Virtual Reality Conferences - Live Interview
Transcript
so I'm gonna take over the screen and put you in a background yeah alright so what the screen or the room that you see back here I'm actually I'd love to have the camera in this position because I'm going to be walking around in this room when you see me walking around in the virtual environment if this isn't that's why I have to keep my floor clean right so just like any other virtue area you kind of like you know you have to have a VR
room for a walk around in the physical space so you don't pop into stuff and and actually give the camera something to to adjust to let me walk you through the hardware real quick all I'm using is the oculus quest headset this is the you know 400 bucks this is the 64 gig version it doesn't have any sensors in the room it's got all the sensors built in it doesn't require a computer to you know play games and use but I am using the oculus link
cable and so what this does are the quest link this hooks up to my PC to take advantage of the horsepower of the PC to to produce everything that we're doing now hopefully in the future we're not going to need this cable everything will just be in the headset alone no external sensor there's no computer needed so it's a headset and these two handsets I'm going to be using to get this down whoa all right so you do that now entertain the masses with my with
my musings so Wow drew is setting up the headset you can see him kind of mucking around and moving around one of the things that I visualized for the CTL advisor conference moving forward is how do we integrate VR into the experience to give exactly that feel but also how do we make it accessible so we'll talk to Drew about some of their ideas about how to make this technology accessible because I'm seeing some really cool stuff done with VR and Enterprise IT conferencing space in
general for example doing Dale peril ones Lodge the peril one team had created a virtual reality environment or virtual reality map of the power1 system so you could put on goggles into a VM going to a VR room and you could pull the chassis post lights out of the power1 you could actually see the the platform is a really really interesting model so you might ask yourself well Keith you're in the room why don't you just show you the power1 well drew naturally came up with
this whole concept that what happens if you're our friends in power one Conor Duffy who sponsored some pyro want content over on the CTL visor CTO dose what if you're in them and the mold we're in now we're in colvett lockdown Connors in Toronto I'm in Chicago I'm a customer I want to see power I want to see this unit I could put on VR goggles and and kind of come walk me through this so you know you think of from a sales perspective but also
we'll get into kind of the use case that drew brought me in for which was for conferencing because I'm putting on virtual conferences drew how's it I mean I can you know perfect though you can hear me I can hear you I'm in the virtual world staring around and what you see is the avatar that I have right here first of all practicing safety from the virtual path but what would be this isn't good par I took a picture of me with my cell phone I
faced up my face to make sure and I uploaded it looming so I can get in and I can choose different avatars step out look that day or whatever it is but this is actual me that so as many people do you want can actually use this and interact with it so okay good you can hear me you can see me everything's good to go right yep I think the only maybe the only thing you're [Music] your your audio was just a little choppy yeah it
stopped up a little bit for me also let me see I can fix that real quick give me a second here it made it's a couple different processes running on the computer here so let me try and shut one or two of them down so Wow so look if that works is that any better for you ah smiley let's uh go on a little bit if it if it's still too choppy Alek eligible okay I can restart it if I need to so let me give
you a quick tour with the camera here so I can take this camera and I can drag it around and what you see behind me is I'm actually looking at my computer desktop right here I've got a whiteboard in the background that I can uh I can use I've got little video screens to show me what I'm looking at and then I have a whole series of tools that I can use here so if you look at this whiteboard I can come over and I can
pick up a marker and I can draw on the whiteboard in VR door door door door door I can throw that markering love it and it's good to go how did that work is this chopping up for you oh I don't know you're muted Keith I can't hear you at this muted on the screen did you lose the all right so now can't hear myself all right so all right can you hear me now hey can you hear me there Keith yeah I can hear you
well that's part of it right is trying to figure out the right way to to get it done I don't know can you hear me on here I can hear you fine so the your sound you sound good I don't know if you can hear me you should be hear me can you hear me can you hear me well I can't you could hear me Chas on I was needy but basically what happens is sometimes my my web browser crashed out on me I'm using the
web browser as a client for the virtual meeting so it just bumped out on me there I'm gonna try and go ahead and restart it and see if it comes back up Chrome has an issue every once in a while but you know when you're messing with this much horsepower on a meeting sometimes it's good to make sure it's all set up the right way using the right client so the secondary so while Drew is doing that this goes to an example one while it wasn't
