Product Startup Podcast Episode 090: Use AR and VR to Disrupt a Market

00:00:00 Kevin Mako: Hello, product innovators. Today we learn from an ARVR veteran on what's happening in the industry today and how it applies to hardware development.

00:00:10 Narrator: You're listening to the Product Startup Podcast, the show that helps bring your product idea to life by chatting with successful inventors, product developers,

00:00:22 Narrator: manufacturers, and hardware industry professionals. Our goal here is to get to the bottom of what makes a product successful, from initial idea to getting your product on store shelves. We're taking you step by step.

00:00:33 Narrator: to build a functional product and scale your product business. Hosted by Kevin Mako, one of North America's leading experts on hardware development for small product businesses. Now, onto the show.

00:00:46 Kevin Mako: Welcome back, everyone. Today, I'm excited to introduce Luke Levine to the show. Luke got into augmented reality and virtual reality back in 2014. He was an early adopter to build both hardware and software to disrupt the real estate industry through those technologies.

00:01:01 Kevin Mako: Today, he is the vice president at XR Applied Technologies, a leader in VR and AR integration.

00:01:07 Kevin Mako: Today, Luke is going to share some valuable knowledge in how inventors, startups, and small manufacturers can think about integrating air and VR and how they can educate and sell new technologies in immersion markets in general.

00:01:17 Kevin Mako: Many of these lessons are relevant for any type of product that is new or disrupting any industry, as most hardware inventions aspire to do. Now, on to the episode.

00:01:27 Kevin Mako: Luke, welcome to the show. Hi, I love to meet you. Thank you for having me. Happy to have you on. I understand that you're in between moving today.

00:01:34 Luke Levene: So you're trying to get situated between all these boxes and everything else that's going on. Yes, thanks. It's literally moving out of our house as we speak.

00:01:41 Kevin Mako: So it's a nice break from the mundane tasks of packing boxes and folding clothes.

00:01:46 Luke Levene: And you normally work out of London, England, and you're currently in Portugal. Well, I left London about two years ago, just when COVID kicked off. And I moved to France for some time, kind of isolated because I wanted to be away from all of the noise that was happening globally.

00:02:01 Luke Levene: Good call. And then I was actually in the U.S. for a toy fair in New York when things got really sticky

00:02:08 Kevin Mako: and managed to leave to fly back to France and then moved to Portugal. Wow. You've been all over the place. Now, you come from a design background. Then you end into selling big ticket items and then into VRA sales in the hardware space and then all over

00:02:22 Kevin Mako: the space. And in terms of VRA are very excited to talk about that subject today because there's a lot happening in the industry. It's well established beyond just a buzzword now. There's a lot that's going to be affecting our lives in the future, both from hardware and software and just human interaction perspectives.

00:02:37 Kevin Mako: So why don't you just get a bit of a background of some of that hardware experience that you had in the AR VR-VR space and anything else you want to highlight in your background? Then we'll jump into what's happening in the space and what hardware startups need to know

00:02:48 Luke Levene: about what's happening in the industry today. I'm an animator by trade, so I'm a multidisciplinaryian in terms of animation. I moved from traditional hand-drawn to 3D stop motion, VFX,

00:03:01 Luke Levene: worked in different areas from design and storyboarding to production, creative direction and direction. I mean, doing music videos and commercials and animation series and motion pictures as well

00:03:12 Luke Levene: before shifting from traditional animation to immersive theatre. Actually, the big influence for me was in 2008, and this is quite interesting because it comes back around to VR today and what's happening

00:03:23 Luke Levene: in the VR space and what to look out for. But in 2008, I had the good fortune to experience a punch-drunk show. So back in 2008, they were relatively unknown and they were performing in

00:03:35 Luke Levene: London. And the experience itself was so compelling, so immersive. I mean, the word immersive now is a buzzword and it's almost like it's sinful to use it. But at the time,

00:03:47 Luke Levene: we had no one had ever experienced anything like this before. So we arrived in the space, no idea what to expect. And two hours later, I came out and it completely radically shifted my relationship with storytelling and the potential of storytelling. And this is interesting for two reasons.

