I interviewed Courtney Harding, Founder and CEO of Friends with Holograms education & training in VR as well as Head of Immersive Content at Virti, at Meta Connect 2024. See more context in the rough transcript below.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.458] 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 voicesofvr. So continuing my coverage of MetaConnect 2024, today's interview is with Courtney Harding, who is the founder and CEO of Friends with Holograms, who... specializes both in education and training in VR. She's also the head of immersive content at Verti, which she calls the Squarespace of VR. So talking with Courtney, you get a lot of an overview of what's been happening within the context of training and education with the context of VR, creating immersive videos and AI integrations through her previous work and what she's currently doing now at Verti. So that's it for coming on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Courtney happened on Wednesday, September 25th, 2024. So with that, let's go ahead and... Dive right in.
[00:01:00.827] Courtney Harding: Hi, I'm Courtney Harding. I've been working in XR since 2016. And I've done a lot of different things. Right now, I have a company called Friends With Holograms that I've had for many years. We focus mostly on education and training in VR. I'm also the head of immersive content at a startup called Virti, V-I-R-T-I. It's basically the Squarespace for VR. So my role there is to help people create really good content. So I teach people how to make content. I teach them the strategy behind it. I teach them how to actually film content. And then, hopefully, they can go on their own and build really great stuff. And we can help scale the ecosystem.
[00:01:37.261] Kent Bye: Great. Maybe you could give a bit more context as to your background and your journey into this space.
[00:01:42.378] Courtney Harding: Yeah, so I started in 2016 working with a company called Moth and Flame, and we did projects for MTV, Ram Trucks, a bunch of really cool sort of film stuff. And then I left and started friends with Holograms. I've worked with a bunch of different companies, including Accenture, where we won the award for Best VR AR at Mobile World Congress. We were finalists for a South by Southwest Innovation Award. I've worked with Walmart. I've worked with Lowe's. I've worked with Verizon in that capacity, developing training and education VR. I worked with Meta for a while in the Meta Immersive Learning Fund. Through that, I worked with a company called Targo on a piece called JFK Memento, which has won a ton of awards and was most recently nominated for an Emmy. And I also teach. So I've taught at Caltech, Barnard, NYU, New Mexico State University. And I teach as part of a program called the Fast Future Executive, where I also co-wrote a chapter for a book called the Fast Future Blur about VR and the future of work. And I think that's everything.
[00:02:45.885] Kent Bye: That's quite a lot. I think the last time we had a chance to talk was with Avenues that was showing at South by Southwest a number of years ago. So it sounds like training has been a real big focus. And maybe you could just elaborate with, I know Jeremy Balanson has said that one of the killer apps within VR has been training. And he's been the co-founder of Stryver, which has been doing a lot of stuff with training. So maybe you could give me a little bit of insight for what's happening in this space of training that you were having all these intersections with.
[00:03:13.334] Courtney Harding: Yeah, I mean, training, I think, and education is one of the killer apps because every company, no matter what you do, you need some sort of training, right? You need training on how to do what your company does. You need training on how to be a manager. You need training on sexual harassment and compliance and all these different things. So there's a huge market for it. And what you can do in VR is create training that is really emotionally resonant and powerful. So the last time we talked was at South by Southwest with Avenues, which is training for child welfare workers. And that was a really powerful piece because you felt like you were actually in a room talking to a family experiencing a crisis. I've done pieces on workplace inclusion. I've done pieces on combating vaccine hesitancy for the World Health Organization, where you practice talking to somebody who is scared about getting their kid vaccinated and you have to practice talking to them in a way that is You know, you want to give them the correct medical information, but you also don't want to be condescending or rude or mean because that'll turn them off. So you can have these conversations that feel really real and you do it in a way that is very low risk, right? If you say the wrong thing in VR, it doesn't matter. You restart the sim. If you say the wrong thing to somebody in real life, that could have really devastating consequences potentially. It also allows you to feel what it's like to be in a situation you wouldn't otherwise be in. So we did a piece for a client on racial bias where you, the user, were at the receiving end of a bias incident, and you didn't know why somebody was being biased towards you. So it just left you feeling really terrible. And that was the whole idea. You understood how bad it felt to be on the receiving end of a bias incident. And no other medium allows you to do that as effectively as VR. And I think that's the really critical part. It allows you to practice, but it also allows you to feel.
