Daniel Beauchamp inspires us to do more crazy experiments in VR

Hello Daniel, I am very pleased to have you on my blog today! Can you introduce yourself to my readers?

Hi I’m Daniel Beauchamp, and I head up AR / VR for Shopify (not Spotify!). My day job involves figuring out with my team how spatial computing will change the way people shop, and how we can bring this technology to the over 1 million merchants on our platform. But in my spare time, I love working on crazy VR experiments, especially around hand tracking.

You have become quite famous in the VR communities for your amazing experiments with Oculus Quest hands tracking. Can you share here what are the three ones that you love the most and maybe comment them a bit?

That’s a tough one! My favourite is probably the hair cutting simulator because it was so fun to build, and the end result was hilarious. It probably took me a good 100 takes to get it looking right, but it was worth it in the end. My wife still won’t let me cut her hair though.

Miniature beatsaber was also really fun to build. While the video looks really colorful and exciting, it doesn’t do justice to what it felt like playing the experience. Once I turned on expert mode it was wild to have hundreds of blocks whizzing past. Plus I had mini-lightsabers on all of my fingers which was quite the experience.

It also had this unintended consequence of creating a more accessible type of gameplay for VR. If you design games to be played on the tray table of a plane, you are also creating experiences for people with mobility issues who might not be able to jump around like in a normal BeatSaber session.

And the other favouritie one I’d pick is networked hands. Not as flashy as the others, but it was mind-blowing to experience talking to another person in VR with natural hand gestures. Even though we only had sphere heads and simple hands, the amount of nuance and body language that came across exceeded my expectations.

Why do you make these prototypes? Are they made for some practical use or for fun?

I love virtual reality and can’t get enough of it, but lately, I haven’t been doing as much of it at work. My team at Shopify started on VR stuff back in 2015 but we’ve been really focused on augmented reality shopping as of late. So working on these prototypes gives me an outlet to work on VR.

The prototypes are also a way to get better at Unity. I was a die-hard Unreal Engine user, but with a lot of AR being in Unity I needed a way to ramp up on the engine.

Why do you say we need more crazy prototypes in VR?

Some of the best discoveries are made through happy accidents. But you won’t stumble on those if you play it safe and do the same thing everyone else is doing. We’re not at a point yet where VR should converge on standards and the “right way of doing things”. There’s still so much to discover, so let’s keep diverging as much as possible and keep throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. 

Some of your prototypes made my mind blow, like the one where you throw your hand to reach something distant. It breaks all the rules. Do you think that the final interface (UX) in VR will be something like that, so crazy we haven’t thought about, or it will be something similar to what we already have?

I’m not quite sure what the final interface will look like, but I’ll be sad if it’s a laser pointer and the pinch gesture. Maybe that’ll end up being the best, but we have LOTS of more experimenting to do before we come to that conclusion. So keep prototyping!

I personally think you are a creative genius. Can you share with us the creative process that you follow when making these prototypes?

Aww shucks, thank you! A lot of my prototypes are excuses to learn new skills and techniques in Unity. For example I’ll start by going “hmm, I’d really like to learn more about compute shaders”. So then I start thinking about what fun things could be built with compute shaders. Hair! Hair simulations! And then I’m building a haircutting simulator.

I have an engineering mindset so I like becoming obsessed with fun tech problems. Next thing you know I’m building a jenga game to see how stable physics and hand interactions can be. I make sure to keep the prototypes small in scope so they don’t take more than a week or two to create, and that they can be distilled in a 15-second video.

Where do you take inspiration for your prototypes?

Real life! Haircutting, jenga, yo-yos, fingerboarding, etc… Add “VR” to the end of any of it and you have a never-before-seen virtual experience. I always make sure to add a clever or funny twist to it to gain good traction with even the non-VR folks.

What has inspired you of the hands tracking of the Oculus Quest more than the use of controllers? I mean, why weren’t you doing these cool things even before?

The best part of hand tracking demos is that all the focus can be on the hands. You don’t need to worry about building environments or lots of props and that makes it much quicker to make prototypes.

Take the hand grating video, for example: the focus is all on the hands with a simple prop. The boringness of the background doesn’t take away from it, because the hands are just so expressive and relatable.

I also started hand tracking experiments because almost no one else was. Oculus had released the feature and there was very little content out there. 

Can you tease us your next experiment? And with what other devices do you think to experiment in the future?

I can’t spoil the surprise! What I can say though is I want to learn more about signed distance fields and marching cubes.

As for other devices, it’s hard to get away from the Quest. It’s such a fantastic device. At work we just got some Varjo XR-1’s so I’m excited to put those through their paces.

Do you think that hands tracking is going to replace controllers anytime soon? Or do you see them serving separate purposes?

As much as I love hand tracking, you can’t beat the feeling and accuracy of a controller for most tasks. I like controllers when I need to use a virtual “tool” and I like hands for communicating. What I’m looking forward to is when both can be combined. I can be drawing with my left hand while gesturing to teammates with my right.

If you could share some lessons that you’ve learned with someone that wants to become like you, what would they be?

You’ll learn more by making several small prototypes than by trying to make a full game or product. 

Like a lot of people, I lose motivation quickly and get distracted by new shiny projects. By keeping my prototypes small in scope I can stay within the “honeymoon phase” and also get the satisfaction of finishing them. I also don’t get tied down to any one idea. I’d rather get 30 small prototypes done in a year than committing to create one big one (and feeling guilty when I don’t finish it).

My other advice is to not wait for the perfect idea! I see a lot of people approach learning XR dev by trying to come up with the best idea for a game or product. That can wait. Start with something small no matter how silly (and useless) the idea may be. Need inspiration? Take a mundane activity and reproduce it in VR. For example, make Leaf Blower VR. You’ll learn a lot about setting up Unity, dealing with interactions, physics, sounds, etc… Do that exercise a few times and you’ll level up in no time.

Your daily job is being the head of AR and VR at Shopify. How is Shopify employing these technologies now and what are its plans for the future?

Shopify now natively supports 3D. Just like you can add photos to your products, you can now associate 3D models that can be viewed in AR. We’re seeing that customers who interact with phone based AR are up to 2.5x more likely to convert because they are more confident in what they are buying. With just a smartphone you can see how a sofa looks and fit in your living room, or make sure a stroller can fit in the trunk of your car.

We’ve laid the foundation for 3D so that we can build upon it when XR wearables become the next computing platform. We want to equip our million+ merchants with tools they need for the spatial computing future.

I’ve read that Shopify wants to become a fully remote company. Is VR helping with that?

Back in 2017 we built one of the first collaboration tools for VR. It was internal only and we used it extensively for brainstorming VR commerce experiences. As we switched gears to focus more on near-term AR products, we used it less and less. Now with our new reality of being remote, we’re getting back into looking at how VR can help us better collaborate and stay connected.