One of Alan's favourite XR

experiences was running into a room at the Royal York Hotel, filled

with 200 people, all deathly silent and hooked into VR headsets. It

may sound like a Matrix prequel, but it was actually a demo of PwC's

VR platform. Jeremy Dalton -- the author of this anecdote -- stops by

to talk about mass VR technology.

Alan: Welcome to the XR for

Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today's guest is

Jeremy Dalton. Jeremy leads PwC's Virtual and Augmented Reality Team,

helping clients across all sectors understand, quantify and implement

the benefits of virtual and augmented reality technology. As part of

his mission to educate, connect, and inspire, he's also a member of

the World Economic Forum, Virtual and Augmented Reality Global Future

Council, and sits on the Advisory Board of Immerse UK, a cross-sector

network for businesses, research and educational organisations in the

immersive technology industry. Jeremy is also an advisor for the

VR/AR Association, and he's also a mentor for our XR Ignite program.

To learn more about PwC's VR and AR endeavors, you can visit

PwC.co.uk/vr.

Welcome to the show, Jeremy.

Jeremy: Hi, Alan. It's a

pleasure to be here.

Alan: It's such an honor and a

pleasure to have you on the show. We've been communicating for many

years now and we even have a kind of a joint research folder that

we've been adding to over the years. So it's really great to have you

on the show.

Jeremy: Definitely, I'm looking

forward to getting stuck in.

Alan: [laughs] Yeah, it's

amazing. So I just want to tell a quick story. About two months ago,

you came to Toronto with your PwC team and ran a partners conference,

and you had an enormous number of simultaneous virtual reality

experiences. So you wanna maybe just explain what that was and how

that came to be?

Jeremy: Yeah, sure. So this was

a particularly exciting project for us where -- very, very quickly,

in summary -- we put 200 people into virtual reality at the same time

and they all had this simultaneous experience in the same room. And I

was able to collect that data in real time and understand exactly

where in that experience they were and what decisions they were

making in that world. So it was fantastic. It went off without a

hitch, thankfully, given the number of potential technical issues

that could have gone wrong. I was very happy. It all went very

smoothly.

Alan: It was quite endeavour. I

remember you said, "Hey, we're doing this thing tomorrow

morning. I'm in Toronto." I cancelled my meetings the morning, I

came over there. I went into the hotel -- it was at the Royal York in

Toronto -- and I went upstairs, walked into this room and it was dead

silent. And there's 200 people -- 200+ people, there was more than

200 people, for sure -- and you could hear a pin drop on a carpet.

And it was the strangest thing, because everybody was in VR and

everybody's looking in different directions. It was this crazy thing.

And you had this branching narrative. Maybe talk to what that

branching narrative was? Right after the experience, you were able to

show the information. Walk us through how that came to be.

Jeremy: Yeah, sure. And I like

your comment about being able to keep everyone quiet. That was

actually mentioned as well by by some of the organizers of the

conference, that they were amazed by this pindrop silence in the

room, because obviously it's very rare. You've usually got people

messing around on their mobile phones. You got them talking to each

other, going to get a glass of water, leaving the room, coming into

the room. So I think it's a testament to the power of virtual reality

to create such a captive and focused audience.

Alan: