- So, this week, we're
talking about VR and AR,
and we're talking about
VR and AR, or AR and VR,
for associations with Tyler Gates.
Okay, so Tyler is the principal
of Brightline Interactive.
Brightline Interactive
creates cutting edge,
interactive experiences and simulations,
including immersive
technologies like AR/VR,
sensor integration, body
tracking, touch screen,
and much, much more for commercial brands
as well as military, government,
and, yes, even associations.
So, welcome, Tyler.
We're gonna talk with you today, yes.
- Thank you very much, Kiki.
It's great to be here.
- Oh, I'm so excited for you to be here,
because I wanna find out why associations
need to care about AR and VR,
and I wanna find out not
just why they should care,
but what the difference
is between the two,
because these things get
confused all the time.
So, can you help us out a little bit?
- Definitely, definitely,
and I'll say this, too,
especially because we're talking
specifically about associations,
I'm also the president
of the VR/AR Association.
- Yes.
- In Washington, D.C.,
and as a part of that,
we're heavily involved in the association,
and the VR/AR Association
is divided up by committees,
and we chair the marketing
and advertising committee
as well as the defense and
intelligence committee,
and then we host the podcast
for the VR/AR Association.
We certainly think that VR and
AR as communication mediums
are critical for associations,
especially even our own, but
just to kind of define the two,
just to kind of maybe
clarify a little bit,
really, virtual and augmented reality
are two separate technologies.
They have lots of things in common,
but the best way to think
about the difference
between the two is really
just trying to define the use case.
So, somebody is going
to use augmented reality
when you want to see the
actual, real world around you,
so really, technologically,
the difference between
augmented and virtual reality
is about what's called occlusion,
which just basically means
how much of the real world
is visible and not actually visible.
In augmented reality,
you have what's called partial occlusion,
where you can look out
and see the real world.
Maybe you might be wearing
a head-mounted display
like a HoloLens or Magic
Leap or something like that,
and you're seeing out to the real world,
but then we actually place graphic content
on the real world that you see.
The graphic content can
actually be relative to
things like furniture and the
walls and things like that,
in the physical space,
whereas virtual reality is
what's called full occlusion,
so you don't see any
part of the real world.
You're in a head-mounted display,
and inside that head-mounted
display, you're somewhere else
and you're using the
head-mounted display to see
something that doesn't exist yet
or is too difficult to
display in real life,
or is to communicate a message.
There's lots of different reasons for it,
but really, it's just about, typically,
when people come to us and
ask, "Should we use AR or VR,"
really, my question is back to them,
"What are you trying to communicate
"and what is the environment
for that communication?
"What's the target demographic?"
Those sorts of things can determine
what type of technology to utilize.
- I think a lot of people,
I hear a lot of people talking about
wanting Terminator-vision,
so that when they're able
to go in and, say, to
a networking reception
or something like that with members,
that they suddenly,
instead of having to do
the awkward look at the name
tag, that it just pops up
and uses something like
facial recognition.
How close are we to anything like that?
- I mean, technologically
speaking, we're already there.
I mean, it's already possible to do that,
it's just there currently are not,
it really takes a company
to invest in creating that.
- Right.
- There's a difference between
what's actually possible
and what has actually been funded.
(Kiki laughs)
- As always, right?
- Right, that's right.
- Yeah, well, and I did
wanna ask about that,
because it seems like
if you're talking about
augment reality, where you're using
some of the environment around
you and things like that,
versus creating a whole entire world,
that there would be different costs
associated with some of
that, so is that the case?
- Yeah, and I would say,
generally, speaking,
AR can tend to be less expensive,
only because, to your point,
there's less graphic creation.
But at the same time, it really depends on
what type of augmented reality,
so if you're just gonna display, let's say
that you're trying to communicate,
you're a medical association
and you're trying
to communicate about the
heart, the human heart,
and you wanna show diseases
of the human heart.
If you're only using one
object, the human heart,
then it's easier to use augmented reality,
because you can play just that
one piece of graphic content
and show different
animations on that one piece
of graphic content, but
you don't have to create
the entire operating room.
