Here’s my interview with Inga Petryaevskaya, Founder, CEO, ShapesXR, that was conducted on Wednesday, November 10, 2021 at Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, CA. 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 structures and forms of immersive storytelling and the future of special computing. You can support the podcast at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. So continuing my coverage of AWE past and present, today's interview is with the CEO of ShapesXR, Inga Petryavskaya, who was launching ShapesXR at AWE in 2021. So this was a very peculiar moment because Inga had just won an Augie Award for ShapesXR, And then the very next morning, they were going to be launching ShapesXR. So ShapesXR does like rapid prototyping and ways that you could lean more into the higher level design processes without having to be like a Unity developer. You can do what was called like gray boxing in something like Unity, but to do it more in ShapesXR to do other levels of light interactivity, to be able to collaborate with other people at the same time, to export it into web-based or Unity projects. I mean, they've continued to expand it and develop it, but this is the very beginning of Shape6R. So kind of hearing the origin story and a little bit about the moment that they were launched. Again, I'm sure there's lots of stuff that's updated and I'm looking forward to catching up with the team there to get a lot of that information. Hopefully now that this conversation is out, I'll be able to catch up with them at some point. to get a lot more details as to what's happening with it, because it's really quite fascinating what they're doing with this kind of rapid prototyping tool for creating spatial design and spatial experiences. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with Inga happened on Wednesday, November 10th, 2021 at the Augmented World Expo in Santa Clara, California. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:50.484] Inga Petryaevskaya: Hi Kent, very glad to meet you in person and that's incredible to talk to you right after getting this Aggie Award, so still quite emotional. So I'm Inga, I'm founder and CEO of Twori, the company that's just releasing tomorrow our new product, Shape6R. We are in VR since 2016 and we're building Twori, you know, but I think it was a little bit ahead of the market, but we've learned so much, you know, about how the creation should look like in VR and what's important. But then 2020 bring those new challenges and we've built Shape6R, which is collaborative and much more accessible for people. So I'm very excited about our launch tomorrow. And I hope that all those years of experience building the creation tool inside virtual reality to truly democratize this creation in real time and allowing people to build incredible content, whether that's immersive content or that's 3D content. And yeah, so we are on this mission to excite everyone about creation in 3D.
[00:02:56.732] Kent Bye: Great. Now, maybe you could give me a bit more context as to your background and your journey into virtual reality.
[00:03:02.625] Inga Petryaevskaya: Yeah, definitely. So I have two engineering degrees. So I'm an engineer and also have a degree in computer science. I studied in Germany, Technical University of Hamburg. And then I had many years of corporate life working for research and development at Siemens, corporate technology, and later on Dell Technologies as head of new business development, actually responsible for finding amazing startups, developers, teams, doing joint research projects and go to market so and later on i tried vr for the first time and that was immediate superpower you know something that you really can't achieve with the tools around you and then you immerse yourself in vr and you realize that you can become a 3d create and you can create and tell stories so it was such a kind of democratization and then i met my co-founders And that's how we started from like more experimenting. So what's achievable? So is it really accessible? I mean, nothing existed those days like UI-wise, interface-wise. So how to interact with objects in VR, how to delete them, how to group them, what are the best practices should be, how the locomotion should look like. All those were experiments with early... teams out there those days, which is like Teal Brush and probably Quill and Google Blogs and ours and Twori. It was a very long journey. And so moving from this corporate life to entrepreneurship life, it was always a dream. It's extreme excitement. You have so many hats. I mean, from being a product owner to create for your products. And we've been lean and small for so long just for people. I'm so glad that we now have grown and we are 12 and the team is very passionate but everyone in our team are people who found their passion for XR before they joined the team so they're all kind of true believers who also get this kind of super skills being in VR and that's very important and that's why we are doing this for so many years but every team member is still with us so we are growing but we are not losing people and that's very important
[00:05:13.280] Kent Bye: Maybe you could tell me a bit more about the story of how you started with Tavori and how that came about and what was the inspiration for creating that as your entry point into actually making creator tools within XR?
