Andrรฉ Elijah

Virtual reality used to be a science fiction trope in the 90s, but now, virtual reality is actual reality! Take it from this week’s guest: the one and only Andrรฉ Elijah. His work building games and doing marketing projects as an immersive director is sought after by brands and celebrities worldwide, including Google, Meta, Snap, Drake, and Beyoncรฉ. And that’s not all!

Our conversation began with a slight nerd-out moment about VR Troopers — shout-out to Michael Hollander! — and then Andrรฉ gave a rundown about AR, VR, the metaverse, and the ins and outs of immersive experiences. He also shared a bit of his origin story as a child actor, Ryerson University grad, and becoming one of the first people in Canada to use RED cameras (which are now a worldwide industry standard). Andrรฉ also gave some great advice for people looking to get into the immersive space.

There’s more than one way to success, and Andrรฉ proves that you don’t have to chase VC funding to do it!

Transcript

Full Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right. So, tell us who you are and what you do.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
My name is Andrรฉ Elijah and I’m an immersive director working in augmented reality and virtual reality.

Maurice Cherry:
How has the year been going for you so far? I can hear from in the background that you probably have started off this year with a pretty big announcement.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yeah, my twins are born in January. So yeah, I guess you can hear them in the background. I’ve got noise canceling headphones on.

Maurice Cherry:
No, no, no. You’re you’re all good. Congratulations.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Thanks, dude. Yeah. It’s been a bit of a shift, but no, it’s been good. It’s been good.

Maurice Cherry:
How has it been juggling work and family? Are you sort of finding that balance now?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
No, it requires a really good partner that can take care of things on the home front while I work maniacally at all hours of the day and night.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, let’s jump into that work a little bit. You have a studio, Andrรฉ Elijah Immersive, and you just recently celebrated your five year anniversary. Congratulations on that.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Thank you, sir.

Maurice Cherry:
Tell me more about it.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
It’s basically a studio where we build everything we want to see in the world. There’s multiple parts to the company. We’re building games. We see games as the major catalyst to enable these new mediums and platforms. And so we want to be there and kind of build the content that we think will sell units and sell headsets and make this augmented reality and virtual reality future pervasive. And then on the flip side, we also work with a number of agencies and brands doing marketing projects, ad campaigns, that sort of thing, building interactive elements of that, or activations, augmented reality activations, metaverse activations, all kinds of stuff. So we’re constantly busy, probably a little bit too busy, some would say, but no complaints. This year’s been absolutely mental. I think I’m really lucky in that I was able to survive this long in this industry.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
A lot of people thought that VR in particular was going to pop off multiple times already and it didn’t and really kind of found its footing during the pandemic. There’s a lot of things that came together. Everything from Oculus Quest 2 or I guess now Meta Quest 2. Everyone being at home with the pandemic and needing something to do, the rise of VR fitness was really another thing that popped off and helped sell headsets and find a user base. And so all these things coalescing at the same time allowed for me to still be here and be in business all these years later. Definitely one of the lucky ones in that regard.

Maurice Cherry:
VR as a technology, I feel like has been trying to pop off since at least, I guess at least the ’90s, right, the mid ’90s.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yeah, that’s correct.

Maurice Cherry:
It has tried to gain some footing. The first, and this is probably weird, but the first thing I think of when I think of VR is VR Troopers. That really horrible, horrible show.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
That show. Yeah. In the ’90s it was basically a riff off of the Power Rangers because there was the three VR Troopers. I remember that. There was a TV station called the New VR and they carried VR troopers. Yeah, it was a station based at a Barrie, Ontario.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh wow. So, interesting thing. Do you remember the black guy that was on there that played JB?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yes.

Maurice Cherry:
He works in gaming. I’ve had him on the show before.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
What?

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, yeah.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
That is wild.

Maurice Cherry:
He told me all the behind the scenes. That show is so chopped up. It’s like the video form of, I don’t know, scrapple or something. It’s like a whole bunch of stuff taken from different shows that they cobbled together and it’s wild. It’s not even from one show. It’s from five different shows that they put together to make that show because they have different outfits in VR grid versus when they’re fighting the monsters. And it’s so funny. There’s a video on YouTube, if you want to check it out. There’s a video where the cast got drunk and did a voiceover of one of the episodes. It’s so funny. It’s so funny.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
That is awesome. This makes me really happy to hear, I’m not going to lie. It’s funny because no one knows what the hell VR Troopers is. You can mention Power Rangers and everyone knows that. Occasionally you can mention Masked Rider and people will get that because it’s just Kamen Rider. You mention VR Troopers, no one ever knows what the hell you’re talking about. So, you made me really happy right now.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. But to go back to my earlier point, VR has really tried to pop off since then. You had Nintendo with the failed Virtual Boy. You even had video games that had virtual or virtual in it, like Virtual Fighter. There’s been all these attempts to try to make virtual reality really a big thing. And it seems like, as you said now-

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Even the Metal Gear Solid VR missions. And I think it was Metal Gear Solid 2. It was all these simulated missions that were, quote unquote, in VR.

Maurice Cherry:
But even now, as you said, there’s been this perfect storm of I guess the pandemic and the technology becoming at a enough of a consumer price point where it’s starting to become commonplace now.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yep. Hundred percent.

Maurice Cherry:
So with your studio, what does a typical day look like for you?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
I don’t really think there is a typical day. It’s everything. So, right now we’ve got multiple VR games in production. One is kind of midway-ish. One is at the tail end and we’re about to go into certification. We’re working on a number of augmented reality projects and advertising campaigns and things like that. So, every day is kind of a mishmash of touching base with my team to see where things are at, play testing our products and projects and giving some feedback there, investigating new technology that we might be called to use in a campaign of some sort or an activation, pitching projects that we ultimately want to build and do. It’s a mishmash. Every day starts early and it goes late, but there’s really no set formula, just whatever we get time to do.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Now we’re talking about VR virtual reality, which again I’m pretty sure most of the audience knows about. But I also just kind of want to level set the conversation because there’s a lot of terms when we talk about these immersive experiences that get thrown around, like AR, XR, the metaverse. Can you give us a couple of definitions of terms that are widely used in this space?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yeah. The three that I use are AR, VR, and regrettably metaverse because those are three biggest ones. XR I throw out the window because that just opens up its own can of worms. So, augmented reality is basically digital information overlaid on top of the physical world. So, whether that’s virtual screens that exist in your room, virtual pets that exist in your space and navigate your space that you interact with, things like that. Virtual reality is an entirely virtual space. So, you put on a headset. There is no pass through. You’re not seeing the real world. You are immersed in a fully virtual world with virtual interactions and virtual environments.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And then we’ve got metaverse, which is basically a think ready player one basically networked experiences with other people in a virtual space. Doesn’t necessarily have to be in VR. You could make a case that Fortnite is a metaverse of its own with the way that people are able to express themselves with various designs and skins and way you can customize yourself. And you’re communicating with people and you have shared tasks and goals or you can just hang out remotely together. I think that’s the perfect example of a metaverse. And so those are really the three that I try and stick to because otherwise you get way too in the weeds with all the different terminology and you lose people.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. Why do you regrettably say metaverse?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Ever since Zuckerberg changed the company’s name, Facebook’s name to Meta, everyone’s been jumping on the metaverse bandwagon. I think in some ways it’s good that we have a shared language finally because if you’ve been working in this space for years, the terminology got pretty hardcore. You had AR, you had VR, you have XR. And then there’s a whole debate online as to what the hell XR even stands for and where the origins of it come from. That’s literally a Twitter battle every other day. And then we’ve got spatial computing, which Magically tried to use to differentiate themselves. And we have Microsoft with Mixed Reality.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And so there’s all these terms and everyone has their own branded version of the same thing, which made having that common language difficult. So, here’s Zuckerberg blowing $10 billion a year, whatever to make the dream happening. Renames the company Meta in the spirit of the metaverse. And so everyone now is using metaverse for everything. But I just think if you’re building this content, you’re building real time content with networked interactions and expressiveness and personalization, all of things like that. Now we have everyone saying that Web 3 projects are all the metaverse. You buy an NFT and it’s for the metaverse, even though you can’t use that content anywhere else. I saw an article the other day about an audio metaverse and it’s like-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh God.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Everyone is just… If you do a Google search every day, it’s just nothing but metaverse this metaverse that. And most of it’s bullshit. If people are selling you stuff that will be used in the metaverse, 99% of it can’t be used anywhere because there’s no interoperability with any of the platforms. So it’s kind of disingenuous I find when people use the term metaverse. I think it’s great because it grounds the conversation to a degree. And if anyone with real understanding will know that we’re talking about networked multi-user experiences that are digital. But for the most part, I think it’s become a bit of a hype train thing and I’m waiting for it to die off again.

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like Meta, Facebook, whatever, they muddied the waters a bit by calling what they’re doing the metaverse because right after that, everyone of course is asking, “Well, what is the metaverse?” But they’re associating the metaverse with Meta and think that everything metaverse related has to do with Meta the company.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yeah, that’s true. But I was watching an interview this morning on the Breakfast Club with Charlemagne, and DJ Envy, and Angel Yee. And they had a Ja Rule on there and he was talking about how he’s building a Madison Square Garden for the metaverse. And I’m like, dude, what now? And so then he said two things later, he had said that he was building inside of the platform called the Sandbox, which is a crypto platform. But one Web 3 real time product isn’t the metaverse. He needs a certain level of interoperability between the different platforms and we need to be able to jump to and from them easily before I would ever consider it to be the metaverse. But it’s common parlance now. It’s to the point where 46 year old rappers are dropping the metaverse now in interviews.

Maurice Cherry:
Right. It’s funny. At work where I’m at now, we just released a print magazine and our next issue that we’re doing the theme for it is Web 3. It’s geared towards product communities. And so I’m trying to find what that intersection is going to be between Web 3 and product communities and stuff. But we were initially going to call it metaverse because of that kind of large encompassing, I guess, general definition of it as so many people jump on the bandwagon. But I think narrowing it to Web 3 hopefully will help with that. But I wanted to get those definitions because I think that along with NFTs and DAOs and all that stuff gets thrown in together and people just get confused and I almost feel like that’s on purpose.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yeah. I think the running joke right now is if you want to raise a bunch of money, maybe not right now because things are on a downturn, but certainly a couple months ago, if you wanted to raise money, you just say Web 3, metaverse, and DAO and a pitch deck and all of a sudden you’re valued at $50 million. And I was even thinking about doing some stuff in the crypto space and I talked to a couple investors. And honestly, dude, I didn’t have anything solid. It was pretty shaky. The idea that I had and the investors were like, “Yeah, your company, if you started right now, it’s valued at $25 million. I can help you raise $5 million tomorrow.” And it’s like, “Say what? Dude, I don’t even have a deck. I don’t have a company. What are you talking about?”

