Using XR to Ensure a Safe Work Environment, with Bit Space Development’s Daniel Blair

Access to the Internet can be spotty
in Northern Canada. But heavy industry happens up there all the same,
and Bit Space Development’s Daniel Blair wants to bring those
workers the same access to XR-driven training and remote expert
assistance as anywhere else enjoys. He chats with Alan about how he
hopes to bring that about, in the first XR for Business of 2020.

Alan: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan
Smithson here with the XR for Business Podcast. Today, we’re speaking
with Daniel Blair, founder and CEO of a Canadian VR company called
Bit Space Development. We’ll be discussing how virtual reality is
revolutionizing industrial training and why it’s vitally important to
define your key performance indicators to release you and your
customers from the Pilot POC Purgatory. All that and more on the XR
for Business Podcast.

With that, I want to welcome my good
friend Dan to the show. Welcome to the show, Dan.

Daniel: Hey, thanks for having
me.

Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure.
Let’s get into what you guys are doin; making serious purposes with
VR and AR. What does that mean?

Daniel: Basically, what that
means is we utilize immersive technologies to create games. But those
games are used for training, education, and really serious purposes.
We aren’t generally building applications that are going to be sold
on Steam or sold on the Oculus store. But what we’re building are
tools that integrate with clients infrastructure to help augment
their workflow or create a safer workplace.

Alan: I know you guys have done
a ton of things. One of them was a hand tool training simulator.
Maybe walk us through what are these things, and how are people using
them?

Daniel: For sure. Some of our
most recent deployments include exactly what you’re talking about,
the power tools simulator, which we created with a provincial
organization here. That tool utilizes the room-scale six degrees of
freedom tracking of any of the open VR-capable headsets, to put new
entrants and kids on job sites and teach them about safe operation of
power tools. And that can range from anything from a drill or a
hammer drill or a circular saw. But we put some really interesting
tools in there, like concrete saws — which would be extremely
dangerous for a new entrant to use in real life.

Alan: I actually know all about
that, cement saws. When I was a kid, my dad was grinding some bricks
with a grinding wheel and the wheel shattered and cut both his legs
wide open. And I remember as a kid, taking him to the hospital and
them having to sew up right down to the bone. I mean, this was a real
problem. I know this firsthand. This is a very, very unsafe tool if
used incorrectly.

Daniel: Yeah. And the worst part
of building these applications are the shock value photos that my
clients will send me. I’ll wake up in the morning and they’ll say,
“hey, this is a good example of why to learn about the safe
operation of these tools.” And they’ll send me a photo of
something similar to what happened to your dad, which is super
unfortunate. And additionally to that, we’ve done a lot of work in
the welding space, and on the more promotional side, our most recent
deployment is called Level Up VR, which we developed with the USAF
Workers of Tomorrow, an organization that promotes safe work sites
and safe work practices for both employers and employees for youth.
And that tool actually won an Impact Marketing Award for the use of
the virtual reality tool in the campaign that was created to raise
awareness. So we see both the marketing side and the education side.

Alan: That’s amazing. Safe
working is something that we need to market to. Tr

Access to the Internet can be spotty
in Northern Canada. But heavy industry happens up there all the same,
and Bit Space Development’s Daniel Blair wants to bring those
workers the same access to XR-driven training and remote expert
assistance as anywhere else enjoys. He chats with Alan about how he
hopes to bring that about, in the first XR for Business of 2020.

Alan: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan
Smithson here with the XR for Business Podcast. Today, we’re speaking
with Daniel Blair, founder and CEO of a Canadian VR company called
Bit Space Development. We’ll be discussing how virtual reality is
revolutionizing industrial training and why it’s vitally important to
define your key performance indicators to release you and your
customers from the Pilot POC Purgatory. All that and more on the XR
for Business Podcast.

With that, I want to welcome my good
friend Dan to the show. Welcome to the show, Dan.

Daniel: Hey, thanks for having
me.

Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure.
Let’s get into what you guys are doin; making serious purposes with
VR and AR. What does that mean?

Daniel: Basically, what that
means is we utilize immersive technologies to create games. But those
games are used for training, education, and really serious purposes.
We aren’t generally building applications that are going to be sold
on Steam or sold on the Oculus store. But what we’re building are
tools that integrate with clients infrastructure to help augment
their workflow or create a safer workplace.

