AR/VR Enhances Workflows, Fuels Collaboration, and Improves Decision Making

BEN FISCHLER: So we're going to get started very shortly. There's folks still sitting down. Thanks for joining us.

We're going to be talking about XR, which includes VR and AR, and how it enhances workflows, fuels collaboration, and, ideally, improves decision making, as well. My name is Ben Fischler. I'm a senior industry strategy manager at Autodesk. We've got several distinguished guests with us, as well as some of my colleagues from Autodesk.

Let's get started. Don't make investment decisions based on anything we say here. We'll just leave it at that.

[LAUGHTER]

OK, our guest today-- and just give a wave when I give you a shout-out. We've got Dana Warren from Yulio, Guy Messick with IA, Adam Chernick and Brian Melton. And from Autodesk, myself, Nick Fontana. Viveka is not with us today?

PRESENTER: Not yet.

BEN FISCHLER: Not yet. She might be a late entry. Qian and Hilmar. OK, let's get right into it.

So I think probably most of us are somewhat familiar with XR and the umbrella that it casts and holds all of these categories. So we consider XR to be a inclusive of AR, VR, and MR. For those of you who are new to these things, AR is generally the layer of virtual elements that are superimposed over real-world experience on different devices. And then VR is the full immersion environment.

And so we're going to be talking a little bit about all of these. And XR is the umbrella that we use to hold all of these together. I'm going to sit so I don't stand here at the whole time. And this is going to be conversational. We're going to get into how folks are using these technologies, what they think the value is, and what they expect for the future.

So this is, I think, an interesting question because for a lot of us who have been around these technologies for a while, they've become normalized. But I think we all have a point where there was that first exposure. For me, personally, it was with HoloLens V1.

I wrote a grant to get one of the early beta devices, and I helped build a-- it was an automatic transmission training application for the HoloLens 1. And that was the point, for me, where I realized, this is going to change how whole industries are going to function going forward.

And I'm curious to hear what folks in the panel-- when they had that moment, that first realization, first exposure. So, Adam, why don't you jump in. What was your first exposure?

ADAM CHERNICK: Absolutely. Man, my first exposure. Well, it was about seven years ago. I was working at a large architecture firm at the time, and we had a creative agency come in that was building some virtual and augmented reality tools.

They showed a few of the applications that they were working on-- pitching our large architecture firm to work with us. And I had seen-- they really had the first compelling, mobile augmented reality that I had ever seen.

And it really shook me. It blew my mind. And it was that day that I really took a step back, thought about the impact that these immersive mediums could have on our industry, and dove in later that night.

BEN FISCHLER: Do you do you remember what device and--

ADAM CHERNICK: It was, I believe, an Android tablet that was running a mobile augmented reality application.

BEN FISCHLER: what about you-- your first step in the journey, first exposure?

GUY MESSICK: First exposure would be about 30 years ago at a ski resort in Colorado where they had this VR experience thing. And it's a platform you ran around on, and it was super low polygon count. Right after that, I was asked to look at some VR apps for a medical client back in the day and realized, if you had a giant silicon graphics tower-- water-cooled tower-- and a lot of time and money, you could do it.

So I said, OK, that's cool. I'll shelve that. And then seven years ago-- a little over seven years ago-- we wanted to start looking at it. And I can't remember the exact moment that I saw something, but we talked to Angel Say and Russell Varriale who started InsiteVR-- came into a studio in San Francisco and said, we want to do VR for architects.

And I started looking at what they were doing at that time. And it was advanced. It worked on standalone which, for us, honestly, is the only way we can go. Clients do not want to see a cable going from their head to a computer. And from then on, it's been-- we funded it and kept up with it full-time since.

BEN FISCHLER: Can you touch on the cable point you just made, just a little-- I think we're going on a tangent here, but I'm just curious. Has that been-- is that a recent phenomenon, or was there a period of transition where people have just-- there's an aversion to the cabled experience?

