Ep. 82 - Lullabot's Jerad Bitner

The Yonder Podcast

Jeff Robbins interviews Jerad Bitner, who is the Development Manager and a Developer at Lullabot, the company Jeff co-founded back in 2006. They discuss the potential of virtual reality in remote work environments and other virtual communication topics.

Here’s the transcript:

JEFF: Hi everyone. It’s Jeff Robbins back with Episode 82 of the Yonder Podcast, where we talk to company leaders and big thinkers, about how to make remote work. We’re focused on expanding the remote work job market, and helping listeners to create happy, productive, distributed teams. This time, we’re talking with Jerad Bitner, who is the Development Manager and a Develop at Lullabot, disclaimer, the company I co-founded back in 2006. I’ve since stepped away from the company, but Jerad still works there and wears a lot of different hats, but he’s also particularly interested in virtual reality, which is what we’re talking about on the podcast today. This topic has come up a fair amount in talking with people about the ways that we communicate, or the ways that we can communicate, and this idea that virtual reality might be a future technology, maybe we aren’t talking in Slack so much, we’re putting on headsets and stepping into the ready player one, movie style, immersive world and meeting our virtual teams in virtual space, or maybe it’s just all weird. I don’t know. It’s up to you. [laughing] But, here’s the podcast. We’re going to give you a bunch of information. It turns out for basically just $400.00 you can buy a headset that will do pretty much all of this that you need to do without even needing an external computer with it. But I’ll leave it to you as to whether this is a direction you want to pursue or not, but it’s a really fascinating conversation with Jerad and a chance to immerse you in this new potential direction for remote work, virtual communication stuff.

I also want to tell you about my business coaching and mentorship practice. This isn’t something that I’ve mentioned too much on this podcast, but for the past two or three years since exiting Lullabot, the company I started back in 2006, I’ve been working with owners and leaders of various types of businesses, both remote and collocated, to act as a virtual business partner, someone to check in with weekly and work out the issues that you need to keep your company and yourself happy, sustainable and help you move toward your goals, whether those are to grow your company or simply to make sure that your company fits into your personal needs, make sure that you work for your company, and your company works for you. There you go. We think a lot about brand and marketing and sales pipelines and also stuff like culture, group dynamics and company growth. I’ve done a lot of brainstorming with my clients helping to develop products and new initiatives for their companies and if those are the kinds of things that you’d like to have someone to talk with about those kinds of things with, we should talk.

If you’d like to set up a call and talk about working with me to help make your company better, visit jjeff.com, and that’s my business coaching and mentorship site, and you can find out more there and fill out the form and we can set up a call and I can tell you more about what it’s like to work me with in that capacity. But if you’d just like to work with me in the capacity of listening to a podcast, we’ll let you do that, and get to our interview with Jerad Bitner.

JEFF: Hi Jerad. Welcome to the Yonder podcast.

JERAD: Hey Jeff. How you doing?

JEFF: I’m good. (5:31) How are you?

JERAD: Doing very, very well, thank you.

JEFF: [laughing] I should mention for everyone listening that Jerad and I are old friends and work acquaintances. (5:44) Jerad, how long ago did you start working at Lullabot?

JERAD: It will be 10 years in March.

JEFF: Wow. And we met probably two years before that when you came to a workshop that we were teaching that I was part of.

JERAD: Yup. Providence.

JEFF: Yeah. And now you’re a superstar.

JERAD: [laughing]

JEFF: [laughing] (6:15) Well, first of all the question I ask everyone, where are you talking to us from today?

JERAD: I am in Gig Harbor, Washington, which is just a little bit north of Tacoma.

JEFF: Wow. (6:24) And do you work from home?

JERAD: Yeah, I’ve worked from home for a long time now. [laughing] I had a room upstairs, my daughter got older, wanted her own room, so we built a small room in the garage, now I have a garage office, or I like to call it a studio, I guess. [laughing]

JEFF: [laughing] It’s all about how you sell it to yourself you know.

JERAD: [laughing] Yeah, it really is.

JEFF: (laughing) You could have a basement, boutique studio, with no windows. (7:04) And so, why don’t you introduce yourself to people.

JERAD: Sure. My name is Jerad Bitner. I am currently by day, a Development Manager and Project Manager at Lullabot. We work on large-scale websites. Current clients is IBM. I’ve been working for them for actually almost two years now, it’s been a pretty long gig, but it’s really good. I think by night I would say I am a creative technologist working mainly in the field of virtual reality.

JEFF: Yeah, and that’s why we got you on the podcast. We’ve had several guests now that have talked about virtual reality as kind of a future of remote work. It’s certainly a future technology, future communications technology, a new way of interacting and I thought, oh, I know a VR guy who’s really interested in that, and you and I talked a few months ago and thought it would be a good idea to have you on the podcast and we can have a conversation about, to some extent, the state of VR, [laughing] and what it is, what works, even potentially what doesn’t work, and what people might look for and think about. Are we at that tipping point yet? Are we ready for everyone to start wearing goggles at home doing all their virtual remote work, [laughing] or where we at with that? (8:57) So, let’s start with the history of things a little bit. Talk to me about when you got into VR and what the state of things were then, and then maybe we can walk it forward.