ready for us to try this and also show so show show show show show show show so show social hard but I think you guys can start to get the drift of where I would like to take sitio buyers or virtual conferences I'm kind of in this mold that not good enough is not not not perfect is not good enough and I'm trying to balance do a balance between what's good enough verses verses verses verses verses verses verses good enough verses what's not ready etc so
I'm gonna go ahead and bring drew back into the conversation so drew can you I hear me all right hey though all right so you're here we go man let's hear does have a little bit of fun here today folks it is fun hey can you hear me over there okay over there Keith yes I can't there you go can you hear me now I can hear you can you hear me I can hear you so I've got the headset on I'm making sure that everything's
set up the right way it's not chopped up as much as it as it was before so I'm gonna try and switch this camera back over into Br so can you hear me I can't hear you still cool okay so look I'm a female now if you can see me back in this environment is it still chopping up pretty bad or is no idea sounds really good okay cool man so I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna change back over here I'm gonna go back to
the I'm gonna get sang a little bit more fitting for me I'll be a businessman today or a bard but to give you an idea is you know you can change your avatars back and forth and as I was mentioning before I can have it set up so that it's me that it's a likeness of me so that someone who doesn't look anything like me there's a number of different ways that I can set it up and in this room I have a couple of different
things that I can mess with first of all you see the whiteboard behind me and again I can go back and I can get a marker and as I say I could but just as bad virtual world as I can draw poorly in the real world so there's a there's a smiley face for you but one of the cool things you can just throw the marker and it automatically goes back to where it's supposed to be the whole concept is that you can have a whiteboard
in the room with you so if you need to make annotations or do something you can give that type of presentation but if I reach up and I grab the camera and I turn it around you see that while I'm talking to you I'm actually looking at the screen of the meeting so I can see your face here I can see what I'm presenting on the other side and this is actually a desktop on my computer so I can launch applications I can get and in
two different things I can put on a PowerPoint presentation I can do a slide show any of that any other content that you can put on my computer I can I can supply that here in the virtual environment and then I can take the little screen and and what's great about it is you can just rearrange the room how you see fit there's handles that are on all these little screens so if you want the presentation in the background and then have your you know have
the PowerPoint on one side and then have your whiteboard or another that's one way to do this so from a teaching perspective or a teaching environment you can do a lot of neat stuff where if it's as if it's a class lesson that you want to give it really talks to that but what's cool is I can get in and I can change things like if I just want to change the entire environment and I want to get off this deal and go into a viewer
should I go I want to go into more of a webinar format now you can see that everything's changed that's a little different can you see that okay I can't see that yeah it's pretty crazy right so I can go and I've got my camera in one location I can walk towards my camera there's a couple of options where I can set up different screens behind me different content that I need I can scoot around the room so I can get closer to the camera I
can take the camera and move it over to the other side so that now you see a whole different environment behind me but there's a lot of things I can do where it allows me to show off you know everything from a PowerPoint presentation to a real world demo to something that's happening in the background I can bring video feeds into this so this can actually be a video feed behind me and then as we mentioned I heard you talking about a little we can even
take widgets like this little guy right here this is just a little widget that's included to show off this capability but imagine this was the latest processor from Intel or the latest uh you know hard drive or whatever it is I can take that and I can you know hand it to you I can walk up and see if I can get a little closer I'm walking around my room here you can take this and you twist it you can turn it around you can look
at it and if you're in the virtual world I can take that unit I can hand it to you so now you can take it and in your lap you can look at it you may not see what the weight of it feels like right but you can take and you can throw it at each other there's a lot of neat things you can do and I think that that adds a level of of at least fun to being able to see trying to grab my
camera here to being able to interact with people in a way that you couldn't do it before and it's not just about you know turning to your side and seeing somebody and taking our presentation but do you just think about what we're doing right here man I'm standing in my room in Texas in a virtual environment I've got a widget that I can hand you that you can take off turn and twist at the same time I've got live video feeds in the background I have
