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Collaborative Product Development in a Virtual World

Virtual product development collaboration can be successful with the right technologies in place. Learn how to thrive online during COVID-19.

virtual collaboration
Hosted By | John Bernero and Gray McCord
COVID-19 has forced teams to adapt to a new world of virtual product development in a hurry. This is a particular challenge for teams who design physical products, especially during the collaborative concept phase.

How do you keep your projects moving ahead without delay? How can you replace in-person collaboration in a virtual setting? How do you evaluate concepts with end-users when you cannot visit them in person? Like you, our team and our clients’ teams had to quickly identify, test, and adapt to new collaboration methods.

In this webinar, we’ll discuss collaboration technologies available in this virtual age of product development. We’ll also cover the implications of these tools and methodologies as we enter the post-pandemic world. Join us to learn:

  • What teams discovered about their existing processes once they went 100% virtual
  • The need for additional tools and technologies
  • Technologies that enable effective virtual product development
  • The implications of virtual product development when teams return to the office

Transcript

So this is all about collaboration and we’re going to talk about that, and of course the first thing that happens is we’re sitting in here. We have this really slick high-end microphone system that we normally use for these things. And of course, today it chose to not work, so we’re coming to you live via a backup system, always pays to have backup.

Casey:

In the year 2020.

Gray:

Yep. This year cannot end soon enough.

Casey:

Awesome. All right. Well, I think we’re probably good as far as attendees are concerned, as far as I can tell, so we’ll go ahead and get started. Hi, everyone. Welcome to today’s webinar on collaborative product development in a virtual world. My name is Casey Branson. I’m the director of business development here at M3 Design, and I’ll be your moderator for today. Joining me are our presenters, John Bernero and Gray McCord. John is our COO and Gray is our CTO here at M3 Design. Today’s presentation will take 35 minutes with five to 10 minutes at the end for Q&A. You may type in your questions at any time, and without further ado, I’m going to turn this over to John and Gray. Okay, Gray?

Gray:

Okay. Let’s hope part works.

Casey:

Yeah. Fingers crossed

Gray:

Well, here we go. Here we go.

Casey:

There you go.

Gray:

Can you hear me now? I’m only kidding.

Casey:

We’re good.

Gray:

All right. So this will take roughly 45 minutes, less if I speak fast, but what we’re going to talk about today is essentially, what’s changed in product development as a result of the pandemic in particular. And we’re going to focus on the one area of today of concept development. We’ll talk a little bit about what’s changed and also what we learned about, that maybe wasn’t optimal in the first place. This isn’t all bad news. And then probably the fun part here is, as we’ve gone through the last nine months with everybody else, of course, we’ve found some really interesting virtual collaboration tools that we’re going to talk about to cover some of the main areas of concept development, and then we’ll talk a little bit about where we see the future going, and then we’ll open it up for your questions.

Okay. But before we get too much further, I want to spend a couple of minutes and talk about concept development in general. Concept development is usually not just one person sitting by themselves in a room with some Jolt Colas coming up with a great idea. It’s a process, and while you may do it slightly differently, I think, generally speaking, everybody’s going to approach concept development in a similar fashion here. Let me go through the steps for you real quick. The first part, and this is actually the fun part, is getting together and ideating to come up with potential ideas for new products to solve problems, that kind of thing. So we look at technologies, we look for analogous products that might provide some level of inspiration, but fundamentally this is a team sport, right?

Usually it involves a bunch of people having a good time in the room and lasts for several hours, and we get all sorts of really interesting great results from that. So you can see problem number one. Once we get down to the point where some of the ideas have been discussed at some length, we’re going to start to visualize those, right? Now you take an idea and we’re going to sketch it out just to make sure that… see how things fit, see what it could be, evaluate potential, get quick sketches in front of people to do some initial evaluation of the concepts. And once we’re done with that, then we get into the real quick and dirty parts. A lot of times, what you want to do after you have a sketch, is you want them to mock these things up, right? You get a sense for how big they are, how much they might weigh, how they might feel in your hands, that kind of thing. Just before you do a whole lot of detailed engineering work, you really want to get a sense for what this thing could be, what it feels like and how it might actually use it. And you just do this for internal evaluation purposes. This helps refine the concept.

