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 did this year. And I think of all the updates we did, this one truly makes it a universally accessible product to the world. And I'm just super excited about that. And to everybody who worked on this: Walid [Abdelaty], our CTO; Paul [Konieczny], our chief product officer; Jonathan [Moss], our chief commercial officer, who takes us and brings it to enterprise; and Julie [Smithson], our chief learning officer. You, Alex, our VP of marketing. Thank you. I want to thank everybody. Sergei [Sachkov], our VP of Research and Development and of course, Octavio, our creative director. We could not be making this product without each and every one of these people, along with the long list of developers as well that are working on this behind the scenes. So I want to say thank you to everybody at the team. It's been a wonderful year. What we've accomplished in nine months is just simply incredible. And I cannot wait to make some huge announcements in early 2021 that will set this world on fire. Let's do it!

Alex: Picking up on Julie, by the way: we've got her on the line. Would love to get her update on the XR Collaboration project, which we had launched earlier this year to some fanfare and really has just been continuing to evolve a behind the scenes. Julie?

Julie: Thanks, Alex. Yeah, it's been an exciting year just in change of educating and learning. And I think COVID, what it has really taught everybody is that you need to consistently learn, and there's no stopping and learning. And learning every day is so important, especially at a time right now, where we need to be so agile about the changes that are happening in our ecosystems, whether they be personal, in our personal lives of what we're dealing with, or professional. So I was proud to be able to pull the XR Collaboration project together along with yourself, Alex and some other great partners, coalition partners in the ecosystem, along with Terry Schussler from Deutsche Telekom and Raffaella Camera from Accenture. Back six months ago when we started to create this project of providing everybody with a resource of how to collaborate online using XR technologies. So the two different components about that, one being the resource guide, just starting to learn about how to meet as an avatar, which hardware to use, the accessibility challenges that are out there and really writing. And we produced a 65 page resource guide on how this could take place in your world. And also with that, we also added a directory of over 70 different XR platforms that are out there, that support online collaboration and remote collaboration. So really, the lessons that we learned out of XR Collaboration is this new, immersive, remote way of connecting digitally online. And for the majority of the world, it's been that transformation of Zoom, and Zoom becoming part of our lives, over meeting after meeting. But the future is really taking a plunge into these immersive collaboration platforms and really honing in on that word, collaboration. So really proud to be a part of that. And Alex, you were an instrumental part of executing that project. Thank you.

Alex: And some significant updates coming to it fairly soon, too. We're recording in mid-December, but this will be coming out much closer to the end of the year.

Julie: That's right. One of the things I think that is a major challenge as we move towards exponential growth is dealing with hardware -- of VR headsets, augmented reality headsets, mixed reality headsets -- and what are their best use cases and which programs are best used for them. So we're really excited to be launching the hardware hub, where everybody will be able to come and take a look at these devices. We look to move them into 3D interactive experiences on the website and that'll be launched in 2021. But first and foremost is getting this information and resources out there so people can start to learn about this technology, what is out there, what their options are for multiple different use cases. Again, it comes back to learning, and that's the focus of XR Collaboration, is to provide that.

Alex: And if folks want to be able to access that resource now, they can head over to xrcollaboration.com, the resource guide, the directory, and lots of little extras all there for the taking.

Julie: Absolutely. And just to highlight a couple of new focuses that we're going to be implementing over the next weeks are a focus on resources for parents and families, as well as more accessibility, contributions and interactive design for accessibility, which is really exciting as a means of inclusivity. So really looking forward to having the support of our team. We're also going to focus on cybersecurity and also on mindfulness, introducing a brand new XR initiative of having the mind boosted and focusing on that healthy mentality. So collaboration comes in all forms, and I'm proud to be part of helping create this resource for everyone.

Alex: I think over the past year, one of the biggest pieces has been that everybody is looking forward to being able to meet in person again. I think everybody is looking forward to being able to shake hands and hug and all the rest. But at the same time, we've also been exposed to some of the possibilities and some of the challenges of collaborating at a distance. Everybody's familiar with the bad Zoom meeting, and the poor connectivity, or everybody sort of struggling to get on to the same page, and just staring at flat faces on a screen all day. We've seen how good it can be. We've seen how bad it can be. And I think that's going to create a lot more pressure for these XR collaboration platforms in the new year.

Julie: Absolutely. And switching over to just the biggest change, I think there's the work challenges that we had. But let's dive into education, which is a huge piece that I've been a part of in understanding, just like every other parent watching their kids go through the challenges of what's going on in your own household. How is your daughter, son connecting into their classroom? How are they communicating with their friends? Then seeing how the teachers are adapting. So I'm opening up a can of worms when it comes to education, because there's so many things that need to change. But what COVID has taught us this year is that education needed to change. It was forced to change. And while COVID obviously has a lot of negativity, COVID basically forced that change that was desperately needed to elevate our education to where it needs to be. We're going through a lot of really big challenges right now, from understanding that digital network and connectivity support systems are being built as we speak. And I'm happy to say I've been a part of them that are recognizing these bigger challenges of how we're going to support teachers. How are we going to support those new classrooms? How are we going to support families, and most of all, the students? And I think this is the power of this change comes back to this technology allows so many stems of education and support and outlets for us to continue to be social. It allows us to continue to be creative and almost draws us in to be creative. And that's what we need most, is we need these creativity outlets so that we can be the people who we want to be and allow those students to thrive in their places and teachers to be able to teach what they're passionate about. So I think this technology, what it's taught us this year is to embrace it and also to be supportive for one another in a collaborative way. Coming back to my XR Collaboration, we can't do this alone. Nobody can. And XR Collaboration introduces that way of thinking, that way of training each other, and mentoring each other, and using that technology to express our creativity. So education has got a lot of challenges. I think we have to be really patient and kind with each other right now, as we go through these. And I kind of accepted a while ago, I just thought, "You know what, this school year is just going to be all about discovery and figuring out what systems work, and also helping those who are very challenged with adapting to digital transformation." But it's certainly highlighted the good and what we need to do for education and building the skillsets for the future of tomorrow. And that's where businesses are changing so quickly. Our ecosystem of change is happening so dramatically. And this is where Alan's going to jump in in a minute and talk about all of these big changes that have happened in the corporate world. And right behind it, education's trying to adapt to all of these changes.

Alex: Well, why don't we kick that portion of it off, get into the big stories of the year? Obviously, COVID sort of in the background of all of them, but some of the big ones, we saw closures, we saw buyouts, we saw acquisitions. We saw some players benefiting from the new environment. We saw other players going completely out of business. Do you want to dig into some of that?

Alan: Yeah, it was a-- I mean-- COVID aside, this is just the way technology goes, when you have a new technology of the world and it has explosive start and lots of investment. Some things work, some things don't, it's just the natural order of things. But this year was just like, OK, if you weren't doing well before COVID, you're done, you're dead. Pfft, done! It just like-- it expedited the death of some companies. And rightfully they were going to die anyway, so maybe it's just better that way. It also expedited, I think, a lot of acquisitions by larger companies, because there's still a lot of money in the ecosystem. I mean, the US fed printed $7-trillion and pumped it into the economy. So there's money there. The problem is the larger companies have all of it. And so what they do is they end up buying up all the smaller companies. And so we've seen a lot of acquisitions. And because these acquisitions happened in maybe a time of distress, they ended up being a good bargain for the large companies, but maybe not so great for the small entrepreneurs that were doing them. But with that, we also saw the pandemic itself wipe out an entire category of this entire industry, so location based entertainment just disappeared.

Alex: RIP, LBE. [chuckles]

Alan: [laughs] Exactly! Sounds like a rap song. But honestly, I mean, that's gone. So you avoid the original location based entertainment. They were in all sorts of cineplexes. They were in theaters around the world. They had great locations everywhere. They had partnerships with Disney. Gone. Then you had Sandbox VR, which-- I think it was Andreessen Horowitz put a bunch of money in, a bunch of celebrities. It was super awesome. They were opening in malls all over. They had a great business plan. Yeah, gone. So they didn't deserve that at all, and there's no way that you could have foreseen that. So there has been those types of things. Then you look on the other side and say, OK, well, that's the doom and gloom. But Zoom is worth a 1000x what it was a year ago. So there's that. And then platforms like Hopin that are worth billions of dollars now. So anybody who had a reasonable platform for video conferencing and events and things like this skyrocketed. And so it just happened to have the right timing. If you were location based entertainment, not so much. But if you happened to have a video chat thing and-- we saw this with SPACES.

Alex: Mm-hm.

Alan: This is one unique identifier that sits on both sides. So a group called SPACES -- out of LA -- and they had locations all over the world. And I actually happened to be a part of the Museum of the Future Accelerator with Shiraz [Akmal]. Hey Shiraz, what's up? These guys, they had a location-based entertainment setup, and COVID hit and they immediately pivoted all their technology over to creating a plug-in for VR, so you could participate in a Zoom call from VR. Pretty cool technology, very straightforward. Once you see it, it's obvious. But they created it in reaction to not being able to do their real business. And so Apple bought them shortly thereafter. So SPACES was acquired quietly by Apple this year. And Apple also earlier this year acquired NextVR, which-- that company has all the licensing rights to real-time capture in 360 of NASCAR, and NBA, and all of the other sports. Golf, I think. everything. So now Apple has the rights to 360 stream or VR stream sports, so that's pretty cool. So if you kind of look at this landscape of acquisitions and what's happening, you'll start to see these things happen. Another acquisition that happened this year, which ended up being pretty large, was the Niantic acquisition of 6D.ai.

Alex: Mm-hm.

Alan: 6D.ai was a cloud mapping system, and it kind of really speaks to Niantic's long term vision of creating persistent 3D experiences throughout the world and with their massive success of Pokémon Go. And they launched this year, I believe, Harry Potter, which is a cool game. I got to play it. It's like just a story driven thing. It's a really great. Anyway, if you haven't tried it, try it out. But you've got this amazing company, Niantic, who's making hit after hit, but also obviously has a vision for a much larger kind of metaverse, if you would. Speaking of things like MetaVRse, you have Invidia, who just announced Omniverse this week, which is their kind of persistent, collaborative platform for high quality virtual reality running in the cloud. So they're using cloud processing to be able to stream that down to you. So there's a lot of big players and a lot of moves being made. Qualcomm announced this year they're XR1 chip, which is a chip that will power all the new kind of AR glasses and VR headsets. And it's a super powerful chip that will allow you to have AI built in for facial tracking and object recognition in these types of things, but also allow you to have-- I think it's up to seven cameras. So front facing cameras, IR cameras, eye tracking cameras, facial tracking cameras, all of these things. They're creating kind of reference designs for the world to build on. We also saw a growth of AR glasses, not in America and not North America, not the rest of the world, but in China. China launched this year a slew of different AR glasses everywhere, everyone from Oppo to Nreal to MAD Gaze, all launched this year. I believe that there's going to be this really fervent growth of AR glasses as the world starts to make really cool content for it. Right now, China is kind of leading the way. They're putting out the glasses in the world. But there's going to be a bit of a barrier to entry to there, because creating the content still requires you to code, which is, again, why we created the code optional system in the MetaVRse engine. But this is the stumbling block, is that we need everybody to be able to create this content for these glasses. So that's kind of a high level overview of some of the big acquisition, big things that are happening this year. There's a ton more, oh my goodness, it could go on and on. We have done one 150 episodes. This is our 150th episode of the XR for Business podcast. So I just want to say, if anybody's out there listening, thank you so much for listening to this podcast, for taking time with us every week to go through an interview and really listen to the industry leaders who are either making or using the technology. I really want to hear from you guys. Please feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, send me a message. Let's continue the conversation. I want to know what episodes you want to hear. If there's something you want to learn about, we'll definitely do that. And don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss any episodes in the future as well. Alex, with that, I know there's been some updates from some of the guests on the show.

Alex: Yeah. Why don't we kick that over, actually? Bringing up China is a good opportunity to sort of highlight some success that we heard from Kai Liang from MEL Science. They recently made their VR education content available on China Mobile's cloud VR service, which is the first time that a major national telecom operator has invested in the copyright on branded VR education content. A lot of the times they'll pay for movies, they'll pay for entertainment, they'll pay for games. But this is really the first time that we've seen a significant move towards education. And again, this is within the Chinese market.

Alan: Yaaay! If we could only market education like we market Hollywood movies and AAA games, we'll be all right as humanity.

Alex: Yeah, seriously. There have been 150 episodes with this episode today. That we've had over 130 guests talking about what they've been up to. We reached out to them earlier this week, asking them what was your biggest success in 2020? What was your biggest challenge? And where do you see XR going in 2021? We heard from Alvin Wang Graylin from HTC talking about 2021 and beyond. He wrote that 2020 has helped to highlight the benefits of XR in a major way to many people that were unaware. The long term change in user behavior of people around the world to make the world more digitized will only accelerate the demand and adoption for XR globally. Alan, where do you see us going in 2021? And what are some of the core technologies that we're seeing right now that are going to help propel that?

Alan: So 2021, I think-- you have to kind of look where the money-- if you follow the money, you'll be able to map out where it's going. Twelve months ago I put a prediction on LinkedIn saying that I thought -- based on some of the things that we're seeing coming out of Unity -- that Unity was going to go public within the next 12 months. That was a year ago. Sequoia put $5-million into them at a $6.4-billion valuation back in December last year. And then fast forward to September 2020, Unity went public at-- I think they launched at something like a $24-billion valuation at launch. And today they're sitting at a $40-billion valuation.

Alex: You called it.

Alan: Now-- yeah, yeah I did. But I didn't see how much-- how big they are now. They are a $40-billion market cap company. You are talking about a game engine that makes video games on phones and computers, that's worth 40 billion dollars. Now, you could say, "OK, maybe that's an outlier." But then you look at Unreal. You look at Epic. And Epic just raised some money as well last year at a seventeen point four dollars billion valuation. So here you have these two massive game engines driving the content creation. And all these concerts are being built on Epic, and Epic's filming Hollywood movies now, because people can't go to sound stages. You're seeing the world go digital and the creation tools to make such exploding. And I think this is only going to continue in 2021, because ultimately the manufacturers of the glasses are making them cheaper, better, faster. Just all the things. We're experiencing exponential growth in chipsets, we're at five nanometer chips now. If anybody wants to see an evolution of technology, look at the M1 chip from Apple. Now, as soon as that M1 chip in, let's say, another two years is in your pocket on your phone, it's going to be able to power glasses that are ten times more powerful than your MacBook. This is where we're going. The hardware is just accelerating at an insane pace, because you got to remember, exponential growth is exponential. We're playing on the back side of the chessboard now. So if you-- long story, look it up.

Alex: [laughs]

Alan: Put a piece of rice on the first board and then double it every square and the second half of the chessboard gets nuts. We are, as humanity, on the second half of that chessboard. And so everything's compiling on itself. Research into computer vision is exploding, research into augmented reality exploding. And so if you follow the money and you follow the technology, what it leads to is-- I would have said that we were going to go completely phone-to-face in, say, 2025 to 2027. That was my prediction. I figured it was going to take five more years to do that. With the fact that there's now millions and millions of AR glasses -- very lightweight, inexpensive AR glasses that run off the power of your phone -- being pumped into the market right now, and with Apple being an outlier, having a whole bunch of technologies that wrap around that: eye tracking, they acquired Ventana for occlusion, all sorts of things, they even bought a game engine: Metaio. So you have this technology growing and you have these big players making big, long bets on this. Oculus came up with a $300 VR headset that rivals anything in the market. You have HTC in China dominating the Chinese market with their headsets. So I think really 2021 is going to be a year of extraordinary growth for 2D platforms, and as people learn to develop 3D games and apps on 2D screens -- phones, tablets, and computers -- that will be the gateway to lead us into the head-worn glasses. And probably mass adoption of that will start in kind of 2023 and progressed to 2025. So 2021 is going to be a real time of developing really great content for the mobile phones. We've got understand mobile phones are-- there's billions of them and they're growing incredibly fast. In fact, if you look at the entire gaming industry, it's about one $165-billion. Half of that is a mobile. And that's the most the fastest growing segment.

Alex: Daniel Blair from Bit Space -- and actually a couple of other respondents, too -- had said that one of the more interesting byproducts of this year was that more companies than ever are looking at XR technology for solving problems, except for the folks like the LBEs who were tied to in-person events or in-person experiences. It seems like almost everybody else has been more busy as a result. What does that critical mass kind of look like? Because I think if you talk to different people, you hear different years. "We hit critical mass in 2020." "We will hit critical mass in 2021." Is it that we're talking about different definitions of critical mass?

Alan: I think people are-- yeah-- I was going to say, what's the definition of critical mass? My definition of mass consumer adoption of the product is the 100 million devices. So when will we have 100 million VR devices in the market? We're probably going to do 20 million this year. I don't know, a couple of years. But people define it in different ways. I don't want to-- I hate making these crazy predictions. Look, we know that everybody in the world has a phone in their pocket. Build for that, knowing that the glasses are going to tether to that. So, just know. That's all you need to know. And it will probably be delivered from the web, because there's a lot of turmoil around app stores right now. So-- and I don't want to get into that. This is not the podcast for that. We'll have a whole separate one on that.

Alex: [chuckles]

Alan: What enterprise clients are looking for now are things that replace face-to-face meetings, and training is a big one because you can't train people now. You can't fly people in, you can't fly people out. There's a huge problem. And I think it's being solved nicely and eloquently with these technologies, whether it's AR on the phone or just 3D on a phone, being able to look at a machine and look at it from all angles and understand it. One of the projects we delivered for a large medical device manufacturer was just a simple training application. We took their 200 page manual. We took all their PDFs, all their videos, and turned it into a 3D experience where you could learn to unscrew every nut, bolt, and screw on it and replace the hard drive, or the fan, or the whatever. You could replace every part, never having read a manual at all. So I could give this 3D thing to anybody over a link -- it's just a web link -- and you could put it beside the machine and follow step by step instructions. And by the end you would be able to replace any part of that machine. That is where this is going, in my opinion. As soon as you see it and try it, you're like, "Oh. We can't go back to paper manuals." You can't unsee that. And I think that once people realize that they can solve a lot of their problems in training, marketing, communications with clients, sales. What about meeting up with a client in a little mall or like a little location where you can-- it's like a video game you're playing together, right? And I saw something really cool the other day called ComplexLand to me. This is the absolute future of retail. Look up complexland.com. These guys built a full game world where you could walk around the world fully free and go and just stick your head in places. It would be a little pop-up store that popped up with maybe new t-shirts. They were able to take the Main Street economy -- or the one and two person shops -- and give them a global presence and give them a place. And there was other brands, Pradas and stuff like that. But there was a lot of independent little stores in there. I think it was just a really great way for youth to go and shop in a way that is novel. It's exciting. Every button I pressed, there was something else [that] happened. There was concerts. It was really cool. They mixed art with shopping, music. It was just-- it was really, really cool. And it didn't feel corporate-y at all. It just felt cool. And I think you're going to see a lot more of that type of thing.

Alex: I also wanted to highlight something that we heard from Mike Campbell at PTC, which was really nice. We asked him what his biggest success of the year was, and he wrote "As limitations imposed by the COVID crisis, social distancing, and lockdowns made it hard for front line workers to do their jobs, the value of the industrial augmented reality market became abundantly clear. At PTC early on, we made the decision to offer our fully functional Vuforia Chalk available for free to anyone who could benefit from it during the crisis. This is for remote assistance. Over 25,000 individuals took advantage of that. The best part was knowing that we were doing our small part to help frontline workers who were struggling, in addition to giving them an opportunity to try new technology that they might not have before. In a year where there's been so much difficulty for everyone, doing our part to make people's lives easier goes in the success column for sure."

Alan: Oh man. PTC is an amazing company. It really is. I got to go to their conference when we had-- [chuckle] pre-COVID, when we had real conferences.

Alex: Real conferences!

Alan: With people! Holy crap! I had the distinct pleasure of going to their conference and I met some amazing, amazing people. The speaker lineup was insane. I ended up meeting Jonathan Moss there and DP Prakash and just a whole bunch of wonderful people. I digress. They bought a product called Vuforia back from Qualcomm, I believe in 2016 or 2017. Anyway, they bought the product. And they just they built an entire ecosystem around this amazing product. And that Chalk program is pretty simple when you think about it. I pull out my phone, it engages the front camera, and allows the other person to see what I'm seeing, and then draw on my world. Now, what they've been able to do with their object recognition, though, is truly amazing. Not only can you draw on the person's world, but you can leave it anchored there. So if I'm looking at a machine and I hold my phone up and then the expert on the other end can see what I'm seeing and say, "Oh, there's the screw!" They put a little arrow, and that arrow stays fixed in 3D space. Now imagine when you're wearing glasses, that's going to be perfect. But even just with your phone, that is enough to show you how to solve that problem remotely without having to fly somebody in and fly somebody out. Tools like that, like Chalk, and I think Microsoft has their version of it as well on Hololens and other things. Those remote assistance applications are truly magnificent and they don't cost a lot of money. They gave it away for free this year. So if you run an operation where you do any sort of manufacturing, you definitely need to have this on all your employees phones.

Alex: Yeah, it's just a lot of these technologies that we've been carrying around for so long, which are improving in terms of connectivity, in terms of processing capabilities, in terms of their underlying technologies like cameras, they're really being unlocked for new things. One thing that we heard quite a bit about throughout the course of the year has been this sort of rising tide of 5G. I wanted to know if you wanted to dig into that a little bit.

Alan: Yeah, 5G. It's faster than 4G, right?

Alex: [laughs] Well, I hope so.

Alan: [laughs] So actually I had-- was very lucky to be invited to a fireside chat with Deutsche Telekom's head of spatial computing, Terry Schussler. We got into why it's important to XR. One of the things that you realize is that the promise of 5G being a thousand times faster, a hundred times faster or whatever it was, was the millimeter wave 5G. And there's limited instances when you can do that, because it doesn't go through walls. It's a limited bandwidth, because it really doesn't have a line of sight path through glass and walls and things. But in an industrial factory or something where you can have line of sight to all your machines, you now have instant, instant, latent free zero latency-- not zero, but you get my point. Very quick.

Alex: Near zero latency.

Alan: And you have the ability to transfer data instantly. This is a game changer for enterprises. Now, what it means for consumers is totally different. Maybe you can download movies faster, you can do this. But imagine your frontline healthcare worker, for example, in a hospital. Now, that person who's in the field can beam out to-- they can put on a pair of glasses, you can see what they're doing, they can walk you through complex procedures instantly with zero latency, so that there's not any issues here and you can save lives. They've also carved out a bandwidth of 5G specifically for emergency services so that they're never affected by too much load on the system. So this is really interesting because you've got kind of these layers of 5G that will serve different parts of the world and communities. If you take it down to how this impacts XR specifically in order to have a persistent metaverse where we wear glasses and the world just is your computer, there's no way to do that without reducing the latency to effectively less than kind of fifty milliseconds roundtrip everywhere, or else you'll start to see glitches and then you'll start to feel sick. This is one of the reasons why cloud gaming has always had a bit of a struggle, because once you hit any latency in a cloud streaming, it really messes it, it gets all pixellated. Imagine wearing that on your face, it's going to make motion sick. So until that technology is a little bit further ahead, we're going to be able to beam things like locational data, spatial data, all instantly. And so 5G really is going to empower this. And the other part about it is that as technology gets better, of course, we want to jam more into it. You look at the first time I was on the Internet, you couldn't do video. Obviously, you couldn't do audio. You could literally type some thing. So I used to get emails with-- remember when you'd get an e-mail, "buffering".

Alex: Buffering. [laughs] You'd walk away from the computer, you'd get a cup of coffee, you'd come back, it's mostly loaded, you at least know what it is now.

Alan: You don't think about it these days, like look what we have now. I can instantly watch a 4K video on my laptop and my phone while watching VR, all at the same time. Like, it's just-- pfft! It's mind-boggling. [chuckles]

Alex: We're so old, Alan.

Alan: Yeah. When I started university, we had like three computers on the campus. Anyway, the long story short about 5G is that it's coming this year. It's really accelerating. T-Mobile bought Sprint this year and is really pushing. So the reason why T-Mobile and Sprint merged, actually Sprint had one part of the bandwidth, the 5G and T-Mobile had the other. They kind of put it together. Now they've got the whole thing. So it's really an exciting time. I think 5G is going to be prevalent in major cities. Now, we can't also ignore things like Starlink that are also happening. Obviously, you're going to have some serious latency issues if you're trying to do persistent XR with Starlink. But at least this can get to rural areas and the least they can participate in the digital revolution. So I think there's going to be a lot of filling in of the blanks where satellite just is the natural thing. You can't-- it doesn't make sense to run cables way out there, but satellite beam is there. So I think we're filling in the blanks for where there's no coverage for high speed Internet. We're in really good position in 2021 to really leverage these higher speeds and higher bandwidth, and push the the envelope, in which-- one thing I have to say about our MetaVRse engine is that everybody dismissed the web as a conduit to build and distribute high quality games and experiences, just because it sucked. It did. The Web just always kind of sucked. We're challenging that status quo. We're able to create very high quality experiences on the web and deliver them through the web. So the benefit to that is you don't have to worry about the app stores, just publish it and send it to anybody instantly.

