XR for Business

By Alan Smithson from MetaVRseBusiness Technology Arts

XR for Business episodes

January 10, 2020 The Sound of XR, with Bose's Michael Ludden
Your various realities -- virtual, augmented, X, etc -- are often talked about in the realm of vision, since we humans lean on vision as our major sense. But the folks at Bose, like today's guest Michael Ludden, know that there's room for sound in XR too.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for
Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today's guest is
Michael Ludden, global head of developer advocacy and principal
augmented reality advocate at Bose Technologies. Michael is a
technologist, futurist, strategist, product leader, and developer
platform expert who loves to operate on the bleeding edge of what's
possible, and is a frequent keynote speaker at events around the
world. Michael was previously director of IBM's Watson's Developer
Lab for a AR and VR, among some other career stops. To learn more
about the work he's doing at Bose, you can visit developer.bose.com.
Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael: Wow, what an intro.
Thanks for having me.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure
and honor to have you on the show. I'm super excited. I was talking
to all fine and last week. I was flying from Toronto to San
Francisco, and I just happened to sit beside a guy who we started
talking about AR and I pulled out the North Glasses. He pulled out
the Bose Frames; we swap. And we had this kind of meeting of the
minds. I had the visual, he had the audio and it was really cool that
I got to try the Bose Frames. What an amazing piece of technology.
Michael: Glad you liked it.
Alan: So you've had a storied
career here. You've done everything from IBM Watson, to Google, to
HTC, Samsung. How did you end up in technology, and why did you get
so fascinated on futurism?
Michael: Well, it's sort of been
a running theme in my life. I read a lot of science fiction as a kid
and I was always interested in technology and -- not to date myself
-- but at a certain point in my life when I was a young adult,
technology started to really aggressively eat everything, starting
with mobile. And I just found that was really the point of inflection
in my life where I studied musical theater in college, I went to
UCLA. I thought that's what I was going to do. I really did. And I
did get a B.A. so I got a little arts education, too. And at the same
time, I was always tinkering with stuff, building my own PCs. I
started my own web development company at one point to make Web sites
in Flash, CS2, and CS3 in the early days; it was brutal.
Alan: There's a conference in
Toronto called Flash in the Can; FITC.
Michael: Nice.
Alan: That's old school.
Michael: It is very old school.
And, you know, I never really thought I'd make a career out of it,
but I needed money. I was a starving actor in L.A. and one of my
friends who I just made by being nerdy, worked for a company called
HTC. They were releasing the first-ever Android phone, which was
called The Dream -- or the G1 in the US. So I was in contact with
this guy; he got a promotion. He said, "you should take my old
job," which was L.A.-based, and I was living there. And I said,
"I want to do it." I was working on a podcasting platform
called This Week In -- not This Week in Tech -- but This Week In. It
was a Jason Calacanis-led network out of the old Mahalo Studios in
Santa Monica. But it paid me pennies. And when they told me what the
job paid and what I'd be doing, I said, "OK, I guess I'll do
it." I needed the money, and it was very flexible. It felt
really easy to me, like that's really all you need me to do.
And so I ended up starting to go around
door to door. What was it like? T-Mobile shop, Verizons shop, AT&T
-- like, carrier stores -- and show them about the phones. An
28 min
January 08, 2020 Digging Up Digital Cadavers in XR, with Sector 5 Digital's Jeff Meisner
Today's guest -- Sector 5 Digital's Jeff Meisner -- hopes to put grave robbers out of business, among other things. He pops in to talk to Alan about all the experiential learning experiences his company has developed, from digital cadavers to study anatomy, to the VR design process of Bell Helicopters.
Alan: Hi, I'm Alan Smithson. And
today, we're speaking with Jeff Meisner, CEO of Sector 5 Digital,
about their pioneering work on the Fantastic Journey Anatomy VR Ride,
Fork Lift Training Simulator, and the work they did with Bell
Helicopters, shortening design times from years to months. All of
this and more on the XR for Business Podcast.
Jeff, welcome to the show, my friend.
Jeff: Thanks, Alan.
Alan: I am super excited. So,
Jeff, you are doing some incredible work at Sector 5. Let's start
with the Fantastic Journey Anatomy VR. Right. This just blows my
mind.
Jeff: Yeah. Yes. Just as a
historical perspective on this, we've been working with this
particular healthcare client for a couple of years now. And we
started out initially doing a 3D digital cadaver, basically, that
allowed them to do facial anatomy. And the company is in the business
of doing injections into the face and hand. And so they needed a way
to have safe areas so the injectors would have training. So we
created a basic virtual training tool and that was initially in 3D,
not in VR, but it was driven through our tablets and things like
that. So it had kind of an AR component to it.
Alan: You will learn in 3D
dramatically better than even just on a 2D screen.
Jeff: Yeah, exactly. And we actually did a conference which had over somewhere between 200-300 of their folks training with a massive 3D screen in front of them. So it was used as a training aid, and really now, it's gone global. So it started initially in the U.S. and got picked up by this company, because they are a global company. And what they wanted to do was take that next step, if you will. And so We're creating this, what we call a VR Fantastic Anatomy Journey. We're going to be taking their folks through… well, if you know what Fantastic [Voyage] is —- as most people do -- but taking them through the human body. So you're going to have a really cool edutainment-type experience, whereby you’re going to be on somewhat of a VR roller coaster, although it being through the body, we're going to be adding some elements of teaching at various points. So it'll stop and you'll be asked questions. It's really, the major focus is to be very much a learning experience. But one of the things we're finding —- and I know you are too, Alan —- is if you make it fun for people, it becomes a much more memorable experience and they want to do it again and again. We're combining kind of that gaming-type element, if you will, but with actual data and experience, to make it something that their injectors are going to be learning from, and not just the entertainment element.
Alan: When you guys started
rolling out the 3D digital cadaver, how are they measuring against
baseline? So, what was their baseline learning before? Just a
textbook? Or..?
Jeff: No, they were actually
using "live" cadavers, and cadavers -- and this may sound a
little gruesome -- but they're somewhat hard to come by, especially
outside of the US. The regulatory issues that you deal with are very,
very high barriers there. When we came along with the virtual cadaver
initially, as I said, it was really only being used in a very small
area. But when they realized that they could take this globally, and
they now didn't have the same barriers that they had in the past,
that really opened things up for them and opened up their eyes as to
the value that this would bring.
1 min
January 08, 2020 Digging Up Digital Cadavers in XR, with Sector 5 Digital's Jeff Meisner
Today's guest -- Sector 5 Digital's Jeff Meisner -- hopes to put grave robbers out of business, among other things. He pops in to talk to Alan about all the experiential learning experiences his company has developed, from digital cadavers to study anatomy, to the VR design process of Bell Helicopters.
Alan: Hi, I'm Alan Smithson. And
today, we're speaking with Jeff Meisner, CEO of Sector 5 Digital,
about their pioneering work on the Fantastic Journey Anatomy VR Ride,
Fork Lift Training Simulator, and the work they did with Bell
Helicopters, shortening design times from years to months. All of
this and more on the XR for Business Podcast.
Jeff, welcome to the show, my friend.
Jeff: Thanks, Alan.
Alan: I am super excited. So,
Jeff, you are doing some incredible work at Sector 5. Let's start
with the Fantastic Journey Anatomy VR. Right. This just blows my
mind.
Jeff: Yeah. Yes. Just as a
historical perspective on this, we've been working with this
particular healthcare client for a couple of years now. And we
started out initially doing a 3D digital cadaver, basically, that
allowed them to do facial anatomy. And the company is in the business
of doing injections into the face and hand. And so they needed a way
to have safe areas so the injectors would have training. So we
created a basic virtual training tool and that was initially in 3D,
not in VR, but it was driven through our tablets and things like
that. So it had kind of an AR component to it.
Alan: You will learn in 3D
dramatically better than even just on a 2D screen.
Jeff: Yeah, exactly. And we actually did a conference which had over somewhere between 200-300 of their folks training with a massive 3D screen in front of them. So it was used as a training aid, and really now, it's gone global. So it started initially in the U.S. and got picked up by this company, because they are a global company. And what they wanted to do was take that next step, if you will. And so We're creating this, what we call a VR Fantastic Anatomy Journey. We're going to be taking their folks through… well, if you know what Fantastic [Voyage] is —- as most people do -- but taking them through the human body. So you're going to have a really cool edutainment-type experience, whereby you’re going to be on somewhat of a VR roller coaster, although it being through the body, we're going to be adding some elements of teaching at various points. So it'll stop and you'll be asked questions. It's really, the major focus is to be very much a learning experience. But one of the things we're finding —- and I know you are too, Alan —- is if you make it fun for people, it becomes a much more memorable experience and they want to do it again and again. We're combining kind of that gaming-type element, if you will, but with actual data and experience, to make it something that their injectors are going to be learning from, and not just the entertainment element.
Alan: When you guys started
rolling out the 3D digital cadaver, how are they measuring against
baseline? So, what was their baseline learning before? Just a
textbook? Or..?
Jeff: No, they were actually
using "live" cadavers, and cadavers -- and this may sound a
little gruesome -- but they're somewhat hard to come by, especially
outside of the US. The regulatory issues that you deal with are very,
very high barriers there. When we came along with the virtual cadaver
initially, as I said, it was really only being used in a very small
area. But when they realized that they could take this globally, and
they now didn't have the same barriers that they had in the past,
that really opened things up for them and opened up their eyes as to
the value that this would bring.
Alan: It's really incredible.
Medical is the by far and away leveraging virtual reality more than
any other sector. I mean, design is kind of a close second. You've
also done some work with design, and we'll get into that in a bit,
but the medical industry is just ripe for disruption. I mean, buying
a cadaver, like you said, is onerous, is expensive. It's heavily
regulated. And let's be honest, people don't really need that anymore
with VR.
Jeff: Correct. And even if these
sorts of things are used in front of the intensive training --
obviously there's regulatory bodies and things like that would demand
certain certifications and things like that -- and in some of that,
we can do. But we also can be right in front of that to, again, make
these experiences a little more fun, a little more engaging. I will
have to tell you that one comment that we got from the training we
did was this lady actually said that our training was "more
realistic than the cadaver," which I had to laugh, because it's
like, how could that possibly be? But the fact that she thought that
this thing was so immersive that it was actually better than the
training on a cadaver, really spoke to me.
Alan: That's incredible. That's
nuts. But if you think about it, you only get one shot at a cadaver.
If you're pulling it apart, you really can't, like, split the face
apart and look inside the brain if you want. With VR, you can take
the whole skeletal layer right out. You can literally see the layers
as you need to see them, versus cutting into the skin. There's
definitely, I think, for the physical training of the last part where
you have to learn how to inject or that sort of thing, you still need
that feel. You need to know how far you go down -- there's a feeling
to it that I don't think will be replaced. But when you're learning
about the anatomy, I don't think there's any better way; you can
literally just remove all you want. "I don't want the body to
have any skin. Okay. There's the bones." This is really
powerful.
Jeff: And a lot of people now,
instead of what, in the past, you know, they had to fly doctors and
nurses, nurse practitioners into training centers. And the cost of
doing that was amazing. Now they can go to these areas, to these
doctors, set these things up, as you know. I mean, all you really
need is a fairly small technology setup.
Alan: Are you guys moving the
stuff to Quest now? Or are you still on Vives and Rifts?
Jeff: Yeah, we're fairly
hardware agnostic, so we've done projects in just about any type of
hardware. I will say we do have the strongest partnership with HTC --
with Vive. We'll get into that a little bit more when we talk about
the forklift project. But I mean, it really doesn't matter to us. As
you know, the technology is changing so quickly right now. And so
we'll look at it from a perspective of what is the best technology
available at the time for the client.
Alan: Let's move from Fantastic
Journey Anatomy VR and let's talk about your forklift training,
because you mentioned it a couple of times, and training people on
moving vehicles, forklifts, excavators, anything where they have to
drive around -- it becomes really expensive. It's kind of like
bringing a cadaver in; bringing people into a facility and letting
them drive around on a forklift, when they have zero experience, is a
little bit dangerous, and a little bit expensive. But imagine giving
them the ability to put on a headset, practice driving around a
warehouse, practice some close calls, maybe some things fall off the
shelf. You could practice scenarios that may happen in a warehouse,
but are very rare. But you can give people that real sense of
practice before they even step on the machine. Talk us through that
forklift training, and how that came to be.
Jeff: Sure. Sure. As I
mentioned, we have a really strong partnership with HTC Vive and they
were coming out with their new Vive Eye Pro headset, which has the
eye-tracking in it. And so we've been talking to them and we were
ourselves trying to think of the best demo that we could go, because
we had a conference coming up -- the EWTS conference that was just in
Dallas fairly recently -- and we were talking to them and we said,
when we do something that's really going to be an enterprise-type
application, that's going to take advantage of the new capabilities
of the Vive Eye Pro. And so we kind of went through project scope
with the folks at Vive and we came up with the forklift training
demo. What's unique and different about this one is utilizing the the
eye tracking software of the Vive Pro. We take the user through a
simulation where they're essentially inside a forklift. They have to
drive a forklift in a warehouse, and we give them some visual cues.
For example, if they look at the row of pallets that are in the
warehouse, one of the pallets, we'll highlight in green. So then they
know, that's where they need to go in and pick up that pallet. And
then we also have a loading dock area where there's different, like,
A through F, I think loading dock locations. So once they pick up the
pallet, it's highlighted where they need to drop that pallet off on
the loading dock. But in between that process, we are tracking all of
their eye movements. So, for example, if they pick up the pallet and
they don't turn their head around to see what's behind them? We're
tracking all of that. And I think where it really hit home was we put
a replay function into the application. So someone will go through
this experience -- and we timed it specifically to be about a three
minute experience because we knew we were taking it to a trade show
-- but we did a replay in double time. So we had about a
one-and-a-half minute replay. And through the replay process, it
shows exactly where their eyes were through the entire experience.
Alan: Cool.
Jeff: Yeah.
Alan: What kind of insights are
you able to glean from that?
Jeff: Basically, we also -- kind
of on the side -- again, we made a little fun, made it into a game
with kind of a leader board. But you got points for doing things
right, and then you got points deducted for doing things wrong. So,
for example, if you didn't turn your head when you were backing up,
or you didn't see the cones that were in the warehouse -- those sorts
of things -- you got points deducted. So we can actually take a
visual which is showing exactly where the eyes were, and here's where
you got points deducted, or where you got additional points for doing
things right. So it's that training element that reinforces to them,
"oh, OK. Yeah, my eyes were down instead of looking up because I
had... I should have been looking up higher to the third row of the
pallets," and things like that. So you have a visual
interpretation of what you've done, but you also have, combined with
a scoring system, to reinforce the points or reinforce what what you
did wrong.
