Mass VR and Squeaky Floors, with PwC's Jeremy Dalton

One of Alan's favourite XR
experiences was running into a room at the Royal York Hotel, filled
with 200 people, all deathly silent and hooked into VR headsets. It
may sound like a Matrix prequel, but it was actually a demo of PwC's
VR platform. Jeremy Dalton -- the author of this anecdote -- stops by
to talk about mass VR technology.

Alan: Welcome to the XR for
Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today's guest is
Jeremy Dalton. Jeremy leads PwC's Virtual and Augmented Reality Team,
helping clients across all sectors understand, quantify and implement
the benefits of virtual and augmented reality technology. As part of
his mission to educate, connect, and inspire, he's also a member of
the World Economic Forum, Virtual and Augmented Reality Global Future
Council, and sits on the Advisory Board of Immerse UK, a cross-sector
network for businesses, research and educational organisations in the
immersive technology industry. Jeremy is also an advisor for the
VR/AR Association, and he's also a mentor for our XR Ignite program.
To learn more about PwC's VR and AR endeavors, you can visit
PwC.co.uk/vr.

Welcome to the show, Jeremy.

Jeremy: Hi, Alan. It's a
pleasure to be here.

Alan: It's such an honor and a
pleasure to have you on the show. We've been communicating for many
years now and we even have a kind of a joint research folder that
we've been adding to over the years. So it's really great to have you
on the show.

Jeremy: Definitely, I'm looking
forward to getting stuck in.

Alan: [laughs] Yeah, it's
amazing. So I just want to tell a quick story. About two months ago,
you came to Toronto with your PwC team and ran a partners conference,
and you had an enormous number of simultaneous virtual reality
experiences. So you wanna maybe just explain what that was and how
that came to be?

Jeremy: Yeah, sure. So this was
a particularly exciting project for us where -- very, very quickly,
in summary -- we put 200 people into virtual reality at the same time
and they all had this simultaneous experience in the same room. And I
was able to collect that data in real time and understand exactly
where in that experience they were and what decisions they were
making in that world. So it was fantastic. It went off without a
hitch, thankfully, given the number of potential technical issues
that could have gone wrong. I was very happy. It all went very
smoothly.

Alan: It was quite endeavour. I
remember you said, "Hey, we're doing this thing tomorrow
morning. I'm in Toronto." I cancelled my meetings the morning, I
came over there. I went into the hotel -- it was at the Royal York in
Toronto -- and I went upstairs, walked into this room and it was dead
silent. And there's 200 people -- 200+ people, there was more than
200 people, for sure -- and you could hear a pin drop on a carpet.
And it was the strangest thing, because everybody was in VR and
everybody's looking in different directions. It was this crazy thing.
And you had this branching narrative. Maybe talk to what that
branching narrative was? Right after the experience, you were able to
show the information. Walk us through how that came to be.

Jeremy: Yeah, sure. And I like
your comment about being able to keep everyone quiet. That was
actually mentioned as well by by some of the organizers of the
conference, that they were amazed by this pindrop silence in the
room, because obviously it's very rare. You've usually got people
messing around on their mobile phones. You got them talking to each
other, going to get a glass of water, leaving the room, coming into
the room. So I think it's a testament to the power of virtual reality
to create such a captive and focused audience.

Alan:

One of Alan's favourite XR
experiences was running into a room at the Royal York Hotel, filled
with 200 people, all deathly silent and hooked into VR headsets. It
may sound like a Matrix prequel, but it was actually a demo of PwC's
VR platform. Jeremy Dalton -- the author of this anecdote -- stops by
to talk about mass VR technology.

Alan: Welcome to the XR for
Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today's guest is
Jeremy Dalton. Jeremy leads PwC's Virtual and Augmented Reality Team,
helping clients across all sectors understand, quantify and implement
the benefits of virtual and augmented reality technology. As part of
his mission to educate, connect, and inspire, he's also a member of
the World Economic Forum, Virtual and Augmented Reality Global Future
Council, and sits on the Advisory Board of Immerse UK, a cross-sector
network for businesses, research and educational organisations in the
immersive technology industry. Jeremy is also an advisor for the
VR/AR Association, and he's also a mentor for our XR Ignite program.
To learn more about PwC's VR and AR endeavors, you can visit
PwC.co.uk/vr.

