Dimitry and Karl
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[00:00:00] Shannon Putman: Hello everybody and welcome to another exciting episode of Putman's podcast, pops. Today you are in for a special treat because I am joined with Carl and Dmitri from GW Pro. Welcome gentlemen.
[00:00:15] Dimitry: Hello. Thank you for inviting us.
[00:00:17] Shannon Putman: Thank you for being here. I'm so excited to have you.
[00:00:21] Shannon Putman: of me paddling on about what your product is, I
[00:00:25] Shannon Putman: let you guys introduce yourself and talk about GW Pro and kind of just let our listeners know what exactly it is and who you guys are
[00:00:34] Dimitry: Oh, thank you Shannon. Thank you for having us here. It's a pleasure because you are always a star of your community, you know,
[00:00:41] Shannon Putman: making me blush.
[00:00:42] Dimitry: Yeah. It's a podcast. It's okay. So Carol Car Bots and me, we are co-founders of GW io. It's a company that is creating their training for hot skills training, may say so.
[00:00:56] Dimitry: So we are doing their modules that train people different professions of different professions to do dangerous and procedural stuff, so it makes them healthier. And happy air at the end. So this is it.
[00:01:14] Shannon Putman: Healthier and happier. Cannot go wrong with that.
[00:01:16] Dimitry: Yeah, sure.
[00:01:19] Shannon Putman: Carl, what about you? Hop on in here.
[00:01:20] Karl: persons.
[00:01:22] Shannon Putman: you
[00:01:23] Karl: I found and contact
[00:01:25] Shannon Putman: for and I'm glad did find
[00:01:32] Shannon Putman: stuck with
[00:01:35] Shannon Putman: those of you that know my history, I was working with a big project with the Kentucky Department of Education, which is incredibly exciting, but it was also very time consuming, so I wasn't able to do much of anything else. And so, you guys stuck with me and found me again, and I couldn't be more excited.
[00:01:52] Shannon Putman: So thank you for that.
[00:01:54] Dimitry: Thank you.
[00:01:56] Shannon Putman: So if I was somebody who had never heard about GW Pro and you know, you said you hard skills, you know, something that you focus on, give me a little bit more information about what could I expect to see when I get into your software.
[00:02:11] Dimitry: So our software provides you with experience of being in different shoes of different workers. So, for example, electricians, construction workers, oil and gas workers that do things at height below the earth. And in very different scenarios, including some very toxic materials and some dangerous procedures such as explosives and everything.
[00:02:35] Dimitry: So that what we do, we put people. In this situation and in situations and train them through the situation to do things right, the right way. So no one gets injured. Nothing, nothing explodes. So everything's all right and the people go home healthy and happy. So this is what we do. And we do it in different modes, of course, randomized things, so it's not just one.
[00:03:04] Dimitry: Pass VR game and it includes very high standards of safety and work procedures from OSHA and niosh. So this is it. And we try to make this training as efficient and quick as possible.
[00:03:19] Shannon Putman: Wonderful, and I love that you mentioned OSHA and things like that. So instead of just looking and saying, Hey, you know, there's a need for this. You guys have actually done the work to connect it to standards that are true to life.
[00:03:34] Dimitry: Yeah. Yeah. Because you know, it's very conservative world. So these standards, they existed for decades and they were trained very old fashioned way people gathered in classes and. They listen to the lectures and there were not much technology, but they prefer some real training. You know that Very expensive when you go inside real.
[00:04:00] Dimitry: Not simulation, but the replica of your workplace. If it's dangerous, for example, high voltage disconnections, you do, you just build the second one that is not connected and put people there. It's expensive. Very time consuming. Yes, it's sufficient, but when we are came, we gained the ability to put people into the worlds they never could get into. The people, and also people that really need to get into these worlds to understand if they need to get there, for example, the students, to see their future professions. So yeah, they're trained, but for many students, it's a big surprise when you go to your actual profession, when you do your everyday job, it may be.
[00:04:51] Dimitry: Be shocking experience for some of them. Yeah. Because yeah, it's real life. They say it's real life. It's real, it's what you do. And we want them to be really prepared from the very beginning and be very confident about what they're going to do in what they're going to expect from their future profession.
