Envelop VR is a productivity tool that provides a virtual shell to allow users to use all of their existing 2D applications within the context of virtual reality. I had a chance to talk to the founder Bob Berry at the SEA-VR Expo, which he also founded last year. Envelop VR announced last week that they raised a $4 million round of funding from Madrona Venture Group. Bob talks about their strategy to create a generalized solution to be able to work all day within VR, and some of the challenges that they had to solve along the way.
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One big issue with a virtual desktop solution is being able to see your hands on the keyboard, especially for people who are not touch typists. They point a web cam down at your hands, and then they render a virtual representation of you hands in VR laid over the keyboard.
Some of the other issues that we discuss include how the screendoor effect is negligible on the CV1 and Vive, the possibility for immersive visualizations, being able to increase productivity by having as many monitors and screen real estate as you want in VR, and the exciting potential of being able to code VR experiences while being within VR.
Bob believes that immersive computing is going to provide a complete paradigm shift in how we interact with computers and he hopes that Envelop VR can provide the tools to be able to help make that happen.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.100] Bob Berry: I'm Bob Berry. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Envelop VR. We're working on enterprise and productivity software for immersive technologies that allow you to work, play, and create in VR.
[00:00:23.680] Kent Bye: Great, so what does that mean? What are people able to do with Envelop VR?
[00:00:27.463] Bob Berry: The first thing that we're working on is enabling you to actually use your computer in virtual reality, the entire computer, and not just one single application at a time. So we're effectively creating a virtual shell for the operating system and enabling all of your applications, all your legacy 2D content like Office and Chrome and Visual Studio, all work harmoniously in a shared environment, in addition to new immersive experiences, whether they be full screen or quote, windowed kind of experience.
[00:00:56.448] Kent Bye: And what does that give a user? What is the advantage of having a fully immersive Word document experience? What is the sort of the benefit of that?
[00:01:04.349] Bob Berry: So go to any game development studio or software production house and you walk through and you see three monitors on a programmer's desk or five monitors or you go to a CIA analyst and they have 12 monitors and they want more or financial analysts, network operation centers, anything that has a lot of monitors and suddenly we can say, well, In VR, you can have as many monitors as you want. It's unlimited desktop space, unlimited desktop real estate. That's powerful, and it's way cheaper, way more efficient than having all of these physical monitors on your desk. So it's a massive improvement, we think, for the productivity of workers.
[00:01:37.847] Kent Bye: And so what are some of the other challenges that you had to do in order to create an experience that was really optimized to have this multi-windowed or more fully immersive experience of being able to work on the desktop?
[00:01:50.482] Bob Berry: Well, it's a huge user experience and interface design challenge. The technical stuff is hard that we've done. You know, we've got over most of the major technical hurdles and now our big challenges are like, well, what does that interface actually look like in VR? Because not all of the traditional 2D design paradigms map directly into an immersive environment. It's just kind of a different beast. So it's a learning process. We've tried a lot more things that haven't worked than do work. And so it's just, we got to continue iterating. The other challenge that developers face right now is you can't make VR while you're in VR. This constant goggle on, goggle off, or test cycle causes eye fatigue and brain fatigue. It's just really an unpleasant experience to have to constantly go back and forth. So one of the things that we're enabling is because you can now use your computer in VR, you can also use all of your development tools in VR. And so seamless transition between the content that you're working on and your actual workspace is an important tool that we're delivering to developers.
[00:02:45.720] Kent Bye: Now one of the things that I see in your marketing of Envelop VR is like 3D visualization. So maybe you could talk a bit about like what is it specifically that you're doing with visualization with your product?
[00:02:56.052] Bob Berry: So immersive computing as a platform in general is a fundamentally new way for humans to interact with compute resources, data, and people. And we believe that by immersing somebody in a data visualization, for example, in Excel, instead of getting like a 2D bar chart, we can export a data landscape into your virtual environment and allow you to look at the data in a more intuitive way. Like I can walk around the data, I can lean my head into the data to zoom into it. That unlocks different parts of your brain that are not being used when you're looking at it on a 2D screen or even looking at it in a 3D viewport and spinning something around. It's just our brains are wired to work in a way that we learn best, our intuition works best when we're in an environment that our brain thinks is real, right? And we think that this is going to unlock human consciousness. It's going to raise human consciousness and it's going to actually raise human intelligence as a species because we're increasing the bandwidth to the brain. We are more intuitively able to look at data and ingest it and retain the information.
[00:03:57.533] Kent Bye: Yeah, and talking to different data visualization experts, there's a lot of hope for what the potential is for that immersive 3D visualization, but there's also a lot of problems with occlusion and other issues that, you know, in some cases it may actually be more efficient just to look at the 2D chart to be able to see all the data. And so, what advantages do you see that that 3D visualization has been able to solve that you can't do in 2D?
