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.

[Editor’s Note: due to an uploading error on my part, this episode was previously released last week with the wrong audio. We’re re-releasing today with the correct audio. We appreciate your understanding, and in particular, Jeff Meisner’s understanding in this matter – Chris, Podcast Editor]

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 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 or 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 h

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.

[Editor’s Note: due to an uploading error on my part, this episode was previously released last week with the wrong audio. We’re re-releasing today with the correct audio. We appreciate your understanding, and in particular, Jeff Meisner’s understanding in this matter – Chris, Podcast Editor]

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 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 or 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.