[00:05:26.641] Inga Petryaevskaya: Yeah, so the Twori story is such that my co-founders, like Dima, he was experimenting with gaming and building for VR, and Viktor is a CG artist and animator, and I'm like more computer science and business development. So the experiment was like, what can we democratize out there? And 3D animation was something that was incredible. hard you know the learning curve was really steep so after let's say some iterations and analysis we thought that we want to i mean the mission is to move people from pure consumption to creation i have kids and i wanted them to build stuff in vr and not just keep watching stuff on their mobile phone so that was kind of very important but as i said pc vr and hardware and everything it was not there yet you know for the product that we've built it's a sophisticated piece of software on pcvr but it was aimed at you know previous and animatics for the traditional entertainment industry so let's speed up your pre-production right so let's replace you drawing your storyboards and create animated storyboards immersively but you know people who were trained for years using my 2dx marks and blender and they know Unreal, so they were not that eager, you know, to jump in VR. I spent like two years meeting with all those Hollywood studios, but usually they had a couple of VR headsets that were somewhere in the basement. And it was more like fun, even with really top studios. We ended up to make an incredible project with Cartoon Network, who released three VR games using Twori. But then later on, I started to look like, who's really kind of getting full licenses? And those were designers and XR teams. and that were people from walmart and unity and facebook themselves but for designers it was not native to do animation and fake interactions you know for them it was like additional extra effort to put into to create their prototype so they really want to do that rapid prototyping and most of the designers use macbooks so pcvr is not the option because it's like religion for them to use mac instead of windows pc and you have to plug your pcvrs to windows pc so in Like late 2019, it was the turning point to decide, do we really, and the market was with Quest, right? Do we really want to put 42 Quest? Or this is the time to stop and think what is really needed and what is actually the pain point? So we've ran like 50 discovery interviews with different XR teams and we realized that the problem does exist. I mean, designers, XR designers, they want to collaborate, the product owner want to contribute early on, they want to test it in VR before they start writing any Unity code actually. And while building Twori we've been suffering from the same thing. It was very slow and very inefficient to build a VR app because whenever you have any ideas and you can sketch it somewhere and then you pitch it to developer and then you wait for several weeks for the Unity build, you put on a headset And then you have to compromise. You feel that this is probably not the best thing, but you compromise because, okay, you have already four weeks of Unity development, which is super costly and expensive. It was not iterative. You couldn't collaborate. So as soon as we have the first MVP of Shapes XR, Just like this collaboration architecture and real-time synchronization for creation part, we started to fully develop ShapesXR and ShapesXR. So, I mean, any prototype that has to be any new feature, we first build on stages and shapes like a linear prototype, like a storyboard. And then once it's approved with a product owner and designers, invite developers to actually understand how it's gonna work and then open it in unity and finalize it without guessing without like being fully developers driven it finally became more like creative designers business tree when I would say that way and It's not just the speed up. It's a tremendous speed up of product development but it's also about like better decisions much clearer decisions better communications in the team and And yeah, so I'm very glad that we decided to build Shape6R for Quest, which is collaborative, which is much more accessible than our previous product, which, yes, we don't have animation, but we have this storyboarding, or let's say it's kind of stop-motion type of... videos but we want to enhance and research and do more advanced interactive systems still without let's say coding so it will be trigger-based like interactions so magic for our users but some kind of interesting stuff behind so
[00:10:19.284] Kent Bye: Yeah, I was just giving a talk to some architects this past week and talking about this tension between how the architectural process is traditionally when you're building actual buildings fairly linear when it comes to designing. And there's iterations within designs, but once you go through that design process and you pass along the blueprints and the design to the construction, Then it kind of moves into the production phase. And, you know, there's aspects where the architect may be still involved, but it's, I guess, more akin to, say, producing a film where there's distinct phases between pre-production, production, and post-production. And that linear process, I think, is in direct contradiction and opposition to the game design process, which is much more iterative. where you don't know what the interaction feels like until you actually build it and have people go and test it. And also just that more agile, lean scrum approach that you get from software development is also that highly iterative approach. And so I see that there's been this tension between that highly iterative approach versus the more deliberative design approach that maybe has everything from concept and design into actually building it without integrating those more iterative or embodied or interactive aspects. And so how have you, I guess, addressed that issue with ShapesXR after the lessons you've learned from Tavori?
