Louis-Antoine Genin-Brien, DeepSight: Augmented reality and 3D work instructions for industrial training

[Music] everyone welcome to another edition of thunder wisdom podcast today we have a special edition it's a french edition um i'm coming back to my roots in quebec startups from there today i'm talking to louis antoine jenner brilliant he is the head of sales at deep site which is an interesting startup that we're going to talk about today ryanatan bienvenido um can you tell us a bit

more about the deepside in yourself yes so thank you for having me i'm very happy to be on this podcast so deep sight so at deep set we do augmented reality are you familiar with mented reality charles i had very important startups back in back back in the days seven years ago but never lifted off the ground but tell us tell us a bit more about it because most people are are not very familiar sure so let's go ahead you know most people will confuse augmented reality with virtual reality and even though these two concepts share their name they're used for completely different applications you know so to start off i would i would distinguish the two so when you do virtual reality you're putting on a headset and you're completely emerged to a virtual

world and most people have experienced virtual reality because you know headsets have become somewhat of a commodity you know anybody can buy a headset it's about 400 when we talk about augmented reality the idea is not to emerge you in a complete virtual setting the idea with augmented reality is to put on some glasses and to be able to add virtual content to the existing world to

the to your surroundings okay so what we do at deepside is to leverage augmented reality to have workers view 3d work instructions uh to be able to do knowledge transfer in the industrial sector much faster because what we found is that most of the knowledge transfer and training in the in the industrial sector is done through job shadowing so every time you need to train somebody you

actually need to have an expert go on the floor and show everything physically to the uh to the learner and so what we came up with is basically a solution where you can replicate expert guidance but virtually on an operational setting got it got it got all right so um two aspects when uh you were telling me that um they need to be overshadowed so two things

went to my mind so um first thing when the the worker is new uh is there like two aspects to the way you could help him work aka just having glasses and having someone on at the other end of the line which is just telling him hey this is what you need to do uh here's how you do it and is the second step to that having you know like pure software that i guess you guys could do that could pre-guide the person like how how does that work so that's the idea the thing is we don't want to take experts time okay so when you do job shadowing you're actually requiring the time of an expert and these experts are more and more rare because they're retiring they're leaving the work uh they're starting

they're stopping to work because they're they're getting older yeah and with the skills shortage there's more and more people to train okay so there's kind of a paradox there where there are less and less experts and more and more people to train and so the idea for us is really to have workers train themselves autonomously so the 3d work instructions that are created into the deepside platform

aim at replicating technical procedures so manipulations exactly on the work setting where the tasks need to be accomplished okay so the idea is not to leverage experts remotely yes we could do it through the glasses because glasses we use have cameras and we could stream what a worker is seeing in real time to a remote expert but the idea is mostly to have workers put on the

glasses and if if ever they need to do a an assembly of an aircraft part for example instead of relying on a on an expert showing them how to do the assembly they're going to see in 3d all of the parts being animated to show how to do the assembly you have to see it a bit an ikea instruction guide yeah but for very competitive but how complicated is that because it's so complex i mean you guys probably need to go in the the plant slash manufacturer physically and build up plans and if this then then what what is that what if their environment change uh how you design a software that will work all the time because in my mind i can picture the software but i i can picture a million of problems

arising and the guy just dropping the helmet and say like hey what do i do now because this thing is not working am i right in thinking you're 100 right and that basically guided us since the beginning of the company in 2018. one of my co-founders francis uh who i think you've spoken to uh he was working at microsoft back then and he saw that microsoft was developing a headset for augmented reality yeah but he saw that the softwares that were available to leverage this headset on the market these softwares were very complicated to use and a bit as you described if you're trying to to content on these

softwares it's very very complicated because it requires you know uh knowledge and development you need to be a programmer you need to be able to modelize assets in 3d and so augmented reality was very very difficult uh was was not accessible to most companies it's only the biggest companies in the world that could invest in augmented reality so what we developed at deepside first off okay was

a graphics engine so we started with a graphics engine okay i'm gonna go far stop me if ever you think i need to clarify some information sure what needs to be understood is that when you're seeing a 2d image let's say you're watching a video okay your video is composed of many pixels okay i think most people know what pixels are today and if you want an

