Liv Erikson was able to to live out one of her dreams when she stepped into the Star Wars universe to battle against a lightsaber training Remote within Sixense’s VR demo. This helped her discover that she has a passion for immersive technologies, and so she started teaching herself Unity and documenting her learning process on her blog called “The Matrix is My Office.” This caught the attention of Microsoft’s developer evangelism team, and they offered her a full-time job where she could explore, learn, and teach about virtual and augmented reality development on her Channel 9 videoblog called “Just A/VR Show.” Liv’s show and blog are some great resources for people who are looking for beginner content for how to get into VR development. I had a chance to catch up with Liv at Microsoft’s Reactor space during the VR Hackathon just before GDC this year to talk about all of her different VR & AR evangelism efforts.
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Rough Transcript
[00:00:05.452] Kent Bye: The Voices of VR Podcast. My name is Kent Bye, and welcome to The Voices of VR Podcast. Today I talk to Liv Erickson, who is the virtual reality developer evangelist at Microsoft. And you may be thinking, well, what is Microsoft doing in VR? Well, as far as we know, nothing quite yet. However, they are doing a lot of stuff with mixed reality and augmented reality with the HoloLens. And in looking at the HoloLens, it kind of requires knowing about 3D development. And there's a lot of skills that you can learn from developing for AR and mixed reality by prototyping content within virtual reality. Since the headsets are more readily available, they're cheaper, and you can do quite a lot of 3D user interface and learning how to work with 3D content within Unity. And so Liv talks about her journey from becoming a VR hobbyist into a full-time developer evangelist at Microsoft. And today's episode is sponsored by the Virtual World Society, which is a emerging organization by Tom Furness. Their goal is to essentially become the Peace Corps of VR, where they want to transform living rooms into classrooms and build a coalition of people who are willing to become subscribers to help support the generation of content, as well as content creators who are interested in creating educational content for solving the world's problems and making the world a better place. So you can get more information in the interview that I just did with Tom in yesterday's episode, that's episode 347, or you can go to virtualworldsociety.org. And with that, let's go ahead and dive right in.
[00:01:50.319] Liv Erikson: I'm Liv Erickson. I'm a virtual and augmented reality developer evangelist here at Microsoft. I basically have one of the coolest jobs ever where pretty much my whole job purpose is play with whatever VR and AR tech I can get my hands on and then teach other people how to do it too.
[00:02:05.439] Kent Bye: Great. So how did this job come about for you then?
[00:02:07.947] Liv Erikson: Well, I moved out to the Bay Area about three years ago, and I noticed that pretty much everyone I met was super passionate about something. And I was really set on figuring out what I was really passionate about. So I started playing with any types of technologies I could get my hands on. And as soon as I saw virtual reality for the first time, I knew that that was it. So I bought the cardboard, I ordered the DK2, I downloaded Unity, I opened up Unity and immediately closed it. I was really intimidated. But I opened it back up and I was like, alright, I'm going to figure out how to make a small project here. And as I was going through the process of learning VR development, I noticed that there wasn't a ton of beginner-friendly content out there. So I started blogging everything I did. I would put all of my code samples up on GitHub and just say, hey, this is totally broken. I have no idea how to fix this, but this is what I'm trying. And making all of the stuff that I did and learned how to do public so that other people could learn from not making the mistakes that I was making. And after doing that for about three or four months, one of my friends who was already working in audience evangelism, which is the team that I work on now at Microsoft, said, hey, do you want to come do this full time for VR and AR? And when you get the offer to basically make your hobby your full-time job, it's really hard to say no to that. And it's been almost a year. I just passed a year doing it full-time, and it's been a ton of fun.
[00:03:23.122] Kent Bye: So what are the primary outputs that you have as an evangelist on AR and VR at Microsoft then?
[00:03:29.834] Liv Erikson: So right now we're trying to work on getting a lot of video content out there. So we've been doing a lot of work with our Channel 9 platform. So I have a VR developer show called Just a VR Show where I teach kind of intro level content around all of the different types of ways that you can build for virtual and augmented reality today. We also do a lot of stuff around blogging, public speaking, teaching classes. I'm working with ARVR women and women who code right now in San Francisco to make lab content and teach a six-week lab series about VR development. And just helping people get familiar with what that whole process looks like in whatever form works best for them.
