Interview with Lori-Lee Elliot, Founder of Future Site AR

XR innovators in Houston, an emerging immersive tech hub, are continuing to explore and address operational challenges seen in energy and industrial operations.

Industrial VR/AR Forum director, Sean Guerre, recently connected with one of these early innovators, Lori-Lee Elliott, Founder of Future Sight AR, to discuss her new projects, the grant they won from Magic Leap and the state of Industrial XR adoption.

Lori-Lee, together with her team, is launching Katana XR, a platform that allows enterprise companies to digitally transform their work environments. Lori-Lee recently shared her XR startup experiences and future technology insights.

SEAN: How did you get involved in immersive technology in the industrial XR space?

LORI-LEE: In a very unusual way. I’m actually a second-generation commissioning engineer. My dad worked in oil and gas as an operator and then as a commissioning specialist and engineer and manager. So I grew up in the industry. 

We moved with each project about every 18 months, so I've been to a lot of schools. When it was time for me to start working, my family was living in Alberta, so I got a summer job in the Alberta oil sands.

When I finished my masters at NYU and was living in New York, it exposed me to a lot of emerging technology, entrepreneurship and very early XR headsets. I found my notes the other day… I was covering a tech story, and I had to go look at some AR glasses. I described them as ‘computer screens in glasses.’ So it was that early.

SEAN: Do you ever think about how fast the technology is moving?

LORI-LEE: All the time. When I first saw those glasses it was 2012-2013, so I know there were people much more versed in the technology at that time than I was. I laid my eyes on it and thought, this is what we’ve been waiting for. This is the future of so many things. 

But I was facing reality. I was graduating from grad school. I needed to find a job, and I was living in New York, which was very expensive. I ended up getting a job with an EPC company to go work on the construction and start-up of an LNG facility in Australia. So I packed up my life, went down to Australia and I was working with the commissioning group, doing completions for them. 

There was a lot of running around out in the field, so I got to learn everything first hand. There were a lot of really great people on that project that knew a lot about their craft and what they were doing.

I was there with other college grads who had engineering degrees and various STEM backgrounds, and we were all brand new. The hard hats didn’t have any scratches yet, and our steel-toed boots were still shiny. We had to ask a lot of questions. 

We were really lucky on that project because there were so many people who had been doing this work for 30 years or more, and they were happy to show us how everything worked. 

It was great, but in the back of my head, I was thinking, “All of these people are amazing, but they’re all telling me the same thing. Which is, ‘I’m retiring after this.’ Or, ‘I’m going to do one more, and then I’m retiring.’

The next cohort was the one I was in, and we were all in our mid-twenties. It was terrifying because all these people are going to go away, and all of that knowledge wasn’t written down anywhere. 

Then it was compounded because we were on this [facility], it was huge, there were so many moving parts, and we had to carry around a lot of documentation with us when we went to the field. All the construction teams had their work packages in these manila folders. The field engineers had all of the P&IDs, data sheets and check sheets. We’d roll them up and carry them around or put them in a backpack. There were a couple of devices onsite, but they had connectivity problems and weren’t used much. 

We were carrying around a ridiculous amount of paper, and it just killed me that back in the office we had so much information on our computers and on the internet but we didn’t have a good way of getting that out into the field where we were doing the actual work. 

That collided in my brain. What if we had these XR glasses so you can see all of the information while you’re doing something and using your hands? Then, people who have all of the expertise can share that, and they don’t even necessarily have to be there with you. We can transform it into a digital something so that it can be passed on. 

I finished up on that project, and I came back to the US, started working on another LNG project and put the first pitch together. That’s how the whole idea started. 

I found a co-founder – a friend of a friend who happened to be a product manager. 

Before we decided to create our own product, we looked all over the world to see if someone else was already making it, because it’s a huge undertaking and I didn’t come from the tech world. We wanted to see if we could partner with them and work on a specific application. Someone else has to be doing it. 

After six months of striking out – we called literally all over the world – a friend of a friend who works in venture capital, sat me down and said, “Look. You’ve really just got to build this thing yourselves. So stop wasting time, go find a developer and build it.” 

So, that’s what we did. We got Veena, our technical co-founder, to join the team a month later. 

SEAN: From there, can you walk me through the timeline to today?

LORI-LEE: My co-founder and I came up with the original idea for the company in January of 2016. We were sitting at True Food Kitchen in Houston having brunch when we bought the URL.

Then, we got the Magic Leap grant in February of this year (2019).

SEAN: Can you tell us a bit more about the Magic Leap grant and what it’s helped you do project-wise to move your company forward?

LORI-LEE: Magic Leap is a startup too. They don’t look like it because they’re so massive, but they are very much in startup mode and have a startup mentality, which is really appealing to other startups. They understand your struggles, and that is really helpful. 

I can’t talk about how much the grant was, but I can say the grants ranged from $20,000 to $400,000. Each company is given something in between based on the complexity and how big your team is.

SEAN: Aside from the funds Magic Leap provided, what additional help did they provide for the project? 

LORI-LEE: I cannot say enough good things about the support. For one, they gave us headsets. I came home one day and there were three spatial computers sitting in a box on my doorstep. It was Christmas and my birthday. Just casually sitting there. I didn’t have to sign for it or anything. I asked, “What is this box, and why are there lithium batteries in it?” It had all those warning stickers all over it. I opened it and I said, ‘oh my god, there’s three of them’. 

