The Engage XR platform holds a mix of different types of gatherings in VR ranging from educational meetings, corporate communications, and virtual events and conferences. With the onset of the pandemic in 2020, then HTC started holding a number of their conferences and announcements on the Engage platform, and eventually became an investor. I had a chance to speak with the CEO David Whelan back in May of 2021 to get a bit more context and history of the Engage Platform.
Engage has continued to develop and evolve as a platform, and it’s worth making a couple of notes including that they changed their name from “VR Education Holdings PLC to “ENGAGE XR Holdings PLC” on November 4, 2021, and their ENGAGE Link platform launched on November 7, 2022, which is how they presented their Fatboy Slim concert in March 2023 (more on that in the next episode).
But Engage XR has continued to innovate in the social VR platform space with their cross-platform support, and optimizations for Quest VR. This conversation with CEO Whelan from May 2021 should provide a lot more context for the history and evolution of their platform, and set the context for how they’re continue to evolve and innovate in the space.
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Music: Fatality
Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to the Voices of VR podcast. It's a podcast that looks at the future of spatial computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash Voices of VR. So in today's episode, we're going to be diving deep into EngageXR platform. It does both corporate communications and education. And more recently, they've been getting into more immersive entertainment and concert experiences with a really amazing experience that they did with Fatboy Slim, where they had a 25 year anniversary with You've Come a Long Way Baby. and just an amazing 45 minute immersive concert experience. I'm going to be diving into that VR concert experience in the next episode, but first I'm going to be diving deep into an archival interview that I did a couple of years ago with the CEO, David Whelan. And there's been a number of different changes since we talked and they've continued to develop their platform. But in this conversation, we do a recap of the evolution of EngageXR from the early days of the VR experiences from Apollo 11 and Titanic, And with the onset of the pandemic, they really pivoted into doing much more corporate communication events, as well as with remote events and conferences that are happening on their platform. So they've been developing a lot of really amazing tools within the context of their platform. And in this first conversation, we're going to be diving into that. I did want to make a couple of notes because this interview at this point now is a couple of years old. However, I think it gives a lot of really good historical context, but there has been a number of key changes. Number one, VR Education Holdings changed their name to Engage XR Holdings back on November 4th of 2021. This conversation with David happened in May of 2021. And then on November 7th, 2022, they launched EngageLink, which is actually the platform that they did the Fatboy Slim concert on. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with David happened on Friday, May 24th, 2021. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:02:05.755] David Whelan: My name is David Whelan. I'm the CEO of VR Education Holdings, and we are the team behind some very popular VR applications like Apollo 11 and Titanic. but we're probably more well known for the Engage platform, which is used primarily for education, training, and then more recently events because of COVID-19.
[00:02:25.139] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. And I know that I remember meeting with you and I think the developer of the Riffmax leader a number of years ago, I think one of the last Silicon Valley virtual reality conferences. And so maybe you could give a bit more context as to from how you went from the Apollo 11 into what you're doing now.
[00:02:41.717] David Whelan: Yeah, so I've always had a keen interest in education and trying to make education broadly accessible to more and more users. So education today, it can be very expensive. So going to university or college, especially in places like the United States and the United Kingdom, You're looking at a six-figure sum. So if you were going to college or university for three or four years, you could have a student debt of $200,000, $300,000. And it really prices out middle-income and lower-income families from providing good education, third-level education to their children. And with a lot of online education today, these MOOC platforms, massive online open course systems, a lot of people will sign up for these courses, which are video-based courses. And they are quite inexpensive to do, but very few people finish online courses. due to the impersonal nature of it, you know, less than 25% of people would actually finish an online course, whereas we could do something a lot better, where instead of just watching videos for video courses, why not be in a real classroom, talking to real people and interacting in a real way. And that's why we built the Engage platform. Originally, it was very much focused on education, where you can go to any virtual university in the world. So as an example, you could do physics in virtual MIT in the morning, and then you could do English literature in say virtual Oxford University in the afternoon at a fraction of the cost because you are living at home. And that was the core idea of why we started working on the Engage platform. And I heard some really skilled people along the way. So one of the early hires that we had was a guy called Mike Armstrong, one of the early developers on one of the very first social platforms in VR, which was called Riffmax, which was a virtual reality theater experience. And I actually met Mike in one of the events that was inside. There was like a karaoke session. inside Riffmax and we got chatting and I said, look, I really like what you're doing. We're actually going to be building out this platform with a team of engineers. Would you like to come to Ireland and try it out? This was about four years ago. And he came over then, we fired a much broader team around him and we really got going from there. So today we have a staff of 60 We listed on the stock exchange in London and in Euronext as well. And we're actually probably going to grow the team to about 100 people before the end of the year. But we've learned a lot along the way. So we've learned from a lot of other platforms that came previous, like Second Life, Rhythm Hacks, AllSpace, all these platforms, they're all focused on younger audience, social interaction, going off on your own journeys, like VRChat actually has been very, very successful. So if we look at those platforms as kind of like the TikTok and YouTube of the virtual reality world, what we're aiming to be on Engage is to be the LinkedIn metaverse or the LinkedIn virtual platform. That's what we are striving to do here.
[00:05:27.747] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I know that last year when the coronavirus hit, that there was a lot of different people that were needing to find alternatives to actually gathering face to face. And I know that one of the first virtual gatherings that I went to was the HTC's Virtual Vive Ecosystem Conference that was held within Engage. And I don't know if that was one of the first big events that Engage had, but maybe you could take us back to about a year ago when HTC was coming to you or trying to do some of these different collaborations.