[00:04:06.907] Kent Bye: Great. And I imagine you're doing a blog as well as doing different speaking events, I imagine.
[00:04:11.748] Liv Erikson: Yes, yes. I love blogging. I've been blogging since 2011. I had a World of Warcraft blog when I played WoW and I've always loved being able to just kind of document what I was working on at any given time. That carried over with virtual reality. My blog is called The Matrix is my office. I spend all of my free time playing in VR, playing with VR and developing for it, hacking on it. And I like to share as much of that as possible as well as just kind of doing random thoughts on the industry and where things are going.
[00:04:38.310] Kent Bye: And so what are some of the big things that you've seen that you've worked on and put tutorials on and that you've released so far?
[00:04:44.938] Liv Erikson: So the biggest project that I did when I was first learning Unity was Kit and VR. And I was doing a lot of demos for kids. And I found that when I was looking at the demos that people were putting out, I had the option of roller coasters or all this horror first-person shooter stuff. So I built Kit and VR to have a demo that I could show kids that was really easy for them to pick up. It was self-contained. It wasn't a roller coaster. And it was kid-friendly. And that was the first one that I did. But I've done a lot of really just small sample code projects. with the Cardboard SDK. I've played a little bit around with Unity, A-Frame, WebVR. Basically, if I can download it and start hacking on it, I will try my best to get it into a format that people can see kind of what the ecosystem looks like, what the tooling looks like, and how to get that up and running themselves.
[00:05:31.221] Kent Bye: And what were some of the big lessons that you think people getting into VR should know before they start?
[00:05:37.170] Liv Erikson: I think that being comfortable with just experimenting is something that people in VR have to be comfortable with. When I first started out, the fear of failing really kind of held me back from experimenting as much as I would have liked to because if I couldn't get something working right away, I had kind of assumed that it was a problem with my skill set instead of just playing with the tooling and figuring out which different platforms worked best for different concepts. And there's a lot of, even today, trial and error in figuring out what works really well and what doesn't from a design and implementation standpoint. So I think the biggest takeaway is that people getting into VR and building for VR right now have to be comfortable breaking rules and making their own rules for things, and be comfortable with that iteration and playing around with stuff a lot.
[00:06:19.102] Kent Bye: It's interesting that you've taken a look at WebVR and also A-Frame. Maybe you could talk a bit about how you see that fitting into the larger VR ecosystem.
[00:06:27.100] Liv Erikson: Yeah, there's a couple of things that I really love about the VR web in general. One is I mentioned I teach a lot of people about VR and a lot of new developers who are coming into the ecosystem have a web background. So being able to come to them with a language that they're familiar with and a platform they're familiar with has been really helpful in opening that dialogue around 3D development and starting to build things in the 3D coordinate system, building interactivity, and having that common language has been really beneficial for reaching new developers and bringing them into virtual and augmented reality and immersive technologies in general. It's really easy to get started with that. You don't have to install any special engines. I love all of the tools that I've played with for VR, and I think that they all have really different strengths and weaknesses. But with the web, you know, you have a text editor and a browser and you're up and running, which is really, really nice for bringing people in to the ecosystem immediately. And then I think that there's some really interesting cases around the VR web. and enabling content creators to get something up and running right away without having to go through an app store process. It's similar to what we've kind of seen happen on the mobile platforms where web applications have started to come into play because they don't want to have to download updates all the time or be able to do that. And then I think even right now with how early on in the VR ecosystem where we are right now, having experiences that work really nicely in 2D browsers and then also in the 3D web is really important for
[00:07:51.320] Kent Bye: Getting sites up and running and experimenting with VR in a way that complements what they currently have right now Yeah, and leap motion just recently released a new update called Orion to be able to kind of upgrade their hand track motion controllers Have you had a chance to play around with that yet?
[00:08:05.413] Liv Erikson: Yes, I have. As soon as I saw the Orion update go out, I immediately dropped everything I was doing to install it and start playing with Geometric and Blocks because I had actually seen a couple of demos a few months ago and I noticed that the tracking was superb and I was like, I can't wait until that comes out because I know that's different than what they have right now. So I've been playing around with the SDK on that. I'm building a little mini application with the Orion SDK to kind of paint solar systems and play around with that, basically. I'm really interested in how VR enables different creative art forms and little, just mini apps almost, not really games, but experiences where you can kind of just play with lights and colors in different ways. And I've been using Orion for that right now. Hopefully we'll have something to show within the next couple of weeks.
