Laval Virtual has a AR/VR Business Intelligence division that tracks the use cases and evolution of XR applications, and produces a number of VR/AR newsfeed email lists and reports (like this free magazine on Health Applications of XR). I had a chance to talk with Head of Laval Virtual’s Intelligence Services, Marie Leblanc, who has a background in industrial design. We talk about the types of research and reports they produce, and why she decided to move back home to Laval from Paris to work with Laval Virtual.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. Hello, my name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. So last week was the Laval Virtual World, which was the online version of Laval Virtual. And because I had a chance to attend both the Laval Virtual last year, as well as this year, I ended up running into a lot of people and I decided just to kind of dig into my archives and air some interviews that I did from Laval Virtual 2019. So this interview is with Marie Leblanc. She's a industrial designer and she's actually the head of Laval virtuals intelligence services. And so they do a lot of these email roundups of all the news at some of the researchers read up to like four to 5,000 articles a week trying to synthesize what's new, what the use cases are, and they're aggregating all this information and they end up being a year round liaison between the different service providers and the customers and people that are in the community from around the world really. But they also put together these different reports. I know they just recently released a report about medical applications of XR and they have three other previous reports that they did as well that have print versions. But you can download the latest version for free just to get a sense of the type of research that they're doing. So we're covering all that and more on today's episode of Oasis of VR podcast. So this interview with Marie happened on Friday, March 22nd, 2019 at the Laval Virtual Conference in Laval, France. So, with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:38.688] Marie Leblanc: I'm Marie Leblanc. I'm an industrial designer. I'm working for 16 years. I worked a lot of the industry and for automotive and electronics, robotics. And one day I worked on a VR project for Starvia. So I was discovering this immersive technologies I was very interested in and I decided to come in Laval to work by Laval Virtual. And here I am working with the enterprises, the societies, companies. So we do everything we can with what we have. The exhibition, that is a 20 years exhibition. And we know a lot of people all over the world, a lot of solutions providers, and we are a facilitator by Laval Virtual. We don't just do the exhibition, we work all the year with solutions providers and also with the companies. And my work is to take care about the companies, that we can answer to the issues that they have and how these technologies can help and what they can do, how they can deploy or not, because we're not a lobbying that's ready to know if it's better with this new technology or this one. and also the budget or money they have to find solutions. We are really a facilitator. So we do creativity stations, we use the Agile methods to to find the solutions. And because we know a lot of people, we are able, for example, to say to a company for this project that it's good if you see what this solution provider did, because he has already thought about that.
[00:03:38.414] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I'm curious if you could tell me a bit more about the business intelligence services, the newsletters you sent out and all the different topics that you're covering and helping keep the larger community informed about.
[00:03:51.583] Marie Leblanc: That's very important for us to have the knowledge, to know. And okay, we have internet, the internet to know, but on the internet you can find all and everything. And so we have curators by Laval Virtual. They are reading 5,000 articles per week and they just select. And sometimes you see news that we already saw one year before or a company that is closed and you continue to see news about these companies even if it's closed. Our curators, they know, so we have a newsfeed, the Laval Virtual Newsfeed, where every week you can receive this newsfeed in your mailbox on the sector you're working in. So if you're working in the health, medicine, or handicap, or art, culture, aeronautics, you can receive your letter just in your domain. And we do that for more than 20 sectors. That's a hard work for the curators because they have to verify every data, every information. But that's very useful for us also, this business intelligence, because they are looking the patents also and everything, so we know what's happened. And what is important also, we did last year a tour, a European tour, with a camping car. They were meeting all the VR community in Europe, in every country. So it means that we meet the people, we see where they are working with the devices they are using, we can discuss with them about their projects also, and we know also that's not always on the Internet.