Alan: That's really impressive.
In one of the things that I think this will do for people is really
shorten the training times, because if you're training on a real
machine and you don't do these things, we have no way as a trainer,
or as somebody teaching you, knowing whether you did it right or not.
In VR with the eye tracking, now you can say, "hey, you didn't
do this right. Do it again until you get it right." And people
can repeat the training as often or as much as they need to perfect
mastery. Are you seeing a decrease in training times with this as
well?
Jeff: We haven't gotten to that
point, because it is fairly new to now see, once they actually get on
the forklift, is that reducing the training times? But that's a
definite goal, is to have those metrics. And as I said before, this
kind of can front end that initial training that people get, that's
fairly boring and people are just, they want to get on the actual
forklift. Well, let's do things ahead of that so that when they get
on the forklift, they're not hurting themselves. They have the
concept. "I've got to turn my head. I've got to look." You
know, those those sorts of things. So I think that's yet to come. But
that is definitely the goal of this moving forward. The other thing
that we noticed, at EWTS -- because we had over 100 different
corporations take this forklift demo in and try it out at the show --
what we noticed was a lot of them were saying, "yeah, we have
over a thousand forklifts of all different types," because I
know that there has been some really immersive form of training done
in the past for specific forklift manufacturers. And that's
fantastic, probably as a next step. The issue, though, is that a lot
of these corporations have four or five different forklift
manufacturers, so they have something a little more generic. That
kind of front ends up process is very valuable for them.
Alan: And I would think that
despite the fact that there's 20 different types of forklift, safety
protocols are probably very similar regardless of the machine itself.
Jeff: Exactly. "Hey, you
need to follow your eyes. You need to be alert. You need to be
looking all around." Those sorts of things are absolutely the
same, regardless of the type of forklift, or regardless of the type
of warehouse or materials. So that's what really makes this exciting.
Alan: One other thing that I
thought would be really cool is making an option where it's like an
open play version, where you can have fire come out the back of your
forklift and it can go really fast.
Jeff: [laughs]
Alan: Maybe some missiles or
something. No?
Jeff: I'm sure any studio would
love to add that, Alan.
Alan: [laughs] Yes. You've got
to shoot the boxes instead of pick them up.
Jeff: Yeah, there you go.
Alan: So you you recently
deployed 200 virtual reality headsets for a large airline. You want
to talk about that?
Jeff: Yeah. The exciting thing
about that, and I think this is part of the value that XR brings, is
that we did a project -- and this is going back over five years ago
-- we did a project for the world's largest airline, whereby they
were placing, at the time, the largest commercial aircraft purchase.
And we modelled all of their business class and first class cabins in
3D. So we use these 3D models, we did a a website for them. We did a
kiosk -- in-terminal activations -- for them. And so these digital
assets that have been been used and been around for over five years,
we then took those digital assets into VR and we showed that off. We
initially did four headsets at their leadership conference and then
their global sales executives just went crazy over it. And they said,
"this is exactly what we need in Brazil and in Japan and in
Europe and all over the world, because when our sales folks are
sitting down with these corporate buyers and these buyers are trying
to decide if they want to travel on on this airline or another
airline, we can actually take these headsets and we put it into the
Oculus Go headset and we could take these headsets, give them to
these corporate-travel buyers and say, put this on. This is what your
executives would be experiencing if they were traveling on the new
777. Three hundred in first class or business class. And here's the
bar. And they can explore the cabin and they can see how the seats
fold down and they can check out the workspace and all of those
things." So that was really revolutionary to them, having that
experience and making it much more immersive. And it's really
fundamentally changed the game for that.
Alan: They're taking the
headsets and they're going to the trade shows or customer meetings.
How are they using it?
Jeff: Yeah, they're actually
taking them to customer meetings them. And now, as you know, the
barriers to entry with the technology has now come down to make this
opportunity available. And also the fidelity of the headsets
themselves have gotten so much better that they're actually going to
meetings with these corporations, because -- these are like global
2,000 corporations -- that their executives are travelling millions
of miles on various airlines and international travel. And so they're
actually taking that into those meetings, and not only telling those
corporate travel buyers about all the benefits of traveling on this
airline, but also they can actually put them in and make it a more
immersive experience.
Alan: So we went from training
people in forklifts to selling people on airlines.
Jeff: Yeah.
Alan: Oh, and digital cadavers.
Holy crap. So you guys are at the forefront of medical, industrial,
and sales. And there's one more big one that... before we put a pin
on American -- guess I can say what the company has since you said it
was the largest -- American Airlines.
Jeff: Sure.
Alan: How are they comparing the
sales with and without it? Is there a way to do that, or are they
just anecdotally saying it's better?
Jeff: Well, they've done their
own internal [research]. But unfortunately, for competitive reasons,
we're not allowed to say, you know, how much. But, yeah, they
definitely had some kind of before-and-after, A-B-type testing as to
how it was before and the response versus how it is now.
Alan: One project that I know
you can talk about -- because we talked about it previously, and I
know there was some massive savings being gained here -- but that's
the product you did for Bell Helicopters. Let's talk about that.
These guys designed a helicopter and took it from years to months.
Jeff: Yes. And really, we had
been working with Bell for a few years. We had done a VR experience
for one of their military aircraft that had not yet... had not
actually been built yet. But it was a project that they were selling
to the military. And so we did it. We did a VR experience for them,
which took them on kind of a mission, if you will. But it was really
an eye-opening experience for the CEO of Bell. He's a game-changer. I
mean, he is such a forward-thinking leader. And he really wanted to
transform Bell from a really historical, very engineering-centric
military helicopter manufacturer to be a leading-edge technology
provider of urban mobility solutions. And this was part of the
journey, was when he saw the response at this particular show. And
this show is called AUSA. It's one of the world's largest army show,
I believe. And when he saw the response there, he said, "we need
to be thinking more like the car companies and we need to be coming
up with concept aircraft and things like that." And he
challenged his team -- he had created an innovation team within Bell
-- his team, and this was basically October. On the commercial side,
they had the world's largest commercial helicopter show coming up in
March. And he said, "I want a concept aircraft on the show floor
in March." And so basically from October to March, which ended
up being less than six months, we went from the sketches of the
aircraft; over 100 sketches to 3D models, put the 3D models into VR.
Actually had Bell's test pilots put the headset on and give us
different changes back and forth of the aircraft. And we went through
that iterative process and came out the other end with only a single
1:1 scale mockup of this aircraft. And we were on the show floor at
at Heli-Expo in March. And oh, by the way, we also incorporated two
Microsoft Hololens experiences into that one; one for the pilot and
one for the passenger. But it was really revolutionary, in that it
was really one of the best use cases of enterprise XR -- taking a
process that historically had taken them years to go through, and
multiple models, and to get to that point, and we shrunk that down
into less than six months.
Alan: Well, I mean, if that's an
indication, it looks like right across the board, you guys have been
in medical, in industrial, in sales and marketing, and design. You
guys have touched everything. Sector 5. Digital is kind of like this
powerhouse of design in spatial computing. And I'm really excited for
what's next. So, Jeff, what is one problem in the world that you want
to see solved using XR Technologies?
Jeff: I think it goes back to
the training. If we can take people out of the environments that are
hazardous -- safety environments -- and we can provide training to
them such that they can learn to the point that they no longer have
to be exposed into these environments, not only in a training
perspective, but have the knowledge and capabilities that eliminates
any sort of future hazards in those environments. I think that, to
me, is an area that's absolutely ripe for this technology. And I'm so
excited about the future and how we can help people in those
environments down the road.
1 min
January 06, 2020 Time for Enterprise to Enter the Magicverse, with Magic Leap's Brian Kane
Until recently, Brian Kane has been highlighting more experiential demos - like one that puts a porthole to the ocean in your living room - to highlight the power of the Magic Leap, and of spatial computing in general. But ahead of his visit to CES, Brian drops in to tell our listeners how Magic Leap is ready to leap into the world of enterprise.
Alan: Hey, everyone, welcome to
the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today we
are speaking with Brian Kane from Magic Leap, about how the 3 billion
dollar company plans to expand their offerings to the enterprise.
We'll also talk about how VR and AR are being used in enterprise, and
some exciting announcements. All that and more, on the XR for
Business Podcast. Brian, welcome to the show, my friend.
Brian: Thank you so much, Alan.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Alan: It's so exciting. Magic
Leap is one of these Magic Leap devices, you put it on, and your
whole world is spatial computing. I've been doing demos with this. I
brought this to the Ritossa Summit last week -- and it's a summit, a
family wealth office summit -- and I showed people the-- I don't even
know it's called, where you put fish on the wall. And basically you
glue an aquarium to your wall and you can stick your-- you can see
right in the aquarium, the fish swim out of the aquarium. It was
crazy. People were loving it.
Brian: Yeah, absolutely. So that
experience -- if anyone is interested -- is called "Undersea".
It was developed on the Unreal 4 engine and built by our studios
team. It's a really, really great demo. I mean, we have hospitals
that are actually looking at it, using it for pain distraction
therapy. And it's actually usually the first demo I go to, so people
can really understand some key things about spatial computing. So
what you do is you start off by meshing your room, and that's where
our device creates -- essentially -- a digital twin of the space
you're in. You then place a portal into a 2D wall and then in that
wall, it looks like you're looking through a portal into the ocean.
And out of that portal swims one small fish, which you can see. And
it moves just like a fish. And when you watch people doing this demo,
they're reaching out and they're trying to touch it, because it just
looks like something you can touch. And then somewhere in the room,
it will randomly spawn a huge piece of coral. And you can move around
it and leave the room and come back, and that coral is exactly where
you placed it. Which is another key concept of spatial computing,
which is persistence. So when you're able to place something, it
stays there. And anyways, it's a great experience. And I'm glad you
enjoyed it. And so did your guests.
Alan: Go to magicleap.com/experiences, because it is so beautiful and vibrant. I love it. And Angry Birds used to be the one that I would show everybody. And it's great, it's wonderful. But man, the Undersea thing is just-- it's just beautiful. Moving from Underseas to under siege. I got to try a Magic Leap experience at the I/ITSEC conference, the Interdisciplinary/Industry Simulation and Education and Training Seminar last week in Orlando. And one of the things I got to try was this thing -- by, I guess, your sister company, that is Magic Leap for government -- and I got to shoot a gun. But when I had the Magic Leap on, I could see a full range in front of me with grass, and trees, and the targets. And it was one-to-one lined up with the gun. So when I looked down the barrel of the gun and I shot that target, it fell over in Magic Leap. It was mind-blowing. It was amazing, actually. Really, really amazing. I know military is one of them. But what are you working on in kind of the enterprise side of things?
Brian: This podcast was recorded
the week of December 10th, which is a big announcement
40 min
January 03, 2020 Using XR to Change Everything (Without Changing Anything) with Lance-AR’s Lance Anderson
Today’s guest, Lance Anderson of
Lance-AR, got tired of seeing so many XR providers only help clients
achieve their stated ROI goals, then leaving them to their own
devices to scale. Lance helps those companies today, by understanding
the need to marry emerging tech with legacy systems, so disruptive
tech doesn’t seem so disruptive.
Alan: Coming up on the XR for
Business Podcast, today we’re speaking with Lance Anderson, founder
and CEO of Lance-AR, a consulting and services company for enterprise
AR space, focused on helping organizations scale deployment. We’ll be
learning about the challenges and learnings from his experience. All
that and more on the XR for Business Podcast. Lance, welcome to the
show.
Lance: Hey, great, thanks for
having me on.
Alan: My absolute pleasure. It’s
very exciting to meet somebody as passionate as you are about
bringing augmented reality to the enterprise. But before we start,
explain how you got here and what is it you do for customers?
Lance: Sure. So I’m coming from
— let’s just round it down, let’s call it 15 years — in the
enterprise space selling software and services and automation, things
like that. Ended up at Vuzix in 2015 and had a great run with those
guys. Late 2018 I left Vuzix and started Lance-AR, because I was just
frustrated. Frustrated with the lack of companies deploying augmented
reality at scale. Everybody talks about the dizzying ROIs that are
out there to get, and all the wonderful things and advantages that
this technology brings. Yet no one was deploying at scale and I had
this unique position at Vuzix — because there are so few hardware
providers — that we were able to see thousands of pilots and POCs,
in all different regions and different use cases. And we just saw so
many of those either fail, sputter, or just kind of evaporate. So I
wanted to take all that knowledge and bring it to the enterprise
space and see if we could turn some things around. That’s why
Lance-AR came about. And really what we do now is we connect
enterprise users, AR hardware manufacturers and AR software
providers, the problem solvers. We connect them all in an agnostic
way, and try to make sure that these folks are set up in the right
way for success, that they have a strategy for achieving success and
then for taking success and moving it into what I would call scale
deployment. So success could be a five unit pilot, but I don’t
consider it success until it’s 500 units or a 1,000 units rolling to
the company. So that’s in essence, what we do.
Alan: That’s amazing. My first
thought when you were talking about the challenges and pitfalls of
getting caught in what they call “pilot purgatory” would be
if you had to kind of focus on the five main things or six main
things, what are those main challenges that make it so difficult to
go from pilot to scale?
Lance: Everybody’s at fault,
frankly. So I’ve done a lot of sales and marketing in my day. The
marketers in our industry are at fault. Promising future worlds today
that just aren’t quite possible. There’s fault in the hardware
manufacturers.
Alan: We’ve got to call out
Microsoft on making videos that people will go, “We want that!”
Lance: It was Microsoft, SAP did
one in 2014.
Alan: Everybody’s been making
these beautifully Hollywood produced videos on “Look at what you
can do with AR!” And then they put the glasses on and are like,
“Well, why is the view cut off?” They’re like, “Oh,
yeah. Well, about that…”
Lance: Not really. Not really.
Well, almost. Use your imagination.
Alan: “Why is it getting
hot on my head?” You’re like, “Ah, well, you know…”
Lance: Yeah, yeah. And I look at
it like it’s like back in the day. You’ve even got shysters selling
tonics, “solve every problem” tonics out of the back of
their car. And yet there are real solutions out there, that are
solving problems and driving value.
