December 3, 2019 • 38 mins
For years the promise of VR -- virtual reality -- has been the lore of science fiction. Today’s consumer and business applications have just begun to scratch the surface of what’s possible when it comes to exploring virtual and our own worlds through connected devices. 5G advancements in wireless networks will take these worlds to the next level and that much closer to truly feeling real. In this episode, we hear from Evelyn Miralles, the former head of VR at NASA; Jeff Marshall, the founder of Ovation, a business built around VR-based public speaking training; and Daniel (Danny Mac) McIntyre, the Director of Community Corrections for Pennsylvania where he has developed an innovative VR program to help inmates prior to release. Make sure to check out other episodes in this series featuring: Durga Malladi, SVP of 4G and 5G at Qualcomm and Flynn Coleman, author of A Human Algorithm.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:02):
In our first episode, we began with a foundational exploration
of what exactly five G is and how will be
framing our thoughts on the future of connectivity. We spoke
with Andrea Goldsmith, Professor of Engineering at Stanford University, Flynn Coleman,
author of a Human Algorithm, and Durga Maladi, senior Vice
president of four G and five G at Qualcom. Maybe
(00:33):
it seems obvious, but business is changing and much of
that change from digital transformation to workplace innovation is driven
by critical advancements in mobility. Platforms like virtual reality will
eventually become solutions for how to get business done. Thanks
for support from Teamobile for Business. We're here to explore
how five G will enable future innovations in virtual and
(00:55):
augmented reality that can advance our future. Yeah. You can
get very easily lost in a space because you don't
know what it's opened down. The only reference you have
is the Earth and the space station. That's Evelyn Mirales.
(01:19):
She's describing the feeling of leaving the International Space Station
to complete a mission in zero gravity, when the dark
comes and the light to start fading, the darkest, so
dark that you can touch it when you get out
of the airlock and you're just coming out and you're
holding you know, your hand with the handrail, and that's
(01:41):
the only point you have the connection with the real world,
and then everything else is like, oh my god, you
can just just fly away from Evelyn ran Virtual Reality
at NASA. One of her missions was to be an
identical copy of the space station where astronauts could train
(02:04):
before going there themselves. They call used from space and say, hey,
I want to tell you, this looks just like the
vir Lab. And it was their feeling that they knew
more of what they were in relation to the vehicle
by doing it virtually first, so every time they did
(02:25):
it for real, they will compare it in their minds
with the synthetic world they already saw. And did you
ever try your own mission? I mean, did you go
to space in the headset? Yes? Yeah, you know. People
ask me that, well, don't you want to be an
astrona and said, well, I've been an astronaut virtually many times,
so yes, I've done it. And what did you feel
(02:47):
like when the astronauts called you from space saying that
what they were seeing resembled exactly the world that you
had built. It's an incredible feeling is an accomplishment. And
you know what, we say, okay, great, next because we
have so many missus to cover that that it was like, okay, great, wonderful,
let's do the next one. You know, that sense of
(03:09):
mission and of using VR for a concrete, real world
objective is crucial to understanding how far reaching this technology
could be. But it also allows us to dream. This
is something that I always dream about and I always
wanted to go to the Moon. My dream will be
(03:31):
that as the technology is better with Fiji and beyond
in the future, is to actually transmit what the astronauts
are looking through the helmets, and they will be following
an astronauts as they step into the surface of the moon.
So imagine what it will be. I mean, just think
(03:53):
of it for a minute. I mean, everybody around the
world can follow these people bound seen in the more
will will be there with it. Virtual reality has left
the realm of science fiction. For a few hundred dollars,
you can buy a VR headset and use it to
play immersive games or experience new kinds of art in
(04:13):
virtual worlds. But the technology goes so far beyond entertainment.
Not only does NASA use it to train astronauts, but
around the world it's helping people learn new skills, cope
with trauma, and even reduce physical pain. So can creater
connectivity and lower latency technological advances we expect will arrive
(04:34):
with the implementation of five G unleash new possibility. A
few decades ago, just a handful of people could imagine
using VR to train astronauts for space. So if we
look a few decades ahead, what role could be our
play in our future? In this episode, we'll explore how
(04:55):
virtual reality is being used to help people prepare for
the real world, not escape it, and at how advances
in connectivity and wireless technology promised by five G could
make virtual reality even more immersive and even more powerful
by increasing the user's sense of presence in the virtual world.
I'm mos Velocian and this is This Time Tomorrow, a
(05:18):
podcast about how advances in connectivity could change the way
we live. Karen Evidence is a computer scientist who built
a VR system starting in the early nineties. To most people,
that would have been a complete pipe dream, but she
was doing something to solve a very practical problem, which
(05:39):
was how do you train astronauts to go to space
when they're still on Earth. You don't tell them about
freeze dried food, because if you do, they won't go.
I think that the first time VR was introduced in
science fiction within a series of short stories from ninety
three by Lawrence Manning called The Man Who Awoke? Have
you been doing, homeworker? I've done this for a while okay.
(06:03):
In the series, proto VR was described as dream dramas
were in the main character encounters matrix like dream palaces,
where the dramas being projected to the sleeping were more
desirable than awaking state. Well, I didn't know that the
dreams of VR when that far back, but at least
for the last ten years people have been excited about
(06:25):
it becoming a widely adopted technology. So I was struck
in the last episode when Durga Malady of Calcom told
us that VR is actually one area that five G
is poised to transform. And this, according to Dager, is
for two reasons. Number one, lower latency can make the
experience feel way more realistic and number two, higher bandwidth
(06:47):
means that the computing can take place locally on small cells,
and that means that the bulky headsets could dramatically reduce
in size, and I could achieve my dream of finally
becoming one with my iPhone. You know, in pop culture,
from the beginning, we've thought of VR as a means
to escape, or to play games, or to exist in
(07:09):
an alternate space, a dream pace, so to speak. Yeah,
and while a lot of people do use it for
gaming and entertainment, I was fascinated by what you said
about preparing people for experiences in the real world. You
mentioned that people often in clinical settings are using VR
to treat pain and trauma, and it's becoming a popular
training tool, you know, from soldiers to surgeons to airline pilots.
(07:32):
But there are limitations to the technology, both ergonomically and
with connectivity. Well, no one feels very cool or comfortable
wearing a bulky headset or being tethered to a massive
computer exactly. And it makes me think about what the
VR of tomorrow might look like. You know, I am
currently able to play ping pong against a terminator robot
(07:55):
without owning a ping pong table. I did it this weekend.
But that's not changing anybody's life. You know. Think about
a world where a car engineer can test build an
entire car without spending any money on parts. In this episode,
we're going to go back to Evelyn to learn about
how she developed the vir l Abbot NASA that helped
prepare these astronauts for life in space. And recently I
(08:17):
traveled to Philadelphia to learn more about a program that's
using virtual reality with an unexpected population. Juvenile lifers are
individuals who were sentenced to life in prison as juveniles,
meaning under the age of eighteen, which was actually deemed
unconstitutional in it's hard to believe it was that recent.
