Simon Lajboschitz - Virtual Reality is here!

Okay, I have a lot of slides, so I'm just going to jump right into it. And that's a beautiful slide. Okay, very white. But my background is not in virtual reality at all. I was working in Tiger. I was in charge of the customer experience for 500 stores. And then suddenly I went on vacation in the States with my family, and I went into a museum. And they had some VR goggles, and I put on these goggles, and I tried this Clouds Over Citra. It's a seven-minute documentary in a Syrian refugee camp. And I took off the goggles afterwards, and I was like, whoa. I felt like I was in a Syrian refugee camp. And it's not with dead babies or anything. It's like pretty nice. You sit in a white tent on the floor, and her mom cooks a meal, and you go to the school. And there's a nice teacher, and everything is pretty good. But it was like I was actually there on the floor in the tent with the mom cooking and the family sitting. And I was sitting around ready to eat. And that was like, whoa, I need to get into this. And so I came home. I found my partner Peter. We started Cora. We opened a shop. We believe it's the world's first virtual reality store because I don't think anybody else was stupid enough to open a shop without any product being available on the market. But then we also do virtual reality consulting, and we also create a lot of content. And we work with artists in New York and architecture, and we do educational apps. And we release our own games. And we try to explore what this new medium can do. And we also have a shared office space. A lot of different things. We're just testing out and exploring what this technology can do. We work with a bunch of different brands in our short life of eight months. 2016 is the year where virtual reality can be a little bit elementary. Good morning and welcome to you, Simon Leipzig. You have just opened the world's first virtual reality store. The first virtual reality store right here in Copenhagen. As you can see, we're just exploring and trying a bunch of different things. And working both with 360 video and 3D. But now I'm going to talk to you about a thing that I meet a lot. That is the virtual reality I've failed so many times. So in the 60s. virtual reality failed. This was going to be the big thing that could transport people to other places. It had smell, it had wind, it had vibration. It was the perfect Mother's Day present. And it weighed around two and a half ton and it didn't really make it. And then in the 80s and 90s, there was also a virtual reality hype with a lot of virtual reality startups and they didn't really make it either. Then came the virtual boy in the 90s. This was going to be the consumer product that was going to be in every home. It was going to transport people to another world. And this is the graphic from inside the virtual boy. Who needs the real world? It's like playing tennis. And what we see is that there was a gap between this ability, this idea from philosophy to transport people to another world and what the technology could deliver. Then the cell phone industry boomed and all the smartphone producers decided to put all these sensors inside the phones. And suddenly we had all the hardware that we needed to actually make a virtual reality experience. And that's why this time around, we have something like the 80s. It's so crazy. That you can try outside. But as you can see, it is feeling that you're in a different place. You actually feel that you're there. You feel that the things... We had two accidents in the shop, small accidents with kids, sadly, but not real accidents. And both of them, one of them happened because they leaned on a virtual thing. So there was like... It makes you feel like you're... They didn't hurt themselves more than a piece of candy could. But I think that shows what this can do. So I think the way to think about virtual reality as a medium is that it's a way to transport people to another place. And you can have many purposes in transporting people. It could be having empathy with someone living in a Syrian refugee camp. It could be communicating. It could be checking if a nurse can handle crisis situations. There's a lot of reasons why you want to transport people to another place. One of the abilities is that when you experience something in virtual reality, it sticks in your brain in a stronger way than if you read something or watch movies. So virtual reality is up there like simulating the activity because the brain kind of stores it like a memory. And so, of course, people in education think this is really interesting, but also people in branding think this is very interesting because what you really want is to create lasting memories for your consumers. Just to give you a little bit... Oh, I'd like to ask, this is a little overview of some of the hardware. How many have seen a 360 video on social media just on your phone in 300... Yeah, okay, that's most. Okay. And how many people have tried Oculus Rift or HTC Vive? Okay, yes. A lot of people have tried it. The rest need to go and try it outside with Jeppe and Simon showing up. This is really, especially the HTC Vive, is like really cool. So if we step a little bit back, I think when we look at