[00:05:12] Shannon Putman: And you mentioned too the danger of it, and it really is, and we are talking life and death in some of these situations and I can't think of a better. A reason to be prepared, especially because our students, you know, they're told a lot of different things. Like, oh, well this is a high paying job.
[00:05:28] Shannon Putman: You know, like linemen get paid this much and it can be very, you know, very lucrative and you don't have to go to college, which is great. However, a, it's incredibly dangerous, which is another reason it's high paying, but they think, oh, I can get up on a line. It won't be that bad. But then it's like, it might not just be that one individual line.
[00:05:45] Shannon Putman: It could be a lot of different things, and then they freeze. So with utilizing your software, you can actually test that out to see is this something I like and I can do?
[00:05:57] Dimitry: Yeah, this is it. And we have, yeah. Because yeah, we show students the places
[00:06:07] Karl: is part why educational facilities love our.
[00:06:11] Dimitry: they are not trained and they cannot go there. This is a paradox of training. So you're trained for something. You cannot attend live before you are trained. So this is like a loop and VR helps to solve this.
[00:06:26] Dimitry: And we have very, you know, very nice examples from our past experience when people found us. It's Steam, for example saying that, oh, my son found working at height. And then he came to me and said, oh, dad, I can do your job. And so why is that? Because I, I went through working at height training.
[00:06:47] Dimitry: So what, and after that they realized that, oh, it is here. They can use it in their real job, in their real training.
[00:06:57] Shannon Putman: And that's an interesting point that you bring up because some of the things that I've experienced with just educators in general is, well, you can't replace the real thing. And of course nobody's trying to replace the real thing. But what kind of feedback have you been getting from any instructors using your technology about having it as an addition?
[00:07:18] Shannon Putman: And not a replacement of the actual experience.
[00:07:22] Dimitry: no, great question because. Regulations are also state that you are not, you will not allow you, you are not allowed to replace something with virtual when you do your final training. Final training means practice on the real things, and they put it above any type of virtual training. And we tested our modules with a very high. very high level professionals, I believe, on the planet. They're from oil and gas sector, and they've, they're super high duper professionals, training other professionals for some very high level job. And the interesting thing was, first that they said it saves time because on, in real practice, they very often don't have too much time.
[00:08:14] Dimitry: In this real life scenario. So they want people to be very well prepared to find a practice in vr, so that helps them. And the second thing, and it was very surprising that when they saw VR for the first time, I mean this high level professionals, they never played games, for example, or sometimes, but they now played VR for training.
[00:08:35] Dimitry: And they said, oh, let me try that. And I said, okay, no problem. Just put it in. Start the learning mode and he says, oh, I'm professional. I don't need learning mode. I need exam. I said, even our developers, they cannot go through the exam from the very beginning. He said, oh I'm good with that. And so he goes like through that and passes the exam in the first round, during their first time in his life.
[00:09:04] Dimitry: I was shocked.
[00:09:06] Shannon Putman: Me too.
[00:09:06] Dimitry: It doesn't. Mean that our app is super, like good and super simple, but it means that he saw there all the things that he does every day and he said that everything is familiar. I'm okay with that. No. Like something out of my work and I'm doing my job, oh, this is it. This is, oh, okay.
[00:09:28] Dimitry: I go and he passed the exam from, for the first run in his life and being first time in vr.
[00:09:35] Shannon Putman: That's incredibly important too, and people might not realize if they've never done it, how important that is, but somebody that has been doing it their whole life, and like you said, they, we have this variable of them never using vr, but they passed the exam because they know their job. And so that's a testament to them and to your software and how you created it.
[00:09:56] Dimitry: hope so. Thank you.
[00:09:57] Shannon Putman: Yeah, it definitely is. 'cause I've seen people go both ways and I've seen a lot of software and not everything is like that. And a lot of times it's, you know, oh, I wouldn't do it this way or this, you know, and it's what I always preach about. If you're going to design something for somebody, you should have that person in mind and involved in the process of creating it.
