Bringing Lego Fish and Global AR Gnomes to Life, with Trigger Global's Jason Yim

XR for Business

English - September 13, 2019 08:38 - ★★★★★ - 12 ratings
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Previous Episode: Making Everyone an Expert, with Scope AR's Scott Montgomerie

Next Episode: The Bugatti Built in VR - XR For Business Podcast News, September 13, 2019

Step 1: Plant augmented reality
gnomes across the world. Step 2: …? Step 3: PROFIT!

Just kidding -- Trigger Global's
army of AR gnomes has a more solid business plan than the Underpants
Gnomes, as well as many other ventures across popular brands,
utilizing mixed reality technologies to bring them to life. CEO Jason
Yim emerges from his hidden meadow to talk about a few of them.

Alan: Hi, my name is Alan
Smithson, the host of the XR for Business Podcast, and today's guest
is Jason Yim. He is the CEO and executive creative director of
Trigger Global, the mixed reality agency. He has creatively led over
150,000 hours of development in mixed reality, including as a Snap
Lens Studio partner, preferred developer for Facebook, and showcase
developer for Euphoria and Google, as well as an early adopter and
early developer for Magic Leap. Yim's recent high-profile work
incorporates mixed reality in marketing for Star Wars: The Last Jedi,
product development for Hot Wheels, and location-based experiences
such as the fish designer for Lego House, and of course, enterprise
tools for AR evaluation tool for Honda. Yim is a recognized speaker
around the world and he has held the stage at major technology and
industry conferences in Singapore, Shanghai, Berlin, Tokyo,
Copenhagen, London, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and all
over the place. Jason's returned to his childhood home to speak at
TEDx Hong Kong on computer vision bringing toys to life. Yim has also
been featured in Apple's first TV show, "Planet of the Apps,"
and won two LA Auto Show award design challenges back to back, with
his partners at Honda Advanced Design. Additionally, Jason has been
assigned four patents in augmented and mixed reality, with several
more pending. To learn more about Trigger Global, you can visit
triggerglobal.com.

Jason, welcome to the show.

Jason: Alan, thanks for that
kind introduction.

Alan: It's amazing, just that
introduction; you think "Holy crap, you've done work with Honda.
You've done work with Lego. You've done work with Snapchat, and
Facebook, and Google." It's crazy, the things that you've done.
And you joined us on stage at AWE this year, to talk about
supercharging your marketing. Tell me about some of the things you
guys are working at right now.

Jason: Yeah, I think for us on
the marketing side it's actually quite an interesting time. We're
seeing basically the market maturing a little bit and then kind of
dividing into two big chunks of work. On the introductory to AR side
of things, we have the social lenses. So that's the
Snap/Facebook/Instagram approach, where it's a small experience for a
smaller budget and it's going through someone else's app, but it's a
much larger user base, which is a good way to start it off. And then
the other group of projects that we work on are kind of larger
development, where the brand can own their own app or they have an
existing app and we're pushing an AR module into that existing app.

Alan: Let's break those into
pieces, here. The first one you mentioned is smaller ones with social
lenses. Can you maybe talk about some of the work you've done in
that?

Jason: Sure. We were one of
Snap's first agencies -- the Lens Studio partners. We actually were
kind of a guinea pig as they were developing the Lens Studio itself.
I believe we're probably one of the first people outside of Snap to
actually use the tool. On the client side, we've worked with
everywhere from Adidas, Pepsi, the NFL, all from sports and brands on
the lens side. On the Snap side, typically they are coming to us. We
either bring opportunities to Snap where we have clients coming in,
and that they're interested in doing a lens, and then we will connect
with a Snap team person as well. Or sometimes Snap brings the
opportunities

Step 1: Plant augmented reality
gnomes across the world. Step 2: …? Step 3: PROFIT!

Jason, welcome to the show.

Jason: Alan, thanks for that
kind introduction.

Alan: Let's break those into
pieces, here. The first one you mentioned is smaller ones with social
lenses. Can you maybe talk about some of the work you've done in
that?

Alan: So you guys are literally
the guinea pigs here. You're the ones who like, "Hey, that's a
great idea. How do we do that? We have no idea; let's call them."

Jason: Yeah, it's actually a
great time, because you get to innovate every single day. Sometimes
they come in with very baked ideas and we just have to figure out how
to execute. And then sometimes it's a little bit more open-ended and
we get to concept from scratch.

Alan: So how are these brands --
especially on the lens side -- how are they measuring success? I
can't imagine it's that cheap. You said it's on the lower end scale,
but what it would be a minimum engagement? $50,000? Or $20,000?