GUY MESSICK: From the get-go, we invested in the VIVE early on and some of the earliest Rift stuff. And then we had the Gear VR, which is a phone in a case, as some of you may know. Much different experience-- people would much rather put that on at lower resolution and less comfort.

I literally saw clients physically back away from me when I held up a VIVE. Like, oh, no. I don't think so. And I asked them why, and they said, well, I don't want to have a cable and so forth. So we started from the beginning, saying, OK, we're focusing on standalone. And that's where we've been since.

BEN FISCHLER: Dana, what about you in terms of your-- where did things kick off for you?

DANA WARREN: Yeah, so for me, honestly, it started back when I was in university. I took architecture. And for anybody who took any sort of program like that, I think we can all admit to hearing at one point or another, "I'm just not seeing it" from our professors. And that drove me absolutely crazy.

And, at the time, I had no idea what virtual reality was. So fast-forward a couple of years. When I heard about it was actually when I started with Yulio. And, immediately, I saw a solution for the problem that I had in university.

And if any of you out there are architecture profs, I know you can admit to saying that at one point or another. And when I saw VR and what it could do, I said, we're never going to hear that again, whether it's in a classroom environment or whether it's with your clients. Because, now, you can literally put somebody inside of the headset and be in that virtual environment.

So that's really where it started. And I've been with Yulio for the past seven years. And we are, for anybody that doesn't know, a virtual reality software solution for businesses. Yeah.

BEN FISCHLER: And, Brian, what about you for your first step on the journey?

BRIAN MELTON: Sure. Well, you know what I always tell people-- you want to do VR, just to go buy a VR headset. Now you're doing it, right? And that's kind of where it started for us.

We happened to get the hardware for our team pretty easy. We had an internal growth accelerator team that funded disruptive technology, and thoughts, and other things. So we had hardware laying there-- the intimidating ones with the wires, and the boat anchor that was tied to it.

But actually thinking back here-- the first experience we had, because we had this hardware, and we were like, well, what do we do with it now, right? We knew it was cool. People were aware of it. But how do we make it something that's practical?

And I was thinking back just now. Nick, you might have actually helped us with this. We were doing a project out in California-- the Calaveras Dam. It was a hydro project out there.

BEN FISCHLER: That's a big one.

BRIAN MELTON: Yeah. So we did some drone scanning of that, so we had a mesh model that looked pretty impressive. And we ended up-- I think we worked with Autodesk to get that put in a really early version of, maybe, Revit Live or something at the time. But, for me, it was really impactful because it was cool to stand around and move in there.

But somebody added a hot air balloon up in there. so we got up in the hot air balloon, and we could look over to that massive dam project. And you had this sense of feeling.

And you didn't know what you were going to do with it at the time, but you're like, this is going to mean something for us in the way that we work and the way that we introduce people to projects and designs. So, for me, that experience made it happen. But if you want to do VR, just go buy the hardware.

BEN FISCHLER: Just to riff on that for a second, do you feel like large-scale projects like that benefit more, or is it really across the board? Or is there a project scale where you're like, we're definitely going to be including these experiences because of the scale?

BRIAN MELTON: I mean, there's a tool in your tool belt, right? You need to make a decision on when you need to use it. But I don't think, for me, the scale doesn't matter of the project. It's, what are you trying to convey? And is this a better way to tell that story than some other tool that you've got?

BEN FISCHLER: Right. Well, I want to shift gears for a moment and include some media and entertainment background. Hilmar, take us-- this is the wayback machine. What was your first step on the XR journey?

HILMAR KOCH: Yeah. That was when I was working at Lucasfilm-- also a customer of Autodesk at the time. And it actually started in AR, not in VR. We did build an immersive cave, which was stereo. So people were immersed in that space-- could actually perceive the virtual worlds that they wanted to build.

And the ability for them to actually get a sense of scale when make decisions based on depth and heights was that much more sticky. It was really obvious immediately that directors, even really high-grade directors who have trouble articulating an exact number-- once you give them the ability to sense the world in 3D and spatially, those decisions really get that much better.

