Empowering Enterprises with 3D and Spatial Computing with Ashley Crowder of VNTANA

Announcer:

Today on Building the Open Metaverse.

Ashley Crowder:

Seeing the behemoths of Amazon and Google enable 3D, everyone's going to have to get on board, including footwear, home goods, furniture, and electronics. The minute your category is live, you're going to have to do it because your competitor is doing it, and it's increasing sales.

Announcer:

Welcome to Building the Open Metaverse where technology experts discuss how the community is building the open metaverse together, hosted by Patrick Cozzi and Marc Petit.

Marc Petit:

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Building the Open Metaverse, season six, the podcast that showcases the committee of artists, developers, researchers, executives, and entrepreneurs who are building the internet of tomorrow. My name is Marc Petit, and my co-host is Patrick Cozzi. Hello Patrick.

Patrick Cozzi:

Hey Mark. How's it going?

Marc Petit:

Good. You've been all around the world recently?

Patrick Cozzi:

That I have, but now I'm back in Philadelphia, and it's springtime. It feels like it's summer; people are around the office wearing shorts. As always, looking forward to today's conversation.

I love the democratization of 3D. I love enterprise 3D, and I certainly appreciate open standards and I know we're going to cover all of those today.

All right, and joining us today is Ashley Crowder, the passionate co-founder and CEO behind VNTANA, a trailblazing company revolutionizing how enterprises leverage 3D and augmented reality. With her vision for immersive technologies, Ashley has pioneered VNTANA's innovative platform, which empowers major brands to manage and integrate complex 3D assets across the design, sales, and marketing workflows.

Welcome, Ashley.

Ashley Crowder:

Thanks so much for having me.

Marc Petit:

As a champion of open standards, Ashley's leadership has positioned VNTANA as an industry front-runner simply following enterprise adoption of real-time 3D. Today our discussion will explore Ashley's entrepreneurial journey, her insight into the present, and, of course, the future impact of 3D and AR across industries.

Patrick Cozzi:

Ashley, we've been following you on LinkedIn and social media for a while; love all the posts that you've been putting out, especially the stuff you did on glTF and USD, of course, got my attention.

We love to kick off the podcast by asking folks to just explain your journey to the metaverse, a bit about your background, and what's inspired all your passion around 3D tech and immersive experiences.

Ashley Crowder:

My journey was kind of crazy. I'll try and give the short version. I studied engineering at USC. I went and worked at Northrop Grumman, wasn't super passionate about that, then ended up at British Petroleum, an oil refinery, for a couple years, wasn't my passion either.

I ended up basically having a quarter-life crisis. I quit. My friend worked at a nightclub, and they needed somebody to run the lights for DJs. So, I quit my high-paying engineering job and started programming light shows for DJs at a nightclub. One of the most fun jobs I ever had.

I started trying to research how we bring these light shows to the next level. How do we create a more immersive experience? I reached back out to my old engineering professors at USC, and they introduced me to ICT, where we had this partnership with the military that funded research in spatial computing. And I was like, "Why did I not know about this when I was in school? This is incredible. This is going to change the world. This is going to affect everything: how we work, how we play, how we learn." And so I started just messing around with things.

I called my friend Ben and was like, "We got to start a company. We've got to build the future of this." This was 12 years ago, so phones couldn't do AR, the web couldn't do 3D, so we started doing location-based mixed reality experiences for DJs and brand-sponsoring events. We built a profitable company doing that, working with clients like DJI to Lexus to Adidas, but nobody ever had the right 3D models.

DJI mailed us a hard drive from China, which did get us their 20 gigabyte GAD file. I called them and I was like, "Never send this to anyone. I can go make your drone." It was insane that mailing a hard drive from China was the best way to get it to us.

We started writing software to help automate the optimization, conversion, and management of 3D assets so we could just turn out our own events faster. Then, in 2019, we said, "You know what? Now, every web browser can support 3D content, and everyone's phone now has a pretty decent AR experience; we should take this software we wrote for ourselves and launch it as a platform."

