The Wild
Your Guide to Virtual Reality Meeting and
Collaboration Software
Live on Crowdcast – April 2, 2020
Transcript – [PDF Download]
Bob Fine Hey, good morning, everyone, on this Tuesday, April. No, no, Thursday.
Joanna Popper I don’t know if it’s one hundred and eighty seven day March, except I don’t know what day of the week. It’s actually April.
Bob Fine I guess it’s it’s day 30 of the pandemic. I don’t know what that is either, but it’s it’s surreal. But we have we just passed over 900 signups and we have 400 people live right now watching with this kick off. I want to introduce Joanna Popper, who is the global head of location-based entertainment for VR for HP. And I really want to thank you Joanna and HP for being the lead sponsor and being my co-moderator for the next seven hours.
Joanna Popper Yes, we’re here together, together, apart while we’re all staying home. We’re so excited to have you all here. Thank you, everyone. We know here at HP and I’m sure all of you have been getting so many questions on how to use virtual reality, how to use remote collaboration tools during this time. Many of us are staying at home, working from home, being remote. And, you know, so we are here to talk to you about that today. We have eleven different platforms are and talking with us. So we are so excited. Each platform has something different to offer for a different industry or a different use case. So very, very excited that we’re here with you all. And also, let’s start by saying first shout out to all the essential workers, health care workers, government officials, the people who are transporting goods on our behalf and allowing us the luxury to be to stay at home and to be using our virtual reality platforms and other digital life type type platforms to have us all be connected here. Someone just asked if this is this be recorded. Yes, it is. So for those of you who maybe in a time zone who can’t stay out with us for all the the hours in a row, you know, you can see it on broadcast afterwards.
Bob Fine You know, everything is being recorded. Everything will be posted and available on VR voice. Next week, you’ll receive an e-mail notice about it. If you’re experiencing any audio issues or delay issues, it is it can be very dependent on your own bandwidth. So if you don’t have a great connection at home, you know it can it can get a….
Joanna Popper Blame it on the audience Bob, that’s nice.
Bob Fine Always, always try refreshing your browser that always cleans things up usually. If you want to submit a question for Gabe at the bottom is ask the question. You can also upload questions. And also, please be aware that they’re running a special promotion. There’s a call to action button there called The Wild 3 for 2 promotion that I’ll take you right to that. So with that, Gabe, I’m going to hand it over to you. You want to go ahead, start showing your screen.
Gabe Paez Yeah, I can start. I think I’m ready to go.
Thank you so much for having us. My name’s Gabe Paez, founder and CEO of The Wild. The Wild is an immersive collaboration platform for your team to work together in augmented and virtual reality. And I’m super excited to just dive right into it and show you what it’s all about and what it looks like.
So I want to talk in the context of showing you what The Wild is and what it looks like to experience it. I’ll be talking, of course, a little bit about our times and where we’re at right now. Of course, this is unprecedented. We have a time when all the sudden, you know, basically the entire workforce of the world is working remotely. And it is just elevated this topic of what it’s like to work, not just work from home, but have a distributed workforce. Trying to work is one in alignment across time zones, across physical locations. And luckily, that is one of the real superpowers of immersive computing is in bringing us together in an unprecedented way.
So just to break down The Wild a little bit here, you have access in The Wild to different teams. These can be different companies, different teams within one, within your company, within one company. And those live over here on the left. Then you’ve got projects. And inside of those projects, you have spaces, collections, and all sorts of content. So there’s a big content management and sharing component to The Wild within this demo project here. I’m able to go ahead and create a space and I’m just going to start with a blank one and call it VR voice. And just create that from nothing. There are integrations where you can also integrate with third party applications to bring content that you’re working on and programs like Revit and SketchUp directly into The Wild and connect those to your space in The Wild. But I’m just going to start with an empty one for now and show you what that looks like. So right here, I can go ahead and share that and copy an invite to this space and then let me just go ahead and move over here to Slack and I’m going to share that with my team. Who’s going to help me inside. So if I click onto here, you can see I joined right in and it looks like Mischa already joined us inside of this space. Hey, Mischa. Hey, they’re doing great. So you can see I’m actually on a Windows computer right now. I logged in Desktop view. That’s how, you know, I’m not in a headset. What’s your setup where you are?
Mischa So I’m working out of my home in Salem, Oregon, and I’m set up with a Vive Pro.