[00:05:59.097] David Whelan: Yeah, well, actually the very first big event we had in Engage. So up until the point where COVID started becoming very rampant, Engage was certainly just focused in the education and training space. And we had some good traction up to that point. So some of our clients, we had Stanford University, Oxford University, University of Arizona. So we've had some really good premium clients using Engage for the educational purposes. We started to see people coming along, looking at Engage for more corporate uses. We started seeing people using Engage more and more for just general meetings and small conferences. And when HTC came to us, they came to us in February. So their original conference was supposed to be held inside China on the Chinese mainland, a physical event. where they'd invite over a couple of thousand developers. They would talk about the new things that are coming up, show them the new hardware, and talk all about HTC products. HTC came to us about six or seven weeks before the physical event was due to happen and say, look, it's not going to happen because of COVID. But we've been using Engage in the background, and we think this is a really good platform. And if you guys can help us work it out, we'd love to host the full conference on the Engage platform. And it was our very first time holding an event and we had to do it in two languages as well. So it was all in English and it was also available in Chinese. And then when we held the events, we had over a thousand concurrent users at the event in VR. And then we had 1.1 million people watching the live stream. And coming out of that event, HTC were quite impressed. They said, look, we really like what you're doing. We'd like to invest in the company. They ended up purchasing a 20% stake in the business. And we've been working with HTC ever since. And as part of the negotiations, we actually also created a commercial deal with HTC to allow them to resell Engage services globally, but they can also sell it within the greater China region. And we only recently deployed Engage fully inside China under the VoIP Sessions branding. So we're very excited by that opportunity.
[00:07:56.500] Kent Bye: And what's the name of the suite that they have? Is it called the creative XR suite or the it's like some sort of suite that they have with a number of different. Applications like museum of other realities and engages white labeled as five sessions, which I think the latest virtual vibe ecosystem conference was held during both the vibe sessions as well as within engage. And so what's the name of the suite that you're a part of there?
[00:08:18.373] David Whelan: Yeah, so it's called the XR Suite, and they have five separate applications, and we're all pretty similar. So VR Chat is one of the applications for Bella is another, and the Museum of Other Realities, and then Engage. I think the way they've marketed it is kind of Engage is the perfect one for events. You know, if you want to host events and sessions inside, Engage is the tool you should use. If you're looking for a more social outlay for younger audience, then VR Chat would be the one that they would focus on. But they're trying to push XR in a general direction. They're not really favoring one platform over the other, but I do think Engage is probably one of the most used ones that they have in the suite at the moment.
[00:08:54.290] Kent Bye: And I know when I went to the Engage sessions a year ago, it was only available on PC VR, but I think since then you've had less compatible versions. And then when I just ran into you at the latest Virtual Vibe Ecosystem Conference, you were actually on a mobile phone. And so maybe you could talk a bit about the evolution of launching out on different platforms to have virtual events. It seems like accessibility is a huge issue. You can't just only serve people that are on PC VR. And so maybe talk about that journey in terms of making your platform available on multiple platforms.
[00:09:24.118] David Whelan: Yeah, so we are available on a huge range of devices right now, and we actually have Mac support coming out in the next few weeks. But we're available on mobile phones, on iOS phones as well. We're available on most standalone VR headsets. We don't support 3DOF headsets officially anymore. Engage can run on 3DOF headsets. It's mostly 6DOF headsets. But the standalone experience from the likes of the Quest and the new HTC Vive Focus 3, these are amazing experiences where you don't need a PC. The stuff that we're doing now on standalone headsets, is the type of work that we were doing maybe five years ago on PC. It's amazing how fast the technology has really adapted. And we're also working on a web-enabled version of Engage, which we hope to have news on quite soon. So we do need to make it as broadly accessible as possible. And actually, the good majority of our clients will use Engage on a daily basis, just on a standard desktop, even without a VR headset. So we have, as an example, there's a school over in Japan called Tokyo Global Gateway. They're a massive organization, and they had a physical location in Tokyo, which was a high-rise building. And inside, they would have set locations for, say, an airport or a hotel lobby, and they would go in and they would role play teaching English to students. And they would go through about 100,000 students a year. doing role play, English speaking inside. But now they do it all virtually on Engage with the digital locations that we have at a fraction of the cost. And what really pushed them into that was COVID. But they're not the only organization. We have Facebook using us for events themselves directly. They hold a load of small mini events inside. We've had Unilever use us for onboarding and training. NVIDIA use us for meetings. So we've had some really premium clients sign up. And COVID has certainly been the catalyst for that huge explosion.
[00:11:08.180] Kent Bye: Yeah, and one of the things that I noticed as each time I've been in Engage and had a few tours from Chris Madsen, AKA Deep Rifter, just to see the amount of things you can do in terms of the content creation tools. So maybe we could talk a bit about what you're seeing with using the spatial affordances of VR to have some sort of educational experience because. You can do a 2D video, you can do a PowerPoint presentation, but the thing that I see that's unique about Engage is that you can start to do spatial presentations or go into a photogrammetry scene or pull in different 3D objects. And there's a lot more of that. content creation tools that you've built into the platform that are designed to make it a little bit easier to create some of these different spatial experiences for educators. And so maybe you could talk about the evolution of that. Cause even when I saw the first public launch, the tool set was an impressive amount of content creation tools that are probably one of the industry's leading integrations that I've seen, at least from all the other different applications. And this seems to be towards the education market, but pretty robust relative to other platforms that are out there.
[00:12:14.209] David Whelan: Yeah, I think one of the best comments somebody said to me very recently, one of our clients who said, Gage has the best features that nobody knows about. So when you go onto our website, it's hard to understand or grasp what exactly it can do. And even when you get into the platform itself, to understand the full power of the editor, it can be quite difficult to grasp. What I like to say to people is we're like Unity 3D for dummies, where you can go in without any programming knowledge, without any development knowledge, could go in and make something very compelling just using the feature sets that we have. So when we built Engage, again, back to the education routes, we built it so that educators themselves can create and share content easily. So with our spatial recording system, obviously they can record their avatar and their avatar's movements and any audio or presentations that they can bring in. That's like a standard enough thing, and we've seen that in other platforms. But what we can do with the editor then is you can go in and edit that spatial recording. So you can add in elements like a 3D object will appear, different animations can appear. You can actually bring that 3D recording in somewhere else, or you can layer spatial recording on spatial recording. So if you wanted to as a single person act out a full show. You could be actor number one. You can also be actor number two and actor number three, and you can interact with yourself inside the spatial recording. But it is very robust where you can also mix in with these spatial recordings, video from YouTube, 360 videos from YouTube. You can mix in any assets that you can purchase from Unity. It's a very, I won't say it's a super easy system to use, but it is easier for people who aren't game minded because we've developed all these systems with educators in mind. So educators would go in and try and make content, but they've been used quite extensively now for sales meetings. So with Audi as an example, they just uploaded a model of their latest sports car and they had a launch inside Engage in China as an example. And they built that all themselves. What we're trying to do is give people the tools where they don't have to come back to us to create content. They can build it all themselves and really build out the platform any way that they see fit. And that's one of the Things that we have coming up quite soon is Engage at the moment is all our clients on Engage are very much separated from each other. They use it as a communications tool within their organization, but we are building this out as a metaverse where within persistent locations, they can link these organizations together inside the platform.
