Bobby Boyd of Anarchist VR talks about Information Visualization in VR and their Salesforce prototype that they built back in 2014. This interview was recorded at last year’s Oculus Connect conference.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.143] Bobby Boyd: I'm Bobby Boyd with Anarchist. I'm one part of a three-person team. And we're a Chicago-based startup focused on finding our spot in the virtual reality software ecosystem. So my history with VR is I came in kind of late, I guess, later than most people. Here, I got the DK1 in November, so I missed the Kickstarter. I remember coming home one night and just an impulse purchase. I think they'd just done a price drop and it got down to $300 or $350 or something. And I always thought it was going to be much more expensive, so this was an impulse buy for me. So I clicked through and then a few weeks later this thing shows up and I strap it on. And it was like the virtual reality that was promised to us as children. So I knew it was kind of the beginning of big things to come. At the time I was working at Groupon, automating a lot of the financial systems for that company. And that's where I met my current tech co-founder, Matt. So, I fast forward three months and I'd left that job and decided to jump in head first and build something, you know, find my space here. So, originally I started building an application, you know, the application that I wanted and I'm a developer. So, the first thing I wanted to do was build a code editor in VR. So I started prototyping a little something, text editor, custom built in Unity. And if you look at some of the more popular text editors today, Vim and Emacs, these are text editors that have evolved over 20 odd years. So it's quite the wheel to reinvent. So I quickly pivoted and decided to build an SSH client. And I have an SSH client that we can start up a text editor in a virtual machine. And I think it's kind of the first glimpse of developer tools in VR and what we can expect to come there. So from there, we started building an interactive REPL. We ported a programming language called Closure. It's a Lisp derivative. So we have an interactive REPL in world. And I think a lot of the developers are going to get excited about this when we release this. to be able to code VR from within VR. I think it's a common problem today. The development cycle is kind of code, compile, and then throw the headset on and test, and then find the issues and rip the headset back off and go fix them, hopefully. And it's a very slow loop. So, cutting down on that, I think these development tools and tools for designers, especially when we add in a collaborative layer, things are going to get really good, right? We're just going to stay in VR most of the day, I think. Yeah, based on that we started prototyping some gesture driven VR desktop software, so you got to see a little bit of that yesterday. We've been playing with various input devices like the Leap Motion, like the Space Navigator, the 3D Connection Space Navigator mouse. I don't know if you've seen that, it's a six degree of freedom push-pull twist input device. But basically, I think the way I'm looking at this, VR is just one small part of several different sensor technologies converging to essentially give us all superpowers in the way that we interact with computers and each other. So, I'm just really excited to be playing a role in that. I think a lot of us are still feeling out the commercial viability for what we're doing. I think most of us are just really excited to be playing in this space at all, but trying to figure out how we can make a living here. So, I think it's going to take a little while for the consumer market to warm up to what a lot of us are trying to build. Even like the best of breed VR games that you see, the market is still so small. I mean, we've only shipped 120,000 DK2, DK1, the combined set of these devices, right? So, any commercial venture that any of us are trying to build right now, it's still going to take a while until you can go down to Walmart or Best Buy to pull something off the shelf, I think. So we're starting to look a little closer at the enterprise application for this, especially with regards to business intelligence and data visualization. So we still have pretty strong ties into Groupon, for example. You probably saw Salesforce just announced their Aware initiative within the past couple of months. So a lot of people are starting to see the implication for virtual reality technologies beyond games and entertainment. And I think that's a pretty safe place to start looking to build a business. So we're thinking about that.
[00:04:17.081] Kent Bye: And so, can you talk a bit about what you're doing with Salesforce in terms of doing user interaction and what the intent is with being able to do some sort of high-level analysis of what's happening within a company within virtual reality?