Alex: There's some really incredible developers who have done a lot of really stellar work in WebXR. My experience generally has been that the web has been a very long time in catching up, for a number of different reasons. The browser is a very constrictive sandbox and there were a lot of workarounds that had to happen. JavaScript is not especially well optimized as a language, but there have been some really incredible things done beneath the surface of the browsers themselves. Chrome and Firefox and others have really come a long way. A lot of the core libraries have really been expanded and extended out, and we are really finally now starting to see the dawn of some really strong web experiences that are not just visual toys or experiments, but compelling environments.

Alan: Agreed to that. Complex Land was all running on the web. It was amazing. It's crazy what you're able to do now. And I think people dismissed the web for a long time. But I think it's having its renaissance moment, because it's literally so universal. Everybody's on the web. I mean, I have Slack, but I don't open the Slack app, I just have it as a tab on Chrome. Everything that I do on my daily basis is just a bunch of tabs across the top of my Chrome. I don't open anything else, hardly. Well, Zoom opens in app, but I mean, I'm sure they don't even need to do that.

Alex: Yeah, two words as far as web is concerned. And I know you're going to love this. "30 percent."

Alan: [laughs] Yeah, the app stores take everything. And actually we're going to see some interesting things. Epic sued Apple and Google this year over the duopoly of the app stores. That was in response to Apple kicking Fortnite off the app store when Epic pushed an update that allowed you to bypass the Apple store and buy it from Epic directly, which violates Apple's terms and conditions. So there's that. I mean, Epic took on the Goliaths of the industry. Now, Epic's not a small company, don't feel bad for them. But they're a $17-billion company. Apple's a $1.7-trillion company. That's a thousand times larger. So... [laughs]

Alex: That battle is still ongoing in different forms. Where do you see that going in 2021?

Alan: Well, the courts, I believe, are going to see it in-- I want to say June. I can't remember, I'll look it up while we're talking. But I think--”Epic v. Apple”... just, Google it. I actually wrote a whole article called "Could Web-Based Game Engines Be the End of the App Stores?" We'll put it in the show notes. And in there, I've actually been just keeping it up to date with all the news. So I just use it as my place to keep all the news for this.

Alex: The other big news that we've got just recently has been this lawsuit by the FTC, that's a direct shot across Facebook's bow.

Alan: Just blocked the sale of Oculus, because in German law, you can't have one product that forces you to get another to have it. And Oculus forces you to get Facebook to have Oculus.

Alex: So 2020 has been a year where the giants have really been enriched, despite the COVID pandemic. But in the tail end of the year, it does seem like there are some significant breakup efforts underway by regulators and by other players within the industry.

Alan: Facebook is going to get broken up for sure. Apple, I don't know how they've managed to stay out of the kind of crosshairs, but with this Epic lawsuit, who knows what's going to happen? We have a different leadership coming in and one that is more in tune to the needs of the people, it seems like. And the needs of the people is higher taxes on larger corporations. And so, we'll see what happens. This is for the US courts to decide, but I would I would predict that there's going to be some breakups of these companies, similar to the Microsoft breakup back in the 2000s or 90's, I guess. So I think we're in for some interesting cases. Maybe it's time, because if you look at everything that's happening in the startup world, startups are just getting gobbled up or put out of business. There's no in between right now. So it's hard to-- it's hard to compete with the goliaths in an industry.

Alex: I think it'll also be interesting to see how the Biden administration handles these companies. Kamala Harris was California's Attorney General. She has Wall Street and Silicon Valley support. She's known as being somewhat moderate as far as going after big business is concerned. But it'll be really interesting to see to what extent they might end up having some teeth, especially moving into the next four years and considering what Facebook has done to American political life.

Alan: If you haven't seen The Social Dilemma, watch it. And if you don't, delete your Facebook, you should. But having said that, I have nothing against Facebook. The people that work there, the company itself had not one malicious thought. It's a consequence of building a platform that billions of people use. There's going to be bad actors all over the place and you have to work on that. Have they done enough to to curb that? I don't know. That's for other people to decide. But inherently, the people that work there, they don't want to see the place they work at create turmoil in the world and create problems where there was none. So I think they're they're going to take a hard look inside and try to fix some of these problems. But maybe breaking them up isn't a bad idea, even for the shareholders. When Standard Oil is broken up in the early 1900s, it became 20 different companies, I think it was. And each one of those companies became bigger than the Standard Oil that broke up. Same thing with the telcos. So breaking up, maybe will can add some variety and spice to to the world and then just kind of shake things up a bit. I don't know if it's a bad thing.

Alex: Yeah, there's something stultifying about being so big.

Alan: When Apple goes from taking 30 years to become a trillion-dollar company and taking 12 months to become a two-trillion-dollar company. Come on, this is crazy.

Alex: And just sort of a little bit off side, Alan. I don't I think we've really covered quite a few things. Is there anything that we feel like we've sort of left off, I think, or do we want to move to the ramp-up?

Alan: I don't think there's anything else left. Nothing major, really, that we missed. Anything major that we missed?

Alex: I think we're good. It's one of those years where-- it was a year where centuries happened. But before we close out, we should take a moment to thank all of our past guests who took the time to write in and give us some of their feedback on the year that was and the year that we're moving into. We're going to be posting an article with some more of your feedback, as well as tweets throughout the last week of the year, just highlighting some of the people's thoughts and stories, book recommendations from Terry Schussler. If you haven't read Flatland before, give it a read. I've read it three times and I see new things in it each time.

Alan: Yeah. Thank you to the people who were on the show, but also to you guys for taking the time to listen to it. It really means a lot. And again, please feel free to reach out. I just-- I want to be part of a community that helps each other. And so I hope we can all help each other. If there's anything that I can help with you, please let me know. And on behalf of everybody at the MetaVRse team, I want to say thank you, and Merry Christmas, and a huge happy new year to everybody. Let's close off 2020 with a bang and let's look to the future with bright, rosy glasses. Because I think the future is bright, we're going to need shades. I'm Alan Smithson, the host of the XR for Business podcast and this has been our 2020 wrap-up. Thank you so much. Happy New Year.

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 communications to how they communicated with their internal audiences, their employees and externally their customers. And we focused on training, learning and development, seeing that that was a true win for just about everybody, as people are looking to onboard people faster as we get a younger audience with Millennials and Gen Zs. They do not want to be in a classroom with a talking head looking at a PowerPoint. They want immersive tools. They want on-demand. They want videos. They want 3D. And so that's what we focused on. Happy to say, just a month ago, we launched the platform. And now it's time to take it to market.

Alan: Congratulations. That must be amazing. Is it one of those platforms that it will be a never ending increase of functionality, or have you kind of nailed the functionality down that your customers have been requesting? I know it's hard to tell the tech teams to take it easy on the functions.

John: Well, we all know that the roadmap will keep us busy for the next year and a half. It's almost like, "OK, which are we going to do first, second, third, fourth, fifth?" But that's why it's been good we've been so active in the market. We get guidance from clients. We get guidance from prospects.

Alan: There's nothing quite like a product roadmap driven by somebody willing to write a check for those products.

John: [chuckles] Well, that helps, too. But one thing, if you see enough people, you start seeing some things repeat certain needs. And the one thing that always struck out for me -- dating back to some of the first times we were at the training magazine conferences with TechLearn and then DevLearn -- when people would come by our booth and see what they did, they just kept repeating, "Oh my gosh, mobile! On-demand! Just in time! You're solving many of the problems I have!" It could be somebody at Lowe's or Home Depot and they'd go, "Hey, we got a situation. We need job aides for performance support." So we've been very focused on performance support. Another area that has kind of jumped out for us, too: take some of the quick service restaurants -- the QSRs -- look at the turnover they might have. And why shouldn't it be the same subject matter expert teaching that sandwich artist how to make the most perfect sandwich? There's many things that are repeatable, and so why not use the best content for that purpose? And one that's really jumped out at us-- and I'm not being shy of calling the CEOs at AstraZeneca or Pfizer or the other leaders with our vaccine solutions. They should be including our very simple to use point-touch-learn solutions in the packages. So you probably know the terms, PI, Package Inserts, and--

Alan: Of course.

John: --also IFU, Instructions For Use. What we've created is beautiful for that purpose, and so easy and fast for a team to add AR to those types of instructions.

Alan: But would an example of that be? What would the need for AR over just delivering it on a 2D device?

John: Well, in the case of, let's say, what's going on with the detection kits, would that be a good one? COVID-19 detection kits.

Alan: Perfect one. Actually very, very timely and apt. Nobody knows how to use those damn things.

John: Well, especially the ones that you got to stick this nine inch thing up your nostril. I mean, it's scary as all get out.

Alan: We got the test this week and we-- the whole family came back negative. So think positive, test negative, everyone.

John: Exactly. But some of these package inserts, as you've probably seen over the years, could be in font size six, six languages, and nobody looks at it. Now imagine if you actually had user-friendly, relevant, current information. Point your camera. Next thing you know, you have a subject matter expert video. You have step-by-steps. You have FAQs. You have a link to purchase more things. You have a call-to-action button in case you had to call an 800 number to get some communication that way. So, the immediate--

Alan: Now with things like Synthesia and stuff, where you can have it all in different languages too, with the click of an AI button.

John: Yes.

Alan: Imagine that, power of that.

John: And depending upon the complexity of the situation, you can use 3D product explosions, put labels as you explode that engine, explode that body part, explode that COVID-19 cell. You can now go deep on it with 3D tools that are baked into the platform. So it's as simple as somebody uploading an FBX file into the platform. We accept it. And next thing you know, it's pushed out to the world in 3D in a matter of minutes.

Alan: It's something I saw post today from the CEO of Sketchfab, Alban [Denoyel]. And he, with the new phones -- the iPhone 12, and the iPad, and the Samsung Galaxy S20 and up -- they all have infrared scanners on them now. So creating 3D assets is actually about to be a lot easier as well. It's interesting how you can create an asset and then share with the world instantly. What are some of the challenges around organizations deploying this, or even just getting started when you go to meet with a new customer? What is the-- I guess what is the value proposition you lead with and how do you solve their problems?

John: I think for many of the people we talked to, it could be lowering their costs. It could be speed to market. It could be surprise and delight your audience. Almost everybody wants to do that, right? They want their audience to have a wonderful experience. I swear, Alan, every time we show the outcome of our platform, almost the first response is, "Oh wow! Oh man! That's cool!" You know? So I don't underestimate the power of surprise and delight and the importance of it. But going back to more the training side, the engagement, the reducing of the training time, the immediacy of the job aid to solve the problem. Today, I was on with a dental platform company that does 3D and 3D printing and they literally -- their technicians and others, or the dentists themselves -- needed to talk about just-in-time, on-demand, in-context solutions while the patient was in the chair. They needed the answer *now*. [chuckles] So when we think of just-in-time, when we think of on-demand, almost all of our clients get that.

And as we're dealing with a "Hey, let's look at our society today." The Internet, the mobile now accounts for more than half of the Internet traffic. 88 percent of the traffic on mobile devices is with apps. And it's almost like people demand an app, because web browsers are still pretty clunky and wonky. Not to say we're not focused on WebAR, because we are. That will serve a certain particular type of audience for certain. But until the world gets a little bit more stable in that arena, most people -- certainly on the corporate side -- are very comfortable to be having their audiences use secured apps that can have a wide variety of training solutions that are all secured, protected with amazing analytics. So that's all part of it, too. Many of the clients are super interested in the analytics that can almost feed into their machine learning. If they start looking at, "Hey, why did so many of our people look at this video so often? Did they like the messaging, or was it they just didn't know that subject matter and we didn't do a good job--"

Alan: That could be, too.

John: "--a very good job training--"

Alan: You watched it five times because it doesn't make any sense. [laughs]

John: And it's like, "Dammit, I forgot. I need to learn that one again."

Alan: So what are some of the metrics that you can provide back to customers?

John: Well, at the very standard level, if you will, right in the dashboard is all the interactions and the renderings. You can put in the date. You can find out are they on iPhones or are they on Android? You can look at each one of the experiences and see how active they were with that exact experience. And then with a JSON dump, my gosh, you can see every detail on every interaction if you wanted to go that deep. So I think every client has a different level of interest on that type of detail. But the good news is we have a range of solutions for them depending upon if they have an entire analytics team or not.

Alan: Are you finding that the meetings are coming from the C suite down, or is it-- are you meeting with the learning and training development people. Are you-- is this being brought in from the innovation side? Who's bringing this innovation into the companies?

John: That's a question you ask every day. It's something you're constantly saying, "Hey, why did that situation occur in one call?" And why did that situation-- it's still nine months later!

Alan: Yeah, this is kind of the gist of the question is what gets people to just go?

John: Well, there's no question, if we're dealing with an innovation company where it's part of their value discipline, that sure helps a lot. Versus dealing with a company that, you know, I'm not trying to be in any way offensive by saying they're laggers -- that's just their strategy. Hey, we'll get to that four or five years from now, right? So the good news is there's certain industries or certain... like, even in education, there's certain universities, they are behind innovation. It's what they do. Like Arizona State University, they're all about innovation and same with companies. And then there's technology companies that are all about innovation. There's gaming companies that are all about innovation. And they want to surprise and delight, right? And their audience expects modern tools to learn. So that contributes a lot. But also warm handoffs at the decision maker level with an innovative company. Man, that's like butter. I mean, that is so perfect.

So the other day with a medical-- big medical company, we just happen to have one of our sellers on the team, spent 22 years at Abbott, 12 years at Thermo Fisher, and he was a pro. And his friends were the GMs or presidents of divisions. Well, when somebody like that goes in with the credibility hr has, has a relationship, then that person teases up with marketing, maybe IT innovation, maybe even sales. And then you have a meeting and next thing you know, you hear them going, "Hey, we can use this here, let's use this for onboarding. Let's use this for the sales force so they can they train people." They see it and their mind just starts going fast. And then the innovators go, "Good, send me an agreement, let's get rolling, so we can do our proof of concepts right away. So as we plan for next year, we got some experiences behind us." And then there's others that, geez, it goes on and on and on. It sure didn't help that we're in a pandemic, so I'm not faulting anybody, but we're constantly trying to say, "Hey, what's the best way to move this along?" So, getting to key decision makers, as we all know, innovative companies. And if you can get the warm leads, that sure helps a lot.

Alan: So if you're speaking to, let's say, your ideal customers, where can people try things out?

John: Sure. If you go to our website, we're doing free trials right now. And that's just a wonderful way for people to get involved and better understand it. And we're having solid success with that. So go to our website, bundlar.com and you'll see there's an opportunity to communicate with us for a free trial and we'd love to work with you. So that's a great way. And the other thing we've done, Alan, is we now have four or five, six, seven different videos so people can see it and really understand it. And what's helped us a lot the last three or four months since we've been able to use the platform, we now can build out vertically relevant bundles fast. We've even done this for-- let's say we're meeting with an important prospect. And next thing you know, you can find some markers, you can find some videos. And before you even hop on the phone call, you have a custom relevant bundle of AR experiences waiting for the presentation. Like "How did you do that, how did you get that?" And so that's been very effective, because that way they can see it firsthand. So the more we can make it about their industry -- or even better yet, about their company -- then they want to move quickly. So you've got to make it relevant that there's no question our first year before we had the platform, we would show them and proudly show them what we did for Arizona State, what we did for Google's grant with DuSable Museum of African-American History, what we did for ASSA ABLOY, or Redbox, a variety of innovators. But man, it's way more effective if it can be a bundle for QSR prospect.

Alan: Totally makes sense. That's the one good thing about doing all the work you guys have been doing is that you now have examples of every kind of which way.

John: It sure is helpful. And also it then gives-- it's given us the great experience on the platform and then from the amazing input we get from the clients and the prospects, that's where they use cases are coming from. I was so pleased today with this international London based company whose parent's in Germany and boy, did they understand 3D, because they're doing it for dental work, right? And for building this see-through braces that you'll put on and 3D printers. And so they totally got 3D and they wanted to use what you could call it digital-to-digital or screen-to-screen experience. And what's interesting, when I first met you, so much of what we were doing could have been, let's say, image recognition, but it might have been using a brochure. It might have been using a retractable banner, something physical like that. And because of COVID-19 and all of us working remotely, most of our presentations, obviously are-- could be Google Meet or Zoom or otherwise. And it's digital-to-digital, where I'm having them be on their computer, have their phone nearby. And they are now looking at the marker, if you will, from my presentation. And I say, cool, will you pull out your smartphone and let's do some AR together. So they pull out their phone and they pointed at the computer screen. Well, it works great. So we've had people in this virtual world saying, hey, we want to bring AR into this virtual world. How do we do that? And the term I've learned from all the training professionals is "blended learning solutions." And AR is ideal for that, as people are moving beyond an LMS that's just on a desktop.

Alan: Yeah, it's so true. They want on their phones, they want it to be available to them just in time, like you mentioned.

John: Yeah. Or on location. There's a lot of people that aren't sitting behind their computer at home all day. There's a lot of the workforce out there.

Alan: I'm sitting in front of my computer all day. I'm losing my mind.

John: [laughs]

Alan: We've covered a lot on this. And I don't want to take away from the gravity of the information in this great conversation. So is there anything else you want to leave anybody with before we-- before I ask my final question?

John: Well, I would just encourage the innovators of the world to explore. We'd like to do some demonstrations and free trials with people. So the words that put a smile on my face every day is when we show our solutions and we hear, "Oh wow!" So we want some "oh wow" moments coming up, and we hope is with your audience, Alan.

Alan: Well, that's fantastic, John. As you know, my commitment is to the greater good of humanity. And so what problem or challenge in the world would you like to see solved using XR technologies and why?

John: I'll share with you something that I know you can relate to with your focus. I presented this to the CEO of 1871, which is a solution for Chicago's high schools. As you know, we have our challenges in the inner city here in Chicago, as many cities do. And sadly, many of these schools don't get exposed to technology and opportunities. So we had some our interns from public schools create-- they created a whole new high school called Windy City High School. And we would like to have some big corporate sponsors, be it Microsoft or Aeon or Discover come in and sponsor us providing augmented reality to every high school in Chicago. Who would then that would force the students -- in a good way -- to work with the administrators, the faculty, and then bring home the experiences to their family with a refrigerator magnet on the refrigerator and say, Mom, dad, look what I helped create for my school. That would make me very happy, if we could get that done.

Alan: I think it's very possible to do it, for all the corporate people out there. Not only can you sign up to be a customer, but for a little bit more, you can contribute to the success of high school students in Chicago. And if the plan goes well right across America, so fantastic. That's really beautiful, John. Thank you for joining us today. I really appreciate it.

John: Thanks, Alan. Have a great day.

Alan: And thanks, everyone, for listening. This has been the XR for Business podcast. Don't forget to hit subscribe, hit the little notifications so you don't miss an episode. And you can follow us on all your podcast stations. So don't forget to hit subscribe. Thanks so much. Have a great day.

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 the first Hololens in our hands. And I remember the first time I tried this kind of device and I really thought, that's it. This is going to change everything. And with the background of physics, we completely could understand how the technology works. And it was just something fascinating and amazing. And we said, "Okay, that's it. Okay, let's drive the story, let's drive the company." And then we started in the area of engineering, because Alex and myself had some engineering background before. Therefore, we tried to figure out the problems in engineering and how can we solve them with the power of XR. So that's how it started in 2015. And until I would say 2016 around, not that much happened. Just a lot of thoughts and a lot of discussion and a lot of everything. And by end of 2015, we managed to get in an accelerator program powered by BMW in Munich. I remember it was an event in Tyrol. A colleague -- from I guess from one of us -- said, "Hey guys, you have to go to that event and show what your idea is." And it was just an innovation event, a very small innovation event, but BMW was their guest and they saw it and said, "Hey, that's cool, let's try it out." And then they just picked up us and took us to the tech founders program in Munich. And there we had our first office. We had the first start. We had coaches and they showed us everything what we have not to do. But we did everything what they say not to do. [chuckles]

Alan: "Oh, we already did those things." [laughs]

Florian: [laughs] Yeah, exactly. And after some years now, I recognize what they said and why they did it. But in 2016 we just thought, "Nah, come on, we can do it better." But that's typical startup life, I guess.

Alan: All right. So what is Holo-Light, then? And what problems is it solving for customers?

Florian: Yeah, OK, Holo-Light is is a company building the technology which drives the XR economy in the future. We started at engineering and figured out that the problems we have there, like big data, industrial consuming, and interaction with XR data in overall. And there we found out by starting in the engineering area that it's the field we want to be there. So we developed end user application. It's called ARES. It's the Augmented Reality Engineering Space. So every engineer who wants to do something, work in collaborative modes, or just engineer their 3D content in 3D can start with ARES. And the technology who enables everything is ISAR: Interactive Streaming for Augmented Reality. It sounds complicated, but at the end it's just a remote rendering technology that helps applications to get streamed on servers. At the end, we see us as the XR economy enabler with our technology. The problems we solve there is high data consuming problem on small mobile AR devices at the end, if you break it down to something small. Yeah. So I can tell you a lot of more of what special stuff you want to know.

Alan: Well, I see some on your website here. Some of the companies you've worked with, ThyssenKrupp, BASF, BMW. Maybe you can speak to kind of some of the specific things you didn't done for those. One of them here is factory planning at BASF. What was that all about? Is that a bunch of people with Hololenses standing around looking at the factory of the future? How did that work?

Florian: The use case of BASF, BASF is doing a lot of stuff, doing simulation things on AR, engineering things on AR and VR. The use case we want to share here is a use case of factory planning, also the one you mentioned on our website. They have huge factories here in Germany, I don't know how big they are. I would say our office fits in there 10,000 times or something. Their pipe systems, they are a really, really old. And they also want to grow a lot in the next years. And so they have to really find everything and do everything new. Usually they start planning on the factory by getting the status quo of the factory, because if you planned it 20 years to go, it won't have the same status 20 years later.

Alan: A lot of larger organizations are realizing this. They have the blueprints from when they built the building. And when they stand there with the blueprints and look at the building, it looks nothing like what it is, because you've had twenty years of "We need to add a furnace over here. We need that machine over here. We need to rewire this, repipe this." And so you're effectively useless with the original information. So how are you bringing that information up to speed?

Florian: Yeah, that's exactly the point. So nothing is like the planned before. What we do is we take the original plan, just bring it into AR as the status quo 20 years ago. And then we go into the field, the engineer stands there where the factory should be planned in the future, and then he just overlays the old plan and sees where are the differences, and where are the problems if they want to build up a new pipe system or if they want to extend something. Then they just take one of our products, the Stylus, and then they just mark the options and the points, what changed from the status quo, and then they just try out to engineer in that new environment the real pipe system they really need. So they need to take also from a modular toolset some standard pipes and then they set it just together, like they do their engineering work in the field and not on the computer. And that's the huge benefit. So they have the status quo plan, yes. And they know it should look like that. But they planned in the real world with the real problems and the real status quo. And with ARES and Stylus, you just can do it.

Alan: I think it must be saving a lot of time for them, because if you're looking at paper diagrams, plan something out, and then the people go and they take the plans, and they go on to site and they start to build it, and they realize, "Well, this is great, we want to put a pipe here, but there's a big machine here now." So by being able to digitally overlay the plans, this must save enormous amounts of rework.

Florian: Yes, and it's not just a matter of time. It's also-- at the end it's always a matter of time, but they also had some cases where they planned with -- before, without AR -- their pipe system. And after the planning, they went to the producement step and they found out that they have -- I think it was -- 20 meters less pipe system they really need to complete their task. And that's just a huge mess. That's not just time consuming. It changes everything. The whole planning of the other factories, they are also related to them. That's a huge impact here. It can save a lot of time, a lot of materials, and also a lot of costs there.

Alan: So I have a question. So you have your your ARES: Augmented Reality Engineering Space. So that's more of like a collaborative space where people can come together from around the world and look at different parts in 3D. Maybe it's an engine being inserted into a car or whatever. But what are some of the numbers around it? So how do you quantify the savings, is there a way to do that? You've have case studies that show we saved X amount of time or X amount of money, or made those things? What are the ROI proof points that you're able to show?

Florian: Yeah, we have a few. As you know, it's sometimes not that easy to quantify an engineering process, but especially here at BMW, we got the statement they can evaluate their concept up to 12 months earlier and save, I guess, a few hundred thousand dollars a year for saving prototypes by using ARES. That directly is related to shorter time to market of their products and also related to their overall outcome of the quality of their products. So if a customer says up to 12 months earlier, then that's not just a bit, that's a huge number.

Alan: Well, that's the difference between being a leader and being a follower.

Florian: Yeah, exactly.

Alan: So talk us through the other products you have. You have ISAR. So what is ISAR? Remote rendering and AR streaming. So I'm assuming you're streaming this down from the cloud, using probably Unity or something=

Florian: Yeah. It started by developing ARES. We were one of our first customer of ISAR. By handling big industrial data, we found out very fast that it's a huge performance issue for industrial data and the mobile devices.

Alan: "Here's our factory in CAD. Oh yeah, it's five terabytes and five trillion polygons. Can you just drop it in the Hololens?"

