Rob Alvarez Bucholska
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Andres Leon: Business Benefits of Immersive Technologies | Episode 369

 

If you’re struggling to keep people engaged and loyal in your product or business, check out my FREE gamification course to learn how to do just that: professorgame.com/freecommunity-web

From gamified learning platforms to virtual corporate training, discover how these strategies can elevate user engagement and drive business success across diverse sectors. Join us to chat with Andres Leon about the future of digital transformation through gamification and immersive technologies. We uncover the practical applications of gamification in enhancing business performance and user retention. Andres shares his experiences in leading innovative projects that blend creativity and technology, offering insights into overcoming challenges and maximizing impact.

Andrés León is a recognized leader in immersive technologies and digital transformation. He currently serves as the Studio Manager for Streamline Studios in Colombia. With over two years in this role, he has successfully expanded the company’s influence in Latin America by spearheading innovative projects in the metaverse and industrial metaverse sectors. His efforts focus on delivering cutting-edge immersive experiences tailored to the dynamic needs of businesses across multiple industries. Andrés also serves as a lecturer in Innovation and Digital Transformation, complementing his professional journey by guiding students and organizations to embrace new technologies. He is a frequent speaker at industry events, such as Campus Party Colombia, and was named a Top 100 Thought Leader in Digital Transformation. A passion marks his career for exploring the intersection of creativity and technology to drive impactful change. Before joining Streamline Studios, Andrés held key roles at Claro Colombia, where he led innovation initiatives and developed B2B products in areas such as IoT and Big Data. He has a strong background in innovation management, team leadership, and strategic market expansion.

Rob is a host and consultant at Professor Game as well as an expert, international speaker and advocate for the use of gamification and games-based solutions, especially in education and learning. He’s also a professor and workshop facilitator for the topics of the podcast and LEGO SERIOUS PLAY (LSP) for top higher education institutions that include EFMD, IE Business School and EBS among others in Europe, America and Asia.

 

Guest Links and Info

 

Links to episode mentions:

  • Proposed guest: Jane McGonigal
  • Recommended book: More of a resource that is Kadine James
  • Favorite game: Captain Tsubasa / GTA Saga

 

Lets’s do stuff together!

Looking forward to reading or hearing from you,

Rob

 

Full episode transcription (AI Generated)

Rob:
Hey, this is Professor Game, where we interview successful practitioners of games, gamification and game thinking to help us multiply engagement and loyalty. I’m Rob Alvarez, a consultant and the founder of Professor Game and a professor of gamification and games based solutions at IE Business School, efmd, EBS University and other places around the world. And before we dive into the interview, if you’re struggling with engagement in your business and are looking to find out how to make sure your users stay with you, perhaps you will find our free gamification course useful. Find it for free in the links in the description. Hey engagers, and welcome to another episode of the Professor Game podcast where we will be having Andres today. But Andres, we need to know, are you prepared to engage?

Andres Leon:
Well, we’re ready, so yeah, we can go. Go ahead.

Rob:
Let’s do this. Let’s do this. And we have Andres Leon today, who’s a recognized leader in immersive technologies and transformation. And he’s currently the studio manager for Streamline Studios in Colombia. Colombia, Latin America, Not Colombia and the U.S. you know, some people get confused there. Colombia, Latin America, right next to my home country, Venezuela. With over two years in this role, he has successfully expanded the company’s influence in Latin America by spearheading innovative product projects in the Metaverse and Industrial Metaverse sectors. His efforts focus on delivering cutting edge immersive experiences tailored to the dynamic needs of businesses across multiple industries. He’s also a lecturer in Innovation and digital transformation, which complements his professional journey by guiding students and organizations embrace new technologies. And he is a frequent speaker at industry events like Campus Party Colombia and was named the top 100 thought leader in digital transformation. A passion marks his career for exploring the intersection of creativity and technology to drive impactful change. And before Streamline Studios, he held key roles in Claro Colombia, where he led innovation initiatives and developed B2B products in areas such as IoT and big data. He has a strong background in innovation management, team leadership, and strategic market expansion. Andres, there’s plenty of things to dive in there, but is there anything that we’re missing before we take off with our questions?

