Episode 190: Visualizing Safety: Immersive Virtual Analytics with BadVR & Jad Meouchy

Published 2023-12-28

Episode notes

What are immersive analytics?

Hello Smart Firefighting Community!

Welcome to another episode of covering real world innovations via interviews with fire service and technology industry experts that empower YOU to develop your very own Smart Firefighting strategy!

Thanks for joining our 16 part FRST Challenge Mini Series recorded at the competition! Tracking and situational awareness has long been a problem for first responders. That's why the FRST Challenge competition is designed to pinpoint 3D tracking technologies that provide one-meter accuracy for first responders in indoor environments, crucial for enhancing their safety during rescue operations.

The 6 finalist teams competed in localization and ruggedization tests at Muscatatuck Urban Training Center from October 23-27, 2023. Winning teams gain access to funding, business support, and live field testing opportunities to evolve their solutions for real-world application.

In this episode:

How immersive analytics can transform public safety and emergency response visibility

The challenges and solutions of small cell backhaul visualization in the 5G era

The multi-dimensional impact of immersive technology on cyber-security and telecom

Hear from Jad Meouchy - the co-founder and CTO of BadVR .

Programming since childhood, Jad has vast experience in reverse engineering, data analytics, and all things mobile. He was the technical co-founder of Osurv, a next-generation customer feedback platform with an innovative mobile-first perspective, which sold in 2017.

BadVR is a next-generation immersive (VR/AR) data visualization and analytics platform. They give everyone at an organization the ability to “step inside their data” to discover actionable insights, faster.

So click play now to hear what he has to share, and stay tuned for the rest of our mini series!

Head to www.smartfirefighting.com to discover how SFF accelerates innovation for emergency responders, to find out when our next event is, or review our curated resources!

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Chapters

0:00 Intro
1:08 Meet Jad Meouchy of BadVR
1:39 The path to Muscatatuck
2:26 The Chariot and Commanding Tech challenges
3:09 Why both VR and AR headsets
4:22 And, not or
5:18 Inside the Commanding Tech Challenge
6:20 Field exercises and live deployments
7:27 An outsider's view of the challenge
8:25 Bringing stakeholders together
9:36 What's next for BadVR
10:39 Takeaways from the day
12:04 Validation from the field
12:41 The story behind the name
13:04 Final thoughts
13:54 Outro

Questions answered in this episode

What is the FRST Challenge and what was its goal in phase five?

The FRST Challenge aims to produce marketable prototypes that demonstrate indoor localization tracking of first responders within one meter accuracy without any pre-deployed infrastructure. In phase five, the challenges increased by including multiple responders, longer durations, and longer distances.

Hear it at 0:00

What does BadVR stand for?

Jad Meouchy says it stands for bring all your data into VR. The idea is to bring the information you have into the holographic environment so you can step inside your data and explore it.

Hear it at 12:47

How did BadVR get involved in public safety technology?

Jad Meouchy says they participated in the Chariot Challenge and then the Commanding Challenge, where they won second place. That gave them appreciation, knowledge, experience and access to the world of public safety with regard to incident command and data.

Hear it at 1:50

Why does BadVR support both AR and VR headsets?

Jad Meouchy says the main feedback was what if the headset changes, so they decided to be compatible with everything. The application adapts to whatever capabilities the device has rather than requiring people to have equipment that adapts to applications, a flexibility that public safety demanded.

Hear it at 3:33

What surprised Jad Meouchy about the reaction to their demo at Muscatatuck?

He says people reacted much more strongly and positively than expected. They thought there might be pushback on the equipment, weight or bulkiness, but people saw through the equipment to the value proposition and what it could do to help them.

Hear it at 10:53

Transcript

Machine transcript of the published audio. Names may be misspelled and some sections are missing.

Ep 190 transcript

Visualizing Safety: Immersive Virtual Analytics with BadVR & Jad Meouchy

Speakers: Kevin Sofen, Jad Meouchy

Source: Whisper medium.en machine transcription of the published Podbean audio (no original transcript found in Drive), lightly cleaned. Speakers were separated by voice clustering and then checked and assigned by hand at every speaker change. Gaps where the model returned no usable text are marked [inaudible m:ss].