image that is more clear there will be more pixels when you're viewing a 3d uh scene to an ar glass it's not pixels it's polygons okay so instead of having those uh creating an image in front of you it's a bunch of little pyramids that will create a scene got it to have these pyramids uh positioned in the space you have what we call a graphics engine

that is going to calculate the positioning of all these polygons in the space and it's with those calculations going to be able to recreate a 3dc okay so the problem with that is that the graphics engines that exist today there are a few maybe you know unity or unreal if you're a gamer uh these graphics engines are very very very powerful too powerful okay okay so when

you're trying to use them on a on a mobile device or on a the thing is these smart glasses have very limited graphic capacity yeah so in 2018 when we first started we realized that if we wanted to make augmented reality accessible first off we needed to have our own graphics engine that would allow deployment of the content on these headsets that's our first premise okay so

once we started with the graphics engine then we realized okay now we have the graphics engine but for people to leverage our graphics engine they still need to be programmers they still need to have a lot of knowledge yeah and that's when we realized we needed to create an authoring tool so a bit like a powerpoint made accessible for everybody to create uh slides yeah it's the

same for our software we created the powerpoint of augmented reality yeah so photoshop or a canva or like something exactly canvas they're probably the best because you know photoshop is a bit complicated but when you talk about canva for example anybody can use canva my mom uses canva you know i need to do [Laughter] it's the this for our tool okay my mom has instagram tic talk

so maybe she's not the best uh example but uh it's the same for our tool at deep site we wanted to build a tool where within four to six hours we could train a company to use it and then they could be completely autonomous to create their own content so today our customers are creating itself their own 3d work instructions there's obviously an implementation phase where we

create their first content for them to view some sort of value associated with 3d work instructions compared to textual instructions or videos for example but after the implementation they already have content and they're able to create more content and they're able to deploy factories across the world within four to six hours of training that's the beauty of deep sites so it's not an agency it's more a

software and the onboarding is made as an agency kind of exactly so we have a service fee where we we train the you know our our customers but then it's uh where our business model is a sas so basically we have a web-based software our clients are able to import the 3d models their 3d scan so that's something else i'll talk about a bit later and they're

going to create all of their 3d work instructions because again i talked about accessibility on the devices so we built our own graphics in to have content deployed on any devices as possible then we built an authoring tool that's web-based and no code to have as many people create the content but then like any other software you need to have inputs you know it's like trying to

build a powerpoint without pictures your powerpoint is going to be very very boring same thing for a deep sight if you don't have 3d models you're not going to be able to create much 3d work instructions and so 3d models are also very also very difficult to get so that's another point of failure so how could we address that well today iphones so iphone 12 pros iphone

13 pros and ipad pros have a special camera okay that camera is called lidar it's the same camera that you find on on tesla's for example on self-driving cars it detects objects okay and and that lighter camera can be used to take 3d scans of environment so a bit as if have you ever taken a panoramic picture like a yes 360 out of 180 picture yep it's

the same kind of process you're just going to be scrolling your phone around a certain environment it's going to generate a 3d model of that environment it's that 3d model that our customers are going to import into our platform and it's around that 3d model that they'll be able to contextualize their instructions so just to give you an example we have customers in the cosmetics industry they

have big production lines well they've taken an ipad pro to take a 3d scan of those big production lines they've imported that 3d scan into our platform and then using our platform they were able to put some arrows to some circles different places around the production line and when the worker needs to go and do a machine setup there will be all the arrows pointing exactly at

different places around the the production line so there is no interpretation risk there might maybe 50 valve 50 handles on the actual line but with our solution it's pointing directly on the actual valve he needs to uh he needs to manipulate and how precise is it the precision is about half a centimeter and how it works is in our software you're going to see your production line

you're going to be positioning a qr code a virtual qr code on the 3d scan into our software and then in the real world you're going to print that qr code and position it at the same place so most of the time you're going to position your qr code at the corner of a control panel for example then you're going to print it and you're going to position it at the sides on the actual production line and when the worker comes with the glasses there's a camera he scans it for code and that qr code becomes the reference for the position positioning of all the holograms in the space lots of technology behind that like i'm trying to wrap my head around because there's the part where you take the picture of the environment so

