XR for Business: Recent Episodes
Alan Smithson from MetaVRse
Alan is back in the podcasting saddle — alongside his partner in life and business Julie Smithson, plus colleague and marketing expert Alex Colgan — to take a look back at the last year of happenings in the XR metaverse.
2021 was quite a strange year, but there were several promising updates in the XR industry to make 2022 something to look forward to, and our panel discusses just a few; NFTs, Facebook, the Metaverse, and much more.
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2020's been a hell of a year, huh? Not just in XR, but for everyone around the world. But the COVID-19 pandemic and the year's other trials have definitely left their mark on the Metaverse (and MetaVRse), for good and ill. Alan chats with Julie, and VP of Marketing Alex Colgan, about all the biggest changes the XR sector saw this year in our 150th broadcast.
Alex: That's one way to start a podcast.
Alan: Well, I figured since we're about to end 2020, and I also figure that since this is our 150th episode, I would crack a beer while we record this episode, because what a year we have had. It has been awesome and awful all at the same time. This year has seen the demise of many companies. It has seen the birth of new companies. It has seen explosive growth of others. And wow, what a year. All I can say is, yeah, cheers to everybody who made it through this year unscathed. Even if you happen to be caught in the crossfire, lose your job, whatever the circumstances, know that as a community, we will get through this. We're all in this together. And I want to just say to all of you, thank you for the effort and the work you've put into the XR industry. It is wonderful. And on behalf of everybody in this industry, we're here for you. We're here to help each and every one of us get through this together. So I want to just start with that.
And moving on, I want to say that 2021 is looking pretty damn amazing to begin with for the XR world. We saw a world go into lockdown. We saw teachers try to teach online. We saw the entire economy move online instantly. And we're not going back to the old world, the way it was. So the virtual worlds that we know are now serving us in ways of gaming, which they always have. But now expanding that, that whole gaming idea and bringing it into retail. Balenciaga just did this amazing 3D retail experience. We're also bringing it into our concerts. We had massive concerts this year by Marshmallow and others, who attracted millions and millions of viewers. And not just viewers, but participants. And this is something that I think is really, really cool, because people were actively engaged. We saw Burning Man go online this year. And together as an XR community, there's no better time than right now to blow this up. Our VP of Marketing and Strategy, Alex Colgan, will turn the tables and interview me on what happened in 2020 and what we can expect from 2021. So, Alex, welcome to the show.
Alex: Hey, thanks for having me on once again. It's yeah, it's been a hell of a year, definitely the sort of year that could drive one to drink. But I think we're all looking forward to 2021, and what it's going to mean for all of us. I wanted to take this opportunity to look back not just at the industry, but also at MetaVRse over the past year, it's been a bit of a rocky road, an exciting road. We've closed a number of different projects. We've made some really major advances on some of the core features. I was wondering if you could maybe talk a little bit about that before we start looking at the big stories of the year.
Alan: Certainly. I think the biggest thing for us is that in June this year, we launched the MetaVRse engine and it was something that we were super proud of. But at the same time, when you look back, if you're not embarrassed by your first release of your product, you released too late. Well, I can say that in the last nine months we have come leaps and bounds. We have a full universal system now, that it works on every browser, every device, it works everywhere. And we pushed an update that allows you to do that, without having to code. Of course, we've always had the JavaScript editor on there and you can wrap code in five different languages into this. But the ability for non-programmers to participate in the 3D revolution, I think is the biggest accomplishment we
The world received a gift three years ago, in the form of AR technology from the likes of Google and Apple - ARKit and ARCore. But most businesses had no one on-staff at-hand to take advantage of this gift without some extensive upskilling to do. John Martin shares how BundlAR makes AR easy for everyone, and what is needed for wider adoption.
Alan: Hey, everyone, I'm Alan Smithson, and today we're speaking with John Martin, the CEO and co-founder of BUNDLR, an augmented reality platform company empowering training, learning, and development innovators with on-demand and mobile immersive experiences. John and I met at the VR/AR Association Chicago meetup, and would become amazing friends as we built the future of communications together. In this interview, we will discuss one of the largest barriers to the widespread adoption of AR and what organizations need to do in order to deploy AR experiences instantly and on a global scale. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast.
John, it has been a pleasure to get to know you over these years, and I'm super excited to have you on the show. Welcome to the show.
John: Thank you, Alan. And I'm looking forward to a great conversation with you, as always.
Alan: It's been a couple of years since we got to know each other. I stayed at your house in Chicago. That was very lovely of you, I got to meet your family. And I've watched your platform go from kind of the infancy stages to being a global phenomenon, now. Let's-- I want you to have the stage to really tell people what BUNDLAR is all about and what you guys are doing.
John: Well, BUNDLAR, we had a pretty clear mission about a year and a half ago. We were very fortunate to be working with some of the world's great innovators on what I'd call augmented reality projects. It could have been a prospective student tour at Arizona State University. Google gave a grant to the DuSable Museum in Chicago, so they wanted to reboot the Mayor Harold Washington exhibit. Proctor & Gamble had projects at upcoming conventions and shows. Remember when we used to have those? And from all of these engagements--
Alan: In real shows, like IRL, in real life? Like in--?
John: Yeah, like in person, back in the good old days. Oh, do I miss that! But at any rate, what we realized was when Google and Apple gave this gift of AR to the world just three summers ago, saying they were all-in with AR, meaning that the hardware was going to work, it was like, wow. Most corporate IT or marketing teams really didn't have anybody on board their staffs that could take advantage of this amazing capability of the mobile device. So at any rate, for us, there's was like, well, what if we could take all of these engagements that we had created, and put them into a repeatable self-serve augmented reality content management system and platform? So it was a very big idea, but we thought one that was worth the journey. So we started to build out a team of 12 really focused AR professionals on the development side to build out this platform.
Alan: Well, I know your CTO, Matt [Wren]. I mean, his whole experience in life was creating content management systems for massive corporations, so--
John: Exactly. So it started with Matt and Gareth [Davies], who's on the product side, but really knows AR. We were so blessed to find literally the man that wrote the book on Unity [chuckles] Joe Hocking, to join the team. And Lewis Gardner on our CMS. So we were very fortunate to have a great team come together. And we shared a vision, which is, let's build out an augmented reality platform that would make it super easy and affordable for businesses and organizations to weave in augmented reality c
Plumbing a problem for developers in Germany, where old pipe systems can make renovating any structure a challenge. Holo-Light’s Florian Haspinger wants to help with problems like this using XR technologies, to enable an XR economy.
Alan: Good morning, everyone, it's Alan Smithson here, the host of the XR for Business podcast. And today we have a very special guest, Florian Haspinger, CEO and one of the founders of Holo-Light. And today we're going to be learning how Holo-Light is redefining engineering across automotive, manufacturing, chemical, and myriad other industries using XR technologies. So with that, thank you and welcome to the XR for Business podcast.
Florian, how are you, my friend?
Florian: Hi, Alan. Thanks, I'm fine. It's a pleasure to be here and thank you very much for having me.
Alan: It's so great to have you on the show. And I'm really excited. But for people who don't know, why don't you just kind of tell us a little bit about what is Holo-Light and how did you get into it?
Florian: Sure, of course. Let me take a bit of time and I will tell you how things started. We have a few stories back in the beginning of everything. This would explain a little bit better how the story would end up. So good stories should start with something like "Once upon a time, there was a big economy and The Problem," and so on. Or "It was a cold, dark winter night in the mountains back in 2015, snow was falling down and you saw the light of the lantern outside flickering inside an old house." But honestly, that's not how it started.
Alan: [laughs] I was all-- you had me on the edge of my seat! "Once upon a time, it's snowing." I could picture it!
Florian: [laughs]
Alan: [laughs] Alright, so carry on.
Florian: We were really frustrated students. We studied theoretical physics in Tyrol. And as a theoretical study -- especially on physics -- also, the study is extremely theoretical. And also the funder. And we sat together in my old child's room. So it was a 2015, around in the beginning. And we were overthinking our life decisions. And just to notice, we were just 24 years old and we thought about how we can invest our lifetime in something, something makes a difference in the world outside. There we thought about how can we make things easier or better in matters of industry and engineering, because also our background was a little bit in engineering. And later and after some silence and after a few questions, Alex [Werlberger] -- our CTO -- came up with the idea to think about augmented and virtual reality. And then we started to talk about how this kind of technology would be able to drive digitization, revolutionize industries, and change the way we consume content in the future.
Alan: What was that, to put a timeframe on this?
Florian: It was in January-February 2015. To be honest, it was really a little bit snowy out there.
Alan: So here you are in the beautiful mountains of Tyrol, probably doing some skiing. Snow's glistening, your CTO says "Aha! I think it's going to be XR!" Then what?
Florian: [chuckles] Exactly. And after this, this brilliant thought about AR and VR we just said, "Okay, yes, let's do it." And we founded a company in April 2015. And after founding the company we sat together and said, "Okay, now we have a company. But what about the business idea and the business model?" So first we had the idea to drive digitization with XR, then we founded the company, and then afterwards we had to build up the business model. So it was a little bit funny in the beginning. But in-- I remember it was later 2015 when we were able to get t
Last year, Deloitte’s technology allowed golf fans to browse three historic holes right in their homes with XR technology; this year, they recreated the entire 18 holes of the U.S. Open. Alan chats with Allan Cook & Kaitlyn Kuczer who drive home how immersive tech is the next technological leap forward.
Alan: Welcome back to the XR for Business podcast, it's Alan Smithson, your host today. And today we have two very special guests: Kaitlyn Kuczer and Allan Cook from Deloitte's Digital Reality practice. They're working with clients to develop and implement their strategies, pilots, and technology solutions in virtual, augmented, and mixed reality, 360, spatial, and immersive; all known as XR. We're going to dive into an incredible project, the US Golf Association using augmented reality to bring a live golf tournament to your living room in full 3D. In addition, we're going to be discussing the multimillion dollar XR practice at Deloitte and how they're serving the needs of customers around the world. All that and more coming up next, on the XR for Business podcast.
Allan and Kaitlyn, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us.
Allan: Good morning.
Alan: Good morning. Where are you guys calling in from now?
Kaitlyn: We are coming in from Denver, Colorado.
Alan: Amazing. And so let me ask you a quick question. How did you both get into XR, and what was the spark that you saw? And then we'll talk about the Deloitte practice and how that's evolved over the last little bit. And then I want to really dive into this amazing experience you guys made at the USGA. So perhaps, Kaitlyn and Allan, tell us how you kind of got into this, and what was the specific factor to get into XR within Deloitte?
Allan: So I'll jump in here. Kaitlyn and I have been working in what we call digital reality -- it's all things: AR, VR, spatial, immersive, and nowadays 3D -- for about four years. Originally, Deloitte was looking at that next generation of exponential technologies, to look at where we think our next generation of consulting revenues, consulting technologies are going to be coming from. Within that, we'd started off a kind of a deep dive analysis of the marketplace and quickly realized that there was really a huge potential for not only ourselves, but for many technology firms, many consulting firms. Since then, we've grown to between 70 and 100 dedicated staff now within the US. We are working with a huge variety of clients. Our main focus tends to be in four broad areas. Firstly doing a lot of strategy work with clients, so helping them to figure out where to play, how to win, where they should be experimenting in this area, but also where they should be implementing projects and helping them to realize significant returns. We're doing a lot of work in immersive learning. I like to say, if it's too dangerous, too difficult, or too expensive to do the training in the real world, why wouldn't you do it in a virtual world? The next big area we're focusing on is really that frontline work, field service engineers, see-what-I-see, do-what-I-do, digital twins. And then finally what we call digital reality experiences. So this is a lot more consumer facing, whether that's retail type events or -- like you mentioned in the intro -- the work that we did with the US Golf Association on the US Open over the last few years.
Alan: So there's a pretty wide swath or pretty wide spectrum here. You've got consumer facing application -- bringing the USGA into your living room -- but then you've also got companies that are manufacturing products that want to see maybe a digital twin of a factory, or even support systems where you can point your phone at a manufacturing machine and h
Talon Simulations was making great strides in the location-based entertainment industry, until COVID-19 hit. Now they’re pivoting the technology to suit more training-based use cases, and CEO Brandon Naids is on the show to explain how.
Alan: Hey, everyone, welcome to the XR for Business podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today's guest is Brandon Naids. He's the CEO and co-founder of Talon Simulations. They are a provider of virtual reality experiences, but not just any virtual reality experiences. They have full motion simulators for entertainment and training. We're going to dig into how these amazing simulators can push forward the reality behind virtual reality. So, Brandon, welcome to the show and thanks for joining me.
Brandon: Yeah, thanks a lot for having me, Alan. Definitely look forward to our discussion.
Alan: I'm really excited. You get to play with probably the coolest toys in the VR space. You have motion simulators for racing games, and it's not all fun and games, but man, you must have a pretty cool office.
Brandon: Yeah, we definitely have a lot of fun here, and we used to take the simulators home for weekend testing, but kind of got to the point where we play with it enough at the office. [chuckles]
Alan: [chuckles] Do you have Thursday night is race night, and everybody shows up and they make bets on each other?
Brandon: Yeah, usually Friday afternoons, it's a good time to decompress and have some competition. So it was a lot of fun.
Alan: And you guys are right in the heart of simulation country in Orlando, right?
Brandon: Yeah, we are. And that's definitely been one of the main factors that we attribute to the success we have, it's just being in the heart of the amusement industry, as well as simulation and training. It's a big hub. And gaming technologies, so couldn't have picked a better spot.
Alan: It's true and I love the fact that you're kind of right in the middle of entertainment or training, so that your teams can enjoy the gaming aspect and the fun, but then also the serious aspect and really bring this technology to businesses in ways that can improve their training and improve their safety, as well. So with that, this is the XR for Business podcast. But I wanted you to just maybe introduce Talon Simulations and kind of give us the elevator pitch, if you would.
Brandon: Yeah. So Talon Simulations specializes in dynamic and immersive experiences for entertainment centers and training institutes. We'll create cockpit based experiences that we're able to adapt for specific projects, or we'll develop our own specifically for the arcade industries. We've put together a comprehensive turnkey, fully automated virtual reality arcade cabinet that we put together all the hardware and the software. And now we launched last year. And you're able to just purchase it, plug it into the wall and run it, whether with a credit card or arcade card reader, or put in free play, whatever the business model is. And for our training products, they are a little bit more customized for each project. Or we sell just the simulators to different integrators, and they're able to take our SDK and create their own experiences within Unreal or Unity.
Alan: Amazing.
Brandon: And those are really the exciting ones, because we'll work with universities, or digital marketing companies, or military contractors, and all sorts of different scenarios have been developed with our motion simulators. So we've seen a wide spectrum of use cases.
Alan: All right. So on that, I'm looking at your website now and there's people racing a
The ability to bring the sense of touch into the virtual is the final frontier of true immersion, and some of that technology already exists. Haptics, however, can be prohibitively expensive, even for some enterprise. Gijs den Butter visits the podcast to explain how SenseGlove can bring that power to business for a fraction of the cost.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today, we have a very special guest, Gijs Den Butter. He is the CEO of SenseGlove. Now, if you're not familiar with haptics, we're going to get right into this. It's going to be awesome. But before we get to that, I just want to say, Gijs, it's really a pleasure to have you on the show. Welcome to the show, my friend.
Gijs: Thank you so much. Real pleasure to be here.
Alan: It's really, really cool what you guys have built. A little while ago, I had the opportunity to try haptic gloves, and I put them on and I was able to reach out in virtual reality and grab an object and feel that object in my hand. And I can tell you, it was one of the most incredible ways to connect the physical world with the digital world. It was an amazing experience. And I'm really, really excited to have Gijs explain us and walk us through SenseGlove and what they're doing. Not only have you built haptic glove, but you've built a haptic glove that has force feedback. And so when you reach out and grab something, it stops in the shape of whatever you're reaching. Like, just explain how you got into the where you are right now. Where did this come from?
Gijs: Yeah, I think this force feedback component is indeed the crucial part of feeling in VR, because you can have haptic feedback -- like vibro-motors and those kind of things -- but really the moment when you're grasping an object and you feel that there is something that isn't actually there, that is a key moment in what touch enables you in VR. And then you can really interact in VR, as you would do in a normal situation. So, yeah, with this belief, we started off in 2015 from a robotics group at the University of Delft -- Technical University of Delft -- here in the Netherlands. And we tried to get-- to make a wearable that is, well, doing exactly this -- so touch in VR -- but was also affordable for every professional use case. We started firstly with a use case of rehabilitation, but we then found that this rehabilitation-only use case was a too limited scenario. And that was mainly because we were on a larger business fair called the Hannover Messe. And one of our current clients, Volkswagen, came to us and said, "Well, this training of impaired people, could you also do that with healthy people, so that they also can experience feeling in VR?" And that was kind of the start. We pivoted from a research group that was searching for a quest where their technology could be used in VR, to a company called SenseGlove. And that's where we're today. So in 2018, we launched our first product. That is really a development kit where researchers or R&D organizations -- like within Volkswagen -- can test, "OK, what does this component of touch add to my virtual experiences?"
Alan: How is Volkswagen using it? I mean, that's a really, really amazing company. Volkswagen Group owns pretty much everything: Porsche, Audi, and BMW, and so on.
Gijs: As maybe the followers of this podcast know that Volkswagen is quite a progressive company if it goes down to VR. So what their two use cases that they're interested in, which one of them is the training of assembly personnel inside of your environment. You can imagine if you are about to become an assembly worker in Volkswagen, you need to assemble those cars. The first day on that line is a pretty challenging day.
Alan:
If you sell a couch that comes in 1,000 different patters and colours, what’s cheaper: printing out a swatch for each variation, or creating a configurator that lets you do that digitally and photo-realistically? The obvious answer is the ethos behind ThreeKit’s product customization software, which CTO Ben Houston joins Alan to discuss.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today, we have a very special guest, Ben Houston. He's the founder and CTO of Threekit. Threekit's a platform used by some of the world's top brands like Crate & Barrel and Steelcase. And what they're able to do is create amazing visual customer experiences through virtual photography, augmented reality, 3D imagery, saving companies enormous amounts of time and money, having to get these photographs, set up studios. And at a time of COVID, we just can't do that anyway. So I'm really excited to invite Ben to the podcast today. Ben, thank you so much for joining us.
Ben: Hey, thank you, Alan, for such a great intro.
Alan: Oh, it's my pleasure, man. You guys have really been working hard in the space. You've been in the space since, what, 2005, I believe?
Ben: In the 3D space for quite some time, but in doing 3D for e-commerce, we've been doing that since 2015.
Alan: Wow. So five years of experience. Let's kind of go back to 2015. What did you start doing and what are you doing now? What are the services that Threekit offers, and how has that changed from 2015?
Ben: When we first got into it, we were actually-- our background's Hollywood visual effects. We started making-- this company originally was creating software for Hollywood films, and we did that quite successfully on a lot of films. And then what we did is we started moving that 3D content creation to the web. Once we had done that, we did that around 2013. In 2015, people started using our 3D content creation for the web, for e-commerce applications. Specifically, they were doing it for configurable products. So interactive 3D product configurators. This is-- Steelcase is a good example of an early adopter of this technology. We started doing that, and that had a lot of success, especially for companies that have massive configuration problems, such as Steelcase's office furniture. As we evolved down that path, the next thing we started doing was virtual photography or also called synthetic photography. That's where you will create a number of renderings of products for companies. A good example of that is Crate & Barrel. We've created hundreds and hundreds of thousands of renders for them, of their furniture, and it all looks real. And so now they don't have to build every piece of furniture and every fabric and then take a picture of it. We can just render those off.
Alan: Gotta be some massive cost savings. We'll get into the numbers later. But wow, that's like-- if you don't have to take photographs, I mean, I can only imagine a photo shoot's expensive to begin with.
Ben: And every one of their sofas is a couple of thousand dollars. So it's just simply not possible. And then what we've done more recently is the rise of AR. That has really been embraced by furniture realtors specifically, and so that allows them to see the furniture, how it would fit in their room or office. And so those are the three main offerings that our platform has.
To recap, you have configurators, so companies that have -- maybe it's a chair -- and it comes in 50 different colors, and five different lumbar supports, and people can configure their office furniture, or chair, or any product, really. The second is -- which is a term I've never heard -- synthetic photography, basically being able to cr
Avid listeners will have noticed a few weeks without a podcast - that’s because Alan’s been hard at work behind-the-scenes building capital for several MetaVRse projects, including the MetaVRse Engine. This gave Alan a chance to reflect on the investment landscape of 2020, and is joined by VP of Marketing Alex Colgan to discuss the new normal that COVID has ushered into the VC world.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today, we have a very special episode. We're going to be talking about the investment landscape of virtual and augmented reality as it pertains to investment in startups, companies going public. What is the investment landscape look like between now and the next few years? How are things going to be funded and what can we expect from the markets in terms of returns? And what can investors really count on to drive those returns as high as possible? Today, I'm joined by the MetaVRse VP of Marketing, our wonderful Alex Colgan. He's going to be joining me today and he's going to be interviewing me today.
Alex: Hey.
Alan: Hey, what's up, Alex? Fun fact about Alex: he also lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Or near Halifax. He's in the eastern part of Canada. So, Alex, thanks for joining me on the show today.
Alex: Canadian born and bred. Glad to be taking over the reins today. Thanks for having me on. And, yeah, let's flip it around.
Alan: It's really interesting, Alex, before we get started I have to really just punctuate a couple of things. Over the last few years, there has been an enormous amount of capital invested into virtual and augmented reality startups, in the hundreds of millions, billions of dollars. And it almost feels like we are going through this kind of winter, where investments have dried up in the area. So I'm really excited to talk about that, because I believe that as much as we're going into physical winter in Canada, I believe that we're going into a beautiful spring with regards to the investment landscape of this technology. So I'm really excited to dig into it today.
Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Bad economies are often some of the best times to invest, and there are also some of the best times to build a startup. COVID has had everybody scrambling over the past six months, and trying to identify the best path forward for the future. As a result of that, we've seen a lot of different sectors have been getting shaken up as a result. What are some of the biggest disruptions that we've seen over the past six months in some of these areas?
Alan: Well, I think the major one is that with regards to investment, everybody just closed their wallets. COVID came and people went, "OK, there's so much uncertainty, just stop everything." And so pretty much all investment across all sectors dried up in March, and basically hasn't really come back until you were starting to see funding rounds happen now in September. And I believe this will continue October-November. Now we find ourselves in a time where there's actually a lot of fresh capital sitting on the sidelines that needs to be deployed. And if it's not deployed, it's losing money. So you have a ton of new startups on the market as well. We have a platform called xrcollaboration.com, and there's been over 70 startups that have created XR collaboration tools that allow you to go in VR, go into AR glasses, and communicate with people around the world. And not only if you have the VR and AR glasses, but there's new opportunities around using 2D screens like computers to navigate these 3D worlds, almost like Second Life, but kind of Second Life 2.0, if you would. And this is giving a huge opportunity for investors. There's a company called VirBELA and they have done really well. Their ma
Alan recently discussed immersive learning with his partner in life and business, Julie Smithson, on her sister podcast, XR for Learning. We thought it was a good episode, so this week, we’re sharing it here for XR for Business listeners.
Julie: Hi, my name is Julie Smithson.
Alan: And I’m Alan Smithson.
Julie: And this is the XR for Learning podcast.
Alan: Well… which podcast are we on? Is it mine or yours?
Julie: I think it’s mine.
Alan: Yours, so the XR for Learning podcast.
Julie: Yeah.
Alan: I’m going to interview you.
Julie: Yes.
Alan: OK, cool.
Julie: Hi, my name is Julie Smithson, and I am your XR for Learning podcast host. In all of my episodes, I talk about the way that we need to change the way that we learn and we teach, to adapt to the immersive technologies that are being implemented in enterprise and business today. So today, my guest — my special guest — is Alan Smithson.
Alan: Hello.
Julie: My partner and husband of almost 20 years. And we’re going to talk about education. So welcome. Thanks for being on my podcast.
Alan: Thank you so much for having me. I’m a little nervous, I’m not going to lie. This is an interesting podcast dynamic.
Julie: It really is. We’ve never done this before.
Alan: No, we have not. So I want to ask you questions, because you are the guru in immersive learning systems. So we’ll hopefully kind of dig up where this lies, and what we have to do as a society to really push the needle forward.
Julie: So what I like to do with all my podcasts is start with a baseline technology. Where are we today? Like, what’s going on today? Which is really good question, because it’s definitely different than it was six months ago.
Alan: I would say, in the industry– I’m coming from the business side of things. What we’ve seen is there’s been a hyper-acceleration of digitization. So in retail and e-com, it has been decimated. People couldn’t go to a store physically, and so everything moved online. And in e-commerce, we’re seeing shopping trends that would have existed in 2030 happen today. This is trickling down to everything, not only retail, but then also meetings. Everybody’s meeting on Zoom these days. Everybody. There’s just– we’re moving to digital and we’re moving to these things much faster than we had ever, ever hoped to do. Plans of digital transformation that would have taken five years are now happening today. So it’s an interesting time to revisit and relook at what does education look like in an exponential world of digital transformation.
Julie: And this is where the skillsets that are now needed — in enterprise, business, and organizations today to digitally transform — those skillsets are not being taught in the school system today. So COVID coming in and forcing people to virtually connect online, the education systems were forced to actually be online and rethink how they’re teaching things. But the unfortunate thing is, is that we didn’t get to the point of talking about what we were actually teaching. It was just more of a digital connection for the past six months.
Alan: Well, I think since this thing has hit, it’s been really just how do we make the technology work in a seamless way that is comfortable for both the teachers and the students? And to be honest, we’re not quite there yet. My kids
Geenee is an AR content company granting the wishes of their clients by creating new ways to market to their audiences, from interactive book covers, to hosting live concerts digitally. Geenee’s Cory Grenier and Elena de Sosa explain how those who master this new communication format today will dominate the market tomorrow.
Alan: Hey, everybody, Alan Smithson here. Today, we're speaking with Cory Grenier, the chief revenue officer, and Elena DeSosa, director of strategic partnerships at Geenee, a platform that delivers cost effective WebAR and scalable image recognition to the mobile web, powering XR experiences with no app required. We'll be talking about the power of the spatial web to connect us across time, geographies, and space to transform our workplaces and give us superpowers that drive commerce. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast.
Without further ado, I'd like to introduce Cory and Elena to the show. Welcome.
Cory: Hi. It's good to be here, Alan.
Elena: Thank you for having us.
Alan: Thank you so much for joining me, guys. Cory, we'll start with you. You're the chief revenue officer at Geenee. I met with one of your colleagues, Luke, a few years ago. We became friends. He showed me this Geenee platform. Maybe just give us the sales pitch on what is Geenee?
Cory: Geenee is a new SAS WebAR platform, which is-- a scheme on your mind, it's like a Wix for WebAR. So before Wix or Squarespace, there were a lot of web developers, and it was really expensive to hire a developer to make a website. And then there was these companies that came along, decades after the initial Internet, and simplified that creation process through templates and intuitive interface. And that's what we've done with Geenee. And so we have years of proprietary image recognition technology and also tech IP and AR for Web browsers. And so we brought that together in a templatized form to allow anybody to create, publish, and share WebAR experiences directly to the web, without requiring an app.
Alan: You've created these, I guess, SLAM algorithms and image recognition algorithms. One of the things that Luke showed me before was the ability to track moving objects or videos. That was pretty cool.
Cory: Yeah. And so we've been leveraging that for a range of businesses across the entertainment, book publishing, and CPG brands, to promote soft drinks and so forth. And so it's really unconstrained what vertical you're in, how you can use the power of spatial computing to connect to your consumers and ultimately transact.
Alan: So are there examples that we can put in the show notes, that link directly to a live example?
Cory: Yeah, there's many that we can direct your audience to. Scholastic just released a new book in the series of The Hunger Games, and we brought the cover to life in an augmented reality experience on the Web. And at the end, you can buy the book across any channel. So we actually have all the purchase sites integrated for some of the movie releases recently. Even during the time of COVID, the studios are looking to connect with consumers in the home and you can experience the film in a 360 environment through AR and learn fan trivia, but also to make a purchase. Every time we believe that AR is a feature, it's not a product, and it's how you use that to connect directly to the business result that the client is looking for to get ROI in that ad spend.
Alan: Interesting. It's great. I was just looking at it, and if you want to try, then go to geenee.me, and then you can just search down the case studies and The Hunger Games one is there. So that's pretty cool. How does it work whe
Developing a pilot or a proof of concept is among the first steps to introducing XR into your industry, but that’s only going to provide so much ROI unless you can fully implement that idea. Dave Beck from Foundry 45 discusses how to make that leap.
Alan: Hey, everyone, Alan Smithson here. Today, we're speaking with Dave Beck, founder and managing partner at Foundry 45, an immersive technology company that develops enterprise level virtual reality training experiences. They've created over 250 experiences for notable clients such as AT&T, Coca-Cola, Delta, and UPS. We're going to be discussing going from PoCs, pilots, and case studies to full scale deployments. All that and more, on the XR for Business podcast.
Dave, welcome to the show.
Dave: Hey, Alan, thanks so much for having me on here.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure. I'm super excited. You guys have been doing so much work in the VR training space. First of all, let's just talk about, what is Foundry 45? How did you get into this? And we'll kick it off from there.
Dave: I guess first off, it's nice to chat with you again. I went back and checked my email, and it looks like the first time you and I talked was way back in 2016. So a lot's happened in that time, hasn't it? So, OK, we put VR to work by creating virtual reality training experiences for enterprise partners. And we specialize in industrial-- think hard skills type training. I've actually been working in immersive technology for almost a decade now. Initially it was in augmented reality, which was something that we added on the side for a SAS product we built, that was actually our main business during that time. And we did a lot of stuff where you would hold up your phone or a piece of industrial equipment, and it would tell you where to wrench on it or how to change the filter, things like that. It was cool technology, but we pretty quickly realized that no one was going to hold a phone or an iPad over a piece of industrial equipment on an oil rig. They weren't going to set it down and start wrenching on something, and then pick it up with greasy hands. [chuckles] So what we wanted to do was hands-free AR, but the technology just wasn't there. We exited that company in 2014, and we were trying to figure out what we wanted to do when we grow up.
Alan: You exited your company in 2014. Most people didn't even know what this technology was when you guys were exiting your first one and getting into the second. Think about that.
Dave: Yeah. I mean, we were trying to figure out what we wanted to be when we grew up. And one of my co-founders bought an early innovators edition of Samsung Gear VR. Do you remember that one?
Alan: I have the one with a solid strap on top.
Dave: Yeah. Did you strap the Android phone into the headset?
Alan: Exactly.
Dave: Yeah. And you could use that camera on the back of the phone as a pass-through.
Alan: Yes. Well, not very well, but yes, you could.
Dave: Well, yeah, it's funny. You know where this is going, right? Because we wanted to use it for hands-free AR, but it didn't work at all.
Alan: Not without making people very sick.
Dave: Yeah, the processor wasn't good enough. It was super laggy, which kind of made it nauseating. So that wasn't going to work. But wow, VR was awesome. That's when we made the decision to start down our current path.
Alan: And that was before ARCore and ARKit. So planer tracking really wasn't a thing. Slim mapping, it was not that easy to do.
Dave: Yeah. I mean, just
Of all the jobs that are difficult to train for, surgery is especially challenging, what with needing a body and all. But our guest Aravind Upadhyaya is working to make surgical training virtual, with the help of XR technologies.
Alan: Hey, everyone, Alan Smithson, host of the XR for Business podcast. Today, we're speaking with Aravind Upadhyaya, co-founder and CEO of 8chili, an Oakland, California based startup, bringing the dream of telesurgery to the real world. Today, we're going to talk about how virtual reality is improving the outlook for remote surgeries globally. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast.
I want to welcome Aravind, thank you so much for joining me on the call.
Aravind: Thanks, Alan. It's a real pleasure to be on your podcast, and to get to know you, as well.
Alan: It's such an honor. You guys are working on something that is a true game changer for surgeries and remote telemedicine. Maybe just tell us what you're doing and the problem you're solving.
Aravind: Definitely. So, just to do a quick intro: I'm a technologist, so I'm an electronics engineer. I've spent the last two decades leading R&D projects in mixed reality, computer vision, Internet of Things, and robotics at one of the biggest, largest conglomerates, the Tata Group. And in 2016, I had my Tony Stark moment when I had the Hololens. It kind of felt like I could hold the power of x-rays in my eyes. And that's when the journey started for 8chili. So we've been working on this technology with surgeons for the last two years, kind of in stealth mode. And this year, GPM, we finally kicked it off. In a nutshell, we wanted to reimagine surgeries with mixed reality, by building a remote collaboration platform. I want to start with this: 60 percent of new residents universally are not confident to perform core procedures. And just about 3 percent of the surgeons globally have access to high quality continuous training. And why is that? And that's because we have a very legacy training system. So, there's a great adage that goes like, "I hear and I forget. I see. And I remember. I do and I understand." And that's why we are building NAVIX AIR, because experience cannot be explained. So you have to experience to really get to be an expert. And NAVIX AIR allows residents to experience what a surgeon does in a surgery. So this, what we want to do, is take the platform to a very immersive collaborative experience. Now, NAVIX AIR is a platform that allows residents to transform into the surgeons eyes and follow their steps simultaneously in the virtual world, without disturbing the surgeon. So let's say you can fail and repeat as many times as you want, even post the live surgery. And the big difference is being able to see what the surgeon sees brings this feel of reality into the residence. And that's what is missing in the cadavers or the existing VR simulators. Because what happens is no surgery goes smoothly or perfectly. There are complications, there are surprises that happen, like another surgeons encounter. And these cannot be captured. So it's the surgeons experience that come into play when something is not going as they expect it to go. And this feel of how to react in such a situation-- let's say, what does a surgeon do? What is the communication that they used to talk to the nurse, the anesthesiologist, or the other juniors who are helping the surgeon? Or what kind of technique? Like, if there is a bleed which was unexpected, how do they go about tackling that? So all these things are scenarios that will be happening in the real world. So there's no substitute for it.
Alan: That makes a lot of sense. So when a surgeon is operating, when these things pop up, it's almost impossible to train for every scenario, but you can record it.
Aravi
Happy Finish’s CEO Daniel Cheetham’s XR bread and butter was virtual experiences and LBEs, until the COVID-19 pandemic forced people to stay indoors. Now, he explains, he’s exploring the power VR has to help enterprise and the environment.
Alan: Hey, everyone, Alan Smithson here. Today, we're speaking with Daniel Cheetham, CEO of Happy Finish, a creative technology and content firm based in London, UK. They've done XR experiences for Ford, Exxon Mobil, and many more. We will learn today how they're using digital twins to add real business value. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast.
Daniel, welcome to the show, my friend.
Daniel: Thanks for having me.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure. I've been looking forward to having you on the show for so long. It's really exciting, the stuff you guys have done. You've done everything from putting people from the real world into VR on a bicycle, to help give them a sense of what it's like to be on the other side of a driving scenario. You've done all sorts of things. Tell us, what is Happy Finish?
Daniel: So, Happy Finish -- or HF, as we're now more commonly referring to ourselves -- we're really in the space of creating content and experiences for grand clients, right from the very beginning. And this is second hand information; I joined Happy Finish about six, six and a half years ago. Now the business is fifteen years old. We have been employing post-production and CGI techniques to create versions of the real world -- or different flavors of the real world -- over the last six to seven years. I think we built a reputation in the immersive technology space. We started working really early on with the DK-1 from Kickstarter, testing, playing around with Unity, seeing what we could do, up to now where we're easily 200+ commercially funded, brand funded XR experiences. And we work across the whole gamut of immersive tech, from 360 video -- which is less the flavor of the month now -- through to real time based experiences across Microsoft Hololens 2, and in AR.
Alan: I've got a call one thing, that I saw here on your site, and I just got to ask: VR bungee jumping?
Daniel: [laughs] One of my crazy ideas. It was in the context, we were chatting -- watercooler moment -- chatting about how we could make some noise about untethered VR, particularly around the Oculus Quest. And it just dawned on me as well, what better way to really test what can be done in untethered VR, than tether it to a bungee rope and have somebody jump off a bungee platform?
Alan: So were you the first one to try this?
Daniel: I wasn't, actually. We a couple of guinea pigs who put their hand up first, but I did try it in the end. It was not without its challenges. We were really putting the tracking system on the Quest to its absolute limits. And so on a few occasions, it was bungee jumping with a blindfold, rather than in VR.
Alan: [laughs] Still pretty amazing that you even bit that off. So was it a brand activation, or was this just an internal--?
Daniel: This is an in-house piece for us. And back until very recently, an area of focus for us was LB. So we've created a number of -- I think -- pretty recognizable motion platform based VR experiences. One that I know got a lot of sharing couple of years ago, that lives at the top of The Shard -- the tallest building here in London -- where the user will fly virtually -- or slide virtually -- around the top of The Shard. We got a lot of screamers and yeah, we had a real focus on building out that as a product. We have four or five of these VR slides around the world now. However, LB has taken somewhat of a hit --
With the recent launch of the MetaVRse 3D content creation engine, Alan chats with Sikaar Keita from Oracle’s XR LAB about what he's building and why he thinks it’s a game-changer.
Alan: Hey, everybody. My name's Alan Smithson, the host of the XR for Business Podcast, and today we have a very special guest, Sikaar Keita from Oracle. Sikaar is the customer experience specialist and XR lab leader, based in France. And today, we're going to discuss how Sikaar is using the new MetaVRse web-based 3D creation platform to invent the future of customer experiences. All that more coming up next, on the XR for Business Podcast. Sikaar, it's such a pleasure to have you.
Sikaar: Thank you very much.
Alan: Today is a very special day for me personally, because we're going to talk about something near and dear to my heart, the MetaVRse platform. We've been working on this for four years, and we finally came out of beta, and we released it to the world June 1st at AWE this year. But while it was in beta, you got in there and you started creating some crazy things. And I really want to dive in there. But let's maybe just have in your own words, what is the MetaVRse platform and why did you choose to start working on it?
Sikaar: So basically, it comes with two main things that were really key to us. The first one is that it's a WebXR tool. And we really believe that leveraging the web to deploy XR experiences is really what will drive adoption. Also, it was super easy to use, and the way we were prototyping really changed leveraging this platform, compared to what we usually do with other platforms.
Alan: So what is the normal path to prototyping, compared to this workflow?
Sikaar: Normally what we would do is that we would do sketches like most design agencies would do. And we sometimes leverage 360 degree virtual tours, because it's super easy to showcase something very quickly to stakeholders, which has a sufficient quality to make them understand what the project is about. And what we figured out is just that leveraging MetaVRse, it was extremely fast to build things that looks good. So we are usually buying our models, we don't model everything ourselves. But it was super easy to come up with something that was good enough to be seen, and to help us get budget, or get the stakeholders' approval to move forward. And that was really a game changer for us.
Alan: The amazing thing that we noticed is that you hadn't been on the platform more than a few days and you started doing things that we had never contemplated ever being done. And one of them blew our minds: you connected an IoT sensor to our web-based 3D platform. Can you tell us, what was the thought process behind that? How did you come up with that?
Sikaar: So basically what we do in the Oracle XR lab is testing, prototyping, and training every possible integration of XR technology with Oracle technologies. And so in this endeavour, we emphasize what comes with feeding XR experiences with data, but also getting data out of XR experiences into record systems. So it just felt normal to get this IoT device connected with an XR experience, so we can drive the experience from out of it, and also get the data back. So basically the idea behind it is very known in the engineering industry and it's all about digital twins. But we have our own platform for that at Oracle. And the idea was can I connect it with MetaVRse, and especially how long would it-- actually, it was done in a flash.
Alan: What made it so quick, though? One of the things that I didn't understand is how did you connect it? Is it because of the ability to code in i
In countries like China, the camera on a smartphone isn't just for fun selfies -- it's an everyday practical device, for everything from banking to shopping. Michael Agustin wants to fast track this sort of adoption in the west by giving retailers AR IoT technology with Curie.
Alan: Hey there, it's Alan Smithson with the XR for Business Podcast. And today we're speaking with Michael Agustin, co-founder and CEO of Curie. They're an augmented reality shopping platform that enables consumers to make better purchasing decisions quickly and visually. All that coming up on the XR for Business Podcast.
Michael, welcome to the show, my friend.
Michael: Thanks for having me on.
Alan: I'm so excited. We had the opportunity to meet recently at., well, these two things, really. It was the VRARA gathering in San Francisco, and then we went from there to Verizon's head office and we went for a meetup where we learned from Apple and a bunch of other people about what's coming up in virtual reality. So it was really great to meet you in person. I want to unpack what you've been doing, but let's talk about what is Curie? We're Curie-ous.
Michael: Yeah. So I see that you're AI-curious. So Curie is an AR shopping assistant that allows people to make decisions very quickly. This sort of ties in to the journey of any customer that is looking to make a purchase about any type of thing. So we're kind of giving people this on-screen HUD, to be able to make decisions on the fly about any different type of product, especially the ones that they would want to save money on. And it also enables retailers to sort of keep other apps from participating in show-rooming in their stores. So we're looking at big box stores by giving them the powers of augmented reality and enabling all of the same tools that shoppers would typically have online, offline. So things like online reviews and movies and people who bought this also buy these things.
Alan: That's really interesting. I think it's it's something that's coming really quickly. And, you know, you guys have listed on your website that you're computer vision company. Walk me through the consumer experience of this. So I have my phone. I'm in a store. I point my phone at a pair of shoes. It recognizes the shoes and says, here's some Amazon reviews on it -- or some reviews from that store, I guess -- and then here's some other things that you might like that aren't necessarily in the physical store, correct?
Michael: Yeah. So typically, you don't have these tools available to you offline. The reason why we say we're a computer vision company is that computer vision is like G.P.S. for your camera. So think about all the times you use G.P.S. and Waze and Yelp and Google Maps. We're doing that from a first-person perspective and providing the ability to sort of connect to things that are in front of you, via services and information. The reason why you would want to do this is that information is typically still not in front of you when you need it, but it's available online. So we were named after Marie Curie, who sort of dedicated her life to seeing what was invisible. And we would argue that right, now information is invisible, and you can't really see it when you need it on top of things.
Alan: Amazing. So are there any companies actively deploying this now, or is this still in early phases, or where were you in the food chain of startups?
Michael: So our lead investor is 500 Startups, and we are gaining customers through a program that's backed by Wal-Mart and Sam's Club and Tyson. We're talking to several OEMs and other types of retailers about incorporating our technology into their shopping apps.
Alan: Inter
With the next generation of Playstation set to hit shelves this holiday season, the big news in the gaming circuit is the revelation of Unreal Engine 5. But this game engine is good for more than just the next top video game experience. Unreal Engine manager Marc Petit explains the many other use cases this technology promises.
Alan: Hey, everyone, Alan Smithson here. Today, we're speaking with Marc Petit, general manager of Unreal Engine at Epic Games. If you're not familiar with Epic Games, ask your kids. They're probably playing a video game built on their development engine. For example, Fortnite is built by them. We'll be discussing the myriad ways 3D and XR can be used for organizations. And of course, what's coming up with Unreal Engine 5? All that more on the XR for Business podcast.
I am super excited and thrilled to invite Marc Petit on the show. Marc, welcome to the show.
Marc: Well, thanks for having me, Alan, and thanks for the introduction.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure. This has been one of those episodes that I've been really excited. And I don't want to hear myself talk anymore, so please tell us, what is Unreal Engine, and how is it being is now OK?
Marc: Well, that's a pretty broad topic. So first of all, maybe we'll go back to the basics. What is a game engine? A game engine is a piece of software, it does a lot of things in real time. What is a game? I mean, a game is everything about a simulated world and a story mixed together. So what a game engine do, they can provide you with real time simulated worlds and/or stories. It's based on complex technology, like real time rendering and rules and physics. But at the end of the day, you can be and interact with the virtual world. And I think that's all XR is about, is empowering and connecting the virtual and the real. So game engine, we're kind of the-- think of it as an operating system for visual development. That's the software on which you can build a game like Fortnite, or you can build a car configurator. So where this lower layer of software comes as a bunch of tools.
Alan: One of the basic things that people misunderstand is that 3D is a little bit different than creating a PowerPoint deck. There's a lot more to it involved, you're rendering many more things all at once.
Marc: Yeah, no, absolutely. Again, think of it of a simulated world. I mean, good 3D, things react when you interact with them. And so you have-- somebody has to go and program those multiple layers of artificial intelligence to bring the right look and also the right behavior of things in the virtual world. So what the game engine does it makes this process very easy, makes it a cross-platform. It's a very, very involved and complex piece of technology. But for users, it's pretty simple to use and that's all we are about: making that process much, much simpler for everybody.
Alan: So one of the things that you guys just released is a video showing the new PlayStation 5 running the Unreal Engine, and the demo was -- and I'll quote -- there's billions of polygons running. I think we start with, what's a "polygon" and why is that important to be able to push so much data? And how does that pertain to a business? How would a business use that then?
Marc: Polygons and triangles, this is how we present 3D geometry in the virtual space. It's basically a way to represent the v
Why trek up to the Arctic circle to capture 360 footage of the aurora borealis yourself, when you can license stunning footage someone else already shot? That was Alan’s thinking when he availed Blend Media of their services, whose founder — Damian Collier — is our guest.
Alan: Hey, everyone, Alan Smithson here. Today, we're speaking with Damian Collier, co-founder and CEO of Blend Media, a centralized hub for all things VR and AR content. From stock 360 images and videos, right up to fully customized interactive experiences. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast. Damian, welcome to the show.
Damian: Hey, Alan. How are you?
Alan: I'm so amazing. It's been a long time since we spoke. I think the first time we met was probably four or five years ago, when you started this wonderful journey. How did you get here?
Damian: Yeah. Well, I'm just thinking back to a panel that we did at VR LA, which must be at least three, if not four years ago. It must be about that time.
Alan: Got to be four years ago, yeah.
Damian: It's crazy how time flies. And obviously, having been in VR and AR, we've seen peaks and troughs, and ups and downs, and all in between.