[0:00] Kevin Sofen: Hello, everyone, and welcome to a new Smart Firefighting mini-series created during the phase five of the FRST Challenge, hosted at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center. The FRST Challenge focus is to produce marketable prototypes that demonstrate indoor localization tracking of first responders within one meter accuracy without any pre-deployed infrastructure. Many of you heard stories from phase four, and here in phase five, the challenges were increased by including multiple responders, longer durations, and longer distances. In these conversations, you will hear from many of the entrepreneurs, first responders, and team members involved that address these challenges and opportunities of X, Y, and Z axis tracking from multiple perspectives around scalability, usability, affordability, and more. This challenge is administered by the Indiana University Crisis Technologies Innovation Lab and funded by the NIST Public Safety Communication Research PSCR division. Also consider putting the NIST 5x5 conference on your calendar located in Chicago June 25th to 27th, 2024. Enjoy this deep dive into first responder tracking technology and please reach out with your thoughts. Here back in front of the hospital in Muscatatuck alongside Jad Meouchy with BadVR. Jad, how you doing?

[1:18] Jad Meouchy: Doing pretty well. Beautiful day. Technology is working. Can't Can't complain.

[1:23] Kevin Sofen: It really is beautiful. I, for some reason, was expecting it to be cold, but it's been quite warm here in Muscatatuck.

[1:29] Jad Meouchy: Yeah, it's same as where we're from, Los Angeles originally. It's like we brought the weather along or made reservations for it. We're very happy.

[1:36] Kevin Sofen: Although the leaves were definitely turning, so fall time is beautiful. So what was your path to getting here to Muscatatuck, Indiana, and participating in this phase five challenge? Well, not necessarily participating in it, but kind of participating on the sidelines here.

[1:50] Jad Meouchy: Definitely, yeah. had participated in the Chariot Challenge several years ago through NIST and did very well in that and then participated in the Commanding Challenge where we won second place and from that we got a lot of appreciation, knowledge of, and experience and access to this world of public safety with regard to incident command and data and the future vision of all of this user interface stuff and so that's what ultimately brought us out here is we had a demonstration of a product that shows this Incident Command virtual dashboard and we brought in the live data and the renderings and we're displaying it here.

[2:26] Kevin Sofen: So for those of us that aren't overly familiar with the Chariot Challenge and the Commanding Tech Challenge, give me kind of a high-level overview of both of those challenges.

[2:34] Jad Meouchy: Chariot Challenge was all about visualizing IoT sensor data. Commanding Challenge was about Incident Command and thinking about and imagining what's the next generation of all of this. Where's this all going? What will this become in the future? And how will technologies like XR, AR, VR, how will that factor in? Will this be a spatial computing experience? So NIST is very much at the forefront of all of this pioneering and we are fortunate to sort of come along and be able to access the public safety world and then bring our sort of XR expertise and fuse these things together to build really meaningful and capable visions of the future.

[3:09] Kevin Sofen: Well we're all very glad you're here and that you're helping continue to push the ball forward and on the table I see both a VR headset and an AR headset. So you're using both. I mean, give me, kind of tell me about sort of how and why you're using both and sort of what's the benefit. I mean, there's pros and cons about so maybe kind of just shine light on kind of how you're adopting and using AR and VR in different public safety applications.

[3:33] Jad Meouchy: We had always started with, I think it was VR, battery-powered VR devices, and got good response. But one of the main pieces of feedback was, yeah, but what if the headset changes? What if something new comes along? What about this headset? What about that headset? So we just made the decision, okay, we'll just be compatible with everything. AR, VR, XR, we'll just make it so that within the experience it'll adjust to whatever capabilities the device has. And if you have an AR experience, we, you know, the user interface is slightly different and the background is slightly different. So that was the idea is how can we make ourselves as versatile as possible and really have an application that adapts to the equipment rather than requiring people to have equipment that adapts the applications. That flexibility was a critical principle that we found public safety demanded.

[4:22] Kevin Sofen: Right on, and I'm a big believer of and not or, and depending on the end user, I mean, whether it's a flat screen, whether it's an AR or VR, they all have their advantage based on the circumstance and the end user.