everything else so that's one of the concept they have that they have in here and go ahead what's up to kind of reinforce what we're doing here you're in Texas I'm in Illinois and I'm not switching this it's just me and you there is no third party there's nobody in the background switching this doing this this is no using to SAS platforms to deliver this concept we're at the same time I'm streaming over LinkedIn Facebook two accounts on Facebook YouTube and periscope and Twitter and this
is like we literally you paint me about an hour ago on LinkedIn he saying Keith let's have a quick chat and you know basically a couple of hawks lucious later we're doing this which is pretty pretty neat yeah it's pretty let me give you a tour of the newsroom over here so you know I can do the weather but what's really neat I think the cool part about it is even though I'm standing here and I've got this headset on my face and we'll flip back
over to it's just a basic headset I've got three year old in the other room you know who's watching blippi I've got you know my wife who's on a conference call I've got my daughter who's doing her homework but here I am an environment that looks and feels like it's studio set and this it doesn't stop with just the avatar the avatar is really what you want to make it so if I want to go I mean this one looks kind of cool but if I
want to go in and make it something more like me you know I can definitely do that if I want to see there you go let's turn it into Trevor yeah if I want look like Trevor I can look like Trevor you know and so you can really change everything about the way that you are in this environment and more importantly if you can see here you know this is the this is the news desk but how cool would it be to take this and then
to say instead just doing it in the traditional way we did it let's do it like this and let's bring Keith in let's put Keith on one side and me on another side then we can do an entire you know an entire set of you know some type of interview or whatnot so that brings me to my next one which is my favorite environment when I talk about the things like you and I had talked about because your virtual conference really blew my mind man the
fact that you were able to get you know so much stuff happening there it's just really it's really awesome and what I think is great about it is now you can take that same conference and you could put it in this huge virtual environment so behind me I've got a green up I'm standing on a stage you know now you can see the the entire room that I'm that I'm in right now I'm in this big theater I've got a stage out in front of me
I can produce a keynote the same way that I would from anyone else I can cycle back and forth through camera so you can see my desktop behind me if I blew you up full screen you could be a featured presenter I can go into the handheld cam ankle cam mode right here but what I'm doing is I have all these different camera angles that are out in the audience that I can switch back and forth to and it gives me a good way to change
the perspective on what's going on and then to look and see you know that I can bring in featured content so there's a lot of really neat things that can be done in this environment when you talk about producing a keynote which i think which i think is pretty cool man what do you think about that so one of the things I really liked about this whole concepts of why you show the virtual room with you know this abstraction of your physical presence from the room
itself by giving us from your constructs so if you think about it I could have everyone to be in the front row like everyone in the room to literally be in the first to roll roll roll roll roll have that camera perspective but be anywhere in the world so so I can look at my left my right and see completely different people but I'm the the kind that like my I'm just disoriented thinking about it you saw when people when smart people start to think about
this and apply it to mass conferencing or mass virtual conferences I think the potential was what can be done is amazing yeah I mean look at this and these are all there's some automated stuff that happens in here so you can fly around the room give you big you know big news big you know information or I can just you know stare at different things but I think the whole idea is that you can take a keynote and like you said not only be able to
be in the front row you know and and stick you really right up front with everybody that's there but also it gives you the ability to produce that element of a full production you know you can have your video crew you can have your effects creation everybody design out where these camera locations are to add emphasis where you need to add emphasis to draw the scene where you need to draw out the scene but make it so that's more than just staring at a box on
a screen and I think to me that's the important part because I think something like this really gives you the opportunity to interact more and engage more but it still gives you the ability to turn around and when you do have people sitting in the front row I can turn and look at you and turn my head and say man Keith did you hear what he just said that's crazy and you can have that side chat going on at the same time well everything's happening and
I think to me that that's really cool because that gives you the ability to interact not just with the person beside you but with the overall event as it's happening so it's pretty cool man I mean this is this stuff's come such a long way in such a short amount of time you know they have a they have a disc court that's online right now you can join the discord you can ask for you know feature request you could say hey it would be cool if
