Getting 110% Out of Training in 360° Video, with VR Vision Inc's Lorne Fade

XR for Business

English - September 09, 2019 09:43 - ★★★★★ - 12 ratings
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The top of a wind turbine a hundred
stories up from the ground is not the best place to be making
mistakes, but making mistakes and learning from them is the whole
point of on-the-job training. That's why VR Vision Inc helps
companies produce XR training modules, so trainees can make mistakes
in a safe, controlled environment. COO Lorne Fade drops by to talk
about it.

Alan: Today's guest is Lorne
Fade, co-founder of VR Vision. Lorne is a serial entrepreneur that
has built several businesses over the last 15 years. He's had the
pleasure of working with some of the world's largest Fortune 500
brands and award winning marketing agencies all across North America
and Europe. His previous agency, Academic Ads, was acquired, and he
went on to found VR Vision Inc. As the co-founder and COO of VR
Vision, they're a virtual and augmented reality startup that's
enhancing immersive training outcomes for some of the world's largest
brands using VR, AR, and AI technologies. He's also the founder of
Reality Well, a healthcare technology platform to improve the quality
of life for those living in long-term care facilities. You can learn
more about VR Vision by visiting vrvisiongroup.com. Lorne, welcome to
the show.

Lorne: Thanks for having me,
Alan. Thanks.

Alan: My absolute pleasure, man.
We've known each other for quite some time through the VR/AR
Association in Toronto, and we shared some booth space together, and
it's always great to see what you guys are working on. I know the
last time we saw each other, you were showing me an automotive
manufacturing facility in virtual reality and how you were using
that. So let's dive in there. Let's talk about how you guys are using
VR and 360 video to make better training.

Lorne: Yeah, that's that's one
of our bigger use cases with Toyota, where we're training about
10,000 employees currently using 360 video, in immersive training
scenarios in VR. And it works really well for eliminating risk and
providing a safe environment with zero harm. And it's totally
immersive. So the employees that are getting trained in VR, no
distractions, they can't be on their phone or anything. It was really
simple the way we did it. We just storyboarded various scenarios with
Toyota on various processes, on safety concerns, on their assembly
lines or processes that were mundane and replicable. And then we went
out and filmed with a stereoscopic 3D camera, so when they put on the
headset they feel like they're there, fully 3D. And we mapped out, I
guess about two to three minute scenarios, various parts of their
assembly lines and filmed it all in full 3D and then ported it over
to VR, added some overlays, some voice overs, some touch points and
interactivity so that the employees could be trained in a completely
immersive environment. Nothing like this is, from my knowledge, has
ever been done before. So it's really cool to have this type
opportunity to work on a project like that.

Alan: So how are they measuring
success? For example, STRIVR is doing 360 video with Wal-Mart and
their key performance indicators. They're measuring training times,
how long it takes to train. They're also testing retention rates.
What are the KPIs that you and Toyota decided on, how to measure
that?

Lorne: Thanks for having me,
Alan. Thanks.

Lorne: Yes. Great question. We
developed a in-house analytics engine for tracking where the user is
looking, the various touch points of the training scenarios. And
every user that uses the platform gets their own log-in, so we track
each user, their effectiveness, and how well they're being trained
with the scenarios. And then within the scenarios, there'll be, let's
say, about 20 interactive touch points for various risks, or hazards,
or processes that the employee needs to learn. And then at the end of
this scenario, they'll get a breakdown or a test results screen that
will get pushed to Toyota's LMS on the backend so they can see how
the employee performs. But also within the headset, the user will get
to see where they performed and get to learn again on the various
things that they might have missed throughout the course of the
module.

Alan: So it's really giving the
employees the opportunity to learn through making mistakes, which is
funny because our whole lives in school, we learn not to make
mistakes: you get an F, and that means fail, and you're screwed, and
you can't go into university, and it's beaten into us never to make
mistakes. But in the real world, we make mistakes every day, and we
learn from them, and we move on. But this is even better, because
it's not the real world. You're able to make mistakes in the privacy
of your own headset, you're not feeling embarrassed.