And then once you’ve gotten through that, then the engineers are going to come in and we’re going to do something we call concept CAD here. But basically what you want to do is convert the idea and the sketches and the mock-ups into 3D CAD at a really basic block level so that you can verify that things will fit, that there’s no real engineering issues that would prevent you from actually creating a product. It’s not a design system at this point, but it’s just making sure that at a block level, things fit.

And then once you get past that phase, and the last few phases generally, you can do that individually or remotely. That’s not really a huge deal. When we start getting into the prototyping phase, it gets a little more complicated. One thing I want to point out, there’s no single prototype. So what happens here is we’re looking at creating different types of prototypes for different purposes, right? So you can have a ‘looks like’ prototype that would be used to show it to people, to get a sense for look and feel, and how much it weighs and things like that. And then you might want to create a ‘works-like’ prototype that could look nothing like the real thing, but it gives you… it simulates the functionality, so you can get a sense for how it might operate, and there’s other types as well.

The point is, there’s different types of prototypes for different purposes, and these all have to be created for the next part, which is where the team sport returns. When you get to the evaluation of the concepts, usually that involves putting these prototypes in front of real human beings. It’s sometimes in group settings, and in fact, most of the time in group settings, which is a challenge right now, if you’re like us. What you’re doing here is you’re testing the product against these requirements, and you’re trying to gather feedback from your executive staff, for example, your manufacturing people and your customers, the support staff and others. That’s how I used to work up until… what’d he say, John, about February, or thereabouts?

John:

Yeah. I mean, we all got thrown a wrench into things and we quickly had to kind of change things. People started to pack up their desks, or have their monitors, their desktops, and otherwise, and headed home. And so although we had some tools to be collaborative and everything working with outside parties and everything else, internally, we really benefited from all being under one roof and we could just collaborate very well.

Gray:

Yeah, that was a tough time. I had PTSD there for a while because the last time I watched a bunch of people in an office walking out with computers and office equipment was when my startup failed about 10 years ago. I don’t have fond memories of that, so got past that. But here we are nine months later, sitting in a room, wearing a mask, trying to figure out what day of the week it is. Yeah. Things have certainly changed.

John:

Yeah.

Casey:

It’s Wednesday, Gray.

Gray:

Thank you.

John:

Yeah. Yeah. Things change, and I think part of this too, is… we had projects going on and I’m sure everyone joining us today did too, and those timelines and expectations didn’t change. So we had to figure out how to shift and we couldn’t visit people, we couldn’t travel, we had research activities planned with customers, and all that stuff went to the wayside. So we had to shift and divert. So let’s get into… as Gray mentioned, our concept development phase was very collaborative and it really benefited from that. We were able to make decisions real quick, on the fly, we could evaluate concepts and prototypes and we were able to essentially make some decisions. But then, I think what we’re facing today, and we’re figuring this out as we’re doing it, is just we’ve really lost that real-time feedback that we once benefited, right?

The time walking between meetings and talking it up, talking to someone real quick and getting a quick update before you ran into it, as well as just that whole immersive collaboration. There’s nothing like a brainstorm meeting where you… around all these different ideas and… webcams and screen sharing just don’t cut it… it’s just not the same. And I think for companies that really have a strong culture and really look at having a good personal connection with their internal team members and their customers, a lot of that was stretched and really… some of that was actually lost, unfortunately. Again, none of these challenges I can list here are new and I think we all faced that. I mean, I think we all quickly jumped onto the Zoom train.