Gabe Paez Thanks, Mischa. So it looks like we also have Nick here. What’s your setup, Nick?
Nick I’m just in my kitchen at my home in Portland on a quest.
Gabe Paez Excellent. I’m in my basement. I should have mentioned that coming to you live from a basement in Portland, Oregon, United States. OK. Great. Yes. So you got Mischa and Nick here. I think Clay is also going to join us momentarily.
So. Oh, and I also should say we have we have, I think, a couple of people from our team in the chat. So do you have any questions directly in the chat? Feel free to keep active there while we’re talking and they might be able to even type in an answer. Some of your questions. So The Wild, like I said, I’m joining on a Windows computer, but The Wild also supports Mac. We have pretty wide platform support in terms of virtual reality headsets. You can join from VR from a Rift from Windows, mixed reality device, an Oculus Quest from a Windows computer like I’m on here in 2D mode and from Mac in 2D as well. One of the common workflows we’re seeing is especially for people that use Mac every day but want to get started with virtual reality. Clay, where are you? There she is here. Hey, Clay. Hi. So Clay is joining on a Quest as well, right, Clay?
Clay I’m on an Oculus Quest.
Gabe Paez All right. Terrific. Well, welcome. They’re going to start building out a space here while I talk a little bit about the platforms. So sorry, I was saying that you can join from a Mac computer and then use a quest right alongside that. So I imagine this is a pretty sophisticated VR crowd. But for those of you who aren’t down with the headsets, the quest is a great one right here. Wireless, all you need is this device. And so when paired with a Mac, it’s excellent because, you know, you don’t have to have like a separate VR computer. You can have your Mac that you’re doing your work on and and then your headset, you know, just desktop. You know, I will say one of the one of the sort of great things that I see right now happening is this real shift toward understanding the value of like what I would say, conference room VR is sort of what everyone was having previously, where you have a shared resource and you’re in your business like this headset in a conference room that I.T. manages toward. Right now, I think we really need to be rethinking of what a headset that every desk looks like. Which really enables the kind of workflow that I’m going to show you right now. So you’ll see here they’re working sort of in scale mode. You see that they’re they’re pretty small on the tabletop. We call this to our board. They’re building out a space like you can see that they’re dragging in content. I’m going to teleport down here into immersive mode to be one and one with one to one scale with them. And I’m going to go ahead and have Mischa break down what the library is. Can you show us everyone?
Mischa Sure. So I can just summon my library, that same content management system that Gabe showed at the top. And I can go in here and navigate my projects and my collections and basically pull out all the assets that the world supports. So I’m in in a little project here and I’m going to pull out. You see, I already pulled out some models from this collection here. Some art assets. We support a variety of file types and objects. We also have integrations with SketchUp. So if you work in SketchUp, you can just bring in your whole model that way. But we can also bring in images. So let me scale up a little bit, move this video over and then I’m just going to bring out a whole bunch of images here. See some sketches and these can just be important trivia. Drag and drop into our into our library and then I can make a mood board, I can scale them, move them around and basically arrange them however I like. And then let me also load in some video we see of some of the team members already loaded in videos. So I’m going to show that. But you can see here in the background that video is very loaded in this space. And then we also have the ability to load in materials, these samples here. So these are just PBR textures. So we can have really freedom on, you know, designing the space just the way we’d like it.
Gabe Paez And one thing I’ll note is we’ve really taken a lot of care with our interface to make it. I like to say like it’s built based on muscle memory. So rather than just being a ton of menus that you’re navigating with your controllers, we try to sort of physically activate every interaction that you have in The Wild so that you see like when when you have the library open. A lot of our there these tabs on them that you that you push to to sort of navigate yourself around, you reach in and you can grab the items, you pull them out. And so there’s a there’s a tacked on this to The Wild that we we really like to work on. Another thing is like a user experience principle that we have, which is called everything you can see. I can see. So there’s no hidden mystery toward when when Mischa does anything, whether it’s bringing up his library or using his tools. You know, we can see everything here, even though I’m, you know, many miles away from him right now. So, Nick, where are you at? Can you come over? Oh, sorry. No, Nick’s not going to forget it. Nick, actually, actually, Clay is going to be showing us the tools. Can you can you give us a breakdown of the tools, Clay?
