Seeing the Future: How Enhanced Realities Are Evolving How We Visualize Design

BRENT JACKSON: So today, I'm here to tell you about seeing the future and how enhanced realities are evolving the way we visualize design. Did any of you guys hear what was said about Bridgestone during the keynote? Were you there for that? OK, good.

Did anyone stop by our booth and see the VR display we had? A few of you? OK, good. So I kind of wanted to focus more on the non-technical side of all of that because I covered that-- it was covered in the keynote and we've been presenting about it kind of the whole week here and I taught a class on that this morning as well. This is more about kind of my experience at Bridgestone working on this stuff and kind of where we see this going.

The stuff we're going to cover today is-- apparently just this. Of course the guy like walks out of the room right as this goes away. I'll just come back over and press it. So kind of the topics I want to cover are, what are enhanced realities? Has anyone heard the term "enhanced realities" before? Yeah, there was a reason for that. It was around for a little while like a year and a half ago when we started working on this kind of as that leading term but now a lot of people call it extended realities or XR.

So once I get through that one, I'm going to explain to you kind of the cases for XR and where kind of we feel that it's useful. I'm going to cover some pitfalls to try and avoid when working with this kind of new technology. Give you kind of an idea on how maybe you can take the experience I had convincing our company to invest in this new technology and use that to convince your company to invest in this new type of technology.

As far as becoming an innovator, just kind of through the work I did, they gave me a new title of innovation specialist, so I'll just give you a walkthrough of what that experience was like and kind of what I felt helped and hindered along the way, so you can decide if you even want to become an innovator. And then kind of moving forward. Kind of next steps that we're thinking about taking and maybe you guys want to take with your company.

So what are enhanced realities? Enhanced realities is a term used kind of as a collective coverall for augmented reality, mixed reality, and virtual reality. The universal term for all this is still being heavily debated. A lot of them include extended reality, enhanced reality, immersive reality. My favorite is the virtual augmented continuum. Just using the word "continuum" is fun. Virtuality, advanced reality, and mixed reality. At the moment, from a programming, extended reality is the one that's used the most.

When you're programming, the things you make for virtual reality and mixed reality and augmented reality-- the tool sets-- are very similar, so they just use XR to describe it. Partially, for the word extended also, the X represents that variable. So you can plug in the A or the M or the V or Q if that comes up. So it's kind of just like the tool set for using for creating these kind of things.

The definition for extended reality is a term referring to all real-and-virtual combined environments and human-machine interactions generated by computer technology and wearables. Basically, putting on some goggles and seeing your data in some way in relation to the real world. And that's kind of what we've been working on.

So the first example I I saw for extended realities was in Jaws 19 featured in Back to the Future 2. This is a great example of extended reality. It is a hologram interacting with the real world. The first project we did for this was called Project MARTI, which stood for Mixed Augmented Reality Technology Innovation. It really kind of just flows off the tongue, and I kind of liked it because it made me think of Marty McFly.

So basically, the take-away is, for now, just call it whatever you want. The person you're talking to will probably either have an idea or not an idea of what talking about when you get around to it, but until they figure it out, I wouldn't really stress about it. So kind of the different technologies involved to kind of give you a quick overview, virtual reality. The main technologies are the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, the Windows Mixed Reality, and the Google DayDream. At Bridgestone, we've decided to work with the HTC Vive because it has room scalability. You're able to, for what we're doing, inport our models and walk around our models and look at them from all dimensions and mark them up and that alone just kind of made us not want to use the rest of them. I guess in Windows Mixed Reality, you can do that as well, but it wasn't around two years ago when the Vive came out and so it was also the only one available to purchase.

In the realm of mixed reality, which is Microsoft's term for a lot of things but specifically for the Microsoft HoloLens, that's taking virtual data and actually looking at it in a place on top of the real world. Not to be confused with augmented reality, it is spatially located. So you can walk around. There's holograms in the real world which we had on display downstairs.

For those, the options are the HoloLens, Meta 2, someday Magic Leap, and Windows Mixed Reality. They call it mixed reality but it's really just a VR headset. So we decided to go with the HoloLens because A, it was available, and B, it really is pretty fascinating in what it's able to do as a standalone headset.