Whereas, like with virtual reality,
if maybe the use case is
you actually want to show
a heart transplant or something like that,
or you wanna do training or
simulation based on that,
then you would wanna use virtual reality,
because then we can actually
recreate the whole scene.
So, generally speaking, I would say,
from a graphic content
creation perspective,
augmented reality tends
to be less expensive
because there's less graphic content,
but at the same time,
there are ways to certainly
shift that paradigm
with augmented reality,
and that's doing
augmented reality that has
any sort of persistence.
So, you're going to like drop
augmented reality content
into the physical world
and have it stay there
in the physical world.
The development cost to
do that is more expensive
than just displaying AR
content from your phone screen
or something like that.
It really kinda depends on the project,
to know which one is more
or less cost-effective,
because you can create
a virtual reality scene
that is very simple, and in a lot of ways,
you don't have to do any
sort of spatial linkers
or geotagging or any depth
perception or occlusion
or people occlusion or segmentation.
There's all these different
types of technological terms
in the augmented reality space,
based on what's now possible,
that requires more development
than sort of previous versions
of augmented reality a few years ago.
- Yeah, I mean, recently in the news,
recently to us, I'm not sure when people
are going to be listening to this,
but recently in the news,
the big story was Walmart.
You know, it was all about
the training and stuff
that was going on with that.
Now that we have companies like Walmart
that are starting to
use this for training,
is this reflecting what you're seeing
as far as organizations
reaching out to you,
and the way that it's being used,
primarily with the projects
that you're being engaged in?
- Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, there really is, kind of,
for us, we've been around.
We're working on our
16th year in operation,
and so, typically, what happens for us is
we have one foot in the
technological space,
where industry currently understands
and what they're asking for,
what they're interested in,
what they see in sort of pop culture,
and there's that one area,
but then there's this other whole area.
We have our other foot squarely planted in
where the technology is going,
and what we get to do, we get
sort of these front row seats
to see the progression happen.
When we first realized the ability,
the capability from a
consumer off-the-shelf version
of virtual reality back in, I would say,
probably 2012, 2013 time frame.
We knew at that point that
it was going to transform
the way that brands and
associations communicate,
and so we just had to kind of wait
until people could catch
up to the understanding,
and what helps people catch
up to the understanding
is larger brands investing
in the technology,
recognizing that it's
significantly powerful,
and investing in the technology,
and that's exactly to your point.
That's what Walmart has done,
and back in September, they
did a test, essentially,
to see does virtual reality deliver,
is it a better training
mechanism for new staff training?
And that's where they started,
and they recognized a 15 to
20% increase in comprehension
during their new staff training,
but then, on top of that,
they also recognized almost
100% satisfaction rate
from their new staff
going through training,
so did you enjoy training?
- Right, right.
- Most people will probably answer, "No,
"I didn't enjoy training," you know?
But these employees are now
saying, "Yes, we loved training.
"Training was so much fun,
it was very interactive,
"it was very contextualized,
"and I understand how to
respond to the customer better."
And the reason for that is because
they're utilizing virtual reality,
so then, they decided to,
they said, "Okay, well,
this is a great test.
"We're going to invest heavily into this,"
and so they now have four
Oculus Gos in every Supercenter
across the country, okay?
And they have two Oculus
Gos in every small,
sort of local Marketplace
Walmart across the country.
I mean, that's about 17,000
units of head-mounted displays,
and truthfully, it's somewhere
between 3 1/2 to $4 million
of investment in just hardware.
- Well, and that, oh, sorry.
- A big brand like that doing that,
and that really helps
kind of turn the tide
for other brands to see, oh,
well, Walmart's doing that.
And I think the important
part to point out is
it's not just novelty.
It's not something Walmart's doing
because it's futuristic and cool.
They're doing it because
it's significantly,
categorically better, and
overall, it's cheaper for them
to train that way than it is for them
to have hired staff and fly
people into school houses
and do all that methodology.
- I mean, I do think
it's really remarkable,
because, to your point,
Walmart isn't known
for doing things because
they're hip and cool,
and so, when you see Walmart
deciding to do something,
you have to know that they're
really looking for something
that's effective, that's
going to help them
make more money, right?
And the fact that the
satisfaction rates are so high
on both sides, and the
training is more effective,
I mean, it has to be a real bellwether
for seeing things change, you know?
More people wanting to
invest in something like this
for their training.
Now, we've talked a lot about training,
but we haven't talked a lot about
some of the other use cases,
which can be all kinds of things,
like with education and stuff like that.
What are some other ways that
you're seeing associations
really begin to use AR and VR?
- Yeah, so virtual reality,
augmented and virtual reality,
I sort of refer to them collectively
as immersive technology.
What we're seeing associations leverage,
we're actually encouraging associations
to leverage immersive technology
in a couple of sort of
key stakeholder areas,
and I would say the two biggest are in
creating value to members,
additional value to members,
and what that does is drives
membership engagement,
where if you're seeing,
if you're recognizing decreases
or drops in membership additions
and the level of engagement,
it's a great tool
to re-engage your members
in a different way,
and I can go into more detail on that,
but the second way that we're
encouraging it to be used
is for advocacy.
Most associations, really,
I mean, they were originally
founded, typically,
around this sort of the dinner table of
some sort of issue, topic, area,
sort of segment of the market
or something like that,
and in a lot of ways, those associations
play a big role in providing
the appropriate advocacy
for that topic or that issue.
We're actually working actively right now
with American College of
Preventative Medicine.
They're an association,
and we're working with them
to build a tool that they can
use for all their fly-ins,
or when they send members
and staff for Hill visits
in Washington, D.C., to go and
talk to members of Congress
around preventable issues for children,
we're actually using virtual reality
to standardize the context.
And what I mean by that is,
as American College of
Preventative Medicine,
they have experts in their field,
these subject matter experts,
who have a significant amount
of information around these topic areas,
and that information,
the member of Congress
doesn't necessarily have
awareness of that information,
and when you have a 30-minute meeting
with that member of Congress,
you're trying to communicate
a lot of information
and trying to get them
to see your perspective
so that they may change
their mind or agree with you
from a legislative perspective.
And so, in that 30-minute
time segment that you have,
it's critical that you try
to transfer or translate
the context about which you're speaking,
and so, instead of using
PowerPoint or showing videos
or showing pictures or
something like that,
we're saying, "Use virtual reality,
"because virtual reality is a faster way
"to communicate the information
and create comprehension."
We can create more comprehension
in a three- to four-minute
virtual reality experience
than you could communicate
in hours, if not days, of
time communicating verbally.
- I mean, I love this idea,
because, while three to four minutes
doesn't sound like a lot,
when you have a limited
amount of time to convey
not just your point,
because it's not just about information,
but when you're really
trying to compel someone
to hear you and understand and feel,
what better way to really compel them
to feel that emotion
than to drop them into
that virtual reality?
And so, I can see where that
would be really effective.
- Yeah, and I love that you bring that up,
because it's so true.
I mean, this was Chris Milk,
who's a famous video producer
and famous in the virtual reality space,
he says that virtual reality
is the ultimate empathy machine.
And the reason for that
is because virtual reality
gives you the ability to
have a lived experience
that didn't actually happen,
and that really is the true
power behind virtual reality,
and it's, I would say,
a major differentiator
from other types of communication,
because other types of
communication really
just compel you to memorize facts.
You watch something on screen,
you read something in a book or online
or whatever the case may be,
and you're memorizing facts,
whereas, in virtual reality,
you're actually committing
your lived experience to memory,
and you're actually creating
a memory in your brain,
and so, when you remember back
to whatever the virtual reality
experience that you did,
when you're remembering back,
you're not remembering
it as memorized data.
You're remembering it as
a memory that you lived,
and there's a significant
difference in your brain
between those two things,
and it's kinda like the
easiest way to describe that is
asking the question, "How much
do you remember from school?
"Factually, how much do you remember?"
I know, for me, not much, right?
(Kiki laughs)
- It has to be at the
end of this interview.
- Exactly, exactly.
But I do remember the things that I did,
and the experiences that I had.
That's the power, that's the difference
between communicating
with every other type
of method for communication
and communicating with
virtual and augmented reality,
is that using virtual
and augmented reality,
you can create a lived
experience for people.
- Yeah.
I'm just thinking about this example,
and thinking about, is it watching,
you know, would watching a
video really make me feel
as much as being dropped into it?