Clay Absolutely. OK. We have a variety of tools here and you click on your control to access the tools and I’ll just scroll through here quickly. I’m going to show you all of them, but you can kind of get a sense of the types of tools we have. So what I want to show you, which is one that I really love, we call Comment. This is a text interface where you hold on the trigger and you leave a comment like this. And then you’ve made an object. That’s a comment. And you can scale at large, if you would like, big or small. Well, it was the intent. Grab here so you can grab and move it around. You can use this to have asynchronous communications if you want to leave a comment and they can come back later and another person read. Then here’s our sketching tool with all the colors. So you could go over here and say, you know, I don’t really like this. Mark that up or you could want to move this over here. So essentially, it’s a drawing tool that you can use in the air, which is really awesome. And we have a measuring tool where you can measure your space. I am measuring try to get a sense of what the space size is. It’s really great. And we have several BIM related tools and a massing tool which you can build on basically just a box where you can add. This is basically the basis of how we made the space through boxes, a series of boxes and use our material tool to actually change colors of this box as well. So that’s just kind of an overview. There’s a people tool which is really fun when you have lost people in the space. I’m making a way to manage people and bring control to space. Things can get a little unwieldy. So that’s a little overview for you. You can ask more questions and I’ll turn it back over.
Gabe Paez Sure. So. So basically, you know, this is a this is a look at basic what you can do in terms of like an ideation work session, The Wild building out both the environment itself and bringing content into that into that space. Additionally, The Wild is great in that you can explore multiple spaces. So everybody everybody hold them. So Nick Nick is going to bring a space out from the library. You see, he brought up his library, which Mischa showed us earlier. Not only can you have content in there, but you can have spaces in there in spaces show up as these portals, which you can see. Nick just went into. Go ahead and go in. Mischa, if Mischa goes, Clay can go in, and then we can go in.
And you’ll see that once we get inside of here, this space starts to build out live. We’re able to come over here and and now we’re in this entirely different environment. Spaces are sort of like the, you know, document type of The Wild where you can have an unlimited amount of spaces and all those spaces organized into projects inside of The Wild and then explore them and explore them together, both as a group or in isolation.
And of course, who doesn’t need to be doing some drinking right now so even virtually we can join for a happy hour. We aren’t at the bars, but we are at the Pink Rabbit space. This environment was actually designed by one of our customers, OMFGCO, a local design agency, one of our first customers.
And who’s helped us a lot as we were initially prototyping and building out The Wild. So go ahead and bring us over to that studio department and then we’re going to go ahead and start showing iOS. And Nick, can you actually. OK. Bring us there first and then and then I’m going to ask you a question. Go ahead.
Nick OK.
Gabe Paez So, Nick, can you talk a little bit about the use cases of The Wild?
Nick Yeah, I mean, initially, one of our biggest use cases is was around built around AEC, architecture firms, and construction – that type of thing. But during all of this, in the new world we’re living in. We’d had a lot of new use cases crop up around meeting spaces or just having a spot to hop in and get away from it all. But we have, you know, an app, a company that designs 2D apps and they bring in the screens, they review. They all live in three different cities across the whole world and they meet twice a week. And then they they are able to review even asynchronously if they need to. We have some companies that do merchandising, so they do retail design, go in and place all the shoes and the shirts throughout a store and see how that looks.
Obviously, like I said, construction and architecture, we have a company that makes signage for events and so create kind of the whole event space and place signs everywhere. So it’s all across the board. It’s really exciting seeing how people are using it even more, even to the point where they’re using The Wild to replace slide presentations and have it be a slightly more interactive situation for everybody.
Gabe Paez Thanks, Nick. So I’m going to actually go ahead and share my iPad with you guys.
Great.
So now you’re looking at the iPad I’m holding right here. You can see that from iOS. You basically have the same ability to navigate your team’s projects, elections and your spaces. So I’m going to show you what it looks like to come into a space on iOS. So this space here, you see I can look all around and now I’m inside of that space that we were just looking at. But also, the thing that you’ll see if I shrink this down is that this space is actually an augmented reality. I can place this space. And then then you can see, of course, I can move all around it and and see it from all different angles. Anyone inside of this space, I can see I can talk to you. It doesn’t matter that I’m, you know, on an iOS device on this iPad. You still have this ability to, you know, interface with this with this space through through this augmented view of the space. So this is super, super useful for multiple reasons. Number one, if people don’t have access to the headset, it’s a great way just to get someone who either who doesn’t have access to at home but maybe does have an iPhone or an iPad into the immersive content. But also, this is a great way to get even someone in in a shared, shared session in the same physical room that maybe as it comes from comfortable putting on a headset into into the space. I’ll show you also, you can reposition dynamically, sort of reposition the space. And the controls for that are pretty simple and really, you know, just anyone can do this. So that is what iOS looks like. So it looks like we’ve got a few minutes left here. I’m going to go ahead and open it up for questions.