Augmented reality. You guys obviously probably know about that. So the iPhone and the iPad have AR kit, which is a pretty impressive development kit. It does a lot of what mixed reality does as far as tracking. Android has its ARCore. Surface. You can use a Surface book to look at augmented reality items as well. Basically any tablet with a camera on it, you can use for augmented reality.

Meta 2 is more like the HoloLens but they refer to themselves as an augmented reality device, probably to differentiate themselves from Microsoft, but there it is. And then also, Google Glass, which has been around for a while. It did not go over so great when it was first announced but it has actually done really well in the enterprise industry by displaying information in front of you so that you can see a task hands-free and do something and also get a see-what-I-see camera view. And I'm not actively doing any development with Google Glass right now, but as far as augmented reality, I still actually feel like it's kind of the best case scenario because really the whole point of all this is to see the data you need to see, where you need to see it, and not have to worry about doing anything with your hands during that process.

So there's a lot of hype around virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality. Especially if you went to the show floor, you saw a lot of people demoing it. So as far as with augmented reality, you've probably heard of Pokemon Go. That is kind of the thing that ruined the internet for a little while by having people walk into rivers and into traffic trying to apparently catch all of them, which I'm not really sure if anyone's done that yet. Apple has the ARKit which everyone's excited about and Android followed suit. Everyone really is excited about how augmented reality is going to change-- I guess gaming is the main thing right now. So there's a lot of hype around that.

Virtual reality, everyone's really hyped about eventually going wireless for something like the Vive. Being able to get all that power without being tethered to something. HP recently released their new VR backpack which I'm testing out right now. And while I don't love having to wear a backpack, it's a really cool-looking backpack and it does allow me to just walk around inside of a virtual world and kind of forget the tether.

Getting rid of the Screen Door Affect. If any of you have used VR headsets, you'll notice you can-- I mean, the pixels are like right here, so I'm not surprised that you can see them. And then kind of the final hope is that we'll get a Vive quality headset in a Daydream-sized package, but it's a little ways off.

And then as far as the mixed reality hype, Magic Leap is probably the most hyped company in the world. I'm really excited to see what they come out with with their light field technology. They're very secretive about it. Getting a larger viewing area. The HoloLens is like a 35 degree field of view, which isn't great, but considering it's a technological limitation, I'm not surprised. I'm just glad they made it anyway. They recently passed a patent that's going to allow them to go 70 degrees in the next generation. So that's going to be great.

Yeah. And then getting higher resolution. You can bring in about 100,000 polygons onto a HoloLens before it starts to bog down. So we're looking forward to that getting better. So we have this hype cycle that a lot of software gets into. As something new comes out, people get really excited about it and they think it's going to change everything and disrupt life itself. It's not, but it will make a lot of things better.

And so once it gets released and everyone is disappointed, because we always are and we have the internet, you kind of enter this trough of disillusionment where people think, well, that wasn't it. It was a bust. What's the next thing I can prepare to get disappointed by.

With virtual reality, it's finally reaching that slope of enlightenment. We've got it out of the realm of this is going to change video games and we're all going to make a lot of money and everyone's going to have it in their house. That's not really happening but it's getting used in architecture and engineering and very professional settings. The companies are kind of having to pivot and refocus on that because we're really interested in it because we're saving a lot of money by using it.

So there's that gap of disappointment that we have to get past, which is a real pain, but we'll get there. You know, the technology keeps increasing. We forget how disappointed we were in it whenever something new happens. Augmented reality, for instance, has been around for a long time and was very disappointing until Pokemon Go came out.

So going to go into some of the use cases that we see in pursuing for XR-- the VR, AR, and MR. The initial one is design. If you went down to our show floor, you'll see how we're using it. Kind of the first thing we're doing is creating this design review application that allows our engineers to review our models before we build them, because it turns out, when you tell a vendor what to do based on a 2D CAD drawing of a plant layout or a massive system and then they make it and they give it to you in CAD drawings and you look at it and you say, yeah, this looks right, it might not be the case and you have to do a lot of rework.

And so that happened-- is kind of how I got started working at Bridgestone because this machine did not come out right-- a third of the machine did not come out right. And they asked me to take all those 2D drawings, a tape measure, and redesign that machine in Inventor in 3D so that we would know what we actually had so that, when it was breaking, instead of saying, can you make this straight again, I could give them the files and they could actually just make it. It only took about 1,000 hours, but I never wanted to have to do that again, so I started pursuing ways to make the design review process better.

