David Nahon is a pioneer of the French XR industry who is currently working at Dassault Systèmes’ 3D Experience Lab. I had a chance to talk with Nahon at Laval Virtual 2019 where we talk about how he’s using VR for Open Innovation to include more perspectives within the design process, how they’re using VR for remote collaboration, and to help unlock creativity with experiences like the 3D Dream Sketcher.
LISTEN TO THIS EPISODE OF THE VOICES OF VR PODCAST
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4VPbM-yAaMw
I ran into Nahon at Laval Virtual World 2020, and here’s some takeaways from out discussion:
50/ Noise distractions were so bad we relocated to a quieter spot, but still had distracting grass animations. @iVEvangelist said the VR head movement is only represented in 3DoF so far as part of optimization process. Fascinating chat on perception & phenomenological calibration pic.twitter.com/lZZ2RYrFlL
— Kent Bye (Voices of VR) (@kentbye) April 22, 2020
This is a listener-supported podcast through the Voices of VR Patreon.
Music: Fatality
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 continuing on my little mini series of interviews that I did from Laval Virtual 2019. This interview is with David Naon. He's from Desos Systems. He's a part of the 3D Experience Lab and he's working on this concept called Open Innovation with XR Technologies. And so this specific system is working with people who are going to be on the front lines of some of the designs that are being created and then to get them integrated into the creative and design process to really create systems that are going to solve the needs that they have on the front lines. And so trying to broaden the scope of who has input and to use these immersive and virtual reality technologies in order to facilitate that. So that's what we're covering on today's episode of the Voices of VR podcast. So this interview with David happened on Wednesday, March 20th, 2019 at the Laval Virtual Conference in Laval, France. So with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:09.850] David Nahon: Hello, I'm David Naon. I work at Dassault Systèmes in the 3D Experience Lab. I do open innovation with XR technologies and I support the strategy of Dassault Systèmes and the teams that are building solutions for our customers where I could value the intrinsic power of XR for our customers, basically.
[00:01:35.015] Kent Bye: Can you give me a little bit more context as to what Dassault Systems is and what they do?
[00:01:40.059] David Nahon: Yeah, sure. So Dassault Systems is not Dassault Plains, let's be clear. We are selling software for 12 industries and clouds and solutions. So we historically have the editors of Catia or SolidWorks, which are computer-aided design tools. But obviously we went much in a broader area. And so we address 12 industries, so starting by automotive, aerospace, and this kind of CAD-centric industries, but we are also into construction, energy, life science, any high-tech goods or whatever, consumer-oriented goods.
[00:02:18.419] Kent Bye: And so maybe you could talk a bit about how Desktop Systems is using XR within all these industries. And maybe by answering that, what you were presenting here at the Laval Virtual, giving a little bit of insight as to what's happening in the realm of spatial computing with you.
[00:02:33.616] David Nahon: Sure. So what we hope to provide are solutions that cover all the product lifecycle of our customers. So the lifecycle starts with upstream thinking and ideation. And so for instance we are launching those monsters kind of immersing sketching tool right inside CATIA. which enable creative designers to invent, ideate, and create new shapes, but not just for the sake of creating them, really for the sake of fitting their production, their pipeline, with insights that then they can use in CATIA and keep going and modeling the future user's experience. So that's one area where we started to launch an actual product. and more globally we have solutions just to do immersive visualization as a whole. Would it be for a person standing on his desk or collaborating with someone who is like in room scale and I'm on my desk and I can share my design for instance and get the feedback from my management or from a customer and basically use VR to make sure that the design you're currently producing is going to be usable, for instance, for an end user. And that, I believe, is really the key lever for VR in the product lifecycle, is how you can model the future experience of a future user and let some real user pretend they are the future users and provide the feedback about how usable things are or how aesthetical it is appealing or not or anything that is so important to make sure that you engineer the good product after that. And also we can do this in a collaborative way remotely you can connect to the same model that is being designed and be multiple people in the same space sharing your insights and taking decisions so that you solve the problem. And that is, I believe, extremely interesting, especially when traveling is going to be a big challenge in terms also of environment. I think having the capacity to meet a collaborator inside your design and work together without having to physically be in the same room is definitely useful. So we're very much into that.