It looks like there are a fair number of questions in here already that I’m going to start looking through.
Bob Fine So Gabe, there are there are a number of questions in their search. So whatever you can try to answer, go ahead and whatever we don’t have time for. We’ll send to you later and we’ll try to get answers and make that part of the post for next week.
Gabe Paez OK, sure. That that would be excellent. Can you join?
Yeah, that’s great. So someone is even joining here asking about size. You know, I will say it’s pretty it’s pretty simple, too, as you can see. Like we had our team members in here. It’s pretty simple to get into The Wild from any of these platforms. One thing I should say is The Wild is really built for a small team collaboration. We impose a limit of some we say nine or 10 people in the space, not as a technical limit to nine or 10 people being all that is technically capable of. You could have a meeting with more than that, but it’s more social constraint, whereas, you know, the experience that you have with a very large group of 50 is quite different from the experience that you’d have with a small group getting together. And we’ve really built and optimized The Wild around this idea.
- Oh, I do. OK, great. So you’re able to basically have people in tandem between these devices. So it’s not like it’s not that there’s an augmented reality mode of The Wild and then there’s a virtual reality mirror.
The idea of The Wild is that you have people from all of these disparate devices joining together in space and one. And they bring whatever device we can and have a common experience.
I’ve been an important part of the industry, which is really just now emerging, is this idea of extended reality and not segmenting it into the idea of virtual reality and augmented reality and mixed reality and really looking narrowly at the use cases for each one. I think that it’s should be up to the up to the participant how and at what level of virtualization they want to participate in the space.
And so in that way, we look at The Wild at its core as persistent spaces in the cloud that you can then access from any of these devices in any configuration that you you’d like to access them from. And, you know, I think more and more you’re going to see the whole industry heading toward this direction, especially as the devices become more multi capable. You’re already seeing this happen right now with some of the VR devices starting to add more of those augmented reality capabilities into it. And so it is truly a spectrum and we want that to be up to the user where they want to live on. That’s OK. It looks like we’re just about at time. If you have any additional questions around specifics, around files that we we support or different workflows that we can enable, I just encourage you to check out thewild.com, get in touch with us via a chat there or a call to action. OK. Also, like Bob was saying, please hit us up with your questions in the actual question box here. And Bob can follow up. So thank you so much. It was a pleasure to present to you. Take care. Bye.
Bob Fine Gabe, I just want to say thank you very much for helping us so often. It was a flawless presentation. You know, again, it’s very dependent on everyone starting with how well it’s going to stream. But I was it was really impressive, actually. So thank you very much. Joanna?
Joanna Popper Thank you to you. Thank you. Everyone. From the team that did a live demo in the webinar is fantastic and looks like a ton of interest from that ton of questions. And so what’s the best way for them to follow up with you and and get a demo and and test it out for their workflow?
Gabe Paez Follow up with us at thewild.com – super easy.
Joanna Popper And you have a last shoutout for the promotion you’re running?
Gabe Paez Oh, yeah. So the promotion for people participating in this conference. We’re doing a 3 for 2 promotion. Sign up for three seats and you get two. Basically with The Wild you have a team and then you just are able to pay for seats on that team. So seats are logins. You can access it from any of our devices via one log in. You’re just getting your user account inside of the inside of your team, inside of The Wild. So thank you guys so much. And I you know, our sales team would be glad to talk with you more about that if you’re interested. Thanks.
Joanna Popper Excellent. There’s a lot of questions about access in the content after I mentioned that the content will be sent out and will be available at VR Voice. So if you’re not able to stick with us all day, you can go to VR Voice starting next week and access all the content.
Bob Fine And you’ll get an email announcement when it’s all right. Great. Thanks again, Gabe. Thanks again. And we’ll be back momentarily, the next presentation.
Gabe Paez Terrific.
Joanna Popper Stick with us where we’re going to switch out to get a new presenter and we’ll be back on.
