It might seem like a small, even

Alan: Welcome to the XR for

Hey, everyone. My name’s Alan Smithson.

Jordan: Hey, Alan, good morning.

Alan: Oh, it’s my absolute

Jordan: So you just let the cat

Alan: What is the XR10?

Jordan: So I imagine that most people that listen to your podcast are pretty familiar with the Hololens 2, that Microsoft has announced that they plan to start shipping later this year. So what we did is, is we hopped on board with Microsoft kind of from the start, maybe mid last year. And we wanted to find a way that we could take the Hololens 2, and adapt it for use out in kind of safety controlled environment. Our focus is on construction, but of course, there’s many mixed reality customers out there in oil and gas, and manufacturing, and other kinds of heavy industries that require PPE — Personal Protective Equipment — when they’re out on the site. So whether that’s safety glass, or hardhat protection, or chin straps, or earmuffs, we wanted to make an integration that took the Hololens 2 and all of its capabilities, and made it able to work with folks out in those industries. So we essentially OEMed the Hololens 2 components from Microsoft and we bolted it into a new form factor that slides down on top of kind of an industry-standard hardhat, and still enables you to use your over your hearing protection, chin straps, all that other type of gear that people need to keep them safe out on the site.

Alan: We have HL2 + PPE = XR10.

Jordan: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s not our first go at this. We actually made a hardhat attachment for the first Hololens. You know, we weren’t there on the ground level from release — like we are at this time — but Hololens 1 came out, and a bunch of people ran with it and said “OK, what can actually use this for?” And as you know, most of the use cases that emerged were very enterprise-focused. And in many of those heavy industries that I mentioned, we were creating software from day one, first for architects with our SketchUp viewer app, but then moving out onto onsite construction with our Trimble Connect app. And we realized very quickly that we just weren’t going to sell any software, because no one could take a Hololens 1 and fit it under a hardhat out on the site. So at that time, we worked with Microsoft, and we basically built clips that would retrofit an off-the-shelf Hololens 1 up into a hardhat. And it sold like hotcakes, people were all over it. And then when Alex Kipman showed us Hololens 2 sometime last year, we quickly realized that because the new form factor — with them moving some of the device to the back of the head — there was just not going to be any way to retrofit a hardhat over top of it. It was just– there too much interference between the hardhat and the Hololens 2. So that was kind of where the decision was made to go full OEM integration on it.

Alan: For those people listening: Hololens, everybody gets it, it’s a mixed reality headset. You can see basically three-dimensional computing. It also has cameras in the front that detect where you are. How are people using this? Like, why would somebody buy this and go down to the trouble of putting a Hololens into a hardhat, and what are the productivity components to it?

Jordan: So I’ll speak to

But still to this day, despite that investment in that kind of initial data creation, there’s this huge data disconnect in 3D, from building a 3D digital twin, going out on a construction site and building physical 3D. But somewhere in between, you walk in on a job site and you’ve got guys holding up 2D paper plans and iPads. There’s a lot getting lost in translation. There’s a lot of rework. Construction is, like, notoriously over budget, over time in almost every project. So that’s really what we’re out to solve by kind of combining those two worlds, using a mixed reality device like the XR10 to essentially be a wormhole between those two 3D worlds, so that you can walk out on-site, collaborate with others and literally see what it is you’re building as you build it.

Alan: The rework problem is a multi-billion dollar problem. We actually have an investment in a small startup that’s looking at overlaying the models on top of the real world. Very similar. But you guys have built a suite of tools around mixed reality. So you’ve got Trimble Connect, SketchUp Viewer, Connected Mine — which I assume is from mining — Trimble Sitevision and Trimble PULSE remote expert. You want to walk us through each of those solutions?

Jordan: Yeah, sure. So some of them touch on different industries, but they all play off that exact same idea of connecting all this digital content that’s being authored or are gathered, out to the real world. So SketchUp Viewer is the design phase of buildings and construction. It’s for your architects and your owners as they’re designing something and iterating through a design, so that they can better understand what it is that each is designing. You know, this has been done in VR for years and years and years, but mixed reality is kind of adding a new component. The ability to actually, you know, let’s say you’re retrofitting a bathroom, being able to go out on the existing bathroom and overlay what it’s going to look like for a customer. The Trimble Connect solution is then kind of that next step in the process. It’s being used by general contractors, plumbers, electricians, HVAC installers to actually go out on-site and monitor the construction as it’s going in, and then ensure that things are going in correctly after they’re done.

We’ve actually worked a little bit–

And so we developed SiteVision, which is a tablet integrated with really Trimble’s bread and butter, which is high precision GPS technology. So if you’re a surveyor or a heavy civil contractor or a utility worker, and you have GIS data or buried utility data, you can walk out on site and see where it is in augmented reality overlaid on the real world to about centimeter level precision. It’s pretty incredible what these GPS receivers can do. The Connected Mine application, I actually used to work on in my last job. It’s really the same concept as what we’re doing in construction. You know, the whole push in the mining industry is getting people out of the mine. It’s an unsafe environment. And so mines, they set up shop for 100 years on a single open pit. So they have the ability to put a bunch of fixed cost investment in the technology for that mine. And many of the leading mines, they are essentially mapping in real-time — using radar and LiDAR and drones and photos — a real digital twin of the mine. And so mixed reality is allowing them to remotely — you could have an office in Toronto — remotely monitoring a mine in South Africa, sitting at their desk but wearing a device.