You know, juvenile offenders connote someone young, but it's actually
(08:40):
the opposite. It's someone who was sentenced to life in
prison when they were essentially a kid, and for some
it's been decades. So Pennsylvania was faced with this challenge.
How would they prepare people who had been in prison
for ten twenty plus years to live in the quote
real world. Before we get there, we'll talk to Jeff Marshall,
who has a virtual reality product that you and I
(09:01):
both tried, Kara, to help us practice our public speaking. So, Kara,
you and I are not astronauts. I am I went
to space camp. I'm an astronaut. That's true. Okay, well
I'll speak for myself. I'm not an astronaut, but together
we did use VR to prepare for a difficult assignment. Yeah.
(09:23):
We actually got asked to speak at Johns Hopkins University
about AI and medicine, and we were extremely nervous, to
say the least. So I had read about something called
Ovation in the New Yorker, which is a VR public
speaking tool, and so I did what anybody does when
they read about someone in the New Yorker. I called him,
this guy, Jeff Marshall, and I asked him to give
(09:44):
us a training. So it's completely nuts. I was wearing
this huge headset and holding two controllers in my hands,
and all of a sudden, I'm facing this unsmiling lecture
theater full of people who look somewhere between board and
outright hostile. And then you have to win these people over.
And sometimes they're on their phones, they're signed because they're
(10:05):
board scratching themselves. But that's how immersive it is. You know,
My pulse was elevated, palms were sweating, not as sweaty
as mine. But one of the cool things about the
product evation is that you get feedback afterwards. Did you
look too much at the less side of the room,
did you pause too much? We're using fillo words like
um and ah and ooh and so and right, and
(10:27):
I actually answered yes to all of those questions. So
when it came to actually delivering the speech, we had
this sense of deja vu. It was the same lecture hall,
they were the same faces, and I do think that
actually took some of the fear out of it. And
part of the mission of this show is to uncover
applications that businesses might build on top of five G
(10:49):
and VR for public speaking does seem like a natural
area to explore. So I've been thinking about VR for
five six years now and can't get it off my
brain that Jeff Marshall speaking the founder of ovation. I
wanted to know how he got started. I can remember
that first experience. It was called Titans of Space. You
(11:11):
are essentially guided through the Solar System from the Sun
to the outer planets. And what what blew my mind
the most about it is how you could just get
a sense of the scale of the Solar System, which
you simply can't get from a textbook. Around the same time,
I had taken a public speaking class at Arizona State
(11:35):
University as a way to get me past my incredible
fear of public speaking, the sort of exposure therapy, forced
exposure therapy to cure that, and I fell in love
with that class. I loved it. I loved the process
of preparing for a speech, and I loved delivering it.
And I was trying to think, how can I build
(11:58):
some sort of application in R that's useful? How can
I create something? And so the two just kind of
came together in my mind. Why don't NIGHT take VR
and this new found passion I have for public speaking,
combine them, see if there's something there. And that was
the beginning of ovation, which is now used by all
kinds of educators and businesses. Essentially everybody gives some sort
(12:22):
of public speech, whether it's to three people or three
thousand people, in every industry you can think of. And
we said, okay, well, why don't we make this software
generic enough to solve this lack of public speaking training
for everyone? So how does it actually work? You put
(12:42):
on the VR headset, you select a venue where you're
going to speak. The boardroom, UH, conference room, classroom, a courtroom,
So you select one of these and then you populate
it with an audience. These are real people who we hired,
brought into our studio and scan end them into three
D models. We then animate them to pull out a
(13:04):
cell phone, to cough, to look at their neighbor, to
scratch their leg, to do what an audience does. If
you want to project or behind you, a timer on
the wall, if you want a microphone in your hands,
all these are virtual objects. If you've used it in
a speech before, odds are we have a virtual version
of that. The goal is to make the experience as
(13:24):
true to life as possible, because the more real that
the virtual reality is, the better it can prepare you
full real reality. It's a phenomenon called presence. Presence is
this idea that for a moment, your subconscious really thinks
you're in that virtual world. Your real self is in there.
This idea of presence is probably the single most important
(13:50):
part of VR because it allows you to focus entirely
on what's going on inside that headset. You don't have
this actions outside of it. You sort of have all
of your faculties focused on this virtual world and whatever
the designer decided to show you. And it's amazing how
effective that can be. It's this presence that makes VA
(14:14):
a useful tool for everyone from people preparing to give
speeches to people preparing to go to the moon. But
significant barriers remain, particularly when it comes to mobile VA.
There are a number of limitations with VR right now
that I wish I could snap my fingers and get
rid of. So right now you need a very high
(14:34):
end sort of gaming PC to drive our experience, and
of course I would rather that not be the case.
It would be nice to just have a headset that
you put on and everything that you need to renovation
is in that headset. It's incredibly liberating to not have
(14:56):
to feel that cord running off your back, to know
that you can do a full three sixty without getting
tangled up. Ultimately, you just want a pair of glasses
that you wear that are no more uncomfortable than the
normal classes you were now. The problem right now is
that to render the most immersive VR experiences, we still
need the processing power of computers and bulky headsets, and
(15:19):
that's where five G could offer a solution. Remote rendering
of virtual reality software is extremely exciting. You flip the
headset on, you put it on your head, you launched
the application and everything just works. You don't need to
plug in any chords, you don't need to update any drivers,
(15:39):
you don't need to restart your computer because it isn't working.
And so one of the solutions to this problem is
edge computing, which is this idea of building many more
smaller data centers closer to highly populated areas and routing
the VR signals they're having a process there and sent
(16:01):
back to that use of directly. All of this could
make the experience of VIA more immersive and more widely
adopted to solve real world problems. When you move your
head in the real world, you never feel like there's
some sort of lag, like the world is catching up
to your head movement, and that needs to be the
case in VR as well. Five g offers this promise
(16:23):
that you'll have latency low enough that you can trick
the brain into thinking that in a VR headset, when
you move your head, that virtual world is going to
keep up, and that's extremely important for all sorts of
different applications in VR. Garrol what was so interesting about
(16:44):
the ovation experience was for me, you know, it's essentially
just a form of practice, not so dissimilar in principle
from practicing speech in front of the mirror. But when
you add this immersive element, it almost allowed my brain
to believe the situation was real, and I think that
in turn made the real situation less stressful and probably better. Well.
(17:09):
Many of us relate to a fear of public speaking.
For some people, just being in public is something they
need to prepare for. I wanted to learn more about
a program that offers training and support to those who
are preparing to be in public for the first time
in a long time, people who have spent much of
their adult lives in prison. I don't know if I
(17:32):
got About a year ago, I read a story written
by Nicole Lewis for the Marshall Project about juvenile lifers
in Pennsylvania's correction system who were using virtual reality to
prepare for their imminent release. I wanted to learn more,
so I went to meet Daniel McIntyre, who helped develop
(17:55):
the program. Everybody just called me Danny Mack. I'm the
director of the Bureau of Community to Corrections for the
Department of Corrections for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. If I
passed Daniel in the street, it would be easy to
guess that he worked for the Bureau of Corrections. He
looks like he's in charge. He has a serious handlebar mustache,
but within a few minutes of talking with him, it
was clear that his warmth and authenticity are contagious. Basically,
(18:18):
what I do is oversee all the state run operated
group homes, so people coming out of a state correctional
institution that do not have a home plan that we
want to successfully reintegrate and get them back into the
communities and get them working and doing positive things will
come to a center in the Supreme Court held that
(18:40):
it was unconstitutional to sentence a juvenile offender to mandatory
life without parole. In this decision was made retroactive, meaning
that a whole population of prisoners who thought they would
never be released were suddenly preparing for life on the outside.