Florian: [laughs] Without ISAR, of course not. With ISAR, yes, you can do that. And that's the big point. We developed an application, a technology by our own, that makes that kind of step happen. So no more data reduction or simplifying data hours by hours or days by days. Just take whatever you have and bring it into AR because industrial customers, they have their workstations and servers. And also cloud providers, they have a lot of computation power. Why not just use it, bring that application you have -- at the moment, a Unity application you have -- on the server or on premise or in cloud. And our SDK just-- at the end, it's very simple. Just at the SDK, I think it's one or two code lines, one DLL and just go for it. And then you build from your Unity application or server application and then this web application runs on the cloud or on-premise, and this streams it directly on the mobile XR device. There will be provided some clients and this client just connects to the server and then the stream gets ready. And the cool thing is it works really with 60 frames per second. So you don't recognize any difference in running on server or on a local machine. That's pretty cool. So no limits anymore.

Alan: That's awesome. Now ,do the cloud services, do they need to be on-site or on-prem? Or can you use this from AWS or a manager or some other cloud service?

Florian: So we provide that technology for both scenarios. So sometimes we have customers also like BMW, who want to use their own on-premise server structure to make sure that all the data they have still remain on their own servers. But we also provide ISAR on AWS, and we have also clients there. So you can use ISAR on every public cloud or on-premise. There is no difference.

Alan: That's really cool. That's great for these clients, because one of the issues that we've kind of found is -- I'm assuming you've run into this as well -- is that every customer has a different cloud architecture. Some are in Azure, some are in AWS, some are in their own cloud that they've built internally. And the flexibility to be able to build this for them in any scenario is really amazing. So the last one here on your on your product list is Stylus XR. What is that about?

Florian: Stylus closes the gap in interaction. So we've found out in-- also in early 2016 that the biggest issues are performance we solves with ISAR. Collaboration, interaction with data, we solved it with ARES. And the third problem is interaction with that kind of content. As you know, if you take a Hololens or any other smart glass, you have the gesture control usage. It works very fine, sometimes better, sometimes it's not that good. And overall, it's not always the best solution for industrial use cases. It's more or less a little bit unprecise. And it makes a huge change if you talk about content creation. If you want to do content creation in AR, then you need something a little bit more powerful than gesture control. And there we thought "Okay, let's solve that problem, too. Let's develop a device for that kind of thing." And then we started of thinking how we can do that. And then we developed AI driven tracking system that tracks a pen -- in our case, the Stylus XR pen. And this pen gets tracked in a cursor around one to three millimeters in real time, so losing the lag in the input side. And this makes a content creation happen and also enables a lot of other use cases. As you mentioned before, the ThyssenKrupp use case, I can also give you an example there.

Alan: Just to kind of frame this, Stylus XR is literally a 3D pen.

Florian: Yeah, that's it.

Alan: So did you make that hardware yourself, or did you have it made? Because I know there's other options in the market, like the Logitech VR Ink or the Massless Pen.

Florian: Yeah, that's true. So first of all, we developed the stylus based on our AI tracking system. And after we had that AI tracking system, we built up the hardware. And there we had a partner to help us out there, because as we are not a hardware company -- we are good at building software -- we had a good partner helping us out there. So still, if we are going to sell a stylus, it's going to be produced from our partner.

Alan: That's awesome. So you actually designed and had a stylus built. Taking the other things aside, I mean, there's a huge market just for that. I mean, Logitech has spent probably millions of dollars developing their VR Ink 3D pen. And Massless, I don't know how much they've raised, but again, another company that's designing a pen that's tracked in 3D space. So is there any thoughts around bringing this Stylus XR into the consumer world, or is it just focused on the enterprise solutions that you're working on?

Florian: At the moment it's more or less focused on the industry. But totally, yes. We are also working to get it run on VR. So at the moment the stylus just runs on Hololens. In future it should also run on VR devices like Oculus, or HTC Vive, or any other. And it also runs -- just small information -- it also runs on the computer itself. Makes it totally fun to interact with a 3D pen on your 2D screen. But that's just a fun fact.

Alan: That's awesome. I actually want one of these now. [laughs]

Florian: Of course, Alan, sure. We can send you one, if you want.

Alan: I want a 3D pen! I want to draw in 3D, man! I've got a Hololens. I've got all the things. Let's go!

Florian: Yeah, perfect! Of course! I will notice that, I will send you one. No problem.

Alan: Thank you. What I'll do is I'll show it to some of our customers, as well. because this is-- you nailed a problem that we've seen as well is that the-- if you go back to Steve Jobs saying that "We have ten styluses that we carry with us every day, our fingers," they're great for almost 99 percent of everything. But there is a missing accuracy. You don't draw with your finger, you draw with a pen. And so there's this kind of inherent need for a very precise device in three dimensional space. And this is really exciting. I had no idea when we started this call that you guys did that as well.

Florian: [laughs] Yeah, perfect! We are always open for a surprise.

Alan: Florian, how do you then not lose focus? So you've got ARES, you've got ISAR, and those are kind of real enterprise applications, serving your enterprise clients. They're software solutions, so they scale quite nicely. And then you've got this hardware device that while also serves their needs. But how do you kind of stay focused when doing that?

Florian: That's a good question. So it was not always that easy in past, as you can imagine, doing three parts together. But we always had one vision: to enable the XR economy with our technology. And if you take all three pieces together, you can drive Stylus and ISAR in ARES. We have a mission that in future, every engineer uses ARES in combination with ISAR, in combination with Stylus. So at the end it's it's one big product we serve to the customer.

Alan: It's ready for your next commercial. "Holo-Light: Three products, one vision. Enterprise unleashed."

Florian: [laughs]

Alan: No? No, maybe not?

Florian: Not bad. That's good. I'm going to take that. [laughs]

Alan: We'll throw that in the website.

Florian: [laughs] Perfect. We sell all these three products also by their own. So there is a Stylus SDK. You can simply integrate the stylus as it is in every other Unity application. You can integrate ISAR in every Unity application, and then power every application by ISAR as a remote rendering application. So at the end it fits together to one vision, but it's also available on a separate way to get things a little bit more widespread in the market.

Alan: Awesome. I want to draw attention to the website. Just so people, if they're listening, they can find you: it's holo-light.com, correct?

Florian: Yeah, that's it.

Alan: You're meeting with a customer now. It's a new manufacturing company. They don't know anything about AR, VR, XR. They know nothing. They just-- they have a factory. They want to add some digital technologies. What would be the first thing you say to them to get them excited about this technology?

Florian: Hmm, good question. Usually if we start a new conversation with a new customer, we first ask our customer, what are their biggest problems they have in engineering and production line overall? Then we say you have problems since the last maybe 10, 20 years. You can solve them and you can make them a little bit better or something, but you can't solve them. And then we go forward and say, OK, let's get a little bit more detail. Tell me your story. And then afterwards we say, yeah, I think there is time we really can solve your problem after 20 years. We can solve all your engineering and understanding problems. We can solve the problems you have between analogue content and digital and real content you have. A little bit like closing the gap in the engineering and manufacturing chain. That's how we start talking with the customer.

Alan: Wonderful. You start talking to a customer by listening.

Florian: Yeah.

Alan: It's so true, right? Sales is 99 percent listening and then I think I can solve that. Great.

Florian: Yeah, true.

Alan: As much as we all work towards building value for our customers and driving ROI, this technology can also really be viscerally used to change the world we live in and make it a better place. So what is one thing, one problem or challenge in the world that you would like to see solved using XR technologies and why?

Florian: There is a way we consume content in the past, and also in the future, and also in the present. In the past, we consumed content on paperworks or maybe later on desktops and monitors. And in future there will be a different way how we consume content and interactive content overall. Doesn't matter at the end if it's an industrial problem or it's a consumer problem; it's just the way how we consume content. I would say XR is the driver worldwide to consume future content overall. So if you ask me, I would say in 10 years there will be no other solution where you want to consume content than XR solution.

Alan: I tend to agree with you on that, my friend. I have a last question and I will end there. On your website, you've listed partners, Microsoft Mixed Reality Partner, AWS, Deutsche Telekom or T-Systems, Oracle. What are those partnerships? What do they look like? What are some of those partnerships and how are they benefiting your customers, those partnerships?

Florian: So a few of them are a little bit more under NDA than others, but overall, I can say if you talk about telco providers, for example, they are going to build up their XR economy system by using ISAR in the future. And if you talk about cloud providers like Azure or AWS, I would say it's quite the same. They are focusing on a specific strategy for building their own AR economy and we are delivering their missing links, like some parts of ARES or ISAR itself. These are more technology partnerships you saw there. We have also partnerships for integrators. They use our products, ARES, ISAR and Stylus, and to integrate it into their customer projects, for example. I would say it's on the one hand, it's a very technical partnership we drive with a lot of these customers, partners you mentioned and also some reseller partnerships; integrated partnership is also reseller partnership. We have also partnerships with CID resellers. They just take our stuff and sell it to their customers as a bundle, because ARES is also able to get integrated into existing CID solutions on the market, and they just take it integrated and then they sell it as a whole bundle. So if there is a customer who wants to take Autodesk solution for, for example, he can say, "Yeah, I want the Autodesk solution with AR," and then they can get the ARES solution if they want.

Alan: Love it. Love it. Florian, this has been really, truly enlightening. And I've loved learning about Holo-Light, about how Florian and his team can really help you revolutionize and digitize your workforce, moving forward in engineering and manufacturing. And it's just amazing. The technology that you guys are building is fantastic. And it sounds like you guys are truly on an amazing path forward in the future of XR. So thank you for joining me today, Florian.

Florian: It was amazing and a pleasure and made a lot of fun.

Alan: And that's the end of the XR for Business Podcast. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button and hit the alerts so you don't miss any episodes. I know we took a brief hiatus over the summer -- COVID times and all - but we'll be getting back to a regular cadence of podcast soon. And I want to say thank you to Florian. And thank you to Alex Colgan and Grace and Chris from my team, for producing this wonderful podcast. There's a lot of work that goes in behind the scenes to make this thing seamless. So thank you very much to my team. And also, I want to give a quick shout out to all the team of MetaVRse who have been supporting this podcast, both financially and in time considerations. So thank you to my team for doing that. This has been the XR for Business podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. And if you want to read the transcripts of these instead of listening to it, it's xrforbusiness.io. And Florian, thank you so much. Holo-Light: holo-light.com.

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 have somebody remotely support you on this. There's really wide range here. And I want to unpack some of these for customers, but I just want to touch on the strategy side of things before we get moving forward, because I think that is-- at the heart of the strength of Deloitte is the fact that you guys are an incredible purveyor of knowledge in the strategy sphere. So when you're meeting with customers, what is the typical cadence around-- you meet with them, and you listen to some of the challenges that they have. Are there some things that drive to the top quickly of the conversation? What is the fastest path to value? If somebody was a new company and you were meeting with them, what is typically bubbles to the surface before anything else?

Allan: I'm going to give that horrible consulting word: It depends. It really, really does earn this case, it's like all firms are so different and so varied in what they do. So, too, are the very nature of what they need from VR, AR, and the like. Some of the projects that Kaitlyn and I have been working with on the more sell-to side, helping firms who have digital reality products really figure out which markets they should be focusing on. So whether that's a geographic perspective or an industry perspective, but really helping them to zero in on how they can make the most money, where they can make the most impact. On the client side, it tends to be where they can realize the biggest benefit. And that's not just necessarily financial. I mean, with the whole COVID-19 thing, Kaitlyn's leading a fairly large initiative around how we can collaborate and cooperate better. I think everybody is a little Zoom fatigued at this point. So how can we be using some of these immersive technologies and immersive solutions to really have a more immersive experience? I mean, start-- Zoom is fantastic for what it is, but we just are all craving more of that social contact, more of that human contact. A lot of work around supplies for accounting and tax companies, a lot of work around how can we help companies realize the maximum benefit? What should their return on investment look like? How much money should they be spending? But I think the biggest thrill for us is three, four years ago, a lot of these strategy engagements were kind of standalone and didn't go anywhere. What we're finding now is that they really are rapidly moving out of the strategy phase into not just, "Hey, can we build a proof of concept?" but to really look at how can we turn our business around using VR immersive technologies.

Alan: That's incredible. So we're finally getting past pilot purgatory.

Kaitlyn: Yeah, exactly. And one thing I do want to also add that's really interesting, popping up from a strategy perspective is --and this is cross-industry interest -- is the strategy behind ethics, privacy, intellectual property rights, and how to proactively integrate that into these solutions. So that whether that be the end user as your employee, your customers are all protected ahead of time. So people are kind of learning from that social media mobile app development kind of phase, and starting to apply those learnings to this new technology of visualization and ensuring that all those are proactively integrated into these solutions.

Alan: That is very, very vital to the success of this long term, because as we've seen in the social media, the unintended consequences can be devastating. And I think being able to track where people are looking, being able to track their head motion, their gait analysis, there's so many more data points that we're able to collect about somebody using these technologies. It's definitely important that we make sure that we at least address and then try to address in advance the potential risks and harm that we could be doing with these, because there's a lot of great good we can do, but there's also harm. So I'm glad you guys are thinking about that as well. So I have a quick question on the collaboration. Kaitlynn, have you seen xrcollaboration.com yet?

Kaitlyn: I have not.

Alan: Oh, you're going to love that.

Kaitlyn: I will check it out.

Alan: It's a global directory and guide to XR collaboration platforms.

Kaitlyn: Fantastic. Now, I've been talking to a few experts in the field, and it's such an interesting space of so many things that you have to think about when you start getting mass number of people into a virtual location, and everyone's designing their avatars and the kind of experiences that they can have. So I'll definitely have to look into that.

Alan: Yeah, we put together a-- I think it's about an 80 page manual now on everything from security to avatars to everything. It's all in there.

Kaitlyn: Great.

Alan: So, yeah, take a look. And yes. So next thing in here, you talked about immersive learning. This is something that's near and dear to my heart. I don't know if you know, but my personal purpose in life is to inspire and educate future leaders to think and act in an economic, social, and environmentally sustainable way. And so I believe that the immersive learning capabilities of this technology. And you nailed it; when things are expensive or they're impossible. These are really technologies that can lift us out of this kind of problem that we've developed in that there's a massive turnover of employees happening daily. The nature of work is changing dramatically and quickly. And so how do we upskill and reskill and maintain reasonable employment for people without having to reinvent the wheel here? What are you guys seeing in the kind of learning/training space?

Allan: So I'll jump in first, but then, Kaitlyn, please, please add to this. Obviously, there's a lot of use cases around safety type training, as I mentioned. If it's really too dangerous to do that training in the real world, why wouldn't you create it in a virtual world? So we've been working with a lot of oil and gas companies, power and utility companies, which-- you really do need to create that sense of fear. You really do need to immerse them in the experience, so that it's not just a computer based training with lots of pretty pictures and lots and lots of words, but it really does hit home. We've found and we've seen studies which show that classic CDTs computer based training you've attention level is in the low teens. And immersive training experience puts your attention 80-85 percent or more. And so if it really matters, which so often is the case in safety -- I mean, it's not only mattering because of potential revenue impacts, but because of genuine life impacts -- that retention is absolutely critical. So we're working with one of the large power utility companies on the East Coast right now around them maintaining very high voltage equipment. I mean, and if you do this wrong, you get blasted 20 feet across the room and your next of kin gets notified.

Alan: So are you putting together like a haptics suits for these people, so that if they make a mistake in training, they get a massive shock through the whole body?

Allan: I love that--

Alan: Or haptic gloves?

Allan: --kind of experience. You know, you get a nasty zap. We're not. I mean, at this point, it's still really visual-audio type feedback. We have been playing a little bit with some of the haptic gloves and the like. We did create some retail immersive experiences with very large immersive walls, which is really not only a sight and sound experience, but a sensory experience. So we have heat, we have fans, we have smells being pumped in to create that illusion of a more immersive experience. We haven't quite got to that Ready Player One like haptics suit type of thing.

Alan: [chuckles]

Kaitlyn: [chuckles] Waiting for it.

Alan: I got to try the HaptX gloves. And I actually-- there was a point where they asked me to to reach out and grab something. And it literally shocked me. And I mean, it was just a buzz on my fingers. But because I was looking at the thing and it all worked, my brain was completely immersed in it. I literally jumped back a foot and they had to grab me, because it scared the crap out of me. So if anybody wants to really fully understand quickly the power of this, take your Oculus Quest, load up Richie's Plank, and walk somebody across a piece of wood and then just give them a little push when they're halfway across. Just give em a little nudge and you'll see people freak out. And you know, they know it's not real. They know there's not a real plank, there's no drop. But your brain just cannot figure it out.

Kaitlyn: My other one that's really interesting on that that front, Alan, is the Everest experience, I believe it's with Vive. And when you're climbing up Mount Everest on an ice wall and someone's backpack falls off and it comes to everyone dodges the backpack.

Alan: Everybody!

Kaitlyn: And starts-- palms start sweating a little bit [chuckles] and everyone is stationary on the ground, safe at home, not in subzero temperatures.

Alan: I walked across the little ladder and it freaked me out, because the ladders creaking, and you're like "Ahh!" One of the things that I think is going to be an interesting combination is this-- is-- now that Apple watches and kind of smartwatches are really prevalent, being able to tie these experiences into capturing the biometric data as well, because there's almost the ability for us to drive people's heart rate up artificially. And maybe there's kind of a sweet spot of, "OK, if your heart rate is above 85, we know that you are viscerally understanding." I don't know what that number is, I'm just making that number up. But this is something interesting that I think will be a long term study for these efficiencies, and how can we make things even more immersive? I'll be really interested to see what you guys are doing with smell. That one is probably one of the most powerful experiences. And yet nobody's deploying it right now or very few.

Kaitlyn: It's a really challenging one to deploy, especially on mobile, as Alan was mentioning, that was actually an immersive wall, and unfortunately, with the US Open Championship, we actually had an experience planned, where it was that immersive wall. And as you're walking through the historic shots of Wingfoot, you could actually smell the grass. There was one championship where everyone is just battling it out during a very hot moment, it's very hot outside, so we had heaters that were going to be running at that time. And so where you can bring that full immersive experience to people on site. Of course, with COVID-19 that presents its own challenges. And so we had to pull back on that one. But it's definitely a part of the possible.

Alan: Really amazing. We actually pitched to Korona the ability to have this heater, exact same thing, heater, but we were going to pump coconut smell in.

[laughs]

Kaitlyn: Oh, yes. [laughs]

Alan: I want to-- you mentioned the USGA and I want to dive into this quickly, because really it's kind of like a better experience for you guys. And I had it on my living room table or my kitchen table when you first launched that, I was watching the shots real time. What was the precipice of this like? How did that come about, and what were some of the challenges involved in kind of getting that out to the world?

Allan: So we have the light of a long term relationship with the US Golf Association. And really three years ago in 2018 when we were at Shinnecock, we first created an immersive experience. We actually allowed you to do a virtual tour of the clubhouse. And you had the course historian talking about various aspects of this very historic course and some of the clubs and different things that you can kind of get that experience. Most of us will never have that opportunity to [go] the clubhouse. But we also allowed you to do a tour with Corey Pavin winning 18th hole back in the 1990s. You were with him in the tee box. You were with him as he ran up to the green, arms in the air. And again, it just gave you that sense of actually what it would be like to be on the 18th hole during the US Open. Last year, we went to Pebble Beach and for the first time, we created the AR experience and part of this was technology had moved on and enabled us to really take advantage of some of the developments in people's smartphones. And at the time, we did just three holes -- holes 6, 7 and 18 -- and created three different experiences on those holes. So one was again, you could watch the players playing live. You could pick your player and see how they had played any of the holes previously, and actually match them up in your own little fantasy pairing to see how they would have played against another player. And then finally, we did the historic shots, so you could actually see how the previous four winners, how they had played those particular holes as well. And we had over 40,000 downloads, which we were thrilled about. I mean, we honestly went into the event just having no idea. I think, genuinely so, if we had a couple of thousand, we would have declared victory. And so when we were at tens of thousands, I mean, we were top 20, top 10 downloads on the weekend on the various sports websites, app websites. So we were just truly, truly thrilled. Kaitlyn, do you want to kind of kick off and talk about what we did this year, 2020, up at Winged Foot in New York? Because it was just such a dramatically different year. And COVID was both a blessing and a curse for us. So Kaitlyn, do want to talk about it a little bit?

Kaitlyn: Yeah. I mean, to Allan's point: COVID-19, the curse was we all had to work remotely, as well as there weren't fans allowed on the US Golf Association, the championship site. We were trying to tackle that problem in addition to was this even going to happen? The exciting piece was if we could just get players playing and the championship could continue and we can get the data that's from those player shots, we could actually create the experience for fans at their home in 3D away, which is what we were able to do and we were able to deliver that virtual experience. So that itself was exciting. The interesting piece about having over-- almost having double the number of people downloading the app. Last year, most of the app downloads actually came from the on-site activation. So the people on-site who went around, downloaded the app as they were just watching the championship. This year, we had all of our downloads remotely and virtually. So that was a different [experience] and what we were able to accomplish, as far as the app itself, we continued with the technology. So technology once again had improved. So instead of having this image that we had in 2019, that people had to download and print out, and then download an app, and then get recognition from the app would be what [hobbled] the 3D AR experience. This year we leveraged surface recognition and that wasn't really available in a stable format last year. So this year is really exciting to be able to leverage that. It just enabled more equity in the system, where you didn't have to have a printer. You could just pull it up on your app, and point it at any surface that-- especially the ones that had texture. We'll talk about some of the challenges to that in a little bit.

Alan: Yeah, don't point it at a white, shiny marble floor. [laughs]

Kaitlyn: I know. [laughs] You know-- OK, we'll talk about the challenge right now. The single feedback from users was the challenge of service recognition, and most likely it's either because they were pointing at a monochromatic surface or to surface that's shiny. Totally get it.

Alan: Kaitlyn, I can say this is being solved very quickly. The new iPad Pro, the new iPhone 12, all the Samsung phones, they all have LiDAR scanning. And LiDAR -- as long as the surface isn't super shiny -- should get rid of that problem of having a monochromatic floor. So very exciting.

Kaitlyn: And that's what we're excited about, is each year this technology gets better and better, which means this app is going to get better and better. Furthering on to the 2019 app, where we only had three holes that we built the 3D models for, this year we built out all 18 holes. We had over double downloads available. I think it's important to highlight from our marketing perspective-- which I don't think enough credit goes to the marketers, but that's really how you get your product out, how you get concepts, ideas out to the public. We saw some really incredible statistics. So our engagement rate over the last couple years just leveraging these applications. So engagement rate meaning people that go on to our websites, and start clicking around and reading. It has gone up double the amount over the last couple of years. Web traffic to our sites increased over six times. Our paid media activations, those had over 100 percent growth. And then the really interesting one this year was what was called conversion of offline to online marketing. And effectively what that was, is we had some commercials online and we also had throughout social and our different marketing activations, we had a QR code that people could scan. It would send it to our deloitte.com/USGA site where [you] would be prompted to download the app. While half the people that we had visiting our website had actually visited purely from that QR code, which means that at some point in the day when they saw the commercial come up, they got up, they took their phone, took a photo of the QR code, went to the website, and then furthermore, a third of those people actually went and downloaded the app from the website. So that kind of conversion and seeing that kind of interest was really exciting. It's the best use that we have seen of having that offline to online marketing, because as I think you're probably aware, Alan, like every time in the mobile app dev world, every time someone [clicks away], you start losing people. And the fact that we were actually retaining people really shows to the excitement of this use case.

Golf on your tablet!

Alan: It's interesting you say that, because the whole thesis behind our product at MetaVRse is that we're web based. So you don't even need the app part. So it's one less step.

Kaitlyn: Yeah.

Alan: So I totally relate with you on that. So beyond USGA, what have you've done now? So you've got all 18 holes, you were able to watch that. So I assume now that that's built, it's just shot data at that point now. So you've got this whole golf course and the golf course is not going to change, they're not ripping up a golf course and changing it. So now you've got that, and that client can now use this multiple times. One of the things that-- theories that we had -- and maybe you guys are seeing this too, I'd love to ask you about it -- is that as you kind of build experiences for one division of a company, let's say, for example, a company comes and says, "We want training." And you say, "OK, we're going to build a 3D training, and it's going to run on iPads, and you're going to be able to train people on this machine." Now, one of the theories we had is that once you build that, there's an upfront cost to building these things and this is not inconsequential. But once you've built it, you could then take the exact same experience, change the verbiage, the wording, and make it into a marketing experience or change the verbiage and change it into a support experience. Are you finding that there's this kind of land-and-expand with this type of solution?

Allan: So actually, I've got three examples that I can tell about that. Two weeks ago I was giving a presentation to a communications organization. They installed large communication devices on top of office buildings, retail stores, malls and the like. And one of the things which they had wanted is, 1), to create an immersive training experience; 2) some kind of field services experience and then potentially to allow some sort of user experience. So user actual self servicing the equipment. And one of the things we realized is once we had created the 3D object, a lot of the expense was now taken care of. You could go back to that 3D object repeatedly. The way that we actually wrote the pitch deck was to have the 3D object as the central thing. And then each one of the experiences circling around that. And you could just see that kind of creating some of these core assets, you get a terrific return on. We did a study for one of the retail organizations, and their detergent bottle. With photographs, something like 8,000 times a year worldwide, different Web advertisements, different catalog examples, et cetera, et cetera. If you create that one asset in 3D, you can absolutely use that repeatedly. And there's a very large, inexpensive but high quality furniture store that about 50 to 70 percent of all of the things you see in their catalog are actually digital renderings of the equipment, including--.