[00:08:52.795] Kent Bye: You know, from my perception, it seems like virtual reality is a lot further along than the development of augmented reality. We're right on the cusp of the consumer launch of VR. And by the time this podcast is released, it's probably have already been released. But yet we may still be a year or two out before augmented reality is going to be kind of at that same level that VR is right now. And so from your perspective as a evangelist in both AR and VR, how does that influence your trajectory of content?
[00:09:19.931] Liv Erikson: I get asked that question a lot, and I think that One of the really kind of key concepts behind it is that right now just making the jump from developing in two dimensions to developing in three dimensions is a really key learning for people who are getting into building immersive content. And what I see is a lot of platform specific decisions that you need to make. That is especially true when you look at the mixed reality spectrum. But at its core, there are a lot of developers who are just learning, OK, how do I work within this XYZ coordinate system? How do I get familiar with placing objects? And so I see right now we're really at a stage where we're laying the groundwork for developers to become incredibly familiar with building technology that surrounds them in general and then looking at the spectrum of where that falls best on augmented to virtual reality tends to kind of come into play as specific applications start being built and in different individual applications of what they're building.
[00:10:13.698] Kent Bye: And have you had a chance to play around with the HoloLens yet?
[00:10:17.001] Liv Erikson: I have, I have and it's a lot of fun. I am really excited to see what people start building with that.
[00:10:22.687] Kent Bye: And so my understanding is that a lot of the development for content for the HoloLens is actually going to be on Unity. Can you speak a bit about the work that you're doing and then how that may kind of lead into kind of more the future of HoloLens development?
[00:10:35.958] Liv Erikson: So I work with the field evangelism team. I don't actually work on the HoloLens team. But what we've done a lot of is just, like I said, teaching people to get familiar with building in 3D environments, getting familiar with those tools. And because it is such a big jump from what a lot of people have done, I know that the team has talked a little bit about how they're building things specifically in the product group there. But outside of that, I'm also waiting for those dev kits to land, too.
[00:11:00.885] Kent Bye: I see. For you, what are the things that get you really excited? Like, what type of experiences do you want to both create and experience in VR?
[00:11:09.472] Liv Erikson: Oh, that's such a hard question to answer. So I start out when I kind of talk about the experiences I'm most excited about to give context. My first experience with a developer kit was the Jedi training demo that Sixth Sense worked on. And my first time trying VR, I got to live out an actual dream that I had had like my entire life. And since I was a little kid, I had always wanted, I love Star Wars. And just being able to realize that this was a technology that quite literally brought dreams to life is something that was incredibly compelling for me. I think that We're kind of on the cusp of seeing virtual reality just as a fundamental shift with how we interact with technology. And I don't even know if I can narrow down into specifics about what I'm excited about because I think everything is really my answer there. And that's such a big, broad answer. But I really see kind of this shift in virtual reality and immersive technologies. making the data that we're interacting with and all of this, you know, tons and tons of data we've been collecting over the web and over the past several decades, bringing that into a format that we can really understand and interact with in a very human way, I think has a lot of potential in terms of how we understand problems that are going on around the world and seeing how we can take data about things like climate change, ocean acidification, turning those into actual experiences that someone can sit down and see. I think that there's been some really great work around awareness and 360 journalism at LiveTime. So you can actually get to experience more of what's happening in the world. And you have a much more personal relationship with that than you would if you're just watching that on a screen. So I think it's hard to kind of nail that down to one or two specifics, but really just being able to turn what we know into something that we can experience. as being kind of the core factor behind what really I think will make VR such an amazing technology.
[00:12:59.634] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I've heard that having like this virtual body ownership illusion, being in VR and actually having experiences within VR, your mind stores it as more of a memory as opposed to something that you've watched or seen. And so I'm just curious if you've had any really vivid memories or stories of experiences that you've had over the last couple of years in VR.
