The Reality of AR & VR w/Destery Hildenbrand
Episode Overview
Welcome back to another episode of Making Better, the podcast where we explore innovative technologies and their potential to enhance our lives. In today's episode, titled "The Reality of AR & VR," we have a special guest, Destery Hildenbrand, joining our host, Matt Gjertsen, to dive deep into the world of augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR). Destery, an XR Solution Architect at Intellize, brings his extensive expertise in the learning and development field to shed light on the practical applications and future possibilities of these immersive technologies. From pilot training to upskilling in the corporate world, they'll discuss the realities of AR and VR and how they can truly make our experiences better. So, get ready to strap on your headsets and join us on this captivating journey into the realm of augmented and virtual reality on Making Better!
About Destery Hildenbrand
Destery Hildenbrand is an XR Solutions Architect at Intellezy. I recently met Destery at a planning event for ATD’s Tech Knowledge conference where I heard him talking about Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality.
Full Transcript
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Destery Hildenbrand [00:00:00]:
You at this point, we've had all these wearable options that are out there, but they're expensive, right? You know, you got the magic leaps of the world, you got the hollow lenses of the world, which they're awesome, they're great technology, but, you know, there's there's very rarely organizations that are going to be like, oh, yeah, give me 20, you know, so I can put them on all the people.
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:17]:
Welcome to Making Better, a podcast from Better Everyday studios devoted to helping small learning teams have a big impact. Today we are talking to Destery Hildenbrand, an XR Solutions architect from Intelliz. I recently met Destery at an ATD planning event for an upcoming conference, and as soon as I heard him talking about virtual reality and augmented reality, I knew I had to have him on the podcast. As a huge fan of these technologies, I'm really excited about the potential they could have for training development. So let's jump in.
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:48]:
Destery. Welcome to the making. Better podcast. How are you doing today?
Destery Hildenbrand [00:00:52]:
Doing great. Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it.
Matt Gjertsen [00:00:55]:
Awesome. I'm really excited to have you. Like I said, we recently met at an ATD planning event. And as soon as I heard you start talking about augmented reality, virtual reality, immediately in my mind, it connected with I've just recently saw the launch of Apple Vision Pro and heard discussions of Quest Three. And so kind of VR AR was already rattling around in my head. So as soon as I was introduced to you, I knew we had to have a discussion. So I'm really excited about this today. But to get started, I'd love it if love to hear a little bit more about you, if you could give the audience a brief description of you and maybe tell us what an XR Solutions Architect does, because I'm not certain that I know.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:01:44]:
No, yeah, absolutely. First off, it's an exciting time, right? There's a lot of really cool stuff coming out. So with the new Apple product and Quest bringing out their latest version so I'm an XR Solution Architect at a company called Intellize, and essentially what I do is I help clients sort of bring their augmented and virtual reality dreams to life, right? So I sort of work with clients and help them to understand, number one, what the technology is, what it isn't. And then number two, how can we start to translate some of those issues or goals or problems you're trying to solve into an immersive technology experience, right? How can we turn that into something where we can really find a solution to those types of problems, where your learners really benefit from it by using an immersive technology of some kind? So that's essentially what I do. In today's day and age, we can call ourselves pretty much anything we want, but I'm essentially just an XR. I just help people find solutions for immersive technology that's really where I kind of hang out and it's a great space to be. Right. I've been there for the past ten years. I've been in learning and development now for about 20 years. So I started off I was just telling people at the event we were at, I started off years ago as a graphic designer, digital artist for the Yellow Pages way back when I know, right? So way back when I had my Power G Three Mac and we were rocking and rolling. But yeah, slowly but surely my journey took me all the way up into more technology driven to where I started. Really getting into the augmented reality space is where I started and then working in virtual reality and really sort of seeing those parallels from all those years in training. How can we really utilize this technology and leverage it to build out these solutions that our learners can really benefit from?
Matt Gjertsen [00:03:31]:
Awesome. I love it and I specifically love that. At the beginning of that, you mentioned how you tell people a little bit what the technology is and what it isn't. What are some of the biggest misconceptions you see when customers first come to you?