Alan: And I think we’re starting
to see that where companies that have been at this a long time, like
Vuzix and the newer companies as well, like the providers that are
creating the software layers. Hololens 2, it’s been hyped and hyped
and hyped. And we’re really excited, because it really is driving
value in enterprise. Maybe not at scale yet, which is– that’s what
we’re here to talk about. But what are some of the sticking points?
Lance: Let’s break it down to
this: enterprise. We’re talking about enterprise deployments here.
This isn’t SAS. These clients are not buying SAS. A lot of people are
selling the SAS. This isn’t set it and forget it. Sell me one pilot,
sell me one license, a pair of glasses, and then I’ll take it from
here and deploy a thousand units. There is a dichotomy of what’s
being sold. Most people are talking to the C-suite and they’re
selling digital transformation. Transformational AR, the new way of
working. But they’re also getting budget and getting paid solving
problem-specific ROI for operation. Those two are dichotomous. So
they sell five units, five licenses. “Here’s my platform
license. Here’s the hardware. We solved your problem. We delivered
ROI for these five users.” And it’s like hands in the air, “Good
luck, god bless.” And they’re expecting these organizations —
these large enterprise organizations — to take those five units and
proliferate it throughout their business and turn that into 5,000.
And that’s really where Lance-AR comes in. And that’s where we saw a
massive gap. It’s really in the services side. So one of the things
we brought out — we actually brought it out at AWE this year and
really leaned into it at the EWTS show this fall — was what we call
our process engineering services, aftermarket sales, right? So what
we found was the service providers and the harder providers were
selling– they weren’t selling success. They were selling the start.
Which is these pilots and all that. We come in after the fact, and we
bring in the knowledge/expertise, the engineering knowledge/expertise
for manufacturing, or logistics, or whatever it might be. That also
has the AR experience. And we work with these clients to say, “OK,
you got your first process onto this new platform. So what about your
other 999 processes? How do we prioritize them? How do we take care
of the back end that will make these a reality?” Some of these
processes are easy to move into a head-worn AR space. Some of them
require all kinds of data connectivity to siloed data in your
organization, and they will require other projects to be done just
before we can do this. So we try to look at all that, help them
through this and start them on this longer term — not long term, but
longer term — iterative transitional process. I hate the word
disruption and frankly, most people in business hate the word
disruption. No one wants their operation disrupted. They want to
transform.
Alan: What did you call that,
because I think this is– we need to emphasize this. “The
iterative–“
Lance: It’s the iterative
transformation or the iterative deployment of augmented
reality/virtual reality within your business organization.
Alan: I think the keyword there
being “iterative.” People think you’re going to just buy
this SAS software, install it, and it works perfectly forever.
They’re missing the part about where you have to make the content for
it. And you’ll have to make the content for one job role, it’s going
to be different than another one. Now, there’s going to be overlaps,
but it’s knowing where those overlaps are where you can take pieces
from the other one and bring them in. I think what you’re doing is
very smart, because we’re also seeing the same thing where we’re
focused kind of on the training side of things. But if you make one
training module, it does not translate to every role in the company.
Maybe there’s overlap, maybe can you re-use the graphics or the
interactions, but every role within a company has its own distinct
training algorithms, and same with when you’re going through digital
transformation of things using AR. Pick-n-pack is not the same as
driving a forklift.
Lance: Exactly right. And
training is a good example. I’d like to get back to that in a minute.
But before, just to finish this first thought out, another area that
I think our software providers are really missing, is the fact that
you can’t sell something that is just completely new into an
enterprise organization effectively. That enterprise is running
today. That factory is open. It has to run. It has to churn out
tires, cars, parts, whatever it is. Disrupting that, stopping that,
removing all of their — or a huge chunk of their — existing
processes and putting this one in, it’s just not going to happen.
That’s not the way business works, it’s too much of a risk. There’s
too much of a fiduciary risk and operations risk and all that stuff.
And I’d say one of our clients — LogistiVIEW, they’re in the
logistic space — and originally they were going after new greenfield
systems. The ROI was there their technology could save millions of
dollars, yet it wasn’t getting traction. What they learned was we
have to exist within this existing ecosystem of these warehouses, and
we changed their tagline to “change everything without changing
anything.” And what that means is, they developed their brand
new AR AI computer vision software to work with antiquated AS400
green screen systems that are the reality of how these manufacturing
and logistic plants are operate, and created that interface in that
at filter — I guess is probably a better way to put it — and merger
so that these companies don’t have to change their core backend
systems to use this new technology. And now that they’re starting to
use this new technology, it’s these organizations themselves that are
raising their hands and saying, “Hey, wait a minute, could we
use it over here? Could we add it over here, now that we’re
connected? Wow. Look at all the great stuff we can do.” And
logistics business has exploded recently due to this change. And I
think they’re a fantastic example of what’s been going wrong in this
industry, which was here’s our great new technology. It’s so awesome,
Mr. Enterprise User, that you should change all your backend systems,
and come over and do things our way. That’s just not the way of the
world. And we’re in that transition right now.
Alan: I think you nailed it with
“change everything without changing anything.” That is just
a brilliant tagline. And if you think about it from an enterprise
standpoint, that changing anything in a line, unless it’s going to
create massive value in the 10, 20, 30 percent improvement range,
it’s risky. I think augmented reality and virtual reality and these
technologies now, they do drive that kind of warranted rollout. But
then how do you do that in a way that doesn’t disrupt? And I think
you nailed it with kind of synchronizing with legacy systems, even
though very difficult to do. You’re taking cutting edge things that
are run on cloud and edge with antiquated systems that are buried in
servers on-prem, and trying to marry that together. It’s interesting.
And I love your point about selling this stuff is not SAS. And so
many startups that I see — pretty much everyone — it’s a SAS play
that they’re working with, and it’s very difficult when the content
doesn’t exist for the roles that you’re looking to work on.
Lance: Content is key. So let’s go back to your training example, because I think it’s a brilliant one. So most training, you were seeing the majority of that is in the VR space. Makes perfect sense. Great opportunity for it. I love training, because training departments have budgets — A. They — B — they are generally looking for new technology and new ways to train their workforce. And C, they look for mobile training, getting it out of the classroom, making it more realistic, situational training, and all that. As you know, there’s a significant content creation play there. But what what I also see is–
Alan: I know, right?
Lance: Well, think about that,
yeah. You know, you know all too well.
Alan: There’s a reason we
started our own accelerator to bring the whole community together. We
see this– look, there’s a lot of content providers in the world
making amazing things. But fast forward three years, there won’t be
nearly enough content creators to satisfy the needs of any of these
companies at scale.
Lance: Well, it’s the same
problem, Alan. So think about it. So there’s two things that need to
be done. So creating net new content in this new way is simple.
There’s actually better ways to do it now. But companies have most of
everything they have is not net new content. It’s old content that
has to be changed, and moved, and morphed. And who owns the process?
Who owns the updating of the process? Is it the training group? Is it
the operations group? Is it– do we even know? It’s half the problem.
So–
Alan: We’re working with a
client now and we said, “OK, so we’re gonna train your employees
in this role. And do you have a manual?” And they gave us the
manual, but it was the instruction manual of the computer that they
work on. It was like written in DOS 2.0.
Lance: Love it.
Alan: I was like, “OK, so
this is nice. So where’s the manual you give to the staff?” and
they’re like, “That’s it.” It’s like, oh my God, you can’t
read this thing. It’s impossible.
Lance: Right. Sprinkle in a
little tribal knowledge on top of that, that isn’t written down
anywhere. All this kind of stuff.
Alan: Exactly.
Lance: But so think about this.
So whatever content you do create in the VR space for training,
alright? Very few people have thought about the investment that you
make there. What percentage of that could the worker take with them
on a pair of AR glasses? Oh, now wait a minute. So there’s training
that you have in their classrooms. Let’s– I’m going to give you a
simple number. So one third of it is, you have that training one
time, you get it, you got it. Good. It’s in your head, you move
forward with it. Another 30 percent, gosh, maybe you don’t use it
everyday. You don’t use it every week. And it would be great if while
I was on the job after training, where I could just click on
something and see a quick video or get a quick little reminder.
Refresher training, let’s call it little telementor on your shoulder.
And then there’s 30 percent of training that you’re just never going
to get right. And you really need — in the field — to be taken
through step one, step two, step three, step four. But the content
that you guys create on the VR side, that investment — and we’re
talking to the C level and the B level here — the investment you
make there can trickle down. And move into your AR and your worker on
the floor experience, if you’re going to give them some type of
mobile way to consume them, then let’s let those workers feed back
into the system. If there’s a part they’re working on that there is
no video for, there is no training for. Well, maybe they could film
point of view themselves and walk people through the training of it.
And have this system that starts to work within itself. And the whole
thing is connected. It’s a much bigger investment. It’s much bigger
than just the hardware you purchase with the SAS that you purchase.
It’s a mindset of how we’re going to capture data, create content,
always update that content and keep this thing moving forward. It’s
just not as a static thing that everybody thinks it is.
Alan: Absolutely. It’s
multifaceted, but I think there’s also the ability in the last, I
would say 24 months, 360 content, for example, you had to stitch
every scene together and it was thousands of dollars a minute. I can
buy a camera now for 500 bucks. It shoots better than we were
shooting three years ago and it stitches on my phone. And I can
literally make a quick training thing on my phone and publish it to a
VR headset in an hour. So you’ve got that kind of low-end side of
things, where companies can start to create their own content. Then
you’ve got higher-end things where maybe you want to have full hands
on training of something. You need to bring in a machine or in
location, and that sort of thing. But as this range of content starts
to be made, there’s gonna start to be similarities. And we’re not
seeing it yet, because not enough people are working on it. But
there’s gonna be similarities, where if I do a fire safety warehouse
training, turns out that will work for pretty much any warehouse, I
can transfer it. And so being able to transfer the knowledge from one
company to another is also something that nobody is looking at yet.
Lance: I agree. And so a lot of
folks are selling to the actual end user, but why not sell to the
provider? So if I’m a provider of, let’s say, conveyor technology for
a warehouse, I should be providing and updating all that training
material that can be consumed either through VR or AR. But that’s my
responsibility, not the employer’s responsibility to keep up with
your changes and your manuals and all that kind of stuff. And if we
can create a little environment where individuals could tap into that
knowledge base, that would be great.
Alan: Well, the problem with
that is you need to make sure that everybody’s synchronized, because
if my company bought Oculus Go headsets for training and then my
supplier comes along, goes, “Hey, we just made this training in
VR, but it only works on the HTC Vive.” you’re like “Oh,
OK.” There’s no standardization and all VR is not made equally,
as we know. Or AR, for that matter. And there’s going to be a huge
range of quality types and compatibility issues and all this, so–
Lance: Alan, standardization is
not on the table for the next three to five years. We will get there,
because if this technology is going to mature and become ubiquitous
— like most of us think it will — we will get to standardization.
We will get to commonalities that make all this simple because the
clients and the users will demand it. They will demand that
simplicity. They will demand that interoperability. But this war
isn’t done yet. And so what we tell clients is — actually I’m glad
you brought this up, it’s a great segue — one of the next biggest
hurdles is companies trying to decide on one physical platform that
they’re going to go forward with. And that means a brand. Is it VR,
is it AR, is it a brand? And even for the software, we’re going to
choose this one software provider. That’s not going to get us there.
Alan: Obviously. I mean, come
on.
Lance: It’s not going to get us
there. Yeah, I know. Right.
Alan: 1990’s calling, they want
their business model back.
Lance: [laughs] Exactly. So what
we try to impart through Lance-AR is we talked about the iterative
process improvements and process engineering that we do. We also have
an iterative model that helps companies go from “Let’s vet this
idea, breed innovation department” into “This comes out,
let’s go get budget and funding and KPI agreements.” Everybody
forgets to do that. Let’s make sure the C level and the IT and HR and
operations and everybody is very clear on what they would agree is
success or not. And then we agree on what we’ll do if we are
successful before we start. And if you don’t do that, don’t start. Go
spend your money on– I don’t know, take everybody out to a ballgame.
You’re better off getting value out of that. But you do that and then
iterate. And it’s a circular process. And while your company is
taking the one good idea they decided on and moving that into
operations, your IT department should be looking at the next round of
physical hardware that’s coming in. So you’re not waiting for that.
You just kind of keep these circles going and–
Alan: Wouldn’t it be great if
there was a consultant or somebody you could just hire, that would
just keep you abreast of all this and work with your IT teams to just
keep you on top of this? Wouldn’t that be amazing?
Lance: That would be amazing. I
don’t know, I’m scratching my head. I think I know some guy that
might be able to help with that.
Alan: I’m going to Google it
here. I think it’s Lance, lance-ar.com.
Lance: That’s a great place to
start. That’s a great place to start. You know, but this stuff isn’t
easy, Alan, and that’s what it is.
Alan: It’s not easy! You and
I’ve been studying this shit for years and it’s complicated, because
every day a new headset comes out and every day a new platform comes
out.
Lance: Yep.
Alan: The way I liken this —
and I’ve said it before in the podcast — is how do you disrupt an
industry constantly and consistently disrupting itself?
Lance: Yeah, it’s– well, you
have to plan for this technology to continue and consistently
iterate. So what you deploy– and remember, in enterprise, they’d
like to let me buy this piece of conveyor, run it for the next 20
years. Sorry, that’s not where this is going. And so companies need
to change. They need to change their mantra and understand. That’s
why actually one of the things we’re coming out with — and I guess I
can show this — is we’re coming out with Lance-AR will be providing
leasing terms, for leasing for hardware, leasing for software,
leasing for applications. We also provide a deployment services,
provisioning, warranty service, and things like that, because that’s
how companies want to buy, especially when they want to protect
themselves from missing the next great tech that’s coming next. But
that’s a side note. We can do that on a subsequent– we’ll do that
next year, when that’s actually in the market for us. And there’s
other things we’re doing too, Alan. I don’t want to share everything
right now, but we are going to provide the world with an agnostic
hardware validation, applicability, and use case affirmation site. We
want to have one area where everybody can come and start to
understand what these technologies can do. I hate, hate, hate when
people ask me, “Lance, what’s the best AR headset on the
market?” It’s impossible.
Alan: I can tell you that. I
know the answer to that.
Lance: Yeah? What’s that?
Alan: You ready? It’s the one
that matches your needs and budget.
Lance: Amen.
Alan: Is that the right answer?
Lance: Do you know how much they
hate that answer? Do you know how much they hate that answer?
Alan: They *hate* that answer!
“Why can’t I just buy one headset and do it all?”
Lance: It’s like, what a copout.