[00:05:04.243] Kent Bye: How do you measure success in terms of the impact of what these communication technologies are doing, the level of immersion? How do you know that what you're doing is working?
[00:05:14.642] David Nahon: So yeah, the question is how do we measure the success? So it's true that we'd love and we have discussions with some research teams on how we could actually measure ideation sessions with or without those immersive tools and have an objective measure. As a software vendor, we can also measure the success of our sales. That's a bit tribal, but it's true that if our customers want it, it's probably that it's providing value. It's true that it's not an easy topic to measure the success. So we'll tell you. I don't know yet.
[00:05:54.534] Kent Bye: It sounds like that you're building a number of different either collaboration tools or trying to break down the distance of space by having virtual interactions or design processes that are happening within virtual worlds. If you're creating these solutions, then what's the story you're telling to these different companies that would convince them to be able to buy these products?
[00:06:15.347] David Nahon: Okay, so the main pitch that we say is that we're entering a world of deployment. So far, people have sold, I mean, software vendors have sold to innovation centers that would provide service internally in the big companies, helping them start to use VR for design, for training, for manufacturing, all these kind of areas. And what we see now is that the business units themselves are coming to us, asking us solutions. And what we provide them, which is different to what people would have done so far, is integrated solutions. Basically, a product is being designed in a life cycle, which we think needs to be continuous and not broken. The digital continuity, so-called. So if you are able to, for instance, sketch a new mirror of a car that you already sold, but you want to find a new design, then you can work directly on the CAD model which you had and iterate on that. And you don't have to export it to another tool, which would be very good in VR, but potentially not connected to this continuous digital backbone. And our customers are very strict on their data. They don't want their data to fly away. They hope that their data will be managed in a back office which has all the security and is always in sync with the best so far design, the single source of truth. And so what we provide them is solutions that plugs to their existing tool and adds new functionalities thanks to VR, but does not break the way they work currently, which is in a continuous way.
[00:08:10.678] Kent Bye: Yeah, and a big part of talking about the full life cycle of a product, the ideation and the innovation has to happen. It's very creative and also often requires a lot of collaboration or at least being able to take something that is in your mind and an idea and being able to either write it down, talk about it or visualize it if it's a spatial concept that you could only understand it if you have a spatial experience of it. So just curious how you think about innovation, creativity, and how all these XR tools are able to lower the barriers to innovation.
[00:08:46.648] David Nahon: It's a very interesting question. The answer is XR, and in particular VR, offers by definition a very natural experience. Basically, all you need to know is how to make a step, how to grab something, look around, move around, like you do in the real life. So you don't need to learn anything specific. And the consequence of that is that designers can include population in their innovation process which so far would not have been included unless if they built physical prototypes. Basically you do a virtual digital prototype that has all the appearance and behavior of what you have in mind and you test it. You test it with real users or you test it for instance with the reseller of your product because they know their customers which are your very end customers. And so you do open innovation basically with a broad range of users. Another example being Workself or an assembly line. If you have the actual workers or the guy who heads the team of the people who are actually on the shop floor mounting a car, if you get that guy, you put it into your VR experience with a new proposition of how you may put that part into this one and it's heavy and it's challenging and it doesn't fit well and so on. If the guy is able to sketch himself the path that he thinks should be used, your designer is going to do a much better job than if he just designs with the intuition it will work. You design for the population that you want to design to and you bring this population into your VR system right away.
[00:10:41.318] Kent Bye: Yeah. So how do you tune in and figure out what the problems are or what should even, I guess there's, there's a bit of just understanding a population, a context, and then identifying a problem. But then there's a leap between identifying a problem and then knowing that immersive technologies could potentially provide a solution to some of those problems. And so maybe you could talk about making that bridge between the problems that you can identify and then actually creating something that's useful.
