Makers of The Metaverse: Jonathan Girroir Of Tech Soft 3D On The Future Of The VR, AR & Mixed…

The Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality & Mixed Reality Industries are so exciting. What is coming around the corner? How will these improve our lives? What are the concerns we should keep an eye out for? Aside from entertainment, how can VR or AR help work or other parts of life? To address this, we had the pleasure of interviewing Jonathan Girroir, Technology Evangelist at Tech Soft 3D.

Jonathan Girroir is a Technical Evangelist at Tech Soft 3D. With his passion for 3D software, CAD, and innovation, for the last 22 years, Jonathan has been supporting software developers to build and utilize 3D visualization tools.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit. Can you tell us a bit about your backstory and how you grew up?

I grew up in rural Vermont — small town, small high school — but I always had a real passion for technology and computers, and for graphics as well. From a young age, I loved to draw and to create technical 3D drawings. When I was first introduced to the Apple IIe personal computer, they had a graphics program called Logo, and I spent a lot of time fiddling around with that in elementary school.

In high school, I learned to program and taught myself BASIC, Pascal, and C++. When I was 17, I broke my back skiing, so I spent a winter writing a graphics engine based on the knowledge I gained from a college textbook on mathematics for computer graphics that I had picked up using Borland C.

Then, I went to university in upstate New York at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. My degree was in computer science, but I spent a lot of time in their program for the digital arts. I learned OpenGL, which is a higher-level language for graphics and ended up interning at a CAD company. After that, I worked at a graphics company where I helped write another graphics engine built on top of OpenGL for visualizing 3D data in biology and learned a bunch of other pieces of 3D technology.

Eventually, I made my way to my current employer, Tech Soft 3D. So, depending on how you count it, I’ve been involved with the 3D technology industry for around 25 years now.

Is there a particular book, film, or podcast that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

For books, it’s definitely that college mathematics textbook I picked up while I had a broken back! That was a real gem to find.

As far as films, I’m a child of the ’80s and ’90s. There was a genre of tech films back then that are kind of cliche and cringeworthy today but were great at the time. I’m thinking here of any of those titles that centered around computers, like WarGames, Sneakers, or — this one is embarrassing — Hackers. Those movies portrayed programming as exciting and edgy, and I think that appealed to a lot of people to say, “Hey, this is a cool industry to be in.”

Is there a particular story that inspired you to pursue a career in the X Reality industry? We’d love to hear it.

I love building things — and not just on the computer either. I love working on tangible things, be it woodworking or mechanics. To me, XR is just an extension of this creating and building process. I’ve always loved trying to represent 3D on a 2D screen, but being able to move that out into reality, whether that’s mixed reality or virtual reality, is incredibly powerful, I think.

My involvement with XR has come about fairly organically, because one of the things we try to do at Tech Soft 3D is to provide tools that will future proof an application for any platform that comes along. Ten to fifteen years ago, that platform might have been mobile. In the near future, it may very well be XR.

The Oculus VR headset was one of the most popular gadgets last year, showing that VR is really becoming mainstream. People are using and becoming familiar with this new technology. Right now, the focus is mainly on gaming and entertainment, but the experience that people have with XR in those situations puts pressure on the engineering industry to start supporting XR devices and supporting XR workflows. So, we’re very interested in making sure we get out ahead of that trend and develop technology to support these new workflows.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began this fascinating career?

One of the most fun projects I’ve worked on is when we started supporting the HTC Vive headsets about five years ago. We set up a green screen room and brought in a film crew to film our interaction with a race car in virtual reality, rendered from a third person’s point of view, and then we overlaid that with some separate video. That project brought me outside of the coding world and into this whole other video production world to do something pretty cool that really wasn’t being done by many at the time. We actually got on the front cover of Digital Engineering Magazine with that project.