Welcome to the show, Jeremy.

Jeremy: Hi, Alan. It's a
pleasure to be here.

Alan: It's such an honor and a
pleasure to have you on the show. We've been communicating for many
years now and we even have a kind of a joint research folder that
we've been adding to over the years. So it's really great to have you
on the show.

Jeremy: Definitely, I'm looking
forward to getting stuck in.

Alan: [laughs] Yeah, it's
amazing. So I just want to tell a quick story. About two months ago,
you came to Toronto with your PwC team and ran a partners conference,
and you had an enormous number of simultaneous virtual reality
experiences. So you wanna maybe just explain what that was and how
that came to be?

Jeremy: Yeah, sure. So this was
a particularly exciting project for us where -- very, very quickly,
in summary -- we put 200 people into virtual reality at the same time
and they all had this simultaneous experience in the same room. And I
was able to collect that data in real time and understand exactly
where in that experience they were and what decisions they were
making in that world. So it was fantastic. It went off without a
hitch, thankfully, given the number of potential technical issues
that could have gone wrong. I was very happy. It all went very
smoothly.

Alan: It was quite endeavour. I
remember you said, "Hey, we're doing this thing tomorrow
morning. I'm in Toronto." I cancelled my meetings the morning, I
came over there. I went into the hotel -- it was at the Royal York in
Toronto -- and I went upstairs, walked into this room and it was dead
silent. And there's 200 people -- 200+ people, there was more than
200 people, for sure -- and you could hear a pin drop on a carpet.
And it was the strangest thing, because everybody was in VR and
everybody's looking in different directions. It was this crazy thing.
And you had this branching narrative. Maybe talk to what that
branching narrative was? Right after the experience, you were able to
show the information. Walk us through how that came to be.

Jeremy: Yeah, sure. And I like
your comment about being able to keep everyone quiet. That was
actually mentioned as well by by some of the organizers of the
conference, that they were amazed by this pindrop silence in the
room, because obviously it's very rare. You've usually got people
messing around on their mobile phones. You got them talking to each
other, going to get a glass of water, leaving the room, coming into
the room. So I think it's a testament to the power of virtual reality
to create such a captive and focused audience.

Alan: It was incredible. You
know, I think this is one of the things that people underestimate
about virtual reality. Because once you're in there, you've got the
headphones on and you're in a comfortable, safe place where you can
get right into it, people lose themselves. They're no longer in a
conference room in a hotel in Toronto. They are in -- in your case --
a board room in an office talking about cybersecurity. You've
literally transported hundreds of people into one joint experience.
And I don't think there's been any other technology in the world that
hijacks 100 percent of our entire focus.

Jeremy: Exactly. And I think
that point, we call it immersion. Immersion is one of the greatest
strengths and in fact, *the* main strength of virtual reality. But I
feel like the word immersion is very broad and doesn't quite pinpoint
the many subsections of immersion that you get as advantages from
virtual reality. And one of them is that ability to captivate an
audience and to put them in a distractionless environment. And that
obviously has incredible uses when it comes to training, to learning,
education, and a number of other business and consumer applications.

Alan: Let's walk through the
experience itself that you guys created, because I think
cybersecurity is a huge issue. And I mean, I don't know how detailed
you want to get, but this was a cybersecurity attack and you were
educating the partners on what to do.

Jeremy: Exactly, exactly. So we
effectively built this from the ground up over a three month period
leading up to that event in Toronto. And the desire was to create an
immersive experience that put people in the middle of a cybersecurity
attack on their company. So we wanted to be able to to take clients
to this world where their company is under attack and to help them
understand what it's like to be in such a scenario, without the
danger or the cost or inconvenience of being in such a scenario
itself. So that's why we use virtual reality here to make that
happen. The base content was 360 video, but a branch narrative of 360
video. So if you can imagine in this world you were asked to make a
number of decisions. One of the first -- or choices, rather, I'll
call them -- one of the first choices is whether you want to be the
CEO, the CFO, or the CISO -- the chief information security officer
-- in this experience, and depending on which character you choose to
embody, you get given a different path or experience in this
cybersecurity attack. So from the CEO's perspective, you're looking
at the strategic agenda of this attack and what it entails for the
company at a high level, things like its reputation, for example.