[00:11:09.972] David Nahon: I would say the secret is the insight you get as soon as you're embodied, potentially at scale one. Your creativity is in your body, it's in your inner brain. It's not into your cortex, it's really where your muscle drives you. and I'm absolutely sure, and it's very fast, it's probably 100 times faster to use your limbic brain than to use your neocortex, because this one is going to compute things, but basically your inner brain is going just to act. And it may not know why he suddenly moved his head, looked down, and grabbed a part just to unhide it, and hide the thing that is behind, but he had that intuition that the thing to solve is there, And you cannot get that on a desktop because on a desktop your body is not involved So your inner brain is not involved and so you don't have all the intuition and insight that you would want to have
[00:12:11.299] Kent Bye: Yeah, it sounds like you want to really turn off that thinking mind just like more of a meditative state, but getting into more of a flow state where you're able to naturally intuitively move your body instinctually from a real deep place of intuition. It sounds like you're trying to create artists out of people who may have normally been sitting at a desk and getting lost in their brain.
[00:12:33.547] David Nahon: Exactly and behind that we want to involve the person who are going to use the objects that you're designing. Take the example of a place where you get served food for instance. We have like a corporate restaurant in the office and they suddenly decided that they will redesign the stuff. and the girl every day she has to move away from the counter because she doesn't see our trolley where she has to count what we are going to eat and every day she has to act in a painful way. If she had been involved in the design. She would have said, hey, but why don't we move this there because I'm that tall and I cannot reach there, I cannot see there. She would have not only helped the designer to do a better job, which was your question, but in terms of employee, she would have the feeling that she's mastering some of her future, of her working conditions. She can change it. She can be part of it. And in terms of engagement for an employee, I believe this is extremely powerful and people want that.
[00:13:49.724] Kent Bye: What is this class of creativity or innovation tools generally referred to in the industry?
[00:13:56.355] David Nahon: I think it's in the family of open innovation. I mean, open in the sense that you're not trying to do your stuff in a closed way, protecting your IP. Basically, what you start to do is share it with the potential users and customers you want to serve. So that is some of the definition.
[00:14:14.527] Kent Bye: Before it's fully baked or fully formed, you're kind of developing it with them.
[00:14:18.115] David Nahon: Yes, exactly. So that is open innovation. And you can also see it as a creative problem solving kind of family and all the design thinking approach, if that was your question. I mean, it's into all that family, which aims at designing not top down, but really horizontally.
[00:14:37.285] Kent Bye: Yeah, and a couple of years ago, I had a chance to see the demo that you were showing at the IEEE VR conference in Arles, France. And it was using a Kinect to put me into the virtual experience. And so it sounds like there's been a bit of a continuation of noticing the power of embodiment within VR and seeing your body and what that does for unlocking creativity. So what is the connection between seeing your body and being able to tap into those deeper intuitive aspects of creativity?
[00:15:05.263] David Nahon: Yes, so yes, the experiment was called Never Blind in VR and now just after we created another experience called 3D Dream Sketcher where we enhanced the experience with more Kinect so that you really could see yourself and the other people in the room from everywhere. And the difference in Max, it's just first in terms of the presence of the virtual world. Because basically, how can I believe this world is real if inside this world I am invisible? It is just, I believe, maybe you know more than me and the people who listen to us know more, Basically what we observed is that the global feeling of presence is enhanced when you have your hands in front of your headset. You see someone that looks like you, that behaves like you, like in the real world. And so that's the first thing. Also what we usually do when we introduce people into this experience is that I ask them if they see their hands. So they move their hands. I ask them if they see their feet. And they start to correlate their visual with their proprioception. And so yes, they start to be amazed. You can measure this by their facial expression. It's true that suddenly something turns on. And second, ask them to touch my hands. And they touch it where they see my hands and their hands. And again, then it's going to be a reinforcement between their visual and their haptic sensation. And then the feeling of presence, I believe this totally enhances the feeling of presence. So that's the first thing. And the second thing about the creativity, we created this 3D DreamSketcher experience where we ask