Nina Salomons: Diversity Can Help Close the XR Skills Gap

Pieter:

Hi and welcome everybody to a new episode of the virtual podcasts with me today is Nina Salomons. She’s an award winning filmmaker and XR creative producer, consultant, and she’s working in the space now for more than five years. We met last week at the ISE X summit in Amsterdam where Nina was moderating the panel where I was part of. So hi Nina. Welcome to our show.

Nina:

Hi.

Pieter:

So please tell us a little bit more about your career paths and how you end up doing stuff in XR.

Nina:

I started in the immersive space by studying filmmaking for five years. I did three degrees of film and television studies and then a Master in filmmaking. And during that time period I had a YouTube channel dedicated to gaming actually. And I learned a lot about the online community and space. And I saw how storytelling and filmmaking was dramatically changing. And I was always interested in science fiction and holograms and all of all of this stuff. And so when I first came in contact with XR or augmented reality, mixed reality, whatever you’re choosing, I was like, I need to be in this. So I went to every single meetup. I organized a woman in VR meetup group. And so every single event, every single month I went to an event related to it and I delved into it. I started organizing hackathons. The first hackathon I organized, a company came out of it where they use virtual reality to train people how to do CPR in VR. And those were the winners of the first hackathon. I work in eyes. And I thought, this is so amazing. All of these other different sectors have to integrate with all of these new technologies because the possibilities are endless. And I ended up being a presenter and a videographer for VR Focus, which is a European website dedicated to the new. So I went to all of the conferences, I traveled a lot, discovered good technology, bad technology, and I had to write or make videos about it. So it was kind of learning about what the technology was, who were the big players in the space, and talking about talking about it, writing about it, making videos about it. Recently I ended up working for Cornerstone Partnership which is a charity organization that uses VR to train social care workers and future foster parents, how to take care of children who come from broken homes. So for domestic violence, alcohol abuse, all of these things, they are using virtual reality to train them how to parent the children properly. And, um, that company was called Inition who built the content and I ended up working for them as a tech consultant. So working as a sales dev, as a producer, helping on the creative side as well.They actually recently went bankrupt which isn’t great. They went down last year, but all the while I was working on bringing virtual reality into prison as of last year. So I’ve been doing that all the while for almost a year now.

Pieter:

VR in prison, tell us more about that.

Nina:

So I’m helping a foundation called the [inaudible] foundation and they’ve already been working on rehabilitation in different prisons. So they’re working already with an organization called beyond recovery. And they have been having incredible results. The founder of the foundation saw what American prisons were doing in Colorado specifically. They were using virtual reality for youth offenders, lifers who’ve been in there from a very young age and they’ve been training them how to reintegrate with a normal life. If you’ve been in prison for like 12 to 15 years, you might not know what an electric car is. You might not know how to use a microwave. You don’t know what a smartphone is, you don’t know how to use a washing machine. All of these things that we take for granted because we live in normal life, they don’t know how to do. So they’re using virtual reality to help prisoners and trained them to reintegrate within a normal lifestyle.

Pieter:

And are there any results of those experiments?

Nina:

Um, so far there’s been a little bit of press about it. Um, the use offenders have been very positive about its use and that’s kind of what prompted this to happen. So I’ve been researching it and we’ve been working together with nodding in prison to work with incentivization for prisoners. So we give them, we give the educational workshops headsets, and if you are interested in showing up, you have potentially 10 minutes opportunity to be somewhere else to try something else to bring your mind at rest. And that is actually been quite productive. A lot of attendance in educational workshops have gone up because of the headset. So there has been very, very useful.

Pieter:

Okay. So you, you mentioned that you had three different film studies. Can you tell us a little bit more about your background in film?

Nina:

So I studied film and television studies and I studied filmmaking as well, so two different ones. Um, I started off wanting to work in Hollywood and wanting to make blockbuster feature films. And I’ve always had a huge interest in independent cinema like an art form as well as documentaries. I’m a huge fan of them. So the first documentary I did was in state of transit, which was used to help. How do I describe this? It’s a documentary that describes critical areas where refugees are in dire need of evacuation, whether you’re a filmmaker, a journalist or a human rights lawyer, your life can be threatened in different locations and you might need immediate evacuation. But in order to ask for asylum, it takes days or weeks or months or years. So there was a transit center created in TIMI, Shara and Romania where refugees and immediate dire situations need to be evacuated to in order to kind of have a leeway of space in between being granted asylum or being murdered. So that was a documentary I worked on. And then following up on the gamer YouTube channel that I had, I made a documentary about female gamers, what it means to be a female gamer. I got a lot of hate on X-Box. Yeah, I was a, I was really into MMOs, so I was like one of the two only female girls and like the whole, the whole group. And I just, I realized there was a lot of connotations that came with it. I was really interested in exploring it cause I was doing my master’s in filmmaking. So I made a whole documentary about what does it mean to be a female gamer because there’s a lot of problems that comes with it from storytelling to characters, abuse online. And this actually goes into virtual reality because a lot of the things that we see in video games then goes into virtual reality because there’s still virtual worlds. And for the younger generation they don’t, they probably won’t see a difference cause it’s a virtual world. So that documentary went out to, uh, some film festivals and then I worked on a lot of short films and corporate content and music videos and things like that.

