>> Hey, everyone.
We have got an amazing episode that
I think it'll going to blow your mind.
We have got Alex from Mixed Reality in Power Apps today,
and he's going to show you exactly how to set up models in
Power Apps and show you how you can actually
take technology and bring it into the real world.
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>> Hello. Welcome back to LessCodeMorePower.
Today, I'm brimming with
excitement because it's the best episode ever.
We are combining my two favorite things in the entire world,
mixed reality and Power Apps.
I'm not even kidding. Am I, Sarah?
>> No. Hey, everyone. I'm Sarah.
We're joined with Alex today.
We're going to tell you all about Alex.
Please introduce yourself and explain,
give the audience a little bit of an insight, Alex,
in terms of your journey in Microsoft,
because I definitely think it's super
insightful and super inspiring.
Then also, some of your interests and really how you
got into working with this amazing technology.
>> I'm Alex. I started at Microsoft awhile
ago working as an intern on teams across Azure and SQL,
where I hopped around a little bit before I joined full-time as
a employee on SQL Security and Metadata Team.
I spent the first few years of my career working on that backend,
very low-level platform code.
That all changed in around 2016 when I tried
out the HTC Vive and the Oculus Rift for the first time.
My world was just completely shattered and changed.
I knew that mixed reality and virtual reality,
augmented reality all had the potential to completely change
the way that we do business and the way that
we do entertainment as well.
>> Just to interrupt you there,
I just want to pull this out.
I'm a planner, I love planning stuff and I
definitely believe in reassessing and rapid reassessment.
But you just bought the HTC Vive on a whim.
You've never planned to, it was just,
"I'm just going to go ahead and buy it," and that just
completely changed everything for you, didn't it?
>> Yeah. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision.
The Oculus Rift had just sold out
on the first day and I saw that the Vive was going on pre-order.
I was like, I love video games,
I love all virtual technology stuff.
I've never really gotten into VR.
I bought it and then the day
it arrived I put it on for the first time,
I was like, "Holy crap.
This is incredible."
I think, like that magical moment,
it just completely changed the way that I viewed my life.
Within a year or two,
I didn't know nothing about making 3D content.
I was never really great at 3D math,
and then I just dove into it
full force and it completely changed my life.
>> That's pretty cool. Taking something,
because you don't have to be this amazing expert
at something to get good at it.
Donna, you can speak to this as well with all your fashion stuff,
is the fact that you knew nothing about it.
You chose that you want to and then you can go ahead and learn it.
>> It's just curiosity.
One thing Sarah and I have seen over
and over is the people who do the
best in tech are highly
curious about things they have no clue about.
They just go for it.
It's not like, "I'm curious. Let me read an article."
It's, "I'm going to go buy a Vive and change
my entire apartment to be virtual reality
capable and instead move my walls so I can have
a whole landscape to not crash into when I
try out my new environment." That is awesome.
>> Speaking of, Alex,
tell us a little bit about this tiny detail you
forgot to mention about cult theater.
>> Yeah. In college, I co-founded and
ran a cult movie club with my friends.
We started out as a small club of three members,
and in the first year we grew to the fastest growing club
at Virginia Tech with 39 members.
We showed all kinds of so-bad-it's-good movies.
My favorite being Uninvited.
You might have heard of Snakes on a Plane,
but you've probably never heard of Cat on a Boat.
>> No.
>> Which is kind of the plot of that movie.
There's a genetically modified cat who escapes from
a research facility who has a penchant for
murdering Wall Street investors.
It is a pretty interesting movie.
>> I need this in my life.
>> I don't know how you don't know about this,
Sarah, that you do screenings at your house.
>> You just got to see it. I'm going to do this.
I'm going to make this club too.
You've changed my life.
>> We are speechless.
This does not happen, ever.
[inaudible] cover, mixed reality,
so we hear you've brought something to show us.
>> Yeah. We can go ahead and hop into the demo.
Let me just bring it up here.
This is Greendale Cooling.
It's a small sample app I made just to show how
you can take a AC sales field scenario
and transform it with mixed reality.
It's going to look really similar to other Power Apps,
but we've added some geospatial and
mixed reality goodies to make it really pop.