Lorne: And it saved you a ton of
money for Toyota overall. Basically, instead of having an employee on
a live assembly line making those mistakes, where they would have to
shut down production, then that could be super costly over time for
the plant itself. This way they're able to train in a risk-free
environment without shutting down of production, so that when they're
ready to hit the assembly line - for whatever the processes that
they're tasked with - they'll be way ahead of the game, it'll cause
less mistakes and save a ton of money for Toyota overall.

Alan: So how are you measuring
that specifically, are you measuring training times?

Lorne: Yeah, we're measuring
training times. We're measuring efficacy for the employees. And then
when we put them on the live line, we get to compare and contrast
based on their test results, how many mistakes they're making on the
live line. Now, we're not fully testing just our training scenarios
as the end-all, because Toyota has a number of other training LMSs
and dojos that they're using for training the employees, but they
weren't seeing an improvement overall with the employees that had
done the VR training.

Alan: That's really interesting.
In your analytics, you mentioned that you're pushing it to their LMS
system. How difficult was that, to go from one company to another? I
would assume there are different ways of working.

Lorne: The biggest challenge
there was working with their IT, because they had a pretty strict
regimen for their firewall. And then accessing it is a very tight
network. A lot of restrictions, a lot of loopholes we have to go
through. So it took a couple of months of working with their IT team
to be able to pass through data from the headsets, and have the
headsets themselves connect seamlessly to their network, and make
sure they were all on the same MAC address. It's actually outside of
my technical scope. I'd have to ask our IT guy internally here. But
basically, once we figured out how to pass through their network, it
was seamless.

Alan: What about things like
device management? Because if you're going to train 10,000 employees,
how many devices does[sic] that?

Lorne: That's definitely a great
concern that enterprise groups need to be aware of. We're seeing the
brands like HTC and Oculus start to catch up with their business
solutions that are going to start to offer enterprise management. We
kind of hacked it for the get-go because it wasn't available as of
yet. There's a great company you can look up called 42 Gears that
basically provide a mobile management solution, that can be ported to
Android for any devices that are being programmed with Android
backends. And that allows us to see all the devices on the network,
push updates through them, and manage them remotely. And then we went
a step further and we developed a mobile management application for
tablets and cell phones, so that a practitioner or a trainer that's
managing the training serials for the users can manage which modules
they're placing the user into, and see where they're at within the
training program.

Alan: Now, is that done from a
tablet or a phone or something?

Lorne: Yeah, yeah, it can be
done from either a tablet or a phone. Anything Android or iOS based.

Alan: When you're making the
scenario-- so, for example, take us back to the beginning. You meet
with Toyota. They say, "Hey, this is great. We want to do a
trial." What is the lead time from this first meeting you had,
to deployment to 10,000 employees. Is that like a year or two years?
What's that look like?

Lorne: I think the development
timeline was about six months, back and forth to storyboard out all
the various modules. We started with a proof of concept with one
simple module to see how effective it would be. They loved the 3D,
they love the immersiveness of it. So we move forward with five
modules, and then those films and the whole processing,
post-production took about a year overall for all five modules. And
now we're in talks to scale that through more facilities throughout
North America. Per module, it really doesn't take that long. It's
just that we have a 360 development production crew, goes on site,
films, takes about one or two days, and then we take it back and
post-produce it with various touch points and voiceovers. And that
whole process for one module takes anywhere between three to four
weeks, overall. I guess the back and forth that took the longest was
working with IT and figuring out some of the other complexities, like
pushing updates to their LMS, things like that.

Alan: I would think also just
the simple procurement process. [laughs]

Lorne: Yeah. Oh, that too.
They're very--.

Alan: Take longer than
everything.

Lorne: Yeah. Yeah.

Alan: Standard across all
enterprises, yeah. There's a note to people listening: if you're
working in the C suite of a large enterprise, perhaps consider
figuring out a way to work with startups more efficiently, through
streamlined procurement processes, because it really is onerous for a
startup trying to innovate on technology, while trying to run the
gauntlet that is procurement.

Lorne: [laughs] And then keep
your overhead going, and runway.

Alan: Exactly. Part of the
reason we started XR Ignite was to really be that - for those of you
who don't know, XR Ignite is our community hub and connector - so our
goal with XR Ignite is to be the connector between startup studios
and developers and corporate clients, and be that conduit for
conversations back and forth. What our corporate is looking for - and
you mentioned some of them, safety, security, networking, device
management, LMS, integrations - and then bringing that knowledge over
to startups and saying, "OK, what do startups need to do
business with corporate?" and that's streamlined procurement
processes, faster payments and more streamlined communications. So I
think it's a time in a place where we need to really bring everybody
together. So that's what we decided to do with XR Ignite.

