XR for Business

Imagine being able to learn, hands-on, exactly how to operate a deep-sea submarine — without needing the submarine! That’s the kind of training opportunities VR training platforms like Immerse are able to offer with the technology at their disposal. James Watson and Justin Parry drop in to talk about all the other opportunities the tech presents businesses.

Alan: You’re listening to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today, we have two amazing guests, James Watson and Justin Parry from Immerse. Justin is the co-founder and chief operating officer and leads product strategy for Immerse. As a founder, he designed and led product development of the Immerse platform from scratch. He now oversees the delivery of all technology and VR content across the organization. Justin has 20 years experience creating and growing B2C and B2B products from startups to global organizations. He’s developed and launched online platforms, websites, mobile products across the world, and joined Immerse from his role as global director of the Internet Yellow Pages for Yell Group. Immerse Virtual Enterprise Platform enables enterprises to create scale and measure virtual reality training content and programs. The platform enables enterprises to look at training and assessment in a completely different way, providing the tools to help maximize human performance, resulting in a more engaged, better equipped and safer workforce. If you want to learn more, you can visit immerse.io.

Guys, welcome to the show.

Justin: Hello.

James: Thanks, Alan.

Alan: [laughs] Hey. So you guys

Justin: Well, it was very sunny

James: It’s British grey.

Justin: Yeah.

Alan: British grey. Oh, well,

Justin: Well, we’ve been in the

And just in terms what you said there,

Alan: What are some of the

Justin: Yeah, that’s for a

James: What we find, I guess, is

Alan: Let’s talk about results

Justin: There is the key thing.

Alan: Really is one of those

Justin: To VR? Yeah, all the

James: I mean, we get a lot of

Justin: Yeah, and we are working

Alan: As part of my trip last

Justin: Right, right.

Alan: And each student had a

Justin: Yeah, yeah.

Alan: Then they revealed the

James & Justin: [laugh]

Alan: “Noooo!!!”

Justin: Old school skills.

Alan: [laughs] Yeah. But they’ve

Justin: Yeah.

Alan: It was really incredible.

James & Justin: [laugh]

Alan: I think we’re not there

Justin: Well, I mean, I don’t

Alan: Yeah, I’m thinking 10

Justin: Yeah. And he was talking

Alan: Hofstadter’s theory.

Justin: That’s the one.

Alan: “Everything is going

Justin: Yes! Hofstadter’s

Alan: It was a really great

Justin: Yeah. Yeah. Agreed. I

Alan: I’ve got my Oculus Quest

Justin: Well, I mean, it’s a

Alan: No, you’re absolutely

Justin: Yeah.

Alan: So companies are already

Justin: Yeah.

Alan: But what I’ve been

James: Yeah. We find there’s a

Justin: One of the things that

Alan: Funny thing. It’s– even

Justin: Yeah.

Alan: “Just give us the CAD

Justin: Yeah. And I kind of

Alan: Yeah, I think to put a

Justin: Yeah.

Alan: And we’re at the point

Justin: It kind of depends —

James: And in that, ROIs can be

Justin: Yeah, for sure.

James: Just based on the ability

Alan: And that is– you know

Justin: Yeah.

Alan: So being able to make the

Justin: Yeah. So the DHL

Alan: I want to do it now. See?

Justin: It’s fun.

Alan: People want to put it on,

James: Yeah.

Justin: Yeah. An interesting

James: And there’s also a big–

Alan: Of course there is.

[laughs]

Somebody’s got to be first.

James: They’ll be competing

Alan: Oh, I love it. And I’m

James: Yeah.

Justin: Yeah.

Alan: Team Manila’s crushing it!

James: Literally, it’s that.

Justin: I was gonna just say–

Alan: So that’s a 5 to

Justin: Yeah.

Alan: 6 to $10-million in

Justin: Well, I mean, it’s going

James: Yeah. I mean–

Alan: Here, let’s just do the

James & Justin: Yeah.

Alan: That’s giving one to

Justin: Yeah.

Alan: And then 1,000 licenses.

Justin: Unless the [garbled] as

Alan: And these are dollars. So

Justin: Absolutely, yeah. And

James: But you could also argue

Justin: Yeah, yeah.

James: There’s a similar– it’s

Justin: Well, yes and no,

Alan: Oh yeah. I didn’t even put

Justin: Yeah. And then factor in

James: Then our licensing is an

Justin: Yes, but not to the same

James: Not to the same degree,

Justin: Just to have a dedicated

James: Yeah.

Justin: Those costs are gonna

James: Yeah.

Alan: Absolutely. So if I’m

Justin: Yeah, there’s– so the

Alan: I think that’s the future

James: I think a big thing they

Alan: Is there anything else

Justin: I don’t think so. I

Alan: So my last question to

James: I’ll go first.

Justin: OK.

James: I think it’s that passing

Justin: James has got a good one

Alan: I know, it’s kind of hard

James: You could just say, “I

Justin: I have another one, but

Alan: Yeah, it’s pretty cool and

Justin: Yeah, I feel the same as

Alan: The stuff you guys are

Justin: Yeah.

Alan: So with that, I got to

James: Yeah, it did start off as

Alan: [laughs]

James: We changed it to “the

“You cannot learn empathy on powerpoint!” Wise words from today’s guest, Somewhere Else CEO Christophe Mallet, who comes by the show to discuss how soft skills training — basically, training for human behavior — is now a wide-open industry, thanks to XR technology.

Alan: My name is Alan Smithson,

Welcome to the show, Christophe, it’s a

Christophe: Thanks, Alan. Thanks

Alan: You’ve been working in immersive technologies. Maybe kind of give listeners an understanding of what you’ve done at Somewhere Else, some of the projects you’ve done, and then we’ll dig into something really exciting after that.

Christophe: So I came from the

Alan: I have. So to paint a

Christophe: It was beautiful. It

Alan: So to put things in

Christophe: Yes, the world of work is changing fast and automation, all of that, meaning that HR Department has a massive challenge now, which is to upskill/reskill massive portions of their workforces, who are already digital workforces. And to do that, the investment that they do is shifting away from knowledge — because the knowledge fits in your phone — into behavior. As a professional currency, your mindset is becoming more important than your skillset. Delivering soft skills training is super hard. You cannot learn empathy on a PowerPoint, right? But delivering face-to-face, role-play type training at scale is difficult. And so the question is, can we use virtual reality as a solution to have the best of both worlds? The experiential impact of face-to-face training, but on top of that, the scalability of digital learning formats.

Alan: I think now would be a

Christophe: Sure. Have you ever

Alan: Sorry, who is it?

Christophe: Mel

Alan: No.

Christophe: It’s kind of the European counterpart of Jeremy Bailenson from Stanford, when it comes to having done behavioral research in VR. So the Bodyswaps format is not something that we invented by any means. We looked at the research and [personal name] from the University of Barcelona is the first one who had this idea of, “What if I could swap body? What if I could be in someone else’s shoes, getting a new perspective on how I behave?” And the first experience that he created was about feeling empathy towards yourself, which is one of the main causes for depression, is your inability to feel empathy towards yourself. Until in his original experience, you were a woman. There was always a mirror to take ownership of the virtual body, and your task was to be nice, to console a young kid that was crying in front of you. You just have to talk to that kid. Now, because we knew you were going to try to be nice, whatever you said, the kid would progressively stop crying. That’s the first step. The second step was the experience. You would swap bodies, so you’d find yourself in the kid’s shoes, listen back to what you said to that kid. And basically the whole idea is, you would reflect on the fact that, “Wow, I showed empathy towards that kid. I said things that are really nice. And actually, I should have empathy for myself.” So you’re using self-reflection and self-awareness as a way to subconsciously impact behavior. We saw that their research — which is absolutely fascinating — and we scratched our head wondering, “Can we apply that for the world of work?” Will it make sense to listen back to yourself, when you are having a review, under-performing employee, when you’re pitching. when you’re dealing with someone who’s vulnerable or shut off, when trying to understand unconscious biases in the workplace, and so on. So that’s the scientific backbone to the format. Would you have it if I gave an example of how we’d use it?