[00:14:32.986] Kent Bye: Yeah, because I know when I went to the Virtual Vive ecosystem conference, both times, the presentations were all pre-recorded and I have mixed feelings in that. In some ways, I like the liveness of the live and sort of the messiness of when things go wrong, you know, but at the same time, there's a time zone shift sometimes, or there's language translations that need to happen. you know, like at the first iteration, the same presentations were in both English and in Chinese. The second one, it was mostly in Chinese, which made it a little bit harder for me to watch. But how do you think about what the value of it being live versus it being prerecorded and I imagine when you're doing education sessions, you want to have that interactivity where you have the audience being able to ask questions and to really be engaged. But when you talk about larger scales, then maybe that interactivity is a little less important. So how do you think about that liveness of the live when it comes to these type of presentations and talks?
[00:15:24.994] David Whelan: Yeah, I always favorite live where the client is willing to do it live. But when you're working with these large corporations, like say Unilever as an example, they want to make sure that everything is perfect. And sometimes there's a bit of an issue where what happens if somebody's internet drops out or the battery dies on their headset, and you have like maybe four or 5,000 people watching a presentation and the person glitches out because of some external issue that we didn't understand. So quite often when you're doing the sales presentations and the conferences, they want to pre-record all their keynote speeches, have them up on our servers, which are AWS, which are pretty stable. You can guarantee that there's going to be no issues. I think what makes the events really cool then is that you will allow networking time. So we always try to say to our clients, look, you can't have six hours of just talks because that's really what the fall down is on video based platforms where people don't want to sit down and watch a keynote after keynote after keynote. What they want to do is, especially in virtual realities, they want to connect with other people in a spatial environment. So maybe have an hour of talks, give half an hour freedom then where people can network and then have maybe another 40 minutes of talks. These people get up out of their seats and walk to different areas, but we're really guided on what exactly the client wants. It is baby steps because a lot of the corporations who are coming to us today, they've tried what they call virtual events, which is on video. And they found out that the feedback from the customers or the people who are attending it, they don't really like those video-based conferences. They want to try something different. Then we guide them and we give them the possibilities. And my content team actually, they do cringe sometimes when we do get corporations coming to us and go, we want to replicate what we would have done in the real world. And we're going, no, you can do so much better. When we had the XPRIZE event, As an example, we held that inside an arcade cabinet. It was a Space Invaders cabinet. We shrank all the participants down to the size of a transistor, and we had them inside the arcade cabinet, and there was keynote talks, and there was lots of social time, and we actually had the Space Invaders fighting above their heads as well. These are the kind of things that we can do that you just don't get in the real world, and that's what we need to get past is we don't want a tool here that's going to replicate what people do in the real world. We need something that's going to be special, something that's completely different, that they can't get anywhere else, and that's the kind of stuff Excites us here at Engage. Yeah.
[00:17:38.273] Kent Bye: Well, I know that Engage started as an educational platform and then you told a little bit of the history of how HTC came along and started to have some of these bigger corporate events. And now it's like white labeled as Vive Sessions. Can you give me a bit of a breakdown as to what percentage of your business now is these more corporate events, live events versus the core of where it started, which was this educational platform?
[00:17:59.257] David Whelan: Yeah. So the events we probably do maybe 25% for businesses in events and then the other part of the business, say, probably pretty evenly split between education and corporate communications. We have a lot of corporate clients that will purchase a location inside Engage, so a persistent location, and they use it as a hub for their employees to log in and have conversations with each other because they're all working remote now. When COVID is done and dusted and everybody's vaccinated, I know there's a crazy rush for people to get back into the office because they want to socialize with people. It's going to wear very thin very quickly. Give it three or four months, people are going to say to themselves, why am I traveling two hours a day in my car to get to work? Why am I spending huge amounts of money on rent to live close to work? I was very productive for over a year living at home. We want to work remotely. And we are seeing big organizations starting to really go to that model. Twitter are allowing people to work remotely, Facebook are allowing people as well, and a lot more people will follow. I think the days of working in these large offices, day in, day out, have really come to an end, and Spaceship platforms are going to take over. That's one of the core offerings of Engage, where we have the virtual office location where you can have private meeting rooms in there, you can have an open lobby, you can hold events for your organization there as well. Even in my own business, We doubled our staff over the COVID period. And even if we go back to the office, we don't have enough room for everybody. We hold all our daily standups inside Engage. Our Christmas party was inside Engage. We actually had the Chemical Brothers playing a mini concert for us at the end of it. These are things that we just wouldn't have been able to do in the real world.
[00:19:36.661] Kent Bye: That's interesting because I used to work at a company that was all remote. And then I worked at a startup that had some remote employees. And what I noticed was that it worked a lot better if everybody is on the same page using all the same tools. And if it's completely remote versus trying to do a hybrid model gets tricky because you end up having these high bandwidth conversations face to face in the office. And then it's sometimes hard to keep everybody up to date, especially if it's not being tracked within like a consistent online tool. So I don't know if you feel that is a similar challenge in terms of when everybody is remote, it actually becomes easier to use something like Engage. But yet if there are people in the office and there are people who are not in the office, then there can be a little bit of asymmetry, at least I've found in my experience, where trying to get everybody to use the same tool sets whether it's the daily standups, you know, if there's like, everybody's using that same tool, because it ends up being incorporating everybody that's remote. But then there's the day to day things that happen in the office that then can be difficult to make sure that everybody is feeling like they're involved. It feels like being a remote employee where there's only maybe five or 10 or 15, or maybe 25% of the people that are remote, maybe if it's half and half, I mean, I don't know, like how you start to think about those trade offs, because it does seem like now that we've gone through COVID and have been moving into this hybrid model, maybe things are shifting, but in the past, at least, there's been challenges when you don't have full commitment to everybody using the same tools.
