Imagine a world where students can sail on a WWII Battleship, study the inner details of a cadaver, and go for a spacewalk, all while never leaving the comfort of their classroom, workplace, or home. Thanks to the connected technologies of AR, VR, and 5G available now, this type of learning is no longer a far-off dream, it’s happening now. The cross-benefits of seamlessly being able to bring the world to the classroom, and the classroom to any part of the world are crucial in advancing society forward by training the minds of our youth in ways that were never before possible.
Join us as we kick off Season Three of The Restless ones with the visionary Steve Grubbs, Founder, and CEO of VictoryXR who is utilizing his passion for education and technology to change the way we all learn. The latest developments in low-latency 5G connectivity, graphics technologies, and haptics have allowed Steve and the company to explore the key insight that engagement impacts the speed and way the brain interacts and processes information. At VictoryXR Metaversities, lesson plans no longer come to life on paper and whiteboards, instead, students are exposed to a 360 field of learning to stimulate their minds.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
For listeners tuning in for the first time, Welcome to
the Restless Ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland, and if you joined
us for the past two seasons, then welcome back. I
couldn't be more excited for the next installment of our show.
As you may know, I've spent the last fifteen years
covering technology and learning how it works, demystifying everything from
(00:24):
massive parallel processing to advanced robotics and everything in between.
Yet it's the conversations with some of the most forward
thinking leaders, those at the intersection of technology and business
that fascinate me the most. On this season, we explore
their unique missions, challenges and approaches to driving their organizations forward,
(00:46):
building bridges to what's next, and leveraging transformative technologies available
today like five G to create a more connected and
meaningful future. What are they looking forward to tackling next
and how will they get there? Let's find out. In
this episode, I spend some time with Steve Grubbs, CEO
and co founder of Victory XR. Steve has dedicated his
(01:09):
time and efforts towards transforming education through technology as well.
Here he began that journey in the public service sector,
but discovered he could make an impact faster while pursuing
an entrepreneurial pathway. I sat down with Steve to talk
about how a convergence of technologies and connectivity have set
(01:29):
the stage for a revolution in education, and beyond that,
how these same technologies are providing the foundation for the
future of work, communication and the metaverse. Steve. First of all,
thank you so much for joining the show. Welcome to
the Restless Ones. First, I want to say that you
(01:50):
and I share something in common in that we have
parental figures who are teachers, and I imagine that was
one of those things that really shaped you early on.
Can you talk about developing a passion for education and
how you initially pursued that before going on to become
(02:12):
an entrepreneur. Sure, so, imagine having Clint Eastward as your dad.
My dad was a tough guy football coach and a
social studies teacher. I actually had him as a teacher.
He was a good teacher, he was an innovator. I
really respected that. But having said that, he didn't make
very much money, and I always thought to myself, m
(02:33):
I think I want to make a little bit more
money than that. So I made the decision to go
into the Iowa legislature, which made even less money than
being a school teacher, and I was chair of the
House Education Committee for four years and wrote the state's
first technology funding bill that put computers and internet and
all of the things that we needed to do to
(02:55):
move into the modern technological eras I left that and
joined the world of entrepreneurship, and one thing that I
found really fascinating was this realization that I think a
lot of people don't appreciate, which is the thought that
simply throwing technology at a challenge does not solve the challenge.
(03:17):
It takes a more nuanced, complex approach, and I think
that that's a trap that a lot of school districts
fall into, this idea of we've managed to get hold
of this technology, but what comes next. It doesn't appear
to be that there was as much thought given to
how to make use of the technology in a meaningful way.
(03:38):
And it seems to me like that was a core
component of your philosophy when you were moving forward. Am
I on the right track here? Yeah, that's that's exactly right.
So we were able to get every school in the
state of Iowa connected to the Internet, make sure they
all had computers. But at the end of the day,
we didn't really move the numbers much on some of
the objective measurements that we were looking at. And I
(04:01):
thought about that a lot, and really I came to
the conclusion that when students love to learn, they learn.
And it's that way for all of us, right. You know,
I love to cook, so I love to learn new recipes.
I love to understand how various cooking items react together, spices, etcetera.
And because of that, learning is not hard, it's very easy.
(04:24):
And it's the same thing when we all had that
class that we really loved. You know, maybe its art class,
science class, literature, but when you love a class, it's
just easy. You just pour yourself into it. So thinking
about how to make a difference globally in education, that's
that's the issue, you know, how do you make it
so that students love to learn? And I can remember
(04:47):
I put on a virtual reality headset in two thousand
and fifteen, and while everybody else put it on and
said gaming, I put it on and said, wow, education.
Imagine learning in this immersive way, whether it's virtual reality
or augmented reality, it will completely change the way students
(05:07):
consume learning, in the way they embrace learning, and thus
far we've been proven to be correct. I I identify
so strongly with what you have said. I have encountered
VR and and A are various mixed reality exhibits, for
example in museums, and have just marveled at what is
(05:29):
possible now and the way to get information across that
previously might have come across as being very dry and
distanced and removed from the person who is there. You know,
and and there's just you don't It doesn't sink in.
You don't have that connection, But mixed reality creates the
opportunity for that connection. And to me, that's what creates
(05:51):
that opportunity for real learning, not just memorizing dates and numbers,
but having a deeper understanding and appreciation for whatever the
subject matter is. Yeah, yeah, that that's exactly right. And
I like to think about some of the experiences we've developed.