[00:04:52.839] Kent Bye: And my recollection with Avenues was that it was using this unique combination of 360 videos, or at least photogrammetry scans, but also just kind of billboarded 2D video of people that was composited over. And it had some way for you to have voice detection to make some choices and decisions. And now with AI, large language models to be able to have natural language input, I'm wondering how this stack of what you see is the sweet spot for having both affordable production, but also really effective of using the affordance of VR to do this type of training.
[00:05:24.423] Courtney Harding: Yeah, I mean, Avenues was voice activated. The challenge sometimes is if you're in a very loud space, like South by Southwest, which is where we were, the voice activation doesn't work because it can't hear you. But generally, you're doing it in a space where you actually can have a conversation. So I still believe voice is one of the most powerful inputs in VR. I think the thing that excited me today at Connect was the sort of level that we've gotten to with AI and natural language processing, where you don't have to have an actor in a 360 piece say everything, say every possible input. You could sort of have them film some responses and then the AI can take care of the rest. So it could be super realistic and super interactive. You know, prior to this, we were constrained a little bit. by the technology where you had to record everything and now we are free from that constraint. So that's really, really, really exciting.
[00:06:14.212] Kent Bye: Yeah. And to go back to kind of the evolution of all these other things that you've been doing, it sounds like teaching has been quite a lot of your practice of consolidating all the insights you had from all the different jobs you've had with working all these different companies. And so I'm wondering, how do you develop a curriculum with the industry that's so ever evolving and changing? And it sounds like you were writing some chapters for stuff, but what was that process of creating a syllabus for some of these different classes?
[00:06:40.666] Courtney Harding: It's really funny because a challenge with this is a lot of stuff gets outdated immediately, right? So I was thinking today that I'm going to have to go back through and re-tape part of a course that I taught last year that's up online at New Mexico State University. A little plug there. Because something changed today where I was like, oh, that's no longer relevant, right? That problem has been solved. I can take it out of the course. So, you know, that's a challenge though. I used to work in music tech before I worked in VR. And when I go back and look at the books I wrote 10 years ago, they're so out of date. And I think that's part of it is just like when you work in tech, that's the nature of the beast. I think also for me, the big ideas right are consistent no matter what the idea is about connection and presence and all of that stuff like that will remain no matter where the tech goes so i think it's really about like the big ideas stay consistent and then it's just kind of updating like yeah new headsets and new capabilities but i think the overarching ideas will stay the same
[00:07:40.660] Kent Bye: You mentioned a class around executives. A lot of the stuff you've been talking about seems like for people who are software engineers or experiential designers, people who are in the weeds of VR. But how does the executive level stuff kind of fit in?
[00:07:54.164] Courtney Harding: Well, so executives need to know what this is and how they can use it in their business. So I was talking to somebody today. I'm actually going to give a workshop for this big German company in a couple of months. And I was explaining the way I see things, which is a lot of people with this need a driver level expertise as opposed to a mechanic level expertise. There are people, a lot of them at Meta right now, who have that mechanic level expertise. They know how everything works under the hood. But the vast majority of people, they just need that driver level with VR. They need to know what it is, kind of how it works from a very basic level, and then they need to know how to create in it. and what it's good for. So that's what I kind of focus on with the execs is you don't need to know Unity or Unreal or maybe you need to know a little bit of 360 filming or somebody on your team does. But you really need to understand the why and the how and what you're going to get out of it. And so that's what I focus on with those people.
[00:08:48.675] Kent Bye: I know that in terms of the training, there's a bit of proving that it even works and having people be convinced that this is something that they should go into. Because it's honestly a lot of hassle a lot of times. A lot of emotional labor. The technology is moving very quickly. It can be difficult to get the content and deploy it out. And there's a lot of stuff that the enterprise scale, at least, that meta I want to say they kind of had it and walked away. And then maybe they're coming back. And so it felt like they were kind of abandoning that enterprise market in a way. But I'd love to hear from your perspective in terms of where things are at in terms of actually deploying out some of these different experiences. And what are some of the data or the evidence that you see or a part of the story that makes it worth jumping through all these hoops in order to actually dive into the immersive space?
