Launch Pad Grad Jeffrey Breugelmans Shares the Development Process Behind AfterNow Prez

Each year, Launch Pad supports promising VR content creators from diverse backgrounds as they iterate on their unique ideas and bring them to market.

In this edition in our Launch Pad Q&A series, 2020 grant recipient Jeffrey Breugelmans spoke with us about his involvement with Launch Pad and how it helped shape his career and the development of AfterNow Prez, an immersive content creation platform that combines the ease of use of PowerPoint with the teleconferencing abilities of Zoom.

Thank you! Launch Pad offered us a fantastic opportunity to pitch and develop our app, AfterNow Prez, with the support of an incredible community and under the guidance of the Meta team.

Becoming a Launch Pad grant winner has had a tremendous impact on my journey as a developer. Not only did it provide some financial security as we continued pursuing our vision for Prez, but it also offered a great boost professionally. It can be hard to feel a sense of accomplishment when you are working on a long-term project that has not yet shipped, but the recognition we received from Meta felt like a great confirmation that we were onto something special!

Prez started off years ago as an internal tool to create Hololens presentations for sales meetings, trade shows, and conventions. We successfully provided this service for a string of Fortune 500 companies, but that demand collapsed completely as the pandemic hit and the world went into lockdown. All of a sudden–with zero projects on the horizon–it was time to figure out how we could pivot and keep the business going.

So we took a step back to analyze the market for new opportunities and quickly realized that we already had a strong foundation in place to build a modern-day solution to the Future of Work. Our new vision was for Prez to become an immersive content creation platform that combines the ease of use of PowerPoint with the teleconferencing abilities of Zoom. Creators can choose to share their content during live meetings (i.e., presenter-led), or asynchronously (i.e., self-guided).

Absolutely! This pivot required three major shifts: (1) porting our app to Meta Quest to reach larger audiences; (2) adding a networking feature to allow for remote, multiuser meetings, and (3) modifying our internal software tool into a user-friendly platform that anyone can use to build and share content.

The development resources and technical support we received during Launch Pad were paramount in overcoming several of these challenges. The subsequent journey as grant winners consisted of structured milestones and deliverables, followed by constructive feedback that helped us to focus not only on the functionality and features, but also on the performance metrics that can greatly influence the success of your app.

Our overarching goal is to democratize Mixed Reality content creation by appealing to aspiring content creators who may not necessarily have extensive coding or 3D modeling skills. As a tool for productivity, we aim to make the process as intuitive and straightforward as possible.

Our web portal (https://prez.afternow.io) is where users can create slides, upload assets, and arrange the animation timeline. To keep things familiar, this process looks and feels a lot like PowerPoint or Google Slides. Next, it is time to jump into the Prez Meta Quest app to ‘set your stage.’ Unlike game engines that require users to understand scaling and 3D coordinate systems, Prez allows you to simply organize your slide content by picking up and placing objects where you think they look good. That’s it! The goal is to minimize the learning curve and to delight users with how much they can achieve in very little time.

I have always seen technology as a tool to engage, enable, and empower. Before embarking on my journey into mixed reality, I dedicated my PhD dissertation to the study of computer accessibility for those who experience physical disability. What I love about virtual experiences is that they can be equal for all users. Though skill levels may vary, anybody who embodies a virtual character automatically gains the same abilities.

VR can enable users to become anyone, visit any place, at any scale (from microbes to galaxies), and at any time; making it a great tool for exploration and building empathy. But I like to think that the Quest has removed many obstacles outside of the headset as well by being affordable, untethered, and highly capable. Now, VR creators and consumers can also be anyone and anywhere, as long as they have a battery charge and an internet connection. This opens up even more opportunities for diversity, equity, and inclusion.

One design challenge that we are asked about regularly, is the lack of avatars within our app. It is a design choice that stands in stark contrast to what people have come to expect from multiuser applications: if you have a meeting in VR, you expect to see and hear the other people.

But Prez is different in that it specializes in presentation delivery wherein the shared content takes center stage. For this, I like to use the analogy of the movie theater. Since there are no avatars, every user can have the best seat in the house without the risk of other audience members distracting you, blocking your view, or invading your personal space.

That said, we are experimenting with ways to make the presenter visible to their audience. We are adding support for green-screen video in our next release, and will be looking into the Meta Avatar SDK as well.

We originally developed Prez for the Hololens, before porting to the Quest, so our UI and UX designs have tended to be “hands-first” right from the start. This is fine for experienced users, but we quickly learned that most novel users are unaccustomed to hand-tracking and prefer to use their controllers. So perhaps our biggest takeaway from playtesting was the need to map our gesture-based interactions to the Quest controllers buttons in a manner that is equally intuitive and accessible. This goes to show the importance of playtesting: you are not your average user.

Despite the rapid progress being made in this field, it is important to realize that the AR/VR industry is still in its infancy as are the interaction paradigms that come with it. Until best practices are established, all we have are fair assumptions and our good intentions.

I recommend aspiring developers to try out lots of different AR/VR experiences, and to take note of what other developers are doing. When it comes to your own development, it is ok to start small and don’t be afraid to try new things. Rapid prototyping and a flexible mindset are key.

Everybody knows the mantra “fail fast and fail often,” but try to “fail smart” as well. Take the time to analyze what does and doesn’t work, and to identify where you can improve.

You can find AfterNow Prez on App Lab here. For more information, please visit prez.afternow.io.