Welcome to Revinsight, the podcast that helps you understand how organizations and individuals adopt, utilize, and track VR results.
Episode #1 – October 18th, 2023
Guest: Dave Beck, founder of Foundry45 (USA)
Maxime Ros:
– Today, I’m glad to receive Dave Beck, founder of Foundry45 based in Atlanta, working now with Axon.
– I wanted Dave to be the very first as he is the one who inspired this format.
– Hey, Dave, how and why did you first turn to VR in your professional environments?
Dave Beck:
– Hey, Maxime. Thanks so much for having me on. I’m really excited to be a part of this program.
– I have actually been working in immersive technology since 2011, and spent the first several years doing Augmented Reality, and just really got into that as a Gee-Whiz way of getting people to download an app.
– That quickly morphed into training experiences where you could hold up a phone over a piece of industrial equipment and it would say, “Here’s where you wrench on it”, “Here’s how you change the filter”, stuff like that.
– But we quickly realized that this wasn’t a great interface for doing that. No one was going to wrench on an oil rig and get all greasy and then pick up an iPad. One of my partners back in 2015 actually bought an early Developers Edition VR headset called a Samsung Gear VR.
– The way that worked was you had an Android phone that you would strap into the headset, and then that’s how you get VR. You could actually use the camera on it as a pass-through. We wanted to try and do hands-free augmented reality. That was at least the actual idea, like a HoloLens or a Magic Leap, but five years before that.
– Unfortunately, that did not work at all. It was super laggy, which made it nauseating, but wow, VR was cool.
– That is really how we actually got into it and never looked back.
