Latest / The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers / Reality Bytes #37: AR & DEX - from Apple Vision Pro to the Workplace

Transcript

Reality Bytes #37: AR & DEX - from Apple Vision Pro to the Workplace · The DEX Show: A Show for IT Change Makers

• 0:01
  Welcome it, change Makers to the Deck Show with Tim Flower and Tom McGrath.
• 0:07
  Let's get into it. Hello, change makers, Welcome back to reality
• 0:13
  Bites the Deck Show, Show within a show, A little bit of a
• 0:16
  skeleton crew for you today, but an absolutely fantastic topic. And I think
• 0:20
  long term listeners know that when we have a skeleton crew often we have some
• 0:24
  of our some of our best discussions. We've got a fantastic relevant topic to
• 0:30
  discuss, which is augmented augmented reality work. If I got that, If
• 0:35
  I got that right, show, it's augmented reality. That's the theme,
• 0:38
  right, augmented reality. You nailed it. Yeah, and I'm excited today
• 0:44
  to hear what on earth an exoskeleton is. But with regards to the theme,
• 0:52
  yes, this is it, there's a different there's a different phrase we
• 0:54
  should use, the augmented connected workforce, and that is a Gartner said.
• 0:58
  It is one of the top ten strategic technology trends for twenty twenty four and
• 1:03
  it encompasses all kinds of really future facing things. I mean, I'm going
• 1:08
  to go to Oriana very soon because Oriana is probably the person with the most
• 1:12
  direct experience of what this actually means. But Sean, let me just start
• 1:17
  by asking you, because you brought this topic to our attention for the show
• 1:21
  today, do you agree with Garten if it is going to be an actual
• 1:23
  trend or an actual big thing discussed in twenty twenty four? Do you think
• 1:27
  they're maybe over egging it just a little bit better? I think they're possibly
• 1:33
  over egging I think it really depends on the industry in the area the work
• 1:38
  sector, So perhaps an engineering architecture firms things like that, I could see
• 1:45
  it having a bigger influence, But in your traditional office jobs, maybe not
• 1:49
  so much, although I do think in the areas of like onboarding and training,
• 1:55
  that's what kind of piqued my interests. Their statistic, I think they
• 1:59
  said over the next or years, they're suggesting that augmented reality will help over
• 2:05
  time to competency by fifty percent, which I think I could see that playing
• 2:09
  out, especially in the first two weeks when you tend to or the first
• 2:14
  month of any new job, you have a lot of questions and you probably
• 2:17
  need a little bit more handholding. But yeah, there's a there's a lot
• 2:21
  we can dive into this with our guests today. With our guests today,
• 2:27
  we haven't got a guest showing it, so it's just us. It's just
• 2:29
  us, well our usual we're all just guests. We're all guests in the
• 2:34
  deck show has Yeah, maybe so, but actually so, Oriana, I
• 2:38
  will come to you first of all, because I feel I feel like you're
• 2:43
  you're you're a resident gamer. Well, I'm not saying nobody else plays plays
• 2:49
  plays computer games that you say that it is a gamer, but I feel
• 2:52
  that you're the most passionate one, and I feel that I suspect, but
• 2:54
  you have the most direct experience of what this this technology actually looks like to
• 3:00
  be inside, so to speak. Do I have that right? Well I
• 3:04
  don't. You don'tderstand if it's And I'm feeling slightly called out because my experience,
• 3:08
  as you very aptually noticed, is absolutely from a gaming perspective, but
• 3:16
  also a little bit from from an academic perspective. It's it's a topic I'm
• 3:22
  very interested in. Tell us, tell us, tell us, as somebody
• 3:27
  who games, tell us, how big apart now of like your recreational gaming,
• 3:34
  augmented reality is maybe some of the highlights, maybe some of the shortcomings
• 3:38
  as a kind of a recreational thing. Yeah, so I think when we're
• 3:45
  talking about AR, I will say it's not something that I've used like extensively
• 3:52
  compared to maybe some other modalities, But I do think it's very exciting,
• 3:59
  and maybe in case people aren't familiar, especially the non gamers who are like,
• 4:04
  what even is this, it might be helpful to distinguish AR and VR,
• 4:09
  because I think they often get brought up in the same breath. So
• 4:14
  VR or virtual reality, is where you put on the headset, you have
• 4:17
  goggles on, your vision is full, you're completely submersed into another digital reality.
