Dissecting Virtual Frogs with VictoryXR’s Steve Grubbs

XR for Business

English - August 02, 2019 09:00 - 34 minutes - 31.7 MB - ★★★★★ - 12 ratings
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Previous Episode: Getting — and Keeping — Your Attention in XR, with LumiereVR COO Alexander Haque

Next Episode: Getting the ROI out of XR, with Sector 5 Digital's Cameron Ayres

These days,
more and more students can — and do — opt out of animal dissection
in science classes, and not just because formaldehyde smells awful.
As fewer kids are morally comfortable with chopping up an amphibian
in the name of their education, an alternative will be needed.
VictoryXR’s Steve Grubbs offers a solution through VR, and chats with
Alan about how XR can be used to enhance education in other ways,
too.

Alan: Today’s guest is Steve
Grubbs, founder and CEO of VictoryVR, one of the world leaders in
virtual reality educational product development. To date, they have
created over 240 unique VR experiences, spanning over 50 different
learning units, with educational partners like Carolina Biological
and Oxford University. They have been able to develop brand new
educational encounters for VR users around the globe. Steve is also a
member of YPO and was recently featured in an article entitled
Virtual Reality Is Transporting Students to the Next Frontier in
Science Education. You can learn more about Steve’s company at
VictoryXR.com. Steve, welcome to the show.

Steve: Alan, thanks for having
me. I appreciate it. We’ve been working in XR Technologies — first
virtual reality, and then augmented reality — since 2016. I first
tried to headset on near the end of 2015 and it struck me that this
type of technology would change the world. And so, we struck out and
decided that our field would be education. And so we dug in and
figured out how to do it, because at that point it was very difficult
to find people; you couldn’t just hire people off the street who knew
how to create virtual reality technology. We set to work figuring it
out. In September of 2016, I attended a group meeting with some folks
in Dallas, and then by January of 2017, we had our first major
product in a school. I felt pretty good that we were able to move
quickly on that first experience.

Alan: That’s incredible. Let me
ask you a quick question. What was the first experience that you
tried that inspired you to start VictoryVR?

Steve: Well, it was a MetaVRse
product that I downloaded to my phone some time, in Google Cardboard.
I am pretty sure I went to the iPhone store and tried a roller
coaster — and this had been a few years now. And then I tried The
New York Times 360 News reporting on my phone and they both were
great, amazing, cool, and so I said, this is something I want to be a
part of.

Alan: For those people that
don’t know you and VictoryVR, maybe just give us a 10,000-foot view
of your mission and why you’re doing what you’re doing, and where you
see the company going. Describe your company, the products, and the
platform that’s being used.

Steve: We believe that we can
change education in a positive way around the world. If you think
about it, for decades — I used to serve in the Iowa legislature, and
I was chairman of the Education Committee, and we spent a lot of time
addressing, how do we improve education? And there were a lot of
things we did on the input side, but at the end of the day, what we
all know is that if students love to learn, they love what they’re
learning — like all of us — then there’s no work in it; you just
love to do it, and you immerse yourself in it. We believe that XR
Technologies — VR and AR — are the solution to having students love
what they’re learning. So we’re creating as much content as possible,
aligned to standards, so that teachers can integrate it into their
lesson plans, or parents can just simply pull it off the shelf and
use it. I have a background in technology. I started my first tech
company in 1997, building web sites. I bought a book called “Web
Sites for Dummies,” read i

Alan: That’s incredible. Let me
ask you a quick question. What was the first experience that you
tried that inspired you to start VictoryVR?

Alan: Ha!

Steve: Since I was the only one
they knew, they really had no choice but to use me. And ever since
then, we’ve had an e-commerce company, Victory Store, and mobile app
starting in ’09. In 2016, moving into XR technologies was a natural
transition for us.

Alan: I noticed that one of the
modules that you guys have built is dissections in virtual reality.
Tell me how that came about.

