Augmenting Enterprise Productivity, with Altoura’s Jamie Fleming and Bharat Ahluwalia

XR for Business

English - April 07, 2020 10:00 - 34 minutes - 31.3 MB - ★★★★★ - 12 ratings
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Previous Episode: Making AR Focals Functional and Fashionable, with North’s Stefan Alexander

Next Episode: Exploring XR Collaboration Statistics in Real-Time, with National Research Group’s Lauren Xandra

One of the best use cases for XR technologies is training and enterprise solutions, as long-time listeners know. Today’s guests, Jamie Fleming and Bharat Ahluwalia from Altoura, pop by to explain how they’re optimizing workplace productivity.

Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan
Smithson here, with the XR for Business podcast. Today, we're
speaking with Bharat Ahluwalia and Jamie Fleming from Altoura about
augmenting enterprise productivity for frontline workers using
spatial technologies. All that and more coming up next on the XR for
Business podcast. Jamie and Bharat, welcome to the show, my friends.

Jamie: Hey, thanks, Alan. Super
happy to be here.

Alan: I'm really excited. So,
Bharat, I know offline you were just-- you were mentioning that you
were part of the original Hololens team. So I know how you got
started in this. Jamie, you've been building experiences for 15 years
in technology. So maybe just give us a bit of your background and
we'll go from there.

Jamie: Sure, yeah. For starters,
this is Jamie. So I actually started out in architecture. I have a
masters of architecture, and worked as an architect for a number of
years. And that's really where I was given an introduction to 3D
modeling and building out immersive experiences in the day-to-day
practice of design and got the spark of an idea of, hey, I could
create a company where we really just focused on creating
experiences, and making them more and more interactive that helped --
in the early years, particularly -- help designers understand what
their designs were. And over the years, that has just become more and
more sophisticated and we've gotten deeper, deeper into the software
side of things. Now we really have a lot of interesting ways that we
can leverage these digital twins to help augment enterprise
productivity.

Bharat: And this is Bharat here.
I got started in this space when I joined the Hololens team. It was
an interesting experience. The project was top secret, as you know,
and I wasn't even told what I would be working on until I agreed to
sign the offer letter. But I knew a couple of key people then said,
"OK, these guys get involved and it will be an awesome product."
And it was. The first time I saw the vision video and the vision of
the device, it was, wow. That's what I want to work on. So I worked
on it for a few years, shipped the V1 of the device and was so in
love with this technology, that I decided to leave the company and
build experiences on top of the device and the platform that I was
part of. I did a small startup that led to being acquired by Studio
216, which is now named Altoura. And here I am. And I have been
building Hololens and VR experiences since then.

Alan: It really comes down to
the experiences, because the devices themselves-- the Hololens 2 is a
magical piece of kit, but if nothing's on it, it's kind of useless.
So you decided to go into the experiences. And what are some of the
things that you've been building? Because I've seen some of them, but
I'll let you guys speak to them. What are some of the experiences
that you've been building?

Jamie: Yeah, we're really-- the
one that we're super excited about right now is the work that we've
been doing with Qantas Airlines. So what we've done with Qantas is
we've taken the 737-800 cockpit and we've re-created it as a digital
twin. And then using Hololens 2, we allow you to interact with that
cockpit as if you were there, so you could be sitting in your living
room or a classroom or anywhere really in the world, networked
together and interacting with functions inside the cockpit, the same
way that you would do in a physical simulator. So as we know with
Hololens 2, it's tracking all 25+ points on each of your hands. You
just-- there's very

Jamie: Hey, thanks, Alan. Super
happy to be here.

Alan: I was watching the video as you were talking about it now. You're in a cockpit of this plane where you're actually interacting with it. You're with another person. But in the real world, there's just two people sitting on chairs in a room. It's crazy.

Jamie: Yeah. You know, it's
important as cool as Hololens 2, is -- and it does definitely open up
opportunities in terms of training, because it is so natural -- but
we understand that people need to have different devices to support
them at different times, for what they're trying to achieve. So we
see a lot of people also using tablets or phones or PCs to do the
same training and be networked across devices. So it's super
important to match the right kind of device application device type
to the use case.