Like I'm looking around
and I'm seeing stuff.
I'm there, right?
And so it does seem to be a
way that would be compelling,
that would really convey both
information and the feeling
and the emotion connected
to an experience.
So, you know, I know we're
running short on time,
but I wanna talk a little bit more about
when somebody is thinking, okay, yeah,
you sold me, I'm really interested.
I want to look into how to
make all of this happen.
What are some of the first steps?
What are some of the things that they need
to be asking themselves to
get at the most effective use
of this technology?
- It's a great question.
I mean, it can be a daunting thing,
to sort of arrive at the point of, okay,
I recognize that virtual reality
is significantly powerful
and I want to be involved in
a project that's creating it,
or I really need to use virtual reality.
It really is find the right partner.
Find the right partner who is
actually creating the content
or creating virtual reality experiences,
because it is a new technology,
but it's also a new
medium of communication.
And so, it means that we
have to think about things
in a much different way,
like for example, let's just say,
for an association, you have a logo, okay?
And your logo exists
two-dimensionally, right?
It only exists on the screen
or on a piece of printed material, right?
And we always, to sort of exemplify this,
we ask the question, what's
on the back side of your logo?
You know, you don't know,
because you've never created your logo
in a three-dimensional space.
Well, that's just a logo,
so there's other aspects,
other ways to think about
creating virtual reality
that kind of challenge
your traditional ways of communicating.
- Right.
- It's really important
to get in touch with
an organization who has a
significant amount of experience
in creating the content.
I would say that's step number one,
is find a company who's actually
creating virtual reality content,
and let them sort of help
shepherd you along the way
of creating the content
for your organization,
because it's too much.
It's too much for the individual,
association, employee,
who it isn't their normal practice
to create virtual reality content,
and it's much better
time spent to work with
a professional organization
who does it for a living
than it is to try to learn how to create
virtual reality content on your own,
but that learning process,
in conjunction with another company,
tends to be a quick one,
because it really is,
virtual reality is a
new way to communicate,
and so it's a new way to
see the world around you,
but once you do it yourself
and you then get a better understanding
of how you would actually
deploy the information,
that's probably one of my
favorite parts about my job,
is that, on a regular
basis, we get to put people
in virtual reality for the first time.
I know it's going to be powerful to them,
but then, when they do it,
they then come out of virtual reality
with all kinds of ideas,
because they have seen a
new way to communicate,
but they're seeing it in their own context
based on their own topics and issues
and things that they want to communicate,
and so you see this mind meld happen,
where the light bulb goes off
and there's this new way to communicate,
and now they're thinking
about all the things
that they wanna say,
but because they've tried virtual reality
and they're working with
a reputable company,
they're able to actually kinda
come alongside that company
who is creating the content,
and they're able to be
the subject matter expert
for what that virtual
reality is going to be.
- I'm laughing because I
remember coming over to visit
the Brightline Interactive offices,
and you guys let me jump in,
and I think, even if you've had
a virtual reality experience,
first of all, things are
changing all the time,
but secondly, you guys put me in there,
and even though I guess
I'd had experiences before,
I think most of us don't on a daily basis,
and so, when you put
yourself in that environment,
you do, you begin to see
that there are all kinds
of other opportunities and
ways that you can build
and create and communicate with people.
I remember the pictures that
Sophia got of the video,
where I was just like, I mean,
it was amazing, and by the way,
anyone who's listening
to this or watching this,
you should definitely reach
out to Tyler and his team
to figure out when you can stop by,
because it is kind of half-maker workshop,
half-super tech,
half-hangout creative space.
I mean, I guess that's more than a whole
if I'm doing half, half,
half, but you get my point.
Very cool space, very creative,
and definitely something
where you guys are,
obviously, connected to your imaginations
and your creativity all the time.
- Yeah, and I'll say, too,
well, first of all, thank you for that.
And please, come one, come all.
It's my favorite part about my job
is to introduce people to a
new way of seeing the world,
but it's also, kind of,
to go back a little bit
to the Walmart example,
what Walmart has done
is they have normalized
virtual reality in a way
that people can understand
that there's an actual logistical
and functional purpose of virtual reality,
and another one that I wanna mention is
our friends at Microsoft.
