect to see that
    the Quest is going to have a lot of applications. That’s the headset
    that has no tether, no wires. It’s completely wireless and mobile.
    And you’ve got these 6DOF controllers.

    Alan: It’s really exciting. What’s the price point? I think it’s–

    Kent: So there’s $399 for 64

    gigabytes, $499 for 128 gigabytes. However for the enterprise it’s
    like $999 per headset, with a $180 per year. There’s a whole Oculus
    for Business that is going to have a whole specific offerings for the
    enterprise and that you get the ability to kind of turn off all of
    the main Oculus Home and be able to distribute just your application.
    And they’re working on different deployment solutions and whatnot.
    Because if you’re working with dozens or hundreds or thousands of
    headsets, then you’ve got to have some system to be able to deploy
    updates and software to all those headsets. And so that’s kind of the
    software they’re working on. But just to kind of wrap up a point that
    I was beginning to make, which is that I’d see virtual reality
    technologies to be very similar to like sitting down and reading a
    book, where you’re actually making a commitment to be completely
    immersed and focused on a very specific task. And I feel like that is
    becoming rarer and rarer.

    And I think that’s been in some part

    the difficulty of why VR may have not been taking off as quickly as
    some would have imagined. The technology is amazing, but there’s a
    certain amount of cultural shift that you have to have in order to
    really commit to being immersed and present within a virtual
    experience. And I feel like once you cultivate that gets that quality
    of being, where you can be fully immersed. And I feel like that is
    tapping into other levels of focus that are becoming more and more
    rare within our lives. And so the levels of like focus and
    productivity and consciousness hacking, I expect that there’s gonna
    be ways for people to be able to really get into these deep flow
    states and potentially even start to do more work from home,
    especially if you work in an open office environment where it becomes
    more and more rare for you to really have this deep focus that you
    need. So I just wanted to point out that there’s a lot of emphasis
    right now in our culture on numbers and trying to quantify things.

    And I’ve been focusing a lot also in

    what are the different qualities that maybe difficult to put a number
    on? And I think it’s like these levels of presence, these depths of
    connection, the intimacy that you can have when you’re face to face
    with somebody else. There’s all these levels of body language where
    you fly across the world, because you want to have that intimacy. I
    think eventually we’ll get there with VR, we still have a lot of ways
    to go in terms of body language and emotional expression, where it’s
    not quite the same as being face to face. And maybe it’ll always be
    preferable to be face to face with certain contexts. But for some
    situations, I think it’s gonna be a lot better to just meet in
    virtual world and to not have to travel as much. And especially if
    you’re talking about like remote collaboration with many different
    people, because if you use something like Zoom or Skype, it’s OK for
    a couple of people. But once you start to have like a group
    conversation with five or twelve people…

    Alan: Yeah, it falls apart.

    Kent: You really want to have

    body language, you will have a spatial audio. It’s so much more
    efficient to have big team meetings within virtual spaces, rather
    than trying to mediate it through digital technologies. And so I
    expect that one of things I’m really interested in seeing is like
    some of these different startup companies within the VR space that
    are remote, and they have to kind of dog food their own remote
    collaboration tools. I think that what that’s going to bring is that
    maybe there’ll be a less emphasis on specific jobs or tasks where you
    have to be expected to go into work. And I think eventually we’ll get
    to the point where maybe you could live out in the middle of the
    country. And as long as you have a good Internet connection, you
    could be still interfacing with some of the most talented and
    brilliant people in your disciplines or domains, and you could be
    anywhere in the world. And I think the potential of what that means
    is really exciting, because it doesn’t mean that you have to go and
    live in Silicon Valley or Los Angeles to be able to collaborate and
    work with some of these people, or whether it’s New York City or
    wherever it is in the world, a major city.

    I see this other trend of these remote

    collaboration or remote work, where people are able to work from
    home. But the thing that’s lost is those group conversations and the
    more serendipitous water-cooler conversations and stuff like that. So
    it’ll be interesting to see how some of these remote companies are
    able to adapt and create these tools. And one thing that I would say
    from my experience of working at a remote company is that if you’re
    completely 100 percent remote, then it works great. But as long as
    you have like a critical mass of people that are face to face, then
    it’s really difficult to be pulling in all these other people into
    these remote environments just because it’s a definite context
    switch. So that’s some of the things that I’m — in long term —
    looking forward to seeing how this all sorts of play out.

    Alan: Yeah. It’s– I think

    another thing that will make a big difference and it doesn’t seem
    like a big thing, but eye tracking. Being able to actually look
    somebody in the eyes in VR. I’ve had the opportunity of playing with
    the Tobii tracking system with HTC Vive. And just being able to look
    at somebody, look at them in the eyes and know that they’re actually
    looking at you. They’re not an avatar that’s kind of a disembodied,
    cartoonish version of themselves. And to be honest, everybody keeps
    trying to push towards photorealistic avatars, and there’s the
    uncanny valley of getting too close to reality, and then your brain
    kind of goes, “there’s something not right” and rejects it.
    But I think we can stay on the cartoonish side of things as long as
    we hope things like eye tracking and hand tracking. It really– it
    feels right. I’ve done conferences in VR where I’m speaking to 200
    people, and I feel like I’ve met some of these people. We have little
    conversations in the hallway before or after the event. And it feels
    like you’ve been there. It tricks your brain into thinking you
    actually were there. It’s amazing.

    Kent: Yeah. Both the Hololens 2

    and the Magic Leap are shipping with eye tracking. And I think that
    the Vive, there’s gonna be an enterprise version that has eye
    tracking as well.

    Alan: Yep.

    Kent: It does make a difference, especially the social interactions. And the thing that the Hololens was really looking at — Hololens 2 — is to be able to look at objects, and that allows the computing technology to be contextually aware. It knows potentially what you’re looking at. It can detect the object — especially with virtual objects, it can know that you’re looking at the virtual objects — and you can start to use voice commands so you could look at a light and say “off” and then eventually have the light turn off. There’s a lot of talk about edge compute devices and getting away from centralized everything and being able to have these different remote sensors. And so I expect that that’s going to be a huge thing, especially if you are a company that starts to deploy a lot of these edge compute devices that are detecting different aspects in an environment. The user interface for a lot of those devices could be a layer of augmented reality in these Hololens devices or virtual reality devices, where you can start to have your command center within a virtual or augmented space.

    Alan: Incredible. There’s so

    many opportunities and so many possibilities and –like you mentioned
    — it’s kind of like when the iPad was introduced. It was great. You
    could watch movies on it, and you could read books on it. And then
    all of a sudden people started making all sorts of things for it. But
    you look back 12 years ago, there was no such thing as an app
    developer, and now there’s millions of app developers. Four years
    ago, there was no such thing as VR developer — well, maybe five
    years now — but now there are probably thousands, if not hundreds of
    thousands, and soon to be millions of people developing for this
    technology medium. And it’s really about to enter this kind of
    exponential phase. But it’s not just VR and AR, it’s artificial
    intelligence, Internet of Things, 5G, quantum computing, edge
    computing. It’s molecular genetics. All of these technologies, all at
    the same time, are really going through this nascent stage where
    they’re entering into this exponential growth phase where they all go
    straight up. And since they all kind of work together, I think we’re
    entering in to what is quite possibly the singularity in the next 15
    years. 10, maybe.

    Kent: Yeah, I’m a skeptic of the

    concept of singularity. And the reason why is because I feel like
    there is human consciousness that is way more complicated than these
    distributed technologies and that– I mean, the theory of singularity
    is that at some point that the change is happening so quickly that it
    goes beyond the human comprehension and of understanding these
    systems. And if we get to that point, then I feel like something has
    gone seriously wrong, because I don’t think it’s about creating a
    sort of a self-sentient technology that is so brilliant within its
    own right that it doesn’t need humanity. I feel like, if anything,
    all these technologies are in service of humanity. But it does speak
    to this larger point of explainability and ethics and morality,
    because an artificial intelligence, at least it’s– when you start to
    have these very complicated deep learning algorithms and you want to
    know why something made a decision, then it becomes a little bit of a
    black box and it becomes unexplainable. So if there is a level of
    these different machine learning applications that are creating these
    models that include millions or billions of feature points that are
    sub-symbolic in the sense that there’s no comprehensive story that
    you could look at and say “Why did this determine that this was
    a cat and not a dog?”.

    But I do think you’re right in terms of

    these are exponential technologies, and there’s gonna be ways in
    which they are combining together that are unpredictable. Just in
    terms of, say, who would have predicted that having a little extra
    bandwidth, that eventually the cellphone signals that eventually was
    catalyzed and inspired text messaging through the accessibility
    needs, that something like text messaging would be able to facilitate
    micro-economies in Africa. To kind of take these combinations of
    things and to see how they’re combined to be able to have these
    emergent behaviors that are a little bit hard to predict. And I feel
    like we’re in that realm right now, where there are going to be
    cryptocurrencies and the blockchain and be able to do distributed
    trust and sell sovereign identity. And that, in a lot of ways, I
    think it’s going to bootstrap what the point that I thought of when
    you were making that point is that, yes, there are app developers and
    there is a value of having a closed ecosystem to be able to do native
    development.

    However, I do think that there’s value

    of having open systems and open protocols and to look at the power of
    the open web. Because you do have this kind of tension between the
    closed walled garden app ecosystems and the power of the open web.
    They kind of are working in antithesis to each other. I feel like
    they’re always going to be a dialectic between the closed and open.
    In some ways, the app ecosystems can be on the bleeding edge. But the
    downfall of being on the bleeding edge is that if you want something
    to still work in a year or two years or five years or 10 years, then
    there’s a lot of like technical debt that has to be maintained for a
    long time.

    Alan: [laughs] Sorry, I laugh

    because to think that something that we build today is going to work
    in 10 years is almost laughable.

    Kent: But there’s VRML projects

    that were created 20 years ago that still work today. There’s
    websites that were created over 25 years ago that still work today.
    So that’s the value of interoperable open standards, is that you
    *can* actually create stuff that is going to be able to be looked at
    in five or 10 years. I feel like that’s a dynamic conversation that I
    don’t hear as much about in the larger consumer VR. But in terms of
    the enterprise, especially if you’re working with these different
    systems where you don’t want to be maintaining a huge systems each
    and every year and just making sure that the unique build still
    works. There’s value being on the bleeding edge, but there’s also
    value of waiting for the open standards, like the OpenXR for
    hardware, or the WebXR, or the OpenWeb, for these open standards for
    identity.

    So I feel like — depending on what

    you’re doing in the enterprise — if you do need to have stuff that
    is still accessible and usable in three to five to 10 years, then I
    think it’s worth looking at some of these other alternatives that
    maybe move slower. But once the WebXR 2.0 spec finally launches —
    within the next year or so, I imagine — then you’re going to see a
    huge renaissance and the alternative like OpenWeb, because I feel
    like not having those standards fleshed out has been leaving all the
    spoils left for to do development within either Unity or Unreal
    Engine. And for anybody who’s doing serious applications, I would
    definitely recommend them to do Unity or Unreal, but to also keep an
    eye on what’s happening in the OpenWeb space, because it’s going to
    be a huge part. Especially as depending on who you’re doing, the
    downfall for those app ecosystems is that you have these walled
    gardens, where you have curators who may or may not want to support
    or promote your different applications. If Facebook does go down the
    route of only looking at gaming, then if you want to create a
    consumer application that is usable by the enterprise, then it may be
    harder to get it onto the platform. So I think there’s a lot of
    different tensions and tradeoffs that I just wanted to kind of flesh
    out there.

    Alan: And that concludes part

    one of the XR for Business Podcast with our guest, Kent Bye. Coming
    up next on the XR for Business Podcast, we have Kent Bye, part 2.

    36 min
  • XR Podcast Hosts Unite, with Voices of VR Podcast's Kent Bye - Part 1
    One of Alan's biggest inspirations to start XR for Business was the prolific catalogue of Kent Bye, who has released 884 recordings for his VR-centric podcast, Voices of VR. Alan has Kent on the show for a chat that was too big for one episode! Check out Part 2 later this week.
    Alan: Hey, everyone, Alan
    Smithson here, the XR for Business Podcast. Coming up next, we have
    part one of a two part series, with the one and only Kent Bye from
    Voices Of VR. Kent Bye is a truly revolutionary person and he has
    recorded over 1,100 episodes of the Voices Of VR podcast. And we are
    really lucky to have him on the show. And this is two parts, because
    it goes on and on. Welcome to Part 1 of the XR for Business Podcast,
    with Kent Bye from the Voices Of VR podcast.
    Kent has been able to speak peer to
    peer with VR developers, cultivating an audience of leading VR
    creators who consider the Voices Of VR podcast a must listen, and I
    have to agree. He's currently working on a book answering the
    question he closes with every interview he does, "What is the
    ultimate potential of VR?" To learn more about the Voices Of VR
    and sign up for the podcast. it's voicesofVR.com.
    And with that, I want to welcome an instrumental person to my
    knowledge and information of this industry. Mr. Kent Buy, it's really
    a pleasure to have you on the show.
    Kent: Hey, Alan. It's great to
    be here. Thanks for having me.
    Alan: Oh, thank you so much. I
    listen to probably the first two or three hundred episodes of your
    podcast, and I went from knowing literally nothing about this
    industry to knowing a lot. And it's those insights that you're able
    to pull out from the industry that's just amazing. So thank you for
    being the voice of this industry.
    Kent: Yeah. And when I started
    the podcast, I wanted to learn about what was happening in the
    industry. And so I felt like one of the best ways to do that was to
    go to these different conferences, and to talk to the people who were
    on the front lines of creating these different experiences. And so at
    this point, I think I've recorded over 1,100 different interviews and
    have published over 760 of them so far. So it's about for every two
    interviews I publish, I have like another interview that I haven't.
    So I just feel like it's important to be on the front lines, going to
    these gatherings where the community's coming together and to just be
    talking to people and see what they're saying. See what the power of
    this new medium is.
    Alan: I had the honor of being
    interviewed by you at one of these conferences. I don't know if it
    ever got published, but it was an honor anyway just to speak with you
    on the subject. But you get to talk to literally everybody, anybody
    who's anybody in this industry. And it's really an amazing experience
    to listen to these podcasts. And you really go deep into the
    technology of it, the listeners of this podcast are more maybe in the
    business, maybe they're not really into VR. What are some of the
    business use cases that you've seen from these people that you've
    been interviewing that made you go, "Wow, this is incredible?"
    Kent: Well, first of all,
    virtual and augmented reality as a medium is a new paradigm of
    computing: spatial computing. And I think one metaphor to think about
    is how we usually enter into the computer is by pushing buttons and
    moving a mouse around. And it's almost like we have to translate our
    thoughts into a very linear interface in order to interact with
    computing. And it's usually also in a 2D space, so a lot of times
    interacting and designing for 3D spaces. And so there's kind of like
    this weird translation that you have to do all these abstractions in
    order to do computing. So I feel like one of the big trends that's
    happening right now is that with spatial computing
    36 min
  • Practicing Soft Skills by Firing Barry in VR, with Talespin’s Kyle Jackson

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

    Alan: Hey, everybody, Alan

    Smithson here, the XR for Business Podcast. Coming up next, Kyle
    Jackson, founder of Talespin. You may have seen Barry the virtual
    human that you can fire in real life. We’ll be talking to them about
    their enterprise software solutions that leverage immersive
    technology to transform the way global workforces, learn, work,, and
    collaborate. We’ll also be discussing how you can use immersive
    technologies as an assessment tool to better prepare your workforce
    for exponential growth. All that and more on the XR for Business
    Podcast. Kyle, welcome to the show, my friend.