people to come in a large-scale area and we tell them, okay, this is 3D DreamSketcher, you are going to be able to sketch a dream where you are the hero of that dream. You are the person who acts as the character, the central character of that scene. Take a posture that represents you as doing the thing that you have in your mind. I don't know, I'm driving an exotic vehicle, I'm doing some gym like I'm in the Olympic Games, I'm riding a dragon and playing polo on top of a dragon, whatever you have in your dream. These are real examples. and tell me when you're ready I will press the freeze button and then this avatar of you stays in the place, you step out of the scene and you start looking at you and drawing your sketch on top of you. and that has been proved because people did it and we have all the records online that you can look at that they suddenly become very capable of expressing their dream which is basically an idea they have something deeply into their brain that suddenly emerged and keeps emerging in a very flow state because the tool is easy, and it's fast, and it's natural. And they suddenly build a total world around themselves in a full flow context. And that has been surprisingly productive. I mean, people are really enjoying and producing something when they look at it after they are puzzled how they could have done that. Also, because when they come to the booth where we showed it, We tell them, you are going to draw, and they tell us, no, I don't know how to draw, and these kind of things. But besides the fact that VR is providing a much easier experience to represent something in space, with this experience, we understood that having your body in the scene and stepping out of your body when you froze it is triggering something which is, there is something to study, very strong, very strong.
[00:19:11.935] Kent Bye: Interesting. Yeah, it makes me think of Wikipedia and when you come to a Wikipedia link that's like red that means there's no stub article and sometimes they create the stub article and Sometimes they just create it and it's wrong. And then if it's a wrong stub article It's more likely to get developed into a fully fledged article as if there was nothing there and people have to write everything from scratch so there's this concept of It's easier to correct something that's wrong when you see something that's wrong on the internet. You're like, I have to fix this. But if there's nothing there, then it's a lot harder to just generate it from scratch. So it's easy to iterate on something and to add something incrementally than it is to just create something. because it's so overwhelming. So I know that many times I go into Tilt Brush and it's sort of like, okay, where do I begin? But it sounds like you're able to, in this experience, somehow create a palette of archetypal experiences that people are going through, and they can pause it whenever they feel a moment that is really striking to them, and then they could then trace that moment and then do a drawing that, if they were trying to do that from scratch, they wouldn't be able to, but you're trying to create these stubs of experiences and allowing them to have their body in the experience, which is somehow, having this mysterious connection that makes it so much more compelling for them to then make these artistic depictions of their larger dreams.
[00:20:27.868] David Nahon: Yeah, yes. And if I can add, we had a visitor, quite elderly person. This person came to us and he was like 80 something and a very famous writer and novelist. Well, he visited the company and got received by our executive staff. And they wanted to have him play with the 3D DreamSketcher. But they were a bit afraid because this person did not move in a very fluid way. And they were concerned about the fact that he may fall because of wearing this VR headset and not get his body and his balance. Still, we tried it. I told the staff, don't worry, I'm here, I'm gonna handle that. And so he put the headsets and he looked at his body and we freeze the body in a certain posture. We help him put his body in front of him and then we let him sit in front of his replica of his body. And he looks at himself, static, but very similar to him. And he stays without moving too much during like two minutes. Everyone looks at each other wondering what's happening. And then it was the time for him to give the conference. So we stopped the experience. So he puts off the helmet. And we asked him, how was it? And he said, it was great, I feel so good. And he stands up and he walks to give his conference and he was like 10 years older than when he came. 10 years younger? Younger, yeah. like if seeing him projecting himself into this very still body of him in front of him would have transformed the perception of his own body in a way a more stable way like believing that he's more stable than he actually is, and transforming his behavior. So if anyone has an explanation about that or wants to study that, I'm happy to try to provide our 3D DreamSketcher to study it. Or maybe, I know that since I presented in IEEE VR, Some research teams started to use Kinect as avatar of themselves. Olivia Krilos has been doing that a lot. But I really wonder what happened.