JERAD: I started into VR as most things hobbyist and it was October of 2014 when I said, I’m buying myself a birthday present and it’s going to be the Oculus DK2, and the DK2 was the second development kit that Oculus was coming out with after their acquisition by Facebook for an ungodly amount of money.

JEFF: (9:48) DK? Does it mean it was pre-consumer release developer stuff? Sort of like the google goggles which have not actually technically been released publicly yet, as far as I know, right?

JERAD: Yeah, the development kit is geared towards developers. It’s usually somewhat subsidized so it’s a little bit cheaper that developers can get into it and just start experimenting with the technology to see what they can do with it and hopefully learn how to create content with that stuff, because by the time you get to a consumer release you want to have a pretty flourishing ecosystem of content to give to the consumer.

JEFF: (10:39) So, what could you do with it back then?

JERAD: Well, back then basically, it was only a headset. You just had a headset that you could put on. It had no stereoscopic view and there were a couple different demos. One of the famous demos was one called Tuscany, where you basically had this place in Tuscany that you could go to and walk around this house. There wasn’t a whole lot of interaction or anything, but it showcased the ability to look around a three dimensional space while sitting at your desk using your keyboard and mouse as navigation and you could look around and it could track your head, but that was basically it.

JEFF: (11:31) Right. So, no positional stuff. When you say you could walk around in the house you had to mouse around or arrow key around to move forward and back?

JERAD: Yes. Like a videogame. You press forward with your arrow key and you go forward and you’re actually still sitting there but it feels like you’re going forward and that’s when they started realizing things like simulation sickness was a thing [laughing].

JEFF: [laughing] So, let’s make sure we’re explaining this, kind of beginner for everybody who is listening. So, simulation sickness is a form of motion sickness, it’s kind of the opposite of motion sickness, right? Motion sickness oftentimes is caused because your eyes are not seeing the motion. You’re in a vehicle but your body’s feeling emotion and because of this disconnect your brain thinks oh, I must be sick, or someone must’ve drugged me, so I need to get this drug out of my system. I should throw up. (12:36) And this is sort of the opposite right, in that you’re seeing motion but your bodies not feeling the motion.

JERAD: Right. Your brain is perceiving motion and your body is not, and so there’s where the disconnect happens and it still is like, yeah, I ate some bad berries, I need to throw up. [laughing]

JEFF: Right. It’s evolution folks. It’s working for you.

JERAD: That is a thing.

JEFF: [laughing] Yeah, we’re eating fewer bad berries these days than we are using VR. (13:08) So, how have things evolved over time? Walk me forward maybe a year or two from there. Things starting to come out into the consumer world. What problems have been fixed?

JERAD: Well specifically with locomotion, I think and try to make sure that people aren’t sick. There’s a lot of design considerations that are in play. So, things like limit the users field of view when you’re moving them, or doing some sort of teleportation is typically a little bit easier to handle than the actual motion of moving from point A to point B. So, just teleporting, and being there instantly, or being able to do things like, some people really prefer snap turning, so that you can hit a button on your controller and it just snaps your view 45 degrees to the right or left. Things like providing a visual cage when you’re moving. So, sort of like when you’re in a car, you’re moving, but you see the car around you. Your body perceives that you’re in the car and the car is moving and not so much making music, although car sickness is still a thing. Right? [laughing] There’s a lot of things you can design into your VR application that can mitigate a lot of those symptoms. So, I think that’s probably the biggest one. The other one is just the advances in hardware have gotten us to higher refresh rates, higher resolution, and when you can give your brain more input it tends to put that motion sickness, or simulation sickness, down.

JEFF: Right. I think when people think of VR these days, they’re thinking of putting on a headset and shooting at things or riding a motorcycle, some kind of high intensity videogame type thing. So, to some extent it probably, is sort of, there’s kind of a disconnect, like, “why are they talking about that on this podcast. This is a podcast where they seem to talk about business culture and communications and keeping people connected.” (15:44) Talk to me about what has evolved in VR in the realms outside of gaming.

JERAD: Gaming is a big use case for virtual reality, but there are literally a ton of other use cases. I think videogames is pretty typical because it makes money, right. [laughing] The game development industry is also the ones who are the most knowledgeable about graphics, and graphical user interfaces and things like that, so you see a lot of game companies getting into VR because it’s a natural extension of what they already do, whereas, typical application development is a little harder, it’s not as natural, and there’s been a very huge transition for me in thinking of creating two dimensional user interfaces into three dimensional user interfaces. Man, that was a whole area of study, and still is, we don’t have it all figured out, but I read a lot of those books.

JEFF: (16:55) Meaning what? Like watching a movie in virtual space would probably be a simple use case.

JERAD: Yeah or interacting.

JEFF: Spreadsheets.

JERAD: Touching buttons to do things.

JEFF: Right. Because this is what user interface has been for the past 40 years, 50 years [laughing], on a two dimensional screen this is what we’re used to.

JERAD: Yeah, and when you add that third dimension it really changes how you have to think about your whole application. [laughing]

JEFF: When you think about it, even airplanes, cars, it’s still a two dimensional user interface even though it’s switches and buttons and stuff like that.

JERAD: On a screen maybe.