Another fun experience — this was probably about 10 years ago — was when I was able to visit Canon’s Japanese office and experience their virtual reality lab. That place was definitely way ahead of its time. They were experimenting with virtual maintenance and training for Canon equipment using XR, so they had a head mounted display with a giant cord connected to a big stack of computers that rolled around, trailing the person wearing the headset. Being able to experience the first iterations of different pieces of groundbreaking technology has been pretty exciting.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I feel like a funny mistake would be something like, “I had this XR headset on and felt like I was falling off a building, and I fell onto my coworker’s desk and spilled their coffee.” I think the worst that happens is that I get funny looks when I’m in my office wearing an XR headset and waving my arms around. Maybe that’s the lesson: stay in your office when you’re first getting used to an XR headset — don’t try to walk around.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

There was a teacher at an elementary school in Brattleboro, Vermont named Jack McKiernan who volunteered his time by hosting an after-school computer club at the school. I would get a ride down there after classes, and we’d spend a few hours coding. That’s where I first really learned graphics. In addition to the after-school club, he would host a computer camp for one week during the summer, and he also contributed to the local bulletin board service (or BBS, which was a precursor to the internet for those of you who weren’t around back then). He was really involved in the community and volunteered a ton of his time — and he really instilled a love of technology. Many of his students, not just me, went on to continue in technology and computer science.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

Right now, I’m working on figuring out ways to prep real CAD data for being imported into the metaverse. That’s actually quite an important step because these head mounted devices still have a lot of technological limitations in terms of the amount of data that they can display and the speed at which they can do so. So, we’re taking a step back to take a step forward: We have to simplify the data and pre-process it in a way that delivers maximum performance in the head mounted displays. The data needs to deliver a much higher frame rate to make it feel real and also to make sure it’s not a nauseating experience.

Aside from not making end users sick when they experience XR, this work that I’m doing helps people by simplifying the workflow around making CAD data usable in XR. It makes the whole process more turnkey and accelerates ways to bring data into the metaverse and move data from one platform to another.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. The VR, AR and MR industries seem so exciting right now. What are the 3 things in particular that most excite you about the industry? Can you explain or give an example?

Probably the #1 thing I’m excited about is populating the metaverse. There’s a digital file out there for almost all the buildings that have been built, as well as for most of the machinery and objects in the real world. Being able to bring that data out of these data silos and bring them into the metaverse is something that we’re really excited about.

Once you start to populate the metaverse, it enables workflows that can be accelerated via the digital context that the metaverse provides. Think of performing maintenance on a car engine. How much easier would it be to find the right component that needs to be replaced if you could overlay a 3D image on reality that identifies exactly where that component is, rather than trying to look at a 2D picture in a manual? Same principle applies for any complex machinery, or even for buildings-in-progress at construction sites when you’re trying to figure out where to put a support beam.

As a flip side of the maintenance scenario, telepresence becomes much easier and more effective with XR. Rather than repairing or fixing a complex piece of machinery yourself, as in the previous example, you can have an expert technician who lives on the other side of the country guide you through the process in real time as you interact with the machinery with a tablet or other device — no need to fly the expert 3000 miles.

The final thing that really excites me about XR is its ability to assist with design review. Companies like The Wild create a shared space where you can have two or more people doing a design review in virtual reality. They just got purchased by Autodesk, so we’re seeing big industry players take note of XR’s potential in this area.

What are the 3 things that concern you about the VR, AR and MR industries? Can you explain? What can be done to address those concerns?

My biggest concern is just the amount of time we are tied to our digital devices. The big tech companies are already really good at finding ways to fill up our time. Web 2.0 has always been an industry of attention where companies are fighting for a slice of people’s mental bandwidth — and that’s going to become even more the case when we have even more powerful tools like XR.

So, how do we make sure that we use this technology for the benefit of humanity and not the detriment — and that we are able to continue to have productive relationships, and we’re not tied to our device and technology 24 hours a day?