[00:13:19.697] Liv Erikson: Yeah, there is one. I was at an SFVR meetup and it was Brain Fizz VR. They had this haptic chair experience and it was in this submarine. And I knew I was in this experience and I could hear it. The chair was adding that vibration in the haptic feedback so it felt more realistic. And I knew as I was in there, I was like, this is not going to end well because it's a short little submarine experience. And in the submarine experience, you end up kind of like you crashed into something underwater and you like the lights flicker and go out. And I knew it was kind of coming because I had been watching them do this, but I did not realize like how intensive a feeling that would be like even just sitting here talking about this. I'm getting this kind of like flashback adrenaline rush of being in this experience where I felt like I was like, oh, my gosh, this is what it would feel like. to be kind of in this claustrophobic little environment and that really kind of stuck out to me as as one of those kind of core examples of it's almost helpful because I think there's a lot of potential around helping phobias and coming overcoming fears with that and those experiences and I'm much less afraid of heights now being in virtual environments where I kind of push the limits and jump off of things that aren't supposed to be jumped off of but That was one of the most, that and the lightsaber training demo of things where I was actually like, oh, I remember being there more than I sit back and think, oh, I was in this experience in the past. And then I guess when I was at Oculus Connect 2 last year and I got to play with Toybox for the first time, that was such an unreal experience because I felt like I really knew the person I was in the Toybox demo with. And afterwards, they actually brought him out and I could meet him. And I was like, I already feel like I know you because we've been kind of playing around in this experience. And it was kind of amazing to me how after just
[00:14:55.462] Kent Bye: You know five to seven minutes in a virtual experience like that I feel this connection to like oh the person who helped me do that and I still have these really fond memories of them Like oh, yeah, we were just hanging out and having this really fun time Yeah, I definitely agree with that The toy box demo for me is also one of my top VR experiences and also those experiences that have additional 4d effects in them You know, I got a chance to try out the void where you're walking around you have 4d effects also the Martian experience which was on this D box and I I think any experience that is able to connect the mixed reality in some way, so having haptic touch or feedback or just starts to take the level of immersion to the next level. So I'm not sure if that's something that you've also looked at in terms of trying to incorporate more of those types of 4D effects.
[00:15:40.473] Liv Erikson: Yeah, it's not anything that I've specifically started working on any individual projects with, but it's been at the forefront of my mind as I'm kind of looking through some of these. I've seen some really fascinating ones that add in things like the fan effects even just something simple that adds realism there and figuring out how to build experiences that having kind of the demo giver a part of, I think, is something that could be explored a little bit more. For me, when I do demos and I have this immersive experience and then someone talking at me in a way that doesn't really mesh with the demo, I see that as almost being distracting. I'm like, OK, I'm going to figure this out and I can hear you, but you're not in there. And I'd really love to try exploring that a little bit and seeing how can I build an experience where me telling someone how to interact with the demo is part of the demo itself and actually adds to that feeling of immersion instead of takes away from it. And that's not entirely the same as adding in different physical effects, but I think that there's a lot to be said for having virtual experiences, more of them, that bring in outside kind of voices and have that shape your experience as well.
[00:16:41.518] Kent Bye: Yeah, and I think that's what in part made the toy box demo so compelling was that you had like a buddy, someone who was guiding you through this world and almost like a guided tour. And I think that we're going to see a lot more of that in terms of going through worlds that people build and having people kind of giving you this guided tour of those.
[00:16:59.885] Liv Erikson: I have to agree with that, definitely. I think the really good demos do take into consideration that having that person or other people who are experiencing something with you at the same time, having that be really blended into the experience makes a big difference. I know that when I've done with Henry, they had the narrator pretty much telling you that, and that was also an interesting experience. But I really think that some of those social applications that blend the virtual and real world at the same time, like keep talking and nobody explodes, are really going to be an interesting area to expand into as more and more people start getting consumer devices. I know I'm super excited for mine and all of my friends are ready for me to have them so they can come over and play with them. And I think having more applications that really embrace both the physical, like the people who are outside of the experience, will also be really interesting.
[00:17:51.442] Kent Bye: And finally, what do you see as kind of the ultimate potential of virtual reality and what it might be able to enable?