Destery Hildenbrand [00:03:47]:
I think one of the biggest things is that everybody's like, it's going to be super expensive and we can't afford it. Right. It's just not going to work. Another thing we really hear a lot, I hear a lot is I don't know if my learners are ready for something like that. Right. And I think that in some cases that can be true. But for the most part, I think what you run into is that cost, ease of use, these are all things that, as we do with any technology or anything that we decide we're going to build or purchase or anything, it all kind of evolves. And I think everyone's more than capable that I've run into of using augmented reality.
Matt Gjertsen [00:04:21]:
Right.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:04:22]:
We all use our phones, so we can use an app to scan and bring things to life through that, or we can put on a headset. Some people just can't. But if they can't do that, there's other ways we can do it as well. Right. We can bring virtual reality experiences to a browser and then it becomes more gameish right inside of there. But yeah, I think the ability and cost, there's still a price associated with it.
Matt Gjertsen [00:04:45]:
Right.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:04:45]:
And it's still a little bit higher than some of the other ways that you do things. But we divide that up into the types of complexity of elearning that we contract out as well.
Matt Gjertsen [00:04:55]:
Right.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:04:55]:
We have a minimum one for this price. We have a medium complexity for this and a completely interactive place for this.
Matt Gjertsen [00:05:03]:
Right.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:05:03]:
And I think what we're seeing is that those costs are starting to level out a little bit in that the amount of money you pay for a very high end elearning starts to hit that sort of mid range of, like, a virtual reality training. And another thing I bring up a lot, too is it's like, well, the types of things you're going to do for virtual reality aren't everyday things, right? We're not going to train everybody how to do everything in virtual reality, but the things that it really does well. So are you putting any of your learners in dangerous situations?
Matt Gjertsen [00:05:35]:
Right?
Destery Hildenbrand [00:05:35]:
Do they have to go, I don't know, play in traffic? Do they have to go interact with environments that are potentially hazardous? Well, the cost there probably evens out based on we don't want anybody to get hurt. We don't want anybody to have any kind of issues like that. So if you're only focusing on it for the things that it does well, then ROI is much easier to find and much easier to see than if you're just trying to be like, hey, we want to use VR, but we don't know what for. Right? It's the age old problem. Technology for the sake of technology is never a good direction to go.
Matt Gjertsen [00:06:12]:
Yeah, absolutely. I'm thinking back to my time as a pilot. And we used Simulators, and you could call it virtual reality all the time. And kind of like you said, there would be varying levels of it, where sometimes you're basically playing Microsoft Flight Simulator, you're just, like, looking at a screen. And then other times, you have kind of like a big screen that's in front of you that kind of goes around you a little bit, and then you get up into the major weapon systems, and they have the full motion simulators where it's all moving back and forth, and it's worth it. It's worth all that stuff, like you said, because otherwise you're having to actually fly the plane, which is crazy expensive. And so if you had to do all of the training in the plane, it would be double or triple or more, the cost versus taking at least some of the stages and pulling it out. So I think that sounds 100% right, because on the other end of the spectrum, in the corporate world, I've seen examples of people trying to do feedback training inside of virtual reality. And I'm sure there are good examples of it, but this one you could kind of tell. It was like they just wanted to do something in virtual reality. That's really what they wanted to do. For people who haven't really gone that deep into this, of thinking about ways to potentially use this technology, what are some of the best utilizations? And it would be great if you see a distinction, if you could distinguish between VR and AR of some of the best utilizations of this technology.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:07:47]:
There's two big ones that really come to mind when we think about the best way to apply each of these technologies. And I'll give you one big one for each of them. So augmented reality, right? Augmented reality also mixed reality. Both of those are kind of the same thing. Augmented reality is the digital overlay of content on the real world, so it keeps us in the real world. And mixed reality is that same thing, only it interacts with the world around us, right? So we have characters that can walk around on the ground. Our phones understand depth, and they know exactly like when we have a table or a wall or it kind of maps out the room for us, right? So augmented reality and mixed reality, they're close siblings, and mixed reality is sort of just that sort of next level of doing it, which is what we're seeing now with the Quest Three and stuff like that, which I'm sure we'll talk about here in just a little bit. But one of the best utilizations for augmented reality is that we've all got our phone, right? We've got a mobile device that can provide our learners with access to augmented reality experiences. And what we use our phone for typically is that just in time or moment of need learning that we have to have, right? I got to figure out where I'm going to go, or I got to know what the next step is to do, or I'm trying to put this, I don't know, replace the windshield wiper on my car and I can't figure it out. I got to watch a video, right, whatever it might be. So augmented reality is fantastic at giving us that instant access to information. So if I have a QR code, let's say I'm just on out in the warehouse, right? I'm building widgets. Whatever I'm doing, I've got steps one through three. I know exactly what I'm doing, no problem. Step five just changed, but I know six through ten, but five is giving me a little bit of trouble. I can use my mobile device. I can use a wearable technology device to scan a QR code or to look at something that triggers access to that training or some sort of an overlay that says, hey, this is how you do it. I don't have to interrupt my flow of work. I don't have to go find an Elearning module, go sit in a class right there. In that moment, I need this info. Augmented reality does a fantastic job of giving us that now. It also does some really cool stuff, game wise and everything else. But as far as a functional learning tool, that's really where I see that it really has the most potential to really kind of change what we're doing while our learners are doing their actual actions inside of in whatever it is they're doing.