Andres Leon:
No. Really good. Very good. Thanks for the invitation, Rob, and thanks for your research about my background. No, basically I’m techie. I love the technology. I love the geek culture. So for me, the video games is the perfect industry because you can collide all the technology and all the passions for the culture. So for me, and thanks for this podcast. I really love your program.

Rob:
Awesome. Thank you very much for your kind words. So Andres, as a director of Streamline Studios for Colombia, what does a day with you look like? Like if we were with you for a day or a week, wherever you want to go for what was that look like? Feel like? What are the main things that you’re focused on these days?

Andres Leon:
Well, basically I have. My role is 40% could be administrative task. Well, you know, somebody must be responsible to see that the bills have paid, the payroll is running, the software is updated with the proper licensing, things like that. So I work in many aspects for administrative things with my teams only. We have some vendors who have the outsourcing for accounting and things like that. That is the boring. But we must do part. The most attractive part I really love is the business generation from Latam. So I connect with companies. I be in charge of the product development for immersive technologies. So basically my day could be in the mornings. I try to close all the emails, invoices, everything administrative. And in the afternoon I try to be really active in the social media like LinkedIn or contacting companies companies or in events in Chamber of Corso Bogota or in industry like Last week, Columbia 4.0, the most largest technology even in Colombia. So yeah, I try to balance in that how creating new connections and how maintain the bills and the responsibilities on time.

Rob:
Everything everybody gets paid on time is an important task to have always there for sure. So Andres, with all this background in digital transformation and innovation and immersive technologies that you have now as well in Streamline Studios, can you tell us of a time where things actually did not go well? Like you were expecting an outcome, you know, with these immersive technologies or whatnot and things did not go your way. A first attempt on learning failure, however you want to name it. You don’t have to name any shame, any names or anything along those lines. You can keep the innocent protected. But you know, we want to especially be there in that story because we want to hear that message of what actually happened. How did you get out of it? Like, what are the lessons learned that we can take from that?

Andres Leon:
Well, a couple things. Well, from my. Well, my background came from the traditional IT technologies, you know, erp, CRM, things like regular companies use. Normally, the way of how you solve the problems is based on linear screens, like the user pressure here and you can see this or that or the ripple, whatever. But when you enter in this industry, in the video games and immersive technologies and spatial computing, your mindset is most to be really, really different. So personally, my personal. The first comment I want to share is my humbleness experience in my initial estimation with the project say no. It’s a simple couple of screens, something that we can do now. When, when you start to work with headset, VR headset, you must consider many different aspects, many different things. How I solve it, be humble, sit with my team, say hey guys, please explain how to solve it. What we must do. Listen to people, understand, empower them to be the creators of the solution. And together we have amazing things. But I think this is something really important for me in that moment. And the second thing in my past experience my life was when I started to learn about the new technologies. I found the IoT as the solution of many power problems. Oh my God, we can digitalize everything. That’s going to be really cool. And I found something really, really important. The power, the electricity. When you have sensors, you must run away to power them. And the difficulty in Colombia that we have is we have three chains of mountains and go to some parts of the country are more expensive that hire a person and fill up one form so the sensors could be sent to there. But try to connect to electricity. Try to have a connection to have that was really difficult. So that was something. Not everything must be solved with technology. No, I learned that. I learned some things really simple. The humans can do it and doing very well. They know the region. And you must be open to understand that not everything, not all solutions that came from Europe, Asia, US and most to apply exactly in the paper say that to Latan Latan. We have our characteristic, we have our way to do the things and it’s important to balancing that. And that’s what other humbleness learning I get from my life.