What a copout answer, right? So we’re gonna provide something that
allows people to kind of self-segment themselves. “My name is
Joe. I work in Europe. I’m doing manufacturing, I’m trying to do
this, that, and the other thing,” and we’re gonna get you down
to a smaller selection and also let you know what’s coming next. So
we’re looking at that kind of stuff. And then we talked about content
creation. That’s a big issue, people.
Alan: We spent an enormous
amount of time– well, I spent an enormous amount of time on
LinkedIn, building a community, becoming friends with all sorts of
content providers all over the world, amazing people doing incredible
things. And we’ve kept a database of all of them. And so I think we
have a pretty good advantage in the fact that we have access to
content providers all around the world at all different levels of
quality in different fields. VR, AR, MR, volumetric capture, spatial
audio, you name it. And I think this is really going to be– you
mentioned right at the beginning. Content is one of those things
where it’s constant, it’s never ending. And so how do you harness the
power of the entire XR community to service the needs of these
customers? As this becomes — like you said — everybody is going to
want this. As soon as they realize that that training that used to
take us two weeks, and we had to fly everybody in, now we can send
them a headset and they’re trained before they even step foot on the
floor. Hello? This is going to be a thing.
Lance: It’s amazing. And you
also just struck on something there where the XR community is
starting to build all this stuff for the users. Let’s define the word
user. So there’s users. There’s the CEO of Fortune 500 Company X,
that we’re considering a user because he or she is writing the check.
Users are the people who wear these devices and actually do real work
everyday, and don’t just push emails back and forth. Those folks. And
this is another pet peeve of mine. And it’s more than a pet peeve.
It’s a–
Alan: Those guys. Who needs
buy-in from the people actually use them? Psh!
Lance: “Whatever. Here, use
this.” This is– well, at least not in the US and Europe. That’s
not how we operate. And that’s not how our workers operate. That
actually is a little bit different in China and some of the Asian
countries. And they’re actually getting pull-through. There’s a
discussion there, and we don’t have time to get into it today. But my
point is this for the user is and I want to talk about efficacy and
stickiness of this technology. We all know see-what-I-see.
Everybody’s heard about it. Telepresence, telementoring, tele remote
support, whatever you want to call it. And we all talk about this
being the number one use case for AR headsets today. It’s not sticky.
That’s the problem. In most use cases, it is a once a day, once a
week use case. That’s just not enough. And the problem is, when
people then go ahead and try to turn it on that one day a week,
connectivity. Gosh, exactly how did I enter my password? And what
button do I press and how do I do it? So the UX is a big problem,
user interface. I was talking with Audi, who were doing– they were
using VR. And they want to use it in their dealerships. And here’s
the deal. When someone walks into a dealership, they’re there to buy
a car, not use VR. And if you want them to have this really cool VR
experience and all that kind of stuff, you’ve got about two minutes,
maybe three minutes of their attention span. You can’t spend five
minutes training them how to enjoy that two minute experience. It’s
gotta be intuitive. It has to be natural. And what is natural today?
Well, that’s changing. And for us in the VR/AR headset space, let’s
look at what else is going on. Voice is everywhere. Let’s use voice.
Hand gesture control, hand using hand gestures. What is it. Google
Pixel came out. So, yeah, we’re gonna enable some gestures and it’s
super limited and all that stuff. But whatever, they see it, they see
its coming. I was in my friend’s BMW the other day, and he was just
swinging his hand around, changing the radio station, using gesture
control.
Alan: Yeah, I actually got to
try the the Ultrahaptics thing on the weekend and you basically goes
in VR. And I reached out– I was playing tic-tac-toe with an avatar,
and I reached out and it felt like I could feel it in midair or I
could feel like I was touching something. But it was it was almost
like a minor electric shock. Like, you know, when you lick a battery,
that kind of feeling. It was really just– it was a weird sensation.
I don’t know. It wasn’t comfortable for me, but they’re trying to
make it so that when midair, you just reach out, you feel something
and you turn it like in a car, you just kind of reach out. But it’s
like, okay, well, that’s called a knob and it’s right there below my
hand. What do I need it in 3D space for?
Lance: Alan, it’s the same thing
as we’re talking up before. Like the “change everything without
changing anything” concept of our new technology needs to be
able to work with old data systems. Well, our new technology, the way
the human being who wears it interfaces with it needs to jive with
their current experiences. Swiping, we’re all using swipe on our
phones and our iPads.
Alan: Only on Tinder.
Lance: [laughs] But if you can
use that with a pair of smart glasses when you expect to use it, when
I want to move a menu or something like that. Wow. Then it just
becomes natural. We’re all talking to our Echos and our Amazon and
all this kind of stuff, for good or bad. I want to talk to my
device. I should be able to do it. We have to look back. Our UX needs
to look back before it looks forward. I guess it’s really me.
Alan: But I agree with you 100
percent. And two things that came up this week were the original
Hololens interactions, where we had the kind of clicky thing and
point click, and it was amazing. We’ve done hundreds, maybe thousands
of demos on the Hololens. And one thing that I always watched was
that anybody over 30 had trouble with that, learning that little
mechanism of pointing your finger up and then flipping it down. —
What do they call it? I can’t remember, anyway. — But it was
natural. They just reach out and like they would reach out in real
life and touch things. And the new Hololens 2 interactions are all
kind of around that real gesture base. They learned anybody– any of
their actual customers are trying to poke at it in midair. They’re
like, wait a second, this is not working. But the interactions with
your hands are going to be very close to being naturally part of
reaching out, reaching and grabbing a hologram. And it’s gonna be
very exciting. And we’re almost there.
Lance: We’re gonna get there.
We’re gonna get there, Alan. We are.
Alan: The Quest hand tracking is
coming in January and the Hololens 2. Even though there was an
article today saying that’s shipping. That article was misleading, it
said we are taking your orders now.
Lance: I put it this way. There
is so much incredibly valuable, useful stuff that can be done today
with the technology we have today, physical, with the software that
exists today, with the UI that exists today. Being able to use an RGB
camera to give myself a thumbs up as a confirmation. I don’t care
what language you speak. I don’t care where you’re from. That’s
simple. It’s simple and it’s effective and it works. And the more we
use the technology that is available today. The more the money is
going to flow in, and support businesses that are– they’re on the
brink. A lot of these software folks are on the brink, or they’re
using investor dollars. And if we don’t help them and pay for what
they’re doing today, they won’t innovate for tomorrow. And our
innovation will actually take a hit. We won’t innovate as fast enough
if we’re just trying to stay alive. And on the software side that’s
very, very true. On the hardware side that’s very true. Hardware
companies need to be very honest with what they’re doing. I thought
RealWear did a great job of that. They unabashedly said we are
designed to be worn with a hardhat for the field worker. If you want
to use our technology anywhere else, good luck, god bless. Enjoy it.
We’ll try to help you a little bit, but that’s what it was designed
for. And that’s why those guys sold more headsets in North America
and Europe than anyone else. They had focus.
Alan: They had focus, and it
turns out they went the most simple route. And sometimes we’re
overcomplicating this stuff. But I’m going to end on this quote that
you just quoted, and I think it’s a great way to to wrap this up.
“Let’s use the technology of today to pay for the innovation of
tomorrow.”
Lance: You got it. AR for today.
We call it the now term, right? Not for the distant future. There’s a
lot of AR solutions that impact your current business cycles that can
be iteratively expanded throughout your organization if you plan
correctly. If you really take this industry for what it is right now
and understand it, there’s a lot of success that can be had. And we
at Lance-AR would love to be your partner in helping you. And I
really thank you for your time, Alan.
Alan: It’s been my pleasure.
Thank you so much, everybody. This has been the XR for Business
Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson, and my guest, Lance Anderson
of Lance-AR. You can visit them at lance-ar.com.
32 min
January 03, 2020 Using XR to Change Everything (Without Changing Anything) with Lance-AR's Lance Anderson
Today's guest, Lance Anderson of
Lance-AR, got tired of seeing so many XR providers only help clients
achieve their stated ROI goals, then leaving them to their own
devices to scale. Lance helps those companies today, by understanding
the need to marry emerging tech with legacy systems, so disruptive
tech doesn't seem so disruptive.
Alan: Coming up on the XR for
Business Podcast, today we're speaking with Lance Anderson, founder
and CEO of Lance-AR, a consulting and services company for enterprise
AR space, focused on helping organizations scale deployment. We'll be
learning about the challenges and learnings from his experience. All
that and more on the XR for Business Podcast. Lance, welcome to the
show.
Lance: Hey, great, thanks for
having me on.
Alan: My absolute pleasure. It's
very exciting to meet somebody as passionate as you are about
bringing augmented reality to the enterprise. But before we start,
explain how you got here and what is it you do for customers?
Lance: Sure. So I'm coming from
-- let's just round it down, let's call it 15 years -- in the
enterprise space selling software and services and automation, things
like that. Ended up at Vuzix in 2015 and had a great run with those
guys. Late 2018 I left Vuzix and started Lance-AR, because I was just
frustrated. Frustrated with the lack of companies deploying augmented
reality at scale. Everybody talks about the dizzying ROIs that are
out there to get, and all the wonderful things and advantages that
this technology brings. Yet no one was deploying at scale and I had
this unique position at Vuzix -- because there are so few hardware
providers -- that we were able to see thousands of pilots and POCs,
in all different regions and different use cases. And we just saw so
many of those either fail, sputter, or just kind of evaporate. So I
wanted to take all that knowledge and bring it to the enterprise
space and see if we could turn some things around. That's why
Lance-AR came about. And really what we do now is we connect
enterprise users, AR hardware manufacturers and AR software
providers, the problem solvers. We connect them all in an agnostic
way, and try to make sure that these folks are set up in the right
way for success, that they have a strategy for achieving success and
then for taking success and moving it into what I would call scale
deployment. So success could be a five unit pilot, but I don't
consider it success until it's 500 units or a 1,000 units rolling to
the company. So that's in essence, what we do.
Alan: That's amazing. My first
thought when you were talking about the challenges and pitfalls of
getting caught in what they call "pilot purgatory" would be
if you had to kind of focus on the five main things or six main
things, what are those main challenges that make it so difficult to
go from pilot to scale?
Lance: Everybody's at fault,
frankly. So I've done a lot of sales and marketing in my day. The
marketers in our industry are at fault. Promising future worlds today
that just aren't quite possible. There's fault in the hardware
manufacturers.
Alan: We've got to call out
Microsoft on making videos that people will go, "We want that!"
Lance: It was Microsoft, SAP did
one in 2014.
Alan: Everybody's been making
these beautifully Hollywood produced videos on "Look at what you
can do with AR!" And then they put the glasses on and are like,
"Well, why is the view cut off?" They're like, "Oh,
yeah. Well, about that..."
Lance: Not really. Not really.
Well, almost. Use your imagination.
Alan: "Why is it getting
hot on my head?" You're like, "Ah, well, you know..."
Lance: Yeah, yeah. And I look at
it like it's like
32 min
January 01, 2020 Using XR to Ensure a Safe Work Environment, with Bit Space Development’s Daniel Blair
Access to the Internet can be spotty
in Northern Canada. But heavy industry happens up there all the same,
and Bit Space Development’s Daniel Blair wants to bring those
workers the same access to XR-driven training and remote expert
assistance as anywhere else enjoys. He chats with Alan about how he
hopes to bring that about, in the first XR for Business of 2020.
Alan: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan
Smithson here with the XR for Business Podcast. Today, we’re speaking
with Daniel Blair, founder and CEO of a Canadian VR company called
Bit Space Development. We’ll be discussing how virtual reality is
revolutionizing industrial training and why it’s vitally important to
define your key performance indicators to release you and your
customers from the Pilot POC Purgatory. All that and more on the XR
for Business Podcast.
With that, I want to welcome my good
friend Dan to the show. Welcome to the show, Dan.
Daniel: Hey, thanks for having
me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure.
Let’s get into what you guys are doin; making serious purposes with
VR and AR. What does that mean?
Daniel: Basically, what that
means is we utilize immersive technologies to create games. But those
games are used for training, education, and really serious purposes.
We aren’t generally building applications that are going to be sold
on Steam or sold on the Oculus store. But what we’re building are
tools that integrate with clients infrastructure to help augment
their workflow or create a safer workplace.
Alan: I know you guys have done
a ton of things. One of them was a hand tool training simulator.
Maybe walk us through what are these things, and how are people using
them?
Daniel: For sure. Some of our
most recent deployments include exactly what you’re talking about,
the power tools simulator, which we created with a provincial
organization here. That tool utilizes the room-scale six degrees of
freedom tracking of any of the open VR-capable headsets, to put new
entrants and kids on job sites and teach them about safe operation of
power tools. And that can range from anything from a drill or a
hammer drill or a circular saw. But we put some really interesting
tools in there, like concrete saws — which would be extremely
dangerous for a new entrant to use in real life.
Alan: I actually know all about
that, cement saws. When I was a kid, my dad was grinding some bricks
with a grinding wheel and the wheel shattered and cut both his legs
wide open. And I remember as a kid, taking him to the hospital and
them having to sew up right down to the bone. I mean, this was a real
problem. I know this firsthand. This is a very, very unsafe tool if
used incorrectly.
Daniel: Yeah. And the worst part
of building these applications are the shock value photos that my
clients will send me. I’ll wake up in the morning and they’ll say,
“hey, this is a good example of why to learn about the safe
operation of these tools.” And they’ll send me a photo of
something similar to what happened to your dad, which is super
unfortunate. And additionally to that, we’ve done a lot of work in
the welding space, and on the more promotional side, our most recent
deployment is called Level Up VR, which we developed with the USAF
Workers of Tomorrow, an organization that promotes safe work sites
and safe work practices for both employers and employees for youth.
And that tool actually won an Impact Marketing Award for the use of
the virtual reality tool in the campaign that was created to raise
awareness. So we see both the marketing side and the education side.
Alan: That’s amazing. Safe
working is something that we need to market to. Training and
education and learning is really competing with Hollywood movies,
triple-A games and social media. And you guys are finding a way to
kind of take the best of those and bring them together. So what are
you guys doing in terms of gamification, and what are what are you
seeing resonate with people?