We started internally kind of figuring out how to do that, and then COVID happened, and it shut down our events business overnight, and we're like, "Well, this has expedited the plan." And so we launched the beta version of our software platform in March 2020 and went from there to where we are today. Now we're a 3D asset management platform used by clients from Kohler to Aztec Industries to Puma to manage and distribute 3D at scale.

Marc Petit:

As a female tech entrepreneur, what have been some of the biggest rewarding moments and maybe also some of the challenges that you've experienced so far?

Ashley Crowder:

I went over my background; I was an engineer, I worked in defense and then in oil, so I've always been in kind of male-dominated fields. I am happy about the positive change I've seen over the past 10 years. It's been amazing to see organizations like All Raise start to help women raise money because we're still getting 2 to 4% of all venture capital, which is insane. But what's great about All Raise is they're also helping get more women partner VCs, and that's the change, right?

It's like we need more women's success stories on the entrepreneur side. We need more investment in women and we also need more women who are funding companies. So it's been really exciting to see that positive change.

Patrick Cozzi:

So Ashley, you've been involved in AR and VR since the early days, and we wanted to jump into that. But before we do, I have to ask: What was the tech stack for programming the light shows for the DJs?

Ashley Crowder:

It was really, really old school. We had this touchscreen computer; it broke half the time. We had QLabs going for content. Then, when I reached out to my engineering professors, TouchDesigner had just come out; it was brand new. And they're like, "You got to look into TouchDesigner." And I was like, "I can't just learn this overnight." I started just trying to get in touch with engineers at school who were learning it and, again, went down a very big rabbit hole and was like, "I need to hire people smarter than me, and I'll know enough to hire the right people and then run the business side at this point."

Patrick Cozzi:

Good advice for scaling.

The AR/VR front as you've seen this emerge over time and then as you look forward, how do you see it impacting industries beyond gaming and entertainment?

Ashley Crowder:

Yeah, I mean, we're already seeing that. When we started, we basically started in entertainment, and we very quickly moved to brands, but today, I actually just got back from a mining conference. We have clients who build heavy machinery, they design in SolidWorks, Siemens NX, Inventor, you name it. But these engineering files are too big and too heavy to share with clients. The sales team doesn't have access to it, but the engineering team does, and they're spending hours of time and really costs setting up Teams meetings to have engineers walk through the salespeople what these products look like. They also don't want to share those models because there's too much IP; they don't want to give it away before they sign a deal.

And so they're actually using our software; our automatic optimization can strip out all the internals. We're stripping out your IP, but we're still giving you that web-based virtual walkthrough so the sales team is enabled to have that call without an engineer on the call, which is costly. We're really seeing any manufacturer who designs and manufactures products is designing in 3D, and they're seeing the use case of being able to leverage those 3D assets on web for sales, marketing, and even internal training.

Marc Petit:

Do you think WebXR and being able to go AR/VR from the web is a viable path, or do you need to go native?

Ashley Crowder:

Yes, I think it's a viable path, and there are different use cases, right? What we're hearing from a lot of these heavy machinery clients is that they need a lightweight web link they can send to somebody to have a quick walkthrough, qualify, "Is this a real potential sale or not?" Before I get people to fly there, get them in a room and maybe put a headset on them and walk them through, like our client Aztec is actually farming all their salespeople with headsets, and they're using, we have WebXR built in because it's easy. The salesperson can put the headset on, scan the QR code, boom, you see the 3D model, so does the prospect and you can walk through together. It needs to be easy enough, right? They don't want to have to download an app and figure everything out.

But longer term, they're looking at “How do we use AR headsets for improved maintenance training?” And that'll be an app, right? So, "I bought a $10 million piece of heavy equipment, something's not working. I'm going to put my headset on, the seller headquarters is going to have somebody with a headset walking me through, seeing things in real time." That's going to need to be an application.

Marc Petit:

Let's go back about VNTANA. You touched base a bit on it already. Can you give us a high level overview of what the platform does?