When you dissected animals in high school, which is a
(06:11):
big thing in the United States, not as big outside
the United States, but Carolina Biological helped us develop these
amazing animal dissections. So instead of cutting open a real
frog with the formaldehyde and the whole deal. Our students
can pick up their floppy frog. It moves just like
the real thing. They can cut it open or move
the organs, examine them, throw them in the air, and
(06:35):
then press a button and the frog comes back together
and is back alive. These are the amazing opportunities. And
some people might scoff and say, well, that's not the
real thing, But the bottom line is think about an
airline pilot. Would you really get on a commercial airliner
where the pilot had skipped his simulator training? You know,
(06:56):
I think most of us would not. The fact that
we can build learning simulators that are more affordable for schools,
saving taxpayer dollars, and second, give students a deeper learning
opportunity that they can repeat as often as they choose to,
increases the fun of learning and also increases the retention. Absolutely,
(07:23):
I really am somewhat envious of the generations that will
be going to school in the near future and those
who are in school now for the kinds of experiences
that they will be able to have. To connect that
to the technology. Obviously, the only reason why we're able
to do this is because we've had the convergence of
(07:45):
multiple technologies and their evolution that enable these kinds of experiences.
Can you talk a little bit about some of the
technologies that are the foundation for what you're building with
these metaversities? Sure, So, first of all, we should define
what a metaversity is so people understand. You know, for
(08:05):
most of the last few years, what schools in universities
have done is they have introduced virtual reality as a
tool into the classroom. What we have done that is
dramatically different but sounds close to the same thing is
instead of VR being a tool in the classroom, we
(08:25):
made virtual reality the classroom. Now what that means is
we take these two terms. We take metaverse, which is
a persistent digital world that you can immerse yourself into,
and we take university and everybody knows what a university is,
and we put them together as a metaversity. So, for example,
(08:46):
let's take more House College. More House College was the
really the pioneer in this field, and Fisk University in
Nashville another pioneer. So these are the two examples that
really sort of broke ground. And if you look at
what they did at Morehouse College, they launched three classes
inorganic chemistry biology, one oh five and World History. So
(09:09):
in World History, they had a week on World War two,
and they came to us and said, we want to
be able to teach us in a way that's meaningful
for students. So instead of building a classroom, a VR
classroom with four walls, we provided them with a battleship.
And so the students that week sat on chairs on
the battleship as it floated in the Pacific, and the
(09:32):
white board was there. And then their professor, Professor Ovll
Hamilton's United States Navy, retired. He taught the class and
he would take them on tours of the battleship and
explain what it was for and how it was used.
Now moved to inorganic chemistry. So you can't see molecules
in the real world, but in this inorganic chemistry class
(09:54):
they went to space. They worked with molecules that were
three ft wide. They would build molecule, deconstruct them, and
suddenly learning came alive. And then finally Biology one oh five,
which is really known as men's health. When they were
learning about sexual reproduction, they shrunk down to the size
of ant man. Then they hopped into a flopian tube
(10:16):
and traveled along with sperm. So there you go. That's
hard to do in the real world, and it brings
learning to life in a way that has literally never
before been possible. So those are a couple of examples,
and getting back to your question about new technologies, what
we're seeing that's going to shape this new world are
(10:39):
the intersection of these technologies. First of all, really advanced
virtual reality creation and virtual reality hardware. You know, hardware
from companies like Quest, which has the amazing metic Quest too,
then Vibe with their Focus three and Pico Neo three.
These are amazing headsets. And then HP has a tethered
(11:00):
headset that really gives clarity. So I get these big
companies creating great hardware. Then second is five G. Five
G is very important so that you're not just tethered
to locations where there's WiFi. If you want to put
on your augmented reality glasses or your virtual reality headst
you can do so, and you can do it anywhere
(11:23):
that there's five G and so this makes a big difference.
And then you've got the whole world of cryptocurrency. So
suddenly in these worlds you'll have a new form of
currency that allows you to you know, buy various digital assets,
and then finally the concept of blockchain and n f
t s. So if you create assets, you can now
(11:47):
protect them by minting them as n f t s
and this is one of the services that we now offer.
So you've got these amazing technologies that are all intersecting
at the same time, and as they intersect, you're going
to see this persistent digital world that opens up around
us and it literally changes everything. This really makes me
(12:09):
think of all the different science fiction visions of what
the world was going to be, everything from Minority Report
to even we've seen like early examples of augmented reality
hardware like Google Glass, which had five G, which I agree.
I think five G is the key component in many
ways to what we're seeing right now because it frees
(12:31):
us up from both a physical tether whenever you're in
whatever location you're using your mixed reality glasses, but it
also frees us up from having to rely on being
in one of those places where fiber gets rolled out.
