VR Labs’ Thoughts and Takeaways From May’s Conferences
At the beginning of this month, our VR team participated in two conferences — ProgressNEXT in Orlando FL and Microsoft Build in Seattle WA. As these conferences took place at the same time on two diagonally opposite locations in the USA we had to split the team in order to spread the VR enthusiasm on both events. In this post, I will summarize the experience of my teammates and me, sharing thoughts on how our VR demos and concepts were accepted by the audience.
ProgressNEXT 2019
This event for modern applications development took place May 6–9 in Orlando. The audience of the conference consists of people who are interested in Progress Software existing products and want to learn more about the future plans of the company. As part of Progress Telerik, our main target was to show the attendees of the event that we are actively working on enabling VR for different business use cases, solving problems in a better way than they are currently solved on 2D displays. We presented our VR applications and concepts using three separate approaches — booth presence, live demo on the CTO Keynote’s stage and a separate VR session with DataViz related presentation. Let’s see how these approaches worked from my point of view.
Booth presence
On the Progress Telerik VR booth we have prepared three sample demos, showing them with Oculus Go and Oculus Rift devices. The first demo is a virtual conference room that can be joined by several people, where they can discuss a sales dashboard data visualization. The second demo is a twitter graph application which visualizes twitter communication in a way that has no readable alternatives in 2D. These two applications may be seen in more details and downloaded for free from our web site. The third one is a healthcare application allowing remote collaboration between a doctor and a patient in a virtual medical room. This application helps the doctor to analyze the data from patients medical test and explain the results and the needed surgery procedures with a descriptive and immersive 3D visualization of a sample human body.
As expected, there was excitement for the technology and our demos from the people that visited the booth. The ones who were skeptic about the technology were rather an exception. It was exciting to see people who showed real interest in our project and were happy to take our contacts to be able to reach out after the conference.
CTO Keynote live demo
About a month before the conference we realized that the CTO Keynote will be focused on AR/VR applications in healthcare, so we suggested to create a demo that can be shown on the big stage. Using the knowledge and reusable components from our existing applications, our team managed to fit the short time span and build a healthcare application that shows how collaboration between a doctor and a patient can be achieved in VR. And voilà — one of the most exciting moments from ProgressNEXT for me may be seen in the photo above! I and Georgi appeared on the stage in front of the whole audience of this conference, taking the roles of a doctor and a patient. In my opinion, this presence on stage, even for a few minutes, was the best exposure of our work that managed to reach the maximal amount of attendees, who are now aware of the existence of Progress Telerik’s VR labs project.
VR DataViz session
Our separate VR session was based on a presentation titled “From 2D to Stereoscopic 3D Data Visualization in Virtual Reality”. We had the chance to present for about 45 minutes our VR DataViz explorations explaining the following points:
- What is DataViz in general and why it is important for businesses?
- How Stereoscopic display works, how it differs from the standard 2D display visualization and how it is similar to the way we see the actual world around us?
- Why 3D DataViz is better than the 2D alternative when talking about real 3D visualizations on a stereoscopic display?
At the end of the session, we showed our Sales Dashboard and our Twitter Graph demos, emphasizing on the strengths of 3D DataViz in VR. After the demos, there were several questions from the audience showing that the people were interested in the technology and wanted to know how they can apply it to their existing businesses. Some of the attendees came to us after the session to discuss concrete ideas and scenarios which they see valuable for their business.
ProgressNEXT summary
We did our best to present our ideas and show our working projects, trying to reach the largest amount of the audience at this conference. We were happy to have these chances for meeting people from different business verticals and discuss with them what values the VR technology can bring to their businesses. There were conference attendees who came to us asking for more details on concrete scenarios. They took our contacts and chances are that some of them are going to reach out to us when the time comes for them to implement a VR solution.
Microsoft Build 2019
This is one of the largest conferences based on Microsoft technologies with over 6000 attendees. It took place May 6–8 in Seattle. Our team targets at this conference can be organized into three main groups — booth presence with VR demos, build connections with potential partners, and research what others are working on in the AR/VR area. Let’s see how this event went from our point of view based on these three groups.
Booth presence
Progress’ booth was big enough to welcome a good amount of conference attendees passing by. For VR we were showing the same three demos already mentioned for ProgressNEXT, with one small difference — the demos were shown not only with Oculus devices but with Windows Mixed Reality VR device as well.
Because it is Microsoft’s conference and their VR platform is Windows Mixed Reality, we decided to port our demos for WMR devices. Being able to achieve this task in less than a week proved that our decision for building components on top of Unity was the right thing — Unity makes it really easy to target different platforms and devices.
On the VR front, there was a lot of interest and enthusiasm in the demos. Most of the visitors were just experiencing the technology, some of them were even confusing the Samsung Odyssey device with a HoloLens 2 device. Developers that had some experience were happy with the demos and took our contacts. Some business people were present, those were enthusiastic about the sales dashboard demo and we gave them our fliers.
Connections building
Besides connecting with people at our booth, we also explored what others are doing in the VR area that may be helpful for our projects as well. We met people working on Microsoft Maps for Mixed Reality, which is based on Bing Maps. They had just released an SDK and wanted to get us on it. This corresponds to our current plans for exploring the geospatial data visualization scenario in VR and we see this connection as a good opportunity to build a good use-case together.
We have also tested the HoloLens 2 device. It is a very well put device. The balance is perfect, just as advertised, the straps are very thin and a bit stretchy which holds the thing perfectly on the head, the holo rings are gone. The display has slightly larger FoV, the colors are a bit off. But the biggest improvement in v2 is the hand tracking. The controls in these devices come just naturally, which is a big leap compared to the v1. Overall there were just few HoloLens 2 devices on the conference and there were several exhibitors that still used HoloLens 1.
Others work for AR/VR
We learned more about an open source project called Babylon.js. It is built by Microsoft and they are considering pushing deeper the JavaScript stack into 3D and by that extent VR. The main site has featured demos, one of the business cases is SharePoint spaces, showing this kind of experiences. They are exploring the options of building a “Babylon.js native”, which is “React native” for 3D. Allowing the JavaScript developer to quickly/cheaply prototype decent VR experiences may disrupt the Unity ecosystem. If played well, this may democratize the VR for JavaScript developers ecosystem as well.
MS Build summary
Honestly, we expected some more AR focus from Microsoft, however, most of the sessions were focused on Azure and other Microsoft projects which are currently unrelated to the Windows Mixed Reality topic. We managed to share contacts with some attendees who were interested in our work and probably some of them are going to reach out to us when they start looking for an implementation in their businesses. We are also happy about making some contacts that may result in future partnership opportunities on mutual projects.