[00:04:30.742] Bobby Boyd: Sure, so it's still early days for our partnership and Salesforce, but a little background there is a guy named Daniel Debo out of Canada sold one of his companies to Salesforce and then they gave him a charter called the Emerging Technologies Group. That's where he started looking at different wearable technologies like smart watches, like the Oculus Rift, and how these are going to be used by Salesforce customers and even the customers of Salesforce customers out in the field. The thing I'm really excited about building and where we're setting our target for at least the next month before we ramp up for a demo that we hope to unleash at Dreamforce in San Francisco, October 13th, is visualizing real-time business events as they stream through the organization. So if I'm the CIO or the CEO of a large you know, like multi-office deployment. I want to be able to see kind of, I guess, the money that flows through the organization and the derivatives of the money, right? The events that lead up to a sale, customer orders. I think it's a common practice today to build a team of data scientists to build these streaming, map-reduced jobs that build complex machine intelligence algorithms and then crunch these numbers down to something essentially like a glorified Excel spreadsheet is the report that I'm going to get at the end of the day. But I think there's a lot of low hanging fruit that we can leverage just the pattern matching abilities of the human brain to visually analyze events as it streams across the org. And I think a lot of that data is just falling on the floor right now. So we'd like to find the sweet spot for just starting to dabble in delivering some value to business customers by exposing that information.
[00:06:10.883] Kent Bye: Yeah, and you know, I work at a tech startup where we use Salesforce and I know that there's the sales team, the sales account reps that are looking at individual contacts and they're in different states. And then there's all the stuff that leads up to somebody taking action on a website to go from just a anonymous user into a lead. So they have their email and then go through some buyer's journey that they eventually become a potential customer, they get qualified, and then they end up getting sold. And so, Salesforce is in the middle of that mix of creating the software to be able to do that. And so what I'm really wondering is, at what point, what type of decisions or analysis is somebody that you foresee going into virtual reality to be able to either get more insight or to streamline that entire process?
[00:06:59.760] Bobby Boyd: It's a good question and I think a lot of that is still uncharted territory for us so a lot of that will come into focus over the next few weeks as we start to build our demo and start to talk with pilot customers. One of the things that I'm really excited about that VR will offer over just visualizing these data streams in traditional projected on a 2D plane. is the potential for collaboration. If I bring another member of an analysis team into the same space as me, I can point to some data visualization or we can collectively analyze this data in a way that I don't think is really possible in any other medium. So I think that's pretty important. Another thing is information scientists have advised against using 3D visualizations in a lot of the data projections traditionally because a sense of depth is kind of a lie until you get to VR. But VR gives us the first format for doing stereoscopic 3D and depth being an actual thing instead of an approximation.
[00:07:55.792] Kent Bye: Yeah, that's interesting in terms of looking at these techniques that may have been not recommended now opening the door to be able to explore what's possible. So what type of resources do you turn to in terms of people that may have looked into this, experts in the field or data analysis or visualization?
[00:08:14.647] Bobby Boyd: Well, I know in academia, for instance, I just mentioned to you earlier, I spent the afternoon talking with Doc Ock about some of the visualizations he's done before. One of the popular ones, he's got some video of this, was doing LIDAR of analyzing a landslide, doing geography analysis over time, right? And I think what we're starting to see across the board is there's this sort of power to comfort ratio that comes into focus, right? Today, wearing the DK2 for eight hours a day is not comfortable for anyone, right? I mean, we're the power users and, you know, like some of the hardcore game devs are forced to wear it for long periods of time. Me, I can probably wear it four hours a day before I feel like I'm wearing my face off, right? So, the upside of the power that you get by using an app in VR has to counterbalance the discomfort. And the good news is through miniaturization and I don't know if you've seen the new demo yet. So, that's a curve that's going to continue to flatten and that becomes really exciting. Certainly there's been some good research from academia that we hope to leverage even right there in Chicago I know there's some visualizations happening to do like crime visualization on a street map this kind of thing But largely I mean I think all this is taking off so much faster than anyone expected on this I guess second revolution if you want to call it that I think we're dabbling in pretty well uncharted territory, so Happy to ride this wave
[00:09:41.803] Kent Bye: Yeah, there were a couple of sort of data visualization-esque scenes within the Crescent Bay demo. Maybe you could sort of comment and sort of your experience of that.