Since that's occurred, we've had over two under juvenile life
(19:01):
is released back into the communities. It's a slow process
back in because if you can imagine going from an
institution for thirty or forty years then back into the
community as it is now with technology and everything that's
out there, it's overwhelming. Too many of them think about
that for a moment, thirty or forty years, that's longer
than I've been alive, Like you know, we had a
(19:22):
juvenile life. For that, we transported across the state and
stopped at a rest stop, and he couldn't figure out
how to wash his hands because the sensors so things
that we take for granted that you had no idea
how to do. So Secretary Wetzel holding all of his
administration and basically said, listen, what can we do. Do
we douce the stress and anxiety and increase their chances
(19:43):
for a successful re entry. And that's how this whole
program virtuality initially started. So I thought, what if we
videotaped in three sixty so we can show them the
center of the facility that they released two Virtually three
hundred and sixty degree video is import because it means
that wherever the user turns, there's something for them to see.
(20:05):
It creates the sense of presence that Oz mentioned earlier,
which is crucial because with v R, the more you
trick your brain into thinking what you're experiencing is real,
the more effective it can be as a training environment.
And they started out showing what the outside looked like.
The cars going by with the traffics like the people uh.
And then you came inside the facility in each location
(20:27):
kind of with the room would look like you know
where they're gonna be eating, the processing through the facility.
So is interesting when you talk to the juvenile life
is many of them like it's like deja vu, deja vu.
When people arrive at these community centers, they feel as
if they've already visited them, which in a way they have.
(20:48):
These community centers are crucial for recently released inmates. Daniel
told me about instances when former inmates were so uncomfortable
living on their own that they would ask to come
back for a few days. I met Daniel at one
of these centers for a monthly meet up for formerly
incarcerated juvenile lifers. I wanted to know what it was
really like for someone who had been incarcerated to use
(21:09):
VR to readjust to life on the outside. So I
talked to Dwight Whetstone. I couldn't believe how like everywhere
I turned my face on my head it was I
was seeing what was should be there. You know what
I actually ever seen in the room before. That's that's
(21:29):
I think that's ridiculous. He wasna. Dwighte was sentenced to
life in prison when he was sixteen for his involvement
in a fatal robbery. He was released about seven months
ago and the transition has been hard on him. No, no,
I just right, Like I said with an emotional I've
broke down in public like SIVI severn times this bus
(21:51):
out in tears. I needed to be out here and
met you know, like I don't feel so like Phillies
in my city and what I lost that relatione. After
speaking with Dwighte for a aisle, the thing that struck
me most was how unprepared he was for the outside world,
how overwhelming it was for him, having spent over twenty
years as an inmate. In that way, the VR headset
(22:12):
provided a bit of preparation for his impending release. I'm
seeing that video like like edged like it burned his
images into my head, so I knew exactly with how
to come through the process and you know all that
so um to see the building itself after the after that,
it was it was kind of comforting a little bit
say that, and then that video didn't prepare me for everything.
(22:35):
I was that as all you know I experienced, but
at least for the space it was, it was comfortable.
Actually coming in real life, those recently released from prison
face profound challenges, and if I learned anything it's that
it's a long adjustment process that can't be solved with
any quick fix. And no one I spoke to on
(22:57):
my visit claimed that virtual reality transfer warm the experience
into something easy or simple, but it is a resource.
Since the first rollout of this program in Pennsylvania, other
states such as Colorado and Florida have followed suit. Dan
is continuing the State of Pennsylvania's work on other applications
of the VR that help inmates experience life outside of
(23:19):
prison even before they get there. So what we do
is we asked them, because that's sometimes the best thing,
what would they like to see? And that's where we
got the idea of having just what it's like to
cross the street. That was a big concern. We didn't
realize he's even there. But you know, back when they
were thirty or four years ago, it wasn't as crazy
it is now. But to reduce the stress and anxiety
(23:41):
associated with this and doing it successfully re integrate them
back into the community, anything we can do to get
one more person successful and stay out from coming back
is we'll do anything we can get those outcomes. The
thing I kept coming back to and talking to both
Dan and White, is how unlikely it will us that
VR would play a role in Dwight's re entry. Someone
(24:04):
like Dwight encountered a technology that was like nothing he'd
ever seen in his life before prison. Here's Dan's perspective.
When I was exposed to virtuality, I realized the impact
it could have on the cost associated with training individuals
and transporting them to locations and trying to get everybody
to get the proper environment. When you can do that virtually,
(24:25):
are you kidding that? As such an amazing tool. So
that's what I want to get across to everybody is
at this isn't for entertainment purposes. This is for re
entry purposes. And there are applications of VR that go
beyond the practical. I remember one time I was at
SCI Muncie. It's a female prison, and while I was
there that one major said Hey, Danny Mack, and he says, well,
(24:47):
we have an eterminal ill inmate that she has about
maybe a couple of weeks left and he said, would
you be able to show her the beach. That's the
one she's never seen. So we showed her the ocean.
We had to sitting on the beach virtually. We took
her snore clean with the fish and stuff. And it
impacted me because you can just see how it's impacted her.
(25:09):
She had tears coming out from underneath the oculus and
he was rolling down her cheeks that she was just
so happy to see that. It was kind of like
the last wish she was granted, you know, as the
mental image of tears streaming down the oculus is so
striking to me because it is a unique blend of
(25:31):
humanity and technology, and it kind of underscores that there
is something special about VR when it's used in this way.
I think you and I are both very drawn to
these types of story about the interaction between technology and humanity,
more so than just a technology itself. But it's there's
no doubt about it. It's a it's a moving and
sad story to think about that woman dying in prison
(25:53):
never having seen the ocean. New technology like VR can't
solve any injustices, but at the very least it count
for prisoners a glimpse of the world. They literally have
no other way of seeing, and in the future that
glimpse could get more realistic and more powerful. The VR
that Dwight used to practice his first visits to the
community center was based, as you said on three sixty video.
(26:15):
That's not interactive and it doesn't have the same sense
of presence that a fully rendered world does. So well
NASA can afford to build that out for its astronauts.