Jason: I would say lenses are,
at the very minimum, it's probably in the $20k-plus range. We tend
not to do very many of those, but we know other people are doing
those. And then it will range up from there. Our sweet spot's
probably -- for lenses -- $40 to $80k, or something like that. More
than that, people are probably pushing it into the app space a little
bit more.

Alan: Ok, so how are they
measuring success with these? Because typical marketers -- and for
the people listening, mixed reality and augmented reality, they're
really pushing the envelope of the technology, but at the same time,
you still need to be able to justify this kind of spend -- so how are
they measuring that?

Jason: Yeah, I think part of the
challenge is sometimes the money is coming from the same budget that
might be coming out of a digital media budget, in which case the Snap
lens or the Facebook effect is basically being compared against more
traditional digital media, like some video buy or a social ad of some
kind. I would say right off the bat that it is very difficult to beat
video placement or something in terms of just impressions. But where
I do think AR wins out, is definitely in engagement, either in
session time, the amount of average time being spent with the
content, or the amount of shares being done with that content. Also
interactions. What are they doing in the Lens itself? Are they
clicking through? Are they doing other things? Are they going through
the transaction and the purchase? Like I think you can pull deeper
interaction through the lens. At this early time, I think that
they're still earned media that you can get, instead of your Snap
lens may get some press, and then that press then gets its own number
of impressions. Or you create a lens, and you create a video out of
that, and then you share that, and then the video of that.

Alan: I've been seeing a lot of
that.

Jason: Yeah.

Alan: It's like the LeBron James
thing, where LeBron comes out of the poster. I think probably only 10
people in the world ever actually did it, but it got a hundred
million impressions from that video. Crazy, the things that are
possible.

Jason: We've done AR things for
some of the big brands that have like seven billion media impressions
worldwide. So the numbers can get quite high that way.

Alan: Wow. What one did you do
that had that many impressions?

Jason: It was a giant movie IP,
which is what we can share, but yeah.

Alan: Oh, okay. Awesome. It's
incredible. So, you talked about the smaller social lenses and that
stuff, using Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram. What about the larger
builds where you're building it for a company under their own app,
that type of thing? What does that typically look like?

Jason: A lot of it comes from
innovation groups, so it's a different budget. On the smaller lens
and effects social AR side, we get a lot of requests via the ad
agency, spending some of the media budget. On the app side, it's
typically more direct to brand for us. The goals are usually a little
bit deeper, so we would recommend an app or module in an existing
app. If you're trying to go for more of a repeat experience or some
sort of deeper technology in the AR experience, like are we tying to
real time stats? Are we tying to some big database on the back end or
besides just the two minutes of fun sort of experience?

Alan: Interesting. There's some
definite ways that this technology can be used for utilitarian
purposes, rather than just entertainment. Is that what you're talking
about there?

Jason: Yes, I think for everyone
in the industry, it has to move in that direction. The marketing
entertainment side of things will always be there, which is great.
But the more basic side of that stuff, I feel, will quickly be a
little bit of a race to the bottom. The higher level type of
entertainment, like let's say you have you're starting to build an
AI, you're starting to push volumetric content, real game engines,
things like that, that there'll still be some premium development
there. But I think that lower level simple lens stuff will very
quickly become a race to the bottom. For AR to be more widely
adopted, we'll be -- again, like you said -- like the usability
stuff. And it doesn't have to be the main feature in an app, just
like GPS and mapping isn't necessarily the main feature in a lot of
apps that we use, but it is a very useful component. Like if I turn
on the Starbucks app and I can find a near Starbucks, I'm not
spending my whole time in the map, but it's a critical piece. AR will
soon be that piece as well.

Alan: I agree, I find it's
really interesting that you mention that, because this came up -- I
think you brought it up, but also some of the other people at the
panel in AWE brought it up -- basically, building AR for the sake of
AR is not what we're going after, building AR is part of something
else. It's just another tool in the toolbox.

Jason: Yeah, and I think we were
getting into some projects now that it's quite interesting what else
we have to tie into, what other backend systems or other technologies
that are involved. Even at AWE, when you had the gentleman from
Macy's up, there's a lot of stats out there right now that are
talking about mixed reality and the effectiveness of it. So I do feel
that it's a great place to be, and I think the future is bright, for
sure.

Alan: You have on your website
here, one of the things I think is just awesome: Travelocity's
roaming gnome. While not utilitarian, probably doesn't move the
needle in terms of inspiring me to travel, but just fun. And it
really drives the brand message home. Who came up with that idea?