Kind of a side note that where I live in
the city of Atlanta, there's no fiber connection that goes
(12:53):
through my neighborhood at all. I don't have that access
having access to something like h five G connect itity
where I'm able to get those same speeds, that low latency,
that high bandwidth, that's incredibly valuable. And for something where
you're talking about such an intensive computational process where you
need to have low latency or else as I'm sure
(13:15):
you've experienced any latency in any kind of mixed reality situation,
that's just grounds for disaster. You're going to have motion sickness,
so you cannot have that. And to me, that's those
are all the pieces that are making this so exciting
because again I remember back to the early days of
virtual reality where those pieces weren't in place, and those
(13:36):
were the reasons why VR failed the first time through
a couple of things. But a lot of people don't
realize and I didn't realize until I really got deeply
involved in all of this, is the power of five G,
especially when it comes to latency. So you know, you
always hear people talk about oh, it's got this big
fat pipe, and you know, maybe you can get this
many gigs per second or per minute, no matter what
(13:58):
that lands at. Really the value is the latency. And
so the reason that's important is because if you and
I are both in this metaverse world, either on our
computers or through a our glasses or a VR headset,
and you're a thousand miles apart away from me, and
you reach into the cavity of a cadaver and you
(14:20):
lift up a human heart. Now I'm across the table
from you, and I see you lifting up that human heart,
and then I see you extend your hand to me
to hand me that heart. Even though I'm a thousand
miles away. I reach over and I grabbed that heart
and I feel it in my hand through hap dicks. Now,
what just occurred there has to be brought in by
(14:44):
whatever device you have on that data you lifting your
arm or picking up the human heart has to then
travel through your headset three or five G, and then
through the entire network A thousand of my calls away
into my headset, and I need to see all of
that happen. And ideally twenty milliseconds or less, the optimal
(15:09):
five G is occurring on the edge, which is where
you're doing the processing at a local tower. That's happening
in like three milliseconds at the best speed, and that's
about the speed that a hummingbird flaps its wings, which
is just crazy fast. So this is why five G
is so important. And you know, I don't think T
(15:30):
mobile is concerned about me mentioning this. But we are
working on an amazing project that's going to deliver medical
training and some fun games through a our glasses that
will be delivered through five G. And it will be
a while before that hits the market, but when it does,
it will literally change everything. Conventional thinking says you have
(15:58):
to pay more to get more. I want the world,
But T Mobile for Business uses unconventional thinking to deliver
premium benefits for better r o I from customized five
G solutions to three sixty support, we help you reach
your business goals right now. I want it now, innovating
to improve business today and tomorrow. That's unconventional thinking from
(16:18):
T Mobile for Business. Capable device required covers on available
in some areas, some require certain planter features C mobile
dot Com. I've been waiting for the moment of the
(16:45):
sort of the killer app for VR and a R. Obviously,
there are very passionate communities that have sprung up, particularly
around virtual reality, particularly in the gaming space. Obviously, there
are industrial uses as well and have been. I mean,
augmented reality started that way. But what do you see
(17:05):
as being sort of the killer app for the the
general public? Do you think we're very far off from that?
Are we at that cusp of VR and are becoming
truly a mainstream technology? So, you know, I think there's
different levels of killer apps. The first level of killer
app is simply communication and audio. When I can tap
(17:29):
the side of my glasses and say, call Kelly, who
happens to be my wife, suddenly it rings Kelly, and
I can choose to double tap and see a little
window in the upper right portion of the lens and
I can see her, or I can leave the video
off and just drive and talk to her that way,
you know, no phone in my pocket. Then I'm done
(17:50):
talking to people, and now I just want to, you know,
play some Boston. And so I listened to a little
Boston for a while. And then I get to the
hotel and I say, play some nightly news, and so
I get ten minutes of nightly news on my glasses,
and then I need to hop on a meeting with
some people in Australia, you know, go to my eleven
(18:12):
PM meeting, and now I'm in the meeting. So this
is the vision, and our piece of that vision is
one that will help students and consumers engage with the world.
I also like that I learned that we share a
common love for Boston, so that ends up being yet
(18:33):
another common element between the two of us. That's right.
I think this is a pretty safe guess that you
would say the metaverse really is going to be as
important and transformational as the dawn of the web. Is that?
Is that how you feel? Yeah? I mean, so, first
of all, let's go back before that. You've had these
(18:54):
major moments in time where communication and the delivery of
in for nation or entertainment changed forever. You know, think
about when Marconi launched radio. Suddenly everybody had ever radio,
and that was this very important. I can remember my
grandfather telling me that they would go sit in the
car and listen to his father who was playing music
(19:17):
in a church, you know, two states away, but it
was being broadcast on the radio, and so changed everything.
Then television did the same thing in the fifties, and
then you know, you get into the modern era and
suddenly the Internet opens up the world, and then phones
moved to that next level, and and now we're approaching
(19:37):
this immersive spatial communication time. I really do think that
a ARE is going to be one of those technologies
that will increasingly find its way into our lives. I
don't think it's going to be that far off before
we start seeing companies offering up smart windows that can
(20:00):
act as displays for various purposes. We've already seen it
incorporated into vehicles in different ways, so we're just at
the very cusp of that as well, and I think
we're going to see that extend. I think everyone thinks
of them as glasses, you know, the idea of wearing
glasses for augmented reality, and shortly that will be part
of it, but I think it's going to extend so
(20:22):
far beyond that into several other modalities. All of this
again is ways where we can marry the power of
the digital world with our physical existence, and it can
have such an enormous impact on everything. I think that's
exactly right. You know, if you look at some of
(20:42):
the science fiction, you just have a little dot that's
on the side of their head, so it's interacting directly
with your brain, sort of an Elon Musk neuralink, you know.
I think that's probably twenty years away, but in the
spanse of human time, twenty years is not very long.
It's true to step on classrooms. We've seeing this technology
(21:02):
being used in class, virtual or otherwise. Are we you
also looking at using it for things such as workplace training,
so that it could extend beyond the direct educational system
and even to things like a corporate training and things
of that nature. Yeah. Absolutely. I have a separate company
called Chalk Bites, and Chalk Bites focuses on corporate training.
(21:26):
So I can give you one really great example so OSHA,
which is the you know, the workplace safety standards of
the federal government creates very important that if you're a
warehouse supervisor, a place of employment supervisor, you need to
know and understand where the violations are. We have an
actual warehouse where you enter in there with an ocean
trainer and then you walk through the warehouse. So instead
(21:49):
of just like learning about it on slides a slide deck,
you actually walk through the warehouse. You see how a
crate is blocking an exit door, you see a fire extinguish,
sure that's out of place, things like that, so you
you experience the learning rather than just reading about it
and falling asleep. Then your trainer is gone and you
(22:10):
have to walk through the facility and identify those violations
and take your little laser pointer and zap them, and
by doing that you score yourself into a good score.