Alan: Absolutely.

Christophe: So the very first

And so the idea was, there’s this gap between the wall of the classroom and the real world. And we want you to practice to get that real-world experience in a safe way, without the danger or the real world. And so that’s why we built The Bodyswaps. It never replaces being in front of real patients, because for starters, AI is not there to have those conversations. But you can — hours after hours — see what it feels like to be talked at by yourself, to be reassured by yourself. And through self-reflection, you build the confidence so that when you arrive in the real world, you have 80 percent or 90 percent of what you should know. And obviously you can translate that for your leadership sales, and so on and so forth.

Alan: It’s incredible. For people listening, what is the next step for them to get engaged with you? Are you making this so that it’s scalable? So you have a certain number of scenarios, is this custom for each company? If a business says “I really want to start using VR for our HR to train these soft skills,” what is the process look like from your art?

Christophe: Well, the first

Alan: It’s like, “Just

Christophe: Exactly. It’s exactly that. And so you really need some kind of a dialogue at the same table as early as possible. You want subject matter experts. They only will know the area. You want a learning designer, his job is not to know VR, is not to know the subject, his job is like, “does that teach?” And that’s it. And obviously you need a client champion. It’s very rare that your entire client’s stakeholders are going to buy into VR. You’re always going to have someone who’s going to be your champion in their company. And you need that person to be at the table with you, because you need to educate that person. If you don’t have that dialogue, you either create beautiful VR that doesn’t teach, or you create an experience that teaches very well but actually doesn’t engage. Or even worse, you create something that does both, engages and teaches, but you don’t have any buy-in, because you didn’t manage your champion, so to speak. So to answer your question, at the moment, we don’t have a standardized library of scenarios. We would build scenarios together with our clients and there are different ways to do that. Either work in a standard way, which is at stake what we already have, the features we already have, the kind of graphics quality that we already have, and simply writes a scenario that fits into that learning format. That’s kind of the standard approach. So low involvement from the perspective of the client. The second one is completely bespoke. Let’s just have a chat, talk about what you want. You might want to bring in some new features, new analytics, the possibility to ask questions, to flag. There’s a lot of things that we can do, and I’ve seen the format shoot at both, together with what the client we work with wants. And the last level is partnership. You might have an IP. You might, for example, be a company that’s been doing face-to-face leadership training with actors for 20 years. And you’re looking at scaling up your business model through VR, in which case it’s more of a partnership. Let’s sit together and see if we can create a product you bringing to the table your learning design and your subject matter expertise, and us bringing to the table the VR expertise.

Alan: Love it. It’s really great. So let’s talk more about details, because it’s one thing just to be in VR and play a video game, and it’s another thing to be in VR for work. How are you seeing the companies address things like buying the gear? Because we work in a lot of companies. And one thing, they come to us and they’ll say, “Oh, you know, our CEO was at a tech conference and he said, ‘We need to get into VR.’ And so we’re calling you because we need to get in VR.” There’s no strategy. There’s no forethought. What do you say to companies that are just coming and saying we need to do something in VR? How do you end up getting to the right decision-makers, or how does somebody from a business standpoint find you?

Christophe: I mean, how to find this is reality of marketing strategy. But to your point, the most difficult aspects of implementing VR right now is moving from the POC to the deployments. I think what’s StrVR did with Walmart, and the scale of it — kind of like, you know, 17,000 headsets in 5,000 locations, the scale is what makes it really impressive. And our approach for that is– and indeed, you’re right. Some clients don’t necessarily see further than “Let’s do VR because we have a bit of a budget and it’s fun.” And so the answer we always have for that is having an agile mindset to this. So we always start with consultancy, which is, we take a short amount of time, a short amount of money as well, a small amount of money. So we don’t take too much risk and let’s make sure to discuss what it is you want and why you want it. You know, you’re going to interview end-users, you’re going to bring in subject matter experts, you’re going to do a UX design workshop, you’re going to do discovery/education workshop with some of their team, if need be. And at the end of that process, we know that you want what you want for the right reasons. We know how are you going to measure the success of your POC or pilot. And you know how much it costs. And what we do with clients is if you want to stop there — because you don’t have the money, or because it’s not the right time, or you don’t have the buy-in — you’re better off stopping there. If you want to work with someone else, you can work with someone else. Otherwise we’ll move forward. And then once you have created your prototype or your pilots, it’s very important to set aside a significant part of your budget for testing it out. The discussion about costs is an easy one to have. You know what your cost-benefit analysis of implementing something, the discussion about are you saving on logistical costs or downtime costs is an easy one to have. The difficult one is what Bertrand wrote [garbled], the “return on impossible.” It shouldn’t be only about costs. It should be about, you know, in a workplace poor soft skills create depression, anxiety, discrimination. And now we have a possibility — by changing perspective — to deliver behavioral change. So we have to measure what it means for your bottom line to go from someone who is depressed, or a manager who just is incapable of managing conflicts, to an able manager. It’s very, very hard to measure. And if you can measure that, then you look at buy-in for implementation. So there is a responsibility that often lands on the client-side to bring the resources to make sure that that is measured.

Alan: A lot of early days,

Christophe: One way to answer

Alan: No idea. But it sounds

Christophe: Well, it is fun in a

Alan: Ah.

Christophe: And that is about

Alan: Ah, yeah, and pleasant

Christophe: It’s not the same.

Alan: Oh, wow.

Christophe: So it builds that kind of filter of self-awareness that he applied to the real world. And that’s anecdotal evidence. If we could prove that at scale, I think we would have something very powerful.

Alan: So let me ask you a

Christophe: And the short answer for that is you’re exactly what STRIVR did. I think STRIVR, being headed by Jeremy Bailenson from Stanford, they have that mindset of having a hypothesis that something might work, and testing it out again and again and again to make sure that the hypothesis holds. And I think it’s the only way forward for us. We have contacted actually universities to try and scale up the kind of research that we already did, which is only academic validation of the learning format. On the other side of things, you want a business validation as well. So the clients that we’re talking with at the moment, we’re making sure that that cycle of testing and validation is built right into the pilot and that we go beyond the happy sheet.

Alan: That’s really incredible.

Christophe: I’m with you. I’m quite curious to also get your opinion. Obviously, the market has completely shifted from a consumer-driven market to an enterprise one, and with an enterprise you have vice industries, of course, and verticals. What do *you* see as being the kind of use case that is now fully validated and accepted by industry as a whole?