Jason: They actually came up to
me at another conference, it was at a Google conference I was
presenting, and they came up to talk about what we could do in AR in
their app. I think the interesting challenge for Travelocity was --
and here's another use of AR -- with Travelocity, you use the app for
booking, of course. Right? But they wanted more engagement after the
booking had been done. Like, how do you keep the Travelocity app
relevant through your entire trip, until you have to book for your
next trip? So that was what AR we were hoping to provide there, was
have something fun to do while you're on the trip, and then also
something sharable to help you remember that trip. And then later on
you could pick up the Travelocity app again when you want to book
your next one.

Alan: So how many gnomes
traveled?

Jason: I actually can't share
that information, but yeah...

Alan: Ah-ha. OK, so there's
gnomes everywhere in the world. Augmented gnomes.

Jason: Yes. Everywhere.

Alan: I think step 2 for that is
to leave them in physical space. So you leave your gnome, and your
gnome is tagged with a message.

Jason: That would be great. Like
a big map for everything.

Alan: Find The Gnome. Yeah. Why
not? You get a lot in hot spots. Canadians all go to either Cuba or
Mexico for the winter. So you'd have these hotspots with all these
gnomes everywhere. And they should be able to interact with each
other. You find somebody else's gnome and your gnome starts--

Jason: If you leave them too
long, they starve.

Alan: They turn to ceramic.

Jason: Yeah. The interesting
part about that, though, was that we were embedding this AR module
into the existing Travelocity app. And that's something that we
recommend to a lot of clients that have an existing app with a user
base, is to instead of building a separate AR app, which is a lot of
lift and you'll spend a lot of money and a lot of energy trying to
drive traffic to a brand new app, just place it within an already
successful app. But that, of course, brings its own giant series of
complications. We were really excited that Travelocity allowed us to
do that because sometimes a lot of clients, if the app that they have
is a primary revenue generator, they are super protective of that.

Alan: Oh yeah, they don't want
you to touch that thing at all.

Jason: Yeah.

Alan: We've run into that as
well. It's one of those things that you're like, "Yeah, if you
break their app, you're screwed."

Jason: Right.

Alan: How do you deal with that?
Do you develop it as a separate thing and then give them a plug-in
for it, or...?

Jason: We want to start
discussing integration at the very beginning of the project. So our
tech teams are normally aligned very early, and the other developer
that actually owns the main app, they probably have a launch cycle
that they are on. So we typically have to dovetail our launch with
whatever cadence that they're in and work backwards from there.

Alan: Interesting. I want to
switch from LA -- because you mostly work in LA -- but you also have
an office in... is it Billund or Aarhus?

Jason: Aarhus, in Denmark.

Alan: So you have an office in
Denmark, in the middle of Denmark, not in Copenhagen, but in the
middle of the furthest island from Copenhagen. So what's that all
about?

Jason: We've been working with
Lego for six and a half years now, I believe. Lego headquarters is in
Billund, which is even more remote than Aarhus. Aarhus is actually
the second largest city in Denmark. Billund is about an hour away,
Aarhus is like the closest major town. Our lead there was ex-Lego, he
had left Lego. He actually worked with us on quite a few projects. He
left Lego after 10 years, then came and joined Trigger. So for us, it
was part of an effort to grow our Lego business out there. I've been
a Lego fan since I was a little kid, like most kids are. So that was
kind of like a dream come true, to be working with them.

Alan: No kidding.

Jason: We went all in.

Alan: [laughs] Of course. You
guys made a fish visualizer, right?

Jason: It's called the fish
designer. It's actually at the Lego Museum. So, super cool. I believe
it's the best performing digital experience there. Basically, what
happens is, as a kid you come into the space and there's six giant
digital tanks. So imagine like a big video screen walls that
represent massive fish tanks, and all the fish inside and all the
creatures and rocks and everything are built out of Lego, digital
Lego. And then as a kid, there are these big stations where you can
take physical bricks, and build your own fish. You build physically
and then you walk up to these scanners on the edge of giant tanks and
you scan in your fish. You add eyes and a mouth. There's like a
little magic moment. And then they come to life in the tank. They get
sucked in through the pipe from your scanner and then they get kicked
back out into the tank as this live fish with their own little bit of
AI. Each tank can hold 300 user created fish. And every minute or so,
there's big animations that happen inside the whole tank, and all the
fish interact together and stuff. And the kids basically get into
this loop where they go back and just build more fish to stick back
into the scanner to bring to life.

Alan: Oh, cool.