Alan: I know you guys have done
a ton of things. One of them was a hand tool training simulator.
Maybe walk us through what are these things, and how are people using
them?

Daniel: For sure. Some of our
most recent deployments include exactly what you’re talking about,
the power tools simulator, which we created with a provincial
organization here. That tool utilizes the room-scale six degrees of
freedom tracking of any of the open VR-capable headsets, to put new
entrants and kids on job sites and teach them about safe operation of
power tools. And that can range from anything from a drill or a
hammer drill or a circular saw. But we put some really interesting
tools in there, like concrete saws — which would be extremely
dangerous for a new entrant to use in real life.

Alan: I actually know all about
that, cement saws. When I was a kid, my dad was grinding some bricks
with a grinding wheel and the wheel shattered and cut both his legs
wide open. And I remember as a kid, taking him to the hospital and
them having to sew up right down to the bone. I mean, this was a real
problem. I know this firsthand. This is a very, very unsafe tool if
used incorrectly.

Daniel: Yeah. And the worst part
of building these applications are the shock value photos that my
clients will send me. I’ll wake up in the morning and they’ll say,
“hey, this is a good example of why to learn about the safe
operation of these tools.” And they’ll send me a photo of
something similar to what happened to your dad, which is super
unfortunate. And additionally to that, we’ve done a lot of work in
the welding space, and on the more promotional side, our most recent
deployment is called Level Up VR, which we developed with the USAF
Workers of Tomorrow, an organization that promotes safe work sites
and safe work practices for both employers and employees for youth.
And that tool actually won an Impact Marketing Award for the use of
the virtual reality tool in the campaign that was created to raise
awareness. So we see both the marketing side and the education side.

Alan: That’s amazing. Safe
working is something that we need to market to. Training and
education and learning is really competing with Hollywood movies,
triple-A games and social media. And you guys are finding a way to
kind of take the best of those and bring them together. So what are
you guys doing in terms of gamification, and what are what are you
seeing resonate with people?

Daniel: So a lot of what we do
gets integrated into classroom experiences, and the engagement rates
and the actual enjoyment — because I would consider both enjoying
something and being engaged in something slightly different — we
found that in our measurement that it is definitely increasing the
awareness and the engagement side, through the use of virtual
reality. So one of our most recent excursions was into the north, for
an application that we call Try the Trades, which was with our
partner, Manitoba Construction Sector Council and Trade Up Manitoba,
which is our provincial sector council for the construction industry
and their awareness organization. So they’re technically the same
company, but they have different teams. And what we did is we took a
couple pelican cases full of Pico Goblin headsets and some virtual
reality learning experiences into the classrooms in northern Manitoba
communities — and to put it into perspective, just how far away
these communities are for listeners in different parts of the world;
to drive from Winnipeg to one of the closest major cities up north,
which is called Thompson, is eight hours of straight driving on a
basically straight road — so these communities are quite far apart.
And we visited about 40 different communities and surveyed the kids
as they were actually taking these experiences, because these are
kids in grades five, six, seven, eight, all the way up to grade 12.
And kids tend to not be super-engaged in classroom activities and the
whole educational aspect of learning about the skilled trades. And
when we expose them to these trades in virtual reality, we found that
98 percent of them were engaged in this, and enjoying the experience.

Alan: What was that, 98 percent?

Daniel: Yeah, that was 98
percent.

Alan: How are you testing that
against baseline?

Daniel: The company that we’re
working with, they do classroom activities, and so they’re already
asking the kids, they’re already measuring the engagement; already
actually looking into these metrics. How are these kids engaged in
the workshops? And usually it’ll be more of a hands-on activity or a
video or slideshow presentation, stuff like that. The introduction of
virtual reality into this increased it from basically non-engagement
all the way up to 98 percent.

Alan: That’s incredible. That
alone, having learners engaged in learning, is one of the main
reasons why VR is the tool that is going to revolutionize education
and training.

Daniel: Yeah, well, especially
when the metric that they’re using to actually find out if it’s
performing as well as it should be is the engagement. And we can show
definitively that the technology has increased its engagement. That
shows that the actual use of the technology is more than beneficial
— it’s solving multiple problems for them. It’s not just making it
more engaging. It is exposing these kids to potential careers. It’s
basically ticking off all the boxes that they look for in an
engagement, but also increasing the actual enjoyment of the kids in
that experience.