But you know, this is the type of experiential learning
that's hard to get you. Previously, an employer might have
to send their rural Georgia employees to Atlanta for a
(22:32):
couple of days for the sort of training. Now they
can stay wherever they're at and pop on their headset
and suddenly they are there with a live trainer. So
that's the type of workplace training. You can do the
same thing with almost anything because we now have true
physics built into VR as well as haptics, which is
something where you can actually feel, and so that makes
(22:55):
all the difference in the world being able to do
those kinds of things without having to take people outside
of an environment. It's really hard to express how valuable
that is, the amount you're saving and travel and time
and lodging the fact that if you're going with a
virtual environment, that means you don't have to have a
(23:16):
physical space set aside to run simulations, which probably is
not something that most companies could do anyway. I don't
think there are a lot of many companies who are saying, yeah,
we have a spare warehouse that we don't use for
our business, but we just use it to train people.
That's not a luxury that most companies have. So being
able to have a tool that lets you do that virtually,
(23:38):
I could see that being invaluable. Yeah, and you know what,
you just think about the personal You know, a lot
of times you travel two hours to to get to
a meeting, You have four hours of meeting, then you
have a dinner, and then you travel two hours home.
Your whole day is shut right, and you know you
miss your daughter's softball game. Well, you know, now instead
(23:58):
of burning the entire day, you pop on the headset
for a couple of hours, You do a couple of
it on zoom, and next thing you know, you have
learned as much or more than you would have learned
at the actual location and the cost is dramatically less.
So it provides an efficiency, a lean efficiency for the employer,
and it provides more time for the employee to to
(24:21):
enjoy their family or just be more productive at work.
Can you tell me a little bit about how you
go about assessing and managing risk in what you do.
I imagine that your work requires uh partnering with lots
of other companies. How do you evaluate that and make decisions?
What are the criteria that are important to you? Well,
(24:45):
first of all, there's a balance between working with say
the Fortune five hundred companies, who you know fairly risk averse,
and then the startups who you know they're going to
burn the bridges behind them. So you need both, and
you have to really make sure that the people that
you work with are people that you trust. And so
(25:06):
there are clearly some checklists on certifications and other safety
standards and safety records that you can check those lists.
But at the end of the day, Victory XR is
my fourth company, and I have learned over the years
that the people you work with, if they can be trusted,
then if there's a problem, at the very least, they
(25:28):
will make a good faith effort to solve that issue. Well, Steve,
I just have a few more questions to round out
this interview, which has been truly fascinating. The first one,
I think is arguably the most important question I can
ask you, which is what is a question you wish
I had asked you but didn't. Well, I think asking
(25:50):
me a question about the coolest stuff we're doing is
always a good question. I am an education nerds, so
everything you've said has been the coolest to me. But
I want to know what you think is the coolest. Sure, well,
there's a stupid question to ask myself, because there's a
bunch of those things. Students study astronomy both in high
(26:11):
school and in higher education, and so we wanted to
create a way to learn astronomy, and so we can
recreate the classroom however we want. So I told our
developers that to build a ground based observatory, but you
have to build into it a star Trek style transporter,
(26:34):
and after you beam up, you land in the starship,
and then you can put on your space suit and
go out for a spacewalk and learn about astronomy that way.
It's a wonderful gift to be able to go to
a planetarium and look up at the stars. But in
our world, you get a step into the transporter, you
(26:56):
see these dots and waves, and you hear this sound
that sounds like your own star trek, and then next
thing you know, boom, You're on the starship and then
from there they can go outside and they can bring
in planets or solar systems, whatever you want to do. So,
to me, pretty cool. Uh, no argument here. I'm also
(27:16):
a lifelong Star Trek fan, and honestly, going through a
transporter through VR is the only way I would do it,
So so I think that that's the right way to
do it. Of course, I could not let Steve go
without asking him one more thing. What would you say
is one of your proudest accomplishments. Well, I would tell
(27:41):
you a quick little story. We are getting a larger team,
but we started with a very small team. And I
was with a college buddy of mine back in Iowa
City and we were on a rooftop having a beverage,
former science teacher and assistant superintendent schools, and he leaned
over and said, you know what you need. You need
(28:01):
dissection in VR. And I said, okay, tell me why.
And he told me why and I said okay. So
I went home. The next Monday, I pulled my team
together and I said, why don't we create dissection in VR?
So my guys got together they sort of scoped it out.
Eight weeks later we have a full frog dissection with
(28:21):
Wendy the science teacher, a hologram whole package. Well, we
were nominated to submit that into the Award for vive
Ports Best VR Education Experiences, like the Academy Award for
Virtual Reality Education, and we were the only American company nominated,
(28:42):
and we ended up winning the Best Global Virtual Reality
Education Experience. And it just all came from listening and
then our team taking eight weeks to build an amazing experience. Wow,
that's a phenomenal turnaround time for anyone who hasn't been
involved in developing something like that. It's an incredible accomplishment.
(29:04):
That was exactly the kind of answer I was hoping for. Steve,
Thank you so much for your time. This has been
a phenomenal conversation. Happy to have been a part of it.
Thank you. Thanks again to Steve Grubs for his time
(29:25):
with us. As a longtime fan of virtual reality, I
found it incredibly exciting to get a glimpse of how
the discipline has come into its own. Not only do
I find the educational application of VR and A are exciting,
but also the broader impact of mixed reality seems like
it's going to be far more dramatic than I anticipated.