00:04:01 Luke Levene: One, as an animator, you don't experience anything that's not created or visualized beforehand. But in theory, nothing exists unless you conceptualize it. And that control is really important.

00:04:14 Luke Levene: But it's also, it's limited to the two-dimensional space.

00:04:18 Luke Levene: When you experience a massive theater, you're lost in a universe that's also been created in a physical space. And this idea of creating otherworldly experiences, it was punched on. planted that seed, that eventually led me into real estate, the idea that you could design space.

00:04:33 Luke Levene: And I suddenly got a taste for physical spaces, but that period taught me about sales. And where everything kind of was consolidated was in the sales of real estate using VR.

00:04:45 Luke Levene: And that was the first time I saw the potential for VR in 2014, just at the time that Facebook had bought Oculus from Pamalaki. And there was this kind of movement.

00:04:56 Luke Levene: and I like to keep an eye on trends and how trends are, where trends are going and to see if there's a point of convergence with a moving trend. There's this new technology. We've known about it

00:05:08 Luke Levene: for a while, but suddenly it might go commercial. And even in 2014, Facebook had an eye on the Metavert and they wanted to kind of create a revolution in social VR, the idea that we can

00:05:20 Luke Levene: all come together in this new reality. And so this convergence of real estate, the virtual reality space, other realms, other dimensions of possibility kind of seem to converge. And that's where I

00:05:31 Kevin Mako: got the idea that VR was really where I needed to be. And that's where I was going to be able to kind of make impact. Because back then in 2014, obviously everybody had heard of VR AR, but it really

00:05:42 Kevin Mako: just was a buzzword at the time. And it was hard to really visualize how it would become integrated into our lives. I mean, there's lots of ideas that were coming out, cartoon shows that were depicting different things on how we'd be living in these separate universes and whatever.

00:05:56 Kevin Mako: But the reality is starting with real estate, which is a great example, even just sticking on a VR headset, being able to visualize what your space could look like, something quite obvious like that, but has now evolved into hundreds of different verticals all across various

00:06:10 Kevin Mako: industries, and we're only at the tip of the iceberg right now. I even think in product design, one of the beautiful things about virtual reality, we use both AR and VR, it's just describing or even on both the development side, but also on developing

00:06:23 Kevin Mako: products, but also on the visualization side, which is something that you were highlighting to, which is so important, both in sales and an understanding of particular space when it came to your real estate, we look at it in products too. How do you get inside of something and really

00:06:35 Kevin Mako: understand how a screw goes into an inner piece? Well, it's very difficult to visualize in 2D. As soon as you pop that into 3D, you can immerse yourself in that environment. So the designer can actually start tweaking and modifying that, but the person on the other side that you're

00:06:50 Kevin Mako: either selling or pitching or whatever it is in terms of a stakeholder can really start to understand that. But again, that's just the tip of the iceberg because there's hundreds of different applications in different industries and a lot of that's trickling down to hardware

00:07:02 Kevin Mako: because the big thing that I find so interesting about ARBR, it's a space where you're converging the digital world and the physical world into one. And that's going to create some tremendous opportunity for a number of hardware companies out there. So I'm curious to see from your

00:07:16 Kevin Mako: perspective, what you see kind of moving forward with this shift in ARVR, what does the future of ARVR look like in the hardware space or just in our lives in general so that we can start

00:07:26 Luke Levene: thinking about as inventors, as product developers, how we can start utilizing or thinking about this technology and how it relates to us and our business is going forward.

00:07:34 Luke Levene: The first thing is the potential to collectively work on a physical space in real time is wonderful. So the idea that you and an engineer,

00:07:46 Luke Levene: a developer, an architect, the buyer can all be physically in a space, customizing that space, responding in real time, focusing on the details like the screws, like flooring, like the tiling, making real time changes in a matter of like

00:08:00 Luke Levene: what would otherwise take weeks can take hours, right? And then you can actually, and then you can sign off on a project, everyone's on board, everyone's aligned immediately. and then go straight to purchase.