• 4:27
  AR is augmented reality. You're in the real world. You're not wearing
• 4:30
  goggles, although Google Glass is actually an example of augmented reatibility. But you
• 4:36
  can see the world around you, you can hear the world around you,
• 4:41
  but there's an additional layer on top of it that's providing you additional information.
• 4:45
  So that's sort of like a practical definition. I think the other analogy that's
• 4:49
  super helpful and maybe a little bit tongue in cheek is VR is the metaverse.
• 4:56
  People got super hyped about it, but it's not really being used.
• 5:01
  AR is Pokemon Go. People thought it was extremely silly, but it got
• 5:08
  huge adoption very very quickly. No, I love the I love that analogy
• 5:13
  oriana question for you. So, as a as a gamer, what proportion
• 5:18
  of your gaming is conventional gaming? You'd have to give me very precise percentage.
• 5:24
  You say, I'm not going to it, but what percentages is conventional
• 5:28
  gaming? Is augmented reality gaming, and is virtual reality gaming. So to
• 5:33
  be honest, right now, I am a very conventional gamer. I play
• 5:38
  almost exclusively PC games. I also do play virtual reality games, and especially
• 5:46
  in the past few years, I've played a lot more I would say maybe
• 5:51
  ten to twenty five percent virtual reality, which because they just happened to have
• 5:57
  that in my life, which makes it a lot easier to do it regularly.
• 6:01
  And a few years ago, actually, pre Pokemon Go, the company
• 6:09
  that made that game made another game that I was very enthusiastic about for a
• 6:14
  few years, and at the time, I didn't really have a lot of
• 6:16
  time to play games. This was when I was a student, so that
• 6:19
  was the only game that I was playing, was this augmented reality game.
• 6:24
  Got It. Got It? And so let's let's I could I could sort
• 6:27
  of talk to you about this all day, actually, and I wouldn't mind
• 6:30
  having a go at some of these games and give me a little little more,
• 6:32
  a little more ground to stand on if I discuss it. But let's
• 6:36
  seeg into into the world of work a little bit and in the digital workplace.
• 6:42
  From there we'll jump into decks a little but Oriana again. First of
• 6:45
  all, what stands out to you about about this transition into the workplace?
• 6:53
  And I don't know, maybe maybe the degree to which your skeptical of its
• 6:58
  short term impact or you're really excited about it, or what you think that
• 7:01
  looks like. Yeah, so, I think there's really great opportunities with AR
• 7:08
  specifically because, among other things, it's a lot easier to integrate into existing
• 7:15
  experiences than VR. Right. VR completely takes you out of your environment.
• 7:19
  It's very expensive, it's very clunky, it doesn't work for a lot of
• 7:24
  people. And again I use it regularly. I like it a lot,
• 7:28
  but I don't find it very practical for a lot of applications. I think
• 7:31
  the practical applications are often very individual and specific to both time and location.
• 7:41
  Right. So there's some great therapeutic benefits or applications for VR, But in
• 7:47
  the workforce, you need to be interacting with other people. You need to
• 7:50
  be interacting with your environment, with your tools, and that's the beauty of
• 7:56
  AR is that it's just an additional layer of support to what you're already doing
• 8:03
  that makes it much easier to adopt, among other things. Right, it's
• 8:07
  enhancing, not replacing, and I think that's huge when it comes to convincing
• 8:13
  people to use it and also its relevance. Yeah, totally agree. Even
• 8:18
  I don't feel particularly scared of the prospect of trying a little layer, but
• 8:22
  whereas virtual reality does indeed alarm me slightly thanks to that, Orianna Dina,
• 8:30
  What about you if you've got any firsthand experience of the technology yourself, First
• 8:33
  of all, only on a very small level, like user friendly kind of
• 8:39
  level. The differences are huge between using augmented reality or anything else like virtual
• 8:45
  reality and others. However, using VR into architecture, into looking into how
• 8:52
  you get to visualize things more and get their feel and look of it is
• 8:58
  a little bit different from an experience on what you get using augmented reality and
• 9:01
  trying to zoom in, zoom out and do those three sixty stuff where Now,
• 9:07
  even when you try to buy some furniture or things around the house.
