XD Immersive Interview: Alfredo Ruiz, IBM

Paul: Why don’t we start with you telling us a little bit about yourself? Your current job role, your company, a little biography.

Alfredo: I’m the design lead of the augmented reality program here at IBM Analytics. My background is in industrial design; I started my career as a designer in industrial design, and then I did my Masters at the University of Cincinnati, focusing a little bit more on research and other types of design such as service and UX.

Professionally, I worked at Steelcase Inc., and then I also worked at Live Well Collaborative, a studio in Cincinnati that also works with multiple companies such as P&G, Boeing, United Health Care and Cincinnati Children’s Hospital. We did a lot of service design, user experience, and product design, so that was more of a blend of different types of design projects.

After my graduate program, I joined IBM on the analytics team, I started getting this interest in new technologies. The first project that came to me was a legacy product, used by data scientist to clean and refine big data. I started thinking, “What if we can see it as an object? What if we can create a sculpture based on the work and process that can help the data scientist out on refining and analyzing a data set.

So, I started exploring that, and then from there we started an advanced concept group that evolved to become the augmented reality program for analytics, that I’m leading right now. I have a global team with studios in San Francisco, San Jose, Austin, and Germany.

Paul: So, it sounds like you went into the analytics field but then kind of brought your creative education and background into that.

Alfredo: I think my industrial design background helped me think a little bit different in those early days at IBM and become more interested on AR/VR. When we’re designing Immersive Experiences we’re using not only UX Design practices, but also considering elements used in product design, such as materials and haptic feedback. It’s a very interesting blend of physical and digital designs. Humans are generating 2.5 million terabytes of data per day; we need to find better ways to analyze our information. What we’re doing in my team is exploring the next generation of analytics solutions, using AR as a medium.

Paul: I’ve done a lot of analytics work myself in retail and retail user experience, and I think one of the big challenges is that it’s hard to interpret. You’re looking at all kinds of data and you don’t know quite where to look. I mean, maybe you have a heat map or something like that, but when you’re looking through the data, it’s really hard to know, “What’s significant, what does it mean, and how can I take different parts of it?” So, I can see why there’d be a pretty big gap in terms of visualization.

Alfredo: Yeah, I think that was one of the big things. When I joined the team, our design director was really straightforward. He said, “You guys are going to be working on really complex problems.” And definitely we’re facing really interesting challenges; it’s a very complex field, and we always need, as user-centered designers, to try to understand our users the best we can and do all the research necessary to come up with the right solutions. It’s a really fun and interesting challenge for me.

Paul: So, what’s your talk going to be at XD IMMERSIVE?

Alfredo: One thing that I want to talk about at XD IMMERSIVE is how AR is changing the way we’re designing. It’s definitely going to change the way we see user experience. Also, part of my background is the blending of industrial design with user experience. Now we’re kind of merging these two things; we’re creating these virtual objects, so now we need to think about materials and how we’re going to interact with these three-dimensional elements. I think that’s a really interesting challenge. Also, everything is new, so we’re basically creating the basis of this new platform that we’re going to be using in the coming years. I think that’s something that is definitely worth talking about.

Another thing I’d like to talk about at XD IMMERSIVE is our experience, from my side at IBM, with creating a tool to focus on data scientists so that they can analyze information. We haven’t seen anything like this, so we’re trying to come up with something useful for them, and trying to enhance all of the capabilities and possibilities that augmented reality provides us. We’re trying to build the next generation of enterprise solutions. It’s a big challenge, but it’s definitely a really fun and interesting one.

Paul: Will you be able to show us some examples of tools?

Alfredo: Yeah, definitely. We’ve been working on that. We had a big show a month ago, and we presented some progress that we’ve made on our tool called “Immersive Insights”. I would love to show some examples, some challenges that we’ve faced in this process of creating this tool that’s going to be released soon. We’re trying to show how we got there, our learnings, our mistakes, and all of that good stuff.

Paul: It might be a little bit hard for some people to imagine what this might look like. Without giving away too much of your talk, how is a day in the life of a data scientist going to be different once you have achieved whatever goals you have in mind right now? What would their day look like, or how would their process be different than it is today?

