#261: Going Beyond Gaming & Entertainment with Clay Park VR’s Shauna Heller

shauna-hellerShauna Heller worked as a developer relations specialist focusing on non-gaming and non-entertainment experiences at Oculus for a year and a half before leaving to start her consultancy Clay Park VR. She’s had a lot of exposure to the leading non-gaming VR experiences and understands what the how the full landscape of VR is shaping up and what the early adopters of VR are doing. I had a chance to catch up with Shauna at the VRX conference to get more insights for how VR is going to go beyond this initial push of gaming and entertainment.

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Spending a year and a half at Oculus in developer relations has given Shauna Heller some unique insights into how the rest of the world is thinking about VR. She has seen a lot of interest in VR across arts and culture, aerospace, architecture, automotive, education, enterprise, medical, music, publishing, retail, sports, themed entertainment, and movie visual effects. Those are just the early movers in the VR space, and she says that this is really just the tip of the iceberg since she’s hearing about a new application of VR every day.

She left Oculus and started Clay Park VR in order to help advise and educate clients about the broader issues around VR who are not sure what to do with VR and how to engage with this new medium. She also is able to provide some unique feedback on what’s been happening within the broader market across all of the different industry verticals.

In terms of her personal interest in VR, she’s a huge proponent of educational VR experiences and sees it as one of the most important potentials of VR. Not everyone is a book learner, and she sees that VR could help us unlock the full potential of our learning capabilities and knowledge in a way that could profoundly change humanity.

Some of her favorite VR experiences include Apollo 11 VR experience as well as First Flight, which is about this history of the Wright Brother’s airplane that was commissioned by the Smithsonian. She wants to see more educational experiences like these that are able to educate without over-indulging, overstimulating or overreaching.

One of the things that I’ve noticed in educational VR experiences is that they tend to rely heavily on narration or infographic text popping up. The thing that I wonder is how VR can go beyond what a film can do, and what the best use of the virtual reality medium will be to provide an embodied educational experience that goes beyond what instructional videos can do. Shauna agrees that this is a tricky balance as to how to balance the environmental visual information, any audio narration, and then any additional text or information provided on the screen. There’s not a set formula for that perfect balance, and so it’s a process of experimentation and knowing a good balance when you see it. It’s an ideal that even her most favorite experiences have yet to fully reach.

One of the biggest mistakes that Shauna has seen in experiences is when developers try to use all 360 degrees to no effect. Requiring viewers to quickly look all around them even if it’s not really compelling to do so can annoy or strain the viewer. The stronger developers have been finding ways to best use this new immersive medium with meaningful applications. She also recommends spending more time on implementing a spatialized audio design since it’s crucial for taking a VR experience to the next level.

Finally, Shauna says that now is the time to get into VR development. It’s still so early in the development of VR that we’re still in the process of unlocking new pathways of discovery with the medium. Ultimately, she sees that VR is going to enable us to engage, enlighten, educate and explore. There’s going to be applications of VR in nearly every aspect of our society, and she’s looking forward to helping guide companies along the way with her work at Clay Park VR.

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Rough Transcript

[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.

[00:00:12.278] Shauna Heller: My name is Shauna Heller and I'm the founder of Clay Park VR. Clay Park VR is a VR strategy and advisory service for corporations, brands and institutions trying to find their way towards or into virtual reality. And I'm also working with developers as a special advisor to them to help them pull focus to their work. All of this, of course, across the non-gaming, non-entertainment space.

[00:00:37.122] Kent Bye: Great. So maybe you could talk a bit about your background and then how you kind of got into what you're doing now.

[00:00:41.833] Shauna Heller: So I recently was working at Oculus where I was a developer relations specialist sitting within the developer relations team and publishing team and I spent a year and a half at Oculus working with everyone there.

[00:00:54.964] Kent Bye: Great, so gaming is obviously going to be huge but I think is going to be perhaps just the entry point to all these other applications and VR has also been around since the 60s, and so there's plenty of other applications beyond just gaming. And so, for you, what do you see as kind of the biggest opportunities for virtual reality in these other sectors?

