Stefan Pernar of Virtual Reality Ventures has looked into the industry sectors that he thinks will be the most disrupted by these new immersive technologies. He’s looked through over a thousand peer-reviewed research articles and narrowed the list of industries down to tourism, construction, engineering, data visualization, healthcare, education, retail & fashion, events, real estate & architecture, as well as marketing.
At SVVRCon, Stefan was showing some detailed infographics that provided research into how each of these sectors will be changed by AR and VR, and Virtual Reality Ventures has started the process of prototyping experiences that can provide a proof of concept as they evangelize the power of immersive technologies to business leaders.
Virtual Reality Ventures is focused on creating enterprise-ready VR applications ranging from tourism to fashion to construction workflow and across all the industry sectors. They’ve integrated the Magento e-commerce solution with Unity so that users can eventually use a scanned avatar of themselves so that they can virtually try on different outfits. He sees a large potential for VR being a part of the $2 trillion fashion industry.
Finally, Stefan reflects on how far SVVRCon has come over the last year, some of his future plans, and how he’s really looking forward to some of the healthcare and tourism applications of VR.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:11.973] Stefan Pernar: My name is Stefan Perner from Virtual Reality Ventures, based in Australia, and we focus on corporate applications of virtual reality.
[00:00:19.935] Kent Bye: Great. And so I'm standing in front of a pretty epic presentation here, and maybe you could talk a bit about what you were researching and trying to prove out with this sort of slide deck here.
[00:00:29.704] Stefan Pernar: Well, what we are doing here is we have looked into the different industry sectors that we believe will be disrupted the most by this new medium. And we've identified healthcare, tourism, construction engineering, data visualization, education, retail and fashion, events, real estate and architecture, as well as marketing. And what you're looking at here is basically the results of sifting through over a thousand peer-reviewed journal articles and going through and looking not only what can you do in VR, because obviously you can do anything in VR, but what should you be doing in VR where you can actually get a tangible benefit as opposed to using traditional means of doing certain things such as training, events, etc.
[00:01:10.542] Kent Bye: Right, and so I guess taking a step back is what is motivating you to dive into this particular area of VR? Is it that you want to make it sustainable or do you have a particular passion on any one of these areas?
[00:01:24.189] Stefan Pernar: I think tourism myself is going to be absolutely epic in VR. The situation that we are facing is we show the device, the hardware, to potential clients and they say, wow, this is crazy. And then the next question usually is, so how does this apply to us? And what we wanted to do is we wanted to have something ready-made where we could, you know, give them a slide and say, look, you are in the retail space or you are in the education space or you are in the event space. Have a look at this visually appealing, made-up infographics that are actually going through the different things that you could actually do in your industry. And then we would come in and then do the content creation, the custom development, etc.
[00:02:03.515] Kent Bye: I see. And so do you have developers on hand that you've already started to work with each of these different sectors of the industry here with the virtual reality ventures?
[00:02:11.982] Stefan Pernar: Yes, we do. For example, in the real estate and architecture space, we are working with a company in Australia called The Ria Group. So they run realestate.com.au. It's a multi-billion dollar company. So we have done a fair few scans for them and some immersive video just to see how immersive technologies can help with selling property or renting property. In terms of the healthcare industry, we're working with a lady in Northern Australia that is into pain management, for example. In terms of tourism, we're working with a company at the Gold Coast who is quite interested about this, and I'm actually going to speak at the upcoming Victorian Tourism Industry Council annual conference in July, which is going to be very interesting, I predict. In terms of the fashion space, we have been here last year already showing off our virtual reality fashion prototype. We have expanded this now, make it more appealing and also, you're actually the first person that I'm going to announce this to, we have integrated the e-commerce platform Magento with Unity. Magento is an enterprise-strength e-commerce platform that is used by hundreds of thousands of retailers online. And our integration now allows to basically create arbitrary virtual reality experiences on top of that. So you don't have to change anything in your existing installation. You just pop on our module on it and then you can create virtual reality shopping experiences for your customers.
[00:03:34.758] Kent Bye: And so yeah, maybe talk a bit about more that integration. Is that a web VR thing? Are people going to be going to downloading application that is then kind of having this self-contained website experience? Or how are you doing a responsive design or actually integrating these e-commerce solutions within a VR experience then?
[00:03:54.756] Stefan Pernar: At the moment it is a Gear VR app that you download and then you can put it on and then the look of the experience is the same of the actual website or very similar anyway the look and feel to maintain the corporate branding. In the future it will be a matter of, it will be browser-based. I mean we have integrated it with Unity so we can create a web-based experience so we haven't really taken it to that level yet but that's definitely in the cards.
[00:04:20.172] Kent Bye: And so, yeah, maybe describe a bit more in terms of, like, if somebody has these clothes or whatever, would they scan them in to have a 3D object that then is sort of integrated into a Unity project and then you output an application that is from a game engine but yet has tied into it an e-commerce platform so that they could actually do e-commerce by looking around and gazing and touching and buying objects?
[00:04:46.993] Stefan Pernar: Yeah, the process is like this. So what we are using is we're using the same patterns of the garment, so the same patterns that you would, you know, cut out of cloth and then sew it together. Take these patterns in a digital form, drape them around a mannequin, and then, you know, have an accurate simulation of fall and flow of that garment on that mannequin. We have also now created a pipeline where we can scan a person and then have that body shape associated with that person's account. so that they can actually see themselves wearing the garments before they actually buy them.