Alan: Incredible. So what other
things have you doing? Because I know you did some stuff in
enterprise training and stuff like that. What have you done in that
space?

Daniel: Yes. On our enterprise
side, a lot of our clients are really focused around site
orientations and site-specific training. We do a lot of work with
steel mills. There’s a local one here that’s quite large, that has
facilities across North America. And we recently deployed a pilot
into their melt shop to give new workers, contractors, etc., an idea
of what to be aware of on that job site. And I personally had been in
a steel mill before, but when they took me through the mill, I was
quite blown away by how super dangerous everything actually is.

Alan: Steel is not that safe.

Daniel: Yeah, obviously. But it’s like, once you go in there, you’re like, “man. This is like a gigantic furnace that’s just melting metal all day long. And they they turned on with explosives.” So like everything about that space — like, everything — is a sharp metal object. Everything around it could probably give you tetanus. I find that, like, when I enter some of these sites, as I’ve been doing this for so many years now, I find that I’m maybe less shocked by this. But it’s kind of crazy that when you think about how I develop basically video games for a living, and yet here I am standing on top of this gigantic building, or in a crane, or in a steel mill taking 360 photos or 360 video or even just scanning the space to create a job site content. But, you know, I get put on these sites. I totally understand why the tool is going to be effective. So the steel mill application, as soon as I saw that thing getting turned on, is like, “all right, I understand why we need to put people in here, virtually.” There’s no way that you can really mentally prepare someone for the whole process. I mean, there’s literally buckets of molten steel being poured into the molds and stuff like that all over the place there. And that’s just one building. These facilities have up to six buildings on their compounds. Additionally, in the enterprise side, one of our longest clients is the Manitoba Heavy Construction Association, and with heavy construction, we’ve spent a lot of time developing out a course called Road Builder Safety Training Systems — RSTS — and that is a full certificate-level course delivered by Manitoba Heavy Construction that is completely delivered through virtual reality. There are 16 modules to that course with an in-app assessment. There are electives, there are requirement courses, but that entire thing is both deployed and delivered through virtual reality. So that is taken into communities, that’s run out of their facility. People working in the heavy construction industry, you get to see all kinds of job sites and learn about the content as opposed to just absorbing that content through a textbook. But they are placed on the job sites.

Alan: Incredible. How many
people would you say have gone through that experience, and what kind
of data are you collecting about each learner?

Daniel: So and that’s that’s
actually a really good segue into one of the things I’ve really
wanted to talk about, which is the key performance indicators. So
when I talk about the road builder safety training systems course,
that’s one of the ones that we developed early on in the years at Bit
Space. And although it has been very effective and lots and lots of
people have gone through it — thousands of people have been trained
in it — we don’t actually collect enough data to know if, like, how
that one is being successful. When I talk about 98 percent increased
engagement in our Try of the Trades northern expeditions, that’s a
good example of where we’ve started to collect proper data. Bit Space
was founded five years ago, and our first projects were developed
using Google Cardboard or the DKII. We didn’t have the luxury of the
six degrees of freedom. We didn’t even have the luxury of delivery
methods to send — with a new Oculus ISV program — the ability to
send APKs to a client’s device. We weren’t able to do that. We had to
manually install all of this onto devices. And one of the biggest
challenges is when clients wanted to deploy these solutions to their
job sites. They often have network connectivity issues. And you and I
have been through all kinds of network connectivity issues over the
last couple attempts at recording.

Alan: It’s never a problem of
network connectivity, it’s just a problem of -no- connectivity. Just
getting us on this podcast was a challenge. We’re talking about
audio.

Daniel: Yeah, and I’m in the
capital city of my province. There’s around a million people living
around here. So we have good enough Internet. But when you get up
north, there is basically no Internet. Depending on the town that
you’re in. There are some towns where they’ve got fair enough
Internet, but because we don’t have that network connectivity, we
aren’t able to collect real-time analytics. And because our clients
aren’t regularly connecting the headsets to a network connection,
it’s also difficult for us to get a data dump. So we rely off of the
metrics that are supplied to us by the client, how many people took
it? How many people passed? Etc. But I don’t feel that what we
actually planned out in that one was… I mean, although the
application solved the problem and it has been quite successful, we
don’t have, like, granular metrics to see how can it grow? How can it
improve? So one of the next steps on that project would be to figure
out, how do we actually measure that? So when we deploy these
applications, we look for all kinds of stuff. We look for, did the
user look in the right direction? Did they activate all the hotspots?
How fast did they get through the experience? Because if you get
through too fast, there’s a chance that they weren’t actually reading
the content. Did they activate the hotspot? Do they open up a hotspot
and then close it right away to activate it? Or do they actually keep
it open a long enough to read the content that’s in there? How many
failed attempts were there in the embedded quizzes? All of those
things are good metrics for checking whether the user is actually
progressing and hopefully retaining and absorbing the knowledge
within the course content, but that only addresses the learning
experiences.