Let's talk about the actual
experiences, because I've tried one, it was really interesting. You
put on the headset and it was really cool because I've never been to
a car factory, where they build car parts and doors and things, and I
was in there and there's this woman stamping giant pieces of aluminum
and she's doing her job. And then you have to look for anomalies. You
have to look for things on the ground, or is she not wearing a
hardhat, or whatever it is? Did they provide you those things or did
you look at the space and go, what if we put a banana peel over here
or...?

Lorne: We basically work with
them on the storyboard to provide the highest risk items that would
be the biggest safety concerns for the employees. Like not wearing
proper PPEs, walking in the laneways where they shouldn't be walking.
Just not using proper safety gear or leaving things in the wrong
places. And then we went a step further and added our own flair, if
you will.

Alan: I love it. Now, were they
accepting of adding your own flair to that? Because sometimes this
stuff can be really dry and boring.

Lorne: The basic secret sauce,
though, that we provided: we developed this for standalone VR
headsets and a lot of the standalone VR headsets really max out at 4K
resolution, whereas we're filming in 8K resolution. So we wanted to
push the best quality that we could for the experience, so it was
completely immersive, was exciting. It had replicability and it was
scalable. So on our backend for the post-processing side of things,
kind of did some optimizations with the 360 video to make it appear
around 6K instead of 4K in the headsets. Reduce some of the
screen-door effect, really just to optimize the visual aesthetic of
it so that when they're playing it in the headset, it just appears as
best as possible for the experience.

Alan: I can attest to that. It
really was a clear situation. It was--

Lorne: It's like watching a 3D
movie. [laughs]

Alan: It wasn't even like a 3D
movie. It was like I was in the factory. But by the time I put the
headphones on and the headset, couple minutes in and I was right
there on the factory floor watching this process of stamping these
things out. I'll never forget it, because I feel like I was right
there, watching it. And I got a few of the things wrong, but...

Lorne: I think that's the true
value of VR. It's being able to replicate any type of scenario that's
in the real world but in a safe, controlled environment. And I think
this works really well for enterprises that have a lot of potentially
harmful, or carry a high risk-versus-reward type of training that may
be expensive for onsite, or dangerous for the people that are
training. There's another scenario we're working on right now with a
wind turbine manufacturer, and they're developing maintenance
technician training and it carries a high risk to go up to the top of
those wind turbines and work on them with a tether. And they'd rather
have these employees trained in a dojo in a safe, VR controlled
environment before sending them up hundred stories high to the top of
a wind turbine.

Alan: You know, that seems to
make sense. I went to a talk the other night and they were talking
about-- there was a gentleman who's making nuclear reactor training,
for the nuclear reactors here in Ontario. And one of the scenarios is
the CANDU reactor, which is a huge reactor. It's maybe 30 feet high
and it's got all these little tubes. And in real life, you can't walk
in front of the tubes, because they emit radiation and there's just
like invisible beam of radiation. So if you walk in front of the
beam, well, you're--

Lorne: Chernobyl.

Alan: Well, no, you're just
going to have a paid vacation. But one of the things that they showed
is, how it's managed today is, they literally have a piece of tape on
the floor. They have duct tape on the floor saying, "Don't walk
within these duct tape lines."

Lorne: Oh, jeez.

Alan: That's the safety
protocols in a nuclear reactor. So being able to recreate that with a
Hololens - is what they used - and be able to recreate visibly what
that beam of radiation looks like. Then you can get a visual
representation so that when you're in that facility and you have to
go because it is not something that people do every day, it's very,
very rare that they have to go in there. But when they have to go in
there, they have this visual representation of these beams of
radiation coming out. And I think that's a little bit better than
some duct tape on the floor.

Lorne: Yeah, I think nuclear
reactor training is one of the better use cases for creating a safe
controlled environment versus a live test bed.

Alan: You would think, yeah. You
know, we don't really want to go down that road. You talked about
wind turbines. That's another big, big area because I mean, clean
power is becoming huge and wind turbines, they're-- I don't know if
you've ever been in one.