[00:22:58.248] Kent Bye: What's going on? Yeah. What do you think? What do you think is going on? Because there's principles of embodied cognition, which is saying that we don't just think with our brains, we think with our entire bodies. So there's a bit of like distributed cognition that is happening throughout our entire body. Yeah. Do you have any sense?
[00:23:14.976] David Nahon: Yeah, that was a bit like what I imagined. This mirrored you is you, although it's not you, but you perfectly know it's not you. And it's very still. So I don't know, maybe it became a meditative topic.
[00:23:32.475] Kent Bye: Well, in the in the Buddhist circles, there's a concept called witnessing consciousness. And so you're taking yourself, you have an embodiment, you have maybe the virtual body ownership illusion that gets invoked. So you feel like it is your body. And then when you step out of it, you're like having a third person omniscient out of body experience where you're having a witnessing consciousness of yourself. Yeah, so for me, there's a bit of, I've had a number of experiences where I sort of break out of my normal perspective, but I don't necessarily know how deep of the embodiment that I had. So maybe there's a connection there between that virtual body ownership illusion, and then once that's invoked, And then you step outside of it, then it's sort of like almost time traveling. You know, I know Mel Slater has studied the time travel illusion to look at yourself in the past, but here you're kind of like being able to just have that out of body experience where you step out of yourself and you have a spatialized representation of yourself where most of our experiences of ourself have been in 2D photos and You know, what's it mean to start to have a spatialized 3D mirror witnessing consciousness of ourself? And is that being able to set a new context for ourselves that maybe is allow us to step out of our perspectives and our worldviews that we normally have?
[00:24:46.587] David Nahon: Yeah, there's one thing I didn't mention which may have had an influence is that we're much before the Uncanny Valley. The Kinect is actually sensing a point cloud in 3D and it's a bit sparse. So basically you see those pixels moving like you but it's full of holes. And what is sure, especially when you look at yourself, is that you feel the gap, because it's so well correlated with your motion. The latency is very low and is not so perceptible, although it was sensed at only 30 frames per second, because the Kinect 2 was running at that frequency, as far as I understand. Still, the fact that you're before the uncanny valley, meaning you don't start to see ugly, strange representation of you because if you try to make polygons, obviously it will be uncanny at the edges. So having this point cloud quite sparse leaves you a lot of space to project yourself in between the pixels and the points.
[00:25:52.960] Kent Bye: To me, as I hear you talking about this experience, I just have this impression that it sounds very psychedelic or this kind of out of body experience. It's just fascinating that it's like a major corporation that's creating these really trippy experiences of embodiment in order to have these real pragmatic effects of allowing yourself to have these new creative insights. And to me, it feels like that there's a certain brain entrainment that we have in terms of our expectations and predictions of the world and that you're starting to cultivate these experiences that are able to almost on demand create these experiences of wonder and awe because we've never had these experiences before. So we're creating new neural pathways in our brain and as we open up these new neural pathways, it seems like that it may be tapping into Connections that we never saw before just like maybe you're on psychedelics or these altered states of consciousness that are doing the same thing But you're able to do this mediated through the virtual technology through playing with embodiment with the deeper purpose and intention of This open innovation with the intention to be able to actually create something out of it Yes
[00:26:58.907] David Nahon: And that's quite fascinating indeed. The question we have now is what happens if we did not make too much of those experiences. If you bring your potential future user like this girl who serves at the restaurant food. If I bring her and I capture her body and then I start designing for her. Would I have the same empathy towards her than towards me? Because so far we've used us a lot. That was me, the topic, and not her. We did some collective experience as well, but I would be curious to see if that has any kind of influence. I don't know if I'm answering your question at the end.