(29:46):
None of that would be possible were it not for
advancements in naturization, processing power at the edge, and of
course five G technology allowing for those high bandwidth, low
latency connections power ing at all. Join us for future
episodes of The Restless Ones, where we will continue to
explore how leadership and new technologies have opened up opportunities
(30:09):
that just a few years ago would fall into the
category of science fiction. We'll see you then. T Mobile
for Business knows companies want more than a one size
fits all approach to support I want the world, so
we provide three sixty support customized to your business. From
discovery through post deployment. You'll get a dedicated account team
(30:31):
and expertise from solutions engineers and industry advisors already right now,
I want it now. Three sixty support that's customized for
your success. That's unconventional thinking from T Mobile for Business
For listeners tuning in for the first time, Welcome to
the Restless Ones. I'm Jonathan Strickland, and if you joined
us for the past two seasons, then welcome back. I
couldn't be more excited for the next installment of our show.
As you may know, I've spent the last fifteen years
covering technology and learning how it works, demystifying everything from
(00:24):
massive parallel processing to advanced robotics and everything in between.
Yet it's the conversations with some of the most forward
thinking leaders, those at the intersection of technology and business
that fascinate me the most. On this season, we explore
their unique missions, challenges and approaches to driving their organizations forward,
(00:46):
building bridges to what's next, and leveraging transformative technologies available
today like five G to create a more connected and
meaningful future. What are they looking forward to tackling next
and how will they get there? Let's find out. In
this episode, I spend some time with Steve Grubbs, CEO
and co founder of Victory XR. Steve has dedicated his
(01:09):
time and efforts towards transforming education through technology as well.
Here he began that journey in the public service sector,
but discovered he could make an impact faster while pursuing
an entrepreneurial pathway. I sat down with Steve to talk
about how a convergence of technologies and connectivity have set
(01:29):
the stage for a revolution in education, and beyond that,
how these same technologies are providing the foundation for the
future of work, communication and the metaverse. Steve. First of all,
thank you so much for joining the show. Welcome to
the Restless Ones. First, I want to say that you
(01:50):
and I share something in common in that we have
parental figures who are teachers, and I imagine that was
one of those things that really shaped you early on.
Can you talk about developing a passion for education and
how you initially pursued that before going on to become
(02:12):
an entrepreneur. Sure, so, imagine having Clint Eastward as your dad.
My dad was a tough guy football coach and a
social studies teacher. I actually had him as a teacher.
He was a good teacher, he was an innovator. I
really respected that. But having said that, he didn't make
very much money, and I always thought to myself, m
(02:33):
I think I want to make a little bit more
money than that. So I made the decision to go
into the Iowa legislature, which made even less money than
being a school teacher, and I was chair of the
House Education Committee for four years and wrote the state's
first technology funding bill that put computers and internet and
all of the things that we needed to do to
(02:55):
move into the modern technological eras I left that and
joined the world of entrepreneurship, and one thing that I
found really fascinating was this realization that I think a
lot of people don't appreciate, which is the thought that
simply throwing technology at a challenge does not solve the challenge.
(03:17):
It takes a more nuanced, complex approach, and I think
that that's a trap that a lot of school districts
fall into, this idea of we've managed to get hold
of this technology, but what comes next. It doesn't appear
to be that there was as much thought given to
how to make use of the technology in a meaningful way.
(03:38):
And it seems to me like that was a core
component of your philosophy when you were moving forward. Am
I on the right track here? Yeah, that's that's exactly right.
So we were able to get every school in the
state of Iowa connected to the Internet, make sure they
all had computers. But at the end of the day,
we didn't really move the numbers much on some of
the objective measurements that we were looking at. And I
(04:01):
thought about that a lot, and really I came to
the conclusion that when students love to learn, they learn.
And it's that way for all of us, right. You know,
I love to cook, so I love to learn new recipes.
I love to understand how various cooking items react together, spices, etcetera.
And because of that, learning is not hard, it's very easy.
(04:24):
And it's the same thing when we all had that
class that we really loved. You know, maybe its art class,
science class, literature, but when you love a class, it's
just easy. You just pour yourself into it. So thinking
about how to make a difference globally in education, that's
that's the issue, you know, how do you make it
so that students love to learn? And I can remember
(04:47):
I put on a virtual reality headset in two thousand
and fifteen, and while everybody else put it on and
said gaming, I put it on and said, wow, education.
Imagine learning in this immersive way, whether it's virtual reality
or augmented reality, it will completely change the way students
(05:07):
consume learning, in the way they embrace learning, and thus
far we've been proven to be correct. I I identify
so strongly with what you have said. I have encountered
VR and and A are various mixed reality exhibits, for
example in museums, and have just marveled at what is
(05:29):
possible now and the way to get information across that
previously might have come across as being very dry and
distanced and removed from the person who is there. You know,
and and there's just you don't It doesn't sink in.
You don't have that connection, But mixed reality creates the
opportunity for that connection. And to me, that's what creates
(05:51):
that opportunity for real learning, not just memorizing dates and numbers,
but having a deeper understanding and appreciation for whatever the
subject matter is. Yeah, yeah, that that's exactly right. And
I like to think about some of the experiences we've developed.
When you dissected animals in high school, which is a
(06:11):
big thing in the United States, not as big outside
the United States, but Carolina Biological helped us develop these
amazing animal dissections. So instead of cutting open a real
frog with the formaldehyde and the whole deal. Our students
can pick up their floppy frog. It moves just like
the real thing. They can cut it open or move
the organs, examine them, throw them in the air, and
(06:35):
then press a button and the frog comes back together
and is back alive. These are the amazing opportunities. And
some people might scoff and say, well, that's not the
real thing, But the bottom line is think about an
airline pilot. Would you really get on a commercial airliner
where the pilot had skipped his simulator training? You know,
(06:56):
I think most of us would not. The fact that
we can build learning simulators that are more affordable for schools,
saving taxpayer dollars, and second, give students a deeper learning
opportunity that they can repeat as often as they choose to,
increases the fun of learning and also increases the retention. Absolutely,
(07:23):
I really am somewhat envious of the generations that will
be going to school in the near future and those
who are in school now for the kinds of experiences
that they will be able to have. To connect that
to the technology. Obviously, the only reason why we're able
to do this is because we've had the convergence of
(07:45):
multiple technologies and their evolution that enable these kinds of experiences.
