Building a game engine for risk

January 12, 2022 | Colleen O’ Connell-Campbell


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Samantha Mathews is CEO and CTO of LOCI, a neurologically proven training system that is evolving safety and spurring the adoption of verifiable credentials as an alternative to raw data collection. Her innovative approaches to data privacy and decentralized web systems has led to speaking engagements at Stanford University, Google, South by Southwest and more. An experienced software and systems designer, she has a proven track record of technical innovation in areas of impact such as crowd modeling, live streaming events, web based virtual reality, offline networking, and so many more privacy immersive learning safety systems design. Starting from a small community, on an island, to living as a DJ across the world, to CEO and CTO of a leading tech organization is a fascinating journey.

 

“If I could choose which time to be alive in human existence, I think this would be probably the time I pick. It's so interesting, because our tools are going from getting smaller and smaller and smaller, and storage getting smaller and smaller down to cellular levels. And our brains are still expanding in our heads. We should only expect everything to continuously change - and quickly. At the same time, a lot of things get left behind when we are so focused on building on top of shiny objects that maybe don't have the best infrastructure. So I think the essence of me is somebody who very much pulls from my past. I am a deep, slow thinker, somebody who likes to solve long-term problems. I was a DJ in my 20s and played a lot of places all over the world and had the opportunity to play for some pretty incredible folks. Then I started live streaming my shows, and kind of figured out a way to hack GoPros, so that you could do really high end broadcasts for quite cheap. That started a live streaming company on the side that ended up bringing me down to the States. I was able to grow. And by chance, just through the GoPro hacking community, and some of my gamer friends, I was able to try the first developer kit of the Oculus (the virtual reality headset that Facebook now owns, which started as a Kickstarter project).”

A pivot from live streaming into having an innovation lab for the 3D web was Samantha’s next step “because you can build so many things with it”.

“I had a house in LA that I would rent out for film locations. And people would take pictures through my fence which would creep me out, because they were trying to scout and look without actually booking. And so I said, hey, I'll give you 20% off if you come to my virtual website tour. You can measure inside, and I can show you around virtually.”

She started keeping track of how much time they saved and took this use case to festivals. “We started doing crowd modeling and actually using city planning software to repurpose the agents that they usually use to create simulations when they're planning train stations and things like that. This helps festivals plan better flow ahead of time. And the safety tools revealed themselves to me to be so abysmal and the safety manager was the most interested in what we were doing. At the time the Vegas shooting happened. You could see in real time where people don't know their exits. They have no idea about their surroundings. What would it look like to update an evacuation map to work in modern times, because I don't think they ever really worked.”

The convergence of an a-ha moment

“I saw a lot of things happening at once: neuroscience of the brain, and the discovery of the GPS of the brain, all these mass shootings and casualty at events. The ability to put lightweight tools together on the web (not the high-end game engine stuff I thought it was). This new level of accessibility all kind of came together into this moment where I was like, ‘I think it would be really interesting to make the new evacuation map, because they're everywhere, for everything, all property, planes, vessels, everywhere. And I just became obsessed, because I knew that I could do it easily. I was building tons of digital twins which is a replica of a physical process or place.

The mission of LOCI is to build awareness in everyone, and give people whose job it is to keep other people safe the tools that provide the right information, at the right time, in the right place.”

How do you describe something deeply technical to your parents?

Everywhere we go, there's somebody whose job it is to keep us safe in that place. Samantha says they have tools that are from the stone ages! LOCI is built to help them give us better information to prevent people from getting stuck to our phones trying to find a way out, getting lost somewhere, or doing the wrong thing in an emergency.

Creating a company around a risk

We're trying to offer simulation training at scale. And that doesn't necessarily have to be fully immersive, you just have to have things that are hyper contextual to your environment, or move you through your environment. That could be like an AR (augmented reality) scavenger hunt, where you have scenarios like ‘if this trash can’s on fire, where's the closest extinguisher?’. It's a way to automate how someone learns about a specific space, in context, with a very specific risk reduction task.

Changing context in the pandemic

“I thought we picked pretty future proof space.” Evacuation training was LOCI's first space fulfilling their vision. When the pandemic hit, scenarios of 70,000 people looking for exits before they went to a concert was redundant! No one was evacuating anywhere!

And we really realized that a fire is just like a virus. A virus is an invisible fire and you have to act accordingly in shared spaces in order for it to not spread. And there's just some key concepts to that, that were really easy to translate. And it was in that moment that we really realized, Oh, we, we built a game engine for risk! Because we were really in a matter of moments able to reuse our tools to make a game that taught the science behind COVID.”

Funding an innovation lab

“I walked into a YWCA and asked if they had any adult evening accounting programs. And they're like, oh, what for? And I said, I just need it for a small business. They said, you might qualify for this youth mean business program. These two business leaders picked 20 people under 30 to put together a business plan and pitch it and if they were successful, they got five grand to start their business. I had my first pitch and my investor gave me enough money to buy the mixer that I needed to start live streaming shows. And then I got other friends and family investment.” That was the start for Samantha.

Fun, frank advice from Samantha

“I have a poster on my wall that says ‘move slow and fix things’. Which is really, to me, the opposite of ‘move fast and break things’, which is what Mark Zuckerberg likes to do. Moving a little slower allows for deeper thought and when you can think deeper, you can solve bigger problems, and when you solve bigger, you can take way bigger steps forward. And so that's sort of my mantra. I guess how that shows up in practice is to invest in yourself and build processes. Take the time to build process and build team because you're only going to move as fast as the people around you at a certain point.”

Listen here to the entire interview: 

https://iamamillionairesonowwhat.libsyn.com/ep208-building-a-game-engine-for-risk