XR for Business

As this episode goes live, Alan’s

Alan: Hey everyone, it’s Alan

Welcome to the show, Kathryn. How are

Kathryn: Hi, I’m great, thanks.

Alan: I’m so amazing. I’m really

Kathryn: Yeah, so I work for XR

Alan: Seems to be the perfect

Kathryn: Yes. So it was really

Alan: So 93 percent said VR is

Kathryn: Yes. You do kind of

Alan: That’s incredible. I mean,

Kathryn: Yeah.

Alan: It’s conducive to what

Kathryn: And I really hear this

Alan: What are some of the

Kathryn: Yeah. So I guess in

Alan: Yeah, it’s

Kathryn: So, I mean, this year I

Alan: Okay. So let’s let’s dive

Kathryn: Yes. So, I mean, we’ve

Alan: Yeah, I noticed you have

Kathryn: Oh, yeah, she’s great.

Alan: She definitely does. If

Kathryn: It’s good, yeah.

Alan: Yeah, it’s– I’m looking

Kathryn: Yeah.

Alan: This is a conference that

Kathryn: Yeah, we’re excited as

Alan: It comes down to– and I

Kathryn: Yeah. And I do think

Alan: Absolutely. I think it’s

Kathryn: And I mean, I won’t say

Alan: I think retailers need to

Kathryn: Definitely. And

Alan: Wow. I can’t wait. I’m

Kathryn: Yes. So, XR

Alan: Exciting.

Kathryn: Yeah, it’s gonna to be

Alan: Super exciting. Oh my

Kathryn: Yeah. Great. Thank you

Alan: Of course we will. That’s

Kathryn: Thank you very much.

Alan: That seems like a really

Kathryn: Oh. I would love to see

Longtime listeners will remember one of Alan’s favorite AR anecdotes; the Burger King ad that digitally vandalizes a competitor’s ad space. But has anyone stopped to think, does that digital space belong to anyone? Or to someone who might not care for digital ads existing there?

Yes, someone has — Dominic Collins

Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan

Dominic, welcome to the show.

Dominic: Thank you, Alan. I’m

Alan: We did an event about six

Dominic: Yeah. So you’re absolutely right. You know, since we started the company about a year ago, there’s so much that has happened to, I suppose, add further grist to our mill, that our service and services like this are required. We kind of see ourselves, I suppose, as the permission layer between the spatial web and the physical world. A lot of– it’s amazing how many big companies now are kind of what I call the immersive lasagna that kind of — whether it be Magic Leap’s Magicverse or the real world index and Facebook — you kind of got these great slides with these, you know, loads of layers with the physical world, or the digital twin, and infrastructure, and all these things that sit on top. But as you say, it doesn’t really feel that the permission of the real-world physical property owner is taken into consideration. Our insight, I suppose — and my background is more conditional and working in marketing — is that where media and platforms have really thrived historically — and when they’ve really kind of accelerated in terms of growth and adoption — has been where all of the axes engaged and rewarded appropriately. And from a digital perspective, there’s never been a time where permission and privacy and consent had more of the spotlight. So Darabase, essentially it is — at its simplest form — an AR database, hence “Darabase”, but we have a global database of permissions where physical property owner — whether that be a big iconic building, whether that be a retailer — is able to register in a kind of technology platform-agnostic way, so this one will work across all the different AR clouds or platforms or whatever you want to call them, that they can register what appears on their property. Now we’re talking commercial content. We’re not saying that we’re trying to govern and be a police force for editorial content. But if someone was to put commercial content or advertising on a building, then we believe that the physical property owner should have a say. That’s a far more scalable and appropriate mechanic, that other companies would have taken a different route. Other companies are creating AR twins of the world and then selling those for a tenth or an eighth or whatever. We think that actually long term, even shorter, it just makes a lot more sense that if I own this iconic building in the middle of New York, that actually I should have a say over what content gets served on it. And if it’s commercial, then I should get a cut, the same way that I can do a deal right now with a company that puts billboards on the side of buildings. I give them the consent, they put it up, they manage it on my behalf, and I get a check at the end of every month. And that’s basically what Darabase does in its simplest form.