Can you talk a little bit about some of the
technologies that are the foundation for what you're building with
these metaversities? Sure, So, first of all, we should define
what a metaversity is so people understand. You know, for
(08:05):
most of the last few years, what schools in universities
have done is they have introduced virtual reality as a
tool into the classroom. What we have done that is
dramatically different but sounds close to the same thing is
instead of VR being a tool in the classroom, we
(08:25):
made virtual reality the classroom. Now what that means is
we take these two terms. We take metaverse, which is
a persistent digital world that you can immerse yourself into,
and we take university and everybody knows what a university is,
and we put them together as a metaversity. So, for example,
(08:46):
let's take more House College. More House College was the
really the pioneer in this field, and Fisk University in
Nashville another pioneer. So these are the two examples that
really sort of broke ground. And if you look at
what they did at Morehouse College, they launched three classes
inorganic chemistry biology, one oh five and World History. So
(09:09):
in World History, they had a week on World War two,
and they came to us and said, we want to
be able to teach us in a way that's meaningful
for students. So instead of building a classroom, a VR
classroom with four walls, we provided them with a battleship.
And so the students that week sat on chairs on
the battleship as it floated in the Pacific, and the
(09:32):
white board was there. And then their professor, Professor Ovll
Hamilton's United States Navy, retired. He taught the class and
he would take them on tours of the battleship and
explain what it was for and how it was used.
Now moved to inorganic chemistry. So you can't see molecules
in the real world, but in this inorganic chemistry class
(09:54):
they went to space. They worked with molecules that were
three ft wide. They would build molecule, deconstruct them, and
suddenly learning came alive. And then finally Biology one oh five,
which is really known as men's health. When they were
learning about sexual reproduction, they shrunk down to the size
of ant man. Then they hopped into a flopian tube
(10:16):
and traveled along with sperm. So there you go. That's
hard to do in the real world, and it brings
learning to life in a way that has literally never
before been possible. So those are a couple of examples,
and getting back to your question about new technologies, what
we're seeing that's going to shape this new world are
(10:39):
the intersection of these technologies. First of all, really advanced
virtual reality creation and virtual reality hardware. You know, hardware
from companies like Quest, which has the amazing metic Quest too,
then Vibe with their Focus three and Pico Neo three.
These are amazing headsets. And then HP has a tethered
(11:00):
headset that really gives clarity. So I get these big
companies creating great hardware. Then second is five G. Five
G is very important so that you're not just tethered
to locations where there's WiFi. If you want to put
on your augmented reality glasses or your virtual reality headst
you can do so, and you can do it anywhere
(11:23):
that there's five G and so this makes a big difference.
And then you've got the whole world of cryptocurrency. So
suddenly in these worlds you'll have a new form of
currency that allows you to you know, buy various digital assets,
and then finally the concept of blockchain and n f
t s. So if you create assets, you can now
(11:47):
protect them by minting them as n f t s
and this is one of the services that we now offer.
So you've got these amazing technologies that are all intersecting
at the same time, and as they intersect, you're going
to see this persistent digital world that opens up around
us and it literally changes everything. This really makes me
(12:09):
think of all the different science fiction visions of what
the world was going to be, everything from Minority Report
to even we've seen like early examples of augmented reality
hardware like Google Glass, which had five G, which I agree.
I think five G is the key component in many
ways to what we're seeing right now because it frees
(12:31):
us up from both a physical tether whenever you're in
whatever location you're using your mixed reality glasses, but it
also frees us up from having to rely on being
in one of those places where fiber gets rolled out.
Kind of a side note that where I live in
the city of Atlanta, there's no fiber connection that goes
(12:53):
through my neighborhood at all. I don't have that access
having access to something like h five G connect itity
where I'm able to get those same speeds, that low latency,
that high bandwidth, that's incredibly valuable. And for something where
you're talking about such an intensive computational process where you
need to have low latency or else as I'm sure
(13:15):
you've experienced any latency in any kind of mixed reality situation,
that's just grounds for disaster. You're going to have motion sickness,
so you cannot have that. And to me, that's those
are all the pieces that are making this so exciting
because again I remember back to the early days of
virtual reality where those pieces weren't in place, and those
(13:36):
were the reasons why VR failed the first time through
a couple of things. But a lot of people don't
realize and I didn't realize until I really got deeply
involved in all of this, is the power of five G,
especially when it comes to latency. So you know, you
always hear people talk about oh, it's got this big
fat pipe, and you know, maybe you can get this
many gigs per second or per minute, no matter what
(13:58):
that lands at. Really the value is the latency. And
so the reason that's important is because if you and
I are both in this metaverse world, either on our
computers or through a our glasses or a VR headset,
and you're a thousand miles apart away from me, and
you reach into the cavity of a cadaver and you
(14:20):
lift up a human heart. Now I'm across the table
from you, and I see you lifting up that human heart,
and then I see you extend your hand to me
to hand me that heart. Even though I'm a thousand
miles away. I reach over and I grabbed that heart
and I feel it in my hand through hap dicks. Now,
what just occurred there has to be brought in by
(14:44):
whatever device you have on that data you lifting your
arm or picking up the human heart has to then
travel through your headset three or five G, and then
through the entire network A thousand of my calls away
into my headset, and I need to see all of
that happen. And ideally twenty milliseconds or less, the optimal
(15:09):
five G is occurring on the edge, which is where
you're doing the processing at a local tower. That's happening
in like three milliseconds at the best speed, and that's
about the speed that a hummingbird flaps its wings, which
is just crazy fast. So this is why five G
is so important. And you know, I don't think T
(15:30):
mobile is concerned about me mentioning this. But we are
working on an amazing project that's going to deliver medical
training and some fun games through a our glasses that
will be delivered through five G. And it will be
a while before that hits the market, but when it does,
it will literally change everything. Conventional thinking says you have
(15:58):
to pay more to get more. I want the world,
But T Mobile for Business uses unconventional thinking to deliver
premium benefits for better r o I from customized five
G solutions to three sixty support, we help you reach
your business goals right now. I want it now, innovating
to improve business today and tomorrow. That's unconventional thinking from
(16:18):
T Mobile for Business. Capable device required covers on available
in some areas, some require certain planter features C mobile
dot Com. I've been waiting for the moment of the
(16:45):
sort of the killer app for VR and a R. Obviously,
there are very passionate communities that have sprung up, particularly
around virtual reality, particularly in the gaming space. Obviously, there
are industrial uses as well and have been. I mean,
augmented reality started that way. But what do you see
(17:05):
as being sort of the killer app for the the
general public? Do you think we're very far off from that?