[00:11:32.626] Inga Petryaevskaya: Yeah, so first of all, I mean, I can't be more agreed that with everything you said and being in software development for many years for me, kind of being agile and have those kind of quick iterations and feedback loop was super important. You know, when I think of it, it's like, okay, so what is Unity? Unity is implementation tool, right? So it's not that much about ideation and it's not collaboration for sure. But once it's implemented, you can't throw it away. It's already kind of final thing done. And this is how we kind of approached Tori. So we had lots of ideation, but we've been trying to use the tool that were never created to build an XR app, right? So we've been inheriting the tools out there created for web, I mean, and then, and Unity for implementation. So with ShapesXR, we see it this way. It's extremely important to have that early prototyping and discovery stage and early design when it's okay to throw away a bunch of your ideas and a bunch of your prototypes to come up with the really, really best one. So it should be super, super iterative. And today, XR teams are completely developer-driven. Right. I mean, when we were coming to XR teams at Fortune 500 companies, it's a little bit started to change now. But one year ago, XR teams were like Unity developers, but developers are not creatives. I mean, it could be. So there are some amazing developers who can really envision it. But even for them, you know, once you are starting implementing, you are not designing and ideating anymore. So probably you could have come with much better ideas, right, than you do. And ShapesXR is first of all for developing VR and AR apps because we think that even ideation should take place spatially. It's very important. So we think in 3D and then we have to somehow represent this on 2D sketch and then go back to 3D flat tool. Isn't it better, you know, we think in 3D and immediately we kind of do it in 3D, right? It's such kind of better difference, but we see it's beyond just building for XR. Our real world is not flat too, right? And when we interact with it, we, and kind of to explore those user journey and the world is also have so many digital aspects today. So we think that it's also cool for product teams, your UX teams to be very agile because UX people, I mean, many UX people for XR and for the 3D that I met recently, they're doing PowerPoint slides. I mean, they really kind of show the PowerPoint of the user flow and experience that is going to happen. They're not 3D people and usually they're not also, let's say, even designers, I mean, those are kind of researchers. But can you imagine that they can really do that in a completely different way if they're UI UX for kind of 3D? And another point with Shape6R is that, I mean, we do want to see better content available for all this hardware because we think that it's going to help with adoption of this industry to see more hits on Quest, to see more hits on any AR device. But it's also important that it feels kind of different, that it's kind of native. but as long as we are trying to inherit and keep using the tool that were created for web or we end up of building some 2d flatish things in vr and ar i mean i understand that like It's not always possible to end up with 3D UIs and truly immersive UIs, but we have to try to do that. And I mean, at least two and a half, but it can be done also like that your UI is super interactive and it's 3D and it's immersive and that it feels different. I always keep asking myself, so I want to make sure that our mission is bold. So if you put on a headset, your session is limited, right? I mean, you can't build for many hours. And it should be a clear reason why are you doing that in VR. Because there are always alternatives, flat screen tools, alternatives, right, to do that in shapes. But I'm sure that kind of do this rapid prototyping and quickly collaborate on your early designs you can't do elsewhere, especially for immersive content. And that's why for me the answer is yes, it's only possible in VR. And so many people are asking like, why don't you also have an iPad app or PC version of your tool before and now also? Because we are not capable to build this magical tool for flat screen. We just don't know how to do that. But we know how to do this magic in VR. So we are so committed and we don't have this pivot to like, okay, let's also have an iPad version or PC version. We just really believe that it's such a blast to do it in VR.