Alan: Sure. I think the easiest one right now is, is upskilling; being able to use not necessarily full mixed reality or virtual reality, but being able to wear heads-up display — almost like a Google Glass kind of thing — where you can pull up information as needed onsite, hands-free. I think another big, huge one is remote assistance or see-what-I-see assistance, where you’re working on something. You don’t know the answer, so you can either pull up the answer in your view or you can call somebody back at the head office. Maybe an expert, maybe it’s somebody who’s retired who’s just coming in. And one person with a lot of experience can now serve hundreds of people in the field that maybe don’t have as much experience. And being able to see what they’re seeing real-time and annotate on their vision, I think is one of the biggest use cases. Companies like STRIVR who are using 360 video as training, I think that is the lowest hanging fruit and it’s one of the biggest impacts from an investment standpoint, because it doesn’t require one hundred thousand or million dollars in investment. You’re talking maybe 10 to 20 thousand for your first modules. And as an enterprise, if you’re seeing 25 to 50 percent decreases in training times and 25 to 50 percent increases in retention rates, this is no longer “Should we do this?” this is “How do we do this as fast as possible across our enterprise?” And that’s what I’m seeing. And I think medical is the biggest use case of this. They’re using virtual reality for medical training almost everywhere now. Every single lab’s got a VR headset. Being able to look at MRIs, data in full three dimensions is just saving lives right now. And when you talk about return on investment, saving lives is probably the biggest return on investment we can do in this technology. I think we’re gonna see it in schools, eventually. It’s going to take some time. We’re working with some companies right now that are building K-12 curriculums. But it really comes in handy when you want to teach stuff that’s not math, learning times tables in your calculus, but learning how complex equations work. One thing that I did was I went in VR and I tried this thing where it took me on the difference between the carbon of a diamond versus the carbon of graphite. It’s the same molecule, but the way it’s stacked differently makes diamonds super hard and makes graphite– because it’s in sheets and they slide off. That’s why your pencil, as you’re writing leaves a stroke of black carbon. Until I’d seen it in that way in VR in full 3D spatial computing. I really didn’t get the concept, no matter how much I read about it. I think things like that, where you can train people in unsafe environments, being able to give people the sense of what it’s like to be trained in a mine is really key, because you’ll hire somebody from mining company and train them for six weeks, eight weeks, and then you send them underground to the mine, and realize that they have panic attacks and they can’t work underground. So being able to immerse them in a virtual space from the very beginning before you even hire them, will give you a good understanding of their mindset going into that. And I thought that was a really amazing use case, one that is not– compared to the savings, it does not cost a lot of money. You know, you’re talking maybe $10,000 just for the setup. And how much does it cost to train a new employee, to have them not be useful to you in the field?

Christophe: It’s a good analogy

Alan: You wouldn’t have very

Christophe: Yeah, but the value

Alan: I agree.

Christophe: And we need to

Alan: Have you tried the

Christophe: No. No, no.

Alan: So there’s an experience

Christophe: OK.

Alan: And basically, you are the

Christophe: Oh, wow.

Alan: They slash and burn all

Christophe: I want people to be

Alan: Well, I would have to say

Christophe: Fair enough. Good

Alan: Yes.

Christophe: I want to see a

Hands-free

Alan: Welcome to the XR for

Yan, welcome to the show, my friend.

Yan: Thanks, Alan. It’s a

Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure to have you. And I can’t wait to dive in here. Maybe just give us a 10,000-foot view of Kognitiv Spark and the great work you guys are doing there.

Yan: So Kognitiv Spark, we do mixed reality communication technology to better provide support to our remote field workers. Our product is called RemoteSpark. It’s an application that has been optimized for the Microsoft Hololens platform. In a nutshell, what it does if you have a field worker that is facing a piece of equipment that stopped working and that worker doesn’t know what to do, that worker can put on the Hololens, start RemoteSpark, and communicate with — let’s say — an engineer at the head office that can help out. The engineer, through a computer, is able to see in real-time what the worker is seeing. They can talk to the person, but they can also provide 3D holographic guidance on top of things. So as an example, if they have a 3D CAD file, that could help the worker figure out what are the steps that need to be done to perform a repair, the expert can drag and drop that on the computer side of things, and the CAD file is going to show up as a 3D hologram in the field of view of the worker, so that the worker can perform the repair.

Alan: So if a field worker’s

Yan: Yeah. And while most of the time that’s what they do right now, the problem with phones — or even tablet-based chat systems, or phone-based ones — is that you have to hold something in your hand, so you can do the repair or do the process or the task that you have to do, at the same time as you’re getting the information and the knowledge. So it’s always a two-step process. With mixed reality, you can just do it all together at the same time. So they’re doing the work, they have their hands greasy and dirty, and they getting the knowledge at the same time. So it’s much more efficient. And also, there are many studies that show that in terms of knowledge retention, it’s about 80, 85 percent higher when you learn about a given task at the same time as you’re doing it with your hands.

Alan: If you look at this from

Yan: Yeah. So our software is a service one, and we have two offerings. One is on public cloud, the other one is on private cloud. Most of the time we sell the public cloud version of it. It’s a yearly fee of $6,000 a year — Canadian — to activate one Hololens unit. So you can have as many remote experts as you want on the computer, but our economic basis is the Hololens unit.

Alan: Great. And so somebody

Yan: Yeah, when it comes to deploying with a customer, the technology side is very easy. Our application is available through the Microsoft Store and we can activate the licenses remotely. The ramp-up is really getting used to mixed reality in general, and then our app. So I would say our experience shows that typically the user is ready to go within 30 minutes. And I’m talking about somebody who has more experience whatsoever about mixed reality or the Hololens, to the point where they are comfortable enough to get in the field and try it out.

Alan: That’s fantastic. So now,

Yan: We don’t have to go. We tend to like to go when we have a chance. And the reason why is that we’ve discovered that to make our customers successful in the long run, typically for a very hands-on, very involved at the beginning, helping them out, figure out their 3D holographic strategies and mixed reality strategies, and it sets them up on the right foot for future success. So we typically try to get involved, especially if a customer is doing a proof-of-concept with us, or something like that. We just get there on the ground whenever we can, or we’re just there supportive as well remotely. And then after that, they’re all set to scale and grow with us, which is great.

Alan: How many deployments have

Yan: So we launched the alpha version of a RemoteSpark in the fall of 2017. I’m not going to disclose the number of active customers we have, but it’s tens of different customers in North America, Europe, and Asia. We tend to work with Fortune 500 companies, as well as some small and medium businesses. And the initial deployments we do are always proof-of-concepts or pilots. But there’s always that vision to scale to hundreds or thousands of units over a period of, I would say one to two years.

Alan: You’re perfectly timed and

Yan: Yeah. The ROI in our case is fairly easy. So customers buy our product for three reasons. The first one is they want to cut down on equipment downtime and that’s typically very quantifiable. And also you can train, translate that into dollars. Your typical industrial use case, any hour of downtime is going to cost thousands and tens of thousands of dollars. The other thing that we sell on is that when we’re saving experts, the trouble of travelling onsite to do troubleshooting. It also has a very direct impact on the bottom line. So we saved up your travel costs as well. But also that expert now has more time to devote to a high value add tasks such as helping people out, figure out what’s going on, instead of travelling. This one is less quantifiable. Companies have to take the industry 4.0 journey and get going. And they find that using RemoteSpark is kind of a great way to get started with mixed reality, with something that you can still sell to the CFO and to the procurement team and they will say, “OK. So that makes sense. It’s not only wishful thinking. There’s action an ROI right from the get-go.”