Matt Gjertsen [00:10:12]:
Yeah, I'm just connecting back to what you mentioned before about something as simple as changing your windshield wiper and going to YouTube. I'm just imagining a world where you just take out your phone, you scan your Vin number, and then you pull back and it's just like on your screen, it's like, pull out this pin and it's just walking you through it. That'd be crazy.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:10:32]:
You definitely could. And it's actually going to be even better once we do start seeing more affordable and presentable wearable technology, too, right? Up to this point, we've had all these wearable options that are out there, but they're expensive, right? You get the magic leaps of the world and you got the hollow lenses of the world, which they're awesome, they're great technology, but it's cost prohibitive for most groups unless you're going to be developing specific apps for it. Right. But there's very rarely organizations that are going to be like, oh yeah, give me 20 so I can put them on all the people. And it's like, no, not at two k a pop, right, or more.
Matt Gjertsen [00:11:07]:
Right?
Destery Hildenbrand [00:11:07]:
It's just not going to work.
Matt Gjertsen [00:11:08]:
Just a quick reminder, if you're enjoying this conversation, make sure to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. And feel free to share this conversation with others so they can enjoy it as well.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:11:19]:
Thanks, but yeah, as soon as we find a computer, a wearable computer that we can get hands free from, which is sort of the goal, I think, the vision of the provision, right, in that whole thing, then all of a sudden we have our hands to do all the things we need to do as well. So that whole mixed reality aspect really has a lot of legs, so to speak, when it comes to potential inside of there.
Matt Gjertsen [00:11:44]:
Yeah, absolutely. And I have some specific questions about the technology, but before we jump into that VR, like full VR, what are some of the best utilizations you've seen for that?
Destery Hildenbrand [00:11:55]:
Absolutely. So virtual reality is absolutely fantastic. And I mentioned this before, putting people in dangerous situations without putting them in dangerous situations, right? That's probably one of the biggest go to training applications that I see day in and day out that we're working with, right? What if we need to put somebody in an open pit mine? What if we need to teach them how to use a complex or dangerous piece of machinery? What if we need to simulate an environment for them to practice in? But if I was to physically put them there, like you mentioned, it's cost prohibitive, right? How much money does it cost the fuel? Something as simple as fire extinguisher training, right? I don't want to have to refill the real fire extinguisher every time I will get them out there. Like, I want to get them hands on with a real fire extinguisher. But at the same time, if I run through the reps, we teach them the Pass acronym, we teach them how to do it, teach them how to approach a fire and put the fire out. Then they only have to practice with the real thing a couple of times. That saves all of those. Saves us a lot of money, a lot of time, a lot of effort. Virtual reality also gives us the ability, as long as they have a three x three space and a headset and a WiFi connection, they can take any of those trainings and they can practice building that muscle memory of all these tasks that they do in there. One more I'll leave you with too on this one, is that virtual reality is fantastic for soft skill training. So having an avatar that especially with the advent of some of our AI options, what if you could have a free flowing conversation with an avatar? Whether it's huge leadership training, it could be emotional intelligence, it could be involuntary departure.