communication, I think we see that this could be a new level of communication. And I'm going to take the best part of my... I'll steal something from a TED Talk. Our plan leader is telling us about how he hunted the woolly mammoth on the tundra that day. We hear his words and translate them into our own internal truths. Same thing happens when we look at the cave painting version of the story, the book about the mammoth hunt, the play, the radio broadcast, the television show, or the movie. All of these mediums require what we call suspension of disbelief. Because there's a translation, a translation gap between the reality of the story and our consciousness interpreting that story. And it died. That happens sometimes. I've seen this before. I know what's going to happen later. Then he's going to present virtual reality, presented like something that goes directly into your senses, where you don't have this, what he calls, suspension of disbelief. You don't have to... You don't have to imagine that you're there. You just feel that you're there. And then he's going to say that you're... I think we can just go to the... Then he's going to say that you could be hunting with the clan leader, or you can... That's okay. Okay, okay. But then you can also be the mammoth being hunted, or you can try many different things. But I'm going to leave that and just go a little bit further because I have so many slides. So, to the evolution of the Internet, this small thing called the Internet, and then how we see the... How I see it evolving. So, Apple in 96, beautiful website. Beautiful website. And this is how it looks now. This is going to be even more beautiful. Netflix. Wow. Wow. And Netflix now. And prepare. Close your eyes if you don't want to see something ugly. It's Vimeo. And Vimeo now. So, but... But if... If we look at this, what we see that if you go 15 years back, you have a lot of text on websites. Then came Facebook, and there was a lot of images. Every website had a big image. And then now it's videos, like most of the content being consumed online are on videos. And in the future, we see virtual reality as being one of those, like the next level of that medium. And what we see is a push from information to experience. And I think when you start thinking those thoughts of... The internet being a place not full of information, like we use it now, but a place that is full of experiences, a lot of things change. A lot of sectors change. A lot of online presence change. And I think that's what Mark Zuckerberg is also talking about here when he says that he believes virtual reality is going to be the next big computing platform. What... This is just a guy saying that, but when he then decided to buy a startup company for $2 billion, he kind of made it mean that, you know, When you look at Facebook's future sandbox project, I think that's also quite interesting. And... You know, you see that with the... Hey, Mike, what's going on, buddy? Hey, Shreth, how you doing? Sorry I couldn't make it up to F8. I'm here at Facebook HQ. That's great. Want to say hi to everyone here at F8? Hey, everybody at F8. Good to see you, virtually. All right, what have we got here? Well, we're standing in a sort of VR test bed that we've put together to... to test various experiments that we've put together to see how they interact together in VR. Right. Let me show you a couple here. Okay. So this is a 360 photo, like we were just talking about. Yeah. But it's in a sphere, so I want you to grab that and slide it right onto your face. Okay. There we go. Welcome to St. Pancras Station, London. Whoa. This is neat. We can go here together. Yeah. Whoa, check out that clock. That's a really sweet clock. I've never noticed that before. It's a clock made by the Dent Company. They've been doing that for like 300 years. Same clock as in Big Ben. Yeah. Okay. Let's keep going. Let's try someplace else here in the... How about... Okay. We're going to go to the circle. Yeah, not so much in the way of all things in the cloud. We're going to go to the circle of the building. I'm sure it's going to be... Hey, 400, go, go, go. This is really neat. This is awesome. Okay. Hey, look at this. I have it here. This is the place you can't probably do something else in. This is a joke. Whoa. Wow. Yeah, check it out. We can put a communication bay in the middle here. And then we've got another one. Okay, just a map. Okay. It's amazing. I had no idea it was so huge. It was really cool. I've never been here. I think I'm going to show you. Okay. So let's take a look at this here. Turn it around. Yeah. Look. Right. Take that. Yeah. And there's another one. Yeah. Right. I'll find you. That's pretty sweet. That's pretty sweet. Cool. Hey, they're getting a selfie in front of Big Ben. Oh, yeah. You know, I never really got a selfie in front of Big Ben before. I may have a solution for that. But I think just that shows you some of the things that they're looking at. And also when you look at the big investments going into virtual reality, you also see all the big tech companies going into virtual reality and also augmented reality. When you see the projections, all these big numbers to show that other people agree with what I'm talking about. But this is kind of