Disruptive AR / VR: An Interview with Luciana Carvalho Se, Head of Partnerships at REWIND, Chief Evangelist at Realities Centre and Co-Founder of Unfold UK
After my interview with Thomas Gere, which you can read here, he put me in touch with Luciana Carvalho Se, who currently works as the head of partnerships at REWIND, chief evangelist and head of partnerships at Realities Centre and the co-founder of Unfold UK, to interview her about the AR / VR industry as well. So again, I want to say a big thank you to Tom for helping to organise this!
Luciana is extremely passionate about strengthening the ecosystem around B2B & startup AR, VR, MR in the UK and played a crucial role in founding Realities Centre and the VRAR Tech London Advocates sub-group. She is currently working with REWIND to deliver immersive experiences for the world’s largest studios, agencies and brands. She is the co-founder of Unfold UK, which is powering XR diversity and inclusion (formerly Women in VR UK). Luciana is an advocate of neuroVR and the cognitive impact of immersive tech and works to empower edutech and STEAM through hackathons, Code First: Girls, SheWorx, Girls in Tech, Ada’s List.
Luciana and I had a great discussion about her journey into this industry and how we can get more women involved in this space! Let’s dive straight into the interview:
About yourself and your journey into AR/VR world
Hi Luciana, thank you for your time today. To start with could you tell us your background, your move from studying law into tech and how you got into immersive tech?
Luciana: To make a long story short, my interest in tech has always been there. My dad was an electronic engineer and I coded my first website when I was 11 on Microsoft Frontpage about Friends, the TV show. But it always felt stifled since I didn’t think it was a viable career option so I went into Law. During a Harvard summer school course on leadership, business and systems, I was thinking about what was important to me, which was the intersection between humans and tech. About how humanity is being advanced or in a sense constrained by technology. After that I did a masters in International Business where I knew I wanted to work with tech companies, particularly Google. I saw a book that said are you smart enough to work at google and I said challenge accepted!
I started interning at startups who had connections with Google as that was my ultimate goal. I loved working with startups that were early stage like pre-series A, simply because I felt you would learn a lot more in a startup, where you would have a high position of responsibility in a small team, an opportunity to start working in digital marketing and learn about operations, growth hacking and networking. All of that ultimately led to 4 to 5 years of working with different startups from EdTech to Big Data so it’s really wide ranging. Looking back, I was essentially dating different tech startups and I loved working with all of them. The first one I fell for was cybersecurity so I co-founded a startup for about a year and learnt a lot. Choose wisely who you are partnering with!
Right after that, a friend of mine from Cambridge wanted me to organise a hackathon for him because he had a solution called Linguisticator where you were teaching languages through memory palaces and visual and spatial queues. Someone told him that it was the perfect application for VR and he didn’t know about tech so I naturally joined him for about 3 or 4 months to get the solution kickstarted. I helped him find 3D animators and connect him to University of Westminster in London, where the Computer Science department had Unity coders to help make the VR solution.
After that, I went to the VRX conference and did my first Vive demo, one of which was with REWIND, who I now work with so it is a full circle. That was early 2015 and I immersed myself in the industry. I started to see the possibilities from not just gaming but also industries such as education and healthcare. For example, with Linguisticator, we were trialing out for children with learning disabilities and dyslexia, who, previously, would not learn “properly”. Within an hour, they could recite their parents’ phone numbers backwards and forwards. This just blew my mind. Education and healthcare really got me into VR.
Since July, I have been doing more public speaking and speaking about Cognitive behaviour change and VR, where my interests really lie. So for the past few years, it has been learning as much as possible, meeting new people and getting Realities Centre off the ground. The REWIND opportunity showed up earlier this year and it was the logical next step to learn more about content and join a company that I always admired and a team that is pushing the boundaries.
I know you are currently the head of partnerships at REWIND in a business development and partnerships role. What does this involve on a day-to-day basis?