Steve: By last summer — and my
annual University of Iowa fraternity gathering — one of my
fraternity brothers is a assistant superintendent of schools in the
Chicago area, and he was a former science teacher. And he said, “you
know what we need; there’s a law in Illinois that says students can
opt out of animal dissection, but we’re required to provide a viable
alternative, and there really aren’t any viable alternatives out
there that they’re really great.” So he said, “why don’t
you create that?” And I said, “that’s a brilliant use
case.” And we went back to my office on Monday, put my team to
work — and that was in July — by the start of the school year,
first week of September, we had a frog dissection completed and in
the marketplace. And that’s when Carolina Biological, the largest
provider of animal specimens for dissection, contacted us because
they had been looking for a digital product that could simulate what
happens in real life. Because in the United States — and I know this
is a trend around the world — 60 percent of students can opt out
these days. As that trend grows, someone needs to provide that
alternative. And I think those of us in the XR community are best
situated to do that.

Alan: So, this has really opened
up a whole new world of learning for students. What is the most
popular of all of the things that you guys have made? What is the one
that really resonates with students?

Steve: Well, always the most
popular is Adventures in Space, where you get to drive our version of
the Millennium Falcon. It’s a pretty cool product. With 48 different
science units — dissection and language learning are outside of
those — they all start from a place; you might be in a spaceship,
you might be in an underwater lab. There’s a lot of different places,
but Adventures in Space, you start out in a spaceship, and then you
travel around the universe to learn about black holes and quasars,
drop down and take a rover and drive around Mars and see the three
rovers that are down there that were left that… I guess one is
still working, that the United States has dropped on to Mars. It’s a
cool way to both learn and do it in an explorative way. Why wouldn’t
you love learning about a black hole if you can fly out to one, and
take a look at it and learn about it when you’re out there? This is
the type of learning that we believe changes the ballgame, and
creates a real love for science, and STEM technologies and STEM
learning.

Alan: Travelling to space is the
one that gets everybody’s attention.

Steve: It is. It’s also we
generally put that out there as a free download on the Windows Mixed
Reality store and Oculus as well as VIVE. And then if you’ve got a
Pico headset, you can also pick it up off of the VIVE Port store.

Alan: I was actually going to
ask you about distribution, and how you’re dealing with that. Most of
your distribution is through the VIVE Port platform? Or how does
it…?

Steve: It depends on how you
consider volume and distribution. We’re all trying to figure out the
business model — the revenue model — to make something like this
sustainable. It’s great to provide a product that can change the
world, but if it doesn’t have a sustainable revenue model, then it’s
not gonna change the world for very long. We upload our products to
all of the major stores, and then we also sell unlimited licenses to
schools. So, if a school would like a one-to-one setup with the
Oculus Go, where they buy 20 headsets, and then in addition to that,
they want a license to our content, we’ll sell them that package. But
then they might do dissection, which won’t work on an Oculus Go. It
needs a full 6DoF, Nvidia 1060 chip system. So they might have three
or four stations for that, and then buy a license to the dissection
product. So, between the licenses and what we get paid when people
download off the stores; that’s our revenue model, so far. Our hope
is to break even this year. We had a nice big bump at the beginning
of the year with Microsoft. We’re just continuing to put it together
a little here and a little there.

Alan: Excellent. It’s early
days, so how are you finding the uptake with schools? Are they
looking for a complete solution? Or do they want you to come in with
the hardware? With software? Do they want you to train them? How does
that look? And was it something that you find you have teams out
there getting schools onboard? Or is it happening naturally?

Steve: It’s a little bit of
everything, but let me address each of the parts individually. We
would rather just be in the software business. But, schools that come
to us want both a hardware, software, and platform solution. And so
we have to provide those things. And so we do. Having said that, some
schools already have their hardware. They’ll go to the Windows store
and download the content. Microsoft, in January paid us a sum of
money so that they could distribute half of our content for free
through their store. So, anyone who owns a Windows Mixed Reality
system in a school can download half of our content. But, there are
more schools currently that have an Oculus product, either the Rift
or the Go. And because of that, some will license it directly from
us, but most are going to the Oculus store and downloading content to
the headsets. That’s currently how it’s happening. You never know
what kind of hardware you’re going to find in a school. But most are
working for some consulting on how to put together the whole package.
And so that’s where we can step in; show them, here are the pluses
and minuses, the costs and the benefits, of a particular hardware.
Here’s what we can offer. You know, we have 52 different VR
experiences that cover middle school and high school. That’s been our
approach.