JEFF: Yeah, well it’s certainly on a screen, but on an airplane, there are just all these switches mounted on the wall of the airplane [laughing]. There are things like a stick shift kind of device, or a steering wheel is much more of a three dimensional interface thing, but for the most part, most of the switch kinds of things tend to be two dimensional.

JERAD: And that’s what’s fascinating, is, how can you take a user interface that is traditionally two dimensional and find things that are, in the real world, that people understand, like levers and switches, and make them three dimensional so that people can use them in those manners. Or, what happens when I flip something over as a user interface. Or, what happens if I grab this and pull it up to my ear, things like that are fascinating to me. [laughing]

JEFF: (18:43) So, communications, again, when we think of gaming it’s usually a relatively solitary experience, maybe you can hear the people who you’re playing the game with or maybe they’re in the game with you, but it’s not call grandma kind of thing. What has been the state of the art with that historically and also moving up to where we are now?

JERAD: This is sort of the number one superpower I think of virtual reality. It can bring people together. A lot of time people talk about, “oh, virtual reality is going to ostracize us and nobody’s going to talk to each other because they’re in a headset”, but in reality, the largest benefit of virtual reality is the fact that I can meet with somebody in a totally different country, a totally different time zone, and feel like I’m exactly in the same room with them. I can see their body language. I can talk to them. I can get their voice inflection just like it would on a videocall, but it’s every more because I feel like I’m actually in the space with them.

JEFF: Fully immersive.

JERAD: Yeah, and what’s more, I remember it as an experience that I had. There’s a fundamental difference between seeing something on a screen and being in it.

JEFF: It’s interesting, the psychology of it, right?

JERAD: Oh, yes.

JEFF: Because one is that you’re watching something on a screen or on a phone, it’s sort of a surprise that you can interact with it.

JERAD: It is.

JEFF: Right [laughing]. Like that first time you did a videocall, like, “wait, you can see me? This is a TV where you can see me”, you know. But this is more immersive, this is an experience and you remember it…

JERAD: Not only can you meet with that person and talk with them, but you can interact with them and you can interact with the things that are in that virtual space together in real time, and so you could imagine that opens up a whole world of collaboration in real time with three dimensional objects [laughing] remotely.

JEFF: Right. So, you could do 3D modeling, 3D sculpting together if you were working on some sort of device or developing a car. You can also work together on a whiteboard device.

JERAD: Yeah. I’m coming up with an article right now, Six Ways to Use VR for Remote Work, and you just hit on two major ones. One is the meetings that we just talked about; another is whiteboarding. You can have a virtual whiteboard with built out sample applications around this where I can meet with somebody and we can express our ideas in 3D space. What’s nice about it too is, it’s not even limited to just the board, I can just draw in the air, and then grab it and move it around. It doesn’t have to be on a flat surface that I’m drawing. The whole space becomes the whiteboard basically.

JEFF: (22:35) So, what’s happening technologically here? Are there specific apps? I know the buzz words that I heard you using years ago, and maybe this is not the current state of the art but, was web VR sort of this idea of creating, mirroring web technologies, so web activity in a VR environment. I should also mention there was this first wave of VR that happened in the nineties and I was doing a lot of web stuff back then, and so there was this idea of VRML (Virtual Reality Markup Language), and things like that that probably evolved a lot. But, how does all that play into this?

JERAD: VRML was very formational; it was a foundation. Tony Parisi was the author around in the early nineties, he’s now working for Unity, which is a game engine company. So, what I want to point out there is, there’s a sort of paradigm. There’s basically these two main options of, you have, sort of videogame engines, 3D engines and then you have web engines, and to a certain extent there’s a crossover. So 3JS is a JavaScript Library that can access web GL within the browser, which basically accesses your GPU directly to do the processing. So, you can get better graphics, better processing there, and, so there are projects like, I think the most prolific one right now is Mozilla has a Hubs project, Mozilla Hubs, which is probably one of the better VR pieces.

JEFF: Mozilla, the people behind the Firefox browser.

JERAD: Yup. Their foundation has a project around that which is geared toward creating 3 dimensional spaces using web VR and has multiplayer built-in. So, you could actually go to a web address and hit a button in your headset, feel like you’re in a 3 dimensional space and have other people join you so you could have a meeting and talk with them and do various things within that space. That’s web VR. There’s also a lot of different projects with game engines. And the difference between these two things is, I would say, quality. Web VR is a little bit like shoe horning and advanced technology to an existing product, the browser. That comes with a lot of overhead. The browser is not meant to do this, so, you even have Mozilla coming up with new browsers. For instance, the Oculus Quest has a brand new browser called Mozilla Reality, or is it Firefox Reality? One of those, [laughing] and it’s geared towards simply only being able to browse websites in 3 dimensional spaces, and it takes out a lot of the overhead that traditional browsers have, and allows you to have multiple browser windows open at once in a 3 dimensional space, allows you to go to a web VR website and click a button and just be immersed in it, instead of a space where your screens are now. So, they’re trying to make that transition very seamless, but the difference between doing that and browsers and doing that with game engines is still, I think, a matter of quality. You can get a lot better quality in game engines, because they’ve been built for a 3D. They’ve been built for optimizing the assets and presenting those assets. They have had this pipeline figured out for years through building videogames and browsers are kind of catching up to that. So, I think that’s the biggest difference really, is just the quality. You can do more easier in game engines and still have high quality things that respond in real time a little bit better than you can in web browsers, but it is catching up.

