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