Andrew Eiche was in the Digital Interactive Group leading the Serious Games division at Booz Allen Hamilton at the time of this interview at Oculus Connect. He talks about CelluVR, which is an interactive educational experience through the circulatory system. In this VR experience, you ride through a vein inside of a nanoprobe to the heart, into the lungs, back to the heart, and then back to the body while educational commentary is provided throughout the journey.
Here’s what Andrew discusses:
- The mandate at Booz Allen Hamilton was to push innovation with cool technology like VR.
- A key lesson was that the lead-in to the experience was key in order to orient you into a virtual space. Their target audience was students and teachers.
- Frame rate is king. They also minimized fear by having calming sound effects like a heartbeat with ethereal music.
- Lessons in VR locomotion & minimizing motion sickness through a lot of testing and by being inside of a nanoprobe ship to minimize vection effects.
- How being at a microscale enables being able to see individual cells and other surprising insights
- Strategies for testing and getting feedback to ensure that they’re creating comfortable VR experiences. They see that it’s successful because their demo booth is always packed. They did 1800 demos in three days at a conference
- The changed the path of the nanobot a lot based upon feedback. Had to ensure that the doors don’t close too soon to go through a wall, which breaks presence.
- It is a predetermined path, but they’re working on making it more interactive
- Also investigating how to visualize data within Oculus that makes it interesting to look at. They’ve been calling it the “Standing in the River of Data.” Trying to see if it’s possible to create a sense of presence with the data rather than making it a numbers game.
- They’re looking at migratory patterns across the US, but trying to create a toolkit to create abstract experiences based upon the input data.
- VR input controls while working with data. Integrating with Leap Motion to get your hands into VR
- Inspired Darknet & Owlchemy Labs and use their rules of VR for minimizing motion sickness
Finally, Andrew sees that that the ultimate goal will be people interacting together within a virtual space.
Theme music: “Fatality” by Tigoolio
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.412] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast.
[00:00:12.045] Andrew Eiche: I'm Andrew Eike, I work for Booz Allen Hamilton's Digital Interactive Group and I lead the serious games part of that group, or actually now gaming in general. What we came here and what we've been showing off is something called CelluVR. It's an interactive experience through the circulatory system. So you ride from a vein into the heart, into the lungs, back into the heart and then back out into the body. as inside a nanoprobe, and as you do it, we talk all about the different parts of the circulatory system you're going through. While you do it, you see red blood cells, you see leukocytes, which are a type of white blood cell, and you see platelets.
[00:00:48.459] Kent Bye: I see, and so it's a very immersive educational experience, it sounds like. And so, how did this come about for Booz Allen Hamilton?
[00:00:55.382] Andrew Eiche: So one of the charges of the group that I'm part of is to kind of push innovation in Booz Allen Hamilton. And I was originally brought on from the games industry to help grow this practice, right? And at first it was a complimentary practice to a number of other ones, but we were kind of coming into our own. So we did this back in the beginning of the year for the original dev kit and we've since been upgrading it. And we did it to show both our company and our external clients that, hey, this is like really cool stuff and we're on the cutting edge of it. We're here making VR as people are conceptualizing how to create VR.
[00:01:32.644] Kent Bye: So what were some of your lessons for what makes a good VR educational experience?
[00:01:37.346] Andrew Eiche: So the lead-in. So our experience is almost pitch black and we slowly turn things on. We make it look like this nanoprobe is booting up. But really what we're secretly doing is orienting you inside the virtual space. Because if we just put you inside this cell and all these red blood cells are moving around you and the ship's flying, it was completely, we would lose people. And a lot of the people who are playing CelluVR, it's their first virtual experience ever. We're in an odd space where we're not getting enthusiasts, we're getting students who maybe have heard of Oculus, or maybe have never even heard of it, and they're educators. So, another big thing that we've learned about, and I think that this is echoed everywhere, is frame rate is king, right? So we fight frame rate wherever we can, we keep the experience as smooth as we can, and then we do all these kind of tricks to make sure that It's not a scary experience, it's a very calming experience. So, the sound of the heart is a very calming sound for humans and we keep that present the entire time. The sound of the music is playing this kind of ethereal soundtrack. So, you know, we learned a lot of these tricks as well as things we knew already from game development.
[00:02:47.424] Kent Bye: And so one thing about VR that can be a little tricky is locomotion and simulator sickness. And so how are you kind of flying through these veins and minimizing motion sickness?
[00:02:57.753] Andrew Eiche: So this is a twofold answer. The first one is a lot of testing, and that got us most of the way there. But the whole trick of the game is that you're inside a nanoprobe, so it feels like you're inside your own little spaceship. And because of that, people can conceptualize that, OK, I'm moving, and then their head has full freedom of motion. So, you know, it's very similar to the other demos you've seen where you can lean back, forth, left, and right, and it's because we made you feel as if you're in a ship.
[00:03:24.793] Kent Bye: Yeah, I think that's one of the fascinating things about virtual reality is that playing with scale and going to these micro scales. And so what type of things are you able to show people at that scale that you couldn't otherwise?
[00:03:35.577] Andrew Eiche: So you can actually see the individual cell itself, like an individual red blood cells. But what's even cooler is you can see the flow of the red blood cells. And you can see how when the heart beats, the walls of the veins and arteries are actually moving in and out along with the heart, something that you never really think about when you look at your own veins.
[00:03:54.266] Kent Bye: With this prototype experiment, how are you testing it and how are you measuring if it's successful or not?