I think that novelty quickly died along with our ability to continue with camaraderie and team dynamics, but I think the same time we, we had parents and others that were actually all of a sudden using that as well. What’s pretty clear is that it’s really not meant for the wide demographics of people with different technical abilities. We lost that and… loss of impromptu interruptions. Everything had to be scheduled now. We’re getting messages through email, IM or text messages. I think we started realizing that we were now stuck in front of a computer all day. It was hard to find time just to go to the bathroom. We’re just… getting outside for lunch.

Gray:

Speak for yourself.

John:

And then of course, customers can’t see you, even though you had projects went on, you had to make some decisions and get some feedback. It was very difficult or impossible to actually get in front of them. A lot of that stuff went on hold and I think companies had to shift. And as Gray mentioned, prototypes… normally we make one and then we all huddle around that, and now all of a sudden that became a little bit difficult and people try to put that prototype up to the webcam and it was shaky, and we lost a lot of time on that and just the fact that we need good internet connection and… how many times have we said that someone’s frozen or they’re on mute? If we could get all those minutes back, that’d be great.

Gray:

Or their microphone doesn’t work.

John:

Or the microphone. Yeah.

John:

But despite all this, we actually learned some things that actually were broken. I mean, some things that… some inefficiencies that we actually had, or were dealing with, with the way that things were in the past. I mean, how many times have we had meetings where we really needed key stakeholders, and just to get them available took months of planning in advance to get them on, to have some time on our schedule. But now with them, they were actually available and were able to review things quickly and make decisions faster. People were actually happy to hear from you, at least at the beginning. I don’t know if it was everyone in their pajamas or the fact that no one was going to work with road rage or just trying to avoid your kids, but people were definitely happy to talk, both customers and employees.

Then all of a sudden, I think, especially with sketch concepts and other very visual presentations, nothing’s worse than being on one of those calls and realizing someone’s driving along the way while they’re taking your call, and then you have to set up a follow-up meeting or send the deck afterwards. I think overall we found some inefficiencies in the way that things we were doing because we’re all busy, we’re all traveling, and that it really avoided our ability to make decisions quickly and fast. The remote work actually benefited in other ways. Let’s get into the meat and potatoes of this presentation. Although software development teams have really been able to do this for a while in terms of being able to collaborate virtually, when we’re designing physical products, that really poses a new challenge, as Gray mentioned. We actually uncovered some tools, some tools we were actually using before, but we also uncovered some new tools that we’d like to share with you. So let’s go ahead and get into that.

Gray:

Yeah. Let’s talk about collaboration tools first. The good news is that there are a pretty robust number of collaboration tools out there. They all work pretty well. The bad news is that… I don’t know about your case, but in ours, we’ve got a bunch of engineers and designers and people were using whatever they felt like using, right? So we had a few people using Asana, and a bunch of people were using Slack or who knows what. We were using Basecamp with a couple of our clients for a while. It’s a pretty good tool, Skype, in some cases. I mean, you go through the list and there’s many more, but the issue is that collaboration doesn’t work really well when you’re all on different collaboration tools.

The first thing we had to do is… first learning was to figure out what can we put people on that solves most of the problem that gets everybody in a common space. And in our case, we picked Microsoft Teams, which to be totally honest, when we started, it was not an obvious choice because back in the February, March timeframe, Teams frankly was pretty crappy. We would never use it for video conferencing, the thing it had going for it was the… we could share files, Office files, things like that. So it was pretty good. However, Teams has progressed amazingly, which is a trend on all these tools, right? Is that they’ve gotten tremendously better over time. That’s the good news.

John:

And don’t forget The VPN access that…

Gray:

Hopefully… I tried to forget that. One cool tool that we found… so one of the big deals that we do… we do a lot of brainstorming at M3, co-collaboration workshops, things like that. And we’ve been accused at times of actually being a subsidiary of 3M, because we get so many sticky notes. So what we do is we tend to get into a room and we have… we plaster the wall with ideas and concepts on notes, and then we move sticky notes around to organize and things like that. Well, we uncovered a tool called Miro, which basically allows us to do that in a virtual mode. As you can see by all this stuff moving around your screen, we basically create virtual sticky notes and comments, and anybody who is on a meeting call for example, can go in and edit that real time.