Jason: We're super proud of it,
because with Lego we often work from concept through to prototyping,
and kid testing, and then final product release. And in this case, we
did a lot of earlier prototypes that had a lot more digital
interaction for the kid, like after you've created the fish you could
play a game, you could control it, something like that. It was really
nice that the testing actually took us back to keeping it much
simpler. So it's a much more elegant solution that the kids just--
they build it physically, which is what they want to do. And then the
digital magic conversion moment is very, very short. It's only like
30 seconds and then they can sit back and enjoy their creation.

Alan: That's so cool. Yeah, I
think we as an industry, we tend to overcomplicate things.

Jason: Yeah, for sure. Sometimes
we are over our skis a little bit, right? Like we're trying to do a
lot more than the consumer wants or needs.

Alan: It's so true. We had a
meeting about this a couple of weeks ago. We're talking about how we
did a 360 video three years ago and kind of moved away from it,
because it just-- it wasn't hard anymore. We were always looking for
the challenge and we realized that the majority of people still
haven't even seen that. Like, "Oh, man. We need to go back to
basics."

Jason: Yeah. I mean, we hear a
lot of stats of when museums are doing their first VR exhibits.
People come in and for 90 percent of the audience, it's the first
time they put on a headset.

Alan: Crazy, right? It's so
second nature for us that we take it for granted.

Jason: Yeah.

Alan: If there's one takeaway
from this entire podcast, it's "keep it simple". You can
stretch and push the boundaries of this technology, but keep it
simple.

Jason: That's actually sometimes
the hardest piece. How do you reduce the friction in these things?
Because consumers are used to just opening up the app and seeing the
content on a screen. How do you make spatial 3D content just as
simple as that?

Alan: That's a good question.
Let me ask you. You did a TED
talk on computer vision, bringing toys to life. Is that talking
about the Lego one?

Jason: No, that was more a
generality. It was similar. We've done 30+ digital/physical play
prototypes with Lego and other companies, for kid testing and stuff
like that. So we understand that there's a lot of effort in trying to
find the fun and find that elegant ease-of-use balance. That TED talk
was about those kind of learnings, but in the toy industry.

Alan: Can you send me a link and
I'll put it in the show notes?

Jason: Sure. Yeah, no problem.

Alan: Amazing. Let's shift gears
away from toys and social lenses. Let's talk about the things that
you did for enterprise tools. You designed an AR design evaluation
tool for Honda. Can we talk about that?

Jason: Yeah, so we co-created
with Honda. We own the tech IP for the tool. We work with one of
their design teams. And what we're trying to solve is-- basically, in
the design process for cars right now, you start off on paper, they
do 100 drawings or whatever. Then they start working on 3D versions
of that. Let's say you get to like 40 designs. But a critical step in
car design is, of course, a volumetric review, like actually seeing
the car in 3D space and getting a sense of its presence in a way. And
traditionally, that's done in clay. So the problem with clay is that
a life sized clay model takes about eight weeks, and these car
companies are spending upwards of $50,000 a month just buying clay.

Alan: Wow.

Jason: Yeah. So, we were tasked
to try to come up with a system in AR, to not necessary replace the
clay model, but to do an interim step before the clay model. Let's
say we can get the cost down and things like that, so of course, we
did. Our version, it can be in a single day instead of eight weeks.
The costs are much lower. They can then evaluate 10 cars in AR
volumetrically first, before they can then commit to one clay model
car. Not only are we saving on costs in time, but I feel like you can
end up with a better product because a lot of the design ideas that
would have been cut early, because of costs gets to live through
another milestone, and continue on to the design process. The big
challenges, though, were we started with Hololens, and then it was
ported to ARKit, it was ported to Windows Mixed Reality, full
backpack solution. And then the later version is Magic Leap, but all
of those see-through -- besides the ARKit, of course -- but
see-through headsets on AR, as soon as you take it outside, it's, you
know--

Alan: Useless.

Jason: It's not the best
experience.

Alan: Yeah. It's funny because
I've seen some people put shields in front of the Hololenses and
stuff, light shields to dim it. It's not the greatest experience when
you can't really see the holograms. That's going to be a really hard
problem to solve for consumer augmented reality.

Jason: Yeah. And I think this
for the car design world, it's actually specifically a very hard
problem to solve, because their legacy approval process happens
outdoors that way. So we had to put digital cars next to physical
cars, which is how they normally evaluate their designs. That's why a
lot of design studios are actually in California because of--

Alan: Nice weather, all the
time.