Ashley Crowder:

We are a cloud-based 3D asset management platform, so you can easily bulk upload hundreds or thousands of assets at a time. We built a proprietary cloud infrastructure called ModelOps, a made up word, model operations. But basically, we can quickly create custom data pipelines, which is really important for 3D because there are over hundreds of different 3D file types. Depending on the platform you're going to, it's going to need a specific file type as well as file size, texture size; there's all these different requirements depending on where you're going.

Within our ModelOps infrastructure, we also built our own patented optimization. We can take a file, automatically reduce the size, reduce the polygon count, change the texture. We have over 40 different flags, so we can basically convert that asset to meet whatever specs you're trying to go to, but maintain the fidelity.

We built intelligence into it, so you can put in the parameters you need to meet and it's going to get there or get as close as it can to there without any visual difference. Then, it's all built on microservices, so you can upload thousands of assets all processed at the same time. Clients like Kohler, they're uploading thousands of assets at a time, say they need to meet these specs, they quickly go through maybe five of the 1000 didn't meet the specs they wanted, okay, they might need to go in and tweak those manually, but we've just automated the rest of their process.

We also have a viewer, so they're embedding our viewer on their e-comm site. We've got the first API access to Amazon, so you can click a button, publish all your 3D over to your Amazon storefronts.

We also can publish 3D to your Google search. Amazon seeing a 2x higher conversion rate with 3D, Google is seeing a 6% higher click-through rate with 3D. We're really just helping enable people to publish 3D at scale and utilize their assets to increase sales.

Marc Petit:

Isn't that a bit surprising? 2024 and this topic of converting assets remains a complex challenge. I mean, I've personally worked on that in every job I had over the past 20 years, including building Datasmith at Epic and all of that. Is there a way that, for example, AI could come and help us solve this problem moving forward?

I think the reason why it's complex is it's a lot of heuristics. This is not just decimation technology and straightforward algorithms; there is a lot of diffused knowledge in doing it right, so how do you foresee that? Is it going to remain the strong differentiation for your platform, do you think? Can you even improve it using AI, or what's your take on that?

Ashley Crowder:

Tens of thousands of 3D assets are being uploaded, and we're constantly using that as a way for our algorithm to learn and get better depending on what you want. We're also looking into AI and how you do that. Just like you guys, I'm hopeful that these standards for glTF and USD are going to help simplify it, and they are. But I think at the end of the day, you still have these big behemoth companies that are making decisions that come down to people.

A good example, I love Amazon; I love working with them. For footwear to publish 3D on Amazon, the shoe needs to be facing forward so the toe is forward. Okay, well, go on any shoe website; every single shoe image, the shoe is sideways because you want to see the side of the shoe. We have tens of thousands of 3D shoe assets on VNTANA, but they're all sideways because that's the way the brand wants them and that's the way the brand wants to publish them, and Google will accept them that way, but Amazon won't so we got to turn them.

It's like these minor things, and unfortunately, I think there's always going to be something like that because it's going to depend on where you're going. We're trying to bring everybody together, but it's impossible to get everybody from Google to Amazon to Home Depot to agree. Home Depot wants a USD file that's less than three megabytes, and Amazon needs a GLB file that's less than 10 megabytes.

Marc Petit:

Do you still need to create different asset sizes for various platforms? Do you see a moment when platforms converge at a level of capabilities that makes this problem go away?

Ashley Crowder:

To look at 2D content as a comparison, so 2D images actually deal with the same thing. So you've got companies like Salsify and Cloudinary who manage and convert your 2D images at scale because Amazon also wants a specific 2D image size and file format that's different than Walmart, that's different than Home Depot.

If you're someone like Kohler, you've got to do that with 10,000 assets, and both companies are doing over 150 million in AR; they're doing great because it's a serious need. It's been completely automated and that's really what we're trying to do for 3D. There's never going to be a day where every retailer, every platform, wants the same exact file format and size, but the point of VNTANA is to make that automated at scale so it's easier.

Patrick Cozzi:

Ashley, you've mentioned so many major brands. I mean, look, congrats on the success of your business, and thank you for helping advance the democratization of 3D. Were there any other brands that you're working with that you'd like to talk about?

