Bungee Jumping with Untethered VR, featuring Happy Finishs Daniel Cheetham

Published: July 28, 2020, 10 a.m.

Happy Finish\u2019s CEO Daniel Cheetham\u2019s XR bread and butter was virtual experiences and LBEs, until the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to stay indoors. Now, he explains, he\u2019s exploring the power VR has to help enterprise and the environment.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\nAlan: Hey, everyone, Alan Smithson here. Today, we're speaking with Daniel Cheetham, CEO of Happy Finish, a creative technology and content firm based in London, UK. They've done XR experiences for Ford, Exxon Mobil, and many more. We will learn today how they're using digital twins to add real business value. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast.\n\n\n\nDaniel, welcome to the show, my friend.\n\n\n\nDaniel: Thanks for having me.\n\n\n\nAlan: It's my absolute pleasure. I've been looking forward to having you on the show for so long. It's really exciting, the stuff you guys have done. You've done everything from putting people from the real world into VR on a bicycle, to help give them a sense of what it's like to be on the other side of a driving scenario. You've done all sorts of things. Tell us, what is Happy Finish?\n\n\n\nDaniel: So, Happy Finish -- or HF, as we're now more commonly referring to ourselves -- we're really in the space of creating content and experiences for grand clients, right from the very beginning. And this is second hand information; I joined Happy Finish about six, six and a half years ago. Now the business is fifteen years old. We have been employing post-production and CGI techniques to create versions of the real world -- or different flavors of the real world -- over the last six to seven years. I think we built a reputation in the immersive technology space. We started working really early on with the DK-1 from Kickstarter, testing, playing around with Unity, seeing what we could do, up to now where we're easily 200+ commercially funded, brand funded XR experiences. And we work across the whole gamut of immersive tech, from 360 video -- which is less the flavor of the month now -- through to real time based experiences across Microsoft Hololens 2, and in AR.\n\n\n\nAlan: I've got a call one thing, that I saw here on your site, and I just got to ask: VR bungee jumping?\n\n\n\nDaniel: [laughs] One of my crazy ideas. It was in the context, we were chatting -- watercooler moment -- chatting about how we could make some noise about untethered VR, particularly around the Oculus Quest. And it just dawned on me as well, what better way to really test what can be done in untethered VR, than tether it to a bungee rope and have somebody jump off a bungee platform?\n\n\n\nAlan: So were you the first one to try this?\n\n\n\nDaniel: I wasn't, actually. We a couple of guinea pigs who put their hand up first, but I did try it in the end. It was not without its challenges. We were really putting the tracking system on the Quest to its absolute limits. And so on a few occasions, it was bungee jumping with a blindfold, rather than in VR.\n\n\n\nAlan: [laughs] Still pretty amazing that you even bit that off. So was it a brand activation, or was this just an internal--?\n\n\n\nDaniel: This is an in-house piece for us. And back until very recently, an area of focus for us was LB. So we've created a number of -- I think -- pretty recognizable motion platform based VR experiences. One that I know got a lot of sharing couple of years ago, that lives at the top of The Shard -- the tallest building here in London -- where the user will fly virtually -- or slide virtually -- around the top of The Shard. We got a lot of screamers and yeah, we had a real focus on building out that as a product. We have four or five of these VR slides around the world now. However, LB has taken somewhat of a hit --