Alan: That panel, because it was with-- the one with Saul Rodgers, right?
Damian: That's right.
Alan: I haven't had Saul on the show, I haven't reached out him. That panel at VR LA, to me, was like the pinnacle of the VR hype. That event was so amazing. And it seems like we kind of took a step back a bit in subsequent years, and now it's starting to pick up again.
Damian: Yeah, it was great. It was a big event. But you know what? This week I attended Laval virtually. And I think they had something like ten thousand attendees and dozens, if not up into hundreds of speakers. And I have to say, for me, it really felt engaging. I didn't attend in the headset. I attended it on the web app that they built. But it felt buzzing. It felt-- there were some great presentations and keynotes.
Alan: I have to say yes, where was: my wife, Julie Smithson, was one of them. [laughs]
Damian: Oh, great. I'm sorry to say I missed Julie's lecture, but I saw some great keynotes.
Alan: What was the highlight of Laval Virtual for you?
Damian: Well, I think it was reconnecting with people virtually. There were people there that I -- like you -- I haven't seen physically for some time. And seeing their avatars and waving at them across the room, and then kind of setting up separate meetings together, it was really well done.
Alan: Amazing. The last time I was on your site, there was Blend Media, and then it ended up being Blend Market, Blend Stock, Blend Studio. Walk us through kind of the progression of where you were when we met, and where you are now and what's what's changed.
Damian: Yeah, we started off as just a new footage business, because I am a serial entrepreneur, they say. I have businesses all in the content space. So that is my background, kind of rights management, IP. My last business was a viral video business that I sold in 2014. And I just had this idea when Mark Zuckerberg posted the first 360 video around about November 2015, I just had this idea for creating what I guess would be described as the Getty Images for 360 video. And that was the original idea. And I raised a bit of seed money, built the first platform in the first part of 2016 as a 360 video stock footage site, helping creators monetize their 360 video content through a platform.
Alan: I have to interj
IKEA might be best known for its affordable furniture, cartoon building instructions, and hard-to-pronounce product names, but that’s not all its about. They’re also exploring how they can improve lives with XR technology, as Martin Enthed explains.
Alan: Hey everyone, I'm Alan Smithson. Today we're speaking with Martin Enthed, digital manager at IKEA Communications, who's also part of the IKEA Digital Lab, looking five to seven years out into the future of how we bring retail to the masses. Martin is also part of the Khronos Group, an organization working on the open standards for spatial web and 3D world. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast. Martin, welcome to the show.
Martin: Thank you, Alan. And thank you for having me here.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure. This interview has been long overdue. You've had to get a ton of approvals and everything. So we're very, very lucky and honored to have you on the show. And thank you so much for joining us. Let's get into it. Maybe you can describe how you got to where you are, and the role that you're at with IKEA.
Martin: I started 13 years ago now in 2007, and I was hired to try to make use of computer graphics into a volume production, instead of just doing a few models or images a year or two, large volumes. And building those back-end tools, coding, setting up standards and everything, up to 2011. And then they hired me to do all development for that company, IKEA Communications. And I've been the IT manager and development manager for that all the way up to now, two years ago, when I became digital manager there. Then I headed up what's called IKEA Digital Lab, that you mentioned. Now I'm working mainly with that, looking into the spatially aware 3D future.
Alan: So how is IKEA using these tools now? Because I think it's a big shock, when you explained to me how the magazine that we get, some of the photos in there aren't real photographs, they're renders.
Martin: That story has been told a few times. But if I take it very short, it started really in volume 2012-ish. So it took like from 2007 to 2012. And in 2011-2012 we did about 10 to 12,000 high-res images a year, and I would say maybe 1,500 of them were 3D. In the last five, six years we have been doing about 50,000 high risk images a year. And about 35,000 of them is 3D, mainly the product images and those things you find there. And then, of course, a lot of kitchen brochures and such are 3D. You take a kitchen brochure from our stores and look at through that one, you will see a lot of 3D. If you take the IKEA catalog, then it's much, much, much less, because most of the time we also do video sessions in those. And that's so much easier to do in a real set. But it's a lot of 3D. But that's the offline rendering stuff, that's in huge production right now.
Alan: So that's kind of pervasive now. So when you're looking at the kitchen catalogue, most of those renters are all in 3D. It's funny, because Helen Papagiannis -- author of Augmented Human -- she's got this game, "Augmented Reality Or Real?" And I've gone through the magazine, I can't tell. I really can't tell what's real and what's 3D. So kudos to you guys for making it realistic. So we render something and we have the best quality of everything. What about real time rendering? I know a couple of years ago you guys experimented with VR and also the IKEA Place app, and real time rendering of spatial objects. What's kind of on the roadmap there?
Martin: The exploration stuff internally started already in 2010, when we made some things that was running in a browser, and then we sent off a small little file that's told how that sce
Labster CEO Michael Jensen was on XR for Learning not-too-long ago, talking about how XR can teach kids science in the classroom. Now he explains to Alan how that same technology is making professional training safer and more cost-effective.
Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan Smithson here. Today we're speaking with Michael Jensen, CEO of Labster, a venture backed, award winning company that focuses on revolutionizing the way science and safety is taught at companies, universities, colleges, and high schools all over the world. They started with creating multimillion dollar science labs in a VR headset. And now they're ready to take on the enterprise training world. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast.
Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael: Hey, Alan, thanks so much, honored to be here.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure to have you. I know you were on my partner and wife Julie's podcast, XR for Learning. And I learned all about how Labster is revolutionizing how we teach science, and making it more exciting, gamified, but also bringing the opportunity to create multi-million dollar science labs for the cost of a cup of coffee. So let's unpack that. Michael, how did you get into this?
Michael: Yeah, so that actually started about nine years ago, when my co-founder and I saw an opportunity to create much more engaging online learning content for students and learners around the world. Basically, most people were learning in very boring, non-engaging formats as we saw it. And at the same time, we saw these billions of dollars being invested into the gaming industry to create really engaging games. And we thought, why not find a way to combine and merge the learning world and the gaming world in a more engaging way, so that we can engage learners in the content, make them more excited about the topics, but also use these mechanisms to help them understand some of these more complex concepts in a much better way.
Alan: Walk people through what a typical Labster lab looks like, and why this is exciting.
Michael: There's two main components that we really looked at. One is engagement -- as I just talked about -- and the other one is timesaving, cost savings. And so what we looked at was, how can we best address some of the biggest challenges in the industry by presently creating virtual training -- similar to a flight simulator that was revolutionizing pilot training -- and then create, for instance, virtual laboratories to simulate dangerous experiments or dangerous scenarios -- like safety training -- and then that way help the universities, in our case as well as high schools -- but now also corporates -- dramatically reduce their cost and saving, as well as the time spent on this training.
And we did a huge research project now -- about two years ago -- a $6-million research project involving hundreds and hundreds of employees around the world in large pharma companies, to really analyze and understand, does this really help? Is there a way for us to create better, more engaging content? And if so, does that really help students or learners understand it better? And does it also help save costs? And the results were quite overwhelmingly positive, was published and peer reviewed -- among others -- in Nature magazine, where we saw more than a doubling of the learning outcomes, as well as engagement for learners, compared to -- for instance -- standard online e-learning training, or even personal one-on-one training. So even compared to a personal one-on-one trainer, we found that this virtual immersive training format can be far superior, both in costs, as
Even in a virtual world, you still sweat. That’s why it’s important to keep your HMDs clean, especially if there’s multiple users. Cleanbox devised UV light technology for just such a purpose, then found a higher calling during the Coronavirus.
Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan Smithson here, with the XR for Business podcast. Today, we're speaking with Amy Hedrick, co-founder and CEO of Cleanbox, a smart technology hygiene company that's providing hospital grade decontamination of shared hardware, which I guess we can all agree right now, is very necessary in the current situation. In this podcast, we'll also learn how the team at Cleanbox is helping hospitals maintain mask hygiene. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast.
Amy, welcome.
Amy: Thank you, Alan. It's great to be here.
Thank you so much for taking time. I know you are crazy busy, working probably 20 hour days right now. You are on the front lines, bringing hygiene in a time where it could not be more important. So thank you for joining us and taking the time.
Amy: It's my pleasure. I'm happy to do it. And you're right. It is very timely. Everybody's focus right now -- globally -- is on hygiene and public safety and public responsibility, and how we can better stay safe when we're able to go back out in the world.
Alan: Absolutely. So I'm going to get right into it. I know you were working with the VR community very heavily, but I think right now this is just kind of top of mind with everybody. So maybe in your own words, you can explain what Cleanbox Technologies does.
Amy: Sure. Well, OK, so Cleanbox technology provides hospital grade decontamination of shared hardware. We designed our core technology with-- actually with XR in mind, with the idea and the belief that virtual and augmented reality had great potential in terms of business and enterprise purposes, as well as in healthcare, and of course, entertainment. Seeing the value there and thinking ahead of what would be the pain points that would prevent a successful global deployment, or a successful corporate deployment, and adequate actual consumer adoption. Few years ago, thinking back on how we would be able to meet some of those pain points and eliminate them and lower the barrier of entry, hygiene seemed to be one of those things that was easy to forget. So with XR technology, it's so sexy and there's a lot of very interesting and cool and unique things you can do with it. So the logistics sometimes gets gets a little bit lost. We came at the XR community from the point of risk mitigation. How could we reduce the risk of contagion transfer and thus some detrimental event happening within the industry? And we've grown since then.
Alan: So right now it's an interesting time, because we're all stuck at home. So things like location based entertainment facilities are empty. Where is your business coming from now? I know you-- from speaking with one of your advisors, Terry Schussler, that you're booming right now. You can't fulfill the orders fast enough. Where's this business coming from, if it's not coming from location based entertainment?
Amy: Well, we've always been addressing multiple markets at once. Location based entertainment is, of course, first and foremost in people's minds because that's -- I guess -- the best education for the average consumer into what immersive technology can do. So it's-- and it's very dear to my origins and we definitely take care of the LB community. On that note, I would say that there are plenty of organizations looking forward to the day that they can reopen, and realizing that not only just the idea of hygiene, but actual hygiene is really critically important to reopening those busine
For most of the world, a cross-country, gapless 5G network is still the realm of futurists. One exception is South Korea, where a 5G network is quickly proliferating. Korea Telecom’s Joonmo Park discusses how his company is using the network to evangelize VR.
Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan Smithson here. Today, we're speaking with Joonmo Park, new media business development manager at Korea Telecom, the largest telecommunications company in South Korea. We're going to be talking about 5G, virtual reality and transportation. All that coming up next, on the XR for Business podcast.
Joonmo, welcome to the show, my friend.
Joonmo: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Alan. And I'm really happy to be here.
Alan: It's an absolute honor to have you on the show. I was really impressed with some of the work that I've been seeing come out of Korea. And I was very impressed to find out that it was the work of you and your team, that have put these things together. So maybe just talk about the projects that you've been working on at KT Tel.
Joonmo: Okay. Our company -- KT -- is the largest telecommunications company in South Korea, with more than 30 years of experience in mobile telephone service, and broadcasting, and Internet. And I've been with the company for over three years across a variety of different functions, including business strategy, B2C business, and B2B business. But about one and half years ago, as a company, we decided to establish a dedicated team that's purely focused on what's new and what's next. So we focused on the emerging consumer landscape and the emerging technology landscape, and make sure that the KT brand continues to be relevant not only today, but five or ten years from now. So we are focusing on looking at new business models and emerging technologies, then tying those to our strategy businesses. So we wanted to make sure that any new innovation that we bring into the society has a lasting impact. But more importantly, a monetary impact that is actually moving the needle. So to introduce a little bit about South Korean XR market, South Korea's telecom operators are really striving to create the right range of immersive mixed reality content to leverage their 5G network and attract more customers. And there are three local carriers, including SK Telecom, and Korea Telecom, and LG Uplus. And they rolled out their 5G network in the nation in April 2019, and together are drawing more than three million subscribers in the first seven months of the launch.
Alan: Sorry, three million subscribers to the new 5G network?
Joonmo: Yes, right.
Alan: So do these people have 5G devices? Is there a lot of 5G devices available?
Joonmo: Yes, right. Because as the launch of Galaxy S10 with 5G, and that many people bought that device and using 5G network right now.
Alan: That's incredible. So how many would you estimate are using the 5G network with 5G devices?
Joonmo: I think until the end of the 2020, more than the five million people will use it.
Alan: Wow, that's way far ahead of North America. In Canada, we have zero 5G deployment. We only have it in research parks and research areas.
Joonmo: Well, you need to think about that. South Korea is a very small country with very many numbers of populations. So it is really easy for companies to make the decision to build new 5G infrastructures, because even though they build small 5G networks, many people would use that. So many tech companies feel that building a 5G networks is attracting more money than just using 4G network.
Alan: So how is 5G -- or just the ability to h
Seeing is believing, but in the age of 3D product views through AR technology, seeing is also conceptualizing. Simply Augmented CEO Boaz Ashkenazy comes on the show to explain how AR-enabled 3D viewing will revolutionize everything from how we shop, to how we work.
Alan: Hey everyone, Alan Smithson here. Today we're speaking with Boaz Ashkenazy from SimplyAugmented. We're going to be talking about how 3D is revolutionizing furniture views and products on the web. All that coming up on the XR for Business podcast.
Boaz, welcome to the show, my friend.
Boaz: Hey, thank you very much. It's good to be here.
Alan: Oh, it's my absolute pleasure. I love the work you guys are doing. Let's get right into it. What is it that SimplyAugmented does, and how is it benefiting your customers now?
Boaz: Well, we have a 3D platform that benefits customers both in the sales and marketing teams, and one of our products is called Simply3D. It allows for sales and marketing teams to easily share augmented reality. We found a lot of challenges around sharing augmented reality online and Simply3D.io is a vehicle for helping folks share. And we also create product and room configurators that exist online that allow people to experience environments and products really easily with augmented reality integration.
Alan: So I got a chance to try one of the samples. I got to configure a-- it was like a quiet room or almost like a study room for open office furniture. So you go in, you close the door, and make yourself a phone call or whatever, but I got to configure it on the web. I hit a button, and it was in my living room here, this giant pod. And I was like, "Oh wow. This pod is huge in real life." So it was a great understanding of how big these things are, and I think that's truly the power of this technology. Maybe you can speak to some of the specific clients that you've worked with. What are they seeing, results wise?
Boaz: You know what's interesting about what you said is a lot of folks have trouble visualizing products at scale, especially with the bigger the product, the harder it is to visualize. I am an architect by training. And I spent years designing spaces, and a lot of times people are surprised about what those designs end up looking like, because it's hard to understand objects at scale. And the pods that you mentioned, they're called Nook pods. And they're large rooms within a room, basically. You can have a quiet room inside an open office, which is pretty typical these days. For two people for four people, for one person. And to see it online and configure it is one thing, but to see it in the environment and walk into is another.
One of the things that we recognized was there was two things that people really wanted to do. They wanted to quickly customize any of their products -- We're used to doing it with cars and vehicles, customize your products with colors, with options -- but then immediately be able to drop that in your environment and walk around it, look underneath it, walk inside it. And that's really what our configurator does.
One of the challenges that a lot of folks face in the XR space is how do you spin up augmented reality with so many possible variations? That's the hard part about building these configurators. There's so many options, that you would never be able to create the augmented reality content beforehand. You wouldn't be able to predict it. And so what we've done is we've allowed for on-demand, real time augmented reality, depending on the choices that you make.
Alan: So once I've configured it -- and I don't know, I didn't actually think about this until now -- but once I've configured -- let's say -- the Nook and I drop it
Surface miners, like the ones safety instructor Nick Ullrich teaches, get to play with some pretty big toys, like loading trucks with tires three times taller than the average person. But tires that big come with some pretty big blind spots, and Nick is using VR to get them used to those blind spots before putting them behind those gigantic wheels.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast, with your host, Alan Smithson. We all know safety comes first, and today, we're speaking with Nick Ullrich, a safety instructor from Gillette College, who's focused on using VR to train mining employees to become safer and better operators. Coming up next on the XR for Business podcast.
Nick, welcome to the show.
Nick: Yes, Alan, thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.
Alan: Oh, it's my absolute pleasure. I read an article about how you're using VR to train mining employees. How did you get into this? Tell us a little bit about your background.
Nick: Ok. Yeah, so the first project that we've done is a blind spot recognition, using virtual reality 360 photography as well. And it's to help miners -- when they're on the mine side -- understand the blind spots of heavy equipment. So we started with that because MSHA -- the Mine Safety and Health Administration -- has an initiative out there about powered haulage. And that's kind of where the idea came from. We see fatalities every year in the mining world. So I wanted to give everybody an understanding of what the blind spots for the heavy equipment that they're working around are on, and give them an idea of that. And virtual reality gave us an opportunity to do that without actually having to have all the equipment here at the college. So it works out great to give them a vision of what they would see if they were in that equipment.
Alan: That's pretty cool. So you're talking about those big, huge dump trucks with the giant wheels and loaders and all these type of things?
Nick: Yeah, absolutely. We have-- in the program that we have now, we have 10 pieces of equipment, it includes the 400 ton haul trucks, which is the largest haul trucks in the world. Those tires are approximately 15 feet high.
Alan: Whoa.
Nick: Yeah, next to them, you will go about to the middle of the tire.
Alan: That's incredible. So you've got these trucks. Now, did you create them as 3D models and then climb inside of it? Or is this taken from like a 360 video type of thing?
Nick: So we do a couple different things with it. We do have 3D models of all the pieces of equipment. So like I said, we have about ten pieces of equipment right now, and we just have 3D models of those, where people can walk around them virtually and see how big they are, put them to actual size or as close as I could get to actual size, by my recollection of them. They can get into them -- for the most part -- and just kind of see it in a virtual spot. And then we did go out to all the different mine sites and take 360 photography of each of those pieces of equipment. And we did it a really cool way. We set up a scene, so we had a whole lot of different things around the piece of equipment. So let's just say a haul trip, we have several different people and smaller vehicles, like light duty vehicles, such as just your normal pickup or van. We had those all set up in a special way, where you couldn't see them from the cab, so they were in the blind spots of that equipment. We took that 360 photo from the cab of that piece of equipment, so we can show everybody what the cab looks like and what they could see outside of it, knowing that they couldn't see any of the things in the blind s
Aggreko’s in the business of temporary power - you need an outdoor installation set up for electricity? They’re who to call. But that means that the less time to train, the better. Walter Davis explains how AR is helping trim some time off a new employee’s intake.
Alan: Hey, everybody, welcome to the XR for Business podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today, we're speaking with Walter Davis, head of talent and learning technology at Aggreko. We'll be learning about how they're using XR to train technicians and speed up their time to competency, for new and existing employees. All that and more on the XR for Business podcast.
Walter, welcome to the show.
Walter: Thanks, Alan. Glad to be here.
Alan: Really excited. Why don't you start by telling us your role at Aggreko and how you started working in XR in this role?
I think first thing to do might help to paint a picture of maybe what Aggreko does, which will help in then showing how we're applying augmented reality to our services. So, Aggreko is the largest provider of temporary power and cooling solutions. We work in over 100 countries and we power things like Super Bowl here in the US, which many of you might know, or the Olympics that are coming up in Japan. That's another project we're doing. We also work everywhere, from remote parts of Africa, to powering up a data center that needs some backup power. So we're sort of everywhere in the background, if you would. Just ensuring that major events and operations run smoothly. And with that, obviously, we need to ensure that we are providing an expert service and minimize any potential downtime. We need to have expert staff to support that.
Alan: So basically, if the lights stay on, you guys are there.
Walter: Exactly. That's a great way of putting it. We make it a point to ensure that we have a highly reliable service.
Alan: So I was reading, Aggreko specializes in seven key areas, oil and gas, manufacturing, mining, petrochemicals, construction. And then events, the live events thing almost seems like an add-on to this, but it seems to fit perfectly.
Walter: It does, yeah. So events are really what we're known for, right? I mean, that's where we will pop up on occasion. Actually, I could say that we are actually in one-- we're in a recent country music video in the background, because we are powering the stage that they recorded the music video at. But yeah, like I said, keeping the lights on, making sure that entertainment can happen, events can happen, and everybody has a comfortable experience.
Alan: So how does VR/AR/XR relate to temporary power?
Walter: With the nature of our business -- as we operate in over 100 countries -- we operate very broadly but very agilely. And one of the challenges that we tend to sometimes have is ensuring that we can bring new hires and products together really in that introductory period of time, when someone is just joining the organization. We don't always necessarily have every type of fleet available for them to familiarize themselves with and educate themselves on, to start developing those competencies. And where we're seeing AR in particular, is in allowing those individuals to gain that knowledge really right when they join the organization. They're able to go through an immersive experience in full scale, so as if the product was right in front of them. Going-- both familiarizing themselves with the key components and aspects of the product, but also going through a key service procedures th
We’re used to navigating our computing with keyboards, mice, and maybe track pads — analog input. But those inputs work for desktop computers; they’re clunky for XR interfaces. That’s why we need gesture controls ASAP, according to today’s guest, Clay AIR’s Varag Gharibjanian.
Alan: Hey, everyone, Alan Smithson here. Today we're speaking with Varag Gharibjanian, the chief revenue officer at Clay AIR, a software company shaping the future of how we interact with the digital world, using natural gesture recognition. We're going to find out how Clay will bring our real hands into the virtual world. Coming up next, on the XR for Business podcast.
Varag, welcome to the show, my friend.
Varag: Hey, Alan. Glad to be here.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure to have you on the show. I know you guys are working on some cutting edge stuff, so why don't I not ruin it, and just let you tell us what is Clay AIR?
Varag: So Clay is a software company, we're specializing in hand tracking and gesture recognition, mostly in the AR and VR space. And we're also tackling a couple other industries, automotive. And our third product category we call Clay Control, which is kind of all the devices that can use gesture interaction at a distance.
Alan: Are you doing this from single cameras, or is this from infrared cameras, or a combination of everything?
Varag: Yes, so Clay's-- we're hardware agnostic. So it'll work across all those types you just said. It could be one camera, two cameras, or more. And all different types, so we'll work on RGB cameras that you'll find on everyday smartphones, to what you might find embedded in AR and VR devices, to monochrome ones, time-of-flight ones, and so we're pure software and we've worked across a lot of those different types and have compatibility with most of them now, which gives us a lot of flexibility and it's really useful.
Alan: So I'm going to be able to look at watches on my wrist in AR, right? Like I'm going to be able hold my hand up and see what the newest, latest, greatest watch is?
Varag: It's actually pretty cool that you say that, because that is one of the use cases that comes in often inbound to us, as companies -- it hasn't happened yet -- but those companies definitely brainstorming around how you track the hands even with just a smartphone, like overlaying something.
Alan: We actually did it. We did a project just using Google's hand tracking library. We managed to make the watch sit on the wrist, but it was kind of glitchy. It would sit weird. And yeah, it was-- it was not great, but we made it work, it just wasn't sellable.
Varag: Yeah.
Alan: So this is really a foundational software. And I know you guys are working with some of the larger manufacturers. You want to talk about that -- or can you talk about that -- and then what that might look like?
Varag: Yeah, I can speak a little bit about that. So we feel -- like you said -- this is software that really needs to be optimized for the hardware that it's working on. The deeper it is in the stack, the better performance you'll get, and the better synergies you'll get with all the other technologies that are working on these devices. So that's why when I joined the company, really, I made the focus to get as deep into the stack as possible. We looked at the market that time a couple of years ago to look at who is really central to defining the reference stack. What's going to most AR and VR devices? And to me, Qualcomm made the most sense. So we spent a lot of time working with them. As you know -- and some of our listeners might know -- they really do define a l
Today’s guest got his start in the world of game development. But soon, Arash Keshmirian saw the writing on the wall that XR’s current usefulness was better-suited to the worlds of industry, retail, and journalism. Arash and Alan discuss how he made that transition.
Alan: Hey, everyone, it's Alan Smithson here, the host of the XR for Business podcast. Today we have Arash Keshmirian, co-founder of Extality. His personal goal is to create powerful content that delivers results. We're going to dig into using Magic Leap and Hololens and mixed reality headsets as a tool for business. So all that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast.
Arash, welcome to the show, my friend.
Arash: Thank you for having me. Great to be here.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure. You guys have done some pretty cool stuff. I was on your website playing with a shoe. What is Extality?
Arash: Were a lot of things to many people. So we built Extality out of a long, 10 year experience in the games industry, building mobile games. Did a lot of games, including Zombie Gunship, which ended up being this kind of worldwide sensation of shooting zombies from an airplane. That company -- Limbic -- we ended up doing a lot of XR stuff. And kind of around 2016, 17, 18 we built a game for ARKit, called Zombie Gunship Revenant. And that ended up being a huge hit across the app store. Apple featured it a whole bunch of times. It was one of the 2017 games of the year. And it spread ARKit to a lot of people, trying new things on their new iPhones. And we later did a project called Zombie Guns Raptor with Oculus and Oculus Go, Gear VR. But really kind of around that time -- 2017 -- we started to feel like it was getting way too crowded in the games business, and we were starting to look around and try to figure out what we could do with our experience in high-performance graphics and making cool experiences, immersive experiences. I started talking to a guy named Ryan Peterson, who's the founder of a CEO called Finger Food out in Vancouver. And he was telling me about all these exciting opportunities in AR and VR for enterprises. He was talking about how they'd saved millions and millions of dollars for a truck company that was looking to move their design to virtual reality from using clay models. And this got our head scratching, we were like, "You know, maybe there's an opportunity to use all of our games experience, to help big companies and do more than just give people an entertaining hour on their phones." So we founded a new company called Extality. And we set out to essentially discover companies that really wanted to explore XR, be it on their phones, on headsets, iPods -- every type of XR -- and leverage our background in doing just really hard graphics problems, building scalable global servers and connectivity, all those hard things that you learn how to do making games, we quickly realized that we're super, super applicable to building enterprise solutions as well.
Alan: Actually, I know Ryan very well from Finger Food, really great guy. And they've done some amazing work in the space. What are some of the highlights that you've done for enterprise? And first of all, I just want to say that having a flying zombie shooter game? Pretty awesome.
Arash: [chuckles] Thank you.
Alan: The fact you guys had a hit with ARKit is pretty amazing, because there's not too much out there leveraging the power of ARKit yet.
Arash: Yeah. I mean, if you want to talk about games for just a second, it's an interesting thing. I mean, it gives people a totally different experience using their phone as the controller and running around the room. We have all these videos during our user tests
There’s not a lot of good coming out of the current situation affecting the globe, but if there is an upside, it’s the rare opportunity to learn from something this unprecedented. Through her work with National Research Group, today’s guest Lauren Xandra has been able to study newly-emerging work-from-home behaviours, and how that applies to XR adoption.
Alan: Hey everyone, I'm Alan Smithson from the XR for Business Podcast, and today we're speaking with Lauren Xandra, vice president of strategy and innovation at National Research Group, a leading global insights and strategy firm, about the original research on XR, AR, and collaborations in a time of Covid-19. All that more coming up next on the XR for Business Podcast.
Lauren, welcome to the show.
Lauren: Thank you so much for having me, Alan.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure. I'm in day 22 of my quarantine. Nothing really has changed in my life, because I work from home anyway. So how are you doing?
Lauren: I'm doing well. It's a healthy adjustment for me, but it's rather timely that we're here today, because I'm excited to share new research, looking at how different demographics are adapting to our work-from-home reality, and to share some exciting findings that we see in the space with new, broader, addressable audiences for virtual solutions in light of all of this.
Alan: Well, the timing on this couldn't be any better. Some dedicated, hard-working people in this industry have banded together this week to pull together an XR Collaboration guide, talking about everything from security to device management to vendor selection to feature lists, and really put a lot of effort into creating a tool online that will give people the opportunity to figure out how these tools can be used for their business or school or education, and which one is the right one for them at the time, for the need they have. And so we're really excited about that, and the information on that will come out on XRCollaboration.com. So, Lauren, please tell me, what is the basis of this study?
Lauren: Sure. So, when suddenly millions of people -- seemingly overnight -- became remote workers, we're faced with these huge questions about productivity, state of mind, social and cultural impact of the situation, and the lasting impact, too. We really set out to understand how people are adapting, what pain points are felt across work-from-home, and in doing that, we can better understand and address whitespace to solve for these pain points, to ease our adjustment to this new -- and bizarre -- reality.
I'd love to walk you through some of the key findings, perhaps starting with generational differences in adapting, and then perhaps looking at more industry-specific challenges and opportunities.
Alan: Sounds wonderful. Let's let's dig in.
Lauren: So we see that the pre-Covid-19 context really impacts different generations' concerns and expectations for the future. Probably one of the most counterintuitive insights is that the youngest in the workforce is actually the least well-equipped for work-from-home. The digital reliance of this generation already makes them victims of social distance pre-Covid-19, and for them, the effects of isolation are amplified. The impact of Covid-19 on culture is really their front-of-mind concern. And here we're thinking about culture in terms of how we connect, how we collaborate. Gen Z has really struggled to disconnect from technology. They're citing irritation from too much screentime, bad work/life balance, well ahead of other groups. And this impacts mental health, with already about half of Gen Z professionals saying that staying
One of the best use cases for XR technologies is training and enterprise solutions, as long-time listeners know. Today’s guests, Jamie Fleming and Bharat Ahluwalia from Altoura, pop by to explain how they’re optimizing workplace productivity.
Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan Smithson here, with the XR for Business podcast. Today, we're speaking with Bharat Ahluwalia and Jamie Fleming from Altoura about augmenting enterprise productivity for frontline workers using spatial technologies. All that and more coming up next on the XR for Business podcast. Jamie and Bharat, welcome to the show, my friends.
Jamie: Hey, thanks, Alan. Super happy to be here.
Alan: I'm really excited. So, Bharat, I know offline you were just-- you were mentioning that you were part of the original Hololens team. So I know how you got started in this. Jamie, you've been building experiences for 15 years in technology. So maybe just give us a bit of your background and we'll go from there.
Jamie: Sure, yeah. For starters, this is Jamie. So I actually started out in architecture. I have a masters of architecture, and worked as an architect for a number of years. And that's really where I was given an introduction to 3D modeling and building out immersive experiences in the day-to-day practice of design and got the spark of an idea of, hey, I could create a company where we really just focused on creating experiences, and making them more and more interactive that helped -- in the early years, particularly -- help designers understand what their designs were. And over the years, that has just become more and more sophisticated and we've gotten deeper, deeper into the software side of things. Now we really have a lot of interesting ways that we can leverage these digital twins to help augment enterprise productivity.
Bharat: And this is Bharat here. I got started in this space when I joined the Hololens team. It was an interesting experience. The project was top secret, as you know, and I wasn't even told what I would be working on until I agreed to sign the offer letter. But I knew a couple of key people then said, "OK, these guys get involved and it will be an awesome product." And it was. The first time I saw the vision video and the vision of the device, it was, wow. That's what I want to work on. So I worked on it for a few years, shipped the V1 of the device and was so in love with this technology, that I decided to leave the company and build experiences on top of the device and the platform that I was part of. I did a small startup that led to being acquired by Studio 216, which is now named Altoura. And here I am. And I have been building Hololens and VR experiences since then.
Alan: It really comes down to the experiences, because the devices themselves-- the Hololens 2 is a magical piece of kit, but if nothing's on it, it's kind of useless. So you decided to go into the experiences. And what are some of the things that you've been building? Because I've seen some of them, but I'll let you guys speak to them. What are some of the experiences that you've been building?
Jamie: Yeah, we're really-- the one that we're super excited about right now is the work that we've been doing with Qantas Airlines. So what we've done with Qantas is we've taken the 737-800 cockpit and we've re-created it as a digital twin. And then using Hololens 2, we allow you to interact with that cockpit as if you were there, so you could be sitting in your living room or a classroom or anywhere really in the world, networked together and interacting with functions inside the cockpit, the same way that you would do in a physical simulator. So as we know with Hololens 2, it's tracking all 25+ points on each of your hands. You just-- there's very
Making any sort of head-mounted AR display has been a challenge, both on the technology front, and from an adaptation standpoint. But Stefan Alexander from North challenged himself even further - by making them look chic, to boot.
Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan Smithson here, with the XR for Business podcast. Today, we're speaking with Stefan Alexander, vice president of Advanced R&D for North, the company this created Focals, the world's first consumer AR glasses. And of course, they're also a Canadian company. And we're really excited to talk about their new product, North Focals 2. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast. Stefan, welcome to the show.
Stefan: Thanks, it's great to be here.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure. As you know, I have had a pair of North glasses for almost-- actually over a year now. I was one of the first 100 people to be lucky enough to get these. I went in for my fitting in Toronto, got these wonderful glasses, I got my little ring. And I proceeded to try all sorts of different things. And super excited to have you on the call and really learn more about what's coming up next for North.
Stefan: Yeah, great.
Alan: Maybe you can just describe the North glasses to the listeners, and how they came about.
Stefan: So, I can give you a kind of brief history of how this whole thing started. So originally when North was founded, it was actually called Thalmic Labs, and the product was a gesture control armband. So this kind of went on your upper forearm. You could make motions with your hand and it would detect your muscle movements and you could control computers, music, do presentation control. But one of the things that they were really passionate about was controlling heads-up displays like Google Glass, which had just come out at the time. I was actually the first person hired to not work on the Myo, that was this armband. And about a year before it came out, they hired me and they said, "Stefan, we think that the control of smart glasses and the control of head mounted displays is really important. But we're not sure if anybody's going to make exactly what we have in mind, what we think is gonna be so big, which is glasses that look exactly like regular glasses. And we don't know the tech to do this, and I don't think it exists yet. But can we work on a way to do these type of smart glasses?" So I had a display background. I was working at OLED displays. And so I started this research program, that turned into the first generation of Focals. And eventually it got so good that it really just took over the company, and we stopped doing the gesture control and we've just kind of went all in on smart glasses and changed our name to North. And that's kind of how we ended up where we are.
Alan: That's fantastic. I wonder-- you started off life as a gesture armband. And it's funny, because I remember this. I was part of the Ryerson Digital Media Zone at the time. And I went to Communitech, which is where North was founded, or I guess Thalmic Labs at the time.
Stefan: Yeah, yeah.
Alan: And I remember going into this tiny little lab with I think there was probably 10 people at the time, and they said, "Hey, try this thing on your forearm." And it was this kind of stretchy, almost like a bracelet with a bunch of black sensors on it. And after that, I went on to create The Emulator, which was the see-through touchscreen DJ controller. And we worked-- we ended up working with Armin Van Buren, who w
Today’s guest Sean Hurwitz started his journey to the XR field in the realm of game development. But as the years went on, more and more he saw the value of putting game engines to work training professionals instead of hunting zombies. He talks about how PIXO VR achieves this.
Alan: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Smithson here with the XR for Business podcast. Today we’re speaking with Sean Hurwitz, founder and CEO of PIXO VR, a Detroit based company focused on VR software for training on processes, safety, and emergency response. Much like myself, Sean believes that extended reality — or XR — technologies can unlock human potential, and realize limitless possibilities. He’s assembled an all-star team of game changing VR and AR engineers, and we’re going to talk about how this translates directly into safety and training across all different industries. All that and more on the XR for Business podcast.
Sean, welcome to the show, my friend.
Sean: Hi, Alan. Thanks for having me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. I’m really, really excited. I’ve been kind of using your VR training video that you did. It was in a basement, and you’re training gas meter people on how to how to — I guess –use a gas meter. But I’ve been using that video to show the diverse range of things that can be done within VR. Tell us about that. Tell us about PIXO VR.
Sean: Yes, I am definitely onboard with the way that XR and training will definitely change the ecosystem, make people’s lives safer and more effective, and hopefully make more money too, at the end. So yeah, the example that you give is a replication of a basement, where technicians were in the traditional way of training, driving around, mirroring or shadowing older technicians as the evolving workforce and the younger generation coming in. And they were training the new employees, the new trainees, and they were looking for a way to do this training that would be close to real life, rather than drive around for weeks or months on end. And they couldn’t show– the problem was they couldn’t really identify or show all the variances in the gas meters in these basements. So we did a multi-user randomized scenario of millions of different setups and scenarios of what these gas meters would look like, and really expedited the training timeline. So PIXO, that’s sort of the– using your video as an example. But we started as a traditional console video game company, moving quickly into mobile and enterprise, and then even quicker in 2016 into getting the first Oculus DK and starting to build enterprise VR training, from that point forward.
Going from making games, because I just interviewed Arash Keshmirian from Extality, and he was doing the same thing. They were making virtual or augmented reality games for phones. And now they’re making enterprise solutions. How did you make that shift from going to making games to enterprise? And was it simply a way of making money or just– what is the precipitating factor of going from making games to basements full of gas fitting technology?
Sean: Well, money certainly plays a role, but really the mission to make people’s lives better, to help improve the planet that we live on, being able to utilize the skill set that we’ve spent combined dozens of years, used the same skill set, even the same game engine as to develop interactive games — which is really what this training is — to be able to replicate things that you either were too expensive to do otherwise or just too risky to do. So, once we figured out that we were able to create the scenarios in the field — or in a basement, like you said earlier — and
Most of the world is stuck indoors as the Coronavirus situation looms. Alan has a few words of encouragement for our listeners, and talks briefly about the power XR has to help keep us productive while we flatten the curve.
For more information, check out our past episodes on virtual meeting spaces:
Jacob Loewenstein - Spatial
Jonny Cosgrove - meetingRoom
Gabe Paez - The Wild
Kalle Saarikannas - Glue
Michael C. Cohen - UgoVirtual
Code is a big part of what makes XR work, of course. But for most businesses, knowing the DNA of the technology will be less important than knowing how to best use it. XR Bootcamp co-founder Ferhan Ozkan is enabling businesses interested in XR to enable themselves.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today, we're speaking with Ferhan Ozkan, the co-founder of XR Bootcamp, a platform to teach professionals how to create VR and AR applications, and support companies to bridge their skills gap in XR development through an intensive onsite program, cutting edge curriculum, and industry renowned lecturers with a focus on industry portfolio projects. I am personally very, very honored to be on the advisory board of XR Bootcamp and helping them really develop the future of how organizations will train their staff on how to build XR technologies. And so with that, I'd love to welcome Ferhan to the show. Ferhan, welcome to the show, my friend.
Ferhan: Hi, Alan. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for inviting.
Alan: It's absolutely my pleasure. I just want to give you a little bit of history about you. XR Bootcamp started from VR First, which was an organization bringing VR labs into universities and colleges around the world. Is that correct?
Ferhan: Yes. Yes. Back then -- almost four years ago -- we started as VR First. The main mission was to democratize VR and AR around the world. And you also supported us on these times, because it was hard to find headsets as a developer, as a startup. And we actually tried to tackle this problem with the help of major headset manufacturers - Oculus, HTC, Leap Motion, Intel -- and they supported us to create VR/AR labs around the world. And we are quite happy with the impact being created now, these labs are actually really become big and creating amazing projects. And we are actually proud to have this network and enable this network. Yeah, we are now actually around 800 university that we can reach and over 400 startup clusters. But as a lab that we have supported and seeded -- as in equipment and other support -- we reach to almost 52 labs. And now we see that these labs become actually quite impactful in their own region to create a regional VR/AR development scene, and VR/AR startup and clusters, and they are even creating VR/AR programs -- academic programs -- and industrial based trainings.
Alan: Ferhan, when did you guys realize that bringing this type of knowledge into the enterprise was the next step?
Ferhan: It is quite interesting, because we talk with institutions not only in educational, but government institutions. They reach to us after hearing about VR/AR. "Can we educate the people in our health institutions? Can we train the people, the employees that is actually working in the-- airport workers, like on the aviation industry?" And we understood that there is actually already an initiative happening on different parts of the world, on different industries based on each government's or each region's industry focus. And then we decided, "OK, what we can do first of all to start the VR/AR innovation in each key destination?" So as I mentioned, seeding the equipment was the first one. I remember in the beginning of 2017, we had some kind of survey, and unfortunately for every 51 developer, there was only one headset in any institution or in a startup cluster. So think of like you want to create something, but you cannot even access the VR headset, which is a shame for this region. So we first of all started this seed equipment program, and then training programs come afterwards. And the biggest supporters or beneficiaries were actually the top enterprises in this local area, from manufacturing to automotive, from aviation to defense indu
Today's guest -- UgoVirtual's Michael Cohen -- describes the hospitality industry like a snowflake - add a little heat and, well, you can imagine. Hotels and cruises rely on proven practices to keep guests happy. Luckily, XR doesn't have to disrupt those practices; they can build on top of them.
Alan: Coming up next on the XR for Business podcast, we have Michael Cohen from UgoVirtual. We're going to be talking about how virtual/augmented/mixed reality solutions -- or XR solutions -- can be used for front-of-house for customer facing activations, from AR to VR. Pre-experiences, what is it like to book this hotel, looking all around you? And also the back-of-house: how do we use this technology to give the best possible training for the staff, so that the customer experience is flawless across the board? All that and more coming up, on the XR for Business podcast, coming up next. Michael, welcome to the show, my friend.
Michael: Thank you very much. Really appreciate it, Alan.
Alan: It's my absolute pleasure. It's been a long time coming. We've been kind of doing the dance, watching each other grow. And I'm really excited to learn about what you guys are doing in the hospitality field. It feels like it's a greenfield opportunity in hospitality, from travel/tourism. A bunch of companies started with, "We're going to put a 360 camera and let you have a virtual tour." But explain to us, what are you doing at UgoVirtual, and what is the response so far in the hospitality industry?
Michael: Well, first of all, timing is everything, as we know. [chuckles] And the global travel and hospitality industry is absolutely a greenfield opportunity. It's primed for scale and expansion in regards to XR. The reason being is that there have been investments and there have been initiatives, both on the brand and enterprise level of hospitality and travel companies, but also in startups and larger companies who have enabled, let's call it a slice of VR or a slice of AR. Or as you mentioned, enabled OK 360 hotel tours that were maybe derivative out of the real estate market and that sort of scenario. Now, the opportunity is very, very serious for UgoVirtual, because we are the travel and hospitality virtual solutions company, very myopically focused to both consult to the major travel and hospitality brands to help them navigate and make investments and strategic decisions for the next three, four, five years on what XR will be for them.
And also from our perspective, we have a portfolio of XR oriented solutions that are very focused and linear to the travel and hospitality space. So we're not taking generic solutions and trying to overlay them on travel and hospitality. The group that's involved with UgoVirtual -- who I'm a strategic advisor to -- we're all 15-20 year veterans on hospitality technology commercialization for the front-of the house, which is guest facing solutions and the back-of-the-house, which is employees and staff. So when you overlay that kind of multi-decade experience on how to get technology efficiently deployed, efficiently commercialized, exceed the demands or the needs of travel and hospitality brands, with these now slowly maturing VR/AR/XR opportunities, it's a wonderful fit for UgoVirtual right now.
Alan: So give us an example. You talked about front-of-house, customer facing solutions. Let's start with front-of-house and then we'll go back-of-house. Because I don't know if you know this, but I actually met my wife working at Delta Hotels in Toronto.
Michael: [chuckles] That's perfect.
Alan: Yeah.
Michael: Yeah.
Alan: I was a bartender, and she was the night manager--
Michael: That sounds like a
Today’s guest, location-based VR expert Bob Cooney, has been in the XR space since the early 1990s. He drops by the show to give Alan an update on all the newest tech advances he saw at the International Association of Amusement Parks and Attractions Expo, and explains how today is the most exciting time to be working in this industry.
[Transcript]
Using VR in the classroom is a no-brainer. It’s immersive tech, and can teach kids in new, innovative ways. But if the people developing the technology don’t understand how kids’ brains learn, it’s not going to take, no matter how innovative. VirtualiTeach’s Steve Bambury drops by to explain how he’s trying to bridge that gap.
Alan: Hey, everyone, my name’s Alan Smithson. Coming up next on the XR for Business podcast, we have Steve Bambury, founder of VirtualiTeach. We’re gonna be talking about digital literacy, the virtual/augmented reality platforms, and the question on everybody’s mind: What are the key barriers to adopting VR and AR in schools and how to overcome them? All this and more, coming up next on the XR for Business Podcast. Welcome to the show, Steve. How are you?
Steve: I’m good, man. It’s good to speak to you.
Alan: It’s really great. The last time we saw each other, we were in Dubai — where you live — and you took me to the Dubai Mall, and we went in and we went to the VR Park, the giant VR Park. And I was just blown away by how big and ostentatious everything was. And it was a really great experience. I can’t thank you enough for your warm hospitality in Dubai. But today it’s all about you. So let’s talk about what you’re doing, and how did you get into this? And what are you doing now?
Steve: I’ve been in Dubai for 11 years. And for those 11 years, I’ve always worked at the same school. I was working a school group here known as GESS — which is the acronym for Jumeirah English Speaking School — also broadly referred to as GESS Dubai now. GESS is one of the leading schools in the Middle East. It’s a very old school, at least in terms of international schools in this region. It’s only, I think four years or three years younger than the UAE as a country. So it is very well established. And yeah, so I worked there for 11 years. I worked as a class teacher in one of the primary schools, and curriculum leader. Eventually become head of computing at the primary school. So I was teaching digital literacy and computer science content to four year olds, 3 to 11 year olds. And I ended up in that role primarily because of all the work I’ve been doing to integrate the iPads in the classroom. From 2011, we were one of the first schools in the Middle East to to roll out iPads in the classroom. And then three years ago, I moved into a role that was created for me, which was the head of digital learning and innovation, working underneath the new director, Mark Steed, who’d just come in from the UK. Mark had the pedigree in terms of digital learning from what he’d done at this very, very prestigious school in the UK called Berkhamsted. He’d also chaired the Independent Digital Strategy Group for eight years there. And so Mark created this role and this role took me out of the classroom most of the time. A lot of it involved training with staff. It also involved going back into departments and helping them with enrichment projects. And it was kind of in parallel to that. I mean, part of the reason that my work with virtual reality really took off is because I moved into this new role, and had this freedom to innovate and to explore new technologies. My first VR headset was just a [garbled] headset I imported from the States in 2014. But it was not long after I started this new role as head of digital learning at GESS that I got my first Vive. I took that Vive into the school and started looking for ways to integrate it into different curriculum areas. In actual fact, I’ve just recently started writing a series of guest posts for Vive on the Vive blog. You can go into Google, like “HTC Vive blog Steve Bambury” or
You may not immediately think of XR technologies when you think of Nestlé, who are more likely to conjure the idea of milk chocolate and bottled water. But their immersive technology lead Richard Hess drops by to explain how even a food company like Nestlé can benefit from embracing emerging tech, on the 100th episode of the XR for Business podcast.
Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan Smithson here with the XR for Business Podcast. Today, we’re speaking with Richard Hess, the immersive experience lead at the massive multi-national Nestlé, making a billion products a year. A day, he said, but I don’t know, a lot of products. You have them on your shelf, you have them in your fridge. We’re gonna be speaking with Rich about Nestlé’s VR and AR efforts in marketing, sales, enterprise solutions, and training. All that and more on the XR for Business Podcast. Rich, welcome to the show, my friend.
Richard: Hey, Alan. Thanks for having me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. You and I have spent a lot of time kind of talking over the phone, but also spending some time on a panel at AWB.
Richard: Yeah, that’s right. Yeah, we’ve crossed paths a few times. I’m just happy to be here, to talk a little bit about what we’re doing at Nestlé.
Alan: We’re super excited. Why don’t you make an introduction to you, and what you’re doing in XR with Nestlé?
Richard: Sure. So for myself, I’ve been with Nestlé for about 10 years now. First based out of the US, working for our waters division there. Mostly supporting digital marketing on the technology side. If you go back 10 years ago, the mobile phone was becoming big, people were starting looking at social media as a way to communicate. Through that journey around three years ago, spent about a year in San Francisco, starting with our innovation outpost that we have out there, looking at emerging technologies. And that’s kind of where I gained a passion for augmented/virtual reality, mixed reality, extended reality, whatever kind of acronym comes in the space there.
Alan: Realities? All the Rs?
Richard: All the realities. Yeah. [laughs]
Alan: I actually wrote an article — you can find it on LinkedIn — it’s called “The ABCs of R”.
Richard: Oh yeah, there we go. That’s good, I got to take a look at that. But yeah, that’s when I started getting a bit more hands on from my under the organization of getting “Okay, I’ve seen a lot of tangible use cases.” And around a little more than two years ago I came over here to Barcelona, where Nestlé has set up this global digital hub, that was mostly — at the time — looking more marketing and sales focused on how do we build centralized global platforms, and products, and services that can serve all of our markets and brands across the world, but now is more holistic across all different use cases, whether it’s in the factories, supply chain, HR etc. It’s kind of looking across the whole spectrum. So the past two to three years or so, I’ve been looking at augmented/virtual reality in that way of how do we take all these little different one-off experiences that we’ve done. And when we see a lot of tangible value in leveraging these technologies, we try to bring them to scale in something that is a full industrialized product, that the rest of the organization can take advantage of.
Alan: Let’s give an example of one that you did a pilot, you realized the success of it and now you’re going–
Richard: Well, I think a really good example — and
Verizon’s XR development lead, TJ Vitolo, dreams of a day where he can download an entire TV series in an instant, or visualize info about the entire world with AR glasses, even living in a connectivity dead zone by the beach. In his position, he’s able to work to make that dream a forthcoming reality by developing the technology that will make 5G possible.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today, I've got an amazing guest, TJ Vitolo. He is the director and head of XR Technology Development at Verizon. Today, he leads the commercial strategy and product execution behind Verizon's VR, AR and 360 organization environment. Recently, TJ and his team launched AR Designer, the world's first streaming-based AR tool kit that allows brands and developers to quickly and easily create augmented reality experiences, with no technical expertise. You can visit Verizon.com or envrmnt.com. I want to welcome TJ to the show. Welcome.
TJ: Hey, thanks for having me, Alan.
Alan: Oh, it's my absolute pleasure. I'm so excited to have you on the show. This is like-- all the things you guys are doing, from working with the accessibility team at Cornell Tech, to your acquisition of Riot, to working with the Sacramento Kings, Yahoo! News. There is so much going on at Verizon. You want to just give us a high level summary of what you do, and what the plan is at Verizon for introducing 5G and XR?
TJ: It's quite dynamic here. You know, the VR space is ever evolving. Teams that do a number of things within VR here. But specifically you mentioned Riot. Between our team and Riot, we manage both of the content and creative end of XR, and that's Riot. And our team manages the technical-- technology side of virtual reality. So really, my team is focused on building tools and enablers, systems, platforms on the 5G network, sort of the underlying side of XR, to help accelerate and grow the adoption of the technology. On the other side, Riot's all about the product and the creative storytelling around VR, which really brings these things to life for people.
Alan: So you've got both the technical side and then the creative. And this is something that I've been harping on with customers as well, and just the industry at large: that this industry is no longer about just making products. And you look at the VC investments and they're investing in platforms and products, but you still need people to create the content. And I think you guys have found that balance with Riot. What do you see as kind of the future of how we create this content, is it going to be user generated versus studio content, or a mixture of both?
TJ: It's going to be a mixture of both. User generation is quite difficult today. One of the products you mentioned, we launched was AR Designer. And really the foundation for that was to put the power of augmented reality and virtual reality into the hands of even the most common user of technology. We built this platform initially with the mindset that schoolteachers-- and not by any means that they're simpletons, but the fact of the matter is they're teaching students, young children, and they've got to have a very effective way to do that, efficient way to do that. And so when we were building this tool, we baseline on children as the audience, schoolteachers as the user of the tool, to produce something that's really effective. So I think you're going to see as VR/AR becomes more ubiquitous, access is going to be much greater, and more in the hands of users. At the end of the day, there's always going to be the community outside of the content or the UGC community producing content. And I think those are the folks who
Macy’s has been in the news a lot this week, and many are worried about what the latest round of store closures mean for the long-running retailer, and the future of in-person shopping in general. But Macy’s resident XR guru Mohamed Rajani came by our podcast a little while back to suggest that the future of retail exists in the virtual world.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Mohamed Rajani, responsible for VR and AR initiatives at Macy’s. Mohamed is part of the new Business Development and Innovation team at Macy’s, and is responsible for driving change through the development of new retail concepts and partnerships amidst an evolving retail landscape. “Mo” also leads Macy’s immersive technology initiatives, including VR and AR in furniture, which is removing key friction points for the customer, enabling an AR view in-room capabilities on the Macy’s mobile app. To learn more about the work he’s doing, you can visit macys.com.
Mohamed, welcome to the show.
Mohamed: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Alan. Happy to be here.
Alan: We had the opportunity to to have a few calls prior to Augmented World Expo. We were on a panel together, and you were talking about the amazing work that you’re doing at Macy’s. So let’s start unpacking that. Mo, tell us about what you guys are doing at Macy’s.
Mohamed: So just a little bit of context that our team does. Our team’s about two and half years old. I’ve been with the company for over eight years, across a variety of different functions. But about two and a half years ago, as a company, we decided to establish a dedicated team that’s purely focused on what’s new, what’s next. That’s focused on the emerging consumer landscape, the emerging technology landscape, and making sure that the Macy’s brand continues to be relevant not only today, but 10, 20, 30 years from now. So as a team, we’re purely focused on looking at new business models, new concepts, emerging technologies, but then really tying those to our strategic businesses. We want to make sure that any new innovation that we bring into the organization has a lasting impact. But more importantly, a meaningful impact that is actually moving the needle.
So if we think about from that context of how we ended up playing in virtual reality and augmented reality, in our business we have a strategic business fillers, and furniture is one of them. It is a business that is high touch, a high margin business, so it’s margin accretive, more profitable to the company, and it’s destination business for us. We’re top of mind for the customer when they’re thinking about furniture. And if you’ve had any experience in buying furniture, it is not a very easy process. It’s one of the few businesses that’s still overwhelmingly physical purchases. More business happens in-store than online, and by a higher margin. And part of it is just the friction involved in it. You don’t know how it’s going to look, how it’s going to fit. And it’s a business that we, as a company, need to fortify. It’s a business that if we want to remain relevant for the next five, 20 years, we want to make sure that we’re not only fortifying the business, but growing and capturing market share. So is that context, whereas we came across emerging technologies as part of our job, we were navigating the landscape and looking at what’s coming out.
This was 2016, into 2017. We started seeing virtual reality technologies, especially in the furniture space, and we started exploring and we wanted to make sure that there was a practical a
This week’s episode goes all the way back to last year’s Curiosity Camp, when Alan shared a ride with Unity Lab’s Timoni West and Vapor IO CEO Cole Crawford, recording a podcast along the way. The three discuss the challenges that will arise as AI begins to replace human workers.
Alan: In a very special episode of the XR for Business Podcast, we’re driving in a car with Timoni West, head of XR… Research?
Timoni: Director of XR in Unity Labs.
Alan: Director of XR at Unity Labs, and Cole Crawford, CEO of Vapor IO. So we’re driving on our way up to Curiosity Camp through these beautiful winding roads, and we decided that we would record a podcast, because Cole, in his incredible company building the infrastructure of cloud computing, they built an AR app to help service that. And I thought, what a cool way to use this technology and this time on this beautiful drive. Wow. Look at the size of those trees.
Timoni: They are enormous.
Alan: Oh, my God. Wow. Well, anyway. Timoni, how are you doing?
Timoni: Excellently. And I’m also enjoying the view. Yeah. Yeah, actually, Cole, I’m really interested to hear more about why you chose to go with that, and what the process was like. My team is working on tools for mixed reality. So for Unity itself, that’s used to make, I think, 90 percent of all Hololens applications right now. Century is using Unity for that. But the tools that we’re making today are allowing, I think, for you to more easily make robust, distributed applications that can work across various devices and for various users.
Cole: And that’s very needed. First off, Alan, I just want to say, you sound like you should be a podcast DJ.
Timoni: So it’s cool that you are.
Cole: Well done. But yeah, I mean, the issue for us when we started down this journey was very much a question of, how robust can we make an experience, about how widely could we make that experience? And the vertical integrated solutions that you had to choose from in the early days of AR/VR, I think, are primed for disruption. I’m super glad to hear that Unity is working on the open APIs, etc., needed to bring this technology to more users, as I’ll quote — maybe a little cliché being where we are and where we’re going — but–
Timoni: Yeah, I want to hear it. What is the problem you company solves?
Cole: Yeah. So we have to think about not four, but 40,000 different data centers; we’re an edge computing/edge data center infrastructure company. And with that means you can’t Mechanical Turk what was originally done in data centers. It works with four buildings. It doesn’t work with 40,000. So we had to build autonomy into every aspect of our business, in every aspect of the infrastructure. And that means building really simple interfaces for what would otherwise be really complex problems. And at scale, from a logistics supply chain — remote hand, smart hands, all the things that you do in data centers — what that means is your FedEx guy, your U.P.S. guy, a contracting company that otherwise would need specialized training, now it’s visually assisted capabilities for what would otherwise be a job that you would train for and then go work in a data center. We simplify that.
Alan: So basically what you’re saying is that you’ve given real-time tools to anybody to be an expert on the field, in the field.
Cole: It’s fair to say that the software is the exper, and what you need are opposable thumbs,.
Alan: Haha! Which democratizes the
We pick up where we left off, with Part 2 of Alan’s interview with Kent Bye, host of the Voices of VR Podcast. In this half, the two VR podcast hosts discuss the ethics of XR, building a strong economic ecosystem for emerging technologies, the AR Cloud, and more.
Alan: Coming up next on the XR for Business Podcast, we have part 2 of the interview with Kent Bye from the Voices Of VR podcast, the podcast that got me started in this industry.
I’m actually one of the founding members of the Open Air Cloud Group and Kronos Group is is really kind of trying to pull together these standards for 3D, as well for e-commerce. I know there’s a group right now trying to standardize 3D objects for e-commerce and retail because right now it’s a dog’s breakfast. Facebook accepts glTFs, Hololens is FBX models, VR is usually OBJs. So you have all these different 3D file formats. None of them really work well together and you can’t– it’s not easy to convert one to the other. And then of course, Apple came along and created USDZ. Or in Canada, USDZed. It’s crazy right now to think that there’s fifteen different 3D model types and it’s kind of like we need to settle on the JPG of 3D, whatever that happens to be, which in my opinion is probably glTF. But I think we need to standardize that and just pick, it so that– can imagine trying to send a photo to somebody and you send it in one format. And we saw this 10 years ago on the Web, just– it was 10 different ways to send a photo in different formats. Your camera would take one format, and it wouldn’t work with your MacBook. I think the tolerance for interoperability, I think the world just demands interoperability now. And if you’re not building for that, well, then you’re going to end up like Facebook and get broken apart.
Kent: Yeah. And I published a podcast with the managing director of Open AR Cloud, and one of the other founding members. And yeah, they were talking a lot about these various different issues. So, yeah, it’s something that you don’t see necessarily a lot of news on, until– unless you’re sort of deep into the weeds of helping design these protocols. But I did go to the Decentralized Web Summit last year, and one of the things that I saw was that there’s kind of like this pendulum that swings back and forth between the centralized systems and the decentralized systems. And I’d say that with cryptocurrency, with the containers being able take different aspects of a server and be able to push it out to the edge. We have it self-contained within either Kubernetes or Docker containers. And just in general, it’s kind of a movement away from centralized systems into more decentralized architectures.
That’s a interesting trend that I think that paying attention to the rise of the decentralized web and what that is going to afford. I feel like it’s a lot more about open protocols and collaboration and having people collaborate in different ways. And that’s something that I’d say has been a little bit lacking within the VR and AR industry. I mean, there’s been a certain amount of not sharing of knowledge, but in terms of like real meaningful collaboration. There’s been a few things like OpenXR and WebXR are of the big standouts, as well as probably the Chromium browsers that a lot of different companies are working on. But in terms of specific things to grow an ecosystem, it’s been difficult for companies to figure out what does it mean to grow community and what it mean to grow an entire ecosystem that you may be a part of. And I feel like the cryptocurrency world has had to deal with that a little bit, in the sense that they’re creating these open protocols, and they have to prove that there’s a buy-in to pe
One of Alan’s biggest inspirations to start XR for Business was the prolific catalogue of Kent Bye, who has released 884 recordings for his VR-centric podcast, Voices of VR. Alan has Kent on the show for a chat that was too big for one episode! Check out Part 2 later this week.
Alan: Hey, everyone, Alan Smithson here, the XR for Business Podcast. Coming up next, we have part one of a two part series, with the one and only Kent Bye from Voices Of VR. Kent Bye is a truly revolutionary person and he has recorded over 1,100 episodes of the Voices Of VR podcast. And we are really lucky to have him on the show. And this is two parts, because it goes on and on. Welcome to Part 1 of the XR for Business Podcast, with Kent Bye from the Voices Of VR podcast.
Kent has been able to speak peer to peer with VR developers, cultivating an audience of leading VR creators who consider the Voices Of VR podcast a must listen, and I have to agree. He’s currently working on a book answering the question he closes with every interview he does, “What is the ultimate potential of VR?” To learn more about the Voices Of VR and sign up for the podcast. it’s voicesofVR.com. And with that, I want to welcome an instrumental person to my knowledge and information of this industry. Mr. Kent Buy, it’s really a pleasure to have you on the show.
Kent: Hey, Alan. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Alan: Oh, thank you so much. I listen to probably the first two or three hundred episodes of your podcast, and I went from knowing literally nothing about this industry to knowing a lot. And it’s those insights that you’re able to pull out from the industry that’s just amazing. So thank you for being the voice of this industry.
Kent: Yeah. And when I started the podcast, I wanted to learn about what was happening in the industry. And so I felt like one of the best ways to do that was to go to these different conferences, and to talk to the people who were on the front lines of creating these different experiences. And so at this point, I think I’ve recorded over 1,100 different interviews and have published over 760 of them so far. So it’s about for every two interviews I publish, I have like another interview that I haven’t. So I just feel like it’s important to be on the front lines, going to these gatherings where the community’s coming together and to just be talking to people and see what they’re saying. See what the power of this new medium is.
Alan: I had the honor of being interviewed by you at one of these conferences. I don’t know if it ever got published, but it was an honor anyway just to speak with you on the subject. But you get to talk to literally everybody, anybody who’s anybody in this industry. And it’s really an amazing experience to listen to these podcasts. And you really go deep into the technology of it, the listeners of this podcast are more maybe in the business, maybe they’re not really into VR. What are some of the business use cases that you’ve seen from these people that you’ve been interviewing that made you go, “Wow, this is incredible?”
Kent: Well, first of all, virtual and augmented reality as a medium is a new paradigm of computing: spatial computing. And I think one metaphor to think about is how we usually enter into the computer is by pushing buttons and moving a mouse around. And it’s almost like we have to translate our thoughts into a very linear interface in order to interact with computing. And it’s usually also in a 2D space, so a lot of times interacting and designing for 3D spaces. And so there’s kind of like this weird translation t
The VR experience Firing Barry by Talespin is getting a lot of press lately, and on the surface, it may look like a slightly uncanny valley way to train someone how to give an old fella the can. But Talespin CEO Kyle Jackson tells Alan it’s more than that; it’s a tool to help humans flex their core competencies in everything from leadership skills to confidence-building.
Alan: Hey, everybody, Alan Smithson here, the XR for Business Podcast. Coming up next, Kyle Jackson, founder of Talespin. You may have seen Barry the virtual human that you can fire in real life. We’ll be talking to them about their enterprise software solutions that leverage immersive technology to transform the way global workforces, learn, work,, and collaborate. We’ll also be discussing how you can use immersive technologies as an assessment tool to better prepare your workforce for exponential growth. All that and more on the XR for Business Podcast. Kyle, welcome to the show, my friend.
Kyle: Hey. Thanks, Alan. Thanks for having me.
Alan: Oh, it’s so exciting. Ever since I saw the video that popped up of Barry, the lovable older gentleman avatar that you can fire. How did that come about? Tell us about Talespin, and how did you get here, where you are now?
Kyle: Yeah, Barry became famous very quickly, because it’s such an ironic idea. And that’s really what I think caught people’s attention; the idea that you could use virtual humans for soft skills training was something that just seemed sci-fi and ironic. But then once you started to peel back the layers of it, it just starts to make a lot of sense.So how we got there, was we started looking at all of the future skills gaps, surveys, research, everything that was surfacing from the Shift Commission, to the World Economic Forum, to McKinsey Global Institute. And we just kept seeing — obviously opposite AI and automation and robotics, all the things that are going on one side of technology — that there was this increasing index toward soft skills for some of the most underserved areas for businesses going forward. We’re building this platform which is supposed to help transfer skills and really align us to the future of work. And every single survey says soft skills is one of the things we should be looking at. And we went, “Wow, is there anything we can do there?” The thing that was most important for us in thinking about that was we have to hit emotional realism to do this. This isn’t like a point-and-click replacement. It needs to be something that when I’m sitting in there and I’m opposite Barry or any other virtual human now, that I believe the emotions and the frustration and all the things that are thrown at me. And to do that kind of at scale. From both an assessment standpoint, content, and deployment to large companies.
Alan: So how did you guys overcome the Uncanny Valley of Barry? I’ve seen so many human avatars that are almost there, but they got that creepy feeling. And if you’re going for emotional realism, creepy is not what you want on the delivery side.
Kyle: No. Well, we kind of pulled up short in our opinion. So we were pushing further than where we landed. And you can get to even more photo-real than Barry is. But soon as you do, you start to push over that ledge and it starts to really be creepy. We’re kind of right in the sweet spot of north of Pixar, but not hitting realism. And that seems to work. We focused a lot on micro-expressions and figuring out like a programmatic way to add a lot of micro-expression to the silent moments too, because I think one of the things that technologists immediately do is we had to figure out how to do animation systems, lip sync systems and things like that for when people are t
Upskilling things like floor management or assembly time, that’s easy in XR. But soft skills, like understanding and empathy? A bit more challenging — but importantly, not impossible. Cortney Harding talks with Alan about how emerging tech, like VR and 360 video, can help us all be a little kinder to one another.
Alan: Hey, everyone, Alan Smithson here. Today, we’re speaking with Cortney Harding, founder and CEO of Friends with Holograms, about their full service VR and AR agency, that focuses on soft skills training and best practices for creating powerful content that delivers results. All that and more on the XR for Business Podcast.Welcome to the show, Cortney.
Cortney: Oh, thanks for having me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. I’m so excited to have you on the show. You guys have done some incredible things and you’ve been a pioneer in this industry for quite some time. But I’ll let you talk to everybody about how you got into this and where you are now and where you’re going.
Cortney: Yeah, great. So I got into VR about almost five years ago now, which is crazy to think about. I have a background in the music business and specifically I was a journalist.I wrote for Billboard. I was an editor there for quite a while. I then went into the music tech space right around the time Spotify launched in the US. It was a great music and tech ecosystem.
Alan: You and I have a very similar background.
Cortney: Oh, funny.
Alan: I was a DJ for 20 years and then created the Emulator, the DJ touchscreen.
Cortney: Oh, cool.
Alan: Yeah. And then I got into VR. I was like, “What?” Go on. I didn’t mean to cut you off. I was like, “Wow, this is great.”
Cortney: No, it’s great. Yeah. So anyway, so I did music tech stuff for several years. I was– I lead business development, and strategy, and partnerships for a couple different startups. And then I saw this VR piece at an art museum about five years ago, and it really broke something open for me. And I was fascinated by it. So I spent about a year — I was still on contract with a music tech company — and I was still writing at the time. So I wrote about VR, I learned about VR, I met a lot of people. And in 2016, at South by Southwest, I did a panel on music and virtual reality. And one of my other panelists was this guy, Kevin Cornish, who’s starting a VR production company, he’s a VR director. And he and I had a really nice conversation, we hit it off. And I joined his VR production company, leading business development strategy. I worked there for about a year and a half. I learned a tremendous amount. It was a very, very intense experience and a very gratifying one.And then I split off to do my own thing. And so Friends With Holograms has been around for about two years now, sort of in its current incarnation. And in those couple of years, we’ve done a lot of different projects, which I’m really proud of.
Sort of our our best known project is the Accenture Avenues Project. So we worked on that with Accenture. And the backstory behind that is pretty fascinating. So Accenture came to us, I believe, right about two years ago now, right when we’re first starting and said “We have this idea, we want to do this really amazing social work training project. And would you like to bid for it?” And we, of course, said yes. So we bid for it and we were awarded it in the spring of last year. And then everything kind of went quiet for a while. And we were working on some other projects. And I just kind of in the back
The average concert is a tour de force for one’s sense of sound (and, if the bass is decent, one’s sense of their bones vibrating). But Anne McKinnon from The Boolean isn’t interested in “average” concerts. She wants to use XR to make concerts a sensation for all the senses.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Anne McKinnon from The Boolean. Anne is a VR and AR consultant and writer. She is an editor and contributor to Charlie Fink’s book “Convergence.” Charlie, as you may remember, was one of the very first episodes we had. Her consulting bridges the gap between entertainment and technology. As an advisor, Anne grows and curates a community of digital artists to leverage new and emerging technologies. Anne is actively engaged in the entertainment industry at the intersection of music, arts, gaming, and tech. You can learn more about the great work that Anne and her team are doing at theboolean.io. Anne, welcome to the show.
Anne: Thank you, Alan. I’m really excited to speak with you today, and also cannot wait to speak to a lot of the listeners.
Alan: Yes, it’s been a while. We’ve known each other quite some time, and you do some work with VR Days and they’ve been on the show as well. And it feels like a family, like a network of people that are all just kind of coming together. So how did you get into this crazy world of technology?
Anne: Actually, VR Days was one of the major events I went to and I started working in tech. And it was as a blogger and just kind of looking at how can we solve problems in VR, what can we use it for, and how can we make improvements to every aspect of our lives? And VR Days was one of the best conferences that bridged the gap between technology and arts, and also brought together everyone from military to education to healthcare, and also the creatives to drive that innovation. So that way, I guess I met some of the teams that I work with now and we’re looking at how to solve all these problems and to bring it to audiences around the world.
Alan: Let’s unpack that. What are some of the problems that you’re working on solving?
Anne: I want you talk a lot today about one of the projects we’re working on for almost two years, and that’s with Miro Shot. So Miro Shot is a band and we’re touring a virtual reality live concert around the world. So to kind of put in detail about what that looks like, is that the audience is physically present and the band as also physically present. And when the audience enters, they have VR headsets on and they are immersed in dreamscape visuals, and the pass-through camera’s a big part of what we do to connect the realities, and to experience music in a new way. And one of the problems that a lot of VR experiences have is how do you reach audiences around the world with live performance, and also how do you reach a large scale audience? A lot of what we’re focusing in business is how do you grow experiences from live to at home. And this is something we’re doing with the band, with up to 30 people at a time for live concert.
Alan: People simultaneously in VR?
Anne: Simultaneously in VR. So a lot of it is based around the concepts of gaming. So we’re really looking at VR as something that’s not contained, taking from classical genres, from theater and cinema and gaming. So everything starts in a gaming lobby. And they start the experience together and depending on where they look, they’ll be able to experience different parts of the world of the music. And they’re also because of the live perf
It’s been said on this show before; XR doesn’t have a technology problem, it has an adoption problem. In Dan Lejerskar’s experience, everyone from universities to governments see the value of XR — they just lack the content to make it a worthwhile, everyday tool. He and Alan explore how EON Reality is addressing this discrepancy.
Alan: Hi, it’s Alan Smithson here. Today we’re speaking with Dan Lejeskar, founder and chairman of EON Reality, a world leader in virtual/augmented reality based knowledge transfer for industry and education. They believe that knowledge is a human right and it’s their goal to make knowledge available, affordable, and accessible for every human on the planet. We’re going to find out how, in the next XR for Business Podcast. Dan, welcome to the show, my friend.
Dan: Thank you so much.
Alan: I’m really, really excited. I know you guys have been working– well, you specifically have been working in the 3D virtual space for many years now. How did you get involved in VR and learning?
Dan: In my past, I used to work with simulators — big aircraft simulators, etc. — and I got really excited about seeing the effect it has on pilots and soldiers, and I always thought that it would be useful to do the same, but for normal people, nurses, etc. But obviously these people couldn’t afford a $50-million simulator. So I had to be patient and wait until the computers follow Moore’s Law; become cheaper, faster, better. And by ’99, the hardware was there, so you can start running this on PCs. So we were very early adopters of virtual reality already in that period.
Alan: We’re talking 20 years. Most people know VR and AR as if kind of something in the last five years. But what was it like kind of going through these growing pains of going from a million dollar simulator — millions of dollars simulator — to now we can buy an Oculus Quest for 500 bucks?
Dan: It’s been an interesting journey, with a lot of ups and downs. And very much VR has been like AI. I’m sure you’ve read about the “AI Winter”, when things didn’t go that well. We’ve had quite a few ups and downs in virtual reality. ’99 was fantastic, because that was the era of dot-coms. And we started with something called Web3D, so you can do 3D on the web. It had actually millions of users. Then we had a hard landing 2001. Remember when dot-com crashed? And we had to move our business from industry and education to defence because we had September 11th. So that was kind of what saved our business, doing homeland security centers and the like. And then slowly and surely, we picked up the business up to 2007, 2008. And during this period, there were several iterations. There was something called people avatars and virtual worlds, that was very popular around 2007. That raised and crashed also, pretty tough. But we managed to navigate those water until I would say 2011, 2012, when the hardware became available for mobile devices. So this was before Oculus. Already then we could see where the industry was going.
Alan: Oh, you guys, you never lost your path. You’ve veered a little bit from military, to industry and education, back to military, and then back to industry and education. Obviously, the passion is in the industry, knowledge transfer and education. What are some of the projects that you guys have done in the last few years that really just made you go, “Wow, this really is something that, quote unquote, normal people can use?”
Dan: So, you’re right. We realized quickly that the biggest value has to do with knowledge
Getting future workers excited for the jobs they might have tomorrow can be challenging, especially when many young workers tend to enjoy challenging themselves with new tasks. Dr. Björn Schwerdtfeger says that AR training can allow those workers to qualify themselves for all sorts of tasks, and have fun doing it, to boot.
[Transcript coming shortly]
Alan: Hey, everybody, and thanks for joining in on the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. I’m really excited today. I have Dr. Björn Schwerdtfeger from Germany. He has more than 15 years experience in augmented reality. Together with the German industry, he’s evaluated almost every idea for AR in applications in the industry. He’s been a co-inventor of Pick-By-Vision at TU Munich. And during that time — when computers for AR glasses were still carried in large backpacks — Björn holds a PhD in industrial augmented reality as a serial entrepreneur. And among other things, his company, AR Experts, is advising about a third of Germany’s most important production companies, and is shaping their augmented reality roadmaps. You can learn more about them at ar-experts.de. And they have another product that they’re gonna be talking about today. It’s ar-giri.com. Björn, welcome to the show, my friend.
Björn: Yeah. Welcome, Alan. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you online. I’m looking forward to this podcast.
Alan: It’s so exciting. The work that you’ve been doing over the last few years — like a decade and a half — is really starting to come to fruition now. I mean, all of the hard work that you and your team have done to evangelize a technology that — let’s be honest — 15 years ago, the technology really wasn’t ready for the market. Tell us, how did you get into this, into AR?
Björn: It was actually quite funny, while still studying at the university, computer science, and then somewhere else, augmented reality which popped up. And someone had a demonstrator, where someone took some glasses and glued a webcam — we had external webcams earlier — just hot-glued to some glasses and using some [unclear] stuff and highlighting it. I think it was just a cube. A virtual cube… And it was so fascinating that you can bring this computer interface into the real world. Quite a long time ago. But it was really nice.
Alan: Björn, did you say there was a webcam hot-glued to a pair of glasses?
Björn: Exactly. That’s how we did augmented reality 15, 20 years ago.
Alan: Amazing. You are one of the OG, the originals of this industry. You’ve been building and advising brands and companies around their strategy for production. What is the one thing in augmented reality right now that you’ve seen the most ROI?
Björn: It’s probably… we’ve seen a lot of companies trying to do everything. Basically every single one of us have tried to out, in the last three decades, and failed with it. And we’re figuring out what is actually the core of augmented reality. And the core of augmented reality is not– it’s not a measurement tool, it’s not a tool for everything. It looks like a display, and it is a good display. But where its core is, where it’s so good in, is in communication. It displays communication and augmented reality is big. It’s so much more close to your reality, that perception is getting much better. So what you tried to communicate with exosheets, nice PowerPoints; it’s getting so closer to the user with augmented reality. And they figured out that the communication got so much better using augmented reality — using good implemented augemnted real
Regular listeners will know that podcast host Alan Smithson is no stranger to the conference circuit, and is often asked to present or speak at the big XR expos. In a special episode of XR for Business, you’ll get to hear Alan in his element, as we present his opening remarks at this year’s VRX Conference.
“Well, thank you guys for joining. Again, welcome to the Blue Room at VRX 2019. My name’s Alan Smithson, and we’re gonna be talking today about the transformation of education using XR. I want to just quickly talk about MetaVRse. We’re building a platform for future-proof learning. And what that means to us is as more spatial computing technologies come on board, what we want to do is make sure that organizations — from training and enterprise, and also schools and organizations in high schools and universities — all have access to not only the content, but the platforms to let them make their own content. So what we’re building is a platform marketplace for technologies and content to grow.
We’re entering into the exponential age of humanity. We’re hitting the point at which all of these technologies converge together. So in the next 10 years, more wealth will be created than all of previous human history. We’re entering into an inflection point, where education systems are going to be stretched beyond our wildest imaginations. Over the next 10 years, more wealth can be created, but right now — currently — we’re building a city the size of Manhattan around the world globally, every single month. Yeah.
We’re going to experience massive changes, from environmental changes, to job force changes, to educational changes, all of these changes are happening to us at a pace that we’ve never had before. It’s happening faster and faster. And somebody said this to me the other day. They said “Today is the slowest it will ever be.” It’s terrifying, it’s so fast. But learning is required at every level, whether it’s skilled trades, unskilled trades, whether it is retirees. We’re working on technologies that will make people live to 150 years old. What are they going to do? We need to rethink learning from a ground-up level. All types of learning, whether it’s at work or at school, all of these things that need a complete rethink.
Here’s a crazy stat: 75 percent of the global workforce will be millennials by 2023. Who else is terrified by that fact? Right? 120 million people need to be reskill, retrained, and upskilled due to AI and automation in the next three years. We don’t have the systems in place to deal with this. Two trillion dollars, that is the global impact that VR and AR will make over the next 10 years, by 2030. And this is an estimate by PWC.
So why is now the perfect time to get into virtual and augmented reality for learning? So over the last three decades we saw the rise of the personal computer and it took 20 years — 30 years, almost — to get everybody onto the personal computer. And then we saw the rise of mobile, and that took about 20 years. XR is going to take about 10 years to go to global mass. So by 2030, we’re gonna be wearing glasses around and those glasses will be inexpensive. They’ll be running on the cloud, so the compute power won’t be on your phone or on your glasses. It’ll be in the cloud, it’ll be all edge computing.
So we’re gonna see this massive growth. And right now, we’re past the hype cycle. We’ve already seen proven business use cases. We’re seeing real ROI being driven. And if you look at the compounded annual growth rate of this industry, it’s unprecedented. The only other industry that’s growing as fast is AI. And it perfectly c
Today’s guest — Sector 5 Digital‘s Jeff Meisner — hopes to put grave robbers out of business, among other things. He pops in to talk to Alan about all the experiential learning experiences his company has developed, from digital cadavers to study anatomy, to the VR design process of Bell Helicopters.
[Editor’s Note: due to an uploading error on my part, this episode was previously released last week with the wrong audio. We’re re-releasing today with the correct audio. We appreciate your understanding, and in particular, Jeff Meisner’s understanding in this matter – Chris, Podcast Editor]
Alan: Hi, I’m Alan Smithson. And today, we’re speaking with Jeff Meisner, CEO of Sector 5 Digital, about their pioneering work on the Fantastic Journey Anatomy VR Ride, Fork Lift Training Simulator, and the work they did with Bell Helicopters, shortening design times from years to months. All of this and more on the XR for Business Podcast.
Jeff, welcome to the show, my friend.
Jeff: Thanks, Alan.
Alan: I am super excited. So, Jeff, you are doing some incredible work at Sector 5. Let’s start with the Fantastic Journey Anatomy VR. Right. This just blows my mind.
Jeff: Yeah. Yes. Just as a historical perspective on this, we’ve been working with this particular healthcare client for a couple of years now. And we started out initially doing a 3D digital cadaver, basically, that allowed them to do facial anatomy. And the company is in the business of doing injections into the face and hand. And so they needed a way to have safe areas so the injectors would have training. So we created a basic virtual training tool and that was initially in 3D, not in VR, but it was driven through our tablets and things like that. So it had kind of an AR component to it.
Alan: You will learn in 3D dramatically better than even just on a 2D screen.
Jeff: Yeah, exactly. And we actually did a conference which had over somewhere between 200-300 of their folks training with a massive 3D screen in front of them. So it was used as a training aid, and really now, it’s gone global. So it started initially in the U.S. and got picked up by this company, because they are a global company. And what they wanted to do was take that next step, if you will. And so We’re creating this, what we call a VR Fantastic Anatomy Journey. We’re going to be taking their folks through… well, if you know what Fantastic [Voyage] is —- as most people do — but taking them through the human body. So you’re going to have a really cool edutainment-type experience, whereby you’re going to be on somewhat of a of a VR roller coaster, although it being through the body, we’re going to be adding some elements of teaching at various points. So it’ll stop and you’ll be asked questions. It’s really, the major focus is to be very much a learning experience. But one of the things we’re finding —- and I know you are too, Alan —- is if you make it fun or people, it becomes a much more memorable experience and they want to do it again and again. We’re combining kind of that gaming-type element, if you will, but with actual data and experience, to make it something that their injectors are going to be learning from, and not just the entertainment element.
Alan: When you guys started rolling out the 3D digital cadaver, how are they measuring against baseline? So, what was their baseline learning before? Just a textbook? Or..?
Jeff: No, they were actually using “live” cadavers, and cadavers — and this may sound a little gruesome — but they’re somewhat h
We live in a three-dimensional world, and according to today’s guest — You Are Here Labs president John Buzzell — our computers are finally starting to catch up with that. John shoots the proverbial breeze with Alan on how spatial computing is going to fundamentally change our relationship with computers, and thus, our relationship with the world.
Alan: My name is Alan Smithson, your host for the XR for Business Podcast. Today’s guest is a good friend, John Buzzell from You Are Here Labs and You Are Here Agency. John is an award winning 28 year veteran of the digital industry, creating interactive experiences across augmented reality, virtual reality, video games, mobile apps and numerous high volume websites. To learn more about You Are Here Labs and You Are Here Agency, visit yahagency.com. John, welcome to the show.
John: Thanks, Alan. Good to be with you.
Alan: And of all the people we’ve had on the show, you have a lot of experience in this field. I mean, you built the AR Porsche visualizer where you could drop a Porsche right in your living room and I actually have a photo of a Porsche in my living room from your app.
John: [laughs] That’s great. You know, that was an interesting project, because we started off on the Hololens and it was a really interesting project. But at some point, Porsche said this is a little too future for us at the moment and we need something that the dealers and the salespeople can use without fear. And so when ARKit popped up from Apple and they said surprise, now everybody with an iPhone 6 and above and use augmented reality, it really changed the game. And we very quickly converted that experience from the Hololens to the humble iPad and it took off from there. So we were really excited to have one of the first ARKit apps that was really connected to a major company or brand. And I’m glad you liked it, too. That’s cool.
Alan: It was really special. Can people download it now still?
John: Well, no, they can’t. That was about two years ago that we did it. And for all of us in technology, who knows how fast it moves. Porsche is a global company and they were very impressed with the innovation. And I think they were excited to kind of pull it back to HQ and see what they could do globally with it. And also our clients left for jobs at other companies simultaneously. [laughs] So–
Alan: That’s the challenge in technology, you’re working on a project with somebody, you’re all in it, and then they leave. [laughs]
John: I mean, I think that’s one of the neat things about emerging tech is, is it really can help vault peoples careers into the next dimension, in the sense that these technologies are so profound and they will affect the work that we do and the way we live our lives for so long in the future, that people that have this experience, it’s really great for them individually.
Alan: You’ve been doing this a while longer than myself, but I’ve been in early VR since 2014. And I’ve noticed that a lot of the people that were just building demos and stuff like that, now are running huge companies. HP and Microsoft, they’re running huge departments in this, just because they were early and learned how to do it. And they learned in a time when there was no YouTube video on how to make AR, you had to just kind of guess.
John: Yeah. I mean, my career resembles that, in the sense that I got started doing interactive marketing on diskettes before CD-ROM. Our friend Cathy Hackl says, “Don’t talk about that, it makes you sound old!” but I think the experi
Your various realities — virtual, augmented, X, etc — are often talked about in the realm of vision, since we humans lean on vision as our major sense. But the folks at Bose, like today’s guest Michael Ludden, know that there’s room for sound in XR too.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Michael Ludden, global head of developer advocacy and principal augmented reality advocate at Bose Technologies. Michael is a technologist, futurist, strategist, product leader, and developer platform expert who loves to operate on the bleeding edge of what’s possible, and is a frequent keynote speaker at events around the world. Michael was previously director of IBM’s Watson’s Developer Lab for a AR and VR, among some other career stops. To learn more about the work he’s doing at Bose, you can visit developer.bose.com.
Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael: Wow, what an intro. Thanks for having me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure and honor to have you on the show. I’m super excited. I was talking to all fine and last week. I was flying from Toronto to San Francisco, and I just happened to sit beside a guy who we started talking about AR and I pulled out the North Glasses. He pulled out the Bose Frames; we swap. And we had this kind of meeting of the minds. I had the visual, he had the audio and it was really cool that I got to try the Bose Frames. What an amazing piece of technology.
Michael: Glad you liked it.
Alan: So you’ve had a storied career here. You’ve done everything from IBM Watson, to Google, to HTC, Samsung. How did you end up in technology, and why did you get so fascinated on futurism?
Michael: Well, it’s sort of been a running theme in my life. I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and I was always interested in technology and — not to date myself — but at a certain point in my life when I was a young adult, technology started to really aggressively eat everything, starting with mobile. And I just found that was really the point of inflection in my life where I studied musical theater in college, I went to UCLA. I thought that’s what I was going to do. I really did. And I did get a B.A. so I got a little arts education, too. And at the same time, I was always tinkering with stuff, building my own PCs. I started my own web development company at one point to make Web sites in Flash, CS2, and CS3 in the early days; it was brutal.
Alan: There’s a conference in Toronto called Flash in the Can; FITC.
Michael: Nice.
Alan: That’s old school.
Michael: It is very old school. And, you know, I never really thought I’d make a career out of it, but I needed money. I was a starving actor in L.A. and one of my friends who I just made by being nerdy, worked for a company called HTC. They were releasing the first-ever Android phone, which was called The Dream — or the G1 in the US. So I was in contact with this guy; he got a promotion. He said, “you should take my old job,” which was L.A.-based, and I was living there. And I said, “I want to do it.” I was working on a podcasting platform called This Week In — not This Week in Tech — but This Week In. It was a Jason Calacanis-led network out of the old Mahalo Studios in Santa Monica. But it paid me pennies. And when they told me what the job paid and what I’d be doing, I said, “OK, I guess I’ll do it.” I needed the money, and it was very flexible. It felt really easy to me, like that’s really all you need me to d
Today's guest -- Sector 5 Digital's Jeff Meisner -- hopes to put grave robbers out of business, among other things. He pops in to talk to Alan about all the experiential learning experiences his company has developed, from digital cadavers to study anatomy, to the VR design process of Bell Helicopters.
Alan: Hi, I'm Alan Smithson. And today, we're speaking with Jeff Meisner, CEO of Sector 5 Digital, about their pioneering work on the Fantastic Journey Anatomy VR Ride, Fork Lift Training Simulator, and the work they did with Bell Helicopters, shortening design times from years to months. All of this and more on the XR for Business Podcast.
Jeff, welcome to the show, my friend.
Jeff: Thanks, Alan.
Alan: I am super excited. So, Jeff, you are doing some incredible work at Sector 5. Let's start with the Fantastic Journey Anatomy VR. Right. This just blows my mind.
Jeff: Yeah. Yes. Just as a historical perspective on this, we've been working with this particular healthcare client for a couple of years now. And we started out initially doing a 3D digital cadaver, basically, that allowed them to do facial anatomy. And the company is in the business of doing injections into the face and hand. And so they needed a way to have safe areas so the injectors would have training. So we created a basic virtual training tool and that was initially in 3D, not in VR, but it was driven through our tablets and things like that. So it had kind of an AR component to it.
Alan: You will learn in 3D dramatically better than even just on a 2D screen.
Jeff: Yeah, exactly. And we actually did a conference which had over somewhere between 200-300 of their folks training with a massive 3D screen in front of them. So it was used as a training aid, and really now, it's gone global. So it started initially in the U.S. and got picked up by this company, because they are a global company. And what they wanted to do was take that next step, if you will. And so We're creating this, what we call a VR Fantastic Anatomy Journey. We're going to be taking their folks through… well, if you know what Fantastic [Voyage] is —- as most people do -- but taking them through the human body. So you're going to have a really cool edutainment-type experience, whereby you’re going to be on somewhat of a VR roller coaster, although it being through the body, we're going to be adding some elements of teaching at various points. So it'll stop and you'll be asked questions. It's really, the major focus is to be very much a learning experience. But one of the things we're finding —- and I know you are too, Alan —- is if you make it fun for people, it becomes a much more memorable experience and they want to do it again and again. We're combining kind of that gaming-type element, if you will, but with actual data and experience, to make it something that their injectors are going to be learning from, and not just the entertainment element.
Alan: When you guys started rolling out the 3D digital cadaver, how are they measuring against baseline? So, what was their baseline learning before? Just a textbook? Or..?
Jeff: No, they were actually using "live" cadavers, and cadavers -- and this may sound a little gruesome -- but they're somewhat hard to come by, especially outside of the US. The regulatory issues that you deal with are very, very high barriers there. When we came along with the virtual cadaver initially, as I said, it was really only being used in a very small area. But when they realized that they could take this globally, and they now didn't have the same barriers that they had in the past, that really opened things up for them and opened up their eyes as to the value that this would bring.
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Today’s guest, Lance Anderson of Lance-AR, got tired of seeing so many XR providers only help clients achieve their stated ROI goals, then leaving them to their own devices to scale. Lance helps those companies today, by understanding the need to marry emerging tech with legacy systems, so disruptive tech doesn’t seem so disruptive.
Alan: Coming up on the XR for Business Podcast, today we’re speaking with Lance Anderson, founder and CEO of Lance-AR, a consulting and services company for enterprise AR space, focused on helping organizations scale deployment. We’ll be learning about the challenges and learnings from his experience. All that and more on the XR for Business Podcast. Lance, welcome to the show.
Lance: Hey, great, thanks for having me on.
Alan: My absolute pleasure. It’s very exciting to meet somebody as passionate as you are about bringing augmented reality to the enterprise. But before we start, explain how you got here and what is it you do for customers?
Lance: Sure. So I’m coming from — let’s just round it down, let’s call it 15 years — in the enterprise space selling software and services and automation, things like that. Ended up at Vuzix in 2015 and had a great run with those guys. Late 2018 I left Vuzix and started Lance-AR, because I was just frustrated. Frustrated with the lack of companies deploying augmented reality at scale. Everybody talks about the dizzying ROIs that are out there to get, and all the wonderful things and advantages that this technology brings. Yet no one was deploying at scale and I had this unique position at Vuzix — because there are so few hardware providers — that we were able to see thousands of pilots and POCs, in all different regions and different use cases. And we just saw so many of those either fail, sputter, or just kind of evaporate. So I wanted to take all that knowledge and bring it to the enterprise space and see if we could turn some things around. That’s why Lance-AR came about. And really what we do now is we connect enterprise users, AR hardware manufacturers and AR software providers, the problem solvers. We connect them all in an agnostic way, and try to make sure that these folks are set up in the right way for success, that they have a strategy for achieving success and then for taking success and moving it into what I would call scale deployment. So success could be a five unit pilot, but I don’t consider it success until it’s 500 units or a 1,000 units rolling to the company. So that’s in essence, what we do.