It's much harder for correction systems, and in the world
of five g v are still won't be a solution,
but it can become a more powerful tool. Of course,
the idea of using technology to prepare people for situations
(26:36):
they haven't encountered is not actually new. In World War Two,
the U. S. Army created an instructional film for American
soldiers about how to behave in an English pub. Let's
go inside. Come on, Oh wait, before we go in,
(26:56):
let me tell you a little about an English pub. Now,
these pubs are open for a couple of hours in
the middle of the day and then again in the
early evening. And incidentally, the beer isn't cold in England,
so if you like beer, you better like it warm Yeah,
I mean sadly, no amount of instructional video can prepare
Americans for the horror of warm beer that greets them
(27:17):
on our gilded aisle. But it is interesting hearing that
to think about just how far interstructional video has traveled
from This was effectively a face too incredibly immersive worlds
that can prepare people for technical, difficult even life or
death situations like astronauts in space, but can it prepare
(27:41):
them for warm beer in space? Warm beer and freeze
drided food. The dream the future with five G is
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(28:02):
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(28:23):
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With these new technologies opening the doors for better ways
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at t Mobile for Business dot com that was working
(28:45):
on NASA as the chief principle engineer for the Virtual
Reality Lab for twenty seven years. Whenever Lyn first started
at NASA, astronauts trained for space using mechanical markups and
real world simulations built on the ground or underwater, but
they were inefficient and expensive, so Evelyn was given a
(29:07):
mission train astronauts in virtual reality. The problem was at
that time, neither the hardware nor the software will fit
for purpose. So Evelyn got to work. We were creating
the content before the hard work and the technology was here,
so we had that content. Now we needed to put
(29:27):
it in a way that it will be workable through
a graphic system that will have the capacity of processing
real time all these scenarios as we were showing it
the astronaut so that it becomes something that they can
immerse themselves. So Evelyn and her team at NASSA built
(29:47):
via headsets from scratch, using any useful components they could
lay their hands on. We modified, we modified, But we
made the biggest breakthrough was when the cell phones came out,
because at that point we knew that we have the
displaces that we were looking for to actually use to
this place for the vision and when that happened is
(30:11):
when we created the helmets helmet that was actually a
prototype of one of our engineers in his garage literally
and we build that design and put it to this
places and it came out wonderful. What struck me about
my conversation with Evelyn was how far she had to
look into the future at NASA. The mission involved planning
(30:34):
exactly what the astronauts would need to do so the
VR simulation could be created years before they went to space.
There is gonna be a mission happening where there's going
to be a spacewalk, so we needed to all know
what the mission when that was going to happen. We
needed to know that now a year ago, so we
can train the astronauts. And the only way to do
(30:56):
that is with graphics. The only way to do that
if you wanted now train somebody's immersed them in that
mission that is in the future, and thinking about the future,
I wanted to know evalenced thoughts on what role five
G might play in the VR of tomorrow. Looking at
HIGI and improving transmission, is that now we're going to
(31:18):
be able to do VR from very far away and
do it in a way that there is no latency
and that creates a more realistic momentum in a space,
if you will. For example, before I left NUSA, I
was creating a product with one of my coworkers that
will basically be following an astronaut through in a spacewalk.
(31:43):
Now is that real time and that transmission gets better
with FIG and the technology as we look in the future,
then we're gonna literally be following an astronaut or real
time using VR. But we need that fast transmission so
that there is no latency. Now Evidence is working just
down the road from NASA at the University of Houston
(32:04):
Clear Lake, where her new mission is to help transform education.
And Evidence made a career out of building towards the
adjacent possible, making use of the best today's technologies to
create tomorrow. And I was curious about what informed her
unique perspective. All my team members that have been long
enough with me there um and especially they were all men.
(32:27):
I had a different perspective based that I'm a woman
in that place. Incredible, when we're building something so complex,
you need to have the different perspective. I was born
in Venezuela, grew up there, but I moved when I
was about nineteen to the States. That allowed me to
see challenges differently than my team. So I was able
(32:51):
to guide them sometimes through some difficult times that we
have by being more proactive because I went through the
challenges so adapting to a different place, adapting to a
different language. I noticed on your LinkedIn you you have
Evelyn Morales n b A, not PhD, not NASA Scientists,
(33:12):
Masters in Business Administration. I mean, and I love that.
I love it because you know I mean, I mean,
I worked through computer science and I got my degrees
in that area, and then I had to learn a
lot of engineering airy, space, mechanical, electrical as I was
going through my different applications, integration of the hard work
with the software, etcetera, etcetera. But when I did my
(33:35):
NBA here at the University's Houston clear Lake, which I love,
it really opened for me the opportunity to see the
business side of it and how to communicate that, how
to communicate all these technical stuff in a way that
was more understandable for other people. If you have a
(33:55):
mission where people believe it, and you put different people
from the from back grounds together, you're going to get
something incredible. So it's about the leadership and how they
project that vision and that mission that has to be
bigger than anybody. Available now from my Heart a new
(34:17):
series presented by Tembile for business, The Restless Ones join
host Johnson Strickland as he explores the upcoming five year
revolution and the business leaders who stand right on the
cutting edge. There are certain decision makers who are restless.
They know there is a better way to get things done,
and they're ready, curious and excited for the next technological
(34:38):
innovation to unlock their vision of the future. These Restless
Ones are in pursuit of bigger, better, smarter, stronger. They
seek new partners, new strategies, new processes. They pursue innovative
platforms and solutions to propel their teams, businesses, and industries forward.
In each episode, will learn more from the Restless Ones
(34:59):
themselves and dive deep into how they think a five
year evolution could propel their business forward. The Restless Ones
is now available on the I Heart radio app or
wherever you listen to podcasts. So Kara, it's kind of
amazing to think how this one technology VR could link
together everything from us preparing to give a speech to
(35:21):
inmates preparing to leave prison, two astronauts preparing formissions in
space right and Actually, the Academy Award winning director Ali
Handrow and youri To created a VR exhibit that traveled
around the country, even to Washington, d C. It was
designed to help people feel the experience of being a
migrant trying to cross into the United States and to
(35:41):
create empathy for them. But in making that piece in
youri to acknowledge the limitations of the medium. In his case,
he built out a ticketed experience. But wouldn't it be
amazing if that journey was something everyone could experience completely.
I mean, we do have consumer VR headset today, But
the reality is, when we wanted to try out Jeff
ma Shaw's program Ovation, we called him. He came to
(36:03):
our studio here at I Heeart. We plugged into his
powerful computer and we wore a super bulky headset. But
it's not exactly accessible. And something five g M mind
enable is more accessible virtual reality experiences because the mobile
headsets could have high quality graphics at the same time
as being more comfortable and portable. What if elderly people
(36:23):
could access it? What if people feeling depressed could easily
access it. Is it even something that could be prescribed
absolutely And like we saw with both Evelyn and Jeff,
the future applications in business are at the forefront. In
more rural areas, five G connectivity could help a farmer
use virtual reality to operate heavy machinery remotely. Also, with
(36:45):
the future of five G connectivity, a doctor will be
able to put on a headset to operate on a
live person while being able to overlay that person's m
r I or CT scan. Surgery could actually be way
more precise. These are all opportunities for five G to
improve what already exists, and we'll explore these speculative futures
in the coming episodes. On the next episode of This
(37:10):
Time Tomorrow, we'll talk to first responders about the new
technologies value using to fight fires Today. Anton Nicole Raimundo,
chief Information Officer of Carrie, North Carolina, about building the
cities of tomorrow. I'm mazveloshin see you next time, no
(37:35):
matter what you're after. T Mobile for Business is here
with a network born mobile and built from the ground
up for the next wave of innovation, from mobile broadband
to IoT to workforce mobility and everything in between. T
Mobile for Business is committed to helping you move your
business forward with the products and services you need, as
well as the dedicated, award winning customer service you'd expect
(37:58):
from America's most loved wireless company. Business is changing. Learn
more at t Mobile for Business dot com.