[00:10:19] Shannon Putman: And I think that's what sets you guys apart from a lot of others that are out there.
[00:10:25] Dimitry: Thank you, Shannon. Yeah, we tried not to make one more VR game for training that we saw already on the market because VR here is for a long time Nestle Saudi Aramco, British Petroleum. These guys. Started VR from the very beginning and they had tons of different approaches. They invited guys from the game dev, from everything.
[00:10:48] Dimitry: And we didn't want to go and create one more VR training that seems nice for VR training. For VR training people. And first thing that we didn't go to developers. We invited instructional designers and talk to them. We talked to instructional designers, like they just came from the construction and I had phone calls with them between the inspections on the location.
[00:11:16] Dimitry: So they came like from the mud, took the phone and said, oh, right, what do we want to ask me today? And so they were, we were talking not about vr, we were talking about that people not listening, people are doing silly stuff. People are killing themselves. Like literally they, they come from nowhere with some sometimes fake documents and they try to do things they never did before and we need to retrain them and do it very quickly because time is money, it's construction and blah, blah, blah.
[00:11:50] Karl: So this is it. We started from this point and I believe that was the key to understanding the customer in the beginning. Yeah. And another step. We added an under understanding of simplicity. For example, we get one button experience so that everyone could use our simulator at once because we are thinking that using we are
[00:12:15] Shannon Putman: also
[00:12:16] Karl: You don't
[00:12:17] Shannon Putman: critical
[00:12:18] Karl: push many buttons
[00:12:19] Shannon Putman: continuously said,
[00:12:21] Karl: understand
[00:12:21] Shannon Putman: especially educators, they get a lot thrown at 'em and it's like another thing I have to learn and this, that, and the other. And you know, you can have the greatest software, but if they can't get to it, it doesn't matter. And so the ability to be able to use your software.
[00:12:36] Shannon Putman: That quickly and that easily, even just if the educator isn't using it necessarily themselves, it takes a little bit of weight off. They're just like, okay. Like, you know, 'cause they don't wanna look stupid in front of their students. They don't wanna not be able to do it. So it might, and from the outside looking in, it's like, oh, that's not a big thing.
[00:12:55] Shannon Putman: But no, it really is very important because those are the things that will keep educators from using it. And you've actually thought about that.
[00:13:03] Dimitry: Yeah, I believe so. When we, you know, that was a time we started, there was only one controller in your hand that was meant to be like tagging something, like showing. Nothing else. And they, after that, they invited, they made some controllers, very simple ones, and I liked them. That was at the time when our one button experience appeared, and after that they made controllers with, you know, this rings with additional menu buttons with more buttons.
[00:13:34] Dimitry: And I said, oh. Why can we just remove them or put like a tape on them because we don't need them. They're messing everything. They're so, every new release, my developers tell me that Let's add one more button. We just won and something.
[00:13:57] Shannon Putman: And the best too is like, they always wanna push a button too. People will just naturally wanna push buttons, you know? And it's like, no, you don't need to do that. Like, and you're watching 'em, you're like, no, not that one. Don't use your thumb at all. And they still do. So I get
[00:14:11] Dimitry: we need to tape it. The tape on control list?
[00:14:17] Shannon Putman: An alarm. Do not touch.
[00:14:19] Dimitry: Do.
[00:14:21] Shannon Putman: What are any challenges that you guys have seen in any of your deployments that, you know, potentially keep people from successfully using, not only, you know, not necessarily specific to your training, but just to the VR training in general?
[00:14:37] Dimitry: Oh, great question. We have two types of customers, educational and enterprise. So initially, as. As I told you, we started from enterprise customers because we understood them more than we understood educational segment. But now I feel that we understand more educational se segment. Segment more because we had many projects with them also.
[00:15:04] Dimitry: And started to understand their problems and their needs because and the, for these two types of customers, there are two types of problems for enterprise. It's, they're huge and they have all these regulations. We do this and that differently. Do you. To comply with this and that. And so everything should be aligned with the internal policies.
[00:15:27] Dimitry: And it's always hard to get something inside big corporate entity that we as a global product provide. So we don't change every time we provide global product. Sometimes we work on it, but it's difficult together. So the main obstacle there is to comply with everything inside. To make this, we provide testing.