00:08:14 Luke Levene: And you can also buy, try before you. But there's multiple different benefits. So when we started to build products, and we also created the hardware as well. So we created virtual showrooms.

00:08:25 Luke Levene: One of the biggest projects we worked on was a billion dollar development where we were re-planning. We worked with two big developers in the UK called Legal and General Schroeder. And there was a regeneration of a whole town center, basically a million square foot.

00:08:40 Luke Levene: And we had to visualize this new town center. We had to build all the sales tools, the marketing tools, the communication tools, the interactive touch screens, the gamified features for the touch table.

00:08:53 Luke Levene: So you could move around this future town center.

00:08:57 Luke Levene: And then lease units from the 3D virtual environment and custom.

00:09:10 Luke Levene: those units and then sell them in real-time. So we had to, and it had to be compatible with your iPhone, your iPad, the touch table,

00:09:21 Luke Levene: the desktop and nothing like this had ever existed. It was really just you're creating things based on the potential demand.

00:09:30 Luke Levene: And you're ideating with the developers

00:09:38 Luke Levene: to figure out what the best products are going to be to serve the their needs. So I feel that it's the exciting thing about the space is there's so much potential to create.

00:09:53 Luke Levene: It's the limitation is where is where does your imagination end? Like what can you conceptualize and therefore what can you create based on what you can conceptualize? And

00:10:02 Luke Levene: if you're, what was beautiful about VR is the potential to create otherworldly experiences. The big disappointment is that people lack imagination, unfortunately.

00:10:12 Luke Levene: most of the time. So you end up building simulations of the physical world and that has become the virtual environments that we end up exploring and people are finding quite tedious and ultimately

00:10:24 Luke Levene: not very compelling as an experience. So I would love to say here exactly where you should go and what you should do and how you should do it. The reality was we were designing the future

00:10:37 Luke Levene: landscape and creating the narrative for how developers going to work, we're going to work with these technologies just through listening and feeling the pain points and experimenting and making

00:10:51 Luke Levene: mistakes and creating multiple iterations of the products that we were building and then

00:11:01 Luke Levene: and then seeing how the market would respond. So it was intuition plus play.

00:11:08 Kevin Mako: plus engagement, plus research that

00:11:14 Kevin Mako: helped us kind of create the shape of the future products of the real estate space, that then became some of the staple products, actually, that people now say, this is how you are going to visualize buildings in the future. This is what people want to see.

00:11:29 Kevin Mako: This is the information that we need to share. But at the beginning, we were inventing it.

00:11:33 Kevin Mako: Yeah, it's amazing. Three things that really pop out to me. The first one that you mentioned is collaboration. That's huge. VR, obviously the tools are relatively new.

00:11:43 Kevin Mako: They've been around for a while, but the ease of access and use and integration with other software pieces like solid works and whatnot that we actually use to create physical products.

00:11:51 Kevin Mako: As those tools become easier to use and better to integrate, then it really leads to, I think, the second thing that you mentioned in there, which is imagination.

00:12:01 Kevin Mako: At first, you're used to using and designing around certain tools like the original drafting tables before we had 3D CAD.

00:12:07 Kevin Mako: And as soon as we got 3D CAD software and the tools that expand and improve and became easier to use, more integrated with manufacturing processes and all the rest, then it allowed you to get more creative, more interesting with your ideas. But you really,

00:12:21 Kevin Mako: when you're a pioneer of these new products, you're also a pioneer of what you can make with them. You're a pioneer of the creativity that your mind is allowed to expand to essentially with these new tools. So that's where it comes down to the last thing that you said.

00:12:34 Kevin Mako: And it all really ties together, which is that experimentation.

00:12:38 Kevin Mako: And when you can use these tools to digitally experiment, because there's really a minimal cost other than time to play and create and expand that imagination, it's a very powerful work can come out of that.