[00:01:15.141] Shauna Heller: So the non-gaming, non-entertainment developers work across arts and culture, architecture, automotive, but they also work across education, enterprise, industry, music, and sports, and theme parks, and themed entertainment, and medicine, and science. These are all super rich areas for development. and they are already coming online. You'll see it, you know, in advertising and marketing and things like that. But really, the broader uses for VR are almost too many to try to name or to number. I think some of the most interesting applications are recreations that could be used in an education platform. And then medicine, of course, is really great. How do we visualize patient data in a meaningful way, not just to show the patient, but actually to plan and strategize out how successful surgery is going to look and then empower doctors to make better decisions before any incisions have even been cut. So those are just a very few. Religion is also beginning to look and think about how they can proselytize in VR. And however you feel about it, it's just another interesting use case. I mean, every day I hear about something new. Someone new is reaching out to me saying, hey, you know, can you take a look at what I'm working on? I don't know if I'm the only one or the hundredth person. But can you help me figure out if what I'm doing is special or if it's already something that's in development? And honestly, a good deal of the time, I've never heard of a developer working on that sort of thing.

[00:02:42.038] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I imagine that being at Oculus and having an opportunity to be connected directly to a lot of these leading-edge, pioneering companies that are investigating virtual reality, I'm sure you've had an opportunity to see a lot of varied experiences across the spectrum of really awesome, but also really terrible. So I'm curious, what are some of the biggest mistakes that you see some of these companies do when they're trying to figure out this new communications medium of virtual reality?

[00:03:08.791] Shauna Heller: So I'm not sure that mistakes are really the right word to use with developers working on content right now or companies. I think that there is some misunderstanding about the potential of VR and the medium itself. So one of the misunderstandings I often see is that developers They want to use all 360 degrees of the environment, even though it's not necessarily compelling to do it that way, or it really pulls the viewer's look and their gaze all over the place. And personally, as a personal choice, I find that to be one of the most frustrating things when I put on a headset and check out a piece of content from a new developer. And they are whipping my gaze all over the place. And honestly, it's not contributing to the experience in any way. They're just doing it because they can. And it's the new toy they have. And the strongest, the strongest developers out there that are doing the best work, they know that they are introducing a visual platform. And they allow other people a window into that world. And that's when you get a really meaningful experience. You get a really meaningful VR application. If anything, one of the biggest mistakes that I see is that developers taking the full 360 view and really overusing it to no effect. And then also there are those who are not paying as much attention to audio design as they might want to. I'm super sensitive to sound. Like I will be immersed in an average performing piece of content, meaning the frame rate might be a little bit low or, you know, or it's just, not super, super visually compelling, but that the audio is really great. And because there's so few examples of people doing really great audio design right now, I will be kind of drawn to an experience like that. So for what it's worth, I think that for developers, a better path for them is to be spending more time in the audio process and designing out the audio experience.

[00:05:04.920] Kent Bye: And so we're here at the Virtual Reality World Expo, and you just gave a presentation to the attendees here. What were some of the big points that you were trying to make there?

[00:05:14.200] Shauna Heller: I think because it was a mixed crowd of established developers and people coming to kick the tires on VR, the point of my presentation here at VRX was to communicate that the time is now to get involved with development. The time to kick the tires, it's not over, but they should be thinking a little bit more about actually getting into development at this time. And so I hope people came away from my presentation feeling like, activated to put a plan in place, to put their people in place, and to start developing. And then for developers, to give them some new paths for where they can go with their content or with their design skills.

[00:05:58.219] Kent Bye: For you, what has been some of the most compelling virtual reality experiences outside of gaming that you've seen?