You can do close collaboration, and one of the side benefits of this is when we were using sticky notes, we always had to go and we’d take pictures of it, and we tried to translate that into a presentation and organize it. With Miro, we just do that in Miro, and then we can export images that really cut down on the overhead of presentation creation. We are super happy with this tool. I hate… I don’t want this to be an advertisement for them, but there’s probably other tools that do this, but this is a really good example of this kind of a tool.

John:

Yeah. So when we get into actually product design and CAD, normally use SolidWorks and Creo here, but OnShape, I think, is a pretty interesting one. I think you can best describe it as Google docs for CAD. The reason for that is that it makes it really easy to share information. It’s completely web based, so you don’t need to actually have any type of hardware or software requirements on your machine. As long as they have a browser, you can do it. You can share files with your vendors, with your other individuals, and then quickly take away that access when you’re done with that discussion. The power of it though, is that the fact that you can have multiple people working on the same assembly or part at the same time, and you have real time visibility of any design updates. You don’t need to check in and check out files, you don’t have to worry about people who go on vacation and forgot to do their check-in, and now you’re reaching out to them, trying to figure out how to get the latest file.

But you can… again, it’s just a virtual collaboration tool. People can edit CAD on their phones. It’s very powerful, and I think this is where things are going. I think with the file-based structure, some of these other systems that we’re normally using, it doesn’t allow for real-time collaboration. The other nice thing is you can add a comment and allow for real-time editing on the fly.

Another one’s pretty interesting here, it’s called Spatial, and there’s a couple of other companies that do something very similar to this, but it’s a… take into account Miro, but taking it to more of an AR type of environment. What’s nice about it is you can have both in-person collaboration, so you and someone else can be collaborating, but then you can dial in someone from afar and they can actually be in your virtual space at the same time, like the sticky notes and everything else that Gray was mentioning. It actually has that potential, has the ability to pull in concepts, ability to talk through different ideas and really immerse the team into a very creative environment. And the best of all, you just take off your headset, shut down, and your room is back to a clutter-free environment, and the information is there to go the next time you’re ready to log in.

Casey:

That lady might give me some nightmares though.

John:

Yeah.

Gray:

Yeah. Cool. So much for this hi-tech stuff. I’m going to go low-tech now. Virtual prototyping is an interesting thing. One of the things that happened, people are stuck at home. They may be able to come into the office occasionally, but generally not. One of the things that we uncovered was that there are low-tech solutions to this. People wound up using whatever they had access to, to be able to prototype. We have some people that have metalworking shops, woodworking shops, we use PVC pipe, two by fours, glue guns, glitter, you name it, whatever people had available to them, they actually used to create simple prototypes so they could express concept ideas with each other virtually. One thing that is happening is that 3D printers are getting really inexpensive.

So we have a few people that have those, but they’re really handy. They have their limitations, but they actually worked pretty well when you have them.

John:

Yeah.

Gray:

And then a little more high tech. This is the tool called Gravity Sketch, which essentially allows teams to create and review in a 3D VR environment together. I think it’s got a ways to go to become truly useful, but I think this gives you a sense for the possibility of having three or four engineers or designers working together to create something in three dimensions without having to be in a room together.

John:

Yeah. I think what’s powerful about this too, is also the ability to get a customer into looking at what you’re designing, and we see here sitting into the dashboard and walking through what works that doesn’t work or things that need to change.

Gray:

Yeah.

John:

This is not new. This is augmented reality for CAD and now VR for CAD. It’s something that’s been around for a while. This is an old picture that eDrawings had done back in… I think it was 2013, where it required you to essentially print out a QR code, put it on a surface, and then you upload, essentially have your CAD on a tablet or a phone and using their application. You can actually scale the unit and move it around within your environment. This has since then changed, and now it actually… systems are smarter now and they can actually recognize flat surfaces already. And I think this is a nice way where it doesn’t require any sort of VR goggles to use. Honestly, if you use Google cardboard, you could always just use your phone in that place set.