Daniel: So a lot of what we do
gets integrated into classroom experiences, and the engagement rates
and the actual enjoyment — because I would consider both enjoying
something and being engaged in something slightly different — we
found that in our measurement that it is definitely increasing the
awareness and the engagement side, through the use of virtual
reality. So one of our most recent excursions was into the north, for
an application that we call Try the Trades, which was with our
partner, Manitoba Construction Sector Council and Trade Up Manitoba,
which is our provincial sector council for the construction industry
and their awareness organization. So they’re technically the same
company, but they have different teams. And what we did is we took a
couple pelican cases full of Pico Goblin headsets and some virtual
reality learning experiences into the classrooms in northern Manitoba
communities — and to put it into perspective, just how far away
these communities are for listeners in different parts of the world;
to drive from Winnipeg to one of the closest major cities up north,
which is called Thompson, is eight hours of straight driving on a
basically straight road — so these communities are quite far apart.
And we visited about 40 different communities and surveyed the kids
as they were actually taking these experiences, because these are
kids in grades five, six, seven, eight, all the way up to grade 12.
And kids tend to not be super-engaged in classroom activities and the
whole educational aspect of learning about the skilled trades. And
when we expose them to these trades in virtual reality, we found that
98 percent of them were engaged in this, and enjoying the experience.
Alan: What was that, 98 percent?
Daniel: Yeah, that was 98
percent.
Alan: How are you testing that
against baseline?
Daniel: The company that we’re
working with, they do classroom activities, and so they’re already
asking the kids, they’re already measuring the engagement; already
actually looking into these metrics. How are these kids engaged in
the workshops? And usually it’ll be more of a hands-on activity or a
video or slideshow presentation, stuff like that. The introduction of
virtual reality into this increased it from basically non-engagement
all the way up to 98 percent.
Alan: That’s incredible. That
alone, having learners engaged in learning, is one of the main
reasons why VR is the tool that is going to revolutionize education
and training.
Daniel: Yeah, well, especially
when the metric that they’re using to actually find out if it’s
performing as well as it should be is the engagement. And we can show
definitively that the technology has increased its engagement. That
shows that the actual use of the technology is more than beneficial
— it’s solving multiple problems for them. It’s not just making it
more engaging. It is exposing these kids to potential careers. It’s
basically ticking off all the boxes that they look for in an
engagement, but also increasing the actual enjoyment of the kids in
that experience.
Alan: Incredible. So what other
things have you doing? Because I know you did some stuff in
enterprise training and stuff like that. What have you done in that
space?
Daniel: Yes. On our enterprise
side, a lot of our clients are really focused around site
orientations and site-specific training. We do a lot of work with
steel mills. There’s a local one here that’s quite large, that has
facilities across North America. And we recently deployed a pilot
into their melt shop to give new workers, contractors, etc., an idea
of what to be aware of on that job site. And I personally had been in
a steel mill before, but when they took me through the mill, I was
quite blown away by how super dangerous everything actually is.
Alan: Steel is not that safe.
Daniel: Yeah, obviously. But it’s like, once you go in there, you’re like, “man. This is like a gigantic furnace that’s just melting metal all day long. And they they turned on with explosives.” So like everything about that space — like, everything — is a sharp metal object. Everything around it could probably give you tetanus. I find that, like, when I enter some of these sites, as I’ve been doing this for so many years now, I find that I’m maybe less shocked by this. But it’s kind of crazy that when you think about how I develop basically video games for a living, and yet here I am standing on top of this gigantic building, or in a crane, or in a steel mill taking 360 photos or 360 video or even just scanning the space to create a job site content. But, you know, I get put on these sites. I totally understand why the tool is going to be effective. So the steel mill application, as soon as I saw that thing getting turned on, is like, “all right, I understand why we need to put people in here, virtually.” There’s no way that you can really mentally prepare someone for the whole process. I mean, there’s literally buckets of molten steel being poured into the molds and stuff like that all over the place there. And that’s just one building. These facilities have up to six buildings on their compounds. Additionally, in the enterprise side, one of our longest clients is the Manitoba Heavy Construction Association, and with heavy construction, we’ve spent a lot of time developing out a course called Road Builder Safety Training Systems — RSTS — and that is a full certificate-level course delivered by Manitoba Heavy Construction that is completely delivered through virtual reality. There are 16 modules to that course with an in-app assessment. There are electives, there are requirement courses, but that entire thing is both deployed and delivered through virtual reality. So that is taken into communities, that’s run out of their facility. People working in the heavy construction industry, you get to see all kinds of job sites and learn about the content as opposed to just absorbing that content through a textbook. But they are placed on the job sites.
Alan: Incredible. How many
people would you say have gone through that experience, and what kind
of data are you collecting about each learner?
Daniel: So and that’s that’s
actually a really good segue into one of the things I’ve really
wanted to talk about, which is the key performance indicators. So
when I talk about the road builder safety training systems course,
that’s one of the ones that we developed early on in the years at Bit
Space. And although it has been very effective and lots and lots of
people have gone through it — thousands of people have been trained
in it — we don’t actually collect enough data to know if, like, how
that one is being successful. When I talk about 98 percent increased
engagement in our Try of the Trades northern expeditions, that’s a
good example of where we’ve started to collect proper data. Bit Space
was founded five years ago, and our first projects were developed
using Google Cardboard or the DKII. We didn’t have the luxury of the
six degrees of freedom. We didn’t even have the luxury of delivery
methods to send — with a new Oculus ISV program — the ability to
send APKs to a client’s device. We weren’t able to do that. We had to
manually install all of this onto devices. And one of the biggest
challenges is when clients wanted to deploy these solutions to their
job sites. They often have network connectivity issues. And you and I
have been through all kinds of network connectivity issues over the
last couple attempts at recording.
Alan: It’s never a problem of
network connectivity, it’s just a problem of -no- connectivity. Just
getting us on this podcast was a challenge. We’re talking about
audio.
Daniel: Yeah, and I’m in the
capital city of my province. There’s around a million people living
around here. So we have good enough Internet. But when you get up
north, there is basically no Internet. Depending on the town that
you’re in. There are some towns where they’ve got fair enough
Internet, but because we don’t have that network connectivity, we
aren’t able to collect real-time analytics. And because our clients
aren’t regularly connecting the headsets to a network connection,
it’s also difficult for us to get a data dump. So we rely off of the
metrics that are supplied to us by the client, how many people took
it? How many people passed? Etc. But I don’t feel that what we
actually planned out in that one was… I mean, although the
application solved the problem and it has been quite successful, we
don’t have, like, granular metrics to see how can it grow? How can it
improve? So one of the next steps on that project would be to figure
out, how do we actually measure that? So when we deploy these
applications, we look for all kinds of stuff. We look for, did the
user look in the right direction? Did they activate all the hotspots?
How fast did they get through the experience? Because if you get
through too fast, there’s a chance that they weren’t actually reading
the content. Did they activate the hotspot? Do they open up a hotspot
and then close it right away to activate it? Or do they actually keep
it open a long enough to read the content that’s in there? How many
failed attempts were there in the embedded quizzes? All of those
things are good metrics for checking whether the user is actually
progressing and hopefully retaining and absorbing the knowledge
within the course content, but that only addresses the learning
experiences.
When we are doing deployment and we’re
looking at actually doing a marketing engagement, I kind of break it
out to a few different segments. So for marketing engagements, we
look at metrics like, how can we possibly increase your sales? Are
more people going to your page or more people go into your
organization? And sometimes organizations that we’re working with
aren’t necessarily selling something, but they’re trying to market
themselves to promote the organization as a whole. So for Safe
Workers of Tomorrow, for example, when we were promoting safe work
through Level Up, really the biggest metric is, how many people are
checking out this game? How many people are coming to the event? How
many people are signing up for the contest, etc? That’s an easy
metric for a short-term campaign, but you’ve got to understand that
not everyone wants to play in VR, and not everybody is going to play
it all the way through, and not everyone’s gonna see every level. And
so it is, at its bare minimum, we are looking at, can we get more
people to come over to the booth?
On the tool side, that’s where things
are starting to get really interesting. With the commercial and
enterprise adoption of virtual reality increasing — and I’m sure no
one could possibly stand against that statement — over the last five
years, the actual pickup of the technology by commercial enterprise
organizations, I’m finding, is just dwarfing the year before each
year. And what I’m finding is that there’s more and more interest in
tools and workflow augmentation. You want to create something and
make it the flattest possible. So how do you do that? You want to
create a piece of software that visualizes this and it has to be as
perfect as possible. How do we run the algorithms on the actual
infrastructure that’s being put up and see that through a Hololens or
see that in VR? And I’m finding that that’s where the real adoption
is at the moment. It isn’t difficult to sell a company on the idea of
using virtual reality training at this point, and we have the metrics
to be able to track that. But when when a client comes to us and they
start telling us of their problems… I kind of break it into a few
different categories. There’s three that I look at and there’s a
secret fourth one. The main category is learning experiences. So they
want to train someone for something. One of the categories is tools
and augmentation. They want to build something that’s going to make
their workflow easier; they want to streamline something. They want
to promote themselves; they want to create a marketing experience.
And then the fourth secret category is just, they want to make a
game. And I find that that doesn’t happen much with us, because we
are in the B2B space. I don’t get a lot of people that come to me and
say, “I want to build a cool game,” although I wouldn’t
turn someone away. It doesn’t generally fit within our target market
at the moment.
The metrics for each of those are going
to be very specific. I’m not going to track how many people are
coming out to an event, or how well is this thing promoting you if
it’s an educational experience, and I’m not going to necessarily
track how many people are learning something. It’s an internal tool
because there’s probably nothing to actually learn. But the most
difficult category to actually track the performance on is the tools,
because we need to know what is the problem that that company is
actually trying to solve and that seems to be the biggest challenge
right now, is that companies don’t actually necessarily understand
the problem they’re trying to solve. And then once we’ve identified
that problem, there’s often resistance from the people that currently
work there into implementing new technologies.
Alan: Maybe expand on that.
Because I’ve heard this before on other podcasts, interviews where
the problem isn’t so much that you’re getting corporate buy in. Maybe
the CEO says, “hey, we’re gonna do this.” The training
manager is like, “yeah, we want this.” And then when it
gets down to boots on the ground, there’s a bit of trepidation and
more pushback.
Daniel: Yeah. So that could
almost be considered one of your metrics of success. Your actual
internal adoption. I find that it isn’t necessarily difficult to sell
at the corporate level. You can get the buy in from the C level
employees. You can get buy in from the business owner. That’s not
usually challenging because they’re usually trying to innovate for
their company. They want the latest and greatest in the company. What
I do find is moderately challenging is getting people that do the
job. So the types of companies that we work with, generally there’s
the C level, there is the training manager, etc. etc. And we can get
through that process and build the advisory committee and actually
figure out what problem is that we’re going to solve. And by the time
we get to that point, we look at, all right, well, how do we
implement this? Usually it is at the actual worker level that there
is the resistance. Either people perceive it as new work or
unnecessary work and they don’t necessarily understand the value of
spatial computing — which, I don’t blame them. I think that if my
job was to do a certain task at a company and I did it for 45 years
and it’s just always been the way it is, it might be daunting to
implement new technology. Now, I’m also the founder of a virtual
reality company, so I’m a little bit biased towards the the whole
aspect of spatial computing. And clearly I am also biased towards
adopting new technologies. But I find that definitely the friction
comes from the actual workers. And you can usually get past it if you
start to actually speak their language and you show them how it
actually enhances the experience. A good example for that: we have a
piece of software that it’s actually internal piece of software. We
didn’t build it for a client. It was started out as a prototype. And
it now is something that we’re polishing up and that is called
Flagger Safety. And a flagger is the gatekeeper to a construction
site. They’re the people that stand out in front of the construction
on the road and they usually have a sign or some sort of
high-visibility vest or jumpsuit, and they’ll stop and release
traffic when the trucks need to drive out onto the road. And one of
the first games that we ever built was for flagger training. But it
wasn’t a VR game. It was just a mobile game. And I hated it. It was
one of the first things that we were ever actually contracted to
build. And I’m just critical of my old work. So I went back to it and
I decided I hated it and thought it would be cooler in VR. And I
mean, I’m not wrong. It is much cooler in VR. But now we have people
talking about actually adopting that technology. So how do we roll
that out to those companies? And what I find right now — and this is
a very relevant example — is the trainers, the people are actually
running those classes, they’re used to doing the classroom portion
and then going out into the parking lot and doing that hands-on
piece. But it’s not a real hands-on piece. It’s just them in a car
being stopped and released in a parking lot by the class that they
just taught. And so what this technology allows us to do is it allows
us to emulate an actual road. So we have emergency vehicles and AI
behind the cars that allows different generation of the road and
different situations to arise that couldn’t happen in a parking lot
or on a job site. And the trainer in this particular pilot spent a
lot of time talking about, “oh, well, now we have to describe
this and that.” It wasn’t until I started describing it more as,
“no, I don’t want to add anymore instruction to the experience.
I want it to be as true to what you just taught.” So
understanding that from the adoption side, that we don’t have to
increase the workload of the people actually delivering the training
or actually implementing the technology, if we show how it just
purely augments the work that they’re already doing. And on the
training side, they don’t have to teach more. They just have to make
sure that the experience that they’re implementing is true to what
they’re teaching, in regards to the the legislation and the process
and all that kind of stuff. So once we actually like crack through
that surface of resistance, it generally gets past it. But then you
have to prove yourself and you can only prove yourself if you
understand the metrics that you are trying to collect.
So for this sort of situation, we would
be tracking retention and we would be tracking. Are you actually
absorbing that content and how good are you doing it at the flagger
training? We track your hand signals, etc., so we’ll be looking at
once you’ve been doing it a few times in practice mode, how quickly
are you picking up these proper signals and how effective are you at
stopping and releasing traffic? And that would be a pretty good
metric to get back to that student. And that also shows that the
software is working. You’re retaining that that information.
Sometimes it’s difficult to get to the point of data collection
because of the whole resistance side of things.
Alan: So here’s a question
that’s come up quite a bit, including at MetaVRse here. And one of
the questions that that we struggle with and everybody seems to be
struggling with, is how do you, when you meet a client, and they say
we want to train for X position or role; how do you then elicit the
right content? Because some of them just have a training manual.
They’re like, “here, here’s our training manual: go.” And
some of them have all of their information in different parts. How do
you capture all the information that goes into this, and how long
does that take?
Daniel: I’ve had it both sides
of the spectrum on that. I’ve had clients where they just give us the
orientation manuals and say, “turn this into VR.” And I’ve
had clients who are super engaged, have all kinds of content and are
totally willing to supply everything you need and help you interpret
it, because I am not an expert on pretty much any of this stuff.
Basically, any of the stuff that I am creating the experiences for,
my expertise lies in spatial computing and interactive digital media.
