XR for Business

XR for Business

By Alan Smithson from MetaVRseBusinessTechnologyArts
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XR for Business episodes

  • Go XR or Go Extinct, with Super Ventures’ Ori Inbar

    Regular listeners have heard plenty

    of stories from Alan’s numerous adventures at Augmented World Expo.
    In today’s episode, we go to the source of all those tales, with
    AWE’s co-founder and executive producer, Ori Inbar — just ahead of
    this year’s summit.

    Alan: Welcome to the XR for

    Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. I am super excited to
    have our next guest today, Ori Inbar. He’s a world leading expert in
    the field of augmented reality industry, and he has devoted the past
    decade to fostering the AR ecosystem as an entrepreneur, advisor, and
    investor. He’s the founder and managing partner for Super Ventures
    and the CEO of AugmentedReality.org, a nonprofit that produces
    Augmented World Expo, the top industry conference for AR since 2010.
    To learn more about what he’s doing, you can visit
    augmentedreality.org and awexr.com or superventures.com.

    Ori, welcome to the show, my friend.

    Ori: Thank you, Alan. It’s

    awesome to be here.

    Alan: It’s so exciting to have

    you. I’ve been waiting for this episode for so long and I just can’t
    wait to get right in. Maybe can you just give us your first AR
    experience, and how did you get into this? You know, I watched your
    2019 keynote from AWE again, and put on these these welding glasses
    that you had back in 2009. You’ve been doing this for ten years
    without any reduction in passion. And how did you get involved? Like,
    what was that precipitating moment for you?

    Ori: So for me, after the

    startup I was working for was acquired by SFP — and I spent seven
    years there — decided to leave and go back to my roots in startup.
    And then I realized that my kids are always stuck in front of a
    screen, computer screen or playing video games. And on one hand, it
    felt like we cannot really change the future. But I was trying to
    look for a way for kids — and adults — to kind of interact with the
    real world, like we did as kids. But by adding some of the things
    that attract kids and adults to computers and to video games and to
    social media and kind of merge it into reality. And at that time, I
    thought I kind of invented something new. But then upon some
    research, I realized there’s a term for it, it’s called augmented
    reality, it’s been around for many decades. But it was hidden in labs
    in a few places around the world. So the mission immediately became
    to find a way to bring it to the mainstream, to the masses. And then
    the iPhone was announced and it felt like finally we have an ideal
    device to deliver augmented reality to everyone, because they already
    have it in their pockets. Of course, from there the path was very
    long and arduous and still is. But I think we’re starting to see some
    of the fruits in the last couple of years where a bunch of new
    applications — whether it’s for enterprise or for consumers — are
    hitting the market and are actually showing value. So it seems like
    we’re definitely on the path to making it mainstream.

    Alan: My first AWE was three

    years ago and I remember it was amazing to me, because I went to
    Silicon Valley VR meet-up or SVVR, and it was mainly VR. And then I
    went to AWE and it was a lot of augmented reality, and glasses, and
    there was companies there making glasses that looked like aliens had
    built them. And it felt really clunky. I almost had this feeling like
    this is really cool, I can see where it’s going, but it’s not quite
    there. And it’s it’s just not ready for the real world, in my
    opinion. But you go back this year and everything is actually,
    Porsche’s using this and Lockheed Martin is using it. Huge
    companies not only are done with their pilot phase, but they’re
    rolling it out at scale. So what do you think has happened in the
    last three years to take it from a cottage industry to something
    that’s in the billions of dollars?

    Ori: Actually, if you take it

    back 10 years to 2010, when we did our first AWE, you had a lot of
    passionate people in the room. But we were talking about vision and
    concepts and ideas, not so much about actual products. And over the
    years, you started to see more and more products hitting the market
    and customers starting to use it in in ways that improve their
    businesses. So that was kind of a very slow process leading us to
    where we are today. And I think you’re right, in the last few years,
    we’ve seen significant maturity of both the products, whether it’s
    smart glasses or tools that are available, not just on glasses, but
    also on mobile devices. But more importantly, we started to see
    enterprises adopting it and showing significant ROI associated with
    implementing AR in their businesses. And that has kind of been
    driving the kind of acceleration of the adoption among enterprises in
    a slew of use cases in practically every industry you can think of.
    So I think that that’s definitely a phenomenon that we’re seeing in
    the last few years and it’s reflected at the AWE. First from the
    number and maturity of the companies, deploying– I mean, delivering
    products and showcasing it on the expo floor. But more interesting is
    the fact that attendees are much more educated about what AR can do.
    They come to the show to actually buy software and hardware because
    they really understand the need and understand what it can do, at
    least to a certain degree. And that’s kind of a whole new era for
    where the industry is with AR and VR.