that needs to be precise and then there's the device that needs to know where it is in that environment um and it's quite surprising to hear that it's a half a centimeter uh in terms of position which which is very precise but my my thing is if um the worker realized that you know the arrow's not pointing at the right spot uh does he signal it to someone and couldn't there be like someone that connects to the helmet and fixes it live yeah so that's a functionality we have into the software where it's a bit like google docs so every every modification you make in the studio which is our authoring tool you're going to be able to view right away on the floor so normally when our customers create they're going to be testing

the content before deploying large scale so there's going to be like a biz engineer or training engineer that's going to be creating the construction in 3d they're going to go and view the content on the floor and if they see that the arrow is maybe two or three centimeters too much the left or too much to the right they're going to be able to quickly modify this

into the studio and all of the content will be anchored precisely at the race interesting well i think you did a very good job at explaining it um and that's what i like about you know salespeople which i happen to be a part of we're very good simplificators because i think you know uh nerds sometimes i mean i'm a nerd in some areas but uh sometimes when

we're too we're too much inside the details we have problems explaining to the the comment of mortal and that's the the beauty of cells you know we simplify to our audience we think we think of them um as as people that you know don't are not in the nitty gritty we use their keywords and we simplify complex concepts in in a simple version so good job on

that um i want to talk about um you know like the the business specifics like what should i pay for let's say that i'm a manufacturer with like 120 employees south of montreal uh how much should i pay for for the software is it like ten thousand one time twenty thousand one time and then i pay say a thousand per month or how does that work you were pretty close uh our business model is quite simple there's a 25 000 fee to start which includes six months of support and we create the first 15 procedures roughly 15 depending on the length of each procedure and and then there's an 850 dollar fee that is charged monthly per device so if you're before so if if in your factory floor you have like 10 glasses that

are in 10 different departments you're going to be spending 850 times 10 each month um but the idea is that that's interesting per device um don't you get like kickback from customers saying like damn that's going to be expensive i guess your reply is like it would cost you twice as much if as a colleague would be there to guide them would that be right i think

exactly i mean as a sales guy you know that it's not about price it's about value so you can you can i mean you can sell a product for fifty dollars if you generate zero return on investment it's it's too much you know but if you sell a product for five million then you generate 10 million in return on investment then obviously it's it's it's a bargain

you know so and it's the same for us obviously the smaller companies that have a smaller volume of production they will miss they will make less economies at scale because they're too small but it but the companies we deal with like abb galderma and eco eagle you know they're large large companies and you know the bigger the company obviously the bigger the economies they can make and

the company i was talking about earlier galderma and the cosmetics they have about 20 production lines in their factory and for one production line only one production line they were having about 12 hours of production downtime on a monthly basis caused by the fact that employees were not able to make uh changeovers so you know imagine you're a new employee you're working on a night shift on

a saturday night um and then you have to go for the production of of of jars of 50 millimeters of hand cream and you go to a production of 100 millimeters you need to reconfigure your machine to be able to do that but if you don't do it correctly it could lead to a production downtime and maybe you'll have to wait until the monday morning for the expert to come back in to do that product changeover um and so with our solution we were able to cut down by half the production downtime on on that production line where we deployed um and that's about 400 000 of return on investment for the first year and you can multiply that by 20 because they have 20 production lines so it's imagine making about 8 million dollars

of return on investment every year for about 200 000 of investment it's it's it's a good i mean it's a good purchase to make right yeah it's it's pretty significant um very cool you guys went on dragons then i was there to uh sometimes well the quebec version oh yeah yeah yeah um so how how what type of company did you go to um what were you doing with my company was a nootropic so a supplement called deluxe um you maybe were marketed you you maybe were a part of our customer base back in the days we had a supplement also called apex gpa and we were uh marketing to asha simaria back in the days i think in 2015 and i saw you were there so all right yeah it's a supplement basically for

the brain so i was was exciting times was funny it was a good experience nice i think the dragons back then were a bit uh rougher yeah it's a pretty soft experience i mean he was he was not uh very competent um from the the feedback that he gave us um but uh yeah it was good we we enjoyed the experience i mean like anything it's good exposure um as a sales guy you know that that's what drove our decision to go on the show is to have exposure and also you have to understand that you know most of our work here in sales is is about educating you know potential customers because they don't know about the technology so if you can go on a show that has about two million uh viewers obviously