00:12:50 Kevin Mako: One of the things that I really want to highlight for all the design listeners out there is really to start understanding how AR and VR might be integrated into your development process, how you may be able to use some of this emerging technology,

00:13:04 Kevin Mako: both on the hardware and the software side to be able to design better products. And if you can be at the front of that, we know this is emerging. When you look 10, 20 years down the road, it's inevitable that more and more physical consumer

00:13:17 Luke Levene: products are going to be designed using virtual reality. It's already happening. We're already integrating that in small bits and pieces into the design process. But look at what Luke did. He pioneered an industry in real estate.

00:13:29 Luke Levene: And you've got to think back then in 2014, it wasn't clear that this technology. was going to revolutionize that, but I can tell you, any time we look at a commercial or even many residential spaces now,

00:13:42 Luke Levene: it's part of the process in many of them. So it becomes the norm. And then obviously, then you can expand your skill sets and your tools and the imagination from there. Yeah, it's, it's nice that you can acknowledge that because at the time,

00:13:57 Kevin Mako: the developers were very, very, very narrow in their vision. And they had, they, they, they, they, It's one of the most established industries of the real estate space and one of the hardest

00:14:08 Kevin Mako: to change and innovate because they had been, the attitude was we've been doing things a certain way for the last hundred years, why would we do things differently? And so you're in a room with all these developers who are looking at us that we don't need this technology and we don't want what you have to offer. And that was the entry point.

00:14:23 Kevin Mako: You're up, you're up against a massive wall. And as a product evangelist, essentially, my job was to meet that mindset.

00:14:34 Kevin Mako: and help them

00:14:37 Kevin Mako: see things differently. This is a big point right here. I want to just double down on this because I know we're talking about ARBR today, but if you're in any hardware space, I think the idea is understanding that for most of the listeners on the show,

00:14:52 Kevin Mako: you're creating or innovating something unique or different that's disrupting some industry in a small way, in a big way, whatever else. I mean, that is the essence of invention and innovation.

00:15:01 Kevin Mako: So if you look at your product and see this great new feature, you have to understand that there's that transition point with your buyer. They need to understand and see this feature.

00:15:12 Luke Levene: And Luke was on the front lines of this in ARVR, but these lessons that Luke discovered in terms of selling, in terms of getting that buy in, in terms of pioneering that industry, that can translate to any new product, whether it's an AR space or it's a new type of toilet plunger.

00:15:27 Luke Levene: You need to both make a great product, but then convince and almost educate your market as to why that's good, and then double down on that as it continues to grow and expand as users start to love it, as they start to appreciate that value that you've now positioned.

00:15:42 Luke Levene: So, Luke, I want to ask you, in that transitionary period, when you were new to the market, what tactics did you use to convince people that this was the future? How did you get them to see that value that you obviously saw?

00:15:56 Luke Levene: And, you know, then, of course, inevitably, you'd sell it to them, right?

00:16:00 Luke Levene: So this comes to the core of what is it? What is the sales process ultimately? Like,

00:16:07 Luke Levene: for me, it's about sharing passion for something. It was,

00:16:12 Luke Levene: there's an, and it's, this is why I'm also, the spiritual dimensions kind of became interesting to me, because it was like, what are we really sharing when there is nothing concrete

00:16:21 Luke Levene: to showcase right what are we share we're sharing a potential and that potential that energy of that

00:16:29 Luke Levene: potential is is intoxicating and it is highly contagious so and what people are really responding

00:16:39 Luke Levene: responding to in all areas of life is the energy of potential and we focus very much on the physical things we're like the potential is the thing you know it's here and it's like well no it's just

00:16:51 Luke Levene: the cup or, no, it's just a speaker. But the potential is the restlessness, the dis-ease, the disease, this is the human condition carries, and the desire to keep growing and innovating

00:17:04 Luke Levene: and moving towards what is beyond, right, just beyond our horizon, because we're constantly seeking a searching. And I know I don't want to go off, but it is something like that, because at the root of what it is that I'm, when I'm talking to a developer, and I'm like,

00:17:18 Luke Levene: this is amazing, you know, he's looking at me going, what is he looking for in me that is going to spark something, where he's making a bunch of, he's like, do I trust this person?