[00:05:20.262] Kent Bye: Oh, wow. Interesting. And so is there an outlet or someone that's actually selling these clothes that have already kind of signed up to do this? Or is this more of a proof of concept that you're showing in order to kind of tap into this potential market that's there?
[00:05:34.247] Stefan Pernar: Well, at this point in time, you know, we are in the same situation like everybody else. There is really not a big market in the VR space, so there's a couple hundred thousand headsets probably out there for people to use. So we're actually still looking for a fashion partner, for a label or a brand who wanted to take us up on this pipeline, but the pipeline is there and the pipeline is ready. So we are ready. We're looking for customers now.
[00:05:56.033] Kent Bye: And when you're looking at these different markets, you know, how are you kind of evaluating the size and potential for what the opportunities are?
[00:06:03.497] Stefan Pernar: Well, that's a really good question. A lot of people point out and say, well, Hollywood is a $90 billion industry, right? And gaming is a $100 billion industry, right? And so it's gaming is larger than Hollywood. But when you think about fashion, fashion is a $2 trillion, so a $2,000 billion industry. And that's why we think that corporate applications of virtual reality have such a large potential. Because if we tap into just 1% of that, that would be almost a fifth of the entire gaming space. And of course, that is going to spread over a number of different providers, etc. But that's not an unrealistic goal.
[00:06:43.502] Kent Bye: Yeah, and when you're going to these different industries and you're kind of presenting these, what are some of the biggest salient points that you've found really resonate with these different people then?
[00:06:54.018] Stefan Pernar: What really resonates with people, for example, in the construction industry and engineering industry is not only the pre-visualization of an actual project where you can go in and you can see how a space impacts you, how the proportions work out, you know, is the hallway too narrow or is the windows too small or something like this, but it's also the ability to integrate these kind of technologies in your actual construction workflow and in your construction processes. Imagine you take an augmented reality device and what we have done is we use the Gear VR pass-through camera where you can put up markers, or if you think about, for example, the HoloLens or Magic Leap, whenever that is going to come out, it might be markerless as well, where a construction inspector could come in, put on the glasses, and then have an exact overlay of where the beams should be, how the reel should have been assembled, where the power lines are, where the data cables are, and then can compare where things should be with where they actually are. And that, I think, has great promise to do good in the construction space, particularly there as an example.
[00:07:59.842] Kent Bye: Great. And so what type of things are you looking for here at SVVRCon then?
[00:08:04.163] Stefan Pernar: I was really looking forward to the Vive, but that is not going to happen apparently, which is a bit of a bummer. But apart from that, for me, it's really about meeting people again, shaking hands, and then staying connected with everybody. Australia can be a bit far away, so SVVR is one of the two conferences that we really want to make an appearance and stay connected with the community.
[00:08:24.074] Kent Bye: Great. And what do you see as you're watching the release dates that have been announced at this point? So we have at least a timeline and time frame. What are you personally doing to kind of get prepared for the consumer launches of all these different consumer-ready virtual reality head-mounted displays?
[00:08:40.320] Stefan Pernar: Some people say that now that we have a release window, for example, for the Oculus Rift Consumer Version 1, that we can now say, OK, now let's put the pedal to the metal. Now we can put a budget to things. And I think that's true to a degree. But for us at Virtual Reality Ventures, we're just chugging along as we were before. It is good to know that we have this release windows now of late 2015 to early or middle 2016. The first ones are going to be the OSVR, it's going to be the Vive, then followed by the Oculus Rift Consumer Version 1 and then towards the When it comes to Project Morpheus, that apparently is going to be leased before the first half of 2016. So we know consumer products are going to be coming now. The big question is, how is the consumer space going to react? So far we have not seen a big consumer marketing push by either of these companies. I know that Samsung, for example, really want to have a big push towards the end of the year into the consumer space. The uptake that I have experienced just over the past year, and this is something that we have to realize, one year ago we were still recovering from the shock announcement of Facebook buying Oculus for $2 billion. It was in March, was it? So we are here now not 18 months later and the industry is already starting to explode in this fashion. It's really interesting to imagine how everything is going to shape up next year at SPBR 2016.
[00:10:07.608] Kent Bye: Yeah, maybe finally, because you've looked into all these different dimensions and sectors of potential applications of virtual reality, what do you think is sort of the most compelling or potential for VR in each of these areas?
[00:10:21.934] Stefan Pernar: I think the biggest benefit, the biggest real benefit is going to be in the healthcare space. You know, if you can help people with their pain or post-traumatic stress, their phobias in training doctors, for example, I think that is really where we're going to see a lot of benefits there. And then, of course, the corporate applications are all interesting, but I personally am really looking forward to compelling tourism experiences, where, let's say, you come home from work, or you are sitting in the train on the way to work, or something like this, and you can have a five-minute trip to Egypt, or you can go into the Amazon rainforest, or, you know, go to Cambodia, for example. These are things that I am personally really looking forward to.
[00:11:01.504] Kent Bye: Great. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:11:05.325] Stefan Pernar: Really looking forward to seeing everybody again here. It is already very different from last year. I think it's going to be three times bigger. Very much looking forward to the next couple of days and thanks for talking to me.
[00:11:17.268] Kent Bye: OK, great. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you for listening. If you'd like to support the Voices of VR podcast, then please consider becoming a patron at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