This is just a video clip of the virtual reality design review application that I made. And so I use this in different models that my engineer's reviewing and I have it set inside of an expansion we're doing to one of our factories really just as a nice backdrop. But as you can see, I have it so you can walk around on a one-to-one scale with these machines, look at it, pull yourself around, look at whatever components you want, mark them up if there's stuff like us who are watching a person do a design review, so you can see what I'm talking about as I'm showing you. So I get to walk around the machine as if I'm really there. If you have a headset on, you can, too, but also, not everyone wants to be in the headset, so they can just follow along here.

It was also the easiest thing to create. It wasn't really that hard. Writing code in Stingray, now Mac's Interactive, is pretty easy with their Flow interface. You just kind of attach things you want to happen to other triggers with little lines and it's really not that bad. So I made this application so that my project manager could review my project that I was working on. And he liked it and asked me to start reviewing other projects.

The other side of that, too, is it comes up-- this has come up a few times for us, that when you design something, you don't always design it to be really efficiently operated or maintained. And so a big assembly, you're going to turn off the bearings and the screws and nuts whenever you're designing your safety features because it will just bog down your computer. So you design your safety features not realizing you just welded a bunch of safety gear in front of the bearings and those bearings can't get greased unless you take all that stuff off and shut the machine down.

And when our machines go down, it's anywhere from $5 to $5,000 a minute in loss, so we don't like to shut them down if we don't have to. So really just kind of want to do everything we can to design what we're making to work as efficiently and reliably and serviceably as possible. I don't know if you guys heard, but the Keystone Pipeline just spilt like 20,000 gallons in North Dakota, and so I kind of wish maybe they had done a slightly better job of reviewing their designs before they made that because that is a costly mistake.

One of the other use cases is-- and one of the ones we're going to pursue a little later down the road-- is in manufacturing itself. So that's actually seeing that data, which I still for right now kind of feel like Google Glass is the best option. It's lightweight, safety glasses with data in front of you. I don't know if you can read that but basically for things you're working on that take between 2 and 1/2 minutes to 9 minutes to do, if you are using Google Glass or something like that, you're going to save about 30 seconds on average, but when you're doing that thing 24 hours a day, seven days a week, all year long, then that saves a ton of time.

And like I said, it's just about being able to see that data in front of yourself and have your hands free and not have to look over here and think about something, come back, make sure you got it right, and look back and forth. Once our design review application's done and we're moving on to training-- that's actually the next one we're going to do-- we have this mixed reality training application we've created to train our sellers, basically-- the people that are selling our tires-- either to customers or to car companies.

So this one, basically, you look at it and it takes the tire and spreads it out in front of you into all the different components of the tire. And this Obi Wan Kenobi hologram of a guy shows up and tells you about each one of these components. This is our drive guard tire, so they'll run flat. And he explains kind of the engineering on a high level behind that, so when you go to sell the tire, you actually know what you're talking about as opposed to just saying, this is our drive guard tire that will run flat.

Virtual reality is going to be really big for training. Some companies are already using it. We're looking into it now that we have the assets. It's going to be really easy to walk people through things. KFC has done a really amazing escape room training video. I'm not going to play it for you. It's kind of long. But it's kind of like fascinating and terrifying.

You're trapped in a room and Colonel Sanders is maniacally telling you how to make fried chicken the hard way, and if you don't make it, you're stuck in there until you do. And to be perfectly honest, after just watching the video, I feel like I could make some pretty good fried chicken. The advantage to using VR for training a lot of people don't really think about is you have these goggles on and these headphones on and you're 100% there. You have no distractions from anything else. You can't look at your phone, you can't try and make eye contact with someone else, you can't be getting ready and then turn out to be late for your presentation, you can't do anything. You just have to watch and do it the hard way or else you're not going to get out of virtual reality.

While I am in the manufacturing department, I've been approached by our sales department because they're curious about using this as well. This is a company, [? Franky, ?] which makes commercial kitchen appliances. And a company I've been talking to in Nashville, Black Box Realities, created a VR tradeshow display of all of their equipment and it's interactive so that they can walk customers through how to use their equipment. This not only impressed that people coming to their booth with the fact that they're doing something a little innovative, it also allowed them to go to a tradeshow with a decently-powered computer and HTC Vive and not their entire line of kitchenware. And so that worked out really well for them.