[4:33] Jad Meouchy: Some work really well outside, some work better inside, some are great in an office, some are great in a warehouse. So having that flexibility, because when you're dealing with an incident, It could be anywhere, literally anywhere. It could be underground. And so having devices and experiences that are just very flexible, we found was really important. And being able to even switch back and forth between an AR mode on a VR headset, like with mixed reality with this meta headset, or being able to turn on the VR mode on the Magic Leap headset. And so it's funny, you almost see all the technology converging a little bit on both simultaneously being available to the end user for different purposes, whether they need isolation or they need the most amount of space.

[5:18] Kevin Sofen: So kind of going back a little bit to the commanding tech challenge experience, how long was it and ultimately kind of what was, what exercises were involved and what was that like?

[5:27] Jad Meouchy: Oh boy, so that, yeah, that was many phases and dealing with a lot of very specific, you know, as a commander, I want to be able to see this information. I want to see different floors of a LiDAR scanned building and I want to be able to see people moving between those floors and identify them and be able to communicate with somebody else, hey, unit 2704 is down, we need to send somebody to get them, and oh, there's 15 people that we've discovered over here. So it was a lot of, I would say, very story-driven tasks and requirements based on real historical scenarios or based on things very similar to historical scenarios. So that's sometimes the best teacher and preparer of the future is to look back at the past. So building these scenarios and environments out of real things that have happened, so that people can train against them and be able to react properly to the unknown of what comes.

[6:20] Kevin Sofen: Well said. And I mean, here were the NIST phase five first challenge here in Miskatik, Indiana. Was there any sort of field exercise or something sort of time when you went out and had an exercise like this?

[6:32] Jad Meouchy: We have done some stuff in the field with live deployments. So with live customer deployments. With regard to something like this is a bit new for us. So having this amount of people, all this different technology, all these pieces fitting together and us plugging into it, as opposed to us being, let's say, the sole technology entity out in the field. It's a different type of an experience, but it's really valuable because now we see how the value chain increases dramatically once you start putting all the puzzle pieces together. So now that you have a live tracking system, now that you have a good mapping system, now all of a sudden, in totality, this becomes really impactful on the first responders and the different public safety individuals. And so that was something that sometimes is missing when we're out there doing our thing alone. And then they say, hey, it'd be great if we could track people inside. And I say, yeah, it would be great, wouldn't it? We don't do that. We're gonna need to find somebody who does, but now we found a bunch of people who do.

[7:27] Kevin Sofen: Absolutely. And I mean, you being, I don't wanna say an outsider, but you came in here and I don't know if you were, that's really in the weeds as much on the FRST Challenge, but you being here on sort of the demo day when you've seen these six different teams competing and they're not competing today, they're demoing and hopefully there'll be the awards ceremony tomorrow. But from your perspective, what's it been? Like, what are your thoughts in terms of what kind of, what you're seeing with the tech and kind of how this has been run and kind of like the whole story and impact here?

[7:56] Jad Meouchy: Yeah, I think that tech seems to be working pretty well. We were looking at some of the live data inside the virtual ops center and we were seeing people tracking along and moving and everything looked pretty good. So from our perspective, the tech looks like it works. I can only imagine what it's like, you know, for everybody hustling around with it and adjusting and tuning. But from our perspective, it looks pretty well polished. Like it's come probably quite a long way during the course of the challenge. So we are, I would say, pleasantly surprised.

[8:25] Kevin Sofen: I would echo that and retweet that. But then I would also kind of want your thoughts on, and you touched on it a little bit earlier, but just all the different stakeholders. I mean, it's kind of towards the end right now some people have left, but why are these kind of events and opportunities to bring all these different stakeholders together valuable, and sort of what have you taken away from this event so far?

[8:44] Jad Meouchy: It's all about getting these different perspectives. So we maybe will meet different people in different places, but to bring all the subject matter experts together, to bring all the operators and the command personnel and the different groups also, you have police and fire and EMS, to bring that all into one place, now you start to understand how they all communicate with each other. And that's something that you don't get in isolation. You don't hear how police and fire hand off an issue or coordinate on an issue, and a lot of issues do require coordination. So that's what's so valuable for us, is being able to have frank, open, you know, very detailed conversations with a variety of people in a short amount of time and bounce some of their ideas off of each other and see how it feels overall and get them all in a group conversation. And that's It's like the epitome of brainstorming right there.