[00:05:41.892] Kent Bye: Yeah, I mean, that's what I've found being a journalist embedded in this community is that I see how the news articles get written. They're often press releases that get sent by companies that have a lot of money and resources to tell the story. And then a lot of those press releases then maybe just get rewritten by some of the news organizations. You know, there's a lot of journalists that are doing a lot of independent work, but for me, as a journalist, I was surprised at how much of the news cycle was driven by these press releases. And I've often found that I get way more interesting information by talking to the people that are the closest to the innovation and the creation of those developers. And so going to those communities and to listening to what those developers are doing, what the people driven by passion or art or storytelling and to see what they're thinking about the medium. And I think it's those perspectives that I get a lot of the most interesting information. So it's nice to hear that there's a combination or blend there.
[00:06:43.468] Marie Leblanc: Yes and in the beginning we didn't know if we would find maybe between five and ten news every week just on one sector in the world because that are just the news of the week. We don't give you news from one month, two months, that's really every week and it functions. It means also the quantity of news that we have on VRAR because sometimes we just read fashion articles or I mean just because it's today it's that makes good to speak about VRAR but We have to read everything just to find the scientific documents or the real use cases which really enhance the human abilities. So that's our goal, to have a real quality in what we give as information in these letters.
[00:07:43.020] Kent Bye: Yeah, because it seems like that VR and AR as technologies, that they're really a new communications medium. That means that it has the potential to touch every domain of human experience. So in some ways, you have to start to read everything that's happening. And I imagine eventually you're going to see these immersive technologies start to entering into all these different domains.
[00:08:05.988] Marie Leblanc: There is too much news, so that is also the idea that when you are in a company and you don't have a lot of time and you just want to follow what's happening. You can have this Laval Vertos news feed, and just you read the five, six news in the beginning. You also have business news, a company by another company. So you can have an idea. And after, if you want to go in detail, we have other services where we can do a presentation of use cases in your domain, or we can do state of the art, or we can go really more deeper. But just for this first service, that's very useful. Every morning you just read the use cases in your domain and you know about it.
[00:08:54.704] Kent Bye: And so in talking to Simon, who's the founder of the Laval Virtual, he was saying that over like 21 years that this has been going on and that it was really a strong political vision by the local governments and community here to really put the money and funding into this idea that you would create this center in Laval, France, that would be this center of innovation for virtual reality technologies and that Over the last 21 years. It's been that consistent gathering the community with this level virtual conference and then Sounds like there's all sorts of things that are happening year-round with interfacing with those same communities to both Cultivate the community educate the community, but also potentially provide specific services And so since you're part of the business of services, what are some of the other services that you're providing to these companies? I
[00:09:47.338] Marie Leblanc: That is really on the how to make the companies, they can decide because they arrive, even if they know a little bit about VR air, they don't know really how they can do. For example, we are working for the sport, for the high level. and the performance and they have innovation services but they don't know what could be the better way to use the potential of these immersive technologies to make the sportman more performant. So we are working on that, for example. Or we are also working with the Andra, that is for nuclear waste. The rest, when you don't use everything, at the end you have nuclear... Nuclear waste? Waste, yes. Thank you. The nuclear waste. And how can you use the immersive technology to organize when you put under the earth... I'm sorry, I don't find the vocabulary, but... how can we deal with this nuclear waste? So we thought about with big groups, that was with Simon also, on solutions, just how immersive technologies can help to work on that.
[00:11:04.285] Kent Bye: And so maybe you could tell me a bit of your journey into virtual reality, like when was the first time that you saw a VR experience?
[00:11:12.824] Marie Leblanc: The first time. Do you really want to know? That was not a good time. That was for Star VR. That was with Guillaume Gouraud from Star VR. And I had to test catatonic. The first time that was a little bit too much for me and I just closed my eyes inside the experience and he said but do you know that you can move your head and I was yes yes that was the first time but after I tried yes other experiences and I saw that everything what is immersive, it touches the emotions very strongly. So also for the memory that is really incredible how fast it is when you learn something in virtual reality or how intuitive it is when you use something with augmented reality. So you have the impression that everything is easier and I think that has something to be with the cognitive load. because for any other devices I have the impression that you have just one way to communicate and with the immersive technologies you can send messages as in theater or as in the real life with nonverbal communication so it means that you can get more information from the senses and from everything else and it means in the task you are doing you have the impression that is more simple, more light.