[00:04:21.995] Bob Berry: Well, that remains to be seen, I think. We're just scratching the tip of the iceberg here in terms of what we can do. And we haven't had a lot of data sets to work with yet. But you can imagine, like, for example, there are many instances where we are taking, like, 3D data, like an MRI of a knee or something like that, and we're looking at it in slices, right? But what if I could have that knee just hovering in front of me and just stick my face into it and be able to look at the different layers, you know, in a more intuitive fashion? Or you look at the Paul Allen's Brain Institute, where they're actually building up, you know, they're mapping the human brain and building up this incredibly dense image library. But, you know, we did a tour of there, and there are analysts that are inspecting the slides, you know, again, we're cutting them into 2D images, are looking at a giant 30-foot image on a 24-inch monitor, and they have to pan around to look for any defects on it, you know? What if we could actually show that image in its full glory and have them, like, walk around the image or lean their head into it, or more intuitively pan around it? we think that could be really powerful and that could speed up our analysis in that particular case. And maybe not give us a new insight, but it definitely speed up the process of analyzing the data.
[00:05:26.298] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I guess there's a caveat there where there's data that's connected to a 3D data, whether it's the earth or the body, and then there's the abstract data visualization, which I think is kind of the realm where it's a little bit more of an open question as to what the advantages would be.
[00:05:40.359] Bob Berry: Yeah, it absolutely is, but you can imagine that certain data in a dataset might jump out in a new way that we haven't really experienced before. You know, a spike on a blob of some kind, you know, but it's really something that we anticipate will happen, but we haven't actually proven out yet because, you know, we're one step at a time. Like, something Envelop definitely wants to work on, but we haven't gotten there yet.
[00:06:02.111] Kent Bye: And so when it comes to the use cases or the problems, have you focused into a very specific target demographic, or is this kind of like a generalized virtual desktop solution?
[00:06:12.638] Bob Berry: I mean, initially we're going to be focused on, you know, developers and the enterprise because, I mean, that's just where the market is initially. We think right now businesses can benefit from immersive technologies, whether they be AR, VR, and incorporating haptic sensors and controllers to allow them to interact with their business processes in new ways. So we want to enable that, but the Envelop platform really is a foundational platform for us to build, you know, customized experiences on to target very specific industries. And we want to open it up to developers to also work and build and create on our platform so they can go into other industries and sell solutions into that. But honestly, the core platform, just being able to use your computer VR, we think is going to be useful for everybody. So that really is kind of a consumer story there.
[00:06:59.317] Kent Bye: And so just today, you're announcing that you're getting a round of funding from Madrone. Maybe you could talk a bit about some details of that and what you hope to do with that.
[00:07:07.661] Bob Berry: I've been saying for a very long time that I think the Seattle area is ripe to be a hotbed for immersive technology and computing platform development. But a major critical component for that ecosystem to be healthy here is investment. And so until that started to happen, it really was going to stifle the growth here. And so it was great to see that Madrona stepped up and put their money where my mouth was. And they've been a great partner to work with so far. They bring a lot of experience in the enterprise to the table that will benefit me. I've been making video games for 25 years. I don't know that much about the enterprise. So, you know, they can really help fill in those skill gaps and help us build like, you know, a big business. So, you know, and the money obviously is used to grow the team and help us accelerate. And we got to be careful because nobody knows how quickly this market is going to emerge. So we got to kind of track that month to month. But it definitely allows us to put our heads down for a while and really focus.
[00:08:01.666] Kent Bye: And so maybe you could walk through some of the experiences that you've had and envelop, like what you go in there to do.
[00:08:08.120] Bob Berry: It's fascinating, I mean, I try to use it every single day for at least a couple hours. The biggest problem right now is the lack of high-quality headsets on the market. So even us developers, we don't have a ton of the HTC Vives or the Crescent Bays or, you know, like, it's very limited. So, you know, using our stuff on a DK2 is possible. but I wouldn't want to be in it for hours. It does cause eye strain, but running our stuff on a Crescent Bay, for example, I could sit for hours. I could really envision an entire day working in an environment like that. Unfortunately, I don't get to code as much as I used to, so the business-y part of my job has me running all over the office and just doing meeting after meeting, so I don't get to spend as much time in it as some of our developers do. But it always delights me whenever I get a Slack message or an email from somebody who says, oh, and by the way, I wrote this in VR. Love it, you know?
[00:08:59.012] Kent Bye: Yeah, and it seems like the current generations of VR hasn't been that level of resolution and there's the screen door effect to be able to actually read text to make it comfortable. But do you foresee like with these consumer version of virtual reality that it's going to be good enough to be able to have a virtual desktop solution like this?