Matt Gjertsen [00:13:34]:
Right.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:13:35]:
I have to let somebody go and I don't want to do that for the first time in real life. Right. I can talk to people about it, role play, that kind of stuff. So those are some great opportunities.
Matt Gjertsen [00:13:44]:
I had never thought about dropping ChatGPT into one of these that's like, whoa, that's crazy.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:13:55]:
Yeah, I've seen some examples where ChatGPT is in there and it has promise, right? Sure. Not quite ready for prime time for anybody old enough to remember that, but no, there's some opportunities there. Like right now we're using conversational AI to connect and we build a specific conversation and then the avatar is just listening for key phrases like, I'm like, hey, good morning, or how's work going? Or gosh, are you having any trouble with your projects? That kind of thing. And it just listens for those key phrases and it has the conversation back with me based on what it hears. Yeah, there's a lot of really cool applications now that we can do, and the potential is through the roof when it comes to all that stuff.
Matt Gjertsen [00:14:36]:
Yeah. And I think the neat thing is especially like with the danger situation stuff know, we already have proof that the technology is good enough that your brain believes the know. I remember there's a recent Disney Plus series called Limitless with Chris Hemsworth, I don't know if you saw that, where the first episode they're talking about getting over fears and stuff like that. And they put him, I think it was a quest two headset, and he walks out onto a ledge, like the edge of a building, like way over, and he and some friends did it and some of them couldn't even do it. They couldn't walk out on it because their brain just believed where they were there. So on that technology point, the technology is always really good already. Really good. I'll admit. I think I've put on a quest headset once. I haven't spent a lot of time playing around with this stuff. I've been really excited about it. But it wasn't until with Apple getting into it and then hearing more about quest three that from my perspective, it seemed like, wow, this is really hitting prime time, especially with Quest Three being a little bit cheaper. But from your perspective, somebody who's been in this space for a while, is this a big leap or are we kind of just continuing a progression that's been happening for a while and it's now just kind of reached a critical mass?
Destery Hildenbrand [00:15:56]:
I think sort of the latter on that one. I mean I think that we've really been waiting in the industry for more people to get more companies to get into the hardware space. I think that one of the things I had really hoped would have happened sooner than later was for more companies to start leveling out kind of our options and bringing costs down a little bit. That was really what I was hoping for.
Matt Gjertsen [00:16:23]:
We didn't have that much. There was Microsoft from Meta.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:16:29]:
Yeah.
Matt Gjertsen [00:16:29]:
I've never heard of many other ones.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:16:31]:
Yeah. So Pico Neo was a big one. HTC had a series right, of stuff. So there's more stuff out there, there's more options out there but until we started we've just been kind of waiting a little bit because the Quest Two, however you feel about Meta and Facebook and all that stuff right. Whatever it might be, it is by far the most versatile and affordable from a company organization standpoint scalable option that's out there. It really is. The pico is great. I've done the HTC vive, it's fine. But for ease of use and ease of working with the Quest has always been kind of the go to as far as making it all work and making it easily work for whatever the organization needs. So we've kind of been just waiting for the next evolution of that. The Quest Pro came out not too long ago which was a neat sort of evolution. It was a little bit more expensive. Right. It was in that 1500 price range at the time. Has a couple of other features in it. Really wasn't meant for gaming as much. They were trying of gear it towards business or in my opinion a lot of these sort of in between ones come out so they can test a few things out and gauge sort of the market and see we're going to charge 1500 for this one. Is people going to buy it? Are they going to come do something with it? What are they going to do? Right, so I think some of that has to do with it too. But like you said, we're starting to land on a few things that we've been waiting for as far as the Apple headset or the Apple option. We've been waiting on that for two to five years. For the last ten years. Right. I mean it's been two to five years away for as long as I can remember and until I actually saw it the day of I still didn't believe it was going to happen.