Steve: If you take all of the
schools — so, 100 percent of schools — what percentage do you think
of the schools (in the US, anyway) have a VR headset? Or are even
considering that? Is it 1 percent? 10 percent? What are you seeing?

Steve: You’re asking this
question; as we speak, I am pulling up our survey results. We
actually surveyed a fair number of teachers, and I will walk you
through the information on that question, because we know exactly —
or at least, from our survey — how many people have it. And it’s
more than you would think. But we expect by the end of this year, I
think it’s 50 percent of schools to have one level or another of some
VR in their classroom. Some schools have full systems, right? They’ve
bought 20 headsets for a classroom, while other schools have just a
little bit. So when we asked the question, “have you tested the
use of virtual reality or augmented reality to supplement current
classroom teaching?” Fourteen percent said “yes, a lot.”
Thirty-nine percent said “yes, a little.” That told us that
at least people are moving in the right direction. Then we asked
them, “do you think you would rather have a one-to-one solution
for the classroom — meaning each student in the class having a
headset — or a station-based approach? Twenty seven percent said
one-to-one. Twenty percent said station-based. Thirty six percent
said yes. Finally — and I don’t want to bore you with a lot of
statistics — but here’s the last question I’ll share: when we asked,
“do you already have hardware in your schools?” Twenty one
percent said they already have it. Seven percent said they would be
getting it this year. Twenty two percent said they would be giving it
next year. So, if you add those three together — it’s about 28+21…
so almost 50 percent, either this year or next year, expect to have
the hardware in their schools. Now, in the United States, that’s over
100,000 potential clients. And around the world, the adoption might
be a little bit behind that, but I know it’s growing rapidly.

Alan: The market adoption for
this in the United States, I think is actually ahead of the rest of
the world, with one exception, and I think that’s China. I’ve seen
some things coming out of China with HTC VIVE, and they’re really
focusing on bringing these systems into the schools. Are you seeing
many people in the US using the HTC products at all, or is it mostly
Oculus?

Steve: We see a lot of VIVE out
there, because the teachers who are true techies all started with the
VIVE, and then they would bring their experience with the VIVE into
schools. Oculus is by far the most well-adopted hardware. But VIVE
is… in fact, I can actually tell you the percentage is, I don’t
know why I’m guessing… in the United States, 12 percent have the
Oculus Rift, which has been out since 2016. Eleven percent have the
Oculus Go, which has been out for less than a year. So that was
really interesting to me, and that cost differential is just a big
deal; essentially, 23 percent. VIVE is 10 percent. Windows Mixed
Reality is 5.7 percent. And then Google Expeditions — which, you can
decide if that’s real VR or not — they’re at 31 percent.

Alan: So that’s Google
Cardboard.

Steve: Well, no. Google
Expeditions is different than Google Cardboard, but they’re close. I
mean, you know. It’s close to the same thing. But they have that
whole platform attached to it.

Alan: Yeah, so teachers can
start and stop the experiences.

Steve: Yeah.

Alan: So let me ask you another
question about the metrics. Are you seeing — from your experience in
students that are using this — are you seeing better metrics around
their testing scores? Or better uptake? What are the metrics around
measuring the success of virtual reality versus traditional means of
education?

Steve: That’s a good question
that we get all the time. We have not had a study done specifically
with our content. It’s something that we would like to have done,
it’s just time-consuming and costly, so it hasn’t been done yet. But,
having said that, there are other organizations and groups who have
done these studies. And what it shows is that there is a significant
increase in retention. On my LinkedIn page, I actually wrote an
article — and it’s a little bit old now, and I need to update the
article — but it’s called “The Data-Driven Case for Virtual
Reality Learning.” There’s been a lot of studies: Oklahoma
State, Pearson, HMH, UC Irvine — they’ve all done different studies.
And one study showed that there was a 14 percent increase in mean
test scores. Another study in China showed that there was a 90
percent pass rate from the group that learned in VR, while there is
only a 40 percent pass rate from the group that did not learn in VR.
So, pretty much every study shows that there’s either increased
retention, better test scores, better results, learning in virtual
reality. People always want to know that. I don’t think there’s
really a lot of debate whether people learn more when they’re in a
distraction-free, immersive environment. But still, it’s going to
take some time for that kind of adoption.