the main thing. The main thing is... The main thing is when the internet gets an experience medium, what will happen? And I think a good example is Wikipedia. If I want to know something about the Great Wall of China, right now I go to Wikipedia and I read about the Great Wall of China. But if I wanted to learn it through an experience, I would put on a virtual reality headset and the most knowledgeable person about the Great Wall of China would walk me around. Maybe I wanted more motivation, more action. Maybe I would be a guard living 800 years ago. Guarding the Great Wall of China and learn through that. But this is kind of the change that I see and this is something that could happen to all areas. Another area, online shopping. There's not a lot of experience in online shopping right now. It's very easy to use. But online shopping could look a little bit more like this. What do you need? Guns. I don't want to sell guns. That's not the point of this video. This could be dress. It could be flowers. It could be a lot of different things. I don't want to sell guns. But it's thinking, if I want an experience of shopping, which is what all retailers where I come from before virtual reality is talking about. All of them are talking about creating an experience. Then this is the way to create the ultimate experience. There's no dirty floors. There's no annoying staff checking their phones. There's whatever it is that you want to make. Training and simulation. I just want to show you some people working with high voltage. They can't do their training so they do it in virtual reality. You can have these trainings. This is a part of the internet. So if you want to know how it is to work at a high voltage electrical facility, you could do this. Google's education project. I'm just going to show a little part of it. Anywhere in the world that you want to go, where would you want to go? I would like to go to the moon. Thailand. Ancient Greece. India. To Nigeria. My homeland. One or maybe all of the seven wonders of the world. When you explore different places, you have the chance to actually learn something new. You want to be able to show the kids that there's something outside of your community that you can go to and learn from and that there's other places you can visit. All right. So let's do our objective and we'll talk about the lesson for today. We're going to take a field trip to Verona, Italy to see the place where Romeo and Juliet lived. I'm going to take you on this field trip under the water. Okay, you guys ready? Pick up your devices and look in your hard board. What is that? A shark. Whoa! Whoa! It allowed us to go somewhere we wouldn't normally be able to go. Are we in China? This is the Great Wall of China. We got to see the places. So we just released our first educational app and we're trying, we just got funding to do the second one. There's a lot of possibilities within this kind of experience education, especially because kids really like virtual reality. Another area is healthcare. We have some really cool projects. You're going to see one later. But also the whole concept of exposure therapy is about exposing things to the people that think that they're afraid of. And then make them comfortable with that. But if you're afraid of flying, sitting down with a psychologist and him showing a picture of a plane, it doesn't really scare you that much. It's not like actually being there. So using virtual reality to train, going to the supermarket, train flying, all these things that are hard to visualize. And then being able to do it at home later is a huge possibility. We have a big project with dementia where you're able to do it at home. Where you're able to, people who are stuck in a wheelchair or stuck at a, and don't remember can go on field trips. We did a project with the Rigshospitalet. When you're just laying here, you can't really get out. But I really feel like I've been in a psychological cave or something. You hear that one of your friends is going to the Philippines or France. They send pictures. And then you're just sitting here, trapped in your hospital bed. So that's it. Good afternoon and welcome to the Blue Planet. That's a pirate fish. He's big. He just opened his mouth and got his tail up. He got his tail up and then he threw a four-petal into his mouth. He's big enough. Then he probably starts eating them. I was a little sceptical, but when I tried it, it was really funny. Much fun than I had expected. When you get the boards on, you're in a completely different place, and you have to get to the point and do completely different things. And then the pain comes in the background. Architecture is another application. Being able to walk, to have experiences online where you can walk in buildings that you've never been to. That's another possibility. This is all digital. I think you'll see in a second when you change the colour of your surroundings. Of course, this is used for architects, but it's also the idea that you can check your hotel if you want. Go walk around in the room. Another area that we're looking a lot into is these virtual showrooms. The furniture company has 2000 square metres of a showroom in Norrhavn, and they sell internationally. Being able to allow