Alan: Great reasons to buy: 1,

Yan: I think there’s a growing

Alan: Yeah, there’s a groundswell coming, and the interesting thing about the timing of this is that you’ve been working on this, you said you launched 2017 your alpha. And you’ve already got two years into this, and you guys have presumably made a lot of mistakes. Which we all do in technology, you build something, you go, “Oh, that didn’t work.” And having that experience of working with customers from the early days, I think is going to really position you guys quite comfortably as you move into this place. You’re looking at this from boots on the ground. You’re seeing companies start to work with it. We’re in Canada, so we’re a fast follow nation in general. We see America do something and then we wait. But being in candidates, it’s much more difficult to sell these concepts in. But you’ve managed to do that. What are your timelines around seeing mainstream adoption? Not in consumer, but in the industrial world? What do you think? We’re looking at timelines before this is in every company.

Yan: I think people will start

Alan: Yeah.

Yan: –consumer is going to take

Alan: So let’s say 2020 and 2021, the awareness starts to build, the groundswell is there, people start wearing these headsets. 2021, -22, -23, we start to see this kind of mainstream adoption within enterprise. And then 2023, kind of beyond is– nobody really can see out that far at this point. But look at 2023/4/5/6. That’s I think where it’ll trickle down to the consumer. Being in that enterprise, you’re working with military, you’re working with the fence, you’re working with industrial. One of the videos on your website really blew my mind. It was a huge room-sized centrifuge. You want to talk about how that’s being used?

Yan: Well, in that video, what we show showcases is our typical use case. So you have a very complex piece of equipment in that case. It’s the largest geotechnical centrifuge in Canada, which is in Newfoundland. So a massively-complex piece of equipment. The subject matter experts and the OEMs are all across the world, so some are in Germany and France and so on. So when that thing decides to not cooperate and breaks down, well, it can take weeks to get the right expert to address the problem. Now, with something like RemoteSpark, you can have the technician onsite wearing a Hololens, and you can have any subject matter expert anywhere in the world, even in other companies that are able to help them out in a timely fashion. It can take situations that would take weeks to address, and cut them down sometimes in a matter of hours.

Alan: I had a chance of speaking

Yan: Yeah, well, it’s used in many ways. It might be about producing artifacts to document an inspection. It can be sometimes if you want, we can dig a picture of the video of what the work is looking at, annotate that on the computer side of things, so the expert side. And then the annotated picture shows up in 3D at the other end. So it’s all about really empowering the worker to do the job right the first time, every time. And in the examples you gave — and I think that’s what we’re seeing as well — sometimes it’s about empowering a technician that just doesn’t have the knowledge on how to do a repair, to be able to do it. And I can give an example. We have a customer in the US. It’s a very large utility. They have a certain type of furnace. So it’s a blast furnace that is quite widely used in their business. And it breaks down quite often. The repair itself is not super complicated to do, but the people that know how to do it are not that many. So they built a CAD file and a 3D model, that has the embedded process on how to perform that repair. So if something goes wrong with that furnace, any technician that has access to a toolbox and is reasonably good with their hands, they can go there, follow the step-by-step animation, and do the repair. So, in that case, you were talking about the reduction on troubleshooting and on task performance. That’s where it comes from. It’s allowing the person that would not otherwise be able to do it, to do the job.

Alan: I think as we move into a time where more and more people are retiring from the workforce — the average workforces in their 50s now — and more and more experts are retiring, there’s got to be a way for us to capture that knowledge and then transfer it to younger generations. So I think this is a great way of doing that. What are some other ways that this technology is being used? Are there any companies that are using this in ways that you didn’t anticipate?

Yan: Yes, sure. We get all kinds

Alan: Is that a partnership with

Yan: No, sorry. This one is a

Alan: Oh, because there’s a

Yan: Yeah, well, it’s one of

Alan: I’m going to switch directions a little bit here. What are some of the analytics you’re able to gather around this? So, for example, I’m fixing a machine. How do you measure before I use the Kognitiv Spark system, and after? What do you do from, like, an A/B testing, so that you can say to our customers, “we’ve improved your process by X percent?”

Yan: Yeah, we typically try to establish a baseline with all the customers we’re using, especially if they’re running a pilot where they have to demonstrate a certain KPI to be able to get further budget. The way we do it, we try to see if they have data in an ERP system or work order processing system of some kind. They may have an IOT platform as well, so we can connect with those platforms. As an example, if you have an ERP system that’s generating the work orders, it will typically include a component about time to resolution or completion time and so on. So we can connect to those systems. So then when the work order is open, the workers on-site, they will work harder and might be displayed in RemoteSpark. They do whatever they have to do and then they mark it complete. So in that case, it’s a very quick way of showing that for a certain category of tasks, if you run it a number of times, you’ll be able to demonstrate as a percentage what’s the improvement. And we kind of have to customize that each time we work with the customer. So sometimes they don’t have such a system, it’s more tracked in an Excel spreadsheet or things like that. But we’re always trying to make sure that we understand what we’re– what they’re trying to achieve. And again, it’s time to resolution, cutting down equipment downtime, cutting down on travel for experts. That’s our bread and butter, really.

Alan: Travel time’s a huge one

Yan: Yeah, absolutely. One

Alan: [chuckles] I mean, it

Yan: Our message is always that if they want to be ready for when the market goes crazy with mixed reality, now is the time. It’s not just a widget you buy; you buy a technology that will change the way you are doing your work. It changes the way we run business. It’s the human element, really, and the process element that takes time to figure out, not the technology. So the sooner you can figure out what are those problems that you will be facing when you try to scale, the more equipped you will be when it’s time to do so.

Alan: Is there anything else you want to share, on the adoption side of things?

Yan: Yes. There’s one thing I’d like to share. There’s a reason why Kognitiv Spark is doing probably better than most when it comes to sales and revenue. Part of it is that we developed a product that works really well. But also we really took the time to understand what are our customers’ constraints. I’ll give an example. There are three reasons why people pick us, instead of some of the other options on the markets. So first of all, we are the only company that can do real 3D communication. So it’s not a 2D communication that includes 3D elements. So we’re still — as far as I know — the only company that can do that. The second is security. So we baked in security end-to-end right from the get-go. It’s not an afterthought. It is because customers told us right from the get-go, it’s got to be secure, otherwise I will not be able to make it past my CISO. And the third point is bandwidth.

Recently I asked our director of customer operations, “Can you tell me how many of our customers are dealing with bad or inconsistent bandwidth on the worksite?” She gathered data, and their response was 100 percent. So RemoteSpark is famous for being able to work on very bad bandwidth, like 256k. We can actually run calls at 128 sometimes. While the closest competitor we have are probably two megabytes a second. Well, on industrial sites, two megabytes a second is a luxury, it almost never happens. Because the place is full of metal equipment, there’s going to be dead zones and so on. So 100 percent of our customers deal with that. And we baked that in — again — right from the get-go. So we have to get out a lab environment — where we have ideal bandwidth and stable bandwidth — and get in the real world and see what people are facing. The mixed reality and the XR field as a whole, sometimes we have a tendency to just stay in our clean offices and not get in the field. I think that the field as a whole would gain a lot by just having different players talk to customers more often.