    Kyle: Hey. Thanks, Alan. Thanks

    for having me.

    Alan: Oh, it’s so exciting. Ever

    since I saw the video that popped up of Barry, the lovable older
    gentleman avatar that you can fire. How did that come about? Tell us
    about Talespin, and how did you get here, where you are now?

    Kyle: Yeah, Barry became famous

    very quickly, because it’s such an ironic idea. And that’s really
    what I think caught people’s attention; the idea that you could use
    virtual humans for soft skills training was something that just
    seemed sci-fi and ironic. But then once you started to peel back the
    layers of it, it just starts to make a lot of sense.So how we got
    there, was we started looking at all of the future skills gaps,
    surveys, research, everything that was surfacing from the Shift
    Commission, to the World Economic Forum, to McKinsey Global
    Institute. And we just kept seeing — obviously opposite AI and
    automation and robotics, all the things that are going on one side of
    technology — that there was this increasing index toward soft skills
    for some of the most underserved areas for businesses going forward.
    We’re building this platform which is supposed to help transfer
    skills and really align us to the future of work. And every single
    survey says soft skills is one of the things we should be looking at.
    And we went, “Wow, is there anything we can do there?” The
    thing that was most important for us in thinking about that was we
    have to hit emotional realism to do this. This isn’t like a
    point-and-click replacement. It needs to be something that when I’m
    sitting in there and I’m opposite Barry or any other virtual human
    now, that I believe the emotions and the frustration and all the
    things that are thrown at me. And to do that kind of at scale. From
    both an assessment standpoint, content, and deployment to large
    companies.

    Alan: So how did you guys

    overcome the Uncanny Valley of Barry? I’ve seen so many human avatars
    that are almost there, but they got that creepy feeling. And if
    you’re going for emotional realism, creepy is not what you want on
    the delivery side.

    Kyle: No. Well, we kind of

    pulled up short in our opinion. So we were pushing further than where
    we landed. And you can get to even more photo-real than Barry is. But
    soon as you do, you start to push over that ledge and it starts to
    really be creepy. We’re kind of right in the sweet spot of north of
    Pixar, but not hitting realism. And that seems to work. We focused a
    lot on micro-expressions and figuring out like a programmatic way to
    add a lot of micro-expression to the silent moments too, because I
    think one of the things that technologists immediately do is we had
    to figure out how to do animation systems, lip sync systems and
    things like that for when people are talking, but especially in soft
    skills, a good majority of the hairy stuff is the unspoken. And so we
    were thinking a lot about like, well, how do we build scalable
    systems for the unspoken and for the nuances of those micro
    expressions. And so that took us on a whole other track. And it
    seemed to really work, because people– we’ve had dozens and dozens
    of people who would take that headset off and be upset, or really
    have that kind of walk-the-plank moment that we all had in VR, but
    around this this idea of like, “Wow, I just I really had a weird
    feeling about this fictional character.”

    Alan: You know, it’s crazy. I

    actually dug– I bought Richie’s Plank again, and I’ve been putting
    people through it. And I forgot how amazingly simple that is. Wow.
    It’s so effective.

    Kyle: And that’s what the Barry

    demo was. So we aren’t building software to teach people how to fire
    people. That’s not really what’s being sold. But we went, “Hey,
    what’s the Plank Experience of emotional realism?” And this
    obviously focused on soft skills, focused on business. And we went,
    “Well, here’s a universal situation that kind of everybody knows
    is uncomfortable, either having been on one side or the other. Let’s
    use that as the thing that basically people sit in and go, this is
    uncomfortable or I knew how to push through that objection or
    whatever.” And it seemed to be pretty effective. So the actual
    stuff that’s being sold is actually more on the empowerment side. So
    looking at how do I get more proficient in giving good feedback, or
    how do I get more proficient in sales? Things like leadership bias
    and other topics that are much more about empowerment than they are
    about termination.

    Alan: The last podcast I had was

    with somebody working on trade skills. So, driving construction
    equipment and electrical and HVAC and these types of things, and you
    guys are looking the soft skills, and it makes me kind of question is
    there anything that VR and AR is not better than the traditional
    training? I don’t know the answer to that, we really don’t have
    enough data. But what are your thoughts?

    Kyle: I think one thing that

    they both have in common is focusing on places where you really don’t
    have a safe place to fail in real life. Soft skills, it seems ironic
    that it’s still on the other end of hard skills, but at the same time
    it’s the exact same thing. It’s like when you go into one of these
    situations and you fail. It’s just as potentially filled with
    liability and other issues as it would be if you drove a forklift
    into a warehouse shelf. It’s actually a kind of a– to me, it looks
    like a very similar theme. But yeah, you’re right. Without pulling
    back those layers of why the value is so much higher, it kind of–
    from the outside, it’s like, “Wow. There’s nothing this can’t
    touch.” But there is really clear consistent lanes that seem to
    be huge ROI.

    Alan: Yeah. It’s interesting,

    because I have seen some things — especially in the education side
    of things — where it doesn’t really make sense to put in VR, and
    maybe they just didn’t make it right. But there’s some some things
    that I’ve seen that are just like, well, you basically just put a 2D
    screen content into VR and that doesn’t really cut it. It wasn’t
    interactive– it was, but very basic interaction. And I thought even
    then I’m sure they’re seeing better results because of VR, because
    you can hijack people’s attention. But it really wasn’t that. So
    yeah, I’m looking at your Talespin. So first of all — if anybody
    wants to visit its Talespin.company
    — where you’ve got this co-pilot training, which is the Barry
    virtual humans, but you’ve listed here “With co-pilot training
    modules, you can teach interpersonal skills with emotional realism”
    Amazing. “Simulate nuanced professional situations, practice
    soft skills in the safety of a virtual environment, create scalable
    and repeatable soft skills training programs, and measure the
    development of interpersonal skills.” How does that compare to
    what companies are doing currently around these types of things?

    Kyle: They don’t have

    measurement. That was the crazy thing is.

    Alan: I didn’t think so.

    Kyle: Yeah, there’s no

    measurement. And– I mean, there’s anecdotal measurement at best. So
    if you’re lucky enough to get put in a group of employees that get
    leadership development, or other types of more privileged trainings,
    those are usually role-plays or summits or things like that. They’re
    very expensive to administer, or to facilitate. And they usually
    are– if you’ve got a really big company, even the consistency
    between facilitators is pretty variable. And so they roleplay through
    things, it’s a check the box on “Did you get access to that
    program? Did you go through it? Did you hit all the milestones over a
    12 or 16 week program?” But with this, obviously, it’s kind of a
    different animal. So what are the things that we’ve had a lot of
    discussions with people, is giving the things that would historically
    have been reserved for middle management not giving those, giving
    access to people much earlier in terms of their own personal
    development for these types of topics. And then doing that in a way
    where obviously, as you’re going through the scenarios, we can
    measure everything. We can measure your own posture. We can measure
    your sentiment. We can measure all the decision points that are made
    in any sort of given conversation. And so servicing that data backup
    in kind of an aggregate way really starts to have a value that
    businesses haven’t even really had before. So it’s interesting to see
    how that’s going to get used. But I think to answer the questions,
    they just don’t– it’s not really measured today.

    Alan: The last podcast, we were

    talking about KPIs, how do you then measure against baseline when
    there’s no measurement to begin with? Or do you just say “From
    now on, henceforth we will have measurement?”

    Kyle: That’s a good question. Do

    we– I mean, basically the obvious things are when you get into
    leadership bias, and some of the diversity inclusion topics, conflict
    resolution topics. There is some core strategy retention that you can
    measure, just like you could in any sort of skill or knowledge
    transfer application. So right now we’re using the idea that there’s
    kind of a 2x increase and information recall for twice as long. We’ve
    been able to measure that. We’ve been able to see huge increases in
    satisfaction over the training, 93 percent over e-learning has been
    what we’d better across all the different things that we deployed.
    Just generally, one of the things that was most eye-opening was
    people’s ability to elaborate on something that was in the learning.
    What we saw– we did an A/B study. And we gave people e-learning,
    where they were sitting in a classroom environment, strict
    traditional learning modalities, some video, and other PowerPoints
    and stuff. And when you started asking questions outside the
    learning, people tap out pretty quickly. “That wasn’t really in
    what we went over, so I’m not really sure.” But with the VR, we
    did a B group, where they had one fourth the amount of exposure, and
    they were able to elaborate 400 percent more. Mind-blowing. It
    translated into confidence that wasn’t even necessarily part of the
    core thing, because they were connecting the dots.

    Alan: Wow.

    Kyle: Because of the way it is

    administered. So that kind of stuff, it’s not soft skills ROI yet,
    but it’s hard to debate it. And so we’re now getting to the place,
    where we’re going to have really– by 2020, we will have really
    meaningful measurement across these big deployments. And we’ll
    probably come up with ways to actually show that improvement curve.
    We’re also getting some more off-the-shelf models so we’ll have a
    catalog, plus the stuff that’s being built specifically for
    businesses. It’s obviously off-the-shelf stuff. We’re gonna have
    thousands and thousands and thousands of users. It’s exciting to
    start to be able to build, put measurement behind some of that stuff.

    Alan: What does the typical

    rollout looks like?

    Kyle: So I would say, generally

    speaking, around 1,200-1,500 people has been like kind of the minimum
    group size where it all kind of pencils out this early on. And that
    obviously gets kind of more expensive today than it will be next
    year. And then as far as the way it’s been administered, we’ve seen a
    pretty wide variety there. We’re often classroom based, to like,
    “Hey, let’s put 10 headsets in twelve cities, and just let
    people book time.” We haven’t really seen that solidify yet into
    one kind of deployment methodology.

    Alan: What works best from your

    standpoint?

    Kyle: The regional stuff works

    pretty good. Obviously with the improvements that are coming from the
    enterprise platforms now, we actually can get to the place where we
    can facilitate regular monitoring and updates of content, if you have
    regional training centers. Up until this summer, we were trying to
    get people to stay in one center as much as possible, just to kind of
    keep the deployment craziness down. But I think that’s going away.
    Honestly, we’re now seeing more and more people go the other
    direction. And then there’s not really a whole lot of room between,
    “OK, I’m going to twelve cities.” versus “I’m going to
    end users.” And hopefully we start to see that there’s enough
    value in the amount of content that people can access, that they
    start buying headsets per user.

    Alan: What are the headsets?

    Obviously HTC Vive and Oculus Rift, but are you seeing more
    deployment now or more excitement around the standalone units?

    Kyle: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

    Yeah. I mean, the standalone units are, from an ease of use, just a
    huge step forward. And we just finished a really large– actually I
    think it’s going to be the largest enterprise study. We just did a
    3,000 person study with about one 150 Oculus Quests, and that
    deployment and that methodology, and the uptick and everything is
    really, really exciting to watch.

    Alan: So, how many Quests?

    Kyle: About 150 Quests for 3000

    users.

    Alan: Amazing. That’s

    incredible.

    Kyle: Yeah. And deployed in– it

    was under 60 days. So pretty quick turnaround time for that many
    users.

    Alan: So, did people just book

    time with it, or did they like, “OK, when you’re done, it goes
    to this person. When you’re done, it goes to this person.” How
    do you manage that?

    Kyle: Yeah, it was booked time.

    There was still some hand-holding at the head end, because a lot of
    — as you’d imagine — most of the users were first time VR users
    still. So there was still some hand-holding, but honestly it was a
    fraction of what it was for any of us two years ago.

    Alan: Oh yeah, I get– last

    night, my friends came over to my house and my mom was putting on VR
    and she’s done it before. But yeah, it was still a challenge.

    [chuckles]

    Oh…

    Kyle: Yeah, yeah. The nightmares

    of– we had a traveling circus, where we had like 10 shipping
    containers that were– that had been converted into VR base for one
    of the enterprise clients two years ago.

    Alan: Oh my God.

    Kyle: Oh my gosh. How many times

    the censors broke out, the controllers broke, and the signals broke.
    I mean, we ended up having two full time people, just to keep them
    up.

    Alan: Yeah, I believe it.

    Kyle: So we’re a long ways from

    that.

    Alan: Well, I mean, we still–

    some of the stuff we’re still doing on the Vives and it’s a full time
    job just keeping the computers up to date. It’s crazy.

    Kyle: Yeah.

    Alan: That’s a disaster. Every

    time you turn it on, it’s like “Windows needs to update all
    these filters.” [laughs]

    Kyle: Yeah.

    Alan: Oh man. So let’s talk

    about some of the — I guess — customer engagement. So you have a
    product here for– I don’t know which one it was, I was just looking
    in the– “Talespin for Insurance.” What is that all about?

    Kyle: Yeah. So, essentially even

    the soft skills stuff kind of came out of the insurance industry. So
    when we started the company, we spent the first several years just
    looking at what are the trends in the future of work? What are the
    things that we can count on as staples for how work is going to be
    delivered and what’s going to matter most? And so we had decided that
    we should look for companies and industries, that have really large
    distributed workforces already. Because of the gig economy is
    expanding, and work is being distributed even more remote. So if
    there’s industries that have that characteristic, we should focus
    there. And then the other was businesses or industries, where they
    operate in environments they don’t own or control. And that was
    because the value is so much higher for them — for early VR adoption
    — that it is safe for a retail company, even though we’ve seen some
    adoption there. But they have thousands of training centers, if you
    think about it. Every store is a training center. So the idea that
    access to the environment is limited is another reason why you see
    such a big uptake in oil and gas and some of these other industries.
    So insurance happened to really embody that. Obviously, they have
    tens of thousands of employees that are out in people’s homes, doing
    really difficult work and it’s highly variable. So the idea of
    simulation and the idea of being able to really leverage all of VR’s
    benefits was a 100 percent fit. And so once we got down that lane,
    one of the other things that became really obvious and apparent, was
    that they have a really high number of situations in which soft
    skills are really important. Because they almost always meet their
    customers on their worst day. Your house is either flooded or burned
    down, or you’ve had an accident, or whatever, their interactions with
    their customers are all soft skills interactions. And so we ended up
    in this industry. We’ve started working with Farmers Insurance in
    2016, and we just saw incredible results. And as we just dug in
    deeper and deeper and deeper, we just found that there was a huge
    appetite for this kind of product in that industry. And so we started
    building off-the-shelf products for the industry, because not
    everybody has a substantial animation budget to really break new
    ground. But they all definitely want the benefit. And so we built a
    platform specifically for the insurance industry. I mean, it’s really
    an expression of all the pieces of our platform we built. And then we
    just started building a content layer on top of that for the
    insurance industry.

    Alan: Amazing. So what are they

    doing? Other than the soft skills? Because it shows a guy holding a
    piece of wood. Are they training them to just deal with people in a
    better way? Or are you even looking at augmented reality, of being
    able to capture spaces for that sort of thing? What is it exactly?