JEFF: It’s a little bit of a “tortoise in the hair” situation. This was the state of things, historically, that even Microsoft Excel was not something you could do in a web browser because it was too complex. But, over time, web browsers got better and you have things like Google Spreadsheets now, and a lot of this stuff is caught up in a way that it is potentially more interactive, more low common denominator, as it’s moved to the web, but the faster, the hair version [laughing] of the tortoise and the hair race is still native apps, which oftentimes cost more money. Or how much of this stuff is free? Or are VR interactive communication apps like this. I know games cost money, but what are we talking about in terms of investment. Let’s talk about the equipment, but first let’s talk about software.

JERAD: Sure. Game engines are typically free as well, until you actually compile that application and what to sell that application and then you’re looking at having a license for that game engine. So, developers end up having some sort of license that they need to purchase in order to actually sell their applications.

JEFF: Interesting. (29:12) So, there’s actually a cost to the developers to distribute their app so it makes it difficult for them.

JERAD: It’s not exorbitant. It’s based on how many licenses you plan to distribute basically. So, the more money the developer makes, the more they have to spend on those engines. I’m not a super expert in that area, like what those pieces are. I dabbled with Unreal and I’ve dabbled with Unity and I’ve dabbled with Web VR a lot. But honestly my main platform these days is something that combines a lot of the stuff into one package, and also allows me to build VR applications without taking my headset off. I can be in VR and build the full application and publish and distribute it with multiplayer built into it, or you can restrict it without that. [laughing]

JEFF: Dude, you blowing my mind. [laughing] (30:23) So, it’s meta right that you use a VR application, or, a VR application to create VR applications.

JERAD: I had a friend describe it a little bit like GitHub. The application itself is not Open Source, but you can build Open Source applications within it and distribute them, so you can publish these things as if you were publishing it on an app store for instance. You don’t really make money off of that, it’s more like if you want to give it out that’s fine, you can charge people for your time to build that thing, so there’s still a client services model there to be had, which is an area I’m pushing for [laughing]. It gives you a lot of freedom. You can even, with the tools that are built into it build these applications much faster than you could with traditional game engines such as Unity or Unreal, in which you still have to take your headset off and do all of the things on your desktop and then compile it and then put the headset back on and test it out, take it off and make your changes. This I can just do everything in VR, without ever taking my headset off, and it’s really powerful.

JEFF: (31:54) How much does a rig cost? If somebody, when they get to the end of this podcast, they think “I need to figure this out,” what are they in for? What are the options?

JERAD: Sure. It depends on what you want to do with it. If you want the high-end gaming system that is going to give you the most power and highest refresh rates and everything like that, you’re probably looking at something like the index.

JEFF: (32:37) That’s for the headset, right?

JERAD: I think right now it’s $700.00. That’s just for the headset, the controls and the tracking devices. But you also have to have a videogame system like Caliber system with a really good graphics card.

JEFF: Windows PC.

JERAD: And a hard drive space system and power consumption. Yeah Windows PC too. Mac is still catching up [laughing] to this stuff, as it always has with gaming, visual stuff. You could probably get one for $600.00 that would be sufficient. I would probably recommend spending somewhere around $1200.00 for a system and then the additional $700.00 for a headset, if I were to recommend it for someone who is going to use this as much as they typically would use a typical workstation for doing professional work. But there are also headsets that are much cheaper, wireless, totally standalone, don’t need a PC for, that are really getting good. The Oculus Quest is probably the most prolific one right now that has the best support and it’s $400.00. So, $400.00 gets you really good graphics, it’s got a great ecosystem of applications, you can do things like web VR development on it, and it comes with the headset and two trackers, no computer. But you have the option to just add a cable and hook it up to a good computer to do even more powerful processing with it. So, it’s extremely flexible, and $400 bucks is not a huge investment anymore.

JEFF: Yeah. Right.

JERAD: I mean how much do you spend on your cellphone? [laughing]

JEFF: (34:58) So, with something like Oculus Quest, would you be able to do interactive VR communication calls with it, or is it more game oriented?

JERAD: Yes.

JEFF: (35:09) It has a microphone and all that stuff? Wow.

JERAD: Yes, you could. It’s got full tracking. It has what they call inside out tracking which is a series of cameras on the front that detect what your room looks like and you can set up a boundary so that if you go past that boundary it basically does a pass through of the camera so that you don’t run into a wall.

JEFF: Okay. I’ve been keeping a loose peripheral watching this over time. So, the state of the art a few years ago was that you had to mount some sensors on the opposite upper corners of a room that would then monitor the room for the VR headset and gloves, or controllers, or whatever, and then send wirelessly back to the unit to kind of, “ok, here’s where they are in the 3D space”, and stuff like that. (36:10) So, what you’re saying now is that you don’t need that anymore, at least with this version of the technology. That the headset is keeping track of where it is within the room by having sensors that go out of it. That’s interesting.

JERAD: Yes. And they also just released this week, hand tracking, so you don’t even need the controllers now, it detects your hands and there are certain gestures that you use in place of buttons; things like pinching will get you a cursor that you could use to click and things like that.