Alan: I think it’s interesting that when we build stuff in MetaVRse, we do the same thing. We have an iPhone 11 and the Samsung Galaxy 10, and we’ve got all the newest phones, and then we’ve got a collection of all of the phones back to iPhone 5 and 6, and we test them on different bandwidths. This is vital and you guys are focused on one device — being the Hololens — which technically uses a lot of bandwidth. But you guys have managed to make that a non-issue, which is wonderful. And I think you definitely nailed the three things. And it’s funny, because as you were talking about bandwidth, you cut out. [laughs] And so we have to deal with this, we have to deal with the fact that bandwidth comes and goes. And especially with a VR or an AR headset on your head, you run the risk of making people nauseous if you don’t do it properly. So I think that’s wonderful that you guys have thought of that. What is the most important thing that businesses can do right now to start leveraging the power of XR?

Yan: The most important thing to do is to just get started. Learn from it. When I mean get started is just not buying a few units and trying it out again in a lab environment. Get them to the field, get them in the hands of workers that are going to be the end-users and the adopters of that technology. And listen to them, listen to what they’re going to tell you. Being able to listen to those lessons learned early on is going to be what dictates the future success of XR initiatives in business, as far as I’m concerned.

Alan: Now, what is the best

Yan: There are many that are

Alan: This technology is saving lives. That couldn’t be more important. My last question, Yan, is what problem in the world do you want to see solved using XR technologies?

Yan: Yeah, I can tell you a story about this one. We use that as inspiration here all of the time. We all have people in that we know — family or friends — that are an older generation of workers that maybe didn’t go to school as long, that are good at what they’re doing, they’re manual workers. But sometimes they feel left behind by technology. So digital transformation hasn’t impacted the way they’re doing the work. And now we live in a world where change is always faster, and more often and more disruptive. You know, whether it’s AI and disintermediation and automation, all those things, these people feel threatened. And what I’d like to see happening with mixed reality is that if we can empower those workers to not only stay relevant, but be even more relevant than before, just by getting them access to the right information and the right knowledge and the right experts at the right time in the right format, I think that we can serve millions, if not billions of people around the world with that technology. And it’s all about making a human shine. I don’t want to see AI shine. I want to see AI work for humans. And I think that’s what XR can do.

Alan: Amazing. Well, that is a wonderful way to wrap up this conversation. Yan, are there any last words that you want to share with the listeners?

Yan: Well, I’d like to thank you. I think it was a great chat. It’s an exciting field. We’ll see more and more companies do great things. So my advice and my last words are: feel free to experiment. Try things out, fail fast, and make it better. [chuckles]

A lot of XR

Alan: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Smithson here today. We’re speaking with Nick Cherukuri, founder of ThirdEye, about their all-in-one AR glasses hardware and software solution for enterprise in logistics, manufacturing, and engineering and how these tools are revolutionizing how we work. All coming up next on the XR for Business Podcast.

Welcome to the show, Nick.

Nick: Thanks, Alan. Glad to be

Alan: I’m really excited. You

Nick: Definitely. So just to

And augmented reality, it’s definitely considered the next major tech platform. So we’ve been developing a lot of AR hardware and software applications for the military. And a few– a couple of years ago, we decided to take some of our technical know-how, our leading engineers — we have state-of-the-art labs here in Princeton, New Jersey — and we decided to develop a commercial product. So we spun off into ThirdEye and we created– just this year, we– earlier this year, we released our X2 mixed reality glasses. So there’s just some high-level overview of the X2. We wanted to really address the customer concerns. We felt this was an optimal time to get into the commercial market. So we feel it’s too early for the consumer market right now, but the commercial AR market is definitely something that we are seeing a lot of traction happening.

So we wanted to develop a pair of

Our glasses are Android-based, so it’s really easy to make access for upgrading to Android 9 soon, so we can take advantage of features like GPS, built-in. We have about a 42-degree field of view. So a binocular field of view is something we have seen customers prefer over a monocular field of view, because it’s less eyestrain. Binocular field of view is more natural to the human experience. We have two eyes, not one eye. So we wanted to develop a binocular pair of glasses, which we did. Our brightness level, we have about 300 nits of brightness in our optic system. So this can be used both indoors and outdoors, which is not the case for some other binocular glasses, which are more indoor products. So we wanted to develop our glass in a way that can be used both indoors and outdoors. It’s lightweight, it’s less than 10 ounces. So it’s something that– it’s easy to wear for a lengthy period of time without feeling any ergonomic issues. And we added some sensors like a built-in flashlight, a 30-megapixel camera. So if you’re running a remote help application for your field workers, you can stream really high-resolution content from your field worker point of view to a remote expert hundreds of miles away.

And we also have built-in SLAM. So SLAM stands for Simultaneous Localization And Mapping. We developed our own proprietary SLAM software that runs on our glasses that’s customized for hardware, so we can do inside out six-degrees-of-freedom tracking. We can do plane detection. So, for example, you could have a hologram of a 3D engine hovering in midair and the user could walk around it. So there are only a few glasses right now that are able to do highly accurate SLAM and our SLAM is accurate. It has about a one-inch drift accuracy and can be used both indoors and outdoors. So you can move your head around rapidly and the hologram will remain fixed in place. So SLAM is something that lets enterprises do more advanced applications, not just 2D AR screens, but you can actually interact with the real world. You can tag mixed reality content onto a giant machine, and leave the room and come back. And it’s still tagged on that location very accurately. So, for example, a worker could have step one, step two, step three, mapped out onto a factory floor, and be able to do that on a daily basis.

So it’s something that allows the glasses to actually interact with the real-world environment, which is where we see the cutting edge mixed reality software development happening for enterprise. So we’re really targeting the industrial, field services, manufacturing, and healthcare sectors. Those are our four main enterprise sectors and we are involved in a lot of other sectors. We have a lot of gaming and entertainment–

Alan: I’m sorry, Nick. What were

Nick: Industrial, field services, manufacturing, and healthcare. So I’d say those are the four. And we partner with many of the leading AR and mixed reality software companies, who have their applications running on our glasses. So we want to create as wide a developer ecosystem as possible. We don’t want to have a closed system, where we only have a few apps, or make it really tough for developers to develop applications. We want to have an open-source operating system, provide a lot of documentation. We have a Unity SDK. We have an Unreal engine SDK. It’s been fairly easy for developers to port applications or create apps on our glasses.

One last point — which is also

And what we’re seeing is, whereas before it might have taken close to 12 months to escape a pilot purgatory into a larger deployment, now we’re seeing enterprises — because there have been success stories right now — deploy within three to six months. So from the initial testing phase and getting all the key players on board — from the innovation department to the business department — and then going to a larger-scale deployment. So I think right now, because there have been a lot of lessons learned from other companies as to what works well for these smartglass deployments and what doesn’t work well.

We definitely really try to incorporate

Alan: So you’ve talked about

Nick: Sure. So what we’re seeing

Another way they come at this is their

But I think right now what we’re seeing is in nearly every industry, even really narrow ones like utilities or wastewater, that’s really specialized, AR software companies who are targeting each of these industries. So I think every industry right now has some augmented reality software that is really effectively targeting like industry-specific use cases. So what we try to do is we partner with a software company. So depending on what the enterprise is, if they’re a field service company, or telecommunications, or industrial, or a visually impaired group, then we partner with the software company that has the best software that deals with that use case.

