Transcript: X for XR
Louise Taggart:
Hello, and welcome to the A to Z of Tech podcast. Somehow, and I'm not quite sure how, we have made it all the way through the alphabet to the letter X. So, for this episode, we're going to be diving into the topic of XR, which I think, and I'm sure my guests will correct me if I'm wrong, stands for extended reality. I'm joined today by Yanna Zhu who is a metaverse technology specialist, here at PwC. By Dr Alex Young, who is an NHS trauma surgeon and also the CEO and founder of the mixed reality training platform Virti. And last but absolutely not least, Chris Fleischmann, who is the founder and CEO of Arthur, which provides digitised workplaces and collaboration spaces. So thank you all for joining me today. It would actually be great to hear just a little bit from each of you about what it is you do, and what your backgrounds are. So, Yanna, if I might ask you to introduce yourself briefly to our audience first?
Yanna Zhu:
Yes, thank you very much, Louise, and it's really great to be here today. So, I work in a dedicated metaverse slash extended reality team here at PwC. Essentially, what I do, and what the wider team does, is we help clients, as well as internal PwC teams, globally, across industry. We understand and leverage the value of extended reality technologies, and the metaverse more recently as well. That can range from advising them on the best strategy, on actually creating experiences, and on deploying the hardware as well as software at scale, and upskilling them on how to best leverage the tech.
Louise:
Brilliant, thank you. Alex, if we could ask you next?
Dr Alex Young:
Hi, Louise. My name's Alex Young. I'm the founder CEO at Virti. I used to be a trauma and orthopaedic surgeon, as you correctly said, training in the NHS. And then I left that role around about three-and-a-half years ago now to go full time on Virti, really with a mission to transform how people learn, train and perform at work. Starting off in the healthcare sector, but now increasingly teaching things like soft skills to corporates through extended reality technologies.
Louise:
Fascinating. Quite a career change, so I'm looking forward to hearing a bit more about that in detail. Then, Chris, yourself please as well?
Chris Fleischmann:
Yes, thanks, Louise, great to be here. I'm Chris Fleischmann. I'm the founder and CEO of Arthur. We focus on XR for the enterprise, so how can we use this technology to get people working together more efficiently, ideally as if they're in the same room, just with superpowers? I've been in AR, VR now for nine years, really starting on some very rudimentary headsets with a lot of cables and all sorts of things. So, it's been exciting seeing the technology evolve to what we have right now in 2022.
Louise:
Thank you. Looking forward to hearing a bit more about those superpowers as well that you mentioned there, so we'll come back to that one. Firstly, Yanna, if I might come back to you, could you explain, I suppose at quite a high level, but what is XR? What's it used for, and how is it different to some of the other terms that we might have heard, sort of, being flung about, like VR or AR for example?
Yanna:
Yes, absolutely. So, as we said, XR stands for extended reality, not to be confused with Extinction Rebellion! And essentially, it is an umbrella term that really describes a range of different technologies that somehow, in one way or another, change or augment the reality around us. It's quite easy to conceptualise it as, sort of, a continuum, where you have on one hand virtual reality, which essentially immerses you completely in a fully digital world, where you have no traces of your actual real-world environment around you anymore. And on the other end of the spectrum, having augmented reality that still allows you to see the world around you as it is, but essentially superimposes a digital layer on top of it through 3D assets or through other imagery as well. Altogether, these technologies can be conceptualised as a range of extended reality technologies that are associated with hardware or with software, in a lot of very exciting use cases that we'll speak about a bit more.
Louise:
In terms of then what this concept, what VR as an umbrella term means, what are some of, I suppose, the economic benefits that it can bring as a technology?
Yanna:
Yes, that's an excellent question. So, we did an economic analysis a while back now in 2019, essentially looking at what the GDP boost and the actual contribution is that extended reality technologies can bring to the economy by 2030. What we essentially found is as a collective set of technologies, XR has the potential to add 1.5 trillion to the global economy by 2030. That is really an impact that can be seen, and is projected to be growing, across a range of different industries, including product and service development, healthcare obviously is a big one, and training and development as well. More recently actually, PwC has published a big survey looking at consumers, and what execs as well think of the metaverse, and the underlying technologies such as VR and AR, and how they might think this can develop in the near future. Actually, we've found that 82% of the executives that we've surveyed are predicting the metaverse to become vital to their businesses in the coming years, so we're essentially seeing big growth there, and a lot of potential for the faculty.