Alan: Also, you can't expect
everybody in a corporation to use Hololens. It's just not the perfect
device for everybody until-- it will be, maybe, in a couple of years.
But I think you're absolutely right being able to do that, and maybe
the future of that is in Web.

Bharat: It definitely feels like
it. What we have seen is there are two types of usage scenarios.
There's a usage scenario which is more like a console or gaming
console, in the sense you decide that I'm going to be in this
experience for an hour or 30 minutes. And in that case, for you to be
inside a Hololens actually makes a lot more sense, like if you're
going through that flight simulator training. And then the other use
case which we have seeing -- say, in real estate vertical -- is much
more casual. When people come in, they pick up a device, they explore
the space, they walk around, they change some options, and that gives
them more confidence in their purchase decision. But that's like a
five minute experience. Having to wear a Hololens for that experience
may not be worth it. So that's where we've kind of seen how the
devices have worked out. If you know you're going to be in that
experience for a large amount of time, then that initial investment
of wearing the device and getting acquainted by it gives you back the
ROI you need. Whereas if you're going to come there casually move
around for five minutes and change a few options -- very basic
interactions -- then the tablet device works out much better.

Alan: And that's something that
you guys have worked on with one of the telco companies.

Jamie: Right. With Sprint, I'll
just give you kind of a quick introduction to how that project came
into being, which was was really interesting. We do a lot of work
with Microsoft in helping serve their customers across a variety of
use cases. And we were in Atlanta talking to a group of Sprint-- the
different leaders within Sprint. They were spread between the
training, the retail layout team, and the network team. And we went
in quickly with our solution. We were able to build a digital twin of
a Sprint store. They didn't have the CAD drawings to support that
exact store. So we just-- through a process called photogrammetry, we
quickly were able to recreate the digital twin of that retail store,
and bring it and show the team.

Alan: And I know you-- one of the previous podcast guests, Jonathan Moss, he was spearheading that project. Is that correct?

Jamie: Yes, exactly. And
Jonathan was very instrumental in helping us understand the
connections of really how to leverage that digital twin to fit
seamlessly within an L&D team's typical process of how they would
go through and engage their employees on doing things like how to
interact with different customer personas. Jonathan was really
visionary in leading and helping us understand that better.

Bharat: We are not training
experts, right? We build the tech, but having Jonathan and his team
on the other side really helped us complete that picture, so we could
see what they were wanting to achieve, and the process that they
followed. And that helped us mature our platform in giving the
toolsets to L&D teams to use. And we've seen that very
successfully adopted by some of our later clients, where they look at
that and said, wow, that's super interesting. In fact, what we want
to do is change our content, just a little bit, to use the same
tools. So that's been great learning as well.

Alan: You guys re-created the
store using photogrammetry. How did that translate to other stores?
Like if it's a different layout type of thing, or was it just a
generic one-store-fits-all kind of thing?

Bharat: So it was just one
store. And I believe they have roughly 10 different store layouts
that each of their store follows. So we had to cover one of them. So
it was a great learning ground for them to say, "Okay, how does
this play for different products in this particular layout?" The
important thing over there is to create the content in such a way
that their team can change it as needed. So they typically will not
change the geometry of the store, but they do want to change the
posters inside it, of what's the latest--

Jamie: Product.

Bharat: --offering or product
that they're offering through it. So that, their team can do very
simply using existing 2D workflows of Photoshop, etc. So that was
important for them, to be able to make those changes without having
to come back to us, once they bought the solution.

Alan: So that they could easily
just transfer out some of the things. Did you have to build something
for that, or how did that work? How were they able to edit it so
easily?

Bharat: We built an auditing
system that helped them edit it easily.

Alan: Now is this multi-device,
I guess -- or do I say agnostic -- can you pull this up on any
smartphone, or can you bring it up in VR? What are the limitations of
it?

Bharat: It's completely device
agnostic. As long as you have a recently-modern device -- iPhone,
Android phones, tablets, laptops -- and when it's AR enabled device
it works in an AR mode, so you can place it around your physical
environment. If you're not on an AR device -- like a laptop -- then
it behaves more like a virtual environment, so you can just move
using keyboard and arrow keys or mouse.