Lorne: No.

Alan: But I have, in VR. I've
been in a wind turbine. I climbed up the ladder on the inside. I got
inside. I looked at the motor. I stood on top of one, all in VR. And
I'm good with that. I don't necessarily need to do that in real life.

Lorne: I've definitely been in
one in VR. I haven't been in a real one. [laughs]

Alan: It's pretty awesome. And
there's so many things that can be done with this. And let's talk
about the cost to deploy something like this. For example, company
comes, XYZ company. They say, "hey, we saw what you're doing or
we heard the podcast. This company is doing this. We make widgets and
here's our machine factory. We want to start doing safety training in
VR." What does that typically look like, for as roll-out, your
measurements of success, and the costs as well?

Lorne: The costs of actually
come down with the standalone headsets, because there's less
graphical work that needs to be done. It's really linear overall.
Basically, there's two ways that we develop up here at VR Vision
internally for these training applications. There's 360 video that's
ported into VR scenarios, that's going to be filming or any type of
real world environment. Typically, the 360 video form factor is going
to be cheaper and more cost effective than creating a CGI based
environment, which is basically the other way that we developed
training applications. For the 360 side of things, per module, we
charge anywhere from 15 to 20,000 dollars, but you also need a
platform to interact with those 360 videos. So we start with like a
base layer for anywhere from five to seven thousand dollars for a
platform that's built out. It's kind of like the menu selection
screen of Netflix, if you will. And then once you're in that
platform, you can select the various modules or training outcomes
that business may want to use. And basically, each training outcome
is anywhere from 10 to 20,000 dollars, with interactivity and voice
overs and fully optimized. It really depends on the length of the
training outcome. These are averaging about three minutes long. But
if you have a longer one, it will take more post-production, which
would be more costly.

For a CGI based environment, those
costs can be far reaching. It really depends on the scope and brevity
of the application. The ones that we've developed, they fall into
like the 40 to 50,000 dollar range, for basically a three to five
minute CGI based training scenario. We did one for a fire safety
drill for a company down in Texas called Alchemy Systems, and it was
basically replicated version of their factory, one-to-one in a CGI
based environment. And it trained the users that worked in the
factory how to find the fire exit, and what to do in case of an
emergency.

Alan: So how did you get the
factory one-to-one scale? I mean, obviously, they have the
measurements of the factory. You just import that into CAD modeling
program or, how did that work?

Lorne: Yeah, they had FBX files
of a lot of their factory. And then there was another way that we did
it was using LiDAR, which basically went on the floor, scanned the
whole factory. It was pretty boxy, rectangular shaped factory, so
it's pretty easy to do. Just scanned the length and then the size of
it, and then ported it over into a virtual environment.

Alan: Well, that's easy.

Lorne: It sounds easy, but
there's a lot of technical expertise, but...

Alan: If I had asked you the
same question three years ago, it probably wouldn't have been that
easy.

Lorne: Yeah. Yeah.

Alan: One of the things that
we've been seeing as a repetition on this show, is that these
technologies are getting better, faster, cheaper every day. There's
more talent coming out that know how to use these technologies. But I
think one of the key takeaways is that, this isn't something that you
should be looking at five years down the road. This is something that
people are utilizing now and getting dramatic results. So let's talk
about some of the results that your clients are getting.

Lorne: They're having
resolutions of conflicts that can arise in a workplace scenario.
That's one of the biggest ones, just avoiding those risks and
avoiding downtime for various training scenarios. They're getting a
lot of assessments, post training. So with our analytics engine,
we're tracking where the users are looking, we're seeing where the
problems may arise, or where things are being missed. And then let's
say they're missing an easily overlooked area of just handling a box
or flipping a switch properly. And we see after training 10,000
employees, that maybe half of them are missing this one simple thing.
So now we know that this training outcome needs to be pushed a little
bit heavier for those employee, so they can reduce the problems with
whatever that specific process is.

Alan: Or maybe the process
itself is flawed.

Lorne: Or maybe that as well.
Yes.

Alan: We never want to talk
about that. But let's be honest, sometimes things were done just
because they were always done that way. And now this can shed a light
on certain processes that are maybe antiquated or out-of-date.

