Product Visualization Using Forge, Fusion 360, and Revit in Virtual Reality

STEPHEN GOETZINGER: So this is a product visualization using Forge, Fusion 360, Revit in Virtual Reality.

So when I started prepping for this class, I started to think of the best way to put it to you guys. And showing you code is about the most boring thing ever. You're a coder, you know how to code. You don't need me to show you that.

But I wanted to give you guys some insights into some of the things that we've worked on in partnership with Autodesk that have been tremendously successful. Simple, simple stuff, but it'll give you some concepts and ideas.

First, a little bit about who I am. Pardon the ugly picture. Steve Goetzinger, senior consulting applications engineer for the Global Product Visualization Technologies group at Steelcase. That mouthful equates to the team that I work for are visualization innovators.

So we are chartered to work within Steelcase, both with marketing and the things that you normally think of as visualization, but also within operations, logistics, all of those other wonderful things that is where the money gets spent, as I like to say.

I like to refer to myself as the chief innovator, or the goofball that says, hey, can we do this? And then I let other people kind of make it come true.

This is our little motto-- "visualize IT," as an I.T. We say that a lot. Part of the reason they say that-- and I'm hoping that this presentation will bring some of that to life for you, is that one of things I like to lean on is that seeing is believing.

And anytime that you see something, it's a picture worth a thousand words and 3D is worth $10 million words because you can actually understand it better.

So seeing is believing. But my big question is what problems do you have to solve in business? I did look at the chart. I know we have a lot of Autodesk people in here, but we have a lot of others in here. So it's a pretty interesting mix. I'm hopeful that I'll ask you guys some questions too.

So a couple of different issues that I want to show you that we've dealt with. And the first one deals with assembly instructions for installers. So we are a global company. The ugliness of our world, Steelcase, is that we manufacture office furniture. We have 60,000 products and 20,000 finishes.

If any of you have a larger portfolio, please raise your hand. Let me know. I'm dying to find somebody bigger. It is both the benefit of our existence, and that our customers and our partners love that, that we have this large portfolio. And the fact that we have to manage all of the data and the information that goes to it is really, really ugly.

So one of the banes of that existence is installation drawings. How do I show you how to put something together in seven different languages, in line drawings that we print out-- keep in mind that a simple installation will be at least a truckload of furniture.

And it'll be a stack of paper that thick that the driver shows up with. And the installers generally kind of go-- right into the wastepaper basket. We want to get beyond that.

Second one of these is actually a project that we have in flight. It's how do we deal with service parts? So for that 60,000 products that we have, we have 32,000 service parts. So you, as a customer, how do you identify the leg on that chair as a service part? And how do you order it?

It's a pretty tough row to hoe. Also, by the way, we want make sure we get the right version. That's always a fun thing, because our products tend to live for about 30 years.

And then the last one is a project that we did with the globalization of industrial design. So originally we had one industrial design center in Grand Rapids. We parlayed that out to two other facilities, one in Munich and one in Hong Kong.

The downside to that-- or the upside to that-- is we are a global company. The downside to that is that I have to produce that chair here, Europe, and Asia. And they all have to agree to it. And there's all kinds of regional standards that they have to deal with. So we'll talk a little bit about what we did with that and the benefits that we brought to the table.

By the way, I'm open. If you have a question, throw up your hand. I hate presentations that are dry. So I'm trying not to suck at this.

So the first one, assembly installations and instructions-- excuse me. So if you look at our products-- and this is a fairly new picture-- our products can be incredibly complex. The simplest thing that we make out of those 60,000 products is a chair that has one finish and no options.

The most complex thing that we make is a thing called a via wall. It's completely parametric, floor to ceiling. You can come into an open facility, such as a factory, and turn it into office space.

By the way, those parts that are parametric are yours. That means that we number every one of them. And if you have to order a service part, you have to tear it apart and look at that number to order it.

So how do we teach somebody to assemble something that's fully parametric? That's a nightmare. Most of the time, this is what you get. The important key feature of this page is this. That's the bench-desk that you were looking at. That's one of the products in that room, of which there are probably 30 in that picture if I really tore it apart. So somebody spends hours taking apart information, coming from engineering, turning it into line drawings, numbering it, putting it together.

You'll notice that I chose one that actually has a different language on it because we have to-- whatever we produce in English, we have to pay somebody else to convert, which always doesn't convert well. Total nightmare.