Ashley Crowder:

I'm really excited about this expansion into more of these industrial heavy machinery companies. It's funny, I mean, I told my journey, I'm kind of going back to the industrial beginnings of my career, but it's just been so cool to go from a mining conference, I was at the World of Concrete and the World of Asphalt earlier this year, conferences I have never heard of who it's the entire Las Vegas Convention Center; it's a massive industry that touches all points of our lives. They've all been designing in 3D for decades and getting to watch the use cases of seeing Aztec, for example, not just use this for sales, but think about how they're building 3D and AR into their business for revenue generation for long-term maintenance contracts and plans is, I think, incredibly interesting.

I know, Marc, we talked about just right before we started of the hype is gone from the metaverse, which is great because it's actually just entering into business as 3D is here and you need it if you're going to be competitive in whatever industry you're in.

Marc Petit:

How do your customers measure the success of the deployment of your solution?

Ashley Crowder:

Even brands like Puma, for example, are starting with that. How do we increase speed to market, and how do we improve our B2B sales first? It's about getting rid of the need for physical samples. Can they use 3D on the web to sell instead of physically making that shoe and needing to have a showroom? There's huge cost savings in that.

We've got a bunch of case studies on our website; one of our clothing brand companies saved about $100,000 per season by reducing samples and replacing them with real-time 3D, and that reduced their carbon footprint by about four tons per season, which is amazing. That's kind of that initial step.

Then there are the brands that do sell directly to consumers; they're looking at that lift in e-commerce. Adding 3D to Amazon is showing a 9% lift in sales. Then, if you have view in your room, or air try on, they're seeing a 2x higher conversion rate, which is awesome. Our client, Lenbrook, they make PSP speakers and blue sound speakers. They went live 3D on Amazon; they're like, "Yep, we're seeing a lift," which is awesome because Amazon has their averages, but our clients are actually seeing that too.

And then Google, I mentioned just having 3D in organic search compared to 2D images is showing a 6% higher conversion rate, which most people will get all their traffic from Google, so if you can increase your traffic by 6%, that's massive.

Then from the industrial clients, it's really around measuring “Can I simplify that complex sale? Can I shorten that sales cycle and reduce the amount of Teams meetings I need with three engineers on a call to get the deal closed?” Because that's expensive.

Marc Petit:

I remember we discussed something that surprised me a while back: helping mining companies. Their knowledge in 3D is relatively limited, so I can see that or even consumer products companies, but you told me that you're working with a AAA gaming company to create marketing materials from their game content. Can you speak to that?

Ashley Crowder:

We are working with, they do AAA games, but they also do movies. You're investing millions of dollars in creating this beautiful 3D content for real-time games, or so many movies are using Unreal Engine to create movie content, right? It's all kind of the same now, which is amazing. But they're investing millions of dollars in these 3D assets, and then they're hiring outside agencies to recreate 3D models for marketing, which makes no sense. This is what drove me crazy for the past 10 years of wanting to fix.

With VNTANA, we're like, "Hey, upload these beautiful, amazing 3D models of characters and content from the movie and instantly deploy and enable your sales and marketing to get all the assets and derivative content they need."

Marc Petit:

I think it's a very, very powerful testament to the power of the platform. I wish you luck with that project.

Ashley Crowder:

Thank you. Yeah, we're excited.

Patrick Cozzi:

Ashley, we wanted to move on to one of our favorite topics, which is the importance of open standards.

As you know, Marc and I co-chair a group along with Guido in the Metaverse Standards Forum on 3D Asset Interoperability, and then geez, I got involved in glTF at least 10, maybe 12 years ago, and I remember going door to door at SIGGRAPH telling people about it and trying to get people interested, and it's really exciting to see how far glTF has came and the adoption, especially in the 3D commerce world.

I'd love to hear from your perspective why standards are important for your scalable deployments.

Ashley Crowder:

Michael Kors is one of our clients, very high-end fashion. That shoe, the color of that shoe needs to be exact, and if I look at the color of that shoe on my computer, it needs to be the same color on your computer. With real-time 3D, that's incredibly difficult because there are so many factors. Having a standard for GLB and a standard color spectrum and lighting is the only way we're going to get there. We're looking at apples to apples.

