Using XR to Ensure a Safe Work Environment, with Bit Space Development’s Daniel Blair

January 01, 2020 00:35:37
Using XR to Ensure a Safe Work Environment, with Bit Space Development’s Daniel Blair
XR for Business
Using XR to Ensure a Safe Work Environment, with Bit Space Development’s Daniel Blair

Jan 01 2020 | 00:35:37

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Show Notes

Access to the Internet can be spotty in Northern Canada. But heavy industry happens up there all the same, and Bit Space Development’s Daniel Blair wants to bring those workers the same access to XR-driven training and remote expert assistance as anywhere else enjoys. He chats with Alan about how he hopes to bring that about, in the first XR for Business of 2020.

Alan: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Smithson here with the XR for Business Podcast. Today, we’re speaking with Daniel Blair, founder and CEO of a Canadian VR company called Bit Space Development. We’ll be discussing how virtual reality is revolutionizing industrial training and why it’s vitally important to define your key performance indicators to release you and your customers from the Pilot POC Purgatory. All that and more on the XR for Business Podcast.

With that, I want to welcome my good friend Dan to the show. Welcome to the show, Dan.

Daniel: Hey, thanks for having me.

Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. Let’s get into what you guys are doin; making serious purposes with VR and AR. What does that mean?

Daniel: Basically, what that means is we utilize immersive technologies to create games. But those games are used for training, education, and really serious purposes. We aren’t generally building applications that are going to be sold on Steam or sold on the Oculus store. But what we’re building are tools that integrate with clients infrastructure to help augment their workflow or create a safer workplace.

Alan: I know you guys have done a ton of things. One of them was a hand tool training simulator. Maybe walk us through what are these things, and how are people using them?

Daniel: For sure. Some of our most recent deployments include exactly what you’re talking about, the power tools simulator, which we created with a provincial organization here. That tool utilizes the room-scale six degrees of freedom tracking of any of the open VR-capable headsets, to put new entrants and kids on job sites and teach them about safe operation of power tools. And that can range from anything from a drill or a hammer drill or a circular saw. But we put some really interesting tools in there, like concrete saws — which would be extremely dangerous for a new entrant to use in real life.

Alan: I actually know all about that, cement saws. When I was a kid, my dad was grinding some bricks with a grinding wheel and the wheel shattered and cut both his legs wide open. And I remember as a kid, taking him to the hospital and them having to sew up right down to the bone. I mean, this was a real problem. I know this firsthand. This is a very, very unsafe tool if used incorrectly.

Daniel: Yeah. And the worst part of building these applications are the shock value photos that my clients will send me. I’ll wake up in the morning and they’ll say, “hey, this is a good example of why to learn about the safe operation of these tools.” And they’ll send me a photo of something similar to what happened to your dad, which is super unfortunate. And additionally to that, we’ve done a lot of work in the welding space, and on the more promotional side, our most recent deployment is called Level Up VR, which we developed with the USAF Workers of Tomorrow, an organization that promotes safe work sites and safe work practices for both employers and employees for youth. And that tool actually won an Impact Marketing Award for the use of the virtual reality tool in the campaign that was created to raise awareness. So we see both the marketing side and the education side.

Alan: That’s amazing. Safe working is something that we need to market to. Training and education and learning is really competing with Hollywood movies, triple-A games and social media. And you guys are finding a way to kind of take the best of those and bring them together. So what are you guys doing in terms of gamification, and what are what are you seeing resonate with people?

Daniel: So a lot of what we do gets integrated into classroom experiences, and the engagement rates and the actual enjoyment — because I would consider both enjoying something and being engaged in something slightly different — we found that in our measurement that it is definitely increasing the awareness and the engagement side, through the use of virtual reality. So one of our most recent excursions was into the north, for an application that we call Try the Trades, which was with our partner, Manitoba Construction Sector Council and Trade Up Manitoba, which is our provincial sector council for the construction industry and their awareness organization. So they’re technically the same company, but they have different teams. And what we did is we took a couple pelican cases full of Pico Goblin headsets and some virtual reality learning experiences into the classrooms in northern Manitoba communities — and to put it into perspective, just how far away these communities are for listeners in different parts of the world; to drive from Winnipeg to one of the closest major cities up north, which is called Thompson, is eight hours of straight driving on a basically straight road — so these communities are quite far apart. And we visited about 40 different communities and surveyed the kids as they were actually taking these experiences, because these are kids in grades five, six, seven, eight, all the way up to grade 12. And kids tend to not be super-engaged in classroom activities and the whole educational aspect of learning about the skilled trades. And when we expose them to these trades in virtual reality, we found that 98 percent of them were engaged in this, and enjoying the experience.