So we’re seeing a proliferation of

Alan: If you kind of put your

Nick: Definitely. And that’s a great question. And I think long term, that’s what everyone’s predicting is, this is going to replace your phone. And it’s just a matter of what technology has the right features to make consumers want to replace their phone with a pair of glasses. So what we see is there’s a couple of core challenges right now, that need to be addressed for consumer deployment. So, field of view is probably the biggest one. The natural human field of view is, I would say roughly around 210 degrees. And right now, the widest field of view glasses — that are in mass production — have between a 40 to 50, 55-degree field of view. I know there are some prototypes that have 70, 80, 90-degree field of view, but in actual mass production now, that’s the field of view that’s there. And I think for consumers, they would want a really wide field of view. As opposed to enterprise, where a narrower field of view helps achieve their ROI use case, so they don’t really need a massive field of view. But I think the field of view definitely needs to be increased, and every year it’s definitely being increased by some of these leading optics companies. And once that progresses closer to what feels like a natural human experience, I think that will really help propel this smartglass for consumer deployment.

Another important factor is the form factor. So I think for consumers, they want it to look like a cool pair of Ray-Bans or glasses. And even technical features like a battery, there needs to be way to reduce that in size. Right now, some of these consumer companies, they’re finding a way around that by having a wire that goes behind your ear to connect to your phone as a processing pack, and that’s the battery source. So that’s one way around it. But we think that consumers want it to be entirely hands-free, just like enterprises want their device to be hands-free. They don’t want to walk around with wired packs or anything, and they want it just to be a pair of nice, cool-looking Ray-Bans they can wear.

So I think the field of view, battery,

Alan: You skirted around the

Nick: Sure, I did. [laughs]

Alan: [laughs] Nobody wants to

Nick: That’s hard to predict

Alan: But here’s the thing, and

Nick: Definitely. And I think

Alan: What are some of the use cases that people are using right now that are generating the most ROI? Like, if I’m a procurement manager at a manufacturing facility, what can I do to wow my executive team by firing a couple of pairs of these glasses and starting right away? What’s the lowest hanging fruit that I can get immediate ROI, because that seems to be how these things are being unlocked. You do a pilot or a small thing, you show an amazing ROI, and then it unlocks the budget to roll this out at scale. So what is that?

Nick: I mean, there’s so many applications, but kind of the way we like to talk about it is just like computers have the Office Suite of Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint that nearly every organization uses those applications. Similarly, for these smartglasses, there’s some overarching applications that we’re seeing are being really commonly used across industries. So that is remote assistance, so someone can see what you see. And it’s great for training new employees and providing remote help. Manufacturing checklist, QR code scanning. So if you’re in a warehouse or manufacturing center, getting step by step instructions overlaid for your specific task flow, or being able to scan QR codes with the glasses and get visual instructions. And then the other most common application is 3D twins and more mixed reality, where you have a 3D digital rendering of real-world objects. So for example, with mixed reality with SLAM, you can scan your environment into a 3D model and you can tag information, any information you want onto the real world, in this– using this virtual 3D model.

So those are the three applications that we’re seeing are being really commonly used. And I think what we envision — and based on the feedback we’re seeing is — those will kind of be the Microsoft Word/Excel/PowerPoint of AR mixed reality, where they’re just really commonly used across a lot of industries. And if you look at most of the AR software companies at the moment, most of them fall into one of those three application categories. And I think the reason is there’s such an immediate ROI it just makes so much common sense, where you’re hands-free, you don’t need to carry around a 50-page manual or use your hands. 80 percent of the global workforce use their hands while they work, so they need an entirely hands-free digital interface, while still being able to walk around and do their daily tasks. So I think those applications are seeing or having some tremendous ROI, we’re seeing close to a 40 percent savings in task time for some of these companies. And a lot of savings in training new workers. Worker safety. And you can really customize the task flow for your individual company needs. So let’s say those are the three most common applications and there’s really some really great AR software companies who are developing. That’s all four.

Alan: My last question for you,

Nick: So one personal preference of mine, and that’s the beauty of mixed reality is definitely in the healthcare space. We’re seeing some really tremendous real-world use cases. So there’s roughly a 200-million worldwide vision-impaired market, where people who can’t see properly or have some type of vision impairment. And with XR, they’re able to really change their lives. And with the addition of 5G and cellular chip directly built into glasses, they can walk around their daily lives using these glasses. And it really helps change their lives on a really personal level. These other use cases are great in terms of worker efficiency and proving KPIs. But from an actual impact in someone’s personal life on a daily basis, some of these healthcare applications — and specifically these vision-impaired community — using these mixed reality glasses is really helping change their lives in a positive way. I think so many times you hear of technology having a negative impact on the world. But I think with this XR technology and with these small streamlined glasses, we’re seeing some really positive and heartwarming use cases. And I think that’s great to see. And definitely healthcare space is a personal favorite of mine for some of these AR mixed reality glass deployments.

Alan: Well, thank you, Nick.

Nick: Sure. So you can visit our

PTC LiveWorx is

Alan: You’re listening to the XR

Mike, welcome to the show.

Mike: Hey, Alan, it’s great to

Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure.

Mike: June, yep.

Alan: My God. I had no idea,

Mike: Well, PTC’s focus is

Alan: It’s amazing. You even had

Mike: We did, we did, yeah. One

Alan: Yeah. So let’s start from

Mike: Ok. So PTC is a billion-dollar plus software company headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts. We have been around for a long time and we got our start back in the late 80s, early 90s by revolutionizing the 3D solid modeling industry. Basically, we invented a better mousetrap that allowed companies to create products virtually in 3D much faster and more effectively than ever before. Fast forward from then, we not only have a 3D solid modeling CAD offering, we have a great offering used in engineering for lifecycle management. And about 10 years ago, we recognized the trend of the Internet of Things, this explosion of connectivity and ubiquity of sensors, and companies wanting to leverage that information so that they could create products and manufacture products and service products better. We invested pretty heavily at that time. And once we did that, we were thinking a lot about this idea of IOT and products broadcasting information about themselves in the form of digital data. And we were thinking about our 3D heritage and we recognized that augmented reality was a great way to unlock some of that digital data in the context of the physical world, where you do your work. And that’s really what got us into AR. I have been at PTC — as you said — for a long, long time. And I’ve been involved in our AR journey since the beginning and it’s been a fantastic ride.

Alan: Vuforia was an

Mike: So we were thinking about

Alan: I have no idea the details

Mike: That’s really the value of the combination of sort of this underlying industry-leading computer vision technology and the knowledge that PTC — because of our heritage and our domain expertise and our technology in the form of CAD, and PLM, and IOT — is really the fusion of all of those things that makes these amazing experiences — like the ones you saw it LiveWorx — possible. And what we’ve found is it’s that combination that is required in order to unlock this potential in the industrial space. If you show up to a– pick your favorite large industrial customer and you show up with a great computer vision SDK and Unity and you say, “listen, we can go build anything.” They say, “OK, that’s great.” And they go build something, but it doesn’t scale. And that’s really the key, if you’re gonna be successful in an industrial enterprise. They need scale. They need re-use. They need these approaches to work across a variety of different use cases and product configurations. And the complexity gets pretty mindblowing. And that’s the experience. That’s the expertise that PTC brings to the equation here. So I think it’s been a great combination so far, and I think we’ve got a bright future ahead, for sure.