[00:09:33.641] Courtney Harding: Yeah, I mean, Meta has kind of changed course several times, which I think is, you know, as they learn, they sort of evolve and change, which is fine. They did release Quest for Business earlier this year. They're releasing Quest for Education more widely, I believe, later this year. So, they still appear to be very committed to that market. You know, I think when you look at the data, right, PwC released a report a couple of years ago about the efficacy of VR training, and it wasn't just incremental improvements, it was astronomical improvements, right? We're talking multiples of people being more engaged, learning more quickly, and there's a lot of data out there that shows that. And even the work that I've done, you know, people have these intense, visceral, emotional reactions, and I think that really shows the power of it. Like, I've had people get very angry in the headset. I've had people get very upset. I've had people do pieces that I've done and cry. And I think that's exciting, as weird as that sounds, because it means things are sort of, you know, you're hitting people on a different level. And so there's a lot of data out there that shows that this is useful. It shows that people learn more quickly. And I also think it really shows an employee that the company is invested in them getting better. So much training content right now is pretty boring. People just click through a PowerPoint. It's kind of dull. It's kind of whatever. And it really shows a lack of investment in employee growth and learning. And for a company to say, no, we are going to take the time. We're going to do this right. We're going to scale it in a way that makes sense shows an investment in their employees that I think is exciting.
[00:10:59.036] Kent Bye: Great. And so now with your current job at Verti, the Squarespace for VR, to me, implies a sort of content management system. Or what does that mean for a Squarespace of VR? What are they actually doing?
[00:11:10.146] Courtney Harding: Yeah, it's basically that. It's a no-code platform where there's two sides to it. So the first side is the 360 video side. So a company can create 360 video. They upload it to the platform. They can add pretty simple interactions. Again, there's no code, so it's literally just like drag and drop. And you can add quizzes and hotspots and make it interactive. It's simple to do. And then the other side of the platform is the AI-powered virtual humans. So you fill out basically a little form. It takes 10, 15 minutes. The AI generates objectives. You check the objectives. And then you can actually go through and have a conversation with this AI-powered avatar about employee management or how to have a difficult conversation about someone's performance or, I mean, really anything. I've built all sorts of insane ones. But it's meant to be for sort of soft skills training and practice. So again, it's the ease of use. And it's the idea that you can spin these up really quickly. You can do multiples of them. Anyone in your team can create these. So people can create their own if they want to practice. Like, oh, I have an employee that's coming in late. And I need to have a conversation with them. And I know it's going to be hard. I can create a virtual human and practice and then go talk to them the next day. So again, it's one of these things where it really lowers the barrier to entry. And it really helps scale across the org, because the challenge with VR is always, how do you create it at scale? How do you get it at scale? And there's a lot of platforms out there that are creating off-the-shelf content, which is fabulous, but you don't always get what you want. You get something that's close to what you want, maybe, but you don't get anything that's custom. And this allows you to get stuff that's custom, at scale, reasonably affordable. And then everyone's creating, and then you're creating this really cool ecosystem.
[00:12:48.493] Kent Bye: Yeah, I had a chance to try out the nworld.ai system that was in the context of different immersive stories. There was the meat wall that was at AWE last year where there was basically a set of knowledge that you could put into this system that then would feed it into like an LLM front end that would allow people to speak to it, but then have the knowledge be constrained so that you weren't just talking to an open-ended LLM that was hallucinating all over the place. And at least you could like set some known knowledge bits in there. So is that sort of what you're doing but for more soft skills training?
[00:13:19.720] Courtney Harding: So there's two ways to do it. The first way is kind of what you said, which is you can upload your company's documents, your company's policies, and have it sort of pull from that. And then if you don't want to do that or if it doesn't do that, then it defaults to open AI or another large language model. So the way I explain it is I would not take medical advice from this, right? I don't think I would take medical advice from any AI at this point. It's still hallucinating, so seems dangerous. But when you're talking about soft skills conversations, people often, maybe not hallucinate, although some of them do, but they say weird things. They have weird reactions. They say things that are non sequiturs. And so I think that actually makes it even more realistic. If you're talking to an employee who's late all the time and they come up with some cockamamie excuse, That could be the AI hallucinating, but also people come up with cockamamie excuses for being late. So it actually makes it more realistic. One challenge that we've had actually, which is funny, is sometimes in medical use cases, the AI is almost too accurate. So if you are a doctor and you're practicing patient intake interview, and you ask the patient about the last time they used the restroom, they will say something like, I last voided my bladder at 11 p.m., But no actual, I mean, doctors say that, but no actual patient says that. They say, I last went to the toilet at 11 p.m. So we almost have to like make it less accurate versus more, because even though that is the correct medical term, right, they're using the correct term. It sounds very stilted and formal. So there's all these like little things that you discover, but sometimes it almost like the accuracy works against what you're trying to do.