[00:21:03.226] David Whelan: Yeah, we found the transition quite easy. And what we found, which was funny, was at the start of COVID, we were in severe lockdown here. Everybody had to stay in their apartments. They can only go out for shopping, you know, for food. And what we found is our daily standups are usually 15, 20 minutes. And then when we were looking at the timesheets, the daily standoffs were starting to go to 40 minutes. And we're going, why is it taking so long? And what happened was that a lot of the people who were working for us and in this industry in general were single males in their mid-twenties to mid-thirties, living alone or living in apartments. and they felt very socially isolated. Even using video platforms like Zoom, people feel very socially isolated because there's not very much interaction. When we were using Engage for our daily standups, they just didn't want to get out because this was their only real contact, or what they felt was their only real contact to other humans because it felt in a spatial platform, it felt like the people are in the room with you and you can interact in a very natural way. And you get all that nonverbal communication as well by how their avatar moves. So the standup started to take a little bit longer. So we had to really refocus and really cut it down and be very sharp with our timing. But it's worked out very, very well for us. I don't think we're going to go back to a full physical office. I think the way we'll make it work for us would be that during planning weeks and QA weeks, we'll have our senior team in the office. So senior lead developer, senior content person, whoever it is, maybe 10, 15 people in the office as we do our planning stages. And then they can communicate that to the rest of the team through Engage. And I normally have a monthly meeting. inside the platform. But I think it'll work different for different companies. I think the companies who have very creative people that need to communicate more easily, spatial platforms are absolutely perfect, like Engage. I don't know if you've ever been on a Zoom call with 15, 20 people. It's very hard to get anything done and you get Zoom fatigue very, very quickly as well. But when you're just watching somebody talk, there's no interaction with anybody else. Whereas if you're in a setting with 15, 20, 30 people, with spatial audio, you can just lean over to the person next to you and ask them a question without actually disturbing the person on the screen as well. The meetings are actually a lot quicker using Engage than they would be on video.
[00:23:09.329] Kent Bye: Okay. So it sounds like there's about a quarter of your business. That's these live corporate events. And then from the rest of the 75%, maybe split almost equally between these remote work features that you're talking about and the education part. So I know that the features that I saw at least at the beginning were very geared towards education, but were there new features that you had to deliver that were really focused on these remote work contexts over the last year with COVID?
[00:23:34.430] David Whelan: Yeah, so the branding bundles was a big thing. So any corporation that's come to us saying, hey, we love what you're doing, but we want to have our own logos in place all over the place. And we want to be able to customize these locations to look like our offices. So we've built all that inside. The way you allocate groups as well, additional security. So Engage is we're just about to become ISO compliant, which is a major milestone for the platform. I don't think there's any other VR platform that is fully ISO compliant. So security is a massive thing, allowing people to run engage on their own servers as well, is another thing that's been asked for. But what we do is, we have a system where when people want to share files, deciding age, when they want to share screens and stuff, we can actually connect it to their own servers or their own databases. So security was a massive thing that we really had to ramp up. But I think we're getting to a good place now, but the features carry over very well. Like for education and for corporate, you need to be able to bring in PowerPoints if you want, you need to be able to draw on a whiteboard, you need to be able to do a sticky note session. These are things that cross over quite readily.
[00:24:36.649] Kent Bye: What are some of the other features that you had to do in order to become ISO compliant? Like what's that mean in terms of the technology stack of what you're now able to do now that you're aiming towards this ISO compliance?
[00:24:47.517] David Whelan: Yeah, so it's the way that you build out your platform and the way that you have procedures in case of anything goes wrong. You know, so if there's a data breach, what are the procedures? You know, it has to be all written down. and verified. The way that the code is put into the database doesn't meet certain regulations. You have to get penetration tests as well from outside teams to make sure that they can't find any vulnerabilities. Or if they do find vulnerabilities, that you patch them pretty quickly. And it's one of the things that we've been working on extensively over the last six months. So it's a hell of a lot of work. It is a hell of a lot of work, but thankfully we have a good team behind us working on it.
[00:25:25.001] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. And it doesn't seem like if you're just doing an education platform, that that would really be catalyzing those types of features of ISO compliance. But given that you're doing so much enterprise and corporate services with remote work, was that the main catalyst for that?
[00:25:39.790] David Whelan: It was, yeah. But even with the education side of it, because we're in Europe, we had GDPR compliance. So the main thing with education is that there's no recognizable data that can identify a user if the data was stolen, you know, especially because they're kids. and that people can't get into a session without having the proper authorization. So those are things we had already. And they don't really mind too much if somebody gets the content for maybe a history lesson, or somebody gets the content for a maths lesson. So it didn't really matter to them that much, but it very much matters to these large organizations if they're doing like, say, a C-level board meeting and someone's PowerPoint presentation gets accessed in an incorrect manner. So these are the types of things that we really have to work hard on and to assure that customers that okay, this is the procedures that we have and we're in a really good place with it.
[00:26:26.044] Kent Bye: Cool. Maybe that's a shift into talking some about the educational aspect, because I know that, you know, going way back to the Apollo 11 piece that you put together, that there is something about that. That was very much like a cinematic experience to be able to really take people on a journey through history, through an event that is actually very compelling. When you think about something that happened in human history, going to the moon, that's an experience that only a few people in the world have been able to have. But yet you're able to use the affordances of VR to kind of recreate that. And that's the seed of where you are now began with doing that. So maybe you could just talk about your own interest in that educational aspect and the power of VR.
[00:27:05.987] David Whelan: When I was growing up as a child, I wanted to be an astronaut. It was one of my dreams to be an astronaut and the Apollo astronauts were some of my heroes. And I knew when I was setting up the business, this would have been about five years ago. It was still a very niche community that we had. There was very few people making money. And for us to make any type of money at all, we have to make a product that would be very appealing to a more general audience. Apollo 11, I thought, really fit the bill where people wanted something to demonstrate VR to their parents. You couldn't put them into a zombie shooter. If you put a controller in your parent's hand or your grandparent's hand, they would probably freak out and they wouldn't understand it. Whereas if you put a more passive experience onto their head and they could check it out and they get a small hit of VR, And I thought that would be very compelling. And thankfully it worked out very well for us. Our Kickstarter helped us fund us initially. And then we started selling Apollo 11. It became a global bestseller in the early days. And I think for about a hundred thousand dollar investment, we've made about 2 million euros back from it. So it was really, really popular. And we followed that on then with other experiences. We built Titanic, which took us a couple of years to develop, and that's done really, really well for us. And Shuttle Commander that we released last year. But these products again, when we were focused on education, were designed to get educators and maybe people who weren't really into technology, more interested in what VR can offer in an educational sense. And they were kind of side projects. We've never had a huge amount of people working on those projects, but they were really profitable for us. But we've really moved on now where we're not building these showcase products anymore. Our complete focus is on the Engage platform and making it very easy for people to access and very easy for people to create their own content.