[00:17:58.545] Liv Erikson: This is where everything feels like another cop-out answer again. But I think that It's hard because I look at kind of where we've gone over the past two years since I really got interested in VR and I see a lot of forecasts in how quickly it will get picked up and how fast it will be able to change things and I think I may err on the side of overly optimistic but I think that at some point in our lifetimes we're going to get to the virtual realities that are indistinguishable completely from our physical world and I think that there's a lot of really interesting implications of that from a philosophic standpoint, from how that impacts society. I actually spend probably more time developing for VR than actually in VR at this point, so I think that seeing how the general public adopts it is going to be a big driving factor in that. That all said, I mean, I think I have a lot of faith in technology and especially in the virtual and augmented reality industries, seeing, you know, worlds where we can create the ideal worlds for each individual person and being able to explore customization of the physical spaces that we're in on an individual basis and really not just making technology very immersive to everyone but also very personalized to everyone. I remember a few years back I saw a physical space that was configured to be very highly technical and represent like a home of the future where they had augmented wallpapers that you could change in your rooms on a day-to-day basis. They had, you know, kitchens that would project recipes onto the counter so you didn't have to be flipping pages around and I think that when we look at the spectrum of augmented to mixed and virtual reality entirely we'll start to see that become completely personalized to everyone and be able to have Worlds where people can just create their own personal idea of what is perfect to them You mentioned some of the philosophical implications.
[00:20:02.147] Kent Bye: I'm curious what you make of those implications of virtual reality that may be indistinguishable from real reality
[00:20:09.253] Liv Erikson: I think that we're going to have to come to terms with or be open to having conversations about the parts of human nature that people don't necessarily want to talk about or feel like they can talk about today. I led a Birds of a Feather session at Grace Hopper last year about ethics and moral implications of VR and people's behaviors in virtual systems and how that ends up impacting their human self. And I think that there's still so much there that we don't really know about. We have some preliminary understanding about how virtual avatars impact our own sense of self when we go into a virtual world and perform different actions. And the idea of technology and science being used for both good and evil just certainly stands in this case. And there are a lot more dystopian futures portrayed with virtual environments than utopian ones. But I think all of that said, you know, we're gonna have to have dialogues around even the unsavory parts of kind of human character and whether or not virtual reality can be used to, you know, help with therapies around that or help keep society more peaceful. I think there's a lot of questions about just how we're gonna be able to tackle that as a species. It's a little hard to say. I like to believe in the utopian side of it and look at that as just kind of an interesting way of helping with fears even to... I don't know. I'm losing my train of thought there. I go a little too deep down the rabbit hole with that sometimes and start thinking about things. Yeah, I think it's going to force people to see other perspectives more. And people have to be willing to do that, I think, with virtual technologies to figure out how that plays out and how we can adopt it as a tool for good.
[00:21:54.399] Kent Bye: Awesome. Well, thank you so much.
[00:21:55.720] Liv Erikson: Thank you.
[00:21:57.302] Kent Bye: And so that was Liv Erickson. She's a VR developer evangelist for Microsoft, who has a blog called The Matrix is My Office, as well as a video blog series on Channel 9 called Just a VR Show. Now, a couple of takeaways from this interview is, first of all, it's great to hear someone chasing their passions and to be able to actually turn a hobby into a full-time career. The big component of that I see is that Liv was adding intelligence to the network. So even though she wasn't at the point of becoming an expert, she was sharing her struggles and trying to teach other people as she went along. And as she does that, she attracted the attention of Microsoft. And now she's doing that full time, which I think is great. Another interesting thing that I noted at the time of this interview, the Microsoft HoloLens had not shipped yet. And so at that point, a lot of the NDAs were still in place in terms of what anybody could really say about HoloLens. And so not a lot of really new information about HoloLens, but you can kind of see from the larger perspective of Microsoft, how they're really interested in cultivating and developing these 3D development skills for people to be able to eventually generate content for the HoloLens, which at this point, even the best way to get content onto HoloLens is through Unity. And one of the most popular shows that Liv has done is actually in Unreal Engine. So it's possible that there could eventually be support for Unreal as well to be able to get content into HoloLens. I'm quite sure that's going to happen. It's just a matter of time. But a lot of the initial support, I think, is going to be through Unity. And so to me, it makes sense why Microsoft would be hiring someone to just basically explore all sorts of different technologies in VR, ranging from A-Frame to Google Cardboard to motion controls and Leap Motion and Unity and Unreal. And so if you are interested in HoloLens development and a little bit more information about HoloLens, then I'd recommend checking out episode 334, an interview that I did with Raven Zachary of Object Theory, who was one of the first development firms to exclusively do HoloLens development and is based here in Portland and does the HoloLens meetup here. So with that, I just want to put a shout out for my Patreon. If you've been enjoying this podcast series and would like to support it, then you can become a contributor to my Patreon at patreon.com slash Voices of VR.