Andrรฉ Elijah:
I felt a little bit dirty having those conversations. I’m like, you know what, I’m just going to keep on doing this VR AR thing for a minute and just ride this out. But that was the thing. You throw enough of those terms around in a deck and you got a really big valuation and chances are Andreessen Horowitz is going to jump in and value it at a billion dollars, which is those things that was happening. So, it’s interesting.

Maurice Cherry:
So, I was going to ask this question. I’ll still ask it, but I can’t help but notice in your profile picture you have these Snapchat, AR Spectacles. And that’s one way that people can experience these immersive experiences. You also mentioned Meta Quest 2. Are there other ways that people can start to get a sense of what these immersive experiences are about?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yeah. So in the case of the spectacles, those are very much developer only or creator only, as Snap’s terminology would be. So, there’s only a handful of people in the world, maybe 600-700 people in the world that have Spectacles right now. They’re early. They’re very cool. I love using them, but they’re really for us to figure out what the capabilities in a lightweight headset need to be for augmented reality to be real and to go mainstream. So, there’s a lot of dialogue between people like myself and Snap to eek out the most performance and have an understanding of how we want to use these things in the first place. I think in the coming years they’ll hit mainstream and you’ll be able to buy them. But right now those glasses are very much for developers to spell out what the future is going to be like.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
In terms of what can you use today to get a sense of what all the stuff is going to be like, Snapchat is huge when it comes to AR. There’s hundreds of millions of active users right now using AR multiple times a day. So, a lot of the marketing projects that my team engages on are all Snap based just because they have a high number of users, the retention is really high, and people just love using the platform. And so my team has built projects for Direct TV and AT&T and Google and probably some others that I can’t even think of right now all on Snap.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And typically when we get a request for breaking down the project, it always starts off with, “We’re going to target every platform. We’re going to do Spark AR and we’re going to do Web AR so you can hit the stuff in a web browser. And we’re going to do Snap and maybe even a dedicated app.” And two weeks into any of these processes, they’re like, “We’re just going to go to use Snap because they have the highest amount of users, the highest amount of retention, and the capabilities of the platform are dope. So, I think if you want to experience AR right now, Snap is probably the way to go on your phone.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And if you want to experience virtual reality, Meta Quest 2 is basically the best headset you can get, best platform you can get. It’s a few hundred bucks. You can go to Amazon or Best Buy and pick them up and bring them home. And it’s honestly the best experience that you can get right now all in one standalone headset. You don’t need a computer, which I think VR was really held back for a while by the fact that you needed a gaming computer for the longest time to be able to drive these things. And so here we have a standalone device that’s basically Android phone on your face. And you get really compelling content. You get, if you want to work on your fitness, you got Supernatural, which is probably the best workout app ever. And I’m really into it for the boxing. We’ve got, if you’re into shooters, they’ve remade Resident Evil 4 in VR and it’s only available on the Quest and it’s probably the best VR game I’ve played next to Half-Life: Alyx.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And so you’ve got all these games that are being able to run in a standalone form factor. And then if you want some of those PC only experiences, then you can connect with a cable or even wirelessly to your PC and have it be a PC headset as well. So I think if you want to get into AR, it’s going to be Snapchat on your phone for the time being. And if you wanted to get into VR, then it’s going to be Meta Quest. And even with the Quest, they’re enabling augmented reality and mixed reality experiences now, too. It’s black and white pass through, but all your content is color. It’s really compelling. It’s really compelling.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow. I have a client that bought me, well, actually I had requested him to get me a Meta Quest 2 instead of paying me a deposit, it’s still in my closet. I haven’t broken it out yet. I need to give a spin.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yeah. Well if you open it up, which you need to, we can play together and you can add me and I will onboard you. That’s a promise.

Maurice Cherry:
No, you mentioned-

Andrรฉ Elijah:
[crosstalk 00:19:12].

Maurice Cherry:
All right. You mentioned these earlier clients that you’ve worked with. You said Snap, you mentioned just for some of the others I’m looking at your website here, Uber, Sony, Drake, Beyonce. When you’re working with these brands, are you seeing any specific trends when it comes to the type of immersive experiences they want to create?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Early days VR was very much driven by hype. So, you basically wanted to have a very basic project. Keep in mind the capabilities when this wave of VR was popping off a few years ago, five years ago, the capabilities weren’t really as fleshed out as they are now. So it was basically you could look around in a headset. If you were lucky, you had motion track controllers. But you’re still tethered to a PC that wasn’t very powerful, especially when it was driving a stereoscopic two views at 90 frames per second. So, you were.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Limited in what you could do. And early days it was basically let’s build this thing, attach a celeb or a big brand to it, and get press. And so basically you were building projects just to get press because there really was no market to make money. So, you were getting paid to build the experiences and your metric was how many views and how many articles did you get? And I think that did a lot of harm to the industry because weren’t creating anything really of value that stood the test of time. People weren’t getting much utility out of it and it hurt the space. And that’s why when I say I’m one of the lucky ones that’s still around, I mean 90% of my peers have died off in this industry to go to adjacent industries or something completely different because there just was no way to make money in VR for the longest time until the last couple years with the advent of the Quest and Quest 2.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
So, I think now we’re at a point where we have enough data and we have enough users that we can make a go of this, if you do it right, and really create value for people, whether it’s through an entertaining experience, like a game, or something that provides utility, like a workout app that actually helps people with fitness. Maybe it’s a meditation app that helps with people’s personal wellness and that sort of thing. So, I think we’re at a point now where we’re trying to identify what are the opportunities to create value for people? As opposed to what’s this flashy headline that I can get with a celeb or a big brand attached just for shits and giggles? And it’s a very different way of working. That’s why I pitch a lot of projects because I don’t necessarily have all these clients coming to me. But it’s like, “Hey, I see an opportunity because I’m working with the platform. I have some insight as to the numbers or percentage splits of who’s engaged in what kind of content. And I see an opportunity here if we do it right.”

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And I think that’s the key thing is doing it right because you don’t want shovelware. You don’t want to announce something that never gets out the door and you ultimately don’t want to fail the platform. As much shit as they take, Meta’s done a really great job in building a platform that succeeds for the developers and that you know that if you manage to get to that store and they push you in front of their audience, you’ll live to fight another day. You won’t have to close up shop, you can pay your mortgage, everything is good.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And I think part of that responsibility is creating content that stands the test of time, that shows up and does well for its audience. And ultimately, I say this every time we take on a project, we got to come correct. I don’t want to build a thing that we ship on day one and we forget about it. I don’t want to ship something that people forget about. It’s like come correct, create value for the platform, create value for the users, and then identify the next opportunity, and rinse and repeat. But the key thing is to come correct.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m glad that you mentioned shovelware because first of all, that immediately took my mind back to late ’90s, early 2000s when companies were just starting to get on the internet. And they were making just trash just to say that they had some sort of presence, like Pepsi world or something like that. Where you go and it’s like, “Oh, you can view our latest commercial.” Why would I want to view a commercial? It wasn’t any sort of intent behind it, I guess, outside of it being just another commercial, another ad. But I think that was also because brands then, this was such a new technology and a new space, they didn’t know how to operate within it. I would imagine now with the metaverse, maybe companies are a little smarter about the type of experiences that they want to have, maybe, possibly, not really.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
I don’t want to anyone under the bus, but no. There’s group chats with people and we see the latest headlines every now and then from the Verge or Engadget and we trade it around. We say, “Why does this even exist?” There’s a lot of that going around still. That’s kind of the nature of the beast to a degree. You got these huge multi-billion dollar companies that are trying to create platforms and they want some big names attached and the people that have access to those big names. It’s the traditional agency model in a lot of ways where agencies aren’t really run by creative people. There’s a million levels of abstraction involved and everyone takes a meeting on every little thing and it’s designed by committee and none of it is breathtaking. None of it is new. None of it’s innovative. And the end product hurts.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
So, I think a lot of these projects and products that come out that are associated with a big agency and a big brand, you can probably guess that it’s not going to be the greatest thing ever. But if you have a really small, nimble team, that’s dope at what they do and they’ve studied the space and they’ve worked at it, they’ve put in those hours, and they get a hold of something valuable, like a brand or IP, then they’re going to knock it out of the park. That’s been the game with everything from the internet to we saw what happened in last year with the NFTs and Web 3 and all this stuff. Did we really need a Matrix Avatar project that’s basically just a rebranded version of Unreal’s Meta Humans? No, I don’t think we needed that. So I think, VR, AR none of it’s really all that different. I think you just need the indies kind of lay the groundwork for everyone else to follow. And you just make sure that the indies get their flowers and they get their paycheck so they can live another day.

Maurice Cherry:
That makes a lot of sense. That makes a lot of sense because what you are seeing are a lot of small studios and independent developers trying to stake their claim. And now the larger brands are kind of trying to rush in. And now that they see that, oh, this is something that I think we can be a part of in some way, now they want to try to rush in and get a piece of it. So, that makes sense. But some of these considerations you’re talking about, there’s so much to think about with, quote unquote, the metaverse there’s virtual wellbeing, there’s economics around NFTs and stuff, there’s intellectual property. How do you factor in these other types of considerations within your work? Do you think about that stuff?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
No, I try and limit the scope of what I do to exclude all that or else I wouldn’t get anything done all day. Our business right now on the games front, we’ve got a couple original games that we’re working on and we’ve become the master’s of porting games. So, we have access to the IP. We don’t have to worry about any of that. So, we’re in a good spot there. And then when it comes to the agency side, obviously we’re working with the brands and agencies. So IP again, isn’t really a concern for us because they’re coming to us and saying, “Use our name and do this thing.” So, I think the way I’ve tackled this, we kind of get around all of that. I don’t think I have, as well as the studio’s doing, I don’t think I have enough dollars for all the lawyers that would be involved with everything you’re mentioning.

Maurice Cherry:
That makes sense. Let the big companies sort that out. That’s what they’re paying for, right?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Exactly.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah. I love that you’ve got this portion on your site with rejected projects. Why did you decide to show those?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yeah, so it’s weird, man. So, a lot of what people do when they’re indie is build products and projects and prototype things. But if you take a look at their portfolios, they only have the finished projects, the sexy ones, the ones that shipped. And you never know about what happened in those three months or four months between them shipping stuff. You never know what the backstory is. You don’t know the genesis of so many of these things. And I found myself for a while not shipping projects and doing a lot of prototyping and having a lot of discussions. And I just wanted an avenue to show it off and put it up as in a way that’s like, “Hey, this is not final. It’s not shipping. It’s not representing anyone. But these are the things that we’re thinking about. These are the conversations that we’re having behind closed doors.” The people that we’re talking to are probably people that you would want to want a product from or at least the conversation with to figure out what this would look like.”