Alan: And eventually you are
pulled up in front of the press to answer--

Jeremy: Yeah, that was cool.

Alan: Yeah. To answer some very
taxing questions about the cybersecurity attack. If you choose to be
the CFO. You then have to make a decision as to whether you recommend
making payments -- Bitcoin payments -- on the ransomware attack
that's taking place. And finally, if you choose to be the CISO, you
get a more technical view of the attack. You're trying to understand
where has it come from, who effectively, where was ground zero in
terms of the attack, who is responsible, what channel was
responsible? And you're trying to plug that up as soon as possible.
And the choice you make there is whether you want to prioritize the
external public facing websites or the internal customer relationship
management or CRM system. And the great thing is, depending on what
decision you make, you get given a different experience. And we can
see all of that data in real time based on what you're doing. I
literally had a tablet in front of me in that massive hotel
conference room and I was able to see exactly what was going on, what
every individual person was doing in that world.

Jeremy: And that's something
that really struck me as very beneficial to facilitators of training,
facilitators of conferences. This, to me, is probably one of the
first times a company has ever done something like this. And that's
why I think it bears a lot of discussion around this, because you
took 200 executives and you put them in the exact same experience,
but with different choices. Now, one of the things that I saw
afterwards is, as soon as they took off the headsets, it was
interesting how you managed to make it so that they all ended within,
I think, 40 seconds of each other or something.

Alan: Yeah, that's right. So
that required not only some technical know-how in terms of using this
platform to kick everyone off at exactly the same time. So I'd
literally be there. Everyone's ready, no issues, no more hands
raised. So I would click this button on the tablet and all 200 plus
headsets would light up and start the experience. That was the first
thing we had to do. And the second thing and probably more
importantly, we had to build the narrative -- or design the narrative
-- of that experience in such a way that the sum of the lengths of
all the branch narratives added up to approximately the same amount.
So you can imagine that was a bit tedious, but as you said, we
managed it. Takes a lot of planning, but yes, we did manage it within
about 30 or 40 seconds.

Jeremy: I recorded a video of
this. You know, I walked into the room and it's funny because I
walked in. People are already in VR. I took some film around
everybody. And then at the end, you see all these people taking it
off and they're kind of like who else is there? And then they start
looking at each other and like with these kind of big eyes going,
"Wow, that was amazing." And the one thing that I thought
was amazing -- beyond the reactions from the people -- was the fact
that you had the metrics up on the screen. So not only were you able
to see it on the tablet, but you then projected that information on
the screen. So as you take off your headset, you can look up and see
what percentage of people chose to be a CFO, CEO or CISO. And then
what percentage of people chose different branching narratives from
there. People are in VR, they don't know what other people are doing.
They pull it off and they can see a consensus. And I'm pretty sure we
figured this out remotely as well. You could do this with employees
all around the world and run them through training scenarios. I mean,
it's obviously not as easy as doing it in one room, but I think
there's definitely potential here. And I think that's probably where
you're going in the future with us.

Alan: Absolutely. I mean, we
could consider this phase one effectively. And there are lots of
other options open to us in terms of how we advance this idea or
concept. And yes, it could be advancing it in a geographical context.
So being able to spread it out to different parts of the world. And
in fact, we've already begun on that. We now have over 500 different
headsets in PwC globally. And a number of the headsets that you saw
in Toronto are now in places like Chicago, New York, London,
Singapore, Melbourne, Dubai, Lagos, Nigeria, even. So we're
definitely keen to spread it all around the world and spread the
education around virtual reality, because I think that's particularly
important. And education, not only in terms of the theoretical
understanding of knowing that VR is advantageous in a training
context because of X, Y, and Z, but actually feeling it, so knowing
it from firsthand experience. And that's incredibly important for a
technology like virtual reality because it is experiential, it can
never be fully understood in purely a theoretical context, which is
why we're so keen to spread the headsets globally, spread the
experience globally, and therefore, spread the knowledge and
understanding globally.