Now that I've kind of told you about all the good things about enhanced realities, let's go over playing pitfall with this new technology and how to kind of get over those mistakes that you might end up making. So the first one is don't do it just to do it. Like, there's a lot of hype behind it. A lot of people say, we really want to use VR. You know, it's the next wave. We've got to figure out how to do it. But don't just do it just to do it. It's going to end up being a waste and you're going to end up not really getting a return on it and you're not going to get to really pursue it down the road if you actually did find a reason to do it.

So on that side, too, if you are going to use VR, go ahead and explore what areas of your industry you shouldn't do it in because people will come and approach you and say, well, can I use it for this, can I use it for that. And it's best for you to say, look, it's not going to solve everything. Here are areas, like for instance, 3D design, I do not think is ready for VR at all. And so I'm much faster with a 3D mouse than a 2D mouse. I don't want to do it in VR. I would get exhausted. And so you definitely shouldn't use it for that. And so go ahead and tell people, this isn't going to replace drafting. This is just going to make the reviewing of the drafting better.

If necessary, if you're not pleased with what's available, maybe wait for the next version. I'm developing right now with the Vive and the HoloLens but I'm not deploying with this version of the Vive and the HoloLens. I'm waiting at least for the next version of the HoloLens, if not hopefully to see what Magic Leap comes out with, and then also, I really like the six degrees of freedom that Mixed Reality is doing with their headset and Vive just launched a standalone six degrees of freedom headset as well.

And so I want to test that out because bringing tracking systems and large powerful computers with you to do a demo is really not great and so sometimes it's best just to do your research with what's available but wait to deploy. And as you're doing that research, if you can, if you have the ability, go field test as much as possible. You know, I work on a floor with 150 engineers who are more than willing to let me know how I should have done this differently as I'm developing this tool set for them because, well, engineers.

And so it's actually really great because I've been making the tool set customized to what they need. They don't care if the textures look amazing and it's photo-realistic, they want it to be accurate. They don't even care if there's stuttering in VR. If the frame rate drops. They don't care. They just need to be able to accurately assess what they're looking at. And that wasn't the original path I was going down, so it made it-- yeah, it made me do it totally differently than I would have thought I would have wanted to do it.

And then also, what is it going to look like if you try and deploy this at scale? It works on the small scale probably pretty well, but once you start deploying it on a large scale, either A, if you're using an outside vendor and not working on this yourself, it's going to get really expensive, especially if it's like on a token-based system of every time you use it you get charged. You know, if I have 20 operators and all 130 plants using this every 10 minutes, 24 hours a day, it's going to get really expensive. And so you've kind of got to figure out what the best approach is in the long run. And then also, if you are doing it yourself, you're going to have to support that software, so what does that look like for you?

And then, as you're working on this, if you can, if you have the chance, do your own research and development on it. Don't pay another company to do it if you can, at least at first. If you have a little bit of a skill set, then you're going to be way better off if you kind of fully understand what's capable of the hardware and software before you start paying someone else to figure that out for you.

So the process that I went through for R and D was kind of finding areas inside my company for improvement. Obviously, that's what a lot of us are doing-- trying to figure out how to make more of it faster, for cheaper, and more efficiently. Once you've identified those areas, try and think, OK, are there-- if you're specifically looking at XR, are there solutions that I can think of where maybe I could use this?

Go ahead. Try and get a couple of different devices. Don't just say, yes, I can use the Google Glass. I'm getting it and going. Hoorah. Go and get a couple of different ones. Little more upfront, not much really, but you want to be able to test and see which one's better.

Like right now, we started with VR because it was available and then the HoloLens for a kind of different use case, but I really feel like the HoloLens is the way we're going to go just because-- well it is lower resolution and you have less controls. There's kind of a lot more that works for our company as opposed to what I originally envisioned us doing with it.

If you can teach yourself how to code even a little bit, try to learn, because if you can manipulate how to make these environments yourself, you'll be able to kind of come up with new clever ways to do exactly what you want without having to pay for a large piece of software that does way more than you would ever want to do. And really, you get the job done for cheaply and efficiently. And then, as you kind of find those things, do what you can. Just choose that low-hanging fruit. For us, it was design review.