I’m not a a real Lyft driver. I am not a flagger. I’m not a confined
space technician, whatever. I find that the most successful projects
that we’ve been on — both in regards to figuring out what are those
metrics and also to actually gathering the content and understanding
it — have what we like to put together; an industry committee. That
committee is usually built up of… if it’s an industry association
that’s putting on the project through a research initiative or
something, usually it’s built up of of relevant parties. So companies
within the industry that would be working with us on this. If it’s of
an application for a single company, usually that committee is built
up of internal entities; so, trainers, etc. Human resources know the
people that would be responsible for the content. And on the most
successful projects, usually what we do — and we’ve got some
processes internally in regards to what spreadsheets we use and stuff
to gather that content — we have an entire phase built into the
project that is just for resource-gathering, requirement-gathering,
processing the content that’s sent to us.
Now, we have had successful projects
where they just gave us the orientation. But that only is going to be
successful if the scope of that project is to create an orientation.
I don’t think that it is reasonable for a client to expect that
they’re going to send over just a manual for a piece of machinery and
that they’ll just suddenly have a virtual reality simulator. And if
people are finding that clients are coming along that are like that,
those are probably not going to be good success stories in the end.
Alan: *Run away!*
Daniel: Yeah, I don’t
necessarily recommend that. I mean, again, everyone will have their
own experiences and other people have their own preferences. Now, the
most success that we’ve had on projects are projects where the
clients have allowed us to come and experience the training that they
offer. So I have been trained on flagging, working in confined
spaces, driving aerial lifts. In fact, just last Friday, a couple of
my team members were up 40 feet in the air on aerial lifts for a
project that we have in the works at the moment. It is important that
the project management level, the business development level, the
project lead level at -least- that you are able to actually
experience the training that they’re currently offering. So that way
you actually understand, at least at a basic level, what you’re
creating the experience about. But also so you see how they’re
implementing that at the moment. Again, this is more for like
training and the educational side in regards to user requirements
gathering for tools. That’s a longer process, a little bit more
integrated with the knowledge experts in the organization, and it’s
more of an ongoing process. But regarding the training side of
things, we we like to build out that committee simply because we are
able to actually iterate on ideas with them. We’re able to gather the
content from them, layout a bit of a plan, and then make adjustments
based off of what they are recommending. And it took us a few times
to fail at a couple of projects to understand what was really giving
us success. But the number one key we found is by actually engaging
the knowledge experts in the organization — which also in turn
sometimes has a positive effect on the actual engagement with the
resistance from the people on the ground actually doing the job — if
you’re engaging those people from the beginning, so they’re able to
have a voice in what you’re building? That seems to really help with
adoption within the organization.
Alan: So I have a bunch of
questions. My brain is just like -poof-. When you make these
experiences, let’s say, for a company, do they ever want to offset
the costs through licensing this to other companies? How does that
work? Who owns the content? And do they want to make that available?
Daniel: Yeah. So that’s a
complicated question/answer. A lot of our clients come to us because
we’ve developed frameworks which allow them to have that cost-saving.
So our number one products, we have a 360 photo/video tool called VR
Safety that allows us to rapidly build and deploy the
360-degree-based applications. And that allows us to really keep the
costs down. They’re really just paying for the photography content
insertion, none of the actual development. And in that kind of
situation, I always allow them to own their content because we own
the framework. On the room-scale side, that’s where it gets a little
bit more complicated because we do have frameworks — we have a
framework called CSS — and CSS handles a lot of the stuff like LMS
integration, and we have our own physics, our own tooling to actually
like use the tools. I mean, there are situations where a client may
want to create content, but often we are doing the R&D upfront
for the tools development. So most of the room-scale experiences that
we create are built off of our own technology and just customized for
our clients. So we do have the ability to resell; to reskin and
re-use. Which generally is not a problem for our clients. If a client
is bringing us on to build a simulator for something ultra-specific
— like, their technology — in that situation, they would likely own
it. Let’s say they built a tractor and they want us to create a
simulator for that tractor. We’re not going to relicense their
tractor as a simulator. That would be definitely negotiated at the
sales level.
Alan: Tractor Crusher VR!
Daniel: We spend a lot of time
building out asset packs that are modular and easy to deploy. So like
we have our own warehouse, our own farm, for example, because we have
a lot of agriculture, a lot of manufacturing, a lot of construction
clients. So we have parks like 3D Worlds that our clients can use for
their experiences that are pre-made, which definitely offsets the
cost. But because we have those scenes, we do do a lot of fun playing
around. So we have been playing with the whole idea of like, can I
shoot zombies in this barn? because sometimes–
Alan: Tractor crusher!
Daniel: Yeah, exactly. I got
into this because I enjoy the technology and I like making video
games. So often, we look at the content and we see if there’s
something fun that can be done with that. And it usually is an
internal game jam-style thing. But we have released a few fun things.
Alan: but, the question is, Dan;
do you guys make a bonus level in the training that’s hidden, if you
hit a certain point level, it unlocks a zombie shooter from wherever
you are?
Daniel: That’s a good idea. We
haven’t done that yet, but we’ve we’ve definitely talked about it.
Alan: If you if you happen to
hit this one button combination of button, zombies come at you.
Daniel: Yeah, well, it’s like a
very specific situation. You’re in the barn and you grab this piece
and you put it in the bucket over there and then, yeah,.
Alan: And all of a sudden, your
hands turn into guns and there are zombies everywhere.
Daniel: Exactly. Yeah. You open
the tool box, and there was a gun and in there; now you have to
defend yourself. Yeah. We haven’t done that yet. I am actually a big
proponent to actually being able to hurt yourself in VR.
Alan: I agree.
Daniel: With our power tools
simulators one of–
Alan: Have you tried the haptic
gloves yet?
Daniel: I’ve tried a few
different haptic gloves. I’m not a huge fan of most of them, but–
Alan: I’ve tried the HaptX
gloves and they were–
Daniel: Those are the ones that
I’ve tried.
Alan: They were great except for
the form factor.
Daniel: Yeah. That’s where
they’ve started to become good. Now I don’t think any of them have
the gloves emulate pain, which is probably a good thing.
Alan: Shock more than pain.
Daniel: But like, one of the
things that my clients often talk to me about is that they like to
have the idea of shock value in the experience. People learn from
that. They see this pipe fall off the roof, and the guy wasn’t
wearing his hard hat. Look at him! And it’s a little gruesome, but
it’s super common in the construction manufacturing industries.
People learn from other people’s injuries. And the whole idea of
allowing you to, say, put your hand under the circular saw. And I
like the idea of you try to cut off your hand in VR, and sure, we
could disable that controller. Now, you only have one hand. Because
that would be a situation that you could do in real life. I like the
idea of being able to do all the things in a real experience that I
can in the VR experience. So if there’s a thing on the table, I
better be able to pick it up. I should be able to throw it across the
room. I should be able to hurt myself with it. Because sure, if you
put a young crowd in an experience, they probably gonna be distracted
by that and then probably take it kind of funny. But like in an
actual training environment, what better way to teach someone to wear
their hardhat than by having a pipe fall off the roof on them?
Alan: Well, Daniel, this has
been really enlightening. I could just talk about this stuff forever.
Where can people find more information about Bit Space?
Daniel: So the best place to find us is on our website, bitspacedevelopment.com. Or BSDEV.ca for short. You can also find us on Twitter at Bit Space Develop.
Alan: Amazing. Well, I thank you
so much. I ask one last question, and I would love your answer on
this. What problem in the world do you want to see solved using XR
Technologies?
Daniel: So my answer to that —
and you’re actually aware of my answer — my biggest problem that I
want to see solved in the world is the democratization of the content
that is being developed and delivered to everyone. So I want for
children in remote communities, rural communities — whether that’s
northern Canada or anywhere — to be able to access high-quality
educational experiences using the technology that we have available
to us. I’m working towards that already, through deploying headsets
with my partner organizations into northern communities and rural
communities. But one of the infrastructure problems is the Internet.
But that’s going to get better. And I want to see that, through XR
technologies, that the quality and quantity of educational
experiences and content to be greatly increased to these communities.
Alan: That is, as you know, also
our mission to democratize education globally by 2040 using XR and
spatial computing. And that’s one of the reasons why I asked you
about the licensing, because building these scenarios, these training
systems are for now very expensive and they will get lower in cost
and then more people will be able to make them. But for now, when
people are investing hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a
simulator or training exercise in virtual and augmented reality,
being able to relicense it and kind of scale that to other components
is really kind of the backbone of the MetaVRse platform that we’re
building. So, you know, that’s one of the questions I wanted to ask.
And you answered it perfectly.
Daniel: I mean, that’s why we’re
so aligned and why we’re good friends.
36 min
January 01, 2020 Using XR to Ensure a Safe Work Environment, with Bit Space Development’s Daniel Blair
Access to the Internet can be spotty
in Northern Canada. But heavy industry happens up there all the same,
and Bit Space Development’s Daniel Blair wants to bring those
workers the same access to XR-driven training and remote expert
assistance as anywhere else enjoys. He chats with Alan about how he
hopes to bring that about, in the first XR for Business of 2020.
Alan: Hey, everyone, it's Alan
Smithson here with the XR for Business Podcast. Today, we're speaking
with Daniel Blair, founder and CEO of a Canadian VR company called
Bit Space Development. We'll be discussing how virtual reality is
revolutionizing industrial training and why it's vitally important to
define your key performance indicators to release you and your
customers from the Pilot POC Purgatory. All that and more on the XR
for Business Podcast.
With that, I want to welcome my good
friend Dan to the show. Welcome to the show, Dan.
Daniel: Hey, thanks for having
me.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure.
Let's get into what you guys are doin; making serious purposes with
VR and AR. What does that mean?
Daniel: Basically, what that
means is we utilize immersive technologies to create games. But those
games are used for training, education, and really serious purposes.
We aren't generally building applications that are going to be sold
on Steam or sold on the Oculus store. But what we're building are
tools that integrate with clients infrastructure to help augment
their workflow or create a safer workplace.
Alan: I know you guys have done
a ton of things. One of them was a hand tool training simulator.
Maybe walk us through what are these things, and how are people using
them?
Daniel: For sure. Some of our
most recent deployments include exactly what you're talking about,
the power tools simulator, which we created with a provincial
organization here. That tool utilizes the room-scale six degrees of
freedom tracking of any of the open VR-capable headsets, to put new
entrants and kids on job sites and teach them about safe operation of
power tools. And that can range from anything from a drill or a
hammer drill or a circular saw. But we put some really interesting
tools in there, like concrete saws -- which would be extremely
dangerous for a new entrant to use in real life.
Alan: I actually know all about
that, cement saws. When I was a kid, my dad was grinding some bricks
with a grinding wheel and the wheel shattered and cut both his legs
wide open. And I remember as a kid, taking him to the hospital and
them having to sew up right down to the bone. I mean, this was a real
problem. I know this firsthand. This is a very, very unsafe tool if
used incorrectly.
Daniel: Yeah. And the worst part
of building these applications are the shock value photos that my
clients will send me. I'll wake up in the morning and they'll say,
"hey, this is a good example of why to learn about the safe
operation of these tools." And they'll send me a photo of
something similar to what happened to your dad, which is super
unfortunate. And additionally to that, we've done a lot of work in
the welding space, and on the more promotional side, our most recent
deployment is called Level Up VR, which we developed with the USAF
Workers of Tomorrow, an organization that promotes safe work sites
and safe work practices for both employers and employees for youth.
And that tool actually won an Impact Marketing Award for the use of
the virtual reality tool in the campaign that was created to raise
awareness. So we see both the marketing side and the education side.
Alan: That's amazing. Safe
working is something that we need to market to. Training and
education and learning is really competing with Hollywood movies,
triple-A games and socia
36 min
December 27, 2019 Adding a New Dimension to Music in XR, with Goldenvoice’s Sam Schoonover
Alan puts it best in this episode of XR for Business: Sam Schoonover’s job with Goldenvoice is to create “wow” moments at music festivals like Coachella. Sam talks about the groundwork they’ve laid at Coachella for immersive reality so far, and where he plans to take it going forward.
Alan: Coming up next on the XR
for Business Podcast, we have Sam Schoon over from Goldenvoice and
Coachella, my favorite music festival in the world. We’re going to be
talking about augmented reality spaceships, augmented reality
portals, bringing video to life in a AR and El Pollo Loco. All that
and more coming up next on the XR for Business Podcast.
Sam, welcome to the show.
Sam: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure,
man. As you know — and as people on the show who know because I’ve
mentioned it before — Coachella is one of my absolute favorite music
festivals. And having been a deejay for 20 years myself, I’ve been to
a few. Coachella is just this magical place. So I’m really excited to
unlock two of my favorite things — music festivals and XR — with
you on the show. So, thank you so much.
Sam: Yeah, absolutely. Me as
well. I think a lot of people out there would agree with you.
Alan: Yeah, man. So tell me, how
did you end up working with Coachella and what have you done before
and how did you get there? Let’s just get into it.
Sam: Previous to this job, I was
doing a whole assortment of different things in the music industry,
and I guess the technology industry as well. I was a freelance
website developer, and had also been curating music and had developed
a playlist curation application. And then alongside that, I was
promoting with various promoters in San Diego and Los Angeles and
touring shows. And that eventually — that and a music blog and I was
doing at the time — introduced me to the guy who started Splash
House, which is a smaller music festival in Palm Springs. And through
him, I met the Goldenvoice team and I got involved at Goldenvoice
Digital, and in a roundabout way, ended up focusing entirely on
innovation just for Coachella.
Alan: What a dream job for
somebody like… “here, your job is to focus on innovation, make
really cool things that nobody’s done in the world, for the most
impressive festivals in the world.”
Sam: Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s a
lot of fun. It’s fun to be able to focus on new things every day. And
we have like just such an incredible team at Goldenvoice, the people
who have been doing Coachella for the past 20 years are still
involved and still loving it. And they’re really the reason why this
job even exists, because they appreciate innovation and they
understand its place and our future. And and they understand that
innovating and experimenting and sometimes failing, but always trying
is a part of what makes things great and stand the test of time.
Coachella is in a unique situation, where it’s a successful music
festival and it’s a successful business, so we have the ability to
spend money on experiences like that, while not every festival out
there is so lucky.
Alan: Yeah. And you guys —
well, “you guys,” I think it was before you even got there
— but Coachella is no stranger to virtual and augmented reality. I
remember in, oh man, it must be 2015/16, Coachella livestreamed 360
content to VR headsets and I believe it was pushing to the — it was!