To help ensure things don’t head in a dystopian direction, companies need to be very transparent around usage and very intentional around the ways they enable people to interact with the technology. For example, providing weekly reports on how much time you’ve spent on your device — and allowing the ability to set daily limits — is actually a very useful function. Companies need to be proactive rather than reactive in this area. They need to sit down and think “Okay, what could potentially be a societal problem resulting from these devices and these experiences?” and then work to proactively address it.

I think the entertainment aspects of VR, AR and MR are apparent. Can you share with our readers how these industries can help us at work?

The examples that I shared a little earlier around populating the metaverse, performing maintenance on complex machines, and doing shared design review are great examples of how XR can provide real value in industrial or engineering scenarios. In other words, XR isn’t all just “fun and games” — it enables people to get real work done and tackle key workflows more efficiently.

What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about working in your industry? Can you explain what you mean?

People should know that we’re not going to get to a world like the one depicted in movies like Ready Player One anytime soon. What’s in the movies is a lot different than what is possible in practice. For instance, when you put one of these headsets on right now, particularly the AR headsets, it can still be a little underwhelming. Not to mention the fact that building these XR experiences takes a lot of work. There’s definitely a long way to go before we’re close to what Science fiction depicts.

What are your “5 Things You Need to Create A Highly Successful Career In The VR, AR or MR Industries?”

I think curiosity is a good quality in general, but it’s particularly well suited for XR. It’s an evolving industry and there’s a lot of stuff going on in the field. Trying different things out, asking questions, being curious about them and how they might be applied to your customers — all those things are key.

Another thing to know about the XR field is that it’s hard work. A lot of the elements around XR aren’t fully baked just yet. Because they are new technologies, they aren’t well documented, and you often wind up working with beta products. So, leaning into the struggle of learning a new skill or a new technology is really, really important.

Similar to curiosity, you also need agility because the field is moving so quickly. All these technologies are leapfrogging one another: what is the standard today could be gone tomorrow, so you want to make sure you don’t paint yourself into a corner, so to speak.

Another good example of agility in action is what Microsoft and Magic Leap have done. Their initial focus with their AR headsets was entertainment. Before very long, they made a major pivot towards industry and the enterprise. They realized that that’s where the real money is for these devices and their applications.

I think familiarity with both the hardware and the software is helpful for a career in XR. In other words, in addition to staying on top of the latest headsets and devices, you should be familiar with engines like Unity or Unreal and the technology stack from Tech Soft 3D for engineering-specific tooling. Those are probably some of the most important platforms in use right now in this space for authoring content.

At the end of the day, there are so many different careers in this space. There’s the hardware side, the software side, the content creation side, and a dozen other areas to focus on. I think knowing which aspect of XR you’re interested in is an important step in having a highly successful career in the industry.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

I think we need to be conscious about how technology not only can help us, but also can impact us in negative ways. We need more people to be asking questions — not just “what are the benefits of this?” but “what are the potential drawbacks?” and “how is this impacting me and those around me?” How do we make sure that we “do no harm”? How do we ensure that meaningful human connection is maintained? At a high level, this centers around knowing when and when not to use technology.

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

I think there are two people that come to mind. The first one is John Carmack, who was one of the foundational figures of 3D programming, particularly for video games. He was one of the lead programmers in the ’90s for some of the quintessential games like Doom, Quake and Commander Keen. He went on to be the CTO of Oculus VR. He also seems like just a really interesting person with some opinions on technology that we share. So, I’d love to have breakfast with him.

Another person at the top of my list is Guy Kawasaki. He was one of the first technical evangelists at Apple, and he’s very big on the concepts of community and connection. I’ve definitely grown up in his era, so I’d love to have breakfast with him as well. If it helps tip the scales, there’s a place called Chow in Bend, Oregon, where I live, that does a really good eggs benedict!

Thank you so much for these excellent stories and insights. We wish you continued success on your great work!

Originally published at https://medium.com on April 24, 2022.