[00:28:48.912] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe you can give a little more context in terms of what do you see happening in terms of education? Because, you know, I know that using VR can be very powerful, but yet a lot of people will maybe default back to just doing what they would normally do, which is stand up and give a lecture and show some PowerPoint slides. But yet you can do spatial presentations or photogrammetry, or maybe you could just describe some of the things that you're seeing that people are doing and experimenting with on the engaged platform.
[00:29:16.288] David Whelan: Education, standard education, as I said, is a little bit broken where only maybe rich people can access the best education in the world. So that's something that we want to open up. But also within Engage, you want to give power to the students to build their own content and learn with each other, not just learning, just through an educator. So the educator can stand there and give a class, and that's great. And I think, but really, when you send the students to go off and build something, a task themselves, that's where it gets really interesting. So with some of the educators, they would say, if they're talking about Roman history, they can then say to their students, okay, guys, you go off, there's the tool sets, build your own Roman villa. I want you to spatially record a scene that would have happened in Rome 2000 years ago. And then we're going to bring the rest of the class in and view it. They're the kind of things that really excite us on Engage, but you can also do full simulations on the platform. So with Stanford and Oxford University, well, with Oxford University, we actually built a virtual reality baby that you have to resource with very limited equipment. So the project is called the Light Project, and they used to teach students in Africa how to resource babies with limited equipment, because not all the hospitals there are very well equipped. And they used to use a lifelike doll, and they'd have 20 people in a real room, and they'd all practice on the doll maybe once or twice. And what they found was the students themselves wouldn't take it too seriously because they can see it's a doll. But now that they're doing it in VR, the baby reacts in real time. The baby is getting bluer and bluer. And if you save the baby, the baby wakes up and starts crying. So it's reactive in real time. And the professors, they don't actually have to travel over and back with the lifelike doll anymore. They used to do that two or three times a year. Now they do it remotely inside Engage. And not only did they do it in live classes, there's also an AI teacher in there. So if the professor can't make the class, the students can go in and load up the simulation at any time and repeat it over and over again. And I do think AI is going to play a key role in education where the students might sign up for the best professor in the world. Let's just say if Einstein was alive today and he recorded a suite of lectures inside Engage, people can replay that spatial recording whenever they want. But if somebody wants to ask that AI spatial recording a question using AI and speech recognition, we can then serve back an answer if that answer is in our database. So think of the hologram from Viagra. The doctor that used to be on Viagra was a holographic projection. That's exactly what we're building towards in Engage, and we're not just using it for education. It's going to be used for corporate onboarding as well, and could be used for a lot of entertainment uses.
[00:31:49.140] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. And I know that when I've gone into engage, it is been very driven by live events that are happening. So you could see what the public events are. If you have a code, you can go to like an event that you may be invited to that you have access to, but isn't generally available to the public. And then there's stuff that's been recorded. And then there's all these other things that people are building. And that to me can be a little bit harder to know how to find that. And so maybe you talk about that in terms of as people are getting onboarded and then just maybe they're just checking out Engage, they want to download and see what's there. there's certain things that are made available in terms of live events that are coming up, but it seems like there's repositories of different learning experiences or worlds that are also being created, but it seems like a little bit harder to just organically discover those. And so maybe you can give a little bit of a landscape for how you think about that and how people can find some of the stuff that's being built.
[00:32:39.425] David Whelan: Yeah, so I would say 95% of what happens in Engage is all private stuff that the corporations themselves don't share with anybody. So they build their own events and they'd invite people to the event. And the first time that anybody would hear about it is when the event is over and they're publishing stuff on social media. We do have an events page where any of the public events are open for anybody to join. They can register for that event and check it out and the stuff going up there on a weekly basis. But we are going to make that a lot easier in the near future. So we are working on an interconnected world in here where it's going to be much easier for you to go and explore some of these really custom locations that these corporations have built. If they allow us to make those publicly available, there's also going to be opportunities as well for you to meet representatives of these organizations as you go into these virtual worlds. So we've a lot of, I'd say, watch this space. We haven't announced anything yet publicly on it, but there is stuff coming in the very near future.
[00:33:36.961] Kent Bye: Okay. Yeah. I think that is going to be an exciting part where, you know, when I jump into engage, I can go check out some of these worlds, almost like the world hopping within VR chat, be able to look at some of these different scenes. Cause I know I've had both the tour from Chris Madsen and discussions with him, where he's been really excited about some of the different photogrammetry scenes that are being pulled into engage and how that's being used for different educational contexts. And so maybe you could talk about that in terms of. the power of photogrammetry to bring in a spatial environment and what kind of things you can do from an educational context there?
[00:34:09.299] David Whelan: Yeah, being able to scan items and bring them in seamlessly is fantastic and explore these locations that look very, very realistic. So there's some partners that we work with that do very, very detailed work and then they bring them into the environment and you can scale it. So if they do a scan of a concert hall, they can scale it up and then you can walk around the concert hall if you want. But we can then overlay that with 3D objects from Engage as well. And it is very hard to get that optimization, right? Because some of these scans can be very, very big. So depending on the device, you'd have access to high-res scans as opposed to maybe lower-res scans. But I think what's really going to help us in the near future is cloud rendering. So there's a lot of telecoms companies out there. They've spent a huge amount of money on 5G licenses, but they are struggling to sell their customers 5G accounts because there's no need to have a 5G account on your mobile phone. You can stream in video and audio quite easily, and you can check your email. But having a very high bandwidth connection on a VR device or AR device makes a massive difference. So you can get these huge photogrammetry scenes into a VR headset while all the rendering is actually done off the headset itself. And HTC have made some prototypes on that and expect to see, and NVIDIA I know have been working on stuff as well, so expect to see a lot more news about that in upcoming releases. And Engage is going to fully support that as well, where we want to have the best possible graphical fidelity on any device by even logging into your web browser and everything is rendered off the headset itself. But it's a real broad open world. And I think that's one of the things that makes it very hard to market Engage. Engage can do so much. It has elements from all these other platforms. It has elements from VRChat from the social space. It has elements from Spatial on, say, the corporate meetings. It has elements from all space from doing events as well. We have all these elements in this one package. And that can be very difficult to market in one way, but we are getting a lot of traction. We've grown our user base by 500% last year, and we've doubled our team in the last 12 months. We're probably going to double our team in the next 12 months. Again, you know, so it's been a very, very productive time and COVID has certainly been the catalyst for everybody being forced online because of COVID.