— it was the Samsung GearyVR at the time. I remember watching one of
one of the shows from there and thinking, “oh man, I’m literally
like getting crazy FOMO.”
Sam: Yeah, you’re right. It was
kind of our first foray actually into, like, I guess what we would
call the VR industry. I think as a lot of us have learned, those 360
music streaming experiences aren’t super compelling. And I just think
the live music experience is so incredible that they haven’t come
close to replicating that quite yet. But nonetheless, there was a lot
of great learnings. I think it was really fun and also important to
us from a branding perspective to be amongst the first live events
even doing something like that. And it was also a fun addition to the
YouTube livestream, which is a really important experience for us and
the fans.
Alan: I think there is a value
to this. Still, the first experience I ever saw in VR was the Beck
concert by Chris Milk. And I think people did the 360 video and then
they kind of got away from it, but I think it still has value in the
fact that being able to be in places where you can’t go — you can’t
stand next to the artist onstage at Coachella, you can’t be on stage,
you can’t fly over the crowd — there’s certain things like that
where I think there’s still gonna be a value in capturing that
content. And I think the next thing would be how do we capture it
volumetrically? But it’s crazy. But another thing that in 2016, 2017,
you guys did an AR [experience], The Box. For anyone who doesn’t
know, when you get the tickets for a Coachella, it comes in this
beautiful box with your wristbands, your tickets. It’s like a
treasure chest of awesome. And one of the years, the box came with a
full AR app that brought it all the life. How did that come along?
Sam: I think usually when the
Welcome Box lands, it’s like a really exciting time for the fans. And
so we always like to think of experiences that can allude to programs
and initiatives that we’re working on for that year that we can,
like, announce and promote to people during that time. And I think
just the idea of… that year, we recreated like a lot of historic
Coachella art pieces and a new fun, interesting way. And then when
you scanned the Coachella box, it was like this little miniature
version of Coachella with some historical art pieces and some art
pieces from that year. Everything was all lit up and glowing and
sparkling and zoom your phone really far, I think it was the first
time that those 2D triggers really were being seen by the public. It
was just a good opportunity for us to do something that excited
people, and hopefully generated some user content.
Alan: [There was] all sorts of
stuff around, it was pretty awesome. So last year in 20… I guess
this year, 2019, you guys stepped it up in a big way with augmented
reality. You want to talk about the… I just got to talk about the
Spaceship, man. It was crazy.
Sam: Yeah. It was really fun. I
think a little bit of context and background; We at some point in the
future — I don’t think anybody really knows when — but we’re gonna
work very closely with artists to help them develop XR content for
their performances. A very important part of an artist’s performance
that I think a lot of people don’t think about is the stage from
which they’re performing on. And that stage introduces a lot of
confines and restrictions as to what the artists can do, and how the
fan is going to view the show. We’re not ready. I don’t think artists
are ready to incorporate that content into their performances. I
think it’s a little bit cost-prohibitive. But what we could do is
start to scope out what it looks like to build XR experiences around
a music festival stage. That was kind of the point of the activation
that we did this year — I would say this last year too, but it’s
still 2019 — last year we worked with a vendor called Portals XR,
and we equipped the music festival stage with AR for the first time.
We chose the Sahara tent, which is a stage that holds some of the
most visually-impactful production at the entire festival. It’s where
we look to book a lot of EDM and hip hop acts, and I think there is
kind of a younger demo there. And we figured that perhaps–
Alan: That stage is amazing, I
got to see David Guetta on that stage. He was awesome.
Sam: A lot of dance music and
hip hop have played that festival stage since that music really got
re-popularized in the early teens. So what we did was, they ingested
a bunch of stage renderings from our stage design vendor and created
a virtual replica of that stage. And we used the screens as markers
to activate the content. And then we designed a bunch of different
space-themed 3D elements and position them inside the tent. So some
of those elements were positioned universally for all users — which
means that everyone saw them in the same location based on where you
were scanning the screen from — and then some AR positioned locally.
And there were elements that were kind of duplicated above the heads
of each user. The content we designed was three different phases. The
first was space objects; there was like a sun that was kind of
centrally located in the middle of the tent, with various planets
orbiting around it. And then the next phase was more focused around
manmade objects. And there is a space station and asteroids and of
course, like this gigantic, almost life-size space shuttle that came
out of the middle of the tent, it would just fly back and forth
throughout it.
We also did a 3D rendering and
animation of this astronaut art installation that we had on site this
year that was called Overview Effect. And the last phase was another
animation of an art installation called HIPO — that stands for
Hazardous Inter-Planetary Object — it was this artist group that’s
been at Coachella three times, and it’s essentially a bunch of people
dressed up as hippos, and they attempt to build the various
structures on-site. And this year was like a really discombobulated
and disjointed spacecraft. We animated it flying around the tent with
hippos hanging off it and crashing into things. We wanted to have
three phases because we wanted there to be something different for
people each time they came back. And these experiences only happened
in between artists’ sets. So it wasn’t happening while artists were
playing, because we don’t want to interfere with artists’ shows and
we also really don’t want to try and enable or inspire people to be
using their phones during artists’ performances. I don’t think they
want it. Truthfully, I’m not really not convinced that people want to
experience things through their phones.
Alan: They might want to capture
a segment and throw it on Instagram. And that’s about it.
Sam: Exactly. Exactly. So we’re
trying to stay away from that, for at least these first few years
until we gather some more learnings.
Alan: Do you think it will
change when it goes to head-worn? Because if I’m wearing a pair of
glasses and can still dance and see my friends and party, but the
stage is in three dimensions all around me, that’s different than
holding up a six-inch phone or whatever it is, and trying to look
through a screen.
Sam: 100 percent agree.
Alan: And the great thing about
what you guys did there is there’s lots of time in between acts.
You’ve got maybe half an hour or 40 minutes in between Jacked on each
stage. So that gives you this beautiful window of time to experiment.
Sam: Totally. That was exactly
the idea.
Alan: How did you get people to
do it? Did you put things up on the screen?
Sam: We have a lot of different
marketing channels. We were talking about it on socials, on-site. We
were sending mobile messages. We have very, very high penetration of
people who are using the Coachella application on-site, and we can
send messages to them based on where they are. So we sent a lot of
messages to people as they walking into the Sahara tent with
instructions on how to use the experience. And I think that’s where
we’ve got a lot of people.
Alan: It’s super, super cool. I
really regret not getting to Coachella this year.
Sam: We should have had you come
and DJ, Alan.
Alan: I actually DJ’ed for
Heiniken House a few years ago. We brought the Emulator there and we
built — because, along the lines of technology, Heineken being one
of the sponsors that year (I think every year pretty much) — they
brought the emulator in, and instead of letting the DJs play on it,
which is cool, they let the audience play on it and try and make
their own mixes. We turned it into a thing called the Remix-perience.
It allowed anybody to walk up, and it was all these buttons with 32
buttons on it, and didn’t matter what button or combination you
pressed. One row was vocals. One was synths. One was bass. One was
drums. And you could just make your own thing. So basically, it was a
big MIDI controller for Ableton in the backend.
Sam: That’s very cool.
Alan: Super cool. We had a lot
of fun too. To mix of Coachella was awesome.
Sam: Yeah, very much so.
Alan: We were staying in the
Heineken… not the Heineken House on-site, but they actually rent a
giant house, and we’re staying there and we went to a party next door
and it was Skrillex, his place that he rented.
Sam: Yes, I think I was actually
at that party, funny enough.
Alan: There was all kind of
industry people.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
Alan: So much fun. So what is
something that you kind of have seen in the last six months since
Coachella that you’re like, “wow, we’ve got to try that.”
What’s something that’s wowed you? Because I mean, you’re creating
“wow.” What wows you?
Yeah, sure. I mean, this industry and
this field is so exciting, because there’s so much happening at all
times. I think, off the top of my head, a few things that are
exciting are when I think of a lot of the progress that has been made
around the cloud, and the ability to create point clouds and
renderings of 3D objects to build AR experiences on top of, that are,
like, three-dimensional. That technology is now a lot easier. We’ve
seen Snapchat introduce the capability with land markers and I think
there’s a lot of players in the space that are doing some really
exciting things, enabling people to capture the point clouds with
just their phone cameras and making those 3-D maps small enough for a
file size that we can deploy it on-site at an event. We’re always
worried about connectivity. If you’ve been to Coachella you know it’s
not always easy to get a signal. So those point clouds that are small
enough to be able to deliver to people on-site is important stuff. I
think a lot of the engines that are enabling people to overlay AR
content onto videos and like live videos, I think all that is really,
really interesting.
Alan: You’ve got to meet my
friend Luke from Geni.
Sam: Yeah, I know Luke.
Alan: You know Luke? Awesome.
Sam: Yeah, yeah.
Alan: Luke’s a good friend. So,
yeah. That’s exactly what they do, is overly AR on top of videos.
Moving videos.
Sam: Yeah, I know.
Alan: It’s not an easy problem
to solve, actually.
Sam: No, not at all. I think
that creates some interesting opportunities for artists to capture
content — live content –, with AR elements on top of that, whether
that relates to a show or something in one of their studios or
whatever it may be.
Alan: Because everybody watches
music videos on YouTube these days. So even having a little symbol at
the bottom, saying “point your phone at this symbol,” and
maybe it’s just a bar code or something. But being able to use your
phone — because let’s be honest, everybody sits there with their
phone watching TV, like it’s just a thing — if you’ve already got
your phone in your hand, why not point it at the TV and see
three-dimensional things coming out of the TV screen at home? At a
concert that’s different, you want to be fully there and present with
your friends. But sitting at home watching a YouTube video, it would
be pretty awesome to have Eminem step out and be in your living room.
Sam: For sure. I totally agree.
I think the last thing I’ll add to that list is just the decreased
cost of producing experiences like this, I think, will enable us to
deploy more, and offer them to some of our brand partners as well.
Alan: And I don’t know if it’s
been done or it’s been in the works, but I want to see a volumetric
capture stage, or just a volumetric capture rig setup for a brand,
where people can basically get a 30-second selfie of them
volumetrically, and then push that out and send an AR selfie from
Coachella with all their friends.
Sam: I think that would be
really awesome. As soon as you find a way to make that somewhat
affordable, you let me know.
Alan: We’ll talk offline. I have
a few solutions to that.
Sam: OK, great.
Alan: I mean, let’s be honest:
it’s pretty badass to be able to do a volumetric selfie.
Sam: Yeah, for sure it is. I
think it’s also the ability to deploy or distribute that selfie in a
way that keeps it volumetric and as an AR asset is also important.
Alan: Yeah, we just invested in
a platform that will allow you to do that on Web. Completely on Web.
That’ll be launched next year. But yeah, we’ll talk. Super fun. What
else have you seen that you’re just like “man, we got to have
that?” I know we can’t talk about what’s coming up next this
year or next year, but let’s dig in to see what excites you. What
have you seen? Have you tried Magic Leap?
Sam: I have tried the Magic
Leap, yeah. And Nreal.
Alan: The Nreal ones are great.
Sam: A few of the others. Yeah,
they are. I would love to do some sort of activation on-site, almost
like a silent disco with–
Alan: Silent disco? What?
Sam: Yeah. It would be fun. The
only issue is that there is a lot of operational difficulties in
terms of distributing those glasses, the cost of those glasses.
Getting someone to pay for it and such. But I think something like
that will be very possible. And sometime in the next few years.
That’ll be fun. I think also it’s interesting. That is really
exciting me is the innovation happening around UX and UI for AR
experiences, and what the UX/UI overlay on top of a camera for people
who are experiencing an AR world of sorts will look like.
Alan: Have you seen the new
Snapchat glasses?
Sam: I have not.
Alan: So version 3… and
Snapchat, listen; I think Snapchat is gonna be the sleeper. You’ve
got Magic Leap, you’ve got Nreal, you’ve got HoloLens, you’ve got all
these companies. But Snapchat, their new glasses, just do what they
did before, they take a video, but in post-production. So you stream
the video to your phone and then you can add digital content on it
after the fact and then post it as if it was in the real world while
you were making the video. That’s gonna be super cool.
Sam: That is gonna be super
cool. I agree with you that there’s the sleeper. I feel like they’ve
kind of just pivoted a little bit and are working actively towards
becoming this AR platform of the future, and kind of really focusing
on that. Right?
Alan: Well, if you think about
it, my guess is — and I could be wrong on this, but I don’t think so
— Snapchat is the biggest user of augmented reality in the world.
Hands down. They do about a trillion stops a year and a huge number
of those, proportionately, I think it’s something like 90 percent of
Snapchat users have used the AR function in the last week. It’s nuts.
And they don’t use the word “AR” at all. They just use the
lens, so people that are using ARE are not even thinking about it as
AR, which is fine. That’s great.
Sam: Yeah, I think that’s really
important, when it comes to how as business owners, how we position
these types of experiences. I think there’s a lot of people who tend
to use the industry jargon, which is kind of unapproachable to the
end consumer. We did some surveys last year and we found out that the
majority of people — we were just surveying people inside the Sahara
tent — asking them a few quick questions about AR, and the majority
people have no idea what that is. So I think sometimes we tend to use
industry jargon in our public-facing promotions, because we want
people to think that we’re forward-thinking and cutting-edge, when in
reality, we could probably do a lot better for engagement and for
just involving people in the program if we built more of a story
around it, and didn’t use those types of words. Like Snapchat does;
they’re like, “space filters,” and they’re creating
experiences that are AR, but people don’t think of it like that. And
so theirs is a little bit more approachable to them. And I think
that’s really important.
Alan: And I think one of the
things that even location-based VR, for example, one of the things
that I realized was amazing in Dubai was this place called VR Park.
And they took regular HTC Vive Games, which only need a 10×10 space.
And if you look at it, it’s not very sexy. It’s two sensors and the
headset. But what it did was they put a whole physical set around it.
So when you walked into the thing, you were in a bank. It was the
John Wick game. So you walked into this bank and it was all built
like a facade. And then you went into a bank vault and like all the
drawers were scattered everywhere. Then you put on the VR headset and
you’re kind of in that realm. And I thought that was a really good
way to prepare people emotionally and psychologically for the
experience. The Void is the opposite of that, where they’ve built
everything into the experience, where they’ve got scent machines and
haptics and things you can touch. But it’s all digital mixed with the
kind of physical that you can’t see. And I don’t know if you’ve ever
been to The Void, but if you take your heads off, it’s pretty
uninspiring. It’s just like, wood walls, there’s nothing there. It
totally breaks your presence.