First thing we're going to do is hop over to
the Select an Opportunity screen here.
You can see that we can select from
a map different sales opportunities that we might have.
It's really seamless.
You can also use the Address Input control that we've added to
type in an address and it will automatically pick
the closest sales opportunity to us.
So we're going to go with William G at 1 Microsoft way.
We're going to go over to the Inventory screen,
which is just going to look like a normal
Power App gallery you've seen before.
But if we go over to the actual product page,
you'll notice that we have this little toggle in
the corner for 2D, 3D mode.
When we toggle into 3D mode,
we can actually view that product in
three-dimensions and see it from all angles.
You can easily then, from there,
hop into the mixed reality mode by
clicking that other button that we've
added in the bottom-right corner here.
Here, you can place it in your space and see whether or
not that that AC is going to fit.
Just probably not the greatest idea to have
a full industrial-sized air conditioner
in your room or in your house.
I think it's probably not going to fit for us,
so we can use some of our other mixed reality tools
to hone in on the best product for this customer.
Hopping out here, we can use the "Measure NMR" button to actually
filter by size and
find what products are actually going to fit for us.
Here you can just draw a shape on the ground,
and then once you've drawn that shape we'll use
Power Automate to filter the results that we
get back from here to actually take that list and
bring it down to only things that will fit in
that bounding box that we just drew.
>> That's amazing.
>> That is so cool.
>> You'll see that we actually only have
four AC units that will fit,
so we can go ahead and hop over to that screen.
But we don't have a 3D model for this one,
but that's okay because you can also just go ahead and place
that image and you can get a pretty good idea
of what that thing is going to look like here.
This works really well for things like shelving or just anything
that has a really 2D footprint and interface with it.
But it doesn't necessarily tell
you the dimensions and sizing of it.
But for our case here, it's pretty good.
Like I said, that doesn't tell you everything about it,
it doesn't tell you how it's actually going to fit there.
It doesn't tell the full story.
You can also just go ahead and place
a wire frame of that using the same dimensions.
That combined with the image control,
we're pretty confident that
this air conditioner is going to fit here.
We can go ahead and take this as reference and we're pretty
confident now that this AC unit
is going to fit for this customer in this space.
>> That is awesome.
>> Now, we can just go through adding the quote.
We can attach some photos that we just took in
mixed reality to that quote
so that we have it there for the future.
Then we can send that off to CDS
and e-mail the customer with that information.
>> That's amazing. From a sales perspective, it's great.
>> I love it.
>> This is taking really a normal workflow that you'd see and
just adding mixed reality to it to get rid
of those rough edges that might exist.
You don't have to take out a measuring tape or do anything,
you can do everything in the context of the application.
>> That is sweet.
>> How does a layperson like me or Sarah,
how do we build this into our app?
>> Yeah. Here is a version of the app with none
of the mixed reality capabilities added to it yet,
so I can just show, really quickly,
how we can attach mixed reality to it and transform this app.
Let's start here on the actual product's page.
So when we're here,
the first thing we're going to do is we're going to go up to
the Mixed Reality tab in the ribbon,
and we're going to add the View in MR button.
The View, MR button is what actually drives
the Mixed Reality view that we saw,
where you used either an image or a 3D model.
So if we come in and we add this button,
we change the view to icon,
which I like because it just makes it look really clean,
and then you can bind it to the model that's sort in CDS.
The first thing we want to do is we want to set
this source property to this pre-configured data.
So this line that I've just copied in here.
It might look like gobbledygook at first,
but it's actually quite simple.
We're saying if we have a model for this product,
display the model, otherwise,
display the image, and that's it.
Now, it's already hooked up to show that image,
and we can just bind it to set up the length,
width, and height so
that it matches the dimensions of our product.
>> Nice. That's pretty good.
So organizations didn't have to
have three modals for
everything to be able to use this functionality?
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. I think the reality is
that as someone who came in as a beginner,
the reality is that 3D models
and 3D content generation is really hard,
and I think one thing I really
wanted to emphasize when I started working on
Mixed Reality for PowerApps is the idea that you
don't have to have a wealth of 3D content coming in.
