On the first episode of The Immersive Wire is Or Lev-Cohen, a final-year Industrial Design student from Tel-Aviv. Lev-Cohen is looking into how immersive tech can be used with drones to provide people with a flying experience that they can control. In particular, he focuses on where his passion comes from, the intricacies for designing products for fringe audiences, and his views on the future of virtual reality.

Learn about how a student got into virtual reality, including how he built his expertise and experience while studying. Or also explores drones, flying, and how to use immersive for film.

Thank you for inviting me. My name is Or Lev-Cohen. I’m an industrial designer from Tel Aviv, Israel. And excited to be here.

Oh, my job I’m an industrial designer and project manager for a firm called Nick Kuda, designer. It is one of the most veteran design firms in Israel, and it’s based in Tel Aviv by the beach. And so yeah, so I am a project manager there, which means I’m the head of a few projects. And that’s about it.

Well, actually, my day job isn’t so much really, apart from the leading firm in HMD design in Israel, but my link to the exterior industry is from my work in school. I’m a fourth year industrial design student. So some close to finishing my term. And my graduation project is a flying experience in XR. So yeah, that’s how long I’m all into that.

The whole the whole idea is that the person experiencing the flight is the same person in control. Being in control is what differentiates this from seeing drone footage on YouTube. Let’s say you can see amazing footage, but you don’t feel like you’re flying even if it was, Or let’s say 360 video, which I don’t think currently exists of drone footage, which is a publicly available when you’re in control and you can go or basically fly wherever you want. That’s the X Factor in that experience.

So you’re actually touching on all the points that are important in this project. We talked about intuitive control and we talked about the basically doing it for as many people as possible and not for the most tech savvy or wealthiest people. So another point is the limitations. The first big point of friction is having to buy something so expensive. A lot of people are not experiencing flying and XR in general because of those costs and not only money, but also social barriers. Like, for example, 97 per cent of drone flyers are men. That’s crazy.

Hmm, that’s a difficult question, especially nowadays. But hopefully I’m working to be taken a meaningful role in creating these enabling projects, and definitely driving forward in the XR space. I’m not sure which opportunities will come my way. But I really believe that that XR is the future and especially AR and I would love to be to be part of it.

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