Regular listeners will know that podcast host Alan Smithson is no stranger to the conference circuit, and is often asked to present or speak at the big XR expos. In a special episode of XR for Business, you'll get to hear Alan in his element, as we present his opening remarks at this year's VRX Conference.

"Well, thank you guys for joining. Again, welcome to the Blue Room at VRX 2019. My name's Alan Smithson, and we're gonna be talking today about the transformation of education using XR. I want to just quickly talk about MetaVRse. We're building a platform for future-proof learning. And what that means to us is as more spatial computing technologies come on board, what we want to do is make sure that organizations -- from training and enterprise, and also schools and organizations in high schools and universities -- all have access to not only the content, but the platforms to let them make their own content. So what we're building is a platform marketplace for technologies and content to grow.

We're entering into the exponential age

of humanity. We're hitting the point at which all of these

technologies converge together. So in the next 10 years, more wealth

will be created than all of previous human history. We're entering

into an inflection point, where education systems are going to be

stretched beyond our wildest imaginations. Over the next 10 years,

more wealth can be created, but right now -- currently -- we're

building a city the size of Manhattan around the world globally,

every single month. Yeah.

We're going to experience massive

changes, from environmental changes, to job force changes, to

educational changes, all of these changes are happening to us at a

pace that we've never had before. It's happening faster and faster.

And somebody said this to me the other day. They said "Today is

the slowest it will ever be." It's terrifying, it's so fast. But

learning is required at every level, whether it's skilled trades,

unskilled trades, whether it is retirees. We're working on

technologies that will make people live to 150 years old. What are

they going to do? We need to rethink learning from a ground-up level.

All types of learning, whether it's at work or at school, all of

these things that need a complete rethink.

Here's a crazy stat: 75 percent of the

global workforce will be millennials by 2023. Who else is terrified

by that fact? Right? 120 million people need to be reskill,

retrained, and upskilled due to AI and automation in the next three

years. We don't have the systems in place to deal with this. Two

trillion dollars, that is the global impact that VR and AR will make

over the next 10 years, by 2030. And this is an estimate by PWC.

So why is now the perfect time to get

into virtual and augmented reality for learning? So over the last

three decades we saw the rise of the personal computer and it took 20

years -- 30 years, almost -- to get everybody onto the personal

computer. And then we saw the rise of mobile, and that took about 20

years. XR is going to take about 10 years to go to global mass. So by

2030, we're gonna be wearing glasses around and those glasses will be

inexpensive. They'll be running on the cloud, so the compute power

won't be on your phone or on your glasses. It'll be in the cloud,

it'll be all edge computing.

So we're gonna see this massive growth.

And right now, we're past the hype cycle. We've already seen proven

business use cases. We're seeing real ROI being driven. And if you

look at the compounded annual growth rate of this industry, it's

unprecedented. The only other industry that's growing as fast is AI.

And it perfectly correlates with the global education market. This is

all of education, this is corporate training, this is K to 12. This

is all education. We'll hit ten trillion dollars by 2030. It's six

trillion now.

"Teach me and I will fo