JEFF: Well, we’re starting to see these gestural interfaces. There was something that came out recently, was it the pixel phone or something like that, that you could change pages by just waving your hand over the device? But it seems a little bit silly with a 2D interface [laughing], like a phone or a tablet, but in a 3D space there might actually be some use for that. That’s interesting. (37:20) So, $400, I’ve got an Oculus Quest, paint me a picture. What does it look like when I’m in a meeting? I’m a remote worker, we bought these for everyone on our team so that we could meet more immersively and interact. What’s it look like? It is ready player 1?

JERAD: [laughing] I guess you could say some of that would be accurate. When you put the headset on you have a home, and you’re by yourself. You have this nice looking home that is rendered and you could change it around to put applications where you want them to be, and you can then execute those applications or you could hit a button to pull up a heads up display, a dashboard that will give you a menu system to go further into the system to launch various applications or whatnot. So, for meeting somebody you would want to launch a particular application and then invite them in and you’re basically meeting. The area can look like whatever you want it to look like. There’s standard templates that you could use and then customize.

JEFF: But this idea of whatever you want it to look like is a very developer centric way of looking at it. Those of us who are more on the consumer side, it’s like, “what does it look like?” [laughing] “What are my choices?” (39:07) What is a typical situation? What does it look like?

JERAD: A typical situation is this house that is overlooking the ocean and you hear the sound of seagulls flying and maybe some ocean waves down below, and there’s extremely nice desks sitting around the area that you could go over to, and maybe there’s a fireplace in the side. That’s a very typical, sort of home environment.

JEFF: (39:44) So, it’s a very posh business retreat that we’re having. Is that what it is? Okay, nice.

JERAD: Yeah.

JEFF: Okay. Nice. Everyone can have their business retreat by the ocean every day. (39:55) And then what do we look like to each other? Do I look like me?

JERAD: [laughing] It’s so hard because it’s like, yeah, whatever you want it to look like.

JEFF: This is an indicator of the state of things. We haven’t quite hit that tipping point where there even is a typical, you know, when we launch Zoom, we kind of know what a video conference is going to be, but 20 years ago when you launched a video conference it was much more DIY and interpretive and stuff like that, (40:33) and we’re still a little bit in that point with the VR stuff right?

JERAD: A little bit. So, Facebook in particular with the Oculus Quest, has a typical look for their Avatars, because you have to standardize on a typical look in order to have some boundaries for customization. So that I can’t walk into a meeting looking like a banana, for instance. So, they have humanoid standard Avatars, and this is one of the things that can turn people off a little bit. It’s a little cartoony.

JEFF: Some people want to express their inner banana.

JERAD: Well, there is that too. There’s a very large contingent of furries than VR, people who want to look like animals, and that is a form of self-expression. It’s a form of reflecting how they feel, which is also a whole nother psychological avenue to go down that is extremely fascinating. The whole idea of how I look in VR actually changing the way that I look at the world is a thing.

JEFF: So, the movie Ready Player 1 for people that haven’t seen it. Stephen Spielberg, Action E movie. But particularly the whole idea is it depicts this virtual world that a lot of this action is happening in. [laughing]

JERAD: The oasis.

JEFF: (42:11) And as we talk about this stuff, I think that there is some similarity, right? That some people look like a person. Some people look a little bit more anime and some people might look like a monster, and ultimately, I think probably it’s going to be yet another thing that if you’re a business leader and allowing these virtual environments, you’re going to want to provide some guidelines that people should be clothed, not make each other uncomfortable. There’s some stuff like, “oh, it’s the wild west man, it’s cool.” But there are some lines that are easy to step over. And, even to the point where if someone could just feel like a non-expressive character or if someone is a lump, or as you’re saying a non-human character [laughing]. Like Bob comes to these meetings as rock, he’s literally a rock. Like, you can’t get any feedback from Bob. It takes some of these metaphoric things to literal levels that are just weird.

JERAD: I’ll tell you. I have a meeting quite regularly with a guy who looks like a jeep and another guy who looks like a piece of toast with jam spread on him and his hands are a spoon and a knife. But we know each other, and we have these meaningful interactions in these places, and the Avatars become a secondary thing. It’s not that important. What’s important is the conversation and the ideas that we’re sharing. The things that come out of that is what’s important. Sure, it’s a distraction maybe at first, but after you get to know the piece of toast, [laughing] it doesn’t matter anymore. Especially since you can change those so quickly, it’s like changing your clothes. A lot of people put so much emphasis on how they look in the material world, and it sort of strips away some of that.

JEFF: Yeah, I mean we see that in remote work stuff anyways, that it becomes more about the actual interactions, the actual communication, the actual work and output rather than so much focus on the dancing around and the rituals that we’ve kind of developed around these things. You can forget that they’re not as important.

JERAD: But there is that transition period, right? To get people to adopt something you have to give them something that they can relate to, and what they can relate to right now is reality. So, you have to create things that are realistic, whether it’s your Avatars or whether it’s the space that you’re meeting in, in order to get people to even understand the value of what you’re doing. Like, we’re just hung up on those visual things, and you have to replicate that in order to have adoption, I think.