Louise:
I mean, those are not insignificant numbers we're talking about here, so I'm glad this is a topic we are covering when it comes to the podcast. So, okay, Chris, if I turn back to you for a moment then, could you tell us a little bit more detail about Arthur, and what it does, how did it start, and what your role is in it now?
Chris:
Yes, absolutely. So, fundamentally, what we're trying to explore is how we can use these new technologies to create an environment where people can work together, completely unbound by geographic limitations. I think it sounds so simple, and usually in retrospect, a lot of things look very obvious. But, you know, if we look at the transformation the world went through in 2020 with the pandemic, we really have to remind ourselves that we thought it was perfectly normal to stand two hours in traffic in the morning to go to an office, to sit in a chair, to be in a video conference with a person that's in another office. That's just, you know, one side of the equation, which is the limits we impose on us if we want to work in a way where we're physically constrained. The other part is, what can this technology do not by just removing this limit but actually creating new ways of how we can engage with information, and how we can explore strategies together, data, or make decisions? This is the second part. I refer to them as superpowers, but we can create this virtual office, where you and I are in 3D together and we can work together, but just as much as we're not bound to our geographical location, we're not bound to physics or any other laws that we would have in our physical meeting. Want to have another whiteboard? Snap your finger. These kinds of things, as simple as they sound, they completely elevate what we can do then in terms of interpersonal productivity, collaborative productivity.
Louise:
Thank you. Then, if we might segue from virtual whiteboards back to our virtual hammers. Alex, it would be great to hear a little bit about your medical background, and how you have come to be involved in this world of VR, and what that means for you?
Alex:
Yes, for sure. So, my background is pretty weird and wonderful. So, as I mentioned, I trained as a doctor in the UK, in the Bristol area for those of you that know your UK geography, but I've also got a degree in education, and I previously had a couple of businesses in the education space. So, I'm very much obsessed with how people learn and train, and how they perform for the organisation for which they work. Certainly, when I was training as a doctor, and when I say 'training', that includes medical school, but also when you graduate, you never really stop learning. You're continuously learning, whether that is in a clinic, or when you're doing an operation, you're always learning, always improving, from every kind of patient interaction or colleague interaction you have. One of the big things that they noticed was that I, as a surgeon, knew how to do an operation. That was very standardised in terms of learning the actual steps. When you go and see a patient, it's very algorithmic in the way that you manage someone or diagnose somebody. Because of that component of patient safety, it has to be very standardised. But where errors happen and where patient safety is put at risk, is that unseen, intangible aspect which we tend to call 'soft skills' in the corporate space, or in medicine, we call it 'human factors'. So, that might be how you communicate with a patient, or how you communicate with a colleague, or in surgery, how you make something like a decision under pressure, during an operation, if something goes wrong. It's those moments where you have to use your own decision-making processes, your own soft skills, that really can be the elements of, sort of, life and death decisions in healthcare.
The way that that is taught in medicine is that it's often done in what are called simulation centres, which are these mocked-up wards or mocked-up surgical operating theatres, where go in and you work with others in a simulated, safe environment. But they're extremely costly, and to get all the people together needed to do that type of training it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. All of those tend to be quite episodic training environments. So, you could come in on one day and do that, and then not have another training session for, say, six months. That then leads to a lot of variability in the type of training you receive. So, if I were to see a patient in the clinic in my hospital, I would get an experience that might be vastly different from someone in a hospital down the road, and would certainly be vastly different from someone in a developing nation for example and that leads to a lot of inequity in learning and training, and therefore in how patient care is delivered. So, I sort of became obsessed with, how can we standardise that very subjective, intangible element of soft skills training? When I was looking at ways to solve that with my, kind of entrepreneur's hat on, really, virtual reality and augmented reality stood out, because we could use that to actually trick people's brains into thinking that they're in these real-world, high-pressure environments. And then get them to make those decisions under pressure, and capture how they make those decisions, because they're in these standardised environments that we can collect data from.
Louise:
Yanna, if I come back to you briefly, from your experience working both with clients, but also your experience of working with PwC internal initiatives as well, could you give us a couple of examples of what VR applications have looked like maybe across different sectors beyond the experiences that Alex and Chris have shared there?