[00:12:46.649] Kent Bye: Well, because you're doing industrial design, I've talked to different people in augmented reality. And they talk about how industrial designers understand how to design spatial experiences for people. They have to understand the affordances of what is comfortable, ergonomic. And there's a specific design strategy that I think actually translates over to virtual reality pretty well. And so for you, what was the moment that you decided to go from industrial design into more fully focused on virtual reality technologies?
[00:13:15.636] Marie Leblanc: I think there has something to be with the user experience. Because, okay, when you are drawing, you know the materials and the plastics and the metals and everything. But in the beginning, what is doing the designer? I think the product, that is the end of the reflection. In the beginning, the reflection is on how we can use that. Will that be useful and how? painless or that's really around the user experience and after at the end you take your pen and you draw something physical because that's what is demanded from the industrials but here is the same you have needs and you have challenges and it is all about conception and user experience so how can we make to make that the easier possible and the more comfortable possible and so that can help to make the life better.
[00:14:19.870] Kent Bye: Yeah, and the other interesting thing about Laval for me is that it's this old town that's relatively small rural area that's away from the city by one to two hours away, three hours if you drive. So what was it about Laval that made you decide to come to Laval away from Paris and to transition and to be working in the city?
[00:14:44.375] Marie Leblanc: I was working for 15 years in Paris. I used to work for 15 years in Paris. And I have two children. And we were four in 60 square meters. And we were dreaming of a house. And I decided to change of work. I wanted to work. I had sent some letters in Paris, and just one letter in Laval, because I thought that would be a great thing. I'm born in Laval and I thought it could be great to work in Laval, but I was also following Laval Virtual from a few years of what they were doing. Because in my ex-job, we went in Laval Virtual every year to see the technologies because we needed that. When I arrived in Laval and I met Laurent, and I said, yes, I'm interested in Laval-Virtuano, and he said, OK, that's possible. We can work together. That was really a chance for me, because I can do the same work as I did in Paris. I'm in contact with so many countries. People who are coming to the Laval-Virtuano Center are coming from Chile, Peru, India, China, and other countries, Spain. And for me, it is very important because we are in Laval, but we could be in any other country in the world because we see so many people all over the world. So I think it's pretty much more richer than what I did in Paris. And I have the house for the children and the forest next to it for the Sunday.
[00:16:27.298] Kent Bye: I think that's actually a trend that I'm starting to see in terms of the rural areas that they have more space and I think that there's been a lot of consolidation and centralization of people within cities but just to see all the different problems of the prices that in San Francisco is a good example to see how much it costs to be able to live there. I live in Portland, Oregon, and so there's a lot of people from both Los Angeles and San Francisco that are moving into Portland because it's like they can afford a house there while they can't afford it either in San Francisco or in Los Angeles. But I think that eventually that people are going to be moving further and further into the country because At some point, once the VR technology gets good enough, they're going to be able to have access to these cultural and social experiences that they'll be able to maybe jump into a virtual reality and then be able to have these social interactions and cultural interactions. And the sense of presence will be just as good as if they were with them face-to-face. Maybe it'll take a long time to get there, but I think it'll get to the point sooner than we think where it feels just as a compelling interaction as to being face-to-face. But because of that, I think there's going to be a lot more of remote work, distributed work, people working from home, and to have these homes where you actually have space that you can have connection to nature and have connection to those local communities. So I actually see that there's going to be like this flight away from these huge urban centers that are so expensive into these more smaller communities, a decentralization of people into more rural areas that the virtual and augmented and immersive technologies and spatial computing is going to help make that possible.