[00:09:51.780] Bobby Boyd: Yeah, I think I know the scene that you're talking about. It kind of drops you on a map looking-esque. I remember Matt came out of the demo and mentioned the same thing. He was like, we have to do that. It's an experience that's hard to capture in words. You sort of have to experience it yourself. But when you are kind of just standing and walking among the data, it's just a completely different experience than anything else. I think there's going to be a lot of value that we can discover. And I think the experience is really going to sell itself once we get in front of the right people in these organizations.
[00:10:22.982] Kent Bye: Yeah, the thing that came to my mind was like, oh wow, I feel like I'm an urban planner and I'm looking at all these heat maps on top of a cityscape. But the interesting thing was that I could actually dive down to different depths and sort of look at it and look at it from underneath now. I don't know what the pragmatic use of looking at the data from underneath would actually be, but there was a sense of being able to see different layers of information. And so if you were looking straight down, you could sort of see that perhaps there was an overlay or transparency that you could start to see a certain amount of depth. And that had been like one of the first experiences that I've seen, at least in virtual reality, that I could see like, oh, wow, I just want to have all this data around me to be able to see those types of patterns.
[00:11:07.076] Bobby Boyd: Yeah, I think you hit on it. I also think one of the superpowers is you have the ability now to take a vantage point that's either hugely expensive or impossible to achieve in real life. So I think that's going to be hugely beneficial for some applications. Like you said, if you're a city planner, a lot of that GIS data is publicly available. I just slurped down the city of Chicago buildings geometry right before I made this trip. And, yeah, one of our visualizations we hope to do is just map to some real-world geometry, probably start with, you know, the Earth and be able to zoom in at local scale. I think it'll really put things in focus for certain data sets. I think it'll be hugely beneficial to realize this actual scale in some cases.
[00:11:48.771] Kent Bye: And maybe you could talk a bit more about your gestural interactions because, you know, you've been using the Leap Motion and being able to interact with virtual reality by just kind of waving your hands around and doing different gestures. What do you find was working really well for you?
[00:12:01.643] Bobby Boyd: Yeah, it's a good question, what works and what doesn't work. So I just got out of the Future of VR panel. I hope that was livestreamed so everyone that's not here can see that everyone agrees this is kind of a huge unsolved problem. And I think it's exciting but also a little bit demotivating to consider the really hard problems that that panel has been able to solve and deliver in Crescent Bay and, you know, the future of Oculus display hardware. for them all to agree that, oh yeah, input is really hard, I think. We still don't know where that's going to shape up. But there are some pretty cool advances happening. Like I said, so far we've been playing with the Leap Motion front-mounted, you know, the VR profile. If you're at Leap Motion, I assume VR had to kind of breathe new life into the company. It's hugely exciting, I think, for those guys to see a lot of the work that they've already done in optical hand tracking now become much more relevant than maybe it was having this sensor lay on the desk. So that's exciting. I think they still have a long way to go. Some of the gestures that have worked best for us is mapping the skeleton to some 3D model and participating in a rigid body dynamic simulation. So you sort of got to experience some of what we've built. It's still got a long way to go. Being able to reach out and touch something or spin something or flip a switch, those interactions work quite well, I think, today. The ones that we still have trouble with are the gestures that come out of the Leap Motion SDK where you can subscribe to a tap event or a swipe event. Those ones are pretty tough. There's been some pretty good stuff written. There's also, you know, completely different, we spent some time at the Control VR office looking at what they're doing with their data gloves. Right before you picked me up for this interview, I was checking out the latest from a Mountain View company called Nod, where they've got some hardware that it's basically an IMU that you wear on your ring, an IMU armlet that you wear on your armband. All that stuff that maps to the skeleton. I think what we're going to see, and I was talking about this with Doc Ock a little bit, I think there's room for a working committee to come together and try to abstract a lot of the way that the gestural input works, so that it's not up to the developers really to re-implement for each different hardware device, re-implement a lot of the hard problems in software. A lot of that should just be solved for you as a developer, as an app or a game developer. You should just be able to say, yes, I want to do VR input, and this is the type of input I want to support, and that's it. And then it should be pushed back down to the device manufacturer to say, yeah, we conform to the VR input standards.
