Getting future workers excited for the jobs they might have tomorrow can be challenging, especially when many young workers tend to enjoy challenging themselves with new tasks. Dr. Björn Schwerdtfeger says that AR training can allow those workers to qualify themselves for all sorts of tasks, and have fun doing it, to boot.

[Transcript coming shortly]

Alan: Hey, everybody, and thanks

for joining in on the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan

Smithson. I'm really excited today. I have Dr. Björn Schwerdtfeger

from Germany. He has more than 15 years experience in augmented

reality. Together with the German industry, he's evaluated almost

every idea for AR in applications in the industry. He's been a

co-inventor of Pick-By-Vision at TU Munich. And during that time --

when computers for AR glasses were still carried in large backpacks

-- Björn holds a PhD in industrial augmented reality as a serial

entrepreneur. And among other things, his company, AR Experts, is

advising about a third of Germany's most important production

companies, and is shaping their augmented reality roadmaps. You can

learn more about them at ar-experts.de. And they have another product

that they're gonna be talking about today. It's ar-giri.com. Björn,

welcome to the show, my friend.

Björn: Yeah. Welcome, Alan.

Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you online. I'm looking forward to

this podcast.

Alan: It's so exciting. The work

that you've been doing over the last few years -- like a decade and a

half -- is really starting to come to fruition now. I mean, all of

the hard work that you and your team have done to evangelize a

technology that -- let's be honest -- 15 years ago, the technology

really wasn't ready for the market. Tell us, how did you get into

this, into AR?

Björn: It was actually quite

funny, while still studying at the university, computer science, and

then somewhere else, augmented reality which popped up. And someone

had a demonstrator, where someone took some glasses and glued a

webcam -- we had external webcams earlier -- just hot-glued to some

glasses and using some [unclear] stuff and highlighting it. I think

it was just a cube. A virtual cube... And it was so fascinating that

you can bring this computer interface into the real world. Quite a

long time ago. But it was really nice.

Alan: Björn, did you say there

was a webcam hot-glued to a pair of glasses?

Björn: Exactly. That's how we

did augmented reality 15, 20 years ago.

Alan: Amazing. You are one of

the OG, the originals of this industry. You've been building and

advising brands and companies around their strategy for production.

What is the one thing in augmented reality right now that you've seen

the most ROI?

Björn: It's probably... we've

seen a lot of companies trying to do everything. Basically every

single one of us have tried to out, in the last three decades, and

failed with it. And we're figuring out what is actually the core of

augmented reality. And the core of augmented reality is not-- it's

not a measurement tool, it's not a tool for everything. It looks like

a display, and it is a good display. But where its core is, where

it's so good in, is in communication. It displays communication and

augmented reality is big. It's so much more close to your reality,

that perception is getting much better. So what you tried to

communicate with exosheets, nice PowerPoints; it's getting so closer

to the user with augmented reality. And they figured out that the

communication got so much better using augmented reality -- using

*good* implemented augemnted reality, it's quite important -- you can

do a lot of mistakes there. But this is helping so much. And that's

why you're seeing currently augmented reality mainly in marketing,

because marketing