And talking about VR, sometimes we do develop concepts that are a little bit larger than life, so sometimes it just makes more sense, instead of actually making a physical mock-up for a prototype, is just to create the whole environment and be able to have yourself or your customers actually walk through the space, talk through design updates or changes that need to be done. We know that some of our clients in the aerospace and medical industry are using this for interior aircraft, as well as for operating room design, but this is definitely an interesting one, which we ended up using here on this product line that we ended up working on called Home Run Dugout.

Gray:

Cool.

John:

And then sometimes the reality is that sometimes you still need to be in-person. I think there are instances that that’s going to always have to be the case. When you can’t be 100% virtual, by just having a fewer number of team members together does one of two things. One, in this case, being socially distances is important, but two, it’s also a cost savings. With newer technology with 5G and better internet connectivity, live streaming of prototype evaluations is going to be more used than ever before, I believe. Nothing new, but I think what we’re going to see is teams are going to be doing or participating or reviewing some of these live events a little bit more often.

Now you can get teams from across the globe seeing and hearing the same things, and I don’t know you, but there’s been instances where when presenting research feedback information, there’s always someone that’s questioning the results or questioning if there’s bias in what you’re presenting, and by having a larger team actually seeing and hearing the same thing at the same time, it’s great. And by including multiple image sources, whether it be your overhead cameras or 360 cameras, the ability to look at different views at the same time allows each team member who is participating remotely to be able to see and hear what they’re actually most interested in.

And then sometimes you have to just get old school and ship stuff out. I think we can take this opportunity and actually make some thoughtful packages of this prototype and maybe ship it to… maybe you have five customers that you need to have evaluate a prototype of yours, but it’s impossible to make five of these units at the same time. So instead of doing that, making one set and then sending it around and having them essentially mail it to the next person, but… with some thought, you can definitely get some one-on-one feedback, actually, by each of the users before you do a group setting. The nice thing about something like this, is you can gather that feedback and then come back and consolidate everyone together afterwards. But again, I think rather than just throwing it into a FedEx box and throwing it in with some bubble wrap, taking the next step further, making sure they have everything they need here and some instructions and the ability to quickly ship it to the next person would be important.

Gray:

And who doesn’t like to get free stuff in the mail?

John:

I know.

Gray:

All right. So as you can see, there’s an awful lot of interesting tools out there. We just touched on a few of them, but make no mistake. There is a lot of room for growth in this area. If you look at online meeting experiences, to be completely honest, they’re still not great. I mean, even yesterday I was using Google Meet, and for some reason, Google Meet will not work with my Bluetooth headphones. I don’t know why, it just doesn’t.

Casey:

Apple headphones?

Gray:

Casey has a nightmare when she tries to do it. User integration and the usability is still has a ways to go on a lot of those to make them easier and more mistake-proof. I think AR, VR, is becoming widely adapted, especially as the cost of that is starting to go down, and I think we’ll see a lot more of that going forward, but once again, same thing, the hardware is pretty specialized, the software can be clunky to set it up and it still needs to be improved.

Internet connectivity is another big one, right? I don’t know how many times, and this is probably happened to you, may be happening to some of you right now where if your internet service isn’t great, you might get dropouts and a lack of audio and video, things like that. I think that 5G is coming along, and that’s going to be a while before that goes anywhere, Skylink could help, that kind of thing. So that’s definitely fluff. I think people are finally trusting cloud-only data management, although, once again, that’s still a potential security hole that still needs some improvement. You don’t like putting things up there and then finding out a month later that Microsoft or Apple is looking at stuff they shouldn’t be looking at. I think in a lot of cases, we found some great tools, but they don’t all integrate with each other, so I think that there’s an opportunity for standards to be set, to allow for consolidation and collaboration of the collaboration tools, so that it works better. And then finally, data security. That’s my bugaboo from day one. Anytime you move something outside of the absolute control of the data owner, you are at risk. And you know that as soon as you put something in the cloud, you’ve got a thousand people out there trying to steal it or hack it. We still have quite a ways to go on that before that becomes reasonably safe, so beware.

