If picking out a car off a lot is like picking out a handful of eggs from a basket, then assembling your perfect vehicle – fine-tuned to your specifications, BY you – is like picking out a few hundred grains of sand from the Sahara desert. At least, that's how ZeroLight's Barry Hoffman sees it. Hoffman shares this with Alan, and other philosophies about XR as a great asset to the automotive industry.

Alan: Today's guest is Barry

Hoffman from ZeroLight. Barry is the chief strategy officer of

ZeroLight, a leading real-time visualization company in the

automotive industry. He has a background with telco, gaming,

automotive, and data science, and interactions with CRMs being the

major thread in his career. At ZeroLight, Barry is responsible for

their US operations, and also leads strategic partnerships and

ZeroLight. This company, just so you know, is really incredible.

They've taken virtual and augmented reality for the automobile

industry to the next level; from AR apps where you can see cars in

your living room, to full VR simulators where you can drive the cars

and see what they interact like. It's an incredible company, I

suggest you check it out at zerolight.com.

Barry, welcome to the show.

Barry: Nice to be here, Alan,

thank you for inviting me.

Alan: It's my absolute pleasure.

I've been a huge fan of your work for a long time. You guys have done

one car after another -- I think one of the ones that I saw on there

was a Pagani. It's just, I'm a carhead as well, so being able to see

the work that you guys are doing and making things look photo-real is

just incredible.

Barry: Yeah, that's true. You

mentioned . It's funny because it's quite a known car, of course --

they only make 100 of series, like how the Pagani Huayra Roadster, I

believe there were only 100 made. But the funny thing is that all

those 100 were sold digitally first. So, there is no real car

available. If you think about the starting price of $2.3-million,

it's sort of like a digital-reality sales case of $230-million. It's

something, if you do the math, how incredible that is.

Alan: So what you're saying is,

ZeroLight contributed to probably the largest use of VR for an

economic benefit ever.

Barry: Yeah, that's true. This

one is, of course, flipped to VR and especially screens, because a

lot of the clientele will want to use it on screens. I would say

Pagani is definitely a case like that. Audi, we definitely

contributed to that part. Most recently, we released a Cadillac in

their showrooms as well, with VR.

All these different car manufacturers,

they tell their story differently. They have different brands, and

they use the technology differently. That's the coolest pitch, and I

like instead of just saying, “okay, there's one type of showcase,

and this is how you do VR.” That would be the same as, “there's

one type of app in the App Store, and that is all you can do.” It's

cool to see this diversity, these ideas coming out of all these

different clients, and then working together with them and turning

that into their story. And not just their story -- because that would

make it only a brand experience -- but also a buying experience,

because a lot of things of what we do is on the high-end

personalization side, like what you just said. Pagani has 18,000

parts, and all those 18,000 parts can be changed into something

unique. That's the ultimate buying experience, I almost say.

Audi, for instance, if you take their

custom build program, I believe there's more Audis in variants

available than there are grains of sand in the world or in the

Sahara. That's the small thing that I have to say. All these thing