Upskilling things like floor management or assembly time, that's easy in XR. But soft skills, like understanding and empathy? A bit more challenging -- but importantly, not impossible. Cortney Harding talks with Alan about how emerging tech, like VR and 360 video, can help us all be a little kinder to one another.

Alan: Hey, everyone, Alan Smithson here. Today, we're speaking with Cortney Harding, founder and CEO of Friends with Holograms, about their full service VR and AR agency, that focuses on soft skills training and best practices for creating powerful content that delivers results. All that and more on the XR for Business Podcast.Welcome to the show, Cortney.

Cortney: Oh, thanks for having

me.

Alan: It's my absolute pleasure.

I'm so excited to have you on the show. You guys have done some

incredible things and you've been a pioneer in this industry for

quite some time. But I'll let you talk to everybody about how you got

into this and where you are now and where you're going.

Cortney: Yeah, great. So I got

into VR about almost five years ago now, which is crazy to think

about. I have a background in the music business and specifically I

was a journalist.I wrote for Billboard. I was an editor there for

quite a while. I then went into the music tech space right around the

time Spotify launched in the US. It was a great music and tech

ecosystem.

Alan: You and I have a very

similar background.

Cortney: Oh, funny.

Alan: I was a DJ for 20 years

and then created the Emulator, the DJ touchscreen.

Cortney: Oh, cool.

Alan: Yeah. And then I got into

VR. I was like, "What?" Go on. I didn't mean to cut you

off. I was like, "Wow, this is great."

Cortney: No, it's great. Yeah.

So anyway, so I did music tech stuff for several years. I was-- I

lead business development, and strategy, and partnerships for a

couple different startups. And then I saw this VR piece at an art

museum about five years ago, and it really broke something open for

me. And I was fascinated by it. So I spent about a year -- I was

still on contract with a music tech company -- and I was still

writing at the time. So I wrote about VR, I learned about VR, I met a

lot of people. And in 2016, at South by Southwest, I did a panel on

music and virtual reality. And one of my other panelists was this

guy, Kevin Cornish, who's starting a VR production company, he's a VR

director. And he and I had a really nice conversation, we hit it off.

And I joined his VR production company, leading business development

strategy. I worked there for about a year and a half. I learned a

tremendous amount. It was a very, very intense experience and a very

gratifying one.And then I split off to do my own thing. And so

Friends With Holograms has been around for about two years now, sort

of in its current incarnation. And in those couple of years, we've

done a lot of different projects, which I'm really proud of.

Sort of our our best known project is

the Accenture Avenues Project. So we worked on that with Accenture.

And the backstory behind that is pretty fascinating. So Accenture

came to us, I believe, right about two years ago now, right when

we're first starting and said "We have this idea, we want to do

this really amazing social work training project. And would you like

to bid for it?" And we, of course, said yes. So we bid for it

and we were awarded it in the spring of last year. And then

everything kind of went quiet for a while. And we were working on

some other projects. And I just kind of in the back of my head

thought, "OK, it got cancelled or it got changed around or

somebody left." As a bunch of a bummer as it is, that stuff

happens. A