[00:09:16.361] Bob Berry: The generation that's coming at the end of this year and the beginning of next is absolutely the first one where we feel very confident that it's going to be quite usable for a large number of people. When I first tried our software on a Crescent Bay like a month ago I was giddy like it was so validating because we'd only been really been working on the DK twos and I was just like and I keep telling people like resolution is gonna get better it's good everything's gonna get better the optics are gonna improve and Once we finally saw it everything was crystal clear. I'm like, okay. This is a win like this is gonna be great
[00:09:47.679] Kent Bye: And how do you deal with the blind touch typing? To see a keyboard there, and that input controls, and be able to type while you're not able to actually see the keyboard. How do you address that issue?
[00:09:57.902] Bob Berry: By allowing you to see the keyboard. So if you go check out our demo over there at the Envelope booth, we have a solution for you to actually be able to see your hands, mouse, and keyboard in a comfortable way. And you don't need to be a touch typist to use the software.
[00:10:11.567] Kent Bye: So how's that being tracked? With the motion? Or how are your hands getting into VR? How are you being able to detect where your hands actually are?
[00:10:17.844] Bob Berry: It's actually a video camera, and it uses your webcam that you would probably already have on top of your monitor, except it's angled down looking at your hands. And then we put that image, we blend it into the environment in a space where it's intuitive, so when you reach your hands in, you actually just see, we're not doing any skeletal tracking or anything like that. When you reach in, you're seeing your hands and your mouse and your keyboard.
[00:10:37.390] Kent Bye: So it's kind of like a mixed reality then in some ways.
[00:10:39.832] Bob Berry: Sure. We call it inverse VR. People get caught up on these terms of augmented reality and virtual reality. I just call them immersive technologies. This is a spectrum. It's not a one or the other. It's not a binary thing. People differentiate them a lot today because the hardware solutions that are enabling different kinds of experiences are at the moment very different, but they will converge. And when they do, we're going to forget about this virtual reality, augmented reality kind of differentiation. It's all going to go away. So I just, I call them immersive technologies, anything that helps you achieve presence. And that includes, you know, haptic feedback and input controllers and things like that. So I like it's a better blanket term. And all of these technologies, when you bring them together, are enabling the wave of immersive computing, which is really, I think, the next big major platform.
[00:11:28.799] Kent Bye: And so this morning, you were up on stage kind of introducing the CVR. Maybe you could talk a bit about your role in the organizing committee and how this all came together.
[00:11:38.547] Bob Berry: So last year, I had a wacky idea that, why don't we have a VR event like they do down in VRLA? So I called up my friend John Root, who runs VRLA, and I said, hey, this is before he joined Envelope. I asked him, I said, how do we set one of these events up? Can you kind of walk me through how you got VRLA booted and everything? We had some sense of what we might do. And we happened to, at the same time, be talking to our friend Bob Barnett at the Living Computer Museum about doing a VR installation at the museum. And we said, why don't we throw an event here to raise awareness for the community? And he said, I love it. I'll get Vulcan to pay for everything. And sure enough, he did. And we had a wonderful event sponsored by Vulcan and Envelope. It was about 300 people, 24 exhibitors or so, including one who crashed the event to exhibit, showed up with a suitcase from Paris and just put up his laptop. We're like, go for it, man. And it was a killer event, and we had so many requests over the last few months of like, are you going to do another one? We really like to see a follow-up event. We're like, I'm kind of busy getting this Envelop thing off the ground, but I figured it would also be a good platform to announce the next wave of our company, the next phase of it. So went ahead and committed to do it, and we actually set up an entity, CVRLLC, to actually run the event. I'm on the planning committee, but you know, My role is mostly to form the planning committee, and then I kind of step back, and man, they took the bull by the horns and ran with it and produced this incredible event. So I really can't take much credit for this one. This is mostly our planning committee, which was made up of volunteers, and they did a fantastic job.
[00:13:11.773] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:13:17.770] Bob Berry: Well, I think immersive computing, like I said, is going to unlock human intelligence and raise our consciousness as a species. Things get really interesting when you look at the intersection between immersive tech, big data, AI. What is the intersection of all that? When we get down to wearable AR, where we're just kind of walking around and we can go into full immersive VR or into some sort of augmented reality or something in between at a whim and we're deeply connected with you know internet of things and Big data machine learning and all that AI when all that converges like what does that universe look like? What does that world look like? And I think we're converging on that very very quickly a lot faster than a lot of people think and it's going to Transform our society in ways we can't even imagine right now
[00:14:03.515] Kent Bye: OK, great. Well, thank you. Thanks. And thank you for listening. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