    Alan: It’s so interesting you

    say that because for the last three years, I feel like we had to
    start every presentation with, “OK, hat is the difference
    between AR and VR? And how do you know–” It was like Basics
    101. And now the conversations, you can bypass all that and go
    straight to, “Hey, this is how it’s gonna make or save you
    money.” And you know, it was– those answers weren’t there three
    years ago from my standpoint, we were presenting this to everybody
    and it was like, “Yeah, so, I’m not really sure how much it’s
    going to cost. And yeah, nobody’s really done it before. So we’re not
    sure if this is going to actually work.” But I think we’ve moved
    out of the phase of “Can we make it work?” to “OK, it
    works. What can we do with it?” to “We know what to do with
    it. We have real ROI numbers. How do we scale it?” So what do
    you think is next, in the next three years then?

    Ori: Well, I think FOMO is

    actually starting to play a role, where you see some of the more
    advanced enterprises adopting it and showcasing how it’s improving
    their businesses, and that kind of registers with everybody else in
    the industry that, you know, if they are not going to start adopting
    it at his thinking about how to adopt it, then they may be falling
    behind. And it was kind of last year at AWE, our motto was “go
    XR or go extinct” because it felt like if you’re gonna ignore it
    as something that is only going to happen in the future, you may be
    left behind, because it takes time really to understand how it’s
    going to improve their business, how to adopt it, how to deploy it.
    It’s definitely a whole new kind of computing platform. So people
    need to prepare for that. And the sooner the better. So, again, I
    think that the fear of your competitors becoming better than you —
    and also to a certain degree with consumers, once they see how AR
    makes certain people better at things they do in their life, whether
    it’s just how they play games, or how they play sports, or maybe how
    they they fix something in their home — that will kind of trigger
    other people to say, “Hey, I need to have that too. Otherwise, I
    will be falling behind.” And that’s kind of a big driver of the
    adoption right now.

    Alan: You know, what I find

    interesting about that, Ori, is that companies are sharing their
    internal ROI measurements. I’ve never seen it where an industry is so
    collaborative. And that may be because it’s just early and the
    money’s not flowing, the VCs haven’t really pushed the envelope of
    what’s possible. But I think there’s just this feeling of
    collaboration. Everybody I talked to is willing to share their
    pitfalls, their challenges, what they can do better so that everybody
    improves exponentially. And I think maybe that’s just a factor of
    exponential growth in general. The fact that all these technologies
    are moving so fast, everybody needs to help to just keep up with it
    all. But it seems like the XR, virtual/augmented/reality space is
    very collaborative. And, you know, it’s almost like someone it’s like
    a family. When I went to AWE, I felt like I was coming home to a
    family of people that understood me. You go through your daily life,
    you say, “hey, you know, try this VR, try this AR” and
    people are “like, yeah, that’s cool, whatever.” And but
    when you go to AWE, everybody understands that they see where it’s
    going, they see the future. How did you– I guess at AWE, you built
    that community from the ground up, and how how do you see that moving
    forward as companies start to put money into this, big money? Do you
    see this collaboration continuing?

    Ori: I do. First of all, I agree

    that unlike previous waves in other industries, I’m seeing more
    collaboration in this industry than in others. I still hear a lot of
    startups that are doing some amazing implementations with certain
    enterprises, but these enterprises are still keeping it as a
    confidential achievement and not sharing it. So it still happens, but
    not as much as maybe in other technologies or other industries. And
    you could probably attribute it to the fact that it’s relatively
    early, but maybe there’s something else there. Because you know what?
    When I started AWE, it was really just to find a venue where we can
    meet likeminded people that also think about AR and are passionate
    about it. And because at that time it was very lonely developing AR.
    There were maybe a couple dozen companies around the world. Nobody
    understood what they were doing. So it was great to come to a venue
    and be able to meet people that think like you and really help
    inspire each other. And over the years, obviously, more and more
    people got to know about it.

    But it’s still– I think up until even

    now, it sometimes feels lonely to develop in AR, because still very
    few people that are developing it and really have a deep
    understanding of the technology. But I think they know there’s
    something about this technology that is about really making us better
    at anything we do, in work and life. And maybe that’s something that
    is driving people to collaborate more, because they feel like we have
    an opportunity here to bring humanity to the next level and improve
    how we do everything, and maybe even combat some of the threats that
    are facing humanity these days in a way that was not possible before.
    So I think that’s another contributor, especially when we think about
    e-commerce and the whole idea of “try it before you buy” or
    just “try before you do”, right? I mean, in many cases, you
    can simulate things with AR that you’re not able to do with a regular
    website or any other application. And that ability to try things
    before you do them — or maybe even get help while you do those
    things, as opposed to just watching YouTube videos that instruct you
    how to do certain things — that adds kind of a level of support to
    two people that we’ve never seen before. And maybe again, that’s one
    of the other contributors to the collaborative nature of what we’re
    seeing in the industry.