When we are doing deployment and we’re
looking at actually doing a marketing engagement, I kind of break it
out to a few different segments. So for marketing engagements, we
look at metrics like, how can we possibly increase your sales? Are
more people going to your page or more people go into your
organization? And sometimes organizations that we’re working with
aren’t necessarily selling something, but they’re trying to market
themselves to promote the organization as a whole. So for Safe
Workers of Tomorrow, for example, when we were promoting safe work
through Level Up, really the biggest metric is, how many people are
checking out this game? How many people are coming to the event? How
many people are signing up for the contest, etc? That’s an easy
metric for a short-term campaign, but you’ve got to understand that
not everyone wants to play in VR, and not everybody is going to play
it all the way through, and not everyone’s gonna see every level. And
so it is, at its bare minimum, we are looking at, can we get more
people to come over to the booth?

On the tool side, that’s where things
are starting to get really interesting. With the commercial and
enterprise adoption of virtual reality increasing — and I’m sure no
one could possibly stand against that statement — over the last five
years, the actual pickup of the technology by commercial enterprise
organizations, I’m finding, is just dwarfing the year before each
year. And what I’m finding is that there’s more and more interest in
tools and workflow augmentation. You want to create something and
make it the flattest possible. So how do you do that? You want to
create a piece of software that visualizes this and it has to be as
perfect as possible. How do we run the algorithms on the actual
infrastructure that’s being put up and see that through a Hololens or
see that in VR? And I’m finding that that’s where the real adoption
is at the moment. It isn’t difficult to sell a company on the idea of
using virtual reality training at this point, and we have the metrics
to be able to track that. But when when a client comes to us and they
start telling us of their problems… I kind of break it into a few
different categories. There’s three that I look at and there’s a
secret fourth one. The main category is learning experiences. So they
want to train someone for something. One of the categories is tools
and augmentation. They want to build something that’s going to make
their workflow easier; they want to streamline something. They want
to promote themselves; they want to create a marketing experience.
And then the fourth secret category is just, they want to make a
game. And I find that that doesn’t happen much with us, because we
are in the B2B space. I don’t get a lot of people that come to me and
say, “I want to build a cool game,” although I wouldn’t
turn someone away. It doesn’t generally fit within our target market
at the moment.

The metrics for each of those are going
to be very specific. I’m not going to track how many people are
coming out to an event, or how well is this thing promoting you if
it’s an educational experience, and I’m not going to necessarily
track how many people are learning something. It’s an internal tool
because there’s probably nothing to actually learn. But the most
difficult category to actually track the performance on is the tools,
because we need to know what is the problem that that company is
actually trying to solve and that seems to be the biggest challenge
right now, is that companies don’t actually necessarily understand
the problem they’re trying to solve. And then once we’ve identified
that problem, there’s often resistance from the people that currently
work there into implementing new technologies.

Alan: Maybe expand on that.
Because I’ve heard this before on other podcasts, interviews where
the problem isn’t so much that you’re getting corporate buy in. Maybe
the CEO says, “hey, we’re gonna do this.” The training
manager is like, “yeah, we want this.” And then when it
gets down to boots on the ground, there’s a bit of trepidation and
more pushback.