Are we at that cusp of VR and are becoming
truly a mainstream technology? So, you know, I think there's
different levels of killer apps. The first level of killer
app is simply communication and audio. When I can tap
(17:29):
the side of my glasses and say, call Kelly, who
happens to be my wife, suddenly it rings Kelly, and
I can choose to double tap and see a little
window in the upper right portion of the lens and
I can see her, or I can leave the video
off and just drive and talk to her that way,
you know, no phone in my pocket. Then I'm done
(17:50):
talking to people, and now I just want to, you know,
play some Boston. And so I listened to a little
Boston for a while. And then I get to the
hotel and I say, play some nightly news, and so
I get ten minutes of nightly news on my glasses,
and then I need to hop on a meeting with
some people in Australia, you know, go to my eleven
(18:12):
PM meeting, and now I'm in the meeting. So this
is the vision, and our piece of that vision is
one that will help students and consumers engage with the world.
I also like that I learned that we share a
common love for Boston, so that ends up being yet
(18:33):
another common element between the two of us. That's right.
I think this is a pretty safe guess that you
would say the metaverse really is going to be as
important and transformational as the dawn of the web. Is that?
Is that how you feel? Yeah? I mean, so, first
of all, let's go back before that. You've had these
(18:54):
major moments in time where communication and the delivery of
in for nation or entertainment changed forever. You know, think
about when Marconi launched radio. Suddenly everybody had ever radio,
and that was this very important. I can remember my
grandfather telling me that they would go sit in the
car and listen to his father who was playing music
(19:17):
in a church, you know, two states away, but it
was being broadcast on the radio, and so changed everything.
Then television did the same thing in the fifties, and
then you know, you get into the modern era and
suddenly the Internet opens up the world, and then phones
moved to that next level, and and now we're approaching
(19:37):
this immersive spatial communication time. I really do think that
a ARE is going to be one of those technologies
that will increasingly find its way into our lives. I
don't think it's going to be that far off before
we start seeing companies offering up smart windows that can
(20:00):
act as displays for various purposes. We've already seen it
incorporated into vehicles in different ways, so we're just at
the very cusp of that as well, and I think
we're going to see that extend. I think everyone thinks
of them as glasses, you know, the idea of wearing
glasses for augmented reality, and shortly that will be part
of it, but I think it's going to extend so
(20:22):
far beyond that into several other modalities. All of this
again is ways where we can marry the power of
the digital world with our physical existence, and it can
have such an enormous impact on everything. I think that's
exactly right. You know, if you look at some of
(20:42):
the science fiction, you just have a little dot that's
on the side of their head, so it's interacting directly
with your brain, sort of an Elon Musk neuralink, you know.
I think that's probably twenty years away, but in the
spanse of human time, twenty years is not very long.
It's true to step on classrooms. We've seeing this technology
(21:02):
being used in class, virtual or otherwise. Are we you
also looking at using it for things such as workplace training,
so that it could extend beyond the direct educational system
and even to things like a corporate training and things
of that nature. Yeah. Absolutely. I have a separate company
called Chalk Bites, and Chalk Bites focuses on corporate training.
(21:26):
So I can give you one really great example so OSHA,
which is the you know, the workplace safety standards of
the federal government creates very important that if you're a
warehouse supervisor, a place of employment supervisor, you need to
know and understand where the violations are. We have an
actual warehouse where you enter in there with an ocean
trainer and then you walk through the warehouse. So instead
(21:49):
of just like learning about it on slides a slide deck,
you actually walk through the warehouse. You see how a
crate is blocking an exit door, you see a fire extinguish,
sure that's out of place, things like that, so you
you experience the learning rather than just reading about it
and falling asleep. Then your trainer is gone and you
(22:10):
have to walk through the facility and identify those violations
and take your little laser pointer and zap them, and
by doing that you score yourself into a good score.
But you know, this is the type of experiential learning
that's hard to get you. Previously, an employer might have
to send their rural Georgia employees to Atlanta for a
(22:32):
couple of days for the sort of training. Now they
can stay wherever they're at and pop on their headset
and suddenly they are there with a live trainer. So
that's the type of workplace training. You can do the
same thing with almost anything because we now have true
physics built into VR as well as haptics, which is
something where you can actually feel, and so that makes
(22:55):
all the difference in the world being able to do
those kinds of things without having to take people outside
of an environment. It's really hard to express how valuable
that is, the amount you're saving and travel and time
and lodging the fact that if you're going with a
virtual environment, that means you don't have to have a
(23:16):
physical space set aside to run simulations, which probably is
not something that most companies could do anyway. I don't
think there are a lot of many companies who are saying, yeah,
we have a spare warehouse that we don't use for
our business, but we just use it to train people.