We shared what we know. You don’t get to sit there and do nothing. What we’re going to ask you to do now is let us know, have you found tools or techniques that have helped you perform concept development during this interesting time? If you have some ideas or something that you want to share, go ahead and type it into your webinar control panel, and we’ll review that a little bit later in the webinar.

John:

Thanks, Gray. As we’re talking about tools that we’re currently using, I think some tools that we definitely see are essentially not quite ready for prime time, but they will be here soon. The fact is, is that, a lot of the tools are not going to go away, but instead they’re actually going to be expanded and become more mainstream as we know it.

And although the pandemic really turned how we do work all over our head and really forced us to rethink what’s the norm, it’s a pretty exciting future of what’s to come. Once we get back to being in-person, the reality is, we are going to start being in-person to do more collaboration, we’re going to be visiting with customers and otherwise. It’s human nature to have that personal conversation that we all need to develop great products that people want and need. However, I think companies and even each other… employees are going to realize there were actually some efficiencies gained by being able to do work from home or work remotely. I think employees are going to start looking at it as a perk and maybe a way to skip the commute and the free food. At the same time, there’s still going to be a need to be in-person. So we really believe that this can be a mixed reality of collaboration in the future, with both in-person and remote teams contributing at the same time. And although this product… I think the technologies we talked about today, the one that I’m most excited about is things like Spatial. Something that the… a virtual reality, augmented reality that allows, essentially, in-person and virtual team members to be able to participate.

So for tomorrow… I mean, for what’s going to happen in the future, we definitely see an increase in virtual workforce. We know several teams that we’re working with actually planned to go remote permanently. Some of our clients are actually starting to put that in place, and I think part of that is because companies are realizing some operational cost savings as a result. They may also even allow for additional flexibility in hiring the right candidates that allow you to get that individual, that essentially you may not want to be moving to where your headquarters are at. But with all this, these technologies do require new investments and I think they are going to definitely be in the future for us to help improve collaborations, and I think we’re going to quickly realize that web meetings… it’s like having a pager back in the past.

Webmeetings worked so far, but I think that we’re going to have some other things that are going to be eventually replacing it. Office spaces are probably likely to turn into a place where there’s specialized tools. It’s not necessarily a place that you just go to do work. It’s a place that you go to do build, to do prototype evaluations or otherwise, but otherwise, a lot of that work can probably go back to the home with some of these additional tools. I know… but Gray, I think it’s an exciting future. It’s going to be interesting to see what new technologies and efficiencies are going to be gained as a result. And I think with pandemic, it really forced us to do something outside of our comfort zone. But as human nature, necessity is the mother of invention, and I think what we’re going to find out here is there’s some things that we’re going to be doing differently and better as a result.

Gray:

You bet. I’m just glad I’m not in the commercial real estate market right now.

Casey:

All right. I that concludes our presentation. If folks are typing in their questions and typing thoughts around virtual tools that are being used, I just wanted to point you all to the insight section of our website, M3design.com, under the insights tab. Here you can find information about upcoming webcasts and articles that we regularly publish in our area of expertise. If you want to be able to stay in the loop about upcoming webcasts, there’s a place where you can put in your information and we will let you know when those are happening.

Casey:

All right. Let’s get to the questions. So first, which tools still have value record teams start going back to the office and resume business travel? What are your guys’ thoughts on that?

John:

Let me start.

Gray:

Yeah, go ahead.

