Using Virtual Reality to Design Physical Objects: Interview with Phil Chacko CEO of Featherfab
Beyond the Headset: Thanks for joining us Phil, can you tell us about yourself?
Phil Chacko: I decided to study electrical engineering at Princeton when I realized that I didn’t have the patience to do research in a lab. I wanted to be a high tech entrepreneur back then, so I quickly switched over to business. After school I went into management consulting doing transactional work with Ernst & Young working on operational mergers and acquisition.
But I still came back to this desire to create things — and this techie impulse that I had. I’d always been a fan of sci-fi growing up, I read the books, played the games, and thought of the various technologies quite a lot. So I finally realized after a few years in consulting that I needed to be around technology. So I joined Netflix and moved to San Francisco. Working at Netflix was amazing not only in thinking about tech and media from the perspective of the Netflix product but also in being in an environment where so many people were thinking very creatively and pioneering how technology develops and impacts society.
That’s where I started thinking about Virtual Reality (VR). Last year, I got to the point where I wanted to start my own thing. I felt that Netflix was great, but it’s a relatively mature product, and I wanted to go and create something new.
I left Netflix in the Summer of 2015 and decided to start a local social company. We put an app on the app store, and I had certain aspirations on how that would tie into VR at some point in the future. The app itself didn’t work out, but it gave me a stronger conviction around what VR can do and how a 3D medium can be transformational for how people creatively express themselves.
That’s how I started working on VR ideas. Will Watts — My college roommate and current co-founder of FeatherFab — was running a 3D printing shop for a couple of years and found that is was challenging for people to to use modern Computer-Aided Design (CAD) software. We realized that designing 3D objects would be drastically more intuitive in VR (the first 3D medium that allows for the natural interaction with 3D data). That’s what got us working on FeatherFab and that’s why we’re so passionate about what we’re doing right now. We are big believers in VR will be as a platform for 3D creative expression.
What was your first VR experience? What was your introduction to VR?
PC: My first VR experience happened last year, and it involved Google Cardboard. I saw it and immediately felt the immersion that VR provides would be transformational.
In the history of entertainment, we’ve moved progressively into more immersive forms of entertainment. Netflix is a great example benefiting how TV’s in the home have gotten a lot better. People have big screen TV’s the experiences that can be delivered on big screen. Televisions are far more immersive than what they 10 years prior being much smaller 20 inch 4 x 3 displays. In a way, VR is just a continuation of that.
That’s where I started thinking about how VR for art and entertainment could be really interesting from an immersive perspective but what became really compelling to us is what we could do for creative expression using the first natively 3D medium. Meaning, up until now, through the printing press from Gutenberg up to computer displays, every user interface that we’ve interacted with has been fundamentally two dimensions and that has shaped how people treat those tools in forming and expressing ideas and getting creative thoughts out into the world. My first experience with Tilt Brush (from Google), was a downright spiritual experience and both validated and inspired our thoughts around 3D creative expression.
So with VR, you can actually reach out and grab objects, you can turn and manipulate them — a fundamentally new experience. Up until now, in order to fully visualize a 3D object, you’ve needed to work with atoms, you’ve needed to sculpt or manufacture to express 3D ideas and that doesn’t have the effortless scale of distribution that digital bits do.
Interesting, can you elaborate more on atoms vs bits?
PC: Sure, so 3D design had been constrained in the past because of a lack of a 3D digital interface. So the only way to truly design in 3D was to actually manipulate atoms, physical material, rather than bits (digital data) and that comes with certain constraints.
Software has this important property where the marginal cost of distributing an additional piece of software or digital data drops to zero on a marginal basis and that has huge implications for any form of intellectual property that can be encoded as bits of software. As a result, once a piece of software has been developed it can find its way throughout society almost instantaneously thanks to the internet.
