Pivoting Game Dev Skills into XR Utility for Enterprise, with Extalitys Arash Keshmirian

Published: April 21, 2020, 10 a.m.

b'Today\\u2019s guest got his start in the world of game development. But soon, Arash Keshmirian saw the writing on the wall that XR\\u2019s current usefulness was better-suited to the worlds of industry, retail, and journalism. Arash and Alan discuss how he made that transition.\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: Hey, everyone, it\'s Alan Smithson here, the host of the XR for Business podcast. Today we have Arash Keshmirian, co-founder of Extality. His personal goal is to create powerful content that delivers results. We\'re going to dig into using Magic Leap and Hololens and mixed reality headsets as a tool for business. So all that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast.\\n\\n\\n\\nArash, welcome to the show, my friend.\\n\\n\\n\\nArash: Thank you for having me.\\nGreat to be here.\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: It\'s my absolute pleasure.\\nYou guys have done some pretty cool stuff. I was on your website\\nplaying with a shoe. What is Extality?\\n\\n\\n\\nArash: Were a lot of things to\\nmany people. So we built Extality out of a long, 10 year experience\\nin the games industry, building mobile games. Did a lot of games,\\nincluding Zombie Gunship, which ended up being this kind of worldwide\\nsensation of shooting zombies from an airplane. That company --\\nLimbic -- we ended up doing a lot of XR stuff. And kind of around\\n2016, 17, 18 we built a game for ARKit, called Zombie Gunship\\nRevenant. And that ended up being a huge hit across the app store.\\nApple featured it a whole bunch of times. It was one of the 2017\\ngames of the year. And it spread ARKit to a lot of people, trying new\\nthings on their new iPhones. And we later did a project called Zombie\\nGuns Raptor with Oculus and Oculus Go, Gear VR. But really kind of\\naround that time -- 2017 -- we started to feel like it was getting\\nway too crowded in the games business, and we were starting to look\\naround and try to figure out what we could do with our experience in\\nhigh-performance graphics and making cool experiences, immersive\\nexperiences. I started talking to a guy named Ryan Peterson, who\'s\\nthe founder of a CEO called Finger Food out in Vancouver. And he was\\ntelling me about all these exciting opportunities in AR and VR for\\nenterprises. He was talking about how they\'d saved millions and\\nmillions of dollars for a truck company that was looking to move\\ntheir design to virtual reality from using clay models. And this got\\nour head scratching, we were like, "You know, maybe there\'s an\\nopportunity to use all of our games experience, to help big companies\\nand do more than just give people an entertaining hour on their\\nphones." So we founded a new company called Extality. And we set\\nout to essentially discover companies that really wanted to explore\\nXR, be it on their phones, on headsets, iPods -- every type of XR --\\nand leverage our background in doing just really hard graphics\\nproblems, building scalable global servers and connectivity, all\\nthose hard things that you learn how to do making games, we quickly\\nrealized that we\'re super, super applicable to building enterprise\\nsolutions as well.\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: Actually, I know Ryan very\\nwell from Finger Food, really great guy. And they\'ve done some\\namazing work in the space. What are some of the highlights that\\nyou\'ve done for enterprise? And first of all, I just want to say that\\nhaving a flying zombie shooter game? Pretty awesome.\\n\\n\\n\\nArash: [chuckles] Thank you. \\n\\n\\n\\n\\nAlan: The fact you guys had a\\nhit with ARKit is pretty amazing, because there\'s not too much out\\nthere leveraging the power of ARKit yet.\\n\\n\\n\\nArash: Yeah. I mean, if you want\\nto talk about games for just a second, it\'s an interesting thing. I\\nmean, it gives people a totally different experience using their\\nphone as the controller and running around the room. We have all\\nthese videos during our user tests'