In our first episode, we began with a foundational exploration
of what exactly five G is and how will be
framing our thoughts on the future of connectivity. We spoke
with Andrea Goldsmith, Professor of Engineering at Stanford University, Flynn Coleman,
author of a Human Algorithm, and Durga Maladi, senior Vice
president of four G and five G at Qualcom. Maybe
(00:33):
it seems obvious, but business is changing and much of
that change from digital transformation to workplace innovation is driven
by critical advancements in mobility. Platforms like virtual reality will
eventually become solutions for how to get business done. Thanks
for support from Teamobile for Business. We're here to explore
how five G will enable future innovations in virtual and
(00:55):
augmented reality that can advance our future. Yeah. You can
get very easily lost in a space because you don't
know what it's opened down. The only reference you have
is the Earth and the space station. That's Evelyn Mirales.
(01:19):
She's describing the feeling of leaving the International Space Station
to complete a mission in zero gravity, when the dark
comes and the light to start fading, the darkest, so
dark that you can touch it when you get out
of the airlock and you're just coming out and you're
holding you know, your hand with the handrail, and that's
(01:41):
the only point you have the connection with the real world,
and then everything else is like, oh my god, you
can just just fly away from Evelyn ran Virtual Reality
at NASA. One of her missions was to be an
identical copy of the space station where astronauts could train
(02:04):
before going there themselves. They call used from space and say, hey,
I want to tell you, this looks just like the
vir Lab. And it was their feeling that they knew
more of what they were in relation to the vehicle
by doing it virtually first, so every time they did
(02:25):
it for real, they will compare it in their minds
with the synthetic world they already saw. And did you
ever try your own mission? I mean, did you go
to space in the headset? Yes? Yeah, you know. People
ask me that, well, don't you want to be an
astrona and said, well, I've been an astronaut virtually many times,
so yes, I've done it. And what did you feel
(02:47):
like when the astronauts called you from space saying that
what they were seeing resembled exactly the world that you
had built. It's an incredible feeling is an accomplishment. And
you know what, we say, okay, great, next because we
have so many missus to cover that that it was like, okay, great, wonderful,
let's do the next one. You know, that sense of
(03:09):
mission and of using VR for a concrete, real world
objective is crucial to understanding how far reaching this technology
could be. But it also allows us to dream. This
is something that I always dream about and I always
wanted to go to the Moon. My dream will be
(03:31):
that as the technology is better with Fiji and beyond
in the future, is to actually transmit what the astronauts
are looking through the helmets, and they will be following
an astronauts as they step into the surface of the moon.
So imagine what it will be. I mean, just think
(03:53):
of it for a minute. I mean, everybody around the
world can follow these people bound seen in the more
will will be there with it. Virtual reality has left
the realm of science fiction. For a few hundred dollars,
you can buy a VR headset and use it to
play immersive games or experience new kinds of art in
(04:13):
virtual worlds. But the technology goes so far beyond entertainment.
Not only does NASA use it to train astronauts, but
around the world it's helping people learn new skills, cope
with trauma, and even reduce physical pain. So can creater
connectivity and lower latency technological advances we expect will arrive
(04:34):
with the implementation of five G unleash new possibility. A
few decades ago, just a handful of people could imagine
using VR to train astronauts for space. So if we
look a few decades ahead, what role could be our
play in our future? In this episode, we'll explore how
(04:55):
virtual reality is being used to help people prepare for
the real world, not escape it, and at how advances
in connectivity and wireless technology promised by five G could
make virtual reality even more immersive and even more powerful
by increasing the user's sense of presence in the virtual world.
I'm mos Velocian and this is This Time Tomorrow, a
(05:18):
podcast about how advances in connectivity could change the way
we live. Karen Evidence is a computer scientist who built
a VR system starting in the early nineties. To most people,
that would have been a complete pipe dream, but she
was doing something to solve a very practical problem, which
(05:39):
was how do you train astronauts to go to space
when they're still on Earth. You don't tell them about
freeze dried food, because if you do, they won't go.
I think that the first time VR was introduced in
science fiction within a series of short stories from ninety
three by Lawrence Manning called The Man Who Awoke? Have
you been doing, homeworker? I've done this for a while okay.
(06:03):
In the series, proto VR was described as dream dramas
were in the main character encounters matrix like dream palaces,
where the dramas being projected to the sleeping were more
desirable than awaking state. Well, I didn't know that the
dreams of VR when that far back, but at least
for the last ten years people have been excited about
(06:25):
it becoming a widely adopted technology. So I was struck
in the last episode when Durga Malady of Calcom told
us that VR is actually one area that five G
is poised to transform. And this, according to Dager, is
for two reasons. Number one, lower latency can make the
experience feel way more realistic and number two, higher bandwidth
(06:47):
means that the computing can take place locally on small cells,
and that means that the bulky headsets could dramatically reduce
in size, and I could achieve my dream of finally
becoming one with my iPhone. You know, in pop culture,
from the beginning, we've thought of VR as a means
to escape, or to play games, or to exist in
(07:09):
an alternate space, a dream pace, so to speak. Yeah,
and while a lot of people do use it for
gaming and entertainment, I was fascinated by what you said
about preparing people for experiences in the real world. You
mentioned that people often in clinical settings are using VR
to treat pain and trauma, and it's becoming a popular
training tool, you know, from soldiers to surgeons to airline pilots.
(07:32):
But there are limitations to the technology, both ergonomically and
with connectivity. Well, no one feels very cool or comfortable
wearing a bulky headset or being tethered to a massive
computer exactly. And it makes me think about what the
VR of tomorrow might look like. You know, I am
currently able to play ping pong against a terminator robot
(07:55):
without owning a ping pong table. I did it this weekend.
But that's not changing anybody's life. You know. Think about
a world where a car engineer can test build an
entire car without spending any money on parts. In this episode,
we're going to go back to Evelyn to learn about
how she developed the vir l Abbot NASA that helped
prepare these astronauts for life in space. And recently I
(08:17):
traveled to Philadelphia to learn more about a program that's
using virtual reality with an unexpected population. Juvenile lifers are
individuals who were sentenced to life in prison as juveniles,
meaning under the age of eighteen, which was actually deemed
unconstitutional in it's hard to believe it was that recent.
You know, juvenile offenders connote someone young, but it's actually
(08:40):
the opposite. It's someone who was sentenced to life in
prison when they were essentially a kid, and for some
it's been decades. So Pennsylvania was faced with this challenge.