Yanna:
Yes, absolutely, happy to. I mean, obviously collaboration is a big area, and is something that's applicable for any industry, especially during hybrid working times. So, we've been working extensively to really bring that to life, using software like Arthur to bring people together in these virtual, interactive, completely customised environments. Another thing that we've been running at scale, both with lots of clients but also internally, is this idea of soft skills training that Alex touched on, but for C-suite-level executives specifically. So, looking at things like race awareness, or managing difficult conversations, or building effective leadership. We've really found that VR can be such an effective and powerful tool, and a lot of our clients look for better ways to interact with virtual humans and really understand. If we look at race awareness for example, what is it like to be literally in the shoes of someone from a minority background, and experience some of the micro-aggressions or racism that they might experience on a daily basis? On the augmented reality side, we've worked a lot with our audit practice or the teams that build things like annual reports, to essentially bring to life some of the stats and the data that they show in there through. For example, holograms of people that are activated through QR codes, or things like animations that you can essentially access with any smartphone or any tablet. So, it's very scalable in that sense.
Louise:
Those are brilliant examples, thank you, Yanna. I think maybe if we can maybe all three of us begin to have a bit more of a conversation around some of these applications in the future. I might turn that on its head slightly before we think about that but, Chris, you mentioned you've been in this space for about nine years, so I'd be really interested to get your perspective on how you've seen this type of technology evolve over the past decade?
Chris:
I think it's really remarkable to take a look at even VR hardware that is just two or three years old. If we look at collaboration, one major step were these all-in-one headsets. I could give a client their own device. They didn't need to think of any other laptop. They could use it from the office, and they could even use it at the airport, and they could just jump into a VR meeting, completely untethered, free. It was easy to use, it was light and it was relatively comfortable, and it was just there. It was just an effective way to jump into a meeting. If we now look at, you know, progress this year, and things that are around the corner, now we're breaking open even one of the biggest limitations that VR headsets had until this day. It's the fact that they are VR only. This 100% immersion that Yanna was talking about, is amazing for some specific types of applications, where I really don't want to have anything from my real world around me. But for a lot of business scenarios, I want to see my keyboard, I want to see the surface of my desk, and maybe I want to see my coffee cup. Going further than that, I might still want to see most of my living room. I want to see my cat roaming around. I maybe don't want this 100% commitment. This is the exciting shift that we're seeing now in 2022, and in 2023, from virtual reality to mixed reality, where we no longer have to have only 100% VR but where we can mix our world, our real world, with the virtual world. Just as much as moving from, you know, bulky, tethered, not all-in-one headsets towards these slick, standalone headsets, was a major enabler for our business. Everything we're seeing around mixed reality now really looks the same way, if it's not even more powerful for our industry, what this opens in terms of possibilities for the end user.
Alex:
I think the things that we're excited about in terms of the technology really are aligned to people's business goals. So, if you think about it one example that we're, kind of, obsessing over at the moment, which is sales training, the whole way that businesses do sales has again completely transformed, and has become much more remote. Now, if you can engage your prospects and you can engage your salespeople in an experience that shows off your product, or helps your salespeople to be more, I guess, engaging in the way that they explain your product, and improve their own communication skills, using technologies like virtual reality, that can actually impact your bottom line. We do a lot of sales training at the moment, taking people through examples of how to deal with objections, or how to build rapport with your customers in different virtual reality environments, where you might be speaking with a virtual human, or your might be watching an interactive 360 video-based training scenario, and suddenly, the way that you learn and train is massively accelerated for the workforce. That will, kind of, get your salespeople to ramp more quickly. It will hopefully stop them from churning, and it will hopefully stop you from losing business. I think those are, kind of, the examples that we're really excited about. In terms of the technology, a couple of things that are really going to improve that and accelerate that are, we're seeing a lot of the new headsets implement things like eye-tracking, implement things like natural language processing around how they deal with speech, and it allows that to be saved to the cloud and analysed, and really links that into actual real-world practical data like people's conversion rates from your customer relationship management tool. And looking at how virtual reality training can actually get you to close deals more quickly, and get your employees to ramp.
So, I think those kinds of elements of connectivity, and those elements of bringing data towards virtual reality training and augmented reality training, and showing the real-world benefits, are really exciting things for us.
Yanna:
To add to that as well actually, what I think is really exciting, and what Alex touched upon as well, is that idea that VR can in the future map facial expressions pretty accurately. Historically, that's something that VR isn't really great at, but if you think about examples like Alex mentioned around sales training and better interaction, one vital thing that we need as humans is to be able to see the expressions of other people, and have that complement how we interact with each other. I guess being a psychologist by background, I always felt like it's great that we can come together in virtual worlds and interact, but that's an element that is still missing in some ways. Do I really feel like I'm capable of guessing just by the intonation of someone's voice how they're feeling, or what they're trying to communicate to me? That's something as well that we will see in the very near future with the newer headsets coming out from brands like Meta, and potentially Apple. That will completely change and enhance that idea of virtual interaction much further. It's never meant to fully replace face-to-face interaction. I would argue, you know, there's nothing as great as the real deal of actually having someone in-person in front of you, but it will still come very close to it. Once we approach being able to integrate other senses such as, you know, olfactory stimulation or haptic technology, we can make XR a much more inclusive tech that really, kind of, replicates reality in a much more powerful way. That's really exciting for us to come in the near future.