Jason: Yeah, nice weather all
the time. So that's the interesting thing. Like, maybe the technology
drives you to an indoor experience. But like--

Alan: I just tried the Varro --
the Varjo or Varro? -- headset, the XR one, which is using front
facing cameras to capture the outside world. So with that, it's
actually blocking out the real world completely, using cameras to
recreate it, and then creating digital content on top.

Jason: That's cool.

Alan: Yeah. It works really
well. I think it would actually be a perfect solution for what you're
doing. And I know they're working with Volvo.

Jason: That's cool. What is the
resolution of that?

Alan: It's actually a foveated
headset. So what they did was, they did a fixed foveation. In the
center, it's human eye resolution. And then it's about-- it's a
little square, almost an inch of your vision. And then as it goes out
to the edges, it blends into a more traditional headset. So it's
very, very clear.

Jason: Wow, amazing. We will
definitely figure--

Alan: The headset's big and
bulky, but it doesn't feel like it when it's on your head, because
they've weighted it. They actually put weights in the back of it, to
offset the feeling of how heavy it is. They made it heavier to make
it feel lighter.

Jason: But I feel like it's
being used in the design process now, like everyone who sees it
understands the benefit of it, and everyone understands that the
hardware and technology is always going to be improving. So we're on
the right track and we just-- with every hardware update -- we'll
check out this Varjo for sure -- the whole experience will improve
and hopefully the results will improve as well.

Alan: I think it's getting there
every step. And then I really love the fact that you guys are right
on the edge of consumer applications that are fun and exciting, kids'
applications. But then also you're building these real world
enterprise tools, that companies are using to evaluate and design
future automobiles.

Jason: Thanks. I think for
brands and developers getting in, I think what we've learned through
this stuff is you just have to be early, try to be first, try to get
as much experience across many industries as possible, because
everything cross-pollinates everything else. The stuff our team knows
from all this trial and error, I think it shows. But also there's no
other way to learn that experience, besides trying it out.

Alan: Yeah, well, it's not like
you can look it up and say, "Hey, how do I do this?"
Because what you're doing is, for the most part, never been done. I
mean, we've done, I think, three or four world firsts and-- well,
four. There was no manual. There was no "Hey, let's look it up
on YouTube and how to do that." It didn't exist. So I commend
you guys, with 150,000+ hours of development.

Jason: Thank you. That's no
creative hours, too. That's just 3D in-dev.

Alan: Straight-up dev. Holy
moly. Well, they say mastery's at 10,000 hours. So you guys are 15
times that.

Jason: I think the need to
experiment and the need to innovate is really great for the team.
Every day you're doing something different and there's always
something proud to write home about. The problem as a business is if
you're always innovating, how do you--

Alan: How do you make any money?

[laughs]

Jason: You're burning so much

[money]

Alan: People don't understand.
Innovation is expensive. And even though companies are paying you to
do it, it's like you build it once, and then it never gets used
again. It's not like building a product where you build it, and then
keep iterating and making it better and better and better. Projects
are a different animal, and it's definitely something that you guys
have mastered. So, congratulations.

Jason: Thank you. We are owning
our own IP now, so our tech IP. So there are some platforms that we
can get to build on top of and resell to different clients and
improve over time. So that's helping us a little bit.

Alan: Love it. Well, let me
know. I'm happy to consider some of those products and platforms for
the XR Ignite program. So with that, is there anything else you want
to leave listeners with? There's so many different things here to
unpack. But is there anything else you wanna leave people with?

Jason: Yeah, I think the sports
stuff that we're doing is really interesting right now. We're doing
kind of AR portals into live games for the NBA, and actually for the
PGA Tour as well. So you're at home watching TV. You can plant a door
in AR and then step through it and then you're courtside at the
finals. And then the next level up from that is what we're doing with
the NHL, and soon with another sports league as well, where we're
bringing live telemetry from the game, live stats.

Alan: That's so badass.

Jason: Yeah. When you're talk
about utility, it's not a wow factor thing. It's a-- with the NHL,
you're watching the game. And then, let's say you see a great play.
You can actually drop the rink onto your coffee table and see that
play, recreate it in AR with all the live data from that play, like
how fast the puck was shot and how fast the players were going. All
that data represented in AR. So I think that's super interesting to
us.

Alan: That's badass. Come on,
let's be honest.

Jason: It's cool to be first.
So, that was fun.

Alan: It is always cool to be
first. Well, thank you so much, Jason. It's been an incredible
interview. And I'm sure we're gonna have to do this again, because in
six months time, you'll have 100 more things to talk about.