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And ultimately I just said one day, “Fuck it. I’m just going to post all of this stuff sitting on all of these decks and all of these ideas and all these email threads and conversations that I’ve had. Why shouldn’t people know about it? They’re not secret.” I did the work to come up with the idea and get it in front of the right people and pitch them. So, maybe people should know that I’m not just kind of sitting around playing Fortnite all day, but I’m not shipping stuff, but I’m actually trying to get things done. I’m trying to build alignment behind the scenes with big brands and stuff. And so just kind of decided one day I got enough material, let’s do it.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And to be fair, I’m probably showing only a 10th of the rejected pitches that are pretty decent. Just a matter of I need to find the time to throw all that stuff up. So I think we’ve got, what do we have in there, dude? We’ve got some People stuff. We’ve got Title and RocNation who I was talking to for a while about doing some stuff. I think we got Dead Menace in there. So, there’s enough cool ideas and content in there that it just kind of made sense to put it out there and say, “Hey, yeah, I know all these people.” And if we have something strong, I can take an idea back to them as well. And maybe we’ll do something in the future.

Maurice Cherry:
And it’s probably also just a learning experience, hopefully, for people that are like, “Oh, we just got pitched on a similar project. Maybe we don’t do it this way, or something like that. So it’s kind of a learning tool.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yeah. A hundred percent

Maurice Cherry:
Now as these immersive technologies become more readily available, now we’ve got, like you said, Snap Spectacles, we got Meta Quest 2. I’m sure there are going to be more peripherals that come down the line in the years to come. What do you think is going to set each experience apart as these technologies become more readily available?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
I think part of it is understanding the tech and how to make it work and understand the limitations and polish everything that you do. Like I said before, you got to come correct. So when we’re creating these different experiences, some of them are games and some of them are applications, mixed reality applications that add a layer of utility on top of your physical space, your home or whatever. I think user experience is really important. Onboarding users that have never touched a headset before is really important. Letting them feel comfortable and getting them to a point of comfort where they can share with their friends, “Hey, put on this headset and try this thing out.” We need to stop getting away from these high end technologies because this kind of tinkerer space or this hardcore technology space and realize that it’s for everyone. So I think polish and onboarding and taking the ego out of it is really important to grow that adoption.

Maurice Cherry:
Now we’ve talked a lot about your work. We’ve talked for the past 30 minutes about your work. Let’s kind of switch back to the real world. Let’s learn more about Andre Elijah, the person, the man. Tell me about where you grew up.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yeah. I grew up in Toronto, middle class family, parents working their asses off to give me a future. Initially wanted to be a child actor and got into that for a little bit. And that kind of kicked off my whole film industry thing. So, did a lot of auditions, was in some commercials and couple small movies and that sort of thing growing up. And really loved the energy of being on set really loved being creative with people. So, that I think set the tone for the rest of my career and seeing how people collaborated and worked under really stressful situations on a set to create something really, really dope.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And grew out of that a little bit. Just the auditions were a lot with everything I had going on at school. I had a lot of extracurriculars and bands and drama and all that sort of stuff. Kind of aged out and then there was an opportunity when I was in, I think grade eight, seven or eight to do what was called an options program and I sucked at sports. So, it was basically an opportunity to do more creative things. So on top of doing debate, there was an opportunity to be part of the film club. And that piqued my interest immediately. My first time shooting and editing, it was a… My first camera that I used was a Canon and GL1 camera, which is a 3CCD or three chip semi-pro camera from Canon. And my first edit suite was I think Final Cut 3 on a Power Mac G4 with mini DV capture deck and external monitors and all that sort of stuff. So I started, they threw me in the deep end and I got to play with the pro stuff first.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
It was probably seven or eight years before I ever touched iMovie. After I started in Final Cut, I found that whole process of shooting projects and editing them and taking them through post production really, really interesting and fascinating. And I picked it up quick. That just kind of became my thing. And I was always a geek and loved playing with computers. So, the fact that I could create the stuff that people would watch and enjoy while geeking out on these really hardcore computers was a dream from true.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
A lot of the older students, I was grade seventh, grade eight and a lot of the older students that were in grade 11, 12 when they graduated, they went off to work in the big leagues. We had some guys that went off to New York and worked on the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films. We had a couple guys go off to work at visual effects houses. We had some that went off to China and worked in documentary films there. And so I guess they all kind of took me under their wing and I got to see life through their eyes for a while and they onboard me to their projects. So, I was this young kid that was getting really shitty duties on their projects, but it was dope. And eventually I got good at editing. So I became an editor, freelance editor while I was still in high school and all that.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
I ended up working with Radio Television Hong Kong. I was editing some of their documentaries and a buddy of mine that I worked with in the corporate world, we were both moonlighting in the film industry. He ended up going to the American Film Institute. He became a directing fellow there and I edited the three short films that got him accepted into the American Film Institute. So, that kind of set me up. And then I worked at my first agency ever I worked at as a video editor initially cutting together demo reels for them and content for their clients. And then they turned me into a flash developer before flash got killed off by Apple, Steve Jobs, and one letter. They turned me more into a dev than anyone else. And let me see what happened when you press a button and something bounces on a screen. They did that. And I think in a big way kind of set me up to where I’m at now.

Maurice Cherry:
So, you got introduced into tech at a early age, but through media. I think that’s pretty cool.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yeah. I really just always love the creative process and being able to geek out to pull that process together. It’s been a lot of fun. It’s been a lot of fun. You see a lot of stuff and yeah, I think the common thread in my career though has been being on the cutting edge of technology. So whether it was the film and using janky ass versions of Final Cut Pro on these ridiculously powerful computers. I did a stint at Canada Pension Plan Investment Board. So, I was a systems analyst for them working on some hardcore service stuff. Years later, after film and agency stuff, working in AR and VR, again, cutting edge of technology. So, I think that’s always been kind of the constant in my life and in my career.

Maurice Cherry:
And now you went to Ryerson University, which I think by the time this interview comes out, people know it’s now Toronto Metropolitan University. But you majored in fine and studio arts as part of their new media program there.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
That’s correct.

Maurice Cherry:
What was your time like there?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
It wasn’t great. I went to Ryerson because the founder of my first agency, he was actually in the first batch of new media graduates at Ryerson. That guy has always been my hero and I love him to death. Shout to Spencer Saunders. I wanted to be like him, so I went to Ryerson and hopped into the new media program over there. And it was very different than when he went to school. I was one of those people, man, I like doing stuff. I don’t really like the theory of things. I like getting my hands dirty. It just didn’t click for me, which is fine. Maybe it clicked for some others, but I like getting my hands dirty. I like building stuff. I like doing the work.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
So, sitting in a class and watching someone code on a projector doesn’t really teach me that much. Hearing about a VHS fine artwork from 20 years prior when we’re doing stuff online didn’t really connect with me. It’s just one of those things. I think that’s been another constant in my life too. I just like doing, I don’t really like the instruction. I Just like getting my hands dirty with the code and seeing how things react when I change things around. So, Ryerson wasn’t really my bag.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
First couple years, I think I was in school full time. And then the last couple years I was working down the street at Canada Pension while I was doing my classes. So, Canada Pension was really cool. They let me slip off to class when I needed to for an hour or two here and then go back to work. So, I start my day early. I’d end it kind of later in the day, probably five, six o’clock. And skip out for, instead of taking lunches or whatever, I’d just go to class. So, at least my last couple years I had real work that I was doing to kind of balance it all out.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
But yeah, go get your degree. That’s the thing that gives you credibility I guess. But I can honestly say, at this point in my career, I don’t think I’ve ever looked back at Ryerson and been like, wow, they set me up for this or everything that I did there led to this. God, no. It was me just kind of downloading Unreal Engine when they announced Unreal Engine 4 and being able to play with those content examples and build my own stuff that really kind of got me here.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s interesting. I have I guess similar experiences to when I was in college. I would imagine that college is still set up this way where your first two years you’re just slammed with classes because you have to take your humanities and all the general stuff before you can really get into your major. And then once you get into your major, there’s not so many classes hopefully. So, you have more time just outside of school to do things. My first year at Morehouse I was ready to go. I was like I don’t know if this is what I want to do. And I stuck it out because eventually I did have part-time jobs. I actually started working in the computer science lab at Morehouse and that’s how I got into, not necessarily how I got into technology. I was into it before then. But I got to spend so much time in the computer lab teaching myself HTML, basic JavaScript, et cetera, reverse engineering webpages, figuring that stuff out on my own that had nothing to do with what I was actually learning in my major courses.

Maurice Cherry:
And so I think if I look back at my time, similar to what you’re saying, I don’t know if I would really recommend it. I could say, “Oh, I went to Morehouse.” And that means something to people in the world. To me, eh, it was okay. It was all right. I got my degree. I got out, no debt. I can say that proudly.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Key part, right? You got out, you survived, you did it.

Maurice Cherry:
We had our graduation outside. They normally have the graduations outside and it stormed on my graduation, lightning hitting electronics stormed. And I’m sitting there in my cap and gown drenched because the person next to me had an umbrella and he wouldn’t let me get under the umbrella because he’s like, “I don’t know who you are. Our last names just happened to be together in the alphabet. Get away from me.” Yeah, I get what you’re saying.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
At least you went to you graduation though. I skipped mine. So yeah, that tells you everything.