[00:14:51.980] Kent Bye: Yeah, it seems like that even at the keynote today, there's been a lot of the VR announcements, and then some MR, but also AI, and then into the more AR. And so it seems like that in the industry as a whole, that gets blending all these things together. And just even from the last time that I've talked to you, there's a lot more of that type of AI integrations. One person had told me that they see AI as kind of the back end, and the XR as sort of the front end for interfacing for a lot of the stuff. But I'd love to hear how you think about all these different integrations that are happening right now.
[00:15:20.250] Courtney Harding: I mean, I don't think that take is wrong, necessarily. I think that all these technologies are converging, right? We're in a place right now where Web 2.0, such as it is, is kind of petering out, right? We had this wonderful run in, I would say, the 2010s where money was essentially free. There was so much going on. People were creating all this cool stuff. A lot of it was based around sort of the smartphone ecosystem. And now that's kind of hit this natural end, right? Now a lot of what can be done has been done, and a lot of what has been done is kind of not as good as it once was, right? I remember the days when you could get an Uber anywhere in New York City for $10, and obviously that is no longer the case. And I think now we're sort of at this transition phase, but we're not transitioned yet. So Sam Altman was on the Oprah AI special recently and he said something to the effect of AI is just the next wave of the internet. And I think he's right because a lot of this stuff will just run in the background. Like we're not even gonna notice this stuff in five, 10, 15 years. Like, you know, seeing Orion today was so interesting because I was like, oh, 10 years from now, much like every morning I wake up and I look at my phone, 10 years from now, I'm going to wake up and just put on my Orion or whatever glasses, and that's just going to be how I view the world. And that's how everybody's going to be viewing the world. And it's just going to become normalized. And then we're going to have a whole ecosystem built around that. And you're not going to see AI as this other thing. AI is just going to be running in the background always, and you're not even going to notice it, right? So I give this example of everyone who has health insurance, and many people who don't, unfortunately, you get letters from your insurance company, oh, you're benefit was denied because of blah blah blah right and then you have to call the insurance company and you have to sit online for 40 minutes and you talk to somebody who doesn't really know what they're talking about and then they're like oh we accidentally put in code one two three four four as opposed to one two three four five sorry right and you've wasted an hour of your day ai will just It's not even going to get rid of that call center worker necessarily. It's just going to make sure that doesn't happen because it's all pattern recognition, right? So we're going to create these smart systems that, again, it's just going to make everything more seamless and easy. And you're not even going to notice it because it's just running in the background. And then, again, with the heads-up displays, that's just going to be normalized, right? Using VR is just going to be what you do rather than going home and turning on a 2D screen. You go home and you put on a headset. And that's how you watch a baseball game or a movie videos of your friend's cat or whatever so I think we're just we're still in that first phase where things are kind of like weird and sticky and coming together but I think as all this progresses and I've seen this progress for many years we're gonna hit a point where like this is just the new normal like smartphones are normal now and have been for several years and we're just gonna hit a point with this technology we're like oh yeah this is normal
[00:18:07.054] Kent Bye: In terms of today's keynote and all the different announcements, was there anything that you were particularly interested in, in terms of the different announcements, or anything that was from XR to AI to the AR forthcoming?
[00:18:18.490] Courtney Harding: I'll tell you what I was surprised by, to be perfectly honest. So the new headset, the new Quest, looks fantastic. Great price point, great features. I have a Quest 3 and I love it, so really excited to see this new headset. I was expecting them to have spatial filming capabilities like the Vision Pro and like the new Pico headset. So it surprised me they didn't roll that out. I think maybe they focused a little bit more on the the Ray-Bans for sort of heads-up filming. I think the film quality of the Ray-Bans is going to be really interesting. I think that's going to unleash a really cool new method of storytelling, especially in places where it's not safe to film with the camera or even film with your phone. Filming with the glasses from that really first-person POV, I think, is going to allow people who've never been really able to tell their stories before to do that. So that's super exciting. Yeah, I mean, the Orion stuff, again, incredibly cool. You know, we'll see, right? Like, I think it's going to be amazing. I'm cynical enough because I've lived through the Magic Leap days where it was like, you know, you see this video of the whale leaping out of the middle of a gym floor and then you actually put on the Magic Leap. You're like, what? But who knows? I mean, meta is obviously not Magic Leap. So, yeah, I was pretty excited by that. A little disappointed it wasn't, like, in stores for Christmas, but... I read something today that was like, if this actually existed, it would be $10,000 a pair. So I get why it's not forthcoming yet. But yeah, I think it was a strong keynote. And the last time I was at one of these in person, I think it was 2017, because it was the year the Oculus Go was announced. And I remember seeing that announcement at the time and just being like, this is the pinnacle of the mountain because we don't have to put smartphones into a Samsung Gear VR anymore. So, you know, to think like what I was excited about, you know, the last time I was here and now I'm just like, oh, we have holographic glasses, you know, and that's what... seven years, like that's insane to think about the progress. And I think when you're in this day-to-day, right, you can get very sort of like cynical and be like, oh, they haven't done this yet, they haven't done that yet. But like to think like we're seven years from the Oculus Go, which was a great headset by the way, but like that's nuts how quickly that's gone.