JEFF: Well, in the early web, and I did a lot of work on the web, in the early web, in the early nineties, every meeting the client would say, “okay, so on the home page we’re going to have a picture of a library, and that’s going to be our resources area, and then we’ll have a picture of a bank.” It was like, “we’ll have a picture of a store and that’ll be where people go to buy things.” It was like you had to have this picture of a thing. AOL was like that for a while. Maybe it was a crutch, and there was a point later in the nineties where we had to sit down with people and remind them it’s a web page, it’s not a village. So maybe we need to do the village thing for a while. I have to admit the idea of sitting down to have a meeting with Godzilla is a little bit much for me to get my head around [laughing] right now, but maybe this is the ultimate and sort of acceptance and [laughing] diversity that we can abstract ourselves. It’s hard to know where that line is.

JERAD: It’s a moving target. As I got into VR, I really like anime, I love watching anime, lots of different types of anime, there’s lots of different types of the actual style and animations and stories, but I couldn’t see myself as an anime character, and all these people were coming into VR with anime characters and I was just like, “I don’t get it,” but there’s a certain ease of use with an anime character. It’s a sort of middle ground between realistic and efficient rendering that you could get. It also allows you to be expressive in a humanoid form, so it’s still very relatable. It’s easy to render. And yet it doesn’t give you that uncanny valley feeling.

JEFF: (48:04) Does that happen? If I try to make a Jeff Avatar and it’s got pictures of me from different angles and it looks just like me except dead [laughing], except that it doesn’t actually react in the same way that I do, does that get weird?

JERAD: It does.

JEFF: (48:27) Is it almost better for people to go for something that’s a little bit more low res at this point?

JERAD: I think so, because the effort of rendering a realistic Avatar that looks exactly like you and the skin looks like your skin, the light semi-permeates it with subsurface scattering and the eyes; eye moving is a thing. Our brains are very attuned to pointing out things that are not real, to pointing out the things that are fake in our perception. We’re very attune to that. You try to replicate it and your brain just says, “no, that’s not real,” and that feels uncanny, and that describes the uncanny valley term, or that term describes that concept, and so anytime I’d seen anybody come into VR with a model that has been constructed out of imagery around them, it’s even weirder than just saying lean into the awkward. [laughing] It’s just an awkward thing. You’re not going to look like a human. Although that technology is also advancing. I’ve seen so much better looking scans, like body scans, and textures and all of that stuff, but it comes at a processing cost, and we’re just not quite at that reality stage.

JEFF: Interesting. (50:03) So, where is all this headed? I’m sure that this realization that people can get into this for $400.00 is a surprise for some listeners. It’s sort of a surprise for me, to realize that oh, wow you can just experiment with this for $400.00 and potentially start to have meetings. What should they google to have a VR meeting? Let’s say, two people who work at a company together both get the Oculus Quest, we’ve got the holidays coming up, [laughing] although they might be behind us by the time this podcast comes out, but you know, they keep coming around, there’s always something on the horizon. For Valentine’s Day, get an Oculus for someone you love. How are people meeting? You don’t download Zoom.

JERAD: I think the highest thing that I see is social VR in general. That term is a thing, social VR. And there are many applications of social VR. Just basically things that allow you to jump into a world and socialize with other people. Maybe they’re random people, maybe it’s an invite only type of scenario. Oculus Quest has it built in.

JEFF: I was going to say, Oculus is owned by Facebook, who is a communications company and has Messenger, and of course they want to monitor everything you’re doing and saying, but they’re going to provide a lot of avenues for you to be able to communicate.

JERAD: I think right now what they use is something called Oculus spaces, which is a way that you could invite somebody into your home space, and you see their Avatar, or you can go to their home space, but they’re also working on a larger social VR network called Horizons. But, yeah, there is that whole concern of the privacy concerns and the tracking concerns

JEFF: I was going to say, it’s like the chat roulette of VR. Like randomly meet people or go into their home, or like [scream] what is happening? [laughing]

JERAD: Like chat roulette VR, go to VR chat. VR chat is another very popular social VR network that allows you to do a lot of Avatar customization and space and world creation and then meet there with your friends and do things like that. The application I was talking about earlier is, some people consider it a bit of a social network because you can build that within it. You can create a space and just invite somebody in there and hang out with your friends. You wanna create a chill place to hang out or a meeting space. But it’s also to the point where you can create applications, and that’s called Neos VR, which I’d love to talk even more about. I just built an application within there for voters in Scheibbs, Austria, who are voting on a new bridge for their town, and we built an application that allows them to switch the bridges, stand on the bridge, switch out the various options and then actually vote on those options.

JEFF: Oh, interesting. Okay. Wow. Okay. Right. So, another side of this is AR which is Augmented Reality, and we’re starting to see things like Ikea, if you download the Ikea app you can move your camera around and see what the Hagen Schengen unit will look like in the corner of your bedroom. But there are other reasons, it’s not an augmented reality where people have to walk down to the river to see what the [laughing] bridge would look like. They want to be able to stand on the bridge and be able to decide democratically voting and so to give them an opportunity to virtually visit the different bridge options. It’s fascinating.

JERAD: Yeah and these folks are already going to City Hall to vote, and so we have a booth set up in City Hall where as the voters come in they’re given a QR code for their coding, we can scan that, allow them to put the headset on, experience what it looks like to walk on these different bridge options, and do a 5 star rating. I basically built 5 star module in VR, [laughing] which is pretty awesome. Yes, it actually communicates with an API.