    Kyle: Yeah. So the platform

    we’ve been building is really… we look at the problem we’re trying
    to address is this whole idea of like how do we accelerate knowledge
    transfer and the alignment of skills for how important it’s going to
    change. And so if you think about that, that’s something that touches
    every single stage of the employee lifecycle. So just addressing it
    as a training platform that only people get access to it at
    onboarding is going to probably miss the mark. And so we start
    looking at like, well, what can we do for assessment, or during
    recruitment? And what could we do for empowerment, when people are
    out in the field? And how can we look at the broad lens of spatial
    computing in each of these lanes? We mapped that out over a couple of
    years. And so, yeah, we’ve got basically a framework for processing
    object-based learning, which is the guy that you mentioned earlier,
    holding the 2×4. So we’re teaching people how things are made. What
    are things even called? There’s a lot of day-one, on-the-job stuff
    that’s just getting up to speed on nomenclature and how things are
    connected to each other. And so we built a framework for being able
    to rapidly build those types of experiences, then process is pretty
    obvious. So in the insurance use case, the first thing that we did
    with Farmers was, you stepped into a simulated home in which that
    home had been flooded or had caught fire, and then you basically had
    to go and play investigator, and you had to sort out all the issues.
    And that meant also understanding how the house was built. And so it
    really embodied all of the benefits of VR. And because people got a
    chance to go out and do 10 or 20 or 30 cases before they ever set
    foot on the job, obviously, you got really good results. And then out
    in the mixed reality lane, we’re exploring kind of like, how can we
    either be able to recall — really quickly, recall — via voice like,
    “hey, I don’t know what that is.” And through mixed
    reality, it brings up some job aides that you may have had in your
    onboarding, starting to connect all these things. So it’s kind of one
    cohesive, continuous learning string.

    Alan: Incredible.

    Kyle: And so that’s what we’ve

    been working on, and just focusing on one industry to start because,
    you know, we kind of have to figure out all these things that are
    systems and standards and frameworks. And then as we get that figured
    out, we can look at other areas. Soft skills is kind of a whole other
    area by itself, because it just branches across industries so fast.

    Alan: It touches everything. I

    think a big one for you guys is going to be banking.

    Kyle: Yeah.

    Alan: I would think that’s a

    natural progression. Insurance and banking would be kind of in
    similar fields. The only difference being insurance people are in an
    environment like you said, that’s not in their control, whereas
    banking you can control their environment a little bit more.

    Kyle: Yeah, we’ve got a lot of

    interest from telecom, from construction — that’s kind of an obvious
    one, because insurance and construction kind of touch a lot of the
    same things, from a process and object-based learning standpoint. But
    for soft skills, yeah, it’s across the board. Health and life
    insurance, health care, banking, you name it. We’ve got it inbound in
    conversations going on in just about every sector. And it’s
    interesting, the problems that people are trying to solve aren’t that
    different. It’s a lot of the same stuff. It’s a lot of like, “how
    do I have a critical conversation where I don’t blow up the
    situation? How do I give good feedback?” There are skills that
    somehow the younger generation coming into the workforce have lost,
    because of becoming so digitally native. And so they want to give
    them an opportunity–

    Alan: It’s funny, the more

    “social” we’re becoming on social media, the less social we
    are in real life.

    Kyle: Yeah, that’s what the

    business world is saying.

    Alan: It’s crazy. Yeah. Now

    we’re using technology to fix the problem.

    Kyle: Yeah, that’s the irony,

    right?

    Alan: Oh my God. What’s

    happening?

    Kyle: It’s just this recursive

    loop now.

    Alan: Yeah man, it’s wild. What

    else are you excited about? And what else have you got coming up in
    2020? People are going to want to–

    Kyle: I think for us, everything

    is finally at a maturity point where we’re seeing a lot of the big,
    traditional SAS and software players step into this space. They kind
    of can’t deny the results. There’s enough ROI calculations and things
    that have surfaced that they know their customers are really bugging
    them about having a solution. So we’ve got some really good
    conversations going on there, to work along with channel partners and
    other kind of big ecosystem players that I think will become
    exponential for the industry. I’m really excited about spending a lot
    more time down the lane of the assessment side, because I think we
    always… like, the thing internally we talk about is if you could
    remember back to your 12- to 15-year-old self — and I grew up in
    Colorado, and we had good schools and generally had access to a lot
    of things — but the idea of what you wanted to do was still very
    much dictated by your parents’ suggestions, or just kind of whatever
    you had nearest access to. And that’s just not really a good system.
    And so the idea that with these mediums, we could potentially have a
    better understanding and assessment of our own real skills early on,
    and start to look at what kind of opportunity lanes are out there for
    me, and and start to build explore those? That to me is a really
    exciting idea. I think it would really be a huge difference in how
    people ended up living their lives. I get really excited about the
    idea that we’re heading into a period where maybe we can better align
    our individual purpose with opportunities, because we’re actually
    going to have better insight into ourselves and to those
    opportunities through these types of mediums. That, to me, is like a
    systemic rewrite of how people assess and start to build their lives.
    And we’re like, I think that’s a 2020 area of focus.

    Alan: Isn’t that crazy? Like,

    it’s hard to fathom that. But that’s where we are right now. We’ve
    been struggling with the future, but the future is now.

    Kyle: Yeah, it’s wild to think

    that that’s where we’re at. It’s not really a science experiment.
    It’s just about committing to the work.

    Alan: Yeah, I mentioned this on

    a previous podcast; it is not a technology problem anymore. It’s a
    people problem.

    Kyle: Yeah.

    Alan: It’s just convincing

    people to adopt this technology. Speaking of that, I want to dig in;
    what are some of the biggest challenges you guys have faced with this
    in general?

    Kyle: I think the scale

    question. Everybody’s like, “this is amazing. The results I
    can’t deny. How do we scale it?” And there’s this idea of having
    to bring more hardware into your business, and that creates a lot of
    friction for businesses. So I often — being contrarian in that
    moment — sometimes you have to really push. I’ve said, “well,
    listen, is your goal to scale access? Or success? Because if your
    goal is to go access, then you use the wrong medium for you today.
    But if your goal is to scale success, then you need to look past some
    of these other things because you’re just getting in your own way.”
    The effectiveness is through the roof. And that obviously, that’s a
    challenge that people… that puts them back in their seat a little
    bit and they go, “it’s actually a good question because we are
    really focused on access. And access doesn’t necessarily equal
    success.” But yeah, the scale question is by far the biggest
    one, which is amazing that we’re having that conversation. Right?

    Alan: It’s a great point.

    Kyle: Yeah. And that’s just the

    fact that we’re even there is, again, night and day over two years
    ago. That question never came up. Now, it’s “we can’t get out of
    the first meeting without having to figure out how to answer that
    question,” specific to that organization.

    Alan: Wow. That’s amazing. Is

    there anything else you want to share before we wrap it up?

    Kyle: No, I think it’s just

    exciting for all of us. I think in the next year, hopefully there’s a
    lot of kind of infrastructures in place to help rise all boats, and
    2020 is the year to do it.

    Alan: Indeed, that’s one of the

    reasons we started XR Ignite as a community hub; for startup studios
    or developers to come together and — like you said — rise all
    boats, because I think there’s a lot of great work being done and
    there’s a lot of camaraderie, but nobody’s really brought everybody
    together as a community. Aside from the VR/AR Association, which is
    doing a phenomenal job as well.

    Kyle: Yeah, you guys have done a

    phenomenal job of that.

    Alan: Thank you, thank you. Our

    mission is to hyper-accelerate the XR industry. So when you look at
    it from that standpoint… we have two companies, MetaVRse and XR
    Ignite — XR for Business Podcast will also be a news aggregator and
    stuff so people can get access to the information they need about
    their industry. But these are all tools that are trying to help the
    whole industry move forward. Right? If we can create a tool that
    helps people find the right supplier at the right time for what
    they’re looking for, and helps them cut through the crap — because
    let’s be honest, if you’re an H.R. manager and you want to do VR,
    where do you start?

    Kyle: 360?

    Alan: Well, they don’t even know

    what that is! They just [think], “I saw a VR headset at a trade
    show. It was amazing. What do I do? Who do I call?” So there’s a
    lot of that going on.

    Kyle: I don’t think we’re even

    close to the end of it. I mean, the education piece is starting, I
    think, to get a little bit more mature because of the help of the
    work you guys have been doing. And we’re now at the doorstep of,
    like, really needing to think about the critical infrastructure; like
    the AWS-layer, is what I always say.

    Alan: And that’s funny that you

    say that, because we actually pivoted about a year ago to focus on
    that. What does the back-end tech stack look like to not only deliver
    this content, but standardize it? Because if I go… and we’ll just
    use insurance company as an example because you brought it up; I go
    in there. You’re talking about the VR being used for the soft skills
    training, but if you take a Matterport camera into a flooded
    building, you can now capture volumetrically the problem firsthand
    for legal purposes. There’s all sorts of ways this technology can be
    used across an enterprise, and there’s no standardization at all.

    Kyle: No.

    Alan: It’s the Wild West. So if

    we can figure out what those standards look like, and also the
    quality standards… I know everybody out there, if you’re developing
    stuff, here’s Rule #1: Don’t make people sick. If we can just adhere
    to Rule #1? I think we’ll be just fine. But I tried something the
    other day. I tried to an experience, and I had to take off after two
    seconds. I was like, oh, God. And this is this is a
    publicly-available thing on Oculus Quest. I was like, okay…

    Kyle: Yeah, I’d hope would be

    that we were done overcoming that objection. Right? But it’s still
    there.

    Alan: It’s a problem for the

    industry. It’s not a problem from our company, or your company. But
    if you have a CEO that had a bad experience — and I did a 5G
    experience, it was one of the large telcos, like a massive telco.
    They did this 5G experience and it showed as they turned from 5G, it
    was an AR experience wearing glasses, and you had to do a task in the
    physical world. But the pass through camera, they they went from 5G
    down to 4G, down to 3G, to demonstrate the difference. And I’m like,
    why are you making people sick? It’s so nauseating. There’s such a
    delay. And it was like, oh, my God. And my wife and I were both sick
    for hours after that. And that was at a major conference.

    Kyle: Yeah, that’s not the kind

    of way that we should be convincing people of 5G.

    Alan: Yeah, “5G is awesome.

    Look, it makes you sick.”

    Kyle: Yeah.

    Alan: What is one problem in the

    world that you want to see solved using XR technologies?

    Kyle: I guess it’s that

    15-year-old self. I want us to be able to, as an industry, give
    access to kids to be able to explore the world in such a way that
    they actually step out of their formative years on a path that they
    already have conviction for. And that’s a ubiquitous… that’s like
    the new standard, not like the exception for exceptional kids. That
    is something that’s right there in front of us. And it’s just a
    matter of walking out for a few more years.

    Alan: You know, it’s amazing; 25

    percent of our company is owned by a trust. And the trust’s goal is
    to deliver on that promise to deliver education at scale. Our goal,
    our mission, is to democratize education globally by 2040. And
    there’s another group in Toronto that I’m a mentor at called the
    Knowledge Society. And they take 14- to 18-year-old kids and they
    really just help them find their passions. Because if you can find
    your passion young in your [life] — and your passions are going to
    change — but if you can just find how to find your passion and
    really just live that passionate learning mindset forever? It doesn’t
    matter what your passion is, as long as you have the passion and you
    realize that you can learn anything about anything instantly. So I
    think this technology will will hyper-accelerate that as well.

    Kyle: And I think it also

    changes people’s definition of success, which I think is something
    that is also going to be critical to our world going forward. And so
    it’s such a good time to be able to focus on those kinds of issues.
    And the fact that there’s huge institutions like the ones you’re
    working with and they’re all out there putting their everything into
    it is really, really inspiring thing to be a part of.

    Alan: PWC just announced that

    they’re earmarking $3-billion to reskill and retrain their staff.

    Kyle: Yeah. And we’re seeing

    those pop up. You know, I mean, AT&T did a billion dollars last
    year. Amazon did $750-million. I mean, this is a topic that is
    obviously, I think, near-and-dear to any large employer. It’s just a
    question of whether they’ve decided to step up, take the
    responsibility.

    Alan: I don’t know if this is

    true or not, but I heard a stat that Accenture has to hire 50,000 new
    employees a year.

    Kyle: Yeah, but that’s that’s

    about the right range. Yeah. You know, you see us 25,000 new
    associates every year. On the associate level.

    Alan: Wow. Kyle, I want to thank

    you again for joining the podcast.

    Kyle: Yeah. Thanks again for

    having me, Alan. It was fun.

    32 min
  • Practicing Soft Skills by Firing Barry in VR, with Talespin's Kyle Jackson
    The VR experience Firing Barry by Talespin is getting a lot of press lately, and on the surface, it may look like a slightly uncanny valley way to train someone how to give an old fella the can. But Talespin CEO Kyle Jackson tells Alan it’s more than that; it’s a tool to help humans flex their core competencies in everything from leadership skills to confidence-building. 
    Alan: Hey, everybody, Alan
    Smithson here, the XR for Business Podcast. Coming up next, Kyle
    Jackson, founder of Talespin. You may have seen Barry the virtual
    human that you can fire in real life. We'll be talking to them about
    their enterprise software solutions that leverage immersive
    technology to transform the way global workforces, learn, work,, and
    collaborate. We'll also be discussing how you can use immersive
    technologies as an assessment tool to better prepare your workforce
    for exponential growth. All that and more on the XR for Business
    Podcast. Kyle, welcome to the show, my friend.
    Kyle: Hey. Thanks, Alan. Thanks
    for having me.
    Alan: Oh, it's so exciting. Ever
    since I saw the video that popped up of Barry, the lovable older
    gentleman avatar that you can fire. How did that come about? Tell us
    about Talespin, and how did you get here, where you are now?
    Kyle: Yeah, Barry became famous
    very quickly, because it's such an ironic idea. And that's really
    what I think caught people's attention; the idea that you could use
    virtual humans for soft skills training was something that just
    seemed sci-fi and ironic. But then once you started to peel back the
    layers of it, it just starts to make a lot of sense.So how we got
    there, was we started looking at all of the future skills gaps,
    surveys, research, everything that was surfacing from the Shift
    Commission, to the World Economic Forum, to McKinsey Global
    Institute. And we just kept seeing -- obviously opposite AI and
    automation and robotics, all the things that are going on one side of
    technology -- that there was this increasing index toward soft skills
    for some of the most underserved areas for businesses going forward.
    We're building this platform which is supposed to help transfer
    skills and really align us to the future of work. And every single
    survey says soft skills is one of the things we should be looking at.
    And we went, "Wow, is there anything we can do there?" The
    thing that was most important for us in thinking about that was we
    have to hit emotional realism to do this. This isn't like a
    point-and-click replacement. It needs to be something that when I'm
    sitting in there and I'm opposite Barry or any other virtual human
    now, that I believe the emotions and the frustration and all the
    things that are thrown at me. And to do that kind of at scale. From
    both an assessment standpoint, content, and deployment to large
    companies.
    Alan: So how did you guys
    overcome the Uncanny Valley of Barry? I've seen so many human avatars
    that are almost there, but they got that creepy feeling. And if
    you're going for emotional realism, creepy is not what you want on
    the delivery side.
    Kyle: No. Well, we kind of
    pulled up short in our opinion. So we were pushing further than where
    we landed. And you can get to even more photo-real than Barry is. But
    soon as you do, you start to push over that ledge and it starts to
    really be creepy. We're kind of right in the sweet spot of north of
    Pixar, but not hitting realism. And that seems to work. We focused a
    lot on micro-expressions and figuring out like a programmatic way to
    add a lot of micro-expression to the silent moments too, because I
    think one of the things that technologists immediately do is we had
    to figure out how to do animation systems, lip sync systems and
    things like that for when people are talking, but especially in soft
    skills, a good majority of the hairy stuff is the unspoken. And so we
    32 min
  • Creating Virtual Scenarios to Train Soft Skills in XR, with Friends With Holograms’ Cortney Harding

    Upskilling things like floor management or assembly time, that’s easy in XR. But soft skills, like understanding and empathy? A bit more challenging — but importantly, not impossible. Cortney Harding talks with Alan about how emerging tech, like VR and 360 video, can help us all be a little kinder to one another.