• 9:11
  You can still get a three sixty view and you just click on it.
• 9:15
  Most of the new smartphones can do that as well, and then it puts
• 9:18
  whatever you're trying to position in the house. You get to see measurements everything.
• 9:22
  So I think experience is different and how we are doing so many things
• 9:26
  from an e commerce perspective or chasing perspective and day to day is getting a
• 9:31
  little bit different with a better pang of things. Is it going to be
• 9:37
  further more improving or how fast it's going to be. I think that's what
• 9:41
  we're going to see next on how fast people are going to adopt it and
• 9:45
  how we can be quicker taking in that technology in our day to day and
• 9:50
  talk to us about where you think the specific evolution of the digital workplace is
• 9:58
  going to be impacted and where that brings the wider issue here a digital employee
• 10:03
  experience into this picture. I think it's well, So it would depend on
• 10:09
  which side are we looking at it from. So it's going to be from
• 10:13
  the user perspective. Initially it's going to be a little bit hard for people
• 10:16
  to adopt it, just like any other change, and from the IT perspective
• 10:22
  as well to be able to measure things more and look into how the interactions
• 10:26
  and experiences of the end ucer is. But all in all, like every
• 10:31
  other change, it will take a little bit of time until everybody's more comfortable
• 10:35
  and get used to it. And I think having the feedback now is quicker.
• 10:39
  Being able to report back on lags or issues or whatever we can detect
• 10:45
  from an end user or digital employee experience perspective could be much much more impactful,
• 10:50
  let's say, or faster to address rather than back in the days where
• 10:54
  we used to be more reactive than now we are more proactive. I've got
• 11:00
  another before we go in to show and even back to you as well,
• 11:03
  doing another question for Oriana. I mean, thinking about this technology, how
• 11:09
  do you see it impacting work itself? Like, not just as an isolated
• 11:15
  phenomenon, but as part of what we discuss on this show a great deal
• 11:20
  around around AI and other sort of forward facing technologies. Do you see even
• 11:26
  more sort of flowing together and how do you think this kind of completes or
• 11:30
  adds to that larger picture of the changing nature of work, not even the
• 11:33
  workplace, but work itself. I think the way it's going to change work
• 11:43
  is going to be very subtle compared to some of the other big changes per
• 11:46
  see. That's my prediction, and I do think that it's not going to
• 11:50
  be the kind of very visible revolution we've seen with other emerging technologies. I
• 11:56
  think a lot of it is going to be in places that aren't quite so
• 12:01
  flashy. For example, a big application could be warehouses, right, and
• 12:07
  that's something that isn't terribly visible to most consumers, is tracking stuff in big,
• 12:16
  big warehouses that's not particularly newsworthy to most people, but it will be
• 12:24
  potentially extremely widespread. So I think that's one of the things with AR that
• 12:30
  is why it doesn't get as much press. And I don't necessarily expect to
• 12:35
  see a huge uptick in the next year for that, although it'd be interesting
• 12:37
  if it does. I think it's going to be more of this background stuff
• 12:43
  that becomes more widespread slowly and then people realize suddenly, oh, this is
• 12:46
  everywhere and it has a million different applications, kind of like the more strategic
• 12:54
  levels of it. And I don't necessarily have a clear sense of what the
• 12:58
  use case would be specifically. I do see a lot of the use cases
• 13:03
  being in For example, we were talking about architecture and things like that.