Pieter:

Okay. Was the documentary about the women in gaming, was it also the reason why you co-founded the women in XR and also XRDI? Because it seems like you’re on a mission in this space now in the VR or the XR or whatever community looking for more inclusivity. Um, could you tell us a little more about that?

Nina:

Oh, this could get super interesting. Um, how do I describe a story? So I’m Dutch but I’m adopted and I grew up in nine different countries and some of them I would say were sort of conflict areas. So I always grew up being pointed at being stared at being kind of seen as like an alien. And on top of that I was a woman as well. And so there’s a lot of things that I personally experienced as a girl, as a woman, um, and as well being put into a box of stereotypes and everything else that comes with it. And I realized when I came into the film industry that even within the UK, it’s, that’s a really classes system as well. So not only do I sound American, I’m Dutch adopted and I’m a woman of like an ethnic background. All of these things played against, and what I realize as I entered the space was that a lot of the stories that are being told are kind of a regurgitation of the same thing sometimes. And you need other diverse voices to want to tell their stories. And so I think I’m doing a lot of work in order to help people one, few safe because it’s not always been a safe space and it still is not a safe space, especially for young women. Because there’s sort of an overlap between technology, video games, film and television and all of these areas. You know, with the hashtag me too, there have been incidents that have rocked the immersive space. And I would, I would want, I would want to make sure that a young person who is of an underrepresented background feels like they can tell their story and not feel put down because of everything that they are simply because they are this. So if I had a daughter or a sister or a friend or best friend or a niece or whatever, I would want them to feel inspired. I want them to tell their stories. I want them to push the technology forward and not think about all of the barriers that exist. So I feel like I want to create a safe community space for people like myself or people who’ve been put with these judgements on them to feel like they can do it and not be bogged down by the expenses or by this barrier and giving them a kind of like a boost up something that I think everybody needs.

Pieter:

So that’s, that’s mainly the reason why you started with XRDI. So you started together with Asha Easton, some of the people.

Nina:

Yeah, so I actually, I organized the VR after the women in VR meetup groups. I wanted to create something bigger, a bigger platform and I realized I didn’t have the capacity to do it. When I worked for VR Focus, I led something called the VR diversity initiative, which in some sense is very much the same thing. So ran four workshops, trained about 78 different people from underrepresented backgrounds and the success stories that come out of there are incredible. I would say 30% of the people who went through the, went through a training of a day where they bill and create something within a single day without any previous knowledge whatsoever. No film background, no coding background. They went in and they created something tangible. And I see these people now working in the space. They’ve been funded by Google. They set up their own careers, they learn unity, learn coding, and now they’re in the space. So I can see a real impact of what that did. Uh, and the possibility of bringing in new talent, new new people, new voices, new stories, new ways of looking at the world. And so waited to see if something would come out of that after I had left. And then after everything that’s happened with Weinstein and everything else in the hashtag me too age now, I realize that people were taking advantage of the hashtag diversity and I realized it wasn’t meant to help them. It was sort of a way of tapping into a community for free without putting any effort into it. And I thought, that’s not okay. We need to restart this again. So Asha and I had been talking about it for a really long time and now we’re going to be doing to celebrate women’s day, a hackathon, half a day hackathon at Tate Modern XRDI and the hope is, and to kind of keep this going, to potentially bring it to other countries at different places, keep it growing, but I have a true belief that people from underrepresented groups have something new to offer. If you have no legs, how do you move in VR if you have no hands, how do you move in VR if you can’t speak? How do you speak in VR? How can you put on a comfortable headset if your hairstyle doesn’t accommodate an Oculus rift and Oculus quest, the head strap, what if your eyes are set differently? All of these things are, people could see them as like, well they’re not in porn or you know, it’s not the majority of the population. But what, what’s really important is that they can offer new technological solutions that we could have never thought of because we’ve always have had, we’ve always had hands. We’ve always had feet. We’ve always seen the world and the way that we see it. But VR is such a new space. It’s such a new innovative space that these people who might see the world completely different to the way that we do, can bring on new technological breakthroughs that we might have never thought of. So that’s why I think it’s important.