    Alan: Hey, everyone, Alan Smithson here. Today, we’re speaking with Cortney Harding, founder and CEO of Friends with Holograms, about their full service VR and AR agency, that focuses on soft skills training and best practices for creating powerful content that delivers results. All that and more on the XR for Business Podcast.Welcome to the show, Cortney.

    Cortney: Oh, thanks for having

    me.

    Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure.

    I’m so excited to have you on the show. You guys have done some
    incredible things and you’ve been a pioneer in this industry for
    quite some time. But I’ll let you talk to everybody about how you got
    into this and where you are now and where you’re going.

    Cortney: Yeah, great. So I got

    into VR about almost five years ago now, which is crazy to think
    about. I have a background in the music business and specifically I
    was a journalist.I wrote for Billboard. I was an editor there for
    quite a while. I then went into the music tech space right around the
    time Spotify launched in the US. It was a great music and tech
    ecosystem.

    Alan: You and I have a very

    similar background.

    Cortney: Oh, funny.

    Alan: I was a DJ for 20 years

    and then created the Emulator, the DJ touchscreen.

    Cortney: Oh, cool.

    Alan: Yeah. And then I got into

    VR. I was like, “What?” Go on. I didn’t mean to cut you
    off. I was like, “Wow, this is great.”

    Cortney: No, it’s great. Yeah.

    So anyway, so I did music tech stuff for several years. I was– I
    lead business development, and strategy, and partnerships for a
    couple different startups. And then I saw this VR piece at an art
    museum about five years ago, and it really broke something open for
    me. And I was fascinated by it. So I spent about a year — I was
    still on contract with a music tech company — and I was still
    writing at the time. So I wrote about VR, I learned about VR, I met a
    lot of people. And in 2016, at South by Southwest, I did a panel on
    music and virtual reality. And one of my other panelists was this
    guy, Kevin Cornish, who’s starting a VR production company, he’s a VR
    director. And he and I had a really nice conversation, we hit it off.
    And I joined his VR production company, leading business development
    strategy. I worked there for about a year and a half. I learned a
    tremendous amount. It was a very, very intense experience and a very
    gratifying one.And then I split off to do my own thing. And so
    Friends With Holograms has been around for about two years now, sort
    of in its current incarnation. And in those couple of years, we’ve
    done a lot of different projects, which I’m really proud of.

    Sort of our our best known project is

    the Accenture Avenues Project. So we worked on that with Accenture.
    And the backstory behind that is pretty fascinating. So Accenture
    came to us, I believe, right about two years ago now, right when
    we’re first starting and said “We have this idea, we want to do
    this really amazing social work training project. And would you like
    to bid for it?” And we, of course, said yes. So we bid for it
    and we were awarded it in the spring of last year. And then
    everything kind of went quiet for a while. And we were working on
    some other projects. And I just kind of in the back of my head
    thought, “OK, it got cancelled or it got changed around or
    somebody left.” As a bunch of a bummer as it is, that stuff
    happens. And then in June of last year, I got a call from my contact
    at Accenture who said, “Oh, yeah, the project’s back on. Want
    to– let’s chat about it. Do you still want to do it?” And I
    said yes. And so I got on a call with her and she outlines the
    project, which is very ambitious and really groundbreaking and has an
    incredible mission, and a two and a half month turnaround. [chuckles]
    And I thought, “OK, here we go.”

    Alan: Hurry up and wait.

    [chuckles]

    Cortney: Yeah. And I think that

    is the experience working with any big company. I think at this
    point.

    Alan: Yep.

    Cortney: But that was a really

    amazing project. So we dove in headfirst. We produced a 20 minute
    long voice-activated VR training piece for social workers. It is a
    branching narrative, so the bulk of the piece you’re asking questions
    of different family members. The question that you ask determines the
    answer that you get. So there’s all these different paths you can go
    down and there’s all these different levels of learning, because not
    only are you learning to actually do family interviews, you are also
    learning about how to ask the right type of questions. And there’s a
    lot of sort of visual cues in there as well. It was an incredible
    opportunity. It took years off my life, but it was very worth it. And
    so that piece came out just over a year ago. That piece won Best
    VR/AR at Mobile World Congress, beating China Mobile and Huawei,
    which is kind of insane. It was a finalist for South by Southwest
    Innovation Award. We did a ton of demos at South by. The second
    chapter of that piece came out last month, and it’s now being used by
    a number of different social work departments across the US. And I
    just found out yesterday it was shown in Germany.

    Alan: Amazing.

    Cortney: So it’s an amazing

    project. We’re incredibly proud of it. We’re incredibly proud of the
    work that we did. So that’s been sort of two of our larger projects.
    Another big project we did was for a company called DDI, which is a
    learning and training company. They came to us with an interesting
    problem to solve, which is they do a lot around workplace inclusion
    and workplace exclusion and training around that. And their challenge
    was that a lot of sort of older corporate executives hadn’t really
    felt excluded in the workplace, so they had no really incentive to do
    this type of training, like it wasn’t real to them. The feeling of
    workplace exclusion wasn’t real to them. So we created this piece
    called Can’t Win and you’re in a meeting and it is– again, it’s
    voice-activated. And this sense is one of frustration. You are
    getting talked over, and you’re going to ignored, and you’re getting
    talked down to. It’s very, very subtle, though. So by the end of the
    experience, we demoed it for a lot of people, and they’re just like
    angry. But they get it. They get that feeling. So that piece was a
    top HR product, named that by HR executives. So that’s been really
    rewarding and that’s been a lot of fun to work on. We work with
    amazing directors. Kevin Cornish directed the center pieces. Gabo
    Arora — who’s directed stuff for UN and The New York Times —
    directed the DDI piece. So that’s a big sort of core part of who we
    are as making stuff that’s really high quality and cinematic. In
    terms of consulting work, we’ve consulted for Verizon, we’ve
    consulted for Coca-Cola, mostly in the augmented reality side of
    things. We have done some work with the Air Force on voice-activated
    pilot training. We just worked with Unity, building augmented reality
    projects. And we are in the process of signing an agreement with a
    very big retailer. And I can’t say which one yet, TBD. But it’s
    something we’re incredibly excited about. So things are pretty good.

    Alan: That’s fantastic.

    Cortney: Yeah, it’s a lot of

    fun.

    Alan: So, now these– are these

    360 branching narratives, is that what this is? Or CGI or…?

    Cortney: Not CGI. So that

    actually dovetails perfectly with the second thing I wanted to chat
    about, which is best practices. So these are 360. They’re shot in
    different ways. So in some cases, the actors are shot against a green
    screen and composited into a 360 background. In some cases, it’s a
    full 360 shoot with — again — the voice interactivity built in. So
    we have, as a company, several core principles for our soft skills
    work in particular.

    Alan: All right. Let’s get into

    it.

    Cortney: So the first one is–

    Alan: This is the good stuff

    right here. We now know what they do. But now, how did they do it?

    Cortney: Yes, we’re– well, this

    is all stuff you would see this just by watching our stuff. So it’s
    not like I’m revealing too much, but– so the first one is, it has to
    be realistic and you have to use real people, because CGI characters
    — no matter how good they are, and I’ve seen some pretty good ones
    — you still know that they’re not real. And there’s something called
    the uncanny valley, where it’s a little bit of your brain sort of
    knowing that a CGI character is not a real person. So you lose a lot
    of the intimacy and the realism when you’re talking to what is
    essentially a cartoon character.

    Alan: You mean Firing Barry is

    not going to be as real?

    Cortney: No. I mean, it’s not. I

    think it’s a high quality game engine character, but it’s not like
    talking to an actual person. So that’s the first thing. And that’s
    our sort of core principle as a company. And that’s for soft skills.
    Obviously, for hard skills and for fun and games and commercial
    stuff, that’s a very different story. But for soft skills training,
    it has to be very, very realistic. We cast mostly actors and
    actresses from the theater world, because we find their level of sort
    of emotion and delivery is the best for VR. And they’re also really
    good at not needing multiple takes, because shooting multiple takes
    in VR is very different than shooting multiple takes in 2D, just
    because of how it gets cut together. So that’s the first thing. The
    second thing is the interactions have to be as realistic as possible.
    So I have a lot of headsets. I’m sitting in my office right now
    looking at all of them. And I cannot wait until the day that I can
    take all my controllers and like run over them with my car, because–

    Alan: [laughs] We’re actually

    going through this.How can we get the hand tracking in Oculus Quest?

    Cortney: Well, yeah, the hand

    tracking Quest is going to be amazing. I’m really excited for that.
    But more to the point, when you’re doing soft skills work, the
    controller is useless, Because again, when I talk to you, I don’t
    point a controller at you and click. That’s absurd. I talk to you
    about using my voice. And so everything that we designed for is with
    voice prompts. So you need to use the controller to start the
    experience, because that’s a function of Oculus, not anything we have
    control over. But then you put the controller down. And what we’ve
    seen is that opens it up to a much wider audience, because there is
    no worse experience than feeling incompetent in VR. You’re already a
    headset. It’s already kind of weird. You feel a little self-conscious
    already, just given the nature of the technology strapped your face.
    So the worst thing you can do is make someone feel even more scared
    and confused. And a lot of people — including myself — are not
    video gamers. They’ve never used these controllers before. So the
    single worst experiences I’ve ever had in VR have been the
    experiences where someone has stood over me and barked orders me,
    “Click here, click here. Now you’re teleporting. Now click this,
    click that.” And I just– I’m like, no. And I just walk away.
    Because if you want your experience to have any sort of scale or wide
    adoption or usability, you can’t be hanging over someone telling them
    a million times to click a thing. That’s– your product is rendered
    useless because of that. So we use voice, we use gaze, these are
    natural human interactions. And also we keep people immersed as much
    as possible. So another very common trope in VR training stuff is
    these quizzes, which are so bad. They remind me of a bad 80s teen TV
    show, where the character would freeze-frame, break the fourth wall,
    take a little quiz about should he ask Susan to the prom or not? I
    mean, it’s ludicrous design. It’s not real. I would love to have like
    a break to quiz every time I try to make a life decision. Guess what?
    I don’t have that opportunity, as cool as it would be. So the idea
    is, you don’t break the immersion. You use voice or gaze or other
    natural ways to move the story forward, move the narrative forward,
    move the training forward, so that you’re not jerking people in and
    out of the immersion all the time.

    And so — again — those are just our

    three main core design principles. Obviously, we design custom for
    each client. As an agency, we don’t have a pre-built product. We have
    vendors that we like, vendors that we enjoy working with. But none of
    them are exclusive partnerships or relationships. We have no
    financial interest in any of them. So we are able to come into our
    clients and say, “What is your problem and how can we solve it?”
    So that’s very different than a lot of products companies, which are
    selling sort of off-the-shelf one-size-fits-all solutions, which
    certainly have their place. They really have their place for certain
    companies in certain markets. But what we can do is really come in
    with — again — these core design principles. But from there, we’re
    wide open. So if somebody says our problem is XYZ, we start with that
    problem. We’re not trying to shoehorn our solution into it. We’re
    starting with what is the holistic view of the problem, and then how
    can we use this technology to best solve it?

    Alan: I love it. And it’s an

    interesting way to approach it, because everybody else is saying,
    “Hey, we’ve built this product and we’ll sell this product. But
    even if it doesn’t fit your exact needs or the problem that you’re
    trying to solve, we’re going to sell it to you anyway.”

    Cortney: Well, they’re not,

    though, is the thing. Because if it doesn’t fit their needs the
    company probably won’t buy it. [laughs]

    Alan: Well, I mean– or they’ll

    buy it, and then it doesn’t fit their needs and then they go, “Well,
    VR sucks.” And that’s the end of that.

    Cortney: Yeah. I mean, that’s

    been the hugest barrier for us. Bad VR, right?

    Alan: [laughs] Yep. And we’re

    not talking about Suzanne Borders’ company.

    Cortney: No. [laughs] No, we’re

    not. We’re talking about– I think a lot of companies underestimate
    what it takes to make VR, both from a financial perspective and a
    technical perspective and a creativity perspective. And they you try
    to do it in-house, and that fails, or they they don’t know what
    they’re doing. And so one value that we really provide is we know
    what we’re doing. We’re subject area experts in virtual reality.
    We’re not subject area experts in what company X, Y or Z is working
    on. So we collaborate very closely with our clients on their subject
    matter, but we know how to build VR and we know — again — what
    works and what doesn’t in VR. And I think a lot of companies tried to
    make VR, maybe on their own or they worked with people who weren’t
    experts in the space, and they got burned. And I think that’s been a
    really big challenge for us to overcome. When you talk to people and
    they say, “Oh, I did VR once and it made me sick.” and it’s
    kind of explained to them “Well, that’s not VR. That’s VR that’s
    not done well.” We’re explaining to them that, “Look, this
    stuff is not going to cost you the same as it cost you to make a
    training video.” It’s a completely different level of production
    and interactivity and design. The flip side is — and there are so
    many statistics, and I don’t know if we have time to go into all of
    them — but VR *works*, far more than any other type of training out
    there. And we’ve seen that time and time and time again. It scales
    better than any other form of training out there.

    This is something I have been talking a

    lot about recently, because I gave a talk on this at the Northwest
    Arkansas Tech Summit.VR is the best thing that has happened to
    workers, because they are now able to use VR to train to do their
    jobs better. And it is empowering to workers to be able to do their
    jobs better. It’s great for bosses, because bosses have better
    trained workers. And when you look at what is the cost of VR, which
    is fine, people have to think about their bottom lines. But what is
    the cost of a poorly trained worker? Best case scenario, poorly
    trained worker, just kind of messes up some stuff up, and there’s
    productivity issues, and maybe they are unhappy and they leave, and
    then you have to hire someone else. And these are all costs that are
    associated with not training your workers well. Then you get into the
    soft skills training, and we work a lot on sexual harassment. And
    that’s a black eye on the company. First of all, because you’re gonna
    get sued. Second of all, I wouldn’t work in a company where women
    were mistreated, and I think that’s many women who feel that way. So
    you’re losing a tremendous amount of talent. And then you go all the
    way up to situations where workers can be maimed or killed. And then,
    of course, that’s hugely negative. So it’s really looking at when you
    balance out the costs and the benefits, you have to look at the
    numbers about how much better of VR training actually works and then
    ask yourself, “Well, what is the real cost of people not being
    trained well?”