It doesn't have to connect to the internet. I'm basically just importing 3D models into VR and into the HoloLens and allowing people to walk around them and look at them and compare them to the real world. And that was a really easy win for us, and because of that, they're allowing me to keep pursuing this area of research. They made me an innovation specialist so that I could just focus on this.

And then also, I guess I kind of covered that a little bit, but prototype your solutions. So come up with an idea and if you can figure out how to code it, go ahead and make a prototype of it. Go test it, field test it, get that feedback, see what you can do. Do as much on the front end before you start really kind of spending a lot of money on development and deployment as you can. And then also, don't give up. You'll probably not do a great job at first. I didn't. But I kept trying and I kept pushing and I got told no quite a bit, but I didn't care, so I just kept doing it until I gave them something they actually liked.

Which leads me to the next one. Rather anecdotal because I can only speak from experience, but if you do want to get your company to invest in it, it's actually not that easy. So there are kind of two paths you can go with this. One is out of the box and the other one is doing it yourself. If you're going to do it out of the box, you want to first research kind of what the out of the box technology will provide, which companies have a proven result, like Google Glass-- I keep going back to that example because they've been around for a while and they've actually had a bunch of really good wins. I'm not using it but it might work out really well for you and so that's a solid out of the box product.

So kind of figure out what they offer, what your development and recurring costs are, what the timeline is going to look like to deploy it, the unnecessary features you're paying for that you don't really need. Compare that to your DIY version of, can we actually do this ourselves? What's the real problem we're solving? What are our development and recurring costs? What's our deployment timeline look like? And what's the advantages to doing it ourselves, such as cost savings?

Then make a chart comparing what they do side-by-side, what problems you're solving, the time and cost to deploy and develop each. Generally, put that in really small print as far as how much it's going to cost, and then in really large print at the bottom, put that ROI number. I didn't do that but I was later told to do that and yeah. Initially, what I did, I took just the real-world information I had from working with my engineers and I said, with the design review app I've created, I can save upwards of $136,000 a year, and with our Wilson plant expansion, I can save $20,000.

And they said, well, congratulations. That doesn't even come close to the cost of us letting you work on that, which I kind of disagree on because apparently they think they pay me more than they do, but they said, go back and come back with some realistic but speculative numbers on where you actually think this is going, not just what's the actual hard return you're going to get this year.

So we did. I got a few of my engineers together and we kind of made our plan and it ramps up basically over five years. So what it is is, you know, we're spending-- I can't tell you, but we're spending x amount of money on projects this year. Of that x amount of money, my department maybe gets involved with 10%. Of the 10% of those projects, I might find a success rate on 3% to 5% of those. Of those 3% to 5% of those, I might save 5% to 10% on the cost. That's a very, very small percentage of what's going on, but over five years, that puts us at about $5 million in savings, so that was a little better than the $156,000 I originally told them I thought I could save them. They said thank you, please continue, and let us know when we have our $5 million.

So they made me an innovator. I can't really tell you how to become an innovator but I can tell you what my process was like so that, like I said, you can-- maybe, if that's something you want to do, you can do it. But you might not, because step one-- oh wait, no, sorry. That's the next slide. Kind of how I got to where I am-- I mentioned this a little bit-- I started out reverse-engineering this machine for Bridgestone.

In 2015, I watched the keynote from my desk and I learned about Stingray, which I realized I could pull my designs into to look at for review. I thought it'd be cool. Someone left managing the Vault so I got stuck being the Vault administrator for about a year, which was fine. I learned a lot.

We got a FARO laser scanner and we just presumed that we could automagically press a button and pull it into VR, so we bought an HTC Vive. Full disclosure, you can't just do that. It's a bit more complicated. But since Owen was using it, I played with it, created the design review application. It worked. We got a return on it. HoloLens came out, so I made a design review application for the HoloLens, and bada-bing, bada-boom, now I have a lot of work ahead of me that I have to do.

As far as becoming an innovator, step one, don't fear the reaper. You've got to be willing to take the risks. You might lose your job. You might present something that they really don't like and it totally bombs and they tell you to hit the road. Well there's a good chance someone else will pick you up if that happens because you were working on something cool. And I also don't suggest you go that hard to actually lose your job but I definitely got my hand slapped a few times with some projects that I was speculating on and they told me to not do that anymore. But then after the third or fourth one, they finally I guess just got annoyed with listening to me suggest projects and just said, all right, fine. Go ahead and do it.