So it was-- VR wasn't just a follow up to the AR experience, oddly enough. But that program is still in existence at Lucasfilm, and it continues to bear fruit.

BEN FISCHLER: Viveka, thank you for joining us. What about you for your first experience with XR?

VIVEKA DEVADAS: I think some of my experience goes back to my childhood memories playing with a View-Master.

BEN FISCHLER: Awesome.

VIVEKA DEVADAS: --and always curious with viewing an image through a lens. And I was so curious that I got on top of a table, hit myself against a wall. And the physician asked me, why did you do that? And then I said, I wanted to see the other side.

BEN FISCHLER: That's awesome.

VIVEKA DEVADAS: So, yeah, that's how curious I've been with images and still images. And I really wanted to see these images moving. So I started building houses made out of sustainable material. Growing up in a tropical weather, so I tested with bamboo.

Slowly, I started getting so interested with this world of 3D, and why can't we view things from a different viewpoint? So I got myself into architecture school, pursued a masters in construction management and then started experimenting with 3D software, like 3D Studio Max, Maya, and slowly tested VR apps.

But one definitely changing point for me was-- I came to Boston like nine years ago and very amazed by MIT and Harvard, so got myself to attend hackathons in XR every year. And it was really cool to see.

I was almost turbocharged-- my interest turbocharged with all the ideas spanning around in hackathons where you were put into groups of people you've never met before. And you could possibly come up with solutions in just a couple of 2 to 3 days. So it started opening out a wide-- unleashed the potential of XR that so many different industries could come up with so many different ideas. And this journey is ongoing. It doesn't stop at-- it's ongoing. And I think we are all in it together.

BEN FISCHLER: Qian, how about you?

QIAN ZHOU: Sure. Thank you. So I started in XR during my PhD building a spherical 3D display. That's why we call it a crystal ball. So, particularly, I started the fundamental spatial perception around it.

And then, I guess, one of the interesting characteristics that we found about that crystal ball is like, unlike those wearable, more common headsets, those stationary 3D display really have minimal motion sickness for people to try on. So that make it very optimal for designers to work on.

But the downside for that is very hard to render real scale large models-- so things like cars and buildings. So later I just switched to the immersive side of the headset and with a focus on novel interactions and interfaces, which is my current role here at Autodesk research. So we're really curious to understand, what are the different ways that users can express their intention in different input modalities and different data set?

BEN FISCHLER: Nick, you want to close us out with this question? What was your first moment on the journey with XR? It's been a journey for you now for a while.

NICHOLAS FONTA: Yeah, a year or two. So I think it started a little over 25 years ago when I was just out of engineering school. My first job, I was working for a flight simulator company in Montreal. And as a newbie, I had the crappy night shifts because simulators were running 24 hours.

And I ended up overnight on a flight sim for a MiG-29 for the Singaporean army. And it was actually some sort of an AR experience. So they had a cut cockpit of an actual MiG-29 in which you were sitting.

And you had a massive headset with tons of wires-- 25, 26 years ago. And it was allowing you to see the actual cockpit but cutting the edge where the windows were and actually rendering the outside, including the wings and everything. So once I had learned how to basically fly the sim, I spent a lot of hours flying the MiG-29 overnight.

BEN FISCHLER: Yeah. I was actually reminded of from Qian's comment about motion sickness. And I think, actually, the first exposure I had was at SIGGRAPH. It wasn't an Evans & Sutherland machine. I think it was an SGI Onyx.

And I felt a bit queasy. Yeah. It was a tougher thing to pull off back then without having people feel a little ill. So this is a big one. How has XR changed your work?

And I think one way to caveat this is apply some time scale to it. So if you want to talk a little bit about near-term-- last five years or so, if you look back, how have things changed? Or if you want to go a little bit further. Adam, do you want to kick this one off again?

ADAM CHERNICK: Yeah. Well, this is a big question. At previous firms, when I was diving into immersive technology and leading some research and development-- before I was at SHoP I was at HOK-- we were building some communication applications. I find that a lot of what immersive tools do is help with communication.