By the way, for that 60,000 products, North America there's three people, Europe there's two people, Asia there's two people that do this. That's it. That's the entire staff today. So it's fairly efficient for what it is.

So we have this legacy process. This is kind of how it goes. I started to describe it, but I wanted you to understand it. So geometry is exported from the engineering systems team. We're a pro engineer house in our engineering systems group.

It's imported into Adobe Illustrator. The geometry is overdrawn. We don't even keep it. We add texts, convert to other languages. The content is then proofed after the fact, and then the content is delivered via printing. So we print all of that stuff out, which means whatever we put into that truck, we have to have a list of to print out. Total nightmare, right?

So let's add a little insult to injury. 75% of the people that are in the world have trouble understanding and converting 2D to 3D. A lot of people look at that line drawing and they can't understand how that goes together, right? Tab a and slot b is what?

The reuse of existing engineering data and the maintenance of ECN's and instructions is a nightmare, right? That table could have changed three times by the time we delivered it to the field.

Again, multilingual-- we've got seven languages. We're pretty pressed to do more, and we refused to.

Paper is a terrible thing, right? We literally ship paper indoor facilities by that crate-full. But the delivery people don't want to carry it and the installers don't want to deal with it. Most of these installers are trained. They've put that table together before. So even though they've put it together before, I don't know that. It means I have to deliver that install instruction again.

The worst one is the bottom one. And it's the best and the worst. We work like automotive does. So if you buy something from us, there's a Steelcase dealer there that helps us. They insulate our complexity from the customer.

That means that the dealership-- we don't have any control over them. The only thing we can tell them is they can't sell other products of other dealerships. But they make money off of the installations. So anytime that we provide them content that's not efficient, they come back to us and they complain. And they say they want money.

Wait a minute, if you sell a car and it's inefficient, the dealership doesn't go back to Ford and say, hey, give us money. That's one of the problems that we deal with. It's also not a very glamorous job. So trying to find people to do this gets to be difficult for the dealerships.

So we started talking about how we might-- and we use that term a lot-- how might we reinvent this process? So we worked, actually with Roger who is in the audience, on Fusion 360. We took the geometry information that we had. We import that into Fusion 360.

Now the original concept for this was hey, we could do this for video. Wait a minute, I still have some of those same problems. I'm producing video that I have to keep and maintain versions and revision on. Kind of a pain.

So we said instead of that, let's animate this. And now let's output this into A360 in the Forge viewer.

So now all of a sudden I have this 3D animated process that I can deliver via URL link. If the installer needs it, they can download it ahead of time and carry it with them. They don't necessarily have to be live and online. One of our problems is that job sites often don't have internet connectivity.

So this would be the first prototype of what that looks like for a chair. This is the first chair that we did. We are now standard on a bunch of different process for this. But as you can see, it shows them exactly how things work. I apologize this is a video. I didn't want to try and do things live in front of you guys.

If something is a little bit askew and you can't see where that bolt goes into that hole, all you have to do is rotate it and you play it again. Or you can stop it at any given point. Or you can use the tools that are in the Forge viewer-- highlight, markup, share with somebody else.

So now all of a sudden we're talking to the dealers about hey, when your people are in the field, wouldn't it be great if they had their phone with them and their tablet with them, and they could circle that problem that doesn't go together and send it back to you?

So the interesting part is this is a brand new chair. This went live in September. And we produced zero paper in it's delivery. So we don't produce any assembly instructions that are printed out. We send them a link via email as part of that delivery. They can click that link, download it ahead of time, do whatever they need to do. And away they go.

First one. Questions?

AUDIENCE: Do you use Forge to create the viewer that [INAUDIBLE]?

STEPHEN GOETZINGER: Correct, yes. And the viewer is-- so the Forge viewer is, for lack of a better term, it's a web geo lightweight viewer. So it's 3D on the web.

The interesting-- the really interesting side is that we started playing around not only with text and not putting text in, but there's things that we can easily do in animation that we can't do in line art.

So where we show a ratchet and tell you to put the ratchet on the but, we can physically show somebody putting the action on but, right? I mean, that's a simple example. But you can carry that out to the nth degree.