“It’s not as simple as hitting copy and paste”
On the other hand, atoms are costly to copy. Marginal atoms themselves have a cost, so basic materials, from mining through manufacture, bring a copying cost. It’s not as simple as hitting copy and paste. At FeatherFab we want to close that gap by making the design process more efficient.
In the future, do you see FeatherFab as a hobbyist tool or will it be used in a professional capacity in design and engineering for example?
PC: There are 60 million people in the US who do arts and crafts in some way, shape or form so we see a large portion of the population already given the constraints of having to work with atoms today, wanting to make physical things in 3D.
If we’re right about VR being a more intuitive platform for 3D creative expression, we have a huge opportunity in the 3D design market. The CAD market today is mostly mechanical, engineering and architectural CAD. So there’s a large set of people that do that today, and they’re happy with the tools that they have.
FeatherFab will enable current non-users of CAD who want to make physical things. So for example through my co-founder Will’s prior company, he worked with fashion designers to make 3D printed bra cups and different fashion related objects for New York fashion week. He found that fashion designers would spend hours drawing what they wanted on paper from 20 different angles to convey what they were trying to do. Then to create that CAD file for 3D printing they would send those drawings to a CAD draftsperson at a high hourly rate, hoping the draftsperson could translate the idea on the page into digital form.
We want to allow that person who is drawing to be able to come to a first order 3D file that expresses what they want in a very intuitive way, much faster and with far less hassle.
What’s it like starting a Startup in VR right now?
PC: There are so many moving parts that to some extent, you have to be an evangelist of this technology and show people why they should care about VR. And then there are people who are well versed. It’s navigating how desktop VR is going to unfold versus mobile VR. How people are going to use VR? Will they use it exclusively in a gaming context? Will they use it in a storytelling context? In an enterprise visualization context? Or as a platform for creative expression? I think a lot of these things can be true, but understanding how the platforms are going to develop is a big part of how it is to be a VR founder today.
It’s effectively matching the utopian vision of what VR and AR can be with what it will be over the next 2–3 years, into the next decade.
So you don’t have the advantage of Startups who have a predicted market?
PC: Right, take for example mobile apps. Mobile is a relatively mature platform with billions of devices out there in the world — you know that there is an addressable market and that there exists the challenges of cutting through the saturation that folks have with apps. VR is so much earlier that all the tools are nascent, so there’s no single standard for VR. There’s Unity and Unreal, but it’s possible that other standards will emerge and eventually WebVR will be a major factor in five years. You need to be mindful of how the various platforms might play out.
What can we be expecting from FeatherFab in the future?
PC: Our mission to is make physical design easy and accessible for anybody on the planet, and we think that VR is a great platform to make that happen.
We’ll be releasing a product for the HTC Vive around the end of the year. (FeatherFab will be releasing for the Oculus Rift as well when the touch remotes are released) So you’ll see a 3D design tool for VR with a sharing community attached to it that will allow people to design with the help of others ideas. The idea is to not have to start from scratch when people are designing a chair or a dress. We’re also going to be partnering with a prosthetics company to produce a tool that will allow prosthetists and patients to create aesthetic covering for their own prostheses.
What type of advice do you have for new developers and Startups entering the VR realm?
PC: All of this is so early that even if you don’t think you know anything, jump in. People are very willing to help. There are plenty of resources out there to get started like Unreal Engine or Unity. I would say if you’re thinking about jumping in — just do it. You won’t regret it. You’re not that far behind the curve, because pretty much everybody is playing catch up right now.
“VR will be a missed opportunity if it’s not also used as a platform for productivity and expression and not just passive consumption”
People should know that physical design is going to be under invested early on for VR and that’s why we’re focusing on it. A lot of folks are going to be focusing on gaming and storytelling applications, but VR will be a missed opportunity if it’s not also used as a platform for productivity and expression and not just passive consumption.
You can follow Phil on Medium Phil Chacko
Or on Twitter @philchacko
Check out Featherfab at Featherfab.com
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