Alan: What was that, 98 percent?

Daniel: Yeah, that was 98 percent.

Alan: How are you testing that against baseline?

Daniel: The company that we’re working with, they do classroom activities, and so they’re already asking the kids, they’re already measuring the engagement; already actually looking into these metrics. How are these kids engaged in the workshops? And usually it’ll be more of a hands-on activity or a video or slideshow presentation, stuff like that. The introduction of virtual reality into this increased it from basically non-engagement all the way up to 98 percent.

Alan: That’s incredible. That alone, having learners engaged in learning, is one of the main reasons why VR is the tool that is going to revolutionize education and training.

Daniel: Yeah, well, especially when the metric that they’re using to actually find out if it’s performing as well as it should be is the engagement. And we can show definitively that the technology has increased its engagement. That shows that the actual use of the technology is more than beneficial — it’s solving multiple problems for them. It’s not just making it more engaging. It is exposing these kids to potential careers. It’s basically ticking off all the boxes that they look for in an engagement, but also increasing the actual enjoyment of the kids in that experience.

Alan: Incredible. So what other things have you doing? Because I know you did some stuff in enterprise training and stuff like that. What have you done in that space?

Daniel: Yes. On our enterprise side, a lot of our clients are really focused around site orientations and site-specific training. We do a lot of work with steel mills. There’s a local one here that’s quite large, that has facilities across North America. And we recently deployed a pilot into their melt shop to give new workers, contractors, etc., an idea of what to be aware of on that job site. And I personally had been in a steel mill before, but when they took me through the mill, I was quite blown away by how super dangerous everything actually is.

Alan: Steel is not that safe.

Daniel: Yeah, obviously. But it’s like, once you go in there, you’re like, “man. This is like a gigantic furnace that’s just melting metal all day long. And they they turned on with explosives.” So like everything about that space — like, everything — is a sharp metal object. Everything around it could probably give you tetanus. I find that, like, when I enter some of these sites, as I’ve been doing this for so many years now, I find that I’m maybe less shocked by this. But it’s kind of crazy that when you think about how I develop basically video games for a living, and yet here I am standing on top of this gigantic building, or in a crane, or in a steel mill taking 360 photos or 360 video or even just scanning the space to create a job site content. But, you know, I get put on these sites. I totally understand why the tool is going to be effective. So the steel mill application, as soon as I saw that thing getting turned on, is like, “all right, I understand why we need to put people in here, virtually.” There’s no way that you can really mentally prepare someone for the whole process. I mean, there’s literally buckets of molten steel being poured into the molds and stuff like that all over the place there. And that’s just one building. These facilities have up to six buildings on their compounds. Additionally, in the enterprise side, one of our longest clients is the Manitoba Heavy Construction Association, and with heavy construction, we’ve spent a lot of time developing out a course called Road Builder Safety Training Systems — RSTS — and that is a full certificate-level course delivered by Manitoba Heavy Construction that is completely delivered through virtual reality. There are 16 modules to that course with an in-app assessment. There are electives, there are requirement courses, but that entire thing is both deployed and delivered through virtual reality. So that is taken into communities, that’s run out of their facility. People working in the heavy construction industry, you get to see all kinds of job sites and learn about the content as opposed to just absorbing that content through a textbook. But they are placed on the job sites.

Alan: Incredible. How many people would you say have gone through that experience, and what kind of data are you collecting about each learner?

Daniel: So and that’s that’s actually a really good segue into one of the things I’ve really wanted to talk about, which is the key performance indicators. So when I talk about the road builder safety training systems course, that’s one of the ones that we developed early on in the years at Bit Space. And although it has been very effective and lots and lots of people have gone through it — thousands of people have been trained in it — we don’t actually collect enough data to know if, like, how that one is being successful. When I talk about 98 percent increased engagement in our Try of the Trades northern expeditions, that’s a good example of where we’ve started to collect proper data. Bit Space was founded five years ago, and our first projects were developed using Google Cardboard or the DKII. We didn’t have the luxury of the six degrees of freedom. We didn’t even have the luxury of delivery methods to send — with a new Oculus ISV program — the ability to send APKs to a client’s device. We weren’t able to do that. We had to manually install all of this onto devices. And one of the biggest challenges is when clients wanted to deploy these solutions to their job sites. They often have network connectivity issues. And you and I have been through all kinds of network connectivity issues over the last couple attempts at recording.