Luciana: We are about 50 in the entire company, including the developers. We are technology and platform agnostic so we work across the immersive spectrum. The company started in 2011 as a VFX (visual effects) company and went into 360° in its early days. It is really interesting because it covers significant breadth from 360° to 2D video and post production all the way through to real-time immersive HTC Vive or Oculus VR.
Having joined in July, I think it’s the most exciting time for REWIND at the moment, it’s a company that has only been self-funded and revenue generating from the very beginning. It has always been more reactive because people know about it. At the moment, we are trying to devise a more proactive strategy — our focus is more on establishing a global presence. One of the things that I focus on is to figure out who we want to work with and then going out and getting it. We are finding industry verticals and key players to work with. It’s never VR for VRs sake.
My disclaimer is if you can do it in 2D, then do it in 2D so sometimes we spend half as much time convincing people not to do AR / VR /MR. It could be a bad sales strategy but at the same time, because we are passionate about the industry it pays off. Sure, you can create something in the short term and get money for that but you are doing yourself a disservice, the client and the industry a disservice.
I also go to and speak at a lot of conferences with work. At these conferences, it is clear to see how the industry is changing and the “transformative” power of VR.
How did you get involved with Realities Centre?
Luciana: I met Tom around the time I was working with Linguisticator. I was already positing this idea of UK VR, as a few years ago there were a lot of companies but they were all disjointed and siloed unlike the US. I wanted to make a community and he wanted a co-working space and after discussing, the Realities Centre idea came to fruition. It has been fascinating, working with him and getting the branding. I was Chief Evangelist so I was getting out there and talking to my network.
Diversity within the industry
What inspired you to co-found Unfold UK (formerly Women in VR UK) and what more do you think we can do to get more women involved in the space?
Luciana: I always wanted to go into tech when I was a kid. I was embarrassed of the fact that I was building a website, which I only realise now. I never felt that Computer Science or Technology was a viable career option — it didn’t even cross my mind until much later on. There are many organisations like Women in Tech, Women Who Code, Code First: Girls, Mums in Tech, She Can Code, etc. I am friends with all of the founders. I have helped them, volunteered, participated at events. I saw the industry being more diverse than any other tech sector. It sits at the intersection of creativity and tech — its beautiful. You got the film industry, gaming and so many others. From everything I have seen in the past, not just VR, but tech in general, we need more women in senior positions. The biggest challenge we found with Unfold was that it was difficult for female founders in VR to get funding unless they had a male co-founder.
A friend of mine was working in marketing and sales and then transitioned into tech. She founded a company with a male technical co-founder and she was the one driving it given her experience in sales. It was a perfect combination for the company but when she pitched, she would not get funding. When he pitched, they got funding and he was objectively worse than her at pitching, but he was a guy!
There are many things we can do such as having more women in boards, but without positive discrimination. It should be based on meritocracy. Sherry Coutu, who founded Founders4Schools, has found that there is a 50/50% interest in STEM until kids are 12/13 but due to aspects such as peer pressure, social pressure, and subconscious bias, women naturally lead away from tech. We should have a soft intervention at that point to prevent people thinking tech and coding is just for geeks.
In fact, a few friends of mine co-founded Women of Wearables, which are combining the creative, fashion industry and tech to do amazing workshops with women and teaching them how to code. Their approach is not “learn to code!” but “would you like to make a smart jacket?” so they start from the endpoint of what is interesting for them. And this is how I taught myself. I could never sit down and say I am going to learn JavaScript. I found that boring. I taught myself how to do Wordpress, HTML, a bit of Java and that was always because I was making websites.
AR / VR Industry
Where do you think AR and VR are headed to in the future?
Luciana: The industry is validated now, for example Facebook announced their plans of getting 1 million people into VR recently. Where I find most value moving forward is looking at different industry verticals — as in drilling down to specifics like how does AR work in a factory or during business processes, or for entertainment.