How would they prepare people who had been in prison
for ten twenty plus years to live in the quote
real world. Before we get there, we'll talk to Jeff Marshall,
who has a virtual reality product that you and I
(09:01):
both tried, Kara, to help us practice our public speaking. So, Kara,
you and I are not astronauts. I am I went
to space camp. I'm an astronaut. That's true. Okay, well
I'll speak for myself. I'm not an astronaut, but together
we did use VR to prepare for a difficult assignment. Yeah.
(09:23):
We actually got asked to speak at Johns Hopkins University
about AI and medicine, and we were extremely nervous, to
say the least. So I had read about something called
Ovation in the New Yorker, which is a VR public
speaking tool, and so I did what anybody does when
they read about someone in the New Yorker. I called him,
this guy, Jeff Marshall, and I asked him to give
(09:44):
us a training. So it's completely nuts. I was wearing
this huge headset and holding two controllers in my hands,
and all of a sudden, I'm facing this unsmiling lecture
theater full of people who look somewhere between board and
outright hostile. And then you have to win these people over.
And sometimes they're on their phones, they're signed because they're
(10:05):
board scratching themselves. But that's how immersive it is. You know,
My pulse was elevated, palms were sweating, not as sweaty
as mine. But one of the cool things about the
product evation is that you get feedback afterwards. Did you
look too much at the less side of the room,
did you pause too much? We're using fillo words like
um and ah and ooh and so and right, and
(10:27):
I actually answered yes to all of those questions. So
when it came to actually delivering the speech, we had
this sense of deja vu. It was the same lecture hall,
they were the same faces, and I do think that
actually took some of the fear out of it. And
part of the mission of this show is to uncover
applications that businesses might build on top of five G
(10:49):
and VR for public speaking does seem like a natural
area to explore. So I've been thinking about VR for
five six years now and can't get it off my
brain that Jeff Marshall speaking the founder of ovation. I
wanted to know how he got started. I can remember
that first experience. It was called Titans of Space. You
(11:11):
are essentially guided through the Solar System from the Sun
to the outer planets. And what what blew my mind
the most about it is how you could just get
a sense of the scale of the Solar System, which
you simply can't get from a textbook. Around the same time,
I had taken a public speaking class at Arizona State
(11:35):
University as a way to get me past my incredible
fear of public speaking, the sort of exposure therapy, forced
exposure therapy to cure that, and I fell in love
with that class. I loved it. I loved the process
of preparing for a speech, and I loved delivering it.
And I was trying to think, how can I build
(11:58):
some sort of application in R that's useful? How can
I create something? And so the two just kind of
came together in my mind. Why don't NIGHT take VR
and this new found passion I have for public speaking,
combine them, see if there's something there. And that was
the beginning of ovation, which is now used by all
kinds of educators and businesses. Essentially everybody gives some sort
(12:22):
of public speech, whether it's to three people or three
thousand people, in every industry you can think of. And
we said, okay, well, why don't we make this software
generic enough to solve this lack of public speaking training
for everyone? So how does it actually work? You put
(12:42):
on the VR headset, you select a venue where you're
going to speak. The boardroom, UH, conference room, classroom, a courtroom,
So you select one of these and then you populate
it with an audience. These are real people who we hired,
brought into our studio and scan end them into three
D models. We then animate them to pull out a
(13:04):
cell phone, to cough, to look at their neighbor, to
scratch their leg, to do what an audience does. If
you want to project or behind you, a timer on
the wall, if you want a microphone in your hands,
all these are virtual objects. If you've used it in
a speech before, odds are we have a virtual version
of that. The goal is to make the experience as
(13:24):
true to life as possible, because the more real that
the virtual reality is, the better it can prepare you
full real reality. It's a phenomenon called presence. Presence is
this idea that for a moment, your subconscious really thinks
you're in that virtual world. Your real self is in there.
This idea of presence is probably the single most important
(13:50):
part of VR because it allows you to focus entirely
on what's going on inside that headset. You don't have
this actions outside of it. You sort of have all
of your faculties focused on this virtual world and whatever
the designer decided to show you. And it's amazing how
effective that can be. It's this presence that makes VA
(14:14):
a useful tool for everyone from people preparing to give
speeches to people preparing to go to the moon. But
significant barriers remain, particularly when it comes to mobile VA.
There are a number of limitations with VR right now
that I wish I could snap my fingers and get
rid of. So right now you need a very high
(14:34):
end sort of gaming PC to drive our experience, and
of course I would rather that not be the case.
It would be nice to just have a headset that
you put on and everything that you need to renovation
is in that headset. It's incredibly liberating to not have
(14:56):
to feel that cord running off your back, to know
that you can do a full three sixty without getting
tangled up. Ultimately, you just want a pair of glasses
that you wear that are no more uncomfortable than the
normal classes you were now. The problem right now is
that to render the most immersive VR experiences, we still
need the processing power of computers and bulky headsets, and
(15:19):
that's where five G could offer a solution. Remote rendering
of virtual reality software is extremely exciting. You flip the
headset on, you put it on your head, you launched
the application and everything just works. You don't need to
plug in any chords, you don't need to update any drivers,
(15:39):
you don't need to restart your computer because it isn't working.
And so one of the solutions to this problem is
edge computing, which is this idea of building many more
smaller data centers closer to highly populated areas and routing
the VR signals they're having a process there and sent
(16:01):
back to that use of directly. All of this could
make the experience of VIA more immersive and more widely
adopted to solve real world problems. When you move your
head in the real world, you never feel like there's
some sort of lag, like the world is catching up
to your head movement, and that needs to be the
case in VR as well. Five g offers this promise
(16:23):
that you'll have latency low enough that you can trick
the brain into thinking that in a VR headset, when
you move your head, that virtual world is going to
keep up, and that's extremely important for all sorts of
different applications in VR. Garrol what was so interesting about
(16:44):
the ovation experience was for me, you know, it's essentially
just a form of practice, not so dissimilar in principle
from practicing speech in front of the mirror. But when
you add this immersive element, it almost allowed my brain
to believe the situation was real, and I think that
in turn made the real situation less stressful and probably better. Well.
(17:09):
Many of us relate to a fear of public speaking.
For some people, just being in public is something they
need to prepare for. I wanted to learn more about
a program that offers training and support to those who
are preparing to be in public for the first time
in a long time, people who have spent much of
their adult lives in prison. I don't know if I
(17:32):
got About a year ago, I read a story written
by Nicole Lewis for the Marshall Project about juvenile lifers
in Pennsylvania's correction system who were using virtual reality to
prepare for their imminent release. I wanted to learn more,
so I went to meet Daniel McIntyre, who helped develop
(17:55):
the program. Everybody just called me Danny Mack. I'm the
director of the Bureau of Community to Corrections for the
Department of Corrections for the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. If I
passed Daniel in the street, it would be easy to
guess that he worked for the Bureau of Corrections. He
looks like he's in charge. He has a serious handlebar mustache,
but within a few minutes of talking with him, it
was clear that his warmth and authenticity are contagious. Basically,
(18:18):
what I do is oversee all the state run operated
group homes, so people coming out of a state correctional
institution that do not have a home plan that we
want to successfully reintegrate and get them back into the
communities and get them working and doing positive things will
come to a center in the Supreme Court held that
(18:40):
it was unconstitutional to sentence a juvenile offender to mandatory
life without parole. In this decision was made retroactive, meaning
that a whole population of prisoners who thought they would
never be released were suddenly preparing for life on the outside.