Alan: So I think in order for

Dominic: Yes and no. So we’re certainly starting out with working with a lot of very large property owners, who both see the risk and they also see the opportunity. And for them, this is a — for lack of a better term — but a bit of a no-brainer. You know, they can register their properties for free, and they can allow it to be monetized and even go down to the level of picking the IP categories in terms of what type of content will appear on the building. They can also, if the retailers have their own content, through Darabase they can be certain of their own promotions. So yes, the property owners kind of create the marketplace, if you want to think of it that way. In terms of who’s on the flip side of that marketplace, actually– we’re about to launch our first SDK and that’s– we think of it much more at a Unity level, than necessarily as an Apple or a Google level. Through Darabase’s SDK, you’ll be able to essentially kind of plugin monetization to your world facing our app, which is much more contextual to the location while being uninterruptive. And that will work across all of those platforms. Now, there’s also other conversations that we’re having — and I can’t go into a lot of detail on those, as most of them are under NDA — but certainly there are very large platforms, who are creating toolsets for brands and agencies who are saying “immersive is core to the future of our business, and we’re investing heavily in the space.” And actually world-facing lenses are probably more interesting long term than self-facing, which there’s been some famous ones for brands like Taco Bell and whatever, but actually the ability to serve commercial content for the mixed reality way on the world is kind of more– has more scope, let’s say. But that’s absolutely, they want to ensure that where brands do that, consents and permissions have been given. From the conversations that we’re having, that’s what we’re building is not a solution that those companies are looking to build themselves. The property companies themselves certainly want to be able to have one place to register. And so we’re building this as a setting in a platform-agnostic way, so that you can call against the Darabase platform to work out what permissions there are, where you can serve content based on the device location in real-time. And yes, that will work across all of the major platforms.

Alan: So you’re really going

Dominic: Oh, yeah. So I mean our foundation’s great, because it kind of straddles both. Right now, this is a mobile play. We know from just in the last few days how the rumor mill can swing wildly between years, let alone months. I fully expect– and I’ve been working in immersive, I ran Jaunt VR outside of the US previously. And so I have been kind of immersed myself in this space for a number of years. And I’m a firm believer that this fourth conclusive wave of immersive will increasingly replace mobile. But for now, and for the years coming up — or several months coming up — mobile is the major play. Facebook had over a billion users now in AR in the last year. So right now, it’s all about supporting the major players, the major platforms through the mobile lens. But as in when we see kind of scale, I suppose consumer-facing consumer-targeting HMDs, then we’ll look to support those too. But that’s a lot of work outside by now. So that’s on the policy for us for the moment.

Alan: It’s going to come, but

Dominic: Yeah, sure. So I spent most of my career, I suppose, working in large organizations, helping them be more digital. That’s when digital existed kind of way back when. I worked in magazines — before the Internet was really a thing, and when people still bought magazines — and I used to land in Esquire magazine in the UK and various bits and bobs. I then went into digital, when that first started. I was in a European start-up a little while, and then I ran Digital Sky, as well as then ran a couple of companies for Orange, France Telecom, and then worked in a company called EE, which is the largest telco, helped to launch that brand with the launch of 4G in the space, as well as being chief marketing officer for a big finance company called Legal and General. So basically spent a lot of my career kind of riding the wave of change through various industries, starting with advertising in magazines and kind of finishing off on the front of the beach in tech. And what I kind of realized when I got to working in the finance side — and having done that for a number of years — and applied what I’d learned in one industry and applying it to the next, was that actually whilst I spent most of my time helping big companies be more digital, it might be more fun to help digital companies be more big. I’ve just done a big deal with WPP, did a big agency review and so on, and was lucky enough to be invited to go to on what they call the West Coast Tour, where they take 14-15 CMOs from across the world, and you got on the bus, — you know, get into SFA, you get on a bus, you go see Jack Dorsey — that’s for a couple of hours, and you get on a bus and you go in a driverless car for a bit. And it’s amazing networking opportunity. And because you’ve got a billion+ worth of ad revenue in the room, the people that you get to meet and evaluate are significant senior and give you a lot of their time, which is a real privilege. And the last company that I met was a company called Jaunt. And John had just raised a seed round. So they had $100-million at that point, from the likes of Highland, and Redpoints, and Disney, and Skye, and China Media Capital, and a bunch of others. And they were this relatively small company in Palo Alto, just thinking about renting a studio in LA. And kind of long story short, I then kind of joined them as the first guy outside of California, and helped to grow that business and launched the international business and then also ran the joint venture in China. And kind of had an amazing time, both from a VR perspective, and then — as you probably know — going into AR, we made some changes towards the end of last year. It’s kind of been the focus back down. Mike wants more of an AR business. And as you may have seen, that was recently– the technology and IP was acquired by Verizon. So, yeah, so I spent that kind of the last four or five years in this kind of an immersive bubble. And it was during that time that I really started thinking about putting my kind of traditional marketing media clout back on, about actually if this was really going to be big, and if this was going to be the main way that we will see additional content that– for sure, some of it is just gonna be floating in front of a building and it’s just my inbox, and it has no relevance or persistence in that location. Some of it’s going to be editorial. And I can probably take a picture of Buckingham Palace and draw a love heart, and send it to my folks in Santa Monica and say “Love, from London.” That’s absolutely fine. But in my mind, if you want to put a Lion King from Disney ad on top of Buckingham Palace — which was a recent landmark, this campaign — then my argument would be, you need the permission of the royal palaces. And if they didn’t get that permission, then they should get paid, because you’re making a direct correlation between the IP of a palace and the IP of a king.