I had the general manager
for education at Microsoft
on our podcast about a month ago.
We haven't pushed the episode out yet,
so we're going to do that,
but they talked about a study
that they've been doing,
they've been working on
for at least the last year,
and that study is now
out, it's a white paper,
and I can certainly send it to you
so that you can geek out as well,
because for people who are interested,
you may be inside your organization,
but you may be sitting there
as the one solitary person
who is holding up the banner flag for VR,
but your leadership is saying,
"Well, we don't do video games",
or, "We don't invest in X, Y, or Z."
There's all kinds of negative things
that people can say about the technology,
but now, what Microsoft has done,
is they've really kind of
lifted a lot of that burden,
because they're now saying,
look, remove the novelty.
Remove the futuristic coolness of it.
Remove all of that.
Take all of that off the table,
because virtual reality
is actually a faster way
to communicate, and with
higher levels of comprehension.
And what they've done is they did a study,
and I'm gonna paraphrase the whole thing
for the sake of time, but
they've done a study where
they put university students
in lecture-based learning,
which is sort of conventional education,
and they've put university students
in virtualized learning scenarios,
and it's the same content,
it's the same curriculum,
and they decided on a minimum
standard for comprehension,
and the students in the
virtualized learning scenario
arrived at that minimum
standard for comprehension
60% faster, six-zero.
- Wow.
- 60% faster with an entire
increase in a letter grade,
and so, it is just categorically
a better way to communicate.
And one last thing about that,
the reason why is because
learning is really
a translation of data.
If you have information
and you wanna give me that information,
you're going to speak it out
loud, which is spoken word,
you're gonna write it
down, the written word,
or you're gonna draw pictures,
making beautiful graphics and
3D models and things like that
that people do, and those are really
the ways of communicating
prior to virtual reality.
In all of those ways of communicating,
you're just translating, so
I don't know if you do this,
but when I'm reading a book,
I'm usually creating a picture
in my mind while I'm reading,
and what my brain is doing
is translating the data.
So I'm taking in the actual
data, it's been written down,
now I'm taking in that
written word, I'm reading it,
but then my brain is
translating it into an image,
a contextualized image in my own head.
Now, who knows whether or not
that image is the right one?
I don't know.
So, the power of virtual reality is
you get to skip all of those
translation methodologies,
and it is straight to the brain.
The actual, visualized
context is being delivered
straight to the brain,
and that's why you can get
the information faster with
higher levels of comprehension,
because you skip all these
steps of trying to interpret
the translation tool,
like the written word.
- Right.
This is fascinating,
and I'm thinking that, if I
were involved in education,
if I were involved in
certification, certainly,
which is such an important
area for associations,
I would be thinking very seriously
about how to apply that
to my own organization.
So, yeah, if you have a link or something,
we can put that in the show notes later
and share that.
Well, I wanted to ask
you before I let you go,
we talked a lot about
where people should start
and what they should be thinking about
before they reach out and
find out more information
from you guys, but what about you?
Like, you are able to do
all kinds of amazing things,
and you are learning all the time,
and definitely with the association,
you're hearing from all of
the different members, too,
about new stuff that they're trying,
so what's something that you, Tyler Gates,
would love to work on, project-wise?
Like a dream project that would be like,
okay, anybody who has the
money out there to do this,
let's do this?
- I love that question.
Nobody ever asks me that,
so I appreciate that.
For me, I mean, look,
I wanna create what I call the
visually contextualized web
or the visual web,
and what I mean by that, in
the context of an association,
what you're trying to do, essentially,
and this is a broad stroke,
but generally speaking,
you're taking a topic area
and you're creating conversation
around that topic area
and creating community
around that topic area.
And then, the expectation
or the hope is that
that generated community
is going to create value
for the rest of the community,
and it's gonna be this
sort of ongoing cycle.
The general challenge with that is
that you have people all over
the world who are separated
or disconnected, and
they're not able to plug in
to a visually contextualized system
that allows them to
understand what's going on
with the association, what's
happening, what's new,
what's coming next, those sorts of things.