Matt Gjertsen [00:18:08]:
Right.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:18:09]:
I just know that you can't get too excited about some of these things, but they've really kind of pivoted. And it's interesting to see the direction that both in this particular case, Meta and Apple have gone because Meta is releasing a new one, which is very similar to the existing Quest Two. But it has some other options, right? It has two full color RGB cameras on the front that allow it to have that mixed reality capability or that augmented. So I can put on my Quest Three and I'll be able to still see the world around me and create experiences based on that, which I think opens a lot of doors. And it's still geared towards a market where, hey, you could kind of use this for a little bit of anything, right? You want a game? This would be great for gaming. We're going to have some companies that are going to partner with us, and they're going to build some fun mixed reality game things that you can do. You want to use it for business? Awesome. We're going to give you the opportunity to develop for it and give you options as far as building it for your learners, for Gamification full simulations, or just that mixed reality sort of they've leaned just a little bit heavier into what they've kind of already been doing. Apple, in true Apple fashion, is just excited about changing the entire paradigm, right? They're like, you know what? I don't necessarily care if you're going to play games on it. We're not really making this for gamers. This is going to change your life. I want to replace your computer, your phone, your everything, and this thing that you put on your face, that's what's going to do it, right? So that's the vibe I get from them is that I don't need to be in this little space over here. I'm going to charge you a premium price because I'm replacing all the other things. It's this, this is it. This is the end all, be all.
Matt Gjertsen [00:19:53]:
I will admit for I don't even know how long I've been wanting to do something like this. Probably since Minority Report came out or before that. Just like the idea of we've all had that moment where we're working at our computer and we have a document and we're trying to figure out where to put our windows. We need to see this thing. And this thing, it's like, I just want to take this document and put it right here. And this one, I want to put it right here. And you'll be able to do that. It amazes me with both the new quest and Apple's vision is that idea that the cameras on them, the front facing cameras on them are so good and the latency is so low that you're looking through the goggles at the rest of the world, not looking through. Know, this isn't like Google Glass where they're trying to overlay that way. They're just putting TV screens right in front of you. That are re showing the rest of the world, and the latency is low enough that you can just operate in the world. That blows my mind.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:20:57]:
Yeah. And that's really what we've been kind of waiting for. We've been waiting for the hardware to catch up to the you know, even in some of the articles that I read, apple is really hoping that they could come up with a smaller frame form factor, AR or mixed reality headset. But it's know, miniaturizing that technology and making it functional and everything else to do the things you want it to do. We're still a ways away from that, I think, as far as the technology evolution, it'll be interesting to see. Like I said, they both really leaned heavy into a different direction, and I think the type of people, their presumed customer base is also going to be very different.
Matt Gjertsen [00:21:38]:
Right.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:21:38]:
So I think that at that $500 price point, the quest opens itself up to a lot more opportunities at 3500, I think is what it was for the Apple Pro version. I think that's going to limit their reach a little bit, even though it has probably I don't know, at this point, just looking at it, it seems prettier, it seems neater. I can't wait to get one on my face so I can actually see what it's going to do. Right. I'm looking at my future travel going, all right, who has an Apple Store? And are they going to have demos sometime soon that I can put it on?
Matt Gjertsen [00:22:13]:
Right.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:22:13]:
So to plan an extra day for my travel, going out to wherever I go just so I can take advantage of it.
Matt Gjertsen [00:22:19]:
Yeah. And I'll make sure in the description of this episode I'll put there was a really great breakdown that Marcus Brownlee did of the Vision Pro. So just for anybody who hasn't kept up with it so you can kind of see where they're going, it is pretty cool. Okay, so I think we've done a good job selling the technology. So I'm now in a learning team. I'm learning manager or whatever. I think I have a use case that I want to use. How does one get started? I mean, obviously they could reach out to somebody like you and Intellise, but do you need different software in order to create this stuff? How does someone get started?