Alan: It’s interesting that you

Dominic: I think I got two answers. First answer is around “is there a legal precedent?” Now, that depends on how you see legal precedence. If you see legal precedence, as in, has something gone to court specifically about AR — like Candy Labs or Niantic — and has that been tested in court? And how much precedence is that specific to AR content of a commercial nature being served on the physical location? You’re absolutely right, there’s very little. Though, let’s be honest. It’s going to come. We want to be able to create a platform which helps to — I use a term probably a little bit carelessly, but — kind of clean that up, ahead of any regulation coming out or self-regulation coming out. But the other way of looking at it is actually “is there existing precedence?” Is there existing law and regulation that should be, or is easily applied to what we’re doing? And I’ve heard people say before — and look, we’re not trying to be the police force, we’re trying to be a company that empowers this, not polices it. We want to be able to create a service, which means that this grows, not diminishes — but I’ve heard people say before it doesn’t really exist, it’s only on the screen. So let’s say it’s The Lion King, the lion’s not really on Buckingham Palace, it is only on the screen. You wouldn’t otherwise see it. But in my mind, that’s no different to me taking a video of Buckingham Palace, and then photoshopping a lion on it and putting it into a TV ad. That’s only on the screen, too. And yet, you could not do that. You could not use the IP of Buckingham Palace in that way, because that’s an established modus operandi. The other way of looking at is actually, is there already regulation that is kind of applied to another media, which is extremely close? And we’re not picking up the phone to the royal palace, or picking up the phone to Snapchat and say, “Hey, you guys should stop doing this, we’re Darabase.” Quite the opposite. What we’re looking to do is try and create alternative iconic locations in that market, where you can do this and everyone’s super happy, and the brand can do it with confidence and brand safety. Which is then the second part of the answer, which is why should anyone care if there’s no law, then does anyone even need doorways? My answer to that is, well, we’ve got this thing — as you probably heard — called GDPR, which is having gotten impact more globally as well. And there’s a bunch of stuff that GDPR kind of puts into place in law, that actually everyone or certainly all the good actors were doing anyway. You know, people were doing double opt-in email before, because it’s the right thing to do.

Alan: I have to say something

Dominic: I agree. And actually

Alan: I had to call it out,

Dominic: …you got it off your

Alan: [laughs]

Dominic: Anyway. So the second thing is that, I believe having been a marketer myself for many years, that the vast majority of brands — and I come back to Burger King — for the vast majority of brands, want to make sure that they are not doing anything to erode the significant money that they spent building my brand equity. But that’s seen as doing the right thing. I know– I speak to major agency groups where they say, “Look, it’s actually in our terms of business that we sign with our brand clients, that we will not book anything that is not permission-based. That’s not to say whatever we’re going to be it’s not illegal, but let’s not book something that’s not permission-based.” Yes, there will be a few guerrilla tactics. And personally I think what’s genius, actually, about the Burger King “Burn the ads” campaign — burning McDonald’s ads and so on — what I think it’s absolute genius about is and I think the AR industry genuinely can learn from this, is that– we live in a bit of a bubble, but everyone in our bubble and a lot of people beyond know about this stuff. But actually, it happened to Brazil, as far as I’m aware. Certainly wasn’t in North America and Europe or whatever, it was a relatively small campaign in Brazil. And what was actually the campaign was the YouTube video they created about some quite good looking people doing this thing on their phone. So I’d love to see the data that said, how many people actually did the experience inside of the BK app and actually got a free Whopper.

Alan: A person said they’d given

Dominic: 50,000. Okay. And

Alan: Millions.

Dominic: Exactly. This is the learning that actually, the vast majority of that campaign was completely permissioned, because it was just watching a YouTube video. So as I said before, we’re saying that this is really applying to where commercial content is specifically being sort of on a location. And where, if you wanted to– So let’s take The Shard, for example, a big iconic building in London. Well, The Shard has not done anything about thinking about that this is even an issue, or registering it or thinking about the IP or trademark of that building or how it might affect digital media. Well, none of that has happened. People can very happily start putting content on The Shard in AR. And the number of people that are going to see that is going to grow and grow as we hope and trust over time. Now, as soon as The Shard, however, goes, “You know what? We’ve kind of recognized the fact that this is now a thing, and we see that there’s an opportunity. And actually, we do allow AR content to be served on the building, but we want to be able to frequency cap it, and we want to be able to make sure that’s the kind of content we want to get on there. We kind of expect to get paid, because if you wanted to film a TV series or whatever in the building, then you go through our film department, and we get paid and we get permits. Normal, normal stuff. And we’re going to make it super simple. We’re going to use this company called Darabase, but we’d like you to use them. And we’re going to– and by the way, when you do that, you know that you’ve been given that permission. We’re going to get a cut of the campaign revenue or a fee or whatever, to allow you to put your content on our iconic and trademarked location.” Now the vast majority of brands will go, “Okay, cool. I can super simply do it now.” But it takes a very different type of brand to go, “You know what? Stuff that. I’m still going to put my content on your property. I don’t care. You’ve done all of this thing, I’m still going to stick it on your property. Screw you.” The vast majority brands will not do that. And we believe that the vast majority of brands that actually really take this medium seriously and come into scale, they’re going to want to know that it’s permission-based. And that’s the same with the publishers as well. You know, we’re working with a couple of large publishers, kind of building them like a private property network, so that they know that– there’s one — again, it’s under NDA, but — global youth-focused brand and sports-focused brand. They want to be able to meet and reach that audience using what we call GeoAR — world facing AR — in locations where their audience are out, going to a club, or going to sporting events, or whatever. And they’ve got a big campaign with a shoe manufacturer, that they can start to introduce location-based AR as part of that campaign. The only reason that they’re now doing that with us is because they know that the proxy network that we’re putting together for them with these big property owners in these iconic locations is permission-based, and that they can go to their brands and say — just like all the other media — that you’re buying from us. This is high quality, high reach, trackable, and all parties are engaged in the process.