They're helping teams better understand space. They're helping people jump into the same space and talk about specific features that are difficult to understand in two dimensions. And they're doing it in a relatively intuitive way.

So the first piece of work that I was able to participate on that was changing how people were working through projects and changing process was a mobile virtual reality application that we were developing while I was at HOK. It was allowing remote teams across countries to all jump into the same application and do design reviews together. So it was working through process.

And then moving forward to today, at SHoP, we're using a lot of the similar ideas, using the Wild and using lots of multi-user, immersive mediums, again, to decrease the amount of time that it takes us to make decisions and make better decisions. Yeah, there's one specific application that we've been developing is mobile augmented reality app to drop buildings in one-to-one scale using iPads, largely because they're easy to deploy to, and they're a medium that everybody knows how to use very easily.

And we can go to a specific site-- go with our clients, 10 of them, bring five iPads, and look at what the building would look like in the future. We can give them options that they can toggle through and actually, again, sort of time travel into the future six years forward when it will be built.

We can understand, in six years, what those future shadow patterns are going to look like on the contextual buildings next to our building and understand the impact that these different design options will have all while you're standing in front of it, walking around it. So this has decreased the amount of time that it takes us to make decisions-- certain decisions in certain specific situations from two months down to two weeks, which is impactful.

BEN FISCHLER: And would you caption that as client review is one of the big--

ADAM CHERNICK: Yeah, client review is definitely one of the big ones. Yeah.

BEN FISCHLER: Brian, what about you? You want to jump in?

BRIAN MELTON: Sure. Well, I changed my-- I don't think we're at the destination, yet. I think we're still on the journey. So how is XR changing our work, I think, is what I would lean into.

And, for us, I think it's communication, for sure. It's a storytelling ability you get with VR. But the engagement-- everybody's busy. Emails going off all the time-- chat, IM. You have very little time with people to engage with them and really get some communication across.

And I think VR, for specific instances, is the best way to engage people because we see a lot more focus when they're in VR. What we say internally-- be here, now. They're in that meeting. They're having a conversation. They're not looking at their email. They're not looking at their phone, or their chat log, or their text. So, for us, it is better engagement and better communication when we really need those feedback from the clients and the project teams.

From a usage perspective, you know we're using VR a lot in design reviews for internal teams to have, I'll say, getting to more informal communication. But then we use it a lot for client workshops where we're getting operations staff and the client team to talk about safety and access with some of the projects that we do. So review and collaboration is big for us, and the engagement with those teams-- since we have very little amount of time with them sometimes-- is key.

BEN FISCHLER: So you mentioned that things are changing and continuing to change quickly. What are areas right now that you feel are in rapid spin and motion?

BRIAN MELTON: Well, this is one technology that it's tough to keep up with, I'll tell you that, from a hardware and a software perspective.

BEN FISCHLER: Yeah, big time.

BRIAN MELTON: But I think what we're starting to see is more of a multi-use device where we were just thinking, oh, design review. This is going to be great. And, now, we're thinking, well, this is going to be a better way to keep our culture while our teams are working remote as a company.

And HR is looking at it. Safety's looking at it-- training aspects. So I think remote presence and remote connectivity-- it's, eventually, just going to be another tool that's sitting on your desk like a mouse and a keyboard. And you're going to use it for certain meetings.

It might be design review. It might be a team meeting. It might be a workshop. But I think that's where the future is going a little bit.

BEN FISCHLER: This is a question for the group, I think. Do you find that there's the client experience, but then there's the process of extracting the client's feelings from the experience? They have the experience, but then they have to communicate to you what they got out of it. And I still find that that's something that is a bit of a challenge, right?

I'm from a film and TV background and games. It's the same problem you have where, when the director points at the screen and says, warm it up it and make it bluer, right? They don't always-- it's difficult to express what they want from the experience.

And I'm curious if anyone's working around, how do you provide tools to clients in a way that allows them to communicate what they're feeling and what their desires are from that experience? I don't know if that makes sense, but it's like, you're there. You provide them with this rich experience, but then they have to have the tools to then express I need more of this, less of that. So maybe that's things like annotation, markup, and so on.

