The power of XR will never be able to destroy the good ol' desire to go out and shop, but that doesn't mean that XR couldn't be used to improve the shopping experience. Tracey Wiedmeyer and Alan discuss a few ideas, from browsing the catch of the day in a VR tropical wonderland, to using VR and AR to test out retail layouts before you build them.

Alan: Today's guest is Tracey

Wiedmeyer. Tracey is the chief technology officer and co-founder of

InContext Solutions. They're delivering a mixed reality platform that

is the world's largest brands and retailers are using to streamline

their merchandising process and go to market strategy much faster.

Tracey is also the former president of the VR/AR Association chapter

in Chicago, Milwaukee and a board member for the Information Research

Technology Institute at Sam Walton College of Business. Tracey is

also a member of the Forbes Technology Council. You can learn more

about InContext Solutions at www.incontextsolutions.com. With that,

I'd love to welcome to the show: Tracey Wiedmeyer.

Tracey: Hey Alan, glad to be

here.

Alan: My pleasure. I'm so

excited. This is a show I've been really waiting to do because you

guys have been using virtual and augmented reality, mixed reality to

help retailers preplan their stores, because right now a retailer, if

they want to design a new store, they literally have to build a

physical store, put all the shelves and build a mock store. And

you're doing this through virtual/augmented reality, and the metrics

that you're able to collect, keep maps, and where people are looking

and the amount of data that you're able to collect from users in a

digital world versus a physical world is actually really quite

amazing. So maybe you can just talk about InContext Solutions and

what you're doing for retailers.

Tracey: Sure, yeah. There was a

lot to bite off there. I'll break it down little by little as we go

here. So I think you mentioned creating brand new physical stores.

There's actually more retail stores today, more brick-and-mortar

stores than there were back in 2000 when the retail apocalypse

version 1 hit the street. You know, it was the end of

brick-and-mortar, everyone has gone digital. So I think there's a lot

of stores being added today and most stores - but whether you're a

centre store grocery retailer or fashion or apartment store - those

stores go through a regular reset on a period of time, whether that's

every couple of years or longer than that. I think the nuance there

is actually at the brand level, you know, especially if we focus on

centre store grocery for a little bit here. The brands are actually

working with their retail partners multiple times a year to reset the

categories that you shop. So cereal, frozen foods, healthcare, baby

foods, all that sort of stuff are constantly going through some sort

of revision period, whether it's... the old way's every six months,

because that's how long it takes them, and I'll get into that in a

little bit. But they're trying to get you to buy or notice one or two

more products on that journey to the shelf. We're using virtual

technology now to basically facilitate that process; everything from

a brand new store, to which products go on the shelf, and how many of

them are stacked right to left and front to back. There's a lot of

low hanging fruit in that process, and maybe I don't know how much,

Alan, you know about what that process looks like today, or in the

past. What I'm going to do is tell you a little bit about where we've

come from.

A lot of brands and retailers have what

they call mock warehouses. They physically stage all their sets, what

every category is going to look like. And then they invite their

brand. You invite your r