Alan: I think you’re on to something for sure. And the first time you kind of explained to me the business model, it seemed so obvious, only because we had had this kind of legal lens meeting with Fasken and VR/AR Association, it was one of those, we just you start to kind of question these things. Well, who does own the digital space? And Magic Leap’s got their Magicverse that they’re building, you know, multi-layer kind of universe of digital content on top of the real world. And you start to go, “Wow, there’s so much data floating around from IoT sensors, smartphones, to sensors from cars and buses and lights and everything.” Being able to transform that digital layer, people aren’t thinking about it now, because the window to the world is through a small six-inch phone or tablet. But when it goes to glasses, and we’re able to kind of really fully unleash spatial computing on the world, this is going to be something that you guys will be well established on. I love the fact that you’re probably three years ahead of everything right now.

Dominic: Yeah. I mean, that’s

Alan: No, I think the timing’s actually very perfect. And I’ll tell you why. Over the last five years, tons and tons of money went into VR, $100-million+ went into Jaunt, ODG. There’s been Plepler. There’s been a number of spectacular raises and failures because people are trying to blaze a path. Well, the good thing is Apple and Google and Facebook and Snapchat are all putting billions of dollars behind this. I think 2020 is gonna be this spectacular year where developers start to really dig into what the ARKit and ARCore capabilities truly are. And I think there’s so many things; we are only scratching the surface. We’re talking about this last night. We’re talking about things that are going to come in ten years from now. We can’t even possibly imagine. It’s not fathomable for us. And I think you are right at the precipice of permissions-based on a phone, and then you’ll be well established when it comes time to transfer that to glasses. And my guess is that’s going to be five years from now before we have ubiquitous glasses. So I’m going to kick my prediction of AR glasses out to 2025. But Darabase seems like it’s perfectly positioned to capture the mobile phone market — which is in the billions of devices — and then be perfectly situated for when it moves to glasses.

Dominic: Yeah. Thank you for the vote of confidence. And as you say, even with mobile — depending on whose research you believe — that the AR advertising [market] is somewhere between 9 and 19 billion, or whatever it is. So, you know, this is a significant market. I think you’re right. What excites me, and what gives me a lot of confidence, is just the amount of underlying technology and enablement that is being built into operating systems. Qualcomm chips, devices, camera technology. We have a great relationship with Scape, for example; the Scapes and the 6D.ais, and all of this super-exciting underlying functionality, which is making it ever easier for super smart and creative app developers — and actually WebAR developers, too — to be able to make some amazing experiences. We just want to be there with them so that they can achieve a higher CPM, they can serve commercial content in a really nice and smooth way into those experiences, and the knowledge that they’re doing it in the right way and that everyone’s engaged and they’ve got a good stream of high-quality advertising and the inventory to put it on. And I think one thing that we really focus on — because as you know, there’s so much going on in the space and you can be so many different things — we try hard every day just to be very true to what it is that we’re building and not to kind of get pulled into “oh, we could do this or that or the other.” There are so many companies in this space. We just want to be this kind of glue — the permission glue — the permission layer that works with everybody else in order to make this a fantastic medium for the future.

Alan: I think it’s gonna be spectacular. And I think being able to give brands the confidence, knowing that they’re doing things legally above board, regardless of wherever the law ends up being. If you guys are already anticipating the best-case scenario, brands can confidently know that their advertising in the right way and then also giving property owners the ability to monetize on the likeness of their buildings. It kind of legitimizes it. It’s almost like when cryptocoins were launched, everybody and the brother launched an ICO or whatever, ITO — they did all different names for them — and we saw the kind of rise and crash of that. But it’s only when there’s regulation involved do we really start to see a maturity and real value created of an industry. And I think AR and VR, this industry, is growing slower than people thought. But it’s growing in a practical, more pragmatic way that is responsible. And I love the fact that our industry is thinking about things like ethics, securities, permissions. These types of things are really important, not just, “hey, let’s just make a ton of money.” I think all of us — everybody on this podcast that I’ve had as a guest, anyway — is looking at this in the long term. Like, this is the next 10 years. This is the future of computing and we can’t screw it up. I think you’re on to something really amazing and I want to thank you for sharing that.