[00:18:04.497] Marie Leblanc: Yeah. And what is very important to us by Laval Virtual, I felt that when I came and I feel that since I am there, that is the proximity. I see all the team has a very good relationships with every solutions providers. They call them easily just to ask them, yes, how they are or what happens for the moment. Laval Virtual, the exhibition, that is the way to meet us regularly also. Because that make 20 years in the beginning that was just few person of the community. And after more and more, and we see us every year. So that's a habit, and we are very happy to see us. And what we want to keep by Laval Virtual is also this proximity. We try all of the team for every people that we are in contact also in the year by the Laval Virtual Center is ready to keep that.
[00:18:59.067] Kent Bye: Yeah, I get this strong sense of community that's here because of that. And that there's exhibits, and you can see these different experiences. And so in a lot of ways, you have a group of people that have been coming here for, some of them that I've met, that have been coming here since the beginning for 21 years, year after year, every year, and then having these shared experiences. And that there's something about what you've been able to create here that's really cultivating an ecosystem. That when I compare what has happened here with that government support and all the focus of building that community versus what happens the United States which is almost like a blindness for what it means to actually cultivate that type of community and to be competitive and secretive and to not have the amount of sharing or to think about things in terms of marketing or numbers that it's hard to measure the success for a community. And so because of that, there hasn't been a lot of focus or investment by these major companies or institutions to support some of the big community gatherings, like Silicon Valley Virtual Reality Conference or VRLA. Some of the biggest companies in the immersive space were absent from supporting those community gatherings. Because everything has to be turned into a business, can only be driven by passion and vision for so long until they don't get the economic support to be able to sustain themselves, and then they have to take a year off. So SVVR didn't meet last year, VRLA is taking a year off. So just at the point where VR is starting to catch this momentum in the larger consumer market, some of the biggest community organizations in the United States aren't even meeting. And so to see what's happening with the Love All virtual for the last 21 years, there's been that focus on the cultivation of that community.
[00:20:42.544] Marie Leblanc: And for example, we are in contact with the Reality Center in London or with other centers in the world, which we are doing facilitation also, because there is no competition. And also with AWE, we are in contact with them, or with the VR Days in Amsterdam. We are working together. So it's very important for us to know every network of VR here, just to know more. about what we can do with this immersive technologies, what happened and what direction it is going to have.
[00:21:19.776] Kent Bye: Great. And so for you, what are some of the either biggest open questions you're trying to answer or open problems you're trying to solve?
[00:21:29.679] Marie Leblanc: For me, with my position by business services, that is how to deploy. Because we see a lot of person we're interested in, we develop proof of concepts, and we see some sectors as construction or industry where it is used for the maintenance. a lot or for supply chain but that is just on one use for example in this society so the question for me is that's interesting to know which will be the moment when they will decide to use that for a lot of other things or use in their companies because there is so much potential with this technology so I'm just wondering the place of immersive technologies in the businesses. And I'm wondering that also because for a company, when it invests a lot in new materials, for example, and the new technologies, they are going so fast. So that we can ask us for the research, no problem. It can be very fast, but for an industry, If they decide to change the devices of a lot of people or to use new methods, it has to stay maybe two, three, four years. If it's changed every six months, the industries, they don't know if they should go or not because they know that in six months that will maybe change. So I think With the cloud solutions, we will arrive to something that can bring stability for the industries and so that they can maybe use many devices just with solution on the cloud and they don't need to make everything new each six months. I think here for me is an issue that I'm curious to know how we will do that.
[00:23:37.471] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I also wanted to just call out that we were participating in the Love All virtual think tank leading up to the Love All virtual conference and that it was a great opportunity for me and I think for everybody in the group to be able to just come together and brainstorm on a number of different topics including what presence is and social experiences as well as a lot of these ethical and moral dilemmas that I think virtual immersive technologies are presenting and so I'm just curious to hear your experience of that think tank, because you were able to help create some amazing mind maps to be able to help communicate some of the distilled takeaways that we had from that brainstorming session. But yeah, just curious to hear your experience of that.