Maurice Cherry:
So after Ryerson, you started out as a freelancer. You were working as a production artist. You were doing a lot of post production work. Was that kind of where the education for you really set in, doing the work?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yeah. But even what I was doing half the time there was no template for, there was no real learning other than doing it. So, I was fortunate enough that I got my hands on the first couple RED cameras that ever landed in Canada. So, for the people that don’t know-

Maurice Cherry:
Oh wow.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yeah. So that was a big deal. But for people who don’t know, the RED camera was really the first 4K digital camera that film productions could get their hands on. So, it’s from a company called RED and Peter Jackson was the first director that would create a project with them. And it was a short film that he created specifically for the company. And since then, they basically redefined Hollywood and they’re kind of the norm now. And if you watch videos from any of the big YouTubers, like MKBHD, or iJustine, or Jonathan Morrison, any of these people, they all have REDs.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And back in the day, REDs used to cost as much as a house. So the guy that went off to be a directing fellow at American Film Institute and someone else that I was working with, they both happened to get REDs at launch because they could spend as much as a house on a camera and they were directors. They didn’t want to know how these things worked. They didn’t need to know. So me kind of being the post-production guy and ultimately becoming an onset workflow person, I learned how the camera worked. I learned how to get the footage off the cards, transcode it.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
I could see a camera shooting and know whether or not it was going to die. And in the early days reliability wasn’t that great. And I just became the guy that knew how these damn things worked. And so I was consulting a lot on RED productions. Known as the RED whisperer because I just knew everything about them. I figured it out on the fly. There was no real support network for these things. No one had them. So, we just had to figure it out by the seat of our pants on a really expensive production on set. And so worked with those cameras for years.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And then that’s kind of what led into me working with Beyonce. So, we were shooting a commercial, a real estate commercial, completely unrelated in New York City. And on the last day of the shoot, I got a message from the director of the Beyonce project saying we’ve got 10 REDs on the floor at a place called Off Hollywood and we don’t know how to set them up. And my partner and I went over there and we got all the cameras on the same firmware version. We set them up so they could do multi-cam shoots. And we got them all up and running at the facility or at the location, which was Roseland Ballroom in New York City, which I think is closed now. And we got those things up and running for four nights and in a day basically.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
For a live via satellite, quote unquote, live via satellite segment for the Michael Jackson tribute concert. We got through that shoot and it was the first 10 RED multicam shoot ever. And we did it for Beyonce and that just kind of we hacked that together. It wasn’t supposed to work and it did. So all of this stuff, it’s you learn by doing. You learn by throwing yourself into really uncomfortable situations and just saying, “Fuck it, let’s just figure it out.” So, that’s kind of led me from thing to thing and it hasn’t failed me yet.

Maurice Cherry:
Now you founded a studio back then, Last Step Studios. And based on what I’ve heard, your current studio evolved out of that over the course of a weekend. How did that happen?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yeah, I’ve had multiple studios. I guess, multiple studios under different names. And I keep on using up all the cool names. That’s why it’s Andre Elijah Immersive now because I just can’t come up with any more cool names that should be the name of a company. So in that company, I founded it with another student from Ryerson and we wanted to make video games. And on day one we realized, oh, crap, video games are very expensive to make, very expensive. And we don’t have money because we’re broke students. And so we pivoted immediately to doing architectural visualization work using real time engines. And so it was initially Unreal Engine.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
The work that we were creating in Unreal, it looked cool, it was realistic looking, and we could change material on couches and on walls and stuff. And that impressed some people, but they ultimately came to us for more traditional rendering work or dollhouse renderings and some static renderings, that sort of thing, because game engines was so new to the real estate market. It didn’t really get a lot of pickup. Ultimately, I think we wanted to do different things.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
I saw the demo of the HoloLens. I think it was at E3 where they showed off the Minecraft demo in AR. And I thought that was really kind of awe inspiring. And I wanted to try my hand at making something like that. I didn’t have the computers to do it. I didn’t have the know how to do it. I just wanted to do it. And at the same time, the Oculus Kickstarter had popped off and VR was trying to find its footing with Palmer at the helm. And there was something new and sexy and crazy about it that I really wanted to be part of. And it just reminded me of the same energy of so many other things that I chased over the years, whether it was doing the post production stuff in Final Cut or I was getting hands on time with the RED.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
It was just kind of new and unexplored and I wanted in. And I saw it. I saw it pretty clearly in my head what it could be. And I just figured I had a chance. So, literally two founders kind of going in different directions and we dissolved the company over a weekend. And by Monday my new company was spun up and I started trying to land that kind of work. And so tried to figure out ways to differentiate myself from everyone else. And I didn’t really know what to do. And I had never 3D modeled in my life. I was the engine guy, my old co-founder was the modeler.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And I figured, you know what, if I’m going to do anything, I’m just going to go build Drake’s house and see what happens. And so I learned to 3D model and I built out Drake’s house, which I think was I don’t remember now. I think it’s 25,000 square feet or something ridiculous like that, his new house. The floor plans have leaked on the BBC. And so I had the floor plans and I built it out. I made a website for it, sent it out to a couple places, a couple media outlets. It wasn’t anything… I didn’t do a full court press for it or anything.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And all of a sudden everyone picked up this goddamn house and there were stories everywhere. Teen Vogue picked it up and the Verge or Polygon picked it up, everyone. And I got millions of views in record time. And everyone started hitting me up, platforms and technology companies and other brands. And they’re like, “What are you going to do with this thing? Can you do product placement in this house? Can we roll it out to our platform?” Et cetera. And it took on a life of its own for a while there, trying to figure out what it could be.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And that kind of gave me the legitimacy in a weird way. It was a horrible project technically. My computers were really weak, so I couldn’t render shadows properly. Couldn’t render post processing. My processors were too weak so I couldn’t even bake the shadows. It was God awful. But again, you have a big name, like Drake, who he’s huge now, but he was big then. You take his name and then you add on something crazy like VR and all of a sudden that’s the perfect combination there for some headlines.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And so from there, I got a bunch of companies and agencies reaching out to me to do some work and then created the first new home sales suite in real estate for Canada off the back of that. And it actually happened to be for Drake’s agency, the agency that represented him for a bunch of stuff and worked with him for a bunch of stuff. They hit me up to do the first new home sales suite in Canada using VR. And so we rolled that out and prospective home buyers actually went into VR in the sales office and checked out their future homes. And so we rolled those out. And I did some stuff out of Miami. And then all of a sudden I’m doing VR for real estate. The thing that I was intending to do with my old co-founder I’m now doing on my own. And from there other companies started reaching, startups started reaching out to me saying, “Can you prototype ideas of ours? Because we don’t have the talent in house.” So, that was a stepping stone.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And then suddenly bigger companies are more amenable to me working on their stuff or they’re reaching out. Pretty gradual growth until a couple years ago. Epic Games gave me a MegaGrant for an educational project that I’ve been working on called Innocence in the Fire. And that was the first major co-sign that I ever got. And they were really great. And so as soon as I announced, “Hey guys, I got an Epic MegaGrant.” Bam, life went into overdrive and Snap took me in and has been really supportive. And they keep on shining a light on me with different profiles and different features at their conferences and stuff. And then now I’m working with Meta. I’m working with some other companies. So, it’s been, the last couple years have kind of everything’s gone into overdrive, which I really love and appreciate. But yeah, it took a minute and some craftiness to get in position for that in the first place.

Maurice Cherry:
It sounds like things really kind of snowballed after that. I think it was Drizzy Manor, that was what you called it, right?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yep, exactly. Yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Things kind of just snowballed after that. And now you’re also on the AR, VR program advisory board at Vancouver Film School. How has that experience been for you in a way entering back into education? Although not as a student this time, of course.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Here, we’ve got a school that has some really amazing graduates. We’ve got Neill Blomkamp went there. End of story, Neill Blomkamp, it’s done, it’s a lock. We’ve got this really amazing traditional film school that wants to explore new media and a new platform. And they’ve really crafted amazing programs and talent to foster that growth. So, initially there was a buddy of mine that was teaching there. He had me just give a guest lecture. The students were really into it. They asked really great questions. And I was honestly impressed because I think certainly myself and my peers weren’t solid students like they were when we were younger. Just talking to the staff and the program coordinator, I was like, “Wow, this is legit. And let’s figure it out.” They just kept on calling me back to give talks.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And for the project that ended up getting the Epic MegaGrant, we actually used some of the students for their thesis project. We let them build a prototype of the game. The work was really great. And so just in conversations of how do you teach the next wave of people how to get into the space and teach them to prepare for the future. That just kind of became the onboarding to bring me in as advisor for the program. And it’s been great. They take our ideas seriously. The students that they have are amazing.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
The talent they have teaching, they’re all practicing professionals. It’s not those who can’t teach. It’s like that’s not the situation here. They’re all professionals in the space. They’re all people I work with in the space doing really dope shit. And so the students are really lucky. I wish all these teachers were at Ryerson when I was there because maybe I’d take something from it. But no, it’s been a really great experience working with the school and seeing the impact that it’s had on these students and seeing where they land after they graduate has been really dope.

Maurice Cherry:
Now you’ve been quoted as saying that your biggest goal for the future is to set the standard for interactive and immersive education. Where does the passion for that goal come from?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
I went to private school when I was a kid and the best we had were VHS’s and DVDs that were horribly boring. And I think that if you’re paying that much in tuition, maybe there should be a better learning experience there. And I think with the accessibility of the Meta Quest or Snap on your phone, the level of access to content has never been more amazing and higher. And I think that if we, instead of doing shooty, shooty games all the time, we tried to engage people in new concepts and ideas and reinforce learnings, I think we’d be further along. So, I just think ultimately that if we were to use all these skills to build something dope, maybe the future has a chance, particularly around climate education.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
We keep on putting people into videos of this is a polar bear dying or this is the world on fire and it hasn’t really made enough of an impact. You just kind of see the trajectory that the world is on. It’s not great. So, I think that if we were to engage people more and actually show them the effects of their actions in a digital environment or in a simulation, that maybe it’ll hit different. The study’s have proven that if you experience things in VR, your retention is way higher. You understand concepts way more clearly in VR. And I think that if we were to use that for some good, maybe the world would be on a better path. So, that’s just one of my weird altruistic things. But I’m hoping that by making these games that are mainstream and onboard more users and get more people there, there’s a viable path to creating really dope immersive content for education. And then maybe we can turn this world around in a decade from now. That’s the hope anyway.