ADAM CHERNICK: Yeah, yeah. Really, really quickly, I think that it's very important to set the stage and to curate the experience. That's really important with these new mediums-- making sure that you are talking about what questions we're trying to answer that day before we jump into an immersive medium because there are a lot of people that can get distracted by "The wood grain on the wall doesn't look correct" when that's really not what we're here to talk about today. And so, yeah, setting the stage is pretty important.

NICHOLAS FONTA: I'm curious. Do we feel that being in an immersive space makes that communication, at least, easier than if we were not in such immersive space for you and your stakeholders?

GUY MESSICK: I think it's more profound than that. And so we were talking about changed, changing. We talked about that. But one thing that hasn't changed since we first got into it is the profound nature of how clients and designers experience space in VR. It is profound.

And we found an article from 1997 in the Harvard Business Review. J. Rayport was one of the authors. You can look it up. They didn't know what XR was then, but they talked about empathic design and how you can more quickly ideate and innovate if you're experiencing a space.

And we saw that. Our second major client, again, seven years ago for a tower in San Francisco-- and their global head of real estate was there and wasn't known as being a real touchy-feely, warm person, necessarily and put on the headset, walked onto the main dining floor, which is the entire floor plate-- about 19,000 square feet-- and immediately said, this is too tight. Our people won't like it.

Now, I'm in the back waving my arms going, there are schedule and cost implications for what you just said. He said, no. We got to redo it. Now, this had been rendered beautifully. Head count had been worked out with strategies, plans approved-- no, clients can't read floor plans. They won't ever tell you they can't.

And right then, my jaw dropped. And I went, OK. That is a big deal. And we've seen that. So that continues, now. There's better hardware. There's better software. There's better articulation of design.

But that is a big one. And so if it's happening with the clients, it's also happening with designers. So we think that's one of the major ones we're seeing. That changed right away, and that is still there.

HILMAR KOCH: Can I throw something out here as a follow-up? Is it also changing-- I think you're speaking a little bit about client, and your client, and your company, but it's also about coordinating between the different groups that you're serving. Are we seeing change actively where it is a communication tool between the different crafts that are stakeholders on a plan?

VIVEKA DEVADAS: I think--

BEN FISCHLER: Go ahead.

VIVEKA DEVADAS: I think to add to Hilmar's point, we can also break down the model into separate disciplines because architects, engineers-- sometimes we don't speak the same language. So with applications like Navisworks, I think it's nice for us to separate out the different elements. If an architect wants to view if there's an HVAC clash in the structural system, they can speak the same language, and it helps them to get on the same page, no matter what stage of a design process they're in.

BRIAN MELTON: I was just going to add-- I think it was mentioned a little bit, but we've seen it. It is easy to get distracted in VR. And I think we need to be careful not to add a communication tool that gives us less feedback than we had before.

Model detail comes into play. If the wall outlets aren't in the right spot, that's not really what we wanted feedback on. Is the wall even located where you would like to have it? So I think it's tough to not get distracted.

I think I'd like to see some tools-- and I think Autodesk can help out here a lot where-- we talked a little bit about this yesterday-- of what's the purpose of being in VR? A lot of tools don't let me share what that purpose is. When we're in this meeting, there was an agenda. You knew what was going to be talked about. It's a structured conversation with a facilitator.

When we get into VR with eight people in [INAUDIBLE]-- boom. They just all go to different rooms. They start talking. They start looking around. Nobody knows where anybody's at. You lose the meeting.

So having the ability to curate that purpose that's there-- I think those tools need to evolve to where it's more of a structured conversation. And I think it's going to get there. The more formal that VR becomes in organizations, they're going to realize, hey, we do need to put more formal things on the way we interact with these tools and people.

BEN FISCHLER: You need the AutoCAD herding functionality. Dana, what kind of change have you seen in your work?