[00:36:21.567] Kent Bye: Well, most of the events that I've gone to have been, you know, like the virtual vibe ecosystem conference, and I've just gone on my PC VR, but I know you have compatibility for the quest. And you know, when I ran into you, you have like the mobile phone. So how do you deal with the differences of the platforms and the capabilities of the platforms? Cause I know in something like as an example, like VR chat, there's worlds that are only available at PC VR, but then they have sometimes a quest compatible version where it's a lot smaller, but yet you can have a shared experience when you're in PC VR and someone else can be in the quest and that you're in the same virtual space. It's just, if you're in the PC, you get a lot higher resolution, but how does engage deal with this difference between the capabilities of these different platforms and how to create shared spaces amongst the people that are in them?
[00:37:09.957] David Whelan: But we start the other way around. So we say, look, the quest is probably the lowest power device that we want to support. If you're building a new feature or if you're building a new location, always think of the quest first and say, right, does it work on the quest? If it works on the quest, fantastic. And then we'll build the super fancy version on PC. So we start the other way around. So everything that we have available also works on the quest. We have very few locations or very few simulations that are only PC only. And the only time we do PC only is if it's a client request, if they want something built really, really quickly. but everything that we build is okay. We need to make sure it works on all devices because regardless of what people join on, we want to make sure that they have a really good experience and we want to make sure that they have access to that experience.
[00:37:54.157] Kent Bye: Yeah, and one of the other really cool features of Engage is this ability to animate and move spatial objects around. I know I've saw some fish flying out of a screen that had like, it was in a theater that had like a 3D movie, but then you're able to add additional elements of spatial things flying around. And it made me think about how this is really a tool set to create these experiences that unfold over time, that it's sort of analogous to like a PowerPoint presentation, but having it spatial and in 3D. I know that Caitlin Krauss has been experimenting with that a little bit on the Engage platform, playing with some of those spatial features, but just curious if you've had other people start to play with that a little bit more, because it seems like one of the powerful things you can start to do, something that feels like a little bit more than just a PowerPoint presentation and a little bit more than just a video, but having a scene unfold around you that has these spatial objects animating around you. It's a powerful feature, but I don't know if I've seen it as much in terms of people really playing with that and really taking advantage of what that could do as an effect.
[00:38:53.889] David Whelan: Yeah, you can, it's one of the great things is with the editor system, using those features is you can convert traditional content into spatial events. So with the Chemical Brothers concert I was talking about, we didn't actually have the Chemical Brothers inside, but what we had was we had a video of one of their songs playing inside Engage direct from YouTube. And then in time with that, using the editor, the animation guy using effects that we already had, had like a full laser show appear and you had like bugs flying off the stage. And he recorded himself spatially as the two DJs from the Chemical Brothers. And then he mixed it all together, just played the video, everything was perfectly in sync. So it converted that standard 2D video into a full spatial concert very, very quickly. I think he'd done it in like a day or something like that. and it looks really, really spectacular. I released a video of it on my own LinkedIn, but they're the kind of things that people can do with the features. But even with the PowerPoints, yeah, if you click on slide two and slide two might be, if it was a medical example, it might be about a knee replacement. Then you can have the photogrammetry knee appear in front of the user and have that animation. So it's not just watching a slide on screen. As I said, we do kind of grimace a little bit when we get people just wanting to do standard slideshows and we're always showing them the possibilities, but it is certainly baby steps where people are just getting used to the idea of being in a virtual room. And you'd be amazed at how many people you'll show them these really cool animations. And even at the end of the HTC event, we actually had a plane take off and fly away. You'll be sitting in, in a VR simulation, showing them all this cool stuff. nine times out of 10, the person is just looking at the virtual cup in front of them and looking around and going, is that cup really there or not? We're still in that stage.
[00:40:36.713] Kent Bye: And have you thought about open standards like WebXR in terms of bringing in WebXR scenes or being able to export to WebXR?
[00:40:44.094] David Whelan: Yeah, we are. We're always exploring those possibilities. So one of the things that's been on the roadmap for a while has been Sketchfab integration. So we're going to have that in hopefully quite soon, but also a full WebXR integration as well is certainly on the cards. Because now of the nature, we actually just announced our 100th commercial client on Engage. So anytime that we build a feature, we're certainly at a startup mode at the moment. We can't rapidly deploy something, throw it out there, and hopefully it works, and maybe it'll cause the platform to be unstable. So anything that we build, we need to make sure that it's very robust, it's very stable, it's also very security conscious, and then we release it. So releasing features can maybe take a little bit longer, maybe than some of the competition we see coming up behind us.
[00:41:25.236] Kent Bye: That was another thing that I noticed about the platform was that you did have your own library of 3D objects. And you just mentioned the Sketchfab integration. And in the broader VR ecosystem, there used to be the Google Poly, which was a place where people could upload 3D models. And it was a great repository of Creative Commons licensed content to be able to integrate into the platform. But, you know, like WaveXR integrated that Google Poly integration, and because it was being deprecated and shut down, then they had to basically shutter the part of their XR business that had people creating their own content. But yet, it seems like a big part of being able to create content is having access to 3D models. And it's great to hear that You have the Sketchfab and being able to pull on different Sketchfab models. But I'm just curious to hear about that part of the platform. You know, you have your own set of models that you've curated and then being able to integrate other models and what you see that's going to be able to enable.