Try and find ways to make yourself obsolete. So what I did was I had this year-long project I had to work on and I never wanted to do it again so I tried to find a way to make that entire process not even have to exist. I don't want people to have to spend a year redesigning machines. I want to allow people to review their machines better in the first place so no one ever has to do that again.

And then move onto the next problem of whatever I'm doing that's annoying and make that obsolete and move on from there. If you want to do it, it's not about just being like, yeah, gung-ho. I'm going to go do it. Seize the day. Just try and like seize the minute. Like, if you have a little bit of free time, just try and learn how to code a little bit, do research on some software, find the free trials, and just dig in, instead of just kind of wasting your time reading about celebrities or politics or something.

On that note, curating my intake was really helpful. I kind of lowered my news feed to just focus on the things I really thought would be helpful. I stopped looking at the news and just started kind of reading about things that I thought would be really interesting and helpful with me and the things that I wanted to do. You only actually have so much time in the day to think. I know it sounds weird to say that but you've really got to choose kind of where you put your thoughts if you want to come up with some creative solution to a new problem.

And a good way to do that is find a lot of time to be bored because this right here will stop you from really making any deep thoughts. Either move into the country so you have a long commute to work or just put it on mute every now and then and stare at the wall and think about stuff until something else comes up. It's the only way to really have those shower thoughts, as people describe them.

And then get ready because it's either disrupt or be disrupted. You can't stop what's coming. You know, things are going to change. The only constant in the universe is change and so I kind of want you to accept that. You know that it's going to happen so it's up to you. You can either try and figure out how to disrupt things or you can prepare for what's going to happen when they are disrupted. And if that's what you want to do, then I suggest going ahead and reading up on how to not get left behind.

Yes and plan on looking like an idiot because walking around an office with a HoloLens on, kind of just like pinching the air, you'll look like an idiot. There's no getting around that. Eventually, people will make fun of you, and especially if you have VR goggles on and off, most people know you can't see them so they do dumb stuff to you, but if you're willing to laugh at yourself and do it, then they'll get over it, too. You're not going to deploy it if you make other people feel like they're going to look like an idiot, so go ahead and be the idiot and that will help everyone else kind of along the way.

And then I guess it's kind of obvious but ignore the naysayers. A lot of people will tell you it's dumb, don't do it, you guys are just playing video games when I'm not looking. This is a waste of your time and money. People are always going to say no but just kind of follow your intuition. If you think it's a good idea, it probably is, and it's at least worth pursuing. If you don't pursue it, then they're right, but if you do pursue it, then there's a chance that you're right.

So let's see. What time are we at? OK, not bad. Moving forward, don't try and keep up with every single thing that's happening but do try and keep up to date. You don't have to always be cutting-edge. At some point, you kind of have to make a choice, but it's a good idea to kind of understand where things are going. That's kind of a part of curating that news feed of what you're going to take in to make sure you can at least-- you don't have your finger on the pulse of what's happening but you at least know it's alive.

Do the math if you're going to plan on doing it. Like, there's a lot of math to it, but make sure it really is a good idea because this technology is really new and while it is exciting and can really change what you're doing and save a lot of money, make sure you do that math so that you aren't wasting money and going to look like a failure and maybe face the reaper. But also, you might realize that you can save a ton of money by doing something simple, like we're doing with our design review application. You know, when I explain it to people at first, they think, that's really boring. What else can I do in this app? It's like, well right now, nothing because there's no cost return for doing more in this app right now. This is all we need. And so later down the road, we'll find new ways, but we don't want to develop stuff just for the sake of developing it.

And on that note, avoid scope creep at all costs. There's so many things you could theoretically do in VR, and if you start trying to do a lot of them, you're going to get scope creep and you're going to end up in a place where your project is huge and over budget. And when it comes time to cut costs savings, innovation is usually one of those areas that's first to go because it's not an actual return on value yet. So try and keep your focus small on one thing to work on-- one or two things to work on. Otherwise, it's just going to get out of control and you'll spend all your money before you even train anyone on how to use it.