Dominic: Not at all. And thank

Alan: Well, since you mentioned

Dominic: So one thing that we

Alan: So I’m going to throw a

Dominic: And I’m gonna dodge the challenge, and say I don’t know what number! [laughs] I mean, it would be unfair on myself and my current investors to just pick a number out of the air. Yeah, but we approached this not to make a ton of money — though that may be a byproduct — but genuinely to try and make sure that this space is one that is a positive for the future of our world as it significantly changes in an ever-accelerating way. I’m sure you and many of your listeners will have seen the hyper-reality video and we know the guy that directs it back here in London. None of us want to live in that world, and we hope that Darabase can be–

Alan: For people listening, look

Dominic: Exactly. So Darabase

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

Used to be the best way to plan a three-dimensional construction project was on a two-dimensional blueprint, or perhaps a wooden model. We live in an era where entire digital twins — models made of light — can be used, but not everyone is. Bentley Systems’ Greg Demchak drops by to explain why that needs to change.

Alan: Thank you for joining the XR for Business Podcast with your host Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Greg Demchak from Bentley Systems. Greg has been designing and driving the development of immersive digital simulation for architecture, engineering, and construction markets for the last 20 years. Educated as an architect, he transitioned to software design after completing a degree in design computation at MIT. He went on to become a senior user experience designer for the Autodesk Revit product, product manager for SYNCHRO 4D software platform — now owned by Bentley Systems — and currently leads the mixed reality team for Bentley Systems. He’s been pushing the envelope of this technology and software for the Microsoft Hololens, and recently built an app for the global launch event of the next generation Hololens 2. To learn more about the work that Greg and his team at Bentley are doing, visit bentley.com. Greg, welcome to the show.

Greg: Thanks, Alan. How’s it

Alan: It’s going fantastic. I

Greg: Yeah. So Bentley Systems

Alan: Well, that’s a big

Greg: It’s a good question. So

Alan: So, for example, you’ve

Greg: I’ll just start with that

Alan: What’s the benefit of

Greg: So like what we’ve seen

Alan: People get their CAD

Greg: Well, there’s a lot of

Alan: So I would assume — and

Greg: So I think we’re still in

So I think that was good. And then a

Alan: It feels like Microsoft

Greg: Yeah, yeah, I know. I’ve

Alan: We actually sold our

Greg: Oh, yeah! [laughs]

Alan: I was like, “Oh man,

Greg: So a lot of changes with

Alan: I did a talk the other

Greg: For me, this goes back to

And manufacturing AR space has been

Alan: Hard to animate a printed

Greg: Exactly. There’s no way to

Alan: I would think also being

Greg: I don’t know if we can get

Alan: Or maybe you can annotate

Greg: That, we do support. So we

Alan: Now, does that go back and

Greg: It doesn’t go back into

Alan: Yeah, that’s really

Greg: Yeah.

Alan: But I’m assuming there’s

Greg: That’s– I mean, basically

Alan: How many active products

Greg: It’s early adopters. So

Alan: Even though it’s early

Greg: It always comes back to

Alan: How do you prove it to

Greg: Well, it’s so expensive.

I think all those benefits just sort of

Alan: Are there still companies

Greg: Yeah, you’d be surprised.

Alan: I would be surprised.

Greg: Yeah, exactly. There’s

Alan: Well, it’s amazing that

Greg: Yeah, yeah.

Alan: Wow.

Greg: So yeah. Well, that’s–

Alan: Yeah, it’s interesting. My

Greg: Well, the software is not

Alan: Hmm. Interesting.

Greg: So like the cost is more

Alan: I said this on another

Greg: Exactly. It’s a cultural

Alan: What are some of the

Greg: I think that’s exactly

And so for me, it’s been a lot about

Alan: Yeah, I think that’s the

Greg: And that’s that challenge

So imagine if if that piece of

Alan: Are you doing anything in

Greg: Seems like everyone is,

Alan: Well, the thing is, you

Greg: Yeah, definitely. All

Alan: I’ve heard it mentioned

Greg: I think that’s where

Alan: It’s ghetto.

Greg: Yeah, it’s ghetto,

Alan: Yeah, you’ve got like–

We’re gonna miniaturise that. And

It’s really interesting that Microsoft

Greg: Yeah. That’s interesting.

Alan: [laughs] It’s funny, one

Greg: But it’s funny. It’s like

Alan: There’s nothing wrong with

Greg: No. And I’ll tell you

Alan: My favorite is when people

Greg: Yeah, we saw people afraid

Alan: “Am I going to break

Greg: Yeah, yeah.

Alan: So I can ask one last

Greg: Hmm. I would like to just

Alan: Yeah, I think there’s–

Greg: I hope so. Definitely.