[00:42:19.764] David Whelan: Yeah, but even so Sketchfab integration isn't there quite yet, but once it is, it'll have 300,000 creative license models available to everybody. But there's also an upload feature on Engage, which isn't accessible to the public. It's accessible to enterprise clients or will be more accessible quite soon. where you can upload your own 3D models directly onto the servers. You can upload your own videos, upload your own MP3 files, upload your own images directly onto the server. And the same as what you do on Sketchfab, and they can be accessed immediately then inside Engage. So we have those features already available. So it really is wide open for whatever people want to build in there. If they want to build their own, on a very simple level, if they want to build their own VR art gallery, they can use it using the features that are there. If they want to upload their own 3D models for a business meeting, they can also do that as well. Or if they're not creators themselves, they can just go through the 300,000 model library on Sketchfab and find something that they need. Or I think we've about 2,000 or 3,000 models ourselves, which are mostly educational based. But anytime that anybody needs something, if it's a corporate client, we'll say, yeah, okay, we can build that for you for a price.
[00:43:27.637] Kent Bye: What's some of your favorite experiences that you've had within Engage?
[00:43:31.982] David Whelan: Oh, the Chris Madison experiences are really good. So he had like a Mars experience where when the Perseverance rover was landing, we were on the surface of Mars and we could see it landing in real time. And then he brought us on a helicopter trip around the Martian surface. I think that was a really good one. I've met some really cool people in there. I've met Lauren Carpenter, the founder of Pixar inside Engage, and we gave him a tour one time. And it was fantastic having somebody like that in and showing him around the experience. Tom Furness, I've met him a few times. He's very interesting. It's not even the experiences. The experiences can be fantastic, but it's the people you meet during these experiences. And then they open up with their ideas about, oh, wouldn't it be cool if we could do this? Or wouldn't it be cool if we could do that? And then we literally, or Chris Madsen's very good at it, he literally builds these experiences on the fly. And they kind of turn around and gobsmack going, Oh my God, I thought it would be maybe two, three weeks for someone to build this from a studio, whereas you guys are just doing it on the fly. I didn't know that the platforms have come this far, especially on standalone devices.
[00:44:31.988] Kent Bye: Yeah, one of my favorite experiences I remember was with Chris Mattson. I think it was one of the educators in VR meetings and that was with Daniel Dabowski Bryant. And we were on a whale flying around on the moon, on the moon shuttle. And it was just sort of like this surreal moment where we were waiting for a talk for someone to show up, but their headset wasn't charged and we're just waiting for to charge up enough. And we're kind of riding around on a whale on the moon and he gets a phone call and he's like talking to this presenter while I'm right behind him on this whale flying around. And it was like one of these surreal moments that could like really only happen in VR. But to me, I think the power and the strength of VR is to be able to create these memories. And like, we're talking about education and the power of education. And I'm just curious if you had any tips in terms of as people are starting to get into this space, how to think about it and how to begin, because there's ways in which that you're trying to empower the creators, empower the students to be able to create their own content. But there's also the potential to have a really good lecture where you are able to communicate an idea in a spatial way that you wouldn't be able to do otherwise. And so as people are coming in and starting to maybe play with the platform, what are some tips that you have for people to make the most out of the platform?
[00:45:47.382] David Whelan: I would think, in your own head, what would be the best possible experience? And just leave your imagination go wild. You don't want to replicate what you can do in the real world. If it's not better than what's happening in the real world, I don't see there's a reason to have it in VR. And I think people would be quite surprised that they could probably get 90% of what their wildest imagination was thinking about inside a platform like Engage with a little bit of tutoring from maybe some of our staff. So we hold classes ourselves every Wednesday exploring Engage. every Wednesday, there's one on European time and one on the US time as well, where you can go in and talk to our staff and you can ask them questions about, look, would I be able to do X, Y, and Z, or maybe you have some files you want to get in. I think that would be the best way to start, but 100% don't try to replicate what you're doing in the real world. And even with VR companies that we see popping up, they're trying to replicate things that people might miss in the real world. I think that's really the wrong way to go about things. You want to have a better type of a meeting. You want to have a better sales presentation. You want a better way of training, a more engaging way of training. These are the kind of things that excite us.
[00:46:50.146] Kent Bye: I think one of the other frontiers are virtual assistants or AI interactions. There's GPT-3, there's the Watson, there's different services from Amazon and IBM and Google and Microsoft and cognitive services. And so are there any specific platforms that you've been drawn to in terms of where you see is a good potential future in order to develop some of these different virtual assistants and AI interactions?
[00:47:15.853] David Whelan: Oh yeah. We're going to have Google Assistant in here eventually. You're going to have AI then from NVIDIA in here as well. There's a lot of really cool technology being built recently and stuff is just accelerating week on week. As I said, we are going to have our own holographic version of the doctor out of Star Trek Voyager, but for different use cases. So be a guy in there for just providing training to people on how to use the platform. It could be a holographic projection of somebody in there providing onboarding for your own corporate clients, somebody else then for education. So it's going to be a strange world. I think we've been at this now about five years, maybe six years, and we've come such a long way. I can't imagine what it's going to be like in the next five years, but I do know that if we try to replicate what people are already doing in the real world, it's not going to be successful. We need to do something that's completely out there and completely new and better than what's come before.
[00:48:11.302] Kent Bye: And so what type of experiences do you want to have in VR?
[00:48:15.906] David Whelan: I'm having those experiences already. It's crazy. I've met real Apollo astronauts because of what I've built in VR. I've met industry leaders, like the founder of Pixar, Lauren, because of virtual reality. I meet interesting people the whole time. I've talked to billionaires. I've talked to people who literally had no money inside the platform at the same meeting. and hearing these people connect and talk to each other, you know, in a real meaningful way. Whereas if you're on a video conference, you know, people can be very dismissive of each other, you know, and people don't get across their points. There's a huge issue with online communication. I think in general, you know, you can see it on social media where there's lots of racism. There's, you know, there's lots of people attacking each other. Cancel culture is a massive thing. It doesn't happen as much in VR. You know, when you're standing there in front of a person, and you're communicating with them, you really feel like they're in the room with you. So you're less inclined to attack that person. Now, I have seen in some social platforms in VR as well, where you could be in with maybe like a 10 year old and he could be maybe screaming, flipping abuse at you. But it's less common, I think, in VR than it is in general online communication. And I do think we can make virtual and spatial communication a lot safer for everybody.