you could do this or add this or change that you know the source called spaces and believe it or not right now it's free if you go to space this com you can download the software if you have a VR headset you can you can do it you can use it as a camera going into either zoom or WebEx or teams or whatever it is you can you can feed into it through spaces and then the pro version which includes all of this and all these
great you know auto camera things and you know the Dali cameras and everything that's happening the pro version of this is only thirty bucks a month for right now and so it's kind of a neat way to do it you know this is a company that that really was having you know they've done a lot of really cool stuff but now what they have is because of kovat you know they develop a lot of video games and they develop a lot of AR and VR functionality
so they had thrown this together the concept of this in a couple of days as a way to interact with each other and now this is software that's helping them save their company but because they've made it a they've made it available to everybody so it's pretty awesome man so I'm gonna check it out so like in my mind all right what I want to try and do is I want to put on a virtual like announcement so think of you know our tech field day
type friends so tomorrow we're gonna do tech field day extra for Red Hat openshift summit and just think if you know me and my virtual delegates are around a virtual roundtable and we're getting presented to you and we all have on these VR goggles and we're you know we can have that back channel that we don't have edit now that we're virtual we could have this back channel where we're talking to each other and then you know the presenter can't hear us in theory and then
the third having this and we're bringing in all the presenters from all over the world to come present their solution tools I think that's the art of the possible and it's quite amazing once you think yeah I really I mean I really think that that that that's really cool because you know if you look in and again I'm just you can just flip environments one of the neat things that you can do is like there's some tables back there there's some virtual people walking one of
the things that you can do is you can load up sketchfab and with sketchfab you can come in and you can build in your own environment so let's say that the the Foskett wanted to make his own you know his own keynote stage and this is the the tech field a keynote stage he could build this entire thing himself or have a graphic designer developer build this and if they do build it then they can turn around and they can load this in so that everybody
can actually see what it's like to be on the delegate table so you're really you're not you're not limited by anything other than your imagination and what you want to do in the 3d environment and this is something that I've talked to a couple of vendors about already vendors at you and I are pretty familiar with I said you know I want to be there I want to be at your conference because I feel like when people go to a conference they don't just go to
the log about or to write about it they go because they want to interact man you know like here's the there's the crowd back there behind me you know they want to they want to sit in the audience and they want to feel like they are part of something impactful they feel like they're somewhere where they can you know where they can change the world and I really I feel like you lose that when you're staring at a screen and you can't look at someone and
go wow you know or you can't look at somebody and say that was incredible I really think that you lose a lot of that when you don't have the ability to to really feel like you're there and this is the closest the lot of us are gonna get for a while to being around other people you know with everything that's going on you know you could see this so cool like I'm it's ridiculous cuz I'm standing in a room in my office and Texas and I'm
staring up and like my arms are raised up in the air and I'm looking up at the screen because there's your face you know what I mean and you start to really forget that you're focusing in a virtual environment and you start to go man I can see how this can be pretty neat you know what I mean so the other I want to add to that is that you know it's not just about it's not just about this environment this is my favorite one but
what I think is really neat is when if you if you smash those things together right and you have the ability to then go into a trade show floor and you have a booth and a booth and a booth and you're able to teleport right I can teleport around the stage I'm over here you know hey I'm over here if you can teleport in a virtual tradeshow environment that means that I can teleport to some booth and if I can teleport to their booth and they're
standing in the booth then I can talk to them and they can talk to me and I can hear them without hearing everything else around me I may hear some ambient noise but at the same time you can have twenty different vendors sitting in their houses with these you know with these headsets on and answering questions and fielding questions from people all day and I think that that's pretty awesome because what that gives you the ability to do is not just connect on a one-to-one basis