[00:16:16.997] Kent Bye: Yeah, I had a couple of thoughts that came up as you were talking about that. I was at the Venice Film Festival a number of years ago listening to some VR creators trying to pitch some of their projects to people who were really coming from the film world. And the film world has a very specific way of that you put a PowerPoint slide, a slide deck into what the experience is going to be. And I feel like there's some element of the VR that you really have to actually almost discover what the interactions are going to be. And it's something that you are finding based upon a lot of iteration and experimentation. But the other point that you made, which is certainly controversial for some to say that the developers aren't creative, and what I would modify that to be, which is as somebody who was trained as a logical engineer, I feel like there's a certain ways in which that there's specifications that are presented to developers and engineers who are trying to work within the bounds of those constraints and those trade-offs to find the best solutions, but that in some ways, the design process, especially experiential design, which is encompassing so many different other aspects of the human experience, it's almost like the architects who are synthesizing so many other different aspects of not only the physical constraints of the building, but also the sociological and the larger contextual dimensions of putting people into spaces. And I feel like that there's something that's lost when you try to collapse everything down into the 2D storyboards or visions, and that by having this move away from something that has traditionally been very developer driven, meaning that there's a barrier between if you want to start to create these experiences you have to know how to program in c sharp and run unity and click all the different check boxes and whatnot and that tool within itself shapes the thinking it's almost like when you write with lines on it you follow the lines and so it's sort of a subtle way of shaping the thought that is possible and yeah so i guess what i'm hearing about the shapes xr just that intention of trying to remove some of the existing constraints but also to not rely upon those 2D projection and abstractions, but to get back into working with the medium native to itself.
[00:18:17.641] Inga Petryaevskaya: This is a very, very accurate capture of that. And please apologize. I do mean that developers can be the most creative. We are developers ourselves. It's more like that it shouldn't be just developers driven. So people who don't have any 3D skills or people who don't know how to code and use Unity, they can contribute to this media being developed. We just want to unlock it to anyone, like Gabriel, who is head of community at Shape6R. He has PhD in biology, but he's one of the most creative people because he discovered like First Warrior and now Shape6R to build his amazing stories, you know. It's just like bringing this power to people who kind of... But, you know, I even talked to... bunch of people who are kind of prototypers and prototyping is also usually meant like doing something already in Unity and they say like when I start doing something in Unity I feel like I implement exact what is gonna look like but sometimes it's so important to kind of push a little bit this implementation stage because you want to really come up with new ideas And I also hope that ShapesXR unlock it to professionals to join, like designers who seek 4XR career or 2D people who wants to explore 3D and they kind of get this magic of creation in VR. And probably then we see more hits. I mean, do we see many hits releasing on Quest? I mean, we do have, of course, some, but we can have many more. And developing 4XR should become much and much easier. accessible. I have this analogy, I don't know if you like it or not, but it really reminds how web was looking like 20 plus years ago. Web was also developer's dream, right? To have your web page, you have to write code, you have to do that. No one was so much care about UX of your website or UI or does really your user end up doing what you want, where the attention goes, right? And with XR, it's the same, so we should be very careful. So what is spatial content means? It's immersive, it's personalized, it's interactive. But do we have tools to create such type of content and such type of apps and game that are like, wow, from the first second because it's so different from web? I personally just keep trying to push this that I don't want to put the headset on and see bunch of flat 2D screens and read text, what I should do, you know? There should be new ways of interactions in space, right? So yeah, so that's the point I wanted to make, but definitely any person can be creative with the right tools, right? And I hope that new generation of, and young generation, they find it as a great thing to pitch the idea to, and by the way, the vision for ShapesXR that I see, Yeah, it's design and prototyping. You can communicate it early on to your customers to test it before again you implement it. But I also think that it's kind of pitching, as you said, for 3D might move from just transcending to 2D slides to really experience your prototype. So not just like lots of words, lots of kind of images. You just press the play button or you immerse yourself and then you get a clear understanding how this product or app or game are going to look like.