For example, we worked a lot with Hollywood and we recently created a VR experience for Ghost in the Shell. It’s another case we talk about because Paramount Studios didn’t really know if they were going to do anything in immersive tech due to the backlash of using Scarlett Johansson. Once they realised they were going to invest, they had 7 weeks to build something and got in touch with us to do a 360° video. We said we can do it but it’s just not worth it in terms of ROI. Instead, we suggested to build a full Oculus Rift so people can really experience the most iconic scenes of the trailer and they were very surprised we could do it in 7 weeks, which was insane but we did it!
I read a couple of articles talking about home entertainment being a big focus for investors going into VR. Realistically, you are not going to have people buy a HTC Vive and playing around with it. If they are early adopters, they might get a Samsung Gear VR. You won’t see people really investing in VR unless they are in tech. Bridging the gap between those early adopters and everyone else and having them experience something that’s high quality is key. One of the biggest barriers we have to adoption now is people having bad VR experiences. Oliver at Rewind usually says “bad content in any medium is still bad content”!
Quick fire round
Now let’s imagine a world, where AR / VR technology was fully advanced, what is one application that you would use it for?
Luciana: Cognitive behavioural change — that’s ultimately what I want to do and I see it as my mission. I come from a family of psychologists so it’s in my blood and my grandma had motor neurone disease, which always troubled me because she was cognitively there but not there physically. Another area in this is stroke rehabilitation, which has been proven such as through Immersive Rehab.
I came across a study from UCL and ICREA-University of Barcelona, where they had a sample of severely depressed patients from the NHS go into a simulation and were told to comfort a grieving child, which they did and it was all recorded. Then, they switched the first-person narrative so they were the child and they saw an image of themselves coming towards them and comforting themselves. This is the definition of comforting your inner child! Within two months, over 65% recorded higher levels of self-compassion and compassion towards others. This is all subjective, which is where the difficulty is with psychology and psychiatry in general. The experiences that make people battle their phobias, their fears, social anxiety, depression through VR is what I want to see.
Are there any startups that have caught your eye recently?
Luciana: Tricky question! Maybe I’m biased but a recent friend of mine is looking at sexual harassment through VR experiences, hoping that we can reach a widespread code of conduct. There was a big thing with uploadVR — two of my friends were on CNN recently talking about their experiences. That’s actually an impediment to getting more women in tech and in VR.
Another startup I think is quite cool is Stitched. There are two co-founders, Elinor and Will. They are doing a similar thing to the Ikea app and have partnerships with John Lewis and other major retailers. They are using machine learning and AR to map-out your place and the first project was curtains. Elinor’s background is in architecture, engineering, and interior design and so she is using everything that she knows, which shows there are AR applications in real estate, architecture and art!
Another friend of mine created Vividly, who is doing something similar. This one is looking at architecture and urban planning — visualising and planning smart cities and smart housing using a mix of AI and VR. It’s so cool! It’s the first and I think the only way in which architects and planners have been able to get such a sketch. They can go inside the plan and see how it would look like, which you wouldn’t be able to see otherwise.
What do you like to do in your free time to unwind from all the immersive technology?
Luciana: Be with friends in real life! I like to travel, which I do with work, exercise and go to random events. I like to be really spontaneous and so I love London for that — there is so much there! My mom always said to me there are two certainties in life — we are born and we die and everything in between is up to us. Just keeping it in mind that we have limited time and that we should make the most of it!
Thank you very much for your time Luciana. It was great getting to know your journey, your views on diversity in tech and how to get more women involved, as well as the insights into REWIND. Readers, I would recommend you to follow Luciana, REWIND and Unfold UK on Twitter for the latest news from them.
If you work in the AR / VR sector and are really excited about the development of this space, please get in touch by replying to this post, LinkedIn or Twitter!
By Abhilash Dubbaka
Abhilash Dubbaka is currently working in Investment Banking and an investor with a passion for the Technology sector. He has a particular interest in the AR and VR sectors. If you have any comments, please contact Abhilash through LinkedIn, Twitter or reply to this post.
