XD Immersive Interview: Katie Hughes, Beast

So I went back to school, studied UX Design, and now I’m an XR product designer. For me, XR is the perfect mix of art and tech. After that, I met the CEO of Beast, Vivian Tan, at a “Women in VR” mixer. By then, I had designed the “Holo-Dog” augmented reality app at the Microsoft Virtual Reality Hackathon. As it turned out, we had similar visions regarding creating XR pets, so we stayed in touch.

Paul: Awesome. As you went from school to working in VR, what kind of transition was that? What was necessary to go from websites and mobile apps to virtual reality?

Katie: At my previous job, I had been working in ad tech, in customer experience and product marketing. So when I was trying to move into the VR industry, I actually didn’t know where to start. Keep in mind that this was a couple years ago, so the field was even more nascent than it is currently. Frankly, what I ended up doing was just googling “virtual reality classes, San Francisco.” I’m very fortunate to be in an area of the country where those classed were already starting to exist. I immediately signed up for a weekend workshop to learn Unity and made my first little Unity app, no coding required, and from there I just started teaching myself on the side.

I enrolled in the UX Design Immersive bootcamp at General Assembly, and every project I did there I tailored towards emerging technology and immersive technology. In the evenings I would go to networking events and VR workshops, and took classes at the ARVR Academy. I also enrolled in a Saturday morning class at Cogswell Polytechnic Institute in San Jose for virtual reality development and started doing hackathons on the weekends. So, it was, you know, quite a bit of work; I didn’t sleep very much for about a year. Basically there are a lot of resources out there that can help you move into VR;I t’s just a matter of actually  taking the leap. and just trying to learn as much as you can on the side until more structured programs are available.

Paul: And what are you going to be talking about at the XD IMMERSIVE conference?

Katie: I’m going to be talking about the design elements behind virtual reality character interactions. At Beast, we’re creating virtual pets for mixed reality, so I will explore building the emotional relationship between virtual characters and the users, and-how to bring those virtual characters to life.

Paul: What was one of the first things you had to work on when you first got to Beast? What was the first project?

Katie: My first project with them was further developing their user personas, doing user interviews, looking at best practices in the landscape for pet applications out there--not just in VR but for 2D, desktop, mobile apps, and otherwise. Seeing what users were responding to, what they liked and didn’t like, and then also mapping out the user flow for the demo that they had at that point in time and identifying pain points.

Paul: How far along were they when you first got there? In terms of making a product and putting it on the market, how far were they?

Katie: When I first started working with them they had just graduated from their incubator, Boost VC. They had a demo of their product and it was still in beta. Back then, you basically entered the virtual reality environment and had all of your magical powers and met all the of the characters at once. It was a bit overwhelming! Now, the flow and interactions are a lot more user-friendly. We’ve worked a lot on the onboarding process and tutorial section, because most people are very new to VR and we wanted to make sure that users didn’t have to have someone standing next to them explaining how to use the controllers every step of the way. So, we spent a lot of time with the onboarding; we’ve since added some storytelling elements; there’s now an objective, there’s rewards when you complete tasks; we have a lot more content; and now we’re commercially available in VR arcades internationally! Beast Pets is now in over 100+ VR arcades across the world. It’s been cool to watch our product and user base grow.

Paul: Cool. I was just listening to a podcast on how Atari got started. It sounds a little similar to that.

Katie: Oh, cool. That bodes well!

Paul: Yeah, a long time ago, but still, a similar start-up path there. Well, that sounds exciting. I don’t want to give away too much of your talk from XD IMMERSIVE, but I guess there’s a lot of psychology involved in pets and in relationships. There’s the technology, but then there’s the emotive aspect as well. So, it sounds like it’s challenging waters to navigate.

Katie: Oh yeah, it totally is, because it’s no longer just looking at something on a 2D screen. We can map the evolution of virtual pets since Pet Rocks, you know?  I grew up with Tamagotchis and Giga Pets. The cool thing is that now we have a chance to create characters that you can realistically interact with and develop an emotional relationship with the technology enables it--you can enter their world, and they can enter yours. It’s quite a time to be alive. But yeah, it’s definitely been uncharted waters to navigate as we’ve been building it all out.

We don’t even consider them virtual pets--we consider them pets. So, to make sure we were on the right path, we consulted a neuroscientist on how to create a bond between the user and the dragons (we have magical baby dragons in our game right now). We had a lot of things to consider, like how do we have the dragons approach the user but not be in their space too much (and better yet, how to prevent them from flying through the user, because that’s a thing that can happen in VR) . We learned some interesting things, like feeding someone something from your hand is a way to increase bonding.

We found that when we were doing our usability testing, users were saying, “I want to feel like I had an impact on the world; that I had a purpose there and that [the dragons] reacted to me.”

It reminds me of the real world. My friend went to Corgi Con in San Francisco and said, “I was so sad, I’d go up to a corgi and try to pet it, and it would get distracted and ignore me and run away to go do something else. I was like, ‘Why am I here?’” When she said that I realized that sentiment paralleled the user feedback we were getting from our playtesting. I think there’s a lot of parallels we can draw from real life experiences when developing for VR.

Paul: Well, looking to the future, the next three to five years let’s say--I know for VR that’s a pretty long way out--maybe even next year, or I guess the year after that--but what do you think is going to become more important in VR over the next few years? Where is it headed?

Katie: I think the most important thing is the hardware. I think right now it’s a lot of early adopters and what you think of as like a “stereotypical gamer” who have really adopted this technology. The hardware is a big barrier to entry; the cost of having an immersive system and a desktop-enabled VR headset (because you have to have the computer hardware that can support VR technology as well). As technology gets better and awareness of VR and AR and mixed reality increases, I can see more mass adoption.

I think especially once you don’t have to be tethered to the headset, that’s going to be huge; once you can have a six-degrees of freedom and not have to be tied to a desktop computer. We’re going to start seeing this immersive technology used not just for gaming platforms. It’s going to go far beyond just gaming and first-person shooters and experiences like that. We can already see that this technology is moving into industries like healthcare and education and training… there are so many use cases. XR isn’t going anywhere. It’s just going to continue getting better and better.

Paul: One of the things I was thinking as you were talking was psychiatry, as far as building relationships and being able to generate some emotions around that. Well, thank you so much for taking the time out. Anything else you want to say before we sign off?

Katie: Yes: if you’d like to try out Beast Pets, we’re always looking for more testers. Send an email to Beta@BeastPets.com and we’ll get you set up!