[00:21:27.748] Kent Bye: Yeah, as I reflect upon all these different other communication media, how they've been evolving, there's all sorts of different ways of creating these abstractions that are pointing to what the final project is going to be. So whether that's in storytelling within film where you have the treatment and then you also have the pitch, but you also have storyboarding. And each of these are ways of using different abstractions to be able to help the director and the whole creative team to actually manifest that in the final form. And I remember talking to Andrea Katakaru, who talks about even in architecture, how you have the blueprints and the plans, but there's always this gap between the plans and the actual quality of experiencing it so you don't know until you actually experience it but the goal i guess is to try to reduce that gap to the point where you can have some form of abstraction that is close enough to give you a sense but then you still go through the creative process but i feel like in other media it's much more mature to be able to do that whether it's in writing or in film or even web design which is you know relatively new Doing the wireframes and all the different planning, and it's moved into that production phase where you have the pre-production, production, post-production, but at least it's been able to reduce that gap. But within XR, it's been kind of like the Wild West again, and it sounds like this is a tool to help perhaps continue to close that gap.
[00:22:46.846] Inga Petryaevskaya: Exactly. So this is exactly about closing that gap. And it's important also to understand that it's not for final, right? And you shouldn't expect it to be at such fidelity and it's such kind of implementation that you can get it kind of final engine or even like you do for like you use Figma for web, right? So it's final design, right? So in VR, running on standalone Quest Collaborative, it's about, indeed, like early discovery, early concept design, let's call it gray boxing, you know. You can still import your own models with textures and, you know, You can import your images and build something quite sophisticated, but it still will be at the stage of this low poly design, but it's the beauty of it. So you can be iterative because you are not afraid of kind of, okay, I have some final thing and I can't do any changes anymore. So, and you can invite people to contribute. And I also want to emphasize that it's important to share your vision early on. So you can do that. in different ways with Shape6R. You can invite people in VR. It's a collaborative tool. It's not just like you build together all in real time. And by the way, that was lots of R&D, you know, to allow 10 people to co-create. So to move together, to change materials, to be on different stages, like on different slides and co-edit in 3D and then merge everything. And it's insane. It's like, it's truly real time. So you can pitch that in VR. You can also export that to web viewer. Okay, if your stakeholders don't have a headset, then you can still have this sort of immersive pitch on web, like still switching between different stages, like slides and different viewpoints and zoom in, zoom out. We have Unity plugin. So to have this really pipeline integration, so you can export your entire space and open it in Unity with one click, literally, and then pass it over to your developers. And 3D export is also coming if you want to not use Unity or you want to go to final implementation to Unreal, then you can export as USD file. So for us, it's also important that we understand that You can't achieve everything in VR today, so implementation is happening elsewhere. So that's why integration to workflows and pipelines is very important. So we allow input, we allow your expert, but we still think that it's so true to start your brainstorming, ideation and prototyping being immersed in 3D.