00:17:29 Luke Levene: Do I feel that I should even first engage in a conversation? Is there value for me here? How is he making? And a lot of these decisions are intuitive. A lot of developers are very fast moving, and they're very intuitive, actually, even though there's a structure,

00:17:44 Luke Levene: the process, the people that really go and sense, and that was always the old way. So my sweet spot with conferences, Mipim was a big one for me,

00:17:53 Luke Levene: which happens in Cannes. It's the biggest real estate conference

00:17:56 Kevin Mako: and it's meeting and connecting and exchanging that passion and enthusiasm

00:18:02 Kevin Mako: just and meeting that resistance and then somehow breaking through with at

00:18:09 Kevin Mako: the root. It's like the love for the thing that you do and loving something is contagious because it awakens something in the other that is

00:18:20 Kevin Mako: is that we can, where we meet and we can meet in these places of innovation in passion and excitement, in creativity,

00:18:31 Kevin Mako: inspiration, all of these words are connected to that feeling, that emotion that you're translating, you're transmitting. And then there's the details, right? And then, but the second thing is, okay, so you've got me, you've hooked me. Now I want to go

00:18:42 Kevin Mako: into the fine print. And then you kind of back it up with the detail, the details of the process and then start ideating with that person. But what you're really just communicating is potential.

00:18:54 Kevin Mako: You've got to sell them what the dream is for them, really. That's the hook. The key is. And we've had some sales discussions on this show before, and it all comes back to the same thing. Don't sell your feature. Sell what that feature does to that person. How does it improve their life?

00:19:09 Kevin Mako: How does it change? How, as you mentioned it, Luke, I love how you're looking at the vision, at the innovation,

00:19:16 Luke Levene: at the improvement to their life or to the world. or whatever else, right? People want to be captivated by that growth.

00:19:23 Luke Levene: And if you can focus on asking them the question, like either what's their pain point or what's, you know, what are they looking to change in their lives or in their customer's life or in their business's life or whatever it is, whoever you are selling it to,

00:19:35 Luke Levene: the key really is to understand what the dream is, not what the features are.

00:19:39 Kevin Mako: And then, of course, you back it up with all that evidence, which is why your features are great and why it's done well and all the rest. But first and foremost, sell them the dream. That's your hook. That's the thing that gets them engaged.

00:19:50 Kevin Mako: And I think that's especially important when you're looking at new and emerging technology. And that isn't just AR and VR, which is obviously big stuff. It could trickle down to that new little widget you have, like you said, on a cup. And you've made a slightly better cup. That is an innovation.

00:20:05 Luke Levene: You are disrupting an industry. You are changing something. So the key is you've got to sell the dream of how that change is going to affect that person's life in a great way. And then trickle it down to why the feature makes sure that that's going to happen, the proof, right? the sale,

00:20:19 Luke Levene: the excitement, and then the proof. Totally. I love the way you express and clarify and concretize some of the things I'm saying. I appreciate that. You're very good at what you do.

00:20:32 Luke Levene: The thing, at the root of it, though, you have to love this thing.

00:20:37 Luke Levene: You've got to love it. You've got to love that innovation in your cup, even if it's a slight widget that you have to love that.