Seating is a good example to start with. But we have stuff that's a whole lot more complex than that. And the other bane of our existence-- sorry I keep saying that-- is that every product connects with every product. So magically, I can start tying some of these things together. Yes?

AUDIENCE: You mentioned that you still have a prototype [INAUDIBLE]. How long did it actually take you to get this going? [INAUDIBLE]

STEPHEN GOETZINGER: Took us roughly about six weeks to get the first prototype built. We had to do some coding because we didn't want certain things to be capable in the tool. So we had to turn some things off for the assemblers.

That time would have been much less. The biggest problem that we had was we couldn't get out of our own way. We had several managers that kind of said, you know, we really want video. And we said no. I'm sorry. Go ahead?

AUDIENCE: No, that's good. So you mentioned that you had an intern do it.

STEPHEN GOETZINGER: We did have an intern do it. Yes, that's correct. The very first one we had an intern do. And we ended up actually hiring him and putting him in charge of it.

AUDIENCE: There you go.

STEPHEN GOETZINGER: Yeah. The really, really interesting side of this too is that originally there were-- like I said, there were three people in the United States that did line drawings. We're a large company. We can transition people around.

So we gave him the option. Do you want to learn how to do this? Or would you like to look for something else to do in the company?

Two of them have transitioned out to other jobs because they didn't want to do this. And we've been able to actually bring on another intern as a permanent employee.

So we have two younger folks that are-- and part of that that's really important I think is that-- I was just in a conference just yesterday talking about this. Millennials are kind of interesting because they're gamers, right? So they don't think like old people like me.

They're not afraid to try something. So it's really fun to talk to Hank, who is our intern, and say, you know, what if we did this? How can we deliver this better? And he-- oh, well let's try it. Instead of well, you know, we have to deal with these people in the field. No, you know? Let's try it. Let's not give it excuses, right?

So I always like to talk about what did we get, right? How did this work for us? So massive improvements in quality was one of the things that we didn't actually plan on. This was just a better way to deliver this. It wasn't a better way for them to actually understand how stuff goes together.

And now we're starting to use this because all of our dealer assemblers are trained. We're using this in the training. So they literally bring in that piece of furniture, set it down, and play the video, and then watch people. And then go oh, we can improve the video or the 3D now by doing it like they want to do it.

It was always interesting to me-- I've been with Steelcase for 20 years. And I watched many installations. And I would look at stuff and go, OK, I started in engineering. I designed that to go together this way. The installer never put it together that way. They don't think that way, right?

Total removal of all the languages. So the cost savings benefit of that alone, I really am not supposed to tell you what the numbers are. But it was insane. Way over six figures a year, hiring these firms to convert to French, and German, and all these other languages.

The interesting part that really has happened is we've got an excess of about 60 of these now. I was in Germany for our new facility opening about six months ago. And the guy who does this over there hunted me down and said how quickly can we start implementing this here?

Oh, really, you mean you want to do this? Oh yeah, right away, as fast as we can. Easy delivery I think is very, very evident, right? It's so much easier to tie this together.

But one of the things that we started talking about right away is because it is a URL, can I simply put it into the electronic media? Can I connect that URL to something else? Can I embed it within these services?

We got really excited when we started figuring out everybody has an AI engine, a search engine like Google, right? We can make it searchable, right? So it is geometry. That you can attach to the metadata it's in there.

So many of those things became an advanced 3D applications platform. One of the things that we found is that people started sharing this, right? Not just the installers, not just the salespeople, but the actual communication to the customer. Industrial designers, how did this go together to an engineer? Here, let me send you this 3D piece that we did.

Our industrial designers are standardized on Fusion. So immediately they started picking apart, hey, if you guys did these animations, we could do those to show people how the furniture is supposed to work. And they've started doing it themselves a little bit. We've actually started getting calls to say, can you help us?

So it's proven into this foundation for all these other groups to follow, right? They started asking all kinds of crazy 'what if" questions. How might I do this? How might I do that?

One of the interesting ones that Roger and I have been working with is our model shop. And they asked a very simple question of we, have two licenses, a pro engingeer. We use it for manufacturing only. And the problem is our modelers are running around all the time. And we said oh, well hey, let's get him some Fusion licenses. And they can simply view what they're supposed to build.

And they're going nuts with it. In fact, Mike is here this week. He's thrilled with what he's finding. So this turned into a catalyst for us. So I think this is kind of one of those key moments where everybody kind of goes oh, there's a lot more here. So any questions on the first one? Cool, OK.