[00:15:50] Dimitry: Sometimes it takes years to get into sometimes more, you know, we even had a fun story when a person that was working with us project, very successful. We did develop, he retired. Because of the age. And so he, or, and we said, don't leave us. Please send someone to us. Yeah. We haven't finished it with him, but with the next person.
[00:16:19] Dimitry: And yeah.
[00:16:20] Karl: finish this.
[00:16:22] Dimitry: And conservative. Feature is the one that connects education and enterprise world. Because, yeah, people don't want fancy new things. They feel that these, they can be distracting them from teaching process and they sometimes feel that, oh, there's something fancy, there's something new.
[00:16:43] Dimitry: We've been doing that efficiently without students. They understood us, but they need to put something on our head that may be distracting, maybe not working properly.
[00:17:05] Karl: Yeah. The difficulties to implement the current structure implement. We are in the
[00:17:11] Shannon Putman: Especially if they feel they
[00:17:12] Karl: and teachers and companies afraid to use something new inside.
[00:17:17] Shannon Putman: I wanna know what they're doing or I wanna see what they're doing. And it's like, even when you tell 'em they only can do what you're allowing them to, they still wanna see it. It's like, well, they're gonna hack it, you know?
[00:17:28] Shannon Putman: And they're very nervous to let go of what they see as control.
[00:17:32] Dimitry: Yeah. And for, you said also that they are a little bit afraid of the things not working properly. When the class started and they will look not very good in front of a class. And we have these, we have a big project in Belgium, as you know, and we are more than a thousand licenses. And we had interviews with teachers and they said, you know, if thing, if a thing doesn't work once, we don't use it again, ever.
[00:18:05] Shannon Putman: You?
[00:18:05] Dimitry: That was the core. We said, all right, we're prepared. I believe it should work.
[00:18:12] Shannon Putman: There's no three strikes and you're out with with educators for sure. And. One of the major hurdles that we always hear about is access and especially anything involving the network. And, you know, when you get into to rural areas, or even if you're not in rural areas if you have 30 devices on the network at one time, things like that it's a huge drain.
[00:18:34] Shannon Putman: So what have you guys done to make it so that people don't, your customers don't have to worry about that.
[00:18:41] Dimitry: Oh we, I think our main focus was on that. During the product development. So we try to create as many features that help to eliminate all problems in rural areas, offline areas, and everywhere. So we have offline mode. We have very like super easy activation. That, that you can use your cell phone network and you will not lose any of your bandwidth or anything.
[00:19:10] Dimitry: It just activates and you then you can go offline for the whole period of license, like. Forever sometimes. And you will not be asked to, like other apps will do to reconnect. So we don't ask to reconnect the teachers. So, and you will not be surprised at the beginning of the lesson.
[00:19:29] Dimitry: Something needs update on Monday. and yeah, nothing will interrupt your
[00:19:34] Dimitry: process.
[00:19:35] Karl: inside all stores, which are available now, and, uh, uh, now,
[00:19:41] Shannon Putman: you the importance of
[00:19:44] Karl: training from their, uh,
[00:19:47] Shannon Putman: think guys are underselling
[00:19:53] Karl: glasses
[00:19:54] Shannon Putman: there are so many times, the first question I always get is, well, do I have to use the internet for that? What do I do? I have to use the internet for that. Like the fact that you can access your trainings complete your.
[00:20:03] Shannon Putman: Trainings and simulations and everything in offline mode is unbelievable. And it is going to allow you to be used by anybody at any point and they won't have to worry about it. And you've done it in such a way that it doesn't sacrifice quality of the experience. 'cause a lot of times when we see things that are, you know, oh well you don't have to, you know, that might be, have an offline mode or something, that's when you're gonna see more like kinda low poly looking content and things that just.
[00:20:31] Shannon Putman: Don't look, I don't wanna say official, but just aren't at the quality that they need to make it effective. It can be a fun experience, but in order to get that real life training that you're after, it has to reach a certain level of. Quality and you guys have that and you've accomplished that in an offline mode, which truly sets you apart.