Alan: I think it’s interesting
that you said that last part of distraction-free, immersive
environment, and I think one of the things that — this podcast is
around the business applications — but this applies directly to
training in business, as well. If you take what you guys are learning
in the education side, and apply it to training of employees, and you
look at the fact that most training is done either digitally, through
a phone app or a web site. What people don’t understand is that
people’s phones are on them all the time. So you have this constant
distraction of second screening, and it takes people’s focus away.
When you’re in virtual reality, there’s no way to look at your phone;
you are completely immersed, and you’re in, 100 percent doing that. I
think just that focus alone makes it a much more powerful medium to
teach people.

Steve: Yeah, even if there were
no other benefit, just the distraction-free learning is a big piece
of that. We have a development company that does corporate training
VR for companies — we’ve done projects for two Fortune 500
companies; I can’t necessarily name them — but what they are looking
for is a way to… what we call, the RIDE theory. Any training where
they rarely have to do that training, whether it’s impossible to
train for it — so for example, like at a nuclear power plant, a
nuclear meltdown; it’s impossible to train for, except in a virtual
or textbook environment. Or maybe, for example, like an oil leak at
an underwater oil platform. These things are impossible to train for.
So that’s the “I.” “D” is dangerous. So, for
example, a power line that has come free due to a storm and is on the
ground then wet. That’s a dangerous training environment, but can be
done in virtual reality. And then finally, expensive. There are
certain things that are very expensive to train for, and you can
reduce the cost dramatically through virtual reality, and in some
cases, augmented reality. For businesses, if they keep that acronym
— RIDE — in mind, that’s a good way for them to create a framework
for decision making in which of their training areas could sustain
the expense of creating a VR version of it, versus those that maybe
you stick with what you’re doing now, with videotapes or reading or
person-to-person training.

Alan: What was the “R”
for? I apologize.

Steve: Rare.

Alan: Rare.

Steve: Sometimes you don’t have
time. When you take people into a training scenario, and you really
only have time to train them on the things they are going to
encounter the most. For example, restaurant training. There’s a lot
of things to train a new employee on, but having a heart attack and
rolling around on the ground is not something that happens very often
in a restaurant. So, it probably doesn’t receive training. That’s
something you could create in virtual reality. Various rare instances
that people can go and train for and know how to use the
defibrillator, or whatever the case might be.

Alan: One of the ones that’s
getting the most media attention is Walmart using virtual reality for
their training. And one of the things they’re training on is Black
Friday sales. Happens once a year. It’s madness. It’s mayhem. And
being able to train people how to manage that, this thing that only
happens once a year. You can’t really train for it. So it is rare,
and I get it; rare, impossible to train for, dangerous, or expensive
— RIDE, I think, is a really great acronym. I think that is a great
value proposition for everybody listening. So, thank you.

Steve: Yeah, and I didn’t come
up with it, but once I read it, I said, that’s perfect. And on the
Walmart side, big shout out to Andy Mathis at Oculus, who put that
whole deal together. Having Walmart in the ballgame really helps all
of us in this field.

Alan: Absolutely. I think it
also springboarded everybody to think about, “oh, wow, this can
be used for all sorts of different things.” It was a great thing
for the whole industry, and Oculus led that. But if it wasn’t for the
Facebook acquisition of Oculus, I don’t think there would be as many
companies… I don’t think this whole VR and a AR explosion would
have happened as quickly. It would have happened, just not as
quickly. I think that caught everybody’s attention.

Steve: Yeah, I think you’re
right. And having the big players involved certainly helps to drive
the process, but they certainly need small players like us,
VictoryXR, to help drive the content side.

Alan: I think the barriers to
entry with this are rapidly coming down, and one of the big ones is
content. And you guys seem to be hammering that one and nailing it
properly. So, hats off to you guys on that one.

Steve: Thank you.

Alan: What are some of the
challenges around, let’s say, a school wanting to bring this in? What
are the some of the things that school boards or schools individually
can start to think about and plan for, when they’re planning their
strategy? Say they want to say, “we want to buy 100 VR headsets,
but we know if we buy them, by the time they get shipped to us,
they’re going to be obsolete.” How does a school plan for that?
And what’s your advice around that?