[00:14:36.154] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that's a sort of tricky thing right now, you know, because you could have the fidelity of fingers on a control VR, but yet, you know, you may not have that same level of fidelity on a STEM system. So, but yeah, I do agree that some sort of middleware, I think that's the thing that has to happen is like once Oculus comes out with their standard VR input control, then they could define at least an initial standard and then expand it to some extent, but then There needs to have some room for innovation for the market to decide what's going to be the most popular with the constraints and the functionality, and then from there start to do the standards. If you do the standards too early, then it could block and limit innovation. I guess it's like a tricky thing with the web where they kind of let people do things, but yet they don't make the internet standards before it's actually implemented across all the browsers, you know.
[00:15:23.717] Bobby Boyd: Yeah, you make a good point. I mean, I think the last thing any of us want to end up with is like another, you know, the programming language of the web is JavaScript and everyone realizes that. Even Brandon Ike says, you know, it's kind of a mistake of history that that's thrust upon us now. So you end up with all these higher level languages that compile down to JavaScript and it's become the bytecode of the web. So yeah, in a way, yeah, we definitely don't want to paint ourselves into a corner. That would be undesirable. But yeah, there's got to be a better way. I think a lot of people are trying to evolve towards it. I think the answer is going to be in just a lot of us coming together. And I think Oculus made a great step by open sourcing the DK1 design. That's awesome. I think open source VR has to start taking off in a big way. So I don't know. I'm ready to donate all the stuff I've built over the last eight months to the open source community. And I hope that we all come together and start to tackle some of these harder problems.
[00:16:15.821] Kent Bye: And I'm curious if you could maybe comment on the name of your company, because it's a little ironic in some ways of being called an anarchist, but yet sort of working with Salesforce, which could be considered one of the most enterprise-y type of collaborations you could possibly have. So how did the name come about, and how do you sort of resolve that sense of irony?
[00:16:33.742] Bobby Boyd: Well, it depends on what lens you view it through, so I actually don't think there's any conflict there. So, the name Anarchist, I think it's an unfortunate twist of fate that now we're in this place where it's immediately associated with sort of the Molotov cocktail-throwing, long-haired hippie crowd. You know, Eric Schmidt of Google, I think, said it best that the Internet is the first invention mankind has invented that we don't understand. You know, it is anarchy. I think we're all anarchists if we're on the edge of technology because the rules are undefined. So it's more in that sense and less of let's all grab pitchforks and overthrow government. Even within the anarchism community, a lot of people have much different definitions of what anarchy means. But I guess personally I do subscribe to a particular slant of anarcho-capitalism.
[00:17:25.353] Kent Bye: Cool. And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential for what virtual reality could provide and how you want to sort of help push it in that direction?
[00:17:36.221] Bobby Boyd: So that's a great question. I think that I stumbled into VR because I have a mindset geared towards technology enabling us to become more than human. So I go well off the deep end and drink all the Kool-Aid on the transhumanism bit. And I think that it's through technology that will evolve ever further towards a limit of utopia. And I think that VR is going to play a big role in doing that.
[00:18:03.942] Kent Bye: Is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say?
[00:18:06.764] Bobby Boyd: I'm privileged to be a part of this. It's one of the greatest communities that I've ever seen in tech or elsewhere. So I'm really happy to be here at the first Oculus Connect event to meet you and everyone else. It's amazing to see all these great minds kind of condensed into one small little proximity. that this is hugely beneficial to get us all connected and I think, you know, a lot of the most valuable things that are happening are outside of the presentation room, so it's just amazing the, just the volume of people that, just valuable connections being made all over the place here. I imagine you feel the same way.
[00:18:41.922] Kent Bye: Yeah, totally. So great. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. 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.