So we started playing around. The first piece, like I said, was a Forge piece that Roger had coded internally to Autodesk for us. And that led us to this concept of we really need to do this ourselves. So we actually brought on another coder-developer, internal to our group. Mike had worked with our group before.

And the day that he showed up he looked me and said, what should I learn? What should I do? Here's your Forge license, Mike. Let's get you connected.

And this actually came from Mike working within our engineering group and looking at pro engineer information. So Mike was playing around for about the first hour. And all of a sudden I got this call over. And he said, hey, what do you know about service parts?

And I said, well, they look like this. They look like line drawings where you try and identify where that goes into the chair, and hope that you order the right one.

It's funny, but it's really not. I mean, if you think about what the dealers have to go through to try and identify and understand 60,000 products, it's almost impossible. So that cylinder is a great example in that there's a different cylinder that goes in each chair, right? And they're not all the same. And did I order the right one?

Well luckily, you know, I know the seating product. So I know that-- oh, wait a minute. There's no brand for that. There's no product name for that, right? This is actually from a chair that we have called a Gesture chair.

The only reason I knew that when I looked it up was because I searched "Gesture" and I recognized the arms. And I work for the company. That's awkward, right? That's incredibly awkward.

So we started asking some questions. We said, well, wait a minute. We have 30,000, or 32,000 service parts. All of these start with a product line, right? They start with a chair. And that's actually a Gesture chair on the right-hand side.

So you see what it looks like. You can understand how difficult it is to understand that that cylinder is the right one that goes to that. And then the second question we started asking is what is a service part and what isn't? Why do we only have 32,000 even though we have 60,000 products?

And we had some really interesting answers. Well, certain things can't be serviced, and all that kind of fun stuff. But we really wanted to get to that point where we ease the use for that end customer. Because at some point in time, the end customer is not as connected to the dealer, right? They buy and then they back away for a while until they have their next big purchase.

So we have, again, three more people who are building drawings for service parts just like you saw. And we really wanted to put together, again, another foundation that we could build on. How do we do that?

So this is what we said. What if we did this? What if we use that Forge viewer, and I said, here's, the chair. And it looks just like the one that I've got. Because they're all very distinct, I can pick them out. They don't have to have necessarily finishes on them.

But can I click on that object and have it tell me what that service part is? And does it know that? Now, the interesting side to this is that we actually did this backwards. Because Mike was playing around for about an hour. And this is the actual Gesture chair that he showed me.

And I said so wait a minute, you pulled in our marketing geometry? And he said no, I pulled in the engineering geometry just like we do for those assembly animations. And I said OK, that's cool. So what?

And he started clicking around. And we really realized very quickly, we carried a lot of that metadata information with us. And we said, well how might we do this? It's simple. And all the tools were right there in front of us.

The biggest problem we have with this is getting volume information out of our engineering PLM system. I'm going to steal from one of the Autodesk reps who will remain nameless. They called it a roach motel. Roaches go in, but they don't come out. It's kind of sad because it's our information, right, that we have to actually fight to get it out of the system.

But once we get it into here, it's open. We can use it, consume it, do whatever we need to. And the best part is that I can show it to an end customer without having to share something. And they can share it with the dealer saying, these are the arms that I need. Is that the right service part?

Simple. All of a sudden now I'm in a 3D world where I can communicate. And wouldn't it be cool if we could put the button right there that says just order that for me, right? Give me credit card.

Now that's something in our industry that's very foreign. It's very tough to do. We don't do that a lot. So us asking that question, we are heretics, which I love. How might we-- and being branded a heretic is too much fun.

So that new process kind of looks like this, much simplified, right? So geometry is exported from engineering systems, that's the hard part. The Forge geometry converter, along with some custom code in there, and then we output that via A360 in Forge. We use that URL link again.

So at some point in time you do have to kind of know what the product brand is to get into that level and find out what it is. But if you get the wrong one, you know visually that's not the right one, right? So you can see it. Seeing is believing.

So those are two big things that we did that have rocked our world. The interesting side of this-- I have to tell you a side story. The very first piece-- we had a manager who was in charge of some of this stuff. And he literally was bound and determined we were going to shoot video from all this.