Sam: Totally. I did the IMAX
experience that was around — I don’t know if it’s still around in
L.A. — who would you recommend, on that note? Void or Sandbox, which
is the more compelling experience? Have you tried them both?
Alan: Which one?
Sam: The Void or the Sandbox VR?
Alan: I haven’t tried Sandbox’s.
I’ve done the Void. How’s Sandbox?
Sam: I haven’t done it yet.
That’s why I was asking you, is it worthwhile?
Alan: The Void is amazing. If I
were you guys, I would even just make a deal with the Void to have a
Void system setup at Coachella, for 20 bucks a person the whole
weekend, because it is an amazing experience, and you can share with
multiple people.
Sam: Interesting.
Alan: It would take nothing to
build on site. I don’t think.
Sam: Because it’s really just a
box, isn’t it?
Alan: What they did — and I
think why Sandbox is gonna be successful — is because they didn’t go
for these giant free-room spaces. They took a 2,500 square foot space
and made it through redirected walking. So you feel like you’re in
this infinite space moving around and interacting with things, but
you’re really in a small room with a door.
Sam: Yeah, that’s interesting.
It is wise to keep the square footage down because ultimately those
businesses are also real estate businesses too.
Alan: 100 percent. It comes down
to number of people you can get through per hour. So it’s throughput
times the square footage, and that’s how you get your revenue model.
So having a big footprint is not in your best interest as a
location-based entertainment experience.
Sam: Yeah. That same throughput
is how we predict experiences like that at Coachella. We had a big
projection-mapped dome experience that HP was the brand partner on.
And you know, we’re thinking about that experience. We’re constantly
measuring throughput. How many people are gonna see it? How many
hours is the festival open? What’s the line going to be like? All
those things are really important metrics when we consider those
physical activation experiences.
Alan: It’s absolutely true. And
I think one of the things that Coachella does really well is spread
it out so that there’s adventure in every corner. Even if you just
look at the map of Coachella; it’s vast, like walking from one end of
the festival to the other is like 40 minutes. It’s a really amazing
experience to be in such a big place. But at night, you’ve got the
silent disco times. You’ve got, what is it, seven stages? Six stages?
Sam: Yeah, seven stages.
Alan: Food vendors everywhere.
And one of the stages is like a nightclub. You walk in, it’s the
middle of the day in…
Sam: Yuma Tent!
Alan: Oh, my God. It’s so
amazing walking in. It’s totally blacked out. Laser lights, smoke.
You feel like it’s like 5:00 in the morning. You’re jammin out. You
walk outside, it’s sunny. It’s like noon. Crazy.
Sam: Yuma tent was cool. Yuma
tent came around before, like, the house and techno revolution even
hit America and it’s been just chugging along ever since. It’s a fan
favorite for sure.
Alan: Yeah. My buddy does the
lighting there. Steve Lieberman, he does a lot of the lighting for
that specific tent.
Sam: Very cool.
Alan: He does like all stage
designs for monster festivals and stuff. So it’s pretty exciting
stuff.
Sam: The lighting in that tent
alone is incredible.
Alan: It really is.
Sam: How far can you take club
lighting and put it in the context of music festival?
Alan: Apparently pretty far.
Sam: Yeah, very far!
Alan: I’m looking at some of the
new stages coming out of EDC and like just the big festivals and man,
every year there’s a new type of light. This year there’s one that’s
like a really, really tight, thin beam on a moving head. When you
have a hundred of them coming out of the stage, it’s just, “wow,
that’s incredible.”.
Sam: Yeah. They really start
blending the lines between lights and lasers and the functionality of
both. It’s pretty, pretty awesome.
Alan: It really is. And that’s
really a form of of virtual and augmented reality. You’re augmenting
the whole space. A good lighting designer not only kind of has this
front facing, “here’s all of the things,” but a lot of
it… like, for example, what’s the tent called? The big one with the
DJs?
Sam: Sahara.
Alan: Sahara tent. There’s
lights all over the tent. Above you, behind you, around you. It just
makes you feel like you’re in something bigger than just a stage with
an artist in front. It’s all enveloping your senses.
Sam: Immersive, I think, is the
word we like to use.
Alan: That is the word!It is.
And now I have a question. Have you guys ever thought about using
scent machines as part of the stage show?
Sam: You know, it might have
been proposed at some point. I don’t work around stage production or
artist production. That’s much more well-equipped colleagues of mine.
I’m sure they’ve proposed it at some point.
Alan: So the thing with AR,
you’ve got glasses — Nreal, Magic Leap — we go to these glasses.
But really it comes down to anything at scale right now. It’s the
device in everybody’s pocket. It’s the little magic window of your
phone. But it’s predicted, and I think we’re on track, that over
2-billion smartphones will be AR enabled by the end of this year.
Sam: I sure hope so. That is the
focus of our mobile AR strategy at Coachella: Smartphones.
Alan: So let me ask you a
question. And this goes beyond the actual festiva;. How do you then
engage people that aren’t at the festival to participate somehow?
Because, like, I can’t always be there, but I would love to
participate. So how do you see that happening?
Sam: I think that part of that
has to come with volumetric experiences. And I think part of it has
to come with enabling artists to deploy AR content that they might
own through the mobile application. Because we have more people
download the application than even attend the festival. So there’s a
lot of people like yourself who download the application, and they
want to know about Coachella, what’s happening, and what’s new. What
we’re tinkering with — and there’s a lot of artists now who have
created AR content for their brand or their music releases, whether
it’s a phase filter or a portal of some sort — when you go onto
artists’ pages on the app, you can see various links out to their
social platforms; to music with our partner, YouTube Music. And, you
know, one day there will be a place where you can see AR content that
they’ve created and want to deploy at Coachella or either people to
take pictures with on-site or for people who are at home watching the
YouTube livestream, to deploy into their coffee table.
Alan: Cannot wait! I’m so
excited. How many employees does Coachella have for that one
festival?
Thousands and thousands. I don’t know
an exact number, but the staff for Coachella, it goes up and down
over the course of the year, depending upon the season. But come
January, there’s a lot of people that start working full time on the
festival all the way through the end of April. And so it balloons
from January through April, and then the month of April when you have
a lot of the temporary but very important staff on site like security
guards and stage managers and the people who are building the stages.
You know, it gets to thousands and thousands of people.
Alan: Have you guys ever thought
about using VR as a training mechanism for those thousands of people?
Something as simple as putting them in an experience where they just
get to kind of wander around from point to point, so that people that
are maybe new to the festival who don’t know where everything is,
they can familiarize themselves with not only the safety and
security, but also where things are now so that they’re more helpful
on on-site.
Yeah, sure. I think it’s an interesting
concept. There’s also just at this time, a cost/benefit analysis that
we have to run. You know, if we’re gonna give them a virtual tour of
Coachella, what does it cost to create that virtual space of
Coachella? How else are we leveraging that asset or utilizing it in
other programs? These are just kind of the questions that we have to
ask ourselves. But I think as the tech to produce and just deploy
those things gets cheaper, it’s definitely something that we would
look at, especially when it comes to jobs that might be a little
risky or unsafe to practice or training and giving people the ability
to do that in a virtual space would be important and safer.
Alan: I think also we’ve been
talking about this on the show repeatedly, but one VR headset can
train multiple people. You could provide training to 100, 200 people
with one headset. It doesn’t have to be one headset per person. So I
think there’s definitely, for the unsafe and risky, but also just
general understanding of where things are before people come on site.
Because thousands of employees, you want to make sure they all have a
baseline of knowledge of things. And with VR, you can actually start
to test that as well, and then test their proficiency. And not so
much test them as just make sure they’re prepared.
Sam: Absolutely. Especially when
it comes down to a lot of times, the security guards are the front
line from the fans perspective. They likely will not talk to one
Goldenvoice staff member their entire time at Coachella, but they
talk to security guards all the time, asking them where things are,
where to find things, where the entrance or exit is. And those
security guard are great for that reason. And it would probably be
more beneficial if they knew where specific things were that
sometimes they might not know the answer to. So it would be useful
from a training perspective, and it would also be useful for a fan
perspective, if they could get an idea before they enter the festival
site, kind of get a virtual tour of the festival site — without
giving away anything, of course.
Alan: Let’s talk about it
further off line, because I think this is something that intrigues
me. How do we train thousands of people quickly and bring them up to
a certain level of proficiency and then reuse those assets for a
different way? And one of the things that we keep telling our
customers is, look, if you’re going to build like a virtual whatever,
maybe it’s a machine and you bring in your CAD data and you train
somebody on the machine. Well, that same 3D data that we just spent,
maybe $50,000 taking it from CAD to putting it into 3D and then
putting it into VR. Well, that same thing, that same asset, can be
used in a AR. It can be used on your Web site. It can be used for
training, can be used for marketing. I think a lot of companies see
it as just a cost center, like, “oh, this is going to cost a lot
of money.” But if you, like you said, re-use and recycle this
material throughout the organization, you actually end up spreading
out the cost quite a bit and getting more value and benefit from it.
Sam: Yeah, I absolutely agree.
Should definitely have that conversation.
Alan: We shall. Awesome. What
else do you want to talk about? Is there anything else that you want
to talk about? To share before we wrap this up?
Sam: You know, I think maybe
just kind of hype — and I know that kind of purpose of this podcast
is to kind of help inform and inspire people to use XR — and I think
there’s a lot of incredible advice out there around the technology
and its use cases in a business context. But I think what a lot of
people don’t talk about enough is just that we should always be
thinking about ways in which we can tell a story and create a program
that I think is more relatable and fits in to… it has to obviously
fit into the brand, but, you know, you can also think about how that
fits into the story of consumers who use your products or services.
There was a really great example. One of my favorite business use
cases was El Pollo Loco did this mural activation. Did you see
anything about it?
Alan: I didn’t actually dig into
it, but I did see that it was there. It basically hold your phone up
to I think was a painting on a wall or something, wasn’t it?
Sam: Yeah. It was in honor of
Hispanic Heritage Month and El Pollo Loco celebrated Mexican heritage
and a lot of their customers by bringing five different murals to
life in L.A. And there was also like a real-world aspect to their
initiative where they donated some of their storefronts as a place
for real-life murals to take place.
Alan: Super cool.
Sam: I thought that was just
such a great story. That’s super relatable. And if you’re a person
who has no idea anything about AR or even what that means, it’s still
something that is going to inspire you to pick up the phone and give
it a try. And I think that’s an example of a great success in this
space.
Alan: I love things that bring a
wider education or social aspect to it like that, bringing a focus to
Hispanic heritage. It’s really wonderful. And for anybody who’s
flying into L.A., El Pollo Loco is within a block of the airport.
It’s always my first up. Those dollar chicken things are great. And
then In and Out Burger. Man, that’s like my L.A. staple.
Sam: Where is In And Out’s AR
experience, man?
Alan: It doesn’t seem like a
brand fit. To be honest.
Sam: They’re definitely not a
brand fit. They have five things on the menu for the entire lifetime
of the company.
Alan: No, probably not. What is
one problem in the world that you want to see solved using XR
technologies?
Sam: I think that XR’s power to
inspire empathy in certain situations is really strong. So I don’t
necessarily have one specific problem, but I think that people who
can use VR to view the planet from above, or experience a day in the
life of someone who lives in a favela, or use AR to better understand
issues or problems that are plaguing society around the world. The
use of that technology will inspire more people to get involved with
these issues, and that’s kind of a sum result that I’m excited to
experience.
37 min
December 27, 2019 Adding a New Dimension to Music in XR, with Goldenvoice's Sam Schoonover
Alan puts it best in this episode of XR for Business: Sam Schoonover’s job with Goldenvoice is to create “wow” moments at music festivals like Coachella. Sam talks about the groundwork they’ve laid at Coachella for immersive reality so far, and where he plans to take it going forward.
Alan: Coming up next on the XR
for Business Podcast, we have Sam Schoon over from Goldenvoice and
Coachella, my favorite music festival in the world. We're going to be
talking about augmented reality spaceships, augmented reality
portals, bringing video to life in a AR and El Pollo Loco. All that
and more coming up next on the XR for Business Podcast.
Sam, welcome to the show.
Sam: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure,
man. As you know -- and as people on the show who know because I've
mentioned it before -- Coachella is one of my absolute favorite music
festivals. And having been a deejay for 20 years myself, I've been to
a few. Coachella is just this magical place. So I'm really excited to
unlock two of my favorite things -- music festivals and XR -- with
you on the show. So, thank you so much.
Sam: Yeah, absolutely. Me as
well. I think a lot of people out there would agree with you.
Alan: Yeah, man. So tell me, how
did you end up working with Coachella and what have you done before
and how did you get there? Let's just get into it.
Sam: Previous to this job, I was
doing a whole assortment of different things in the music industry,
and I guess the technology industry as well. I was a freelance
website developer, and had also been curating music and had developed
a playlist curation application. And then alongside that, I was
promoting with various promoters in San Diego and Los Angeles and
touring shows. And that eventually -- that and a music blog and I was
doing at the time -- introduced me to the guy who started Splash
House, which is a smaller music festival in Palm Springs. And through
him, I met the Goldenvoice team and I got involved at Goldenvoice
Digital, and in a roundabout way, ended up focusing entirely on
innovation just for Coachella.
Alan: What a dream job for
somebody like... "here, your job is to focus on innovation, make
really cool things that nobody's done in the world, for the most
impressive festivals in the world."
Sam: Yeah, sure. I mean, it's a
lot of fun. It's fun to be able to focus on new things every day. And
we have like just such an incredible team at Goldenvoice, the people
who have been doing Coachella for the past 20 years are still
involved and still loving it. And they're really the reason why this
job even exists, because they appreciate innovation and they
understand its place and our future. And and they understand that
innovating and experimenting and sometimes failing, but always trying
is a part of what makes things great and stand the test of time.
Coachella is in a unique situation, where it's a successful music
festival and it's a successful business, so we have the ability to
spend money on experiences like that, while not every festival out
there is so lucky.
Alan: Yeah. And you guys --
well, "you guys," I think it was before you even got there
-- but Coachella is no stranger to virtual and augmented reality. I
remember in, oh man, it must be 2015/16, Coachella livestreamed 360
content to VR headsets and I believe it was pushing to the -- it was!
-- it was the Samsung GearyVR at the time. I remember watching one of
one of the shows from there and thinking, "oh man, I'm literally
like getting crazy FOMO."
Sam: Yeah, you're right. It was
kind of our first foray actually into, like, I guess what we would
call the VR industry. I think as a lot of us have learned, those 360
music streaming
37 min

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