Interview with Josh Ruben, Co-Founder of Z3VR

Last month, our Executive Director Sean Guerre, met with Josh Ruben, co-founder of Z3VR and executive director of ION XR Lab. 

He discovered some impressive work that Josh and his team are doing in the world of immersive tech. They are not only developing XR programs within the health and wellness field, but also driving an initiative to bring a greater understanding of the unlimited applications and solutions XR can bring to the industrial table here in Houston.

SEAN: What are your current roles within the XR Houston community? 

JOSH: First and foremost, I am the co-founder and CEO of Z3VR. We’re a digital therapeutics company that’s focused on solving some of the psychological challenges associated with long duration space flight using virtual reality. We have partnerships with NASA and several other academic institutions for the purpose of solving those issues and building products there. 

Secondly, I’m the Director of the ION XR Lab. This is a space that was conceived in partnership with Microsoft, Intel, The Rice Management Company, Station Houston and, of course, Z3VR.

The first space we launched in early October is entirely focused on industrial use cases of AR, VR and MR. Our primary objective is to turn Houston into the national center for enterprise XR. It’s a tall order, but we believe that we have partnerships in place and enough momentum now to do that. 

Over the course of the next few months, we’ll be announcing two additional labs. They will have a very similar ethos to industrial space that we’ve launched with Station, with the exception of being focused on healthcare and education, respectively. 

I’m really excited about those initiatives and can’t wait to talk about them more. 

Finally, I’m working closely with a group here in town called Code Park. Code Park has been around for the last couple of years, and, basically, they go into underserved schools and communities and teach kids how to code. We’re co-developing curriculum for middle and high school students that will launch in several Houston-area schools next year. 

SEAN: Walk me through how the ION XR Lab will be interacting with the community to build this national-level organization? What are its initiatives? 

JOSH: Initially, we set out to connect startups and corporations – that was the whole purpose of the lab – but we found that many of the corporate teams saw XR as an irrelevant gaming technology. 

Most of the time that I spent with them over the past year was spent educating them on a very general basis, covering what the technology is and what it’s capable of. This is before I had the chance to show them a solution that one of our startups developed that is relevant to their business. With that being said, another major function of the space is filling that education gap.

In order to turn Houston into a capital for enterprise XR, the market needs to be educated. We have all this money and all these corporations that have relevant problem sets, but they don’t know what we’re working on. That’s step number one. 

The second thing is, after we’ve educated these corporations, we work with them to understand the topography of their business and where XR could solve problems. This makes it easy for us to take a startup that is affiliated with the space, and plug them into a very specific business unit within a company. 

At the end of next year, we’ll be judged on our general understanding of these businesses and their problem sets, then also the broader XR ecosystem. So, that tech transfer function is another really important thing for us here. 

In addition, we want to support all of the community events and companies that are located here in Houston, like the Industrial VR/AR Forum. I’m really looking forward to next year and collaborating with you on that, as well as Karen Snyder’s initiative, Houston VR, MaceVL, HTX Labs, Shiny Box Interactive and many others. It’s clear that we're all rowing in the same direction, and I want to provide as much support as I possibly can because this isn’t something that this lab can do alone. It’s such a large goal that we have.

SEAN: It sounds like you’re describing this lab as a kind of hub of other enterprise XR initiatives throughout the region or nationally. 

JOSH: Yes. It’s not that important that everything happens here in this building. 

When I look at ecosystems like Vancouver and San Francisco, there are many of these sorts of initiatives that are going on, but they’re all focused on all of the activity happening in their space, and I don’t really care so much about that. I just care that it’s in the city.

SEAN: What got you interested in immersive tech? 

JOSH: My career started off in digital health. I was working at a startup called BrainCheck. It’s based in TMCx. At BrainCheck, we were developing iOS applications that acted as a diagnostic aid for concussions and early stage dementia. It was there that I met my co-founders with the work that we’re doing now at Z3. 

The three of us had a fascination with virtual reality from the consumer standpoint. We were heavy VR users back in the day, and, coincidentally, we also did all of our development in Unity  - which, as you know, is related to the development work that we’re doing now. 

We ended up having this conversation on where VR could go from the consumer side, then from the enterprise side, and we became fascinated with the healthcare use cases that we were thinking of.

As we dug deeper and deeper into this technology, we found this vast array of other use cases that are very relevant to Houston across all of its major industries. That’s what led us to today. 

SEAN: Are there other initiatives you see happening in the Houston XR scene? 

JOSH: I’d love to put a spotlight on the value of these immersive technology teams within the corporations here, the teams within the corporations that are partnered with your events and with my space. The work that is possible when these teams are given the room to explore are extremely impressive. 

SEAN:  What’s kind of your role with XR Showdown ™, and what have you learned from previous work?

JOSH: The XR Showdown ™ exists at the intersection of reality TV, internships and hackathons. Basically, it was born out of the University of Houston game design program, specifically with Karen Snyder. 

Essentially, she was producing these game design students out of her program, and two things were happening. The first was that they were leaving Houston immediately after graduating. They’d go to Austin, San Francisco, etc. 

Second, she would talk to gaming companies and hear this problem over and over again - students really just weren’t prepared for the work environments that are standard across the industry coming out of these programs. There was a large ramp-up period that needed to happen. 

Her method for addressing that was this showdown concept. So, she piloted it with the Healthcare Games Showdown in the Summer. She enlisted partners from Texas Children’s Hospital, AT&T and Mt. Sinai Hospital.

She approached the innovation departments of these large healthcare systems and asked for real problem sets that are relevant to serious games. They each provided three problem sets and funded teams of students. The teams were, on average, four to six students. They would hack on this problem and be recorded for six weeks. 

In XR Showdown ™, there are stakeholders, like you’d find in a corporate setting, and a goal you’re trying to accomplish. There are clearly defined problems, a project manager, a game designer and an artist. All would build towards the solution relevant to these corporate partners. It’s an extremely effective model for addressing several aspects of the talent issue that we have here in Houston. 

SEAN: What do you think is going to be happening in the enterprise XR space in the next 18-24 months?

JOSH: The last few years have really been about learning and testing for many companies. Now you’re going to start seeing announcements of much larger, more impactful deployments and case studies. You’re going to see many more hardware units flowing into Houston. You’ll see more big tech players coming to town. Microsoft is already here, but there’s also been intense interest from Magic Leap, Oculus, HTC and others in the enterprise space, specifically in this industrial sector. 

I think their presence hasn’t been felt at all but it will within the next 24 months.

More on Josh Ruben:

As the founder and CEO of Z3VR, Josh works with academic partners to develop evidence-based digital treatments for chronic diseases. Josh co-leads HoustonVR, a community of practice that works with organizations like Station Houston to connect startup founders, corporations, academics, and government leaders with the shared goal of turning Houston into an international hub for immersive technology.

You can go here to learn more about the Industrial VR/AR Forum or catch up with Josh and his company, Z3VR, here.