Alan: I guess what was the
feedback from the real people that matter, the employees? Did people
like this? Was this something that-- in both, in the Quantas example
of XR training and the retail Sprint training. What was the feedback
with people? What do people think?

Jamie: That's part of the joy,
and why it's fun coming to work every day, because you are creating
and giving people experiences that really do spark a lot of joy. And
it takes maybe a session that you weren't as quite excited about
watching some tutorial videos or working through a PDF. Suddenly
you're in that environment, you are interacting with that
environment, and there are definitely a lot of oohs and ahhs. And
from the trainer's perspective, having a captive audience that is in
this virtual environment, you know they're not spaced out checking
their cell phones or not paying attention. You can see exactly what
they're doing. They're engaging with one another. And it really is
transforming. We're seeing in feedback that we're getting more
customers, it really is transforming the way that people are engaging
with this learning content.

Alan: Two users as well? Could
you have multiple people using the same experience at once?

Jamie: Yes, absolutely. So you
can have multiple people in that same environment. Those people can
be either physically located in the same area, or they could be
totally separated across geographies. They can be on different device
types. So some people could be in a headset, others could be on a
phone. Maybe the instructor's on a tablet or a computer. So, yes, we
really accommodate people knowing that the value-- a lot of this,
Alan, comes back to what are-- what problems are you solving with
immersive training? Why is immersive training interesting, or should
enterprises be thinking about it? And it comes down to, there are
several different ways to measure the ROI of these applications. And
one is, does this save me any cost as an enterprise? And so we know
that a lot of cost and time and energy is wrapped up in people
traveling to venues, to specific physical locations, to receive the
training. And so the importance of having-- giving people the ability
to stay where they are, but still be networked together in a single
training session, that is critical, I think, for immersive training,
too; to show out and prove out that ROI. I think there are a handful
of different data points of ROI, in different problems that you're
trying to solve. But reduction in travel is certainly a huge one.

Alan: I don't know the exact
number -- because the podcast was recorded a year ago -- but I know
that that Sprint one from Jonathan, it saved them millions in travel
costs.

Jamie: Right. The team-- that
travel team, I believe the stat was that they were on the road about
80 percent of their time. The trainers, they're just constantly on
the road. And being able to stay centralized but network in and train
a session of people anywhere at any time, without even leaving your
home. That was transformational.

Alan: So you guys have built
some pretty amazing experiences. You've got experience in kind of
building the hardware platform. You've built experiences. What's
next? What do you guys see as the ultimate potential of this? Where
does this go from here?

Bharat: So just the technology
as a whole is still evolving, as I'm sure multiple guests have said
this. We do expect augmented reality to be as pervasive as mobile is.
It may take years. At Oculus, they said 10 years. I personally
believe that should be less. I don't know who said the same, I think
Bill Gates said this, "You will always overestimate what you do
in one year, and underestimate what you can do in ten." So this
definitely feels like-- at some point the glasses will be thin enough
and small enough that you can wear them, and when the battery life
will last the whole day. When that happens, you would see a switch to
being a consumer phenomena, just like mobile devices was. But
currently it is definitely an enterprise-first technology. It is
similar to how PCs came about. They first got introduced into the
workspace, and then over time got into everybody's home. Unlike
mobile devices, which kind of did the other way around, people bought
them for their own use and then kind of started putting your own
devices into the workspace stream. So we do think this is a wave
that's coming, and it's going to be used across all kinds of
industries. But in the next two to three years, enterprises is where
it is. And we've chosen this very deliberately that it's what the
frontline workers where your environment influences your
productivity. That's where this technology is so applicable. And
that's what we are seeing. We are seeing it in training, whether it's
flight simulator training, because, of course, your productivity
depends on the flight deck you are in. Or in retail or training
because you're selling in the store. So the more training you can
have in the store, the better your attention is. We're also seeing
you can real estate sales and marketing, it is so much easier to sell
a house or lease out commercial office spaces if the person buying or
leasing can actually see the space, can design in it. So definitely
enterprises is where the focus will be. You've seen Magic Leap pivot
to enterprises. Hololens pivoted between 1 and 2, if you see the
experiences that shipped with Hololens 1 was much more gaming and
entertainment, whereas Hololens 2 was much more enterprises. So
that's where our focus is as well.