you know go see the keynote take 10 minutes to go outside or 20 minutes or whatever for the whole day just set it up so that the booths are working somewhere talk to them grab the little where's my little widget let's so you grab a little widget you know that's here and you pick up my little widget we've got a little widget take it and throw it at them and let them get hands-on with it so that now people really have the ability to to not
just see and talk but interact like hey man this is check it out this is the latest thing you know the latest hard drive the latest wireless access point you know here's a here's a 3d model of a computer of a server of a chip let's go take a virtual cruise fly through you know the motherboard make it look like the you know like Star Wars there's so many things that can be done when you when you start to really let your mind open up and
think about you know what a virtual environment means and I think to me that's the most impressive part about all this is if this if all of this could be done in three weeks dude imagine imagine where we're gonna be in three months yeah man that is really so what's the website for people to check out like what's available for free and what's like out there now when space is calm I lose my mind but yeah spaces not thumbs switch back over to this mic can
you hear me there okay you you okay so yeah space is calm is is is where it is I mean it's dude this thing's so crazy it's so crazy so crazy um space is calm if you jump online if you go my LinkedIn or your LinkedIn I know you've shared some of the stuff on there there's a guy named Brad who's been putting a lot of work and development into it you know and his whole team over there at spaces they're based out in Culver City
and well these are this is just a group of innovative people working from home trying to come up with you know crazy creative ideas but to me it's so much it's more it's about the the possibility of this in the future because the Sun what's this what's this blows over assuming that it will has to been there's something that happens I love going out to eat Indian food with you you're going to me but at the same time doing stuff like this they can bring us
together I think that's the key is what are we doing right now what is this entire industry doing to bring people together or to leverage technology so that we don't have to get on planes so that we can be quicker we can be more responsive we can be more efficient this whole thing was was born out of what you see behind me and which is crazy if I could talk about that for just a second that kid that's there has a mobile router in it and
it's connected to that camera up there now it's not virtual that's if it's a real camera but the reason the BES here is what I I'm working with the customer on an incredible project and I don't want to lose momentum with where we were and part of the next phase was to do a physical installation of some devices but those devices have to be installed in very specific locations in order to leverage real-time location services and their wireless access points or sensors right and I knew
that I had to be there to understand where they were going to be installed and if they were moved I had to be there to see where they were going to be moved so I can mark it on the map and make sure that my travel liberation trilateral ation worked perfectly so I would know where these devices are but I couldn't be there especially because of kovat so conceptually I said man how awesome would it be to take a 360-degree camera like it's laying around here
somewhere I don't know I lost it how cool would it be to take a 360-degree camera stick on a tripod and then use the VR to get in there and so what the kit behind me you see is is exactly that I can take that camera and I can stick it in that box with a battery and a connection to for aizen or AT&T or both I can ship it out to the customer site they turn it on they put it on the tripod and it
immediately starts feeding video back into VR now not only can i view what they're doing but i can draw on the walls and i can mark it out of it instead of being that big keynote stage behind me it's actually a video of the real-world environment so I have a dim without on my LinkedIn page but it was that that led to one thing that led to another that led to another zone all right man so we both have one o'clock meetings that we have to
get to but that was pretty cool man I appreciate you reaching out to me about it there's some other stuff that I want to talk to you about that we didn't get to pitch this to my wife right after you pitched it to me I pitched it to my wife and the friend of hers about doing distance learning using this to do distance learning and big global class our own people from Australia New Zealand Europe and the US all getting together in one classroom to be
taught so think about primary education secondary education professional development etc the the the the the juices get formed but we got to go this is fun yeah one cool concept here it is it's not just about being in the virtual environment whoever the presenter is we can take real world video and superimpose it on that virtual video so that whoever is giving the presentation they don't have to be in VR they can just be standing in their room with cameras and a green screen and that
video can be fed in so that everybody can view it as if they're there but the video is actually coming from someone in the real world so just something something to chew on there man all right man for those of you yet that's thought this this whole time listening to me and drew just shoot the breeze tell me what you think about this do you want to see more content like this if if you do we'll keep producing it because it was a fun conversation there
yeah