Create a functioning prototype. So a hologram is worth a thousand pictures. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then you have one million words in one hologram. Really the best thing we did was create these prototypes and then I let the engineers try it. They said, this is great. Thank you for doing it. Let me show my manager.

Manager puts it on. This is great. Thank you for doing it. Make a presentation for the president. He says, OK, I get this. We can kind of see it. Put the goggles on. And then finally the CEO sees it and says this is where we're headed. This is the future. I will support this. And once the CEO of the company told me that, I knew there was a really good chance I might not get fired for having done this. I'm still working on it but yeah, I feel like he's got my back.

If you can and if you're a manager, please let the people under you do this. Try and plan on failing about 20% of the time. It'll open you up to take those risks and just waste a little bit of money upfront to find out that something is a bad idea as opposed to wasting a lot of money and finding out just one thing is a good idea. And you might find a great idea in that 20%. But just go ahead and expect to spend some time on something that later on just was not worth it.

Google DayDream was that for me. You know, I love the DayDream. I really like it but it did not work for my design review application. But I did get a Pixel XL out of doing research on it.

Once you kind of get an app in a working, functional, acceptable state, put a bow on it and send that present onwards. You can always update it later on. Just get it out as fast as possible. If it's working, even if you have to manually install the models every time, which I taught a class on how to do that this morning because we're still doing it. It's out there and it's working and your company is innovating and you're using VR and the word spreads. It's much better than just waiting for the perfect product. Like, you don't have to deliver something perfect. You just have to deliver something that saves money.

And then lastly on moving forward, right now, I kind of feel like there aren't enough vendors in this space to get a competitive deal if you're just going to go out of the box. You're going to get that new iPhone premium of this is the only thing available that does this and so you've got to pay for it. And if that's what you need-- if that's what your company needs, that's fine. Just know that you're probably going to be overpaying now compared to what you're going to be paying for in a year or two because it's such a new technology and such a new field and there aren't a lot of people that even know how to create for it that there's just not enough systems there to make it competitive yet.

So in summary, kind of what we've covered today is, for Bridgestone, extended realities is the next evolution of our tool set. We've recently made the move from 2D to 3D and now 3D to 3D-3D, I guess? Avoid as many pitfalls as you can as you're working on this. Do your own R&D if you can so that you can test it out and see what works and what doesn't before you waste your time and money deploying a solution someone else from a company told you would make you a lot of money.

And then, obviously, keep it simple, specialist, because the simplest app that saves money is the one that's going to succeed first. Yeah. And then ignore all the naysayers and just go ahead and do it. The worst thing that happens, they say stop doing it, and at least then you did it and you tried.

That's basically it. So now go make it and make some cool stuff. If you make a product that works really well and it's competitively priced, I will probably buy it from you. Or ask questions if you want. We might have some time left.

AUDIENCE: So we're in that situation [INAUDIBLE] and we've had a couple of people dabble [? with ?] engines and [INAUDIBLE] and things like that. But it's something that's very, very difficult from higher management to be allowed to build more. And they get it. They understand it's important but you just have [INAUDIBLE] to say we're going to dedicate x amount of dollars or x amount of-- so there's a little [? complaining ?] around here and there. What would be your advice to get the company online a little [INAUDIBLE]

BRENT JACKSON: The standard way would be to just kind of put the numbers of what other companies are doing and how they're winning. There's a lot of whitepapers out there about how the technology is saving x amount of dollars in x areas. The way I generally think is, if you have a little bit of money, like spend the $2,500 on an HTC Vive and a computer that'll run it, use Stingray. You have Revit, I'm assuming?

AUDIENCE: Yeah, we do.

BRENT JACKSON: Yeah. So Revit plugs into 3ds Max. Plugs in the Stingray really easily. And so you can-- without knowing any coding whatsoever-- and the licenses are there, I think, with Revit-- you can make that deployment and come up with a use case where what you want to show a client and find that person upper management and just get them in the goggles. Because the second they see it, they at least then kind of have that aha moment of like, OK, walking around my new apartment building I'm building and deciding where I want to put features is way more useful than just kind of showing it to them in Revit's 3D view. Or being able to see behind the wall or where the pipes are going to go and laying it out that way. Kind of just letting them understand what the experience is going to look like will-- at least for me, once they saw it, they got it.