Alfredo: One of the things that we were thinking when we started creating this tool is that right now all of these technologies--VR and AR—are still evolving. What we want to do is enhance those tools that our users have. We want to empower our users and improve the way they do their work, by combining their current data scientist tools and enhancing that with Immersive Insights.

We’re focusing on data scientist and business analysts, but also business executives. When you’re working with big data or large amounts of information, it’s really getting difficult to understand and keep track of everything. It’s so complex and there’s so much information out there that just the way we perceive the world, if we can visualize it on a multi-dimensional level with these new technologies, it will help us speed up the analysis process.

Paul: Let’s take an example. Let’s say I’m a data scientist and somebody asks me to look for something or to find some pattern. What am I going to do differently when I have this Insights tool?

Alfredo: Data Scientist work with huge amounts of information and they try to obtain important insights from their explorations. They work with data sets that look like huge spreadsheets that contain a bunch of information. Obviously there are visualization tools, but most of them are two-dimensional. So, if I’m trying to find, for example, patterns or relationships, you’re basically comparing A against B in a two-dimensional visualization. But with AR, we’re able to show multiple dimensions at the same time and combine multiple datasets. We have size, color, and all of these extra values, and we’re compiling much more feedback from that data on a virtual, three-dimensional visualization. That’s a big advantage. So now they can speed it up; with Immersive Insights we are accelerating the data exploration process.

Paul: It sounds a little bit like when NASA is filming the sun. They can show the sun as just a big bright spot, but if you look at it with different data, it looks very different. All of a sudden it’s very dark, and then there are all these flares… Just the way they look at data changes the appearance of it.

Alfredo: One of the things that we are trying to enhance or show to our users is that now you can actually walk around your data. You can actually see and visualize the information at multiple angles. It’s different when you’re seeing a spreadsheet in front of you, or just nine different 2D visualizations. Now you’re seeing everything as one object, and you can analyze it at different angles, so now you’re identifying different patterns and maybe some outliers. For example, with outliers, in seconds you’re already realizing, “Okay, there’s something weird here, let’s take a look.” So, that’s one of the cool things about this technology. This is something that is still a work in progress and that will keep evolving, but those are a few of its big advantages.

Paul: A lot of people are talking about 4D and 5D, so I imagine at some point you’ll be able to smell the bad data and say, “We need to throw this data out. It’s rotten now.”

You’re already dealing with the future because you’re already trying to bring about something new that’s not there. But if you had to look three or four years out in terms of augmented reality, what do you think is going to be happening? Where is this taking us?

Alfredo: I think the first versions of augmented reality, and even virtual reality, need to catch up a little bit more. We’ll have better field-of-views, and right now we’re wearing these heavy headsets, batteries, constraints and all of this stuff. But for the future, all of that is going to evolve and become much simpler. So for me, the experiences are going to be much more organic and natural. I think that’s the goal, that’s something that we want to keep working on. And also using something like, for example, voice. Making something more natural to have a conversation with your tool and do whatever task you want to do in a more natural way.

We’re thinking about what’s going to happen with 5G, new internet, and what that will represent. I think many industries will be disrupted and will evolve. Education, for example; healthcare… we will be able to be present in one of these experiences just by putting on a headset. I think the key is for this technology to be very natural and organic for us, different from smartphones and tablets. So, I think many industries will evolve, and the way that we use our tools and experience life will change. I guess one of the things from our side now is, “Okay, how can we create the most humane way to bring in these new technologies without disrupting the way we socialize, and be responsible with how we take these new technologies to the next level?”

Paul: That makes sense. Awesome. Well, that’s all that I had on the interview. Is there anything that you want to tell our attendees before we sign off?

Alfredo: Yeah, I think XD IMMERSIVE will be a terrific conference. I’m really looking forward to hearing the other speakers. I see a lot talent there, and they definitely will be providing a really interesting point-of-view on their specific areas of expertise. They’re the people that are leading this next phase of our evolution in technology, so I think it will be really cool to hear from all of them.

Paul: Yeah, I’m really looking forward to it myself.