it's good for us but for the market in general of augmented reality and since then we were able to spread discussions with big big big corporations uh one is hiring 11 000 people just in montreal so it just gives you an idea of the customers we are starting to deal with because of that visibility yeah it's pretty cool and uh tell us about your background because we

jumped in the the company real quick i saw you were um an entrepreneur at centec also what what kind of business did you launch here uh well first off you have to understand that as an entrepreneur i have a very weird background i started my university studies at ashes c in business um i sit there for one year i think in my second semester i failed all

my classes except one because i was already admitted in industrial design and i was spending a lot of time drawing and skateboarding and i wouldn't go to my classes you know my accounting class was at the same time as the as the cassette or the the happy hour at actually so i didn't go three months [Laughter] so drinking culture as hsu is like next level yeah but

you know what making connections brings you more than knowing how to do a uh you know you can find people to uh to do your accounting for you but you can't you can't make connections like this you know it's it's more difficult to make connections so did you make good connections because i wasn't successful back in the days and well i mean i've talked to a bunch

of people but i don't think i made any lasting connections of all my psyca set did were you successful in that yeah well one of my other co-founders nicholas um uh we met at we while we were actually friends before but we cemented our business relationship at ssa we saw that we had you know very complementary skills um so that's one of the few uh connections i

made but today i have connections at kushtal i had a bunch of industrial companies as well that i met from ssa and we just started uh we're almost starting to work with a company called group affi in quebec and it's uh was one of the guys that integrated me at ssa so uh i mean i mean i i think that the social aspect you get from school is more important than the actual knowledge you get because if you're curious enough you can learn about anything on your own but that's just me um but yeah i mean i i my background is mostly social sciences because after doing industrial design i went back into sociology economics i traveled a lot and i realized that my biggest skill is vulgarizing complex information so that's why i realized

i had a good fit in technology because as you said earlier sometimes you know it's just about vulgarizing the value to our customer uh people don't understand the value just because they don't understand the technology because it's not well explained by the people who develop it so yeah i think that that if if somebody wants to go in technology wants to start a business they first need

to to to to they first need to know how to explain it well uh so that's my background and for salt tech i mean i was it's with deep side that we went at soundtech okay uh so we started the last almost a year ago uh we we started normally businesses at suntech and other incubators are like you know they go at an earlier stage we went a bit later but that helped us in in a sense because there's a lot of uh of uh mitch ma uh matchmaking done by the incubator uh sontek has something called collision lab where they they introduced you to big companies like bombardier the the port of montreal cgi so a bunch of companies that could either help us reach new clients or they could implement our technology internally

so because of our maturity level you know were more often than not on top when we when they introduced a bunch of companies to their partners so that helps us a lot and uh yeah so but i think i think in in general like when you're an an innovative company especially in quebec we have a lot of uh collegiate uh technology transfer centers we have a lot

of innovation centers and we have a bunch of channel partners as we call them that can be our salesperson but at no cost you know if people believe in your technology they will talk about it and so today we're four people in the sales team here but we receive leads every day from a bunch of partners across the province and across the country and uh you know

that's why we just applied to an incubator in seattle we don't need much of the mentorship or just having somebody there that can vouch for us to companies in the region really helps us interesting let's talk about the seattle thing a bit later but again to dive in your past for example my student exchange which was around the time around the same time as yours literally changed

my life in hong kong how was your student exchange in in rome and how did it change your mindset the student exchange really changed the way i see people i when i came back from my student exchange i changed my whole friend group uh i think that's the most important thing you know it's not about being in rome or being another country but mostly being away from

home uh changing and changing environments and understanding that maybe you're better off alone so were your friends like toxic in some sense were they like drinkers or no not not really but it's just you know ambitious i was friends with my my the same friend since high school you know i hadn't changed my uh my group of friends and i realized that we really didn't have as

much interest in comment that i i thought yeah so being in italy and seeing people from across the world and see that we have more stuff in common than the people i grew up with uh really changed my outlook on life but i don't think the student exchange had and obviously i'm a big i'm i'm a big geography fan if you if you did research on me you would see that i have a youtube channel and i do geo guests or streams i really like uh discovering new cultures and but i think the best way to discover new cultures is just trying to get out of your comfort zone my home when i came back from my student change i started working at ikea in a call center it was a it was a job