Alan: It’s never a problem of network connectivity, it’s just a problem of -no- connectivity. Just getting us on this podcast was a challenge. We’re talking about audio.

Daniel: Yeah, and I’m in the capital city of my province. There’s around a million people living around here. So we have good enough Internet. But when you get up north, there is basically no Internet. Depending on the town that you’re in. There are some towns where they’ve got fair enough Internet, but because we don’t have that network connectivity, we aren’t able to collect real-time analytics. And because our clients aren’t regularly connecting the headsets to a network connection, it’s also difficult for us to get a data dump. So we rely off of the metrics that are supplied to us by the client, how many people took it? How many people passed? Etc. But I don’t feel that what we actually planned out in that one was… I mean, although the application solved the problem and it has been quite successful, we don’t have, like, granular metrics to see how can it grow? How can it improve? So one of the next steps on that project would be to figure out, how do we actually measure that? So when we deploy these applications, we look for all kinds of stuff. We look for, did the user look in the right direction? Did they activate all the hotspots? How fast did they get through the experience? Because if you get through too fast, there’s a chance that they weren’t actually reading the content. Did they activate the hotspot? Do they open up a hotspot and then close it right away to activate it? Or do they actually keep it open a long enough to read the content that’s in there? How many failed attempts were there in the embedded quizzes? All of those things are good metrics for checking whether the user is actually progressing and hopefully retaining and absorbing the knowledge within the course content, but that only addresses the learning experiences.

When we are doing deployment and we’re looking at actually doing a marketing engagement, I kind of break it out to a few different segments. So for marketing engagements, we look at metrics like, how can we possibly increase your sales? Are more people going to your page or more people go into your organization? And sometimes organizations that we’re working with aren’t necessarily selling something, but they’re trying to market themselves to promote the organization as a whole. So for Safe Workers of Tomorrow, for example, when we were promoting safe work through Level Up, really the biggest metric is, how many people are checking out this game? How many people are coming to the event? How many people are signing up for the contest, etc? That’s an easy metric for a short-term campaign, but you’ve got to understand that not everyone wants to play in VR, and not everybody is going to play it all the way through, and not everyone’s gonna see every level. And so it is, at its bare minimum, we are looking at, can we get more people to come over to the booth?

On the tool side, that’s where things are starting to get really interesting. With the commercial and enterprise adoption of virtual reality increasing — and I’m sure no one could possibly stand against that statement — over the last five years, the actual pickup of the technology by commercial enterprise organizations, I’m finding, is just dwarfing the year before each year. And what I’m finding is that there’s more and more interest in tools and workflow augmentation. You want to create something and make it the flattest possible. So how do you do that? You want to create a piece of software that visualizes this and it has to be as perfect as possible. How do we run the algorithms on the actual infrastructure that’s being put up and see that through a Hololens or see that in VR? And I’m finding that that’s where the real adoption is at the moment. It isn’t difficult to sell a company on the idea of using virtual reality training at this point, and we have the metrics to be able to track that. But when when a client comes to us and they start telling us of their problems… I kind of break it into a few different categories. There’s three that I look at and there’s a secret fourth one. The main category is learning experiences. So they want to train someone for something. One of the categories is tools and augmentation. They want to build something that’s going to make their workflow easier; they want to streamline something. They want to promote themselves; they want to create a marketing experience. And then the fourth secret category is just, they want to make a game. And I find that that doesn’t happen much with us, because we are in the B2B space. I don’t get a lot of people that come to me and say, “I want to build a cool game,” although I wouldn’t turn someone away. It doesn’t generally fit within our target market at the moment.

The metrics for each of those are going to be very specific. I’m not going to track how many people are coming out to an event, or how well is this thing promoting you if it’s an educational experience, and I’m not going to necessarily track how many people are learning something. It’s an internal tool because there’s probably nothing to actually learn. But the most difficult category to actually track the performance on is the tools, because we need to know what is the problem that that company is actually trying to solve and that seems to be the biggest challenge right now, is that companies don’t actually necessarily understand the problem they’re trying to solve. And then once we’ve identified that problem, there’s often resistance from the people that currently work there into implementing new technologies.