Alan: That’s amazing. My first thought when you were talking about the challenges and pitfalls of getting caught in what they call “pilot purgatory” would be if you had to kind of focus on the five main things or six main things, what are those main challenges that make it so difficult to go from pilot to scale?
Lance: Everybody’s at fault, frankly. So I’ve done a lot of sales and marketing in my day. The marketers in our industry are at fault. Promising future worlds today that just aren’t quite possible. There’s fault in the hardware manufacturers.
Alan: We’ve got to call out Microsoft on making videos that people will go, “We want that!”
Lance: It was Microsoft, SAP did one in 2014.
Alan: Everybody’s been making these beautifully Hollywood produced videos on “Look at what you can do with AR!” And then they put the glasses on and are like, “Well, why is the view cut off?” They’re like, “Oh, yeah. Well, about that…”
Lance: Not really. Not really. Well, almost. U
Access to the Internet can be spotty in Northern Canada. But heavy industry happens up there all the same, and Bit Space Development’s Daniel Blair wants to bring those workers the same access to XR-driven training and remote expert assistance as anywhere else enjoys. He chats with Alan about how he hopes to bring that about, in the first XR for Business of 2020.
Alan: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Smithson here with the XR for Business Podcast. Today, we’re speaking with Daniel Blair, founder and CEO of a Canadian VR company called Bit Space Development. We’ll be discussing how virtual reality is revolutionizing industrial training and why it’s vitally important to define your key performance indicators to release you and your customers from the Pilot POC Purgatory. All that and more on the XR for Business Podcast.
With that, I want to welcome my good friend Dan to the show. Welcome to the show, Dan.
Daniel: Hey, thanks for having me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. Let’s get into what you guys are doin; making serious purposes with VR and AR. What does that mean?
Daniel: Basically, what that means is we utilize immersive technologies to create games. But those games are used for training, education, and really serious purposes. We aren’t generally building applications that are going to be sold on Steam or sold on the Oculus store. But what we’re building are tools that integrate with clients infrastructure to help augment their workflow or create a safer workplace.
Alan: I know you guys have done a ton of things. One of them was a hand tool training simulator. Maybe walk us through what are these things, and how are people using them?
Daniel: For sure. Some of our most recent deployments include exactly what you’re talking about, the power tools simulator, which we created with a provincial organization here. That tool utilizes the room-scale six degrees of freedom tracking of any of the open VR-capable headsets, to put new entrants and kids on job sites and teach them about safe operation of power tools. And that can range from anything from a drill or a hammer drill or a circular saw. But we put some really interesting tools in there, like concrete saws — which would be extremely dangerous for a new entrant to use in real life.
Alan: I actually know all about that, cement saws. When I was a kid, my dad was grinding some bricks with a grinding wheel and the wheel shattered and cut both his legs wide open. And I remember as a kid, taking him to the hospital and them having to sew up right down to the bone. I mean, this was a real problem. I know this firsthand. This is a very, very unsafe tool if used incorrectly.
Daniel: Yeah. And the worst part of building these applications are the shock value photos that my clients will send me. I’ll wake up in the morning and they’ll say, “hey, this is a good example of why to learn about the safe operation of these tools.” And they’ll send me a photo of something similar to what happened to your dad, which is super unfortunate. And additionally to that, we’ve done a lot of work in the welding space, and on the more promotional side, our most recent deployment is called Level Up VR, which we developed with the USAF Workers of Tomorrow, an organization that promotes safe work sites and safe work practices for both employers and employees for youth. And that tool actually won an Impact Marketing Award for the use of the virtual reality tool in the campaign that was created to raise awareness. So we see both the marketing side and the education side.
Alan: That’s amazing. Safe working is something that we need to market to. Tr
Alan puts it best in this episode of XR for Business: Sam Schoonover’s job with Goldenvoice is to create “wow” moments at music festivals like Coachella. Sam talks about the groundwork they’ve laid at Coachella for immersive reality so far, and where he plans to take it going forward.
Alan: Coming up next on the XR for Business Podcast, we have Sam Schoon over from Goldenvoice and Coachella, my favorite music festival in the world. We’re going to be talking about augmented reality spaceships, augmented reality portals, bringing video to life in a AR and El Pollo Loco. All that and more coming up next on the XR for Business Podcast.
Sam, welcome to the show.
Sam: Hi. Thanks for having me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure, man. As you know — and as people on the show who know because I’ve mentioned it before — Coachella is one of my absolute favorite music festivals. And having been a deejay for 20 years myself, I’ve been to a few. Coachella is just this magical place. So I’m really excited to unlock two of my favorite things — music festivals and XR — with you on the show. So, thank you so much.
Sam: Yeah, absolutely. Me as well. I think a lot of people out there would agree with you.
Alan: Yeah, man. So tell me, how did you end up working with Coachella and what have you done before and how did you get there? Let’s just get into it.
Sam: Previous to this job, I was doing a whole assortment of different things in the music industry, and I guess the technology industry as well. I was a freelance website developer, and had also been curating music and had developed a playlist curation application. And then alongside that, I was promoting with various promoters in San Diego and Los Angeles and touring shows. And that eventually — that and a music blog and I was doing at the time — introduced me to the guy who started Splash House, which is a smaller music festival in Palm Springs. And through him, I met the Goldenvoice team and I got involved at Goldenvoice Digital, and in a roundabout way, ended up focusing entirely on innovation just for Coachella.
Alan: What a dream job for somebody like… “here, your job is to focus on innovation, make really cool things that nobody’s done in the world, for the most impressive festivals in the world.”
Sam: Yeah, sure. I mean, it’s a lot of fun. It’s fun to be able to focus on new things every day. And we have like just such an incredible team at Goldenvoice, the people who have been doing Coachella for the past 20 years are still involved and still loving it. And they’re really the reason why this job even exists, because they appreciate innovation and they understand its place and our future. And and they understand that innovating and experimenting and sometimes failing, but always trying is a part of what makes things great and stand the test of time. Coachella is in a unique situation, where it’s a successful music festival and it’s a successful business, so we have the ability to spend money on experiences like that, while not every festival out there is so lucky.
Alan: Yeah. And you guys — well, “you guys,” I think it was before you even got there — but Coachella is no stranger to virtual and augmented reality. I remember in, oh man, it must be 2015/16, Coachella livestreamed 360 content to VR headsets and I believe it was pushing to the — it was! — it was the Samsung GearyVR at the time. I remember watching one of one of the shows from there and thinking, “oh man, I’m literally like getting crazy FOMO.”
Sam: Yeah, you&#
Most kids who grew up spending too much time at the video arcade wound up with fewer quarters and a few earfuls from their parents. That’s not the case for Kevin Williams, who turned his arcade addiction into a career as an out-of-home entertainment guru. He drops in to talk about how XR is taking old ideas and breathing new life into them.
Alan: Hey, you’re listening to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. In this episode coming up is Kevin Williams. He is the out-of-home location-based entertainment expert, and he’s what’s coming up next. We’re going to talk about Disney vision, the 90s, immersive entertainment, dream craft, driving go-karts in augmented reality, Great Wolf Lodge and magical wands. All that and much more coming up on the XR for Business Podcast. Founder of the DNA conference and publisher of the ever-mindblowing Stinger Report and my guest today, Kevin Williams. Thank you so much for joining me on the show.
Kevin: Thank you, Alan, a real pleasure to be here. The check’s in the post.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. You don’t know this, but you’re one of my very first mentors in this entire industry. You were the first person I reached out to and you were so gracious with helping me understand this world of VR and AR before anybody really caught on to this. That was back in 2014, and I’ll never forget it. So thank you for being there for me.
Kevin: Oh, thank you for remembering. Our industry only grows by the new people that you can introduce to it.
Alan: And with that, I want to make a challenge to everybody in the industry who owns some sort of VR or AR device — and I am included in this. It’s easy for us to not remember the journey and excitement of our first few times of trying these technologies. I implore everybody and make a challenge to everybody that owns a device — or many devices, in our case — in the next seven days, to put it on as many heads as possible; to get those reactions, to re-energize yourself to the fact that wow, this technology is revolutionary, it is mind-blowing. And we have it sitting in our backpacks, sitting on our desks, sitting in our labs. Let’s show everybody.
Kevin: Well, that’s part of the reason why I’m so passionate about augmented reality and virtual reality being used in out-of-home entertainment. We can get a lot more heads in it, rather than it just sitting on a shelf in the development studio.
Alan: I couldn’t agree more. I had the opportunity to meet with Dream Craft Attractions on the weekend, and oh my goodness, they’ve even solved the problem of hygiene! How do you put people in those masks without having to sterilize all of the devices? So they came up with this ingenious plastic helmet. Like, so smart. And then the VR headsets lower down.
Kevin: It’s interesting; you talk about how long this industry has been going. I was just having a conversation. You do understand that that two-part liner system is actually based on the original idea that Walt Disney’s Imagineerium had for their Disney-bution system.
Alan: “Disney-bution system!”
Kevin: So, Disneyvision was the system that was its Epcot in the 90s. That’s where a lot of people first heard about virtual reality in the theme park sector. And because Disney at the time was trying to work out which was the best way to get people into virtual reality — and this technology is clunky, was using CRTs — they came up with a two-part system where there was a liner that you put on first, and then the head-mounted display component clipped into that liner when you go to
Imagine owning the digital real estate surrounding the Taj Mahal. Well, to be real with you, you can’t have all of it – today’s guest, SuperWorld co-founder Hrish Lotlikar, already has a piece. But he’s made it easy for anyone who wants it to buy the rest, and other plots of digital real estate around the world.
He also talks about The Rogue Initiative and SingularityNET!
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Hrish Lotlikar from the Rogue Initiative, SuperWorld app, and SingularityNET. Hrish is the co-founder and chief business development officer for the Rogue Initiative, a Los Angeles based entertainment company composed of award winning entertainment industry professionals, including alumni from Amblin Entertainment, Pixar, DreamWorks Animation, Disney, Activision and they are creating new original feature films, television, AAA cinematic interactive VR, and gaming content. He’s also the co-founder of SuperWorld — superworldapp.com — which is Foursquare meets Pokemon Go meets Monopoly in the real world, building a community in AR, powered by the blockchain. They’ve built an AR real estate marketplace, ad marketplace on the blockchain, which also acts as a social AR app, allowing users to personalize their real world by adding anything, anywhere in augmented reality with photos, videos, texts, and 3D objects, and share those experiences with their followers. He’s also an advisor of SingularityNET, a decentralized marketplace for AI algorithms allowing companies, organizations, and developers to buy and sell AI at scale. Previously to this, he was in venture capital, but he got better. If you want to learn more about Hrish’s initiatives, you can go to the Rogue Initiative, which is therogueinitiative.com, SuperWorld, which is superworldapp.com, and SingularityNET, which is singularitynet.io.
Hrish, welcome to the show, my friend.
Hrish: Hey, thanks so much for having me, Alan. I appreciate it. Looking forward to having this conversation.
Alan: Oh, absolute pleasure. You do a lot in this space. And the first time we met was at– I think it’s now called Global World Summit. But it was called– what was it called before?
Hrish: The VR/AR Conference?
Alan: Yeah.The VR/AR Association Conference. But let’s unpack these amazing initiatives that you’re doing. Let’s start with the one that’s Rogue.
Hrish: Yeah.
Alan: Tell us about it.
Hrish: Sure, yeah. So, Rogue Initiative we started back in late 2015. My co-founders, Pete Blumel and Cathy Twigg. The goal of the Rogue Initiative was looking at the convergence of linear, Hollywood, traditional entertainment and interactive entertainment. And how could we — from the ground up — create new original properties that brought those forms of entertainment together? Because there is a confluence of technology and Silicon Valley in Hollywood that was coming together. And how do we how do we kind of leverage that, to create new original content that goes across all of those medium? So building and developing a new story that starts on the feature film side and then organically moves to interactive all the way through TV, through all the way to amusement park rides and toys. So building franchises from the ground up, bringing in top Hollywood talent and interactive talent, and knowing from the foundations of creating that content, that we’re building it to go across all those mediums. And that’s the kind of hig
In between your regularly-scheduled XR for Businesses episodes, Alan has a brief update and recap of his recent trip to the Ritossa Family Office Summit in Dubai
Hey there, it’s Alan Smithson with the XR for Business Podcast. And today’s episode is a very special recap of a conference that I just spent two days at, called the Ritossa Family Office Summit. This is a gathering of elite family offices, a total of 600 prominent business owners, sheiks, royal families, private investment companies, and international business people, getting together to discuss the future of investing. Now, to put it in perspective, the people that attend this represent about $4.5-trillion in investable wealth. And this conference is the world’s largest and most exclusive gathering of elite family office decision makers.
This year’s topic was “East Meets West”, and the theme of Dubai summit will act as a bridge between Middle East families and their European, Asian, US, and Latin American counterparts. This was an amazing experience for us. We were there as a vendor. We were the only company there bringing virtual and augmented reality to these people. And the interest level around virtual and augmented reality was insane. People were asking all sorts of questions, “How long is this going to take? What is the roadmap now? Who’s using it? What companies are doing it? How can we involve our company portfolios in this?”
And really, we came at this from a training standpoint. Virtual and augmented reality training is the most effective, efficient training solutions we’ve ever created as humans. Everything from being able to track where the user’s looking, to their biometrics, their heart rate, all of these things combined create what we are hoping will be the future of all education and training. And at MetaVRse, what we’re really focusing on now is building out a platform marketplace to help businesses navigate the technology, figure out what technology works best for the needs of their employees.
Because as we enter into this kind of age of exponential growth, what we’re seeing now is a massive change in how we work. Over the next three years alone, IBM estimates that over 120 million people will need to be reskilled and retrained due to AI and automation. And from a strictly monetizable standpoint, PWC — the global conglomerate — they’ve just earmarked $3-billion to reskill, upskill, and retrain their staff.
AI and robotics and automation are coming faster than we can possibly think about. And virtual and augmented reality give us this kind of unique perspective as to how we can train people in a way that is easier, faster, more efficient. And I think we’re going to need that as we enter into exponential growth.
Back to the Dubai summit. First of all, I want to say a huge thank you to Anthony Ritossa — the host of the summit — who brought together these incredible people. It was under the patronage of His Highness, Sheikh Ahmed Al Maktoum, the ruler and prime minister of Dubai, and the ruling family. And it was really amazing to meet their chief investment officer, Mohammed Al Ali — who actually today is being knighted in London — and he is the CEO and advisor of their International Investments Enterprise. We met with Adam, the judge from the private office of His Highness, Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Nahyan. We met with Faris, and his team from the office of Sheikh Sultan Bin Abdullah Al Qasimi.Qasimi.
And all of these sheikhs represent family offices from different parts of the UAE. You have Dubai, you have Sharjah, you have Abu Dhabi, and all of these different emirates. There’s investments where they’re looking not just to invest in oil and gas and these things, they’re really looking towards investing in world cha
When you’ve been a journalist on the XR technology beat for 20 years, like VentureBeat’s lead writer Dean Takahashi has, you develop a hunch or two about the direction the industry might go. Alan picks Dean’s brain for a few such scoops.
Alan: Thank you for joining the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson, today’s guest is the one and only Dean Takahashi, the lead writer for VentureBeat. He’s been a tech journalist for more than 28 years, and he’s covered games for a twenty one of those years. He’s authored two books: Opening the XBox, and The XBox 360 Uncloaked. He organizes the annual GamesBeat and GamesBeat Summit conferences. To learn more, you can visit games beat dot com or venture beat dot com.
Dean, welcome to the show, my friend.
Dean: Thank you. And thank you for having me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. We had the distinct opportunity to meet at AWE this year for a very short amount of time. I think we rode the escalator down? But I’ve been a big fan of yours for a long time. I read the articles that you write, and they’re very insightful. They’re very factual. I’m just very honored to have you on the show. So, thank you very much.
Dean: Thank you. Nice, and happy to hear.
Alan: How did you start… first of all, I guess you’ve been in the games world for a long time. How did you kind of pivot over to VentureBeat, and what is VentureBeat? Let’s let’s unpack what VentureBeat is, for people that may or may not know?
Dean: Yeah, I was sort of a traditional newspaper and magazine journalist for a long time, and then, when the web came along and people started podcasting and blogging, I looked around and felt like it was less of a risk to go try something new than it was to stay at a newspaper. I was at the San Jose newspaper at the time. So about 11 years ago, I joined VentureBeat, and it had been started two years earlier by Matt Marshall, who was a venture capital writer for the Mercury News and an early blogger as well. And so, we were a tech news blog and competed at the time with likes of GIGO, and TechCrunch. They have been either… gone away, or they they’ve been acquired by larger companies. So we’re still one of the last, larger independent tech blogs.
And then within that, when I joined about eleven years ago, we started GamesBeat as well, as sort of a subsection that focused on games. At the very beginning, we were sort of a startup and venture capital site. But now we pretty much cover the gamut of tech news and game news. And then, our particular vertical focuses are artificial intelligence on the tech side, and then the whole game sector. And then, I guess as far as getting into VR and AR, I’ve really followed the news. I remember seeing the Oculus guys — Palmer Luckey and Nate Mitchell and Brendan (Iribe) over at one of their CES tables in the early years, well before they were acquired. I think I even tried to get an interview with John Carmack, like, the day after he did a demo at E3. The next day, he was gone. So I was on the hunt kind of early. Never quite the absolute first person to dive into VR.
Alan: But very close. You’ve seen it from pre-DK1 days — where [it was] probably a cobbled-together a collection of flat screens, wires, and duct tape — and what it is today, where you have real consumer-grade virtual reality that’s not even connected to computers. You’ve seen a lot over the years. You’ve written countless articles on virtual and augmented reality. Is there anything that you may have written about before that you couldn’t have predicted, that has happened already?
Dea
As this episode goes live, Alan’s away giving a talk at the XR Intelligence conference in San Francisco. A little while back, he sat down with Event Director Kathryn Bloxham, to get a sense of who will be there, what there is to see, and where the XR market is as 2019 comes to a close.
Alan: Hey everyone, it’s Alan here, with the XR for Business Podcast. Today, we’re speaking with Kathryn Bloxham from Reuters Events brand, XR Intelligence, about their amazing business conference, VRX happening in San Francisco, December 12th and 13th. I will be speaking at that conference on the transformation of learning with XR. We will also be discussing the findings of their 2019 XR industry report. All that and more, on the XR for Business Podcast.
Welcome to the show, Kathryn. How are you today?
Kathryn: Hi, I’m great, thanks. How are you doing?
Alan: I’m so amazing. I’m really excited for a number of things. One, your industry report is the quintessential report on what the industry is actually looking forward to in 2020 and beyond. I’m going to be speaking at your VRX conference — we’ll talk about that, and all the great things — and you also host a number of really informational webinars. So we’ll get into that. But let’s talk about you and how did you end up being in where you are right now?
Kathryn: Yeah, so I work for XR Intelligence, which was actually recently acquired by Thomson Reuters under the new Reuters Events brand, which is very exciting. We speak to people throughout the entire year about the trends, challenges, solutions, and opportunities that they see in virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. So primarily our audience are end users of the technology. So it started mostly as people in gaming a few years ago and the entertainment side, and gradually is actually getting more and more focused on enterprise customers. And then we also put together various types of content throughout the year. So we do the webinars, industry surveys and reports, as well as three events throughout the year across the US and Europe. And that really allows our contacts to keep their eye on the progress of the industry and make informed business decisions about investing in immersive technologies.
Alan: Seems to be the perfect jam for the XR for Business Podcast, as our mission here is to inspire and educate business leaders to invest in XR technologies. So having said that, what are some of the findings of this industry report you guys did?
Kathryn: Yes. So it was really interesting. We’ve done it for the past few years. and this year we managed to get around 750 people take part. And there was some really interesting patterns that emerged when we looked at the 2019 survey compared with the 2018 survey. So this year, for example, the hardware, software and third party content creators to XR have seen much stronger growth in the enterprise side of that business, compared to growth in the consumer sector over the past 12 months. So I guess that’s kind of in line with people moving towards the money as people are seeing a lot more money in the enterprise side. And that’s kind of reflected in the fact that consumer adoption hasn’t been as much as people would have expected it to be at this stage. So growth is accelerating for enterprise applications, particularly maybe surprisingly in VR. So in 2018, 38 percent said that they were seeing strong or very strong growth in VR for enterprise and this rose to 46 percent in this year’s survey. So it kind of reflects the demand trends with enterprise end users seeing strong ROI. And then 93 percent of the enterprise users said that VR had had a positive impact on their b
Longtime listeners will remember one of Alan’s favorite AR anecdotes; the Burger King ad that digitally vandalizes a competitor’s ad space. But has anyone stopped to think, does that digital space belong to anyone? Or to someone who might not care for digital ads existing there?
Yes, someone has — Dominic Collins from Darabase, who is building an AR digital permissions platform to ensure the AR marketing ecosystem is fair and equitable for everyone.
Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan Smithson here, and today we’re speaking with Dominic Collins, CEO and co-founder of Darabase Ltd., a global platform that is managing and monetizing AR permissions on the physical world. All that and more, on the XR for Business Podcast.
Dominic, welcome to the show.
Dominic: Thank you, Alan. I’m delighted to be here.
Alan: We did an event about six months ago — with our law firm in Toronto, Fasken — and we did this kind of “VR and AR through the legal lens” event with the VR/AR Association in Toronto. And what we realized was there’s this kind of massive problem that if you’re putting augmented reality over top of the physical world, who owns that data? Who’s responsible for it? I think the first case study that we’ve seen of this is Burger King lighting McDonald’s advertisements on fire in AR. This is going to be a really interesting space. And now with Snapchat putting world lenses on buildings. So this is what you do. What do you– walk us through, what it is Darabase does, and how it’s solving this problem?
Dominic: Yeah. So you’re absolutely right. You know, since we started the company about a year ago, there’s so much that has happened to, I suppose, add further grist to our mill, that our service and services like this are required. We kind of see ourselves, I suppose, as the permission layer between the spatial web and the physical world. A lot of– it’s amazing how many big companies now are kind of what I call the immersive lasagna that kind of — whether it be Magic Leap’s Magicverse or the real world index and Facebook — you kind of got these great slides with these, you know, loads of layers with the physical world, or the digital twin, and infrastructure, and all these things that sit on top. But as you say, it doesn’t really feel that the permission of the real-world physical property owner is taken into consideration. Our insight, I suppose — and my background is more conditional and working in marketing — is that where media and platforms have really thrived historically — and when they’ve really kind of accelerated in terms of growth and adoption — has been where all of the axes engaged and rewarded appropriately. And from a digital perspective, there’s never been a time where permission and privacy and consent had more of the spotlight. So Darabase, essentially it is — at its simplest form — an AR database, hence “Darabase”, but we have a global database of permissions where physical property owner — whether that be a big iconic building, whether that be a retailer — is able to register in a kind of technology platform-agnostic way, so this one will work across all the different AR clouds or platforms or whatever you want to call them, that they can register what appears on their property. Now we’re talking commercial content. We’re not saying that we’re trying to govern and be a police force for editorial content. But if someone was to put commercial content or advertising on a building, then we believe that the physical property owner should have a say. That’s a far more scalable and appropriate mechanic, th
It might seem like a small, even simple fix, to attach an AR device to a hardhat, but according to Trimble’s Mixed Reality expert, Jordan Lawver, such a simple fix exponentially expands the capabilities of folks working in heavy industry. He drops by to explain to Alan how that is, and how AR can take things even further as it goes hands-free.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast. Today’s show, we interview Jordan Lawver, head of mixed reality at Trimble. They’ve got a number of different solutions for the construction worker that leverage the Microsoft Hololens 2, the XR10, which is their new wonderful hardhat based augmented reality/mixed reality headset. So all that coming up. And more on the XR for Business Podcast.
Hey, everyone. My name’s Alan Smithson. Today, we’re speaking with Jordan Lawver. Jordan, welcome to the show, my friend.
Jordan: Hey, Alan, good morning. Thanks for having me.
Alan: Oh, it’s my absolute pleasure. I’m really excited. And I wish this was show and tell, because what do you have sitting right on your desk right now?
Jordan: So you just let the cat out the bag. We’ve got an XR10, sitting here right in front of me. And I promise it’s not the only one in the world. We’re starting to ramp these guys up and get them ready to go out onto a job site near you.
Alan: What is the XR10?
Jordan: So I imagine that most people that listen to your podcast are pretty familiar with the Hololens 2, that Microsoft has announced that they plan to start shipping later this year. So what we did is, is we hopped on board with Microsoft kind of from the start, maybe mid last year. And we wanted to find a way that we could take the Hololens 2, and adapt it for use out in kind of safety controlled environment. Our focus is on construction, but of course, there’s many mixed reality customers out there in oil and gas, and manufacturing, and other kinds of heavy industries that require PPE — Personal Protective Equipment — when they’re out on the site. So whether that’s safety glass, or hardhat protection, or chin straps, or earmuffs, we wanted to make an integration that took the Hololens 2 and all of its capabilities, and made it able to work with folks out in those industries. So we essentially OEMed the Hololens 2 components from Microsoft and we bolted it into a new form factor that slides down on top of kind of an industry-standard hardhat, and still enables you to use your over your hearing protection, chin straps, all that other type of gear that people need to keep them safe out on the site.
Alan: We have HL2 + PPE = XR10.
Jordan: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s not our first go at this. We actually made a hardhat attachment for the first Hololens. You know, we weren’t there on the ground level from release — like we are at this time — but Hololens 1 came out, and a bunch of people ran with it and said “OK, what can actually use this for?” And as you know, most of the use cases that emerged were very enterprise-focused. And in many of those heavy industries that I mentioned, we were creating software from day one, first for architects with our SketchUp viewer app, but then moving out onto onsite construction with our Trimble Connect app. And we realized very quickly that we just weren’t going to sell any software, because no one could take a Hololens 1 and fit it under a hardhat out on the site. So at that time, we worked with Microsoft, and we basically built clips that would retrofit an off-the-shelf Hololens 1 up into a hardhat. And it sold like hotcakes, people were all over it. And then when Alex Kipm
Used to be the best way to plan a three-dimensional construction project was on a two-dimensional blueprint, or perhaps a wooden model. We live in an era where entire digital twins — models made of light — can be used, but not everyone is. Bentley Systems’ Greg Demchak drops by to explain why that needs to change.
Alan: Thank you for joining the XR for Business Podcast with your host Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Greg Demchak from Bentley Systems. Greg has been designing and driving the development of immersive digital simulation for architecture, engineering, and construction markets for the last 20 years. Educated as an architect, he transitioned to software design after completing a degree in design computation at MIT. He went on to become a senior user experience designer for the Autodesk Revit product, product manager for SYNCHRO 4D software platform — now owned by Bentley Systems — and currently leads the mixed reality team for Bentley Systems. He’s been pushing the envelope of this technology and software for the Microsoft Hololens, and recently built an app for the global launch event of the next generation Hololens 2. To learn more about the work that Greg and his team at Bentley are doing, visit bentley.com. Greg, welcome to the show.
Greg: Thanks, Alan. How’s it going?
Alan: It’s going fantastic. I wanted to say thank you so much for taking the time to join us here. And let’s kind of unpack the work that you do at Bentley Systems. From a 10,000 foot view, what do you guys do?
Greg: Yeah. So Bentley Systems — just to frame that — is a global software company focused on engineering and infrastructure, architecture, and construction software. So it’s– we basically produce software for the built environment. So anything from bridge design, to high-rise construction, to infrastructure that needs to be modeled. And it’s a platform that serves that industry across the board.
Alan: Well, that’s a big industry, considering there’s the equivalent of Manhattan, the size of Manhattan being built every single month somewhere in the world. So you work with large infrastructure projects, building skyscrapers, bridges, infrastructure. How does XR fit into that?
Greg: It’s a good question. So the way we see XR fitting into this is– and you’ll see this term, it’s really becoming — I think — quite popular now in the industry, is this idea of the digital twin. And what started out as 2D drafting and then sort of evolved into 3D models, and then this idea of building information modeling is evolving into this idea of the digital twin, which is that any given building or asset or a piece of infrastructure can have a parallel digital representation of itself as a 3D model, and then also now as a 4D model, which is to say that the model evolves and changes through time, just like the physical building. And the XR piece is a really cool way to basically bridge that digital and physical space in a kind of a natural way. So that’s where we are developing on top of the Hololens platform. It’s basically a way to take those digital assets, and then render those assets as digital artifacts or 3D models or information in the context of the physical space. So that’s had the opportunity. These buildings, these infrastructure assets are evolving and changing over time. And you can basically render digital parts of that through the Hololens and see a mixed reality view of the world.
Alan: So, for example, you’ve got a– let’s just use a building, a skyscraper, you’re building a building, you’ve got the Revit models or the BIM models or the CAD models. So let’
If a picture’s worth a thousand words, then a video is worth millions! That’s David Sime’s philosophy, anyway; he’s marrying online video marketing to XR technology, to reach people’s gaze — in a world with increasingly more competition for their attention — with Oncor Reality.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is David Sime, founder and technical director of Oncor Reality. With over 19 years of digital media experience, David delivers promotion and analysis at strategic, tactical, and operational levels. Disciplines include virtual reality, augmented reality, targeted online video, and strategic digital marketing across social media, mobile, pay-per-click, smart TV, and out-of-home mediums. David directs the multi-award winning digital media agency Oncor Video and now Oncor Reality. Based in London and Central Scotland, this multimedia team delivers results based in immersive media solutions across engineering, construction, hospitality, and luxury retail sectors all around the world. If you want to learn more about his company, it’s oncorreality.com.
David, welcome to the show, my friend.
David: Thank you for having me, Alan. Can I start paying you to introduce me in events? That sounded amazing, I’m really impressed by myself now.
Alan: Okay, let’s restart. David Sime, here we go!
David: [laughs]
Alan: No? Too much?
David: No, I think that–
Alan: I mean–
David: I think that’s just enough for me. Just enough. [chuckles]
Alan: [chuckles] We’ll sell you the whole state, but you’ll only need the edge.
David: [laughs]
Alan: Oh man.
David: I’ve been watching what you’ve been doing on LinkedIn for years, man. And it’s super impressive. I really, really enjoy watching all your travels and all the places that you go. I can only aspire to that kind of activity. But, hey, I’m doing my best.
Alan: Well, I can tell you that I can’t go on LinkedIn anymore without seeing your smiling face, so you must be doing something right.
David: I think I’m developing an addiction. That’s what I’m doing. [laughs]
Alan: It’s like crack.
David: I can’t seem to stay off. I managed to wean myself off Facebook. And then this came along, the specter or the methadone of the digital marketing world. And now here I am. But it’s great, because people are super friendly and a lot less rude than in any other channel.
Alan: It’s amazing, because you really have– I’ve only experienced maybe 10 people — out of 30,000 connections and millions of views — that I’ve had to block. And that’s really amazing. I think it’s because people know that if they do dumb shit on LinkedIn, I know where you work.
David: [laughs] Exactly. I mean, I’ve always said it’s the anonymity of social media that can be the problem, that makes people not behave themselves. LinkedIn, you are the representative of yourself, your business, everybody knows who you are, where you live. You just have to behave. Although some people still don’t. And it just seems ridiculous to me.
Alan: The great thing is you can click a button, and they disappear from existence.
David: [laughs] I know! Because you get people that ruminate and ruminate over this kind of stuff
Imagine being able to learn, hands-on, exactly how to operate a deep-sea submarine — without needing the submarine! That’s the kind of training opportunities VR training platforms like Immerse are able to offer with the technology at their disposal. James Watson and Justin Parry drop in to talk about all the other opportunities the tech presents businesses.
Alan: You’re listening to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today, we have two amazing guests, James Watson and Justin Parry from Immerse. Justin is the co-founder and chief operating officer and leads product strategy for Immerse. As a founder, he designed and led product development of the Immerse platform from scratch. He now oversees the delivery of all technology and VR content across the organization. Justin has 20 years experience creating and growing B2C and B2B products from startups to global organizations. He’s developed and launched online platforms, websites, mobile products across the world, and joined Immerse from his role as global director of the Internet Yellow Pages for Yell Group. Immerse Virtual Enterprise Platform enables enterprises to create scale and measure virtual reality training content and programs. The platform enables enterprises to look at training and assessment in a completely different way, providing the tools to help maximize human performance, resulting in a more engaged, better equipped and safer workforce. If you want to learn more, you can visit immerse.io.
Guys, welcome to the show.
Justin: Hello.
James: Thanks, Alan.
Alan: [laughs] Hey. So you guys are in beautiful, sunny, warm UK. How’s it going over there?
Justin: Well, it was very sunny until last week, actually, with the sort of slightly freakish weather that we’ve been having, but today is cold.
James: It’s British grey.
Justin: Yeah.
Alan: British grey. Oh, well, we’ll just assume it’s beautiful and sunny. So let’s get digging in here. I’ve had a chance to try out the Immerse platform. It’s really amazing. You’re completely immersed, and the demo that you guys did for us: We were inside of a submarine. We not only go into it, but interact with all the bits of the submarine and start to learn parts of, “how do I make some things work?” And the great thing about it is you guys were there every step of the way. But one of you was in VR, and the other one was on a tablet or a computer. Talk to us, just to how did Immerse come to be?
Justin: Well, we’ve been in the training space quite a long time. We weren’t initially in VR. We actually delivered our training applications via desktop, but they were always multi-user. So we would be tying together people from somewhere — maybe even Kazakhstan, some oil and gas training that we did — with trainers that may be in Iraq, or in the UK, or wherever that might be. And that was all done in a sort of virtual world. So it’s a little bit like the old Second Life, if people remember that. So it’s a powerful proposition, but it’s still a little bit difficult to sell. So with the advent of the headsets — or the latest generation of headsets, at least — we made the move into VR and a lot of services that we built there just kind of immediately made sense, and we got traction very quickly. We effectively then pivoted the whole company to be a full-on VR training platform. We rebuilt a lot of those services, especially for VR, because there was obviously some small itemization that we need to make. And so we find ourselves where we are today.
And just in terms what you said there,
“You cannot learn empathy on powerpoint!” Wise words from today’s guest, Somewhere Else CEO Christophe Mallet, who comes by the show to discuss how soft skills training — basically, training for human behavior — is now a wide-open industry, thanks to XR technology.
Alan: My name is Alan Smithson, your host for the XR for Business Podcast. Today’s guest is Christophe Mallet, co-founder of Somewhere Else. Somewhere Else Solutions is a London based innovation agency specialized in immersive technologies. He’s now exploring how to leverage immersive technology and artificial intelligence to deliver soft skills training that actually delivers behavioral change. The end goal is to make the workplace a better place for everyone. Throughout his careers, he has strived to bring together brilliant minds, makers and businesses to deliver impactful projects and solutions. He’s worked with a variety of global clients, including Adidas, Samsung, Ernst and Young, Save the Children, Sony, IKEA, KPMG, Nokia, and the list goes on. To learn more about Somewhere Else Solutions, you can visit them at somewhereelse.co.
Welcome to the show, Christophe, it’s a pleasure to have you here.
Christophe: Thanks, Alan. Thanks for having me. It’s good to be here.
Alan: You’ve been working in immersive technologies. Maybe kind of give listeners an understanding of what you’ve done at Somewhere Else, some of the projects you’ve done, and then we’ll dig into something really exciting after that.
Christophe: So I came from the world of mostly strategic consulting, digital and social, and the world of storytelling, kind of on my own time. And back in 2015, I met with a guy called Julien in a pub, and he showed me an experience: The Night Café, in which you enter a painting by Vincent Van Gogh. I don’t know if you’ve tried that one.
Alan: I have. So to paint a picture for people. They took Vincent Van Gogh’s painting and then made it fully spatial so you could walk around in the painting in VR. It was the night café and you could walk around and go and sit at the piano. And it was beautiful. Really, really beautiful.
Christophe: It was beautiful. It was very early. And my jaw dropped, because I saw a new way to tell stories. I was a bit bored of my previous job, so I decided to quit, and I started a studio with that guy — Julien — and another guy, Randy. And kind of alongside the market — the way the market has evolved since 2015 — is, the wow factor was big in the beginning, where a lot of things were done around entertainment and marketing. We worked on that with TV channels, we did an escape room in Paris, we did stuff for the climbing experience for Adidas. Champions seeking experiences for the UFR. And that’s honed our skills in what it means to tell a story in virtual reality, versus other mediums — such as cinema. And about two years ago, Accenture, BCG, McKinsey started publishing their reports about how immersive technologies should impact service design, visualization, training, and so on. And so suddenly, immersive tech started appearing in conversations at the boardroom level, which is what you need for any technology to be adopted. And so we started receiving inquiries in this area, and specifically in training. And so for the past, I would say 18 months to two years, we’ve been specializing on that and more specifically on the behavioral side of things and taking VR support what it really is, which is– you know, VR has been very focused on environments, and virtual realities are recreating the environment virtually. But your reality is also about the people who are part of th
Hands-free AR devices like those made by Kognitiv Spark are changing the way we work by helping us all work smarter, not harder. CEO Yan Simard drops in to remind enterprises shy to get started enhancing the workplace with XR technologies will — should they wait too long — be left in the dust.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Yan Simard, the CEO of Kognitiv Spark. He’s designed and led many innovative business ventures through his own startups. He also has extensive professional experience with companies such as CGI, Zaptap, Vision Coaching, AIS, Incite Wellness, Bell Canada, Industrial Alliance, and more. I’m just going to read this quick quote from Yan. “We believe that mixed and augmented reality, if used right, can not only allow frontline and field workers to stay relevant, but make them more crucial than ever before.” With that, I’d like to welcome Yan and it’s kognitivspark.com.
Yan, welcome to the show, my friend.
Yan: Thanks, Alan. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure to have you. And I can’t wait to dive in here. Maybe just give us a 10,000-foot view of Kognitiv Spark and the great work you guys are doing there.
Yan: So Kognitiv Spark, we do mixed reality communication technology to better provide support to our remote field workers. Our product is called RemoteSpark. It’s an application that has been optimized for the Microsoft Hololens platform. In a nutshell, what it does if you have a field worker that is facing a piece of equipment that stopped working and that worker doesn’t know what to do, that worker can put on the Hololens, start RemoteSpark, and communicate with — let’s say — an engineer at the head office that can help out. The engineer, through a computer, is able to see in real-time what the worker is seeing. They can talk to the person, but they can also provide 3D holographic guidance on top of things. So as an example, if they have a 3D CAD file, that could help the worker figure out what are the steps that need to be done to perform a repair, the expert can drag and drop that on the computer side of things, and the CAD file is going to show up as a 3D hologram in the field of view of the worker, so that the worker can perform the repair.
Alan: So if a field worker’s either in a factory or a warehouse and they’re looking at a machine, the machine breaks, why don’t they just pick up the phone?
Yan: Yeah. And while most of the time that’s what they do right now, the problem with phones — or even tablet-based chat systems, or phone-based ones — is that you have to hold something in your hand, so you can do the repair or do the process or the task that you have to do, at the same time as you’re getting the information and the knowledge. So it’s always a two-step process. With mixed reality, you can just do it all together at the same time. So they’re doing the work, they have their hands greasy and dirty, and they getting the knowledge at the same time. So it’s much more efficient. And also, there are many studies that show that in terms of knowledge retention, it’s about 80, 85 percent higher when you learn about a given task at the same time as you’re doing it with your hands.
Alan: If you look at this from an ROI standpoint, what is the investment to get started with Kognitiv Spark? Obviously you need a Hololens. So that’s, call it $3,500. And then what else do you need after that?
Yan: Yeah. So our software is a service one, and we have two offerings. One is
A lot of XR technologies started from projects in the military sector, including AR. Today’s guest Nick Cherukuri is working to bring what he’s learned from years working in tech for the defense department, and is bringing it all to enterprise — and eventually, consumers — with his line of AR glasses.
Alan: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Smithson here today. We’re speaking with Nick Cherukuri, founder of ThirdEye, about their all-in-one AR glasses hardware and software solution for enterprise in logistics, manufacturing, and engineering and how these tools are revolutionizing how we work. All coming up next on the XR for Business Podcast.
Welcome to the show, Nick.
Nick: Thanks, Alan. Glad to be on.
Alan: I’m really excited. You guys have a really original and awesome looking pair of glasses for the enterprise. Walk us through your X2 glasses and how are people using them? What makes them stand out from the competition? What’s the form factor? Just walk us through your solution.
Nick: Definitely. So just to provide some background about ThirdEye, while we may be a relatively new name in the commercial space, we have over 20 years of experience developing this technology for the United States Department of Defense. So that’s our origin story. And as you may know, the military, a lot of the technologies we use today have evolved from there, so for example, the Internet, GPS, even Siri for your iPhone originally came from SRI, which is right down the road from us in Princeton, developed there and Apple bought it off them. So the military has been a great incubator for these advanced technologies.
And augmented reality, it’s definitely considered the next major tech platform. So we’ve been developing a lot of AR hardware and software applications for the military. And a few– a couple of years ago, we decided to take some of our technical know-how, our leading engineers — we have state-of-the-art labs here in Princeton, New Jersey — and we decided to develop a commercial product. So we spun off into ThirdEye and we created– just this year, we– earlier this year, we released our X2 mixed reality glasses. So there’s just some high-level overview of the X2. We wanted to really address the customer concerns. We felt this was an optimal time to get into the commercial market. So we feel it’s too early for the consumer market right now, but the commercial AR market is definitely something that we are seeing a lot of traction happening.
So we wanted to develop a pair of glasses that really hit some of their needs. And some of the needs we heard were the glasses had to be entirely hands-free. For example, many workers, they have safety requirements, where they cannot have any wired packs. So you can’t have a wired processing pack or a wired battery pack. It needs to be all hands-free, compacted to one pair of glasses. So that was perhaps the most critical use case that we heard, that this is– you had to develop the glasses in a way that’s entirely hands-free. So we made our X2 glasses entirely hands-free at about nine ounces form factor. So it’s something that can be worn for a lengthy period of time. Another use case that we listened to was, it has to be attachable to a hardhat. So the glasses could be as advanced as you want, but if it can’t attach to a hardhat, or to a bumpcap, and meet some basic ANSI industrial certifications — ANSI Z87 — then it can’t be used in these industrial settings. So that’s something that we definitely incorporated into our glasses, to be attachable to a hardhat, and to a bumpcap.
Our glasses are Android-based, so it’s really easy to make access for upgrading to Android 9 soon, so we
PTC LiveWorx is one of the biggest gatherings of up-and-coming XR tech in the industry. With all sorts of amazing future tech demos, PTC’s Executive VP of AR Products Mike Campbell understands how businesses might want to implement the most far-out features of XR technology right away. But he says there’s plenty AR can do perfectly right now that more industries should take advantage of.
Alan: You’re listening to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s episode is with Mike Campbell, executive vice president of Augmented Reality Products at PTC. Mike leads the Vuforia product team, and is responsible for driving the product and technology strategy of PTC’s leading solutions for the development of augmented reality applications. You can learn more about the work they’re doing at ptc.com.
Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike: Hey, Alan, it’s great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. I’ve been really, really looking forward to this, because I went to LiveWorx in… was it June?
Mike: June, yep.
Alan: My God. I had no idea, first of all, how big PTC was and how important Vuforia and your augmented reality strategy is going to be and is becoming to all sorts of different industries. I got to fix a tractor. I got to work on an ATV. I got to look in retail. Is there any industries that this won’t affect?
Mike: Well, PTC’s focus is really in the industrial enterprise domain. And I would say across all of the verticals there — heavy equipment, automotive, aerospace, medical devices — I mean, all of those places are ripe for transformation, thanks to the power of augmented reality.
Alan: It’s amazing. You even had a boat there.
Mike: We did, we did, yeah. One of our customers is Beneteau.
Alan: Yeah. So let’s start from the beginning here. What is PTC? What do you guys do? Where did it come from? Let’s start there.
Mike: Ok. So PTC is a billion-dollar plus software company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. We have been around for a long time and we got our start back in the late 80s, early 90s by revolutionizing the 3D solid modeling industry. Basically, we invented a better mousetrap that allowed companies to create products virtually in 3D much faster and more effectively than ever before. Fast forward from then, we not only have a 3D solid modeling CAD offering, we have a great offering used in engineering for lifecycle management. And about 10 years ago, we recognized the trend of the Internet of Things, this explosion of connectivity and ubiquity of sensors, and companies wanting to leverage that information so that they could create products and manufacture products and service products better. We invested pretty heavily at that time. And once we did that, we were thinking a lot about this idea of IOT and products broadcasting information about themselves in the form of digital data. And we were thinking about our 3D heritage and we recognized that augmented reality was a great way to unlock some of that digital data in the context of the physical world, where you do your work. And that’s really what got us into AR. I have been at PTC — as you said — for a long, long time. And I’ve been involved in our AR journey since the beginning and it’s been a fantastic ride.
Alan: Vuforia was an acquisition. Was that something that you guys made a decision to– can we build this in-house, or should we just acquire it? How did that come about?
Mike: So we were th
Any good XR startup needs someone to invest in their world-changing idea before they can start changing the world. The GFR Fund is one such investor group, and this one in particular has cultivated an impressive portfolio of XR up-and-comers. Managing partner Teppei Tsutsui drops by to share some of his investing strategies.
Alan: Welcome to The XR for Business podcast with your host Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Teppei Tsutsui. For the past decade, Teppei has been the managing partner of the GFR Fund, and he’s led several key investments in acquisitions in Tokyo, including GREE’s acquisitions of open feet and Funzio. Teppei is currently leading the GFR Fund in San Francisco. You can learn more about the GFR Fund by visiting gfrfund.com.
Teppei, welcome to the show, my friend.
Teppei: Oh yeah. Thank you for having me here.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. You guys were one of the very first companies to start investing in the virtual and augmented and mixed reality space. You come from a gaming background. Maybe just give us a little overview of the GFR Fund, and how this came to be that you’re investing in some of the name brands in virtual reality.