[00:20:53] Shannon Putman: So if anybody's listening, like, that's a big thing because they, that does not happen very often and it is rare to find that. And so, I think you guys should continue to pat yourselves on the back and brag about that feature. 'cause it's huge.
[00:21:09] Dimitry: Thank you. We have a special project, for example, in Canada that was aimed to deliver professional training for rural areas. It's just the project for the, they took the devices with our software and brought it offline for, I don't know, for six months for the whole period of license because the headsets were traveling across the country and you know.
[00:21:33] Dimitry: The country's huge. The country of Canada, they have forests, they have very remote areas. They don't want to find the network all the time, and sometimes it's impossible. And some of our customers also took the headsets to very remote locations, such as offshore drilling rigs without any web connection.
[00:21:52] Dimitry: So they used it there. No problems.
[00:21:56] Shannon Putman: Yeah, that, that's amazing. Especially if you're looking at what's happening in Kentucky right now. And one of the districts that I work with Pike County, they just had some horrible flooding and, and lives were lost homes, and, you know, half the school flooded and then the rest that wasn't is being used as emergency shelters.
[00:22:14] Shannon Putman: So who knows when and where they'll even be when they get started back into school and everything else. So to be able to have accessibility to that, even just like, of course, you know, like, oh, they're in a flood and they're gonna shelter. We're not gonna, you know, worry about getting homework done, but. To have a headset and have some sense of normalcy.
[00:22:36] Shannon Putman: At least, you know, for the students it can be a nice distraction and kind of a mental lifesaver because it's like all of this is going on, but I can, you know, even for a couple minutes, I can just do something else that isn't this reality right here that I'm dealing with.
[00:22:50] Dimitry: And the thing that is having some perspective in your situation. So you are opening your future with that, doing so, I'm now, I'm getting prepared for something creative and for creating my life, even in this accident. So this is very important. You just don't, you do not sit with your hands down.
[00:23:09] Shannon Putman: Right, exactly. And before we kind of wrap things up you have been incredibly supportive of the work we've been doing here in Kentucky, and you have even offered for people to try your software, which is incredibly exciting and it is not something that. A lot of companies do. They'll do it for like seven days or something.
[00:23:29] Shannon Putman: They're like, oh, there you go. But you guys have continued to support students here in Kentucky. So if anybody would like to try the software, they can reach out to me at Shannon at PubMed are consulting. However, I would also like you guys to tell them if they wanna, you know, learn more about GW Pro or, or, reach out to you guys as well, where would you direct them to go?
[00:23:51] Karl: Our webpage, GW
[00:23:53] Shannon Putman: There you go.
[00:23:54] Shannon Putman: It's got all the information on there, everything.
[00:23:56] Dimitry: Yeah know. And
[00:24:00] Dimitry: pro io safety VR bundle across different platforms. If you have meta headset, you can find it in NetApp store if you have different headset. please try to find it in your headset store, live
[00:24:15] Shannon Putman: And Arbor, and we said manage xr, dec, all of them.
[00:24:21] Shannon Putman: right. love it.
[00:24:22] Karl: We are everywhere.
[00:24:23] Shannon Putman: That's what need to
[00:24:24] Shannon Putman: be. I have to exactly. Gentlemen, this has been lovely. I cannot thank you enough.
[00:24:32] Shannon Putman: always love talking you and I love all the exciting things that we have planned and I'm not gonna give everything away, but people need to pay attention 'cause there's some big things happening.
[00:24:42] Shannon Putman: If anybody is at SY and they would like to try GW Pro, please come and check us out. We'll be there for sure. And. One of the things that I also wanted to thank you is from a personal standpoint is thank you for continuing to support Putman XR Consulting. In the beginning, I know it was all crazy and I, I never wanted to be a business owner, so I'm still finding my way through all of this, but you've been nothing short of amazing and supportive, so I cannot thank you enough and I truly consider you friends, not just colleagues.
[00:25:11] Shannon Putman: So thank
[00:25:12] Dimitry: you, Shannon. Thank you. really appreciate that.