    Alan: Well, let’s talk about the

    actual cost, and then we’ll work backwards. What does something like
    this cost?

    Cortney: That is a question

    that’s basically impossible to answer without any sort of a–

    Alan: How long is a piece of

    string?

    Cortney: Yeah, exactly. It’s–

    how much does a movie cost, right? I mean, I can make a movie on my
    iPhone for nothing. The cost of an iPhone. You can make a Marvel
    movie that costs millions and millions and millions of dollars

    Alan: All right. So let me

    rephrase that. When you meet with a customer and they want to do soft
    skills training, what is the range by which you quote them? Because
    at the end of the day, somebody has to make a decision on how much it
    costs.

    Cortney: So that’s dependent on

    a number of factors. And I’m not trying to be swishy here–

    Alan: Well, no, what are some of

    the factors, so people can–?

    Cortney: What is the creative?

    So is it a sort of linear narrative? Is it a branching narrative?
    What is the–

    Alan: That make a big

    difference, I would assume.

    Cortney: Huge, huge difference.

    What is the level of interactivity? Is it a couple different voice
    prompts? Is it a conversation? Is there gaze activation? Is there
    something tactile. What is the interaction? How many actors do we
    need? How many locations do we need? Where are we shooting? Who are
    we shooting with? How long is the piece? Because that impacts
    production time. How many video files are associated with the
    production? Because that’s production cost. How long is the script
    and how intense is the script? Because we hire writers and we work on
    a lot of the scripts ourselves. That costs money. And scripts need to
    be designed for interaction and VR. So the different voice platforms
    we work with need different things to be in place. So it needs to be
    scripted a different way. If we’re using a different voice platform
    so that the voice platform will work. Obviously you can’t have people
    reading incredibly long questions, because that’s a readability
    issue. And on and on and on. So it’s really this kind of holistic
    package that people need to consider before they–

    Alan: So how do you scope this

    with the customer? Do you sit down and you figure what the problem
    is? What does that look like?

    Cortney: So we actually have a

    separate product that deals with that. The way our flow works is we
    get introduced to someone. We do a capabilities call — a
    capabilities meaning a demo session, that’s all sort of just our
    business development — and once there is a pretty firm interest, we
    have something called a VR/AR jumpstart. And that’s a one week
    program, it’s five days. We embed– ideally, we embed in the office
    of the client. If that’s not feasible, we have done some over Skype
    or video chat. Generally, we like to be with the clients. In the
    VR/AR jumpstart is a flat fee for one week, and it’s two people and
    we come to you. Day one is–

    Alan: What does something like

    that cost?

    Cortney: So the VR/AR jumpstart

    is $20,000.

    Alan: Yeah. OK. So a $20,000, it

    gets you going.

    Cortney: Yes. So the $20,000 is

    basically– here’s what it gets you: day one is, what is the problem
    you’re trying to solve? Because a lot of people still don’t really
    have a clear sense of what VR is best for. So they’ll say “Oh,
    we want to do this, because someone else did it in VR” or “We
    want to solve this problem that is very broad.” And so we’re
    defining the problem. We are like, what exactly do you want to get
    out of this? What are your KPIs? What are your measurements? What’s
    your budget? Everything, so that defines it all. Day two, we work on
    the creative and we work on the script. So what does this concept
    look like? How many people are involved in this? Where are the
    interaction points? And then we start writing not the final script,
    but a skeleton of the script. Day three, we get a bunch of people
    from your office who did high school theater, and we put them in a
    room with a 360 camera and we shoot a basic prototype. It’s a way for
    us to sort of work out the blocking and the scripts and the
    interactions. And obviously we’re not building something that’s fully
    interactive in a couple of days, but it at least gives us the
    opportunity to check our own work. Day four, we go off and do a
    little side office and we auto-stitch the footage. We obviously can’t
    build something fully interactive, we dummy in whatever interactions
    there are so it seems kind of natural. And then day five, we use our
    test. So the client brings in four or five different people who are
    users, a representative of the users. And they go through and they
    test it, and they give us their feedback. What the client is left
    with at the end of the week is an MVP that is by no means ready for
    prime time, but is something that they can show to their boss and
    they can say, here’s user feedback. Here’s sort of the first draft of
    this. And then that’s kind of the end of that initial engagement. And
    then the second part of the engagement — once it’s fully funded —
    is that we do the whole big thing. So we revise the script, get it to
    the final points. We hire the director, hire the cast, do the shoot,
    do all the production, do all the post, do all of the design for
    whatever interactions there are, and then we deliver a fully finished
    product to the client.

    Alan: That’s awesome.

    Cortney: Yeah.

    Alan: What a great process. It

    saves a lot of time. We’ve been kind of down this road a few times,
    and this seems to be a great way to save a lot of time for a
    customer. and give them something that they can go and get buy-in
    from the higher ups.

    Cortney: Yet, because for most

    people, VR is still very theoretical at this point, and they haven’t
    seen a lot of good examples. And maybe they’ve only seen VR video
    games, which are fun, but I’m the CFO or CIO or something of a
    company, I am not going to immediately link my kid’s zombie shooter
    game to what can we do in training. So a lot of what we do still to
    this day is just demoing for people. We spend a lot of time putting
    people in headsets, and that’s great. I do think that’s going to
    change as the headsets are more widely adopted. I also think that’s a
    huge barrier for us. So we were on the call with a big telecom
    company — I won’t say which one — and they brought us in to chat
    with them. Did this big group call, because they really wanted to do
    VR. They’d heard their competitors were doing it. They were like, “Oh
    my gosh, we have to do VR now.” .

    Alan: We get that a lot. “We

    went to my CEO and CES, and he needs VR, ASAP!” [laughs]

    Cortney: Oh god, I know. So

    anyway, we were on this call with them, and even leading up to the
    call, I said, “I’m happy to share some work with you. We can
    share our work to your Oculus Go headsets, if you just let me know
    the address. I’m happy to share and send some examples to you.”
    And the person I’ve talked to said, “Oh, we don’t have an Oculus
    Go.” And I thought “I’m kind of tempted to cancel this
    call.” because an Oculus Go costs $200. You can buy it on
    Amazon, you can buy it at Best Buy. You can find it a lot of places.
    If you are serious about investing in VR as a company, and you’re
    going to put down a reasonable amount of money, you should at lest
    spend $200 to buy a headset. And that, to me, is kind of the mark of
    people who are serious about this stuff, as opposed to just like, “Oh
    yeah, somebody decided to yes. Wouldn’t it be neat?” So that’s
    been kind of my marker at this point as to who I’ll sort of seriously
    take meetings with is if you’re not willing–

    Alan: What a great way. What a

    great barrier. Here, go buy a VR headset. We’ll send you some content
    to take a look at. Then we’ll have a meeting.

    Cortney: Yeah. I really should have a referral deal with Oculus. [laughs] I’m not asking people to buy a Vive and a gaming computer and a this and a that. I fully understand that people don’t have those. Those are very expensive. They’re great, but they’re expensive. And they’re– But this is the type of thing where, to me, it kind of separates out who’s serious and who isn’t. And it’s not a hard and fast rule, certainly. For me, I have to look at other factors of are you serious or not? But it’s a little bit more of constantly reminding myself that a lot of us are much further out ahead than most companies. And what’s interesting to me is that a lot of companies are just kind of letting it pass them by, when their competitors are really crushing it. Walmart’s a great example. Walmart have invested a lot into training in VR and they’ve had a tremendous amount of success, and Target, Costco–

    Alan: But here’s the thing: with

    any new technology that disrupts– I mean, how many companies didn’t
    have a website for years and years and years?

    Cortney: Oh, yeah!

    Alan: And then all of a sudden,

    if you didn’t have a website, you weren’t on the map. And I think the
    same is going to happen with VR and AR training, because it is such a
    big difference between your regular training, whether it be paper,
    manual or e-learning, whatever their current learning is. When you
    put it in spatial computing, when you put somebody in a headset and
    hijack their entire senses, it is exponentially better.

    Cortney: Oh, yeah.

    Alan: And so companies like

    Walmart, they get it, because they are way ahead of it. And it will
    come to a point in the next three years — I think — where every
    company, if you don’t do it, you’re gonna be left behind.

    Cortney: Yeah. I mean, your

    example is spot on. And it’s funny. I remember right when we were
    first starting out, I had a meeting with this big agency that we’re
    now probably going to do some work with. And my contact there led me
    out to the elevator after our meeting. And he said, “Look, I
    worked in agency.com in the 90s for years, and I was pitching
    companies about building websites.” And everyone would say stuff
    like, “Oh, the Internet’s a fad!” or “Oh, we’re in the
    Yellow Pages. What do we need a website for?” And like every
    excuse, and he does couple of years of pitching, pitching, pitching.
    And then he said basically one day you walked into the office and he
    had 20 voicemails and everyone’s like, “We need a website
    tomorrow!” And I do think– I mean, listen, I can’t tell you the
    number of people who didn’t take my calls for months and all of a
    sudden they’re calling me in a frenzy. Like I’ve had a couple of
    people–

    Alan: That weird turning point,

    where the your outbound suddenly becomes inbound.

    Cortney: Yeah. I mean, I’ve had

    a couple of people sort of say, “Oh, we’ll never do this. This will
    never happen.” And then a year later, they get back to me and
    they’re they’re begging us to do this. So–

    Alan: You’re like, “Well,

    the price is now 50 percent more.”

    Cortney: I mean, some– yeah,

    look, I’m– sometimes– well, I don’t actually do that. I price very
    honestly. But it’s more the type of thing where I’ll fully call
    myself out on this. I was a magazine editor in 2008, 2009 when
    Twitter was really starting to take off. And I just remember looking
    at Twitter and being like, “What is this? This is stupid.”
    And I was like, “Let’s make the interns do it.” And now
    it’s a much bigger thing. People learn, people change, and people get
    into this stuff. And I definitely do think it is moving forward. I
    think that people just have to be very clear on — again — defining
    the problem, doing really good creative, because that’s the thing. So
    much– I’ve looked at the training videos, and they’re so bad and
    they’re so pointless.

    Alan: They’re so bad. The bar is

    so low. [laughs]

    Cortney: Yeah, I know! And I

    wrote this thing recently — and I know we like to joke about it, and
    I certainly do — but if you look at sexual harassment training, I
    teach at NYU and I had to do the NYU sexual harassment training
    recently. And it’s laughably bad. It was made for $20. And it’s fine
    to laugh at it, but it’s also not because it’s a huge problem. And
    you’re basically–

    Alan: Why bother doing it?

    Cortney: Yeah. Well, no, I know

    why you do it. Because in New York, legally you have to. But it’s so
    lawyers can tick a box and say, “Okay, we did this.” It’s
    not about like, oh–

    Alan: But it doesn’t actually

    move the needle. It doesn’t actually make an impact.

    Cortney: And the thing is like

    it’s minimizing women’s pain. Like this is minimizing the pain and
    the trauma that women feel when they have to deal with this. Because
    training about this is a joke, right? Training about diversity and
    inclusion, people still joke about. And it’s like it’s minimizing the
    feelings — the real feelings and the real trauma — of women, and
    people of color, and disabled people, and LGBTQ people. And it’s a
    really massive issue that goes beyond just, “Oh, let’s just do
    this dumb little training for an hour, that no one pays attention
    to.” So I think that’s the real key with VR is again, it brings
    it back to the point of this is a good thing for workers.

    Alan: Cortney, let me ask a

    question.

    Cortney: “Are you now, or

    have you ever been a communist?” [laughs]

    Alan: [laughs] Are you? No, what

    my question was, knowing what you know and all the projects that
    you’ve done, could you build a generic system that could be sold to
    multiple companies? So that a company didn’t have to go through all
    the custom, but it would just be a “Here’s an inclusion
    scenario.” It’s really well produced, and it touches on
    everything, but not specific to one company, for example.

    Cortney: Sure. And that’s what

    we– I mean, our Accenture — Accenture was a client on our social
    work project — and that is currently being used by several different
    social work departments all across the US. So you don’t have to build
    something that’s custom for like California, or Georgia, or Illinois,
    or New York. It can just be training for social workers. We can also
    do — and we’ve talked about doing — white label products specific
    to different state regulations or different– some states have huge
    problems like opioid addiction. And so there is that. So, yeah, I
    mean, a lot of our partners are doing things where basically they are
    then selling them on to a number of different consumers. It depends,
    you definitely can do something that’s generic and off-the-shelf, for
    certain companies or for certain scenarios. And then you need
    something that is more specific in other scenarios. So if you’re
    dealing with really specific regulations, that’s one thing. If you’re
    dealing with just sort of like “Here’s what you do in a
    situation where you’re dealing with sort of discrimination,”
    that can be more broad. So, yeah, I mean, when I talk about the work
    that we do, nothing that we do is so incredibly specific, it can only
    be used by like one tiny company.

    Alan: What I was thinking —

    when you mentioned you Can’t Win platform or project that you worked
    on — for senior managers of every company, that should be mandatory.

    Cortney: Oh, totally.

    Alan: Put yourself in the eyes

    of a black woman in your company in a management meeting, and see how
    that works out for you.

    Cortney: Well–

    Alan: I mean, it’s very

    difficult to understand what that’s like, if you are — I’m just
    going to throw it out — if you’re a white male executive, you can’t
    fathom what it’s like to be ignored and not included in the
    conversation.

    Cortney: Here’s the thing. I

    don’t think VR can make you understand someone else’s perspective. I
    have done a lot of your experiences where it’s like, “Now you’re
    a such and such. Now you’re a such and such.” And I’m not, I’m
    me. Putting on a VR headset is not going to race almost 40 years of
    me being me. So what VR can do really well is not like, “Oh, now
    you’re a young black man, and you’re looking at this weird melted
    cartoon version of yourself.” And that’s supposed to have
    empathy. Like, no. The second I take the headset off, I’m gonna kind
    of forget it. What it can do, is put me in a scenario where I am
    having those same feelings. So it’s not about, “Oh, now you’re
    this totally other person.” It’s about “Now you’re having
    this new feeling.” But again, the more we ask people to suspend
    a ton of disbelief in VR, the harder it’s going to get. So we’ve
    actually– I’ve seen this in doing some testing about the Can’t Win
    experience. The first draft of the Can’t Win experience that someone
    else did — not us — was — and that’s why we got brought in — so
    let’s say you’re a woman and you’re in a meeting, and men are sitting
    here talking about basketball and ignoring you. They put that on men
    and the guys were like, “Yeah, so? I go to a sports bar with my
    buddies. They’re following a team I’m not following. I don’t care.”
    So you can’t just be like “Now you’re a lady. Now you’re a
    person of color. Now you’re an old person. Now you’re a this.”
    That does not work. What works is–

    Alan: That’s intriguing.