Steve: Well, obsolescence really
isn’t an issue. Will there be a better widget on the market? Yes. But
when you buy a car, will a better car come out the next year? Yes.
But does it make your existing car obsolete? Absolutely not. Whatever
hardware schools purchase, the content is going to work just as well
on that hardware for years to come. And at the right time, one can
upgrade. But getting back to the challenges, the first challenge is
cost. You’re probably not going to spend less than $10,000 to get in.
Now, you could buy one Oculus headset with content for $500. So
there’s certainly the ability to dip your toe in the water and test
it out, for as little as $500. But to outfit one classroom they could
cart, that can be moved from classroom to classroom; you and spend a
minimum of $10,000. So that’s challenge number one. Having said that,
pretty much every school district, every school, has a technology
budget, and a curriculum budget. So it’s just a matter of
prioritization.

Challenge number two is integration
into the classroom. Most teachers are generally — like all of us —
there’s momentum, and they’re going to be moving in the same
direction, doing things the way they’ve been doing them for a long
time. So this requires a different level of work. There’s a certain
amount of hassle to get technology working, and to get it working for
every student and make sure they can all use it. So there’s some
challenges there. Professional development — training teachers — is
a big piece of it. We actually have a person on our staff, Rene
Gadelha. She’s a curriculum specialist. She formerly worked for
Pearson, she’s formerly a classroom teacher, she served on the school
board in two different states. She is the perfect person [for this].
And when somebody purchases our content, or they just want to hire
her to come in, she’ll fly in and do professional development around
virtual reality. That’s that’s our solution to problem number two. By
the way, our solution to problem number one is we also have a grant
writer on staff, who helps schools find grants, and helps them write
them, if need be.

Problem number three, it’s a problem
that’s coming down quickly. Initially, you had to have a very
high-end graphics computer. You basically to have a $1000 computer to
run a virtual reality system. And every school I went to said, “well,
we’ve got some really good computers. Can we just use those?” I
would have to say, “unfortunately, no.” And in fact, I
never found a school that had a computer with a 1060 Nvidia chip. So
it requires them to buy this high-end computer. Well, with the Oculus
Quest coming out soon — the VIVE Focus, the Oculus Go, the Pico
headsets — all of that is becoming less of an issue, if they want to
just buy a headset for $400-$600. People can do that now without
having to have the big computer attached.

Alan: Any other challenges? So,
you’ve covered costs, which you guys are mitigating with grants;
integration into the schools, which you guys are covering with
professional development; and then, the need for high-end equipment,
which — I think — the barrier to entry is being rapidly knocked
down by these standalone units that are coming out. Are there any
others that you found?

Steve: There are minor
challenges. Proper training in hygiene with headsets is important.
That’s just a small training issue that we need to be aware of, and
we need to teach. So, you know, if you get past those first three
issues… if there’s a fourth, it might be the amount of content out
there. But at this point, there’s quite a bit of content. Now, the
downside is, there’s a limited amount of standards-aligned content,
and schools really do look for it to be aligned to the NGSS, or
Canadian standards, or whatever the case might be. But there’s a lot
of content, and there’s enough standards-aligned content to alleviate
those issues. Do we have a lot in history and some of those things?
Not yet, but it’s on its way.

Alan: Amazing. What is one
experience that you, personally, would love to see in VR?

Steve: I would love to be able
to stand in the middle of the Battle of Gettysburg, and experience it
in true, simulated VR. And I don’t know if our graphics chips are
quite there yet, but they’re close. That is something that would be
just amazing to experience; different moments in history, while
standing right in the middle of them (and not getting killed, which
would be awesome as well).

Alan: [chuckles] Absolutely. We
don’t want that. Well, this has been phenomenal. We’ve learned tons
about the statistics and what people are using it for, how schools
are bringing this [to the classroom], barriers to entry, the
challenges, how to overcome these challenges. Is there anything else
that you think listeners would need to kickstart their foray into
bringing virtual and augmented reality into the classroom? Or into
their HR or training arm of the business?