Alan: Maybe expand on that. Because I’ve heard this before on other podcasts, interviews where the problem isn’t so much that you’re getting corporate buy in. Maybe the CEO says, “hey, we’re gonna do this.” The training manager is like, “yeah, we want this.” And then when it gets down to boots on the ground, there’s a bit of trepidation and more pushback.

Daniel: Yeah. So that could almost be considered one of your metrics of success. Your actual internal adoption. I find that it isn’t necessarily difficult to sell at the corporate level. You can get the buy in from the C level employees. You can get buy in from the business owner. That’s not usually challenging because they’re usually trying to innovate for their company. They want the latest and greatest in the company. What I do find is moderately challenging is getting people that do the job. So the types of companies that we work with, generally there’s the C level, there is the training manager, etc. etc. And we can get through that process and build the advisory committee and actually figure out what problem is that we’re going to solve. And by the time we get to that point, we look at, all right, well, how do we implement this? Usually it is at the actual worker level that there is the resistance. Either people perceive it as new work or unnecessary work and they don’t necessarily understand the value of spatial computing — which, I don’t blame them. I think that if my job was to do a certain task at a company and I did it for 45 years and it’s just always been the way it is, it might be daunting to implement new technology. Now, I’m also the founder of a virtual reality company, so I’m a little bit biased towards the the whole aspect of spatial computing. And clearly I am also biased towards adopting new technologies. But I find that definitely the friction comes from the actual workers. And you can usually get past it if you start to actually speak their language and you show them how it actually enhances the experience. A good example for that: we have a piece of software that it’s actually internal piece of software. We didn’t build it for a client. It was started out as a prototype. And it now is something that we’re polishing up and that is called Flagger Safety. And a flagger is the gatekeeper to a construction site. They’re the people that stand out in front of the construction on the road and they usually have a sign or some sort of high-visibility vest or jumpsuit, and they’ll stop and release traffic when the trucks need to drive out onto the road. And one of the first games that we ever built was for flagger training. But it wasn’t a VR game. It was just a mobile game. And I hated it. It was one of the first things that we were ever actually contracted to build. And I’m just critical of my old work. So I went back to it and I decided I hated it and thought it would be cooler in VR. And I mean, I’m not wrong. It is much cooler in VR. But now we have people talking about actually adopting that technology. So how do we roll that out to those companies? And what I find right now — and this is a very relevant example — is the trainers, the people are actually running those classes, they’re used to doing the classroom portion and then going out into the parking lot and doing that hands-on piece. But it’s not a real hands-on piece. It’s just them in a car being stopped and released in a parking lot by the class that they just taught. And so what this technology allows us to do is it allows us to emulate an actual road. So we have emergency vehicles and AI behind the cars that allows different generation of the road and different situations to arise that couldn’t happen in a parking lot or on a job site. And the trainer in this particular pilot spent a lot of time talking about, “oh, well, now we have to describe this and that.” It wasn’t until I started describing it more as, “no, I don’t want to add anymore instruction to the experience. I want it to be as true to what you just taught.” So understanding that from the adoption side, that we don’t have to increase the workload of the people actually delivering the training or actually implementing the technology, if we show how it just purely augments the work that they’re already doing. And on the training side, they don’t have to teach more. They just have to make sure that the experience that they’re implementing is true to what they’re teaching, in regards to the the legislation and the process and all that kind of stuff. So once we actually like crack through that surface of resistance, it generally gets past it. But then you have to prove yourself and you can only prove yourself if you understand the metrics that you are trying to collect.

So for this sort of situation, we would be tracking retention and we would be tracking. Are you actually absorbing that content and how good are you doing it at the flagger training? We track your hand signals, etc., so we’ll be looking at once you’ve been doing it a few times in practice mode, how quickly are you picking up these proper signals and how effective are you at stopping and releasing traffic? And that would be a pretty good metric to get back to that student. And that also shows that the software is working. You’re retaining that that information. Sometimes it’s difficult to get to the point of data collection because of the whole resistance side of things.

Alan: So here’s a question that’s come up quite a bit, including at MetaVRse here. And one of the questions that that we struggle with and everybody seems to be struggling with, is how do you, when you meet a client, and they say we want to train for X position or role; how do you then elicit the right content? Because some of them just have a training manual. They’re like, “here, here’s our training manual: go.” And some of them have all of their information in different parts. How do you capture all the information that goes into this, and how long does that take?