You can just come in with small things,
a small scenario that you think can
be made better with mixed reality,
and you can find the ways
to generate that content and put it in there.
As you get more and more involved with it,
you're going to hopefully fall in love just like I did,
and just want to find any way you can keep that going.
All right. The other thing we saw was the wire frame.
We have a different control here,
the [inaudible] MR button.
We're going to do the exact same thing that we did with the model,
where we just set it up with the same width, height,
and depth properties that we had set on the model as well.
Now, they're going to be bound to the same data.
>> That's pretty good. So you're just using
the selected product from
the gallery in the previous screen, aren't you?
>> Yeah. You need to change the unit of measurement to
inches because a 74-meter air conditioner is terrifying.
So that's it. Now, our product gallery page
is actually all set up with mixed reality.
Coming back, the other thing we saw was the measurement filter.
To set that up, we have a different control,
the Measure in MR button.
So we can just drop that in here,
bind it, place it so it looks nice.
We're going to want to set that up.
In the Measure button, we have various different moods.
In this case, we use the volume mode,
which allows you to just draw
that cube that we drew on the ground.
Then we're going to do something a little bit more advanced here.
So I have pre-set up a flow
that takes the output of that and generates the dimensions.
All it really does is it takes the output of
our measurement control and walks
the path of that volume you just
drew and calculates out the bounding box.
What we do here is we take all of that and
we run it through Power Automate,
and then we pull out those dimensions and use them
as a filter that we have set up for this list.
Then the same thing here, we also want to use
inches because that's the unit we're working with.
Now, it's completely setup.
We've gone from having an app with
no mixed reality to having one that uses
mixed reality in two different ways in five minutes.
I think it's pretty cool that you can do
this thing that used to take a team of experts in five minutes.
>> That is wonderful and so cool.
So now you just hit play and you got it.
>> Yeah.
>> Amazing. Do you mind quickly showing
people how to turn on these mixed reality features at all?
It's over in File Advanced.
So right there.
>> The first thing you have to do is you have to set
up the ability to toggle on experimental features,
which is a tenant admin permission.
If you come into File Settings Advanced and see this,
you need to contact your IT administrator.
But if this is here,
if you scroll all the way to the bottom,
you'll see this new little field, Mixed Reality features.
Turning this on and off will
enable both showing Mixed Reality bar here in the ribbon,
as well as in the tree view here.
Both of these give you access to the same controls.
>> Yeah. All of you who are asking,
how do you turn on this MR thing?
Admin center, turn on ability to see experimental features,
then come to experimental features,
turn that on, and you're good.
Have fun with [inaudible] Try it, send us feedback.
>> All right. I have some homework
I want to give to all you viewers at home.
Just really starting to get engaged
with Mixed Reality content and 3D content in PowerApps.
The first thing I want you to do is go and find a GOB model.
There is a lot of these available on
the internet that you can use as well.
We probably have some links
to resources in the comments down below,
and just add the view in 3D component
that lets you view a 3D model in the context of the browser,
and just start playing around with that and seeing it.
Then add a View in MR button to
your app and bind it to the same 3D model.
Then I want you-all to go and take that model
and view it on your phone using the view in MR component,
and just start really engaging with 3D content,
and hopefully, you'll have that same magic moment I had,
and it will start letting your imagination run wild,
and let us know what cool things that you think
of and share it with us on the PowerApps Idea Forum.
>> There you go. I'm just going to go ahead and say
that's the best homework anyone's ever given on the show.
>> It raised the bar a bit.
>> Yeah, you raised the bar completely, Alex.
This was amazing.
Thank you so much for being here and sharing first your journey,
but second, something so actionable and real, and so useful.
I can imagine this being used
in so many industries across the board.
Dear friends out there,
we're just starting with the Mixed Reality and PowerApps journey.
We have no idea what your use cases are, only you know,
so please do try out
the tools that we have right now and give us a ton of
feedback so we can co-create with you and
make them what they need to be.
Awesome. Until next time. I'm Donna.
>> I'm Sarah.
>> Our special guest today was Alex.
Thank you so much for being here.
See you next time. Bye.
>> Bye, everyone.
>> Bye.
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