Since that's occurred, we've had over two under juvenile life
(19:01):
is released back into the communities. It's a slow process
back in because if you can imagine going from an
institution for thirty or forty years then back into the
community as it is now with technology and everything that's
out there, it's overwhelming. Too many of them think about
that for a moment, thirty or forty years, that's longer
than I've been alive, Like you know, we had a
(19:22):
juvenile life. For that, we transported across the state and
stopped at a rest stop, and he couldn't figure out
how to wash his hands because the sensors so things
that we take for granted that you had no idea
how to do. So Secretary Wetzel holding all of his
administration and basically said, listen, what can we do. Do
we douce the stress and anxiety and increase their chances
(19:43):
for a successful re entry. And that's how this whole
program virtuality initially started. So I thought, what if we
videotaped in three sixty so we can show them the
center of the facility that they released two Virtually three
hundred and sixty degree video is import because it means
that wherever the user turns, there's something for them to see.
(20:05):
It creates the sense of presence that Oz mentioned earlier,
which is crucial because with v R, the more you
trick your brain into thinking what you're experiencing is real,
the more effective it can be as a training environment.
And they started out showing what the outside looked like.
The cars going by with the traffics like the people uh.
And then you came inside the facility in each location
(20:27):
kind of with the room would look like you know
where they're gonna be eating, the processing through the facility.
So is interesting when you talk to the juvenile life
is many of them like it's like deja vu, deja vu.
When people arrive at these community centers, they feel as
if they've already visited them, which in a way they have.
(20:48):
These community centers are crucial for recently released inmates. Daniel
told me about instances when former inmates were so uncomfortable
living on their own that they would ask to come
back for a few days. I met Daniel at one
of these centers for a monthly meet up for formerly
incarcerated juvenile lifers. I wanted to know what it was
really like for someone who had been incarcerated to use
(21:09):
VR to readjust to life on the outside. So I
talked to Dwight Whetstone. I couldn't believe how like everywhere
I turned my face on my head it was I
was seeing what was should be there. You know what
I actually ever seen in the room before. That's that's
(21:29):
I think that's ridiculous. He wasna. Dwighte was sentenced to
life in prison when he was sixteen for his involvement
in a fatal robbery. He was released about seven months
ago and the transition has been hard on him. No, no,
I just right, Like I said with an emotional I've
broke down in public like SIVI severn times this bus
(21:51):
out in tears. I needed to be out here and
met you know, like I don't feel so like Phillies
in my city and what I lost that relatione. After
speaking with Dwighte for a aisle, the thing that struck
me most was how unprepared he was for the outside world,
how overwhelming it was for him, having spent over twenty
years as an inmate. In that way, the VR headset
(22:12):
provided a bit of preparation for his impending release. I'm
seeing that video like like edged like it burned his
images into my head, so I knew exactly with how
to come through the process and you know all that
so um to see the building itself after the after that,
it was it was kind of comforting a little bit
say that, and then that video didn't prepare me for everything.
(22:35):
I was that as all you know I experienced, but
at least for the space it was, it was comfortable.
Actually coming in real life, those recently released from prison
face profound challenges, and if I learned anything it's that
it's a long adjustment process that can't be solved with
any quick fix. And no one I spoke to on
(22:57):
my visit claimed that virtual reality transfer warm the experience
into something easy or simple, but it is a resource.
Since the first rollout of this program in Pennsylvania, other
states such as Colorado and Florida have followed suit. Dan
is continuing the State of Pennsylvania's work on other applications
of the VR that help inmates experience life outside of
(23:19):
prison even before they get there. So what we do
is we asked them, because that's sometimes the best thing,
what would they like to see? And that's where we
got the idea of having just what it's like to
cross the street. That was a big concern. We didn't
realize he's even there. But you know, back when they
were thirty or four years ago, it wasn't as crazy
it is now. But to reduce the stress and anxiety
(23:41):
associated with this and doing it successfully re integrate them
back into the community, anything we can do to get
one more person successful and stay out from coming back
is we'll do anything we can get those outcomes. The
thing I kept coming back to and talking to both
Dan and White, is how unlikely it will us that
VR would play a role in Dwight's re entry. Someone
(24:04):
like Dwight encountered a technology that was like nothing he'd
ever seen in his life before prison. Here's Dan's perspective.
When I was exposed to virtuality, I realized the impact
it could have on the cost associated with training individuals
and transporting them to locations and trying to get everybody
to get the proper environment. When you can do that virtually,
(24:25):
are you kidding that? As such an amazing tool. So
that's what I want to get across to everybody is
at this isn't for entertainment purposes. This is for re
entry purposes. And there are applications of VR that go
beyond the practical. I remember one time I was at
SCI Muncie. It's a female prison, and while I was
there that one major said Hey, Danny Mack, and he says, well,
(24:47):
we have an eterminal ill inmate that she has about
maybe a couple of weeks left and he said, would
you be able to show her the beach. That's the
one she's never seen. So we showed her the ocean.
We had to sitting on the beach virtually. We took
her snore clean with the fish and stuff. And it
impacted me because you can just see how it's impacted her.
(25:09):
She had tears coming out from underneath the oculus and
he was rolling down her cheeks that she was just
so happy to see that. It was kind of like
the last wish she was granted, you know, as the
mental image of tears streaming down the oculus is so
striking to me because it is a unique blend of
(25:31):
humanity and technology, and it kind of underscores that there
is something special about VR when it's used in this way.
I think you and I are both very drawn to
these types of story about the interaction between technology and humanity,
more so than just a technology itself. But it's there's
no doubt about it. It's a it's a moving and
sad story to think about that woman dying in prison
(25:53):
never having seen the ocean. New technology like VR can't
solve any injustices, but at the very least it count
for prisoners a glimpse of the world. They literally have
no other way of seeing, and in the future that
glimpse could get more realistic and more powerful. The VR
that Dwight used to practice his first visits to the
community center was based, as you said on three sixty video.
(26:15):
That's not interactive and it doesn't have the same sense
of presence that a fully rendered world does. So well
NASA can afford to build that out for its astronauts.