Alan: You mentioned 500 headsets
across PwC around the world. And one of the things that I noticed and
I took some photos of the aftermath, that was this experience. You
had 200 and some odd people in VR. They finish the experience, they
go out for coffee break. Your team collects all these VR headsets and
headphones and brought them into a staging room. And there was
literally a pile, four feet high by five feet wide, of VR headsets.
And I mean, that's clearly not the way we're gonna do this in the
future. How are you guys managing your device management? Is it like
something like a device, like a cell phone or something? Or how are
you managing device management within PwC? And what would you
recommend to other companies who are looking to deploy these
headsets? Because that's a big challenge for people, it's device
management.

Jeremy: Absolutely. And yeah,
you're right. That scene was something out of a VR apocalypse
scenario.

Alan: It was scary! [laughs]

Jeremy: [laughs] But
unfortunately, that is the way it has to be, at least currently.
There's no real way of getting round it, if you're trying to manage
headsets on such a large scale and particularly trying to handle them
remotely, you've got to have some sort of mobile device management --
or MDM -- solution in place to be able to manage, control the
software on the headsets, manage the settings on them, install,
uninstall content, all of this sort of stuff. It's very difficult to
centralize that physically, and very onerous. So if you imagine 300
headsets globally, if we needed to do updates on those headsets or we
needed to install content, or delete content or whatever it is,
perform some sort of action, the very low-fi way of doing it is to
call the person up on the phone and say, "Right, step-by-step
instructions. This is what you need to do." and send them the
files and get them to plug the headsets in, or have rails they're
going to move the files across. And it would be an absolute nightmare
to do that on a scale, large scale.

So instead, what we've got is we've got
this mobile device management software installed on every single one
of those headsets, which has gone around the world. And whenever
anyone has requested an update or the installation of some content,
all I have to do is ask them to read me the asset tag on the side of
the headset. I will then go into my MDM control panel on my web
browser here in London. I'll enter the asset number in, I'll see it.
They have to connect it to Wi-Fi. That's one of the things they have
to do. But once it's connected to the Internet, I'll see it pop up as
online. I will then send it instructions remotely via this web panel.
So, for example, we have a little macro, so to speak, around
installing certain bits of content or wiping the device or changing
the Bluetooth name, all of those little things. So I will send as
many instructions as I need to to get the action to be performed. It
will get performed remotely via Wi-Fi on their side and depending on
the size of the file, if we're installing something, it should take
anywhere from a few minutes to half an hour maybe to get that content
installed, and away they go. There is no need for them to do anything
beyond reading that asset number and connecting it to Wi-Fi. We
just-- we do the rest remotely via this web based control panel.

Alan: That's incredible. Now,
this control panel, is this something that you're making available to
other companies?

Jeremy: So this is not our piece
of software. So this is a piece of software by a company called 42
Gears, and they have a platform called SureMDM. But that's only one
option that we're looking at at the moment. There are many other
options. VMware is looking into MDM solutions for virtual reality
headsets. And then you've also got Oculus with their own MDM solution
as well. So there's quite a few different bits and pieces out there.

Alan: So let's talk quickly. And
I don't want to talk too much about brands and stuff like that, but
you chose not to work with the Oculus Go headset. But instead you
were working with another brand, that was mainly because of this MDM
mobile device management software solution. Correct?

Jeremy: So there were a few
considerations that went into that decision. So in the end, it came
up to, for us, the Oculus Go versus the Pico G2 Pro. And we like the
fact that the Pico headset didn't require the use of a controller,
which made it far easier to do these demonstrations at scale. So if
you imagine two hundred headsets in that room and having to connect
two hundred controllers.

Alan: Oh, that would be insane.
How would you even figure that out? You'd have to tie them-- I've
seen it before, where they tie the remote to the headset.

Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah.

Alan: But, man, the interference
of having 200 Bluetooth devices. Oh my God.

Jeremy: Exactly. And that was
actually a consideration in deciding whether we were going to
Bluetooth the headsets, the headphones to the headsets, or not. In
the end, given what you just said, that went through our minds as
well. We don't want to risk 200 Bluetooth connections, all in the
same location, connecting to individual headsets, and getting that
100 percent right. So we simply went for the lo-fi solution in that
case, and plugged the wiring between the headphone and each headset.