Steve: So, definitely. We didn’t
talk about AR yet. And at the NSTA — which is in St. Louis, is the
National Science Teachers Association; I think it’s in about four
weeks — we will be rolling out our augmented reality products, and
they are so amazing right now. I know that that’s what I should be
saying, since I’m the founder, but I’m just telling you; they are so
cool. The first product we’ll roll out is textbook AR. In each
chapter of a book, there’s usually one really challenging concept —
like photosynthesis, or cellular regeneration. Whatever the difficult
topic is, what we are doing is creating an augmented reality
experience, so that you’re reading through a textbook, be it digital
or paper-based, and when you come to certain parts of the book, you
can hold your phone over it and a teacher will pop up. In our first
one, it was being able to look inside the human cell. You got a human
cell that pops up, and you can touch different pieces of it, and the
nucleus will come out, or the golgi will come out. And you can really
both see how they work, and hear a description of how they work.

But you really get this amazing
teaching tool through AR. We will also have an anatomy product, where
the parts of the body will rise from the human torso. And then you
can touch them and learn more about them. You can look at them in 3D,
and ultimately, you’ll be able to see a cross-section of them, look
inside them. And then we have one more product; I’m not announcing
quite yet, but it’s going to be amazing. So, we’re excited about
this, and we think that people at NSTA and elsewhere are just going
to love it.

Alan: I think you’re right. I
think this is going to be a really big thing. Now, is this something
that you’re aiming towards the tablets that are already in schools?
Or is this something that you’re aiming towards students using their
own devices? Or both?

Steve: It’s their own devices. I
mean, you could certainly use the tablets that are already in school,
assuming they are AR-enabled. But for the most part, if you have a
textbook — whatever form your textbook takes — you should be able
to whip out your phone, and hold it over certain parts of that
textbook, and have this special AR learning experience pop up. And
really, it makes learning more interesting and… “immersive”
is not really the right word, but it allows you to interact with that
learning, and that it could be a big game changer.

Alan: It’s very interesting that
you’re talking about this, because we interviewed Charlie Fink,
author of Metaverse and Convergence, and they are two books about
virtual and augmented reality that have AR-enabled parts of them. So
it’s really interesting that, this whole idea of bringing a static,
flat textbook to life using augmented reality is fantastic. And
something that we’ve been working on the background is a platform
that it would allow anybody to make their own interactions on this. I
think it’s very timely and I think it’s going to be really big for
textbooks.

Steve: It’s going to be huge. So
huge. Children’s storybooks, everything. I just think that this piece
of AR will grow quickly.

Alan: I agree with you 100
percent, and they say by the end of 2019, there will be over
2-billion AR-enabled smartphones on the market. So, I think the
market definitely has penetration, and it’s a lot larger than virtual
reality headsets. But, I think it’s that early thing that gets
everybody’s attention. And because the technologies are so similar,
it’s just a natural progression, from augmented reality to virtual
reality, and then eventually glasses and that sort of thing.

Steve: Absolutely. I’m with you
on that.

Alan: Well, Steve, is there any
problem in the world that you want to see solved with XR?

Steve: Well, there’s a lot of
problems. I’ve had the opportunity to travel around the world a lot,
and one of the things that we will get to do through XR is we will
get to spend time with people in other countries without travelling
to those countries. We’ll be able to interact in their communities in
ways that we never could before. And it will be cool, but it will
also bring the world together. The more you realize that the Chinese
are wonderful people — when I travel, you just see, people are
wonderful — and it will tear down barriers between countries, and I
think it will make the world a better place. Maybe I have my John
Lennon glasses on, but I just think that AR/VR have the possibility
to really break down barriers between groups of people.

Alan: I just want to ask you one
more question. What is one thing that you’ve seen in this industry
that you’ve been really blown away by? Because I mean, you’ve
probably seen a lot, and you guys have built a lot. What is something
that you’ve seen that just made you go, “wow, this is
incredible?”

Steve: There’s still so much.
When I was in Beijing and I first participated in multiplayer virtual
reality, and me and three buddies went on a spaceship and fought
aliens? That was the experience that blew me away more than anything
else in the world. Of our own experiences, the first time I picked up
our frog dissection — our floppy frog — that is the thing that
people are just blown away with, in our experiences, is just the
realism of what you’re experiencing, and the ability to interact with
your friends, and others that you may not know, inside VR. It just
blows my mind.