Even Amazon, the return rate is insanely high if your images on Amazon, your 2D images don't match your real product, right? Now we're adding 3D into the mix, which we know is giving people a better understanding of the product, but if that 3D is different, the color is slightly different from your images, which are also photoshopped and not necessarily real. You get the real product; how do you match everything on all these different devices as well?

Standards are essential to getting us there. GLB, for sure, is the standard for web. I'm very excited for OpenUSD as well, though I think it's confused the market a little bit. Some companies and brands who are just getting into real-time 3D, all of a sudden they're like, "Oh, now it's USD, we should do USD." And I'm like, "Okay, but why do you want to do USD? Because if you are trying to go to the web, you still need GLP." There's still a lot of education that needs to happen.

Marc Petit:

We recently had Ben Conway, our co-founder at the Metaverse Standards Forum, to talk exactly about that. I think that was very enlightening to hear from the users what it means and the potential confusion. But we're working to make the round-tripping transparent so that hopefully that does not become an issue moving forward.

Are there any other standards that you feel…we mentioned WebXR and the whole web stack. I think it's an important aspect. Are there any other needs that you see in your ecosystem for standardization?

Ashley Crowder:

Yeah, I'm also really happy about the 3D viewer standardization because you have the model, but then the viewer affects the lighting and how it looks. It was really great to see The Khronos Group push the viewer certification program, which, not perfect, but we're getting there. Trying to explain to people who are new in real-time 3D, they will take a 3D model from a VNTANA viewer and then they'll drop it in an open Babylon viewer, and it's like, "Why does this look different?" It's like, "Okay, well, think about how you would watch something in the sunset, and as the sun sets, the color changes your perspective." Well, that's kind of my best analogy for non-trading people. Viewer standardization is really important.

Going back to USD, I mean, I think it's just getting started so I'm excited for standards there, because it is going to be an ideal format for certain people. We're working with a few museums who are scanning art to archive it, and they want USD to be their main file format, which makes sense because they want to include audio and animation and all these different elements of that ancient artifact, which USD is great for, but then they also need to be able to convert to a GLB for web and AR and other things.

I think having the two groups work together on that conversion standardization will be really important.

Marc Petit:

Has the Vision Pro had an impact in your world?

Ashley Crowder:

We got one, and what was really cool was our viewer worked out of the box with it. If you're shopping on Kohler.com, or wherever, you can click 'View in AR' within your headset and pull down the sink or whatever.

That was really, really cool to see.

Marc Petit:

And that's because of the use of our standard, right?

Ashley Crowder:

Yes, because the USD standard. Apple's always like, "We built AR kit, and this is our device, and everything's just going to work," which is awesome. I was really surprised; I went to the Apple Store, did a demo, and pulled up the VNTANA website. It's like, "Awesome," and I bought it.

But it's also just been eye-opening. I've recorded just a few videos and posted them and it's been amazing the response of people being like, "Oh wow, this is now possible." Because of that response, we're also launching WebXR in a few weeks in VNTANA so you can also do the same thing with a Quest 3 or Magic Leap.

Patrick Cozzi:

Ashley, I mean, I think the role of open standards is very clear. Today's reality is there's still a lot of proprietary 3D formats.

I'm curious, what's your kind of product and product strategy around that? Then as the ecosystem evolves in the future, how do you see things playing out?

Ashley Crowder:

We're all about supporting the standards because we want people to be able to scale the 3D everywhere. To do that, you need standards, and we're going to always convert to a certified GLB, certified USD, and it's going to keep changing; that's the one thing you can count on; everything's going to keep changing.

Sometimes, that's the harder way, right? If you're trying to create some amazing interactive 3D web AR experience, it's easier to build your own proprietary format because then you can do anything to it quicker and faster than if you are working with standard groups and following what's being released. But at the end of the day, we feel that is going to make it the most long-lasting and usable platform moving forward. We're constantly pushing a lot of people to do a lot of things because we're not going to move forward until it's within GLB or USD.