[00:27:37.976] Kent Bye: Yeah. I'm just, I mean, I think in some ways I'm, uh, sharing my initial thoughts and seeing if it spurs any other thing. Cause it's, so I think there's a big part of what we're talking about here is that it's a bit of a grand mystery consciousness as a mystery presence of a mystery, trying to actually define it. You mentioned earlier, you know whether or not what's happening with the embodiment and if that's really connecting to the deeper sense of presence and I found that Sometimes with embodiment it can be a bit of a mixed bag so you have different dimensions of expressing your agency with your active presence and having a a sense of suspending your disbelief and having a sense of mental and social presence and Maybe there's elements of music or narrative or plot that has this deeper emotional immersion that gets you really engaged into an experience but I feel like the body is something that we've had to deal with a lot of poor technology in the sense that we can't track the elbows because we can't track the elbows then when you're in VR you can only track your hands and So then if you're in VR and you start to do a full inverse kinematics tracking of your body, but yet if you are moving your elbow up and down, it's not tracking just like as you expect with your proprioception, that can actually like make it worse. And so I actually find that. depending on the technology that you have available, you're better off going with the minimum amount of what can be tracked. Otherwise, you're gonna be breaking presence because you're going to make it feel like this is not my body and you're gonna get snapped out of it. But there seems to be something with leap motion and having your hands into the experience that has this deep sense of embodiment, but also having your full body within the experience. I remember the experience of Never Blind in VR where it did feel like I had a deeper sense of embodied presence, even though it was super low fidelity. And even here at the Laval Virtual, there's a number of experiences where they have pass-through cameras where they're using video technology to do real-time point cloud and then AI to make it look somewhat photoreal, but because the camera's offset to where my eyes normally are, I have this disconnect between reaching out in the world and having my hand be further out because it's not matching where my eyes normally are. And so I have this disconnect between my proprioception that actually takes away my sense of embodiment. So I find that sometimes embodiment, you can either hit or miss if it's like this house of cards of plausibility that either you really nail it and you get it right. But once you start to be off a little bit, you kind of break the presence and it's hard to recover.
[00:29:59.344] David Nahon: It's probably what Mel Slater calls non-plausible. Basically, you have an issue with plausibility, so it breaks the presence, to make it short, I think.
[00:30:08.388] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so for you, what are some of the other big open questions that are either driving your work forward or specific problems that you're trying to solve?
[00:30:17.097] David Nahon: What I want to try is to really integrate this kind of creative sketching and immersive ideation into actual innovation workflows. So far, we've used it for the general public, letting the users express their dreams. Now, what happens if I want to conduct an actual ideation session with actual professionals in a B2B context, where people would actually use that system solution, which is my employer. So how that this turns into an actual solution, where we put this kind of experience in production and we really let end users, retailers, so really all the crowd around the product team to really take part of the design in VR and really contribute to this innovation. I mean practically at scale and not just as a prototype. I just don't recall the second one which I had in mind.
[00:31:22.295] Kent Bye: Okay. And finally, what do you think the ultimate... Oh, go ahead.
[00:31:27.458] David Nahon: Okay. And I mean, you were about to ask what is the ultimate potential of VR and what it might be able to enable. Yes? Yeah. Your favorite question. And yes, what I wanted to say is that I believe that in the few years, we may be able to let anyone really take part of the design of the products they would want to have for instance in their home. So imagine you need a chair or you need a table and basically I'm going to enter a store where I would myself design that chair or that table and the modeler behind it will be clever enough so that everything I design is manufacturable could be 3d printed for instance with lattice or any kind of way to produce large 3d printed parts or cut in wood or whatever but if you mix a good user experience and a good modeling engine under it which is able to transfer your design intentions into printable, manufacturable objects. Then you enter a way of super massive customization. So far, when for instance, you buy a car, you're able to customize the color of the seats, the material, the wheels, the blah, blah, blah. It's only, I would say, customization in a finite space. you have a certain number option and you multiply the parameters so you have a huge number of configurations but it's still finite. If you get into this kind of new design experience you have an infinite number of design and it's going to be the ultimate design you want to produce and that can only be achieved at scale by yourself in VR.
[00:33:23.070] Kent Bye: Great. That sounds amazing. Let's do that. So is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say to the immersive community?
[00:33:31.251] David Nahon: Come to Laval, by the way. I mean, it's a small town not too far from Paris. Very nice. But you'll find next year such a big concentration of experiences to try and vendors of everything, conference and so on. So I live in Paris, but I was kind of born in Laval. My VR heart is in Laval because this is where it all started in France. And it's still very active. And so come and try Laval Virtual.
