Longtime listeners will remember one of Alan's favorite AR anecdotes; the Burger King ad that digitally vandalizes a competitor's ad space. But has anyone stopped to think, does that digital space belong to anyone? Or to someone who might not care for digital ads existing there?

Yes, someone has -- Dominic Collins

from Darabase, who is building an AR digital permissions platform to

ensure the AR marketing ecosystem is fair and equitable for everyone.

Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan

Smithson here, and today we're speaking with Dominic Collins, CEO and

co-founder of Darabase Ltd.,

a global platform that is managing and monetizing AR permissions on

the physical world. All that and more, on the XR for Business

Podcast.

Dominic, welcome to the show.

Dominic: Thank you, Alan. I'm

delighted to be here.

Alan: We did an event about six

months ago -- with our law firm in Toronto, Fasken -- and we did this

kind of "VR and AR through the legal lens" event with the

VR/AR Association in Toronto. And what we realized was there's this

kind of massive problem that if you're putting augmented reality over

top of the physical world, who owns that data? Who's responsible for

it? I think the first case study that we've seen of this is Burger

King lighting McDonald's advertisements on fire in AR. This is going

to be a really interesting space. And now with Snapchat putting world

lenses on buildings. So this is what you do. What do you-- walk us

through, what it is Darabase does, and how it's solving this problem?

Dominic: Yeah. So you're absolutely right. You know, since we started the company about a year ago, there's so much that has happened to, I suppose, add further grist to our mill, that our service and services like this are required. We kind of see ourselves, I suppose, as the permission layer between the spatial web and the physical world. A lot of-- it's amazing how many big companies now are kind of what I call the immersive lasagna that kind of -- whether it be Magic Leap's Magicverse or the real world index and Facebook -- you kind of got these great slides with these, you know, loads of layers with the physical world, or the digital twin, and infrastructure, and all these things that sit on top. But as you say, it doesn't really feel that the permission of the real-world physical property owner is taken into consideration. Our insight, I suppose -- and my background is more conditional and working in marketing -- is that where media and platforms have really thrived historically -- and when they've really kind of accelerated in terms of growth and adoption -- has been where all of the axes engaged and rewarded appropriately. And from a digital perspective, there's never been a time where permission and privacy and consent had more of the spotlight. So Darabase, essentially it is -- at its simplest form -- an AR database, hence "Darabase", but we have a global database of permissions where physical property owner -- whether that be a big iconic building, whether that be a retailer -- is able to register in a kind of technology platform-agnostic way, so this one will work across all the different AR clouds or platforms or whatever you want to call them, that they can register what appears on their property. Now we're talking commercial content. We're not saying that we're trying to govern and be a police force for editorial content. But if someone was to put commercial content or advertising on a building, then we believe that the physical property owner should have a say. That's a far more scalable and appropriate mechanic, that other companies would have taken a different route. Other companies are creating AR twins of the world and then selling those for a tenth or an eighth or whatever. We think that actually long term, even shorter, it just ma