Alan: I'm going to go out on a limb and say it's IKEA, because [chuckles] I've had IKEA on the show, Martin [Enthed] from IKEA's visualization team. I don't know if that's the right when you're talking about, but they-- 70 percent of their catalog is all CG.

Allan: Absolutely. Absolutely. So, I mean, again, it's just people don't realize, and when you showed pictures of the real object VS the digital object, you just can't tell. I mean--.

Alan: No, you can't.

Allan: It's nearly identical. But we're also working with a number of automotive companies, which you take that automobile, the design specs in R&D. It then gets passed, its design gets passed through the manufacturing, gets passed through to the marketing team, it gets passed through to -- eventually -- to the dealer. You are keeping that original design true to what it was meant to be. It doesn't get changed each time. It's a bit like the game of whispers, where one person whispers into one one person's ear and it starts off with "Send reinforcements, were going to advance," and ends up with "Spend three and fourpence, we're going to a dance." That original message completely gets lost over the kind of little changes that get added each time and get magnified. And again, it's a terrific savings of money, because you already have that 3D asset that you can then pull and just use in the marketing side. So, no, completely, totally agree with you there. Some of the visualisations things you just associated with this aren't necessarily just how to save the most money, but creating the 3D photorealistic designs and imagery can just be used throughout the process to save a ton of money.

Kaitlyn: And expanding on the whole content pipeline. There is an entire frame of thought behind that is OK, once you do create these 3D assets over time, of course, you're probably going to want to add to that repository. And so how do you start adding quality assurance and ensuring that it passes [through] so that you don't have random employees just throwing throwing 3D assets into this pipeline that's leveraged? How can you get ahead on the organization of that, so that you can really streamline those those efficiencies?

Alan: How *do* you do that? Because I identified this two years ago as a massive problem. We were doing a WebAR project for Shoppers Drug Mart, it's like a pharmaceutical company here. And we ran into this problem where we built all the assets and we sent them to the client. The client was an agency, so we send them to the agency. The agency then sent them to the client. The client then sent them to the brands and all three levels needed approval. And so how do you send somebody a 3D asset for approval? And just there was no way. So we were like taking photographs, still shots, sending it. They were marking it up. It was really, really not a very fun experience when you have three levels of approvals for every asset and there was countless assets. So how are you dealing with that now? Are you integrating into current CMS systems? Are you building new solutions? I know TurboSquid's got something they're working on, with their part of there, and CGTrader as well. They're working on asset data management. So what are you doing to solve that?

Allan: We are beginning to look at how to best integrate not only with the CMS systems, but also your entire ERP system. Just some of the things that we're doing, for instance, with field servicing is how can you integrate the actual work orders into the work that they're doing, so that they're not having to check what the next work order is, often in situations where they can't use their hands, where they're halfway up a pole, or they're holding equipment, that type of thing, getting that kind of step by step instructions being brought down to them. So how do you integrate that into the larger ERP systems? We built some solutions for field services on top of one of the big ERP players last year and demonstrated it at one of the major events, on just how you can do the entire workflow calling up from your core systems today. I do think that we're having to figure out new standards, particularly on the retail side, and we're part of the Khronos [Group] standards organization, working with a whole host of different retailers and manufacturers on that space, is to try and figure out what are the new standards going to be, not only around the rendering and creation of the 3D objects, but the storage, the access, the metadata surrounding all of these, just to allow everyone to be able to access them in a quick, efficient, and timely manner.

Alan: Really wonderful if Apple stayed in there.

Allan: It would be fantastic if everybody would definitely sign up to one standard, I conclude.

Alan: Because right now we've got two bifurcated standards in the world. We've got USDZ and glTF, much like VHS and DVD[sic]. But I think, from what I'm seeing -- and probably you guys are seeing the same -- those are the two standards everybody is moving forward with. But because there really is no standard -- and there won't be unless Apple joins -- how do you deal with the fact that there's no standard, and you have to build two files for everything you do?

Allan: Well, to a certain extent, we're used to that. I mean, a lot of our clients have got multiple backend systems that we have to be able to interface with. We try not to make a single stand. We will work with any of the ERP, CRM, CMC vendors, and we'll adapt to their standards. Obviously, we have a preference. We have some of our folks who are a little bit more skilled in one particular area. I mean, there's two major 3D development platforms out there at this point. I mean, I don't necessarily think having just one is necessarily always the best, because having a little bit of competition in the marketplace, having unique points of view. However, I do think we're going to have to move towards, if not one standard, at least integrating the two standards to allow rapid sharing of the backend files or else, like you said, we really are going to have to create twice as many assets effectively for the same job.

Alan: Would be amazing if there was a platform that automatically did that?

Allan: Would be very happy to do that for someone if they would like to pay for it.

Alan: Well, we've already built it, so we can talk about it after. [laughs] It's already done.

Kaitlyn: [chuckles]

Alan: So I want to talk about something that keeps coming up in conversations, and one of the things that we've identified at MetaVRse is that the wearables VS 2D screen. So let's assume 2D screens are computers, tablets, smartphones. So there are seven billion devices out there that can do 3D, whether it's a smartphone, tablet computer. There are far less wearables. What percentage of new projects that you are seeing or what percentage are using head-worn devices -- glasses, VR, that sort of thing -- versus tablets, computers, smartphones and the like?

Allan: It's relatively small still. And I would say that the proof of concepts we're doing are still experimenting in the area of head-mounted displays. A lot of the projects we're rolling out, I'm going to put immersive learning to one side because I would say that those are obviously kind of VR headsets at this stage. But actually out in the real world, it still tends to be smartphones as the predominant -- or tablets -- mechanism. Part of that is, as you said, there's billions out there already in the marketplace. So just an ease of adoption. I am excited about the announcements of smartglasses, AR glasses coming out next year. Things are going to be more affordable, more accessible, and people are just going to get used to the idea. I think the kind of the last year or two we've got used to the idea of being able to see things in 3D. The next couple of years are going to be we're going to get used to having a smartglass and having it easy and, again, affordable. It's going to start to really turn that page. I would say right now there are AR glasses or smartglasses in the marketplace which are very good at doing a singular job. Some of the monocular devices are being--

Alan: RealWear, that sort of thing.

Allan: Exactly, exactly. If you need that virtual 2D hands-free screen, RealWear, fantastic solution on that. If you're in a warehouse having a monocular device, it's got a see-what-I-see, barcode scanner. Again, perfect for the job. You want to take that and then try and do digital twin, it's going to fail miserably. You want to take that and have some kind of social integration, where it's doing facial recognition, calling up whatever database to give you a background on, it won't work. But I think as we move forward, as for immersive learning, we are extensively using VR headsets for that and that technology continues to just get stronger and stronger. And obviously in gaming and in sports. I was reading something about the NBA this morning and how they're really going to look at VR moving forward outside of the season, to see how they can take advantage of it, how they're going to have fan involvement with their particular sport. And we're working with some sports teams right now, which are really interested in how they can be using AR and VR. And I say VR brings the best of the in-stadium experience to your house, whereas AR brings the best in-home experience to the stadium. So when you're in my house, I put a VR had set on, I get that immersive sense of being in the crowd, the excitement, just being in the game. Whereas when I'm at the game, being able to bring my phone -- on in time, smartglasses -- being able to see which player is which, being able to see the arc of the ball being thrown through the air. Or like what we did with the US Open Act, allowing you to choose the angle that you want to watch, and be able to see the game in a whole new way that you just wouldn't be able to see.

Alan: Yeah, that's what struck me about the golf AR experience you guys built was that I could pick the player, pick the hole, really choose my own adventure of what I wanted to see at the time. And I thought that was just super cool. I could even pair up players that weren't on the same hole together and watch them like-- It's just-- it's consuming sports in a in a whole new way. And I think it's wonderful, guys. And it's interesting that Apple bought a company called NextVR and NextVR had secured contracts with NASCAR, and NHL, and NBA, NFL. So I think Apple's in a really interesting position that they have access to all the sporting content that we want in VR glasses. And so I think we'll see what Apple comes up with. One of the things that I like to say is that we're going to go from phone to face in the next five years. So we'll see.

Kaitlyn: [chuckles] I like that.

Alan: With this, is there anything else you want to share around, how people can reach out to you guys and reach out to the Deloitte team, learn more about XR and how you guys can deliver for them? What would you say to somebody if they're interested, and how would they find you?

Allan: Well, you can reach us either directly through the Deloitte website, deloitte.com. Again, part of the excitement that we're finding right now is there's so many entry points to starting creating XR experiences, whether it's doing a strategy engagement at the front end, trying out a PoC, or actually leaping directly into creating solutions for the workforce, whether that's in heavy industries, retail industries, consumer facing industries. We're seeing just new things, which are just popping all the time at this point. It genuinely is an exciting time to be in this industry.

Alan: I definitely agree. Kaitlyn?

Kaitlyn: Yeah, I would definitely say part of the excitement of having successes in this space is that anything that drives to an industry excitement is really what drives to improving the technology. And so we're always excited to talk to anyone who says, "Hey, I have an idea," because we're always looking at new ideas. You never know what's going to be that next thing. Like Pokémon Go, like who knew that that would be such a big idea that would go viral? You never know what kind of applications are going to be the next form of collaboration. And so we're always looking not just what we can do today, but how we can work with clients, customers for tomorrow to really help drive to that next iteration of their business. So, as Alan said, reaching out through LinkedIn, connecting, getting to share all the ideas I think is paramount in this space, because there's just so much to talk about. We're not just converging technologies, but we're also starting to converge more like the empathic side from a psychology sociological level into what we see every day. Once-- to get to your point, once you get that device on your face, when you can see anything about the world around you, what does that look like? And so really attacking that from the left sided brain people to the right sided brain people and everything in between is, I think, one of the most important things that we can do in this industry right now.

Alan: Amazing. Which, Kaitlynn, you kind of led me into my final question of the day. And I'll ask you first, Kaitlyn, what is one problem in the world that you want to see solved with XR technologies and why?

Kaitlyn: I want to see equity in education. I have actually initiative from a volunteer perspective to try to bring inexpensive headsets to underprivileged schools. Thinking about like the Google Cardboard, couple of dollars. What the funny thing is, globally, a lot of adults have smartphones despite living in any kind of situation. And so if you can start bringing the educational experience to kids that wouldn't ordinarily have that access, I think we can start to really flatten out the access to what people know and really start tapping into talent that we never knew we had, from a global scale.

Alan: You should listen to a podcast recently, where they talked about the digital divide in the US and how the first thing we need to do, at least in the US and around the world, is get Internet access to everybody, because we're talking about VR and AR in these kind of advanced technologies, when some people don't even have Wi-Fi. So I'm with you there. Allan, back to you.

Allan: So I'm going to take a slightly different track. I mean, I believe that this is truly the next major transformation of how we use technology. I mean, the first giant shift from mainframes to PCs, and then PCs to the web, and then the web to mobile. I just see this as being that next major, massive shift. And so I'm just truly excited that this is going to be the next global transformation of how we interact using technology, how it enhances the way that we interact with each other, our access to information and the richness of the experience that we get from this. It's really exciting to be at the beginning of one of these new solutions. But going back to something that Kaitlyn said midway through, we are both very, very committed to some of the ethics and some of the trust issue that also need to be thought about upfront. I wrote a white paper on this about a year ago. I got to present at the United Nations last summer for one of their exponential technology forums about this topic. We are actively working with leading companies in this space as they really think about responsible innovation and trying to anticipate just some of the more moral ethical challenges we're going to have as we kind of move into this next iteration of a brave new technology world.

Alan: Allan, where can we find out? Can you can you send me a copy of that white paper?

Allan: Would be thrilled to and you can read it at the Deloitte website, but I can-- I'll definitely send you a copy of that.

Alan: That would be great. Actually, I'm in a book club right now. MetaVRse is part of the Creative Destruction Lab in Toronto, and we're having a reading club on the ethics of technology and humanity. So it's very timely. There's so much to unpack in this. So I wanted to say thank you, Kaitlyn and Allan, for taking the time to be on the podcast and really share your knowledge. I'm looking forward to doing this interview again, let's say, a year from now and learning where you guys have gone, because I believe that this is only just scratching the surface of what's possible. So thank you very much.

Kaitlyn: Thank you.

Alan: And thank you, everyone, for listening. This has been the XR for Business podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. And don't forget to subscribe and don't forget the hit the alerts so they don't miss any future episodes. If you want to read the transcripts instead of listening to it, you can do so at xrforbusiness.io. If you want to learn more about Deloitte and their practice, you can go to deloitte.com and you can search "Allan Cook" or "Kaitlyn Kuczer". Thank you so much, guys, for this. It's been a real honor to have you on the show.

Allan: Likewise. You're welcome. Thank you.

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 and stuff like that . What is the weirdest simulation that you guys have built?

Brandon: Well, I'm going to have to say the drunk driving one, because simulating impaired driving in virtual reality is pretty weird. And it feels weird, because it's disoriented and it's blurry and your reaction time is delayed. So we actually have a customer that has that simulation, they bring it around the country on what they call the Save A Life Tour to universities and high schools to simulate that, to help deter young people from making that as a decision. So it's weird, but it's also very rewarding use case as well.

Alan: Best use case, to be honest. If we can prevent people from doing that, that's amazing. Oh, I love the use case. I was at the I/ITSEC conference and that's in your backyard. I don't know-- what does I/ITSEC stand for again?

Brandon: It is the Interdisciplinary-- uh...

Alan: Oh, "Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation [and] Education Conference." The world's largest modeling simulation and training event. And that was pretty cool, I got to drive a tank. Have you done any tank simulators?

Brandon: I have done a tank simulator, and the one that I find most memorable from there was a bazooka simulator.

Alan: Whoa, I remember seeing that, but I didn't do it! Dammit. I should have.

Brandon: Crazy.

Alan: You have these simulators and are you guys making the content, or do studios make it? If a client says, "OK, I have a backhoe or a tractor and I want to train people on it," do they come to you and say, "I have this tractor, I don't know what to do. Can you help me?" Or how does it work? What's a typical engagement look like from an enterprise?

Brandon: Yeah, after we are approached and we understand the project requirements, we'll either be able to utilize an off-the-shelf software that we can license and integrate into the system, or we can help oversee the production of a custom scenario developed in one of the game engines. Or they can also oversee that separately, if they have internal software development skills and a team. So there's a couple of different situations that we can help with. Either way, we are more of a hardware company and integrate software, and we will work with a team of partner software studios for when we do outsource that, and we really just determine the best means based off of that current project and what fits their needs the best.

Alan: What are the -- I guess -- the price ranges of these things? Are there different ranges? Is there one that has-- maybe moves certain degrees, and then one that's more aggressive? I know one of the simulators that I tried, I felt like I was on a roller coaster. The thing was flinging me around like I was-- it was crazy. What sets your your hardware solutions apart, and what should people look for when buying these?

Brandon: Yeah, there's definitely a variety of products out there. We've been, for the last five years, working on our specific two-degree-of-freedom, compact full-motion simulator. And our starting price point's $10,000. So it's definitely more expensive than most people can get in their homes, but still a fraction of the cost of what you get with level D full flight simulators that cost a million dollars. And we're leveraging virtual reality displays that prevent you from needing to have a full projector dome and full scale replica cockpit, since that's all now in the head mounted display. And we're utilizing basic controls that simulate the different interfaces that you would have. And we're able to get the price point down of these high fidelity simulations that were really only accessible to small percent of people. Now there is a level of simulator products anywhere from seat movers, which just move your seat around, but they don't move your controllers around, and it doesn't really synchronize with what you're seeing.

Alan: Almost like a D-Box or something?

Brandon: No. So a D-Box is more of a motion simulator. They actually have the capabilities of mounting a whole setup cockpit on to a seat and feeling it. So really, we definitely have competitive products to D-Box. And although we're still really friendly and if there's ever a project that utilizes their actuators, we're definitely open to integrating those. But there's actually some things you can buy on Amazon, and so those you can get for a couple of thousand, but it's not a full motion simulator. So we're definitely on the low end for a full motion simulator. It's synchronized one-to-one with what you're seeing and what you're feeling, which is going to reduce any VR sickness that you might get in a static rig or a poor motion simulator. And it will queue up with the acceleration commands that are coming from the game engine in real time to another software called Actuate, which is basically the middleware between the game and the simulator. And you're able to customize that. So that program allows you to customize profiles and the amount of motion you're getting in each direction. And right now, we're also finalizing the launch of a few new products, with more degrees of freedom that is perfect for more advanced aircraft, like helicopters as well as boats, because of the heave axis. So once you get to three DOFs and you're able to lift people up and down, you simulate the butterflies in your stomach, which is a key component of helicopter simulations and driving in the water, because you get a lot of those sudden up and down feelings.

Alan: Oh, neat.

Brandon: Definitely excited about that. And our six-degree-of-freedom simulator, which will be a compact, full motion simulator comparable to a level D flight simulator, but a much smaller footprint, still integrated with VR head mounted display. And it will be as real as you can get. And--

Alan: How much would that be?

Brandon: Well, we're working on the pricing, but it'll still be within the tens of thousands. So you won't be looking at hundreds of thousands of dollars now.

Alan: Well, when you say tens of thousands, to put it in perspective, the military simulations that I saw were in the millions, so tens to hundred X price drop. So if people think $10,000 sounds scary, or $30,000 or $50,000, no, it's not scary if you're able to train people on a multimillion dollar piece of machinery. I think it's well within the price, because just having the ability to train people on that machinery could be impossible or expensive or just not available.

Brandon: Exactly. We're trying to train people better and faster. And those are really the limiting factors right now, especially with pilot shortage, both private and commercial and military. So it's important to be able to train people better. And if we can train them, get the throughput increase faster by having more of these systems available, then it's going to increase throughput and allow for us to catch up a little bit. So, those are our main goals.

Alan: So what companies are currently deploying Talon Simulations' motion simulators right now? Can you speak to any specific ones? And is there any data around the work they're doing? You don't-- you actually don't have to be specific about the customer, you can just maybe generalize, but are they seeing better results? Are they seeing-- what are the results that people are getting when they're using this for training?

Brandon: Yes. So they are definitely seeing some results on whether it's for young driver training or self-driving car acclimation and scenario-based situational awareness. They're just seeing an increase in the effectiveness, compared to basic classroom training. And recently we've acknowledged this study that was done by PWC and a few other organizations to compare VR training to classroom training for soft skills. And they've had these really good metrics on how much faster that they've begun training, and how much more confident they are, and more focused they are. And so we're trying to reach these same metrics with our platform as well. I mean, they're saying four times faster than classroom training, four times more focused, 275 percent more confident. So we're actually at the beginning stages of more concrete studies that will validate that training in virtual reality with motion based system as a haptic device, along with a new feature that we're implementing, which are haptic hand tracking gloves that now allows you to interact with your objects. You're going to be able to train better, you're going to train faster. And we want it to be that much significant of a difference compared to what you would do just by looking at a regular computer screen or PowerPoint presentation.

Alan: It's funny, we have to do studies to prove what we know inherently to be right. What's next, then? You have a new product coming out. And how are you finding with these COVID times? Obviously, your out-of-home entertainment business has probably taken a bit of a hit. Are you finding that things are picking up, or are people getting back to work on this stuff? What's going on in that field?

Brandon: Yeah, so the last few years we really have been primarily focused on location based entertainment, and that has been impacted pretty hard by the pandemic. And at the beginning, when all of our customers that have entertainment centers shut down, we realized that we want to refocus our efforts back on our roots, which have always been training. Our very first prototype was a flight simulator and we've always done work with the military and for training. But it hasn't been our primary focus. So we have reshaped our efforts back into that realm. And it's a tricky industry to guide through. But we've made that pivot back in April and we're starting to get some more traction back. We just got a project for the Air National Guard and there's a great research opportunity with the Air Force that we're pursuing. And we also just got awarded a Unreal-- or an Epic MegaGrant to develop in Unreal, basically in collaboration with BeBop Sensors who makes these haptic hand tracking gloves. So we're really excited to start creating that scenario and test the effectiveness. And it definitely aligns with a lot of the work that the military is looking to develop in the near future.

Alan: It's interesting, I interviewed Gijs Den Butter from SenseGlove. So haptic gloves are getting-- they're getting the notice.

Brandon: They are. So it was in 2015 I/ITSEC, I believe, maybe -14. We had a prototype simulator there. And the number one feature request was hand tracking and interacting with your instruments. So we've been following the developments of gloves for the longest time and the tracking just wasn't really there. And LeapMotion never really satisfied what we're looking for. And then-- then they got acquired. And so we've been really excited to find a company for us to partner with, that also has a proven track record with the military and is excited about making these developments. So it really is the next logical step forward. You got to simulate as many senses as you can to make it as realistic as possible. And we're excited to validate how effective a training device these can be.

Alan: Yeah, it'll be really interesting to see in, let's say, 12 months from now, not only the traction that you guys have built up, but also the case studies and the real numbers and the real data. I think they're going to be completely in your favor. I had the opportunity to try the HaptX Gloves at I/ITSEC and man, having haptics, the feeling of force feedback and touching things. It really did complete the immersion and having motions it's being able to drive. It just-- I don't know, it just feels right. It just feels amazing. I used to have a racing seat in our office and it didn't move, but it was pretty cool, we had a sub-pack. It was kind of like, yeah, it was like a glued together version. So what is the best game to play on your system? Like, what is your go-to game?

Brandon: Well, I come from a background of amusement industry jobs as I, before we started the company, I was at Universal Orlando and always a big roller coaster enthusiast. So our roller coaster simulator, we integrate with no limits too, so pretty high powered roller coaster simulation that's very realistic. And I always enjoy testing out new roller coasters. And there's a great community online of people that design their own, that we can just download and plug and play into our simulator. So that's always a lot of fun. But as a gamer, I'm not the most avid gamer like my business partner is. But we do like to play EVE: Valkyrie from time to time on it, and that is--

Alan: Cool! Oh, that would be super cool.

Brandon: Yeah, the space simulations are pretty intense and somehow the motion in zero gravity seems to work. And we're really excited, too, about the new Star Wars: Squadrons coming out.

Alan: Oh, man. Argh! I need to fly an X-Wing.

Brandon: Yes, sir. Finally.

Alan: Finally! Come on, man, I just want to fly an X-Wing! How hard can it be?

Brandon: [chuckles]

Alan: What else do you want to share with the community before we wrap up?

Brandon: You know, I think virtual reality is getting a lot of press as a buzzword over the last few years. And with Facebook purchasing Oculus and all of the developments they're doing and recently having all of these major announcements on their plan for it, I think it's definitely going to be something that we hear more of. And people will start being able to use it more, whether it's at an arcade or it's at their job. And I think it's a really powerful technology. So I really want-- and I've said this since we started the company, it's all about providing people the best first impression possible with VR. And honestly, for some people, this isn't even their first impression, because the last couple decades we've had VR try to break into the mainstream and the technology wasn't there. So there's definitely some reluctance in adopting it. But it's proving to be a powerful tool, immersive technologies in general. So we're excited about AR and everything that there is to occur with advancements with both of those. And I just think everyone needs to kind of give it a chance. And if you don't have the best experience first time around, try it again, because there's definitely great apps out there. There's great resources that it's going to be really powerful for, whether it's just training, or education, and learning history, performing surgery. It's just amazing. And we really look forward to seeing it implemented more and utilized in these different industries.

Alan: Indeed. There's so much goodness coming, with the announcement of the new Quest 2 at $299 with double the resolution and better battery life. Just everything. Everything across the board is better, and it's cheaper. It's-- this is VR's moment to really blow up. They even decreased their pricing for their ISV program, their service provider business program. It went from $1,000 to $800 now. It comes with the full service and everything. So I think it's really coming along. Can somebody program something, let's say, for example, for Quest using your systems as well? Would that be possible?

Brandon: Yeah, it is possible. Although our simulator is PC based, as far as the motion goes, you can definitely use the Quest as a display tool as well.

Alan: We could just use the link cable, I guess.

Brandon: Yeah, you can use the cable. And if you do it wirelessly, it just needs to be synchronized properly. So for us, we're trying to maintain an enterprise edge and utilize some of the PC based headsets. So we mostly use the VIVE ProEye at this point, and we're excited for the Varjo and XTAL and all those more advanced headsets, because we want to be able to provide something that you wouldn't necessarily get at home. Although now the stuff you're getting at home is already really incredible. [laughs]

Alan: That's the thing, right? You've got Varjo, and they've got the human resolution VR headset that's $10,000. And it's-- if you're designing a new car or a new plane or something, you want to have that fidelity. You can't not have it. But they're cramming more pixels into the consumer ones almost as quickly. It's amazing.