[00:06:04.062] Shauna Heller: So some of the most compelling experiences for me outside of gaming have been the experiences that educate you without indulging you, without overstimulating you, without overreaching. I think one of the standards that almost everybody that's not in gaming and not in entertainment and traditional will point to the Apollo 11 experience, which is great, and that's by a group doing immersive education, and to me, that's just a really great use of VR. It allows you to go along on the Apollo 11 mission. It's really great, super compelling. They've come a long way. I saw it when it was in an early, rough, kind of pre-vis state, and the developers on that have really gone a long way, and I do hold that up. I think my second favorite VR experience is actually the first flight by the team working with the Smithsonian. And that group put together the Wright Brothers' first flight and they used all historical data. They went back and did original research and uncovered information about that first flight that had never really been considered before. They paid immaculate detail to that recreation. And that team was coming out of, they have a discipline in pre-visualization for motion pictures. So they were able to apply a lot of their knowledge about motion capture and design and storytelling into the Wright Brothers experience. And it's really, it's really extraordinary. And they did a really nice job with sound design as well. And for the Vive, but they were telling me that they've built so many features into it that you can freeze frame and walk around in the environment, kind of like your own version of a bullet time, but in a CG environment. But at the same time, they put so many features into the Wright Brothers experience that they actually had to turn many of them off just to get solid performance out of the piece as a basic consumer piece of content. So I can't wait until processing speeds have gotten a little bit faster that they can start flipping those switches back on and give you an even more immersive experience.

[00:08:10.384] Kent Bye: So, you know, I've done a lot of interviews. When I ask people about, you know, what they get excited about virtual reality, a lot of people do end up mentioning education. However, there's also not a lot of money in education. But I expect that virtual reality is, I think, going to open up a lot of new avenues for adult education or education of just things that people are really interested in and learning about things in this medium that There's certainly a lot of potential there. That said, I've also seen a lot of bad approaches to educational VR where they kind of treat it like a documentary where they may rely too much on a narrative or the sound rather than actually showing you anything in virtual reality. Often we'll see something and I may say to myself, why does this need to be in VR? Because it just kind of feels like a film. And so that to me seems like a challenge of like, how do you kind of think about that and describe to people if you see them kind of like just try to use their film approaches to doing like a lecture or something versus making something that's a little bit more engaging or interactive or immersive.

[00:09:13.670] Shauna Heller: When I look at educational content, and there isn't just a lot of very good educational content just yet, but I see developers working on good projects. But I think what looks like successful education content in VR is the kind of content where you are put in the middle of an experience. You're not put in a 3D environment looking at 2D content like you would like a documentary. You are put in the middle of, say, a beating heart or a bloodstream, and these things are rushing past you. But there is a secondary, how do I take away something from that experience? It is providing a little bit of contextual information, maybe even, and it sounds silly, but maybe you have pop-up with different pieces of information, but you have to touch it. You have to reach out and touch that information. and interact with it, and that's when you start to remember it. But then maybe there are going to be little quizzes at the end. But again, in VR, right? Where you're not being quizzed on just that information that you learned in a pop-up menu, but you're being quizzed on information that could have only come to you from a visual or audio sense. I think what's important to talk about here, though, is that because it's early days and we do have ways of reaching in a level of immersion that comes from both visual and audio, but two different visual, right? Contextual information and just the pure environment itself. that I think everyone needs to learn, myself included, what's going to be the interesting timing for when do you make a piece more visually compelling and less compelling with menus and information and when do you layer in more audio to take over the story. And it's really a fine balance and it's more of one of those situations where you just know a good piece when you see it. And right now there are very, very few examples of that. Even for the pieces of content that I've mentioned, there's still a lot of information coming at the user. And it's going to take some time to figure out when do we pull up, raise the volume on information and lower the volume on audio? When do we raise the volume on the visual information around you versus the audio information? So it's going to be this blend back and forth and will take some time.

[00:11:24.032] Kent Bye: So I get the sense that there may be some perhaps broader issues of VR that you wanted to help address by starting Clay Park VR and I'm curious like what are some of those broader issues that you feel like through your consultancy you could help address?