DANA WARREN: Yeah, so even just expanding off of that, that's something that we have really been focusing on is the collaboration aspect to it and understanding that things like that can get away from you pretty easily when you have that many people in one space and everybody's all over the place. So we have a collaboration tool, and you can guide somebody through the presentation.

You can focus their headset to a specific location or aspect of the design, and you always know where they are. You can give them the freedom to roam around, but you can also keep them in one place in the design, and I do think that's incredibly important.

My perspective is a little bit different, obviously, because I'm on the side of bringing the AR and VR tools to you. But I think one of the things that is changing as we speak is where VR and AR is being used. And a lot of the time, it was being seen as a special occasion tool that you would only use at final pitches or final presentations. But that has really been changing a lot over the past couple of years.

And I think the one thing that has helped that is how easy it is to use the tools that are out there today. They go with your existing workflows. You don't have to learn a whole new software or a whole new technology. It exists with the tools that you already use.

So we are seeing it being used from early project ideation through design development all the way through to final spec. So I think that is continuing to grow, and that's going to be the use moving forward. And like Brian said, it's going to be something that you use every day. It's no longer going to be seen as a novelty.

BEN FISCHLER: Let's see. All right, here goes crystal ball time. Next 5 to 10 years-- so go wild. What do you what do you see happening in the next 5 to 10 years? Guy, you want to kick it off?

GUY MESSICK: I would stick with 5.

BEN FISCHLER: Yeah. Pick your time scale.

GUY MESSICK: 10 is outside my crystal ball range. Being more ubiquitous across the spectrum, sure. It's going to be more accessible. Every week, every month we're going to see more and more of it.

It's going to be how you interact with design, and construction, and coordination globally. There's no doubt to me that's where it's going. And I think the level of-- one thing to keep in mind is wherever you are in this world of AEC or manufacturing and media and entertainment-- because we see a blend now of media stuff. We have people working in Maya building virtual environments.

But, for us, I think one thing that may be interesting and you may see is we have now two businesses, if you will. And we do interiors. We're on a whole different level of time-- 6 months, not 6 years.

And we do see the outlets in the wood grain. It's absolutely what people are looking at for interiors. We do tens of millions of square feet a year. That's important at that level, so keeping that going-- that accessibility across the range.

But we have a group that builds environments and designs for virtual space only. It's not going to be built in the real world. And we're seeing more and more of that.

So when you talk about getting your groups together and keeping that culture going, we are seeing a flood of work for clients globally. Right now, how do we build something that has our brand, our feel, what's important to us as the culture of our company? And then, where we going to meet? Because we're going to be remote part of the time.

I think there's another question coming where I think that's another thing to bring up is, what is the reality of how people work and live now? It is different than 2 and 1/2 years ago, fundamentally. I think this platform is going to have a lot to do with that in the next 5 to 10 years. How do we work and connect?

BEN FISCHLER: Qian, I want to hear a little bit from research on what you're going to predict for 5 to 10 years. Or what would you like to see? We can--

QIAN ZHOU: I think-- for sure. I just want to add a little bit to the one that you mentioned about working remote. I feel like in 5 to 10 years, I would say a lot of potential of XR used to help us better connected. And I feel like this connectiveness can apply to two folds-- one is, probably, people connection that help people work from home or when hybrid meeting become a new norm that we need technology to better support those needs for us to help with the better collaboration and communication.

But I also feel like this connectiveness can be data connection so that we have better way to visualize and interact with the data-- with the larger data kind of bandwidth that we human can handle in different modalities. But it also probably will be the data connection to the greater ecosystem so that XR should not just connect to the cloud, but you also can connect to desktop, tablet, and mobile.

I think some of them are already start to appear, for example, communication with the tablet to share the view, to handle the previous question on the client's needs or client's of view. But maybe there would be more about this data connection connect to the greater ecosystem in the future.

BEN FISCHLER: Nick, do you want to jump on this one?

NICHOLAS FONTA: I can a little bit, yes. So, yes, to everything that was said. Of course, devices will be cheaper, more comfortable, easier to use, longer-- all of this will happen, for sure. So there's a lot of different things happening on multiple fronts pushing in the same direction.