Maurice Cherry:
Now your career to date, as you’ve described it just in this interview, has been extremely prolific. Who are some of the people that have really helped you out over the years, whether there’s been mentors, peers, anyone?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Everyone, man. I think this whole industry. I would say the immersive industry is more open and friendly and awesome than any other industry I’ve been part of. I think at the heart of it, we’re all a bunch of misfits trying to find our way and trying to lock in and create the future that we all want. And so it’s been ultimately way more collaborative than any other industry I’ve been part of. So, it doesn’t really matter if it’s a major executive at a company that’s doing immersive stuff or it’s a lowly developer that specializes in some weird thing. The whole industry has been really collaborative and really cool. And there’s you basically check your ego at the door. So, to single anyone out would be kind of weird because I’ve literally gone up to the top execs at Meta, formerly Facebook, and been like, “Hey, I really want a meeting with so and so.” And then they send a message and the next day I get a meeting with that person.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
It’s just one of these things. I think VR and AR, I don’t think anyone that’s in it, really in it isn’t a geek. I think we all identify with each other in really profound ways. And so there’s a level of humility involved in the industry that’s been really great. You see inside of industry Slacks and Discord groups and everything. We’re all sharing information. We’re all sharing learnings. We’re all helping refine each other’s pitches and play testing each other’s games and applications. And as much as it’s Andre Elijah Immersive, there’s a lot of people on my team and there’s a lot of people not on my team that have helped out and helped to get us where we are now. So, it’s really one of those things, it takes a village to raise a kid. So, I think we’re no different

Maurice Cherry:
If there’s somebody that’s out there that’s been listening to this and they want to follow in your footsteps, whether it’s I would imagine just getting into this world of AR and VR, what advice would you give them?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
I would say just do it. I don’t want to sound flippant with that, but this is one of those industries where it doesn’t take a whole lot to be able to get in and start building. When I worked in film years ago, you needed more than a Handycam to have a good looking image. You needed more than just iMovie to have a really solid edit and final delivery. You need the color correcting and all that sort of stuff. And so you have all the software and hardware considerations and all that. With AR and VR, you need a not so powerful computer and a $300 headset and you’re off to the races. Game engines are free. Unity and Unreal are free. They have lots of example projects and tutorials online that you can follow to find your footing and start building, but you don’t need a powerful computer because these headsets are all running mobile parts.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
So, you’re not pushing for photorealism for these projects. So I think for under a grand ultimately you can be set up and you can start building. And so I think that removes a lot of the barriers and a lot of the excuses as to why you can’t get into it. So, I would say literally just Google some of your favorite games and how to rebuild some of those mechanics. There’s literally YouTube channels that just show you in Unreal or in Unity how to build mechanics from games that we all play and like. Learning about the interaction systems and how to set up a project and how to compile. This is all stuff that’s available at your fingertips. So I think more than ever in this industry you want to do it. You can just go ahead and do it. You don’t need to ask for permission. There’s no one gate keeping any crazy hardware or software. You can literally just start.

Maurice Cherry:
What do you think you would’ve went into if you didn’t get into this field?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
I asked myself that a lot. For a while I wanted to be an entertainment and intellectual property lawyer. And for a while I wanted to be a robotics engineer. And for a while I also wanted to be a professional jazz trumpet player. I played trumpet for a number of years.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
It was going to be one of those three things.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice. So given how fast all of this is progressing, the technology and everything, where do you see yourself in the next five years? What do you want to be doing?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
I’m going to be shipping a number of games in the next two to three years and then probably go investor. My team members know that I can maintain this pace for a couple more years. They’re all young. They got a lot longer to go and I want to be the first check in on their companies when they go ahead and do their own thing. And I tell them all the time, “I need you guys to bang out these games on these projects and we’re going to do them together. And you’re going to have them to your name and it’s going to be great. And then you’re going to go out and you’re going to do your own thing and you’re going to stomp all over me and it’ll be fun. I just want to be the one to fund you.” So, I really want to be the ones that open some doors for them once they’re done with my stuff and just help the next generation I think.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
I think there’s been this whole thing since early web days, and then you saw the shift to the app store and everything and all these tech companies, there’s a certain progression. And you need to go get your Tech Crunch articles and your press and go get your venture capital and all this sort of stuff. And I think there’s other ways to do that. I think if you’re really good at shipping products and projects that connect with people, there’s a different way forward. And so I just want to impart my wisdom on these people and I know a lot of people and look at my rejected section, I know a lot of people. So if there’s a way for me to open some doors and connect some dots for folks, then I think that’s the position I want to be in a couple years. And not necessarily shipping a project for a brand every month, month and a half and deal with these crazy ass hours. I’m getting old.

Maurice Cherry:
And you got kids!

Andrรฉ Elijah:
And I got kids! I got to watch them grow up and do after school activities with them when they’re older and stuff. So yeah.

Maurice Cherry:
Well just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you and your work and everything online?

Andrรฉ Elijah:
Yeah. My website is www.andreelijah.com. And my Twitter is @andreelijah. So if you want some industry hot takes, that’s probably the place to go. And then yeah, my website, that’s where the portfolio lies. And if you want to know the work that we’ve done or the stuff we pitched and rejected section, it’s all there.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good. Well, Andre Elijah, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show. Just hearing this, I don’t know, almost this whirlwind of activity that you’ve got going on, not just with what you’re doing now with the studio, but what you plan to do in the future and really how you’ve had this passion to do this for such a long time. I think it really points to the fact that while these technologies, VR for instance, have taken a long time to get off the ground, there’s been this constant steady push by people like you to really push things into the, not just the mainstream, but to the next level to create experiences that in the future we’ll be talking about for years and years to come. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Andrรฉ Elijah:
I appreciate you, dude. Thanks for having me. It was a lot of fun.

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Charlene Atlas

The introduction of the metaverse to the general public was one of the biggest topics in tech last year. As we all learn more about the metaverse and what it means for the future of the Internet, I thought it would be a fantastic idea this year to talk with some of the folks out there who are involved with the metaverse in some capacity.

Meet Charlene Atlas, an interaction designer for undoubtedly one of the biggest companies to stake their claim in the metaverse — Meta. We started off our conversation talking about her resolutions for this year, and she spoke about her work on the Reality Labs team. From there, we discussed the metaverse and some of Meta’s plans, and Charlene shared how she became interested in technology, gaming, and eventually got into the AR/VR space.

Charlene is just one of many people who are helping to create the future of the Internet, so I hope you get inspired by her work and discover a way to chart your own course!

Transcript

Full Transcript

Maurice Cherry:
All right. So tell us who you are and what you do.

Charlene Atlas:
Hi, my name is Charlene Atlas and I am on a mission to break our content free from flat screens. As an interaction designer in Reality Labs research at Meta, formally Facebook, I work with scientists, researchers, and engineers to envision and create the far future of virtual and augmented reality.

Maurice Cherry:
Break our content free from flat screens, I like that. It’s funny, I’ve had some folks on the show before that have done AR and VR, mixed reality. And I always keep bringing this up about, I don’t know if you remember this television show in the ’90s called VR Troopers.

Charlene Atlas:
No, I’m not familiar.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, people that listen to the show are probably tired of me mentioning it. But there was this show called VR Troopers, very much in the same vein of a Power Rangers, it was very much like a Japanese like Sentai, Karate Kid show. And they were basically these kids that fought in virtual reality. It’s so interesting because I think about that time and then I think about the topics that are discussed now around virtual reality and the metaverse and how that was fiction when we were kids. And now it’s reality as adults, which is just wild to think of.

Charlene Atlas:
There’s a lot of things that we thought in the past we couldn’t do you that we can do now. And so I’m hoping that in the future too we can achieve the impossible, what we think is impossible now, for sure.

Maurice Cherry:
So we’re recording this right before the new year, just so folks know. But I’m curious to know, how has 2021 been for you, any grand discoveries or anything like that?

Charlene Atlas:
Well, it’s been pretty interesting for me because in late 2020, I had my first child in September.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, congratulations.

Charlene Atlas:
Yes, thank you. So he’s about 14 months old now. So it’s been a pretty interesting year for my husband and I, having our first kid. And he’s just changing so much every day and it’s great to watch him grow. And doing that all during the pandemic has definitely been another layer of challenge and adventure. But we’re doing good. Yeah, thank you.

Maurice Cherry:
Nice, nice. I guess going forward, thinking about 2022, do you have any particular plans or resolutions or anything?

Charlene Atlas:
I think the main thing for 2022 is that we really want to see our families. So none of our family has actually met our son yet. So really want to figure out all of this pandemic stuff and be able to see our families back home.

Maurice Cherry:
I can imagine that’s, oh, wow, with a new baby. I’m sure your parents and other family and stuff. And then his his dad’s parents also probably want to see him too because wow. Hopefully you all can make that happen.

Charlene Atlas:
Thank you. With his age, he can’t get vaccinated, that kind of thing. And then you have older parents and so it’s like, it’s not the best combination for the current situation. But I feel hopeful that we’ll get to see each other next year.

Maurice Cherry:
Fingers crossed, I hope that happens for you, I really do. So you work as an interaction designer at Meta, which, of course, most people know about as its former name, Facebook. What does interaction design mean at Meta in terms of the work that you do?

Charlene Atlas:
So I’m particularly in Reality Labs, the organization that focuses on augmented and virtual reality. And within that, I’m in the research organization. So even though I’m called an interaction designer, it’s different from what you might assume of web design or 2D interface design. It’s more about how are we going to interact with this new medium of virtual and augment interfaces. And so that’s what I mean when I say interaction designer. My team that I work on with research design is a different field from product design, in that you’re not focusing on making a product that you’ll then release in a few years, it’s more that you are working directly with scientists and engineers who are making completely new technologies to look at what is the user value, potential user value in the future of these technologies, what are things we could change to have more impact in the future, and maybe even what are new technologies we should invent to really meet the needs of people in the five to 10 year timeframe.

Maurice Cherry:
I can imagine it’s probably really interesting to think that far out as it relates to technology and what you want to accomplish and things of that nature. What does a typical day look like for you?

Charlene Atlas:
I’m involved in a lot of different projects. And so of course there’s meetings with the research teams, there’s doing the usual designer things of making specifications for how an experience should be built. So we build experiences that use some of these new technologies. We often also have to build what we call time machines, so this idea of creating an experience that’s simulating things that we expect will exist in the future so that we can better evaluate things that we want to create. So there’s a lot of prototyping and also a lot of writing. So at Meta in general, we value writing a lot. So there’s a lot of writing of what are people’s future visions, what are ways to approach work. Also if you have any new ideas, you usually have to write a one pager of some kind to start getting traction around it. So it’s mostly a lot of writing, making mock-ups, talking with researchers to understand what question we need to answer to really get the technology in the right direction to really make the impact we want to have in the world in the future.

Maurice Cherry:
Tell me more about Reality Labs. You mentioned a bit about what the makeup of the team is and I guess the technology that it works on. But can you just go a little bit more in depth about that?

Charlene Atlas:
So rally labs, so we have more of the product side that focuses on our current work. So things like the Meta Quest, Meta Quest 2, VR devices that we have out in the wild. But then the research side, we have a lot of different research teams inside that focus on a variety of topics like graphics. So cutting edge graphics research, optical research, display systems, perception science, like how do people perceive what they’re seeing. So we really have a team for each piece of what we think will be necessary to build the future for VR and AR that can really become the next wave of technology for the world.