Brandon: Yeah. And now with these new line of GPUs as well, I mean, this is such an incredible time to be a part of this industry and it isn't slowing down. If anything, VR is really taking off more this year. It was definitely getting a lot of traction with location based entertainment. And I do see that coming back where people will have their headsets at home and playing games, but still want to show off their skills at arcades, in competitions and tournaments and things like that. So I definitely do see that bouncing back. There's definitely just-- it's going to find out where it's going to end up and who's going to utilize it. But it's already been-- I mean, the industry's already been growing quite a bit the last few years, and it's only going to get bigger and better.

Alan: Yes, I completely agree with you. What problem or challenge in the world do you want to see solved using XR technologies and why?

Brandon: Well, I've always wanted our mission at Talon to be saving lives and changing lives. And what I mean by that is I've always seen people's faces when we give them demos, especially if it's on a race car or rollercoasters, their face lights up. And it's-- I've never seen smiles and excitement this big. And I operated rides at Universal. [chuckles] So this was amazing being able to get thousands of people at this point and see their reactions to VR experiences. And then for training, we want to train better. We want to save lives. We want people to get better at what they're doing. We want them-- we want to show them that if we can deter them from drunk driving, and texting and driving, and start adopting self-driving cars, I mean, that's one of the whole research projects one of the universities is testing, is to try to get people familiar with self-driving cars and feel more comfortable adopting that, because it is so, so scary and futuristic and is already happening. This technology is already changing lives and saving lives, and we're grateful to have the opportunity to play a small role in it every day. So it's really exciting. And I look forward to seeing many more years of adoption and having an impact.

Alan: That's incredible. Brandon, thank you so much for joining me today. And how could people find you?

Brandon: You can find Talon Simulations on Facebook at TalonSimulations, LinkedIn talon-simulations-llc, BrandonNaids. You can connect with me on there. And you can follow us on Instagram and just keep a lookout for all the new updates that we have coming for you at the end of this year.

Alan: All the new new. Amazing.

Brandon: Exactly.

Alan: Well, and I'm assuming the website as well, talonsimulations.com. Well, thank you very much for joining me and thanks everybody for listening. This has been the XR for Business podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. And if you want to read these episodes instead of listening to them, you can do that as well. We have a transcript of all the podcast episodes at xrforbusiness.io. Thanks again and have a great day, everyone.

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: I can imagine.

Gijs: Nowadays you don't have-- well, you have some basic skills, you have seen some videos. But you're just walking in that line and your task needs to be completed within two minutes. So on the very complex task, what they did, they created dummy lines or dummy assembly tasks, where you basically do these tasks that you do on the line, but then in a more chill environment, there's no stress at all. But yeah, to create it is quite costly. So they thought, "Well, we could also do these trainings in virtual reality, rather than on this dummy line." And they started doing use cases like pick and placing -- or boxing -- of boxes and picking and placing of parts. But as they were moving on, they want also-- would like to have some more complex tasks added to this virtual training. But yeah, with these controllers, it was quite hard to-- if you push on a button and then something happens that's not really a training. But really, if you need to connect two plastic parts together or you need to drill inside a door panel, for example, that's where it starts to become complicated and the task that you need to train. So that's the reason why they asked, "OK, we need that next level of immersion. We need to have that component of touch into VR." And that's where they explored our option, that we were offering with this prototype on this particular business fair that we were on. And the other side is, if you're in the design process, and you would like to know if, for example, your car part that you have been designing is actually able to be produced by your manufacturing workers or has the right ergonomics. Nowadays you just build a prototype, physical prototype, which is a very costly process and test your ergonomics, for example. If you could do that in VR and can have that similar behavior that a human has inside the virtual environment, that really is cost saving for companies like Volkswagen.

Alan: I'm looking at different pictures on your website, and the website's senseglove.com. Now, these are not fashionable gloves. You're not going to be walking down the street wearing these things. They're a big blue frame and you look like a little robot. But in a research or in a training scenario, who cares? What are some of the other use cases that people are thinking. Obviously, training is an easy one. It's a no brainer. "I need to train somebody or check out the ergonomics." What are other some of the other use cases that maybe you didn't anticipate that people are using this for?

Gijs: A wonderful use case I really liked we never would be thinking of: it's one of the cases that Proctor & Gamble did together with us at Proctor & Gamble Health. And basically they had a idea of getting awareness of nerve ending disease, of nerve ending problems. Well, you can compare this to, for example, Parkinson. And they want to get empathy and awareness of this particular disease among general practitioners, but also on the general public. So they approach us and say, "Hey, you can create touch in VR, but can you also create touch that doesn't exist in VR?" We said, "Yes, of course we can." So what we did, we created an environment for them where healthy people like you and I can experience how it is to have that disease. So first you just do your scenario without any symptoms, and then you repeat that same scenario with the symptoms of this nerve damage disease. And then while you feel some tingling in your fingers, the resistance stops from the glove. So that causes that most of the people will drop the object that they have in their hand. And so really, you can get a feeling of how it is to have this disease. And while for the general public, this was meant to become like an ah-ha moment, "Hey, this is a really extreme version of what I experienced today. So I might need to visit a general practitioner." And also for the GP's, it was a awareness moment of "This is actually what my patients are feeling. This is what we're helping them with."

SenseGloves in motion

Alan: I think some of the best use cases of VR and AR technology end up coming from the end users. Not the people developing the technology at all, but the people that say, "Oh, this technology is great for X, can we use it for Y and Z?"

Gijs: Yeah.

Alan: We had Oracle, a gentlemen from Oracle, Sikaar [Keita]. He actually built an IoT sensor connection between our MetaVRse engine and this Bluetooth IoT sensor. And then yesterday, the new Airpods have 3DOF controllers built in, so they have accelerometers built into them. So somebody built a link between Unity and the Airpods, so they can turn their head, and it turns the 3D model in the screen. There's a lot of cool things that you don't think of with that. So let me ask you a question. This came out of TU Delft, which is a technical university in the Netherlands. Is the IP out of a lab, is it part of the TU Delft IP library, is this completely proprietary? Have you raised capital? Maybe talk a little bit about that, and how you're funding this, and what your plans are for the near and far term futures?

Gijs: Yeah, yeah. So I started this company as one of the co-founders together with my former supervisor at TU Delft, so it's really the technology that me and my co-founder developed, although we developed it under the umbrella of the TU Delft. So well, we have a wonderful system here that you can get the IP as a company and the university will become a shareholder in your company. So that's what happened with us. And when we spun out that technology, also, we got a convertible loan from the university itself. So we had some start capital to build our first initial product, which is -- to me -- a really good way of developing technology that comes out of university labs. And there with that loan, we were able to build our first prototypes and to build the first stage of the company. And back in 2017, we got some angel funding. We got also a new co-funder into the more experienced entrepreneur into our board. And last year -- so last November -- we did our Series A round. So we're a venture capital tech startup at this point, although the European venture capital landscape is quite different from the American.

Alan: You mean you didn't raise $25-million Series A?

Gijs: No, no. It was not a $25-thousand Series A. In the European Series A you have to be between one and five million. That's basically the European Series A.

Alan: Awesome. It's so great for you guys to hear that. And you're delivering these, right? You have these kits, these developer kits, right?

Gijs: Yeah. So indeed what you mentioned, our current product is really a developer kit. So it's not a finished product. It's a product that researchers, R&D organizations can already test, "What does touch in VR mean for us?" And we especially keep it at a price point that's affordable for every business use case. At the same time, we can learn from our clients. So if our clients are developing VR trainings -- or developing these wonderful use cases, like Proctor & Gamble did -- we know what to improve. It works both ways. We can get a little bit of money out of it, because we sell these devices. The industry can already test what does touch mean in VR, and we get information in order to build better products for the industry.

Alan: What you guys have done is you've basically built a system where you can touch in VR, you can touch in these virtual experiences. I think what your-- what was it, $3,000 for the developer kit?

Gijs: Indeed.

Alan: Now how much-- because I've also tried the HaptX gloves, which must be considerably more money, because they come with hydraulics and heat and cold and like. Yours is more the simple aspect of touch and force feedback, which-- I don't know that you need all the other bells and whistles, to be honest. But having not tried both, would be interesting to see a comparison. How would you compare the SenseGlove to the HaptX in terms of performance, feature sets, and then maybe price as well?

Gijs: Where HaptX has as a vision to have touch as close to feeling in reality as possible, we take the minimal components of touch, in order to let you behave natural, so as you do in real life. That's so different. So it's rather like immersion, but we have versus realism that HaptX has as a vision. For us, basically, there are four different ways of digital feeling. The first way -- to us that's the most important way -- is the way how you feel the shape and the density of an object. And that you do with force feedback, so the resistance on your fingers in a virtual environment. The second way is where you feel textures. And that can be done by a simple vibration motor that's also in your smartphone. So there you can create ideas of buttons there, you can create ideas of rough and smooth surfaces. And then there is a third way, and that's where you feel edges and like small roundnesses and then roughnesses, those kind of things. And that's where you-- there's a term called skin deformation. So that's the delta between the pressure that is given on your skin. And that is where HaptX really is focusing on. So HaptX has wonderful technology where they have air pressure bubbles or liquid pressure bubbles -- I think currently it's pressure -- where they put all kind of bubbles on your skin and deform your skin. So the difference between our technology and the difference between haptics technology is that, with the technology of haptics, you could feel edges of an object, and with ours, not. That is because we think that it can also be levelled due to the visual aspect that you have in this virtual environment. Sometimes people ask us and say, "OK, if I close my eyes, I don't feel I'm holding an apple, I'm only feeling I'm holding a rough round shape." That's indeed what it will feel with the SenseGlove, because we think that the combination of your visual aspect, that you're seeing an apple and you're feeling a round object that will trick your brain, "Hey, I'm holding an apple." Whether with, for example, a HaptX setup, you would come closer to the idea of feeling an apple, rather than a rough round shape. And that's the difference in technology. Obviously, that comes with a price point. I think the latest estimation, what I saw is that a HaptX system will cost you €30,000, up to €100,000. I'm not sure where they are at this point in the market. And the SenseGlove is a €3,000 device that you can buy, and plug and play, and start using the day after you bought it.

Alan: I actually had a really great experience with HaptX gloves, and I'm really excited to to try these SenseGloves. At a factor of price of 100 times cheaper, at least 10x cheaper, that's a great way for researchers to start to learn the benefits of touch within a virtual environment. I think it's really exciting. How can somebody try these? They can go to senseglove.com and order a pair of these.

Gijs: If you're indeed a researcher or if you have enough budget, it's the most easy way to order it, via our web shop, or send me an email. Yeah, that's the most easiest way to try out. It's only like for €3,000, you're already getting started. For some other projects, hopefully when we can do business fairs again, we're [at] most of the VR business fairs, like the WE. We've been to Eurohaptics lately. We were on CES. Also please keep an eye on our website, where we are. And if really you have a very interesting use case and doubting how essential is the device, we also have some devices that we can borrow out.

Alan: You talked about Proctor & Gamble, we talked about VW. Is there any other companies that you've seen that they come up with a use case that you went, "Wow, that is super cool." What are some of the fringe use cases for this?

Gijs: The Proctor & Gamble one and this one is really cool in these terms, because you really experience something that you would hopefully never experience in your real life. We had some strange research projects where there were typical-- now, mostly on the side of having a disease and being able to empathize on that disease or overcome the disease and for example, rehabilitation use cases. But as I'm a very [big] believer of augmented reality, I also would like to mention one of the use cases that a-- well, not a research institution, in Germany did, Fraunhofer. They combined SenseGlove at an augmented reality set up. And then while you still have that bulky blue exoskeleton that you see through these augmented glasses, but at the moment you actually can grasp the virtual hologram that is in front of you. And in this case, this was a design of a headlight. You really feel, "Okay, I have something here." And you really believe also that that augmented headlight casing was there, that really is also cool.

Alan: So you're in the real world, you reach out, you see a virtual object, and you can grab it and touch it. Ohhh!

Gijs: And then your imagination can go wild. So we could have this podcast and have your hologram next to me. We could high-five. We could shake hands.

Alan: Yeah, the virtual handshake.

Gijs: That's what this technology can bring us.

Alan: This is super cool. Now, I have to ask this now, my mind is racing on this. Do you guys have plans to miniaturize the technology in any way, shape, or form, to make it so that you're not staring down the big blue exoskeleton?

Gijs: Yeah, yeah. That's definitely one of our big goals. Yeah. With force, you need to bring your force to somewhere where it can land on the physical world, because otherwise, yeah, you don't feel any resistance. So it will always have some form of plastic inside the glove system. But yeah, to be honest, we are working on miniaturizing our SenseGlove, because this is one of the biggest demands of our clients.

Alan: I just read an article about diminished reality, how basically they're using augmented reality to erase parts of the world. So if you're looking at something, you can actually take it out of the world real time. I wonder if you could just put some sort of tracker, like maybe a QR code on the back of the gloves. So as you're using them, it actually understands that whenever I see this QR code, take it away, take it out of the scene, so all you see is a pair of hands. Even though it's there as the gloves, and everybody in the world can see it. But when you're playing with it, all you see is a pair of hands, digital hands.

Gijs: In VR, obviously, that is--

Alan: Oh, VR is easy, but AR is the hard part.

Gijs: In AR, that's different. But also the downside of an exoskeleton is the weight balance that you have. If you do really, really small tasks, sometimes your exoskeleton collides with each other. So there are limitations to the exoskeleton, besides the visual part of it. So, yeah, we're really working hard to miniaturize this. I won't say too much of a detail of how we will do this, but expect that from our company in the upcoming years.

Alan: Well, I'm certainly really excited for the future of SenseGlove and haptic technology. The second I put the HaptX gloves on and had that experience, I was a full believer. And I will never forget that experience at CES, where I reached into a fire and it caught me. And these are memories burned into my brain. So I believe that using the combination of VR and haptic gloves and the SenseGloves for training, I believe that you can actually start to give people -- I would say -- probably 70 to 80 percent of the real world training that they're required. And the cost savings are just astronomical, when you start to realize what can be done in virtual worlds, especially on things that are dangerous and expensive. Maybe it's running three shifts a day. You can't train people on it, because it's real. Time is running and never stops. So how do you train people on a line that never goes down? Then they have to learn as they go. This gives them an opportunity for mastery long before they ever step foot in the factory floor.

Gijs: Indeed. And I think with haptic technology, you can indeed bring that real live realism into VR. And what's key about that is the KPI of mistakes that people make on their final exam, or on their final-- first day of work. And I think that's also a really good way of measuring the effectiveness of your VR training. Compare, for example, the amount of mistakes people make on a real life training. Compare that with the amount that they make on training with controllers. And then compare that also with the training with haptic gloves. You'll see that the training with the gloves is more comparable to this real life training than when you have these controllers. Nice example here is one of our clients. They were training in VR how to replace fuses in some kind of fusebox environment. The action they needed to do in VR to replace that fuse was to pull a trigger button and then the fuse came out of the box. But in real life, you needed to push the fuse, turn it a little bit, and then pull it out. So the guys that were trained in VR with the controllers, they knew, "OK, I need to pull a trigger, so I pull the fuse," and the first time they did it, they actually broke that box, because they were trained wrongly. But if you would have had a haptic glove, you would've really needed to push first, then turn, and then take out that fuse. And you would be trained in a life-like situation. So that is really where haptics can force you to have that muscle memory of how the real-life situation would look like.

Alan: And that's really what it comes down to. What's the point of building a photorealistic VR training, if you're not going to go all the way and train it right down to what you need to do? Gijs, is there anything else you want to share with the community, with the podcast, how can people get a hold of you?

Gijs: Yeah, the best way is to reach out via our website, via a contact forms – we have dozens – it will eventually end up in mine or my colleague's e-mailbox. I'm happy to answer all your questions. But also really try to see where is the haptic-- where's haptics at this point? Because it's really-- at this point in time, I think it's just one to ten percent of what actually can be achieved with haptic technology. It's the new field of research in VR. So we know what VR, what the visual can mean for us. And now it's really time to also see, "OK, what is this next level of immersion?" So things like spatial audio, things like motion capture, but also really haptics is one of the key features in order to make VR more immersive. And I think we have a product on the market that you can today already experience. And also think together with us where this new field will go to.

Alan: I thought that was really interesting on your website, you had a section where for the price, for example, you have €2,999 to buy the developer kit. But then €3,999, and you get time with your developers to help build something. That was really cool.

Gijs: So we have four businesses package, where we can create your first haptic use case together. So this is really for businesses that have already a VR training, for example, but lacking that immersion of touch. And then we help you to actually get the SenseGlove into your virtual environment, into your Unity environment. And we see that this 40 hour development package is -- most of the time -- enough to create that first proof of concept for your first haptic training. And also for the other side of the research is we have something on the website called a warranty package. This is maybe a wrong term here, but it usually is some support from our side that we help you in order. When you have questions on our SDK, we have developers that built our SDKs and are happy to help you over phone or over some sort of lesson support gear. So, yeah, we really want to work together with our clients to create the future of haptic technology.

Alan: Well, Gijs, thank you so much. We're so glad to have you on the show, and if anybody is interested in seeing how haptic gloves can really transform their training -- and beyond, really, beyond training, it could be anything -- I think adding haptics to a virtual experience really does complete the circle of immersion. And when you have that combined with spatial audio and great visuals, it really does create this full package immersion. And I think this is the future of learning, of training, and of probably marketing and sales in the future as well. So thank you, Gijs, for taking the time with us. Everybody, if you're interested in learning more, you can go to senseglove.com. And yeah, we'll continue to follow up with Gijs and team, and we'll see what's next in the world of haptics. So thank you very much, Gijs.

Gijs: Thank you so much, Alan, for having me. It was a pleasure.

Alan: My pleasure. And that is the end of the XR for Business podcast for today, your host, Alan Smithson. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button so you don't miss any episodes. And if you want to have the transcripts of this, we transcribe all the episodes at xrforbusiness.io. Again, thank you so much for joining us, and have a great day.

Alan: Oh, wait a second! Gijs, I have one more question. I almost forgot to ask it. What problem or challenge in the world do you want to see solved using XR technologies?

Gijs: Yes, so the problem that I would like to be solved is that we're getting away from these 2D interactions in computing. So as we're now typing on a keyboard, as we're now-- always with our face down, looking into our smartphones. Yeah, that to me isn't really an interaction. That's just you immersed in a computer screen. Well, with XR, you finally, well, can get up again and interact with the digital environment around, like you would do-- as you would [if you did] not have any idea of the existence of computing. And that's also really nice-- there's a nice metaphor. We once had the grandmother of one of our founders here, old lady, and she never had done any iPadding or computing before. We put her in VR, we put her on the SenseGloves, and she knew how to interact with the digital environment. And if you then sometimes compared it to really expert computer users, where they're used to clicking on buttons and those kind of things, who are way too fast for like, let's say, grabbing things, and expect that just putting your hand next to something will enable the grasping motion. Yeah, that's really cool to see that, that a grandmother can actually intuitively interact in this virtual environment, that sometimes the so-called expert users are expecting a different type of interaction. So really, the problem that I would like to solve -- or being solved -- with XR is that we again come to normal interactions in this digital environment, rather than fake 2D interactions.

Alan: I love it. It's a really great vision. And I think as we move into spatial computing as the new normal, this will be the way we interact. And you are already seeing it with Facebook's hand tracking, and it's all coming. And actually, I wanted to give a quick shout out to XR Boot Camp. They're our partners, and they just finished a master class on hand tracking and programming for hand tracking. And I think there's a great synergy here, where they can maybe start to teach how to create interactions using the SenseGlove as well. So I'll make an introduction.

Gijs: Definitely. Thanks.

Alan: Thank you so much, Chris.

Gijs: And also indeed -- like on the latest Facebook Connect, the new name -- indeed, one of the questions that they had as well is how to interact in this new domain of spatial computing. So in this example of the mouse in 2D, that was what was given, what is the next thing in 3D? And I think that is a really nice challenge that we can solve as a community over the upcoming years.

Alan: Absolutely. It turns out we have built in mice. We got these things called "hands."

Gijs: [chuckles] Indeed.

Alan: Well, thank you, Gijs. I really appreciate it.

Gijs: Thank you.

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 create catalog images and website images, without ever using a camera.

Ben: Yes. And then the third is using those same 3D assets that we can use for the interactive 3D configurator and the virtual photographer. We can then also export or create AR experiences using those same assets, the same models, the same materials.

Alan: That's incredible. So now a retailer has a one-stop-shop to do a lot of the things that maybe was being done by several firms.

Ben: Yes, it is a consolidation, and it does lead to a lot of efficiencies, because you only have to make your materials once, you only have to make your models once. And that configuration data is often run off a lot of business data, from an either ERP or some e-commerce integration. We only need to do that once and then you get all of these outputs.

Alan: Well, that's interesting that you mention that, because one of the things that I noticed about your system is if you go to threekit.com and hover over "Solutions," you have all the e-commerce platforms listed: Magento, Salesforce, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce and SAP. Maybe explain how that kind of would work. If I'm a retailer and I sell something, how would it work through your system?

Ben: OK, well, it's basically an integration. Our configurators are a set of options that you specify, and then we can show that as attractive 3D AR or the virtual photography. We can integrate into the e-commerce platforms option system and then it just automatically follows whatever they pick in their e-commerce system. Our pictures or interactive 3D would follow, and then you can add that to cart and then we automatically generate a thumbnail of that configuration, then you can checkout. It can also then do post-order workflows. So often, like we have some companies that create 3D prints, so they configure product for just-in-time manufacturing, so we can help create that STL for you.

Alan: Oh wow. That's like next level. So you're not only visualizing and showing it, but you're then able to take whatever they've designed themselves, throw it over to 3D printing and-- oh wow, that's a great pipeline.

Ben: Yeah, we do that actually as well for bombs. We can also do that for like 2D print files, like you're making custom t-shirts or some type of custom cell phone case. So there's a lot of different outputs and we're adding more all the time, because then not only are you getting that 3D configuration, you're actually getting a full business transformation, that you can cut out steps of your standard fulfillment process. It just becomes fully automated.

Alan: That's amazing. And that's what everybody needs it right now, and especially in a time where technology seems to be kind of blinding us to our human interactions. What this, I believe, will allow e-commerce companies to do is when this is all automated, you can spend more time answering customers questions and really developing a personal relationship with your customers. I think this is-- it's technology that allows for a more personal touch. It's great.

Ben: Yeah, and just a lot of cost savings and scalability, too, because when you don't have someone rejigging all your orders just to get it over to film it, yeah, your business can just scale.

Alan: This is incredible. Is it mainly large companies or is there small, medium sized companies as well? What are you seeing?

Ben: We see various different companies on the smaller end. We work with-- I have to be careful. I can only talk about the ones that are public.

Alan: Oh, it's fine. You don't have to mention any names, but just maybe examples of how people are using it. Because if you're a small retailer, a lot of times these solutions are just completely out of reach. And so I don't think that's the case in your world.

Ben: Yeah, like we work with-- Pukka is a good example, they make custom hats. So these are like baseball caps or beanies, in Canada, they're called toques. And so you can configure what any colors you want, you can do custom logos, as well as fonts on it. You can even upload SPGs and it'll display them. Before they'd actually have to do this sort of an iterative process. Someone would request what they want. They'd send back a picture of here's what their designer thought they wanted, and there'd be a lot of interaction. Now they do that fully on the web without any human involved, and they get a live preview, and then they can submit that to order. So that just opens up a whole new market they didn't have before.

Alan: Ok, so let me ask you straight up numbers. And since then, does that increase sales?

Ben: Yes. At Audi -- not our customer - but they saw 66 percent increase in user engagements once they switched to a 3D cart configurator from a 2D solution. And those who view 3D products are 11 times more likely to buy than those who don't.

Alan: OK, hold on. Hold the phone, hold the phone. So you're saying Audi used 3D configurator and saw a 66 percent increase in activity, in time spent on an object or what was that?

Ben: Yeah, that's Audi reporting that they saw 66 percent increase, when compared to a traditional 2D solution.

Alan: Wow. And then 11 times more likely to buy.

Ben: If they saw a 3D product. That's according to [Audi].

Alan: That's incredible. So how does an organization get started with this? Let's say, for example, I'm a manufacturer of desks and I want to have my desks in 3D. And do I have to have CAD models? Do I come to you and do you have a service that builds them? Walk us through the process from "I have a product that could could use this configuration, it'd be great in AR, and I would love to do photographs." What is the step by step process of an organization looking to engage with Threekit?

Ben: It all depends on what is your product? If you have CAD models, that's a really good place to start. If you don't have CAD models, there's other solutions. We can 3D scan your furniture and then turn that into high quality computer models or we can even work with photos. It is best, though, if we do have CAD models, but there is other solutions. Like we do purses and suits and many organic type objects without CAD models. That's the modeling side of things. There's also the material side of things. So if you have standard materials such as like stainless steel, or like a ceramic, or standard plastics, we have material templates for those. If you have more exotic materials, such as very specific car paints or various woods, we can scan those. We have one client, Tailored Brands. They own Moores Clothing in Canada and also Jos. A. Bank in the States. They have 1,300 suit fabrics, of which 600 are dark blue or black.