[00:34:00.425] Kent Bye: Yeah, it's my first time to Laval Virtual, and there's over 350 companies. To me, I find it really overwhelming, and it's fascinating to run into you again. We met at IEEE VR, and there's some fascinating stuff that you're working on here with this open innovation things that is kind of mind-blowing as to kind of experimenting and seeing what's possible. Are there any other recommendations that you would give for me to go check out here at Laval Virtual? Because it's just a little overwhelming, but I'm just curious if you have any other recommendations.
[00:34:28.980] David Nahon: Yeah, go visit Clarté, who is the local center of resource, and they are really at the edge of really inventing really, really great and cool stuff. And walk around the student work, because those students are, most of them, in very good schools in French. We have excellent game design, and globally experienced design and art and engineering schools. And the students are doing an amazing job because they have the time, they have great teachers, and they are very well stimulated here. So they do very, very innovative stuff. There's still, I hope, Japanese small crews that, thanks to the partnership, the historical partnership with Akiko Kirae, I think it's his name, who came and do his postdoc and some school here, they have kept a very good and close relationship. So we find all those small Japanese super creative demos, which they think so much out of the box, compared to what you guys in the U.S. or us in Europe would think of. So, it's strange, but you find a bit of Japan in Laval. Awesome, great. Well, thank you so much. Thank you, Ken. See you soon.
[00:35:54.568] Kent Bye: So, that was David Nohon. He's at Desos Systems, and he's at the 3D Experience Lab, as well as working on open innovations for XR technologies. So, I have a number of different takeaways about this interview. It's that, first of all, well, this interview really stuck with me in terms of talking about something that I want to live into into some capacity, which is to talk to people from across the industry, sharing information and really collaborating with the larger community in terms of getting information from other people and disseminating it and just helping to mediate concepts and ideas, inspiration, and to be this conduit for sharing knowledge and catalyzing this concept of open innovation. Now, in this use case, it's very specific to how can you start to collaborate with your end users, your customers. If you're designing systems, you give an example of somebody who is in the cafeteria and has to deal with bad design day to day, what would it mean to have somebody who's actually living in some systems that have suboptimal design processes that make their lives a lot worse? How can you incorporate them into a virtual reality experience that could allow them to give some feedback that could then eventually create other systems that make their lives easier? So this concept of open innovation, I think, is a really powerful one. And I haven't heard a lot of other companies talk about it. It was at the Laval Virtual in France, where Dassault Systems had a whole booth. And I'd actually interviewed David once before at the IEEE VR 2015 in Arles, France, where we talked about his never-blind in VR, where he was using a Kinect camera to give you the sense of full embodiment. So he's continued to work at Dassault systems. And it sounds like that in order to measure success, part of that success is producing products that are valuable enough for your customers to continue to buy your products. And so that is one metric of success for continuing to get that feedback and to continue to iterate on what tools are useful. Obviously, there's a lot of remote collaboration types of functionality that was already being developed for Dassault systems. And I imagine that in this era of the coronavirus and COVID-19 and this global pandemic, that there's going to be an increased interest in those types of remote collaboration, remote work types of functionalities. But when it comes to collaborating openly, just to see how you can get more people involved in the design process, especially the people who are on the end users. The other thing that I think David pointed out here that I ended up actually following up with is the professor Akihiko Shirai, who is one of the Japanese professors who was facilitating this bridge between France and Japan and the connection to Laval Virtual and other universities there in Japan. facilitating this interaction between these two regions for a long time. And so that was a good tip because I ended up actually following up with Akihiko just to be able to get a little bit more context as to his story and that historical relationship between Japan and France that has been a part of his experience there. I know David had said that he's been involved in Evolve Virtual for like 19 years now. He's been attending all but the first couple of the, and so, you know, 19 or 20 of the different experiences that he's actually been able to take part in now since he was at the Laval Virtual World this year and I was able to catch up with him. 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 Voices of VR. Thanks for listening.