Alan: There is so much to unpack

Mike: Yeah, well, remember

On top of that library, though, PTC has then taken that technology and we’ve built purpose-built offerings for things like — as you said — you-see-what-I-see, or expert knowledge capture, or an offering that we call Vuforia Studio, which lets you leverage 3D CAD data you already have and present step-by-step instructions with animated 3D to make it very, very clear. I think that’s probably how you were able to replace those brake calipers at LiveWorx, right? You were using augmented 3D instructions. And what’s great about that is we’ve been able to make it super easy for our industrial customers to create these experiences at scale. As far as the answer to your question, it’s probably about 50-50 in terms of customers that are using the Vuforia computer vision SDK to go build all kinds of custom things. And the rest of them are really embracing these industrial enterprise use cases with purpose-built solutions that we’re delivering.

Alan: Let’s talk about what these solutions are enabling your customers. So let’s say, for example, we’ll just use John Deere. I was at LiveWorx and I’m walking around and my jaw is literally hanging open the whole time. I’m trying to figure out what do these guys do? I came to LiveWorx thinking, “Oh, they make AR for industry, not thinking anything else.” And then, of course, I realize I get the crash course and “Oh, we make this CAD-like program where you can build a product.” Let’s say you’re fabricating a product digitally and then it’ll also say, let’s enter in the information about that product. I need it to be 500 grams or less, I need it to have this type of tensile strength. And it’ll run all sorts of calculations and give you unique build designs of a product in ways you never could possibly think of as a human. And it’s a collection of all of these tools that are serving this customer. So let’s just take John Deere for a second. I put on a RealWear headset and I was able to see a screen in front of my eyes that walked me through step by step on how to change an air filter. Recognize that I’m in front of the tractor, give me the information, said “climb up the tractor,” pull this door open, pull out the filter, replace the filter, do it up. And within three minutes, I had replaced an air filter on a tractor that I would have assumed the air filter was on the front of the tractor, not the back. It turned me into an expert instantly. So what are the types of things that customers are doing then?

Mike: That’s a great example. What you were able to experience is the output of a product that we actually introduced just in May, and that product is called Vuforia Expert Capture. And basically we built this product, because there’s a lot of domain knowledge out there in our customers. There are people that have been working in industry for a long, long time. And they’re getting to the point where they’re retiring right here in North America, a lot of the baby boomers are leaving the workforce. And companies have this challenge that when those people leave the workforce, their knowledge goes with them. So what we did is we built this tool called Vuforia Expert Capture. And basically what it does is it allows an expert to put on either a RealWear device or a Hololens, and basically just do their job. So what happened in the demo you saw is we had an expert come in and teach us all how to replace the air filter. They went through and they did their job. And when they were done doing their job, we took the device and we plugged it into a computer. And we extracted all of the video, all of the spoken word, all of the bookmarks and pictures, everything that they captured as they did their job. And we prepared that, kind of enhanced it a little bit, structured it, and we published out a procedure. And that procedure is then presented back, either on a RealWear device or on a Hololens or on a phone or a tablet or frankly, I mean, you can even dump it out to Word, if you want it on paper. But that’s all we’re talking about here today. So who wants that?

But what you saw was the result of that, which basically provides procedural guidance. And this is — again — a new product we introduced in May. The market reception to this has been outstanding. I mean, again, this is a real problem that companies are facing every single day. And this is a great solution to that problem, taking advantage of some of the latest technology. That’s just one of the things that we allow you to do. That’s — again — the newest offering. And that’s one demonstration you might have seen. The one where you did the brake repair, that’s one where the situation was a little bit different there. What we were trying to teach you was not something that somebody had in their head, but sort of an engineered procedure. That was a procedure that somebody either in service planning or maybe manufacturing process planning, they would have defined ahead of time and there would be engineering deliverables, animations, and sequences, and prepared processes for that. So in that case, we got to leverage 3D engineering data and use that to present to you how to get the job done. And what we’ve realized in our AR journey here, is that there are different constraints on affordances that a company might have. They might not have 3D. They might have knowledge in people’s heads. And Expert Capture is important. They might just need to be able to access an expert remotely. And that’s where our you-see-what-I-see — or we call it Vuforia Chalk — offering is most relevant. Or they might have a highly engineered set of information that they want to present to somebody. And really that whole spectrum has to be respected. And we’re trying to embrace that with a true enterprise AR suite.

Alan: What are some of the other

Mike: Yeah. So there are four

Alan: Yeah, the first time I saw

Mike: Could have been, yep.

Alan: Three years ago. And you guys were not trying to reinvent the wheel with like, “Hey, we need to have image recognition that’s precise”. It was “No, here’s a barcode. Look at the barcode, it’ll recognize it, and then overlay the data.” And I thought that– QR code, not barcode — and I thought sometimes we as developers, we’re overthinking things. A QR code allows you to identify an object really quickly, rather than try to put it through a database of a thousand machines that all look the same. That was a really easy way to do it. And then once you’ve got that, you can just add annotations, you can bring in CAD data, you can overlay the CAD 3D model on top of the actual physical unit and teach people how to use it. Teach me how to fix it, that sort of thing. And that was three years ago. And what I saw this year was basically the real practical use cases of that technology. There was kind of like a coffee machine, I think was the demo. And now it’s expanded to boats, and tractors, and all sorts of things. What’s the craziest thing that you’ve seen somebody work on using AR?

Mike: Well, let me make a really

What we’ve learned is that it’s really important to meet the market where they are. There’s all kinds of crazy things that we could potentially do. And a trap that customers often fall into, is they imagine the most outlandish thing that AR computer vision technology *could* do for them. And what we try to encourage them to do is identify things that are practical, that are going to have a business impact, that are going to be valuable and move the needle. And frankly are achievable, let’s go do something bite-size and make an impact, and then build off of that success and go on. So there’s this element of pragmatism. There’s this idea of meeting the market where it is, not showing up and saying “You’ve got to spend bajillions of dollars.” or “You need the most outlandish high-end hardware.” or whatever the case may be. Just identifying business problems that they have, that are well-suited with AR technology that’s available today and then going off and solving problems for them. So I’m glad you saw that a few years ago. And that’s a mantra that we really hold dear and continue to drive into our customers.

Alan: One of my previous

Mike: That’s right.

Alan: I mean, that’s a big

Mike: Yeah, I mean that– and

Alan: One of the things that you guys have done very well, is being advocates in promoting augmented reality to the industrial workforce. And one of the things that you did was a joint piece with the Harvard Business Review called “A Manager’s Guide To AR,” but it was also AR-enabled. So if you downloaded the app, you could bring the white paper to life, and this factory popped up. What was the genesis of that?

Mike: It’s been an interesting

Alan: We’re still very early in this technology and you guys are pushing the limits so you have more experience than most. But one thing that I found really amazing is that I was at a bicycle show recently, and the Cannondale bikes have a– well, it’s a custom, it doesn’t say PTC, but I recognized the shape. They have a QR code on them. How are they using that? I didn’t pull out my phone and make it work, but I saw the Thingworx tag on the bicycle. Now, is that shipping with every bicycle? What are they doing with that?

Mike: So that’s actually called a Thingmark. It’s a combination QR code and AR marker. So basically it provides unique identification, so our system knows what bike is this? And then we use it also to place the content. It’s 000 for the augmented content. And what Cannondale is doing, is they originally wanted to help their technicians in your local bike shop — their dealer network, if you will — understand the new features on their bikes. For some of their bikes — it’s not available on all of them, but some of their higher-end bikes — they built an AR experience. And that AR experience does a couple of things. It teaches the dealer what the important features are of the bike. So what are the new capabilities and what are the performance specs and all of those kinds of things? It also provides them service instructions for how to do certain things to the bike, replace the shocks, or whatever the case may be. And then finally, it also provides spare parts identification. So the technician, instead of pulling out apart and trying to find it in a manual or find it online somewhere, they can simply look at the bike. And then in AR they see what all the part numbers are so they can order replacement parts.