JEFF: (55:16) Are they voting like rating Amazon or it’s actual legal voting in VR?

JERAD: It’s actual legal voting. They are able to do a 5 star rating which communicates with an API that records their vote in a block chain. It’s in a partnership with another company who does this voting API for local governments.

JEFF: It’s really interesting stuff we’re getting here.

JERAD: And that’s what I really want to point out here. It’s not just the social things. It’s not just the meetings. It’s not just the games. You build actual, useful special applications for virtual reality, and I think that’s really where the market is.

JEFF: So, you’ve got VR, you’ve got block chain voting, which is fascinating, and everyone should look into, and also non-binary voting. This idea of choosing preferences on a scale, ratings voting, which is a thing that we’re just completely not familiar with in the United States, at least. Well, I mean, you choose one, but it’s not like who would be your second choice, usually is not the thing. I would like to vote for this person but only a little bit [laughing] which is probably reflective of a lot of peoples voting. Wow, fascinating. (57:07) Tell me about any other stuff that’s happening in VR that you’re working on or you’ve seen people working on, that might give people a little glimpse into the future for all of this.

JERAD: My other topic I like to talk about in VR and participate in is just art. There is a lot of artists who, as you know, artists really push the boundaries of society in general and tend to cling to newer technologies for their work and ways to express themselves. Art in virtual reality is a huge community. There’s a huge conglomerate of people that are just doing art. So, things like tilt brush. Tilt brush is a very common one. Google bought the applications, it’s now a google application, and it allows you to just paint with different brushes and textures in virtual space. That right there tends to be a big clicker for people because they’re drawing but then they can walk around inside of their drawing. So, that’s a very big avenue. Three dimensional art in general has always been a thing, but now it’s giving people like architects and professional car designers and shoe designers the ability to work with their creations in a 3 dimensional space which gives them a greater understanding of what they’re actually making. It gives them, spatial awareness of what it actually is. So, instead of having their brain translate their ideas, which are 3 dimensional to a 2D screen, they can work with it in 3 dimensional spaces as if they were modeling it from wood or clay, and actually take that and then give it to somebody to 3D print. My calling card in some circles is mandalas. I like to create 3 dimensional mandalas and animate them and share them with people, a lot of people like this. So, it’s a great way of just having self-expression. So, art in general, and crypto art even. Oh my gosh. So, marrying VR [laughing] and crypto currency in a 3 dimensional space to create art and sell your art. It’s amazing.

JEFF: [laughing] Too many buzz words. I got to go take a shower.

JERAD: Wait until we throw AI in there buddy. [laughing] I haven’t even started on that one. [laughing] Art is a really big area as well.

JEFF: There’s also a lot of stuff that’s been happening with immersive VR stuff around therapy, mental health stuff.

JERAD: PTSD.

JEFF: Post traumatic stress, and stuff like that, or people with chronic pain who might be immobilized or something like that to be able to go sit in a field for a while.

JERAD: It is. It’s a sort of therapy by distraction I would say, but that is a very real thing to somebody who is feeling so much pain that they want to escape reality. If you give them that tool it actually relieves the symptoms there, and we’re even seeing it with children, being able to distract them from some sort of procedure reduces their anxiety, which ends up increasing the rate of healing afterwards as well.

JEFF: (1:01:29) So, dentists with virtual reality goggles is what you’re talking about?

JERAD: Well they already cover kids eyes and put the headphones on and everything. My daughter just had a tooth pulled, and I wish I would’ve taken a picture because the amount of things they put on her, I was just like, “oh, I should’ve just brought my VR headset,” she would’ve been totally fine. [laughing]

JEFF: Get to get some Minecraft done while she’s in the chair.

JERAD: Minecraft in VR is a thing as well, yes.

JEFF: (1:01:54) So, what’s the future here. The $400.00 headset feels like a bit of a tipping point. We’re starting to get there. A lot of the barriers are moving out of the way. There’s still sociological barriers. There’s probably people listening to this podcast going like, “these guys are crazy. I would never do this,” and they might be right, but they also might be just not relating that 5 or 10 years from now everybody will be doing this. The first time I saw someone walking down the street talking on a cellphone I felt like they were just breaking all sorts of societal norms. It was a horrible thing. It was totally rude. And now it’s just the way of the world. (1:02:57) Paint me a picture. What are we looking at? What are going to be the advances in the coming years and what should people be keeping an eye out for, particularly around communication in VR?

JERAD: Allow me to proselytize a little bit. [laughing]

JEFF: Stand up on the soapbox. There you go.

JERAD: [laughing] I honestly see the future of VR and spatial computing related to what we do today with computers. Twenty years ago, you didn’t have a computer in your home; most people. They didn’t know what a website was. Today our whole economy is completely dependent upon it. If computers went away, if websites went away, our economy would literally crash, and that was only 20 years ago. This technology is advancing at a pace that is faster than the computers advanced as well. It’s advancing even computing technology. So, the future is going to, I honestly believe people will want 3 dimensional spaces to interact with their customers more than they’re going to want a webpage. I don’t think webpages will go away. I think there’s always going to be a use for pulling up a flat piece of information and not have the investment of going somewhere, but we already go places. We go to the mall. We go to the store.