If a picture’s worth a thousand

Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is David Sime, founder and technical director of Oncor Reality. With over 19 years of digital media experience, David delivers promotion and analysis at strategic, tactical, and operational levels. Disciplines include virtual reality, augmented reality, targeted online video, and strategic digital marketing across social media, mobile, pay-per-click, smart TV, and out-of-home mediums. David directs the multi-award winning digital media agency Oncor Video and now Oncor Reality. Based in London and Central Scotland, this multimedia team delivers results based in immersive media solutions across engineering, construction, hospitality, and luxury retail sectors all around the world. If you want to learn more about his company, it’s oncorreality.com.

David, welcome to the show, my friend.

David: Thank you for having me,

Alan: Okay, let’s restart.

David: [laughs]

Alan: No? Too much?

David: No, I think that–

Alan: I mean–

David: I think that’s just

Alan: [chuckles] We’ll sell you

David: [laughs]

Alan: Oh man.

David: I’ve been watching what

Alan: Well, I can tell you that

David: I think I’m developing an

Alan: It’s like crack.

David: I can’t seem to stay off.

Alan: It’s amazing, because you

David: [laughs] Exactly. I mean,

Alan: The great thing is you can

David: [laughs] I know! Because

Alan: I give people two chances.

David: Or you’ll be blocked.

Alan: That’s it.

David: That’s it.

Alan: Yeah. Let’s move away from

David: Oncor Reality. Okay, phew. For the backstory. Okay, listen, I’ve been doing kind of communications and education-related stuff for the last couple of decades — actually, yeah, 20 years this year — I started off by doing standard marketing and I was lucky enough to work with some very technical people and web development stuff like that. So I helped them with marketing, they helped me with technical stuff. And I’ve developed– I’ve actually maintained most of those relationships to this very day. One of my best friends, in fact, Alan Thayer, who runs a company called Contact Online — Contact Digital now, actually — he still works with me. I still help him with marketing. He still helps me with digital. That was all good. But I was trying to help people with communicating with the world, on usually very low start-up budgets without getting ripped off by — at the time — things like directories, and conferences, and magazine advertising, and that kind of stuff that rarely works unless you got a huge budget, right? So I was trying to get them to use more sensible ways to get to more people cheaper. And then along comes this new-fangled fancy-dancy internet thing. And I’m like, “OK, well, this is perfect, because this means that somebody with a wee bedroom operation can actually reach anybody in the world, anybody can be a multinational.” So that’s why I started — for most instances — started working with these techie people — who had the help — to learn more about this Internet stuff. And I’ve run a few companies myself. I applied the same stuff to marketing, that kind of thing. What I observed was, people’s attention spans were going down and down and down. We were using analytics systems like Urchin, which was subsequently bought by Google and became Google Analytics. And you would get maybe 2 minutes, 1-2 minutes of attention span on a website, which at the time we thought, “Oh my God, that’s nothing!” That’s hardly any time at all, in comparison to magazines, you know? And then as time passed, it went down and down and down. The options online got more and more and more. The speed of connections got better and better.

Alan: It’s crazy, I just heard a

David: [laughs] This doesn’t

Alan: My guess is in less than

David: Oh, it’s less than five

Alan: Two seconds?

David: No, no, slower than that.

Alan: Really?

David: 20th of a second.

Alan: Is it really?

David: Yep, absolutely. Has been

Alan: You make a decision

David: Yep.

Alan: We have less of an

David: We do. We absolutely do.

Alan: Oh my god. XR — or

David: Well, here’s how I got

Alan: Very similar to Canada. We’re a fast follow country. We want everything that the Americans are doing, with one-tenth the budget.

David: [laughs] Well, that’s basically Scotland versus London, in the UK. So I’ve got an office in London, and you find that they are the early adopters. And we do a lot of work with the Emirates and stuff, and they are really early adopters, but they are coming from a place of plenty. They don’t have any scarcity issues, or as many scarcity issues. So they can just have fun things and see whether or not it’s going to work. It doesn’t matter. Whereas up here — and maybe even in Canada — there’s more to lose. I can understand why they labor. But, see, that breaks down entirely when it comes to augmented and virtual reality. Everybody wants it. They want it, whether they know what the return on investment is going to be or not, whether they have an idea of how it’s going to benefit their business or not. It’s the shiniest shiny new thing ever. And I feel like I’ve gone from trying to sell healthy snacks, to selling freshly baked cakes in a room full of hungry people. They just all want some, it’s great. And I’m doing my best to try to convince everybody. “Okay, look, here’s what you need this for. Here’s why we’re doing it. Here’s your target audience. Here’s how much you’re investing. And here’s how we’re going to ensure a continuous return on investment for you.” and half the time they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just give me the shiny!” Which is fine. You know, that’s fine. I’ll go with that. But it’s meant that we get to do all sorts of things. You know, we’re getting.

Alan: All right. So let’s talk about that. Your website lists a number of different industries. You’ve got energy, construction, education, corporate, commercial. Let’s unpack that. What have you done or what are you doing in industry and energy, for example?