[00:25:16.937] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's cool to hear that you have USD, which is one of the scene graph open standards that's out there. And I know GLTF is something that is also used quite a lot on different web-based projects. And I'm curious if you can export to GLTF and if there's any layers of scripting that can help animate things, because I know that's always... tricky thing to add motion and dynamic animations or scripting into some of these different and that you know it gets into what is the computer languages they're going to do that and it's something that I think is still not been fully settled for what the full solution of the scene graph with all the interactive components and animation components but yeah just curious to hear a little bit if you are able to do things in gltf and the dynamic scripting or interactive aspects that you have in there as well
[00:26:02.665] Inga Petryaevskaya: So great question. Right now, with this release tomorrow on store, we will have Unity plugin and web expert, but with the first update, we exactly have the GLTF expert. And later on, it will be USD to be kind of more diverse from formats perspective. So GLTF is getting there, but like so many people are asking for having USD. Coming to interactions, you know that our DNA is storytelling, and our DNA is showing your design in motion, in function, and showing different states of your product, of your app. So we're one of the innovators and, let's say, early developers of real-time animation in VR and keyframe animation in VR. So to actually simulate your user flows and simulate your app in function. So here in Shapes, we have these linear stages. Between these stages, you can have this twinning interpolation. It could be linear, stepped, curve interpolation. So we experimented that. So we will be releasing with just, let's say, switching of stages. And then we would really want to listen to the community. I mean, do designers prefer to have this animation, like real-time we had in Twori? Collaborative animation will definitely be a challenge, you know, because it's becoming a co-creation tool. but still doable, there is nothing impossible. Or we should more move towards building this non-linear interactive system that we are not planning to introduce scripting, we really want to make it and keep it like the tool that is so delightful and easy to use, right, that you can do basic trigger-based interactions without coding. So, like, we have an analogy in Figma, for example, for web, those type of trigger-based interactions. So this is something to research. So we might add animation at some point if we see the need for that, or we more move to, let's say, really advanced interactivity system because designers at the end, they love to push buttons and they love to, you know, change of states happening that way rather than to fake, let's say, how the user flow is going to be with animation. But it's so powerful for storytelling. So that's why it's also, let's say, something to consider.
[00:28:21.573] Kent Bye: And who are some of the target demographics or the audience for this experience that you have with the ShapesXR?
[00:28:28.669] Inga Petryaevskaya: So our, let's say, target audience today are, as we call it, wide remote product teams. And those are XR designers and UI UX designers for VR, AR. But again, like our own team could be a great example. So I can call myself a product owner. So I want to meet with the designer to discuss, let's say, how this or that is going to work. And we just do some wireframing in 3D. and then he can spend more time, let's say, going deeper, analyzing and building this prototype. And then he invites myself and our developers and other designers, and we then discuss it and we edit, and then developers finish implementation in Unity. We think that XR teams should become, let's say, early adopters of this tool because what is the alternative for them to do that? I mean, should they keep using Figma to ideate and design for VR AR? I mean, I really don't believe that is the right way to do that or skip completely the prototyping stage and just go to Unity to do builds. I also don't think that this is the best way to create for XR. But we hope that any designer who is designing real-world services where the space matters, where the user interacts with some products around, it's also the right use case. You know, we realize that pre-sales people in those companies who have XR teams, they still go to pitch XR projects with PowerPoint. Think of any other big name consulting studio. And those are kind of end up with missing projects and not getting funding because I mean you're trying to explain what is going to be how tasty your pizza is to a person who never tried pizza so coming with a headset and saying like let's go so you get immediate understanding what we are going to build it will be 15 minutes experience for your client and you probably spend another one hour to build it and you get your project done so it's pre-sales people for XR is also let's say the target audience for us but overall it's XR product teams, because we think that everyone can contribute to the product being developed to actually release better products faster.
[00:30:42.183] Kent Bye: I was talking to Amy from Women in XR, and she actually mentioned to me that Shapes XR was receiving some of the funding from that. So I don't know if that's been announced yet or if you can speak about that.
[00:30:52.105] Inga Petryaevskaya: I'm very glad to actually announce that it's not a secret. So it's an amazing investment for us because we met with Amy at SIGGRAPH in 2018, I think. Oh no, it was probably 2019. I don't know, probably it was 18 or 19. and then I was pitching her the tool that we are building and I've learned about WXR and that was like okay so it's not just about spatial computing it's also about women entrepreneurs so like it's niche in the niche and I was like you're crazy I mean like and we participated in the acceleration program cohort 3 that was really standing apart of so many programs it was very dedicated very picky, so how to use our founders time, you know, it was a very, very well designed program. And that was our first, let's say, collaboration that we did end of 2019. And I'm so glad that now they were excited about our pivot. And I think they were excited that we revised what we are building and that we are focused on collaboration that much. And we are coming conquest, we build some strategic relations. And yeah, so they're joining us as investors. And I think that they bring all the experience and networking they have in this area. And I'm a huge fan of EMI and Martinez. Thanks for mentioning that. Yeah.