[00:11:37.313] Shauna Heller: So some of the broader issues facing virtual reality as a medium and a platform and a form of communication is that a lot of companies and corporations and brands and institutions are honestly just not sure what to do in it, how to engage with it, what developer they should be talking to or where they should be getting their information because there are a lot of people with opinions and ideas about virtual reality right now. But the truth is, is that in the beginning, there are only going to be a few approaches. And those approaches will be to put content on a platform. And there are going to be more and more platforms over time. And we've seen, you know, practically a new one show up every week. But being able to work with those organizations that need to have a presence, who want to have a presence, but just don't understand how to go about that. And as oftentimes don't know who the good resources are. for just a one-on-one conversation, right? Just for someone to say, okay, this is maybe what other people are thinking about in terms of VR. This is what would make sense for you guys if you're interested. And just guiding them and helping them get a better understanding of it so that they can make really well-educated decisions.

[00:12:52.353] Kent Bye: I guess one of the challenges with non-gaming VR is that it is so huge that it really kind of covers all dimensions of life and society and so as a consultancy that's focusing on things that are not just gaming but sort of everything else, do you see that there might be a kind of like a sweet spot or a thing that you focus on like specific verticals or how are you gonna like narrow it down from like the vastness of all the potential out there?

[00:13:17.526] Shauna Heller: So a year and a half of working at Oculus, where I saw a tremendous amount of VR development that was not gaming and not entertainment, gave me kind of a unique perspective to how the rest of the world is thinking about VR. And in those different verticals, whether it's arts and culture, architecture, automotive, advertising and marketing and commerce and consumer products and education and enterprise and industry and music and sports and theme parks and themed entertainment, that is even just the tip of the iceberg. And those were broad buckets to begin with, but those are also some of the earlier movers. And then in time, I came to learn about a lot of other compelling VR uses. So how do I pick who I'm going to help? And I think those seeking me out are pretty knowledgeable about what they do and don't know. And in these early days of Clay Park, that might be as much of the filtering process that goes on as anything else. People who know that they don't know and would like to gain a better understanding of what to do in VR. Personally, I'm a huge proponent of education and VR. I was a horrible, horrible book learner when I was a little girl, but I was very imaginative, very gregarious, very outspoken, verbal, very much into arts and culture, but mostly doing. And when I put on the DK-1 a couple years ago, I put that on, I thought, holy cow, if I had had this when I was a little girl, I would be an actual rocket scientist by now. And things turned out pretty okay for me anyway, no regrets. But to me, education is possibly one of the most important areas of development for VR. We remember and retain so much more when we are immersed, when we do and see and learn and experience. And if we're unlocking in younger people, at least 13 and up for now, if we're unlocking even more knowledge and understanding through education in VR, that's just going to profoundly change humanity. If you start to think about it, If we're actually able to learn at the capacity that we can and that we have a potential for, what aren't we discovering? What aren't we researching? How many solar systems and galaxies aren't we getting to because we just haven't unlocked the potential of our own knowledge? So to me, education in virtual reality is super extra important.

[00:15:56.954] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?

[00:16:03.665] Shauna Heller: Well, this is Kent's famous question. I've been a big fan of your podcast for a while. And so I always laugh when you put that one out there. And I thought, how am I going to answer that when Kent asks me that question? So based on the experience of being inside a platform for a year and a half and spending uncountable hours in VR at this time, I think it's a little early to pick the clear winners. And I know that's a disappointment, because it's the question you love to ask everybody, Kent. And it's my favorite to hear answers to, because I keep thinking, how are they going to respond? And one day, am I going to be on that podcast? And am I going to have to prepare a response? But the truth is... is that VR is so young, and there's so much to explore and do, and so much development that's going to unlock so many more paths of discovery, that to say, what is the ultimate use? Well, to me, the ultimate use of VR is to engage, enlighten, educate, and explore.

[00:17:06.754] Kent Bye: Great. Anything else that's left unsaid you'd like to say?

[00:17:11.030] Shauna Heller: I just want to thank you, Kent. You have one of the best podcasts out there and I hope you don't edit this out. I know you to be very modest and really the work that you do is really terrific. And I want to thank you on behalf of the virtual reality community for your commitment to sharing all of this information and knowledge with the VR community and people who are smart enough to download and listen to your podcast. Thanks for having me.

[00:17:34.216] Kent Bye: Great, thank you. 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.

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