Creative Collaboration in XR
We’ve all had the collaborate virtually over the past few months, so for our most recent event with Verizon 5G Labs, we decided to look beyond video conferencing to the Future of Collaboration. We invited leaders from three cutting edge XR collaboration applications to present: Andrea Ancieto-Chavez of Digital Film Tree, Melissa Chan and Clay Walsh of The Wild, and Inga Petryaevskaya of Tvori. After learning about some of the tools being developed, we hosted a fireside chat with Lauren Ruffin of Crux and Jonathan Williams of VRX to discuss collaboration in action as artists and producers in the space.
Check out the full recording of the event and highlights below.
Andrea
“We wanted to make sure that anyone can use StoryKit, so we built StoryKit to empower storytellers. This can work for anyone who is working in TV who needs to quickly to iterate, or anyone who is creating high or low budget films, to someone who is getting started in education wants to learn how to tell stories...Considering the current pandemic, this is definitely something that will work, because you don’t need to be in the same room, and you can collaborate from anywhere in the world.”
Clay
“We believe that collaboration in 2D is really difficult, and it would be almost impossible to catch errors early and make critical decisions you need to make on your 3D models and spaces. So if you’re going to be building something and going to construction, it’s much easier to catch those problems and communicate when you’re doing it at human scale...2D is a really inefficient way to talk about 3D.”
Melissa
“The Wild is a series of virtual workspaces you can use with your team. You can bring in your 3D models--a lot of our customers use Sketchup or Revit for creating built environments, so we have native integrations with those platforms, so you can pipe those models right into the Wild and you can experience that model at scale before it’s built for better decision making….You can iterate and prototype as you go.”
“We built our tool for architects and environmental design, but since March we’ve been getting a lot of inquiries from lots of different industries, because all of a sudden people see remote collaboration and XR. We’re not exclusively for architects; we’re trying to figure out how to adapt our product so that we can accommodate anyone who wants to use the Wild to collaborate because there’s so much value to being together to collaborate in a space. I think people are getting a lot of Zoom fatigue, realizing and craving connection--it’s not terribly effective to have a bunch of little faces on your laptop screen. We’re all standing here together, we know how it feels to be immersive and be in a room together. We’re really feeling that and we’re all trying to figure out how to adapt to this new normal. I think we’re going to see a lot more opportunities for remote work.”
Inga
“We ourselves were experiencing those challenges...when we are transitioning from the desktop to VR or AR, it’s really very costly: it costs time, it brings communication gaps, and overall is very inefficient because you’re building on 2D flatscreen something that your users are going to experience spatially.”
“With Tvori, we really think that we can democratize XR content creation industry because anyone without 3D or programming skills can jump in to use the software and start building and animating, so a much bigger variety of talents can join the space and contribute to amazing contents and products.”
“We all have huge expectations about 5G. For VR in particular there is this technical innovation required so that we don’t feel any delays...microseconds might really matter when you are creating in VR...When the 5G is at such a stage... if it can can democratize computational power from the cloud, and we can do amazingly realistic polygonal stuff in VR that would definitely impact adoption and collaboration. Quick and seamless access to amazing computational power and all the resources is very essential to grow the adoption of VR creation tools like Tvori and the whole industry.”
Lauren
“I’m in the process of working on a couple of awesome projects. One is the one that we’re working on with Howard University We’re building a series of events like this for Howard University’s Institute of Intellectual Property and Social Justice. They work with a lot of creative people to get access to intellectual property lawyers, and instead of just talking about it, we’re going to bring them into immersive spaces to do that.
The other project that I’m working on that I’m really stoked about that’s developing quite nicely is with all of the Black Panthers Alumnae. Our goal is to build a really large scale AR exhibit that really brings together all of the amazing aspects of what an experiential education exhibit could be for folks outside of a museum, to create a safe AR exhibit since people really aren’t going to be sharing VR headsets in public institutions anymore. So how can we bring these Black Panther Alumnae into the technology, so we’re partnering with Metastage who has generously offered to help us, and we’re turning them into holograms so people can interact with them. It’s so relevant right now with the uprising of the Black Lives Matter movement, and we want to make sure that the Black Panther Alumnae get their due, in particular since so many of them are still in prison. We really want to begin to talk about that some of them were unjustly convicted and have been in prison 40 or 50 years.
An ideal collaboration for me is something that I’m passionate about.”
“Ultimately we want to make sure that XR is a place where people can tell their own stories and have resources to do that...Really it’s about how do we build a community and have an industry that is welcoming for everybody and safe for everybody. Those are the kind of collaborations that I’m into.
I think the other thing I’ve been thinking about a lot is how do we use this time to start developing times and experiences that are great for everybody, not just the people who are already familiar with tech. I was on Twitter a couple of weeks ago and someone said ‘What do you have to do to get more consumers in”, and I was like ‘Get more Black people in! We’re dope. We make great stories. We guide the culture and there’s so much money here. We drive so much revenue.’”
Jonathan
“I worked with Kyrie Iriving on a 360 video for his Uncle Drew film, and that was the best experience...it’s also what I think makes an ideal collaboration because everyone really knew their roles and brought a lot of creativity to it. There wasn’t a whole lot of overlap in what we were trying to do. We were all just able to come together to create a really cool project.
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“It was cool to see behind the scenes. You see all these guys on TV and things--I thought that was the cool thing about the immersive experience. Usually you just see these guys on the court...even the simplest thing like seeing [Kyrie Irving] getting a massage, it was cool, it was different. People don’t really get to see that intimate side of things--that’s something that XR really brings to the table.”
On working with the Boy Scouts:
“Once the pandemic hit, they were looking for something brand new. I’ve found that’s been the case with a lot of clients, we were talking about something totally different, but as soon as this hit, they needed a way just to communicate and stay in contact with each other.”