But I think the two things are going to be probably quite different than what we've seen so far. First is a better understanding, from our part, in terms of what the human interactions and interaction patterns will have to be so that you could really be fully comfortable for long periods of time doing many different tasks and jobs in an XR environment. So that's one.

And the second is, I'm betting that we'll see a lot more fluidity between full VR and full AR both in terms of devices, but in terms of use cases that we'll want to use XR for. And it will be a mix both of the jobs that we're going to be doing XR and also a mix of the experiences that we're going to be having collaboratively.

So they have people in different mediums, different AR on the spectrum of XR at different places just all interacting together. So I think that's going to really change how this can be done.

BEN FISCHLER: Just to add on to this question, I'm curious for the group, are there any devices, device form factors that you're particularly excited about? And we don't have to get into specific manufacturers, but it feels to me like we're about to-- I don't know if we're on gen 3 or gen 4 of some of the headsets.

But it feels like there's a bunch of interesting hybrid pass-through designs and things like that. I'm curious, what are folks most excited to see hardware-wise and devices and what we might be able to do with those? Anyone want to--

GUY MESSICK: I think the windmill I tilt against is augmented reality. And I don't focus so much on tech. I focus more on people, I'll be honest, these days. How are people using stuff?

But what what we've wanted for years was to walk into a cold shell, put on a device that's easy and light and see the design, and walk around and interact with it, and see the real world so you're not bumping into columns. But that's the thing where we're going to get to.

We have a-- part of our firm does giant art installations for building repositioning. We need to see that in AR. That's huge. But that stickiness in the tech isn't quite there yet.

Is that a hardware and software problem? Yeah. But that's where we want it to go. And I can't tell you which company is going to do it. But as soon as that happens, we will invest.

BEN FISCHLER: Yeah. Anyone else?

DANA WARREN: Yeah, I can add on that, for sure. We're definitely not there yet in terms of the hardware that's out now and even, honestly, coming soon. The wearable technology-- it needs to get to a point where, like Nick said, people can spend extended amounts of time in there.

And it's a really challenging issue with nausea and motion sickness. And it comes down-- it has a neuroscience component to it. It's something called vergence-accommodation conflict. So it's the disparity between what your eyes are seeing right here in front of you versus what you're actually looking at.

So it's something that we're nowhere close with the headsets that we have today. And over the next couple of years, I'm not sure if we'll get there. But there are solutions and steps that we are taking now to combat some of these issues, like stereoscopic imagery, for example. So that's what provides the depth in the images. But we need the advanced advancements with the hardware in order for this to be something that is accessible to everybody.

BEN FISCHLER: Anyone else?

HILMAR KOCH: I'll throw in bandwidth and 5G into the mix because I think there is this opportunity for people to get-- have a desire to get the world augmented with new things and data visualization of the things that they want to see. There's so much that we could bring to the device out in the field.

But hauling around our little computers that do the work seems to be impractical. And the data is also massive. So I'm hoping that 5G is going to have a little hand to play in that to bring data and bring even Compute to the edge so we can have a richer experiences out there. That's my hope.

ADAM CHERNICK: Yeah and to follow up on that, I absolutely agree with that. We're seeing there's some really interesting technologies, such as Pixel Streaming, which are allowing us to use the computational power of servers in the cloud and not the computational power on these mobile devices, which is allowing us to run much more rich and computationally-intensive experiences on these lighter-weight devices, which is really important.

And so to follow that same trajectory, what I think is really interesting is looking at some of the acquisitions that some of these large, real-time companies are making to help us see where all this is going. Some of the acquisitions by Epic Games are really, really interesting. Their acquisition of Sketchfab, Quixel-- Megascans is another one.

What we're going to see is that in the past of real-time technology, what we've always done, typically, is if we wanted to-- we're rendering a building, and you'll see the front lawn in front of the building, and there's some rocks there. To create that rock, we always had a three-dimensional artist who looked at pictures of rocks, and maybe went outside and grabbed a rock, and then tried to three-dimensionally model something that was really close to what they're seeing.

