Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 3:14
In Swell We Meet: A Series of Conversations with Fellow Swellcaster Friends - Alex Harvey
So I am going to strike up a conversation with Alex to understand how he co founded river, which stands reality in virtual reality. Rivr. Basically, it's saying, okay, we've got these great technologies out there. How can we make them be game changers for industries that really make a difference in our lives? First I'll post you just go to his Swellcast with his username, which is going to be posted here
Alex Harvey
@Alextench · 1:59
So I was thinking about the real estate that you could use, and ideally, I think I can go for a longer image with six internal images that would probably grab more attention. But I love your image as well. You screenshot in an image that is quite an old virtual reality scene, but it just shows a teleporting and shows a little steam icon. So it shows it's a virtual reality thing. And also then that you've got a hashtag
Alex Harvey
@Alextench · 4:23
The Fidelity of these games are just stunning. This in, like, 2013 14. And then I left and we started doing VR and all the VR I was playing was like cartoons. It's like playing the Simpsons games in VR. And I'm like, Hang on. We've just spent ages getting really good photo realistic graphics. And now we're all going back to Simpsons World. So yeah, I wanted to make something good with the fact that we can now do photogrammetry inside VR
Alex Harvey
@Alextench · 4:25
So it's a big order for us subsequently done bigger orders, which is great. But at the time, two years ago, two or three years ago, yeah, 20 boxes was a big thing for delivering it down into London. And we shot the video content because we're a production studio as well. We've got a full team of five people that would go out and shoot a 360 production that meets all their training needs
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:56
Wow. This is really interesting. This is why I love hearing about the growth of a company and ultimately inspiring others to see journeys because you went from cars to cruise ships to the travel industry. And then in that big jump, when you had that gig to help the bus drivers, you mentioned something about that experience around empathy. And I want to kind of drop into that for a second because when you drop people into environments that are 360 where they're immersed
Alex Harvey
@Alextench · 5:00
But once the blue Light services saw that we were doing 360 video, I was like, this is only halfway. This is only half of the VR story. The other half is six degrees of freedom where you can actually move around in the scene, pick things up, interact with objects and more detail in there. So they didn't really know what I meant. So I said, Look, I'll go away and come back with a demo
Alex Harvey
@Alextench · 5:00
It was to do with an initiative that was called Destination Zero. By a certain date and time, there will be a certain amount of less deaths on London roads from buses. And it was all about 30% VR and 70% classroom learning over like a two day course, a little bit of VR on each day, but never replacing it, just adding it as a talking point
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:26
It's really exciting, because if you follow any trajectory of any content innovation, the market gets flooded after a while, but this is very customized. So really interested to see what your perspective is on the industry as in terms of its scale and ability to help all kinds of verticals who might not think that they're worthy of this kind of immersive content