Regular listeners have heard plenty

of stories from Alan's numerous adventures at Augmented World Expo.

In today's episode, we go to the source of all those tales, with

AWE's co-founder and executive producer, Ori Inbar -- just ahead of

this year's summit.

Alan: Welcome to the XR for

Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. I am super excited to

have our next guest today, Ori Inbar. He's a world leading expert in

the field of augmented reality industry, and he has devoted the past

decade to fostering the AR ecosystem as an entrepreneur, advisor, and

investor. He's the founder and managing partner for Super Ventures

and the CEO of AugmentedReality.org, a nonprofit that produces

Augmented World Expo, the top industry conference for AR since 2010.

To learn more about what he's doing, you can visit

augmentedreality.org and awexr.com or superventures.com.

Ori, welcome to the show, my friend.

Ori: Thank you, Alan. It's

awesome to be here.

Alan: It's so exciting to have

you. I've been waiting for this episode for so long and I just can't

wait to get right in. Maybe can you just give us your first AR

experience, and how did you get into this? You know, I watched your

2019 keynote from AWE again, and put on these these welding glasses

that you had back in 2009. You've been doing this for ten years

without any reduction in passion. And how did you get involved? Like,

what was that precipitating moment for you?

Ori: So for me, after the

startup I was working for was acquired by SFP -- and I spent seven

years there -- decided to leave and go back to my roots in startup.

And then I realized that my kids are always stuck in front of a

screen, computer screen or playing video games. And on one hand, it

felt like we cannot really change the future. But I was trying to

look for a way for kids -- and adults -- to kind of interact with the

real world, like we did as kids. But by adding some of the things

that attract kids and adults to computers and to video games and to

social media and kind of merge it into reality. And at that time, I

thought I kind of invented something new. But then upon some

research, I realized there's a term for it, it's called augmented

reality, it's been around for many decades. But it was hidden in labs

in a few places around the world. So the mission immediately became

to find a way to bring it to the mainstream, to the masses. And then

the iPhone was announced and it felt like finally we have an ideal

device to deliver augmented reality to everyone, because they already

have it in their pockets. Of course, from there the path was very

long and arduous and still is. But I think we're starting to see some

of the fruits in the last couple of years where a bunch of new

applications -- whether it's for enterprise or for consumers -- are

hitting the market and are actually showing value. So it seems like

we're definitely on the path to making it mainstream.

Alan: My first AWE was three

years ago and I remember it was amazing to me, because I went to

Silicon Valley VR meet-up or SVVR, and it was mainly VR. And then I

went to AWE and it was a lot of augmented reality, and glasses, and

there was companies there making glasses that looked like aliens had

built them. And it felt really clunky. I almost had this feeling like

this is really cool, I can see where it's going, but it's not quite

there. And it's it's just not ready for the real world, in my

opinion. But you go back this year and everything is actually,

Porsche’s using this and Lockheed Martin is using it. Huge

companies not only are done with their pilot phase, but they're

rolling it out at scale. So what do you think has happened in the

last three years to take it from a cottage industry to something

that's in the billions of dollars?

Ori: Actually, if you take it

bac