Alan: Well, it's a good thing
that Pico didn't take the Apple approach and get rid of their headset
jack.

Jeremy: [laughs] I know, right?
But regardless of vendors, there are advantages and disadvantages of
every single vendor. And the interesting thing is just understanding
what headset works for you, depending on the exact solution, scale,
company, and situation, basically, you're trying to deploy to.

Alan: If you were to give five
key things that you evaluate a headset on. You just mentioned a
couple, so let's list them out.

Jeremy: Okay. So one of them
pretty obviously is specification. So firstly, specification from a
power perspective, in terms of the processing power of the headset,
is it good enough to run the type of content that we want to? Second
of all, the type of lenses, the resolution of the screen, ultimately
the visual fidelity, the field of view, all of that I would consider
under visual fidelity of the experience, because obviously that has a
big effect when you're running virtual reality experiences. Then I
would go also to costs because obviously that's a major
consideration, especially if you're doing it at scale. How much is
each headset going to cost, maybe at a bulk level if you're buying
lots of them at once. Then I would consider the user experience
points. Now there are quite a few of these. The need to have a
controller connected was one of them that we considered. The need to
register an account to use the headset is another one that we
considered. The ability to run an MDM solution is now extremely
important consideration at scale. So that's definitely a
consideration. And one of the other considerations we had -- which
may or may not be relevant, depending on what your focus is -- is the
level of B2B focus versus B2C focus of the headset manufacturer. So
for us as a company, our main concern is B2B. So we're very keen to
engage with manufacturers of headsets that concentrate on the B2B
market.

Alan: So specifications, visual
fidelity, cost and user experience, is there anything else?

Jeremy: Other considerations
would come under supporting tools and software. So some headsets
might support a type of kiosk mode as standard, and that's quite
useful depending on your context sometimes. I would consider privacy
issues, particularly if you're going to have confidential content or
content that you need to have such a policy in place for compliance
reasons.

Alan: Actually, that's really
important. Recently just read an article that three of the major VR
collaboration platforms got hacked. So--

Jeremy: Yeah.

Alan: And it exposes the fact
that while these solutions are ready for use, they're maybe not ready
for enterprise scale yet. And I think that these are some
considerations that we all need to factor into what we use and what
we don't.

Jeremy: Absolutely. And that
goes back to our cybersecurity concerns and one of the reasons we
created this experience in the first place.

Alan: It's all circular.

Jeremy: Exactly.

Alan: [chuckles] So let's dive
into some some numbers here. What were you guys measuring as the
success key performance indicators of this experience? How did you
measure success?

Jeremy: So interestingly, for
this particular event in Toronto, a measure of success would be
having a vast majority of users that have provided feedback that
believe it was a positive educational experience vs. an indifferent
or negative one. The real KPI will come in a few months time, when as
we start to run this experience with clients, we get an understanding
of their level of interest and engagement with the platform and
whether that has added value to them in terms of understanding what
it's like to be in such a cyber security scenario. And ultimately one
of PwC's services is in cybersecurity and providing various services
around that issue to companies. So we'll see if that helps as well to
augment the pipeline in sense of selling these services.

Alan: So let me ask, if you can
share, what was the feedback? You probably have some data around
positive versus negative. Was there any negative feedback?

Jeremy: Yeah, yeah, Yeah, there
there was. And inevitably there always will be. There will always be
negative feedback for any type of initiative or venture, particularly
with an emerging technology like virtual reality. That is-- such a
technology will always come under fire when there are alternatives
that consist of the status quo. So for example, you'll always have
some people saying why couldn't we have just watched it as a video,
for example. Or you will get some people who are saying the room was
was too hot or too cold. Now, that may not be related to the VR
experience particularly. But if you think of it as a whole from the
outside, that does affect how a user feels about going through that
experience. So even though it's an external factor is what I'm
saying, it does affect the ultimate outcome. So to give you some
stats on it, it was very positive, was 95 percent positive.

Alan: Whoa!