a very boring job but i worked with a bunch of people that came from different backgrounds you know i went to a private school i was always given everything i wanted but when i started working like here i realized there were people with really different situations than me and that really made me you know questioned priorities in life and and you know it made me think about

giving me other challenges that i thought before so yeah i i go from one topic to the other i'm very adhd but yeah we're two of us which is why this podcast is is going left and right but that's that's the best um coming back to seattle and i mean we've got a couple minutes left so let's try to to compress everything but where do you see deep sight uh going in the next few years i had the look at your road map there's exciting stuff in there the seattle incubator like is that the next step you know where what do you need to do to take deep side to the next steps there are a few markets we have identified already that could very could benefit a lot from our technology but also are

already ready for this kind of the kind of innovation we propose and the market in the washington state is one of them it's one of the biggest hubs in the aerospace sector in the world we already have a few clients in the aerospace sector and we're in discussions with very very big companies in the aerospace sector so it's a matter of time before we we bloom in

that sector so the washington is good for that we're also exploring the uae uh market the uk market germany and france and they're all you know france is big in the aerospace as well germany and the uk are very big for reduction of ar and the uae has a lot of money to invest in innovation so in terms of commercialization these are the next steps definitely but

in terms of product roadmap we're missing a lot in ai um so obviously because we're our users are wearing glasses we're able to gather data on humans that people would not we're not able to gather before so all this data will be used to train ai algorithms and it will help companies prevent errors accidents it will also help companies generate you know learning opportunities for workers and

so we think that working this way will help companies you know be more uh agile and resilient to the world we're living in today with a skill shortage and supplying got it and that's an interesting vision and i wish we had more time but i still have two more questions for you so that the first one i'm curious as for what you're reading a a special person

like you a geo guesser like you like what what is uh louis reading right now you know what the the book i'm reading right now is and you'll have to forgive me for swearing it's called [ __ ] it let's start tomorrow by action bronson uh i love this guy i was listening to the podcast of his uh two days ago with mike tyson hot boxing very good podcast yeah yeah yeah i listened to it too i think it's an old episode that i i think i listened to it a couple times it's i really like this guy and to be honest with you i read a lot but it's mostly like articles and and short stuff i i'm adhd so i spend too much time reading something and the reason why i like this

book it's because it's written in like very short sentences it's like eight word sentences and i can hear act bronson's uh voice in my head when i when i read it i don't read much but i wish i did it but i don't and if uh if you know if we have french listeners i strongly suggest reading tetraminx it's a book i read once a year uh just to remind me how stupid we are as humans how simple the beings we are yeah yeah that's funny uh i'll add both to my reading list i didn't know that he had the book action bouncing um last question for you yeah i mean i'm gonna in quebec you know like you know the entrepreneurial um situation there what would you tell uh for a young founder let's

say he's 17 you know from the northrow of montreal what should he do to get started and what advice would you give to him uh well first off ask yourself ask yourself why if you have an idea and you think it's life-changing ask yourself why it's life-changing and you're probably gonna get an answer and it's gonna lead to another why and keep asking yourself why why why

all the time and you know most people sometimes they want to start a business but they they have an idea but it doesn't resolve a problem it doesn't answer a need a true need that another company doesn't already are involved so i think that with my biggest advice is is don't be passionate about your idea be passionate about your problem um so yeah that would be my

advice what is your why and in fact i think we have a very and we have a very good system for you know for companies we have a bunch of incubators uh you know there's really no reason not to start a business yeah i think uh i think somehow the connection is lagging but i was asking um what is your why our why today uh you know we it's a bit special because i say that when we first started the business we was not very clear uh because we wanted to start just a augmented reality company today our why is there's a skill shortage people need to be trained and there are no ways to do it correctly you know the alternative to job shadowing on the factory floor is paper guides and videos but

if somebody has uh you know two years of high school and you're trying to explain them how to run a machine that's 20 meters by 20 meters with 100 valves you're not going to be able to do that with a paper guide especially if that person has a language barrier it comes from you know as a remote worker coming from another country it's very difficult to train

somebody with paper guides so that's our why there's no there's no good way to train people today very good luis thank you for coming today was a cool podcast i think you did a very good job at explaining they're at the company in a very easy way and you dropped a lot of insights so thank you for that thank you very much [Music] foreign