their customers to walk around and see all their furniture, all their possibilities, is another big area. But this is just some of the main things that we found. This transition from information to experience, what that can do. Just to give you a little bit of the idea of how to get started with virtual reality, how we work with our customers. Because obviously we're not specialists on any of these areas. We're not specialists in education, we're not specialists in psychiatry, we're not specialists in architecture. Where we partner with people who know their stuff, who want to explore virtual reality. The first question is why do you want to use virtual reality? It might be quite obvious, but a lot of people just want it for the flash. Like the coolness of it, and they don't actually want it for any. So some of these things like visualising things that can't be visualised. Simulating things, having people feel that they're present in another place. Something that has to do with memory and teamwork. Or telling stories in an immersive way. Some of the main things. Then another thing that adds complexity a lot. To working with virtual reality is what hardware do you want to use. Nobody in general, not a lot of people have the hardware yet. And I don't think people will have the high end hardware in their homes. My grandmother probably won't at least. So you have some of the distribution like on YouTube, Facebook, on smartphones. Google Cardboard, you can buy a lot of Cardboard, send them out to your customers. You can have some of the location based. So like if you're an airline company, then you can have a HTC Vive in the airport. Or at the places where you sell your airport tickets. But you probably can't make an experience and think that millions of people are going to try that experience in their home. So that's a huge complex thing that customers don't always think about. Then also the distribution. Do you want it as an app? Do you want it in one of the stores? The stores are very guarded. They have to be very relevant. It's really hard to get branded content in. Then if you're on YouTube or Facebook, there's a lot of restrictions. Then it's basically only 360 video that you can put in. Then you can do things in the browser. Like WebVR is going to be really big. 360 websites. But it's all trying to figure out how is it that you want to distribute the content that you've created. And that's actually a really big challenge. And a lot of people forget this part. And that's why they make really good content that nobody sees. I think another thing is choosing between 360 video or real time. So real time 3D graphics is in a game engine like Unity or Unreal. And 360 video is of course a video. You can do a lot of things in video. If you want photo realism for a low budget. That's probably the way to go. You can buy some pretty good cameras for 3000 kroners. Like the Samsung camera. And you can go and you can film. And you can upload to YouTube in a matter of hours. And it's pretty easy to use. And the quality is pretty good. But if you want something with 3D where you can interact with things. You need to go with real time things. I think the real time things can also work on the other devices. So this is not actually accurate. These arrows going down. But it's an estimate of some of the most popular devices. Then there's a huge problem in the user experience design about nausea. So many people who tried virtual reality. Especially if they tried them 10, 15 years ago. Got really nauseous. At that time the main problem was the sensors in the device. And the frame rate. So the number of pictures that were shown. And the sensors that could notice that you turned your head. So basically you would turn your head. And then the whole world would rotate around you. And you would vomit. Now the nausea. That type of nausea problem is currently mostly on the smartphone. The smartphone. If you just hold up your smartphone you won't get nauseous. But it's basically just on the cardboard. Google cardboard. And you think that the sensors might not be that good. If you have an old phone. Other than that the problem is now a new problem. Which is that if you take a camera in virtual reality. And you move it. People get nauseous. Because what they notice is that my body is standing still. But I feel like I'm moving. And that disconnect with the real body makes them nauseous. It also happens in games. If you sit with an Oculus Rift. And an Xbox controller. And you want to play Counter Strike. Which many people want. Then you move forward with your finger. And the virtual body moves forward. But your body stays still. And you get nauseous. So basically there's a whole new area about designing movement without moving. So the main use right now is teleporting. So basically teleporting. You don't get nauseous from teleporting. So basically you just choose an area. And then you jump to that area. And you close your eyes. And when you wake up. In a split second after. You're at a different place. And you don't get nauseous. So that's how you design around that. But of course it becomes more complex. When you add something like the HTC Vive. Where you can actually move your body. And you can go down. And that's fine. But then you