Daniel: Yeah. So that could
almost be considered one of your metrics of success. Your actual
internal adoption. I find that it isn’t necessarily difficult to sell
at the corporate level. You can get the buy in from the C level
employees. You can get buy in from the business owner. That’s not
usually challenging because they’re usually trying to innovate for
their company. They want the latest and greatest in the company. What
I do find is moderately challenging is getting people that do the
job. So the types of companies that we work with, generally there’s
the C level, there is the training manager, etc. etc. And we can get
through that process and build the advisory committee and actually
figure out what problem is that we’re going to solve. And by the time
we get to that point, we look at, all right, well, how do we
implement this? Usually it is at the actual worker level that there
is the resistance. Either people perceive it as new work or
unnecessary work and they don’t necessarily understand the value of
spatial computing — which, I don’t blame them. I think that if my
job was to do a certain task at a company and I did it for 45 years
and it’s just always been the way it is, it might be daunting to
implement new technology. Now, I’m also the founder of a virtual
reality company, so I’m a little bit biased towards the the whole
aspect of spatial computing. And clearly I am also biased towards
adopting new technologies. But I find that definitely the friction
comes from the actual workers. And you can usually get past it if you
start to actually speak their language and you show them how it
actually enhances the experience. A good example for that: we have a
piece of software that it’s actually internal piece of software. We
didn’t build it for a client. It was started out as a prototype. And
it now is something that we’re polishing up and that is called
Flagger Safety. And a flagger is the gatekeeper to a construction
site. They’re the people that stand out in front of the construction
on the road and they usually have a sign or some sort of
high-visibility vest or jumpsuit, and they’ll stop and release
traffic when the trucks need to drive out onto the road. And one of
the first games that we ever built was for flagger training. But it
wasn’t a VR game. It was just a mobile game. And I hated it. It was
one of the first things that we were ever actually contracted to
build. And I’m just critical of my old work. So I went back to it and
I decided I hated it and thought it would be cooler in VR. And I
mean, I’m not wrong. It is much cooler in VR. But now we have people
talking about actually adopting that technology. So how do we roll
that out to those companies? And what I find right now — and this is
a very relevant example — is the trainers, the people are actually
running those classes, they’re used to doing the classroom portion
and then going out into the parking lot and doing that hands-on
piece. But it’s not a real hands-on piece. It’s just them in a car
being stopped and released in a parking lot by the class that they
just taught. And so what this technology allows us to do is it allows
us to emulate an actual road. So we have emergency vehicles and AI
behind the cars that allows different generation of the road and
different situations to arise that couldn’t happen in a parking lot
or on a job site. And the trainer in this particular pilot spent a
lot of time talking about, “oh, well, now we have to describe
this and that.” It wasn’t until I started describing it more as,
“no, I don’t want to add anymore instruction to the experience.
I want it to be as true to what you just taught.” So
understanding that from the adoption side, that we don’t have to
increase the workload of the people actually delivering the training
or actually implementing the technology, if we show how it just
purely augments the work that they’re already doing. And on the
training side, they don’t have to teach more. They just have to make
sure that the experience that they’re implementing is true to what
they’re teaching, in regards to the the legislation and the process
and all that kind of stuff. So once we actually like crack through
that surface of resistance, it generally gets past it. But then you
have to prove yourself and you can only prove yourself if you
understand the metrics that you are trying to collect.

So for this sort of situation, we would
be tracking retention and we would be tracking. Are you actually
absorbing that content and how good are you doing it at the flagger
training? We track your hand signals, etc., so we’ll be looking at
once you’ve been doing it a few times in practice mode, how quickly
are you picking up these proper signals and how effective are you at
stopping and releasing traffic? And that would be a pretty good
metric to get back to that student. And that also shows that the
software is working. You’re retaining that that information.
Sometimes it’s difficult to get to the point of data collection
because of the whole resistance side of things.

Alan: So here’s a question
that’s come up quite a bit, including at MetaVRse here. And one of
the questions that that we struggle with and everybody seems to be
struggling with, is how do you, when you meet a client, and they say
we want to train for X position or role; how do you then elicit the
right content? Because some of them just have a training manual.
They’re like, “here, here’s our training manual: go.” And
some of them have all of their information in different parts. How do
you capture all the information that goes into this, and how long
does that take?