So that’s what Connected Mine does. And it’s not only overlaying the 3D CAD that that laser scanned at the mine, but also all the stockpile volumes and the movement of ore through the mine, and all of that kind of IoT information coming off of the different sensors. And then last but not least, the PULSE application, it’s built off of a field service application called Trimble Pulse that we have. And it’s essentially a remote expert solution. So if you have workers out in the field repairing electrical transmission towers or whatever it might be, giving them the ability through their phone to essentially call back home and have an expert back in the office — which are becoming kind of few and far between, many of them are retiring — so you essentially have that expert back in the office able to beam out to 100 different guys to help them, only when they need it.

Alan: That is a really complete

Jordan: Depending on the use

We Trimble actually just built another building here on our Denver campus. And during the construction, we actually went out with a lot of our technology and kind of used it on the site. And so we went out with a general contractor and the HVAC sub, and it was right after the structural steel had been installed — so basically the decks and the columns and the beams were up — and we essentially took their BIM model of the HVAC and we walked the floor to essentially do as-built comparisons. We’re comparing the digital HVAC to the real world installed steel. And within about five minutes we found, I think, three or four different spots where the steel guys had gone off their plan a little bit. They had installed little support kickers, probably a completely necessary change, but they hadn’t essentially synched it back to what’s known as the coordinated model, that all these different subcontractors share to ensure that their puzzles are kind of fitting together. And because the steel guys hadn’t mapped that back — which is a very, very common thing — the HVAC guys were in the process of prefabricating all of those HVAC components somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.

And so they were expecting delivery

Alan: That’s amazing. So this

Jordan: [chuckles] I sure hope

Alan: [laughs] When you put it

Jordan: Yeah, exactly. It makes

Alan: Well–

Jordan: I promise you I won’t.

Alan: The thing is, I’ve put this crazy number out there, I said “Virtual/augmented/mixed reality is going to create a trillion dollars in value in the next 10 years.” Now, if you think about it practically with solutions like Trimble Connect and Connected Mine and just the stuff you guys are doing, just in the money that you’re able to save customers in — just call it one specific aspect and that’s rework — over the next five years, just in your company alone, that could be in the hundreds of millions, if not billions of dollars in savings, just in one company. So you can imagine this, times all the companies in the world, times warehouses and sales and training. And if you factor in every type of way this technology can be used, I think that trillion dollars in value created by XR is probably closer to the five to seven-year mark. Because it’s just so– people are thinking in terms of how many headsets we’re going to sell. But like exactly what you said, the headsets, call it $10,000. Well, you’re saving that in one small area immediately. So the value created over the lifetime of five years of this headset is gonna be in the millions of dollars.

Jordan: Yeah. And fortunately, the XR10’s half of that, it’s under $5,000. So you’re under the cost of the Hololens 1. And it’s a much more capable device this time around. So it’s pretty impressive. I very much agree with you. I don’t know about the trillion-dollar, maybe, I don’t– I haven’t tried to run the numbers. But the way I think about it is the Internet was like a great unifier for the world, right? Like you had all these people, billions of people spread across the world, all with their own independent knowledge on billions of different topics, from how do you cook curry, to how do you build a house. And the Internet gave a platform to connect those people together, and all that knowledge together. When I think of XR technology to a lot of people, it’s still kind of seems like a gimmick. But once we get the mindshare out there of what the technology really is, I think they’ll come around. Because what it really is is you have all of this data which is properly connected, human to human through the Internet, but it’s not properly connected, human to world.

Jordan: And so that’s what AR is

Alan: Even going to get more

Jordan: Yeah, I agree. Construction sites are actually a little tricky to set sensors up on. You know, like an open-pit mine is actually very easy, because — like I said — it gets open and they carve it for 150 years. Construction sites because they change so often. It’s a little bit difficult to get infrastructure that’s not going to immediately get blocked by a piece of drywall or something, right? What’s interesting about a solution like Hololens is, today most of the work that’s been done is, how can we take data that already exists and then use the Hololens to visualize it? But I think that’s only one part of a bigger story. And I think that in the very near future, we’re going to start exploring how Hololens can actually collect the data as it goes. So not only can it show you a ton of information, but it can collect it as it goes, as well. So that example that I use of our guys up on the construction site and being able to see that design versus as-built clash, there’s no reason why a Hololens couldn’t use artificial intelligence and machine learning to tell you that by itself, right?

Jordan: And if that’s the case, then you don’t have to rely on the human anymore to be able to identify that issue. Rather, you could have– you could put a cheap little occipital sensor on every single person’s hardhat — rather than everyone wearing Hololens — and walk around. And it’s the exact same concept as what Elon Musk is trying to do with the Tesla, or any of these folks out there doing autonomous vehicles. You have vehicles that are not only using a map and knowledge to kind of navigate themselves, but they’re also sending information back to it at all times. It’s like, “Oh, this business went out of business, send that back to Google Maps.” And so it’s this kind of constant data cycle.

And I think you’ll start to see the

Alan: Yeah. Or maybe just send a

Jordan: Yeah, exactly.

Alan: Yeah. The possibilities

Jordan: Yeah, we’ve worked

Alan: Amazing. Amazing. And

Jordan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Alan: So speaking of helping

Jordan: So I’ll hone in on

And I think in addition to that, it’s