• 13:09
  I was just going to say, also, I think there's some really interesting
• 13:13
  opportunities too that are not going to be the first to be explored, but
• 13:18
  that there's a lot of potential in enabling a really diverse workforce. So one
• 13:26
  of the early researchers of augmented reality glasses, vad Sterner, also has done
• 13:35
  a ton of research in accessibility technology and how do we enable people with different
• 13:39
  physical needs to interact with the world, to interact with technology. And I
• 13:43
  think that's a really cool application that again isn't necessarily going to get a ton
• 13:48
  of hype because a lot of it isn't going to be super widespread, or
• 13:52
  the things that get the most hype are the least relevant to the vast majority
• 13:56
  of people because they're huge and expensive and they're we're not going to be implemented
• 14:01
  at scale. It's the little elements that streamline work processes that can be used
• 14:09
  by hundreds of thousands of people that have the biggest impact. In my mind,
• 14:15
  very cool and sure. And then kind of similar question as a pit
• 14:20
  to Dina, which is, you know, how do you see this impacting
• 14:24
  decks in are kind of space specifically going forward, and what do you think,
• 14:30
  what do you think the implications are for it and what it might be
• 14:33
  doing or should be doing to kind of prepare for this next stage in the
• 14:37
  ongoing kind of technological revolution around the workplace. So I think it's going to
• 14:41
  be probably incremental changes, like everyone was saying, I don't think we're going
• 14:46
  to see like a huge shift in one particular technology, but probably one thing
• 14:52
  that came up when I was researching a little bit about this for it that's
• 14:56
  probably even being used now as helping them or folks who are at looking at
• 15:00
  the actual servers, so monitoring data center facilities when you have outages, it
• 15:03
  can be extremely beneficial to just get eyes on what's going on to the actual
• 15:09
  physical structure, especially if it's in like a remote location or something and you
• 15:13
  know you can't actually get there in person. And then just for kind of
• 15:18
  like again back to thinking about us and what we do for work working for
• 15:22
  a software company kind of the traditional office environment, I would love to see
• 15:26
  this if there's going to be something in between in person and you know,
• 15:35
  doing calls on zooms and teams without having to go to like the metaverse.
• 15:39
  I don't want to do complete virtual reality, but thinking almost along the lines
• 15:43
  of like hologram Star Wars type type of style where you can get a group
• 15:46
  meeting, which I feel is like the only downside sort of a remote working
• 15:52
  at times when once you get like more than two people on a call.
• 15:56
  As we all know, we've been doing this for a couple of years now,
• 15:58
  working remotely, it is really you do lack certain things that you would
• 16:02
  in person, just like you lose all those senses and sensory skills that you
• 16:06
  have, and you know, you don't really know what everyone's doing behind their
• 16:11
  screen. So if there's somewhere way to merge that or fill that gap,
• 16:18
  I think that would be huge in the next couple of years. But I
• 16:19
  really I don't know. I'm optimistic. You want to know what everyone's doing
• 16:23
  my homebo screen show, and that's what you say, No, just you
• 16:26
  know in the room. I guess you know what I mean. But if
• 16:30
  they're nodding off, you know, you miss certain social cues. I feel
• 16:33
  like when you're just kind of staring into a computer screen and talking to someone
• 16:38
  three thousand miles away. Yeah, no, it's fair enough. I quick
• 16:42
  quiz for you, Ben, Shawn, because you brought a topic to us.
• 16:45
  So what is an exoskeleton exactly? So I believe in exoskeleton is something
• 16:52
  that assists, like in industries like manufacturing or architecture engineering, So it's sort
• 16:57
  of a robotic assistance to help you do heavy lifting things like that. But
• 17:03
  it should be a better definition, which is like something that crops up in
• 17:07
  halloween or I don't know is in your closet. It does sound good,
• 17:11
  isn't it? And Okay, what's computer vision exactly? I don't think the
• 17:17
  times come up with a discussion so far. Computer vision is an application of
• 17:22
  AI as well as AR. So computer vision is using computers to basically look
• 17:27
  at stuff and try to identify it and understand what's happening. So analyzing images,
• 17:34
  trying to identify what's in the image, trying to understand maybe what's going
• 17:38
  on in the image. So there's some interesting applications there, as you might
• 17:42
  imagine for a lot of different fields to try and use computers to identify stuff
• 17:48
  in images and videos, things like that. So I want to mention one
• 17:52
  of the cool things with exoskeletons is actually that they don't need to be robotic,
• 17:59
  So there's very different levels of like how technologically complex it has to be.