To be able to leverage virtual reality
to deliver that communication on demand
in a visually contextualized
way that matters
to both the sender and the recipient
is something that I believe associations,
if they're not doing it already,
or if they're not
thinking about it already,
they should be, and this is, to me,
it's tantamount to the way that
people understood the
internet when the internet,
I would say, again, in
the late 90s, early 2000s,
when people started to
realize that you can have
ubiquitous, simultaneous
access to information.
Nowadays, to us, that's
like so commonplace
that we don't even think that that was,
at one point, novelty.
- Right.
- But it was novelty at one point,
whereas now, it's the same
thing with virtual reality,
where, can you imagine
how much more effective
it would be to be able to
go into virtual reality
and understand all of the issue areas that
underprivileged children
face across the country?
It would be very powerful to
fully get a context of that,
but it's very difficult
to do that right now,
because video production
costs are expensive.
It's difficult to sort of
distribute content like that
across the globe, but
see, in virtual reality,
you can have that, where somebody can just
go into that space and they
can spend time in that space,
as if they were actually there.
And so, I would love to work
on any project like that,
where I can bring awareness
to a people group,
and not to get, you know,
I mean, to sort of stay high-level
from a political standpoint,
but I would say that, to me,
what makes me really passionate
about virtual reality
is that it's a way that
we can leverage technology
to create empathy, awareness,
compassion, and honestly,
overall love for people around the world.
Most of disagreement,
I would say in general,
is due to a lack of information.
Most hatred is due to ignorance,
and so we can solve those large problems
with technologies like virtual reality,
because we can all of
a sudden make you aware
of an entire people group that
you didn't even know existed.
You didn't know how they lived
or what their circumstances are,
and we can all of a
sudden make you visually,
contextually aware in a way
that you lived a memory.
And now that you've lived that memory,
now that's going to affect the
way that you make decisions
and the way that you think
and the way that you care
about people around you,
and so, for me, the dream
projects are to work
with the technology in ways
that have massive effect on the world.
- I mean, I love that answer so much.
Whether or not you believe me,
I just hope you do,
because I'm all about
community, and I think that,
when I look out and I think
about the social isolation
that people are facing,
and now they're tying that
to so much early dementia
or early-onset of dementia,
and even people not adhering to therapies
and loneliness and the lack
of trust that people have,
and you know, when you
think about how technology
might be able to actually help,
and thinking about this,
as you were saying,
Chris Milk saying that the
ultimate empathy machine,
that could be incredible,
incredible for associations,
or anyone really out there
trying to figure out how they connect.
- Yeah, and I'll say, we're
working on projects right now
where we're using virtual reality
to address post-traumatic stress.
We're using virtual reality to address
the opioid addition crises,
and we're using virtual reality,
not just as a communication
tool to help people
understand the impact,
the devastating impact,
of some of these issue areas,
but we're also actually using
virtual reality for treatment,
and so there are ways
to leverage the technology well-beyond.
You know, we oftentimes
get the comparison,
I say this often, that
people understand a new thing
through the lens of an old thing,
and so you have people who
understand virtual reality
through the lens of the next closest thing
that they actually do
understand, which is video games,
and so, virtual reality,
it may have birthed out of
the video game industry,
but it is well beyond that now,
and we're using it in the architecture,
engineering, and construction space.
We're using it with military
and government simulation.
We're using it for flood
disaster response training.
We're using it for safety training.
It's being used in the medical space.
I mean, there's things
well beyond video games,
in industries that wouldn't
touch video game technology
with a 10-foot pole,
but they're now using virtual reality,
because they've realized what we've known
for the last six years,
is that it is categorically better.
It's cheaper, overall,
and it delivers your message more directly
to those that matter in a way
that they're going to comprehend it
and be able to make actionable decisions.
- Well, I appreciate so much
that you took the time to talk
with Association Chat today,
and I wanna thank
everyone who's listening.
I hope you've learned
something helpful today
that will help you to reach your members,
to reach more people,
and maybe, yeah, to maybe
build some empathy in.
Please join us next time,
and until next time, everyone,
keep asking questions to learn every day.
As Joseph Campbell once said,
"The cave you fear to enter
holds the treasure you seek."
All right, thank you so much, Tyler.
- Thank you very much.
- All right, bye bye.