Rob:
Amazing. Amazing. I think you know, there’s two things on that. One to unpack as you were saying, you know, being humble and understanding like letting. Letting on the first part especially letting other people who have experience with some things as well sort of take over some of the stuff. But then with technology like people when I. When I when I mention gamification game inspired learning or game inspired strategies for solving stuff. People’s minds some for some reason tend to go to what you guys make, right? Immersive 3D environments, super complex AAA video games and all which is awesome and fantastic. Don’t get me wrong, I love those. And when that is the solution you need, I’m all in. I actually that’s something I would. I would definitely enjoy very much creating. But oftentimes more often more often than not, you know, not the budget or honestly the problem Require that such a huge high level. And people sometimes forget that there are. There. There’s a life outside of technology as well. And you know, I have some, some of the prototypes here. You know, this is a broken prototype of my cards. I created this. This card game might eventually become a board game. I’m not 100% sure yet. For helping my students learn a specific subject that I have on my supply chain management classes. That’s it. It’s a card game. And it doesn’t get simpler initially. I also have here the way I prototyped it initially. These were index cards. Index cards. That was it. That was all I needed to do my prototype and to see if things were working. So yes, we easily forget that technology is not the do all be all every single time. It might be the solution, might be a part of the solution, it might even be the whole solution, but it doesn’t have to be. So cheers and kudos to that, Andres. And let’s actually shift, right? I mentioned the word fail and it’s a loaded word for many people as well. So let’s actually go to the other side. What about a time when things actually did go well? Maybe a positive experience that you want and can share. Can you tell us how that happened? You know, what were maybe some of the success factors? We want to live the story with you especially.

Andres Leon:
No, basically. Well, we are. My passion is this technology and I have a strong background in B2B business. And basically all my career I passed from many consultants in firms and just start to learn the processes and the things that really matters to the business. Because when you are in the entertainment industry, you want the people to have fun, time, enjoy the time, have good experience. When you pass to the corporation and companies, entertainment is nice to have, but they need information on time accuracy, they need to solve problems and how you find this intersection that you use the expression gamification. That is usually how literature say that other people say how you can implement that. But the form factor is something that the business side is not really important at the beginning. But when they saw that you can solve many things and have an impressive experience, something beautiful, something attractive, things start to change. So we start to work last year with an immersive experience of how pulled to be the fashion fashion show, the fashion boutique Cubin and the shop to transform this experience. And the interesting fact was at the beginning we think, hey, we’re going to take an E Commerce and put 3D assets. But I say, hey, this is not something fun, it’s not attractive. What we do was try to get the, the claw drop, but with a 3D proportional and really high detailed characters. And then we create an experience when you feel that you’re in a forest but inside a shop. So something that you couldn’t do in a physical shop, but you can do in a computer, in a tablet, in a VR headset. So for me that was really, really useful and really interesting to see how this experience that in technically speaking is just spend time working around the job, but you can start to extract more information that you actually can to get in a physical store. And what I explain, one person can stay in one corner of the area of one shop and you are not, you don’t know what they are seeing, you are not what they are attracted, you are not, you don’t know what’s happened with them. When you start to see the journey inside experience the interaction with the clothing, the interaction with the fabrics, the interaction with the materials, you start to extract many information that is not normally in a physical store. And that was really, really, really satisfactory. Really, I really, really enjoyed that. To see how we are connecting something pretty with something useful for the organization and that’s made me really proud. So now we are pushing this experience within different companies. We are in its initial stage, but I hope that we can get more detail and more information about how the people interact with the brands, how the people interact with what they are purchasing and extending this experience to the next level.

Rob:
It sounds amazing. Love that. Thanks Andres for sharing all that. And you know, with all the experience you’ve had and all the stories that you’ve shared already, I’m sure that when you’re, when you’re facing a challenge, there is a certain way which you go about solving the challenge or even deeply understanding it initially. Can you run us through, you know, a quick sort of through what goes on in your mind and what are maybe the steps of oh, there’s this problem that we’re going to solve with immersive technologies. How do we go about doing that? Sort of putting on maybe a hat of project manager or of like, I don’t know, like how does that look like? Is there something that you can share in that sense of how you guys or you in particular do that kind of work?