But, now, there's a fundamental shift happening, which is, we're actually going and we're scanning the real world, and then we're bringing the real world into these virtual environments, which is going to make the realism and the richness of these virtual environments indistinguishable, in a lot of circumstances, to the real world.

And this fundamental shift is definitely, I think, where we're going and is going to, again, bring adoption because this is something that people want to see. They don't want to go in and see a cartoony environment that doesn't look very good. They want to see something that looks incredibly realistic, and I think we're going to see just that.

HILMAR KOCH: Does the audience have any skepticism to express about technologists speaking about what's going to be possible in the 5 to 10 next years? Happy to have that debate, too, because, yeah, just some call this the third VR event winter. And what do we need to crack to make you successful is one question that's out there.

BEN FISCHLER: We will have time for Q&A, or do we want to jump in to questions right now?

GUY MESSICK: There's a microphone right there.

BEN FISCHLER: Yeah, I'm down for questions right now. Do you want to come on up on the mic, or--

PRESENTER: No pressure. Come stand in the spotlight.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, really. It's a two-parter. One is, the one thing that I've noticed in our industry is by the time we get invested in these workflows, I think it's too late. I'm curious, do you guys have a R&D department to go through these workflows when you guys are first starting-- tinkering, trying to figure out what's going to work or not?

GUY MESSICK: For us, yes. But that's one of the groups I run called Design Intelligence. But it's not a big, formal group of 20 people doing just research. We implement for use right away.

But I've got a pretty simple world. The way I look at things, ROI is use. So people are using it and effectively working better, that's great. If they're still using it to drive revenue, that's wonderful, too.

But we test. We implement. We work on pilot groups, and we have to have a very rapid iteration. But, yeah, we test first and move forward.

By the time you buy it, will it be too late? I'm more than happy to talk to you later about that. I don't think it's as tight a thing is it seems.

AUDIENCE: The reason I ask that is because in our industry, we're all production-driven. So when you're doing these workflows, and tinkering, and trying to figure them out, it's too late.

GUY MESSICK: Yeah, it's got to work right away.

AUDIENCE: Yeah, it's got to work now in the project.

VIVEKA DEVADAS: I think it's easy to get carried away with all the hype. Every day, we have a new headset, and every other day, there's some app. So it's very, very easy to get drawn into. And, OK, that organization is developing something.

But I would say, definitely look closely within your own organization. And map those things early on, and identify what is key for your organization, be it your teams, or be it your applications, or be it your requirements. Maybe you're just looking to do a high-end visualization, or maybe you're looking at something higher, like you're maybe designing a stadium, or maybe you're designing something which needs more daylighting or sustainable aspect.

So I think all that boils down to your own organization's value proposition, which you should convene as a team and outline it at the very first and then jump into the technology. So I think that, early on, mapping is very crucial.

AUDIENCE: Go ahead. Go ahead.

BEN FISCHLER: Well, actually, I think you raise a really great point. And I want to throw this out to the entire room. Just a show of hands-- how many folks in the room feel like the pace of change or the cycle of change within XR technology has been too rapid or problematic for you in your business? OK, so-- I mean, it's--

AUDIENCE: It's a good thing. But we're in that-- we're in the process of having to learn all these things in the middle of production work. And it's just not working. The change is happening too fast, which is good but bad for production work.

BEN FISCHLER: Double-edged sword, for sure.

BRIAN MELTON: One of the things I'll say-- I work at Black & Veatch, so it's a large company-- 8,000 to 10,000 people. Doing some research is easy, and it's good to have overhead resources to focus on those things that drive faster. But one of the challenging things is getting up to scale.

And I think what we're seeing is that you used to come to work at a company like Black & Veatch, and it's fantastic technology. You were wowed when you walked in the door. And now we're getting pulled to the future by a new hires that are starting saying, why don't I have VR on my desk? Why doesn't my timesheet work on my phone? They're asking for these things.