[00:32:16.721] Kent Bye: Yeah, and we just finished up the Augies Award, and you came home with an award tonight. And so, yeah, maybe talk about what that was like to be able to win that award.
[00:32:25.685] Inga Petryaevskaya: That's so exciting and so unexpected, honestly, because we submitted the nomination, was it like several months ago? And in those days, we didn't have our amazing trailer ready, or let's say we didn't have all those materials, but we already had access on App Lab, and people could try it, you know? And something that I'm very inspired that once people go in there, especially if they're not alone and they're having those sessions together with someone, they usually kind of get it and they're so impressed. And this award is definitely the recognition for our team. I'm so proud of our small, super dedicated, passionate team. And we are so long here, but it's the feeling that we are just start today, you know. we're releasing tomorrow and it's like start but everyone is very excited and this award goes to all those super hard-working team members of mine and I'm very proud of we have very diverse team you know we have probably 50 50 women and men you know 12 people team including developers and but again as I said before everyone was passionate about XR and they are not like strangers in our team Like Gabriel that I mentioned, for example, he used to be one of the early adopters of our first product. He was working at Procter & Gamble and using Twori to tell touching stories about clinical trials. And once I was looking at analytics and like, who is that crazy guy who recently spent like 38 hours in there? What is he doing there? So I reached out to him. We started connecting. We met at VR Days Europe 2019. And then he joined us almost one and a half years ago. And that is such a great team member because he's sharing his passion widely. And this helps a lot because you usually don't have time, you know, to talk about what you are doing. And every team member, every developer and my co-founders and... and our design team, it's a very dedicated work, you know, we all work a lot and getting this Aggie Award is a great recognition for the team and for the community, you know, what was also very different and our big mistake that we did with Twori, because we couldn't allow it to do differently, With ShapesXR, when we had the very first MVP, super early, it was probably not there in any sense, but it was already collaborative. We started doing meetups and invite our beta community of testers. So we ran 52 meetups in Shapes while it was evolving. And once we had the session and people were saying, you know, the menu, and the menu is a major UI that you already explained. it's confusing. So, okay, no problem. So we did all those usability inside ShapesXR test. We rebuild it again. And so it was much more iterative and user-based feedback development compared to the previous product. So we've built that not just by our team, but ShapesXR was really shaped by the community. And I'm so grateful to our beta testers, their commitment, attending our VR sessions, spreading love, giving their honest feedback that was very helpful.
[00:35:37.836] Kent Bye: Did I hear you right that you just said that you've been using ShapesXR to design ShapesXR?
[00:35:42.893] Inga Petryaevskaya: Exactly. So it's totally self-proven. I mean, right now, it's already like for the last probably five months that we are fully developing ShapesXR using ShapesXR. I mean, every new feature is first prototyped there, we approve it there, then we transfer this to Unity and we finalize it. But now I'm so confident what it's going to have from Unity because something that we approve in VR as a prototype, it's 99% close to what you get. Even our lobby that you, when you jump in the lobby, we had nine different options. So we voted in Shape6R, we selected the best one and then finalized in Unity and it took us two and a half days maximum. It was even less. So the challenge was to choose between those nine options that we had. So that's something that is so different from our previous life.
[00:36:31.681] Kent Bye: So this is really the quality of the moment of being here at Augmented World Expo. You just won an Augie. Tomorrow morning at 10 AM, you're launching on the Oculus Store after being on the App Lab. So talk me through what that is like to finally be getting this out into the world, launching tomorrow at 10 AM.