Andres Leon:
Normally when I have a new problem, normally I start to stress and enter the chaos. My initial thought, we’re going to die, like, ah. And then I try to calm, calm, relax and try to see the things in other ways. Only we are humans and desperation and the time is always a challenge. But I love in Agile methodology I prefer the concept of product owner to understand because what is the real important when you want to solve something is understand what is the real needs of your user or slash client depending at the end. The client is not necessarily the final user. So well, we can discuss for that in another chapter. But when you understand who going to use these what is really important to them and understand that you have different layers of people who you must attend is really important to translate to give that sensibility to your team. One tool that I love to use is user Personas, the canvas, the canvas producer Personas. So I put a name like this is Juan. Juan is the safe representative for this brand. This is Maria. Maria is the person who going to use and going to purchase something. Oh, this is Michael. And Michael is the it, the head of IT and the responsibility of this. And have these different users give you a more detailed, more focused way to solve the things. And then I love the brainstorming session with my team. Again I love to hear them and try to work with them. It’s not necessarily with brainstorm, I prefer different way we can use design thinking we can use. Sometimes we play with roles, things like that. But normally we try to at least to discuss, not to have this other point of view because it’s always important to the people start to hear and someone at least make questions about the ideas because sometimes everybody is they need to sort everything. So it’s important to have at least some discussion. And then I start to define the processes and the tasks and define the timing and the capability. Because sometimes you have a really good solution but you don’t have the technology or you don’t have the experience or you don’t have the tools yet. So sometimes I try to validate and try to balance in that and then we the agile way to work and try to have the discipline. Because what is the problem when you have trouble problems and you are solving things, your creativity is super high and you are solving something and in the middle of that solution you want to make other change, another change, another change and you are really excited and then everything get a mess. So it’s important to have that discipline when you are using agile methods to have hey, I solve in this way, I close evaluate makes sense or not I pass to the next solution. But at least to complete the cycles sometimes could be challenging. Sometimes it’s possible, sometimes not. But I try to have that discipline because normally when you are excited solution solving things, you you get amazed creating many, many, many solutions and you can confuse the team and even the client.

Rob:
Yeah, getting excited is the kind of problem that gets you into trouble every now and then for sure. But you know, to be fair as well, it is the kind of I’d rather have the excitement problem than the I have no idea what to do here or I’m unexcited entirely about what I’m doing. Right. It’s almost a good problem to have, I would say. But you know, the best strategy, as you’re saying, I think a good way to face it is through agile methods where you have that discipline of doing things a certain way. So that that excitement is I don’t want to say contained, but actually directed in the. In the. In the right. In the right direction. So, Andres, that is fantastic. And you’ve, you’ve shared a lot of golden nuggets in your process. Is there something that you would like to call a best practice? Something that you would say, well, do this in your immersive project and you know your result is going to be at least a little bit better than it was if you didn’t, if you didn’t do this or think about it this way or whatever the best practice.