Lorne: Something that helped us
optimize our training programs was to learn from the employee
feedback, and then getting multiple iterations of our training
programs in place, so that the frontline employees can help optimize
training elements to maximize effectiveness.

Alan: So maybe unpack that a
little bit.

Lorne: So basically with the
post-training assessments, we did a lot of surveys on the employees
to see how effective they were finding it. We had some training
modules that were rated much higher than others. So we can go back to
the ones that were lowly rated and find out "Well, maybe this
was too hard for the employee to learn various elements of the
training protocols." so we can make it a little bit easier for
them to find whatever the risks were or the safety concerns were for
the training scenario.

Alan: So now in that case, you
have to go and refilm this, if it's 360 video, for example.

Lorne: Yes, it would be to
re-storyboard it from the ground up for 360 video. For CG, it's just
a matter of tweaking things in-house.

Alan: I think therein lies the
exact cost-benefit analysis of 360 versus CG, because if you're
filming in 360 video, it's 15 to 20k to film each one of these
modules. And in CGI you're looking at 40 to 50k. The difference being
if something needs to change, you have to go re-record that, that's
another 20k. In CG, if you need to change something, you can change
it on the fly. And one of the things that I love about computer
graphics is that you can reconfigure the warehouse. You can add
elements real time. You can add things in. So there is that benefit
of--

Lorne: Future proofing.

Alan: Yeah, future proofing
that. But it's not always necessary and it's not always warranted. So
when do you decide which one to use over another?

Lorne: There's also factors to
consider, like multiplatform support, having VR/AR functionality, but
also being able to push those exact scenarios to the web. In case
there's not a VR headset available, being able to have a 360 video on
the web for the user to learn in a dojo or LMS environment, that
doubles the effectiveness and accessibility of the training programs
as well.

Alan: What devices are you
pushing up to now and how does that look like? Let's take 360 and
then we'll move into CG, for example, because the headsets are
changing daily. We've taken a complete device agnostic approach,
because who knows what the next big thing is gonna be. So how do you
then future proof the content to be available in such a broad range?
How does that look like and what devices does that go to?

Lorne: We've kind of
transitioned away from PC powered VR. We think that a lot of the
future is going to be based around standalone devices. And as the
computers get smaller and faster and more portable, people are just
going to want to get away from the cumbersome setups of sensors and
just move toward easily portable and scalable device. Things like the
Oculus Quest, Oculus Go make it really easy for adoption. Then you
see Vive Focus and the Focus Plus, work equally as well. They're much
more portable and scalable for businesses to adopt, whereas two,
three years ago these devices didn't exist. So it's hard to predict
where things are going to be in another two years based on how fast
the industry is moving.

Lorne: From the backend side of
things, for programming, something to be aware of when developing
these - CG based, especially - is there's a lot of downsizing of
sampling for various graphics, because the standalone devices simply
can't push the same amounts of power and graphic quality that the PC
powered devices can. So a lot of the times we have to really dumb
down or filter down the polygon counts, just to make sure that the
standalone devices can still push a decent looking scenario but not
overload them, so not to cause frame rate issues and nausea.

Alan: Very interesting.

Lorne: It's definitely something
that developers should be aware of, or businesses looking to adopt
the technology.

Alan: What's the biggest
challenge that you've found in the adoption of this technology?

Lorne: Tracking issues has been
one of the biggest hiccups for us. Before the Focus Plus came out, we
were really stoked that finally stand alone VR is here and we ported
over a lot of our platforms to the Focus and then we ran into a wall
with tracking issues, the controllers would lose focus when you put
the controller behind your head, for example, simply because the
headset only had cameras front facing. The Oculus Quest has helped a
little bit with that because they have four cameras on the front and
they're kind of like a fish eye lens. So they track a little bit
better for fronts to the sides and above you and below you. But
still, you're going to lose tracking if you have to put your hand
behind your back for whatever reason. So that's something that's been
a challenge for us, for developing some training scenarios.

Alan: I think the hardware
itself is growing by leaps and bounds. They've made really, really
big strides in bringing that one unit without having to have a
computer. And I think that's one of the biggest challenges with VR
has always been the challenge of just getting it to work. You set it
up, and then all of a sudden you've got 30 Windows updates, and then
another Steam update. And then by the time you're ready to go,
there's an hour gone. Your training time is missed.