JEFF: Particularly when we’re buying things that we want to be able to see and experience. A refrigerator, right, that you want to go to the appliance store to be able to talk to the person and be able to look at the different refrigerators, but that stuff could happen in virtual space.

JERAD: Yes. And it does. I’ve built some spaces like that that are concept things. It’s going to become more and more of a thing, and I do think that our economy and society will be dependent on it at some point. It’ll just be a part of everyday life. I don’t know that we’ll replace things. Actually, let me say that differently. I don’t think it’s going to take away from existing things. I think it will replace some of the things that we already do, because it will do them better. That’s something I want to be a part of, and I want to invest my time in building that future technology. It’s sort of a choice at this point. I think it’s going to be a thing. I think VR headsets, I think they’ll probably end up merging with AR, so VR and AR merging, and having a device that can do either/or.

JEFF: These days it tends to be separate. Augmented reality, phones are capable of augmented reality and they’re ubiquitous and so, we’re doing more like 2 dimensional augmented reality stuff. Using your phone as this little viewer of the augmented reality while it uses your camera to do spatial awareness and place your “Ikea unit in the corner of your bedroom” was the example I used. However, if you’re talking about VR, virtual reality devices, that have these cameras that are facing outward to help figure out where they are in the room, those cameras could also, you just turn them on in the screens in front of your eyeballs, right, and now you’re seeing the room and you could potentially augment that too. (1:07:11) So, these things are merging together. Am I correct?

JERAD: They are. You are. They already are. To an extent I’m seeing augmented reality glasses. They look like sunshades that you could just put on and have augmented reality.

JEFF: So that’s another one, right. So, non-goggle kind of interaction and stuff.

JERAD: Yeah. Well you got to make it like glasses because that’s what people understand and it’s the convenience factor. I put my glasses on every morning. So, if augmented reality is built into them, I just have it at my disposal. And then it’s just a flip of a switch, eventually, that actually immerses me into a virtual world and replaces my reality as well.

JEFF: (1:07:56) So virtual reality glasses that feel and look more like glasses than the current goggle thing. [laughing]

JERAD: Yeah, and if it’s as simple as flipping a switch to move from reality to virtual reality, it becomes very convenient and people like convenience and will use that.

JEFF: Yeah, it’s weird. I don’t know. (1:08:22) Is it the decline of western civilization or an evolution of humanity, or just another weird thing to be like, “oh, yeah, he’s got a 3D TV” or whatever. It’s hard to know [laughing] what all this means, but it’s really interesting to keep an eye on it and particularly from this podcast, we talk about virtual communication, we talk about communicating online and this is increasingly becoming an avenue in that realm. I don’t know, I’m still not quite sold on it myself, but we’re close. I know that it’s just a matter of maybe in a year that I’ll have some company on that just does this, they do all their meetings in virtual reality and it’s the best thing ever, and we’ll hit, not necessarily that tipping point, but we’ll at least have those clear and obvious role models. When I first started talking about remote work, we were kind of looking for that, and to some extent had that in Lullabot [laughing] right. This like, “hey, we’ve got this really cool thing that we’re doing. Is anybody else doing this? Are we doing it in a way that works for other people?”

JERAD: Are we the only ones?

JEFF: Yeah [laughing] which is how Yonder got started and all this kind of stuff, and now this being the 82nd podcast I feel like, yeah, we’ve talked to a lot of people that it’s worked for and this idea that, oh that’s not a thing that works or that seems crazy, is not really so much of an argument anymore. I think we’re going to start to see that with virtual reality.

JERAD: If I may, since you’re talking about podcasts and the number of podcasts that you’ve done, that sort of proves out the fact that remote work is a thing. There’s also a really good podcast that I would recommend by someone you know, Kent Bye, who does the Voices of VR podcast. He has over 700 episodes.

JEFF: Kent worked for Lullabot years ago, and I can say that Kent is nothing, if not prolific.

JERAD: Yes, he really is.

JEFF: 700 episodes. That’s amazing.

JERAD: Yeah, he’s done a lot of work with that. And his big thing now is trying to extract the amount of knowledge that he’s uncovered in a more digestible format. To sit through 700 podcasts, that’s a huge time investment right. [laughing] Good talking with him about that.

JEFF: 82 podcasts is quite an investment as well. [laughing] Well, great. Jerad, thank you so much for coming on and shining a light into the goggles here.

JERAD: My pleasure.

JEFF: Was there anything that you wanted to touch on that we didn’t get to?

JERAD: I think that’s pretty good. I will mention I have an article that I’m writing right now that I’ll probably end up adding this podcast to the end of that is about the future of work, about ways that you could use virtual reality for remote work specifically, different use cases there. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I talk a lot about VR things there and my name is circuitry, spelled phonetically sirkitree.

JEFF: (1:12:03) Yeah, and that’s your username on various things, but if people want to follow up with you is that a good place to ask you questions and stuff like that?

JERAD: Yes, it is. I communicate a lot with a lot of different people on Twitter.

JEFF: Great. Well, Jerad thank you so much for coming on and talking to us here.

JERAD: Thanks for giving me the opportunity. Appreciate it.

JEFF: Yeah. Take care.

JERAD: You too.