[9:36] Kevin Sofen: Couldn't agree more. It's really that magic in the room once you get these different stakeholders and perspectives. And yeah, thanks for that. So it's October 23, 2023, and I'm kind of interested in what's next for BadVR. I mean, where's your focus? Do you have any sort of tech roadmap rollout in terms of where you're taking this? And what's next for you?

[10:00] Jad Meouchy: Yeah, we're doing a bunch of customer deployments. We're doing some different pilot projects. We are doing a lot of demonstrations, so we're kind of making the trade show circuit and all of that. We're doing some different talks and all of that. We just got a couple of patents awarded, so we're just heads down on the tech, getting it out into people's hands, getting feedback from them, begging them to give us the most critical feedback possible so we can improve the product, and really just building a projection into the future of where we think this is going. But distribution through the different headsets is, I would say, the next step, is we're starting to do some of that marketing and really bring it to market.

[10:39] Kevin Sofen: I love it. And, you know, I guess I've asked this a little bit in the podcast already, but sort of anything that sort of caught your eye, surprised you here? Any sort of takeaways from your day here in Muscatatuck?

[10:53] Jad Meouchy: The reaction that we got from some of the different people that we that were able to experience it and test out the demo was much more impactful, much more sort of surprising than we thought. We didn't think that they would react so strongly positively to it. We thought there might be some pushback on the headset, the equipment, the weight, the, you know, the bulkiness, the heat, all the different things you could nitpick about a piece of equipment. But they saw through the equipment and they saw to the value proposition to the actual application and what it would do potentially to help them. And so that was really, I would say, really impactful to us and really helped us build a good handle of why we came out here, which is to have that exact conversation with somebody who isn't going to get hung up on the little details that might change in a couple months, but to really think about the grand vision of where this is all going. And for them to reinforce and, I would say, almost authorize that vision and say yes we do think that's the right direction that you're going in. That's really validating for us and that gives us a lot more confidence to put our time into pushing in that direction.

[12:04] Kevin Sofen: I love to hear that I mean you gotta it's sometimes you gotta do what you know is right but it's also really important to have that feedback from me just looking in the parking lot over there seeing Stefan Truithan and some of the other bright minds here from Chief Dale Rolfsen and Captain Kurt McKenzie and Jason Pennington and David Weil and Sonny Kirkland, just all these people here. It's really as important as a valuable brain trust. And obviously, you've gone through a few in this program. So I think you've done a good job of squeezing the line on some of the value of the business development. It's not just the engineering side, but the biz dev side. And kind of looking at your shirt, it reminded me of, I got to ask, the name BadVR and the brand, what's the story behind that?

[12:47] Jad Meouchy: Well, other than being badass, it does actually stand for something. It's an acronym. It's bring all your data into VR. So bring the information that you have, the world's information, into the holographic environment and step inside your data, explore it, discover all the hidden insights. BadVR.

[13:04] Kevin Sofen: That is badass. I love it. And if I could ask you to give us one sort of—I've asked everyone this, and this will be maybe my token mark of this podcast series, bit of a mic drop of sorts of a comment, a question, an insight, a challenge or anything that you could leave us with here today.

[13:21] Jad Meouchy: I think what we've seen, what we've experienced here is the spark of what will become a raging inferno of capabilities. So I think that maybe we've all been hunting around for that ember, but I think it's very clear that it has migrated from that. There's definitely something here, there's something to it and everybody knows it. And so we all know that we're at the beginning of a very interesting journey.

[13:44] Kevin Sofen: Well said. Well, it was wonderful to stumble upon each other here in Muscatatuck, and I look forward to learning more and staying in touch about all things BadVR.

[13:52] Jad Meouchy: Thank you.

[13:53] Kevin Sofen: Stay badass. Thanks for listening to today's episode. What did you think? What'd you learn? Hopefully something, right? Please reach out on social media with your thoughts on this episode and any other suggestions for future content. We look forward to capturing more important stories across public safety and are here at your service.