That's not a luxury that most companies have. So being
able to have a tool that lets you do that virtually,
(23:38):
I could see that being invaluable. Yeah, and you know what,
you just think about the personal You know, a lot
of times you travel two hours to to get to
a meeting, You have four hours of meeting, then you
have a dinner, and then you travel two hours home.
Your whole day is shut right, and you know you
miss your daughter's softball game. Well, you know, now instead
(23:58):
of burning the entire day, you pop on the headset
for a couple of hours, You do a couple of
it on zoom, and next thing you know, you have
learned as much or more than you would have learned
at the actual location and the cost is dramatically less.
So it provides an efficiency, a lean efficiency for the employer,
and it provides more time for the employee to to
(24:21):
enjoy their family or just be more productive at work.
Can you tell me a little bit about how you
go about assessing and managing risk in what you do.
I imagine that your work requires uh partnering with lots
of other companies. How do you evaluate that and make decisions?
What are the criteria that are important to you? Well,
(24:45):
first of all, there's a balance between working with say
the Fortune five hundred companies, who you know fairly risk averse,
and then the startups who you know they're going to
burn the bridges behind them. So you need both, and
you have to really make sure that the people that
you work with are people that you trust. And so
(25:06):
there are clearly some checklists on certifications and other safety
standards and safety records that you can check those lists.
But at the end of the day, Victory XR is
my fourth company, and I have learned over the years
that the people you work with, if they can be trusted,
then if there's a problem, at the very least, they
(25:28):
will make a good faith effort to solve that issue. Well, Steve,
I just have a few more questions to round out
this interview, which has been truly fascinating. The first one,
I think is arguably the most important question I can
ask you, which is what is a question you wish
I had asked you but didn't. Well, I think asking
(25:50):
me a question about the coolest stuff we're doing is
always a good question. I am an education nerds, so
everything you've said has been the coolest to me. But
I want to know what you think is the coolest. Sure, well,
there's a stupid question to ask myself, because there's a
bunch of those things. Students study astronomy both in high
(26:11):
school and in higher education, and so we wanted to
create a way to learn astronomy, and so we can
recreate the classroom however we want. So I told our
developers that to build a ground based observatory, but you
have to build into it a star Trek style transporter,
(26:34):
and after you beam up, you land in the starship,
and then you can put on your space suit and
go out for a spacewalk and learn about astronomy that way.
It's a wonderful gift to be able to go to
a planetarium and look up at the stars. But in
our world, you get a step into the transporter, you
(26:56):
see these dots and waves, and you hear this sound
that sounds like your own star trek, and then next
thing you know, boom, You're on the starship and then
from there they can go outside and they can bring
in planets or solar systems, whatever you want to do. So,
to me, pretty cool. Uh, no argument here. I'm also
(27:16):
a lifelong Star Trek fan, and honestly, going through a
transporter through VR is the only way I would do it,
So so I think that that's the right way to
do it. Of course, I could not let Steve go
without asking him one more thing. What would you say
is one of your proudest accomplishments. Well, I would tell
(27:41):
you a quick little story. We are getting a larger team,
but we started with a very small team. And I
was with a college buddy of mine back in Iowa
City and we were on a rooftop having a beverage,
former science teacher and assistant superintendent schools, and he leaned
over and said, you know what you need. You need
(28:01):
dissection in VR. And I said, okay, tell me why.
And he told me why and I said okay. So
I went home. The next Monday, I pulled my team
together and I said, why don't we create dissection in VR?
So my guys got together they sort of scoped it out.
Eight weeks later we have a full frog dissection with
(28:21):
Wendy the science teacher, a hologram whole package. Well, we
were nominated to submit that into the Award for vive
Ports Best VR Education Experiences, like the Academy Award for
Virtual Reality Education, and we were the only American company nominated,
(28:42):
and we ended up winning the Best Global Virtual Reality
Education Experience. And it just all came from listening and
then our team taking eight weeks to build an amazing experience. Wow,
that's a phenomenal turnaround time for anyone who hasn't been
involved in developing something like that. It's an incredible accomplishment.
(29:04):
That was exactly the kind of answer I was hoping for. Steve,
Thank you so much for your time. This has been
a phenomenal conversation. Happy to have been a part of it.
Thank you. Thanks again to Steve Grubs for his time
(29:25):
with us. As a longtime fan of virtual reality, I
found it incredibly exciting to get a glimpse of how
the discipline has come into its own. Not only do
I find the educational application of VR and A are exciting,
but also the broader impact of mixed reality seems like
it's going to be far more dramatic than I anticipated.
(29:46):
None of that would be possible were it not for
advancements in naturization, processing power at the edge, and of
course five G technology allowing for those high bandwidth, low
latency connections power ing at all. Join us for future
episodes of The Restless Ones, where we will continue to
explore how leadership and new technologies have opened up opportunities
(30:09):
that just a few years ago would fall into the
category of science fiction. We'll see you then. T Mobile
for Business knows companies want more than a one size
fits all approach to support I want the world, so
we provide three sixty support customized to your business. From
discovery through post deployment. You'll get a dedicated account team
(30:31):
and expertise from solutions engineers and industry advisors already right now,
I want it now. Three sixty support that's customized for
your success. That's unconventional thinking from T Mobile for Business
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