[00:24:16.698] Marie Leblanc: frustration because we said so much interesting things and that was so really interesting everything and I could not note everything and sometimes I understood what happened but you don't know with which words you have to say that or how you can draw that and Maybe, I said, for next year we had to film it so that I can see that again, just to have everything. But I think that's the play. That's always like this, in the beginning a lot of ideas and after we converge and just to synthesize and to have a base for discussions and to be able to share also this document to the whole community.
[00:25:02.905] Kent Bye: Yeah, I found that at the VR Privacy Summit, it was a similar thing, where we were able to brainstorm the whole landscape of all these things, but then to distill it down into some sort of comprehensive takeaway is a challenge. But I'm actually really happy with what we were able to at least distill it down. But I agree that there's so much that was happening. And you're a native French speakers or first language, and then you're listening to people speak English, and then you're writing notes in English in a very dense topic. So I think you did a great job of all things considered in that. But yeah, for me, it was just a great opportunity to just brainstorm. And it sounds like there's a lot of that type of open innovation and creative practices that happens at Laval Virtual to be able to try to be in conversation with all these people, and to help brainstorm, and to figure out what those problems are, and to start to at least capture that space. And then from there, try to figure out a strategy for how to address it.
[00:25:54.799] Marie Leblanc: Yes, and that was very interesting for me also that you came from the group, in the group we came from different origins. I mean scientists or more on what exists, for example like me or I'm not a scientist, so we had different profiles and that was very interesting to discuss together because it is from different entries. and I learned a lot with everyone and that was also a very not comfortable but very good thing for me to be with you because I like the personalities of everyone and I like the dynamic that was in the group and I like this idea that the chateau is also a very beautiful place. Yes, the mood of these two days were very, very good to me. And I said, just after the Think Tank, I called my boss and I said, OK, forget everything I do by Laval Virtual. I just want to do Visionary Think Tank all the time.
[00:27:01.890] Kent Bye: That's great. And finally, what do you think the ultimate potential of virtual reality is and what it might be able to enable?
[00:27:13.455] Marie Leblanc: I really believe in augmented reality for every people. I mean, we will see for virtual reality, but just an intuition like this. I have the impression virtual reality can be used for companies, for the work, because it helps methods or maybe also for the training. But I have the impression that augmented reality is accessible for everybody and we can see with iCloud and with the clouds which are coming or with the 5G, the connectivity and also for websites for example in the beginning you had to build your own websites, you had to ask for somebody to do that and today you can find solutions on the internet and you can do your website. So I think it could be the same for augmented reality applications that could also be used in companies but that will be easily after to do content for this solution and easily to use also because of the hardwares because you can use that on your smartphone and that's really intuitive. So maybe we will find solutions with virtual reality devices that are really easy to use and so everybody will use that but if not I see that like this but virtual reality will be more developed for really precise goals and really precise actions and augmented reality very free with open source to develop just what we need with that or what can help.
[00:28:58.817] Kent Bye: Awesome, great. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:29:05.118] Marie Leblanc: Keep going, because we are very happy to read, to see everything new, everything what is developed. That's so amazing what we can do with that. And there is two things. We spoke about the polarity of these immersive technologies also. So I would say keep going in a direction which doesn't hurt human.
[00:29:34.605] Kent Bye: Awesome. Great. Well, thank you so much.
[00:29:36.728] Marie Leblanc: You're welcome. Thank you a lot Kent.