[00:04:00.848] Andrew Eiche: So how we're testing it is kind of a combination of conferences and just the man on the street test, right? It's very easy for us to get people to try it out. We go to someone's office and say, hey, take a look at this. Or we go to a conference or even a place like this, and we just demoed for two hours. And how we've known it's successful is our demo booth is always packed, people are always talking to us about it. For instance, at the National Science Fair, which is kind of a children's event that runs every other year in D.C., we were there this year, and we did 1,800 demos in three days. And we had to kick people out because the show had ended and we still had a line around our booth. So we consider that a success.
[00:04:43.009] Kent Bye: I see. And so what was some of the things that you changed within the VR experience based upon some of the feedback that you were getting from people experiencing it?
[00:04:50.630] Andrew Eiche: The path of the nanobot has been like supremely changed. We also ensure that, and this is very specific to our experience, that you go through valves. So it's these doors that are opening and closing. And they're not really synced to the movement. So we had to synchronize them because if by chance it was closed as you as you went through the nanobot, we would say, you know, you would have somebody say, oh, that doesn't feel right, or, oh, I just went through the wall. So we had to, like, synchronize all these parts to make sure that everything, we never broke that structure of reality.
[00:05:25.201] Kent Bye: And is this an experience that's on Rails, or is it something that there is actual user interaction that people can engage with the environment in some way?
[00:05:32.661] Andrew Eiche: Currently it's on rails and you can adjust the speed. We're working on making it more of a user interactive experience with the ultimate goal being able to even like pick which spot in the body you want to go or pick different kind of paths to go down. We have other, we had a horse ride through Rome, which was a fully interactive experience. So you have the game pad and you're guiding this horse through ancient Rome as you're being told things and you get to pick whatever arcing path you want to.
[00:05:59.245] Kent Bye: And so what's next in terms of some of the next projects that you're thinking about doing?
[00:06:04.092] Andrew Eiche: So the next project we have is probably our most ambitious one. We're going to figure out how to visualize data in Oculus in a way that makes it actually interesting, not just put bar charts and graphs and things like that. We call it standing in the river of data has been the term we've been kicking around. There's a few other terms, but basically it's like, how can we use this concept of presence to really get you to understand or feel data instead of just making it a numbers game?
[00:06:32.878] Kent Bye: Interesting. Yeah. So what is the use case that you have or what's the problem that you're trying to solve? Because a lot of times when you're trying to find look at data, you're trying to find some sort of pattern towards some end or some goal.
[00:06:44.463] Andrew Eiche: So the current one we've been working on is migratory patterns across the US. That's kind of where we started because that one's simpler to visualize, but what we're more looking at is not even that. We want to say, what is the toolkit? Can we make the thing where you, like in Excel, you put in your data and out comes a chart? Well, we want to be like, you put in your data and out comes this really interesting kind of abstract experience.
[00:07:08.345] Kent Bye: Yeah, and so when it comes to engaging with these datasets, you know, how are you doing a VR input in terms of gestural control or being able to manipulate or sort of swipe around and, you know, it's sort of an open question right now, but I'm curious if you've started to look at, you know, being fully present and being able to engage and swipe and manipulate these data sort of panes around.
[00:07:29.449] Andrew Eiche: So as of now, we're using typical controllers, but I think we're going to start moving towards actually doing a leap motion solution. We want to get the hands in there. And I think that what's going on with Leap is really compelling with their hand model and everything that they're doing. To have somebody be able to reach out, grab, spin, turn, you know, dig into something and change the field of view just based on gestural control is really compelling to us.
[00:07:55.204] Kent Bye: Great, and what are some things that you draw some inspiration from that you've already seen within the VR community?
[00:08:02.695] Andrew Eiche: So we're from the DC area, so we know E and Darknet. That's definitely been something we've drawn a lot of inspiration from, just that game. And then we also draw inspiration from our friends at Alchemy, because they have some of the best, they've done some of the best work in figuring out kind of this, like, how do we not make people sick? What are the rules of VR? And so we start with, like, their framework for the rules of VR, and then we move out from there.
[00:08:29.483] Kent Bye: Now, what's the nature of the work that Booz Allen Hamilton does? Is it a lot of government, contract, military, or what's sort of the field that you guys are in?
[00:08:39.507] Andrew Eiche: So the field that Booz Allen is in, which isn't necessarily the field that we're in, but the larger corporation does government consulting, commercial consulting, and just kind of that whole area. So it's military, civil, health, those kind of things. Now we help with that, but we also do our own projects. We'll come in and somebody will say, we need an app that does this, or we need an experience that has this feeling, or a museum will ask us for help, and we'll manage those. So it's a mix of helping the Booz Allen engine, which is doing these large government contracts, as well as running our own singular things where we're directly managing our clients.
[00:09:24.642] Kent Bye: So has there been any sort of direct connection between Booz Allen Hamilton and the government in terms of how the government could potentially use VR to become a better government?
[00:09:37.087] Andrew Eiche: We're always trying. I mean, this is one of the things that I do is we go out there and we show these things to the government folks. And I can tell you from personal experience, there's a lot of people who want to use them in the government. So the short answer is yes, it's small pockets. But yes, there are people in the government who want to use it, and there's us trying to provide it to them.
[00:09:58.910] Kent Bye: Great. And finally, what do you see as the ultimate potential for virtual reality, for what it can provide, and how you want to help push it in that direction?
[00:10:07.871] Andrew Eiche: So I think that, and it's been said about a dozen times since I've been here at this conference, the ultimate goal as I see it is people interacting together in a virtual space. Whether it's a game, or it's looking at data, or it's exploring the circulatory system, or it's something like even as simple as a chat room, that's where we're going is this kind of future where we don't feel like we're watching a screen together, where we feel like we're all sitting together doing something.
[00:10:40.486] Kent Bye: Great. And is there anything else that's left unsaid that you'd like to say? I don't think so. Great. Well, thank you so much. All right. Thank you.