    Cortney: –you’re you, but

    you’re in a new situation. That’s another really core belief of ours
    is the social worker training we built has been seen by a lot of
    people, which is amazing. But it’s for social workers. If we’re
    building training for police officers — let’s say — the perspective
    is of a police officer. I’ve seen police officer training, where it’s
    constantly shifting perspectives. And I don’t like that. I don’t
    think that works. I think it is very confusing. Like there was a
    Verizon piece that came out — we didn’t work on this, obviously —
    so there’s a Verizon peace that came out recently, and it’s been
    posted all over. It’s public. It’s like perspective shift. So the
    first perspective is you’re a Verizon store employee, and some guy
    comes in and he’s mad because his phone doesn’t work. And then you
    sort of see him and he’s like, “Oh, my daughter’s trying to call
    me on her birthday, and I can’t get it to work.” And I mean,
    sure. But then there’s no learning. The learning in that piece should
    have been “OK, this guy comes in, he’s clearly upset. How do I
    ask him the right question, to help him explain why his phone doesn’t
    work?” That’s the stuff that you really need to do. It’s not
    like, “Oh, understand that people are upset or everyone has a
    story.” We kind of already know that, you shouldn’t have to
    teach people that. That’s kind of an obvious thing. So the real thing
    is, yeah, perspective shifting, it doesn’t work. It’s too clunky,
    it’s too fragmented, it’s you herky-jerky. And this is our sort of
    core design principle, is meet people where they are. Don’t ask them
    to sort of suspend their disbelief once they put on a headset.

    Alan: Amazing. I have one last

    question for you, Cortney.

    Cortney: Yeah, totally.

    Alan: All right. What problem in

    the world do you want to see solved using XR technologies?

    Cortney: Oh god. So the biggest

    one — I mean, there’s a lot, obviously — the biggest one for us is
    sexual harassment. And that’s something we’re working on right now.
    And I think a key thing that you can do in VR — that you can’t do in
    any other medium — is really notice the nuances of someone’s body
    language. So the VR piece that we’re going to do on sexual harassment
    — and I can’t unfortunately say who the client on this is, but all
    will be revealed in time — the idea is people can say the same words
    to you, but their tone and their facial expression and their body
    language convey very different things. So the idea is basically
    you’re having a conversation with someone. You say something that’s
    kind of borderline and they’ll either lean forward, they’ll laugh,
    they’ll genuinely say, “Oh my God, that’s so funny, hahaha.”
    They’re into it, it’s cool. Or you say something, and they look down,
    and they kind of look away, and they shrink back, and they say, “Heh
    heh, that’s so funny.” They’re saying the same words, but every
    other signal is telling you different things. So, again, it’s really
    about how do you read body language and sort of handle that in social
    situations? And then it gives you the opportunity to course correct
    if you need to, because it’s not punitive. Everyone’s sort of said
    something that lands flat. So it’s really about like, how do you read
    the room? How do you read people’s expressions and read their body
    language? And I think that would be great for sexual harassment, it
    can be great for consent, deploying that on college campuses where
    there’s a lot of issues around like affirmative consent. That stuff
    is really, really important. And that’s stuff, to me, that I would
    love to dive even more deeply into than we already are.

    37 min
  • Creating Virtual Scenarios to Train Soft Skills in XR, with Friends With Holograms' Cortney Harding
    Upskilling things like floor management or assembly time, that's easy in XR. But soft skills, like understanding and empathy? A bit more challenging -- but importantly, not impossible. Cortney Harding talks with Alan about how emerging tech, like VR and 360 video, can help us all be a little kinder to one another.
    Alan: Hey, everyone, Alan Smithson here. Today, we're speaking with Cortney Harding, founder and CEO of Friends with Holograms, about their full service VR and AR agency, that focuses on soft skills training and best practices for creating powerful content that delivers results. All that and more on the XR for Business Podcast.Welcome to the show, Cortney.
    Cortney: Oh, thanks for having
    me.
    Alan: It's my absolute pleasure.
    I'm so excited to have you on the show. You guys have done some
    incredible things and you've been a pioneer in this industry for
    quite some time. But I'll let you talk to everybody about how you got
    into this and where you are now and where you're going.
    Cortney: Yeah, great. So I got
    into VR about almost five years ago now, which is crazy to think
    about. I have a background in the music business and specifically I
    was a journalist.I wrote for Billboard. I was an editor there for
    quite a while. I then went into the music tech space right around the
    time Spotify launched in the US. It was a great music and tech
    ecosystem.
    Alan: You and I have a very
    similar background.
    Cortney: Oh, funny.
    Alan: I was a DJ for 20 years
    and then created the Emulator, the DJ touchscreen.
    Cortney: Oh, cool.
    Alan: Yeah. And then I got into
    VR. I was like, "What?" Go on. I didn't mean to cut you
    off. I was like, "Wow, this is great."
    Cortney: No, it's great. Yeah.
    So anyway, so I did music tech stuff for several years. I was-- I
    lead business development, and strategy, and partnerships for a
    couple different startups. And then I saw this VR piece at an art
    museum about five years ago, and it really broke something open for
    me. And I was fascinated by it. So I spent about a year -- I was
    still on contract with a music tech company -- and I was still
    writing at the time. So I wrote about VR, I learned about VR, I met a
    lot of people. And in 2016, at South by Southwest, I did a panel on
    music and virtual reality. And one of my other panelists was this
    guy, Kevin Cornish, who's starting a VR production company, he's a VR
    director. And he and I had a really nice conversation, we hit it off.
    And I joined his VR production company, leading business development
    strategy. I worked there for about a year and a half. I learned a
    tremendous amount. It was a very, very intense experience and a very
    gratifying one.And then I split off to do my own thing. And so
    Friends With Holograms has been around for about two years now, sort
    of in its current incarnation. And in those couple of years, we've
    done a lot of different projects, which I'm really proud of.
    Sort of our our best known project is
    the Accenture Avenues Project. So we worked on that with Accenture.
    And the backstory behind that is pretty fascinating. So Accenture
    came to us, I believe, right about two years ago now, right when
    we're first starting and said "We have this idea, we want to do
    this really amazing social work training project. And would you like
    to bid for it?" And we, of course, said yes. So we bid for it
    and we were awarded it in the spring of last year. And then
    everything kind of went quiet for a while. And we were working on
    some other projects. And I just kind of in the back of my head
    thought, "OK, it got cancelled or it got changed around or
    somebody left." As a bunch of a bummer as it is, that stuff
    happens. A
    37 min
  • Attending Digital Concerts in XR with The Boolean’s Anne McKinnon

    The average concert is a tour de force for one’s sense of sound (and, if the bass is decent, one’s sense of their bones vibrating). But Anne McKinnon from The Boolean isn’t interested in “average” concerts. She wants to use XR to make concerts a sensation for all the senses.

    Alan: Welcome to the XR for

    Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Anne
    McKinnon from The Boolean. Anne is a VR and AR consultant and writer.
    She is an editor and contributor to Charlie Fink’s book
    “Convergence.” Charlie, as you may remember, was one of the
    very first episodes we had. Her consulting bridges the gap between
    entertainment and technology. As an advisor, Anne grows and curates a
    community of digital artists to leverage new and emerging
    technologies. Anne is actively engaged in the entertainment industry
    at the intersection of music, arts, gaming, and tech. You can learn
    more about the great work that Anne and her team are doing at
    theboolean.io. Anne, welcome to the show.

    Anne: Thank you, Alan. I’m

    really excited to speak with you today, and also cannot wait to speak
    to a lot of the listeners.

    Alan: Yes, it’s been a while.

    We’ve known each other quite some time, and you do some work with VR
    Days and they’ve been on the show as well. And it feels like a
    family, like a network of people that are all just kind of coming
    together. So how did you get into this crazy world of technology?

    Anne: Actually, VR Days was one

    of the major events I went to and I started working in tech. And it
    was as a blogger and just kind of looking at how can we solve
    problems in VR, what can we use it for, and how can we make
    improvements to every aspect of our lives? And VR Days was one of the
    best conferences that bridged the gap between technology and arts,
    and also brought together everyone from military to education to
    healthcare, and also the creatives to drive that innovation. So that
    way, I guess I met some of the teams that I work with now and we’re
    looking at how to solve all these problems and to bring it to
    audiences around the world.

    Alan: Let’s unpack that. What

    are some of the problems that you’re working on solving?

    Anne: I want you talk a lot

    today about one of the projects we’re working on for almost two
    years, and that’s with Miro Shot. So Miro Shot is a band and we’re
    touring a virtual reality live concert around the world. So to kind
    of put in detail about what that looks like, is that the audience is
    physically present and the band as also physically present. And when
    the audience enters, they have VR headsets on and they are immersed
    in dreamscape visuals, and the pass-through camera’s a big part of
    what we do to connect the realities, and to experience music in a new
    way. And one of the problems that a lot of VR experiences have is how
    do you reach audiences around the world with live performance, and
    also how do you reach a large scale audience? A lot of what we’re
    focusing in business is how do you grow experiences from live to at
    home. And this is something we’re doing with the band, with up to 30
    people at a time for live concert.

    Alan: People simultaneously in

    VR?

    Anne: Simultaneously in VR. So a

    lot of it is based around the concepts of gaming. So we’re really
    looking at VR as something that’s not contained, taking from
    classical genres, from theater and cinema and gaming. So everything
    starts in a gaming lobby. And they start the experience together and
    depending on where they look, they’ll be able to experience different
    parts of the world of the music. And they’re also because of the live
    performance, they’re really tied to the real world, experiencing it
    in a new way.

    Alan: Are they at home when– or

    is this at a physical location?

    Anne: Completely live. One of

    the recent ones we did was, we were at VRHAM! festival in Germany. So
    we did 18 live immersive concerts over four days. And what it looks
    like is we have up to 30 people every time. We do six to eight shows
    per day, and they last about 30 minutes from start to finish. So the
    audience is coming into– we were at a warehouse on the outskirts of
    Hamburg. And what’s so amazing is that this experience we can take
    to– we’ve performed at churches at the Institute of Art in Amsterdam
    Baptist Cinema. We did an underground music venue in London, New
    Blush in Paris and Gaité Lyrique. And yeah, the audiences there,
    they put the headsets on, the band comes in and plays a couple of
    sets, and they see these amazing visuals and they feel haptics and
    temperature and scent. Whole new way to explore music.

    Alan: So they’re live. They’ve

    got a headset on. So when they walk in, there’s a bunch of chairs or
    is it standing?

    Anne: Seated. So because again,

    a lot of people are experiencing VR for the first time, I can be a
    lot to take in, especially when you have the powerful music, a band,
    and you have all these different scents and feelings and also
    voice-over that’s talking about world-building. Because a lot of this
    in a way is building the future of how we’re going to experience our
    world.

    Alan: It’s incredible. So I was

    at the FIVARS Festival, which is the Festival of International
    Virtual and Augmented Reality Storytelling, and they had a band there
    and the band was playing in a small room and everybody kind of came
    in to watch. But the band was playing to 3D mapped visuals. So
    somebody had projected it on a wall and had a couple of pieces, and
    one guy had a drum and the 3D projection was on the drum. So this is
    like that only times eleven.

    Anne: One other thing is we

    learned very early on is that if we want to make it the best we
    possibly can, we have to collaborate with people who are from
    different backgrounds. So we have a collective about 700 people from
    all over the world who contribute to the visuals of the band, like
    the one who saw at FIVARS Festival But also, too, we have two master
    students who are working with us in the band, and they create a lot
    of these virtual scenes and virtual worlds. We use everything from
    haptics. So it’s not just VR. Again, we can’t– I don’t think think–
    let’s look at immersion, we have to look at something beyond VR and
    how can we create an atmosphere and how can we create an experience.
    And one of the posts I wrote recently on my blog at theboolean.io was
    about Sleep No More and how it’s everything that VR should be. And it
    created a lot of good debate on Twitter. So I’d love for people to
    join that conversation.

    Alan: An amazing article. So

    explain how the haptics are working. Are you using something like a
    SUBPAC or…?

    Anne: Yeah, SUBPAC has partnered

    with us for a lot of events and we use their– the one that’s like a
    backpack, we put them on the chairs. We also use wind, so people can
    feel– it’s funny, because a lot of the times we do a bit of an intro
    into the experience and sometimes I’ll forget to say, “Oh,
    you’ll be scented, we’ll use wind.” And then afterwards, when
    we’re talking to our audience, they’ll say “Did I smell the
    desert?” or “Did I smell the ocean?” because we have
    Timothy Hand, who does scents for us and he’s at Somerset House in
    London. So we do have a custom scents for shows.

    Alan: Oh my God. I’ve got to

    come and try this. This sounds amazing. First of all, what kind of VR
    headsets are they?

    Anne: This is a great question

    for artists, because I think a lot of the struggle is how do you find
    the right hardware and how do you talk with the right teams? Because
    we’re a super, super low budget, like the label has been incredibly
    supportive. But a lot of it is independent. So HTC has given us some
    Vive Focus and we love them, because being untethered is a huge
    important part of having audience come in and not feeling like it’s a
    hassle, but really having this like ritualistic atmospheric
    experience without breaking that sense of immersion. But we don’t
    have funds to port. So that’s something that we’re looking for. But
    otherwise we’re using the Samsung Gear VR. And those have been
    absolutely amazing. Again, they’re tetherless. They’re easy to put on
    and off. We can pack them up and take them in boxes around the world.
    They’re super easy for production. The pass-through cameras are
    great. So we’re really keen on using those. But again, it can be
    really difficult to talk to big companies, or we rent the headsets
    out for every event.

    Alan: Yeah, I think device

    management with VR is a bit of a pain in the butt, because you have
    to keep them charged, especially with the Samsung Gear VR’s great,
    because you can just swap out the phones.

    Anne: Yeah, it’s really–

    Alan: Stack of phones charging

    while you’re swapping it out, whereas if you’re using something like
    an Oculus Go, you’ve got to take the whole machine away. So there is
    pros and cons, but the only problem that is Samsung in the future is
    not going to be supporting Gear VR, looks like.

    Anne: Yeah. So definitely in the

    process of transferring over. The Quest would be absolutely amazing
    for what we’re doing because again, it’s super high powered.

    Alan: And if you think about the

    Quest on a price point, it’s actually way cheaper than a Gear VR
    because a Gear VR is, let’s say $200 for the headset or 100, but then
    the phone is like a thousand bucks.

    Anne: Yeah, but we rent for

    every single show. So at the moment we’ve been working on this for
    two years. They’ve received some grants from the Dutch government. A
    lot of personal support. And we have– I’m going to be in a meeting
    in Vancouver International Film Festival, then I fly straight from
    London at the show — at the International Festival Forum — to pitch
    in Vancouver for funding at the film festival. And then we’re also
    representing to Creative XR Art Council of England for opportunities
    to bring this to its full potential.