Charlene Atlas:
So if you think about that shift that happened from command line interfaces to the GUI, that’s the level of shift that we’re trying to make with AR/VR in the future. So basically we’re trying to cover all of the different senses that humans have, all the different things that people might need to be able to do. We have world class researchers in each of those areas that we can work directly with and see how we can put all that together into something that can hopefully be a transformational change in the future.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk about the metaverse which Facebook debuted at Facebook Connects a few months back. On a high level, so our audience can understand it and also so I can understand it, what is the metaverse?

Charlene Atlas:
The metaverse, as we’ve talked about in the public, is an embodied internet. So this idea of connecting with people that you care about and really feeling present with them is one of the key pieces of it. And this isn’t something that is limited just to my work in AR/VR, but it’s really something that exists and can be accessed by lots of different devices. Just like now, we are in a call or if we’re in a video call or if you’re on the internet, there’s lots of different ways to access the internet and lots of different ways to join a call or what have you. So it is really about putting the pieces in place so that we can move beyond where we are right now with just having these mediated surfaces right between us and instead feeling like we are together and can really engage as we would in real life.

Maurice Cherry:
So it’s really just like, and then correct me if I’m wrong here, it sounds just like a natural extension or progression of say the internet that we know now.

Charlene Atlas:
If you think about the internet now even this isn’t real, what we’re doing now. It’s being replicated, there’s so many steps of audio being replicated and represented. So really we have our senses, we interpret what we receive and we feel or have a sense for what’s going on. And that’s the same thing with a metaverse, is just that it’s something that’s going to take years to build just because of the scale of what we’re trying to do. But you can think of it as that next step of how do we really feel like we’re together. This is a huge leap, what we’re doing right now of what it was like decades ago. So that’s the leap that we want to make into the future.

Maurice Cherry:
As you said, that reminded me of the scene in the matrix where Neo goes to meet the Oracle for the first time. So Neo goes to meet the Oracle and before he meets her, he has to sit in this little waiting area. There’s this kid that’s bending these spoons. You know what I’m talking about, this part of the movie?

Charlene Atlas:
Yes, I remember [inaudible 00:12:16].

Maurice Cherry:
And the kid picks up the spoon, he picks up the spoon and then he hands it. Well, he bends it then he hands it to Neo. The kid is like, “Don’t try to bend the spoon, instead try to bend yourself and then you’ll realize that there is no spoon.” So for me, I’m going a little esoteric here, so bear with me, to me, the way that I think about that with the metaverse is that just like how you’re saying this isn’t real because of the recreation of voice across electrons and distance. We’re not talking really in real time, it’s like a simulation of that. So when you think about the metaverse and that extension of that, it’s taking what we already know now with the internet and it’s ways and culture and stuff like that, I would imagine. And thinking about what that means on just a grander scale.

Charlene Atlas:
It’s helpful to think about, what are the barriers that exist now? And going back to your question before for of, how do you project that into the future? That’s part of what we think about. Is like, what are the things that people have issues with now? What are the technologies that exist that are on track to land at certain points in the future? And so then now knowing those technologies are going to be in place, what can we enable for people? What are the experiences we can enable? And these are experiences that, as I said, it’s not going to be that you can only access it on a particular device. It’s going to be, anyone can access it on their own device, in their own way. And all of those different access points have to be available experience for people.

Maurice Cherry:
I’m glad you mentioned that about the access. Because what I remember from Connect is that most people were using the Meta Quests 2, which people know also as the Oculus Quest 2, that was its old name. But people have seen that device in terms of, oh, this is how folks are accessing it. And like you said, there’s going to be different ways to do it in the future because the Meta Quests 2 is, of course, not the only device that you can use to access virtual reality and stuff. You can use a cell phone or you could use another device from another company or something like that. So it sounds like as this builds out into the future, there’ll hopefully be more of a, I don’t know, like democratization of technology to access it. But I don’t know if that necessarily all has to stem from Meta, it sounds like.

Charlene Atlas:
Yeah, right. And as we’ve said, in the different releases, we’re not trying to… It’s not that it’s like we are making the metaverse and nobody else is. We’re building for the metaverse, we’re getting ready, we’re getting ready for us all to be at that point. Just like the internet isn’t owned by any particular company.

Maurice Cherry:
I think it’s helpful to think about it that way, in that Meta is building for the metaverse and that Meta is not creating the metaverse. I’m trying to make sure I get that distinction down.

Charlene Atlas:
This is like nobody is making the internet. Yeah, exactly. You’ve got it.

Maurice Cherry:
I get it, I get it. I’ve been around on the web for a long time. And I remember even in the early days of the web going from web 1.0 to web 2.0, just the big shift, especially as it related to social media and how do we communicate with each other now in these new ways that we didn’t before. Because web 1.0, and I’m dating myself here, it was basically just research. All you did was just look up things and read them. Email existed back then, but it was in a very rudimentary state. And there certainly weren’t a lot of social spaces unless you thought about maybe a forum or Usenet or something like that.

Maurice Cherry:
And then social media really started to take hold, let’s say what, maybe in the mid 2000s or so with Facebook being one of them, but Twitter and other things. And then as those platforms and experiences grew, this whole other culture arose with it as these things grew. So I see now, it sounds like we’re starting to transition from web 2.0 to web 3.0 or web 3 with the metaverse. There’s going to also be that same type of culture change in a way.

Charlene Atlas:
And definitely similar to what you just described happening on the internet, is what I hope at least will happen, and what we talk about a lot at work will happen in the metaverse of creators having the chance to create new things. That’s one of the reasons even that I’m a designer, is that I just love that you can put something out there and people can find new ways to use it and find new ways to express themselves. So I think it’s going to be really great for giving creators that chance to find new ways to express themselves.

Maurice Cherry:
And even with that expansion and culture, there’s a lot to think about in terms of just like… It’s weird for me to think about it this way because I distinctly remember how the web really clicked over from one to two. And now how it’s about to click over from two to three. I even from one to two, there were so many new things that were created with the advent of social media and user generated content. The whole economy around online advertising, that’s a whole industry that did not really exist in 2000. And now you do Google ads or whatever. There are people that have made millions just off of advertising on the internet. Now you can think of, with the metaverse, there could be different economic opportunities like that, or how do brands get in on this? And what about intellectual property and all this stuff? Like how do you factor in all those considerations in your work?

Charlene Atlas:
Some of the things we’re doing now that are a peek into the future is that Spark AR. So we do have AR that you can do face filters, that kind of thing on your phone. And we recently hit 700,000 creators on that platform. So people are already finding new ways to use these new mediums to create. As far as all these other things that we have to consider that you mentioned, something I’m really proud of that our group has done is release our responsible innovation principles that you can look up online. So we’re really laying out these are the principles we’re going to have as we build this new thing. Because we know that there’s going to be all of these questions and we want to build out in the open and we want to address things out in the open with everyone. So there’s definitely a lot to figure out and we’re doing our best to make sure we do it responsibly.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s so exciting to really think about the path that you all are really forging with this and to take all these considerations and things in mind. It’s interesting you mentioned that about Spark AR because I just saw a tutorial on TikTok, of all places, on how someone can easily make like an AR drawing, a Spark AR drawing using Procreate. So this person had a Procreate drawing. And for people listen, Procreate is a drawing application on the iPad. Basically they took those layers and dragged them into a Spark AR thing and was able to… It looked really easy. It was a TikTok, so they illustrated it in like 60 seconds. I was like, “Oh wow, you can easily make AR things just like this?” Yeah, I can see how that economy or even that just opportunity for creators to make new things in this space will really unfold. Especially once more people start to understand the technology, are able to get their hands on it and really just understand the possibilities behind what can be done.

Charlene Atlas:
You can download Spark right now and make stuff. I was making stuff the other week, just it’s pretty easy. So that’s really great, what you just mentioned because you never can fully imagine all the things that people might use it for. And it’s really great to watch people discover new ways, new mediums of art and expression.

Maurice Cherry:
So we’ve been talking about the metaverse, let’s bring it back to the real world. Let’s talk more about you because, of course, you’re the guest for this episode. So tell me more about where are you’re from, where did you grow up?

Charlene Atlas:
So I am from Maryland over on the East Coast and my family is from Haiti. So my parents are from Haiti and they met in New York and moved to Maryland and had my brother and I.

Maurice Cherry:
Growing up, were you exposed to a lot of technology?

Charlene Atlas:
I think my earliest memories are in school using a huge floppy disc to play games in the computer in the library, so there was that. My brother was really into video games and so I played a lot of games. It was through that playing games with my brother that really got me interested into technology. I really wanted to make games since I was pretty young because I just loved how much fun it was to play with him. I remember looking in the manuals back when there used to be manuals in the games, there’s a list of names there and it’s like, “Oh, I could do this? I could do this, make games?” So I just started a journey of trying to figure out how I could do that. And I wrote a letter to Sega asking what classes I could take all of these things. So it started me off there.

Maurice Cherry:
Did they write back to you?

Charlene Atlas:
They did. It was a really nice letter they sent. And they said take math and this and that. So when I went to high school, I actually did a science and technology magnet program that I got into for high school. So I did a lot of science and technology courses there.

Maurice Cherry:
Very cool. And of course that interest and passion eventually ended up leading you to USC, where you double majored in computer science games and East Asian languages and cultures. That sounds like quite a course load. Tell me about your time there, what was that like?

Charlene Atlas:
It was pretty interesting because… well first of all, I applied and accepted without ever visiting it. Because I was living in with Maryland and I was applying to schools. And this school, they had this computer science program that focused in games. And it wasn’t even that they had it yet, it was going to be ready in a year, and so I’d have to do the regular computer science and transfer into it. But I was just so excited to be able to go to a four year university where I could learn about other things, and East Asian languages as my other passion as well, and get to focus on making games. And it’s this great program, it’s a joint program between the cinema school and the computer science school. So I just was like, “I have to go there.”

Charlene Atlas:
Then I also was in marching band in high school and the USC Trojan Marching Band is one of the most famous bands around. I was like, “I got to be in this marching band.” So I convinced my parents like, “I got to go to this school.” And I went there. Something interesting is that I actually did get to go there before the school year started because I got into a program at USC for high school students for making games separately. So I went there over the summer, did the high school program, and then continued on to attend the school.

Maurice Cherry:
What was it like doing the marching band at USC? Because they’re a pretty well known band, the Trojans, right?