And we kept saying no, no, no. And he said no, no. We're going to shoot video.

And he literally walked into the room with a director that he reports to that we also report to. And he said, so when we shoot video-- and the director stopped him and said, over my dead body will you shoot video of this.

So all of a sudden he understood the benefit of what we were bringing and the fact that we were drastically reducing effort time and providing a benefit to the customer. All wins.

So this next piece gets really interesting because we've been working on this one for quite a while, about a year. And it goes to that last piece that I talked about, the globalization of industrial design.

So I'd like to pick on Ford. We're from Grand Rapids, Michigan, which is right around the corner from Detroit, Michigan. And our CEO is now the CEO of Ford. So we're a little bit privileged I think.

Industrial design on a car is very interesting because there's lots of moving pieces, right? Industrial design on a chair or industrial design on a product, it doesn't work the same way.

We have all these products that are global-- sorry, no they're not. They're regional, right? So I may produce that same chair in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. It's different. It's smaller in stature. It means different regulatory demands. It's not the same chair. But it has to look the same.

Because if I sell to somebody as big as Mobil Oil, who's a global company, they want their offices all to look the same. Nike and other customers, they want their offices to look the same, right? They want a common look and feel.

So as we started expanding across the globe-- that first one up there was the what we refer to as the Innovation Center. And we actually build Innovation Centers. Our Innovation Centers are full of engineers and industrial designs.

And then we created one in Asia, and then Europe. We just opened the brand new one in Europe. And we started asking that question. Well, wait a minute, when we would do this how are we going to actually produce a model-- meaning a real model-- and get everybody to approve that chair?

I use a chair because everybody understands and recognizes a chair. You're sitting in one. I know they're uncomfortable, I apologize. I'm allowed to say that.

So we said well, wait a minute. You know, we have three different locations doing three different things. But they really need to look at common data. They need to be "the same." They need to be yellow ones that are red, and blue, and green.

So as we looked at that, we said how might we? That was our first statement. And one of the things we started asking was what are the problems that you're dealing with?

The first problem was money. Every time we produce a chair-- and we do about six to 10 chairs a year now-- each one of those chairs has in the neighborhood of four prototypes. Each prototype is between $25,000 and $35,000. That's before it's ever completed. That's just trial prototypes.

Now all of a sudden not only do we have to produce all of that, but we have to ship it to different locations. Or we have to produce it there so that the ID guys can look at it, and touch it, and feel it, and I was jokingly say smell it.

And we call that a product design review. And they do this multiple times to get agreement between each other. And it's always amazing to me that I go, it's just a chair. It's really not, right? A chair to us, it can be $2,000 for a chair.

I proudly say that I sit in the chair now that costs more than my first car. This is what that looks like.

Now, this is a render that we actually pulled out of some other visualization stuff. But this is literally what it looks like. All around Steelcase you see these chairs that are covered up with these blankets, these sheets. Because nobody else is supposed to see it because it's this big industry secret.

So wait a minute, how do I package that up and ship it across the globe, and have somebody unwrap it and then show it to somebody without it being a secret? There's all kinds of really weird caveats that come into play here, right?

And the ID guys get really finicky about this. Because they do want to actually smell the material. It's really funny, but I totally get it. Having an art background, I want to touch it, right? I want to feel it.

So we started doing some research with Steelcase and Autodesk on VR collaboration. And this is a video of that very first one. You'll notice that there's three colored players in there. If you know Merton-- from the offices of the CIO-- Merton is in here. There's another gentleman in here from Munich. And then there's a whole group of people in here from Grand Rapids.

So we have the entire seething industrial design crew come in. And we were passing the goggles around. But I wanted to play the video-- whoops, sorry. Back up.

I wanted to play the video for you guys. Because it's very interesting on a couple of points. So when we first did this, the ID guys literally went, it'll never work. And we said give it a try. Come on in and try it. They went OK, fine.

So as you see them working together-- and there is audio here. But you can see Merton in his lab waving his hands and explaining to everybody how the technology works. One of the big worries was is everybody going to get it fast enough that they can work with it? Is it going to be functional for what they're doing?

And what we found was that they adapted to it like that. It was no problem, like a duck to water, right? And we started asking questions as we went along. And one of the first ones was, you know, do you guys ever slice a chair in half as a real prototype to see what the guts look like?