    Alan: Now, you mentioned funding

    and I think this is an important segue, because I talk to a lot of
    companies on the show and a lot of founders, and most of them are
    funded that have been on the show funded of some sort anyway, whether
    it’s seed funding or venture funding. But funding is a key element,
    especially when you’re experimenting with technology. We’re pushing
    the limits. You guys are pushing the limits of what’s possible with
    this technology. And sometimes it doesn’t work. And if you’re looking
    at it from a strictly monetary standpoint, you would never take any
    risks. If that was the case, if you were only looking at it from the
    business standpoint, where you would never take any risks because the
    risks are high. So how do you convince funders and who are the
    sources of funding that you guys have tapped into to allow you the
    creative freedom to do what you want to do and bring this really
    incredible show to life? But also, are they expecting return, or is
    this government grants, or what does that look like?

    Anne: This is a great question

    for how we’re approaching this project as creative based. A huge
    important part is that we have the freedom to be really innovative
    and that we’re not meeting certain deadlines and goals. And we’re
    also bringing together a lot of collaborators who are working with us
    on a project as open source band, if you could say. So, making it
    open source, making it accessible, making it somewhere where everyone
    can be a part of it has been something we’ve moved towards to make
    it– to bring it to where it is today with a very, very small budget.
    In terms of an XR project that’s touring the entire globe — and
    we’ve sold out every ticket to date — the amount of money that’s
    found to it is very, very little. But the potential is– and we’re
    presenting in Texco actually. Our partners are presenting for us and
    that’s in Singapore. So when we have access to corporate events and
    author galleries and institutions, where we bring those types of
    budgets, that’s what’s really allowing us to build it out. In terms
    of investors, it’s something we thought about very carefully. Do we
    want to have an influx of cash immediately? Do we want to grow and
    scale this right now? Or are we going to let it grow in scale
    organically? Are we going to retain that freedom to build it
    independently without meeting business deadlines? I think this is
    something a lot of companies–

    Alan: Tell me you guys kept the

    autonomy and freedom.

    Anne: We did. Yes.

    Alan: Yay!

    Anne: It’s been worth it every

    step of the way.

    Alan: Absolutely. Because let’s

    be honest, when you get pigeonholed into venture capital, there’s a
    boss leaning over your shoulder saying, “Do this, do this, do
    this.” And right or wrong, you are beholden to a board.

    Anne: Yeah. And I think I’ve

    heard some people say, too, that once you get your first drive in
    venture capital, you’re always gonna be raising your next. So it’s a
    huge demand, I think, to scale that at a rate that can take a bit of
    time, especially as we’re all learning industry now. And what you
    plan for in one year might completely change as we learn new things
    and discover new applications.

    Alan: It’s exactly why we

    haven’t raised as a company until now, because we had a little bit of
    seed capital. We found some clients that were very interested in
    doing great new stuff. So we actually used our clients budgets —
    typically in the marketing sector — to do our R&D, because as
    you exactly just said, this industry is moving and it’s fluid and
    it’s changing every day. One day Apple will come out and say a new
    feature. And then Google came out with a new feature. And those two
    features alone will wipe out 100 startups. So being able to be nimble
    and look at the big picture in the long term is really, I think, the
    key to long-term success of this whole industry. I think there’s
    gonna be a lot of companies that are building, building, building,
    and they’re raising capital. And while there’s– who went out of
    business? DAQRI!

    Anne: Yes.

    Alan: DAQRI, the augmented

    reality helmet, they raised enormous sums of capital. But one, they
    were too early. They were doing this for 10 years. And the market for
    that, what they were doing is just starting to kick off now. They
    just raised too much money too early in it. It can set up companies
    for failure more than its success. And I think this is a lesson for
    people who are listening, who are startups, who have a great idea.
    But just be very careful where you get your funding from. And the
    best form of funding — in my opinion — is customers.

    Anne: Yeah. I mean, when we’re

    booking out the show to something– because we have to be very nimble
    and also we are growing and scaling at — I think — a great pace
    where we’re also at the right timing, and also for consumer adoption
    it’s not what everyone expected it would be this year. And I think a
    big part of that is having accessible and very innovative and
    creative arts pieces, and there are lots of them out there. But when
    you go to VR, a lot of VR studios — or I should say arcades — a lot
    of them, it can be very difficult for someone to get to, buy a ticket
    and then you have to sign up and you wait 30 minutes and you try one
    thing, but you don’t really understand how it’s used. So I think a
    lot of times it’s like when people first started watching theater,
    they would go out and see theater. And then it was on TV, and they’d
    go to the movies, and they understood the concept, and there was a
    show, then it came into the house. And it slowly expanded to where
    people were comfortable with it in the home as well, and also
    interacting with it in many ways and shared it with their friends. I
    think we’re slowly, slowly building up to the same rate as what we
    see with other mediums that we’re drawing from.

    Alan: The FIVARS Festival does a

    great job. They kind of have these little areas where it’s just
    walled off by curtains and you can sit there and you can– you load
    an experience so they have it all synchronized to a tablet. I was
    going to ask you about this. How do you synchronize all the headsets?
    What program do you use, or what do you use to synchronize the
    headsets so that everyone is getting– or are they getting the same
    experience?

    Anne: Yeah, they are. So we have

    our own app on the Oculus store. And we invite everyone into a gaming
    lobby, and we use a networking system. We can’t rely always on the
    Wi-Fi of the places we are, so we always bring our own routers. And
    this is we can connect. I mean, as we do more testing– when we first
    started in 2017, we had 10 people going through an experience at
    once. And now we’re doing live shows at 30, just because the
    restrictions for renting. That was we did more tests and we kept
    accessing our budgets. We can do 60 people in the live experience and
    the connectivity is so important for that, because the show only
    happens once those people of the show is sold out. So we have to have
    a stable network and a stable experience in hardware.

    Alan: But I would think that the

    entire experience is probably preloaded onto the devices and you’re
    just using the network to trigger them, right?

    Anne: That’s right.

    Alan: Yeah, because I think

    pushing the content would be too onerous.

    Anne: Yes. We actually have a

    live system. So as we’re performing different songs or different
    experiences or two different audiences, we customize what people see
    and change in tune with the music. So everything from the haptics,
    the temperature, airflow, the scent is all controlled through the app
    we’ve created, controlled through an iPod or any laptops we’re using
    on stage.

    Alan: Wow, that’s so cool. Now,

    can people experience this *not* at a live show? Is there any way
    that they can download the app on the Oculus store and enjoy one of
    these concerts at home?

    Anne: It’s something we’re

    building up to. We’re going to find out in the next couple weeks.
    We’re extending it. A lot of that what we’re looking at is how do we
    make it accessible, and community building, and user generated
    content. I’ve been exploring a few partnerships with Science Space
    and also Synth Riders with Kluge Interactive, and also building out
    our own experience that hopefully will be available in 2020.

    Alan: So cool. It’s amazing

    being able to crowdsource the graphics, and everything will be
    amazing. It’s never-ending at that point. I think the ability to
    create this technology, to create 360 and VR and AR is dropping
    dramatically. Five years ago, the cost was in the millions and now
    it’s in the tens of thousands and soon it will be free, like
    everything else. Making a video on your phone and posting it to
    YouTube is pretty much effectively free. Except for your selling your
    rights to advertise. But that’s a whole different story.

    Anne: That’s something we’ve

    explored, too. So how can we commercialize this, how can we make a
    successful business beyond ticket sales. And doing activations so we
    can import any Unity scene. So if we’re talking to gaming companies
    we can import them and do live activations. L’Oreal does a lot of
    really neat work innovations on how we can incorporate an experience
    or activate a new game. If Fortnite comes out with a new– how do we
    do avatar integrations. So it’s very, very flexible in how he present
    this, what content we present in it.

    Alan: So cool. And I think one

    of the missing elements to live events in VR — for example, if
    you’re watching a basketball game or a live concert — is the social
    aspect. And one company — Big Screen VR — has done a really good
    job at one thing, they allow you to watch a big screen. So you sit on
    a couch or on a space — wherever you pick your room — and you can
    watch a movie on a big screen. And one of the key things that struck
    me about their business model is that they allow you to sit on the
    couch with a friend and have a conversation while watching the movie.
    For movie purists, it would be terrible. You can– I’m assuming you
    can mute the person. But just being able to have that conversation
    with somebody, maybe your girlfriend’s across the world and you just
    want to sit and watch a movie together. I think that bonding time is
    really important. And with live events, live events by yourself
    aren’t– turns out not that much fun! But being in an event where you
    can share with other people, is that something that you guys are
    looking into as well?

    Anne: Yeah. Well, I mean, based

    on our live performances, the entire dynamic of it is that we wanted
    to focus on something that was social, so rather than having it as a
    passive experience, ownership of the experience was also something we
    thought was very important. So as you have people contribute to the
    visuals the show we feature them around the world. Because we’re
    working — again — in the music industry, a lot of this off that
    base we’re also working with fans, and fans love to be a part of what
    we’re doing. And for us, it’s also a huge honor to have them being
    involved and growing a project with us. So Kent Buy also talks a lot
    about this feeling as if you’re actually there as well. So how when
    you’re in the scene and when you use the pass-through camera, you see
    people wave to each other while they’re in VR sitting next to each
    other, even though they have the headset on or smelling each other or
    spinning each other’s chairs during this concert or pointing at the
    band, trying to figure out what’s real and what’s not. And these are
    things I don’t see in a lot of demos, and people almost want to get
    up. And you can tell that they’re really excited and they’re looking
    at the visuals and and trying to understand it, and they’re talking
    to their friends after– we almost always talk with everyone after
    the concert, and we get a lot of feedback from our audience. And
    that’s something also that’s allowed us to really get a lot of the
    ideas was from speaking together, speaking with our users and people
    who are on the fence who liked being a part of it.

    Alan: It’s wonderful. So have

    you built in the interaction for the user into the headset? So maybe
    gaze control, where they look at something and it triggers something
    else, or even like a survey at the end saying, “How was your
    experience? Rate it from 1 to 5.” or have you’ve done that?

    Anne: Yeah. So we’ve done the

    gaze control work when looking in the scene. People are flying
    through it, they can control the direction that they’re travelling.
    However, we do surveys at the end because it really is concert in a
    live production. So people line up, let’s say the warehouse in
    Germany, people would line up on this like beautiful industrial space
    and they’d have one of those classical red ropes. People are all
    waiting to have their tickets for a certain timespots. And no one had
    to wait. They all come at the time when their show is going to begin,
    and they come in and it’s very ritualistic. So even before people put
    the headset on, the performance has already started. It’s very much
    like when you walk into a dark room and you’re expecting to see an
    amazing theatrical performance. And there is kind of soundscapes and
    we have voiceover and they’re talking about their childhood, talking
    about adventure. And they get the headsets on, we explain a bit for
    what they’re going to experience. And then we had to experiment so
    much, too, about when does the band come on. Because if the band
    comes on after they put the headsets on and leaves before they take
    it off, sometimes people don’t even realize the band was real. So
    when they’re seeing them through the pass-through camera, they just
    think that the technology is so amazing, because the band looks so
    real. [chuckles]

    Alan: Oh, wow. So you guys are

    using the pass-through camera with visuals?

    Anne: Yeah. So we use added

    visuals. We also use lots of dry ice and smoke, with lots of
    lighting. Our entire team, like our– we have a tour manager. He also
    went off and does lots of work with Grace Jones. The label is
    Believe, and they do DJ Shadow and Björk, and the management is East
    City with alt-J and Wolf Alice. So the team is incredible. Our
    booking agents are AEG, Live Nation, CODA, Paradigm. So in terms of
    ability to take this all around the world, it’s absolutely amazing.

    Alan: No kidding. That’s so

    cool. When are you coming to Toronto?

    Anne: Oh, we hope to come to

    Toronto next year. Right now, we’re speaking with our partners in
    Singapore, about doing Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo. And we’d love to
    do– we’re looking at the West Coast tour from San Francisco to Los
    Angeles for early 2020.

    Alan: That sounds amazing.

    Anne: It’s great, too, for

    companies. In a way, it’s as a showcase of the technology, since
    we’re having the headset, and we have haptics, and we have all these
    different technologies coming together. It’s such a good way to show
    the capabilities of this technology to a new audience.

    Alan: Yeah. You know, it’s

    crazy. SUBPAC just partnered with Beat Saber to make a custom Beat
    Saber SUBPAC.

    Anne: Yeah, I know. It’s really

    amazing to have the collaborations and something that people —
    whether or not they feel like they’re a part of it — can also take
    it home and and have the gear, and in a way, be a part of the team.

    Alan: Well, I guess they can be

    part of the team because you’re crowdsourcing content, which is if
    you look at the history of human presentations — from concerts, and
    music, and theater, and TV, and movies — the user wasn’t really part
    of that process, ever. They were just consumers. And now we’re moving
    into a world where anybody can be a creator, like the number one
    social media platform in the world right now — well, growing — is
    TikTok. It’s enabled kids to be creators again and given them an easy
    way to make really cool stuff. VR and AR have this unlimited untapped
    potential to let the crowd design and run wild with their
    imaginations.

    Anne: Yeah, we have a 16 year

    old, who is part of our collective in Virginia, who’s taken some
    amazing drone footage that we used in our music videos. So not only
    are we doing VR, but we’re also [researching] integrations into
    gaming. How do we– what’s [unclear] me about ScienceBase and some of
    the partners we’re working with is you can access their– it’s like a
    massive multiplayer online game with user generated content. So we
    have our own area and you can access it in VR, you can access it on
    desktop. And also our game designers are building out this
    experience. So it’s an experience, you can activate different music
    videos, see different artwork from the collective, and also be a part
    of it. So we always encourage everyone to be part of growing the
    industry, because now is the time when you can really become involved
    in it.

    Alan: I started in VR in 2014,

    but one of the things that stuck with me I was listening to–
    actually it was Kent Bye’s Voices of VR podcast. And one of the
    things he said was, “At this point, it doesn’t matter if you’re
    a Hollywood producer or you’re in your basement. Everybody’s equal,
    because nobody knows how to do this stuff.” And it almost feels
    like– we’ve come a little bit of ways, because we know how to make
    360 films. We know how to make VR and AR, and there’s tutorials
    online. But four years ago, there was no tutorials online. You just
    had to try it. And it feels like we’re still at that kind of
    beginning time, where anything’s possible and anybody can do it.

    Anne: Definitely. One of the

    challenges we faced was the idea that we had to be ready before we
    released into the world. And we started in 2017 like underground
    performance at the Institute of Art Amsterdam. And then it took until
    actually this year, when the first single was released with the band,
    Miro Shot, that we started doing public performances with press. And
    one thing that our team would encourage people, looking back, is to
    put it out in the world and work with other people and get feedback,
    because it’s never gonna be perfect. Art is never perfect. But
    innovation is always amazing and people appreciate it.

    Alan: I wish we could tell that

    to our corporate customers, who are– you’re like–

    Anne: [laughs]

    Alan: “Hey, we want to be

    the first in the world to do this!” And when things go sideways
    — as they often do when you’re pushing the limits of technology —
    they’re like “Why doesn’t this work?” and you’re like,
    “Well, because it’s the first in the world. And we told you it
    might not work, and it doesn’t work.” [chuckles] But thankfully,
    we have customers that are willing to take those risks with us,
    because you really do have to push the limits.

    Anne: Or working directly with

    the creative team, because then they won’t necessarily understand the
    restrictions of the technology, and they’ll come up with really cool
    solutions. And then also the company will find more innovative ways
    of exploring their potential of what they want to communicate.