Jeremy: Exactly.

Alan: 95 percent positive. And
the other five percent said it was too hot and too cold in the room.

[laughs]

Jeremy: [laughs] I'm drawing out
some from this batch of experiences, and I'm also drawing out some
from a previous run that we did, with actually 2,800 people. So we
ran a VR experience previously, it was about a year ago, year and a
half ago now. This was with 2,800. Not at the same time, though. So
this was only with about 100, maybe 150 at a time, max. So we took it
to its limits by going to 200 this time, with our own Internet
infrastructure to support that. But previously we ran it with 2,800
people and got much greater feedback. So I'm sort of feeding that in
as well. And to create a framework -- if anyone's thinking about
gathering feedback from a VR experience -- the type of feedback
you're going to receive can be bucketed into the contents of the
experience. So in other words, was the content effective? Was it
impactful? Was it relevant?

The next bucket is facilitation. So
you've got someone who's obviously leading in terms of that session.
They're telling you how to put on the headset, what to be aware of,
what to click, what to do, what to touch, what to look at, and so on.
Instructions, ultimately. And if those instructions are poor, the
entire experience can be damaged as a result. And then you have
external factors. You have things like the temperature of the room
and believe it or not, even more interesting than the temperature of
the room -- and this is a real piece of feedback -- the floors were
too squeaky.

Alan: Ah.

Jeremy: So if you could imagine
a hundred people in a room going through a virtual reality headset,
just as you said, Alan, the room in Toronto was pindrop quiet. If you
have facilitators and organisers and the AV team walking around the
room dealing with whatever they're trying to deal with during the
session, if they are making a relatively loud noise on the floor or
some sort of distracting noise, then that is taking you away from the
immersive and impactful experience that you've created in this
virtual reality world. So that ultimately leads to a negatively
impacted experience. So even something as small as that is something
to be aware of. Those three buckets are quite useful.

Alan: I think we figured out the
title: "Mass VR and Squeaky Floors."

Jeremy: [laughs] I like it,
yeah. It's good.

Alan: It's really interesting,
because the one thing that was so striking was that silence in the
room. The squeaky floor thing is definitely an issue, and people
breaking people's presence is an issue. But I think that can be
overcome with maybe noise canceling headphones, or something like
that.

Jeremy: Potentially, yeah. But
you know what? The bigger story and I just mentioned one more thing
before we move on. It's also you talked about taking people away from
the world through maybe walking around or talking to each other,
whatever it is. Usually those noises are not deliberate. So you have
people that are trying to be quiet. They're trying to creep across
the room because they need to get to the other side. But I have seen
a few people who I would describe as not mischievous or or
deliberately negative, anyway. But you can see that they're doing
something that is deliberate, and could be conceived or would be
considered distracting. So, for example, we all know virtual reality
to a lot of people is still a novelty. So when you see your friends
or your colleagues in virtual reality, enveloped in this completely
different world, it messes with your head a bit, because you've
probably never had this experience before, where you are together
physically but one of you is in another world. And because of that
novelty factor, you get people who get very excitable about it.
They--

Alan: They want to get a picture
beside them, sticking their tongue out.

Jeremy: Yes. They want to get a
picture beside it. But even worse than that, you get some people who
start waving their hands in front of them and saying hi to the
person, and trying to get a reaction out of them. We definitely have
to move on from that sort of culture, and we will, eventually. But
it's that beginning hitch.

Alan: I got to drop a story in
here. We were doing a demo for groups of people, and we were doing
one in a private club in Toronto. And there's a pool table there.
This guy says, "Look, I'm going to go and do this VR thing. I
really want to try it, but make sure my friends don't come near me."
I was like, "OK, no problem."

Jeremy: [chuckles]

Alan: He's in the experience,
he's doing his thing. And he hands me his phone and says, "Take
a photo of me." I say, "Oh, OK." So I back up, and the
second I back up to take a photo of him, his friend comes over with a
pool cue and just hits him right in the nards. And that was the end
of that guy's VR. He will probably never go in VR again. And so I
think we need to be really cognizant one, to not do that to people,
but also not to break people's immersion. It really is jarring.

Jeremy: Exactly.