Alan: I saw this thing when I
first got into this, I said, "I'm not interested in games. I
want to figure out productivity." So you've done training stuff,
you guys been working-- you used to be called Studio 216. Why the
change in name? Or was it just because you merged and they said, "You
know what, we're gonna be altouristic."

Jamie: [laughs]

Bharat: I'm going to use that
line from now on.

Jamie: Yeah, I know, right?
That's great. You better quickly trademark that, Alan.

Bharat: [laughs]

Jamie: The history and the
legacy of Studio 216 was really about content creation. We've done
literally, I would say, tens of thousands of virtual objects and
environments that we've built out of the last 15 years. A lot of that
was focused on real estate, of building out projects that didn't yet
exist and helping pre-sell or pre-lease them. And it was really
through-- kind of a couple of events happened for our company, one
which we just mentioned that we acquired Bharat's startup and to
help. We were very excited about the cloud component of what he had
built for extended reality and saw it highly applicable to the work
that we were doing with Studio 216. The other kind of major milestone
for us is that we raised venture capital, and as part of that we
raised money to focus on the software applications. And as part of
that we rebranded as our flagship software product, that we call
Altoura. And so we just transitioned the name from Studio 216 to
Altoura.

Alan: What does the flagship
Altoura software actually do?

Jamie: So I'll give you kind of
a high level view of it and Bharat can take you into the weeds, if
you're interested. But at a high level, our software allows the
creation or-- we take a digital twin of an object or an environment,
and we bring it into our software, which immediately allows it to
work across devices. You're connected with voice-over-IP. You have
avatar representations of the different people in the sessions. And
you can easily make that digital twin interactive, depending on what
application you're trying to solve for. If that is sales and
marketing, maybe you want to explore different finishes or different
layouts of an environment. In training, maybe you're following
different steps of how you operate a piece of machinery or how you
interact with customers. And then the other piece that's really
critical for us with Altoura is that we allow our customers to create
their own-- for example, in training just using a web portal, you can
easily integrate your existing L&D content into our software and
expose it in that 3D environment and make it interactive.

Alan: That's super cool. What
does that mean?

Bharat: We basically have a
cloud software. Our app runs in the cloud. It is-- we have clients
with each of our devices that we support from mobile tablets, PCs to
headsets. But the app that's running the state of the app is in the
cloud. So if-- let's say if you are on your iPhone, looking at a
space that we generated, and I'm here in my Hololens looking at it.
If I was to move a table around, you would see that table being moved
as well, because the app's kind of running agnostic of the device,
it's running in the cloud. And so that allows us to do, for example,
what in for one of our clients, there was a slide deck that they had
to go to learn about the product. And yes, you can go to a slide deck
on your laptop, it's a 2D space. But to be able to pull that slide
deck inside the experience and see it next to the product within
having the product OK'd and give you a visual to associate that
training was very important for the client. So that was something we
could easily do. Similarly, for that product, there was a companion
app that the sales representative had to learn as to how to operate.
So we could build a walk-through of that app within that experience.
So you wear the headset or you're on your phone, on your PC. You're
navigating the store, you bring up the device. You can say, I want to
learn about it, I want to see how to use it, or I want to see how to
sell it. And the "sell" would be a roleplay. There would be
a virtual customer come up and have-- you could build up a whole
decision tree where the customer would be saying, "I want to to
do this." And your response as the trainee would be, should you
start selling now, or do you want to understand the requirements
better, or do you still just want to kind of empathize with the
customer? And you could choose your path and go down and complete the
roleplay and get feedback back, like was this the right thing to do
or was that the wrong thing to do? All this while you're feeling like
you're inside the store that you would be actually working in.

Alan: Super cool. So people
could do the training from home before they even stepped foot in the
store?