    Alan: Absolutely. I mean, if you

    leave it to people that are in the technical realm to develop
    everything, they will only do what’s technically possible. But if you
    leave it to an artist and say, “Here’s the technology, what do
    you think?” and then you go, “Hey, can we do this, and
    this, and this?” And the technical people are shaking their head
    going, “No. No, we can’t. No, we can’t.” And then somewhere
    in the middle, somebody goes, “Well, we’re going to, whether it
    works or not.” But there’s always that that adventurous feeling
    with artists. I don’t know if you know my last company, Emulator, we
    developed a big, huge see-through touchscreen DJ controller. And we
    got to work with Linkin Park. We gave Mike Shinoda a big touch screen
    in the program. It was a MIDI controller. So he could do whatever he
    wanted. He came back and he showed us a video that he had made. It
    was like just a bunch of octagons on the page and it looked like
    nothing. It looked like a bunch of things thrown on a page. And he
    started to play it like a piano. He was playing a touch screen like a
    piano that he had designed from scratch himself.

    Anne: That’s amazing.

    Alan: These are the kind of

    genius brains that you get with musicians and artists. And I think
    the marriage of technology and art is one that will never get
    divorced.

    Anne: Yeah, I mean, one thing

    that’s so [unclear] about any narrative and any story, is that that’s
    what people are going to remember — so when we’re releasing all
    these new products, so like Quests and headsets, Hololens, augmented
    reality, haptics, so even SUBPAC is a great example — is people
    aren’t going to remember as well, without a story or a context. And a
    lot of that comes from the creatives, because they can fill a part of
    that story or connect to that story by making something and working
    very hard for something, and then using an amazing way of sharing it
    with the world.

    Alan: I agree. So what’s next,

    then? So you’re going on tour. You’re going to Vancouver. You’re
    raising some capital from grants and in different things, you’re
    selling tickets to this thing. What is the 2020 schedule look like?
    It must be getting crazy.

    Anne: Yeah. So for 2020, we have

    huge plans. And definitely right now is the time when we’re
    confirming all the technology we’re using, all the marketing we’re
    doing. We’re speaking with Razer as well. Doing some amazing stuff
    because the equipment we use, it’s in a live show and we have to use
    the best that there is. And we share that with our audience. We talk
    about it, we put it to the test. So all of that now and our next few
    shows that we’re working on towards the end of this year, that’s
    going to lead into global tours in 2020.

    Alan: It’s going to be amazing.

    I’m definitely going to catch one of the shows next year, for sure.

    Anne: Yeah. No, I cannot wait

    for everyone to be a part of it. And also, as we build out the
    at-home experience, we’re going to invite a lot of the community to
    experiment with us for the first time.

    Alan: I can’t wait. This is

    going to be incredible. You made a custom scent. In your opinion,
    what does it smell like?

    Anne: Well, I think a lot of it

    is going to be about the context. So when you walk outside in the
    day, you experience the light in different ways, because how you feel
    and what your experience is. So when you smell something, if you’re
    flying over an ocean or a desert, I think a lot of that will have all
    the senses coming together to make a new impression. That it is
    whatever you make it to be. We relate from your experiences.

    Alan: Interesting. So true,

    because it really comes down to your own perception. That’s why I was
    asking that, because what smells like summer to me may smell like
    something else to you. And smell is one of those senses that is
    really, really underrated. We’re working on training, and scent can
    add an element to it that may be very subtle and people maybe don’t
    even notice it. But let’s say, for example — and this is not
    something we’re working on — but you’re training somebody in a mine
    and you want to give them that understanding of what it’s like to be
    in a mine. You can either turn up the heat, if it’s hot underneath or
    cold and give them that that smell, maybe it’s iron or sulfur. These
    are things that you can prepare people for. And subliminally, they
    really resonate with that. And it enhances training, enhances the
    experience overall. So I think just adding the scent and the wind and
    the haptics. You guys sound like you’ve really got the whole package
    there.

    Anne: Well, I mean, does it

    really have that wow factor anymore in the sense that you can’t put
    on a Google Cardboard and show a cool video of somebody going down a
    rollercoaster? We have people who are really experts in VR and AR
    right now and immersive technology. And we really have to be making
    cutting edge experiences.

    Alan: I couldn’t agree more. I

    was at FIVARS and I’m a little jaded, I’ve seen a lot of cool things.
    And the ones I saw were really great. I looked at one called The Life
    In 2049 and it was looking at what is life going to look like in the
    year 2049. And it was all CG, and it was OK, it was good. But there
    was another one going to Mars, and the quality was just incredible. I
    couldn’t believe how great the quality was from the Gear VR. I had
    kind of in my brain said “OK, well, the Gear VR is not very
    good,” I’ve kind of turned it off in my brain. But having tried
    it this weekend, I was like, “Wow, this thing is really still
    great.”

    Anne: Yeah, the way– a lot of it, too, as we work with the creative teams and developers, it’s about making it initiate the file in a certain way. So it’s not too dense. So in terms of layers, is there any movement and motion? It’s how can you compress the motion, so that when we’re streaming it through headsets live, it comes out as the best visual quality.

    Alan: You can take it right away

    all the polygons, and just apply a video overlay. And it looks really
    photo-real, but there’s no depth or texture to it, so.

    Anne: Yeah, there’s been some

    amazing video games that use really low poly visuals and it’s just
    stunning, stunning. And a lot of it is just about setting the mood
    and setting the atmosphere and going on an adventure in this new
    space.

    Alan: Yeah. You know, the one

    thing that you mentioned that I think is really important —
    especially for location based entertainment, including live concert
    — is setting up the atmosphere before you put the headset on. I
    think it’s very important. And the one place that does this really
    well is a place called– what is it called? VR– Oh, I can’t remember
    what it’s called. It’s the huge VR arcade in Dubai, in the mall. I
    can picture– they have– when you first walk up to it in the mall,
    the entire cityscape of Dubai is hanging from the ceiling upside down
    in three dimensions.

    Anne: Wow.

    Alan: And everything around it

    is video screen. So you get these buildings kind of coming down from
    the sky. At one second it’s daytime, the other time it’s nighttime.
    That’s even before you walk in. And you walk in and do a Vive
    experience. It was one where you’re bank robbing or whatever, which
    you go in a bank vault and it’s all littered, there’s newspapers on
    the ground. It’s like you went in a bank vault that was just robbed,
    and then you put on the VR headset.

    Anne: Yeah. I mean, those are

    such good escape room things too, where you actually physically in a
    cool area.

    Alan: Yeah.

    Anne: I was at Dreamscape Immersive with Carter [Hulings] giving me and my colleague from Miro Shot, taking us through the experience. And it was awesome. Very [unclear] doing from the moment you walk in there, it’s like going into a theater. And we have all these, I guess, relics and books about travel, and I think it was Ron McJunkin — who’s based in Switzerland with Dreamscape — he said they’re like a travel agency. And when you go in, you put the gear on, you step in, and you’re waiting in anticipation. And they did also so cleverly, the redirected walking. So even though you’re in such a small space, you feel as if you have just gone on a one mile adventure. And it’s exciting, because you actually feel like you’re in open worlds. So doing really clever things like that in the physical space and having it, like I said, during that you’re participating in and there’s interactive features, it’s hugely impressive.

    Alan: Yeah, I think the first

    time that I ever engaged with physical objects in a virtual world
    blew my mind. We were passing around a ball and the ball looked like
    a basketball. I grabbed it and we were passing it around and just the
    act of passing a physical object around was cool. And then the ball
    turned to a fireball. And then he passed it back to me, I was like,
    “I don’t want to touch it, because it’s on fire.”

    Anne: Yeah.

    Alan: But then being able to

    play catch in VR with a physical ball… like, that’s so meta.

    Anne: One thing with that, too,

    is like avatars. I think a lot of people are aiming for total
    realistic. But we forget that there is gamers all over the world who
    prefer animated characters, and they seem like you can– even just
    when I’m in a VR experience with colleagues or friends, you can tell
    just from like, let’s say a very basic robot figure, just by their
    movements you can really identify who they are. And that’s something
    that’s quite amazing.

    Alan: I actually– I got to

    speak with Philip Rosedale from High Fidelity. And one of the things
    that we’re talking about security in VR and we’re talking about
    retinal scanning and this and he said, “Well, to be honest, one
    of the easiest ways is gait analysis, because you are a certain
    height and you hold yourself a certain way, and the headset will
    rest, and you will move in a certain way that is unique to you. And
    it’s very, very hard for people to fake.”

    Anne: Yeah, again, it’s a

    natural cadence and rhythm that becomes part of our identity, which
    is another huge question in VR.

    Alan: Yeah, I think we’ve only

    scratched the surface of digging into our own identities within VR.

    Anne: Yeah, but it’s a very

    exciting industry, in terms of innovation and creating new
    experiences and engagement, and having it as something that’s more
    than just an eyeball on the screen and a tick in the box, then I
    think this is really something that can make experiences and sharing
    stories and really creative and beautiful connecting medium.

    Alan: I agree. The fact that

    we’ll wear glasses every day, probably within the next 10 years,
    probably in the next five years. And all the compute power will not
    be on the devices themselves, it will be in the cloud. So the
    computers themselves will be super cheap. The cloud streaming service
    will be super cheap. And then the content will be crowdsourced and
    user generated. And so it will just be this big hub of user generated
    content, that gets upvoted and downvoted based on people’s likes and
    dislikes. But also if you apply artificial intelligence algorithms to
    that, you can really then start to drive content to people in a
    meaningful way. We use a lot of incredible algorithms to sell people
    more crap that they don’t need. What if we sold them more learning,
    and used marketing techniques and algorithms to drive people to learn
    more with an altruistic outcome, rather than just try to sell people
    more stuff?

    Anne: I think– I mean, it can

    democratize everything like collaboration, education, healthcare,
    access to education, even. I know travel comes up a lot on your
    podcast as a distance. And yeah, it’s one of the– I was so, so lucky
    I got to go present one of my short stories at this event called
    Virtual Futures in London the last two years. It’s just a speculative
    fiction and it’s exactly about that, is how can AR solve lot of the
    global problems and one of them is that need to be materialistic. So
    how can we we use overlaying data on the real world and light, and
    then solving that need for physical items. And also a lot of the
    physical gear that’s needed for communication systems. How can we
    make communication systems better with the cloud? There’s still a
    huge way to go. Globalization, I think, is very much in its early
    days and this technology will again decrease the distance. And in
    terms of every way that we can innovate AR and VR, I’m sure we’ll be
    a part of it.

    Alan: Well, I don’t even know

    what to say to that. That’s amazing.

    Anne: I guess when we’re talking

    about business, it’s a good time to invest.

    Alan: Yeah, you think? This is

    why we waited. We actually sat on the sidelines and waited and did
    all our R&D and everything. We’re like, “Okay, we’ll wait
    until there’s real proven use cases so that we can go to our
    investors and say, this is where the money is made, and we’re going
    to go and get it.”

    Anne: Yeah, that’s right.

    Alan: Yeah, absolutely. What

    problem in the world do you want to see solved using XR technologies?

    Anne: I think to say that, “the

    one problem,” I think is very, very difficult thing, After just
    saying that, I think can be a part of everything. But I think that
    what I can be a part of is just to facilitate learning, and learning
    from others, and also working together. And it’s something that
    everyone can be a part of. And, again, really education and
    healthcare and the arts and creativity and access to resources. As
    you say, tutorials. There’s so many ways to be a part of this. And I
    think we’re all working to make it the best it can be.

    Alan: Well, I don’t know what

    else to say with that. Anne, thank you. And thank you, everybody, for
    listening. This has been the XR for Business Podcast with your host,
    Alan Smithson. If you want to learn more about the work that Anne is
    doing, you can visit theboolean.io and make sure you check out Miro
    Shot live VR performance, coming to a festival near you. Thanks,
    Anne.

    Anne: Thank you so much.

    42 min
  • Attending Digital Concerts in XR with The Boolean's Anne McKinnon
    The average concert is a tour de force for one's sense of sound (and, if the bass is decent, one's sense of their bones vibrating). But Anne McKinnon from The Boolean isn't interested in "average" concerts. She wants to use XR to make concerts a sensation for all the senses.
    Alan: Welcome to the XR for
    Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today's guest is Anne
    McKinnon from The Boolean. Anne is a VR and AR consultant and writer.
    She is an editor and contributor to Charlie Fink's book
    "Convergence." Charlie, as you may remember, was one of the
    very first episodes we had. Her consulting bridges the gap between
    entertainment and technology. As an advisor, Anne grows and curates a
    community of digital artists to leverage new and emerging
    technologies. Anne is actively engaged in the entertainment industry
    at the intersection of music, arts, gaming, and tech. You can learn
    more about the great work that Anne and her team are doing at
    theboolean.io. Anne, welcome to the show.
    Anne: Thank you, Alan. I'm
    really excited to speak with you today, and also cannot wait to speak
    to a lot of the listeners.
    Alan: Yes, it's been a while.
    We've known each other quite some time, and you do some work with VR
    Days and they've been on the show as well. And it feels like a
    family, like a network of people that are all just kind of coming
    together. So how did you get into this crazy world of technology?
    Anne: Actually, VR Days was one
    of the major events I went to and I started working in tech. And it
    was as a blogger and just kind of looking at how can we solve
    problems in VR, what can we use it for, and how can we make
    improvements to every aspect of our lives? And VR Days was one of the
    best conferences that bridged the gap between technology and arts,
    and also brought together everyone from military to education to
    healthcare, and also the creatives to drive that innovation. So that
    way, I guess I met some of the teams that I work with now and we're
    looking at how to solve all these problems and to bring it to
    audiences around the world.
    Alan: Let's unpack that. What
    are some of the problems that you're working on solving?
    Anne: I want you talk a lot
    today about one of the projects we're working on for almost two
    years, and that's with Miro Shot. So Miro Shot is a band and we're
    touring a virtual reality live concert around the world. So to kind
    of put in detail about what that looks like, is that the audience is
    physically present and the band as also physically present. And when
    the audience enters, they have VR headsets on and they are immersed
    in dreamscape visuals, and the pass-through camera's a big part of
    what we do to connect the realities, and to experience music in a new
    way. And one of the problems that a lot of VR experiences have is how
    do you reach audiences around the world with live performance, and
    also how do you reach a large scale audience? A lot of what we're
    focusing in business is how do you grow experiences from live to at
    home. And this is something we're doing with the band, with up to 30
    people at a time for live concert.
    Alan: People simultaneously in
    VR?
    Anne: Simultaneously in VR. So a
    lot of it is based around the concepts of gaming. So we're really
    looking at VR as something that's not contained, taking from
    classical genres, from theater and cinema and gaming. So everything
    starts in a gaming lobby. And they start the experience together and
    depending on where they look, they'll be able to experience different
    parts of the world of the music. And they're also because of the live
    performance, they're really tied to the real world, experiencing it
    in a new way.
    Alan: Are they at home when-- or
    is this at a physi
    42 min

About XR for Business

From the publisher's feed

Meet the leaders who are changing the face of virtual and augmented reality