Lorne: Yeah. Definitely
something to be aware of. I think we're going to see a lot of
advancements in technology in both consumer markets, as well as
industrial and commercial applications. Something that we've been
really excited about is, we've just been testing the RealWear AR
headset.

Alan: They raised 80 million.

Lorne: Yeah. They raised a ton
of money, but they're really competing with the Hololens. It's not
really competing in a sense because Hololens is more for a static
environment, where the RealWear is more for on the job task based,
ruggedized training. And I think there's gonna be a lot of potential
for hardware - mixed reality based hardware - in the future. I think
they're going to combine a lot of AR and VR for ruggedized use in the
field. I think that's where the immersive training side of things
will move towards, although it is hard to predict.

Alan: I got to go to PTC's
LiveWorx in Boston and I tried the RealWWear headset, and basically
what it is, is a little articulating arm that mounts to your
construction hat, and it's like pulling down a screen in front of
you. Like imagine pulling up your phone, right? But you pull up a
little screen and it's like having a 9 inch, 10 inch tablet that's
about maybe a foot away from your face, in one eye.

Lorne: Interesting.

Alan: But it's ruggedized. So
it's waterproof, it's bombproof. It's like this big rubber arm. Now
the issue with it - and they're going to address this, I'm sure, on
subsequent ones - is that finding that little sweet spot of getting
it right in front of your eye in the right spot is kind of finicky,
you kind of wiggle it. And then once you get it, it's usually fine.
But I put it on and they have this thing called Expert Capture. And
what that means is, you can use the camera on this thing to capture--
let's say, for example, I'm an expert, I go up to a machine - in this
case that I went on, it was a tractor - I look at the tractor and I
say, OK. And I hit record and I record how to replace the air filter.
And then I hit stop. Now, that's recorded forever and it can be
pushed out of every headset. Now, what I do is I put on the glass. It
walked me through step by step. A little video said, "here, go
here, pull off this cover, replace the thing, put the cover back,
make sure the switch is turned." And that was it. And I replaced
an air filter on a tractor. And I've never touched that before. I'd
ever been on a tractor before. But that little heads-up display gave
me all the information I needed, real time.

Lorne: So do you think you could
do that on a real world tractor now that you've learned it in the
headset?

Alan: Oh my God, yes. I've done
it. So it's in my head. Obviously, I don't know the model of tractor.
So it would vary by model. But if you put me in front of that model
tractor and said change the air filter, I go to the back of the
tractor, I climb up, I pull the air filter out. I know exactly where
it is. Yeah, I did it.

Lorne: It's amazing.

Alan: It's not something that
you told me about or I learned on YouTube. I did it. I did it in real
life with my hands. And I think this is something that being able to
train people on in VR is one thing, where you need a completely
virtual and safe environment, but also taking elements of that 360
video elements or those elements of just the information you need at
the time you need it, into the real world is really important. That's
why I think RealWear it is a really excellent, elegant solution,
although it is very low tech, if you think about it.

Lorne: Yeah, I think being able
to use your hands in the real world. I think just a hands-on element,
it creates much better retention for learning overall, versus the
scenario where you're using controllers. You're still learning, but
being able to get your hands dirty, if you will. And I think that
more than even VR may help learning retention. So it's interesting to
see where the space goes in the next couple of years.

Alan: Yeah. There's a trial
we're going to test. There's an excavator, a VR experience made by a
Toronto company called Career Labs. And the first thing you do, you
learn how to start it, what all the controls do, and then you drive
it. You go grab some rocks and put it in a dump truck. So we're going
to put my daughters, who are 11 and 15 in the scenario for an hour
each, and then we're gonna take them out onto an excavator and see if
it translates from an hour in VR to being able to operate a real
excavator.

Lorne: That's great.

Alan: Well, we'll see.

Lorne: See how the results are.

Alan: It'll either be awesome or
they'll destroy a couple hundred thousand dollar excavator.

Lorne: [laughs] Let's hope not.

Alan: I hope not. I have
confidence in the VR training.

Lorne: [laughs]

Alan: So what's next for you
guys? You're expanding, you're growing, you have a new office in
Toronto. What's next?