Alan: That’s amazing.

Mike: It’s a very, very cool

Alan: [chuckles] Yes, you do.

Mike: Their customers, as well

Alan: It’s interesting you say

Mike: Oh, that’s awesome.

Alan: [laughs]

Mike: The unintended uses of

Alan: Some companies are seeing

Mike: Yeah, it well, it’s my

Alan: What are some use cases

Mike: I think that the potential impact for AR across the industrial value chain is deeply profound. It will fundamentally change the way that we interact with the world around us. But when you factor in the reality of where does content come from? How comfortable is digital eyewear? Can I work truly hands-free, with all of the benefits that AR promises, for an entire shift? Some of those things aren’t quite there yet. And then frankly, the computer vision technology is still maturing. It gets better every quarter. We come out with great new innovations, but it’s not a human eye connected to a human brain yet, not yet anyway. Those limitations can get in the way of some of the more advanced use cases. But as we’ve talked a little bit about, there’s so much potential impact right now, whether it’s capturing expert knowledge, sharing expert knowledge in real-time, or presenting compelling instructions and other 3D and digital data in the context of the physical world. And what we’re really encouraging our customers and our clients is to work with us to identify those opportunities, and let’s go drive some real value there.

Alan: That’s like music to my

Mike: Absolutely.

Alan: How is Mattel using AR?

Mike: Yeah, I would speak for Mattel and many of the other toymakers. A lot of them are Vuforia customers. And what they’re doing is they’re recognizing that the nature of play is changing. You and I grew up with Hot Wheels. You and I did not grow up with iPads. [chuckles] And kids today, they do. So the challenge for some of these toymakers is, how do they bring a digital element into the physical world of the toys that they make, whether we’re talking about Lego, whether we’re talking about Hot Wheels, whether we’re talking about Mattel and a hundred other companies. Augmented reality gives them the ability to do that. It gives them the ability to supplement their physical toys with an experience, whether it be animations or gameplay. All of those kinds of things, which really resonates with the kids that are playing these games today. So that’s a great space for us. And we’re really lucky to have a lot of great toymaker customers using our AR tools.

Alan: You actually mentioned Lego and I know Lego has been doing a ton of stuff in AR over the last few years. We had Eden [Chen] from Fishermen Labs on the show and they’ve done a lot of work with Lego in Denmark, to not only animate the boxes, but– I was just on actually, if you go in walmart.com/lego and then you click the “see it in action” button, you can now drop the Legos toy set on your table, and see it animated and see how it plays in front of you. And I mean, that’s all web-based.

Mike: That is very cool.

Alan: Let’s take a look at that. So right now, everything that you’re building is app-based. Are you guys moving towards a web-based offering in the future, or is that something on the roadmap?

Mike: It’s something where we’re looking at. As with everything else, as technology proliferates and standards are established and embraced, we really have the opportunity to drive this democratization even further. So that’s something that we’re there were researching. The advanced research team is looking at that. What I can tell you right now, is that app-based is really what the foreseeable future has for us. Whether that app is a broadly applicable viewer, like we have with Vuforia View, or custom-tailore apps that a toymaker like Lego or an automaker like Mercedes Benz will make for a particular use case, doesn’t really matter. But in the near term, that’s really where a lot of the focus is.

Alan: One of the things that people have to realize is that companies like RealWear, for example, RealWear is a head-worn display that allows you to move this articulating arm into your side of view and see almost like a maybe 10 inch iPad, 10 inches from your face so that you can see stuff. But it’s not really AR. It’s just kind of augmenting, giving you a screen. It is, by all accounts, the lowest possible tech of this. It’s not doing image recognition, it’s just literally showing you either PDFs, or videos, or information and being able to capture that using a camera and project it back. And they just raised $80-million. So I think we’re– as a collective group, we need to take a step back from trying to invent the future of the future of the future, and say “Hey, the tools we have right now are driving real ROI value. How do we leverage those the most so that we can fund the future of the future kind of things?” And I think you guys have done a great job on that.

Mike: We’ve got a great

Alan: You really hit it there.

Mike: Yeah, but like you said earlier, it’s early days. I am quite sure that the folks that Magic Leap are going to recognize how much value there is in the enterprise space, and figure out that they’ve got to have certain characteristics. And I think that there’s a lot to happen in front of us in the realm of digital eyewear. Sometimes I think about 15 years ago when maybe you had a smartphone with a great camera, and I had one with a huge screen, and my friend Matt had one with a keyboard on it.

Alan: If you’re talking fifteen years ago, I had a belt. And I had a phone on one side, I had my camera on the other side, I had my Palm Pilot, which wasn’t connected to Wi-Fi, which was just literally a calendar on the backside. I looked like Batman, I had a bat belt.

Mike: All right. But what do you

Alan: There is a black device

Mike: Not taking the bait.

Alan: Ahhh, dammit! [laughs]

Mike: [laughs] I do believe that

Alan: Yeah.

Mike: We have no idea what Apple

Alan: It’s interesting. The

Mike: They’re just audio, right.

Alan: But they’re direct — literally direct competitor — to the Bose AR offering, the Bose glasses.

Mike: Yep.

Alan: Assuming they’re going to be pretty awesome, because I tried them out and spatial audio, I think, is actually going to drive a lot of value, just with the audio.

Mike: Yeah, I agree. I would say

Alan: Oh, speaking of touch.

Mike: I have. I was at EWTS last

Alan: I got to play with the

Mike: It’s mindblowing.

Alan: –mindblowing. [laughs] It

Mike: It’s an application for a remote expert assistance. So it basically allows you to see what I see, and it allows both of us — while we’re speaking to each other — to draw on a live video stream of the real world. And what’s interesting about that, is that we’re drawing on this live video stream and what we draw actually sticks to the real world. So this isn’t a case where I take a picture, send it to you, you circle something, send it back to me. We’re both looking at my view of the real world. And if you see something you want to draw my attention to, you simply draw an arrow, draw a circle, whatever the case may be. And no matter where I look, when I come back to that spot, those annotations will be fixed there in space. So this is a tool that is really key for helping, let’s say a junior technician, somebody that’s a novice out in the field. This is allowing companies to save money on rolling a second service truck. It’s allowing them to increase their first-time fix rate. And one of the most exciting things about this technology is that it works on a really, really broad collection of devices. So, you know, the reality is most technicians out in the field, they probably have an iPhone, they probably have something running AndroidOS. And this technology works on many, many of those. It doesn’t require — for example — ARKit enabled devices or anything like that.

Alan: Being able to have an

Mike: Yeah, I agree. I think–

Alan: It’s one of those things

Mike: What problem do I want to

Alan: I want to say thank you. This has been an eye-opener. PTC’s LiveWorx. If you haven’t been to LiveWorx, you gotta go the next year. The stage that you guys set up at that event rivaled EDM stages. It was incredible. Multi-level stage with lights and lasers, and it was just mindblowing. And you really know how to bring people together in the context of industrial applications. You could feel the palpable energy. So visit ptc.com to learn more. Yeah. Is there anything you want to add, Mike?

Mike: No way, man. I wouldn’t