Charlene Atlas:
Yes, Trojans. So yeah, it was definitely intense. It’s a full-time job almost, especially since I was in the drum line. I was in the drum line so there’s extra practices for drum line and then there’s practices for band. Then you’re getting up at 5:45 every Saturday before the games because you got to do practice in the morning, then you got to do the marching all the way to the stadium and doing performances on the way, then you got to do the pre-game, you got to do the halftime show, the post-game. So it was a lot of time and so it was tough doing the computer science major, the band, the East Asian languages with the focus in Japanese major. I did some part-time work to help pay for school. So it was pretty busy, but it was so fun being in the band. And I got to do all kinds of…

Charlene Atlas:
In addition to doing the Rose Bowl, going to the Rose Bowl four times in the Rose Parade four times, I was able to also do various LA gigs, since we’re known as Hollywood’s band. So I’ve been on the Grammy’s, I’ve been on BET Awards, game shows, and stuff. So it was just a really interesting thing to be doing in college and just getting to have these experiences.

Maurice Cherry:
And then on top of that, you also even got a chance to study abroad too.

Charlene Atlas:
So I did take five years to finish because with the two majors plus I went to study abroad in Tokyo. So went to Jochi Daigaku, which in English they referred to it as Sophia University. And it was really fun. I stayed with the host family, I took my classes. The classes were pretty hard, maybe I shouldn’t have studied so much, I should have traveled around. But I was like, there was a lot of classes that I was taking in addition to Japanese language. So it was fun, a great learning experience. And I assumed that I would be back, I always thought I would live in Japan long term. But it was a lot of fun and it was great to reconnect to Japan because I had also gone there in high school as well.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, what brought you there in high school?

Charlene Atlas:
So my school in Greenbelt, Maryland, I basically had a sister school relationship with a school in Japan. And it’s called Yokohama Suiryo High School. Basically there’s an exchange program. So we would have exchange students come in and stay with us and we would sometimes stay over there. So basically every summer, there would be a trip to Japan. So one of the years I went. And the years that I went, one of my friends actually convinced our Japanese teacher to take us on an extra part of the trip where we would bike across the country. So there’s this road called the Tokaido Road, and it’s an old route and has a lot of historical significance. There’s an art print series that’s based on it. In any case, my teacher had done that trip with someone before because it’s a trip that people just take either walking or biking. And my friend convinced him to take us on it. I don’t know how he got the approvals for it, but he basically took us, a bunch of 15 year olds, across the country for two weeks on bikes, 400 miles.

Charlene Atlas:
That was really, I think, a turning point in my life because I had never biked more than a block before, then I had to bike 400 miles. So it was important for me and then also honestly to help my relationship with my father. Because my father was like, “You can’t do this.” After the first practice ride, I was collapsing into his car. He drove a cab at the time, so I get in the back of his cab and I’m like, “My legs.” And we’ve only gone like four miles and he’s like, “You can’t go to Japan, you’re going to hold people back.” All of this, he’s saying all this stuff.

Charlene Atlas:
But then we came back and my teacher told them how well I did. We did tons of practice rides basically before we went. So I got so much better and my teacher was like, “Hey, she really can do this.” My teacher, Mr. Suison, I can’t thank him enough. He really convinced my dad and showed him she can do these things. And ever since then, he’s behind me 100% for anything that I do, including when I said I needed to go across the country to USC. So that was helpful.

Maurice Cherry:
Wow, that’s quite an experience. I’d imagine that really builds fortitude, especially in high school.

Charlene Atlas:
And it’s pretty hilly at certain parts. Have you ever seen those Japanese prints with the huge mountain? It’s extreme in the picture, but we were on that thing. So it was pretty hard, but I really of tried to push through. Around that time, Eminem’s Lose Yourself song was popular. And so I was just repeating that in my head like, “This is your shot. Come on, this is your opportunity.” I’m just trying to get through.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds like a Gatorade commercial or something.

Charlene Atlas:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s really helped me, I always feel like I can do anything.

Maurice Cherry:
And of course, as I did my research for the interview and saw you had a lot of great experiences in college. I can imagine even just doing the band is a lot, with all of the different appearances that you had to do. But studying abroad. One thing that I mentioned before we started recording is that you interned at NASA in college. I interned at two NASA facilities in college as well. What was your internship experience like there?

Charlene Atlas:
Actually my internship was during high school. So my high school, that I mentioned Ellen Roosevelt, it had, as part of the science and tech magnet program that I was in, you had to do a senior project. And you could do it either as your own project or as an internship. And fortunately, right next to my school is NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. So I was able to do a computer science internship there, that was really cool. I’ve always loved space, and so it was great to work there. I worked in the cryogenics lab. And basically what they do is they reduce the temperature on sensors. It’s a technology for reducing temperature on sensors so that they can be sensitive enough to receive what the sensors need to receive from space. So the intention is that these things would be sent out into space and they need to be kept cold enough to do their job basically.

Charlene Atlas:
So the project was to… They had this program running their machine, their cryo machine, and it was called a, what was it called? It’s a very long name, it was like adiabatic demagnetization refrigerators or something like that. They were running this program on it, but it was super slow. So my project was to rewrite it all in LabVIEW, which is this sciencey way of doing programming, a visual programming language. I think they were using, I forgot what they were using before, but… So I rewrote it and it worked a lot faster and they were so happy. It was supposed to actually get sent to space, but then all of the funding got pulled. I think something about George Bush happened and then all the funding was pulled for all of their stuff. But that almost got to go to space. But later on, a holo lens was sent into space with some of my work on it. So I feel like I’ve been vindicated there.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, that’s so interesting. When I interned at NASA in college, I did two internships. I did one at AMS, which is out in Moffett Field near Mountain View. What was interesting is I interned there and it was around the… I think when I got there, first of all, it was my first time in California, but I got there and I remember people on the NASA campus where buzzing about this new search engine called Google, have you heard of it? I remember all of that because it was right around, it was summer in 2000. And people were really buzzing about this new, yes, this new thing it’s down in Mountain View called Google or something like that.

Maurice Cherry:
Then I did Marshall Space Flight Center in Normal, Alabama, my junior year. But then they also pulled the funding for our program because 911 happened. So they pulled it and then the funding went towards Homeland Security. So the goal initially was oh, you intern at these two places. And then when you graduate you’re set up to work for NASA, that was what I was going to do. But then they pulled the funding and it’s like, well, sorry, good luck. I’m trying to find something now. So that’s interesting that that ended up happening or a similar thing. I don’t know, maybe this might have coincided around the same time, I don’t know. That’s really interesting.

Charlene Atlas:
Because I graduated around, let’s see, 2005 or something. So maybe, I don’t know. But I think probably it’s likely that projects funding gets pulled all the time maybe.

Maurice Cherry:
Yeah, that’s true.

Charlene Atlas:
[crosstalk 00:31:35].

Maurice Cherry:
There’s one thing that NASA is really known for, is not getting a lot of funding. So that makes sense actually. While you were in college, you got a chance to intern at a gaming company, Electronic Arts. Was that your first foray into really working on games in that way?

Charlene Atlas:
Yeah, it was great. I went down to San Francisco area, worked at Electronic Arts. And yeah, it was my first gaming company job. So I was a software quality assurance test intern. So basically testing the game, creating automation, and doing programming for testing the game and improving the quality. It was really fun, I worked on, let’s see, I think I worked on SimAnimals on the Wii, and a little bit on Dante’s Inferno. It was a great experience to get that chance. I guess a similar situation what you just described, they were going to hire me full time. They were saying like, “Oh, we’ll come back to you and hire full time.” But then they froze hiring. So it was another thing where I felt like, oh, maybe I’ll work here, this will be where I work, but then it didn’t work out.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s interesting how that stuff ends up happening in college. And then for me, I had to scramble and find oh, well what’s going to be the thing that I end up doing? Because I was in school on a certain path like, yeah, I’m going to go this way, and then you get this big curve ball thrown at you. In your case though, you ended up getting hired by a pretty big tech company right around the time you graduated is that right?

Charlene Atlas:
Microsoft came to our campus, came to what we call the game pipe laboratory in the games major and talked with us and asked me if I would come interview. So I ended up working at Microsoft as a software development engineer in test or an STET, which is a role that they don’t have anymore. But basically the role, how they describe it, is that you are the last line of defense for the user in terms of the game. So working on Xbox, working on the Connect game. So connect is the first motion controller, if you remember it, of basically you could use your whole body to control the game. And so worked on the launch titles for that as my first work there.

Charlene Atlas:
And then while I was there, we started working on HoloLens. So HoloLens started and it was a pretty nascent project when I got involved, to the point that the test team was basically the only people who could run the demos. So I was involved in a lot of high level demos, just making sure things would go right and all of that. The HoloLens is basically a headset mixed reality computer. So while I was working on HoloLens, I actually switched to design, and I can get into that story if you want. But yeah, Microsoft was my first corporate gig.

Maurice Cherry:
Let’s talk about that because you were there for a little over eight years. So you had a long time to really settle into the work that you were doing. But you started out, as you mentioned, in engineering, you started out in engineering and then you transitioned to design, what brought that shift about?

Charlene Atlas:
So as I mentioned, the test role was advertised as you’re there to protect the consumer, you’re their advocate. Then while I was on HoloLens supporting HoloLens, my test team was assigned to the studio that had a really great design design team, and I started learning more about design. Also around this time, one of the creative directors in the org started posting pages from universal principles of design in the bathrooms for some reason, in the bathroom stalls. I was like, “What is this?” This is the most interesting thing I’ve ever read. Because if you know that book basically each page, you can learn this whole, a principle of design and how it’s shown in the real world. I was like, “This is amazing, what is it?” So a few things came together there.

Charlene Atlas:
I had also been looking into, how long do I want to stay in test? I started literally going around interviewing people who had been in the test field for 20 years to see, what are you all working on? I want to be you someday. And then after talking to them, I was like, “Oh, I don’t want to do that.” That’s what I’m doing now, but just on a bigger scope project. So all of these things came together and I just talked to my manager and I was like, “I think I want to switch design.” I talked to the creative director for the studio we were supporting about and he started giving me some tasks to do and I did well with those. I had been helping one of the designers with user tests. So having people come in and try out the application. And we started this list of metrics for how much people were enjoying it. And I really loved seeing those metrics like go up.

Charlene Atlas:
I was supposed to be in charge of putting in code into the build to collect data on how things were going, filing bugs, all of this. But I was like, “Who cares about the bugs if it’s not fun?” So I realized that I cared more about, and I always have cared about experience. But apparently at this moment I was like, “Oh, design is the one, this field design is the thing that I thought I was doing or that is accomplishing the goal that I actually have of making an experience for people that matters, that they feel, and that they have fun.” So they gave me a chance. And funnily enough, the creative director, he said part of the reason he gave me a chance was because I’m a musician. So he knew that I had at least some creativity.

Maurice Cherry:
Oh, interesting.

