Barry Hoffman, Chief Strategy Officer at ZeroLight, discusses how customized, high-quality virtual reality (VR) experiences can draw in consumers. If you’re interested in attending VRX San Francisco 2019 on December 12 and 13, feel free to follow our affiliate link to register.

3E: Can you tell us your name and the company you’re here to represent?

BH: My name is Barry Hoffman and I’m the chief strategy officer of ZeroLight. 

3E: What makes ZeroLight unique?

BH: What makes us unique is that, on the one hand, what we’ve always aimed for is the highest quality, you know, like looking at certain technologies, you know, mobile 6DOF, holographic devices, we’ve had them for years now. It needs to hit a level where the quality represents what the end user wants to see, so in our case, that’s the consumer. If we work with new technology that does not hit the market yet, we’re doing things in ZeroLight Labs. That means we use the technology, we showcase it to our clients, but we’re not selling it.

Another unique thing is our rendering pipeline makes very high-end rendering. I think we’re the only one who can show on 8K screens currently. We’re the only one showing foveated rendering with StarVR at this level of quality.

Other things is like if you need to expose a product in the world, across regions, everywhere, whether it’s China, the US, Nepal, India, you know, like whether you’re in Australia, a product there is not a product here, and every product has small variations. You need to be able to deliver that in real time, without anybody being in-between completely automated, completely setup in a fast way, that’s what we do. We’re the only one in the world who can do that in an automated fashion. The rest of the world needs to do manual stuff, so that makes us unique.

3E: What trends are you seeing?

BH: You know, we see what a lot of people see, of course, that there’s new technologies coming into the market. You know, everybody’s trying it out. The only thing is, because we’re very close to our customers, it’s not just about adapting the technology to a market, but it’s actually finding out where the technology fits the real use case. 

Those are the moments, the first moments, where technology can count. Like with augmented reality (AR), you can create something in the street, with an ad, you can actually create a magical moment that the car can be yours.

By personalizing it, already within the search, to a level where you think, “Oh, that’s actually what I was looking for.” If you’re looking for a red car, don’t show a black car – show a red car.

That’s stage one. Stage two is once you start searching for it, then you want to configure all the building blocks of a highly complex thing like a car, but there’s other products, as well, which are highly complex. Highly-personalized sales is what the sales of the future is.

If you look at any trend, any white papers, you know, they’re all talking about personalized customer experiences. So that’s what we’re currently aiming for with the new technologies that come out. It’s not just showing depth like VR can do, or showing it in a location like AR can do, but how can it actually show it in the location and then personalize that experience for everybody that uses it, so those are big trends.