Future Visual
We meet the company designing VR experiences to train pilots, sell furniture and take a tour of Formula 1 garages
This VR design studio only came into being in 2012 but has already worked with Ferrari, John Lewis and top airlines. We speak to co-founder Tim Fleming to visualise its journey.
You might think VR headsets are stupidly expensive, but the opposite is true when it comes to the clients Future Visual works with. Aircraft simulators cost around $10 million each – VR headsets cost less than a seat in business class, and they’re transforming the way aviation staff are trained.
Now you don’t need to spend six weeks getting security clearance for a pack of trainee ground crew to operate at the airport – they can slip on a VR helmet and be trained to work on “live” worst-case scenarios, rather than pretending something’s gone wrong.
Aviation is just one of the varied industries that are benefitting from Future Visual’s VR projects. We caught up with the company’s founder Tim Fleming to discover more about how VR is transforming business in unexpected ways.
On the cutting edge
Fleming has had a long and varied career at the cutting edge of computing graphics. He started out at as an animator at Silicon Studio, working on high-end video effects software such as Houdini. That led to a decade-long stint working with Fatboy Slim, producing the content for the massive screens at the DJ’s Big Beach Boutique gigs on Brighton beach, with audiences in excess of 200,000 people.
Whilst working as Fatboy’s “VJ”, Fleming also began exploring other avenues. “In 2007, the iPhone came out and I saw that on tour and I thought ‘oh wow, that’s amazing’. What I was really excited about was that everyone had video in their pocket. I remember it very clearly, thinking that ‘oh my God, that’s going to be such a game changer’. I was still doing all the touring stuff, but I set up a little company called Podgods where we were focusing on producing short-form content for the small screen,” he said.
Podgods then morphed into a corporate production company called Plastic Pictures, working with companies such as Unilever and BP. It was there he first stumbled across the DK1, the development kit for the virtual reality headset that was later to become the Oculus Rift. “I saw that and I had that same kind of feeling as I had in 2007. The implications of how it could be a game changer felt much more profound and obvious than when the iPhone came out.” He immediately sold his shares in Plastic Pictures and “went into stealth mode”, emerging with a new company Future Visual in 2014, set up specifically to create VR content. And before long the company was mixing with some of the biggest brands in the world. The company won an Innovate UK award and began working with John Lewis on how VR could be used for immersive retail, letting customers “see and touch” a new range of furniture that wasn’t yet in store. “This was about providing access to inventory in the full range of colours and fabrics that otherwise wouldn’t be available [in store],” Fleming said. The trial was set up in John Lewis’s flagship store on Oxford Street and customers weren’t pre-warned about the experience, yet they took to it with remarkable ease, according to Fleming. “They were just in the Oxford Street store on Saturday, doing their shopping, and the data we got from that was incredible,” said Fleming. Customers were asked at the end of the experience to rate on a scale of one to ten whether they would be prepared to do their shopping in VR in the future. The John Lewis customers responded with an average of 9.4. Future Visual also created an augmented reality app for Ferrari, allowing the company’s F1 hospitality guests to stroll through the pit garage and see what a particular component does or the impact of the different grades of tyre. Yet it’s perhaps the more mundane, less showy apps that Future Visual is developing that will make the biggest impact.
Low-budget flights
Fleming says the company’s mission is “to provide access to situations and scenarios that are physically impossible or prohibitively expensive”. And there are few business scenarios that are more expensive or harder to access than commercial aircraft and airports.
Airline pilots are well used to training in virtual reality, with those gigantic cockpit simulators now a long-
established part of pilot training. However, they’re still so expensive to configure and run that training in simulators lacks what’s known as the “startle factor” – the important test of the pilot’s ability to respond correctly to an unexpected emergency.
“We’re able to put them in situations that feel real but they would not normally encounter in real life,” said Fleming. “Normally this is something that’s very difficult to train for. Even when you put people in very big, expensive sims, they kind of know what’s coming, because they’re told ‘we’re going to do engine failure today’ or depressurisation.” What’s more, reprogramming the simulators for different emergencies is tricky and time consuming, whereas VR headsets can easily switch from one scenario to another.
Nor is it pilots alone who benefit from VR training, but the ground crew too. “When ground-training schools are training ground crew, one of the big problems is getting security clearance for all these people who have not yet officially passed through the system,” explained Fleming. “When they do get access, it’s usually for a very short period of time and the aircraft are usually in good working order.
“What we’ve built is a simulator where we can choose a time of day: day or night, clear or foggy. We’ve got narrow-bodied and wide-bodied aircraft. And we’ve got a number of errors ranging from oil spills, to fuel pits that are left open, to damage on the aircraft, to people not wearing hi-vis jackets. A bunch of stuff that just wouldn’t happen or is unlikely to happen in real life.”
Virtual machine learning
Right now, virtual reality deals with training staff how to cope with pre-prepared scenarios. But Fleming and his team are hoping to introduce machine learning into the process, so that the experts can train and improve the systems themselves.
Let’s take the example of the aircraft maintenance crew once more. The staff on the ground may have the collective knowledge to solve a problem more efficiently than a method stipulated in the training manuals. If, say, 20 experienced ground crew can strap on a virtual reality headset and asked to perform a specific maintenance task, the computer can tap their combined knowledge to calculate the most effective way to solve the problem. “If you’ve got a baseline of an expert journey through your operational procedure, the machine learning can either identify the optimum path from the sum of those journeys, or it can perhaps make suggestions of a more efficient route,” said Fleming. “It can then plot a learner’s journey through that space.”
So, when a trainee comes to tackle the same problem solved by their experienced colleagues, the AI can guide them towards the correct solution. “They might get to the engine intake, and they’re looking a little bit lost or not finding the errors they’re looking for,” said Fleming. “It would then make suggestions based on their inactivity, if they’re struggling to find the correct area.”
South coast setup
Given that VR shares much of the same technology as games development, you might expect Future Visual to have a huge team of devs working from its studio in Brighton – a pebble’s throw away from the scene of those Fatboy Slim gigs Fleming directed a decade ago. In fact, it’s quite a slender operation. There is Fleming – the self-styled
Fleming and his team are hoping to introduce machine learning, so that the experts can train and improve the systems
chief doing officer – and co-founder and CTO Iestyn Lloyd. Then there are two other developers and an artist, but that’s it in terms of full-time staff. “We’re in a studio complex, where we’ve got other game artists in the building and other concept artists, so we’re able to expand up to 12 quite quickly,” said Fleming.
The limited scope of the VR experiences Future Visual is building – be it in-store shopping or in-house training – make the development cycles much more rapid than those of more open-ended games. “We are using a lot of gaming techniques in our content to make it look great, and to be fun, be playable and be memorable,” said Fleming, “but we do it in a shorter production cycle. Even an indie game can take a year, two years. We’re able to be more nimble than that.”