David: Right. Now, the energy sector is interesting, because it’s split up between traditional energy, fossil fuels and oil and stuff like that — and that’s big news in Scotland, there’s a lot of oil going on here, a lot of money there — to renewables, which is also big news here, because we’ve got a lot of wind — not so much sunshine — and a lot of waves. So there’s a lot of power being generated by these. And you would think that what these two bits of the industry would require would be completely the same. Or maybe completely different, where we are actually selling the same thing to them, but in different ways. So what we’re selling to the oil and gas industry is the live, remote, safe visits to places like oil platforms and high-risk places that are offshore. It means that we can send any number of people to these places. All we need is a 360 camera stay up there. They can do a lifesaving station, they can be guided around. We’ve even worked our way whereby that live 360 body has actually movement within it.

You can have avatars — virtual people

The next thing that we’re doing is that

Alan: A little bit. That “saving

David: Are you really?

Alan: No. [laughs] I watched the video of my friend, he’s a futurist. And today he had a post on LinkedIn. He’s like, “I met a guy who works for a big company, who is a legitimate denier.” And he goes, “By the time– I had an hour-long conversation with him, everything that he was saying was just a bunch of fake news. He was quoting a Time magazine article that was a fake.” And I’m like, “Guys, wake the [bleep] up! The world is on fire!”

David: [laughs] I know, right?

Alan: But what I saw recently that blew my mind was actually India is starting to use ground-up plastic in their roads. It turns out that it makes a great building material for roads. It’s resilient. It lasts longer than traditional concrete. And it doesn’t have the traditional cracks that concrete gets. So it’s actually a great building material for that. I mean, look, we have enough plastic on this planet to pave every road in the world over again.

David: We sure do. I mean,

Alan: I know. When we grew up,

David: Yeah. Yeah. “Here’s a ladder, it’s 50 meters high. You know, just try not to fall off.” But yeah, the stuff they got now, it’s all bouncy, these flakes. I don’t know the word. Anyway, that stuff’s made out of ground-up tires, and that’s been around for ages, right? Tire crumb, they call it. Because tires are a notoriously difficult thing to recycle. But that’s a really good thing to do with it. But you see, the road surface that they’re using in India, it doesn’t lose grip as it wears down. That’s the problem with using other materials; usually when they wear down, they get shiny and slick and they lose the grip. This stuff doesn’t, this is great.

Alan: You can re-use it. If you need to, you can pull it up, regrind it, put it back down. Plastic doesn’t ever go away. So it’s– if you have a million-year lifespan of a piece of plastic, you get a million-year life span of your road. Awesome.

David: Yeah. Yeah. That’s something you want to last for a million years. But I know they’re getting better at it all the time. Well, this is why I’m basically trying to do. I figured, OK, what’s an unlimited resource? All those poor buggers, photographers who bought into drones and were sold the dream. “Oh, yeah. You get drone, endless work will come in, and you’ll be laughing.” And most of them have got these things sitting on a shelf, gathering dust.

Alan: I mean, I actually was one of those people and I did the business model. I was like, “OK, we’re gonna have a drone company. We’re gonna do exclusive drone footage for high-end real estate, and all this.” And… yeah. We looked at it, and we were like, “These drones are dropping in price, and they fly themselves now. I don’t know about that.”

David: Exactly. And the thing is

Alan: It actually makes sense. Let’s be honest, we don’t want people flying around with potential bombs on people’s heads, because if that falls in somebody’s head, that’s it, they’re done.

David: Oh, yeah, absolutely. And those things go so high now, and they go so fast. And then you’ve got things like you need to know about the flight path. You need to– so the guy that we’ve got in our team — oh, you’d love this guy — he’s ex-Royal Navy. He used to be a submariner, right? So in the Cold War, he was “Hunt for Red October” kind of stuff. Except his Scottish accent was legitimately meant to be in his submarine, because he wasn’t Russian.

Alan: [laughs]

David: And then he went and he

Alan: Let’s talk about that for

David: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, when we originally put this to the housing associations, it used to be hard to deal with community housing projects and that kind of stuff. We say to them, “Hey, we can predict all your solar stuff!” and they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can you tell us what condition our roofing tiles are in?” Because that’s a big issue for us. Because normally what they do is, they just put in all the roofing tiles in all the houses, and then they go, “Okay, this thing’s got roughly 10-year lifespan, so in 10 years’ time, we just take all off and replace it.” You don’t need to, everywhere. You may find that in some places it wears earlier, and in some places it’s sheltered. They can save — I’m talking a small housing association here in Scotland, which is a small country — they can save tens of millions of pounds in a single pass. And then they can take that money that they’ve saved, and apply it to other things. Like we’ve got a problem with fuel poverty here, mostly keeping places warm. [laughs] This is a problem, you know. I don’t think there’s as many air conditioning units in Scotland. And they can apply it to dealing with fuel poverty. And we can even, if you fire off an infrared camera onto the same drones — which is cheap, a lot cheaper than things like LiDAR and laser scanners and stuff — then we can share the heat egress from buildings, so we can say, “Oh, that one’s actually got some seriously bad insulation. That person’s spending way too much in their heating, they’re losing most of it to the sky.” We go in and get them insulation. That save them money, saves us money, everybody’s happy. I mean, the thing is, the technologies are meeting, it’s finding solutions for it. As you know from my background, I’m all about things like education and communication and stuff like that. So I tend not to think too hard about the tech. I tend to think, “Okay, here’s the tech. Here’s what it *could* do. Where’s the need? Where can we find people who could benefit from this?”