They also have a full partner program as part of the grant. They don’t just give you money and say, “Hey, go figure it out.” They have a dedicated partner that you can talk to, day or night, if you need help with anything. They’ll get you coding resources too. 

We worked through a lot of best practices because we were actually one of the first cohorts to be developing this. All of the standards you have for building for web and mobile, we don’t have those in XR. 

It’s a bit difficult to wrap your head around designing UI and UX for the world. It’s not a tiny screen. It’s everything you can see at any given time. 

They were great when we would ask questions such as, “What color should this button be and how do we interact with these elements?” They have a whole team of people who are experts on their side that can tell you, “Here are five different opinions, and here’s what we found works best.” They’ve been amazing. 

SEAN: Where are you now, and where are you wanting to go in the next several months?

LORI-LEE: Right now we just launched on Magic Leap (on October 15th).  At that launch, you’ll be able to download the app on the Magic Leap One.

Shortly after that, we’re going to publish on Android, as well, so you can download it on any Android phone or tablet from the Google Play store. This will really help with accessibility if you don’t have a headset or access to one right now.

Then, we’ll follow that up in 2020 with iOS and get on the Apple App Store. The initial rollout on Magic Leap and Android is so we can get through a couple of pilots with our ideal customers. That’s one thing that’s really key and is lacking a lot in enterprise software, especially in oil and gas across the board - actual user testing before they finalize the product. You need to sit the people down who are actually going to use it, give it to them and have them give you feedback. 

SEAN: How long do you estimate these proof of concepts will be running?

LORI-LEE: It’s up to the client. If they wanted to do a really long proof of concept, we could cater to that and run up to 90 days. I would recommend rolling it out in 30 days, start to finish, and get it done. 

SEAN: Can you tell me a bit more about the app? 

LORI-LEE: The app is called Katana XR. Katana is a mixed reality platform where you can upload any kind of work instruction, tutorial, guide, work package, checklist - anything that is step by step - and turn it into an immersive work package. Then you can assign that to a person. 

Once it’s assigned, it gets pushed to a device. If it’s a phone or tablet, the end user receives a notification, and they can go in and are guided through a task. 

The user gets text instructions and can place the text where it makes sense for the field of view. Typically, it includes a 3D model with some arrow prompts. If the user is looking at a valve and it says, “Check the nameplate,”  there will be an arrow pointing on the 3D model showing where the nameplate should be. 

If a 3D model is not optimal, you can also attach PDFs, images, video, sound and audio recordings. For each step, you have to acknowledge that you’ve completed the step, and the user might be asked to input a value - such as a temperature reading - before going to the next step. 

We also build logic on the backend into these steps. If the app tells you to do something such as, “Disconnect the power source,” and the user says, “No, I did not do this,” it won’t let them continue. This logic is one of the benefits I can talk about a bit later. 

The user goes through this immersive work, and, at the end, they say it’s complete. When it’s complete, the person on the computer back on the other end will be able to see, and give the user feedback.

SEAN: What kind of benefits does an energy or industrial company receive from your solution? 

LORI-LEE: Two come to mind.

The first one is, an increased ROI from your workforce. if you have any kind of workflow that is very manual, a lot of paper, it’s a lot of processing, document control, data entry, and reporting. If we translate that into AR, we can shorten that workflow, from something that was very manual and time-consuming to something that is fairly automated and digital. You can do more with fewer people.

The second one, is decreasing rework. The main cause of rework in a lack of proper training. One thing the XR industry currently does well, is training. If you have new hires or anyone who’s going to be doing a new task, we can load those tasks into the software, and they can be trained on how to do it from just about anywhere… an office, at home, etc. 

These benefits are great because they produce quantifiable results that we can measure. We can look at performance, including with the XR training versus without and the actual training time itself. Was it shorter? Did they perform better versus normal training or in a control group?

SEAN: Where is industrial XR today, and where do you see it headed? 

LORI-LEE: Right now, in engineering and construction, it’s very early to non-existent when it comes to being used on actual projects. Part of that has to do with the hardware and software availability and connectivity.

I think when we get 5G it’s really going to change a lot of things. And it’s a little bit more common now for project sites, even when it’s just a dirt field, to have 4G. Whereas, five years ago, that was not a given. 

We still see a lot of things happening in the office environment, such as visualizing 3D models on the table, that are very low risk, where companies are just getting their feet wet. 

As far as the industrial side, I think the place XR will take off is training. 

That’s what we’ll see in the next 12 months. In the next 18 months, we’ll start seeing it actually roll out on the project. It will probably come from the client-operator side, and trickle down to the contractors and subcontractors, especially if clients are asking for the tech. 

I've seen a little bit of that already, where clients are starting to ask, “What are you doing on the XR front?” We’ll see more and more companies try to fill that need because it’s a huge market. 

More on Lori-Lee Elliott:

Lori-Lee co-founded Future Sight after a decade in the energy industry. She has worked with several large energy sector companies, including Shell, Jacobs, Bechtel, Sempra, Kiewit and CB&I. Lori-Lee also has an Honors Bachelor of Science from University of Toronto and Masters from New York University, where she was a graduate fellow.

For more information on Future Sight AR and the Katana platform, you can visit: futuresitear.com