Patrick Cozzi:

Look, I think that's a great approach. You're producing open standards. I guess you import proprietary and then convert, is that right?

Ashley Crowder:

Yeah, so if we get a good example, we started with a lot of fashion companies who use programs like CLO and Browzwear, which were really built for creating a pattern file to make clothing. It's a very odd 3D file that you get. But through our platform, we automatically convert that into a good certified GLB and a standard USD. We're kind of fixing some weird things to make it meet those standards. We do that with a lot of different, anything you upload, our algorithm is going to try and correct things to do that.

Patrick Cozzi:

I mean, on that note of advancing the open standards to meet these new use cases, it is an interesting kind of balance that we walk where we want to have the robustness and the consistency of the ecosystem, but we also want to advance a standard to meet these new use cases and open up these new industries at a pace with which ecosystem can keep up.

What do you think is needed when you're looking at glTF/GLB and then OpenUSD? What's next?

Ashley Crowder:

It depends on the industry. I mean, for fashion, we need to figure out in real-time, it's a really hard problem, but think about how many shoes and clothing have fur or velvet. We are kind of there, but fur is still really difficult. The other is displacement maps, so many fashion companies use displacement maps to get the logos just right, and you can kind of approximate them with normal maps, but you're not going to fully get there. That's a big problem we see with people going from these clothing browser programs and trying to go to real-time.

With the more industrial companies, really, our optimization, we're getting 20-gigabyte files that we're reducing down to one megabyte. We're solving that problem; just making it easier to texture add materials, which, having those standard material libraries, which Adobe Substance is awesome, we always point people in that direction. It'll be interesting how that space evolves.

Marc Petit:

As we discussed earlier, there seems to be a great adoption of 3D these days. I mean, a couple of days ago from this recording date, Walmart announced selling physical products into Roblox. I think it was a great moment in commerce.

How do you look at platforms like UEF and Roblox? I mean, you use the web as your primary platform, but have you considered demand from brands to integrate your content into a platform that comes with an audience?

Ashley Crowder:

We have an Unreal plugin for that reason. It's incredibly easy to upload assets from Unreal to VNTANA and then pull assets down. The reason that's really convenient for people is everything's tied to our API. It's one thing if you're building one experience or publishing to one platform, but if you're publishing to 10 and then that product changes, you want to be able to change it in one place, and then that API automatically pulls it into all your different platforms. We are seeing that request.

Roblox is a unique platform because it's all about user-generated content. Front-runners like Walmart are partnering with Roblox creators, they're giving them an asset, but then they're changing it to fit Roblox, right? It's kind of this partnership.

I think the forward-thinking brands are open to letting artists change their products, which is really important. Roblox is a unique platform where I think you could, as a brand, publish that 3D asset as a base but then know that in order for it to succeed, the users need to be able to change it and make it their own.

Marc Petit:

If you look further out for retail, what do you think are going to be the key and exciting technologies to help retailers?

Ashley Crowder:

VNTANA. No, I'm kidding. I think it's interesting because Amazon, Walmart, right now, they have huge teams building 3D assets in-house. Wayfair did too; Wayfair was building all the 3D assets even for their sellers, which makes no sense to me. Do you do all the photography for your sellers? No. You say, "Hey, if you want to sell on my website, you need to do photography in this way, give me these images." But for some reason, so many retailers were like, "We're going to build all the 3D models," which is insanely expensive, time-consuming, and I don't know, it just doesn't make sense to me.

Amazon has moved to sellers, which makes sense. It's way too big. There's no way they could possibly create all these 3D models; sellers need to submit a 3D model, and it needs to meet these standards just like our 2D content. This is where we're moving forward.

I'm hopeful that the other big retailers will do that. Best Buy is doing that. They said, "These are our standards." Right now, it's like, upload it to a box folder, which is not super scalable, but we're getting there. I think we're going to start to see just like all the retailers have the 2D content standards to sell on their websites. They're going to have 3D standards. They're going to have a way to either publish via API or upload to their platform, have a standard QA process.

At VNTANA we're doing that at scale for people to meet whatever spec.