And they said no. But we always put it in our platform. So can you put it in our platform? And we started laughing, going just-- it's virtual. Put it up in the air. It'll stay there. It doesn't fall down. There's no gravity, right?

We started also working on the fact that they wanted to play with materiality, and they wanted the material to look real. They didn't want to smell it. But they had to be able to see what does that look like, are there holes in the fabric, all of those kind of fun things.

And as we started going back and forth-- and this is actually the lab space, if you will, that we use for Ford and their cars. If you were here last year then you saw them with the new Mustang in here. It was very interesting because we said this space is too big.

And the ID guys went nope, this is perfect. Because we can mess with the lighting, we have all the space, and we can slice it. They went oh, we can slice it. And we can see how this works. And we can highlight. And then they started putting sticky notes all over the place. And they said, can we save this?

Now keep in mind, three different locations-- we're communicating all of the geolocation information from every controller of who's moving what. So this is a little labor intensive. This is not in Fusion. This is actually in Vred.

But it really spurred on a lot of ideas for Merton and for Brian Penney's team, which has now turned into 3D Studio Live. So if you wander out on the shop floor in the maker space, you'll see we have a giant booth with Autodesk, and you can play with health care. And you can move furniture around and see how it looks. And it's quite collaborative.

And we'll play this whole thing for you. But I think a couple of things that are really important that really caught me off guard, one of them was we had a gentleman who has been industrial design with us for quite a long time. He's about 60 years old. He's the head of industrial design for seating.

And we talked to him about what did you think. And you've got to remember you get a guy who's about 60 years old with these goggles on holding this chair up in the air, shining a flashlight into it, giggling like a little kid.

And then we said, hey John, why don't you sit in the chair? But it's virtual. I can't sit in the chair. And I said trust me. Sit in the chair. And as he put it on the ground and he sat down, we shoved a chair underneath him, and he just lost it. Perfect. Wicked cool, right?

Now part of the reason I'm showing Merton here is the other piece that was really kind of almost frightening is-- remember Merton's in LA and we're in Grand Rapids. And as we ended the session. Merton and I high-fived.

We didn't think about it, we didn't say anything. I just said "high-five"," We stuck our hands up in the air, the technology melted away, and it was people talking to people about what they saw and what was there. It worked amazingly.

Whoops, sorry about that. I had to stop the video. Let me go back into that. Oh, come on.

OK, so we did a number of experiments, multiple locations, tried different things-- what did work? What didn't work? How do we connect? What were the issues? What weren't the issues? And we documented all that.

And we came up with this new process. So geometry exported from engineering systems, and then Revit models. One of the big problems we hit on was they literally looked at us-- the ID guys looked at us-- and said, well, we do two things with this.

First, we put the chair by itself and we say what's the chair look like? Then we put the chair together with all the other furniture that we have, and we see what it looks like. So we have to be able to do that. So we've played around with that using Revit models. We actually use Sketch-Up and a number of other tools kind of all combined together.

The really nice thing is that the converter, the geometry converter that's in Forge, handles all that stuff beautifully. We don't lose anything, right?

So we take that Forge application-- we use Vred in this case, but we can do it through other things. That Forge application has started. The location data of all the objects are shared, meaning that I have to be able to store that in-state because of course the ID guys wanted us-- they wanted all their sticky notes is what they really wanted.

Now, the interesting part is that the model gets manually shipped all over the world, right? And now that we're in live, we don't have to do that anymore. It's just in the cloud. So we just point to it. So this is actually out of date.

Now from that, remember we said that they wanted to do-- and we call it settings. So a chair, desk, and a lamp is the joke, is the setting, right? It's objects put together in space.

We mentioned that to Brian Penney. And got this funny call from Brian. He said, hey, are you coming out any time soon? I got something I want to show you. And the next thing I know, we are in Stingray and we are moving furniture.

So we, again, showed this to the industrial design guys and said, hey, you can move furniture virtually. And they went, OK that's great. So what? But we said but you're in the 3D space. So you not only can move it in 3D, but you can experience it in 3D.

And one of the first things that they started talking about-- kind of incredible-- was well, can we have this stage with the different chairs up on it? And then we can just grab the ones that we want. And when we do that, can it just instantiate so that we've got this type of chair with this desk, and this type of chair with the same desk, and this type of chair with a different desk. And we went, yeah.