Lorne: I guess I'd like to touch
on Reality Well, because that's a subsidiary brand that we're
launching. We actually just launched the website and we're doing a
bunch of PR right now for it. It's basically a platform built for
standalone VR - for the Vive Focus or Oculus Quest - with a health
care focus, for measuring improvement of quality of life. So we're
really focused on retirement homes, hospice centers, places like that
for the elderly. We want to help with cognitive thinking, memory
retention, improving mobility, as well as just adding entertainment
and increased mood for people that are otherwise bedridden or just
bored out of their minds.

The platform itself is fully contained with three sections. The first section is CG based environments that are playful and fun, with animals and interactivity, and they're just meant to be light and fun for the users to explore. There are things like winter scenes, beaches, forests, very vibrant colors, all CG based. The second part of the platform is real world 360 videos and photos, that we're slowly procuring in 8K stereoscopic 3D. The highest quality that we can really develop for, it's all our own content. And it's just places like landmarks all around the world, bucket list items. I'm actually going to Italy in two weeks to film more content there as well. And that's a great way for the users to visit places that they may not get a chance to visit in their lifetime. The last part of the platform is minigames, but they're called exer-games, or serious games in the healthcare community. And we're working with the University of Waterloo to validate these games, to help with things like mobility, to help with memory retention. Some of the games are like rock balancing games. There's like a music game. It's kind of like Beat Saber, but you're on a beach and there's just some beach balls coming at you instead of the Beat Saber blocks. It's a lot of fun. They really enjoy it so far. We're developing more games for that as well. There's a fishing game that we're almost finished and there's gonna be a farming game as well.

Alan: So let me get this straight. You're hitting beach balls on the beach. Is it things like, [hums jitterbug tune]? Is it like big band swing music? Clearly not techno music like Beat Saber.

Lorne: No, no, it's not techno.
It's more classical chill, laid back, relaxing type of music. This is
definitely aimed at a different crowd than the Beat Saber crowd..

Alan: Not going to have the
Skrillex remix?

Lorne: No, no dubstep here. It's
to help increase their mood and just overall entertainment. So it's--

Alan: Are you collecting data
about these people as well?

Lorne: Yes. Yes.

Alan: The health care providers
so that they can help with, because I can imagine there's some
depression and there's some loneliness, so...

Lorne: Yeah, there's analytics
for all of our platform and there's a rating system, as well for a
lot of the experiences. So after they've tested out each one, they
can rate it on a scale of 1 to 10. So we can try and drill down what
they like the most. And right now we have pilots in about six
different health care facilities. And we're gauging and measuring to
see which type of scenarios and environments that they like the best.
And so far, they seem to love animals. We filmed at Toronto zoo, and
that's one of the favorite 360 video experiences that we've shown
them so far. Because you know what it is? It's the 3D. When you're
filming in stereoscopic 3D, - let's say you're looking like a horse
range - you almost want to reach out and touch the horse's head,
because it feels like it's right there in front of you. So it's
really amazing what we're able to do with the technology nowadays.

Alan: It's really fantastic,
being able to provide such a wonderful service to seniors who may or
may not be able to get out, or maybe their memory is failing. And
it's just, it's wonderful.

Lorne: Yeah, it's definitely
heartwarming. And I really hope that it helps. And we can grow this
to provide it to as many facilities as possible, because I think this
could be super beneficial for a lot of people. You know what it is?
It's like bucket list items. If I'm 80 years old and I can't travel
anymore and I never got to go to Machu Picchu, bring me a headset and
give me a 3D video or tour of Machu Picchu, so I can feel like I'm
there. To me, that is truly amazing. And that's what we're trying to
provide.

Alan: That's wonderful. So that
leads me to my last question. What is one problem in the world you
want to see solved using XR technologies?

Lorne: I think the most
impactful thing that XR technology can do is train people that save
lives, people that are in roles like firefighters or policemen, in
high risk scenarios - army's definitely a huge one as well - any type
of role that carries a really high element of risk for real world
scenarios, and has the impact to potentially save lives. I think that
is where I'd like to see the technology used the most. If we could
leverage the technology to mitigate risk in those risky environments,
and at the end of the day, this technology is used to save lives, I
think that would be a beautiful thing to use the technology for.