can't move outside the area that you're marked. Which can be up to five times five meters. But usually it's smaller. So then you have to teleport outside that area. So that for the user interface. For that is quite complex. And also each of these devices have different needs. In terms of controls. There's also all of these devices are quite different. You have the HTC Vive with these controllers that you hold. And they're almost like your hands. Then you have the Xbox controller. That is currently the available one for the Oculus Rift. Where you sit down with the controller. And you move it like a game. But now they're coming out with some controllers. That look a little bit like the HTC Vive. On the Samsung Gear VR. Which is the most popular platform. I think right now. You have a touch pad on the side. Which of course is very restricting. But you can swipe up and down. And stuff like that. But it's very limited to what you can do. And then on the Google Cardboard. You have the version two. They released with a small button. And it's just like a cardboard button. But then you can look and click. But the thing is that the button breaks really easily. So most people do this thing called gaze control. Which is that there's a little dot here. And when you look around. So now I'm selecting the computer. Like a small clock. In half a second. If I look at the computer for half a second. Then I have selected the computer in my interactions. So these are some of the main challenges. That we see in this space. Some of the main things that makes it complex. To work with virtual reality. Because basically the video is pretty easy now. For some of the lower end hardware. And the 3D real time thing. Is also something that people in the game industry. Are pretty used to. And you can work in unity. So it's like these things are not technically hard. It's actually the design process that's pretty hard. Yeah. But this is kind of the main thing. That you should think about. Now I'm just going to give a little bit. We have a little bit of extra time. So I'm just going to go a little bit. To add a little bit of complexity. About some of the future technologies that I see. I just want to show you. This is an amusement park in the states. It's also going to come to Denmark. Kind of a level up. Of virtual reality. Where they make the virtual space. Fit with the real space. ink type thing. You. This is my favorite. This is a rain machine. So it rains in virtual reality and you feel it. I think that's pretty cool. But then you also have all these technologies that are being mixed into virtual reality. So you have voice control. You have 3D. Like these years are just me guessing when it's going to be integrated into the headsets basically. But like 3D scanning allows you to 3D print things, put it inside, like you can draw something in virtual reality and print it. And then you can take something from the real world and put it inside your game. So there's kind of gateway between the real world and the virtual world. And it's going to be pretty available. Eye tracking is also going to be pretty good and going to make the computer power that you need to use to do virtual reality a lot less because you just need to render where people look. You have haptic feedback, feeling touch. It's things that are going to be mixed in. Hand tracking you already have, but it's going to be interesting when it's going to come and be a part of the headset. You have Project Tango. That's a part of Google. Having these chips that can scan your environments. All these things are going to be merged in. You have artificial intelligence, brain control. But I think the main one, and these years are way wrong. And the guy coming, the speaker after, knows a lot about it. So I should probably remove that slide. But augmented reality, of course, is something that you talk a lot about in the context of virtual reality. But it's quite different. I'm just going to show a little bit of a little ad for Microsoft HoloLens. Technology is all around us. And Jayway has it outside. You should definitely try. We use it in every aspect of our lives. It enables us to do amazing things. But what if we could go further? What if we could go beyond the screen? Where your digital world is blended with your real world? Now we can. This is the world with holograms. What will they enable us to do? New ways to visualize our work. I have an idea for the fuel tank. New ways to share ideas with each other. How are things going your end? I just put the images in one drawing. Perfect. More immersive ways to play. New ways to teach and learn. So put the new training in your head. And then we trap in the place of the old one. Now what? And tighten here and here. New ways to collaborate and explore the places we've never been. Look at this formation. Let's take a closer look. And new ways to create the things we imagine. Because when you change the way you see the world, you can change the world you see. So I did my life. I did my life. I did my life for you. This is Microsoft HoloLens. Yeah, that was my presentation. Thank you. I don't know if anybody noticed. dog, the animated dog at the end. It took me like 800 times to watch this video and then I saw it. But thank you very much.