Alan: So let's get into some
numbers. Can you discuss the costs associated with us, ranges?

Jeremy: I can give you ranges,
yes. But I'll start by saying that, to anyone thinking about
implementing virtual reality and deploying it in their organization,
cost is a factor. But it is not something you should be too afraid
of, because you can have VR projects that-- you can vary the scope of
VR projects and the terms of those projects in such a way that they
can go from tens of thousands of dollars to hundreds of thousands of
dollars. Now, this particular experience to go through the ideation
on it, to build it, to set it up, procure the headsets, and actually
deploy it over in Toronto -- so abroad for us, from our perspective
-- and that was in the low hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now,
bear in mind, that is also including the procurement of-- this was--
I'll tell you exactly how many we ordered, it was close to 300
headsets in the end. Because we were going to use them elsewhere as
well. So that's the sort of range we're looking at for such a
project. But again, that is also including the software development
time, the 360 videography, building the platform, dealing with even
things like the network infrastructure and procuring that as well.
So, I think we did it pretty well, personally.

Alan: From what I've seen out
there, you guys managed to do this on a real budget. Even if you said
500,000 for 300 headsets, plus the software to deliver it, plus the
filming. I mean, there's people out there charging that much just for
360 video development. So it's pretty impressive what you guys were
able to do. And that's why I am so honoured to have you as a mentor
with XR Ignite, because you bring such a practical, pragmatic
approach to this technology.

Jeremy: The honour is all mine,
Alan. Thank you so much.

Alan: Awesome. So let's talk
about the return on that investment. PwC invests 400,000 or 300,000,
whatever it is, somewhere around there. And you've got these VR
headsets, 200 partners that have tried it. What has progressed from
there, that will create a return? So, for example, the partners that
were there, how many of those partners now have requested VR in their
divisions?

Jeremy: So there are five to
ten, off the top of my head, that are leading cybersecurity services
around the globe for PwC. And they have requested the use of these
headsets in their territories, to assist with the selling of those
services. And as I mentioned earlier, these start in the US and they
go all across the globe, from the UK, to Central and Eastern Europe,
to India, to East Asia, Singapore, Australia. So we're really glad to
see such a a widespread adoption of these headsets. And I don't think
that would have been possible if they hadn't experienced it
firsthand. So, I mean, I'm thinking one of the partners in particular
said they-- after experiencing it, they immediately messaged me and
said, "Jeremy, we need to start deploying this to clients in one
of our regions in Asia immediately, let's get on the phone." And
I was on the phone with them the week after. And now they have a
number of headsets that they're using over there.

Alan: Yeah, I noticed that Asia
actually-- I don't know if it's the culture or because they bypassed
us with PCs and went straight to mobile. But the China, Asia market
for virtual reality is voracious. They love everything to do with it.
And they spend an awful lot on education and training, more so than
we do here. And this tool is by far and away the most powerful
training tool we've ever created as mankind. So I can see why there's
an allure there. And then have you deployed it now in Asia?

Jeremy: Yeah. Yeah, it is
running in multiple territories in Asia now, which is great.

Alan: Incredible. So, what's
next on the roadmap? You've done the cybersecurity thing. What would
the next experience be that you guys are gonna create?

Jeremy: So in context of
thinking about the future roadmap for this particular product -- and
even going a little bit outside it -- let's talk about the wider
remit of training. The interesting thing for us is to see what
platforms and what types of content match different business
scenarios to add real value. So by that I mean, in my opinion,
virtual reality is really good for soft skills training and for
hands-on training. And when I say hands-on, I mean any form of
activity that requires you to be present in a certain location
because you have to use certain tools, or machinery, devices,
infrastructure, whatever it is, needing to be in that location to
perform those actions. That type of scenario is very powerful to use
virtual reality to train for. So we're looking at those two buckets
and we're thinking, OK, so you obviously have 360 content. And I know
360 content is potentially controversial to a lot of people. But I
will exclaim my stance on this right now and say that 360 content is
like Schrödinger's Cat. It is both a virtual reality and not virtual
reality, at the same time. It depends on the context. So 360 content
that is being experienced in a virtual reality headset -- or some
form of virtual reality device -- is a virtual reality experience.
However, if you take that same virtual reality content and you
display it on a 14-inch 2D laptop screen where you're using the mouse
to click and look around the environment, that is no longer virtual
reality, despite being exactly the same content. So that's my stance
on 360 video with regards to virtual reality.