Destery Hildenbrand [00:22:57]:
Yeah, that's a great question, and I think that's the million dollar question, right. That's what we get all the time to get started, let's start with augmented reality, right? Augmented mixed reality. So it's a little bit easier to get started there because there are more opportunities for just, like, having these WYSIWYG editors, right. Cloud based codeless tools that you can drag and drop. Things like zapr. Things like bundle. AR blip r. Right. There's a lot of these cloud based tools that you can go out and you can start using, and they're going to be very similar from a learning team perspective. The skills you need to get started with those, it's going to be similar to what you're doing already in things like, I don't know, photoshop beyond captivate storyline, right? We've all got some of these skills. Our teams already have some of these skills available to us. So translating those into something that's those WYSIWYG editors, it goes by pretty smooth, right? If you can build a PowerPoint, you can hop into some of these and start building AR or this semi mixed reality content. Now there's limitations though, so like you see, you're not going to be building Pokemon Go inside of one of these programs. But what you can do, and it's a little bit more affordable to start this way, too, is that for the price of a license that's similar to these other types of learning tools that we have, you can get. Started and build out some of these experiences that are a little more engaging, that have depth, that can use 3d models in space, right? You can start to really kind of create these digital overlays of content and start to work with it. In most cases. A lot of these programs have like hobbyist accounts or free trials that last indefinitely that you can use as well while you're still trying to figure it out. And I think that's a great way to start. You want to start building stuff out, try it out, hand it to some people that you potentially are going to learn from it, hand it to some people who are potentially going to manage people who learn from it and get all the feedback you can, right?
Matt Gjertsen [00:24:51]:
Yeah.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:24:52]:
So that's a really good way to do that. The challenge we run into is that when you want to start upping the complexity, you have to find tools that allow you to do that which then require different skills that as learning developers, we didn't typically cultivate. Right. And this kind of leads us into the VR development aspect of it as well, in that a lot of the tools to build advanced augmented reality or to build advanced even to build virtual reality in general require us to understand a little bit more about the developer side of game creation or working with tools like Unity or Unreal. Right. Game development engines, understanding some code, right. You're going to need to know some JavaScript or C Sharp depending on the tool that you use. So at that point, we start to transition from the skills we already know to these other skills that typically while we were learning about instructional technology or learning theory, we weren't like, oh yeah, now I'm going to go to my JavaScript class. Right. It just didn't typically fall under.
Matt Gjertsen [00:25:54]:
No, it certainly didn't come up when I was making the shift from instructor pilot to corporate L and D. That.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:26:01]:
Didn't come up exactly. So you run into a lot of those types. Of things. And that's when you have to start kind of reaching out and finding partners or finding other people within the organization that you're at that have those types of skills. It's not unheard of for instructional designers or learning content creators or whatever we call ourselves nowadays to learn those skills. It's just a challenge, right. That's a potential barrier that we run into.
Matt Gjertsen [00:26:25]:
Yeah. One of the barriers that you mentioned or one of the places where that need shifts or that effort level shifts is the difference between AR and VR. Within AR. Or VR too, but specifically within AR. Could you give an example? Do you have an example, top of mind of where is kind of that limit of something that somebody who's just been an instructional designer, they've never coded, they've not done game development. They're using rise beyond that kind of stuff where they might be able to do it versus it starts to get they're going to either have to find a partner or do some significant learning in order to be able to execute it themselves. Is there a good example that people could have in their heads?
Destery Hildenbrand [00:27:10]:
Yeah. So if you think about, I mean, any of this stuff is going to require some upskilling of some kind, right. You always have to learn a new program. So if you think about, let's imagine we were going to make like a what's something everybody might recognize. Remember in Harry Potter when those posters came to life? Right, if you wanted to bring marketing materials to life or pull things up like that, something like these cloud based tools would work great. You could scan, you could overlay content like images and maybe a 3D model or links and stuff like that. Typical types of assets that you would build into most of your other learning tools, right. In some cases you may have a timeline that you work with, you're assigning some variables. All familiar things that we do in programs like Storyline or Captivate or some of these other tools you wanted to build, maybe a basic selfie frame that you wanted to do that was enhanced by augmented reality. You could do something like that. Now let's say you wanted to sort of maybe move to the next level and you wanted to have a 3D model that was interactable, right? You could click on, it blows up, it comes back together, or you wanted to be able to put pieces together or move things around or have avatars that maybe have a conversation and work with you that way. These next level types of interactions are going to require tools that are able to support those. Now in a lot of cases these tools, they're great. They really are. Like, I just taught a kid's kit camp in VR, starting with VR, and I had five teenagers and they were all with no code, able to start building their own virtual reality room and get in there and start working with it, right. They were able to build interactions, a locomotion system, all that kind of stuff. So the codeless opportunities are growing exponentially because all these companies want everybody in their program. They want to have the least amount of friction possible to get you in and doing stuff in there. But when you want to start creating leaderboards, or you want to start creating gosh, I don't know, game systems that are inside of there, or you want to start creating custom animations and interactions, these are going to require that you have a next level sort of skill set. And you're thinking from that sort of developer mentality, right? And that's sort of the advanced augmented reality piece of it and virtual reality. The price of doing business in VR today is that you have to have that development team that can support the environment, building the asset creation. Those are all very complex things that we don't typically have on our learning teams or that's not a skill set that we typically have so they can build that part of it and then the learning team is still in charge of doing all the things that they do. Right. The needs analysis, working with the SMEs, making sure that our goals are solid and it's solving the problems it needs to solve. So they have to sort of work in this sort of synergistic way, if you will, that it all has to kind of work together that way. But yeah, all these tools are really trying to come up with better ways for us to sort of have that sort of frictionless experience and removing some of those barriers to entry. But it's less so in augmented reality. But it really shows itself when we start to develop for VR.
