Learnings from ARVR Innovate

An honest view of AR and VR in 2019

James Watson from Immerse telling it how it is

The 6th ARVR Innovate conference was just held in Dublin, Ireland, and I had the pleasure of appearing on the final panel of the day. Alex Gibson, the event organiser, asked us what we had thought of the day, and the overall themes and learnings.

Honesty

I told Alex that I was taken by the honesty on show at the conference. Most tech conferences are back-patting exercises, where successful entrepreneurs or corporate evangelists are asked questions either relating to their success or about their visions of the future. These visions tend to be very optimistic, which is understandable, what startup or tech giant wants to paint a negative picture of their potential markets?

At ARVR Innovate this year however, there was a definite theme of acknowledging the hype surrounding AR and VR may not be entirely justified.

• Dave Vincent, Chief Digital Officer with Tourism NI (a government body in Northern Ireland) was asked what was the best use case for AR or VR in tourism was — he replied that he hasn’t seen a sustainable one yet. He said he was “cynical but supportive” — that he was funding companies and projects in these areas in the hope of finding a great use / business case.
• On the same panel as Dave, Stella Setyiadi, Chief Marketing Officer of Octagon, an AR startup, mentioned that one of the main challenges in developing AR apps is actually getting consumers to download them.
• Camille Donegan, General Manager of Virtual Reality Ireland, talking about B2B VR, said that her company is making money but that it isn’t easy.
• Peter Woodbridge, Creative Director at Storylab, gave the opinion that in-home VR may not be as big as people may think it will be.
• On my panel, I also mentioned how some of my testing of AR with consumers shows that they / the technology may not be ready for it — that they can struggle with certain use-cases and behaviours that they haven’t encountered before.
• Likewise, Paul Sweeney, COO of DAQRI (the AR headset company) gave a great talk, with an honest appraisal of the current state of AR — that it hasn’t reached that “inflection point” yet, where mass market adoption takes place. He also deserves major points for including a Life of Brian reference:

Paul Sweeney and John Cleese

basically making the point that the confusion on what to call Augmented Reality (AR / MR / XR / Spatial Computing / Extended Computing / whatever) is rather like the People’s Front of Judea …

• Jan Pfluger, from Audi and advisXR, made some great points about the different factors a company should consider with AR/VR:
• Hardware quality — resolution, color correctness, field of view, ergonomic, optics
• Precision
• Is the data ready to show the right content?
• Scalability, device management
• Legal requirements
• Health and Safety
• Budget
• Return on Investment
• Workforce considerations — will workers feel threatened by the change?

So, overall, it was very refreshing to hear pragmatic views of the current state and potential of AR & VR, not just the usual evangelising.

I also got to briefly try the Magic Leap device, the massively hyped AR headset, whose company claims to want to ‘bring magic back into the world’. It was just ok — the field of view (what percentage of your view you can see holograms in) was limited, just like the Microsoft Hololens, and it frankly doesn’t look so cool …

So cool.

For a device with the investment (billions) behind it, and incredible promotional material, the actual reality doesn’t live up to it.

On a More Positive Note

A lot of the speakers and panellists however also talked about the successes of current AR & VR, along with the amazing potential for the future:

• Paul Sweeney showed some of his company’s work with enterprise AR, including DAQRI’s smart glasses, that actually don’t look too bad, design wise!
• James Watson, Immerse, gave another great honest talk, and showed a VR solution his company has made for DHL, to train their cargo packers, how to pack boxes more efficiently for air transport. He had the solution itself available to try out at the conference’s expo section on the Oculus Quest, which people really seemed to enjoy using.

Alex Gibson, event organiser, trying the Immerse demo on the Oculus Quest

• The Oculus Quest was mentioned a lot as a potential game changer for VR. The upcoming device (just recently open for pre-orders), with its 6 degrees of freedom (or ‘dofs’ for the cooler amongst us) allows the user to walk around, untethered to a computer and unrestricted by the need for any sensors. I haven’t tried it yet, but have the Oculus Go — a cheaper version with no tracking, but similarly not connected to a PC or smartphone — and it’s a fantastic device. I can see the Quest expanding the use of VR in the market.
• The conference has a laid back feel, probably due to its small size, which made crowd participation effective. One attendee, Paul Holden, the Northern Irish comic book artist, made a great point that the growing pains experienced by the industry now are needed to prepare us for the future
• Likewise, another attendee, Phil Morrow, made the fantastic point that we may not need as many devices in the market as people think we do. He pointed out that there’s only so many PS4s in the world, but they are hugely successful.
• Paul Shanahan from Microsoft gave a talk about the upcoming HoloLens 2, and while slightly in the more traditional tech-giant evangelist style, he also showed a great video of his 5 year old daughter using the HoloLens; and so naturally picking up the gesture based interface. It showed a brief glimpse of the future — that eventually the tapping at the black mirrors in our pockets will be replaced by a whole different range of interactions.
• Paul also mentioned the Azure Kinect DK, a camera that seems quite like the AWS Deeplens, that uses some of the HoloLens’ machine learning based recognition, but as a standalone camera; he mentioned Microsoft are currently trialling it in the US to spot signs that a patient is about to fall out of a hospital bed.
• Niall O’Driscoll, vStream, gave an optimistic view of VR as being very useful for healthcare — pain management, prevention, adherence, training, exposure therapy, stress inoculation and more. Along with a nice photo of a crisp sandwich.

It made sense at the time

Other notes worth mentioning

• Dr. Brian Vaughan, TU, gave an interesting talk on an AR case-study for tourism.
• Audi’s HoloLens experience was back again this year and worth trying.
• The Road Safety Authority of Ireland had some pretty sobering (forgive the pun) VR experiences in the Expo relating to drink driving and driving while tired.
• My dinosaur obsessed 4 year old daughter loved the free pack of Octagon AR dinosaur cards I brought home!

Final thoughts

ARVR Innovate is a great conference — small enough to allow for meaningful conversations and networking, but large enough to have valuable content. The honesty shown this year about AR and VR was refreshing to see and hopefully will help the attendees when they’re making business decisions in these areas.

If you’ve any thoughts or comments, let me know below, and you can get me onTwitter or LinkedIn. Check out Liberty IT here. Thanks, Andy