Alan: [laughs] Wow. How do you differentiate between those?

Ben: So we do high quality scans and those high quality scans can capture the subtleties in the bumps, the sheen, the different thread patterns, and so that each one of those looks unique and accurate, because when you have that many choose from, you really want to be accurate. Because what people see in your virtual photography, they're going to expect. So, yeah, that's where we get the models and that's how we get the materials, the last aspect of that is we have to get your configuration data. What features go with which other features, and what is the total number of features? We can do that in a number of ways. One of the best is do ERP integration if it's constantly changing, or we can do one time integrations or get it from your e-commerce system, or we can give you more full control over that if you want to have some way of customizing that and controlling that yourself.

Alan: So is there a self-serve platform as well where people are-- I'm assuming you have some sort of content management system for customers to get in and make changes to skews and things like that?

Ben: Yeah, we have a number of customers who are doing self service, and that can vary from just managing which configurations you want to be showing. Let's say you've got a new product, and you want to show only some of those configurations and release maybe more materials a couple months from now, or discontinue some options. We have our customers can also self maintain if they know some things about 3D, they can add their own materials and their own models as well. And we have some clients doing that. But that's too much for other clients. So we can we can handle many different levels of self serve, depending on the needs of the client, their sophistication, and size.

Alan: That's amazing. One of the things that you didn't touch on, that I think is going to be a fairly large part of this is, we talked about configurators, synthetic photography, AR. But what about using 3D to boost ads? I know you partnered with Google recently, so maybe you can speak to that.

Alan: That's actually from the same platform. Once you already have your models, your materials and your configurations, we can then output any one of those to the Google ad platform. And therefore you can-- for some of our clients, some of our clients have trillions of combinations. That's on average, probably they have tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands combinations. You can pick any one of those to send us an ad. And then depending on feedback, it's very easy for you to start making A-B tests between different types of configured models.

Alan: That's great.

Ben: The other thing we can do is we can also send those virtual photographs to Google ads as well. So you can do both 3D ads, as well as traditional image-based advertising.

Alan: Have you been doing 3D ads long? Is it-- do you have enough data to say do the 3D ads convert higher than regular 2D ads, or maybe there's not enough data yet?

Ben: Google has published some numbers on that. We've been doing 3D ads through Google for about a year, I guess. It depends on the product, and also the success of AR also depends on the product. Doing AR on a very big product actually can often confuse users. So the smaller the product -- without it being like sort of jewelry -- the better AR is for it.

Alan: Really? Huh.

Ben: It varies depending on the type of product. Images, as well. One cool thing with our image integration with Google ads is you can have someone try a configured product and say you're doing a suit. And we have-- I think we support over a trillion combinations for Tailored Brands. We can then create an image of that, a final image and then Google can use Pixel technology to start showing you that custom image that no one else has seen. And it can start showing you that on other websites, to encourage you to come by and complete that transaction.

Alan: Wow.

Ben: Interestingly enough, if we knew that you had bought a suit, we could actually start suggesting ties to you, and we could make images of the suit that you bought along with some suggested ties -- if there's a special in ties -- and then show those. So that you can now have imagery that's custom on demand for you, based on your style preferences or your previous purchases.

Alan: Wow. There's so much to go through here. We talked about clothing and furniture, but some of the industries that you serve go pretty wide. You've got here furniture and home goods, commercial furniture, building materials, clothing and shoes, manufacturing, medical devices, jewelry, watches, kitchen, bath, and luggage. Of those industries, which ones are seeing kind of the greatest impact of this technology, or is it all equal?

Ben: Each one is being impacted quite a bit. It's a mass success when you have a lot of a configurable product. I think the challenge, our solution doesn't work well, if you're selling like one product that doesn't have configurations, because you only need one photo. If it only-- if you saw what product and it comes in four different colors, it's getting harder to justify our solution, because you probably have four copies of the product already, and you could take photos. So I would say that the more configurable your product is by your customers, the more valuable our solution is.

Alan: I'm looking at your clothing page and it's a suit jacket and the suit can be blue or gray or beige. But the interior -- and this is where men like to to get customization -- the interior of the fabric could be thousands of different fabrics.

Ben: We did some really interesting work to get the NFL teams into Jos. A. Banks as interior patterns. That's the suit brand owned by Tailored Brands.

Alan: Oh, man, that's super cool. Who doesn't want to have their football team in their blazer jacket, built into the liner? And the possibilities with this are endless. OK, so since we've kind of come from 2015 to 2020, what do you think is going to be the trend moving forward to, let's say, 2025?

Ben: What I recommended or what I was suggesting earlier is where you know people's previous purchases, and then you can start making contextual suggestions of additional purchases that match that. So let's say we know that you've frequented this furniture retailer and you had bought a number of purchases previously. Well, then maybe they could show you pictures of your suggested purchase in context, or we could even learn maybe based on the style of that furniture, because we know more about that furniture than people normally do with just a SKU, we can actually go, "Well, this style of furniture actually looks really nice with this other one" so if you have brown end tables, you probably want to have a couch that matches that if you're upgrading your couch. So I guess that's concierge-ing, suggesting additional products that go with your existing purchases. And we could show that visually. And we can also just make those recommendations based on that deep knowledge of the products. The other one, which I'm really excited about, is additional trial. So with this LiDAR that Apple is pushing pretty hard -- I'm pretty sure Google is going to follow suit pretty quickly, probably one year behind, and then they're going to have LiDAR on their top end phones, probably coming to Samsung -- but try-on is going to be made really possible, try-on of suits. You'll be able to try on that suit and then see it. So that's AR, plus really high quality LiDAR scanning, skeleton detection, and then clothing simulation. And then you can try on a baseball cap at home. You can try putting on a tie. It could even start suggesting that this is the right size for you. It could suggest, "Well, we know you have that suit, you don't even have to put it on. But I can start suggesting ties for you." Scan your room and it knows which furniture you've already bought and then it makes suggestions based on that. So AR becomes easy. You don't even put like the new furniture down, you just scan your room and it goes "By the way, here's where I think the table should go. This is the table I think you should buy." Then it goes "Well, here's four other suggestions that I also think are [suitable]."

Alan: That's crazy.

Ben: It's going to be pretty cool. I wonder if you can even scan your videos. "By the way, here's the lights I suggest you change, and this is how your room would look different."

Alan: Oh, how cool is that.

Ben: Yeah. So that's where we're going. And it's great that Apple is pushing this pretty hard. There may be AR glasses as well. There's a lot of rumors [that] Apple's working on that.

Alan: And Facebook announced their research version of them; Project Aria.

Ben: Yeah. So that would be very cool. And all of these things just become a bit more integrated if it's in your glasses. Though I do think that's like-- I don't know if it'l have wide adoption by 2025.

Alan: No, I think the glasses, my guess is-- well, who knows, man? Nreal is launching their glasses as a consumer glass with all the telcos. I know they're working with Deutsche Telekom and T-Mobile and a number of other companies. So these glasses are coming to the market. I just don't think there's a massive enough base of content that is viewable on them. So we'll have to see. But there's going to be some options.

Ben: Yeah, yeah. LiDAR plus AR glasses is a very interesting combination.

Alan: I totally agree. And the new iPad Pro has LiDAR built into the front sensor, so you can now scan your room. And there's rumors that the iPhone 12 will have LiDAR scanning as well on the front-facing camera. They already have it facing your head -- which the face unlock uses -- but having-- being able to LiDAR scan your room and understand that, not only the image of the room, but the actual structure of it, where the table is, the floor-- the analogy I tell to people is, it's like Pokémon Go if the Pokémon could hide behind things.

Ben: But then also it will recognize your furniture.

Alan: Yeah.

Ben: So you don't even have to enter in like a lot of people want to do home planning. But right now, if you try any of those home planners they're like, "OK, entering your walls, OK, now put your existing furniture in." And if you want to do that, you're in for hours of work. But in the future, it'll just scan your room.

Alan: Yeah, it's going to be so easy. And I know you've seen demos like that, because I've seen some of them, like, "Wow, the future is already here." [laughs]

Ben: I think that going into stores will actually be like a downgrade from what you could do in your home. The only thing you're getting is you're able to touch it. You're able to touch that material, able to sit on that sofa. But other than that, you're not missing out that much.

Alan: So, OK, what are some of the things you're working on now, that you're super excited about that is coming in 2021, let's say, what are some of the things you're really excited about? Maybe push new technology? What do you want people to know that's coming in 2021 for you guys?

Ben: We've got a big push on configurable AR, and we're going to be pushing even harder on that. We've got wall placement coming. We're looking at a technology called WebXR. But right now, reconfigurable AR technology already works both on Apple and on Android phones. And then I would say that's probably-- a lot of it is also increasing the ROI. So ensuring that the platform is low cost to you and that it provides the most benefit.

Alan: I think this is where a lot of early AR start ups and VR startups in general missed the boat. They started creating a technology, and then they had the technology and it was looking for a solution. Being able to create ROI directly and demonstrate that ROI, that's really what customers at the end of the day want, especially B2B customers. I'm enamoured: I'm looking at a DeWalt drill right now on your demo site. Their demo site -- just so if you want to know and go and try these things out -- there's a whole site. If you go to threekit.com, go to the "Resources" tab and down to the "3D Product Library". And there is bracelets, backpacks, sound systems, high heels. Is there a product category that you guys *haven't* touched yet, that you think would make a good one?

Ben: We really have a quite broad set of clients.

A rad bike helmet designed using ThreeKit's 3D configurator.

Alan: Yeah, it doesn't look like-- it looks like you cover everything: there's a tent here, a watch. It's really, really great. And the fidelity on these objects is really beautiful. And it's all real time and it's all running on the web. So one question I actually had from a technical standpoint is how hard is it to put these things on the web, compared to something like an app or maybe using Unity for a configurator? What is the difference between workflows on Threekit, versus Unity or even Unreal?

Ben: Well, let's see. I talked about the evolution. We used to do everything through a previous platform we had called Clara.io. A lot of the current technology evolved out of Clara.io's online 3d editor that we made. We made a new platform called Threekit, specifically for the 3D e-commerce market that we're in now. What it did is it made a number of major changes from Clara.io that made it very powerful. It actually has models separated from materials, separated from -- say -- textures. And then it also has an e-commerce catalogue and option set. And so all of that together makes it very low cost to scale up, both in terms of products and options across your catalog. It's-- in some ways the asset management system is very similar to Unreal Engine. But the advantages that it has over, say, Unreal Engine is everything's on the web, optimized for the web, and our runtime is very, very small. So Unreal and Unity do have abilities to go on the web. But if you try and use them, you'll find out that everything is very slow, because it's loading a full game engine, or at least a partial game engine on the web. And you have to create everything in that game engine. Whereas ours, you create it in an online platform that actually is designed around e-commerce and configurations, and then everything is optimized to be small. So that's sort of the difference. The other thing that's different from those existing platforms is that we have a render system that's very similar to how it works in visual effects. So this is how you create your stages, your sort of backdrops, and then you create your virtual photography using that. That's also something that isn't even in Unreal Engine or Unity at all. So I guess we're sort of a platform that's reimagined, inspired by Unreal, inspired by 3D content creation systems like Maya, and then web-based systems like Google Docs. It's sort of taking all those ideas and then making a system that's perfectly tailored for the needs of e-commerce.

Alan: So maybe you can speak to actually that for a second, because I think this is something missing from all the other systems that I identified a couple of years ago. We were doing a project on WebAR, and we had an agency as a client, and then we had the client, and then we had the brands, and everybody had to approve it. And the back and forth, we couldn't send the 3D model, so you'd end up taking five or six photographs or snapshots, sending it over, they'd say "Change this." It was a disaster. So talk about maybe your versioning and how that works. And it's a it's a feature that nobody talks about, but I think it's vital to e-commerce.

Ben: I think it's vital, and it's very important when you're actually doing the project. But it's really hard to communicate when someone's looking to sort of license or buy our product, because the people that are buying our product -- and this is about maximizing ROI -- what people are looking at, they don't usually judge it based on that impression. They only find out about its value once you're in the project.

Alan: But it is one of those things that they really do need to think about.

Ben: Yeah, our version is based sort of on some developer technology -- it's not using this technology -- but it's inspired by something called GET. And this means that everything is versioned, and we know every change that was ever made. So we can go back in time to the present. We can also make branches. So you can take like the current accepted version, then you can have an artist start say, making a bunch of fixes to a number of materials, and then they can propose that back, and then people can look at how that looks, and then accept it or not accept it. And so then we have a review system as well, where then you can have people sign off on those changes. So, yeah, it's basically based on reviews and approvals, and then branching and versioning. It sounds complex, but it actually works really well in practice, because you don't get changes you didn't want in the main system.

Alan: So I think one of the questions I have now is what are the limits? Because it's in a web, obviously Unreal. I think their latest ad was "We're pushing a billion polygons in the PS5". So obviously PS5 or PS4 and these game consoles, they offer far more rendering power with dedicated GPUs and everything. How are you then able to take this web-based 3D and provide it to Android and Apple? And of course, everybody's got different types of phones, and there's no-- Samsung S20's great, but what if somebody's got the Samsung A version, which is a lower price model? How do you get around that? What is the kind of limits that you recommend or have? Are there limits to the size of the projects, and the detail and fidelity of these projects?

Ben: There is, depending on the options. So if someone has a very complex product and visual fidelity matters a lot -- like, say, the suits, and those 500 or 600 fabrics that are all dark blue and black -- that one's really hard to do in real time, such that you can capture the subtleties of the material. So those I wouldn't recommend you do real time, but use the virtual photographer product, or that feature capability, because then you can spend more time and make a perfect rendering of that fabric, that captures its subtleties. And then it's just an image that was on your website. But if you're doing something that's simpler, such as like an office chair, while they do have dark blues and blacks, you don't have to tell the difference between like 600 of them. And therefore maybe you can drop the fidelity a bit and then go for that real time aspect. We do recommend that your models are generally under five megs in size. Smaller is always better, because it loads faster and load time doesn't matter for e-commerce. So I guess it's a different trade off for every customer. But you want it to load really within a couple seconds, if not like two seconds. But some of our customers are willing to wait a bit more, because maybe they're more in the B2B space and in the B2B space, people are willing to wait more for load time. They're not quite as fickle as a B2C sort of situation, where there's many different alternatives for that specific product and someone might get bored if they have to wait like four or five seconds. But if you're configuring a workbench, you're probably willing to wait like five seconds and then get a much more detailed model or very complex configuration setup. But it is up to the client to decide where they want their fidelity to be, based on what they're willing to put up in load time. And of course, we use industry best practices, optimization of various types to try and minimize that, too, so that we can give the best experience with the app load time.

Alan: So what is the largest project file size that you've had to work with? Or has there been a customer who said, no, I really want to push some crazy 10 megabyte file? Is it possible or...?

Ben: You *can*. It would be a horrible user experience. So, no, we don't do that. We would push them towards image based configuration, then. The files we use to create the suits are hundreds of megabytes in size. But we turn that into an image, and then it's less than a meg download, probably like 100 kilos. And that's the best way to do it, right? So that's a different way of optimization. But nobody would ever choose 100 megabyte download when you can get half a megabyte. And that half a megabyte actually will probably look better than some janky slow interactive WebGL where you can't tell the difference between those 500 dark blues and blacks. Once you hit sort of the capacity limit of current technology, we then will probably push you to an alternative solution that's still on our platform. Or you can do both. I do think that when we start doing interactive try-on, those suits will not look as good as the suits we're rendering right now in images, but you will be able to see how it fits. So maybe it might be a combination of let's see how it fits on my body and it can maybe fit to your specific proportions. But then when you want to pick the fabric, you go to an image based configurator. It's sort of like with AR right now. The AR that we do for furniture is not as good as our our virtual photography. But if you want to see it fit in your room, you don't have a choice. So you look at the pictures, you see how beautiful, how subtle the reflections are on that fabric, how that velvet interacts with light. But then you go into AR and you see if it fits in your room. So by using a combination of technologies, you get all the benefits.

Alan: Wow.

Ben: That's like the best example. Wicker cannot look good in AR right now. It's just too many details.

Alan: Huh. Who would have thought wicker? I mean, I guess this is just things you come up with as you do thousands of products. You're like, "Oh, that one wasn't so good."

Ben: Well, that's because it's a lot of individual threads, graphs that you can see. And so you can mimic it in AR, but it just doesn't quite look as good as you could make it in a render.

Alan: Amazing. Well, Ben, I could literally interview you all day long. I love this stuff and I love what you guys are doing at Threekit. It's really amazing. So without blathering on too much longer, what problem or challenge in the world do you want to see solved using XR technologies?

Ben: Well, I think it's try-on, try-on of clothes. That's like the frontier that we're waiting for. I think AR glasses are going to be interesting. But I think that once you have try-on for clothes, facilitated via LiDAR and sort of body fitting.

Alan: I'm literally, as you were talking, I'm looking on your site at a golf shirt, with a dragon on it and there's different patterns, it's super cool.

Ben: Yeah. AR glasses are going to be cool, but I don't-- I think they're just going to be an accelerator. I don't know. It actually might be very cool when you can redo everyone's rooms in context. Advertising in AR glasses might be interesting.

Alan: Yeah, well, Unity-- I don't know if you know, Unity went public this-- er, last week, and 62 percent of their revenue comes from the ad division.

Ben: No way. Really?

Alan: Yeah. Yeah. Look at their IPO filing. I had no idea.

Ben: Huh.

Alan: Yeah. It's going to be a thing, for sure.

Ben: What do *you* think? Where do you think the market's going? What is most interesting things you see coming?

Alan: So in the short term, I believe that, just take away AR and all the Rs, just 3D on web. The web is a ubiquitous platform that lets anybody experience it without apps and any of that. It's just a nice connection between a brand or a company and the consumer in a way that maybe they haven't seen before. As more and more consumers grow up with AAA video games, I believe that the experiences that we deliver have to be at least that kind of photorealistic quality that people are used to, or at least AAA gaming. We've only scratched the surface of what's possible delivering 3D on web. And of course, you're offering AR and it's unlimited photograph system. I think those are the most compelling parts right now. And we almost got to a point where we're inventing new technology before selling the old technology to people. We have stuff that works now that is immediate. And everybody, of course, wants the new new. But I think there's so much value to be gained from the existing technology, just showing things on 3D on a website, and we've only scratched the surface of what's possible in that. So I think leveraging the technology that we already use every day that we maybe take for granted, but consumers, they want to try new stuff. 3D is a novelty right now and it's new. And I think brands need to really leverage it immediately.

Ben: Yes, that makes sense.

Alan: I'm looking at a Lamborghini right now. It's awesome. Well, Ben, people can reach you at threekit.com. You guys are based in Ottawa, Canada.

Ben: We actually are headquartered in Chicago. We also have offices in Chicago, San Francisco, New York, London, and Paris.

Alan: Amazing. So you guys are a global company now, but it was started in Ottawa, wasn't it?

Ben: Yes, it did start in Ottawa in 2005.

Alan: Canadian companies, whoo! We're kicking ass and taking over the world! It's awesome. Well, is there anything else you want to share with the audience before we wrap up?

Ben: No. Thank you, Alan, for the offer.

Alan: Ben, this has been so great. And I want to thank you for being on the show. And I want to thank everybody for listening. This is the XR for Business podcast, with your host, Alan Smithson. And don't forget to hit the subscribe button, because every week we have a new episode coming out, and you really don't want to miss amazing interviews like Ben. Thank you so, so much. I wish you all the best success with Threekit in the future. And I know you guys just raised a Series A round, so I wish you all the best success. And hopefully we'll see Threekit as an IPO story in the next few years.

Ben: Well, thank you.

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 market caps over $3-billion right now. And they've just done really, really well with creating this new experience of moving around socially in a 3D space. And then if you take things like Unreal Engine, they're doing concerts on their Fortnite platform. So instead of playing a video game and shooting everybody, you're enjoying a concert by Trevor Scott or whoever. So there's these great opportunities where 3D scenes and 3D in general is being used in ways we didn't really contemplate before. So I think there's a huge boom there. And then you're also seeing a couple public companies. Unity Technologies just went public.

Alex: Huge news.

Alan: Huge. They raised a billion dollars in one day. Their evaluation went from about $6-billion last year to over $13-billion as of today. So they went public on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker U. I think there's a couple of things. One is that there's the investment landscape in kind of startups and smaller check sizes have really contracted. But I think the public markets have expanded. The US Fed has dumped or created $3-trillion and put it into the economy. So that does have a trickle down effect with with regards to the stock market.

Alex: Speaking with some investor friends of mine, one of the things that jumped out to me, especially in the first few months of the pandemic and the shutdown, was that many of them identified issues with travel, issues with getting connected with startups or organizations that they might want to work with. Investors really rely a lot on their gut and whether or not they feel they can trust startup founders, as they're ramping up their platforms or going to market. A lot of that emotional connection is really something that -- especially the senior investors, the ones who have been in the game for decades -- are really, really good at, and have been hindered as a result. Are we seeing people be able to adjust, or are we finding with restrictions loosening up that some of these more organic conversations are beginning to happen again?

Alan: Well, I think what we're seeing pretty simply is that people are just -- like every other type of the business or part of business -- people just moved on Zoom and continued the conversation. And what I think we're seeing, yes, it's hard to have a firm handshake and look somebody in the eyes, but this is the new normal. And so we have to deal with it. And in doing so, I think what this will afford investors a new luxury, actually, one where they can invest wider than they normally would, in geographic terms. They can see more deal flow in a very short amount of time, using conference calls. And for the entrepreneurs, they don't have to spend thousands of dollars on plane tickets to fly around to go meet with investors. I think it's a lot more efficient in the long run. And really, there's been a lot of documentation around the bias that is created when you have face to face meetings, when you're actually looking at the person, it can create a bias that -- right or wrong -- it just is a bias. And so by being more analytical about investments, I think there'll be a long term benefit in the fact that they're not making gut decisions based on somebody they just meet for the first time. A lot of times they're going to be doing a lot more due diligence, a lot more digging, because they're not able to have that verbal and in face to face communication. However, I do believe that the investment landscape -- especially in the early stage startups -- I think is actually getting a little bit later. COVID has basically said, "Look," -- pre-COVID -- "oh, you have a startup, you have a technology, the technology's somewhat usable. We'll put a few million dollars into your company and watch it grow." Now it's a little different. They're saying, "OK, you have a technology, that's great, good for you, go sell it. And then when you have customers that have bought from you more than once, and you have more than one customer, then come back to us and have a conversation.! So it's really changed. I think what it's forcing startups to do is get traction, get real traction before they even talk to these investors. And I think that's actually overall good for the whole investment environment. I don't think investing into companies with no proven track record -- maybe a product on a napkin - these days, much like the bubble in 2000, it popped and there was a reckoning and people wouldn't realize that, "Oh, maybe investing in these pie-in-the sky valuation companies is not the right way to do it." And a prime example of that, as you know, is-- I won't even say it.

Alex: [laughs] There really is this challenge, especially with the inability to do live software demos, the danger is always that everything looks like slideware if you're not able to meet somebody in person.

Alan: But isn't that the whole point of virtual technologies? If you're a VR company, let's say, for example, shouldn't you be able to do your pitch in VR? If the investors you're pitching don't have a VR headset at all, are they the right VCs to be pitching? Are they the right investors? If they don't have the basic minimum technology to understand this technology, why are you pitching them? So if I was a VR startup and only focused on VR, I'd be doing all my pitches in VR, use the technology.

Alex: No, no, I don't know if you need the president of the Men's Hair Club to also be a member. [chuckles]

Alan: [chuckles] But he *was*, and he was--

Alex: He was, it's true.

Alan: How did you know? [laughs]

Alex: Not to play into stereotypes, but often investors of a certain age may not have interest in or access to the very latest and greatest.

Alan: Look. A Quest is cheap now. It's 500 bucks. And the new one, Quest 2, is coming out. It's $299.

Alex: Now that you can actually get them.

Alan: Now-- well, yeah, exactly. So the interesting thing is the technology is not a barrier anymore. And think about it. If you're pitching somebody who-- especially with VR, it's really hard. You have to put it on their face for them to experience it. And this, I think, is a problem right now. If you're living in, let's say, Toronto and you're pitching somebody in San Francisco and you make VR, how do you put their head in there and make sure they're in there? And companies like VictoryXR and ENGAGE, these platforms for education and meetings, I think they're doing a really good job at bringing not only investors, but customers through the experiences. So they say, "Look, if you if you have a VR headset, go in there and we'll meet you and we'll do a full tour." And I think they're doing a fantastic job at that. Now, if you look at something like game engines, for example, Unity and Unreal, they've been established for many, many years. And Unity's, I think started... I think it was 2003, I think it was.

Alex: I guarantee that most of Unity's investors are not going into the engine to build their own demos.

Alan: 100 percent. But they also raised a lot of their money before this and they just went public. They don't need to go and do personal demos for every investor now, but for small startups and studios and people that are raising money, they definitely need that one-on-one, and they need to pitch that. So what people are doing is pitching by Zoom. How many companies have we pitched for sales meetings in Zoom? This is the new normal. So you have to adapt, you have to go forward with it and just do it. So luckily, MetaVRse, when we're pitching for customers or investors anything, our product really does translate through the web. So even though we're kind of using Zoom--

Alex: Yeah.