Daniel: I’ve had it both sides of the spectrum on that. I’ve had clients where they just give us the orientation manuals and say, “turn this into VR.” And I’ve had clients who are super engaged, have all kinds of content and are totally willing to supply everything you need and help you interpret it, because I am not an expert on pretty much any of this stuff. Basically, any of the stuff that I am creating the experiences for, my expertise lies in spatial computing and interactive digital media. I’m not a a real Lyft driver. I am not a flagger. I’m not a confined space technician, whatever. I find that the most successful projects that we’ve been on — both in regards to figuring out what are those metrics and also to actually gathering the content and understanding it — have what we like to put together; an industry committee. That committee is usually built up of… if it’s an industry association that’s putting on the project through a research initiative or something, usually it’s built up of of relevant parties. So companies within the industry that would be working with us on this. If it’s of an application for a single company, usually that committee is built up of internal entities; so, trainers, etc. Human resources know the people that would be responsible for the content. And on the most successful projects, usually what we do — and we’ve got some processes internally in regards to what spreadsheets we use and stuff to gather that content — we have an entire phase built into the project that is just for resource-gathering, requirement-gathering, processing the content that’s sent to us.

Now, we have had successful projects where they just gave us the orientation. But that only is going to be successful if the scope of that project is to create an orientation. I don’t think that it is reasonable for a client to expect that they’re going to send over just a manual for a piece of machinery and that they’ll just suddenly have a virtual reality simulator. And if people are finding that clients are coming along that are like that, those are probably not going to be good success stories in the end.

Alan: *Run away!*

Daniel: Yeah, I don’t necessarily recommend that. I mean, again, everyone will have their own experiences and other people have their own preferences. Now, the most success that we’ve had on projects are projects where the clients have allowed us to come and experience the training that they offer. So I have been trained on flagging, working in confined spaces, driving aerial lifts. In fact, just last Friday, a couple of my team members were up 40 feet in the air on aerial lifts for a project that we have in the works at the moment. It is important that the project management level, the business development level, the project lead level at -least- that you are able to actually experience the training that they’re currently offering. So that way you actually understand, at least at a basic level, what you’re creating the experience about. But also so you see how they’re implementing that at the moment. Again, this is more for like training and the educational side in regards to user requirements gathering for tools. That’s a longer process, a little bit more integrated with the knowledge experts in the organization, and it’s more of an ongoing process. But regarding the training side of things, we we like to build out that committee simply because we are able to actually iterate on ideas with them. We’re able to gather the content from them, layout a bit of a plan, and then make adjustments based off of what they are recommending. And it took us a few times to fail at a couple of projects to understand what was really giving us success. But the number one key we found is by actually engaging the knowledge experts in the organization — which also in turn sometimes has a positive effect on the actual engagement with the resistance from the people on the ground actually doing the job — if you’re engaging those people from the beginning, so they’re able to have a voice in what you’re building? That seems to really help with adoption within the organization.

Alan: So I have a bunch of questions. My brain is just like -poof-. When you make these experiences, let’s say, for a company, do they ever want to offset the costs through licensing this to other companies? How does that work? Who owns the content? And do they want to make that available?

Daniel: Yeah. So that’s a complicated question/answer. A lot of our clients come to us because we’ve developed frameworks which allow them to have that cost-saving. So our number one products, we have a 360 photo/video tool called VR Safety that allows us to rapidly build and deploy the 360-degree-based applications. And that allows us to really keep the costs down. They’re really just paying for the photography content insertion, none of the actual development. And in that kind of situation, I always allow them to own their content because we own the framework. On the room-scale side, that’s where it gets a little bit more complicated because we do have frameworks — we have a framework called CSS — and CSS handles a lot of the stuff like LMS integration, and we have our own physics, our own tooling to actually like use the tools. I mean, there are situations where a client may want to create content, but often we are doing the R&D upfront for the tools development. So most of the room-scale experiences that we create are built off of our own technology and just customized for our clients. So we do have the ability to resell; to reskin and re-use. Which generally is not a problem for our clients. If a client is bringing us on to build a simulator for something ultra-specific — like, their technology — in that situation, they would likely own it. Let’s say they built a tractor and they want us to create a simulator for that tractor. We’re not going to relicense their tractor as a simulator. That would be definitely negotiated at the sales level.

Alan: Tractor Crusher VR!