Alan: Well, let me ask you a

David: Highest ROI is in– it’s definitely in an engineering and energy sector engineering. That’s where you get the most bang for your buck. But that’s because their outgoings are so massive. It’s not so much return, it’s savings. That’s where it really seems to benefit them, because they can actually save money on travel, they can save money in insurance, they can save money on other forms of energy generation, that kind of stuff. They can, for instance, see with an offshore oil platform — here’s another example of our user — you fly a drone around that thing once a month, and you check the structure of it, let’s say using laser scanners. And then you just come back the next month, and we see if it’s moved. If it’s moved, you’re in trouble, because this thing is like hundreds of thousands of tons of steel, where it’s being battered by North Sea waves and stuff like that constantly. If that thing even begins to shake, it’s going to start to fall to pieces. And the repair bills for that are going to be vast in civil engineering. So, yeah, so those kind of savings, this kind of pre-emptively working out whether damage is occurring, or pre-emptively working out whether you need to get in there and just fix something, once that frees a station team, it saves time. That’s where the real benefits are. But my God, are they interested in the remote meeting side of things, because that’s going to save them an absolute fortune. The lost man hours, the transportation, the corporate and social responsibility to reduce travel emissions, to stop flying people around in jets for pointless meetings. Have you ever met somebody who works for a big company that actually enjoys business travel?

Alan: When you’re 20, business

David: Exactly. And then you can

Alan: We actually work with a

David: Absolutely. That’s the

Alan: Oh wow.

David: Yeah, I know, I know. I’m

Alan: That seems important.

David: Yeah, not blowing up or

But if you look at people in life or

Alan: The more I learn about

David: Absolutely. Absolutely. Although you do tend to find– this is quite sad, really. But when we’re dealing with, again, you know, offshore oil and that kind of thing, we were talking to them about using a drone that can detect hydrocarbon clouds, you know, like gas loads of explosives, from a distance so that human beings don’t have to go into that situation. So they’re not at risk. And I thought, “Oh, that’s amazing. That’s great that this industry is interested in safeguarding its workers’ lives.” It’s not. [laughs]

Alan: No, it comes down to each

David: Precisely. And if

Alan: The end of the day, companies, the way we’ve designed capitalism — and I think it will change over the next 10 years, to be honest — the way we’ve designed capitalism is we have one measure for success of a business, that is economic. My personal purpose is to inspire and educate future leaders to think and act in a way that’s socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable. That three-phase of this is really what I think is going to be how we manage this.

David: Yeah. No, I totally agree with you. There’s a book I read — there’s there’s a writer here. I really like, he does science fiction, and he does fiction; he’s called Ian Banks (when he is doing his fiction, he is called Ian Banks, when he’s doing his science fiction, he is Ian M. Banks, right?) — this was one of these weird crossover ones where it was a bit Sci-Fi-ish, but it wasn’t fully, and it was called “Transitions.” Basically, Ian Banks is a bit of a socialist, and he describes these guys that can — these people — who can transition from one dimension to another. And some of these dimensions are slightly more or slightly less advanced or slightly further into the future or further back, or whatever. But they’ve defined them — there’s this organization called The Concern, which, that’s their job. They move through these different dimensions, attempting to find patterns and right wrongs or avoid catastrophes, that kind of thing — but they’ve defined certain dimensions as being cruel or kind. And the ones that they define as being cruel are the ones where shareholder capital and limited companies has come into being as a means of growing organizations, because it inevitably ends up with profit being put before anything else, because your shareholders — most of the time — they really know are disconnected from the actual activities of the company, or what they’re connected to — usually by like a hedge fund manager or whatever — are, “how much money am I getting back on my investment?” That’s it. So I thought, a company has two choices. One of them is, “let’s put out an oil pipeline across Alaska: If we put it above ground, it disrupts caribou migratory pathways and cause mass extinction; if we put it under the ground, it won’t, but it’ll cost us more.” They’ll put it above the ground, because they’ve got to get the best return on investment. And there’s our problem. But there are ways around this, like ethical investment planning and so forth. And there are ethical investment charters, and groups, which only allow investment — or basically, highlight which companies do not qualify for this investment — and those ones, the ones that do qualify, are doing better. So even if you are to take it as, “it’s just money,” people are actually moving in that direction. They will get more investment if they are ethical. And I think that’s a good move.

Alan: What problem in the world

David: Lack of communication.