And they said what's the limit? And we said RAM-- nothing. For the most part, it's not. It's not limited.

One of the things we've actually kind of struggled with is actually UIUX. And I jokingly say that if you look at anything that you work on, every UI that's out there today for the most part-- other than certain games-- is 2D. It's paper converted electronically.

All of a sudden you're living and working in a 3D world and you have to be able to interact with that 3D world. And it's amazing how many people have a different idea of how to interact with that 3D world. Because we don't have a common language like paper to start with.

If you think about UIUX design, most people pull out a piece of paper and they start drawing boxes for buttons, right? We don't have that. How do we interact is really a complex situation.

So again, working with Autodesk we've played around with how might we create these settings. The very interesting part is you'd look at us and say, well what do you save? I jokingly say we save gator board. If you guys know what gator board is, it's the Styrofoam stuff with the paper on both sides. That stuff's about $45 a sheet.

I cannot tell you how many reams of this stuff that we go through in a year with the industrial design guys carving it up and gluing it together and-- they want to get a feel for what it looks like.

Well, they don't need that anymore. They've already started augmenting into this world. The fun part was is that they bought a new machine about two weeks ago. And they literally called us that, hey, can you guys come over and set up our new machine? OK, why? We don't know how to do it. But everything works fine in the old machine. But we need the new machine.

So keep in mind rules don't apply. Which is always a fun thing for ID guys. They love it when rules don't apply.

So in this new world, this is what it looks like. So geometries are exported again from engineering systems, Revit models are gathered. Now, this is a little bit outdated. Because now we're coming through 3D Studio Max in the live instead of Stingray. Before, we were using Stingray in the live format. And it worked great.

Both of them work very similarly. The only difference. And one of the things that we've found as a caveat is that when we do settings, we don't want as high of visual quality. It's more about the space and how things work together versus the fabric on the chair.

So we're playing between these worlds trying to understand and figure that out. The weird part of that is they're ID guys and they look at things differently than we do as IT guys, right?

Guys and gals in both sides talking to one another, we don't have a common language. So we had to invent that. And it's very interesting as they start talking about well, can't you do this? And we go OK, you've got to describe it. Because I don't know what that means.

It's very powerful. One of the things that we've done-- the Forge-- the gentleman who's coding Forge for us, Mike graduated from a program that incorporates graphics and geometry into their program.

So it's very beneficial to us because we can have these conversations about when you're dealing with this geometry, do this. Most coders developers don't live within that environment that live in the business world. They don't code geometry. So it makes it a little bit easier on us.

And if you want to play with it live, there's Steelcase. We are on the maker space floor. The space that we have there gets real interesting. Because again, remember we said how might we, and does this augment other things?

The reason I bring that up is because we started in industrial design. And we started showing people what we'd done. And one of the first groups that came to us was our health care sales organization. We said hi, health care sales. Why do you want to talk to us? You want us to render something for you?

And they said, no, we want to do virtual tours. And we want to let people mess with stuff. And we said OK, why?

Well, we have this really ugly thing in the United States that protects us called HIPAA. And I said why is it ugly? It's a good thing, isn't it? And they went no, because we can't take Connie on a tour of the hospital because she's not there as a patient. HIPAA law refuses that.

So how do we take a potential customer through another hospital to show them what we've done? Because our goal is to make hospitals not look like hospitals. We want to make them feel comfortable so you're not so uptight. And it's just brutal, right?

Well, we're doing that through live. And you can actually go and walk through a customer care space. And if you don't like it, please, move the furniture around. We'd be thrilled if you did that, right? We'll help you move it around if you want. I do believe there's some materialities you can play with in there too. But make it yours.

That's one of the things that I'll leave you with, is that in our group of 60,000 products and 32,000 finishes, the magic is that we have an entire group of engineers that literally are about 100 people total almost, about 85 roughly in the United States, that make special products.

So if you don't like that table that way and you want to put a hole in the middle of it and round the corners, we'll do that at a cost. We do 60,000-plus SKUs a year doing that additionally. And we want to include all of that within that VR world and make it as easy as possible.

Because the worst case that I ever heard of-- and I heard this just two weeks ago-- customer called in. They wanted a simple four drawer file cabinet, lateral file cabinet. You guys all know where it is. I don't need to show you a picture, right? We want to make that eight drawers.