Bharat: Exactly. And this
company used to have people come in post store closure to do this
training at odd hours, because they couldn't do it while they were
customers in the store. So this allowed them to scale that up pretty
well.

Alan: So does your system allow
them to make it themselves?

Bharat: Yes. In some cases,
there are companies that have dealt with 3D content like the
construction companies. They already know how to deal with 3D. And
for them, it's a very simple training to understand how to transform
assets from standard authoring tools like Autodesk, 3D Max, or Maya
into something that our system can understand. And that's absolutely
about forward. And in some cases retail clients or airlines that
right now don't have the 3D skillsets, they just have us do it. But
what we have starting to see, interestingly, is people are thinking
about investing and hiring people with 3D technology experiences, so
that they can take more control over the content and how this
progresses through their enterprises.

Alan: But I think as we move
forward, 3D is just going to become like video and like audio.
Everybody can do it. One of the stumbling blocks you mentioned is
bringing in 3D models. It seems to be kind of the stumbling block
everybody runs into. Because let's be honest, there is no
standardization yet. So do you guys have your own file format that
you're working with? Or do you use certain specific file formats?

Bharat: That's a great question.
And yes, you're absolutely right. When we were pitching to investors,
for them to even understand that, oh, 3D doesn't have a well-defined
standard format. It's taken for granted in 2D. So that was
interesting. We have our own format, not a file format. So to be
clear, we went after the most optimized format for Unity, which are
Unity AssetBundles. That's the format we support. What we've done is,
we have added a lot of decorations to that AssetBundle. So in the
content itself, you can say, "I want this chair to be
interactive, but I don't want this table to be interactive. I want
this table to be--" Or you could say "This is the product
that I want to associate this decision tree that I created using a
web portal." So you can decorate the content, and our system
understands that and brings up the right experiences. So this allows
us to do a 3D model once and give it to the client, and then the
client can just link 2D content or the decision tree roleplays to
different objects in the 3D space, thus minimizing the need for 3D
changes.

Alan: So is it a specific model,
then? Are you using glTF or...?

Bharat: No, we are using Unity
AssetBundles, so that's the format.

Alan: This is all built on
Unity, then?

Bharat: And Unity AssetBundles
is the most optimized file format that Unity understands and that's
very important, especially for Hololens or any other -- like Magic
Leap -- because their processing powers are so, so limited on what
kind of content they can process.

Alan: So exciting. I'm just--
the questions are so many. I guess the question would be why wouldn't
they just build it on Unity, then?

Bharat: Unity is a big platform
for developers. To reach where we have reached, we've invested
decades of-- personal decades of our team into a place where we are,
where an AssetBundle can be consumed on multiple device types and
work together in a coordinated manner. Yes, you can open up Unity and
create a simple experience and sure, if that's how you want to do it,
that's not a bad format at all. Unity is growing exactly for that
reason. But if you want a scalable enterprise ready system, then that
part is a really hard part. Then having our solution ready, where you
can still take that AssetBundle learning, but use it on our platform,
which does the rest of the things, like distribution, making sure it
is running on all devices, that it's networked. All of those benefits
you get by putting it on our systems.

Alan: Do you guys manage device
management as well?

Bharat: No. We tend to integrate
with an MDM kind of systems, our Hololens MDM is a good system for us
to use. Mobile-- anyway, they already have mobile MDM systems.
Actually, our apps are in the app store. So that's another way, easy
way for them to get, like they don't have to go and install it from
someplace. They can just go download it from the app store, log in
with their credentials and they will get the experiences that they
signed up for.

Alan: I guess it's all running
on cloud, you said. But I know some companies, they want to run it on
premise. Is that possible as well?

Bharat: Yes, we have-- our
system is built on containers. So it's a containerized system, so we
can move it to their cloud. So some of our clients wanted to run it
on their tenant, rather than in ours. So, absolutely. That's easy
enough. And we can run it on local machines, because it's all running
within the container that we can take anywhere. That has been on us,
that sometimes they don't have cloud connectivity in locations that
they want to do training in, for example.

Jamie: Sometimes there are
security issues--

Bharat: Or security issues.