Alan: --I can actually send a link and people can experience the AR, 3D or whatever technology on their phones, real time. And that makes a big difference because now I've presented and then transferred that over to your device, and when it's in your hand, and you can touch it, and feel it, and spin the objects around, and experience it, I think this makes a big difference. You have to get creative with demos now, more than ever.

Alex: And I think it's highly dependent on the platform, but ours has the advantage of being fully web-based and capable of running on practically any device.

Alan: It really does help. And I would implore anybody who's working in the space that if you can't figure out how to make your software work across a ton of different devices, you're not going to succeed in general, because who knows what people are on. Are they on a computer? Are they on a phone? Are they on VR? Are they on AR? Are they wearing glasses? Are they not? That's why Unity and Unreal are worth tens of billions of dollars each, because they have this cross-platform reach. And this is why companies like Spatial, for example, have raised millions of dollars as well. They work on Oculus Quest, they work on the Magic Leap. Having cross-platform abilities really opens up the market for any startup to do business, and when it comes down to investment, investment capital is probably the most expensive capital you, as a startup, will ever, ever take in. And I was actually watching a talk the other day, it was some investors and there was this very, very seasoned investor. I can't remember who he was and I apologize for the name, but his whole thing was, "Look, the best investment your company will ever get is sales dollars." And it really resonated with me. We've built this culture of raise money, lose money, raise more money, lose money, raise more money. Growth at all costs, that type of thing. But when it comes down to it, a business that constantly loses money is not a business. It's a pit. Unless you're going to just try to grow to a million users and hope that you get taken out by somebody. But I think we're in a different landscape. We're in COVID times now, and people are looking for real value.

Alex: So as the market is limping its way towards 2021, what do you think the XR landscape looks like? LBEs obviously took really hard hits. There are segments of the industry that may never recover. Where do you think there are opportunities for real growth? And what parts do you think will fall away as we push ahead over the next year?

Alan: Well, I think unfortunately-- and I love LBE VR, it's so exciting. If anybody's tried The Void or Sandbox, these companies, they've spent millions of dollars on providing really great out-of-home entertainment experience.

Alex: Premium tier.

Alan: Oh, like vibrating gloves and scent machines, and the whole nut. And I'm really sad, to be honest, that there probably will be no more Void. I believe this is going out of business. Don't quote me on that one, because they don't know. But Sandbox VR, they raised a couple hundred million dollars there, they're struggling. It's very hard to run a business when your customers cannot come and see you. It's just impossible. So where do I think this is going? I believe and I've always believed that we're a mobile first society right now. All the growth that we're seeing in the whole industry is in mobile. And I believe that over the next three to five years, we're going to go from phone to face, with Facebook announcing their AR glasses last week. Or at least their R&D style glasses, so they can capture everybody's data.

Alex: [laughs]

Alan: We'll leave that for another podcast. You also have North being acquired by Google, so Google's making some strides there. The glasses are coming. Apple had a very kind of-- it's the first time Apple didn't announce a phone in September, which is interesting. They did announce a number of things that kind of lead you to believe that they're working on this. So it's interesting to see that glasses are coming. We're going to go from phone to face. And I would have said five to seven years before COVID, and I think it's three to five now. So I think things are speeding up there. But I think there's still a long road, three to five years, before we have full mass acceptance of wearing glasses on a daily basis for AR.

Alex: Yeah, the horizon has really continued to stretch. I remember back in 2014 when a lot of folks figured that the horizon, to at least being able to hit the hockey stick part of that, was going to be three to five years. And look where we are now.

Alan: Well, Alex, it's easy to say, "Oh, yeah, it's going to be a trillion dollar industry, blah, blah, blah." And all of these-- what do you call it... analysts, these big analysts, "Oh it's going to be billions of dollars. It's growing by a 150 percent." What happens when they're wrong with their analysis? Nothing. Nobody goes back and says, "Oh, you predicted this. You owe us some money because you you failed us." So these predictions are-- you have to take all of them with a grain of salt. Five years ago, there was zero data about the industry. Zero. They were just making it up out of their backsides. However, now we've got data, we've got traction. And unfortunately, a lot of investors invested too early. There was hundreds of millions of dollars invested in companies like Flipper. They were on the right track, doing really cool stuff, but five years too early. And I believe that even Magic Leap, if you'd put the three billion into Magic Leap starting today, they may have a shot. But they were just way too ahead of the world in terms of adoption and what the world needed. And then I think the other focus is that everybody went after consumer first, and consumer is not the market that's expanding. It's enterprise applications that we're seeing right across the board, that are adopting this and really growing, with the one exception of the Quest. That's the only one that's kind of got some consumer traction.

Alex: Well, the Quest is able to bypass that, because they've been pushing really hard on the content front. Content is always this catch-22 when it comes to the consumer markets. Consumers need to see lots of content that they want in order to buy the platform. The platform developers need to see that there is a sufficiently large user base in order to justify development in the first place. And I think back in 2014-2015, a lot of folks were assuming that Moore's Law was just going to magically kick in, and all of the components were going to be miniaturized, and all of the heat problems were going to go away.

Alan: Alex, as you know, that's the thing: they are doing that.

Alex: They are doing it. It took a lot more fight than I think people were anticipating at the time.

Alan: Well, people always overestimate what they can do in the short term and underestimate what they can do in the long term. And we took a 10-year roadmap on this. I said, "OK, we started in 2015. So if you take that 10-year roadmap, then you're not going to be disappointed." And this is what I would encourage investors, also. When you're looking at the startups that you're looking at, what are their five- and 10-year roadmaps? Do they even have one? Are they looking for a quick exit? There's going to be a lot of little exits that happen. And we've already seen a ton of M&A happening in the space as well. But I think there's going to be a ton of rolling up of these technologies. And those are not going to be billion-dollar exits. They're going to be 10-, 20-, 30-million dollar exits. North Glasses, they raised something like $195-million and sold for $185-million. (Don't quote me on those numbers, I'll have to Google them.) But they sold for less than they raised. Is that a success story? I don't know. If you're an investor and you get nothing back, at least maybe you get return of capital. And they made some really great developments. So maybe it is a success story.

Alex: Mixed success story, yeah. I think the presence of a large headset manufacturer -- or I should say, a significant headset manufacturer -- out of Canada will be missed. Maybe you can speak of it actually to the Toronto aspect of that.

Alan: Of which, sorry?

Alex: North.

Alan: North Glasses. So, I mean, Toronto is not home of North, actually they're in Waterloo, which is about 40 minutes west of the city. So they're not really in Toronto. They're in a little hub called Silicon Valley North. And there's this corridor between Toronto and Waterloo. Google's got a head office there. And North had their head office. They were doing manufacturing. They were doing research. They were doing everything in Waterloo. And for those old enough to know what a BlackBerry is, Waterloo, it was the home of BlackBerry. And so there's a really, really big tech community there because BlackBerry was the largest tech company in Canadian history, one of the biggest success stories, and one of the biggest lessons of technology in Canada, next to Nortel. But we had this wonderful conglomerate of tech people, I guess. And so now North was able to develop real, true augmented reality glasses. They were interesting because they were just a heads-up display, but it was really cool -- I have them sitting on the desk here. And you had a little ring and you could see them and they were wonderful. But again, timing and... it takes a lot to change people's behaviors. I don't wear glasses on a daily basis. You want me to put glasses on? They better be damn awesome.

Alex: And comfortable.

Alan: And comfortable and light. And the batteries have got to work and the field of view has got to be good. And so, consumers are fickle. And I think what you're going to see in 2020 is a launch of new XR viewers, things like NREAL or MAD Gaze, these glasses that give you spatial computing, very lightweight, I think NREAL's are something like 88 grams. So not heavy at all. And they're going to plug into your phone so that all the processing power will be on your phone, via probably USB cable. And so these glasses are going to unlock abilities for people to have AR on their face. So I think there's opportunities around there. And I believe they just raised $40-million. I think it was for the AR glasses... not MAD Gaze, the other ones.

Alex: Speaking of some of these longer-term trends, at time of recording, we're less than seven weeks out from a presidential election in the United States. We've seen an enormous bleed of labor and to some extent capital from south of the border to a lot of these technology hubs: Vancouver, the GTA, and Montreal being some of the major beneficiaries. Can you lay out what you sort of see? Are these trends going to accelerate regardless of who's sitting in the Oval Office?

Alan: Oh, that's an interesting question. I believe the fundamental differences between the candidates; One wants a complete closed down and nationalistic view of the world -- America, above all else -- and that's fine, I understand that. And they've positioned themselves to take advantage of that. However, we're in a global world now. We're in a global society. And it doesn't behoove any one nation to try to isolate themselves anymore. We're past that as humanity. And that's a kind of a dumb thing to do. And what's happened now is all of the talent that you normally would see come into a country cannot, it's blocked from that. And I think that's going to do a disservice to American technology companies in the long run. I also think that Americans naturalized and natural born Americans have a lower risk tolerance across the board, for everything from starting businesses to employment. Everything is lower risk. And when you have an entire generation that's being built around lower risk, that means lower entrepreneurship rates and lower innovation. And when you don't have immigrants coming in with highly technical skills from around the world, this can be a hindrance to companies. Now, we're already working remotely anyway. So do we really need to bring people into a country to work for you? So maybe this will open up opportunities for companies to have development partners around the world. And I think this is a great place to be in a time where we're in the middle of a pandemic. You mentioned earlier, it's the best time to start a company and get a company off the ground, because if you can succeed an environment like this where the world's upside down, we're in a presidential election, things are going sideways. There's riots in the streets. We have race riots going on in the U.S. If you can build a business that's successful during all of this, you are going to be able to weather the storm. And to come back to MetaVRse for a second, we've been kind of focused on sales for the last little bit. And so really what we've done is focused on our customers and what do they need right now? How can we help with that type of thing? I think the investment landscape, we'll start to realize with with different companies that as long as you're making sales in this environment, if you can make real revenue in this environment, you're a company to to invest in.

Alex: And again, it's an environment that exposes needs that were not being exacerbated before. We have seen these increasing demands for things like remote training, which already has lots of proof points to back it up. But you have these established processes in place for, this is how we train industrial workers. This is how we train people who go out on the oil rigs. But then as soon as those traditional ways no longer work, it opens up this gaping void.

Alan: Yeah, it's exciting. We just finished a project, as you know, where we took a PDF manual, which was like a 200-page manual with a bunch of 2D diagrams, and we converted it into 3D completely. And man, my new sales pitch is going to be. "Here's your PDF manual. What do you think of this? It's great. Right now, here's the 3D version. Choose which one you want moving forward." It's a no-brainer. You can't... it's not even the same ballpark. You spend 20 minutes looking at this picture going, OK, is the arrow pointing at that part or this part because it's too deep? You can't, you can't tell. But in 3D I can zoom right in, see where the arrow's pointing, figure out the part number and go. It's not even in the same... it's an exponential, 100X improvement in what was being used before. So if a picture says a thousand words, then a 3D experience says a thousand pictures. And so now you've got a million-times improvement over words. We're really at that point where 3D is easy to make, easy to share and easy to to learn how to build. And that's one of our ethos at MetaVRse, is it should be everybody allowed to make 3D. It shouldn't just be, "I have to hire some unit developers," or "I have to go and find a bunch of people to help me." Anybody in the organization, whether it's in training or marketing or e-commerce or support, should be able to create these experiences quickly and easily and share them and disseminate them to their trainees as quickly as possible.

Alex: Yeah, a lot of junior marketing folks love platforms like Canva for that reason. Because it provides them with the tools that they need to be able to achieve rapid turnaround on things that would normally require a graphics designer. And we're seeing this increased demand for 3D experiences and being able to get inside a product and understand. I just wish I'd had something like this 3D experience for the last time I built furniture in my house.

Alan: We were doing a demo for one of our clients, showing them one of my experiences, and they said, "Oh my God, IKEA needs this for their furniture."

Alex: Seriously.

Alan: If you're listening, Martin from IKEA. But it's true and it doesn't need to be an app, MetaVRse is completely Web-based, so you bypass the need to push an app and wait for apps, updates and all that. We're moving beyond that.

Alex: That brings us to another topic that has been very much in the news lately, and that is this struggle between Epic Games and Apple. And at the heart of this question is the question of app stores and the question of revenue share.

Alan: Well, on that note, Alex, I'm going to put a pin in that because I just wrote an article entitled Could Web-Based Game Engines Be the End of the App Stores? So I'm going to put a pin in this. We're going to wrap it up today and look out for that article coming out this week. I really want to thank you for for flipping the tables today, Alex, this is really exciting. I do have to wrap it up because I have another podcast interview right now.

Alex: Yeah, yeah.

Alan: Yeah, yeah. It's that time. One place I would tell everybody to go if they're interested in learning more about the investment landscape is Digi-Capital. Tim Merrill and his team over at Digi-Capital keep a really great VR/AR investment deal flow real time. And so you can go to Digi-Capital, just Google it, and Tim Merrill has got some great stuff on there. You can see where the trends are going. Q1 of 2020 was the lowest investment in AR in the last five years. And that was pre-COVID. So you can imagine the last two quarters, VR and VR investments basically were down to nothing.

Alex: Nowhere to go but up!

Alan: Yeah, you can't go anywhere but up now. So maybe some advice would be for startups to look at Unity, look at NexTech VR, AR, NexTech XR or whatever. They're a company on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Unity is now on the stock exchange. So I think investors in the mass investment landscape are starting to understand this technology. And I think that's good for everybody involved. And I think there's a huge opportunity. The time is immediately now. Five years ago is too early, now is perfect, and two years from now will be too late. So I think it's an interesting wave we're in. We're in the second wave of AR and VR and it's all going to start with the phone and go to the face.

Alex: Well, thanks for being on the podcast today, Alan. I'll hand the reins back over. Have a great interview.

Alan: Awesome, man. Thank you so much. And thank you everybody for listening. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button so you don't miss any of the XR for Business Podcast. I'm your host, Alan Smithson, with my amazing guest and I guess I'm the guest of this one. Alex Colgan, VP of marketing for MetaVRse. Awesome, buddy. Thank you so much.

Alex: Cheers.

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 are more tech savvy than–

Julie: Our kids.

Alan: Our kids. I’m sorry, oh my goodness! Wow, what a crazy dynamic! Our children! Obviously, we’re in a tech forward household, but our children are way more tech savvy than their teachers. And it almost feels like the teachers are not getting the resources they need to bring digital into the class, even though we have no choice right now. And in the fall, one of our daughters is going back to school full time and the other is going in some sort of part time rotation thing. That’s for now. That could change next week. The uncertainty, I think, is one of the biggest problems with everybody right now. So how can teachers right now leverage the tools that exist now? The Zooms, the VirBELAs, the ENGAGEs. How can they use these platforms on the devices that everybody has already, to just give a better experience right now with what we have in our hands right now?

Julie: Well, it’s a tricky situation, because you have different systems. And I don’t like to just think in Canadian terms, because you and I deal with very different things that are happening in the United States, that are dealing with Europe, that are countries like Uganda, all over the world. This is the first time that the world is faced with the same problem at the same time, in the same situation with COVID. And it has made everybody sit back and go, “Whoa, how do we now deal with education?” But what are we really teaching about education? And the point about teachers, they’re the actual key to everything right now, they hold that base knowledge that we need to transfer to students. The unfortunate thing right now is the content that they’re teaching is–

Alan: Here’s the interesting thing. There’s nothing wrong with the content. It really comes down to can we use this, instead of looking at it as a bad thing — where nobody can go back to school and everything’s digital — instead of looking that as a bad thing, can we leverage this unique opportunity to then say, “OK, this teacher is really, really the best teacher in math,” so instead of him teaching only 30 students here, he can have a reach or she can have a reach to thousands of students coming in and learning from the best. And how can we leverage these tools to give them more of a personalized learning experience to every student? Not every student wants to memorize everything, and not every student learns at the same speed. Our current system before COVID pushed everybody through at the exact same speed in every course. But it left some behind, when you graduate from grade 10 to grade 11, really you can’t read, but you got pushed through anyway. It didn’t really give the students that needed more time in certain things and less time in others to– it’s not flexible for the students. So maybe being digital, we can create this kind of flexible, personalized learning. What do you think?

Julie: Yeah, this is where the hybrid system comes in. And I should retract what I just recently said, because I said the content that they’re teaching right now is not for the future. And it’s really important that we understand and still learn about our history, where we came from, and how we’re digitizing moving forward. And this is where that hybrid system will come into play, to help us move forward and implement digitization into the lessons that we have. Our teachers [are] being pushed into managing multiple different courses with multiple different kids. How overwhelming is that, to manage 30 different personalities with a whole bunch of different subjects? We would never ask a store manager to do that same thing.

Alan: You wouldn’t ask any employee. “Here, you’re going to do five jobs.” I guess a startup would.

Julie: [laughs] “Welcome to entrepreneurship.” And you know what, that’s fine. But we’re talking about education right now. We’re talking about trying to give each student an individualized lesson plan, personalized to them. And that’s the way the system now needs to change, because every student needs to register online to access the portal — shall you call it — to connect with the education system, to connect with their teacher.

Alan: So do you see this as something that would be built from a school board level, or a local level? Is this a national level?

Julie: It’s going to have to be embedded into every level, I think. It always starts at home, it always starts in the local communities. But the voices of change need to come from the top. Governments need to support the change and understand that. I think there’s a lot of countries with unions, and I think unions really need to learn about how things are going to transition if they’re going to represent the teachers well, because there’s so much change for teachers there. Even I’m overwhelmed thinking about what they’re facing and the challenges of– even the personalities of the students, right down to the core of how they’re executing their documents, when the students aren’t even in front of them.

Alan: With our own daughter, one of the teachers was teaching using an antiquated version of Word, and the kids had to submit in this antiquated version of Word. And this was a 10 year old version of a software that nobody has access to anymore. And that one little thing–

Julie: She was so frustrated.

Alan: Everybody was frustrated, because the kids are like, “Well, we’re on Google Docs over here for everything else, and you’re using this thing.” So I think it’s– does it require more training of teachers in technical skills?

Julie: Absolutely, absolutely. They need to learn how to operate the system that they’re given, first of all. That’s on them. They’re going to have to, because the education systems, until they see or know or understand a better way of doing things, they’re going to force what’s in front of them. So they need to learn to digitally connect. They need to learn to constantly change themselves and understand that they’re going to have to–

Alan: It’s interesting you say that. And I really think this is an interesting point. If you look at pretty much everybody in the workforce right now, they’re constantly and consistently going for new trainings and learning, upgrading their skills, because as technology changes every other industry rapidly, people just have to learn. They’re going on Udacity, or Udemy, or LinkedIn learning and just finding and consuming this learning and getting these little certificates. But students in schools and even the teachers, they have ongoing learnings where they go to courses and stuff, and so there’s that. But it’s not encouraged in students to be finding what they’re passionate about, and going and learning it. Because it’s not even shown that they can learn anything they want.

Julie: No, it’s a very directive way.

Alan: It’s like “Here, you’re not going to learn this and only this, and we’re not going to tell you that–

Julie: So structured.

Alan: –a whole world of knowledge exists beyond just a few click strokes and going on Udemy and a free course,” and now you’re learning about AI, or you’re learning about robotics, or you’re learning about macramé. It doesn’t matter. But you’re learning, you’re learning about training dogs, whatever you’re passionate about. I think the school system needs to foster–

Julie: Creativity.

Alan: –creativity, but also innovation. And then how do you encourage people to try the myriad of things, and then really dive into the ones that encourage them for that? How do you do that?

Julie: So there obviously needs to be structure. Systems don’t work without systems. And this is where–

Alan: I’m going to take that quote. “Systems don’t work without systems.” It’s so true.

Julie: [laughs] They really don’t. And education teaches that structure system. It provides that daily: you have to be here at this time, and recess is at this time, lunch is at this time. Which we do that at home, but essentially kids spend more time at school with that type of structure, to teach them how to report in, how to handle things, and how to work in groups, and do all of those things. And they’ve done very well. But now how do we structure in a new way, to innovate and stir curiosity?

Alan: How do we leverage the massive amount of learning tools online for kids in a school system? That should be– maybe it’s just as simple as replacing one of the courses with one you just have to learn– you have to take a course on this, and it has to be a minimum of this. Anything you want, like the ultimate elective. How can we add functionality to the existing system, the education system globally, not just in Canada or US or Europe, but just globally, adding two very simple things: gratitude, mindfulness and deep breathing exercises, and then also financial planning and investing, and these kind of– those two things there aren’t taught really at any school level. And if we had them as a kind of a regular habitual thing right after the national anthem, you take three deep breaths. Here, let’s do that right now. Let’s do two breaths.

Julie: Yeah, okay. We’ll do that. Okay. And not just for the morning, just any time you feel stressed. And you know who also encourages this, is Caitlin Krause from MindWise. She’s great at creating that presence. And if everybody kind of takes that three breaths to heart, whenever you’re stressed, whenever you don’t know what to do, whenever you are just not sure of anything, or things are overwhelming.

Alan: Yeah, it’s really a physiologically and mentally stimulating exercise, that puts you in the right mindset. By hyper-oxygenating your blood, you can think clearly, obviously. It seems like an obvious thing, but we don’t teach it. And I think if we can build this into the morning ritual of every school. This was one thing that will give kids a tool to deal with the stresses as we enter into exponential growth in digital transformation.

Julie: Email a lot of them.

Alan: In six seconds. [inhales] Hold. Let it out really slow [exhales] really slow. Now, take a deep breath and hold it is deep as you can. [inhales] And out, really slow. [exhales] All the way out, push it out. And one deep, deep breath. [inhales] Hold it. And let it slow. [exhales] Now, just take a second to feel the clarity.

Julie: Yeah, feels good. Your body just automatically feels like there’s more air. And you can breath better.

Alan: And you’re kind of forced to sit up. You can’t take any breath slouched over, so it forces you to sit up. So anyway, that’s one thing. And then the second thing that I think we can build right into, that’s, what, 30 seconds of a school day. And the other one would be a simple gratitude journal. So write three things you’re grateful for, put your book away. And those two things will set every kid’s day up right. Beyond that, there’s things like yoga–

Julie: You can get into that.

Alan: You can get all into that. But I think those two things could be added to every school system with the stroke of a pen. “There, we’ve just now improved our school system.” Second thing is once a week we get together as a class and we look at our finances. Here’s where I am, here’s where you are. Oh, I spent money here and balancing your financial world.

Julie: Which has never been taught. And I think it’s a huge key to that piece within you to go about your daily lives unstressed about not being able to pay for things, and as a huge part of our life is paying for things.

Alan: Well, it’s uncertainty. In no level of school do we make it a habit to look at these things. If you’re just going to have it every Friday at 3 PM, I look at my finances and go, “OK, cool, this is where I am. This is my my assets. Oh, look, my investment over here and a little bit better.”

Julie: And even little kids.

Alan: We could even create some real money for each child. Start with a $100 investment fund in grade one, and they’re not allowed to touch it until they’re in grade eight, and every kid gets to pick their own stocks.

Julie: This is where banking institutions need to play up. So in social responsibility for their own economic.

Alan: And as long as they do it when we are basically you’re graded on it. And if as long as you check in once a week and check all your balances and it’s done on your phone, any device. Or most kids have a phone or access to some sort of computer, and you could do it. Banks could then start to have a relationship with children earlier, but in a much more healthy relationships around saving, investing, learning where the money comes from. Personal financial management is essential. So those two things right there, combined with adding all these digital aspects of personalized learning, how do you think we can implement that at a global level?

Julie: Yeah, so this is where– before we did all those great things, this is where I want to talk about gaming. How many kids around the world have joined Fortnite working in teams? Our daughter’s been working with our niece, two hours away in their teams–

Alan: It’s funny, because Epic Games has gone from this game engine to this global phenomenon with millions of kids playing this. And Tomorrowland just partnered with Epic Game’ Unreal Engine, and did the Tomorrowland concert.

Julie: Yeah.

Alan: Like last week. And they had something like 150 percent more attendees than the physical one.

Julie: Yeah.

Alan: People are getting used to these worlds that they can move around with. What is next, and how do we incorporate education into that?

Julie: Yeah. So coming back to the gamification and how kids are going to transform from being in Fortnite for the last six months in COVID times to the classroom, because they’re used to gaming all day.

Alan: Can we make the classroom into Fortnite?

Julie: [laughs] It comes back to the gaming motivation model. It’s something that I learned from the conference GDC this year, why kids– and how kids are so intrigued in the gaming world, and the challenges that they need to do to get where they need to be. And it incorporates everything from fantasy, from working with others, to having admission, and then being able to accomplish that. Now, when you think about gaming, what do you think about?

Alan: Mostly shooting.

Julie: Bombs, you should think about shooting, and who wants to think about that? There’s no system in the world that wants to engage a student through education with a gun in their hand.

Alan: Basically what you’re saying is, Fortnite minus the guns plus some educational content.