It's much harder for correction systems, and in the world
of five g v are still won't be a solution,
but it can become a more powerful tool. Of course,
the idea of using technology to prepare people for situations
(26:36):
they haven't encountered is not actually new. In World War Two,
the U. S. Army created an instructional film for American
soldiers about how to behave in an English pub. Let's
go inside. Come on, Oh wait, before we go in,
(26:56):
let me tell you a little about an English pub. Now,
these pubs are open for a couple of hours in
the middle of the day and then again in the
early evening. And incidentally, the beer isn't cold in England,
so if you like beer, you better like it warm Yeah,
I mean sadly, no amount of instructional video can prepare
Americans for the horror of warm beer that greets them
(27:17):
on our gilded aisle. But it is interesting hearing that
to think about just how far interstructional video has traveled
from This was effectively a face too incredibly immersive worlds
that can prepare people for technical, difficult even life or
death situations like astronauts in space, but can it prepare
(27:41):
them for warm beer in space? Warm beer and freeze
drided food. The dream the future with five G is
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at t Mobile for Business dot com that was working
(28:45):
on NASA as the chief principle engineer for the Virtual
Reality Lab for twenty seven years. Whenever Lyn first started
at NASA, astronauts trained for space using mechanical markups and
real world simulations built on the ground or underwater, but
they were inefficient and expensive, so Evelyn was given a
(29:07):
mission train astronauts in virtual reality. The problem was at
that time, neither the hardware nor the software will fit
for purpose. So Evelyn got to work. We were creating
the content before the hard work and the technology was here,
so we had that content. Now we needed to put
(29:27):
it in a way that it will be workable through
a graphic system that will have the capacity of processing
real time all these scenarios as we were showing it
the astronaut so that it becomes something that they can
immerse themselves. So Evelyn and her team at NASSA built
(29:47):
via headsets from scratch, using any useful components they could
lay their hands on. We modified, we modified, But we
made the biggest breakthrough was when the cell phones came out,
because at that point we knew that we have the
displaces that we were looking for to actually use to
this place for the vision and when that happened is
(30:11):
when we created the helmets helmet that was actually a
prototype of one of our engineers in his garage literally
and we build that design and put it to this
places and it came out wonderful. What struck me about
my conversation with Evelyn was how far she had to
look into the future at NASA. The mission involved planning
(30:34):
exactly what the astronauts would need to do so the
VR simulation could be created years before they went to space.
There is gonna be a mission happening where there's going
to be a spacewalk, so we needed to all know
what the mission when that was going to happen. We
needed to know that now a year ago, so we
can train the astronauts. And the only way to do
(30:56):
that is with graphics. The only way to do that
if you wanted now train somebody's immersed them in that
mission that is in the future, and thinking about the future,
I wanted to know evalenced thoughts on what role five
G might play in the VR of tomorrow. Looking at
HIGI and improving transmission, is that now we're going to
(31:18):
be able to do VR from very far away and
do it in a way that there is no latency
and that creates a more realistic momentum in a space,
if you will. For example, before I left NUSA, I
was creating a product with one of my coworkers that
will basically be following an astronaut through in a spacewalk.
(31:43):
Now is that real time and that transmission gets better
with FIG and the technology as we look in the future,
then we're gonna literally be following an astronaut or real
time using VR. But we need that fast transmission so
that there is no latency. Now Evidence is working just
down the road from NASA at the University of Houston
(32:04):
Clear Lake, where her new mission is to help transform education.
And Evidence made a career out of building towards the
adjacent possible, making use of the best today's technologies to
create tomorrow. And I was curious about what informed her
unique perspective. All my team members that have been long
enough with me there um and especially they were all men.
(32:27):
I had a different perspective based that I'm a woman
in that place. Incredible, when we're building something so complex,
you need to have the different perspective. I was born
in Venezuela, grew up there, but I moved when I
was about nineteen to the States. That allowed me to
see challenges differently than my team. So I was able
(32:51):
to guide them sometimes through some difficult times that we
have by being more proactive because I went through the
challenges so adapting to a different place, adapting to a
different language. I noticed on your LinkedIn you you have
Evelyn Morales n b A, not PhD, not NASA Scientists,
(33:12):
Masters in Business Administration. I mean, and I love that.
I love it because you know I mean, I mean,
I worked through computer science and I got my degrees
in that area, and then I had to learn a
lot of engineering airy, space, mechanical, electrical as I was
going through my different applications, integration of the hard work
with the software, etcetera, etcetera. But when I did my
(33:35):
NBA here at the University's Houston clear Lake, which I love,
it really opened for me the opportunity to see the
business side of it and how to communicate that, how
to communicate all these technical stuff in a way that
was more understandable for other people. If you have a
(33:55):
mission where people believe it, and you put different people
from the from back grounds together, you're going to get
something incredible. So it's about the leadership and how they
project that vision and that mission that has to be
bigger than anybody. Available now from my Heart a new
(34:17):
series presented by Tembile for business, The Restless Ones join
host Johnson Strickland as he explores the upcoming five year
revolution and the business leaders who stand right on the
cutting edge. There are certain decision makers who are restless.
They know there is a better way to get things done,
and they're ready, curious and excited for the next technological
(34:38):
innovation to unlock their vision of the future. These Restless
Ones are in pursuit of bigger, better, smarter, stronger. They
seek new partners, new strategies, new processes. They pursue innovative
platforms and solutions to propel their teams, businesses, and industries forward.
In each episode, will learn more from the Restless Ones
(34:59):
themselves and dive deep into how they think a five
year evolution could propel their business forward. The Restless Ones
is now available on the I Heart radio app or
wherever you listen to podcasts. So Kara, it's kind of
amazing to think how this one technology VR could link
together everything from us preparing to give a speech to
(35:21):
inmates preparing to leave prison, two astronauts preparing formissions in
space right and Actually, the Academy Award winning director Ali
Handrow and youri To created a VR exhibit that traveled
around the country, even to Washington, d C. It was
designed to help people feel the experience of being a
migrant trying to cross into the United States and to
(35:41):
create empathy for them. But in making that piece in
youri to acknowledge the limitations of the medium. In his case,
he built out a ticketed experience. But wouldn't it be
amazing if that journey was something everyone could experience completely.
I mean, we do have consumer VR headset today, But
the reality is, when we wanted to try out Jeff
ma Shaw's program Ovation, we called him. He came to
(36:03):
our studio here at I Heeart. We plugged into his
powerful computer and we wore a super bulky headset. But
it's not exactly accessible. And something five g M mind
enable is more accessible virtual reality experiences because the mobile
headsets could have high quality graphics at the same time
as being more comfortable and portable. What if elderly people
(36:23):
could access it? What if people feeling depressed could easily
access it. Is it even something that could be prescribed
absolutely And like we saw with both Evelyn and Jeff,
the future applications in business are at the forefront. In
more rural areas, five G connectivity could help a farmer
use virtual reality to operate heavy machinery remotely. Also, with
(36:45):
the future of five G connectivity, a doctor will be
able to put on a headset to operate on a
live person while being able to overlay that person's m
r I or CT scan. Surgery could actually be way
more precise. These are all opportunities for five G to
improve what already exists, and we'll explore these speculative futures
in the coming episodes. On the next episode of This
(37:10):
Time Tomorrow, we'll talk to first responders about the new
technologies value using to fight fires Today. Anton Nicole Raimundo,
chief Information Officer of Carrie, North Carolina, about building the
cities of tomorrow. I'm mazveloshin see you next time, no
(37:35):
matter what you're after. T Mobile for Business is here
with a network born mobile and built from the ground
up for the next wave of innovation, from mobile broadband
to IoT to workforce mobility and everything in between. T
Mobile for Business is committed to helping you move your
business forward with the products and services you need, as
well as the dedicated, award winning customer service you'd expect
(37:58):
from America's most loved wireless company. Business is changing. Learn
more at t Mobile for Business dot com.
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