Charlene Atlas:
So I was like, “Oh, I’m glad I did that.” I guess, do music my whole life. So I interviewed and then I haven’t looked back. So that was back in… Basically I’d been in test for about four years and then 2015 or so is when I switched to design. So I got to work on the launch experiences for HoloLens and then go on to work on incubation projects and windows before I came to Meta.

Maurice Cherry:
That’s interesting how something that you were doing as a, I don’t know if I would necessarily say it’s a hobby, but like another interest of yours, music, ended up being in a way this entry point for you into design. Which I think hopefully for people that are listening, illustrates how important it can be to be well rounded when it comes to the work that you do. It’s one thing, of course, to focus on what it is that you know, but then if you have these other interests, they can often guide you in many different ways. Like growing up, when you mentioned the science and tech stuff, I was captain of the maths leagues in high school, I majored in math in college, and I was also a musician. You mentioned musician, I was a session musician in my 20s and stuff like that.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s interesting how eventually design ended up becoming my career, because I didn’t want to be a math teacher. I liked math, I didn’t like it that much to go and teach it. But I certainly liked it enough to get a degree in it, which that’s probably a whole other story. But it’s interesting how those other parts of yourself or those other interests and things that you have contributes or can contribute to other opportunities and things that you can pursue.

Charlene Atlas:
And that’s actually what I’ve always loved about game development because games are something where it’s a mixture of art and science. So I’ve always wanted to make sure I had a lot of interest and things I could pull from to create in my game development. Then I also feel like both music and design are about making people feel something. My approach to design is that I think of this magic moment of, what is this feeling I want to have someone experience by using this prototype or using this thing someday when it’s a product? What is that feeling I want them to have either in what they’re trying to do or connecting with someone else in this? Music is like that too, where you can make someone feel something. So I think it’s a really interesting connection that they have.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, what are you excited about at the moment? This is probably a vague question considering what you’re doing with Meta and all of that. But what’s the thing that’s really exciting you right now?

Charlene Atlas:
Like the group that I’m in at work, an interaction design group that I talked about earlier, I think we really have an opportunity. And I think we’re go going down some really interesting pathways as to, how do we actually move forward? Like I said at the beginning, how do we move away from how we do computing right now? So I’m really excited about some things that we’ve released publicly recently on our tech blog about our tenure vision for AR and about some of the things we were building such as a haptic glove for being able to actually feel virtual objects, to wrist based interfaces that can be controlled by EMG or electromyography in your wrists so that you can do very simple interactions. So I think it’s just a really big opportunity we have to finally, after decades of doing things one way with computing, of keyboard and mouse and standard way of doing things, we actually have an opportunity to really improve just how we do things in general. So I’m just really excited to be a part of that.

Maurice Cherry:
Now, your career to date, just one, going through what we’ve discuss so far, has been super prolific working for Microsoft, working for Electronic Arts, and even all of your other activities with music and going to Japan and everything like that. As you look back at your career, who are some of the people that have like really stood out and have helped you as mentors?

Charlene Atlas:
What’s interesting, I’ve touched on some of them in this talk, which I guess is saying something. My teacher back in high school, Mr. Suison, who took us on that trip. He didn’t have to…. I assume he took on a lot of risk taking a group of teenagers across a foreign land. But that really helped develop me as a person and define me for a long time, so I really appreciate that. I mentioned that person who took a chance on me, Cameron brown. So the first creative director I had who hired me as a designer, and he really took a chance. I think there’s a lot of times in our lives when people just…

Charlene Atlas:
If you make the right connections, people will give you an opportunity that if you take that opportunity, it really can change the course of your life. I really appreciate being able to do this design work from that opportunity because it really is aligned with just how I think about how I want to make an impact in this world. So I really appreciate everyone who’s contributed to that. And really takes a lot of people over a long period of time to get us all to where we are right now.

Maurice Cherry:
If there’s someone that’s out there that’s listened to your story and they want to follow in your footsteps, what advice would you give them?

Charlene Atlas:
Well, as far as following my footsteps, I think it’s really important to figure out what makes you excited and what makes you feel passion for what you’re doing. One of the things that got me the Microsoft job, I learned at some point, was that they really wanted me make sure I show the passion for what I’m doing. They gave me advice through the different rounds of like, “Make sure you show that your passionate for what you’re doing.” Because that really will drive everything you do after that, and so that’s what I focus on. I just focus on wanting to make… What is the impact I want to make? And how can I do that? And how can each day go towards that?

Charlene Atlas:
As far as getting into this field, the AR/VR field it’s surprisingly easy these days to really jump in and learn things. There’s Unity game engine for building experiences. For example, we actually have a program called Oculus Launchpad. So promising VR creators from underrepresented backgrounds, we actually give support to them to build experiences, put their products out there. So there’s a lot of resources at Meta for people to get involved. But there’s also just a lot out online. Spark AR that I mentioned, build something. So like in general, I would say figure out what your passion is and then actually start just doing something, bias towards action. So if you have an idea, build that idea. If you don’t know how to do it, figure out how to do it. There’s just so much you learn from just trying to build something. Because if you just try to learn a topic without actually building something, you’re going to be missing out on a lot.

Maurice Cherry:
What do you think you would have went into if you didn’t go into tech?

Charlene Atlas:
It’s interesting. I feel like depending on which point of my life we’re talking about, I think it would’ve been different. So I’ve always loved space, so sometimes I think about maybe even someday in the future, working more in the space field. I just really love the idea of humans going to another planet and all that. I don’t know how I would contribute necessarily at this point. But I just love that idea. Also with the interest in Japan, which stemmed from my interest in video games initially, I sometimes think about, I could have gone into, of course, with the other major, I could have gone into translation or being maybe a Japanese teacher. But probably if I was going to go down that path, I’d probably go into translation because I really loved the idea of helping people connect.

Charlene Atlas:
And that was one of the biggest things I learned from my exchange experience. Was when we would have students come visit us or we would visit them, we were all just high school students, we were all silly laughing high school students, even though we were from different countries and spoke different languages. That’s something I learned really early on about people, that we’re not as different as we think. So I love that idea of helping other people communicate between each other, even if they’re speaking a different language. So just in general, anything that involves connecting people is something that I would go into.

Charlene Atlas:
And I’ll just also say AR, VR, augmented reality, one of the things that excites me so much about it is this idea of being able to be present with people, like I talked about earlier. Basically I feel like AR, VR is the next best thing to teleportation. So I wish I could teleport to go see my family or go to places I haven’t been in a long time. But I feel like I’m working on the next best thing. So I guess also if teleportation ever becomes a thing, I would definitely work on that.

Maurice Cherry:
It’s interesting you mentioned that about space because one, space is super, super interesting. But like right now, I feel like there’s this whole thing around governance of space. Because no one owns space, it’s space, nobody owns space. But you have the international space station, you have other countries that have launched satellites and things like that. And there’s tons of space junk just orbiting the planet or in the planet’s fairly low orbit or something like that. And it’s like there’s no real governance around space or cleaning up space, I mean space in terms of just what’s around the earth and stuff.

Maurice Cherry:
Because there have been some times I think this year where a couple of people were talking about, “Well, how come we can’t just take all the planet’s garbage and launch it into space?” I’m like, “That’s ridiculous.” If you think about it on a logistical level, humans create a lot of waste. Do you know how much time that’s going to take, how much fuel that’s going to take? And like just dumping it in space doesn’t solve the problem. Anyway, space is infinitely interesting. And I do feel there are a lot of opportunities there even with the whole new Space Force thing. But from research capability, certainly with other planets and things. But if earth is our home, which it is, then our yard is filthy, there’s toys and stuff, it’s a mess. So maybe, I don’t know, focus on that, I don’t know. But that’s a whole other thing.

Charlene Atlas:
I think space exploration and the work that we do on augmented reality, virtual reality relate in that there’s a lot of uncharted territory. That’s one of the things that make it really exciting right about space, is like, who knows what’s out there? We got to get there, we got to see stuff. And that’s what my group does. Is we got to go out there and figure this out. Because basically every day there’s a long list of unknowns that we’re dealing with and it’s just a very high ambiguity space. So honestly, it can be frustrating sometimes. But it’s also exciting because the potential for what we can learn is just so huge. And that’s what I like about both of those areas.

Maurice Cherry:
High ambiguity spaces are a lot of fun because you then really get to carve out what you want to do and figure things out. The fact that nothing is really concrete means that you can do what you want, but also establish rules and things. So I like working in those spaces, it’s really fun. Where do you see yourself in the next five years? I think just based on the work that you’re doing, of course, it’s going to be future focus. But if you really could look into 2026, I think two, five, six, what kind of work do you see yourself doing or what work do you want to do?

Charlene Atlas:
Like I said, we work in the five to 10 year timeframe. And so I’m hoping that five years from now, we’ll be in a place where some of the things we’re working on have landed or we’ve figured out what we shouldn’t be doing. I just really want to be helping us get to that place where things are getting more defined and we’ve landed in a good place. So right now, I… So I’m an individual contributor, I don’t manage any people, but I do drive a lot of, what we call, cross group collaborations. Like you have an idea and you can drive it with a lot of different people.

Charlene Atlas:
So I would love to keep doing that work but at a greater scope. And just really helps carve out the strategy for how are we actually going to land this thing? Because even once we’ve figure out a lot of things like, “oh, we figured it out,” we have something in the lab that works, is great. But then it’s like, okay, now we really have the work do of how do we actually transfer it to something that people could actually use? So I think five years down the line, I’d love to be a leader in the organization that’s helping to find some major piece of this future we’re trying to create.

Maurice Cherry:
Well, just to wrap things up here, where can our audience find out more information about you, about your work, all of that? Where can they find that online?

Charlene Atlas:
You can go to charleneatlas.com and on there you can also find the link to my LinkedIn. Definitely hit me up if you’re interested in working in Reality Labs. Also the tech.fb.com, the Tech Facebook blog has a lot of our latest research information posts.

Maurice Cherry:
Sounds good. Well, Charlene Atlas, I want to thank you so, so much for coming on the show. As I was doing my research for all this, and I mentioned to you before that I’m going to this metaverse conference thing tomorrow, that I’m super excited about. But as I was putting all this together and really just digging into your background, you have accomplished so much. It’s mind boggling to see the work that you’re doing now, and because it’s such an uncharted space. I hope that people will get a sense of your passion for this, as you’ve mentioned before, about people being passionate about this. I hope people get a sense of what your passion is for this. And hopefully that can fuel them to see what new possibilities might be out there for them, especially as we embark upon a new year. So thank you so much for coming on the show. I appreciate it.

Charlene Atlas:
Thank you so much, Maurice. It was great talking to you.

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