Andres Leon:
Is at this moment. The immersive experience has really challenged something we start to discuss previous to this recording. At this moment the Metaverse is colliding with platform games as I prefer to call. So you are seeing Roblox, Fortnite, Minecraft, Grand Theft Auto, Sandbox. You have seen many different platforms, but you are seeing many games where the people spend many hours there. And for the people who want to put their brands in those spaces, they need to understand what is their target client, the user, the user gamer, the user player, the user person where is really easy because for some brands they don’t look like or stylize of. Fortnite could be something that don’t match with their brand, but opposite for others. For others that cartoonies that stylize. It could be something that they really match with their brands. And what’s happening with. I know I came in some part of my life from marketing. I love marketing because they always have money. So they can do many things but the problem is they have money to spend super fast. Marketing needs something for Mother’s Day, something for Valentine’s Day, something for Halloween, something for Christmas. They can wait two years for something they know this is something for next week, couple weeks, one month in advance at the top. And they spend in easy to get solution that you can implement super fast. And those platforms like Fortnite Roblox and the others are really good and really fast to implement. But at the end you are losing the momentum to attract the people to start to understand them. And you have only really pretty launch and not an strategy. So my suggestion when you’re working in an immersive experience, try to understand if you are designed something for one time. Hey, I open a new store in Tokyo, in Madrid, in whatever you want to analyze for all you want to use. Hey, go for this fast solution. You want to have a new channel, new way to learn, to understand, to interact with your clients. A take your time, read and decide what is going to be your next steps. Obviously you want to have your in house solution only for you. You want to need a good content material to help the people recurrence. You feel hey, this is innovative, something with new information, with new products, with something good for me. So you want to need that Moscow that discipline that work to have information all the time. Or you can have something in the middle and integration some aspects in popular platforms. Other in my private solutions or things like that. And something I found in my recent research and sorry I extend but I really love to talk about this is the metaverse at this moment in the big corporation is a private experience because the big companies are concerned about the iPad. What is not a data user. The GPDA thing like that about information of the user is something well working in Europe specifically, but the information of the company. So we are talking about our strategy, what going to be our next product release, what going to be our next market to attack, what going to be your next strategy. And that kind of things are really, really private for the company. So what we have found is a strong increment in the private metaverse as a space for this cause to co create to work together inside the companies. But it’s something that the companies don’t want to share, don’t want to talk with the people. Because at the end it’s not part of their strategy and it’s not something that they going to open their doors to the people external to entering their experience with their platform. So it’s something that we start to see that what information must be indoor inside of the company and one you want to share with your clients. So these aspects are really, really important to understand because it’s not what bullet fit for everything. So you need to balance in and understand what is your needs and what is going to be your next step according of your needs and according to budget.

Rob:
Obviously Sounds great, I love it. So Andres, you’ve given us a few recommendations there on those great practices. Is there a person that you would recommend as well, somebody that you would listen to in an interview, a future interview in the Professor Game podcast, answering these same questions? Maybe somebody you look up to, somebody that’s inspired you or somebody you’ve never, you know, you’ve read a book of and maybe would like to hear more. I don’t know, wherever your inspiration takes you.

Andres Leon:
I love Jay McGonigal. She’s the guru of gamification. Her TED talk is really, really famous. It’s like I don’t know, 2010, 2012, something like that was my inspiration. I love when I heard she talk about that. I read her book and specifically what she said is when you are gamer and that connects with my young Andres. I remember when I was in the university and she said that one gamer can spend all weekend solving one mission or passing one word completely, not eating, not sleeping, play with all the passion, with all the energy, with all the focus and something that could be really interesting. And I don’t want to say that the slavery of the employees or something like that, but you can have that flow, that momentum that focuses to work and solve things as you solve one level when you’re going to fight with a big box on something going to be attractive. So I really, really want to hear how she feel and how she saw the world now with this AI generative with the new 3D games, with the new metaverse experience with just start to talk about this and she wrote the book wasn’t the technology as they developed now. So I really would like to hear about what she’s thinking about the new world with her.

Rob:
Absolutely. Jane McGonigal is very, very high on the list. She’s been mentioned. I haven’t made the numbers ever but I think she’s probably the most mentioned potential guest for Professor Game in the past for full transparency, I have attempted to contact her a few times. I know she has a very busy schedule. She has a lot of people following social media. So you know, I completely understand. I’m not, I’m not upset about it or anything but I have tried a bit. I haven’t been like full blown like oh, I’m going to get like. But, but I have tried a few times. So if anybody in the audience or you Andres, if you have ever contacted with her and you would, it would probably be more helpful for her so that she, she can bring this to her attention if anybody knows her to have an introduction so that that would be Absolutely amazing. Not expecting it. That’s fine. But if anybody hearing this has it and would love to have her on the podcast, I’d be very, very excited to get an introduction as well. I will try in any case in the future. Once again that I’m fine with that. Thank you Andres for that fantastic recommendation you talked about. Her book Reality is Broken super better. And the other one that I’m not sure if there’s another one that came out recently. Recently I think I haven’t read it in any case. Fantastic. Is there any book or maybe it’s one of those books, I don’t know. Is there a book that you recommend? This audience, the engagers who are people looking forward to thinking of creative, immersive, gamified experiences to improve loyalty, engagement or whatever that looks like in their own projects.

