Restructuring Travel–Digitally

Over Coffee® | Stories and Resources from the Intersection of Art and Science | Exploring How to Make STEAM Work For You

Over Coffee® is on Christmas hiatus. Please enjoy this rebroadcast of one of our top podcasts of 2020, and we'll see you in the New Year! (Photograph courtesy of The Wild, and used with permission.) Suppose you needed to present a special creative project in another city. Even without considering the current pandemic, you would still have to deal with: reservations, check-in, luggage, delays, possible jet lag, potential mix-ups... What if, instead, you could simply offer your project virtually? And collaborators could work with you, in mixed reality, to suggest modifications? That's exactly how The Wild Founder/CEO Gabe Paez is reimagining future travel through XR. While The Wild is primarily immersive software for professional design teams, it can also have applications for education. And families may even use it when, due to the pandemic, face-to-face gathering just isn't a possibility. Gabe, who was one of the speakers at the VR/AR Association's first Global Online Summit in June, shared a way his own family used The Wild for a social gathering: his daughter hosted a virtual party, complete with games, for her ninth birthday! And during the summit, The Wild sponsored the VRARA's first Global Student Design Competition. It was an exciting one! And in this interview, Gabe discussed The Wild's most recent innovations, and his perspectives on the ways XR can change transportation for the better, as well as offering a look at some additional ways XR could become a part of daily life in the future. On this edition of Over Coffee® we cover: How a unique professional challenge ultimately led to Gabe’s interest in working with immersive technology; The immersive-software insights that led Gabe to create The Wild; How The Wild mirrors the physical world; The ways in which XR may provide a preferable alternative to physical travel for creative collaboration; How virtualized transportation could be beneficial in the educational and medical fields; A look at some possible personal-use scenarios of virtualized environments. Something new that Gabe and his team had, literally, just added to The Wild at the time of our conversation.