Julie: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So we need to focus on gaming without guns. Games for Change is doing some great stuff. And OK, so now you think about gaming, but what if you can game with Lego? What if you could create a solution out of gaming, and creating that mastery class out of admission? Kids loved it and they wanted to be a part of it. The biggest thing about gaming is that once you do all of those steps, once you have that excitement, you create a team, you have a challenge, and you think about all the things that you can do and have that fantasy level, then it goes into “I want more, I want to do another level, I want to play another game.” That’s where the “I love to learn” comes in. Can you imagine if kids wanted to know more, and they could engage on a daily basis–

And they could make a real difference? This is, I think, the problem that we don’t teach people that they can make a difference, they teach them to get a job. What job do you want? What do you want to do in work? What job do you want? And that is the wrong question. The right question is what probably do you want to solve? What challenge do you want to tackle? We’re not– we don’t get presented the challenges. But if we started systematically presenting the world’s challenges. “Here’s the problem in a global level. Here’s the problem at a national level. Here’s the problem at the provincial or state level. Here’s a problem at a local community level.”

Julie: And it starts in community.

Alan: So I’m reading a book by Marc Prensky, called “Education to Better Their World: Unleashing the Power of 21st Century Kids.” And one of the main things is, what if we then incorporated one class, one hour a day devoted to solve a challenge or problem in the world? It could be global. It could be local. It could be as simple as planting a vegetable garden for your community. It could be anything. Imagine if every class did that and then we had awards for this and then we can inspire the next year to think even bigger. Imagine the good that would come of our communities, in one hour for every class. Could be one hour a week, really.

Julie: Yeah, yeah. And I think that we need to also try and do this in a digital way.

Alan: Of course. We have bigger scale.

Julie: And this is where the hybrid system comes to play. And a lot of people ask me, “OK, Julie, what do we need to do?” Then I think the students are a big part of the solution. They’re so smart, they’re so ready to be a part of things. They’re ready to change. But they need our leadership. They need to know what they need to solve. And this is where one of the things I’m working on is, is that big play between enterprise and education systems to build partnerships to solve their problems. Take a look at what classroom subjects can be taught digitally online best, what subjects can be solved to teach in different ways, using this technology to extend that out.

Alan: What I think we need is we need to approach innovation in education the same way we approach innovation in enterprise.

Julie: Yeah.

Alan: And one of the major hurdles that we’re running into as a company — a startup ourselves with MetaVRse — is the time it takes to go through procurement with large companies. They’re actually hindering themselves now, because technology is moving so fast. By the time their slow procurement process takes place, the innovation’s already onto the next iteration and their competitors — if they have a tight procurement process — they’re already all using that technology. And technology’s moving so fast and iterating so quickly now that you need it immediately. Now, to put that in perspective, all three branches of the US military have gone to a quick procurement system for technology. They have a six week window. You apply and you’re either– they buy it or they don’t within six weeks. It’s a– your maximum ten page submission with a maximum ten slide pitch deck. So they’ve completely got rid of these five hundred page things. It’s like you have an innovation? Because the innovations are getting smaller too. They’re becoming more niche. Their software is really solving these things. AI is solving predictive maintenance problems, predicting all sorts of things. So in order to have the best innovation — and we’re not doing this with education at all — in order to have the best innovation, you must simplify and shorten the procurement process. And so that has to happen as well. So enterprise is already starting to work on this and they’re shortening the procurement process. It’s getting there. But in education, we haven’t changed our procurement processes in… ever. For 20 years.

Julie: Yeah. So I think it really comes down to what does a school year mean? The one thing that it comes down to with school is that we only reward the kids once a year for passing a grade. And 365 days is actually a lifetime in a company. There’s so many things that can happen in one year now. We’re on that exponential growth stage.

Alan: It’s crazy. And we don’t apply any of this innovation directly to education. And I keep thinking of this one– I can’t remember who said it, I think it was Rita Hoffman. “If it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t matter.” We have to think locally and engage our students in their local communities, but again, we also need to let them know that they can create a piece of software that goes viral around the world. They already have the mindset of that because they see TikToks that go viral and go around the world. But instead of a little dance, maybe you solve a problem that makes you rich.

Julie: Yeah.

Alan: Because right now AI is making people rich on a daily basis. You saw one small problem for a factory that saves some $50-million, you’re rich.

Julie: Yeah.

Alan: So and these are algorithms that, once you solve that one, change the algorithm. China’s training their grade five students on AI algorithms now.

Julie: Yeah. Let’s circle back to what we can do today, because that’s what everybody’s most stressed about. We’re stressed about that. That’s 30 days away. And these kids are going back to school. Or they’re not. There are certain places around the world where they’re not.

Alan: Ok, so what are some resources that we can talk about right now that people can use outside of the school system? Because the school systems right now, they need love. If you’re part of a school system, you’re part of the executive, and you want to introduce us, we’re happy to meet with school boards, governments. We’re really happy to help. Julie’s world leader on this, obviously. So reach out to us, [email protected]. With that said, what do we do in the fall? So, one thing that I think — and I want to start doing with our kids, as well — is as part of their– our curriculum, not schools’ curriculum, but our curriculum. They’re going to have to take an online course on something. University of Michigan, for example, they have something like 200 courses available for free online now. So it’s just a matter of going through and saying, “You know what, I like that.” But how do we motivate them? And I think it has to be forced on them for now. I don’t know. If anybody has another way, carrot versus stick, I don’t know yet.

Julie: Yeah, the whole inspiration part is, I think, going to be the trickiest to try and literally reach into that computer and get the kids attention on the other end. And also being that teacher to be able to manage that. And it’s really important that school systems support the teachers right now.

Alan: Yeah, they really do.

Julie: A lot of technology information sessions, just what tools can be in place that make that little bit of difference to manage a student on the other end of that connection? Because we’re not going back to– well, except for our kids, but we need to look at that virtual online setup. What does that look like? That looks like my child being able to connect with a human, first thing–

Alan: And then how do we make sure that every student has access to technology and the Internet? That’s a whole other problem. I mean–

Julie: Well, let’s start there. I actually think there’s a huge mandate now for corporate responsibility. And it also comes from the sustainability factor to recycle some of this gear that flips over every six months, and being able to use that and recycle that through the systems. There’s a responsibility for corporations to also sponsor and donate schools with the most up to date stuff so that they can stay innovative.

Alan: But how do we make that universally accessible? So that may be great in Silicon Valley, where a tech company donates a million dollars to a local school, that’s great for that local school. How do we make that accessible in the inner city in south Chicago?

Julie: Yeah, it’s going to come down to budgets and that’s a hard thing to swallow.

Alan: Well–

Julie: There needs to be money put towards that.

Alan: Governments have printed over $5-trillion for the last four months. Maybe we could trickle some of that down to education.

Julie: Yeah, I think that we’ll start to see family companies of investment start to–

Alan: Family offices

Julie: Family offices, and it’ll–

Alan: Ed-tech’s hot.

Julie: Yeah.

Alan: Ed-tech is one of the fastest growing tech segments in the world. It’s estimated to go from about six — is it trillion? It *is* trillion, isn’t it? — six trillion globally. So the global education industry right now is around six trillion, and it’s estimated to go to 10 trillion by 2030. That’s all education and training. So enterprise training, schools, universities, everything, the whole budget.

Julie: So the big factor here is corporate responsibility, because if corporations don’t invest–

Alan: You either invest early in the kids education or you invest when they become employees of yours and they don’t know anything that you need them to know.

Julie: That’s right. And that’s why we need to start to implement this into an elementary school, into every single school, secondary schools, colleges, universities. Because if enterprise doesn’t have the talent, they’re not going to be able to be in business.

Alan: You’re absolutely right. And you have groups like TKS — The Knowledge Society — they’re kind of taking the top one percent of students, and then really giving them a personalized “Hey, you’re into artificial intelligence? Perfect. Let’s go meet with the profs at UFT who invented it.” Talk about proper immersion into a subject. But can we then still bring a 360 camera for that meeting where that kid meets the inventor of AI captured, so every kid who’s interested can out on a VR headset and experience that same meeting? So can we start to use these technologies to grab these personalized moments of learning?

Julie: Sure, we can do it all. And that’s the thing, there’s so many resources out there right now that are starting to put these pieces together to be able to do that. We’re just not quite there yet. In the meantime, let’s talk about just quickly, what can can schools do in the next 30 days? What can teachers do, parents and students? What can everybody do today? So the first thing that I always tell a school is create your tech team. Every school needs a tech team. It needs have to have both teachers and students on it.

Alan: You need two geeky teachers and 10 geeky students.

Julie: Yeah, yeah. But not even geeky. And I think this is another perception of this technology–

Alan: Yeah, but it’s cool to be geeky, though.

Julie: For sure. But it’s not just about technology. There’s so many other facets. And the other week I spoke with Girls Inc and MasterCard to inspire the next generation. And different skillsets that are coming out, they’re different project management roles, and graphic designers, 3D modelers. There’s so many different jobs that are out there. But our school system isn’t teaching any of them.

Alan: And showing it.

Julie: Yeah. So that’s why I talk a lot about 3D learning, and trying to introduce augmented reality more into the lessons. And augmented reality seems like a really freaky thing, but it’s Snapchat and Instagram face filters, essentially.

Alan: Snapchat has something like 125 million AR filters a day.

Julie: Yeah.

Alan: And over the next, I would say three to five, maybe six years, we’re going to go from the phone to a pair of glasses that you put on your head and now your whole world is a computer. So spatial learning will be something that is just available to everybody because the glasses are cheap. So how do we then get people to start creating in 3D?

Julie: This is where,, I guess enter the MetaVRse 3D Engine.

Alan: I mean, this is the whole reason we made this thing is to make it easy for people to make 3D. But I mean, beyond just us, there’s got to be people making 3D objects. But one of the things that’s coming faster than we anticipated was the phones now have Lidar scanners or infrared scanners on them, so they can scan rooms, or people, or places and convert them into 3D instantly. I made a 3D bust of my brother by walking around in a circle. It was crazy. So the tools to create 3D assets are getting easier to use. And then the tools to make experiences with those three sets are getting easier to use, like MetaVRse and Unity and Unreal. I think the tool boxes are getting better. But how do we expose kids to those toolboxes?

Julie: Yeah, so it’s going to take still a lot of time to be able to introduce this technology. It’s going to be really important for school systems and teachers to lead the way to educate. But it’s also going to play a huge role on parents to introduce resources for their kids, because [it’s] every parent’s responsibility to teach their kids as well. We can’t completely depend on our education systems to catch up in time. And for us, we have unions in our system and to be able to flip over and change any kind of content has been has been years of change. We don’t have that time. And that’s what’s really scary right now. So this is where a system of innovation from students, being able to give them a mission and a goal, something to inspire them. Inspiration is going to be so important in a school system right now. Having a teacher, the teacher’s role, acceptance from the students is going to be key.

Alan: They have to also have– it has to be a bidirectional learning. Teachers are not the stage anymore. They– trust me, your students know more than you. If you’re a teacher and you think you know more than your students, you don’t. They have access to the world’s knowledge. Ask them any fact and give them their phone for 30 seconds and they will find it. They probably won’t even type. They will just ask it into–

Julie: The voice text thing.

Alan: –into Siri, Google, whatever, Amazon.

Julie: Our kids amaze us and teach us every day. And I think it’s really important for families, too. And we’ve had this time with our families the last couple of months. But to really open up that communication and listen to how kids approach technology, because that’s how it needs to change, because they’re building the communications. And even for me, just keeping up with TikTok right now, and the acceptance and communication between Snapchat and what’s important to them. And even through the little kids — just the other day we talked about this, the little girl who we know that was so upset, losing a pet in Roblox — and the social impact these games are playing right now. The kids are already connected. They’re there already, so for them to move over to a system online, it’s going to be no big deal for them, at all.

Alan: These are digital native kids, they were raised with a cell phone in their hand and a soother.

Julie: And they already have emotions and connections to that digital technology. So now it’s going to be the responsibility of the systems to build out the right processes, systems, implementing this new mindfulness technique, to be able to handle the digitization of their world, because nobody’s used to being this connected. And it’s only going to be more and more. So it’s so important that we take the time to breathe and we take a day off. We do celebration Saturdays, but we try to do sleepy Sundays and we plan to do that tomorrow. Sleepy Sundays is our try to [dis]connect for at least 24 hour period.

Alan: Try to disconnect and just try to turn your phone off, and all your technology once a week. It’s very difficult, but it’s a worthwhile endeavor, and go for a hike and enjoy nature. I think this is comes down to the parents as well. You know, we have to get back to nature a little bit, as much as the digital world is going to drive our economy and drive our daily lives. We also have to retreat into the solace of nature and get back to the basics of the earth. And if we don’t do that, if people only see the inner walls of a building in a city, they don’t understand why we need to protect the environment. In order to realize why you need to protect the environment, you have to enjoy the environment, enjoy nature. So whenever possible, schools should also take children on trips just to walk in the forest, just to go and enjoy nature. This should be part of our lives. On that note, Julie, this has been a really amazing experience.

Julie: We should do it again sometime. It’s fun. And thank you for joining me. There’s a lot of pieces to the puzzle. There’s a lot to learn. It’s important that everybody continues to learn, and not just my podcast or Alan’s podcast, but listen to the voices out there that are sharing ways to change, to build efficiencies in your life using the digital technologies that are out there and take it upon yourself to to help others.

Alan: Thank you for listening. If you want to learn more, you can go to xrforlearning.io. My podcast will be on there as well, xrforbusiness.io.

Julie: We also have a great resource at XR Collaboration.

Alan: XRcollaboration.com. And there’s also XR Ignite, which is our community. And you can go to xrignite.com, as well.

Julie: And lastly, just MetaVRse. MetaVRse.com, you can’t forget that.

Alan: Oh, of course. [laughs] What funds all of this is metavrse.com. And if you’re a developer and you want to just skip all the marketing stuff and go straight into it, it’s engine.metavrse.com. It’s free to join, check it out. And…

Julie: That’s it.

Alan: Thank you so much, everyone.

Julie: Thanks very much. And thanks for joining, everyone.

Alan: Bye!

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 when a customer comes to you, they say, "Hey, I have an idea for a project, I want to promote this book, I want to put a AR on the front cover." Do you have developers you work with? Do you have developers in-house? Do they build it themselves? How does it work?

Cory: Yes, so we have a robust engineering team, primarily based out of Berlin, with a couple other engineers in Ukraine. And our CTO is here in Los Angeles, where we're headquartered. And so we bring a lot of world class PhDs to create and deploy these technologies and make them accessible to everyday people. So there is no coding required when you work with Geenee. Oftentimes it's the internal marketing teams that supply the assets. Sometimes they connect us to their advertising agency of choice. Once we have those assets, whether it's 2D or 3D, a digital avatar, a movie trailer -- it's really unconstrained to the imagination -- then we can leverage our CDN or Content Delivery Network, all of our back-end infrastructure and our front-end infrastructure to easily create, publish and share these experiences directly to the Web. And the turnaround time is usually less than two weeks.

Alan: Amazing. So where does the art come from? And I'm sorry, Elena, you're on the call as well. Let's have you introduce yourself. I'm not used to this three-way control here. Passing over the microphone, the baton to Elena. What is your role, and how did you get involved in this?

Elena: So I'm the director of partnerships at Geenee. And my background: actually, I started at Google Glass when that project was underway in 2013 and 2014. So that was my first foray into augmented reality. And I really love that experience, because I got to interface with business leaders and developers in all sorts of industries -- whether it was entertainment, or music, or education, or manufacturing -- and just hear the different ideas for how people wanted to use AR and what applications they wanted to build. Sort of that ultimate concept of what they could really do with the technology, because at that time it was really fresh and people had had a lot of exposure to it. So this was really people's first time in many cases, getting to try on Glass and getting to dream up anything that they wanted to do. And while Glass ended up being a little too ahead of its time -- and there's many reasons that you can give for why it didn't work out -- it just really got me excited about the future and what was possible. And from there, I went on agency side to work on innovation teams. So I worked with companies like Warner Brothers, and Hilton, and Paramount Pictures to find creative applications of technology to enhance their advertising campaigns. When I had this opportunity come up with Geenee, I was really excited to be on the other side of that and be that technology provider, and power those experiences that people have been talking about for so long and finally get to see those come to life. And at Geenee I worked really closely with our different clients to make sure that the things that they want to produce come out to spec. We help them think through the user experience. We help them think through designing for augmented reality, because a lot of times that's new for people. And I just make sure that nothing goes wrong. Basically, I make sure our clients are happy and I make sure that we're making magic.

Alan: So what's your favorite project that you've done so far?

Elena: That's a good question. I really loved working on The Hunger Games project, because I had been such a fan of those books and movies when they first came out. And I also really loved It 2. We worked with Warner Brothers in the UK and you could recognize all of their out-of-home advertisements to trigger a surprise selfie experience, where Pennywise from the movie It came, jumped into your camera. At first you would see a balloon float up, sort of like in the movie. And then without telling the user, we activated their front facing camera and then it ended up taking a surprise selfie that was baked into a personalized version of the trailer. And then they could save that out. And then that also linked ticket purchases and stuff like that. So that was a really, really fun one, and a cool way to just be a little bit disruptive.

Alan: I have a question on that, actually. Have you been able to show an uplift or an uptick in sales? Has this led to real conversions? Can you talk about numbers? Do you have real numbers?

Cory: We do. And what we saw with that specific campaign with It 2, is that five percent of everybody that went into that experience clicked the ticketing link we connected to Fandango. And that's pretty high. When you think about performance marketing and your advertising on social media, anything around the two percent is standard. So we more than doubled that by having a fun and entertaining, interactive and more immersive multisensory experience that ultimately led to higher transactions.

Alan: See, that's awesome. That's what people want to know, they're like "How do I make more money with this thing?" What do you see for the next 12 to 18 months? What are people going to do with these technologies? What do you hope or what are you working on, maybe that you're working on something that'll come out soon, or what do you see?

Elena: I think right now people are really excited about AR, because it's providing a bit of a stop-gap with everything shutting down with the pandemic. It's still a way to kind of deliver these entertaining experiences at home. And it's also something to do. I do think that that's really been a catalyst to just drive more interest and excitement around AR and just more engagement with it in general. And we're actually working on a project right now, where we're replicating the listening party experience. You've seen a lot of virtual reality concerts. I think there's one with The Weekends that's coming out on TikTok in the next few days, or may have already come out.

Alan: Tomorrowland sold out three times more tickets than they would have normally.

Elena: Wow. But yeah, I mean, we're working on this AR listening party, which is basically going to take that AR listening experience where everyone would gather in person and the musician would perform. And it would be really special for everybody who is able to be there in person, small crowd style thing. And we're going to try and make it equally special in augmented reality, where certain industry folks can get a preview of the album that's being released. And there's going to be special visuals that match up with that, that are going to be really cool and different from what you've seen before and just augment that listening experience a lot. So you're just not hearing that album, but you're also seeing the vision that the artist had for it.

Alan: It's very cool. So I guess this would be a combination of 2D assets and 3D assets visualized in the 3D world, is that correct?

Elena: Yeah, it's going to be 3D animated assets that we're going to pair along with the audio sound experience.

Alan: So how are you animating? Like, how are you building those experiences?

Elena: We have developers that are modeling and then animating them, and then we're we're placing them into the WebAR environment.

Alan: So let's talk more about use cases. Is this a marketing play, your marketing books and movies and other things? Do you see any use cases beyond this, in maybe medical, or do you see anything else? What's your main focus? If you were to kind of identify your ideal customer right now, what would that be?

Cory: It's currently the top tier brands and that the industry is less important, but a company that has incredible reach and scale. And so one of the CPG brands that we're in a late stage negotiation is, they have what they describe as more triggers in the world out there than any other company. And they said the only thing that rivals how many triggers they have is trees, is forests. And so there's I guess there's one hundred and ten billion impressions or brand logos out in the world produced annually by this company. And they want to--

Alan: Sounds like Coca-Cola. I can't think of any other.

Cory: Well, I can't confirm or deny it, but yeah. So that company has stated that they don't want to just play in AR. They know it's the next big platform -- as Tim Cook said just a few months ago -- since the smartphone. And they want to be the number one leader in three to five years in this marketplace. And so we're working with this client to validate some proof-of-concepts that could enable the brand to have capabilities that it just doesn't have today, and to be able to connect to its consumers at every touch point through the power of spatial computing. And there's another company, a rival to that one, which has actually a big print business. And they want to activate all of their magazines, even books, bring it all to life in WebAR. And not only the animated experience and the immersive experience, but the audio experience as well. So they sponsor a lot of top athletes, particularly in F1, and they want to have voice overs and a connection in a more multisensory experience that's not possible when you're looking at a two dimensional scene behind a pane of glass. And so it's really exciting. It's never been a greater opportunity in terms of connectivity, in terms of the power of the client devices, edge computing, as well as having billions of connected cameras. And that's why we built these technologies to bring that all together and then provide an easy and cost-effective way for brands to build these experiences on a mass scale.

Alan: Well, there you go. I don't know what else to say. So on that note, my friends, let's ask the final question that I ask, and we'll start with Elaina. What is the number one problem in the world that you want to see solved using XR technologies?

Elena: So I am, in my private life, an artist and a maker. I love DIY and that's my hobby. And I would love to see hands-free how-to tutorials that are very visual, that you can interact with for just everything in the world. But for me specifically, I want to see that with art, and just being able to learn how to create something, that maybe feels like there's a big barrier to entry, whether it be like pottery, or jewelry making, or weaving, or whatever it can be. And I think once you have a device that lets you have your hands free to create and play around at the same time, it's actually learning and be really hands on and visual with it at the same time. That's going to be amazing.

Alan: That's super cool. And Cory, same question.

Cory: I first joined at the computer space 15 years ago at a company called Lenovo, which acquired IBM Computer and later Motorola. And the reason I joined that firm was because I believed in the power of computers to connect people, and then later on joined a startup that made computerized eyewear. And that company was sold to Snapchat and became the first director at Snapchat and saw a emerging idea become a one billion dollar annual business in AR, peer-to-peer advertising with the Snapchat lenses. And so where we're at today is seeing entire industries leverage these technologies, even if they don't call it AR specifically, like Pokémon Go has now made over $3-billion. And so Geenee has focused on a vertical of advertising and marketing to nail that niche. And then once we penetrate that market and have has a sizable, dominant category leading position, then we can expand to other verticals -- as you said -- such as health care, manufacturing. It's really unconstrained on where these technologies can serve people and give them superpowers in the workplace. But one of the things that we're most excited about during this time of financial recession is the ability to leverage WebAR for charity, where there's so many important social causes that need funding. And so actually it was a Elena who came up with a concept that we've already validated, which is taking a stop sign and using our image recognition technology to recognize all stop signs. Which could be any species of stop sign in the UK, Germany. But we just took the US as a starting point. So if you go outside and you point at a stop sign, you can stop and donate to a charity. And there is multimedia that can be served up, which we've currently done, showing the video of the charity and then having the donate page at your fingertips. And we would be happy to share that after this podcast. So I think that's one way that WebAR can really make a difference and put dollars into the hands of people that need it most.

Alan: Well, that's a great use of this technology for sure. And I want to thank you guys for joining me on the podcast, and also thinking about these types of things there. Is there any last points you guys want to make before we wrap it up?

Cory: I would just say that millennials and Gen Z don't remember life before the mobile phone and by contrast, the first 20 years of our lives, Alan, you and I, when we were born and until we were 20, we weren't connected to the Internet. We didn't have all the information at our fingertips. And today, any child that is born in 2020, 20 years from now, 2040, they're not going to distinguish between extended reality or augmented reality, the mobile phone is just going to be their reality. And so the companies that adapt to that reality of spatial computing, using tools like MetaVRse, like Geenee, they'll be the ones that are positioned for market leadership in the future. Well, I'm glad you said it. Elena, carry on.

Elena: Adding on to that, I do think people are really excited about AR and that by removing the barriers that we have seen so far -- the cost, for example, or needing to code, or the general ease of creation -- and making it as easy as possible to use it, we're just going to start to see a lot more uses of it and also the possibilities of how it will be used. I'm really excited to see what new things come up, because it's been the same sort of concepts in mind for years. And I'm sure there's even more cool things out there that we haven't even explored yet.

Alan: It's amazing. Once you make a tool that allows people to build, you never know. When I was building DJ software, Mike Shinoda from Linkin Park actually took our software and built a complete modular keyboard that looks nothing like a keyboard on a touch screen.

Cory: That's awesome.

Elena: That's so cool.

Alan: Recently on our MetaVRse platform, we had somebody from Oracle -- Sikaar [Keita] -- he built an IoT sensor connected to the Web3D, and was able to control it real time. So you never know what people are going to invent when you give them tools that are kind of open and unlocked. So I'm really excited about what we can see coming out of the Geenee camp in the next little bit. Thank you so much for joining me, guys. And thank you, everyone, for listening. This is the XR for Business podcast. I would ask you to subscribe. If you're listening on the podcast, hit Subscribe. And you can visit xrforbusiness.io and sign up there, and we'll make sure that your inbox always has a new, fresh episode. Again, Cory, Elena; thank you, guys.

Elena: Thank you.

Cory: Thank you.