Patrick Cozzi:

Ashley, as you look out five to 10 years, what are you most excited about in terms of 3D innovations?

Ashley Crowder:

Seeing the behemoths of Amazon and Google enable 3D and enable it at scale; everyone's going to have to get on board, right? They're doing it category by category. They're supporting footwear, and home goods, and furniture. It’s going to be rolling out to more electronics. The minute your category is live, you're going to have to do it because your competitor's doing it, and it's increasing sales, and they're going to meet you.

This year, seeing that is huge. It's great that Apple finally got in the headset game because it's pushing everyone forward. I think we're going to start seeing that more and more in the workplace because of the value of people in the field with maintenance and training and sales, which really bring real dollars to the bottom line of a business. We're going to keep seeing the headsets get smaller and smaller like we saw in phones and computers, it's the same thing. I'm hopeful at some point it will be those Ray Ban meta-glasses that can do everything, but maybe in 15 years, I don't know.

With everything AI, I am so excited because the biggest barrier to this entire industry has been the creation of 3D content. We can use AI to speed up the creation of 3D and volumetric content that just opens the floodgates for all the things that you can do. And you will definitely need a 3D asset management platform, and we're here for that.

Marc Petit:

Have you guys made some testing with novel technologies like NeRFs or Gaussian Splats, do you see have hands-on experience with them?

Ashley Crowder:

We've had a number of AI companies reach out to us because they need a robust database that can have metadata tied to assets to train their ML models. We've always been very focused. We are not an AI company, but we can leverage AI tech to make our platform better, and we can be the platform to help train ML models for an AI company, which has become really interesting.

We have tens of thousands of 3D models, and you can upload 2D images and auto-render things. And we built a QA pipeline for ourselves to compare images and compare 3D models. So all of that can really enable an AI company to train ML faster, which is what we're seeing some of our clients do.

Marc Petit:

Do you see a potential role in the future for VNTANA in the commerce of purely digital goods?

Ashley Crowder:

We're not going to be selling digital goods, but we'll be publishing 3D to Roblox, Walmart, and anywhere else that you're going to be buying digital goods. I think the buying habits aren't going to change, but the content expectations will. Just like when the internet first came out, it was like a pamphlet on a website that was awful; now, we have this beautiful UX design and a whole industry around that to get higher conversion in clicks. Well, you can now have volume metrics read the inverse of content and how is that going to change your website?

Patrick Cozzi:

So Ashley, longstanding tradition on the podcast, our final question is, is there a person or organization that you'd like to give a shout-out to?

Ashley Crowder:

I really want to give a shout-out to Joanna Popper. She was leading VR at HP and Chief Metaverse Officer at CAA, and now it's doing so many things in the space to push the space forward. But also she created a whole XR women's group almost just by accident. During COVID, she was like, "I'm so bored, and I'm opening up my Zoom at 5:00 P.M. on Fridays. Here's all the great women I know in this space, join and just chat."

This call is still going. Four years later, we still meet, and it's grown into an amazing group of women in the XR space where we share our wins and reach out for help. It's just been an incredible group, and she's amazing in how she brings people together and is doing so much in the XR space.

Marc Petit:

We had her on the show last year, and we say hello to her. She is a ball of energy.

Ashley Crowder:

She is a force, it's great.

Marc Petit:

All right, and that's a wrap then for today's fascinating conversation with Ashley Crowder from VNTANA. 

Ashley really brought to light how VNTANA, her company, is at the forefront of powering 3D experiences that are transforming the enterprise across fashion, manufacturing, retail, and even entertainment, as we discussed.

We deeply appreciate your insight into today and tomorrow. Your passion for open standards and XR and your long-standing passion for democratizing those categories really shone through. Thank you so much for being with us and sharing your entrepreneurial journey with us.

Ashley Crowder:

Yeah, thanks so much for having me. This was fun.

Marc Petit:

Of course, a big thank you to our ever-growing audience. You can reach out on our website, on our LinkedIn page, and anywhere on social media. Thank you so much, and we'll see you back for another episode of Building the Open Metaverse. Thank you, Ashley, thank you, everybody, and thank you, Patrick.