00:20:44 Kevin Mako: I believe that that comes first. people feel the passion on the other end of the phone even if you're not on video they can they can tell

00:20:51 Luke Levene: the difference between somebody who's just trying to sell something to make a buck and somebody who's trying to sell you something because they know it's going to make your life better and they're they're so convinced it's going to make your life better that you can feel that energy they're

00:21:06 Luke Levene: they would almost do it for free because they know how much that's going to help somebody that passion can be felt yes yes for sure and then the same for love of money comes to mind that the first time I was like, of course, some people love money so much that

00:21:19 Luke Levene: the passion is motivated by making money because it's like, I like, there are people like, I love money. I don't, I love,

00:21:28 Luke Levene: I love changing the world. I think, I think like making, like bringing something new to the world. That was, that's what I loved. That was what was driving me at the very

00:21:37 Luke Levene: beginning. I was just inspired by the potential of what this product could do. And I wanted to be at the beginnings of those conversations. And I love. bring that to people. I loved sharing that enthusiasm. I love to show people how they could

00:21:52 Luke Levene: change their own businesses with this technology and to find that process.

00:21:58 Luke Levene: That's great.

00:21:59 Luke Levene: You have any last minute thoughts in terms of the augmented reality, virtual reality world? Anything else you want to share before we say goodbye? So just to come back, Punch Drunk 2008, and I think this is a nice finish. They partnered with

00:22:13 Kevin Mako: the company called Niantic today. So Niantic, you might recognize. as the creators of Pokemon Go.

00:22:20 Kevin Mako: And Pokemon Go is currently made over 5 billion in five years as an application for the most successful application in AR that exists today for toys and games. Even though it wasn't specifically AR, it's kind of,

00:22:33 Kevin Mako: but as a product, it's one of the most successful case studies.

00:22:38 Kevin Mako: What's interesting is Punch Drunk, who were revolutionizing immersive theater in 2008 are now going to revolutionize the augmented reality space

00:22:47 Kevin Mako: with Nyantik in and starting from this year and they're in the process of working out what it is that they're going to create together as two kind of de facto

00:22:58 Kevin Mako: institutions that are converging to really redesign the future of what experiencing is going to be and

00:23:09 Kevin Mako: but where we talk about endless potential sometimes that canvas is too big so to look at people who are able to create the end of like to create a,

00:23:20 Kevin Mako: to shape that into something that we've not seen before. I feel that that collaboration between Niantic and Punch Strong is really where our attention should be.

00:23:34 Kevin Mako: Because what we can learn from that collaboration will influence every other area of

00:23:42 Luke Levene: the VR and AR space. It's incredible. It's the, you know, it's another evolution of the tools that we're able to. to use and we're just at the tip of the iceberg to even know what experiences that's going to

00:23:54 Luke Levene: create for the world in hardware spaces and software spaces. And of course, ARVR, it's the merger of those two worlds. So our digital world is now going to come right in line with our physical world because we have these tools, a whole bunch of them, but this is right in the middle of

00:24:09 Luke Levene: being able to connect that all together. Luke, really appreciate you spending some time today to come on the show to talk about AR, VR, VR, and how to sell it, as well as those less to everybody else in the product space, what they can derive from the ARVR world is very revolutionary

00:24:24 Luke Levene: and understanding how to actually create businesses around revolutionary periods of time or revolutionary technologies is always a unique subject. So thanks again. Appreciate you being on the show today. Thank you.

00:24:36 Luke Levene: Maybe I can just mention our company XRA, XR-R-A, XR-applied, and if anyone wants to explore some ideation processes with us, they can reach out and connect me. And I'll put the show notes, links and all that in the bottom of the show notes.

00:24:49 Luke Levene: can just click through to Luke's LinkedIn profile and to your company and all that. And anyone can explore and learn more. Amazing. Thank you for your time. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Luke. Take

00:25:00 Narrator: care. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of the Product Startup Podcast, the show that teaches you what it really takes to bring your product to market and turn it into a big success. This podcast

00:25:12 Narrator: series is brought to you by Mako Design + Invent, the original and leading firm in North America to provide global caliber in-to-end physical consumer product development to startups, inventors, and small product business clients.

00:25:26 Narrator: If you're looking for product development help on your invention, head over to Mako-design.com. That's m-a-k-o-design.com for a free consultation from one of Mako Design's Ford Design Studios from coast to coast.

00:25:41 Narrator: Thanks for listening and see you next time.