Most businesses

have the information and infrastructures they need to be more

efficient and competitive -- it's just a matter of having it all at

their fingertips. RE'FLEKT is working at making that process easier

by creating a modular, scalable, open-source operating system for

businesses to build their own in-house AR applications on top of.

President and CMO Dirk Schart drops in to explain how.

Alan: Welcome to the XR for

Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today's guest is Dirk

Schart RE'FLEKT President and CMO. Dirk Schart is a marketing and

growth driven tech executive, whose current mission is to build the

operating system for enterprise augmented reality. Dirk leads the US

operations for RE'FLEKT. Dirk is one of the first employees of

RE'FLEKT and is a funded company by global companies such as Bosch

and BASF, and today plays a leading role in enterprise AR.

Previously, Dirk built the Digital Innovation Lab for Hyperloop

Transportation Technologies, for which he continues to work as an

advisor. Within four months, he built a team and developed the first

MVP, and he also directs the VR and AR team for Hyperloop

Transportation Technologies. Dirk helps technology startups such as

VisualX, VYON, and RiseStep. He's the author of two augmented reality

books, albeit they're both in German, but you can get them. And he

also contributed to Metaverse, the book by Forbes writer Charlie

Fink. He founded the first AR blog in Germany, "WE ARE AR"

and has been interviewed and quoted by leading media such as Tech

Crunch, Venture Beat and Huffington Post. For more information on

RE'FLEKT, you can visit re-flekt.com.

Dirk, welcome to the show.

Dirk: Hey, Alan. Thank you very

much for having me.

Alan: My pleasure, my friend.

The last time I saw you was at Augmented World Expo, and I think we

were taking silly photos.

Dirk: That's true. But was fun.

[laughs]

Alan: It's always fun. And it's

becoming like a family, this whole augmented reality family and

everybody's working together. And it's been wonderful. And the work

that you guys are doing at RE'FLEKT is world class. And I really want

to dive into the benefits of this technology and how you guys are

using it. Let's talk about that.

Dirk: Absolutely. So you already

mentioned it in the intro; what we're doing is we're building the

operating system for enterprise AR. So what does that mean? That's

for us the foundation of how enterprises will use AR in the future.

Let me go back quickly and talk a little bit about how we started.

That makes it easier for the listeners. Back in 2012, it was really,

really difficult to create any kind of augmented reality

applications. So it was completely different to what we have today.

And we started to develop individually programmed applications. There

were no platforms. There was nothing at the time. And one of the

first things we did is, we build an application for Range Rover. And

the reason for that was that they came and said, look, we have a very

complex repair. It's about a few return line of a Range Rover car.

And the mechanics, they always have problems doing that because it's

complex. They don't do that every day. Documentation doesn't seem to

be perfect for it for that use case. They try PDF, they tried videos,

but result was the same, they couldn't fix the problem. So we built

an application.

We showed it to them and helped the

mechanic, because it guided them step by step through that repair and

showed them exactly at the point where they had the problems. "Wait.

Now focus on it. Have a look. Double check before you do the next

step." And that at the end helped them to perform the task much

better and reduce their error rates. And then, of course they asked

about, "okay, so how can we do that for all our car models?"

And at