Teppei: Sure. Yeah, absolutely. So the GFR Fund is a seed stage fund that’s investing technology companies, disrupting the digital media and entertainment space, including VR and AR. We have about 40 million under management and we invest in primarily in North America, but also in Asia and Europe, too. And we are backed by ALEC Japanese… more like a strategic investor from Japan and Asia, including GREE, which is a publicly-traded company, a mobile gaming company out of Tokyo, and they also help us investing in companies and altogether. Before launching this fund back in 2016, I was working for a company called GREE. — that’s the same company that I was kind of explaining — and I was the head of the corporate development team based in Tokyo, and also here in San Francisco, so that I was kind of working together with them, just looking for lot of the venture companies in the gaming — and VR and AR — space, as well. So that’s how we got started, this GFR Fund, and that’s the relationship.
Alan: GREE is a fairly large company, is it not?
Teppei: It is. So they have about 1.5 billion market cap and they’ve got about a thousand employees across the globe and they’ve got 2,000 billion US dollar revenues. So it’s I feel like a decent company, decent size company.
Alan: That’s awesome. I would assume because — it’s social media and gaming — you would be a direct competitor or something like Tencent. Would that be the case?
Teppei: Yeah. In a way. But the GREE’s more built upon the mobile games, whereas the Tencent sell– they do both PC games and some sort of consoles, too.
Alan: Got it. I’m looking at your portfolio here under the GFR Fund. You’ve got VRChat, Spaces, the WaveVR, Littlstar, InsiteVR, Streem, Torch. Let’s go through these — if you don’t mind — and kind of talk about each one one at a time, and why you guys chose to invest it. But first I want to know: you talked about your fund being $40-million, when did that fund start?
Teppei: The first fund was launched in April 2016, so it’s almost like a four, three and a half years ago. And then we also launched a second fund, beginning of this year.
Alan: Great. And then, so you’ve got– that’s $40-million total under management?
Teppei: Yes. Yeah. We
We’ve had a lot of people from a lot of different industries on XR for Business, and many of them have espoused how much things are going to change when the world finally has a global 5G network to work on. Well, in today’s episode, we have one of the folks responsible for laying the groundwork for that network — Nokia’s Sandro Tavares — on to talk about how that’s coming along.
Alan: Thank you for joining the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Sandro Tavares, and Sandro is with Nokia. He has more than 20 years of international experience in the telecoms industry, with the past 18 working with the Nokia family of companies. He’s had several key roles that have been integral in shaping the latest evolution steps in the mobile industry and communicating these advances to Nokia service provider customers around the world. He is currently the Head of Mobile Networks Marketing, a position in which he leads a global team focused on promoting Nokia solutions for mobile networks, including 5G. To learn more about the great work that Sandro and his team at Nokia are doing, you can visit nokia.com and if you want to dig even deeper, you can just type in “Nokia 5G” into Google.
Sandro, welcome to the show.
Sandro: Thank you very much, Alan. Thanks for having me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. I’m super excited about this. We’ve had people from telcos, people from industry. We’ve had all sorts of great people on the show. But we’ve never had somebody from a company that is building the literal infrastructure that all of XR will run on. And that’s 5G.
Sandro: Yeah, that’s great to hear. Really an honor to be here and to be the first one discussing this topic with you guys.
Alan: So tell us, what are you guys doing at Nokia? Why will this impact XR?
Sandro: Well, I would say that probably a lot of the listeners, they know Nokia for the devices, right? From the cell phones in the past and the early stages of the smartphones. But Nokia has actual history that goes much beyond that. It’s a company that was founded 150 years ago. It started as a paper mill in the countryside of Finland. It has evolved through several different industries. And in the last decades, it has been focused on technology. So our two biggest businesses in the past were the handset business, so the devices, the cell phones as we know them, and then the networks that actually support these devices. So the networks that are provided to service providers, operators all over the world. Then after Nokia has divested these devices business few years ago, then we focused 100 percent on our networks business. And this is what we are doing now. We build basically all generations of telecommunications in the past, and now we are heavily focused on making 5G a reality. And that’s where basically what takes my time throughout most of the days, just talking to customers and discussing about the benefits that 5G will bring to the world, that just goes much beyond just providing broadband. And looking to the applications that can be built with 5G, quite a lot of them are actually going to be enabled by XR technologies. So you can think about a myriad of applications where XR, AR, and VR are going to be important and that are going to be leveraging 5G to actually get brought to the market and delivered to customers.
Alan: Obviously I’m a little biased, being the XR for Business Podcast. Let’s dive into some of those use cases. Let’s take a broad. I was told real millimeter-wave 5G in its perfect condition will be able to be 100 to 1000 times faster than what
Getting started in AR marketing and virtual try-ons can be tricky for enterprise, especially if — like Walmart or Amazon — you’ve got hundreds of thousands of products to model and host. Or, it could be easy, with the help of services like Seek, which hosts 3D content like YouTube hosts videos. CEO and founder Jon Cheney drops in to share the details.
Oh, and Alan gets a spaceship.
Alan: Thanks for joining the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Jon Cheney from Seek XR. I’m really, really excited to have Jon on the show. We traveled all through China together, pitching to rooms full of Chinese investors. And it’s been an amazing experience. Jon is the CEO and founder of Seek. They’re a leading provider of web-based augmented reality for e-commerce brands. I just found this out about him: he’s a composer as well, for films. SeekView is his web-based product built for e-commerce brands. They’ve won several business competitions, including Pluralsight LIVE, where they won $50,000. They’ve announced some really big partnerships with Walmart and Lego and some other stuff. We’ll get to that. But if you want to learn more about John and the work they’re doing at Seek, it’s seekxr.com.
Jon, welcome to the show, my friend.
Jon: Thanks so much, Alan. Great to be on the phone with you today.
Alan: I’m so excited, man. It’s been a minute since we got to just talk and hang out. We had a great time in China. And since then, you guys have done some amazing work. Talk to me about what you guys are doing. I saw some things from Lego and Walmart. And you’re building 3D visualizers for big companies. What’s going on?
Jon: Yeah, man, it’s been quite a journey. Where we are today is way far away from where we started. [chuckles] There’s a lot of people in the XR industry that could probably chime in with similar stories. With this industry that changes so fast, you got to be ready to move with it. But from the very beginning, we’ve had one overarching goal that actually hasn’t changed. We wanted to make augmented reality easier to find and access, and make this a technology that was more accessible. And where we’ve landed is in web-based AR. And there’s obviously hundreds of use cases for web-based AR, but where we really decided to focus is on the e-commerce realm of things. And you’re talking about Walmart, Lego, and those were a couple examples of some of our recent partners. But we’re really focusing on the e-commerce and the retail sector, because there’s just huge benefits when a customer, the end-user is able to use this technology to see a product that they’re considering purchasing. Whether it’s a little Sonos speaker, or a new couch, or a new shoe, or whatever that is, to be able to see it in your space, in your environment, and kind of have all those questions answered that you don’t really know until you get the product, typically. It’s just a huge benefit, and so because of that very obvious benefit, it’s taking off in a big way, and we’re fortunate to work with some of the big, big companies out there at this point.
Alan: So you created this web-based AR visualizer. Walk us through, like I’m on a website, I’m scrolling down, I see a product, I’m like, “Man, that’s really cool, but I don’t know if it’s gonna fit my living room.” — maybe it’s a coach, we’ll just use a couch as an example — I don’t know if it’s going to fit. You can press a button, using the camera on the phone, now it’ll project that couch in
Chemistry is a tough subject. You could memorize the periodic table left and right, but it can still be hard to actually picture what’s going on at the microscopic level when atoms collide. Director of Business Development for MEL Science, Kai Liang, says that’s the beauty of their VR chemistry kits – it brings the learner down to the atomic scale to see it for themselves.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Kai Liang. He is an amazing global world-trotter, travelling around the world promoting virtual and augmented reality for education. He’s a deep expert and practitioner of VR and AR education and industrial solutions in the global marketplace. He’s currently the acting director in a number of different companies, including world-class VR education content company MEL Science as their director of business development, leading VR education company Smart Stone Technologies, and the co-founder and VP of a leading Chinese VR education company, Growlib Technologies. He was recently appointed to the European Managing Director of Shadow Creator, a leading Chinese AR glasses and solution company based in Shanghai. Kai’s various businesses are responsible for successfully deploying VR education classroom solutions to thousands of schools in many countries all over the world. And soon, solutions in several countries directly with the ministries of education. You can visit melscience.com for more information.
Kai, welcome to the show.
Kai: Well, many thanks, Alan. That’s a fantastic intro. Very kind of you.
Alan: Oh, it’s my pleasure. I’m really excited to have you on the show. How did you get into VR?
Kai: Well, I think it’s really a part of the trend. I used to leave the marketing for glasses-free 3D technology. I was the VP for Dimenco. Glasses-free 3D — or otherwise called auto-stereoscopic 3D technology — has a lot of promise, has a lot of potential, but unfortunately, due to a number of factors, the business didn’t take off. The industry kind of slowly drifted, and a lot of my friends and partners actually moved into virtual reality. And I can’t help but notice that the difference from auto-stereoscopic 3D, VR was a technology and an ecosystem that is joined by a lot of leading global brands such as Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Huawei, etc. etc. So business is growing stronger and stronger. And I can clearly see that it offer a stronger impact to user, as a media forum than auto-stereoscopic 3D. So yeah, that’s how I just naturally fit in, my credits from 3D to VR. And education is really the area that I initially settled on to. I find that lot of possibility and their missed potentials. I believe this can add a lot of value to what we do.
Alan: Well, I think you guys have already started to add an enormous amount of value to the education system. You sent me a license to your MEL Science VR application. The very first lesson was the difference between pencil lead or — carbon in a pencil lead — and carbon in a diamond. And I was able to — in VR — go in to at the molecular level, and see why carbon as a substrate like lead — or not lead, but graphite — is different fundamentally than how a diamond is. One is organized in sheets and the other one is organized in a structure that is much, much stronger. Obviously, diamonds are much stronger than graphite, but they’re the same materials. And unless I had gone into that VR experience and gone down to the molecular level, I would never, ever really fully understand how that works. This kind of virtual reality experiences to explain phenomenon that are really difficult to grasp from a two-dimensional level. This is really, reall
If you want to master something, teach it.” That’s the old adage, and at Circuit Stream, the thinking is teaching XR helps you develop better solutions, too. Founder and CEO Lou Pushelberg created Circuit Stream courses to give companies the power to educate and empower themselves, and just make the whole XR ecosystem stronger.
Alan: You’re listening to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Lou Pushelberg, founder and CEO of Circuit Stream. Circuit Stream’s story began in 2015 with Lou traveling around North America, connecting with developers, designers, and creators, pushing the boundaries of immersive experiences. Rather than try to build the next big application like everyone else, Lou saw a bigger need for education and training that could help propel the industry forward. From this journey, Circuit Stream’s 10-week online course emerged. Their education platform has reached over 25,000 students. They’re a Unity authorized training partner and their team of 20 people is giving professionals the skills they need to build value-driven XR experiences. They have three business divisions: education, software development, and their platform. To learn more about the great work that Lew and his team is doing, you can visit circuitstream.com.
Lou, welcome to the show, my friend.
Lou: Alan, thanks so much for hosting me. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Alan: It’s my absolute honor. I’ve been watching the work you guys are doing. You’re basically one of the only educational institutions that are teaching people the practical hands-on skills on how to create XR. How did this come about?
Lou: Well, I was working for another VR startup early in 2015. They were based out of Seattle. This was kind of the DK2 era — so early in VR’s history — and personally was inspired by a lot of the early pioneers, who were building some of the flagship VR content and titles that were coming out on the first wave of consumer hardware — so the Vive and the original Rift — and was basically looking for an opportunity and a need, where I could create value for the ecosystem and help accelerate the adoption of VR and ultimately of XR technology, and found that kind of service and value that I could provide to the ecosystem in education.
Alan: So how did you begin? Where do you start with building a course for technology that’s emerging? Like, “Unity 101: here’s how to make a model.” Like, how did that– where do you even begin?
Lou: [chuckles] Yeah, that’s a good question. So we began with a kind of a core philosophy that was, the only way to learn anything really in it — and especially this technology — was to get hands-on and just start building things. There wasn’t a playbook for VR and AR, there wasn’t a series of best practices at the time. They were kind of just beginning to emerge. So we really wanted to focus a lot of what we were doing around getting people into Unity and some of the other major engines, and just helping them start blazing their own trails by just building stuff and sharing it with people. That’s kind of been our MO and what we try to facilitate with all of the professionals, companies that we work with. So in kind of architecting the course in the beginning, we would go straight to the source. So you mentioned travelling across North America. I had basically booked a trip through what were the four biggest hubs down the West Coast. So starting in Vancouver and then heading south through into Seattle, San Francisco, and LA and in each XR hub, I would interview developers, sometimes from startups who were kind o
Ask someone with enough experience with 360 filmmaking (like Alan), and they’ll tell you — it’s not always been a user-friendly undertaking. From exporting to editing, making great 360 content could definitely be a chore. Insta360 Marketing Director Michael Shabun visits the podcast to explain how their products try to make the process seamless for all 360 filmmakers.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Michael Shabun from Insta360. He’s the marketing director of Insta360 and leads North American marketing strategy, partnerships and communication efforts. Michael specializes in helping overseas brands build their presence in North America. Previously to joining Insta360, Michael led the Business Development Team for DJI — that’s the crazy drone company in North America — where he was instrumental in moving the company into the public spotlight through a series of strategic partnerships with entertainment, sports, and enterprise verticals. If you want to learn more about Insta360 and the awesome cameras and platform that they’ve built, you can visit insta360.com.
Michael, welcome to the show, my friend.
Michael: Thank you so much for having me, Alan.
Alan: All right. Tell us what Insta360 is, and how you got involved with it.
Michael: It’s been quite a ride that the last couple of years. Insta360 actually started off as a very tiny company in the dorm room of our founder and his name is JK Liu. And what he wanted to do was create a product that was simple and easy to use and had 360-degree capabilities. And he didn’t really see an all-in-one product in market like that at the time, four years ago. And so he created the hardware and wrote the software to make 360 truly a consumer product. And in that four years, Insta360 has grown to become the global leader in 360-degree cameras, whether it’s on the consumer, prosumer, or professional side. We now have 11 products in market today that, again, range from tiny little portable cameras that are fun for social media, all the way through to cinematic cameras that now shoot 11k. We run the gamut in terms of what cameras are in market, could we cater these cameras, too. And at the end of the day, it’s really all about the user experience. So how do you create a powerful, strong camera, 360 camera tool, but also give it the ease of use of a consumer product, and not have to spend too much time in post and all those things?
Alan: Insta360 in my mind really stands out above the crowd, is for you guys to be the number one 360 camera company is saying a lot because there have been a lot of entrants into this market. Samsung, Nokia entered with their OZO, Jaunt — which recently just got sold to Verizon — they had their Jaunt One camera. There’s been a ton of companies try to come to market with a 360 camera. There was even the Bubble Cam out of Toronto. But where you guys, in my opinion, have really made a big impact — and I love this about it — is two things. One, ease of use. I can take a photo, it stitches on my phone. I can take a video, it stitches on my phone. But then, the user experience on my phone is absolutely spectacular. I can create a tiny planet, I can create an animation, I can post it directly to all my social media platforms, instantly. And that’s where I think some of the other larger companies have failed. They’ve created amazing hardware, but they failed on the delivery of the actual experience, from the hardware to the software, out to how people actually want to use it. Where did you guys come up with the idea of the stabilization? Because this is key to VR. One of the key things about the Insta
In the late 19th century, Eadweard Muybridge – to win a bet – took several pictures of a horse in motion, and in the process, basically invented film. It was a brand new way to experience media, and it changed the world. Radiant Images hopes to do the same with an investment in 360 video production, and VP Michael Mansouri drops in to explain how.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Michael Mansouri, co-founder and vice president of Radiant Images. Michael is known as one of the industry’s most knowledgeable, inventive, and passionate technologists. Born into a family of filmmakers, he has produced and directed several high impact documentaries, most recently for the United Nations Geneva Summit for Human Rights. His documentaries help raise awareness of human and animal rights violations around the world, to provide a voice for the voiceless. He’s been always interested in the overlap of film and technology, so he co-founded Radiant Images in 2005. Mr. Mansouri’s efforts in filmmaking led to NASA and JPL’s 2018 Emmy win for outstanding original interactive program for Cassini’s grand finale, which was NASA’s first recognition in the film community. At Hawk-Eye, he hopes to break through the technology barriers surrounding digital innovation and provide a more meaningful impact that connects and engages humanity. You can learn more about the great work that Michael and his team are doing at radiantimages.com.
Michael, welcome to the show.
Michael: Hey, good morning, everyone. Michael Mansouri, co-founder of Radiant. Very happy to be on this podcast with you guys.
Alan: I am super excited. You know, the first time I found out about Radiant Images was at the UploadVR launch party in LA. And I was in this beautiful space and people were drinking drinks and everything. Good time. And I walked into one of these small rooms and I saw the collection of quite possibly the craziest 360 cameras I’ve ever seen. There was cameras with 20 lenses. There was ones that fit on your head like a helmet. There was little miniature ones. You guys had kind of everything. And I just– coming from somebody who started in VR using 360 cameras — you know, the GoPro rigs where we glued them all together — and coming from that and then walking into this room, where you would take in what we were doing from a basic standpoint of collecting 360, and you just took it to the next level. How did you guys get involved in that? Like, what was the first precipitating factor of going from traditional film to 360 filmmaking?
Michael: That’s a great question. Radiant’s history is traditional, but we do traditional way, in traditional methods. How we got really excited and involved in immersive was our background is documentarians, we ask always questions. And we ask a lot of questions that break beyond the surface and beyond the obvious. We always were much more interested in taking deeper and deeper. And part of what we did is we started really looking at our industry, motion picture, media, entertainment, and just in fact, communication, our communication methods. How have they changed in the cycles of technology shifts that happens every 10 years? What is the new method of how we engage? And what we realized is, the average American sees between 4,000 to 10,000 pieces of content, every single day. How do we distinguish?
Alan: Say that again? What?
Michael: Yeah. It’s a fact. [chuckles] The average American sees between 4,000 to 10,000 pieces of content every single day.
Alan: Okay, we’ve got to unpack. That is ridiculous.
Michael:
Paul Travers has been in the XR business long enough to remember the early headsets, which were not exactly elegant in design – he describes one of his early models as a football helmet. But today, Vuzix has managed to shrink a ton of XR potential into sleek, sexy sunglasses that would look good on any goth noir vampire slayer. He chats with Alan about the advantages of svelte headsets, from military applications to making driving safer.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Paul Travers. Paul is the founder of Vuzix and has served as the president and chief executive officer since 1997. Prior to the formation of Vuzix, Mr. Travers founded both e-Tek Labs and Forte Technologies Inc. He has been a driving force towards the development of products in the consumer market. With more than 25 years experience in consumer electronics field and 15 years experience in virtual reality and virtual display fields, he is a nationally recognized industry expert. He’s joined by Vuzix’s head of business development, Matt Margolis. If you want to learn more about the Vuzix platform and their headsets, you can visit vuzix.com. Paul and Matt, welcome to the show, guys.
Paul: Hey, Alan. Thanks for having us.
Alan: It’s my absolute honor. You guys are making augmented reality headsets that people actually will want to wear. And I think it’s amazing, your Blade glasses look like a pair of awesome sunglasses. They’re lightweight. They’re wireless. They’re every– they’re all the things. How long has it taken you guys to get there? I mean, you started in 1997. You must have gone through massive iterations along the way.
Paul: Yeah, Alan. I mean, we’ve made all the big stuff, the crazy things. They really started in ’93 or ’94 when we started shipping our very first VR headset, the VFX-1. And if you look it up, you’ll see VFX-1, it’s a football helmet sized gizmo. And then in ’97, actually I bought out all the outside shareholders and started Vuzix. A little bit of history there, we started in the defense space. We were making thermal weapons sight engines that go in the back of the light/medium/heavy thermal weapons type programs for DRS and Raytheon. And doing that, we got an opportunity to work with the special forces guys. And if you think about it, these guys are carrying around 300 pounds of gear. They got their laptop. They’re basically the ultimate mobile wearable tech guy. And at night, they would light up like a Christmas tree. So they put a poncho over their head. They had all this gear on and they came to Vuzix and said, look, could you guys make a pair of Oakley style sunglasses? They called it the Oakley Gate. And they said, if we could do that, half the military would buy these things. And so even all the way back then — it was ’97 to 2000 — these Special Forces guys wanted cool. They wanted lightweight. They wanted it truly functional. And so over the years, we’ve come out with a lot of different devices and each iteration we’ve been pushing on, making them smaller and lighter. We were talking a little bit earlier about the top-down versus bottom-up approach. I mean, there’s some really cool technology that’s out there that’s doing all spatial computing and the likes, but it’s big. And for Vuzix, we’re taking the lightweight, trim, wearable all day side of it, but highly functional. When you’re looking for streaming video applications where you’re doing see-what-I-see for maintenance, repair, and overhaul, or you’re in a warehouse all day long taking stuff out of that warehouse. You don’t want a great big, heavy thing. You want a supe
Nuclear energy is no joke, and to train to work in the field can be risky and costly… unless you’re training in a virtual environment. That’s the kind of technology Shachar “Vice” Weis, co-founder of VRAL, has been developing for the last several years. Alan and Vice discuss the pros and…well, are there really any cons to non-radioactive training simulations?
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is a great friend, Shachar “Vice” Weis. He’s a software developer with 25 years experience. He’s worked in many fields and disciplines, from ancient mainframes to tiny system-on-chip units. Vice has extensive experience with 3D frameworks, game development, robotics, UX design, and automation. He has broad the R&D experience from managing an R&D in a startup environment, to developing enterprise solutions in HP Labs and leading an R&D team in the Israeli Navy Computer Center. Vice’s worked in many areas, including datamining, web development, virtual reality, 2D and 3D graphics, image and video processing. And he brings acute analytical skills, system system-wide vision, and experience with clients and knowhow in R&D work methodologies. You can learn more about his company, Packet39, it’s packet39.com.
Vice, welcome to the show, my friend.
Vice: Hey, good morning. Thanks for having me.
Alan: It’s my pleasure. I’m really excited. Your presentation is at Virtual Reality Toronto meet-up was mind-blowing. I got there and I sat down, and all of a sudden this guy on stage is talking about nuclear reactors and using Hololenses for training and virtual reality training and simulators. And I was sitting there with my mouth open the whole time, taking photos and trying to capture all of the goodness. And I’m really honored to have you on the show. How did you get into nuclear? Like, what happened there?
Vice: Well, as most things in life, it was mostly chance. I met a guy at VRTO — the Toronto VR conference — three years ago, and he was working for a company that provides services for nuclear power, specifically Oakajee here in Canada. And we got to talking and we understood that there was a lot of a lot of need and virtual reality could solve some really interesting problems. And we took it from there.
Alan: VRTO, it’s a small conference, but man, the level of quality of the attendees and the speakers at that conference every year is just phenomenal. And it feels like the show keeps getting smaller but more important in its stature. So it’s cool to hear that you–
Vice: It’s getting smaller and more condensed and I’ve given a talk at VRTO every year in the last three years and every time it was–
Alan: Yeah, it’s amazing. This is the first year I missed it. I was traveling, but I’m really excited to see what comes next year because I know it got smaller, but it just got– the people that attended it are really deep into this stuff. So tell us about this nuclear reactor training, kind of what was the first step with that? How do you start training people in VR for nuclear facilities?
Vice: Well, there’s a lot of stuff you can do in VR and a lot of stuff that you shouldn’t. And the trick is finding the correct path. We started with a proof of concept project, that was the airlock. And this was new to me as well. I didn’t have any experience in nuclear power specifically, back then when we started. And it turns out that the entire core, the entire facility where the core is housed is airtight. And to get in and out, you have to go through an
If YouTube is the world’s compendium of videos of cute cats and unboxings, then the Sketchfab platform is well on its way to becoming the equivalent cultural database of user-generated 3D objects. CEO Alban Denoyel discusses the origins and the future of the service with Alan in this episode.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Alvin Denyuel– I screwed it up already. How do I say it?
Alban: “Deh-Noh-Yell.”
Alan: “Denoyel,” OK. Today’s guest is Alban Denoyel from Sketchfab, the world’s largest platform to publish and find 3D content online. Imagine it’s like the YouTube for 3D. Prior to Sketchfab, he worked for four years in the 2D world of photography. He loves making 3D content with photogrammetry or VR sculpting. He’s a graduate from the ESSEC Business School in Paris, France. If you want to learn more about the wonderful work they’re doing, you can visit sketchfab.com.
Alban, welcome to the show.
Alban: Hey, Alan, thanks.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. I’ve been looking forward to this episode for so long. I’ve had a Sketchfab account for about four years now and I’ve only managed to publish a couple of things on there. But it’s so cool. I mean, you’re literally making the YouTube of 3D models. How did you guys come up with that concept? Where did that come from?
Alban: Actually, it initially came from a technical challenge, I guess. My– So, Sketchfab is built on top of WebGL, which is the first web-based framework to display 3D graphics in the browser and WebGL was initiated by Mozilla back in 2011. And my co-founder and CTO, Cedric, had been a 3D programmer in the gaming industry for 15 years, was hired by Mozilla to make one of the very first demos of WebGL for the launch of Firefox 4. And then I just started peeking around the tech and started building an MVP to essentially help the people he was working with in the 3D industry to be share and display 3D assets with just a euro and a browser.
Alan: Incredible. I mean, you guys have come a long, long way. How long have you been doing that? When did it start?
Alban: Cedric started in 2011, I met him early 2012, and we officially launched in March 2012. So it’s been more than seven years.
Alan: Wow. Seven years. And how many 3D models are hosted on Sketchfab today?
Alban: I stopped counting at three million. [chuckles]
Alan: So there’s over three million 3D assets hosted on Sketchfab today. And I would assume over the next 10 years, as everything moves to 3D, that number is going to probably end up at 3 billion, at some point. So why do people need Sketchfab?
Alban: So people use this mostly in two ways: either to publish content or to find content. So published content means sharing, embedding, displaying, hosting 3D files that they have. So these are as 3D creators, or brands, or architects, or any number of industries. And so they have 3D files and they need a way to embed them on a web page or share them with someone who doesn’t have 3D software to open them, or use them in VR and AR and so on. And then other people come to Sketchfab just because they need content. Either regards to presentations, or it could be to build video games. It can be to build AR/VR experiences, it can be to make a video or two-dimensional learning. Again, the use cases are pretty diverse as well.
Alan: Let’s start with the way– where you guys came from, because up until recently it was a free pla
Thanks to the power of computer technology, you can browse the contents of a book you might like to buy online, without ever touching a physical copy of it until it’s already been bought and delivered. Wouldn’t it be neat if you could do that, but with real estate that doesn’t even exist yet? Recent Auggie winner Emily Olman thinks so, and she drops by to tell Alan all about how volumetric capture and photogrammetry will make that possible.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is a great friend of mine, Emily Olman, CEO and co-founder of SpatialFirst, a prop tech startup and creators of PlaceTime, a mobile immersive property visualization application bringing spatial computing to real estate. Prior to this, Emily founded Hopscotch Interactive, a 3D VR marketing service company, to accelerate the adoption of new media and technology for property marketing using reality capture. She spent her career monetizing new media and developing new business models for Frontier Technologies. With a background in media sales, business, and property marketing, she believes that spatial interfaces will unlock properties’ full potential. Emily is a regular speaker on immersive real estate technology, both in the US and abroad. She’s just finished serving as the VR/AR Association’s San Francisco chapter co-president from 2016 to 2019. Yes, she’s got mad skills.
Emily, welcome to the show!
Emily: Hi! Thank you, Alan.
Alan: Thanks so much for joining me. It’s been a long time since we saw each other, I think was at AWE.
Emily: Yeah, it’s been a little bit, but it’s great to be chatting with you.
Alan: Amazing. How’s everything going?
Emily: Well, it’s great. And it’s been busy. And I feel like we are just heading into the most exciting time of the year. Things sometimes have their natural ebb and flow, in the summer months, for instance. But I think as we get towards the end of 2019, I think there’s some really exciting things that are gonna be happening.
Alan: So tell us, tell us what’s been going on with you. You were the co-president of the San Francisco chapter, which is one of the big chapters of the VR/AR Association. And you’ve seen this industry come from nothing to where it is today, and it’s really starting to take off. So maybe just give us kind of a brief history of how you got into this industry, and where you’ve seen it come from?
Emily: That’s a great segue into my perspective on the industry. I was fortunate to be running the San Francisco chapter of the VR/AR Association for a few years with Mike Boland. And we really got to see the industry start to go through many different shifts. But I would definitely also say that we got to where we are today because we really are standing on the shoulders of giants. And so the work that folks have been doing for decades in immersive technologies and virtual reality has really led to what’s enabled me to move from my passion for reality capture into creating a new interface and to be involved with very emerging technologies such as spatial computing. What’s kept me busy is having a startup. We started this company, SpatialFirst, about two years ago and have been working hard ever since to really make something unique that addresses the future of spatial computing for real estate.
Alan: So when you say spatial computing for real estate. Walk us through what that means and why it’s important.
Emily: As we know, when we are looking at spatial computing, this notion of we know exactly where a digital piece of con
One of Alan’s favourite XR experiences was running into a room at the Royal York Hotel, filled with 200 people, all deathly silent and hooked into VR headsets. It may sound like a Matrix prequel, but it was actually a demo of PwC’s VR platform. Jeremy Dalton — the author of this anecdote — stops by to talk about mass VR technology.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Jeremy Dalton. Jeremy leads PwC’s Virtual and Augmented Reality Team, helping clients across all sectors understand, quantify and implement the benefits of virtual and augmented reality technology. As part of his mission to educate, connect, and inspire, he’s also a member of the World Economic Forum, Virtual and Augmented Reality Global Future Council, and sits on the Advisory Board of Immerse UK, a cross-sector network for businesses, research and educational organisations in the immersive technology industry. Jeremy is also an advisor for the VR/AR Association, and he’s also a mentor for our XR Ignite program. To learn more about PwC’s VR and AR endeavors, you can visit PwC.co.uk/vr.
Welcome to the show, Jeremy.
Jeremy: Hi, Alan. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Alan: It’s such an honor and a pleasure to have you on the show. We’ve been communicating for many years now and we even have a kind of a joint research folder that we’ve been adding to over the years. So it’s really great to have you on the show.
Jeremy: Definitely, I’m looking forward to getting stuck in.
Alan: [laughs] Yeah, it’s amazing. So I just want to tell a quick story. About two months ago, you came to Toronto with your PwC team and ran a partners conference, and you had an enormous number of simultaneous virtual reality experiences. So you wanna maybe just explain what that was and how that came to be?
Jeremy: Yeah, sure. So this was a particularly exciting project for us where — very, very quickly, in summary — we put 200 people into virtual reality at the same time and they all had this simultaneous experience in the same room. And I was able to collect that data in real time and understand exactly where in that experience they were and what decisions they were making in that world. So it was fantastic. It went off without a hitch, thankfully, given the number of potential technical issues that could have gone wrong. I was very happy. It all went very smoothly.
Alan: It was quite endeavour. I remember you said, “Hey, we’re doing this thing tomorrow morning. I’m in Toronto.” I cancelled my meetings the morning, I came over there. I went into the hotel — it was at the Royal York in Toronto — and I went upstairs, walked into this room and it was dead silent. And there’s 200 people — 200+ people, there was more than 200 people, for sure — and you could hear a pin drop on a carpet. And it was the strangest thing, because everybody was in VR and everybody’s looking in different directions. It was this crazy thing. And you had this branching narrative. Maybe talk to what that branching narrative was? Right after the experience, you were able to show the information. Walk us through how that came to be.
Jeremy: Yeah, sure. And I like your comment about being able to keep everyone quiet. That was actually mentioned as well by by some of the organizers of the conference, that they were amazed by this pindrop silence in the room, because obviously it’s very rare. You’ve usually got people messing around on their mobile phones. You got them talking to each other, going to get a glass of water, l
It’s a bummer when you’re shopping for just the right item, but the store is out of stock, and the website only has a 300×300 jpeg to go by. Plattar’s platform is to help those retailers have digital twins ready in AR for their customers to experience, whether at home or in the shop. Founder and Aussie Rupert Deans braves the epic time difference to chat with Alan in Toronto about the platform’s goals.
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Alan, along with his wife Julie, are members of the VR/AR Association, and as such, one of the annual XR gatherings they look forward to most is the VR/AR Global Summit in Vancouver, which is just a few weeks away (Oct 31-Nov 2). Alan has the event’s executive producer, Anne-Marie Enns, on to talk about what attendees can expect on the show floor this year.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is a great friend of mine, Anne-Marie Enns, the executive producer of the VR/AR Global Summit, coming to Vancouver, Canada, October 31st to November 2nd. And I am super excited to announce that both my wife Julie and myself will be speakers at it, and it’s hosted by the VR/AR Association, which we are also members. She’s served as the executive producer for the show for two years and previously was the producer of the CVR, the Consumer VR Show, also hosted in Vancouver. She’s the founder of Pulled In Productions, a live event production company that specializes in tech events and live productions. You can learn more about the VR/AR Global Summit by visiting vrarglobalsummit.com. Duh.
Anne-Marie: [chuckles]
Alan: We’re here now with Anne-Marie. Thanks for joining me.
Anne-Marie: Thanks so much for having me, Alan.
Alan: I’m super excited for two things. One, to come and see everybody in Vancouver and two, to find out who else was gonna be there speaking at this. So let’s get into it. Tell everybody what is the VR/AR Global Summit, and what can they expect from this?
Anne-Marie: Well, the VR/AR Global Summit is going into its second year, and it is two days that are jam packed full of amazing industry speakers, workshops, speed dating, great events, amazing exhibits and demos. And so it is just the show to go to if you’re looking for great content, great conversations and awesome networking in a beautiful location.
Alan: I have been a guest speaker at your conference for a couple of years now, and I can tell you — for the people listening — there’s two conferences that I — or three, I guess — that I look forward to every year: AWE, which is by far the most impactful augmented reality conference, and that takes place every year in San Francisco, and now there’s going to be one in Munich. But then there’s the Virtual Reality, Toronto; VRTO: That one is a small but very powerful group. And the Global Summit is kind of like taking both of those. Where you’ve got this small, intimate group talking about the future of technology. Then you’ve got AWE, which is very kind of enterprise focused, how to make money? And you bring those two together and you’ve got this global summit. And it’s just incredible because it feels like a small conference, even though it’s not small, it feels like a small conference because everybody there is super passionate. They’re willing to share their experiences. What can we expect from the speakers this year?
Anne-Marie: Sure. Well, we’ve got so many amazing speakers this year, and we take a lot of time to carefully curate who goes on our stage. So it takes us a while to get that program launched. But we’ve got some amazing people this year, both in the enterprise side — so talking about training — we’ve got a whole defense and government sector that’s happening at the event this year, a couple hours of that. We’ve got beautiful immersive artists and people working in immersive storytelling that are coming. So we’ve got Lenovo, Niantic, MasterCard, HP, Forbes, a whole bunch of great of the big name companies. But then we’ve also got
Regular listeners have heard plenty of stories from Alan’s numerous adventures at Augmented World Expo. In today’s episode, we go to the source of all those tales, with AWE’s co-founder and executive producer, Ori Inbar — just ahead of this year’s summit.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. I am super excited to have our next guest today, Ori Inbar. He’s a world leading expert in the field of augmented reality industry, and he has devoted the past decade to fostering the AR ecosystem as an entrepreneur, advisor, and investor. He’s the founder and managing partner for Super Ventures and the CEO of AugmentedReality.org, a nonprofit that produces Augmented World Expo, the top industry conference for AR since 2010. To learn more about what he’s doing, you can visit augmentedreality.org and awexr.com or superventures.com.
Ori, welcome to the show, my friend.
Ori: Thank you, Alan. It’s awesome to be here.
Alan: It’s so exciting to have you. I’ve been waiting for this episode for so long and I just can’t wait to get right in. Maybe can you just give us your first AR experience, and how did you get into this? You know, I watched your 2019 keynote from AWE again, and put on these these welding glasses that you had back in 2009. You’ve been doing this for ten years without any reduction in passion. And how did you get involved? Like, what was that precipitating moment for you?
Ori: So for me, after the startup I was working for was acquired by SFP — and I spent seven years there — decided to leave and go back to my roots in startup. And then I realized that my kids are always stuck in front of a screen, computer screen or playing video games. And on one hand, it felt like we cannot really change the future. But I was trying to look for a way for kids — and adults — to kind of interact with the real world, like we did as kids. But by adding some of the things that attract kids and adults to computers and to video games and to social media and kind of merge it into reality. And at that time, I thought I kind of invented something new. But then upon some research, I realized there’s a term for it, it’s called augmented reality, it’s been around for many decades. But it was hidden in labs in a few places around the world. So the mission immediately became to find a way to bring it to the mainstream, to the masses. And then the iPhone was announced and it felt like finally we have an ideal device to deliver augmented reality to everyone, because they already have it in their pockets. Of course, from there the path was very long and arduous and still is. But I think we’re starting to see some of the fruits in the last couple of years where a bunch of new applications — whether it’s for enterprise or for consumers — are hitting the market and are actually showing value. So it seems like we’re definitely on the path to making it mainstream.
Alan: My first AWE was three years ago and I remember it was amazing to me, because I went to Silicon Valley VR meet-up or SVVR, and it was mainly VR. And then I went to AWE and it was a lot of augmented reality, and glasses, and there was companies there making glasses that looked like aliens had built them. And it felt really clunky. I almost had this feeling like this is really cool, I can see where it’s going, but it’s not quite there. And it’s it’s just not ready for the real world, in my opinion. But you go back this year and everything is actually, Porsche’s using this and Lockheed Martin is using it. Huge companies not only are done with their pilot phase, but they’re rolling it out at scale. So what do you think has hap
It wasn’t long ago that the concept of having a personal relationship with computers was the stuff of science fiction — everything from HAL 9000 to V’Ger posited a far-out future when that would start to happen. Well, according to Mike Pell — author of THE AGE OF SMART INFORMATION — that time is now.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is somebody absolutely spectacular. Mr. Mike Powell, he is the head of the Microsoft Garage and the author of “Age of Smart Information,” a new book about how artificial intelligence and spatial computing will transform the way we communicate forever. Find the latest on Mike at futuristic.com and excerpts from his new book, at theageofsmartinformation.com.
Mike, welcome to the show.
Mike: Thank you, Alan. My pleasure to be here.
Alan: It’s so exciting. I was gifted your book actually by a good friend of mine, John Bizzell. And we had lunch and he’s “Oh, you haven’t read this book.” And I guess he sent it to me on Amazon. I got it the next day, and I’ve been just voraciously reading this book since, I’m about halfway through. But man, your book has really opened my eyes to how everything around us will not only have the data available, but it’ll be in context to our personal needs. And it’s really incredible. So how did you– just kind of walk us through your journey of how you went from inventing PDFs, to writing books on smart information?
Mike: It’s a long story, but I’ll try to keep it really short. You’re right, a lot of this did sort of form when I was back in the early 90s when I was working on Acrobat with some of my friends at Adobe. Back then, when we were working on the very first electronic documents for interchange, it was very apparent that people were not going to enjoy reading these things like sitting upright and being uncomfortable. You really needed some hardware and software that didn’t exist at that point to enjoy the information, right. To enjoy whether it was book or documents or reports, whatever it is you were reading. And so at that time, I started to think a lot about how the information itself — you know, the thing that we were reading — was so dead and lifeless. I guess it was amazing that you could now transfer to other places when people around the world could see exactly what you were trying to say. But the thoughts about how there was always more to it started to percolate back then. And over my career, I’ve always had the good fortune of working on the leading edge of technology. So I was very early into 3D and interactive graphics and visualization, and I started to do a lot of experiments with bringing information to life. I’ve always been fascinated with communications, helping people communicate as clearly as they can. And so that was really the start of a lot of this, was trying to see what we can do to help people be able to understand and communicate better by using the information, the things that we create every day, whether that’s tweets or emails or books or movies or music, doesn’t matter. Whatever the medium is that you’re communicating in, there’s always so much more that can be brought out that we as people understand inherently, but yet are never reflected in that final form, that piece of communication comes in. So that’s where we started.
Alan: So let’s unpack that. So, you know, I’m reading a PDF, then you guys probably added the ability to have hyperlinks and then what else can you add. Now you’re looking at, “OK, what does the world look like when the computers are no longer bound by the 16 by 9 rectangular shape?”
Regular listeners know that folks like Alan and his guests attend a number of XR-related conventions, events, and symposia. Well, one -- VR Days in Amsterdam -- is right around the corner! Alan has founder and festival director Benjamin de Wit on to talk a little bit about what there will be to see -- and what attendees can expect to take away -- from this this year's shindig.
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Alan is always ready with an interesting XR anecdote or two on this podcast, but even he has a source for interesting XR tidbits. In today’s episode, he brings that source to him – XR journalist and consultant, Alice Bonasio. They end up chatting about the principles behind the idea that XR is an “empathy machine.”
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Alice Bonasio, the technology writer for Inside VR and AR. Alice is a technology writer/producer/consultant with a particular interest in the immersive space. Over the past 15 years, she’s combined a career in freelance journalism, contributing to outlets such as Wired, Quartz, Fast Company, Playboy, Upload VR, Ars Technica and many others. She’s advised a broad range of companies, from startups to major corporations on their communications and digital strategy. She’s currently the editor-in-chief of Tech Trends, a news and opinion website she founded in 2016, and the curator of the daily Inside VR and AR newsletter, which I personally read every single day. You can connect with Alice on LinkedIn and you can also reach her at Twitter on Alice Bonasio. And if you want to subscribe to Inside VR, it’s inside.com/vr and inside.com/ar.
Alice, welcome to the show.
Alice: Hello. Very nice to meet you. Thanks for inviting me on.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. I read your content daily, so it’s a real pleasure for me to have you on the show. Every day I get this Inside VR, and I skim through it, I look for the things that are business related. And at the bottom, it says “curated by Alice.” And I was like, I got to have her on the show. So thank you so much.
Alice: You’re very, very welcome.
Alan: You are my source for news.
Alice: [laughs] That’s very nice to know. Yes. And the more subscribers we get, the more I get to do what I love, which is trawling through all of those interesting bits of news. So, yeah, definitely get everyone to subscribe. That’ll be great.
Alan: Well, I know one way to get more subscribers, we should write a piece about this amazing new podcast called the XR for Business Podcast.
Alice: Ah, yes, yes. That’s how you make a great plug. Yeah, yeah. We’re pros here, we’re pros.
Alan: So I want to dive in here because there’s so much to get in. We’ve got an hour, let’s really make the best of it. Let’s start with one or two things that you’ve seen in the last little bit that just blew your mind, because I think you get to see everything from a 10,000 foot view. What is personally blowning your mind in XR for business?
Alice: I think one of the recent examples — and you were talking about it when you were saying about doing your news roundup — in the last week was really that Microsoft demo at Inspire. That really did blow my mind. And it’s one of those things where you see several elements just come together into something that just makes such sense. And it was one of those eureka moments. Together with mapping, I think that translation is just such an obvious use case for augmented or mixed reality, but it is also one of the most difficult ones to get right, because you just need a lot of elements to be at the optimum stage and to come together for the experience to work. And the experience either really works well or doesn’t. So what they did was, at Microsoft Inspire — which is a partner conference for Microsoft — Julia White, who is an executive for
Unlike in nature, ideas in enterprise don’t grow or perish by the laws of natural selection — survival of the fittest — but rather, which ideas are communicated and understood better at the early stages. But not every good idea is best expressed on a whiteboard. That’s why Gabe Paez developed The Wild — a digital collaborative space designed to help teams workshop designs and ideas in a VR environment.
Alan: My name’s Alan Smithson, the host of the XR for Business Podcast, where we interview industry leaders in making technologies in virtual, augmented and mixed reality. And today’s guest is Gabe Paez. Gabe works at the intersection of engineering, design, and business. He’s the founder and CEO of The Wild, and immersive collaboration platform for teams to experience their work together, from anywhere in augmented and virtual reality. The Wild enables spatial design teams to ideate, review, share, and present in cross-platform XR from the same room or across the world. Gabe has over a decade of experience leading experiential product teams and has designed immersive software products for a diverse roster of Fortune 100 companies including Google, Samsung, Nike, AT&T, and Verizon. To learn more about The Wild visit thewild.com.
Gabe, welcome to the show.
Gabe: Hi! It’s good to be here. Thank you.
Alan: Really amazing. Thank you so much for taking the time. I know you’re super busy. You just launched The Wild out into the wild. Tell us about The Wild. How did this idea come to be, and what is it?
Gabe: Well, to be honest, I feel like I’ve spent my whole career trying to explain ambitious ideas to people, and what I’ve realized in that process is that there are pools for sharing that idea — especially in the early stages of that idea — are so limited. And often the best, the most ambitious, the most interesting ideas get shut out early on, solely for the reason that they are misunderstood or not completely communicated to the other person. So I really wanted to break down that barrier; find a way for everyone on a team to experience an idea together, while it’s still in the ideas stage straight through to execution, and to find an efficiency in that process. Not just solely for cost savings, but ultimately, to find the best ideas and let those surface to the top of the stack.
Alan: Let’s break it down here. So this is a collaboration tool or a platform where people from around the world can go into a virtual space and experience design together.