[00:29:39.232] Kent Bye: So that was Marie Leblanc. She's an industrial designer as well as the head of Laval Virtuals Intelligence Services. So I have a number of different takeaways about this interview is that first of all, Well, Laval virtual has been producing all sorts of really compelling research and building this network for the last 20 plus years. They had the European tour last year, and they announced it this year, but I doubt that it's actually going to happen with Coronavirus and COVID-19. I just don't see how taking a road trip around all of Europe is going to be a viable thing, especially with this global pandemic. But in the past, we're able to take a camper and just go to different regions, different areas and meet face to face with the different solution providers and the companies. And so they've really just been building out their network from around Europe. And they also been producing these free email digest. And Marie said that they had consumed up to four to 5000 articles per week, just trying to survey all the different news that's out there and aggregate different use cases and different studies and synthesize all that and send it out on their newsletter. And their intelligence services in terms of putting together these different reports, they put together a great report about medical applications of XR at the the latest level virtual world. And you know the the thing that was also really compelling was the fact that Marie was born around Laval and then she worked for a long time in Paris but then decided to come back into Laval to be able to work and this trend of how Laval was just kind of like this small town where it didn't necessarily like merit being able to compete with all these other big urban centers but local government had this vision to be able to really support this creation of the center and to really focus on an emerging technology. In their case, they've been doing it for over 20 years now. And so they've been really able to like, foster this rich and deep community. And also, because it's virtual reality technologies, they've really had people from around the world be able to come visit virtually, especially this last week, they had over 11 000 registrants to the laval virtual world they had over 6 000 people create avatars for verbella which is the online platform that they used and then at any given moment there was over 1200 concurrent users which happened on the first day of laval virtual world but Marie is able to be there in Laval and be able to have the different types of conversations that she would have in Paris because there's people from around the world who are working in emerging technologies and it just allows her to be able to engage with the different types of people that she normally would run into just physically in Paris but here it's like this topic of interest that has allowed her to like basically have this very rich professional life in the middle of an area that doesn't have a lot of other cultural institutions and other things around it. So, you know, I just was interviewed over the weekend on the between realities podcast, and we started off talking about the coronavirus and how the coronavirus in the COVID-19 is something that, you know, for the foreseeable future, we may or may not have a vaccine. We're not quite sure. There's certainly approaches with testing and contact tracing and things to be able to mitigate how to go back to the sense of normal, but we look at this as a potentially new era for the next number of decades, whether or not there's going to be continued outbreaks of different severity, we don't know what is going to happen. But certainly this is a once in a 100 year event. And maybe it's going to be more frequently, we don't know quite yet. But the point is, is that we can start to use the virtual reality technologies to start to build in some resilience to actually build up some technologies and some capabilities that we may not normally have the initiative or incentive to be able to do, but really start to eat our own dog food and see how far we can use these immersive technologies so that if things do go back to some sense of normalcy, then, you know, maybe we'll realize we don't have to do as much travel as we needed to before. Or maybe the culture of remote work will be just so much more finely developed and so that people could start to live from anywhere and start to work for a wide variety of different institutions. So I think this is an opportunity to start to see how we can start to decentralize and decolonize these urban centers and start to move out and spread out a little bit, perhaps, which is a big part of the work-life balance that Marie decided to move back to Laval. And maybe there'll be a broader movement towards that. That's yet to be seen, especially as we are still at the very early days of this. And we don't know If and when there will be a vaccine, fingers crossed that there will and things will just, you know, slip back to normal. But I think that there is a benefit to be able to shift some of these deeper habits and patterns because there's, there's larger issues that also need to be shifted as well. So just in talking to Marie, I was sort of pontificating about this back in March of last year. So it was really striking for me to hear this again, to be like, Oh yeah, wow, this is actually like coming to pass where we do have this forced remote work from home type of thing that's happening right now. And so, yeah, just to see how we can continue to use these immersive technologies to push that forward. So that's all that I have for today. And I just wanted to thank you for listening to the voices of VR podcast and If you enjoyed the podcast, then please do spread the word, tell your friends, and consider becoming a member of the Patreon. This is a listener-supported podcast, and so I do rely upon donations from people like yourself in order to continue to bring you this coverage. So you can become a member and donate today at patreon.com slash voicesofvr. Thanks for listening.