Now on the other side, we have a
different type of content. We have computer generated content. Now,
this offers you different advantages or disadvantages compared to 360
content. One of the advantages of computer generated content is its
ability to be quite customizable. So if I wanted to take this
experience and I wanted to switch up the type of conversations you're
having, if I wanted to change the type of characters you're speaking
to. That type of customization *could* be simulated using 360 video,
but much more complicated, much more time consuming in terms of
trying to build out every possible scenario. And at the end of the
day, you'll never be able to build out every possible scenario,
without going back and revideoing in that exact same context. So
we're keen to start exploring computer generated content. Where it
makes sense from the point of view of perhaps soft skills training,
when it comes to hands-on training computer generated tends to be
very strong, because you're obviously looking for much greater levels
of dynamism, of interactive activities. It's no longer about just
making decisions at a high level, it's about actually performing
minutiae of actions. Which computer generated content is very good
for.

So in summary, we're exploring
different types of content for training in virtual reality. We are
exploring different types of devices. We're particularly keen to
start seeing how much of our six degrees of freedom tethered virtual
reality content can be ported to standalone headsets. So in other
words, taking it from something like an HTC Vive Pro or or an Oculus
Rift, to a Oculus Quest or a Pico Neo 2. So in a few months time,
we'll be reviewing our 6DOF strategy, just as we did with our 3DOF
strategy for this event. And I'm quite excited to assess it, based on
a lot of the criteria we spoke about before and see where we get to.

Alan: Well, I just want to
unpack -- for the people listening, who may not know what 6DOF and
3DOF are -- 3DOF is three degrees of freedom, meaning you can look
left, right, up, down, but you can't move in the space. And six
degrees of freedom, meaning you can look up, down, left, right. But
you can also walk forward, you can crouch down, you can jump up. So
you have that six degrees of freedom.

Jeremy: Yeah. And I'll also add
to that -- because that's a good point, I keep forgetting that not
everyone might know what that means -- but also to explain that
further, we're also talking about moving from 3DOF controllers to
6DOF controllers. So, again, talking about what Alan just said from a
controller perspective, with some 3DOF controllers, you're able to
point them around--

Alan: It's like a glorified
laser pointer, yeah.

Jeremy: Yeah, exactly. But with
6DOF controllers, you're actually able to move them in physical space
and see them moving in the exact same way in virtual reality. So now
imagine where you've got a 6DOF headset and 6DOF controllers, that
gives you complete freedom of movement and being able to look around.
And that's the type of headset that we think is very powerful for
corporate training scenarios. And we want to explore what devices and
content really works well in an optimized fashion on those types of
headsets. So that's what we'll be exploring over the next few months.

Alan: Incredible. Well, Jeremy,
I want to ask you, what is one problem in the world that you want to
see solved using virtual and augmented reality or XR?

Jeremy: That is a difficult
question. I'm going to say-- I'm going to pick something outside of
business, and say that when it comes to healthcare and helping people
manage traumas, helping people manage fears, helping them manage
conditions like dementia, helping them get out of the house even, if
they have accessibility challenges. I think this broad remit of using
VR for good in a personal context, I think that will have great,
great positive effects for humanity. And I think we're only starting
to see that come out now in the world. So there's a lot of exciting
things to come. And I think VR and AR can do a lot of good in the
world. I'm looking forward to seeing that happen.

Alan: Well, that is a great way
to end this podcast. Jeremy Dalton from PwC Global. I want to say
thank you so much for being a guest. If you want to learn more about
the great work that Jeremy and his team are doing, you can visit
PwC.co.uk/vr. And how can people get in touch with you, Jeremy?

Jeremy: Probably best via--
well, I'll give you the options. You've got LinkedIn, you can get me
on LinkedIn at jeremydalton.info, you put that in your web browser.
Or you can catch me on Twitter, @jeremycdalton. I'm looking forward
to chatting.