Daniel: We spend a lot of time building out asset packs that are modular and easy to deploy. So like we have our own warehouse, our own farm, for example, because we have a lot of agriculture, a lot of manufacturing, a lot of construction clients. So we have parks like 3D Worlds that our clients can use for their experiences that are pre-made, which definitely offsets the cost. But because we have those scenes, we do do a lot of fun playing around. So we have been playing with the whole idea of like, can I shoot zombies in this barn? because sometimes–

Alan: Tractor crusher!

Daniel: Yeah, exactly. I got into this because I enjoy the technology and I like making video games. So often, we look at the content and we see if there’s something fun that can be done with that. And it usually is an internal game jam-style thing. But we have released a few fun things.

Alan: but, the question is, Dan; do you guys make a bonus level in the training that’s hidden, if you hit a certain point level, it unlocks a zombie shooter from wherever you are?

Daniel: That’s a good idea. We haven’t done that yet, but we’ve we’ve definitely talked about it.

Alan: If you if you happen to hit this one button combination of button, zombies come at you.

Daniel: Yeah, well, it’s like a very specific situation. You’re in the barn and you grab this piece and you put it in the bucket over there and then, yeah,.

Alan: And all of a sudden, your hands turn into guns and there are zombies everywhere.

Daniel: Exactly. Yeah. You open the tool box, and there was a gun and in there; now you have to defend yourself. Yeah. We haven’t done that yet. I am actually a big proponent to actually being able to hurt yourself in VR.

Alan: I agree.

Daniel: With our power tools simulators one of–

Alan: Have you tried the haptic gloves yet?

Daniel: I’ve tried a few different haptic gloves. I’m not a huge fan of most of them, but–

Alan: I’ve tried the HaptX gloves and they were–

Daniel: Those are the ones that I’ve tried.

Alan: They were great except for the form factor.

Daniel: Yeah. That’s where they’ve started to become good. Now I don’t think any of them have the gloves emulate pain, which is probably a good thing.

Alan: Shock more than pain.

Daniel: But like, one of the things that my clients often talk to me about is that they like to have the idea of shock value in the experience. People learn from that. They see this pipe fall off the roof, and the guy wasn’t wearing his hard hat. Look at him! And it’s a little gruesome, but it’s super common in the construction manufacturing industries. People learn from other people’s injuries. And the whole idea of allowing you to, say, put your hand under the circular saw. And I like the idea of you try to cut off your hand in VR, and sure, we could disable that controller. Now, you only have one hand. Because that would be a situation that you could do in real life. I like the idea of being able to do all the things in a real experience that I can in the VR experience. So if there’s a thing on the table, I better be able to pick it up. I should be able to throw it across the room. I should be able to hurt myself with it. Because sure, if you put a young crowd in an experience, they probably gonna be distracted by that and then probably take it kind of funny. But like in an actual training environment, what better way to teach someone to wear their hardhat than by having a pipe fall off the roof on them?

Alan: Well, Daniel, this has been really enlightening. I could just talk about this stuff forever. Where can people find more information about Bit Space?

Daniel: So the best place to find us is on our website, bitspacedevelopment.com. Or BSDEV.ca for short. You can also find us on Twitter at Bit Space Develop.

Alan: Amazing. Well, I thank you so much. I ask one last question, and I would love your answer on this. What problem in the world do you want to see solved using XR Technologies?

Daniel: So my answer to that — and you’re actually aware of my answer — my biggest problem that I want to see solved in the world is the democratization of the content that is being developed and delivered to everyone. So I want for children in remote communities, rural communities — whether that’s northern Canada or anywhere — to be able to access high-quality educational experiences using the technology that we have available to us. I’m working towards that already, through deploying headsets with my partner organizations into northern communities and rural communities. But one of the infrastructure problems is the Internet. But that’s going to get better. And I want to see that, through XR technologies, that the quality and quantity of educational experiences and content to be greatly increased to these communities.

Alan: That is, as you know, also our mission to democratize education globally by 2040 using XR and spatial computing. And that’s one of the reasons why I asked you about the licensing, because building these scenarios, these training systems are for now very expensive and they will get lower in cost and then more people will be able to make them. But for now, when people are investing hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a simulator or training exercise in virtual and augmented reality, being able to relicense it and kind of scale that to other components is really kind of the backbone of the MetaVRse platform that we’re building. So, you know, that’s one of the questions I wanted to ask. And you answered it perfectly.

Daniel: I mean, that’s why we’re so aligned and why we’re good friends.

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