Alex:
I don't think any type of technology's ever going to replace, or certainly shouldn't replace, the actual in-person element of anything really. So, we obviously do a lot of healthcare training. You're never ever going to completely replace that doctor-patient contact, or the need for people to work together over an operating table and help someone, but what you can do is you can massively accelerate the time it takes for them to get to proficiency. Then when they are in those in-person encounters, they're performing at a much higher level, a much safer level, and a level where they're much less stressed, because they've been through these scenarios in a much more accessible, standardised training environment. I think in terms of, like, the wider use of virtual reality at the, kind of, consumer level, because you're asking people to put on a headset, there's always going to be an element of, 'I'm going to use this for a set period of time, and then I'm going to go off and do something else.' I don't think for the most part anyone is going to, sort of, stay in a headset like in the film WALL-E, where they have to be rescued by a small robot, even though that would be very entertaining. There's always going to be an element where I think people will just naturally understand that they will go in and they will use the experiences for set tasks during their day, at their workstation, and then they will go back to doing their normal business. That's certainly my take. I don't know if Chris or Yanna have any other contrasting views.
Yanna:
Yes, I would agree. It's never a case of using VR for the sake of using VR, or moving completely digital. It's really about finding where the technology can add most value, and developing the features and its capabilities accordingly. It's very much a market that is dictated by the need that the industry has for it, and accordingly, the applications and the successful deployments that really add value come with it.
Chris:
Yes, maybe to add to this, I do agree with Alex, in the near future, that this will be purpose-driven devices. I do think however that we are moving towards a world where eventually, we will replace any physical screen that you might be using right now with a much more powerful XR, MR headset. Maybe it's going to be contact lenses, or something you can actually wear the whole day, that is not bulky, is not heavy, but is incredibly easy to wear, and actually allows your neck muscles to relax for once, because you're not looking down at your phone, you're actually looking into other people's eyes, and you're looking in the world. It's just instead of this dystopian view that we become slaves of the virtual world, I think we're going to be pretty smart about making the virtual world a slave of the real world, as in, 'I will wear this headset and it will give me, you know, contextual information on where the next restaurant is while I walk. At the same time, I can pretty much appear in my grandmother's living room and say hi to her and her dogs, and no matter where we are in the world, we can just connect. So for me, it's a little bit more the question of what kind of world we want to live in. Fundamentally, I do think that there is this incredible force for good behind abolishing geography playing too big of a role in our lives, and I think they will show us a way, a variation of the world, that is beautiful, and full of information, and full of inter-human communication. Again, I think the reason why I'm so positive about this is, it's really hard to look at the current devices and understand where this can go, because we are inherently built to look at the limitations of the reality, the heaviness of the device. There are so many reasons why this is not going to work, right now, if you just look at what you have in your hands, but this is not the way innovation works.
This is not the way new technologies emerge. If I had told myself nine years ago, when I had the first AR headset on my head, that, 'This is what we can do right now,' I think it would really come very close to magic, what we can do already right now. If I look at the next couple of years, it's just going to be even more powerful. So, I do think we're moving towards this world, before we switch to brain-computer interfaces, which is then probably the next topic. Yes, so I think that's going to be an interesting world, and I think it's up to us to shape this technology the right way.
Louise:
Well, I think unfortunately, we've run out of time, but that was such a lovely, positive note to end the discussion on, so thank you, Chris, I think that was a really great, thought-provoking take-away for us, so I really appreciate that. To all three of you, Alex, Yanna and Chris, thank you so much for joining me for this podcast, and taking the time to contribute to this discussion. I personally really enjoyed hearing about this type of technology, some of the benefits it can bring around inclusivity, and how it can help to change perspectives, and maybe reassuringly, how it will complement in-person interactivity rather than completely replacing face-to-face, in-person collaboration. So, I think all that leaves me to say is, also thank you to our listeners for joining us, and please join us for the next episode, which will be the penultimate letter in the alphabet, for Y. So, thank you.