Daniel: I’ve had it both sides
of the spectrum on that. I’ve had clients where they just give us the
orientation manuals and say, “turn this into VR.” And I’ve
had clients who are super engaged, have all kinds of content and are
totally willing to supply everything you need and help you interpret
it, because I am not an expert on pretty much any of this stuff.
Basically, any of the stuff that I am creating the experiences for,
my expertise lies in spatial computing and interactive digital media.
I’m not a a real Lyft driver. I am not a flagger. I’m not a confined
space technician, whatever. I find that the most successful projects
that we’ve been on — both in regards to figuring out what are those
metrics and also to actually gathering the content and understanding
it — have what we like to put together; an industry committee. That
committee is usually built up of… if it’s an industry association
that’s putting on the project through a research initiative or
something, usually it’s built up of of relevant parties. So companies
within the industry that would be working with us on this. If it’s of
an application for a single company, usually that committee is built
up of internal entities; so, trainers, etc. Human resources know the
people that would be responsible for the content. And on the most
successful projects, usually what we do — and we’ve got some
processes internally in regards to what spreadsheets we use and stuff
to gather that content — we have an entire phase built into the
project that is just for resource-gathering, requirement-gathering,
processing the content that’s sent to us.

Now, we have had successful projects
where they just gave us the orientation. But that only is going to be
successful if the scope of that project is to create an orientation.
I don’t think that it is reasonable for a client to expect that
they’re going to send over just a manual for a piece of machinery and
that they’ll just suddenly have a virtual reality simulator. And if
people are finding that clients are coming along that are like that,
those are probably not going to be good success stories in the end.

Alan: *Run away!*

Daniel: Yeah, I don’t
necessarily recommend that. I mean, again, everyone will have their
own experiences and other people have their own preferences. Now, the
most success that we’ve had on projects are projects where the
clients have allowed us to come and experience the training that they
offer. So I have been trained on flagging, working in confined
spaces, driving aerial lifts. In fact, just last Friday, a couple of
my team members were up 40 feet in the air on aerial lifts for a
project that we have in the works at the moment. It is important that
the project management level, the business development level, the
project lead level at -least- that you are able to actually
experience the training that they’re currently offering. So that way
you actually understand, at least at a basic level, what you’re
creating the experience about. But also so you see how they’re
implementing that at the moment. Again, this is more for like
training and the educational side in regards to user requirements
gathering for tools. That’s a longer process, a little bit more
integrated with the knowledge experts in the organization, and it’s
more of an ongoing process. But regarding the training side of
things, we we like to build out that committee simply because we are
able to actually iterate on ideas with them. We’re able to gather the
content from them, layout a bit of a plan, and then make adjustments
based off of what they are recommending. And it took us a few times
to fail at a couple of projects to understand what was really giving
us success. But the number one key we found is by actually engaging
the knowledge experts in the organization — which also in turn
sometimes has a positive effect on the actual engagement with the
resistance from the people on the ground actually doing the job — if
you’re engaging those people from the beginning, so they’re able to
have a voice in what you’re building? That seems to really help with
adoption within the organization.

Alan: So I have a bunch of
questions. My brain is just like -poof-. When you make these
experiences, let’s say, for a company, do they ever want to offset
the costs through licensing this to other companies? How does that
work? Who owns the content? And do they want to make that available?

Daniel: Yeah. So that’s a
complicated question/answer. A lot of our clients come to us because
we’ve developed frameworks which allow them to have that cost-saving.
So our number one products, we have a 360 photo/video tool called VR
Safety that allows us to rapidly build and deploy the
360-degree-based applications. And that allows us to really keep the
costs down. They’re really just paying for the photography content
insertion, none of the actual development. And in that kind of
situation, I always allow them to own their content because we own
the framework. On the room-scale side, that’s where it gets a little
bit more complicated because we do have frameworks — we have a
framework called CSS — and CSS handles a lot of the stuff like LMS
integration, and we have our own physics, our own tooling to actually
like use the tools. I mean, there are situations where a client may
want to create content, but often we are doing the R&D upfront
for the tools development. So most of the room-scale experiences that
we create are built off of our own technology and just customized for
our clients. So we do have the ability to resell; to reskin and
re-use. Which generally is not a problem for our clients. If a client
is bringing us on to build a simulator for something ultra-specific
— like, their technology — in that situation, they would likely own
it. Let’s say they built a tractor and they want us to create a
simulator for that tractor. We’re not going to relicense their
tractor as a simulator. That would be definitely negotiated at the
sales level.

Alan: Tractor Crusher VR!

Daniel: We spend a lot of time
building out asset packs that are modular and easy to deploy. So like
we have our own warehouse, our own farm, for example, because we have
a lot of agriculture, a lot of manufacturing, a lot of construction
clients. So we have parks like 3D Worlds that our clients can use for
their experiences that are pre-made, which definitely offsets the
cost. But because we have those scenes, we do do a lot of fun playing
around. So we have been playing with the whole idea of like, can I
shoot zombies in this barn? because sometimes–

Alan: Tractor crusher!

