Your various realities -- virtual, augmented, X, etc -- are often talked about in the realm of vision, since we humans lean on vision as our major sense. But the folks at Bose, like today's guest Michael Ludden, know that there's room for sound in XR too.

Alan: Welcome to the XR for

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

Michael Ludden, global head of developer advocacy and principal

augmented reality advocate at Bose Technologies. Michael is a

technologist, futurist, strategist, product leader, and developer

platform expert who loves to operate on the bleeding edge of what's

possible, and is a frequent keynote speaker at events around the

world. Michael was previously director of IBM's Watson's Developer

Lab for a AR and VR, among some other career stops. To learn more

about the work he's doing at Bose, you can visit developer.bose.com.

Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael: Wow, what an intro.

Thanks for having me.

Alan: It's my absolute pleasure

and honor to have you on the show. I'm super excited. I was talking

to all fine and last week. I was flying from Toronto to San

Francisco, and I just happened to sit beside a guy who we started

talking about AR and I pulled out the North Glasses. He pulled out

the Bose Frames; we swap. And we had this kind of meeting of the

minds. I had the visual, he had the audio and it was really cool that

I got to try the Bose Frames. What an amazing piece of technology.

Michael: Glad you liked it.

Alan: So you've had a storied

career here. You've done everything from IBM Watson, to Google, to

HTC, Samsung. How did you end up in technology, and why did you get

so fascinated on futurism?

Michael: Well, it's sort of been

a running theme in my life. I read a lot of science fiction as a kid

and I was always interested in technology and -- not to date myself

-- but at a certain point in my life when I was a young adult,

technology started to really aggressively eat everything, starting

with mobile. And I just found that was really the point of inflection

in my life where I studied musical theater in college, I went to

UCLA. I thought that's what I was going to do. I really did. And I

did get a B.A. so I got a little arts education, too. And at the same

time, I was always tinkering with stuff, building my own PCs. I

started my own web development company at one point to make Web sites

in Flash, CS2, and CS3 in the early days; it was brutal.

Alan: There's a conference in

Toronto called Flash in the Can; FITC.

Michael: Nice.

Alan: That's old school.

Michael: It is very old school.

And, you know, I never really thought I'd make a career out of it,

but I needed money. I was a starving actor in L.A. and one of my

friends who I just made by being nerdy, worked for a company called

HTC. They were releasing the first-ever Android phone, which was

called The Dream -- or the G1 in the US. So I was in contact with

this guy; he got a promotion. He said, "you should take my old

job," which was L.A.-based, and I was living there. And I said,

"I want to do it." I was working on a podcasting platform

called This Week In -- not This Week in Tech -- but This Week In. It

was a Jason Calacanis-led network out of the old Mahalo Studios in

Santa Monica. But it paid me pennies. And when they told me what the

job paid and what I'd be doing, I said, "OK, I guess I'll do

it." I needed the money, and it was very flexible. It felt

really easy to me, like that's really all you need me to do.

And so I ended up starting to go around

door to door. What was it like? T-Mobile shop, Verizons shop, AT&T

-- like, carrier stores -- and show them about the phones. An