Gabe: So The Wild really puts collaboration at the core of the offering, not as an add-on, but as the foundation of what we’re doing. We’re creating a collaboration hub for people that design spaces, environments to come together and experience those spaces from anywhere in the world. Architects, engineers, people that their profession is to take an idea and transform that into a physical place in the physical world somewhere. And so they have a unique challenge that the output of their process, their design process really isn’t realized until the very final stage. So what The Wild does is sort of says we now have a capability that we don’t have to wait until the very end to really understand that space and to experience it, not just as a simulation on your own, but to experience it together as a team, just as you would in the very final moments where you walk through that space physically with your teammates and look at what you’ve created together. We’re using not just virtual reality, but the whole XR spectrum to allow those team members to experience that idea as a concept in the very early stages, either in total virtual space,
All the world’s a stage, but in AR, that’s a stage we’re still building. Visualix is hard at work building that stage with their street mapping technology, which will one day help make everything from digital maps to Pokémon Go a whole lot better. Co-CEOs Michael Bucko and Darius Pajouh drop in to discuss their technology with Alan.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s episode is with two amazing people from a company called Visualix. Michael Bucko and Darius Pajouh are really, really passionate about analytics and teleinformatics. Michael is a CTO and co-CEO of Visualix and has a computer science/teleinformatics background, he worked as a data and software engineer and founded many companies before. At Visualix he does packaging, partnerships, and technology, as well as make sure that Visualix has the best tech team in the world. Darius, on the other hand, is the co-founder and also co-CEO. He studied physics with a specialty in non-linear optics. He did not stay in research for long, because he founded a startup and then raised $200,000 and it fails — we’ll get into that — but he worked at a company called Innogy, the largest energy utility company in Europe. And the venture developer program that allowed employees to start companies, funding from the mother company. And so that’s how in 2017, Visualix was born. To learn more about Visualix, you can visit visualix.com.
Welcome to the show, Michael and Darius.
Darius: Thanks. Thanks for having us.
Michael: Thank you very much. Welcome.
Alan: We’ve been talking for so long and now we finally get to have a conversation on the record.
Michael: Amazing. It’s been awhile.
Alan: It’s been a minute. It’s funny, because one of my interviews today was with Dr. Walter Greenleaf. He’s been working in VR for 33 years.
Darius & Michael: Wow.
Alan: So when you think you’ve been pushing hard for a long time, think about Dr. Greenleaf. So, Michael, tell us what is Visualix and how does it work? Why somebody would want to use it?
Michael: Ok, so Visualix is a mapping and positioning platform. We allow the largest scale, most reliable augmented reality in the world. It’s very simple. You take a mobile phone and you map a space, for instance, your apartment or a warehouse. And then in this map, in this digital twin that you’ve created, you can place augmented reality content. And then people — viewers — can see this content in real time extremely accurately. And it works at scale. So it’s very, very reliable, works at scale. And we have an SDK for that.
Darius: And if I may add something, so the USP that we created is that we do all the computation on the backend. So we use the mobile only as a sensor to really get the data in terms of data we get on the phone. But the real computation, the heavy lifting for mapping, as well as localization, is in the backend side. So this allows us to basically escape the limitations of mobile devices such as phones or let’s say, AR glasses that only allow shared experiences on an area of about 20 square meters or 50 square meters. So basically a small room. Where we extend this from 20 square meter to 20,000 square meters. So about a thousand fold. And this is something that you only can do if you have a powerful backend. And this basically makes us the only company that can create one spatial map that is together. You can basically create one spatia
XR has come a long way, baby – and we have one of the technology’s earliest pioneer’s on today’s episode. Dr. Walter Greenleaf has been working in the field for 33 years, since the days when VR was little more than a twinkle in research scientists’ eyes. Now, he and Alan chat about how far the technology has come, and how far it still has to go.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Dr. Walter Greenleaf, a behavioral neuroscientist and medical technology developer working at Stanford University. With over three decades of research and development experience in the field of digital medicine and medical virtual reality technology, Walter is considered the leading authority in the field of working in this industry, and he’s been doing this for 33 years. Unbelievable experience. Dr. Greenleaf has designed and developed numerous clinical systems over the last 33 years, including products in the fields of surgical simulation, 3D medical visualization, telerehabilitation, clinical informatics, clinical decision support, point of care, clinical data collection, ergonomic evaluation technology, automatic sleep staging systems, psycho-physiological assessment and simulation assisted rehabilitation technologies, as well as products for behavioral medicine. Dr. Greenleaf’s focus has always been on computer supported clinical products, with a specific focus on virtual reality and digital health technologies to treat post-traumatic stress disorder, anxiety disorders, traumatic brain injury, stroke, addictions, autism and other difficult problems, and behavioral and physical medicine. He’s currently a distinguished visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Media X program at Stanford University’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab and the Director of Technology Strategy at the University of Colorado National Mental Health Institute Center. To learn more about the work that Dr. Greenleaf and his team are doing, you can visit the Human Interaction Lab at Stanford at vhil.stanford.edu and a new organization that he’s formed called the International VR Health Association at ivrha.org.
Welcome to the show, Dr. Walter Greenleaf. So great to have you.
Walter: Thanks, Alan. I’m pleased to be here with you.
Alan: That’s an honor. You are considered one of the godfathers of this technology. You’ve been working in it your whole life. And I want to personally say thank you for laying the groundwork that allows people like myself — the new people getting involved here — to really pick up where you left off, and where you’ve driven this whole industry forward to, and let us really build upon your lifetimes of knowledge. So thank you very much for paving the way for us.
Walter: Well, thank you, Alan. And really, without everybody else’s and my colleagues work and your work and other people who are helping the trends position from something that for a long time was a research lab curiosity and something that really hadn’t escaped the confines of academia. Now we have it out there in the world. And I’m particularly excited about all the progress has been made in applying VR and AR technology to difficult problems in healthcare. For me, it’s a very exciting time.
Alan: I’ve been keeping track of all of the different things that come up in my news feed and I have a health and medical folder. And it’s interesting, because last year I actually had to break it apart into a mental health folder, in addition to the traditional health and medical. So there is an enormous amount of, not just research, but real practical applications being created f
As the lead writer and head of content at BrainXchange, Emily Friedman has had ample chances to explore a lot of XR-related topics. She lets Alan pick her brain about a few of them, from getting millennials interested in trades, to democratizing knowledge, and how humanity will enter The Cloud.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Emily Friedman from BrainXchange and Augmented World Expo. Emily Friedman is a New York based enterprise immersive, wearable and emerging technology advocate, journalist and facilitator. She’s Head of Content and the lead writer at BrainXchange, lead journalist and senior editor at Enterprisewear Blog, and head of marketing and communications for Augmented World Expo USA and AWE EU. To learn more about BrainXchange, you can visit brainxchange.com. And if you wanna learn more about AWE or Augmented World Expo, you can visit awexr.com.
Welcome to the show, Emily.
Emily: Thank you for having me.
Alan: Oh, it’s my absolute pleasure. I’ve been really looking forward to this conversation, because you are writing everyday – or, not everyday, but what, a couple times a week? — on the enterprise wearables world. So maybe just kind of give us an overview of what is BrainXchange and AWE. Let’s start with that.
Emily: Ok, I wish I were productive enough to write multiple articles a week. But there’s a lot going on. BrainXchange, we started out as a boutique events company, and we just happened to enter augmented reality at the right time. It was 2015, right after Google Glass, quote/unquote failed. And there were all these headlines, “Glasshole” articles. But if you read between the lines, it was clear that smartglasses weren’t a failure, and that enterprises were actually finding good use cases for it. So today we provide events, content, and other services all related to facilitating enterprise XR.
Alan: You know, I’ve been at AWE a couple of times now. I lead the startup track this year. It’s an important conference for virtual/augmented/mixed reality and some may say it is the most important conference. It’s where everybody around the world gathers in. And I made this comment that if the building happened to collapse, basically the entire VR world would cease to exist, and we’d have to start over again. It was an amazing collection of some of the world’s smartest people working in this technology and enterprise. They seem to be really driving this technology forward. What are you seeing?
Emily: Well, as for AWE, I think it’s a very important benchmarking event. Like you said, the entire industry gets together at that one point. What we’re seeing — and the reason we gravitated towards enterprise at first — is that that’s where the money is. I mean, that’s where the money has to be made, both for end users and the AR/VR companies themselves. At the end of the day, we cater to the enterprises and we talk to them every day. We get on the phone with Fortune 500 companies, the innovation people and all these different companies every day. And we listen to their pain points. AR/VR happens to offer a solution to a lot of their pain points.
Alan: So what are some of the pain points? Let’s unpack that.
Emily: Huge one is a shrinking workforce, that creates this need to train faster, better. So as the workforce ages — in manufacturing, I think the average age is like 40 to 50 now — and retires, not only do you need to attract new talent; you need to train them. As a millennial, this is actually pretty important to me. Learning a skill today just doesn’t get you as far as it did half a ce
Most businesses have the information and infrastructures they need to be more efficient and competitive — it’s just a matter of having it all at their fingertips. RE’FLEKT is working at making that process easier by creating a modular, scalable, open-source operating system for businesses to build their own in-house AR applications on top of. President and CMO Dirk Schart drops in to explain how.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Dirk Schart RE’FLEKT President and CMO. Dirk Schart is a marketing and growth driven tech executive, whose current mission is to build the operating system for enterprise augmented reality. Dirk leads the US operations for RE’FLEKT. Dirk is one of the first employees of RE’FLEKT and is a funded company by global companies such as Bosch and BASF, and today plays a leading role in enterprise AR. Previously, Dirk built the Digital Innovation Lab for Hyperloop Transportation Technologies, for which he continues to work as an advisor. Within four months, he built a team and developed the first MVP, and he also directs the VR and AR team for Hyperloop Transportation Technologies. Dirk helps technology startups such as VisualX, VYON, and RiseStep. He’s the author of two augmented reality books, albeit they’re both in German, but you can get them. And he also contributed to Metaverse, the book by Forbes writer Charlie Fink. He founded the first AR blog in Germany, “WE ARE AR” and has been interviewed and quoted by leading media such as Tech Crunch, Venture Beat and Huffington Post. For more information on RE’FLEKT, you can visit re-flekt.com.
Dirk, welcome to the show.
Dirk: Hey, Alan. Thank you very much for having me.
Alan: My pleasure, my friend. The last time I saw you was at Augmented World Expo, and I think we were taking silly photos.
Dirk: That’s true. But was fun.
[laughs]
Alan: It’s always fun. And it’s becoming like a family, this whole augmented reality family and everybody’s working together. And it’s been wonderful. And the work that you guys are doing at RE’FLEKT is world class. And I really want to dive into the benefits of this technology and how you guys are using it. Let’s talk about that.
Dirk: Absolutely. So you already mentioned it in the intro; what we’re doing is we’re building the operating system for enterprise AR. So what does that mean? That’s for us the foundation of how enterprises will use AR in the future. Let me go back quickly and talk a little bit about how we started. That makes it easier for the listeners. Back in 2012, it was really, really difficult to create any kind of augmented reality applications. So it was completely different to what we have today. And we started to develop individually programmed applications. There were no platforms. There was nothing at the time. And one of the first things we did is, we build an application for Range Rover. And the reason for that was that they came and said, look, we have a very complex repair. It’s about a few return line of a Range Rover car. And the mechanics, they always have problems doing that because it’s complex. They don’t do that every day. Documentation doesn’t seem to be perfect for it for that use case. They try PDF, they tried videos, but result was the same, they couldn’t fix the problem. So we built an application.
We showed it to them and helped the mechanic, because it guided them step by step through that repair and showed them exactly at the point where they had the problems. “Wait. Now focus on it. Have a look. Double check before you do the next step.” And that at t
We often talk about how XR technologies are great tools for education and training on this podcast. But why is that? Like, physiologically? Turns out, XR tickles the thalamus in ways traditional learning strategies never could, and that’s not us just whistling Dixie.
Today’s guest — Cognitive Design & Statistical Consulting, LLC CEO Todd Maddox — has a PhD in Computational and Psychological Science, meaning there’s no one better to explain why XR and your brain are a match made in heaven.
Alan: You’re listening to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Todd Maddox. He is a cognitive design specialist. Todd is a PhD, and the CEO and founder of Cognitive Design and Statistical Consulting LLC. He’s also a learning scientist and a research fellow at Amalgam Insights. His passion is to apply his 25 years of psychological and neuroscientific expertise gained by managing a large human learning, memory, and performance laboratory to help build better education and training solutions. Todd has published over 200 peer reviewed scientific articles, resulting in over 10,000 academic citations and hundreds of speaking engagements. During his 25 year academic career, he’s awarded $10-million in federal grants from the National Institute of Health, National Science Foundation, and the Department of Defense to support his research. Since entering the private sector, Todd has embarked on a mission to translate the amazing body of research conducted in the ivory towers into plain English and help companies leverage this research to build better products. Todd is especially interested in applying his expertise in the psychology and neuroscience of learning, memory, and performance, and to use immersive technologies in manufacturing, health care, corporate training, and retail, to name a few. You can follow Todd on LinkedIn. Just look for “Todd Maddox PhD.”
Todd, welcome to the show.
Todd: Hey, Alan, it is fantastic to be here. Thank you.
Alan: It’s such an honor. I’ve been reading your posts and your articles, and trying to get through some of your scientific papers is a challenge. It’s so much information there.
Todd: Yeah, I hear you. And to be honest, my recommendation is to sort of skim the peer-reviewed stuff, because it does seem like it’s written in a foreign language, even though it is English. And the LinkedIn post and the more recent stuff, where I really try to talk in plain English, because if a scientist can’t present their work in plain English then there’s something wrong. So that’s what I’m trying to do.
Alan: I love it. And one of the articles that was recently published was a report on VR as an empathy builder, through Tech Trends.
Todd: Yeah.
Alan: Here, I’m just going to read a quote from it:
“Any profession that requires interpersonal interaction, such as education, retail, food service, call centers is better served with strong empathy.” Let’s start with that.
Todd: Totally, yeah. Every one of those examples is a people example; people interacting with other people. I know we’ve got amazing technologies; we’ve got robots, we’ve got all these wonderful things that are making our lives better. But let’s face it, in the end, it’s about people interacting with other people and caring for other people, walking a mile in somebody else’s shoes. That is really just so critical.
These technologies — in particular virtual reality, I would say — this is an immersive technology. I could be dropped into any environment. ThatR
Don’t let his impressive stature fool you; Virtual Reality Marketing CEO Terry Proto knows that, in an industry where there’s a ton of use cases and many roles to fill, it doesn’t hurt to be small. Heck, it usually pays to be! Terry joins Alan in a chat about how companies can best find their niche in the XR realm.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is the one and only: Terry Proto. He’s the CEO of Virtual Reality Marketing. Terry is an award winning digital imaging and digital games producer. He has over 15 years of production and sales experience in the US, Europe and Asia. And he’s been creating images since the very first version of 3D Studio back in the 90s, and has evolved over the years working on myriad projects, including agency work and other products and project endeavors. In a previous life, he struggled with getting clients and visibility consistently for his own creative studio, despite the quality of his work. And after connecting with a lot of CEOs in the XR space, he realized that his problem was a widespread problem. So for the past two years, Terry and his team have been on a mission to help studios and brands better connect for everyone’s benefit. To learn more about his company, Virtual Reality Marketing.com, go to virtualrealitymarketing.com. It is my absolute pleasure to welcome Terry to the show.
Welcome to the show, Terry.
Terry: Hey, Alan. Well, thank you very much. I love the intro. It’s really an honor to be on your podcast today.
Alan: Thank you. It’s such an honor to have you on the podcast. I know we finally got to meet in person for the first time at AWE — Augmented World Expo — what, about three weeks ago now?
Terry: Yeah. We connect with so many people, and it’s all digital and it’s all remote. So it truly feels good to shake someone’s hand now. [chuckles]
Alan: I got a hug from you, which was awesome.
Terry: [laughs] Exactly.
Alan: You are a very strong man. I don’t know if you’re benchpressing Volkswagens in your spare time, but those of you who know Terry; he’s a very large, solid dude. Not just in physical stature, but in mindfulness and everything. And his passion shows through in the work that he does. I really want to start digging into that. So tell us about Virtual Reality Marketing, and talk about how you got into this.
Terry: I think you nailed it in the intro. It really started with my problem as a producer. And you know, when you’re a producer, you’re in your own silo and you’re working on those products and you’ve got your clients, your team, you’re flying around for business meetings and events. And you connect with people, but it’s more superficial. And when I stopped being a producer, I took a step back and I started talking to a lot of people. And that’s when I realized that my problem was — I wouldn’t say everyone’s problem, but very common problem — and I looked around and I couldn’t find a solution for myself for years. And I figured it would be time to hack all this and solve this for everyone.
Alan: So what is the solution that Virtual Reality Marketing is doing? You’re connecting agencies and big brands with studios. Is that correct?
Terry: Yeah, exactly. Simply put, Virtual Reality Marketing, we’re the most comprehensive directory of AR, VR, 360 studios. And we are also focusing on building the largest XR case studies library. Right now we’re close to 150 on the site, and we are on track to have 500 by next year. The problem that we
The human eye is a wonderful and complex thing, and it’s a technological feat just to even come close to its natural revolution. Well, the folks at Varjo have created something that is pretty darn good at it. Alan may have trouble remembering how to say their company’s name, but he can attest to the clarity of the XR-1’s display. Varjo CEO Niko Eiden comes by to give us a look behind the curtain of its creation.
Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today we have Niko Eiden, CEO of Varjo. He’s formerly held top product leadership positions at Microsoft and Nokia. At Nokia, Niko led a product program team in 2006-2007, and together with researchers from Nokia Research Center, his team developed the basis for the optical technology that later became the Microsoft Hololens. Niko has a Master’s in science in aeronautical engineering. Varjo is redefining reality by jump starting a new era in computing. Their hardware and software lets people seamlessly mix realities together, moving from the real world to extended reality into pure virtual reality, all with human eye resolution. Their new headset, XR-1, is a mixed reality developer device for engineers, researchers, and designers who are pioneering a new reality. With photorealistic visual fidelity, ultra-low latency, and integrated eye tracking, the XR-1 seamlessly merges virtual content with the real world for the first time ever. If you want to learn more about Varjo, you can visit varjo.com. And I want to welcome to the show, Niko. Thanks so much for joining me.
Niko: Thanks, Alan. Nice to be here.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. We got a chance to meet at AWE this year and I got to try the XR-1, which was — oh my God — what an incredible experience. You put on the headset, the pass-through cameras were as if I didn’t have a headset on at all, I could just see the whole world. And then all of a sudden a car appeared in front of me; in the space I was in, there was a car. Then I got in the car, and the space around me disappeared, and I was in the car. And the one thing that really stuck out with me that blew my mind was. I was looking — it was a Volvo — and I remember looking at the steering wheel. And the little Volvo symbol in chrome was so crystal clear. It looked like a real car. Let’s talk about your technology and how you guys ended up at this place.
Niko: Sure. We really had the initial vision– the founding team, we had a long background in different augmented reality and VR devices. And we had always been talking about that video see-through type of devices could actually combine the best of both worlds of AR and VR devices. And every time you started talking about them, somebody kind of commented basically that don’t bother: the latency, the lag between what you’re seeing through the cameras, and what’s happening in reality is gonna be too long. Or the resolution is not going to be good enough, it’s not going to look great. But we were in the summer of 2016, we were looking at a demo and the demo was shown with the Hololens first gen device. And I got really thinking that this would be such a cool demo, but it’s really missing a big part of the experience, because it wasn’t able to show the image in a photorealistic fashion. It was a very high fidelity graphic scene that we were looking at with Hololens and we were just thinking that this would be so much better with a VR device. And combining the reality with a video see-through device could actually really work. We were a bit curious. We had some extra time at that point together with Urho [Konttori] — one of the other founders — and we built our first prototype in 24 hours, and the experience was really magical. So it was a very s
Firefighters need to train like any other professional, and their training usually involves setting a mock set ablaze – which, as you might imagine, would be costly to reset. Enter RiVR, who are using 360 video and photogrammetry to recreate these practice blazes digitally. CEO Alex Harvey and Alan have a heated discussion on the topic.
Alan: Hey, everyone, my name is Alan Smithon, your host for the XR for Business Podcast. Today we have Alex Harvey, CEO and creative director at RiVR, a virtual reality training and visualization company based in the UK. RiVR harnesses the power of VR and photogrammetry technology to create interactive, immersive training experiences. They’re currently working with the UK Home Office, UK Fire Service, Police Service and the Department of Defense in the US. Their ultimate goal is to enhance the way humans learn (I love that). Alex has a deep understanding of the games industry, having worked on commissions for the likes of Codemasters, the BBC, and Ford Motor Company. He’s obsessed with harnessing the latest A/V technology to make the real world differences that we all need. He gets to work with incredibly talented people to make this happen, and to quote him, “I love the feelings and memories we can evoke in VR when technology, creativity, and innovation collide.” I love that quote. RiVR’s exhibited at six different VR shows this year, including CES Vegas, and their technology has been reported on by the BBC. To learn more about RiVR, you can visit rivr.uk.
Alex, welcome to the show, my friend.
Alex: Hi, Alan. Nice to meet you. Nice to speak again.
Alan: Yeah. We’ve been kind of back and forth on LinkedIn, and emails, and it’s really finally great to sit down and have a conversation with you.
Alex: It is such a busy world, and it’s great to chat in person.
Alan: Listen, let’s dive right into this. Explain to us what RiVR is and how it’s making a difference.
Alex: RiVR is “Reality in Virtual Reality.” We’ve been creating VR experiences now for probably nearer to three years with the production company, starting back in 2014, but we started obviously with 360 video doing things for Thomson Holidays — you experience what it’s like to be on a cruise ship, or be on a plane. That was three years ago. Then we started moving into the room-scale photogrammetry world, with very much a significant push at RiVR for training, and using photorealism to make sure that the users of our experiences are completely immersed. I often say to people, “I want you to feel like you’re in the world, and not in a Simpsons cartoon world.” It is very much pushing photogrammetry and photo realism into VR. You know, there’s a lot of people doing photogrammetry now, but two, three years ago? It was only of the likes of–
Alan: That was you and Simon!
Alex: Yeah! [laughs] Me, Simon and Realities.IO. They were the guys that were pushing it. And it really felt like when I saw those early experiences of Realities.IO and Simon’s stuff, it felt like I was inside a video, but not quite? I want to try and be inside video content. I think that–
Alan: Let me kind of unpack this fruit for people listening. So, what Alex and his team do is they go into a space, and they will take hundreds of photographs — if not thousands of photographs — of the space, and they’ll convert that into a game engine-based experience, where you can actually walk around. Now, what I think is really mind-blowing about what you guys have done at RiVR is, not only do you create the environment, but then you take specific parts of the environment — for
LEARNING
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Developing Communication Skills And Improvement of Literacy
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Enlarging Real-Life Experience
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Supporting Specific Needs of the Disabled Students
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Developing and Improving Empathy
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Receiving Workplace Experience
Read more:https://programminginsider.com/5-real-uses-of-virtual-reality-in-education/
Mixed Reality Classroom
The Mixed Reality Classroom
Microsoft has created an ‘Immersive Classroom’ that teaches students about all sorts of emerging and exponential technologies such as VR/AR, AI and 3D Printing. it incorporates Paint 3D, HoloLens and other Mixed Reality headsets, and 3D printing. Other activities also explore coding and robotics using tools such as Minecraft and Artificial intelligence, where students get to build their own chatbot.
The immersive classroom is open for schools to experiment with incorporating digital tools in learning, and has facilitated the delivery of more than 60 free workshops for over 1000 students since opening in 2018
A.I. and virtual reality can determine neurosurgeon expertise with 90 per cent accuracy
http://www.thesuburban.com/life/health/a-i-and-virtual-reality-can-determine-neurosurgeon-expertise-with/article_08c12c76-d0b9-11e9-a6c2-6f29fcf49393.html
Machine learning-guided virtual reality simulators can help neurosurgeons develop the skills they need before they step in the operating room, according to a recent study. Research from the Neurosurgical Simulation and Artificial Intelligence Learning Centre at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital (The Neuro) and McGill University shows that machine learning algorithms can accurately assess the capabilities of neurosurgeons during virtual surgery, demonstrating that virtual reality simulators using artificial intelligence can be powerful tools in surgeon training.
This research, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Aug. 2, 2019, shows that the fusion of AI and VR neurosurgical simulators can accurately and efficiently assess the performance of surgeon trainees. This means that AI-assisted mentoring systems can be developed that focus on improving patient safety by guiding trainees through complex surgical procedures. These systems can determine areas that need improvement and how the trainee can develop these important skills before surgeons operate on real patients.
RETAIL
Walmart & Lego offer a new Web-based AR Experience
https://www.walmart.com/lego
Jon Cheney, CEO of Seek, an eCommerce company specializing in AR, showed off an ever-so-cool AR application that Walmart uses in its Lego kiosks—sending clearly intrigued eTail participants to their phones to view
Step 1: Plant augmented reality gnomes across the world. Step 2: …? Step 3: PROFIT!
Just kidding — Trigger Global’s army of AR gnomes has a more solid business plan than the Underpants Gnomes, as well as many other ventures across popular brands, utilizing mixed reality technologies to bring them to life. CEO Jason Yim emerges from his hidden meadow to talk about a few of them.
Alan: Hi, my name is Alan Smithson, the host of the XR for Business Podcast, and today’s guest is Jason Yim. He is the CEO and executive creative director of Trigger Global, the mixed reality agency. He has creatively led over 150,000 hours of development in mixed reality, including as a Snap Lens Studio partner, preferred developer for Facebook, and showcase developer for Euphoria and Google, as well as an early adopter and early developer for Magic Leap. Yim’s recent high-profile work incorporates mixed reality in marketing for Star Wars: The Last Jedi, product development for Hot Wheels, and location-based experiences such as the fish designer for Lego House, and of course, enterprise tools for AR evaluation tool for Honda. Yim is a recognized speaker around the world and he has held the stage at major technology and industry conferences in Singapore, Shanghai, Berlin, Tokyo, Copenhagen, London, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and all over the place. Jason’s returned to his childhood home to speak at TEDx Hong Kong on computer vision bringing toys to life. Yim has also been featured in Apple’s first TV show, “Planet of the Apps,” and won two LA Auto Show award design challenges back to back, with his partners at Honda Advanced Design. Additionally, Jason has been assigned four patents in augmented and mixed reality, with several more pending. To learn more about Trigger Global, you can visit triggerglobal.com.
Jason, welcome to the show.
Jason: Alan, thanks for that kind introduction.
Alan: It’s amazing, just that introduction; you think “Holy crap, you’ve done work with Honda. You’ve done work with Lego. You’ve done work with Snapchat, and Facebook, and Google.” It’s crazy, the things that you’ve done. And you joined us on stage at AWE this year, to talk about supercharging your marketing. Tell me about some of the things you guys are working at right now.
Jason: Yeah, I think for us on the marketing side it’s actually quite an interesting time. We’re seeing basically the market maturing a little bit and then kind of dividing into two big chunks of work. On the introductory to AR side of things, we have the social lenses. So that’s the Snap/Facebook/Instagram approach, where it’s a small experience for a smaller budget and it’s going through someone else’s app, but it’s a much larger user base, which is a good way to start it off. And then the other group of projects that we work on are kind of larger development, where the brand can own their own app or they have an existing app and we’re pushing an AR module into that existing app.
Alan: Let’s break those into pieces, here. The first one you mentioned is smaller ones with social lenses. Can you maybe talk about some of the work you’ve done in that?
Jason: Sure. We were one of Snap’s first agencies — the Lens Studio partners. We actually were kind of a guinea pig as they were developing the Lens Studio itself. I believe we’re probably one of the first people outside of Snap to actually use the tool. On the client side, we’ve worked with everywhere from Adidas, Pepsi, the NFL, all from sports and brands on the lens side. On the Snap side, typically they are coming to us. We either bring opportunities to Snap w
The old-school way to train someone for a task involves memorization, repetition, and practice, in order to make it like second nature. Not only is that time-consuming, but also, people aren’t very good at it. So why train, when AR makes it obsolete? Scope AR aims to help companies get out of old habits, and CEO Scott Montgomerie drops by to explain how.
Alan: Today’s guest is Scott Montgomerie from Scope AR. Scott is the CEO and co-founder of Scope AR, a global leader in developing augmented reality solutions and products for industrial clients focused around field maintenance, manufacturing, and training. As the pioneer of utilizing AR for industry support and training, Scope AR are partnered with technology leaders such as Google and Microsoft. Since founding the company in 2011, Scott as one of the first executives to get augmented reality tools in use by multi-billion dollar corporations. Having launched many AR firsts, Scott has become one of the industry’s thought leaders and visionaries. He’s shared his knowledge and spoken about some of the most innovative uses of AR at several leading conferences, including South by Southwest, Augmented World Expo, Unity Vision Summit, and XRDC. Some of the clients include Unilever, Prince Castle and Lockheed Martin. To learn more about Scope AR, visit scopear.com. Scott, welcome to the show.
Scott: Thanks a lot, Alan.
Alan: Yeah man, I’m really super excited. We’ve been kind of chatting offline and it’s amazing, the work you guys are doing and you’re starting to really see this uptake of augmented reality being used in enterprise. Can you maybe give people a 10,000 foot view of Scope AR, what you’re doing, and who your clients are, and what they’re using it for?
Scott: Yeah, sure. So we really view that augmented reality is a way of interacting with the world in a way that’s much more intuitive, the way that we evolved with our hands and our eyes. And so we really view that there’s a huge market central there. I think it was a stat out there that said that, 90 percent of Silicon Valley is focused on the worker that’s at their desk, using computers and screens. And there’s a vast market out there that is untapped, in these field workers that are using their hands and their eyes. And so if we can use augmented reality to get them the information they need, at the time of need, and really help them become an expert when they need to know that information. And like I said, we think that’s a huge market. So we really approach the problem in two different ways with our products. The first is a remote assistance capability. So we were the first to market with a product called Remote AR, we launched in 2015. So it was far before any of the other 30 companies that are out there today. The idea is that it allows you to communicate over video between a technician and an expert. So it’s almost like FaceTime. If you’re looking at a piece of equipment — maybe a car engine — you take your phone or a pair of smart glasses like a Hololens, and you can look at this piece of equipment and transfer this video back to somebody with expertise. And this expert can now draw on their side of the screen, and get a really good remote guide instructions. So the problem with something like FaceTime is that the communication channel is not wide enough to provide really good instructions. When was the last time you actually communicated with a mechanic over the phone or over FaceTime? There’s no chance.
Alan: Never.
Scott: Yeah, exactly. It would probably be very painful for him to guide you how to replace something simple like a spark plug. “It’s that one right there. No, to the left. No, no, the other le
The top of a wind turbine a hundred stories up from the ground is not the best place to be making mistakes, but making mistakes and learning from them is the whole point of on-the-job training. That’s why VR Vision Inc helps companies produce XR training modules, so trainees can make mistakes in a safe, controlled environment. COO Lorne Fade drops by to talk about it.
Alan: Today’s guest is Lorne Fade, co-founder of VR Vision. Lorne is a serial entrepreneur that has built several businesses over the last 15 years. He’s had the pleasure of working with some of the world’s largest Fortune 500 brands and award winning marketing agencies all across North America and Europe. His previous agency, Academic Ads, was acquired, and he went on to found VR Vision Inc. As the co-founder and COO of VR Vision, they’re a virtual and augmented reality startup that’s enhancing immersive training outcomes for some of the world’s largest brands using VR, AR, and AI technologies. He’s also the founder of Reality Well, a healthcare technology platform to improve the quality of life for those living in long-term care facilities. You can learn more about VR Vision by visiting vrvisiongroup.com. Lorne, welcome to the show.
Lorne: Thanks for having me, Alan. Thanks.
Alan: My absolute pleasure, man. We’ve known each other for quite some time through the VR/AR Association in Toronto, and we shared some booth space together, and it’s always great to see what you guys are working on. I know the last time we saw each other, you were showing me an automotive manufacturing facility in virtual reality and how you were using that. So let’s dive in there. Let’s talk about how you guys are using VR and 360 video to make better training.
Lorne: Yeah, that’s that’s one of our bigger use cases with Toyota, where we’re training about 10,000 employees currently using 360 video, in immersive training scenarios in VR. And it works really well for eliminating risk and providing a safe environment with zero harm. And it’s totally immersive. So the employees that are getting trained in VR, no distractions, they can’t be on their phone or anything. It was really simple the way we did it. We just storyboarded various scenarios with Toyota on various processes, on safety concerns, on their assembly lines or processes that were mundane and replicable. And then we went out and filmed with a stereoscopic 3D camera, so when they put on the headset they feel like they’re there, fully 3D. And we mapped out, I guess about two to three minute scenarios, various parts of their assembly lines and filmed it all in full 3D and then ported it over to VR, added some overlays, some voice overs, some touch points and interactivity so that the employees could be trained in a completely immersive environment. Nothing like this is, from my knowledge, has ever been done before. So it’s really cool to have this type opportunity to work on a project like that.
Alan: So how are they measuring success? For example, STRIVR is doing 360 video with Wal-Mart and their key performance indicators. They’re measuring training times, how long it takes to train. They’re also testing retention rates. What are the KPIs that you and Toyota decided on, how to measure that?
Lorne: Yes. Great question. We developed a in-house analytics engine for tracking where the user is looking, the various touch points of the training scenarios. And every user that uses the platform gets their own log-in, so we track each user, their effectiveness, and how well they’re being trained with the scenarios. And then within the scenarios, there’ll be, let’s say, about 20 interactive touch points for various risks,
Tired of waiting for the US treasury to put a female face on the $20? (Because you’ll probably be waiting a while yet!) Google’s got you covered, or rather, your cash: they’ve developed an AR app to put Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. That’s just one of the interesting bits of XR news Alan has in store for this week’s news update.
- A white paper published by Microsoft found that test scores among students using immersive technologies improved by as much as 22 percent, with the effect maintained over a period of weeks, including increased performance on skills-based tasks and gains in knowledge, abstract reasoning, and critical thinking.
- In a new survey of 900 developers working on VR/AR, 33 percent of them were focusing on education, and 27 percent were focusing on training
- Google puts women on US currency with an AR workaround
- New 8-minute galactic primer “Clio’s Cosmic Quest” is the future of AR education
- Fortum nuclear power plant uses VR for control room training
- Fitz Frames allows kids to virtually try on and customize glasses with AR
- US military using Hololens for planning ‘sandbox’
- LA Dodgers embrace virtual reality batting practice
Even with all the advancements in CG animation, it can’t capture that distinctly lifelike essence that a real human exudes. But XR can capture that essence — volumetrically. Metastage CEO Christina Heller drops by to discuss the process of transcribing the aura of a person into XR space.
Alan: I have a really special guest today; Christina Heller, the CEO of Metastage. Metastage is an XR studio that puts real performances into AR and VR through volumetric capture. Metastage is the first US partner for the Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture Software, and their soundstage is located in Culver City, California. Prior to Metastage, Christina co-founded and led VR Playhouse. So, between Metastage and VR Playhouse, she’s helped produce over 80 immersive experiences. To learn more about Christina Heller and Metastage, you can visit metastage.com.
Welcome to the show, Christina.
Christina: Thank you so much for having me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. We met, maybe three years ago? At VRTO?
Christina: Yes, that’s correct.
Alan: Yeah, we got to try your incredible experiences, mostly in the field of 360 video. And you’ve kind of taken the leap to the next level of this stuff. So, talk to us about Metastage.
Christina: Sure. As you said, it’s a company that specializes in volumetric capture. I think, in the future, you’ll see other things, but at the moment, we specialize in volumetric capture. Specifically, using the Microsoft Mixed Reality Capture system, which is an incredibly sophisticated way of taking real people and authentic performances, and then bringing them into full AR and VR experiences, where you can move around these characters, and it’s as if they are doing that action right in front of you.
Alan: Let’s just go back a little bit. What is volumetric capture, for those who have no idea what volumetric capture is?
Christina: Sure. For a long time, if you wanted to put real people into AR/VR experiences, you had basically two ways of doing it. You could either animate it; so, you would try to create — using mo-cap and animation — the most lifelike creation of a human character possible. Think, like, video games; when you go play a video game and they’ve got a character playing a scene out with you. If you wanted to put real people into these XR experiences, that was the most common way to do it.
Then there was also volumetric capture, which, for a long time, just wasn’t quite — I would say – at the technological sophistication that people wanted, to integrate it into projects. Volumetric capture — thanks to the Microsoft system, I think — is finally really ready to be used in a major way in all these projects. And basically what it does is, we use 106 video cameras, and we film a performance from every possible angle. So, we’re getting a ton of data. We use 53 RGB cameras and 53 infrared cameras. The infrared is what we use to calculate the depth and the volume of the person that’s performing at the center of the stage. The RGB cameras are what’s capturing all the texture and visual data.
Then, we put that through the Microsoft software, and on the other end of it you get a fully-3D asset that really maintains the integrity and fidelity of the performance that was captured on the stage. Unlike some of the animated assets — because this was kind of the challenge — the animated assets, they might get kind of there, but they had that uncanny valley thing going.
Alan: Yeah, those are creepy.
Christina: Yeah. And so if you’re not familiar with the term “uncanny valley,&
Game engines like the versatile Unity have long been the go-to for AR development, and for good reason. But its reputation as a video game engine can also be intimidating — especially to those who want to create AR software for enterprise. That’s why Paul Reynolds lit his TORCH; an app he co-founded that lets you design your own AR platform, right in the palm of your hand. He chats with Alan about his claim to flame.
Alan: Hey, everyone, my name’s Alan Smithson, the host of the XR for Business Podcast. Today’s guest is Paul Reynolds, the CEO of Torch, a really exciting augmented reality platform. It’s a mobile augmented reality development and deployment platform for enterprise. Paul has been a software developer and technology consultant since 1997 – since before the interwebs! In 2013, after 10 years of creating video games, he joined Magic Leap where he was promoted to senior director, overseeing content and SDK teams. At Magic Leap, Paul recognized the lack of accessible tools for non-game developers that was hindering widespread adoption of immersive and spatial computing technologies. In 2016, Paul moved to Portland, Oregon, where he founded Torch to address this very problem. To learn more about Torch, you can visit torch.app. Paul, welcome to the show.
Paul: Thanks for having me.
Alan: It’s such a pleasure. I’ve been looking forward to this episode. Torch is such a cool platform and I keep seeing your posts on LinkedIn of putting stuff around your office and stuff. So tell us, what is Torch, and how did you come up with this crazy idea?
Paul: The easiest way to think about it is, it’s a mobile application — currently for iOS — that lets anyone build interactive spatial scenes. So, you create a project and you’re building it in the camera of your device, which means you’re also walking around the space, or moving around the space and you’re building up interactive experiences visually, without writing any code. We call that the design environment, and that’s the freely available [option] — anyone can jump into it and just start building. What makes it a platform is the capability of taking what you’ve created in Torch, and exporting it and publishing it and integrating it into your existing app, or pushing it out to another platform or tool. What we really wanted to focus on was allowing people to iterate in augmented reality — directly within augmented reality — as opposed to sitting on a desktop computer and trying to figure out how to work a game editor, and get more people able to work productively in 3D. That’s really the heart of it.
Alan: That’s so cool, because if you’re sitting at your office, you’re like, “wow, this AR stuff is hot. It’s amazing.” You know what, go learn Unity and coding and figure out how to actually make it. Six months later, you’re like, “oh, look, I made a portal.”
Paul: [laughs] Right.
Alan: What you guys have built is a simple way to just do it visually.
Paul: Yeah. So, my background was in video games, back in the day where everyone was building their own engine. You really didn’t even have time to build a really nice editor on top of that. So when Unity came out — we’ll pick on Unity in particular, because it’s just such a well-known product — when it came out, it was the game engine that most of these game studios I’ve worked for wanted to build. And that was really unique; they had basically taken what would normally mean millions and millions of internal R&D dollars, and turned it into this tool that pretty much anyone can download for free. B
The technology we talk about on this show is pretty cool, but what’s function without form, right? Thankfully, there’s plenty of both to go around, as Electric Runway’s founder Amanda Cosco drops by to talk about. TL;DR — there’s a lot of cool ways to use XR to stay in-fashion, from virtual try-ons, to AR-enabled hair colour-changing mirrors.
Alan: Today’s guest is a great friend of mine; Amanda Cosco, CEO of Electric Runway. One part geek, the other part chic; Amanda Cosco is a leading voice in the intersection of fashion and technology. Through her work with Electric Runway, Amanda is committed to bridging the gap between these two seemingly opposite industries, to help humanize technology, and help push the fashion industry into the future. In addition to contributing to notable publications such as WWD, Toronto Star, and Wearable, Amanda shares her insights through talks given on both local and international stages. She’s made several radio and TV appearances, including CBC’s The Goods and TVO’s The Agenda. She’s been recognized as a top woman in wearable technology, as well as a key thinker on the future of fashion. As a consultant, Amanda shares her expertise in the innovation economy to help future-proof business models and save her clients time and money. Amanda earned a master’s degree of arts from Ryerson in Toronto, and prior to that she graduated from York University. She holds a certificate of digital media skills from OCAD University. And she’s the chair of the Fashion and Business Management Professional Advisory Committee at Centennial College, as well as the Board of Champions at the Bata Shoe Museum. If you want to learn more about Amanda and her company, Electric Runway, visit electricrunway.com. Amanda, welcome to the show.
Amanda: Thanks so much for having me, Alan, and thanks for that kind introduction.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. I’m so excited. You are a leader in this industry. You’ve been in the wearable space forever. Tell us how you got started in this.
Amanda: Well, Electric Runway actually began with a future fashion runway show that I curated for the Maker Festival in Toronto. So the brand very much has its roots in performance and the actual runway, but it’s evolved over the years. And I had been a part of the burgeoning wearable technology scene in Toronto. And it wasn’t until I covered a technology festival in Toronto and had the opportunity to interview a cyborg — a self-identified cyborg — for the Globe and Mail and did a story on him. It wasn’t until then that I realized that wearable computing is absolutely going to change us, as humans. And that’s when I decided to focus my career as a journalist and entrepreneur on technology on the body. And that’s also the time that Electric Runway began. And it quickly became the umbrella under which I do lots of speaking and events and curation, in order to just bring everything together, that’s going on in this exciting industry. And what’s really great about it, is that being focused on fashion and beauty gives me a really specific lens, through which I can view technological innovations like augmented reality and virtual reality. So, rather than trying to cover everything that’s happening in technology — which is impossible these days, because technology is disrupting every industry — I’m allowed to sit in this niche of fashion, beauty, retail, consumer experiences and really just talk about how emerging technologies are brushing elbows with these innovations.
Alan: Incredible. So you’ve seen a lot of technologies in the fashion space. With respect to virtual/augmented/mixed reality, I know you hosted an event — about a
Alan – and XRIgnite — isn’t the only XR shepherding game in town! Samantha Wolfe — who co-authored Marketing New Realities with previous XR for Business guest Cathy Hackl — drops by to share her own insights on how best to help brands, businesses, and campaigns venture into the XR minefield, and come out the other end unscathed.
Alan: Today’s guest is Samantha Wolfe, managing partner at we are PHASE2. Samantha is a marketing and branding strategist, focused on making “never done before” a reality. Sam is a co-author of the book “Marketing New Realities: An Introduction to Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality Marketing, Branding, and Communications,” and is a contributing author to Charlie Fink’s book “Convergence: How the World Will Be Painted With Data,” with a chapter focused on augmented reality for brands. She also runs the largest marketing and branding Facebook group focused on VR, AR, and MR, which has over 2,500 members. She’s a board member of the New York VR Expo and South by Southwest Pitch, and has been on the judging panel for the Games of Change Festival and the AWE Auggie Awards. To learn more about Samantha, you can visit samanthagwolfe.com or wearephase2.com.
Samantha, welcome to the show.
Samantha: Hi, Alan. Good to be here.
Alan: It’s so amazing to have you on the show. We’ve known each other for a few years now, and we keep seeing each other at different conferences, and it’s always fun. I think the last time was AWE, but before that was CES. This year we got to hang out in a glass booth; almost like a fishbowl in the middle of CES.
Samantha: I think our picture went up on Fox News or something like that.
Alan: Oh, did it really?
Samantha: Like, the two people in the middle of the glass booth for VR Voice. And we had such a fun conversation. I think Bob Fine was a little taken aback about how excited the two of us got together. So I’m excited for this conversation!
Alan: [laughs] This is gonna be a great conversation. And for those of you who don’t know, Bob Fine runs a wonderful podcast called VR Voice, so you can check that out as well. Samantha, you’re the managing partner at we are PHASE2. So, talk to us a bit about what is we are PHASE2, and what are you guys doing? And then we’ll just have a conversation around the wonderful marketing opportunities that virtual and augmented reality afford.
Samantha: Absolutely. The way I like to talk about we are PHASE2 is that we are about marketing with and for emerging technologies. We help companies who are in the emerging tech space be able to market and communicate what they’re doing, but we also have companies who want to market to and with those emerging technologies. So if you’re an advertising agency or a brand who says, you know, “we want to do something really innovative,” and want to integrate — whether it be AR, VR, AI, IoT — into what you’re doing, that you could come to us and we’ll help you through that process. Or if you’re like, “You know what? We need some developers to help work on this campaign that we’re doing.” We’ll work with you as well. The other thing I’ve said is marketing emerging technologies and emerging technology marketing.
Alan: Emerging technology marketing. I get it. So–
Samantha: It’s both ways.
[laughs]
Alan: Are you talking about virtual/augmented/mixed reality, or are you guys also diving into artificial intelligence and machine learning and IoT sensors and that kind of stu
Welcome to the second episode of the XR for Business News podcast, the show where our host, Alan, provides a quick rundown of the week’s top XR news stories!
This week’s XR use cases range from educating children and training police officers, to turning Snoop Dogg into an AR character in Snapchat filters, with many others in between.
- A new study shows that VR significantly reduces pain versus an active control condition in hospitalized patients.
- The marine electronics market is embracing AR to enhance sailing safety
- VR is being used to train police officers to better understand those with mental illness
- Mountain Equipment Co-Op is using AR to enhance the retail experience
- Wonderscope’s latest AR reading experience teaches kids how to handle bullies
- Singularity University announces VR training program and on-demand classes at 2019 Global Summit
- Snoop Dogg becomes a Snapchat AR character to promote his latest record
- Terry Fabrics creates app allowing customers to preview window coverings in AR
- YouTube introduces AR virtual try-ons starting with lipstick
A plain room with a table, a few chairs, and a whiteboard has never sounded so…futuristic! But that’s one way to describe the technology behind meetingRoom, a VR space, where colleagues from around the world can gather and discuss business as if they were all in the same, plain ol’ multi-purpose room!
meetingRoom CEO Jonny Cosgrove does a better job of describing it, so take a listen!
Alan: Today’s guest is Jonny Cosgrove, founder and CEO at meetingRoom.io. Jonny is responsible for creating a new collaboration platform that allows anybody from multiple devices to be in one room and collaborate together. Jonny started his career volunteering and doing activism, before moving into events, marketing, and technology, operating in Dublin and Boston. He completed his MBA at Trinity College, Dublin, and began building the future of work, with a focus on sustainability, collaboration, and emerging technologies. You can learn more about Jonny and his team at meetingRoom.io.
Jonny, welcome to the show.
Jonny: Thanks for having me.
Alan: Oh, it’s my absolute pleasure, Jonny. We’ve known each other quite a long time, through the VR/AR Association and through great calls like this. We’ve met in meetingRoom, and I’m really, really excited to share with the world what you guys are working on, because the work that you guys are doing is really pioneering how people will meet in the future — in now, not even in the future, but right now — how people are meeting and collaborating. And I think, as we move to a world where we start to really think about travel — not just international travel — but travel to and from work, having people drive two hours to work, back and forth every day. It’s really inefficient, and it’s a real time suck for everybody. Not to mention, creating disastrous effects for the environment, as well. So let’s dive into this. Explain who you are, and your company, and what does meetingRoom do?
Jonny: No problem at all. So I agree. Pollution sucks. Unnecessary commutes absolutely suck. What we’re trying to do is make sure the collaboration is easier. One thing we found everyone can agree on is that collaboration is easier and more effective when teams work together in the same place. So, meetingRoom is a service that allows people to work with each other, using familiar meeting room facilities — like whiteboards — in a virtual environment, from anywhere. We’ve made this accessible from anywhere. We made it secure, and we’ve made these places in the spaces persistent. So, when you write in a whiteboard and you return next week, it’s still there, just like in real life. And what we found is, that it allows employees to feel a higher level of immersive engagement with what’s happening in the actual meeting. It keeps you focused in that time — in that moment — and lets you have more effective meetings. Even though employees are spread all over the world.
Alan: You mentioned something… heh heh, I thought it was funny because as you said, “Oh, yeah, you know, you put all your notes on the whiteboard and just like the real world, they’re there when you come back.” I was thinking, no, that’s exactly the opposite of the real world!
Jonny: [laughs]
Alan: Somebody’s erased all your notes, and you’re like, “no! I didn’t take a picture of it!”
Jonny: Thank you for helping me explain it. So, one of the thingsthat actually happens a lot is that exact issue. That’s one of our own internal metrics; we’re working to get this through this point, “how are you using their internal rooms ex
Last episode was all about the value of VR in creating virtual meeting spaces; today, we’re looking at AR. As Jacob Loewenstein from Spatial explains, both have their advantages in an enterprise setting, but AR is best suited for people collaborating together in the same room. Listen to this edition of XR for Business to find out why.
Alan: Today’s guest is Jacob Lowenstein, VP of Business Development and Strategy at Spatial. Spatial’s mission is to empower people to be more connected, creative, and productive. Organizations are increasingly distributed across offices and information doesn’t flow easily; success depends on people working together. Their first product enables people to collaborate anywhere with AR. The founders have deep backgrounds in 3D user interfaces. Co-founder Anand Agarawala sold his previous startup, BumpTop — a 3D physics multi-touch desktop — to Google, and also demoed this in a TED Talk. Co-founder Jinha Lee developed pioneering AR interfaces at MIT, Microsoft, and Samsung and then also showed them at a TED talk. They are a passionate team of 3D designers, VR and AR experts based in New York and San Francisco. Our guest today, Jacob, has also been a partner at Samsung NEXT. And I’m really, really excited, because Spatial has raised a seed round from such amazing investors as Inovia Capital, Expa, Lerer Hippeau, Leaders Fund, and Samsung NEXT. To learn more about Spatial, you can visit spatial.is.
Jacob, welcome to the show.
Jacob: Hey, it’s great to be here. Thanks so much for having me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. We had an awesome opportunity to meet at Charlie Fink’s exclusive dinner at CES this year, and I was really blown away by the warmth and passion that you bring. And so I want to just thank you for taking the time to jump on the show with me.
Jacob: I had a blast at that dinner, and I believe we both had delicious Indian food together. Shout out to Charlie for organizing that. I met a ton of wonderful people, and the compliment goes right back in the other direction. I mean, you have been at this for a while as such a positive and fundamental figure, helping shed attention and light on the projects in the space that matter and that are moving the needle. And frankly, you’ve been moving the needle yourself, and have been a builder in this space for some time. And so I’m excited to chat with you, and happy to answer any and all questions.
Alan: Well, on that note — and I thank you for that — tell me about Spatial. I know about it, but for the people listening — really, you guys have built enormously powerful tools. So, maybe give us the idea of what Spatial is, and how it’s being used.
Jacob: Totally. So, I’m going to give you the headline, and I think the backstory is a little bit illuminating. I know you spoke a bit about that already, but I’m going to dive deeper. But the headline is that Spatial enables people to collaborate from anywhere with augmented reality. And the idea is, essentially, we’re all big believers in the VR and AR space. I imagine folks that listen to this podcast are, or are trying to learn to be. And if you’ve done a lot of demos in VR/AR, you’ve probably encountered the same phenomenon, which is; you get someone to put on the headset and they say, “Oh wow, this is cool,” and they smile and they compliment you, and you probably never hear from them again. And it&
Some people find VR to be a solitary experience – too lonely to ever really be a place that humans can feel comfortable in. Well, tell that to Alan, when he met today’s guest – Kalle Saarikannas from Glue – in Glue’s virtual reality chatroom. Despite being continents apart, it felt like they were face-to-face. Kalle sits down again with Alan – this time, without the avatars – to explain why he wants to make Glue a household name.
Alan: Today’s guest is Kalle Saarikannas, business development manager for Glue, a new collaboration platform — and I’ll let him talk more about it — but Kalle is a 26-year-old combination of curiosity for emerging technology and commercial sense, making innovations a reality. Glue is a multi-user, multi-device, virtual reality hosting platform that is redefining the future of remote collaboration. Prior to Glue, the pioneer of XR remote collaboration, Kalle was working closely with intelligent packaging, RFID sensor tech, mobile augmented reality, and RFID solutions for B2B and Consumer Engagement Solutions. He’s built a strong, built-in entrepreneurial mindset, and established his first business at age 15. He has a master’s degree in business management from Hanken School of Economics, and an expression of his interest towards XR technology. He wrote a master’s thesis about XR tech, “Immersive Virtual Reality and Training, Using VR in the Facilitation of Learning.” His free time is spent volunteer firefighting in Helsinki, Finland. To learn more about Kalle and Glue, you can visit www.glue.work. Kalle, welcome to the show; so excited to have you.
Kalle: Yeah. Thank you, Alan, for having me on — and Glue — in the show.
Alan: It’s really wonderful. I had the opportunity to try your platform back in New York during… there was a conference, I can’t remember what the conference was, but we we’re speaking at it, and I got an amazing chance to meet with your colleague, Jani. And he got to show me the Glue platform — which, for the people listening — imagine putting on a VR headset, and it doesn’t have to be the most fancy headset. They’ll work with all of them. You put it on, and now you’re standing in a room. Like, you and I had a conversation — you were in Finland, I was in New York — and we had a conversation as if we were standing in the same room together.
Kalle: Yeah, I remember that. It was quite fascinating to me, too. For the first time in virtual reality, we were having an eye contact with each other, although we were some 4,000 miles apart, in different continents.
Alan: It’s really cool. So, maybe describe the Glue platform, and what your vision is for this.
Kalle: As you mentioned in the intro, Glue is a software; a system for live mobile device virtual reality collaboration. We’re not just a virtual reality platform, but we also support desktop users, mobile phones, iPads, and we provide a whole service for having meetings in virtual environments. Basically, our business model is that we are building a platform which operates in a software as a service model, by offering the client access to persistent virtual spaces that can be customized to the needs of the client. Let’s say a enterprise wants to — that has a lot of remote meetings using traditional remote softwares, such as Skype for Business or Google Hangouts, which are based on two-dimensional screens. You’re having video calls, you can see the other from the camera — instead of that, we offer three-dimensional virtual spaces, that you can really feel the presence of other people, although you are sitting on a different continent, miles apart.
How an end user experiences a new mode of technology is almost as important — if not more — than how the tech works on the inside. Because, let’s face it; it could be an amazing bit of code, but if the human mind does not find it simple or easy to use, it’s a non-starter. Austin McCasland is a UX prototyper working with Google, and he and Alan chat about the finer points of UX design for AR.
Alan: Today’s guest is Austin McCasland, a designer and developer in immersive computing. Austin has written multiple courses across VR and AR design and development. He’s designed and developed Paint Space AR, named by Apple as one of the best apps of 2017 and currently works full time at Google as an AR Interaction designer. Austin employs a user-first synthesis of technical understanding and UX design to create effective and useful products in emerging technology. I’m really, really excited to welcome Austin to the show. Austin, welcome to the XR for Business Podcast.
Austin: Thank you for having me, excited to be here.
Alan: If you’re looking to learn more about Austin, you can visit his website at austastic.com. Let’s dive right in; you work at Google as a UX designer — user experience, for those who don’t know — walk us through what you do on a daily basis.
Austin: I’m a UX designer, and I do a lot of prototyping. Basically what I do is, I think about software problems from a user-first perspective. Thinking about what are things that people are doing that they need solved — or what are things that they’re doing that they could do better with technology, whether it’s a standard app, or with AR/VR – and then I basically go through a process of iteration to come up with features for products. And specifically, in my current role, I’m on a prototyping team that looks at how we can leverage spatial computing across all these different types of use cases. So, I see a range of use cases, and explore what’s possible from a product perspective.
Alan: So, what are some of the use cases that you’re seeing in your day-to-day business that you’re prone to working on? Or what you’re really attracted to? What are some of the best use cases so far?
Austin: The things that I look out for when there’s a use case that could be particularly well-suited — and I’ll speak mostly to AR here, although I can also speak to VR — but in AR, when there is a problem that’s already spatial in nature, it’s usually a pretty good indicator. You’ll see this with try-on apps where — and I use this term more broadly to also describe apps like IKEA and stuff — let’s say there’s this problem of, “I need to see what something looks like in my space.” AR is really well-suited to help with those types of problems. Or, “what does something look like on me, in physical space?” Now, those aren’t the only things. But any time that your users are doing something out in the real world, or they need information about how something would be in the real world, that’s usually a pretty strong signal that you can lean into AR to provide some value there.
Alan: Let’s give an example. You mentioned IKEA, and what they’re doing with their Place app. What they basically allow you to do is take your phone, put a digital piece of furniture in the exact size [you want], so you can see what your couch is going to look like. But this kind of transcends all types of visualizations. For example, I saw one where Coke did a visualizer to show retailers what the new Coke machine would look like in their stores. And it’s not just sending them a photo and marking it up. It’s
If you need well-researched info on the trends and changing tides of emerging tech to feel confident dipping your toes into the XR sea, SuperData’s Carter Rogers has you covered. As their chief analyst, Rogers specializes in turning data into actionable intelligence, tailored to the needs of businesses who are just starting to explore the space. In today’s episode, he chats with Alan about what all the data can mean.
Alan: Today’s guest is Carter Rogers, and he’s the principal analyst at SuperData, a Nielsen company. He regularly advises Fortune 500 brands and Triple-A game publishers on how to succeed in the interactive media space. As SuperData’s lead XR analyst, Carter is responsible for the company’s reports on immersive technology. A sought-after authority on interactive media industry, Carter has presented at every event around the world, including Casual Connect, the LA Games Conference, and the VR/AR Global Summit. His commentary has also appeared in USA Today, Variety, The Guardian, and Verge. He creates and oversees interactive reports and segments, including virtual and augmented reality, eSports, mobile games, and he’s really amazing at pulling together all the data that businesses are using to make real business decisions, on where to invest their capital. You can learn more about this data at superdataresearch.com.
I want to welcome Carter to the show. Welcome!
Carter: Thank you very much for having me, Alan.
Alan: My absolute pleasure. I’m really thrilled and excited to have you on the show today. I know personally, we’ve used your reports for our company several times, and every time it’s been pragmatic, not pie-in-the-sky numbers; really validated, well-thought-out reports on where the industry is, where it’s going, who the players are. I really want to start digging into this, and learn more about SuperData. For the people listening, I want them to walk away knowing more about the industry and know where they can find more information. So, what is SuperData?
Carter: Well, yeah, glad you read all our reports; that’s what we like to hear! To give everyone a overhead view, we’re a market research firm. We’re part of Nielsen as of late 2018, and the original focus of the company was on digital games — video games, primarily. But we since branched out to cover other areas, like eSports, game streaming, and of course, augmented/virtual/mixed reality. Started covering those areas when they were very tied to games, especially when the original Oculus Rift was launched. But as the XR space has broadened to include more enterprise-focused applications, we have also adjusted our research accordingly, and really cover the enterprise space as well; providing things like market estimates and things like that, to a wide variety of companies in VR and AR.
Alan: Ok, so, you provide market estimates. Where is this market going? What’s one stat that’s going to blow everybody’s mind?
Carter: I’d say the main thing is augmented and mixed reality are growing fast, but mainly in the enterprise space. I’d say that through at least 2022, the enterprise will account for the majority of augmented and mixed reality headsets like Hololens and Magic Leap. Enterprise will account for the majority of those through at least 2022. It’s really going to be the enterprise that drives this very hot space in the XR industry.
Alan: You think it’s following a similar trend to mobile cell phones? BlackBerry started off kind of as an enterprise tool, as well. Is that what we’re seeing here? The technology’s maybe not quite ready for the mainstream adoption, but it has very real, very useful bu
What better publicity could a VR company ask for, than to have an Avenger demo your product in prime time, on one of the most-watched talk shows in America? That’s exactly the kind of lucky break Beat Saber had, and today’s guest – Zambezi Partners co-founder, and long-time occupant of the XR space, Jenna Seiden – was instrumental in making that happen. She regales Alan with the tale at the top of this new episode of the XR for Business Podcast.
Alan: Today’s guest is Jenna Seiden and she’s an entertainment and emerging technology consultant in VR, AR artificial intelligence, and IOT, and she’s a social impact investor. Jenna has a proven executive leadership in entrepreneurship, with demonstrated startup and high growth business experience. She has broad experience in traditional film, TV, digital media, augmented reality, virtual reality and video games. She has an innate ability to lead diverse groups, including creative, financial, and engineering teams. She has outstanding content and business development, success on a global stage, and a sophisticated board of directors, to production-level experience. She’s worked for some amazing companies; Venture Advisor for LUMO Labs Beat Saber, Springboard VR, Felix & Paul Studios, Baobab Studios, Exit Reality VR. She’s the former head of content acquisition and partnerships for VIVE Port at HTC VIVE, and she used to be the V.P. of content development and strategic partnerships for the worldwide business development for Microsoft Studios. It’s my absolute pleasure to welcome Jenna to the show. Welcome, Jenna.
Jenna: Thank you so much for having me.
Alan: And one thing I failed to mention; people can find you at Zambezi Partners.com. Welcome to the show. You have done so many amazing things in your career; where do we begin?
Jenna: I’m exhausted, hearing you give me such an amazing intro there. I’m just this person who likes to help people tell their stories. And I started off in sports, then went into traditional Hollywood, and somehow found myself being an explorer in all these new tech platforms and went, “wait a minute, these great storytellers have all these other places to tell different branching storylines. They can do this on YouTube, and they can do this on an XBox. They can do this now in VR.” And I sit right in the middle of the tech side, and the storytelling narrative side, and the business side. So I’m thrilled that I now have a narrative, because once upon a time I had employers go, “you make no sense, you move around too much.” And I go, “well, I’m not my grandfather that worked at IBM for 50 years.” This is a world where people do bounce around every two-to-four years, and we get to try things. And I love that I had such great experiences with some of these amazing consumer products companies. They were all challenging — sometimes were great, sometimes were not so great. And now, it’s the first time I’ve been on my own. But I’ve never been happier.
Alan: So, Zambezi Partners is a small consulting firm, but it seems like you’re consulting for some really big brands. I mean, let’s just take Beat Saber. Beat Saber was just on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. Here’s a VR/AR game that is now in the forefront of mainstream media. How did that happen?
Jenna: I’m thrilled how that happened. I will caveat it with, I was on Jimmy Fallon’s team of agents back in the day. I worked on a mobile game with him. I used to work at NBC. But none of that was initiated when this opportunity came up, which is what I love so much. It was a nice thing to throw in there, when people who didn’t know me were like, “who are yo
If you didn’t think our 3-episode-a-week release schedule was dizzying enough, welcome to the XR for Business Podcast’s new weekly news rundown! The space is evolving so fast, Alan is devoting a few minutes each week just to talk about the newest, most interesting use cases hitting the trades!
This week, XR is taking us everywhere, from the surface of Mars, to ritzy Audi showrooms, to the svelte form of Bobby, a teddy bear 3D-scanned in real-time by Samsung’s new feature on the Note 10.
- NASA has used Microsoft’s HoloLens AR system to design its 2020 Mars rover.
- The U.S. Army bought 100,000 HoloLens headsets to study how AR can help soldiers get ready for battle.
- Walmart, Amazon’s rival, is testing new store managers with AR exercises.
- Boeing uses AR to guide workers who build and service planes. So does Airbus.
- Google has revived its Google Glass project for enterprise applications.
- RealWear, a startup based in Vancouver, Wash., recently raised $80 million for a head-mounted AR system that’s designed for the workplace.
- Snap is raising another $1B with a focus on acquiring and building more AR technology into the platform.
- Samsung showed off their new Note 10 with full 3D capture, rigging and animation capabilities: check out my LinkedIn post.
- Osso VR partnered with UCLA to do a Surgical Training Study Showing VR Beats Traditional Training by 130%
- Audi, Unreal Engine & Mackevision introduce a new digital showroom in Web3D, VR and AR
We talk a lot about the business use cases of XR on this podcast, but any good business comes with a great fitness plan or exercise room. XR is no different, and VRdōjō founder Michael Eichenseer runs Alan through a few of the cardiovascular benefits to the technology.
And that’s just the first six minutes! Many other topics are touched on in this episode – virtual writing spaces, remote assistance, spatial learning, his own XR makerspace, and more.
Alan: Welcome to the show, Michael, how are you doing? Pretty good. How are you? Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me on the show today. It’s going to be a really exciting one. Let’s tell everybody at home. What is your vision for virtual augmented reality? Was the best virtual reality or a AR experience is what is the best thing that you have done? And explain to the listeners why that is so.
Michael: For me, it’s definitely the fitness aspect of VR. As a gamer, I definitely enjoy the fact that I can play a game, not be sitting the entire time, and afterwards, I’ve burnt 500 calories, and feel really good about it the next day. The research coming out in XR in reducing pain and increasing motivation, to me, is fascinating.
Alan: There was a lot of medical use cases coming up in pain reduction, using virtual reality for pre-surgical — and also perisurgical — where you’re wearing a headset to distract you. I know one of the things that blows my mind is, my daughter, she’s 10 and she is terrified of needles. Like, we’re talking blood-curdling screams from the nurse’s office. The next time she goes, we’re gonna use VR to try to distract her while they take blood, because it’s a stressful thing. And when somebody goes into a surgery, being able to decrease their stress; it’s hard to measure the success outcomes, but at the same time, just being able to calm them is something that I think VR does really naturally. You talked about exercising in VR. Give us some examples of some of the ways people are using VR to exercise.
Michael: The boxing games are pretty popular, and I definitely have to mention Beat Saber. That’s probably the top one at the moment.
Alan: Basically, you have two lightsabers in your hands, and you’ve got to swipe up and down, and left and right, with your left and right hand, and dodge out of the way of things. It is incredible.
Michael: It’s dancing.
Alan: Dancing and disco, and it’s so good.
Michael: Yes, it’s really good. You kind of lose track of time. I think that’s why it’s good that it’s based on music; the song ends and you’re like, “oh, back to reality a little bit.”.
Alan: Yeah, there’s a guy who was playing, he lost 45 pounds playing Beat Saber.
Michael: Yes. I’ve actually met a 68-year-old retiree who logs into VR every morning at 5:00 a.m., just to warm up for the day.
Alan: That’s incredible. What does he play? What does he do?
Michael: Back when I met him, we were playing a game called Smash Box Arena. It’s a multiplayer game, kind of dodgeball. It’s defunct now, but there’s a lot of other games like that. I think Rec Room is probably the number one out there, where you can hop in — it’s a free game — and it’s cross-platform and you see people in there at all times of the day.
Alan: I’ve played paintball in there. I
The power of XR will never be able to destroy the good ol‘ desire to go out and shop, but that doesn’t mean that XR couldn’t be used to improve the shopping experience. Tracey Wiedmeyer and Alan discuss a few ideas, from browsing the catch of the day in a VR tropical wonderland, to using VR and AR to test out retail layouts before you build them.
Alan: Today’s guest is Tracey Wiedmeyer. Tracey is the chief technology officer and co-founder of InContext Solutions. They’re delivering a mixed reality platform that is the world’s largest brands and retailers are using to streamline their merchandising process and go to market strategy much faster. Tracey is also the former president of the VR/AR Association chapter in Chicago, Milwaukee and a board member for the Information Research Technology Institute at Sam Walton College of Business. Tracey is also a member of the Forbes Technology Council. You can learn more about InContext Solutions at www.incontextsolutions.com. With that, I’d love to welcome to the show: Tracey Wiedmeyer.
Tracey: Hey Alan, glad to be here.
Alan: My pleasure. I’m so excited. This is a show I’ve been really waiting to do because you guys have been using virtual and augmented reality, mixed reality to help retailers preplan their stores, because right now a retailer, if they want to design a new store, they literally have to build a physical store, put all the shelves and build a mock store. And you’re doing this through virtual/augmented reality, and the metrics that you’re able to collect, keep maps, and where people are looking and the amount of data that you’re able to collect from users in a digital world versus a physical world is actually really quite amazing. So maybe you can just talk about InContext Solutions and what you’re doing for retailers.
Tracey: Sure, yeah. There was a lot to bite off there. I’ll break it down little by little as we go here. So I think you mentioned creating brand new physical stores. There’s actually more retail stores today, more brick-and-mortar stores than there were back in 2000 when the retail apocalypse version 1 hit the street. You know, it was the end of brick-and-mortar, everyone has gone digital. So I think there’s a lot of stores being added today and most stores – but whether you’re a centre store grocery retailer or fashion or apartment store – those stores go through a regular reset on a period of time, whether that’s every couple of years or longer than that. I think the nuance there is actually at the brand level, you know, especially if we focus on centre store grocery for a little bit here. The brands are actually working with their retail partners multiple times a year to reset the categories that you shop. So cereal, frozen foods, healthcare, baby foods, all that sort of stuff are constantly going through some sort of revision period, whether it’s… the old way’s every six months, because that’s how long it takes them, and I’ll get into that in a little bit. But they’re trying to get you to buy or notice one or two more products on that journey to the shelf. We’re using virtual technology now to basically facilitate that process; everything from a brand new store, to which products go on the shelf, and how many of them are stacked right to left and front to back. There’s a lot of low hanging fruit in that process, and maybe I don’t know how much, Alan, you know about what that process looks like today, or in the past. What I’m going to do is tell you a little bit about where we’ve come from.
A lot of brands
Tony Stark’s flashy, nanotech gold-titanum suit of armour might be a thing of fantasy, but some of his other powers are on the cusp of reality, with the power of the Internet of Things. Praemo Board of Director’s member Paul Boris uses his years of experience in the XR space to explain how such a marvel of computing could be possible.
A good friend of Alan’s, publisher of the online XR news publication, VR Voice, drops by the show for a general chat about the future of the space, including the potential for XR to help train workers in a future where retirement is less common, saving money by designing hospitals in VR before brick meets mortar, the video game crash of 1983, and a little Fruit Ninja.
Alan: Today’s guest is a good friend of mine, Bob Fine. In 2011, Bob launched the only printed magazine covering social media, The Social Media Monthly. In January 2014, he launched his second print titled The Startup Monthly in May 2016, he launched — what I love — VRVoice.co, a content vertical on all things virtual reality. In addition to his publishing endeavors, Bob continues to provide I.T. strategic planning consulting services to both private sector and non-profit communities. Bob has over 10 years of additional work experience as a systems and sales engineer with various companies, including CMGi, Hughes Network, IOWave and Raytheon, as well as two of his own consulting companies, Geoplan and the Cool Blue Company. I want to have a warm welcome; thank you, Bob, for joining us on the show today.
Bob: Alan, thanks very much for having me. I’m honored to be one of your guests.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure and honor to have you on the show. I’ve met with you many times. You’ve actually shared some CES stories, and we’ve been in a little glass booth in CES together. That was wonderful. You have your own podcast and news outlet, talking about all things virtual reality, VRVoice. That is been amazing, and you’ve been a great influencer in the space, so thank you.
Bob: Well, I appreciate that.
Alan: So the first question I love to ask everybody is, what is the best VR/AR/XR experiences — or what are some of the best experiences — that you’ve had so far?
Bob: You know, I guess from my perspective; I’m a longtime video gamer. I just went to PAX East on Friday, up in Boston. I was my first PAX event. And if you’re not familiar, that’s the Penny Arcade conference. Huge, huge gaming conference. It makes E3 look minuscule. And I’m old enough where I started with an Atari 2600. One my the reasons I started looking at VR again in 2016 was because of that video gaming interest. When you ask me my best experiences right now, I’m going to kind of… I’m thinking about some of the early games that that I played, that gave me that “woah” moment. As I’m thinking back to it now, this was actually on HTC VIVE — first gen, which was only maybe 3, 4 years ago now — and I was so impressed with the first generation of hardware that I was like, “well, this is ready for prime time.” The prices might still be a little bit high, but the quality of the gaming was there already. Just two off top my head is the VR version of Fruit Ninja, which I’ve personally put about 400-500 people through, because it’s one of the best and fastest experiences I think you can give somebody that’s never tried VR, but you can give to anybody whether they’re five years old or ninety five years old.
Alan: Slicing fruit in VR is magical, and the fact that they have the haptic feedback to the controller is just… [implied Chef Kiss]. You’re right, it is a magical experience.
Bob: The other game that I was really getting addicted to was Space Pirates, which I think is still just a brilliant early video game that demonstrates the quick and easy access to VR. It’s kind of like the space invaders of AR, I think, in terms of what those early games that caught fire and was easy to pick
Alan and his guests often espouse investing in XR on this podcast, but that comes with the implicit understanding that you should expect a return on that investment. Cameron Ayres from Sector 5 Digital discusses strategies for maximizing that ROI.
Alan: Today's guest is Cameron Ayres, the director of innovation at Sector 5 Digital, a digital agency specializing in augmented reality and virtual reality applications for the enterprise. His primary role is developing the strategy and implementation of emerging technology, to best enhance digital projects. Sector 5 Digital helps companies transform their brands by creating brilliant digital content for marketing, communications, sales, and entertainment. Clients include many Fortune 100 clients, including American Airlines, Bell, IBM, Intel, and many more. You can learn more about Cameron and Sector 5 at Sector5Digital.com. Cameron, welcome to the show.
Cameron: Thanks for having me, Alan.
Alan: My pleasure. I'm so looking forward to this. Some of the stuff you guys are doing is mind-blowing. I had a chance to look at some of the things you're doing -- bringing Bell helicopters, their new drones, to VR, and allowing people to experience these. You've done work with airlines, with car companies, with Harry Potter. Describe what Sector 5 digital does, and some of the projects and things that you're most proud of.
Cameron: Sure. At a high level, what we focus on is coming into these companies that are doing a lot of great work, but they just want to kick it up to the next notch. They want to tell stories in a new way. They want to increase their ROI, is the bottom line to a lot of it. "How can we do things faster, with exerting less effort and less man hours?" That's where virtual reality, and augmented reality, and a lot of other different media come into play. We come in and we'll actually sit down and brainstorm around, "what are the problems, and how can we come up with solutions?" And it's funny how many clients you'll interact with that come to you with a solution. "We want a hologram," or "we want virtual reality." But what we specialize in is taking a step back and saying, "let's do a deep dive. Let's talk about what virtual reality accomplishes, and if that is the best medium." And then, if it is, we can move forward with brainstorming. But it's so important to not fall into the trap nowadays, of trying to make the next gimmick... or, to do it just because the technology's cool. Let's do it with a sense of purpose.
A lot of what I do is try to take new and emerging technology -- obviously right now, VR/AR/XR; all that falls into it -- and using that to enhance messaging and storytelling, training, simulation, all of that type of stuff. It boils down to two words for me, which is "presence" and "experience." You have the presence, for things like training, for things like real-time engineering. You really feel like you're there. Then you have the experience side of it, which is more the storytelling, the marketing; let me actually go on a mission, and something that doesn't exist yet, and get a feeling for how that's going to change warfare, how that's going to change my ride to work every day. A lot of it focuses around messaging, storytelling, and training.
Alan: You've done everything from -- like you said -- storytelling and training. What are the big, open spaces for companies? Let's say you're a medium-sized business. You see XR, you're going, "well, I have no idea where to get started." What is that low-hanging fruit for businesses to get involved, and just start with this technology?
Cameron: I've noticed that -- and
These days, more and more students can — and do — opt out of animal dissection in science classes, and not just because formaldehyde smells awful. As fewer kids are morally comfortable with chopping up an amphibian in the name of their education, an alternative will be needed. VictoryXR’s Steve Grubbs offers a solution through VR, and chats with Alan about how XR can be used to enhance education in other ways, too.
Alan: Today’s guest is Steve Grubbs, founder and CEO of VictoryVR, one of the world leaders in virtual reality educational product development. To date, they have created over 240 unique VR experiences, spanning over 50 different learning units, with educational partners like Carolina Biological and Oxford University. They have been able to develop brand new educational encounters for VR users around the globe. Steve is also a member of YPO and was recently featured in an article entitled Virtual Reality Is Transporting Students to the Next Frontier in Science Education. You can learn more about Steve’s company at VictoryXR.com. Steve, welcome to the show.
Steve: Alan, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. We’ve been working in XR Technologies — first virtual reality, and then augmented reality — since 2016. I first tried to headset on near the end of 2015 and it struck me that this type of technology would change the world. And so, we struck out and decided that our field would be education. And so we dug in and figured out how to do it, because at that point it was very difficult to find people; you couldn’t just hire people off the street who knew how to create virtual reality technology. We set to work figuring it out. In September of 2016, I attended a group meeting with some folks in Dallas, and then by January of 2017, we had our first major product in a school. I felt pretty good that we were able to move quickly on that first experience.
Alan: That’s incredible. Let me ask you a quick question. What was the first experience that you tried that inspired you to start VictoryVR?
Steve: Well, it was a MetaVRse product that I downloaded to my phone some time, in Google Cardboard. I am pretty sure I went to the iPhone store and tried a roller coaster — and this had been a few years now. And then I tried The New York Times 360 News reporting on my phone and they both were great, amazing, cool, and so I said, this is something I want to be a part of.
Alan: For those people that don’t know you and VictoryVR, maybe just give us a 10,000-foot view of your mission and why you’re doing what you’re doing, and where you see the company going. Describe your company, the products, and the platform that’s being used.
Steve: We believe that we can change education in a positive way around the world. If you think about it, for decades — I used to serve in the Iowa legislature, and I was chairman of the Education Committee, and we spent a lot of time addressing, how do we improve education? And there were a lot of things we did on the input side, but at the end of the day, what we all know is that if students love to learn, they love what they’re learning — like all of us — then there’s no work in it; you just love to do it, and you immerse yourself in it. We believe that XR Technologies — VR and AR — are the solution to having students love what they’re learning. So we’re creating as much content as possible, aligned to standards, so that teachers can integrate it into their lesson plans, or parents can just simply pull it off the shelf and use it. I have a background in technology. I started my first tech company in 1997, building web sites. I bought a book called “Web Sites for Dummies,” read i
XR technologies are undeniably a leap forward in humankind’s mechanical evolution. But our brains – the way they work – haven’t quite evolved in pace with them, so XR solutions are hardly solutions at all unless they work within the confines of how we think and react. Alex Haque of LumiereVR waxes philosophical about how to design XR with that in mind.
Alan: Today’s guest is Alexander Haque, the founder of RetinadVR, whose mission was to help pioneer virtual and augmented reality through powerful data. RetinadVR was acquired recently by LumiereVR, in July 2018. Alex is now the COO for LumiereVR, which is bringing quality VR content to the masses through masterful curation and distribution. You can learn more about Alex and Lumiere by visiting LumiereVR.com. Alex, welcome to the show.
Alex: Hey, thank you so much for having me, Alan. Pleasure to be here.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure.
Alex: Yeah, thanks for having me. You’re one of my favorite LinkedIn personalities, and a fellow Canadian! So I’m excited to talk shop with you.
Alan: Canadians are taking over the VR scene in a big way. It’s really exciting. The purpose of this podcast is to provide as much value to businesses and business owners and people in companies that are looking to explore and expand on virtual and mixed reality and augmented reality, and figure out how these technologies can be used for them. So, perhaps let’s just take a look back at RetinadVR; what you guys were doing there, and what led you to what you’re doing now.
Alex: Right. Yeah. It’s a great jump off point. So RetinadVR actually got started in Montreal in 2014. Our mission was, as you said at the beginning, was to bring VR analytics and data to virtual reality. And what I mean by that is understanding these new data points that can be interpreted from a VR headset. And what we found is, understanding people’s movement in VR is something that we can actually grab from a headset. And then translating that into actionable insights was basically the mission of the entire company for the last three years, up until the acquisition. And things are very much still along that path, but a little bit more, I guess, pigeon-holed into Lumiere -pecific use cases for right now.
Alan: So maybe talk about Lumiere and what you guys are doing there. I know you’ve done a recent project with synchronizing a ton of headsets at a fairly famous location. I’ll let you talk to that.
Alex: So we did about 250 VR headsets, all synced up from Madison Square Garden for LumiereVR, which brings that enterprise software to large venues and media entertainment folks. MSG is a really good use case; museums, aquariums, science centers, planetariums — those are really good places where VR lives, [and] is complementary to an existing exhibit. The example with Madison Square Garden, for instance, was they have a 90-minute tour within the venue. So, a lot of people don’t actually know this — I think the international community knows this little bit more — Madison Square Garden, I think, is in the top five or top 10 most-visited, most iconic places in New York City. And I didn’t know this, being obviously, a Canadian hockey fan. I thought you just show up to Madison Square Garden — a great, beautiful venue — and you enjoy concert or a game, and you go home. But apparently what you could do is, they have off-hours visits throughout the day that are 90 minutes that are called the All Access Tour. And they show you the history of this is where Mohammad Ali boxed. This is where goalie Henrik Lundqvist for the New York Rangers, here’s his, like, million-dollar Swarovski 10-
Princess Leia’s desperate holographic plea to Obi-Wan Kenobi might have been a vision of the far flung future in 1977, but today, volumetric capture is making that a reality. Using cameras and the AR cloud to map and replicate an object in three-dimensional space, volumetric capture has lots of practical use cases – Raj and Alan talk about a bunch of them.
Alan: Today’s guest is Raj Puran, director of client XR Business Development and Partnerships at Intel. Raj is a 25-year veteran of the semiconductor and software industry with Intel Corp. He is currently director of Business Development and Strategic Partnerships, focusing on growth areas of compute in virtual, augmented, and extended realities. Raj has spent the last four years of his tenure on building business opportunities, use cases, experiential marketing with partnerships in location-based entertainment, museums, education and other commercial XR segments. Prior to moving into business development, Raj has held several positions in I.T. systems, engineering, data center engineering, information security, network and cellular IP development, ERP business engineering, and Healthcare Solutions Development Budget leads opportunities for his customers and partners to utilize exciting and intense compute power in the immersive technology and XR landscape. Through a collective ecosystem of compute-focused processing, storage, sensing technology, data processing, content creation solutions, and new innovations in the area of wireless VR, AR, 5G, artificial intelligence, volumetric capture, and immersive sports available from Intel. To learn more about Intel, visit Intel.com. Raj, I’m very excited to welcome to the show. Thank you so much for coming on.
Raj: Alan, thanks for having me. It’s a pleasure to speak to you again.
Alan: It’s really amazing. The last time we saw each other was at the Mixed Reality Marketing Summit in New York City, which was a really amazing conference. It was kind of like an un-conference. It was in the basement of the National Geographic exhibit, where you could walk around and see all sorts of amazing things. And in the basement of this center was some of the brightest minds in XR Technologies getting together to discuss the marketing capabilities. And I know you have worked on everything from the marketing side to education side. Tell us, what are you doing at Intel to drive XR forward?
Raj: Yeah, I think the biggest thing for us is we are known as a PC platform company, but I think we’re bigger than that, obviously. We’re doing things in the area of volumetric capture. We’re working on a portable volumetric solutions like RealSense sensing solutions, which allows you to create really elaborate programs around immersive media and immersive experiences.
Alan: Let’s unpack that one thing. What do you mean by volumetric capture?
Raj: Volumetric capture has generally been where you place a subject or an object or a person in a series of cameras, right? So this is basically a room; an array of cameras are set up, and the subject is in the center point of that array of cameras. And essentially, a singular object is captured, and then it’s — utilizing point cloud and the camera data — you essentially create a 3D object, right? That could be a 3D rendering of said person, or object, or whatever that subject may be. And you are able to then utilize that; whether you utilize it in a 2D production or 3D production like VR, you can then utilize that to be used as holograms, or virtual characters, or so forth.
Alan: So being able to create recreate the Star Wars little hologram thing.
Raj: Absolutely. And that’s one of the use cases, right? So, h
The web page is a deceptively simple invention, but its creation — and more importantly, its cross-programmability — made the World Wide Web the technological powerhouse it has become. Gabriel Rene founded VERSES to encourage similar similar developments in spacial computing.
Alan: Today’s guest is Gabriel Rene, an architect and founder of The VERSES Foundation. He’s a technologist, entrepreneur, researcher, media and music producer, whose 25-year career in the technology, telecom and entertainment industry has granted him the knowledge and experience to consistently invent unique business verticals, and to navigate the novel challenges of the emerging global digital entertainment, marketing, e-com, mobile and spatial technology markets. aAs a deep technology pioneer, mobile executive, and corporate strategist, Gabriel has built multiple innovative technology companies, developed groundbreaking enterprise and consumer software, and forged strategic partnerships with multiple Fortune 50 companies. Rene has worked with — and advised some of — the world’s largest brands, spanning media conglomerates, telcos, media manufacturers, mobile manufacturers, governments, and major brands. As a C-level executive founder, he has demonstrated unique leadership, strategic and operational capabilities in growing businesses from zero to $25-million in annual revenues. As an advisor and board member, he has helped multiple startups and founders navigate their way to success. Gabriel serves as the executive director of the VERSES Foundation, an organization at the intersection of Block Chain, Virtual Reality, and Artificial Intelligence technologies designed to power Web 3.0 and dedicated to the interoperable adoption of spatial technologies across every major industry. As the founder and executive director of VERSES, the Global Advisory Board Member and co-chair of the AR Cloud Committee, and a founding member of the Open AR Cloud. With that, I want to welcome Gabriel Rene. Thank you for joining us on the show.
Gabriel: Thank you, Alan. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Alan: Where can people find you online if they want to look into it?
Gabriel: Well, if it’s me personally, you can find me @GabrielRene at LinkedIn, and you can also find me on Twitter under the same name. And then with VERSES, you can go to VERSES.io to get all the latest information on us.
Alan: So let’s unpack this. Tell me what you’re doing at VERSES right now, and I want to get the full understanding of what is VERSES, and why it’s important for people listening.
Gabriel: So I guess the first place to start is way back in 1990 or so. There was a young, talented researcher by the name of Tim Berners-Lee, who was working at the CERN Institute, and he was developing a new set of technologies which have come to be known as the World Wide Web protocols. So those are all the HTTP, which was hypertext transfer protocol, and HTML, which is a hypertext markup language. That, combined with a browser, which he developed as an open source standard, and on top of the domain structure that had been pre-existing — which we’d been using from the email era of .coms and .edu, .org, etc. — he created this you URL format, which essentially made pages programmable, gave us the ability to link content on those pages, and the ability to network those pages. This, of course, became the World Wide Web.
The majority of our technologies and power and advantages and capability today, whether in business or personal lives, in public or private sector, come from the benefits of these core protocols that enable the network. But it’s fundamentally a network of pages and text and media. And now, with the dawn of new interfaces th
Chicken Waffle! Now that we have your attention, check out this episode of XR for Business. Centertec CEO Bill Tustin joins Alan to talk location-based VR “retail-tainment.” Fun, exciting XR technologies are revitalizing America’s malls, and taking kids on field trips across the stars or through the pyramids; places they could never go in real life.
Alan: Today’s guest is Bill Tustin. Bill has owned a location-based VR location for over three years. He’s worked for 25 years in the casino banking industry, teaching them how to implement technologies that increase their revenues, create great customer experiences and have fantastic ROI. He has used that experience to create a successful location-based VR place with multiple revenue sources, including XR educational content and XR programs. His company just made a seed investment in Chicken Waffle — crazy name! — but it’s an XR solution provider that develops innovative solutions with high-quality branded experiences. They’ve created many enterprise experiences in a world for an amazing list of partners and clients. [You can learn more about Bill’s business at www.centertec.com]. They’re working on all sorts of really cool IP, and I want to welcome to the show: Bill Tustin. Thanks for joining me.
Bill: Thank you.
Alan: Thank you so much. You’ve been working in VR a long time. What are some of the best experiences you’ve seen, and what drives you to do what you’re doing?
Bill: Really? The smiles on people’s faces. We work with a lot of children, and the children and the teachers are very excited about learning about VR, experiencing VR. Just, customers’ experiences has been great for the last few years.
Alan: Awesome. You say you were working with children. Is this just location-based entertainment? Or, what are you finding is something that… what is resonating with everybody?
Bill: From the educational aspect of it, where they can go and experience a visual education experience? The teachers actually have been really excited about it; just the fact that they can go, like, for example, to the civil war, and experience of battle with great artwork. It educates some really, really well. Especially the younger they are, the more they get excited about it.
Alan: So, what’s one of the best XR, or VR/AR, experiences that you’ve ever had?
Bill: Well, for children? Space. Anything with space, they get really excited about. Anything underwater. These are all experiences that they can’t experience in real life. You can’t experience space right now — I mean, hopefully in the future you will — and most people don’t really go scuba diving, especially kids. So, they’re going to really experience underwater adventures, or Space Adventures. And then, on the education aspect, we work very closely with the schools on exactly what they’re teaching them, so the education aspect of it is in on the experience.
Alan: Interesting. You made an investment in Chicken Waffle. Can you maybe tell us what’s… what’s Chicken Waffle? As soon as I heard the name, I was like, “what the heck is a Chicken Waffle?”
Bill: The founder of Chicken Waffle actually co-founded TheWaveVR. He actually still owns TheWaveVR, which became a very big social media music platform. One of the reasons why we invested in them is, we saw a need in the education field, where just the content that was there wasn’t really up to par for the children. They really wanted to have more interactive experiences. It just seemed like a lot
From headsets to haptic suits, there is going to be a lot of accessories and apparel in XR to chose from, including some that expand senses you didn’t even know were XR-compatible. Antony Vitillo – AKA Skarred Ghost – drops in to discuss different devices with Alan, their use cases, and what companies should consider when they go shopping for some.
Alan: Today’s guest is Antony Vitillo, better known as Skarred Ghost. Antony is an XR consultant and author of an amazing blog called The Ghost Howls. He also runs a consulting company called New Technology Walkers, where they develop VR solutions and advise companies about how best to use VR and AR. Antony recently traveled to the fourth annual VIVE Ecosystem Conference — VEC — in Shenzhen, China. If you’re not already following Tony, you can learn a lot by connecting with him on LinkedIn and subscribing to his newsletter at skarredghost.com. Tony welcome to the show.
Antony: Hello, Alan! Thanks for this opportunity.
Alan: It’s so great to have you on the show. I had a wonderful opportunity to speak with you many times, and we are both very, very passionate about virtual and augmented reality. I want to just thank you for taking the time to be on the show.
Antony: I’m very happy to be with you. I’m happy to speak to you live, after so many messages we’ve done on LinkedIn. Super happy to be here.
Alan: Let’s just dive right in, and we’re going to try to bring as much value as we can to the listeners today. We have a lot to go through; we’re going to go through all of the different hardware aspects involved in Virtual/Mixed/Augmented Reality — XR — and it’s not just the headsets or headphones. You’ve got things like haptic suits, haptic gloves. You’ve got touch-sensitive stimulators. You’ve got VR headsets, AR headsets. You’ve got mobile phone-based AR, eye tracking set devices, taste experiments, hot and cold devices, thermal devices, and then tracking systems for motion capture, and of course, treadmills for omni-directional walking. So there’s a lot to unpack here. Let’s start at something crazy; haptic suits. Let’s talk about haptic suits, and why and where these would be used in any industries.
Antony: I’m very interested to have these suits, because they offer the promise of letting you use your full body in VR. So, finally, you can be there with all your body. You know, my first startup was about full-body in VR, but using Kinect. So, a different approach, but I’m a big fan of having the possibility to kick objects, to move your body in every possible way, and see your full self replicated in VR.
The advantage of using the haptic suits over other approaches, like the one that they used with Kinect, is that you don’t only have your full body — your full movement — in VR, but you can also feel sensations. You can have haptic feedback. So you can [feel] hot, cold. You can feel pain and whatever. It’s really full immersion; a bit like we have seen in the Ready Player One movie. Wade Watts wore that expensive suit, to fully be inside the Oasis. This is why I think they’re very interesting, because they can really enhance your visual experience; your sense of presence, like your ancestors like to say.