Matt Gjertsen [00:30:29]:
Perfect. I think that's a great way to understand it, and it sounds like a big gap or a big bridge, is when you're trying to go from displaying information to interacting with information. Once you try to have an interactive environment, that's where the skill level really skill required really goes up. That makes a lot of sense.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:30:49]:
Yeah. And it's the same way with all of the elearning module elearning content we create too, right. You can have stuff that just pops up very PowerPoint ish or we can have complex interactions that turn it all into a game. So using variables and everything else.
Matt Gjertsen [00:31:03]:
Yeah, great parallel. Awesome. Well, anything else that I didn't ask about? Anything else that people need to know? Top of mind when they're starting to get into AR and VR.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:31:16]:
I think a great place to start when it comes to this is that if you know some things but don't know all the things, get out there and try everything, right? Get out there. Experience as much as you can. Download some games. If you can find a headset, if you can buy a headset, get in a headset, play the things that are in there, right? Explore all that the technology has to give and then share it with the people at your organization or share it with your clients. Share it with everybody and get their perspective, get their thoughts, right. The more you know about it, the easier those conversations are going to be and the more confident you're going to be once you get that green light to start actually building things out for whatever your projects might be. But understanding the technology, getting in there. And again, like I mentioned at the very beginning, knowing what it is and knowing what it's not, right? A lot of people still, they're like, I don't know, augmented and virtual reality, they're basically the same, right? Well, no, they're really not. They're significantly different. And you want to make sure that you can have those types of conversations with everybody, right? Sometimes it's hard because I tend to hang out in circles of people that know all of these things already. And then I run into a group and I'm like, oh yeah, this and this, and they're like, I don't know what that term is. And I'm like, you know what, I appreciate that and I apologize. I'm going to back up a little bit here. So I think sometimes I take for granted that just because this is my space all the time, but yeah, you want to be that source of knowledge. You want to be that source of optimism and excitement and knowledge about this new thing. And I don't know exactly how it's all going to play out, but I do know that in some way, shape, or form, there are going to be immersive opportunities, immersive experiences, immersive technology available to us in learning and development. So even if today isn't the day, the more you know now, once that day arrives, you're going to be able to just hit the ground running. You're going to be right there. You're going to be able to help your organization grow and build and not have to wait into that to go through that learning curve that all these other groups are going to have to do. So you guys will be able to really kind of start off know, be a part of that forefront.
Matt Gjertsen [00:33:27]:
Awesome. That's such a great point. Such a great point to end on. So, Destery, thank you so much for your time. I definitely think people got a lot out of this conversation, so thank you so much.
Destery Hildenbrand [00:33:37]:
Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So always fun to talk about the things I do all the time.
Matt Gjertsen [00:33:42]:
Awesome, thanks.
Matt Gjertsen [00:33:44]:
Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you liked the discussion, make sure to hit like and subscribe so you never miss an episode. As a reminder, if your team is struggling keeping up with the training development demands of your organization, we want to help. Better Everyday Studios is a full service instructional design team that can help you with everything from ideation to actual content creation and delivery. Please reach out to us using the link in the episode notes below.
Matt Gjertsen [00:34:09]:
Have a great day.
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