[00:49:33.316] Kent Bye: Cool. And so for you, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:49:41.161] David Whelan: Oh, that's a tough question. I think if you go back before the personal computer came out and you see what the world was like back then and how much of a sea change the world has been because of the personal computer, like 50% of jobs, they're all using PCs. There's a lot of PC based jobs around the world. Virtual reality is going to be the same way. I think we're going to be reducing office sizes globally. I don't think there's going to be as many people in offices. Spatial platforms are going to be the new offices of tomorrow. There's going to be full spatial services as well. I do think there's going to be full colleges and universities online. That was one of the core things we were trying to do, where you can go attend virtual Oxford University and get a full degree. I think that's going to happen a lot sooner than people expect. But I also think there's going to be a whole industry for virtual events. just like the event services in the last 12 months, they were completely decimated. I think there'll be a lot more event services inside virtual reality and a lot more specialized events as well, where you can really, like if you're at a medical event, as an example, instead of being in a conference hall, you're inside a human body. Hey, I'll meet you at the brain, does a neurosurgeon going to give a talk? Or, hey, I'm going to meet you down at the spine because the specialist bone doctor is going to be talking about the spine. These are the types of things that are going to happen. But it really excites me because Nobody really knows the future. All I know is the future is going to be completely different to where we are today.
[00:51:01.203] Kent Bye: Great. Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the broader immersive community?
[00:51:08.506] David Whelan: No, I just, all I want to say, look, I've been having a blast over the last five years. I don't feel like I've gone to work. You know, it's just been a crazy time, a crazy creative time. And I think we're really coming along, like we have some really great clients at the moment. And as I said, like we have some really big corporates using the platform. I do think we're really on the threshold now for big industry to start taking spatial communication seriously. I know Facebook have been totally focused on retail experience, but I do think now that's starting to change now to more corporate enterprise use cases. And I think HTC are one of the people that have seen that and have seen that early. And that's why their new headset is such an important device, I think, in this new field of spatial communication.
[00:51:51.751] Kent Bye: Yeah, I know I've had a number of different guided tours of Engage and that's really helped me see the potential of the tool set. Is there any recommended way for people if they want to learn more about what Engage has to offer? Is there a video or is there a way to people to get like a one-on-one guided tour or at least a group tour or do you have onboarding sessions or where should people go in order to get more information about Engage?
[00:52:13.789] David Whelan: Yeah, so the best way is just visit the website, which is EngageVR.io, and you can register for a free account. And once you register, just click on the events page, and then you can click on any of the events that are coming up, which are publicly available. I do recommend the Wednesday events, which are called Explore and Engage, if you want to reach out to our people directly.
[00:52:31.427] Kent Bye: Okay. So Wednesday events of Explore Engage to see different events and maybe some tours. And, uh, yeah, well, I, I know I've been in a number of different events within Engage and like you said, probably one of the tools that have the most features that people don't know about. And I think it's, you've been clearly, you know, having a hundred different clients and being able to feed the development that you're doing for the enterprise back into the education space, I think is a really great model. I don't see that as much and other platforms, but to do these different contexts, which is the. remote work, remote collaboration on top of the talks and the conference gatherings, and then the education space. There's a lot of features that are across all of those. And it's great to be able to have the business model to be able to fund the pioneering development, but then have everybody to be able to benefit from that. So yeah, I just wanted to thank you for coming on and unpacking a little bit more and sort of exploring what all of what Engage has to offer.
[00:53:24.300] David Whelan: No worries. Great talking to you.
[00:53:26.342] Kent Bye: So that was David Whelan. And at the time of this conversation, he was the CEO of VR Education Holdings. But then later in that November of 2021, they changed their name to Engage XR Holdings PLC. And yeah, I have a number of takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, I think Engage is one of those applications that is not very well known and within the broader XR industry in terms of all the different features and capabilities that they have. And it's really quite robust. And they've taken this approach of having an interesting blend of their products. At the time, back in 2021, there were about 25% events and the rest of the 75% was split between education and then corporate communications. And so does sound like that in the onset of the pandemic, HTC came to them and they said that, you know, hey, we have been using their platform, and they really needed to transfer what was going to be a physical event into more of a completely virtual event. And so I was attending a number of these different virtual events and press conferences from HTC. This conversation that I did was soon after one of those different events that had happened a couple of years ago, just really impressed with what they were able to do with creating this networking vibe with these presentations that we're doing, but also the content creation tools and everything else that they had was really this kind of rapid iteration and production process that they have that allows people to be immersed within VR to be able to actually use the tools to be able to create these immersive experiences. And then later in November of 2022, they eventually launched this XR Metaverse, creating this LinkedIn of VR to provide with what they call the Engage Link. And that's a platform that they use to be able to do this whole concert experience with Fatboy Slim. That'll be diving into much more detail in the next episode and packing that whole experience. But really this cross-platform emphasis where they're really designing everything to work first with the Quest. And then maybe add a little bit of extra fidelity with the PC VR experiences, but really not really that much extra fidelity. And I have to say that going through the Fatboy Slim experience, just to have the whole worlds that they were creating and the dynamic interactions and the social dynamics, I think it, on the whole, even if the visual fidelity wasn't the most amazing, visual experience I think the holistic gestalt of what they're able to create and to have everybody there embedded into VR is this trade-off that I think is really Beneficial for what they're doing which is trying to make this more accessible for as many people as possible Whether or not you're on a quest or whether or not you're on a PC VR. So I've been really super impressed with what they've been able to pull off and there's been a number of different events that have popped into And yeah, using their tools to be able to have this more corporate communication aspect, and they seem to be very successful with using these XR tools with a number of different companies. They have engaged clients they list in the latest press release as Kia, HSBC, MTN, KPMG, Pfizer, Adtelem, and Pearson. So yeah, at the time of this recording of this interview back in 2021, they said they had over 100 commercial customers, and I'm sure that's grown since then. And I hope to do an update on whatever's happening on their platform at some point, but I did want to just give a little bit more of this historical context before we dive into the latest iteration with Fatboy Slim concert that they had earlier in March, which was really one of the most mind-bending and amazing social VR concert experiences that I've had. So look forward to the next episode to dive deep into Norman Cook, a.k.a. Fatboy Slim, as well as David McDermott, who's the head of studio there at EngageXR. So, that's all I have for today, and I just wanted to thank you for listening to the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