Daniel: Yeah, exactly. I got
into this because I enjoy the technology and I like making video
games. So often, we look at the content and we see if there’s
something fun that can be done with that. And it usually is an
internal game jam-style thing. But we have released a few fun things.

Alan: but, the question is, Dan;
do you guys make a bonus level in the training that’s hidden, if you
hit a certain point level, it unlocks a zombie shooter from wherever
you are?

Daniel: That’s a good idea. We
haven’t done that yet, but we’ve we’ve definitely talked about it.

Alan: If you if you happen to
hit this one button combination of button, zombies come at you.

Daniel: Yeah, well, it’s like a
very specific situation. You’re in the barn and you grab this piece
and you put it in the bucket over there and then, yeah,.

Alan: And all of a sudden, your
hands turn into guns and there are zombies everywhere.

Daniel: Exactly. Yeah. You open
the tool box, and there was a gun and in there; now you have to
defend yourself. Yeah. We haven’t done that yet. I am actually a big
proponent to actually being able to hurt yourself in VR.

Alan: I agree.

Daniel: With our power tools
simulators one of–

Alan: Have you tried the haptic
gloves yet?

Daniel: I’ve tried a few
different haptic gloves. I’m not a huge fan of most of them, but–

Alan: I’ve tried the HaptX
gloves and they were–

Daniel: Those are the ones that
I’ve tried.

Alan: They were great except for
the form factor.

Daniel: Yeah. That’s where
they’ve started to become good. Now I don’t think any of them have
the gloves emulate pain, which is probably a good thing.

Alan: Shock more than pain.

Daniel: But like, one of the
things that my clients often talk to me about is that they like to
have the idea of shock value in the experience. People learn from
that. They see this pipe fall off the roof, and the guy wasn’t
wearing his hard hat. Look at him! And it’s a little gruesome, but
it’s super common in the construction manufacturing industries.
People learn from other people’s injuries. And the whole idea of
allowing you to, say, put your hand under the circular saw. And I
like the idea of you try to cut off your hand in VR, and sure, we
could disable that controller. Now, you only have one hand. Because
that would be a situation that you could do in real life. I like the
idea of being able to do all the things in a real experience that I
can in the VR experience. So if there’s a thing on the table, I
better be able to pick it up. I should be able to throw it across the
room. I should be able to hurt myself with it. Because sure, if you
put a young crowd in an experience, they probably gonna be distracted
by that and then probably take it kind of funny. But like in an
actual training environment, what better way to teach someone to wear
their hardhat than by having a pipe fall off the roof on them?

Alan: Well, Daniel, this has
been really enlightening. I could just talk about this stuff forever.
Where can people find more information about Bit Space?

Daniel: So the best place to find us is on our website, bitspacedevelopment.com. Or BSDEV.ca for short. You can also find us on Twitter at Bit Space Develop.

Alan: Amazing. Well, I thank you
so much. I ask one last question, and I would love your answer on
this. What problem in the world do you want to see solved using XR
Technologies?

Daniel: So my answer to that —
and you’re actually aware of my answer — my biggest problem that I
want to see solved in the world is the democratization of the content
that is being developed and delivered to everyone. So I want for
children in remote communities, rural communities — whether that’s
northern Canada or anywhere — to be able to access high-quality
educational experiences using the technology that we have available
to us. I’m working towards that already, through deploying headsets
with my partner organizations into northern communities and rural
communities. But one of the infrastructure problems is the Internet.
But that’s going to get better. And I want to see that, through XR
technologies, that the quality and quantity of educational
experiences and content to be greatly increased to these communities.

Alan: That is, as you know, also
our mission to democratize education globally by 2040 using XR and
spatial computing. And that’s one of the reasons why I asked you
about the licensing, because building these scenarios, these training
systems are for now very expensive and they will get lower in cost
and then more people will be able to make them. But for now, when
people are investing hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a
simulator or training exercise in virtual and augmented reality,
being able to relicense it and kind of scale that to other components
is really kind of the backbone of the MetaVRse platform that we’re
building. So, you know, that’s one of the questions I wanted to ask.
And you answered it perfectly.

Daniel: I mean, that’s why we’re
so aligned and why we’re good friends.