Andres Leon:
Well well at the end is many at this moment YouTube is a Babylon library. You can enter and see many, many, many aspects and many different talks and expert that you can you can follow and see. Personally I really like the well I really like the content from well for immersive technologies. I really like at this moment all what is happening in the digital Fashion Week for New York, London and Paris is something that’s really attracting me because it’s a redefinition between what’s happening with NFTs, what is happening with the clothing, what is happening with experience. Someone I recommend but she puts a lot of things in LinkedIn and have an amazing talk in LinkedIn is Kadeen James. I never spoke with her yet but I really really like what she does and what she express. She’s doing something really amazing attractive the big brands in this immersive experience. So for me it’s really cool and well obviously then all the announcements related to Marshall of our framework with what is happening with Horizon and it’s really interesting and something I want to recognize and kudos for him is how he challenged the Canning Valley this uncomfortable 3D hyperrealistic faces and he passed his metaverse to a stylized so it’s something pretty but it’s not realistic and now with the new VR glasses it’s creating something really really realistic and it’s not uncaly. So for me something really impressive. What they are doing and follow all the patterns and what they are expressing is something really important to to follow and understand because at the end they are setting the next step of not necessarily this industry but at least this technology and it’s important to be aware of what is the market researching and what is the market proposing or what going to be the future of the experience and I’m not sure if they want to be the future or the near future because this is moving super fast. Super, super fast.

Rob:
Absolutely, absolutely. So Andres, we get to the difficult question now. Andres, what would you say is your favorite game?

Andres Leon:
Oh my God. My my favorite kid game as when I was kids was Captain Tsubasa super companionist and this cartoon from Japan was the captain when I was kid and I really hunt the possibility to play your cartoon. That was when I was kid. So I really love that but with the years I get older and all the grand photo saga I love the grand photo saga. So I’m waiting for the for the six new experience that they’re going to release soon. I want to see what happened with that and it’s always really amazing. Even they are bad with the Colombians some characters that are really dangerous for Colombian but what we can do is but I really love that that open world experience is really cool for me.

Rob:
GTA series is very very impressive in that sense as well. So Andres, we’re arriving to the end of the interview. I don’t know if there’s anything else you want to make sure that you say any final piece of advice where we can find out more about your work both at Streamline Studios and anything else you might be doing. This is you know your final couple of minutes.

Andres Leon:
So all you no we have blog in the Streamline middle line Streamline Middle Line Studios.com if you want to reach out. I really really passionate and active in LinkedIn so please search me Andres Leon Uno if I love to talk and share information and and learn many things of I really really appreciate if you want to follow me and continue with this and my only advice for the young people who want to enter in video game and inversive industry is this is the most exciting time in the world at this moment. These technologies that are a peer is not going to replace the human. They are helping us to be better, more professional, more effective, more accelerated. So I suggested to take the advantage, take the time understand what you want to do in the video game industry is not only one type of games. The immersive experience is not what type of experience. We have many, many things to do, many roles. So if you love the technology and what we can do follow your instinct, learn about that use the new technology and please follow me if you want to talk and discuss about these things. And Rob, thank you again for this space and really nice talk.

Rob:
It’s great having you Andres thank you again for sharing your experience, your knowledge, your understanding, everything that you’ve done. However, Andres and Engagers, as you know, at least for now and for today, it is time to say that it’s game over. Hey Engagers, and thank you for listening to the Professor Game podcast. And since you are into gamification and game inspired solutions, how about you go into the free gamification course that we have for you. Just go to professorgame.com freegamification work course, all one word professorgame.com freegamificationscourse and get started today for free. After that, we will also be in contact and you will be the first to know of any opportunities that Professor Game might have for you. And remember, before you go on to your next mission, before you click Continue, please remember to subscribe using your favorite podcast app and listen to the next episode of Professor Game. See you there.

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