• 18:03
  So the simplest exoskeleton can, for example, support somebody who has to
• 18:08
  kneel or sit for long periods of time or stand for long periods of time,
• 18:15
  especially while like we're saying, doing very physical labor. So this is
• 18:19
  getting at that sort of concept of like you can enhance an experience and enhance
• 18:26
  what a person can do in ways that are more subtle versus like the very
• 18:33
  extreme end of that is like an actual huge cage around your body that's like
• 18:37
  carrying tons of weight and can do all kinds of different tools and things like
• 18:41
  that. That's sort of the more sci fi vision that we have of it.
• 18:45
  Nice. Nice And speaking of speaking of sci fi visions, one other
• 18:51
  thing that keeps coming up is that when when you read in into this topic,
• 18:56
  is the whole the whole concept of kind of uh, you know,
• 18:57
  it's alluded to it there of robots being increasingly involved in our working lives,
• 19:04
  and Dina, you are our official robot apocalypse on reality bias, So you
• 19:12
  know, where does this fit into your overall picture and how do you anticipate
• 19:17
  the kind of the robot presence in the workplace to be developing over the next
• 19:22
  few years. So I'll take it into phases. I think that's how evolution
• 19:27
  takes place. So let's be a little bit out there cyborg wise. So
• 19:33
  we're going to be half and half, which is something that you already have,
• 19:37
  you just don't use it that much or you don't highlight it that way.
• 19:41
  Where we have prosthetics, where we have aided devices that would help us
• 19:47
  function at our best capability that we know about in our human power for now.
• 19:52
  So in a little bit, and I know that there are lots of
• 19:55
  researchers that are already there where we can do some enhancements to our genes,
• 20:00
  to our capabilities, so kind of making ourselves a bit of a superhuman in
• 20:04
  the way. So if we're working on that side for the existing human beings
• 20:11
  to enhance their life experience, then we are more or less doing the same
• 20:15
  for the robots or bots or the artificial intelligence that we have in place.
• 20:18
  So building off of AI, where you have a brain, then you're going
• 20:22
  to try and replicate the same experience a human being is doing as well.
• 20:29
  So we should be having more and more artificial intelligence and if you want to
• 20:34
  have them in robots, that's fine. I think robots it's just like a
• 20:38
  very old term. Now it's just going to be an artificial intelligent brain doing
• 20:42
  something at the workplace that will be helping us. So starting with the GPTs
• 20:48
  doing more and more of robots who would be having artificial intelligence brains maybe sitting
• 20:55
  next to us in our offices, not offices where we use AI assistances,
• 21:02
  et cetera. So we are already starting to use that in the workplace where
• 21:04
  you have assistance taking notes or the captions that are being automatically generated now live
• 21:12
  in your zoom calls, et cetera. So it is there. It is
• 21:15
  coming to live. I don't think it's very like sat or or ecliptic key
• 21:21
  when it comes to that, but it will evolve faster. I think that's
• 21:25
  my personal thought. The more we start to adopt, the more we provide
• 21:29
  feedback, the quicker it will enhance itself, and then we will be able
• 21:33
  to use it more in the workplace. Wonderful last words, din know,
• 21:37
  I like we have you know, I'd like we got to at least touch
• 21:41
  upon roboto populyps as well. This is a dominant recurring theme now of the
• 21:45
  future, Facing tex show episodes, Reality Bytes episodes. I should say and
• 21:49
  thanks to Sean for bringing a great topic and thanks to Oreana for bringing some
• 21:55
  actual, real hand the most hands on experience with R and semi insights.
• 22:00
  It's been great. So it just reminds me to say thanks so much everyone,
• 22:04
  Bye bye bye, thanks guys, that great. Thank you. To
• 22:10
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• 22:25
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• 22:29
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