John:

Yeah. I think a lot of the tools we talked about here, just even just the techniques, do have some value, at least in the short term. I think we’ve seen some benefit on using a consolidate systems such as Microsoft Teams, not to say that’s the only thing to do, but Miro and OnShape are definitely things that… they were around before we were forced to go remote, but are definitely going to be things that we’re going to be using even more so now, moving forward. We saw some efficiencies and a lot of different areas there too, as well. Related to VR and AR and some of these other more… being able to have different types of experiences, I think we’ll definitely see a bigger uptake on some of those tools in terms of how they’re being developed, and part of that… I think in the past, they’ve always seen as a gimmicky thing? I think what’s realized is that there may actually be some true potential in this, and we’re going to start seeing some of that development happening and being and coming front and center.

Gray:

Yeah. And I think especially VR in particular for large-scale prototyping. The visualizations is going to have a key role, because frankly there’s no other real cost effective way to do that.

John:

Yeah.

Casey:

Do you agree with that?

John:

Customer evaluations… I think we’re still going to see some of that stuff being in-person, but I think we’ll see some different ways of doing it, being using different camera views, 360 cameras. But again, like I said before, I think things like Spatial I’m really excited about, because what that allows is that it doesn’t matter if you’re in-person or remote, you still can collaborate, and you’re not that one person that’s dialed into the web meeting for instance. It’s always… nothing’s worse than being the one person not in the room, and so at least that way allows for everyone to be on the same level playing field and be able to contribute equally.

Casey:

All right. Steve asked, what other methods or tools are out there for digitizing work that maybe you didn’t include in this presentation?

Gray:

Yeah. There is a lot. I mentioned earlier Google, but Google docs, Microsoft Online, both of them have collaboration editing tools, typically for Office documents. There’s things like Wacom tablets or Wacom, however you want to pronounce this. Touchscreens for sketching, doing brainstorms, things like that, and those are becoming much lower cost and much higher resolution. They’re becoming very useful. Using multiple cameras for online meetings, having a top-down or first-person view camera can really make it more, interactive.

Cheap 3D printers. I think I mentioned this before, but these things were getting really inexpensive and it may be at some point, that instead of shipping prototypes, we just email a 3D file and have somebody print their own. I think there’ll certainly be some of that. And then for really inexpensive VR, you got things like Google Cardboard. Now there is probably the lowest tech piece of equipment you can get for VR. You see that in a smartphone and you’re good to go, and everybody pretty much has a smartphone these days already. One of my personal favorites… I don’t know if you’ve seen this on the internet recently, but the new iPhone 12 has a LIDAR capability. I’ve seen people are 3D scanning their rooms, and prototypes and all sorts of interesting things. It’s clunky right now, it doesn’t look really great, but that shows you the potential for that technology in a small device.

John:

I can see us using that, scanning an environment and then placing products in space and making sure that the layout, the workflow is all seamless for the end user.

Casey:

And going back to the topic of real estate, not the space, one of the things that I… slightly off topic, but one of the things I’ve found to be interesting lately, is some of our clients have been reaching out to us about creating music immersive innovation spaces at their facilities. It’s things like trade shows and these major sales events going away, they’ve been asking us to help them think through how their environment is being designed, so they can bring one or two clients in at a time and have this specialized experience together… it’s not really crowded. It’s an interesting way of investing back in the facility and creating different opportunities there. I think that’s all the questions that we have for today. Does anybody… excuse me.

Gray:

Last chance, people.

Casey:

If there’s anything we didn’t cover?

Gray:

Okay, all right.

Casey:

I’m going to call time. Well, thank you everyone for joining us today, appreciate all the attendees being here with us, and we will be in touch in the future as we have other webcasts scheduled.

Gray:

Stay safe out there and feel free to reach out. If there’s anything we can do to help you get through this, let us know.

John:

Or if you have any new tools that you’re using, please share as well. Nothing’s better here than being able to leverage everyone, and I appreciate it. Have a good one. Thank you.