Alan: So, let’s unpack this for a second, Tony. What would some of the practical use cases of this… I can see one in military training, where you’re in a virtual world, you’re in a hostile environment, and maybe something explodes behind you — a piece of shrapnel hits you — and maybe it vibrates. Maybe explain some other instances, where this could be used in enter
Many scenarios that might be improved by an augmented reality heads-up display shouldn’t require an overly arduous selection process; most gizmos will do if you’re checking a weather app while jogging. The same can’t be said for picking out a device to help oil rig workers work safely and efficiently in the middle of the Permian Basin. Shell’s VR incubator lead Michael Kaldenbach talks with Alan about the things his team had to consider when selecting the right device for the job.
Alan:Today’s guest — Michael Kaldenbach – is an augmented, mixed, and virtual reality incubation lead at Shell, the global oil company. He is a driven, goal-oriented, resourceful, and creative person, who really understands the usefulness of this technology, and bringing how to bring it to the market. He’s chosen the family motto of Arctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton, as it accurately reflects how he approaches any challenge or goal: “victory through perseverance,” or “Fortitudine Vincimus.” He strives to apply entrepreneurial mindsets and thinking up out-of-the-box solutions and approaches when working in this technology. If you want to learn more about his work, you can visit Shell.com.
I want to welcome to the show, Michael Kaldenbach. Welcome to the show, Michael.
Michael:Hi, Alan. Thank you very much for having me on.
Alan:It’s my absolute pleasure. I’m really excited. I want to dig right in here, because I know you guys at Shell have been doing a ton of work in everything from kind of marketing and trade shows, right through to oil wells previsualization. So let’s talk about some of the ways that you and your team are using virtual/augmented reality right now.
Michael:So I think One of the better case studies we have is around augmented reality remote assistance, and I’m sure you’ve seen examples in the wider industry for that one. But for us at Shell, that means that we utilize a head-mounted display — in this case specifically, the Realwear — and it is used for our operators; for quick resolution, and to get remote expertise to be brought in.
I think it always helps if I provide a little story to set the scene; think of an offshore oil platform out there in the ocean. Typically, the most senior person is the control room operator, and there are more junior operators that are assisting the running and maintaining of these kind of assets. If in the control room, they see a deviation on one of the many dashboards they have, they send out a more junior operator to investigate — normally with a radio phone or walkie talkie — and then they guide them through, they get back to “what is the situation; what’s the sound the machine is making?” But where we really revolutionize that process is with a head-mounted display. It is as if the experienced operator has immediate eyes on the situation. So think about [it] — you see (or I see) what the junior operator is seeing, and thereby, I can use my years of expertise to resolve the issue, and get back to safe operations.
In a case where my expertise set is also not sufficient, we can quickly be joined by a remote expert who can be onshore — can be anywhere in the world — to join that same virtual room, so that a three-way conversation happens. Not only that: instead of having those conversations like, “I recognize the problem; you need to switch off the third button from the left, it’s kind of greenish on the left side, bottom side of the machine,” instead, we use something called “telestration,” and that’s the benefit of having a head-mounted display, whereby I — as the remote expert — can draw on my screen and the same visual is replicated to the junior operator, so in his line of sight, he
DJ Smith is the co-founder of The Glimpse Group, an XR technologies accelerator that’s doing startup incubating in a whole new way. Listen as Smith explains to Alan how Glimpse works, and some of the tech companies that are already beginning to grow under its umbrella.
Alan: We have an amazing guest today: DJ Smith is the co-founder and chief creative officer at The Glimpse Group. The Glimpse Group is a holding company for a portfolio of 10 startups, focused on virtual and augmented reality industries. At Glimpse, DJ’s responsibilities include overseeing the production of all the VR and AR content, as well as leading efforts to locate new subsidiary companies. In addition, DJ is the organizer of the New York virtual reality meetup. NYVR hosts monthly events focused on virtual reality technology and the premiere venue for the industry networking collaboration within New York City. NYVR is the second-largest virtual meetup in the world, with over 6,000 members. Prior to entering the VR/AR industry, DJ worked 20 years in the real estate and construction industries.
The Glimpse Group is a company designed with the specific purpose of cultivating entrepreneurs in VR, AR, and of course, XR. The business model simplifies many of the challenges faced by entrepreneurs, while simultaneously providing investors with an opportunity to invest directly into the VR/AR space. The Glimpse Group will fund, cultivate, and manage business operations while providing a strong network of professional relationships. Being part of The Glimpse Group allows entrepreneurs to maximize their time and resources in pursuit of their mission-critical endeavors. They’ve invested in 10 companies, which we’ll get into this show, but the 10 companies are Adept Reality, In It, D6 VR, Kobach, Immersive Health Group, KreatAR, Number9, Early Adopter, MotionZone, Foretell Studios, and I’m sure there’s gonna be a lot more on the show. To learn more about The Glimpse Group, visit TheGlimpseGroup.com.
Welcome to the show, DJ.
DJ: Thank you very much for the amazing introduction.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. I’ve been waiting for this call for so long, I’m really excited to have you on the show. Tell us, how did you get into virtual/ augmented/mixed reality, or XR technologies?
DJ: Sure. It’s a life calling that I was seeking for many, many years. In 2012, I saw the Palmer Luckey Kickstarter video, and I was like, “it has finally arrived!” So from that point on — it’s kind of a pivotal moment in time for me and my life – I started buying all the toys; really, just absorbing as much tech as I possibly could.
The meet up was formed shortly after that. I think the meet up started with 10 people in a dusty old conference room, and it just has steadily grown and grown and grown, and as it grew, my involvement in the industry grew and grew and grew. So we’re now the, I believe, the second-largest VR meetup in the world. It basically put me in direct connection with many of the developers in the city. The big entities; the Googles, Microsofts, where we would hold our event, as well as the whole investment community.
Then, about four years ago, the Oculus Rift and the VIVE was coming out, and I saw that there was an opportunity to actually start making a living out of it. I put in my notice in my construction job, and a week later I met my current business partner, Lyron Bentovim, who saw the same timing and opportunity within the space. He came from the investment side of things; had his own tech startup, ran hedge funds, and was most recently involved in publicly-traded companies. He had the idea of the Glimpse business model, which was taking bits and pieces from his experience of hedging bets and the challenges with a typical VC
If picking out a car off a lot is like picking out a handful of eggs from a basket, then assembling your perfect vehicle – fine-tuned to your specifications, BY you – is like picking out a few hundred grains of sand from the Sahara desert. At least, that’s how ZeroLight’s Barry Hoffman sees it. Hoffman shares this with Alan, and other philosophies about XR as a great asset to the automotive industry.
Alan: Today’s guest is Barry Hoffman from ZeroLight. Barry is the chief strategy officer of ZeroLight, a leading real-time visualization company in the automotive industry. He has a background with telco, gaming, automotive, and data science, and interactions with CRMs being the major thread in his career. At ZeroLight, Barry is responsible for their US operations, and also leads strategic partnerships and ZeroLight. This company, just so you know, is really incredible. They’ve taken virtual and augmented reality for the automobile industry to the next level; from AR apps where you can see cars in your living room, to full VR simulators where you can drive the cars and see what they interact like. It’s an incredible company, I suggest you check it out at zerolight.com.
Barry, welcome to the show.
Barry: Nice to be here, Alan, thank you for inviting me.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. I’ve been a huge fan of your work for a long time. You guys have done one car after another — I think one of the ones that I saw on there was a Pagani. It’s just, I’m a carhead as well, so being able to see the work that you guys are doing and making things look photo-real is just incredible.
Barry: Yeah, that’s true. You mentioned . It’s funny because it’s quite a known car, of course — they only make 100 of series, like how the Pagani Huayra Roadster, I believe there were only 100 made. But the funny thing is that all those 100 were sold digitally first. So, there is no real car available. If you think about the starting price of $2.3-million, it’s sort of like a digital-reality sales case of $230-million. It’s something, if you do the math, how incredible that is.
Alan: So what you’re saying is, ZeroLight contributed to probably the largest use of VR for an economic benefit ever.
Barry: Yeah, that’s true. This one is, of course, flipped to VR and especially screens, because a lot of the clientele will want to use it on screens. I would say Pagani is definitely a case like that. Audi, we definitely contributed to that part. Most recently, we released a Cadillac in their showrooms as well, with VR.
All these different car manufacturers, they tell their story differently. They have different brands, and they use the technology differently. That’s the coolest pitch, and I like instead of just saying, “okay, there’s one type of showcase, and this is how you do VR.” That would be the same as, “there’s one type of app in the App Store, and that is all you can do.” It’s cool to see this diversity, these ideas coming out of all these different clients, and then working together with them and turning that into their story. And not just their story — because that would make it only a brand experience — but also a buying experience, because a lot of things of what we do is on the high-end personalization side, like what you just said. Pagani has 18,000 parts, and all those 18,000 parts can be changed into something unique. That’s the ultimate buying experience, I almost say.
Audi, for instance, if you take their custom build program, I believe there’s
Aviation itself is one of humankind’s great technological marvels – something that can be easy to forget when we’re wedged between passengers in coach on some redeye flight. Neutral Digital’s Greg Caterer is using another one of our technological revelations – XR – to reinvent the airline industry, everything from designing aircraft, marketing at trade shows, and making the flight more comfortable for the passenger.
Alan: Today’s guest is Greg Caterer. Greg is the chief operating officer at Neutral Digital, an end-to-end immersive content creator, focusing on the luxury travel sector. Neutral Digital is an aviation-focused content creation house at the cutting edge of immersive interaction solutions; they deliver augmented reality, virtual reality, digital design, architectural visualization, in-flight entertainment solutions, and apps and websites for the aviation industry. In a nutshell, they deliver technology for clients’ campaigns. The Neutral Digital team consists of professionals with a wide-ranging expertise in VR digital experience, design, software development, and CGI production. Neutral Digital can be found at neutral.digital. Welcome to the show, Greg.
Greg: Thank you very much, Alan. Thanks for having me on the show.
Alan: My absolute pleasure. I’m really excited to learn about the stuff you’re doing. I’ve seen some of the videos, I’ve seen what you guys are doing; holy crap. It’s really, really awesome, the stuff you’re doing.
Greg: Thank you. Yeah, it is. We’re certainly very proud of all the work that we’ve been doing, particularly since specializing in the aviation sector, and then obviously more broadly, the travel sector as well. We feel as though we get the chance to educate an industry, as well as creating and selling a product, and really helping to define exactly how this niche can use extended reality, and in particular, virtual reality technology. So, yeah, we’re very proud of what we do.
Alan: So, okay — let’s get right into this. One of the things that blew me away was the photorealism that you guys have created of 3D models and virtual environments, of being in an airplane. Maybe explain — if you can, speak to brands that are using this; if you can’t, that’s fine — but speak to what it is you’re building, and why that’s important.
And let’s unpack this, because if you’re somebody who’s in the aviation world, this is a technology that can be used right across your enterprise; from previsualization, marketing, sales, training, remote assistance, remote collaboration — it can be used everywhere. So, what is the focus of what you guys have been doing, and what are the results that people are seeing?
Greg: You’re absolutely right with your observation, Alan, about it. Especially the breadth of use cases that this technology has.
So, there’s a lot in this. I’m going to try and condense this down to a relatively concise answer. But broadly speaking, because of the replicability and the repeatability of everything that’s created in CG, we would build experiences that focus on marketing, training, and design for airlines, the component manufacturers, the training bodies, et cetera. Anybody who’s got anything to do with aviation, whether it’s the high cost of acquisition for the product itself, or whether something intensely physical that needs to be shown off.
So, a really good use case — and one of the main workstreams and strands that we tend to focus on — is marketing. There’s a very, very big cost benefit to this, and also, it calls out, perhaps, the benchmark technology that existed bef
The current generation of 4G devices are great, if you want to chat faster, share photos, or stream a movie on the go. But for real-time spatial computing technologies — like XR, for example — that just won’t cut it, especially when it could mean life or death. Terry Schussler is the director of Immersive Technology at Deutche Telekom, and he’s working to bring 5G into the XR domain, and expand the capabilities of mixed reality technologies.
Alan: Today’s guest is Terry Schussler, “entreprenerd,” technology architect, passionate software designer, writer, speaker, trainer and all-around awesome guy. As a software innovator, Terry’s focus has been making software smarter for users, while leveraging technology to enable new forms of communication. During the development of over 200 commercial software products, reaching over 50 million users on desktop, mobile and tablet devices, Terry has delivered numerous technology innovations; artificial intelligence and consumer products, multimedia, hybrid online/offline CDRoms (what’s a CDRom?), interactive multimedia on the internet, real-time character animations, factory-to-consumer personalized plush toy design, just to name a few. A number of his products have been category creators, opening up new markets with long-tail monetization opportunities. If you want to learn more about the company that Terry works for, Deutsche Telekom is at www.telekom.com
It is with great honor that I welcome Director of Immersive Technology at Deutsche Telekom, and founding member of the Open AR Cloud, Mr. Terry Schuster. Welcome to the show, Terry.
Terry: Thanks, Alan. Nice to have the opportunity.
Alan: Thanks so much. It’s really a pleasure and honor to have you on the show. And I’m just going to dive right in here because I think the people listening really want to get an understanding of how this technology can be used for them. So to start it off, what is one of the best XR experiences that you’ve ever had?
Terry: One of the best experiences I ever had was actually realizing that the technology can be used not just to make people money, or to provide education, but to actually save lives — that it can really be transformative. So a company which unfortunately is no longer in business, ODG, created an oxygen mask for pilots, which allowed the pilots to operate a plane using augmented reality when the cockpit was full of smoke. Seeing that product developed and come to fruition really got me thinking differently about the importance of utilizing these types of technologies to increase human safety and save lives, as well as provide all of the obvious benefits that we’re used to.
Alan: Wow. That is… how do you even… that’s a show-stopper. I had Mark Sage on the show, and he was talking about how firefighters are using this technology for heads up displays, and military are using it for being able to see in the dark and creating that visibility layer. Can you maybe talk a bit more about this, this mask that can help pilots in a distressed situation like that? Because there’s so many ways this technology can be used to save lives. I think we should dig into that.
Terry: So, ODG co-develop this with… I think with FedEx. FedEx, I think, had two flights which had crashed due to a cockpit filled with smoke conditions that prevented the pilots from being able to properly control the plane. They made a decision to look at how they can utilize technology, a heads-up display technology, using AR to give pilots the visual controls that they need to continue flying the plane, even if such a situation happened. And they actually had a live demonstration unit at the Augmented W
Your company has access to AR technology. Great! …now what? Have you thought about how to effectively implement that technology to solve a problem? Or are you just planning to develop a neat digital gizmo, release it to the world, and hope folks will use it? Zappar CEO Caspar Thykier joins Alan to discuss his personal Three Cs for Success in AR, and how to think critically when developing AR solutions.
Alan: Today’s guest is Caspar Thykier, CEO of Zappar. Caspar has an extensive background in advertising and marketing, and has been lucky enough to work with some of the most successful companies with the biggest blue chip brands, surrounded by the best people. Now he’s spending all of his time in the new world of spatial storytelling — or augmented reality, as some call it. He’s helped so many companies get to market, but the one that he’s working on now that is at the forefront of all this technology is Zappar. Zappar is an augmented reality platform, and a creative studio, all rolled into one, and they’ve been doing augmented reality since 2011. Zappar are really specialists in augmented, virtual, and mixed reality and they’ve been leading the way for over seven years. They work with some of the biggest brands in the world, to meet their marketing and commercial objectives by adding a layer of interactive digital content to their products, packaging, point-of-sale places, and physical marketing collateral. Basically, they turn all passive print into always-on media channels that brand owners can control, which is pretty incredible and amazing stuff. You can learn more about Zappar by visiting them at Zappar.com. “Zed”-A-P-P-A-R dot com. Or, if you’re American, “Zee”-A-P-P-A-R dot com.
I want to welcome Caspar to the show. Welcome to the show, Caspar!
Caspar: Thank you so much, and thanks for that introduction. Especially making a difference between the US and the UK pronunciation of “Zee” and “Zed”.
Alan: Well,I’m Canadian, so we share the “Zed.”
Caspar: There you go.
Alan: Well, thank you so much for joining me, I’ve been really excited about this podcast interview. You are literally a pioneer — not only a pioneer but a leading pioneer — in this industry. Zappar, you guys have done work with Wal-Mart, you’ve done work with 7-Eleven, with tons of alcohol brands, with packaging brands, with consumer packaged goods. Let’s just list off a few of the ones — the highlights — that you guys have done recently, and then we’ll dig into what this technology does for a brand, how they can use it, and how they can get really involved.
Caspar: Absolutely. Yeah, that’ll be great. Maybe to preface that, I think how we’ve come to be working with such a diverse range of clients and partners really stems back to where we started.
As you said, it seems a long time ago now, back in 2011, because we were a company that was self-funded then. When you think back then, you had to explain pretty hard to people what AR was, and we had to make sure that any of the projects we worked on were clearly revenue-driving, revenue-generating for the business. So at that time, we looked pretty horizontal and shallow across lots of different industries. I guess we looked into other black folks of contacts to see where we could fish first. That meant that we ended up exploring the opportunities for AR across entertainment – we did a lot of work with the Hollywood studios at that time, with Warner Brothers and others, both for theatrical marketing and consumer products — but then into retail. Working with retailers across the world, be it here in the UK with Asda, Wal-Mart in the sta
The old ways of advertising in legacy media just won’t work in an XR environment, so Admix CEO Samuel Huber has tried to figure out more effective ways to peddle products in a virtual realm. Today he explores his XR marketing ethos, which focuses on the user first.
Alan: Today’s guest is Samuel Huber, founder and CEO of Admix, the first ad tech platform for mixed reality, giving XR developers the best tools to monetize their content. Admix is a platform that allows advertisers to place non-intrusive ads into VR and AR and gaming content. Their platform allows companies to filter hundreds of advertisers via their programmatic platform, and start generating revenue within minutes. Previous to Admixed, Sam was part of the e-commerce platform Kout.io, social gambling app Betify and the first binary trading game on the app store, Rogue Trader. Admix is a venture-backed startup, having raised $2.4-million. You can learn more about Samuel and Admix by visiting: https://admix.in/
Sam, welcome to the show.
Sam: Hey Alan, how are you? Good to be here.
Alan: I’m fantastic; thank you so much for being on the show.
Sam: Thanks for having me, man.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. For the people who don’t know you, I know you’re very active on LinkedIn. For those who don’t know, do you want to just introduce yourself and introduce Admix in your own words? Describe what your company does and what your service and platform does to serve businesses.
Sam: Yeah, yeah, for sure. I started Admix about two years ago now, initially based in London. Now we have also an office in San Francisco. The whole idea that we realize is that there’s so many great, immersive content being created, whether it’s VR, AR, and this is really going to be the way that content is going to be consumed in the future. Right? Whether it’s for entertainment, games, education, training — all of this stuff is going to be spatial content. And what we figured out is, there’s already great content being created, but very little incentive for the creators — or ways for them — to actually monetize this content. On the web, if you create a website, you can go to Google and you get a tag, and you can put ads and you can make a living out of it. But that’s actually not what happens right now in VR and AR. I think over the next few years, we’re going to see a lot of paid apps migrating to free content. That’s generally the way things go. And at that point, these developers are going to look for a new business model and advertising is going to play a massive part of it.
However, from the very beginning, our idea was to build a better future for advertising. Not banners and pop-ups and annoying, that are already terrible on the web, and would be even worse in VR and AR. But instead, creating an advertising model that really works for this immersive content. So, we’re talking about product placement. It’s how brands can be part of the experience, part of the creative process without intruding, but while still generating great return for the developers. So that’s really what we’ve built. It’s a simple SDK that integrates with Unity as a content creator, or you can drag and drop product placement within your experience. We then connect that to a massive network of advertisers.
So basically, you create your app at Admix and you can get revenue generating in about three or four minutes. And it’s continuous. It’s instant revenue. And so far, the developers that we work with really, really like us. We have about 22 people now in the company, raised over 2 million dollars last year, and we are expanding this ye
AR dragons, psychedelic displays at Coachella, and other digital gizmos made possible with XR technologies are fun and all, but Mark Sage, founder of AREA, is on the more pragmatic side of the table; he loves it when XR technologies can solve real-world problems for businesses. Mark and Alan sit down to discuss how to do that, and how that creates a better ecosystem for enterprise XR to thrive.
Alan: Today’s guest is Mark Sage. Mark is a product owner, creator, marketer, innovator, business development professional, evangelist, spokesperson, strategist, program and project manager, and mentor across a range of AR, mobile, B2B and B2C technologies and products in an international context. Mark is currently the executive director of AREA: Augmented Reality in Enterprise Alliance; the only global, membership-funded, non-profit alliance dedicated to helping accelerate the adoption of enterprise augmented reality, by supporting the growth of a comprehensive ecosystem. AREA members include Exxon Mobile, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, NVIDIA, PTC, and so many more. You can learn about The AREA at theAREA.org. It is with great honor that I welcome AREA executive director Mr. Mark Sage; welcome to the show, Mark.
Mark: Thanks so much, Alan. It’s great to be here to speak to you, and to those who listen out there, as well. I’m really excited. Thank you.
Alan: Thank you so much for joining me. We’re really excited; let’s get right into this. I’m going to start — just, dive right in here — what is one of the best XR experiences that you’ve ever had?
Mark: Oh, wow. Gosh.
Alan: I know, I’m going right in there.
Mark: You are, aren’t you? And in the kind of role I’ve got, I have a huge opportunity to go around the world, experiencing all sorts of different experiences. I guess, when I first started, one of the first things I was amazed about was the DAQRI Helmet, back in the day. I remember first wearing that, probably about three years ago, thinking this would be amazing. It didn’t quite end up as it would be. So, they’re still working on some of the areas there. What I’m really thrilled about is the experiences that really solve problems. Being focused on the enterprise space, I love to see things that are solving real-life problems, here and now. So anything from the simple-yet-effective remote assistance services and applications, I love seeing those; the way that you can engage with an expert, and get real detailed information of how to fix things.
I always love trying those things out. I love some of the simple things; I remember being at a shipyard in Finland, and just using a tablet, they were showing me how they look into a new container that had been built, and how they could check what was going on, and using in an eight hour experience to make sure it was all correct. They were cutting down — literally, by hours — the amount of time it took to review things, and make sure it was all set up and stuff like that. Right into the step-by-step innstruction, I always remembered RealWear, when they did their first step-by-step instruction. Doing it in a brewery, and showing how they were moving taps and pipes, and doing work there. So to be honest, anything–
Alan: Do you think they did it in exchange for beer?
Mark: Well, I hope so! I absolutely hope so. So you know, Alan, anything that shows some real benefit… I love some of the kind of cool stuff, but certainly, my experience in the enterprise AR stuff that actually solves a problem, and creates real benefit for enterprises, is really cool for me.
Alan: It’s interesting you mentioned that DAQRI s
6D.ai CEO Matt Miesnieks has been in the AR game since the beginning, and he says the best in the industry have always known the best, native use cases for the technology; the problem was for the technology to catch up to the use cases. Listen as Matt and Alan discuss how the tech and the vision are starting to line up today, with the help of groundbreaking cloud mapping technology.
Alan: Today’s guest is Matt Miesnieks, the CEO at 6D.ai. Matt is renowned as one of the world’s AR industry leaders, and through his influential blog posts and persona around the world. He’s also the co-founder and CEO of 6D.ai, the leading AR cloud platform, which is his third AR startup. He also helped form Super Ventures, which is a platform and V.C. firm investing in AR solutions. He’s built AR system prototypes for Samsung, and had long executive and technical careers in mobile software infrastructure before jumping into AR back in 2009. In his career, he’s been the director of product development of Samsung for VR and AR research and development, co-founder and CEO of Dekko, that created the first mobile holographic and mixed reality platform for iOS, 3D computer vision, and slam tracking. And Layar, he was the worldwide head of customer development; Layar sold to Blippar back in the day. And I want to invite Matt to the show. Thank you so much for joining me on the show.
Matt: Thanks for having me.
Alan: Thanks Matt. This is really an honor to meet you, and you have so much experience in this industry that we can all learn from. You’ve been doing this, it seems like, since the beginning. So why don’t we start with what you’ve seen as the progression of augmented reality over the last decade that you’ve been involved?
Matt: Using words like “decade” brings it home. I mean, I got into AR from working for the company called Openwave that invented the mobile phone browser, and seeing that phones were being connected to the Internet, and started to think about what was next. And realized that interfaces were getting more natural, and we were going to end up connecting our senses to the Internet. You can connect a sense of sight — our dominant sense — that was going to be a really big deal. And I learned that was called augmented reality; that ability to sort of blend digital information and the real world into what you see. I kind of jumped in expecting it to be happening pretty soon. And at the time, there was nobody. At the first AWE conference back then, I think there was 300 people in total. And that was the entire professional AR industry. That included a bunch of researchers, a bunch of, like, science fiction authors, just a bunch of weirdos and a handful of people with some sort of commercial expertise. I think the interesting thing is that, even back then, the use cases and the kind of interactions and those sorts ideas around, these are the things that AR is going to be good for in the earliest days is still the same ones. It wasn’t like anything’s changed; they’ve stayed the same. What’s gotten better is the user experience around those use cases. The technology is improved. There’s like 100x or 50x more processing capacity in our hands. The algorithms have gotten better. And the same use cases that we knew were good ideas back then are now like, oh, these are starting to work now. Enterprises and consumers are starting to get some value out of it.
Alan: So let me interject quickly, for the people listening who are not familiar with this industry: what are these use cases? What are the use cases that have stood the test of time? I know one of them that keeps coming up on almost every podcast that we do is remote assistance. The ability to have other people see what you’re se
Businesses that were late adopters of the World Wide Web and the mobile realm are the butt of obsolescence-themed jokes today. Extended Reality evangelist Rori DuBoff from Accenture joins us to advise the businesses of today how not to miss the same boat, and shares strategies on staying ahead of the curve.
Alan: Today’s guest is Rori DuBoff, Managing Director and Head of Content Innovation and Strategy for Extended Reality — that’s VR, AR and MR — at Accenture Interactive. Rori is a strategic and innovations leader with over 20 years experience working in digital marketing, integrated media, creative brand advertising, and emerging technologies.
As a virtual, augmented, and mixed reality evangelist, Rori advises companies on strategy and marketing opportunities for brand and business transformation. Prior to Accenture, Rori was Global Head of Digital Strategy and executive vice president at Havas Media Group, where she led and managed strategic planning worldwide, with a focus on digitally-integrated marketing communications and innovation.
Previous to that, Rori was a partner and director of strategy at Ogilvy, where she focused on developing digital marketing strategies for health, retail, and media industries. Rori holds an MBA from NYU Stern School of Business and a B.A. from the University of Pennsylvania.
She is a regular public speaker, contributing writer for Ad Age, Guardian, Campaign US, Mediapost, and a jury member for the Cannes Lions. With that, I mean, what more can I say? Rori, welcome to the show, and Rori, I just want to let people know that they can find you on Accenture.com and they can follow you on Twitter @RoriDuBoff. Rori, welcome to the show.
Rori: Thank you. Nice to nice to be joining.
Alan: It’s such a pleasure to have you on the show, and I’m really excited. I want to dive right in and get an understanding of what Accenture Interactive does, and what your role there is, and how you’re helping businesses use these virtual/augmented/mixed reality technologies across their enterprise.
Rori: Sure. So, Accenture Interactive is part of the larger Accenture consulting company. So Accenture is a very large technology and strategy company with over 400,000 employees worldwide. Accenture Interactive was developed, I think about five… a little bit more than five years ago, to focus more on the brand experiences that a lot of our clients were looking to develop, in terms of engaging customers. So within Accenture Interactive, we focus on user journeys, on strategy, on experiences, on marketing, and we’ve more recently — in the last two years — been looking at this new space of extended reality. And extended reality is the term that we are using at Accenture, and I think across the industry others are also using this term “XR” to include virtual reality, augmented reality, 3D experiences; all different types of experiences that blend the digital and physical worlds, and work on extending your reality.
Alan: So, would the things like computer vision and machine learning, would that fit? Would you bundle those under XR as well?
Rori: Yeah, absolutely. Those are critical technologies that we are looking at, in terms of making VR and AR experiences smarter, more personalized. Accenture has different groups, like a group headed dedicated to artificial intelligence, things like cloud computing, and machine learning is a part of artificial intelligence. And we work together to sort of use those technologies within the immersive experience area.
Alan: Incredible. So let’s dive in: what are some of the best examples that you or your team has worked on in this type of role? So, you’re meeting with a cus
Elizabeth Baron drove innovation forward at the Ford Motor Company since the ’90s, advancing XR technologies in the automotive industry. Now, Elizabeth joins our host Alan as she discusses her new venture, Immersionary Enterprises, as well as her pioneering work at Ford.
Alan: Today’s guest is Elizabeth Baron. Elizabeth has been a true pioneer of virtual and augmented reality as the global lead for immersive realities, bringing together multiple disciplines throughout Ford Motor Company. developing multiple immersive realities using VR, AR, and MR to provide information in context to the design studio, multiple engineering teams, UX developers, and computer-aided engineering analysis and many more. Elizabeth has seen dramatic changes, from huge room-sized, multi-million dollar CAVE systems, to haptic seats, to car cockpits made out of wood. From the promise of virtual reality to it becoming real, Elizabeth has been an industry leader always pushing the limits of technology.
She has just started a new venture called Immersionary Enterprises, to provide probability spaces where an enterprise can study any potential reality, or the art of the impossible or possible, with a host of relevant data. These realities can be shared across a global connected work team for more collaborative decision making. Immersionary Enterprises aims to establish a holistic immersive reviews as a near-perfect communication and collaboration paradigm throughout industrial design and engineering.
It is with great honor that I welcome VR pioneer Elizabeth Baron to the show. Welcome, Elizabeth.
Elizabeth: Oh thank you for having me, Alan. That’s quite an introduction. I really appreciate it.
Alan: Well, you certainly deserve it. You have been in this industry since the very beginning; you have seen some incredible changes, and maybe you can speak to what you’ve seen in the last 30 years of being involved in virtual and augmented reality, from where you started to where you are today.
Elizabeth: Yeah sure. It’s actually quite a transformation I’ve witnessed. It really blows my mind in some regards. So, way back in the day when I started my career at Ford Motor Company, virtual reality was out there, but it wasn’t really a thing in enterprise, per se. And I really became interested in it and started working with it, I would say, before its time. So around the late 90s, I started working in that space and putting together, like, a life-sized human model that could scale to different proportions. We tracked the human through magnetic motion tracking. And since cars are made out of metal, that poses a little bit of a problem, so we created a wood — like, oak and mahogany — adjustable vehicle that could be a small car or a big truck, and then put you in it, and then changed you to be either like a super tall man or a very small woman, and let you do ergonomic assessments. So at that time, we were limited to 60 thousand polys in our entire scene.
Alan: Wow!
Elizabeth: I know! So we were culling data and massaging things and we’d say, you know, two weeks and we’ll have something for you. And we were really working hard because you have to try to represent a vehicle and a person and an environment in 60 thousand polys. So you can imagine what it looked like; it wasn’t very pretty. But we actually were able to get some value out of it. So we progressed from those days to working more with better tools and optical motion tracking became a thing. So that was a big advancement. So we can now work within prototypes of vehicles and it really opened up another whole set of possibilities for us. And so we worked in that regard, and at that time, I really realized the benefit of doing passive haptics. So
Training employees can be like pulling teeth – both for the employees and management. But thanks to XR technologies, Jonathan Moss has had success in finding new, innovative ways to get the team engaged in training at Sprint.
Moss chats with Alan, discussing how XR can be used to invigorate a corporate team, save a company millions, and how it can all be done in-house with a moderate investment.
Alan: Our guest today is Jonathan Moss head of learning, technology, and sales enablement and XR strategy at Sprint. Jonathan and his team proposed to unleash everyone’s potential by evolving the experience and growing Sprint’s consumer sales organization, through learning and sales enablement. Concurrently, they are taking on the industry through utilization of technology to disrupt and design learning that is different from what we’ve ever experienced to date.
They are on a mission to eliminate dull and ineffective training. Jonathan is a lifetime learner that continues to challenge today’s norms by thinking in terms of possibilities and realities. His team is working with startups and experts to develop virtual training, mixed reality, real gaming for learning — not just points and badges — and has already launched the ability to serve up content at the point of need, using augmented reality.
Jonathan has had the pleasure of leading teams up to 250 people that spanned the entire country, with operating revenues of 14 billion dollars. They have implemented strategies that have changed the growth trajectory of people and results through leadership and employee development programs, redesigning sales processes, integrating technology for improved customer journeys, and cost saving efficiencies, creating operational models that optimize profitability and executing on the fundamentals of business using virtual, augmented, and mixed reality technologies. For more information about Sprint you can visit Sprint.com, and you can follow Jonathan on LinkedIn or on Twitter, and it’s @Jonathan Moss.
Jonathan Moss, welcome to the show.
Jonathan: Hey Alan, great to be here. Thanks for letting me join.
Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure. You and I have connected so many times, and you know I’ve been really looking forward to this interview. You are a pioneer, a leader, and an industry pundit. The work you’re doing — both at Sprint, but also on collaborating with everybody through the virtual and augmented reality association — is fantastic. So thank you for all the work you do. We can’t wait to learn more about what you’re doing, and really drive this message that virtual and augmented reality are not only here, but they’re transforming businesses.
Jonathan: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Alan: So tell me, let’s start with what you are doing on your day-to-day basis that Sprint, and what are some of the things you’re doing right now?
Jonathan: Yeah. Awesome. So a few things that we’re really doing now is trying to understand all the different technology. So, from mobile AR, virtual reality, mixed reality, and really seeing how we can utilize it for our learning curriculum. What we’ve understood is that this is not only a better scalable way for folks to learn, but also with the immersion it allows for elimination of digital distraction, as well as activating some of the brain regions that we need, and we understand from science, that will allow our learners to retain and apply the things that we’re trying to teach them better. So we’re super excited about the technology and all of its use cases that we’re using today.<!--
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You’ve heard of “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee”; get ready for “XR Moguls in an Uber at AWE.”
Alan holds a quick, guerilla-style backseat interview with Kris Kolo, Global Executive Director of the VR/AR Association. They discuss the awesome things they saw at the expo – like the VR pool party – and the VRARA’s upcoming Enterprise Summit at LiveWorx Boston on June 10.
The future is here, and it looks like…a hipster Colonel Sanders? Strange as it sounds, turning the antebellum-esque brand icon into a Millennial-friendly digital influencer is just one way that brands around the world are turning to XR to reach their audiences in inventive new ways.
Here to delve deeper into the ins-and-outs of marketing in XR is futurist Cathy Hackl, co-author of the brand-new book, Marketing New Realities. From Coachella, to virtual try-ons, and yes, even KFC’s “playboy chicken impresario,” Cathy explains how XR technologies will change the way we interact with our customers.
Alan: Today’s guest is Cathy Hackl. Cathy is a futurist, speaker, and amazing author. Cathy is an Emmy-nominated communicator-turned-augmented-and-virtual-reality-global-speaker, producer and, author. Cathy has worked with You Are Here Labs, HTC VIVE, as a virtual reality evangelist during the launch of their latest headset, the VIVE Pro, and during the company’s partnership with Warner Brothers blockbuster, Ready Player One. Cathy is also the co-author of Marketing New Realities: An Introduction to VR and AR Marketing, Branding and Communications. Cathy has been featured in media outlets like CNN, Silicon Beat, Entrepreneurs, CMO.com, Forbes Venture Beat, and so many more! She is a global adviser for the Virtual and Augmented Reality Association, and a leading voice in the VR space. For more information you can visit cathyhackl.com. It’s with great honor that I welcome developer/marketing specialist Cathy Hackl.
Welcome to the show, Cathy.
Cathy: Thank you Alan appreciate it. Happy to be here.
Alan: It’s such a great pleasure to have you. We’ve been very fortunate to have traveled around the world together, and been on different stages, and it’s so great to finally have you on on my show.
Cathy: I know! I’m really excited for your podcast. Congratulations.
Alan: Thank you so much. The idea with this podcast is to bring as much value as possible to businesses who are trying to kind of wrap their head around, “should I get into VR? What should I do? How do I get started?” All of that. So, I think you have an incredible insight as to this, and your book, Marketing New Realities. Let’s start there and kind of unpack some of the ways that marketers are starting to use virtual and augmented reality, and let’s dig in from there.
Cathy: For sure. So when we started the book — I co-authored it with Samantha Wolfe — when we started the book, you know, really the reason we wanted to do the book was to create an educational resource. For marketers, specifically, that had lots of questions that weren’t sure. And we created it as an educational resource for those marketers, that wanted questions answered. Also, as a way for marketers to educate their clients, right? They could bring the book to a meeting, they could leave the book with a potential client. So, you know, we just really put a lot of heart and soul into it, in making it something that people would be able to benefit from, from an educational standpoint. So it’s been quite successful, you know. We were at the South by Southwest bookstore. Adobe Summit had us up at their bookstore as well, so it’s been a wild ride, I have to say.
Alan: Absolutely incredible. So I actually had the pleasure of reading this book, maybe… it’s gonna be… when did you publish it?
Cathy: 2017, was it? I think it was 2017.
Alan: I remember reading it on a plane, and I was just glued to it. The whole flight, I read the book. And for those of you don’t know, it’s called M
The latest generation of XR technologies introduces radical new capabilities, from multi-user tracking in massive spaces, to 6DOF standalone headsets, to the ability to track hands, eyes, and lips. HTC’s Alvin Wang Graylin discusses what this means for everything from automotive design to helping children learn about the universe.
Alvin Wang Graylin is an industry leader, evangelist and passionate driver of XR technologies, particularly virtual reality. As the China President at HTC, he leads all aspects of the company’s VR and smartphone business in the region.
Alan: Today’s guest is an industry leader, evangelist and passionate driver of XR technologies, and particular virtual reality, Mr. Alvin Wang-Graylin. Mr. Graylin is the China President at HTC, leading all aspects of the Vive/VR (VIVE.com) and the Smartphone businesses in the region. For those of you not familiar with HTC Vive, VIVE is a first-of-its-kind virtual reality platform, built and optimized for room-scale VR and true-to-life interactions. Delivering on the promise of VR with game-changing technology and best-in-class content, VIVE has created the strongest ecosystem for VR hardware and software, bringing VR to consumers, developers and enterprises alike.
He is also currently Vice-Chairman of the Industry of Virtual Reality Alliance (IVRA.com) with 300+ company members, President of the $18B Virtual Reality Venture Capital Alliance (VRVCA.com) and oversees the Vive X VR Accelerators (VIVEX.co) in Beijing, Shenzhen and Tel Aviv. Mr. Graylin was born in China and educated in the US. He received his MS in computer science from MIT and MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Mr. Graylin graduated top of his department with a BS in electrical engineering from the University of Washington, where he had specialized in VR and AI over two decades ago under the tutelage of VR pioneer Tom Furness.
Please welcome to the show Mr. Alvin Wang-Graylin.
Alvin: Hi, how are you doing, Alan?
Alan: I’m fantastic. There we go, we got you now. Awesome. Where are you calling in from?
Alvin: I’m in Beijing, China.
Alan: Beijing right now. And what time is it? It’s gotta be in the middle of the night, I think.
Alvin: About 10:30 PM.
Alan: Oh, well thank you so much for taking the time to record this with us. I’m going to jump right into it. For the people listening, you know, really, really exciting things happening at HTC right now, and you just held your fourth annual VIVE Ecosystem Conference, or VEC conference in Shenzhen. Can you maybe speak to some of the announcements and how their impact is going to really impact business use cases of VR?
Alvin: Yeah, I’m happy to jump right in. We just had our yearly biggest conference of the year, and had about a thousand people come in, and about a hundred press, and essentially all the industry folks that are in China – and actually, quite a few folks from around Asia and even parts of the US – came. People, from the developers, from our sales channels, our accessory partners. A lot of investment companies, as well as Chinese carriers, governmental organizations that are involved with high tech. Essentially, what we do every year is gather together all of the leading players in the industry and try to create a unified direction. And the key direction that we were trying to point to this year is something called multi-mode VR. That’s when, you know, VR can be used, not just for one way of connecting, but it could be connected to your PC. It could be connected to 5G cloud VR. It can be connected to a console, or a 360 streaming camera, etc. So it’s a very exciting time for us in the industry, that these n
How will the convergence of 5G and AR and artificial intelligence lead to the creation of experiences that no one’s ever imagined? Join Forbes columnist and author Charlie Fink to find out!
Alan: Hello everybody. Today’s guest is one of my good friends and someone I consider a mentor. XR consultant, columnist, speaker, and author, Mr. Charlie Fink. Charlie Fink is a Forbes columnist and an author of two AR-enabled books – Charlie Fink’s Metaverse: A Guide to VR and AR, and Convergence: How the World Will Be Painted with Data. Charlie is a former Disney, AOL, and AG Interactive executive, famous for coming up with the idea that turned into The Lion King. Charlie was EVP and COO of VR Pioneer Virtual World Entertainment. He was an SVP of AOL Studios and president of the American Greetings Interactive. Charlie founded and exited to venture-backed startups and has produced over 30 award-winning Broadway musicals. Charlie is leading the way in XR for business by covering and reporting on everything XR-related. With that, let’s welcome Charlie Fink.
Charlie: Wow, I don’t know if I can live up to an introduction like that. Thank you Alan.
Alan: Oh you’re amazing. You’re amazing and thank you so much for being on the show. First of all I want to congratulate you on the launch of your new book Convergence, an AR-enabled book about AR. Maybe you can tell us a little bit about the book, and why it came to be.
Charlie: Well, we were looking at doing a second edition of the first book which sold very well, but it soon became apparent that the AR topic in particular had been sort of glossed over in the first book, which was largely about VR. So, I started to think about the idea of doing a new book, and I got a lot of support for it in the community. In fact, it is a sponsored book, meaning I got enough donations that I could afford to write the book and get it printed. It’s printed on premium paper and it’s priced high like a textbook at fifty dollars – of course it’s filled with an hour of animation – so it’s not a normal book and it doesn’t adhere to book economics. So to make it work I really needed to build a community of about 100 people around the book, many providing augmented scenes and many actually contributing thought leadership and reporting. The topic of the book kind of evolved because I, you know, originally I was thinking the title would be something like ‘the many modes of AR,’ or ‘how the world will be painted with data,’ which is a phrase I coined, which suggests a fully-scaleable AR cloud. Which would make the devices we use a whole lot more useful and interesting than they are today, where we use something called marker-based AR.
And as I got into the book and editing the work of my collaborators, it was clear everyone was talking about the same thing, which is this world of ubiquitous, wearable computing. What the final form factor will be we can debate, but this idea of a magic-verse based on a mirror world became the theme of the book, which is essentially the convergence of 5G and AR and artificial intelligence that would manage all of this data for you so that it is wanted and contextual. Otherwise, if it’s interrupting you, I don’t see how that’s possibly a welcome augmentation, right? It can’t be showing you advertising; it has to show you what you want when you want it or where you need it. You don’t need to see the weather in front of your eyes spatially, although it would be fun from time to time. But the truth is you know what the weather is.
So that became the title of the book, Convergence. And if you look at history you know there have been a number of moments of sort of platform innovation that launched heretofore uncon
We are about to see the largest transformation in human history. Artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, quantum computing, 5G, blockchain and virtual, augmented & mixed Reality are all maturing at the exact same time.
My name is Alan Smithson, and I am going to be your host for the XR for Business podcast where I will interview industry leaders who are either making or using immersive virtual, augmented and mixed reality solutions for business.
From marketing and sales to logistics and training to design and remote collaboration, you will learn how the world’s largest organizations are implementing an XR For Business strategy and why you should too.
We are about to see the largest transformation in human history. Artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, quantum computing, 5G, blockchain and virtual, augmented & mixed Reality are all maturing at the exact same time.
Anyone of these technologies on their own would be revolutionary but used together, we begin racing towards the Singularity or the point where the exponential curve of technology goes straight up, unlocking unprecedented value in the market.
Over the next 10 years, more than $1T in value will be created by virtual, augmented & mixed reality (XR). Our goal is to be the central community hub for XR for business and XR For education.
Our mission is simple: Hyper-Accelerate XR For Business & Education.
The XR for Business podcast will interview leaders from marketing, manufacturing, retail, training, HR, banking, insurance, emergency services, IT, and of course from virtual, augmented and mixed reality professionals creating the tools we will use to enter into the age of spatial computing.
The podcast is aimed at inspiring and educating business leaders who are looking for an advantage by leveraging the transformative power of XR.
This is our way of sharing our years of research, knowledge, successes and failures with you, our listeners in hopes that you will be better able to make sound investments in this technology to help you solve problems that affect us all; unnecessary business travel, retiring workforce, environmental impacts, job upskilling, automation, rapid employee onboarding, knowledge retention, remote operations and so many more. XR is solving these challenges in spectacular order.
This podcast interviews the world’s top brands across industries from retail and e-commerce to food service, telecommunications and education so you can glean information that is relevant to you.
Some of the technologies encompassed by the term XR include; 360° video, 3D Volumetric capture, photogrammetry, 3D modelling, virtual, augmented & mixed reality, computer vision, machine learning, and spatial audio, haptics, and even scent machines.
A little bit about me and how I came to host the XR For Business podcast: I am the Founder and CEO of MetaVRse alongside some very talented people including one I am particularly fond of, my wife and Co-Founder, Julie Smithson. We have been working in XR since 2014 when I first tried the Oculus Rift DK1.
MetaVRse is a leader in XR Solutions for business. Over the past 4 years, we have made some incredible world firsts; We built the first VR Photobooth™ for Samsung. We built the first Augmented Reality Teleportal for Genesys and Adobe. We made the first commercial WebAR project for Shoppers Drug Mart. We even built an AR app for HBO’s Westworld launch and a augmented reality sandbox for Kubota Tractors. We filmed Niagara Falls, Pride, Groove Cruise, and the Queen’s Plate in 360° video.
We have consulted for firms in almost every industry; telecom, mining, food service, retail, marketing, e-commerce and education.
It has been through these experiences that we have built