Pieter:

Oh, okay. Because I thought that like the mission of XRDI to close a skill gap because there is a huge industry wide skill shortage of developers. Is that right?

Nina:

I mean they come hand in hand, they come hand in hand. If we can upscale people from underrepresented groups to then get hired by companies. We are changing the landscape of how stories can be told, the technological innovations that can take place. But in order for that to happen, they first need to have access. And that’s what this would be providing. The workshops are free to attend. They’re all put together by individuals who care about the community and might’ve come from similar backgrounds. And the whole idea is upscale, upscale. We’re not a educational platform. We are a push through the door, get access to technological innovation to hardware to software that you will never know, might not have ever had access to, but you now get to try it for free. And if you are inspired and if you want to continue working in a space, if you suddenly see a crossover in a sector that you work in or VR, AR, MR, then suddenly you might start up your own company or suddenly you might want to experiment and work together with other people that you might’ve met. Either way. It’s that sort of inspiration that working together that giving you an imagination of what’s possible. That really what we’re trying to inspire. And eventually if people do want to continue down that path and hopefully there’s a platform or there’s a, you know, courses at universities that will provide people the means to upscale quickly to then go in the industry. But this is really just a pinch. It’s just the opening of the door of inspiration and inspiring people. And I’ve seen it work before and I know that it people will want to work in the industry after getting their hands on it.

Pieter:

Okay, sounds great. So what if people are, are interested, how can they reach out? What’s next? What, what can they expect of the programs or how can they get in touch with you guys?

Nina:

Sure. You head over to the website, it’s XRDi.org. You can sign up over there if you’re interested. If you’re interested in supporting via hardware or software or volunteering or any other means, let us know. There’s a sort of a contact us right now, the event that we’re organizing is at Tate modern on the 8th of March. However, we plan to organize more into future Asha and I are hoping that we can make it a venture that potentially we get more sponsorship, more support and can be brought elsewhere. The whole idea is we just want to cultivate a, an inspirational space for people to be inspired and then come and join us in the immersive community.

Pieter:

Okay. All right. Now it’s only based or focused on London

Nina:

Right now. It’s just based in London. That’s where Asha and I are based. But we have had people ask us to bring it to New Zealand already or to bring it to wills to bring it to Canada. And you know, all of these things could be a possibility if we had the support and actual funding for it. But right now this is all done in our free time. We’re not getting paid for it. We just really, we really care. We really want to make it a safe space.

Pieter:

Wow. So final question. You told me earlier that you’re working on a VR movie. Could you tell us a little more about that?

Nina:

So having, coming from a creative background, from storytelling, I think my real passion is just telling stories. And I have been seeing a lot of VR films, a lot of VR content for a very, very, very long time. And I think I know what works well and what doesn’t work well. And I’ve had this film concept in my mind for a very, very long time and it’s going to be using eye-tracking. It will have no form of dialogue whatsoever, so it’s very, I suppose passive experience in a sense that it’s not fully interactive with your hands or controllers. I thought what is the best way to tell the story if you’ve never tried virtual reality before? And eye tracking is one of the areas where I think VR hasn’t really touched upon fully, especially because I think virtual reality falls into the realm of theater rather than filmmaking and when it comes to interacting with a virtual object. The part that’s very scary or it gets interesting is when you lock eyes with someone where you’re walking on the street an absolute stranger and you make eye contact. That’s when something happens. It’s nonverbal. You don’t know how to explain it, but I’m sure for example, if you go to another country, you don’t speak the language, you can still meet face to face, eye to eye and have some form of interaction and so that’s something I’m interested in working on within this piece. It’s about a seven to 12 minute long short film. It’s, it’s a animation, so it’s not actual real characters and it plays a lot with light, sound and movement. So the way that you interact with the characters will be only through your eyes and you’ll be able to sort of change in landscape using your eyes only. I think this is one of the areas that VR headsets haven’t been fully able to make use of yet because the headsets don’t support it, but we have some support from HTC Vive. So the Vive Pro Eye does have integrated eye tracking and I think there’s some real subconscious storytelling ways of interacting with characters here that could be really interesting. So I’m trying to get the funding for this. I’m trying to get it pushed through and fingers crossed that by next year or by the end of this year that it’ll be finished. It’s a very expensive process. Yeah.

Pieter:

Okay. So yeah, I would like to thank you for this very pleasant conversation. It sounds very interesting what you’re all working on and I hope to hear more from it soonNini so thank you very much.

Nina:

Fantastic. Thanks.