[00:20:28.237] Kent Bye: Yeah, a lot of it has been a lot of the computer vision and AI and everything else that's helped to supercharge everything to make even the Quest possible. So yeah, as we start to wrap up, I'd love to hear what you think the ultimate potential of spatial computing might be and what it might be able to enable.
[00:20:42.441] Courtney Harding: I feel like the last time I did this with you, I think one time I did this with you and I was really sarcastic and said it was like embodying a chicken. And then the next time I did it, I think I was really sincere and I said it was the social worker POV. And I think it's going to be some combination of both. And the Orion glasses, again, even though they're not quite here yet, was so exciting for me because I see a world where people can live with their heads up again and where information is just delivered in a much more like meaningful seamless way and we can connect to people around us in a much more seamless and meaningful way so I think that's really exciting. I think the storytelling, first person point of view storytelling is going to be huge very soon. I'm shooting a ton of stuff on the Vision Pro this summer, mostly just for my own sort of edification and learning. But what I have discovered doing that has been really amazing. So thinking about like, what's it going to look like when people are making movies with the Vision Pro, when people are making actual movies, not just sort of demo reels with the Ray-Bans? What does it look like when a woman in Afghanistan who can't tell her story gets a pair of these glasses and can walk around all day and people can see that, right? Or someone in North Korea or somebody in a conflict zone or, you know, anywhere, like people can have this amazing way to tell their stories. And there's a great sort of protest slogan that's been around for a while. The whole world is watching. And I think these glasses will open up the ability for literally the whole world to watch through someone else's eyes in real time what's happening. Great.
[00:22:18.999] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid? Any other final thoughts you have for the immersive community?
[00:22:23.581] Courtney Harding: Well, I'll just do a little bit of a plug. So if you are interested in learning more about Verti, go to V-I-R-T-I.com, verti.com. There's free trials. We don't take your credit card or anything, so you can sign up and play with it if you're interested in learning, training, education. It's a good thing to check out. And yeah, I mean, that's... you know, just really excited to see like what's coming next. I can get cynical about this stuff sometimes. I've been doing it a long time. I go through enough boom and bust cycles. And I always wonder like, oh, maybe I should have gone to law school like my mom wanted me to. But events like today and conversations like I've had today really to me reinforce that like this is happening. It's the future. And it's a really amazing thing to be part of.
[00:23:02.731] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, Courtney, it's always great to catch up with you to hear what you have going on in your slice of the Excel world. And really interested to hear all the stuff with training and education, but also this latest venture that you have with Verti and turning a lot of the stuff into a product that people can tie all this stuff together, all the best practices that you've been pulling together. And yeah, it sounds like some really interesting synthesis that I'll have to check out myself. So thanks again for joining me here on the podcast to help break it all down.
[00:23:26.106] Courtney Harding: Thank you so much for having me.
[00:23:27.947] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to the Voices of VR podcast, and I would like to invite you to join me on my Patreon. I've been doing the Voices of VR for over 10 years, and it's always been a little bit more of like a weird art project. I think of myself as like a knowledge artist, so I'm much more of an artist than a business person. But at the end of the day, I need to make this more of a sustainable venture. Just $5 or $10 a month would make a really big difference. I'm trying to reach $2,000 a month or $3,000 a month right now. I'm at $1,000 a month, which means that's my primary income. And I just need to get it to a sustainable level just to even continue this oral history art project that I've been doing for the last decade. And if you find value in it, then please do consider joining me on the Patreon at patreon.com slash voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