[00:36:49.710] Inga Petryaevskaya: I'm very excited and nervous at the same time, you know, being on store is very important, but it's also very unpredictable how people kind of feel about it. You know, the Quest audience is very diverse and there are so many gamers there and overall Quest audience is probably biggest percent of it's coming to Quest to play games, right? So I'm a little bit scared about like reviews that people were expecting another shooting game and then they have to do something and to be creative. But I'm sure that we have our, let's say, fans and people who really want to do something more and who believe that Quest is much beyond than just a gaming console. And I mean, I'm also eager to learn and see if it has like different impact on traction. So how the product could live on Quest, because we've been on Steam, we've been on Oculus Store and Viveport, and now Quest is a completely different story. So for us, being on store is so important to make it accessible to people. It's going to be free. I mean, anyone can create and it has everything in the free version. We do have subscription, but it's only, let's say, if you want to have many more projects than the default one. But features-wise, it's just the same products. It's important for the reputation, it's important for people to try it out, to spread the word, to develop the market. The focus still will be on professional teams and B2B, XR teams, and I hope we start scaling and it gives us traction and then we can grow and move faster. We've been cockroaches and lean for so long that we are very excited to start moving faster and getting there and So excited, a little bit nervous about reviews and kind of how people welcome it. But I'm absolutely sure in the quality of the product. It was done differently from how we did it before. And it was tasted over and over and over again. So, yeah, I mean, that's a big moment and very emotional about it.
[00:38:54.619] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality might be and what it might be able to enable?
[00:39:03.743] Inga Petryaevskaya: You know, I mean, for me, it's a lot about the future of what is going to happen in VR. And I can simplify because, I mean, so many people are talking about that and sharing their perspective. But when every day I look at my calendar for the next day, And I see meetings in Zoom and I see meetings in ShapesXR. I'm so happy when the next meeting is going to be in ShapesXR because then it will be focused. It will be like very creative and immersed and you kind of just jump and do your stuff. While I'm usually kind of, okay, it's another kind of Zoom I have to... focus on it. So I believe that it's definitely changing the way how we are developing and designing for the real world and for the murderers. It's also kind of important. With mixed reality headsets, we already started to experiment with pass-through. It's unlocked so many new use cases. You know, you design just on top of your real environment and I don't know if any of the hardware vendors would ever allow us to stream our environments to each other, then it would be incredibly amazing. I hope that many more people start thinking about VR for work and not just like meetings, but more like doing work, replacing their current tools with like being productive and being super efficient in VR. So think of it of the new kind of design platform and new communication platform. It will definitely take time. I mean, it will not happen tomorrow, but with more accessible hardware and with kind of this mixed reality trend, I'm sure that we will get there and this will happen. I'm more sure than ever before. great is there is there anything else that's left and said that you'd like to say to the immersive community so i just want to say that this community it's immersive community is probably the best one that we can dream about i mean i don't know more diverse community than immersive community creatives who are building for vr and they are all amazing people we are all pioneers we are all early adopters everyone else is just catching us in this journey right but we have all this knowledge and we have all this experience that let's share it with others let's inspire other people to discover new tools to discover new hardware to spread the word about it's yes it's a hard game you know we all in this for a long time there are kind of big players but there are so many indie amazing indie creators developers and and people who evangelize this for years but i feel that the moment has come and i want to inspire you to keep going we are very close to see when it finally happens for the world and it's not going to be anymore our tiny community that we all know each other for years but it's going to be huge
[00:41:59.084] Kent Bye: Well, this is the first in real life face-to-face interview I've done since the pandemic has happened. And it's been since January of 2020 since I was at an event like this. And so it's good to be back in the Augmented World Expo after you had just won this Augie Award and to just sit down and kind of unpack that. your own journey over the last number of years from Tavori to ShapesXR and your launch tomorrow. So thanks for taking the time out of your schedule to be able to sit down and share your story and to give this vision of what the future of design could be with ShapesXR. So thanks for joining me on the podcast today.
[00:42:33.057] Inga Petryaevskaya: Thank you very much. And it's a big honor for me. You know, as I said, I'm a huge fan of you for many years. Thank you very much.
[00:42:41.462] Kent Bye: Thanks again for listening to this episode of the Voices of VR podcast. And if you enjoy the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