Jamie: --they don't allow them
to do that.

Alan: Yeah, it's-- there's all
sorts of reasons why. Well, you mentioned doing photogrammetry of the
store, for example. Maybe you can elaborate on ways people can
acquire these models?

Jamie: We use a variety of
methods to capture and create a digital twin of an environment. So
photogrammetry is one. Doesn't-- it's not -- I would say -- the best
for every type of application that you're trying to create a 3D
environment. But I think right now it seems like you've got a few
choices. You can buy some generic 3D scenes from digital asset
stores. But more typically, I think you-- if you don't have the
experience in-house, you need to find someone that can create the
digital twin of whatever environment that you're looking for. And
doing that in a cost effective manner, that's going to allow you to
interact with it in the ways that you want to interact with it. So
maybe that's a long-winded way of saying that I think the advantage
right now -- where we've seen a lot of advantages with our customers
that don't have the 3D capability -- is they can engage with a group
like ours to create these environments and then quickly optimize them
and distribute them across devices using our software. The other
piece that we've seen is there's just such a wild price, an effort
range for creating a, say, a training experience, or a sales and
marketing experience. And we all know the industry is maturing. It's
evolving every single day. There are all kinds of fantastic news out
there. But one thing that where we have really benefited is the
ability to quickly stand up for a very low cost, to stand up the
digital twin of an enterprise's environment, and allow them to start
using it in a very short period of time. So it doesn't require a lot
of-- really, it requires no coding in terms of getting these training
set up. It's just the effort of building out an environment usually
takes anywhere from a couple of days. It may take a couple of weeks
depending on the size and scale of this environment. But for an
enterprise to be able to begin training in something within a few
weeks after signing a deal is really transformational.

Alan: That's another issue that
comes up with people, is that they don't want to be locking into a
year long production schedule, to have something made where by the
time it's made, it's obsolete. So I am going to ask you guys one last
question, because we're at 30 minutes here. And what I want to know
from you personally and you can each answer this is, what problem in
the world do you want to see solved using XR technologies?

Jamie: That's the million dollar
question. Coming back to what we have had the opportunity to build
out lots of different-- to solve lots of different problems already
with extended reality. And I think the ones that we're really
interested in are around training, just to be able to give people the
ability to train anywhere in the world, to network with experts
anywhere in the world, to preserve the legacy of what other people
have figured out, and interesting content in the past, to be able to
preserve that and extend it to people in the future. So I would say
it would come down to, there'll be more and more interesting and
exciting ways to propagate training.

Bharat: And in the long term, if
you look at this technology as it was and kind of predict out maybe
even a decade out, it's strongly, strongly believed that this will be
as pervasive as mobile. So maybe the question that I would like to
answer is not that which problem it will solve, but the capabilities
that it will give to us will be so different from what we have now
from mobile phones -- which were so different from PCs -- that I
would be surprised if there is any problem that is not impacted by
this technology. This will solve or this will create solutions or
create opportunities that you can't even think of, just like before
the mobile phone arrived. Like if you were to go maybe in the 1990s,
who would have thought an Uber would be possible? It is only possible
because you have this device with you that you carry at all times. Or
things like Instagram, where you can communicate so effectively,
because you now have a device that can take cam-- that can take
pictures and apply filters on that. So I feel similarly as this
technology grows and especially as it gets into consumer adoption, it
will impact every aspect of our lives, and it will create
opportunities and experiences that we really can't think of right
now.

Alan: If you look back 10 years
-- well, I guess 12 years -- iPhones didn't exist. iPads didn't
exist. And now everybody in the world's got one in their pocket, or
some sort of device like it. What will be the things we do with these
glasses?

Bharat: They will impact every
aspect of communications. I think they will just enhance your quality
of life, in my point of view.

Alan: I couldn't agree more.
Where can people find you guys?

Jamie: They can find us in
Seattle, Washington. Or they can find us at altoura.com.

Alan: Amazing. Well, thank you
guys so much for joining me on the show.

Jamie: All right. Thank you,
Alan.

Bharat: Thanks, Alan. Great to
talk.