    Alan: It’s interesting. I would

    say almost every single person that I’ve interviewed has an
    altruistic side to it. They want to see this technology used for
    good. I think that’s one thing that is just really pervasive in this
    industry, is that everybody understands the risks of it as well. I
    think there’s an inherent risk of collecting eye tracking data, and
    positional head tracking data, and more data about individuals.
    There’s a risk there, but I think everybody’s very well aware of the
    risks and they’re really adamant about protecting humanity from those
    risks while using the tools to create great things. We have so many
    environmental, social, monetary aspects to our world that are not the
    best they could be. There are big challenges and virtual and
    augmented reality hold the promise of exponential education. And I
    think if we can harness that, we can educate the next generations to
    solve the world’s biggest problems. What do you think about that?

    Ori: Also, Ray Kurzweil likes to

    say that every technology brings promise or peril. And it’s really up
    to us to decide on how we use technology. Anything from cease fire
    kind of qualifies to in that quote. So it’s really up to us. And when
    I say “us” it’s everyone in the industry, it’s the
    technologists, it’s the creators, it’s the developers, it’s people
    that adopt it. I totally agree that it provides an opportunity for
    exponential education. If you think about what’s really unique about
    AR and VR or spatial computing, it’s really about getting away from
    the unnatural way we interacted with computers in the past 40 or 50
    years, which was on a two dimensional screen with a two dimensional
    input device, the mouse and the keyboard. And now we’re getting back
    to technology which enables us to interact with the world and with
    information the way we did in the million years before the 2D
    computing that we know of today existed. And the fact that it’s more
    natural to us, I think, also allows us to to learn much better
    because we learn better in 3D. We learn better when we interact with
    things. We learn better when people are involved in the education
    than if you just read it on a two dimensional screen.

    So that by itself, I think, could give

    a significant leap forward in how people learn, and how knowledge is
    on one hand captured and also disseminated. And that’s one of the
    areas that I’m most passionate about in the AR space, which is how do
    we use this technology to capture knowledge that is currently being
    held in people’s brains, and communicate it in a way that is beyond
    just a book or beyond just even a YouTube video in a way that we can
    actually experience it in anything we do. And then also capture that
    knowledge and then be able to disseminate it to everyone on Earth.
    WildAid, they tried to do a certain thing. Again, it could be work or
    it could be just your day to day life kind of thing. So, yeah,
    exponential education is probably one of the biggest promises of this
    technology.

    Alan: It’s interesting you

    mentioned capturing that that information. I think I was at PTC’s
    LiveWorx this year and their Expert Capture system is really low
    tech. When you when you think of all of the technologies we have with
    Hololens and Magic Leap and we have all these amazing technologies
    for spatial computing. And they took something so simple as a pair of
    glasses with a camera on them to capture the person’s view of doing
    something with it. Maybe it’s fixing a machine, maybe it’s working on
    a tractor. Doesn’t matter, but it’s able to capture key snippets of
    that information from an expert and then show it to the next person
    with just a heads up display. And you look at RealWear, they just
    raised $80-million and it’s not really AR. It’s more a lens that
    shows you a computer screen that’s maybe three feet from your face
    and allows you to kind of see videos and text and PDFs. But that
    ability, to be able to capture that knowledge and disseminate it
    quickly through a platform is really revolutionary. And I think we’re
    only scratching the surface of what’s possible there. What
    technologies that you’ve seen that are maybe in the early stages or
    betas or just kind of under the radar, what technologies really do
    you think will push learning forward?

    Ori: So I have to start with

    maybe a somewhat controversial statement, which is I think the tech
    we have today is good enough.

    Alan: [chuckles] I agree.

    Ori: To do a lot. I mean, it’s

    really about– now it’s about creators really leveraging the tools
    that we have, the devices that we have — which in most cases, it’s
    going to be a smartphone or tablet, not even glasses — and build
    applications that leverage the special capabilities of this medium
    and have people — again — become better at anything they do. Yes,
    of course we have a lot of things that we still need to develop and
    improve, but the basic foundation is there. But if you think about
    what else can you do? How can it really accelerate things? It’s
    something that I started talking about a couple years ago. It’s
    called the AR cloud. And that’s a software layer that basically
    creates a digital copy of the real world and allows developers,
    creators to place content in a permanent, in a persistent and
    sharable way on the real world. So that if I see certain content in a
    certain place and I come back tomorrow — or maybe someone else is
    trying to access it with a different device — they will see the same
    content, the same kind of interaction that I have.

    And that’s something that visionaries

    in AR have been talking about for at least a decade. But now we’re
    actually starting to see the initial implementations of that
    technology, whether it’s from small startups like 6D.ai, but also
    companies like Microsoft, Google, Apple are starting to show their
    first steps towards the AR cloud, kind of providing persistent
    information on the real world, things that– Minecraft Earth, which
    is a really cool game currently in beta, is doing already that, it
    allows you to place something that you’ve created, that you’ve mined
    in Minecraft anywhere in the world and allow other people to come and
    interact with it in a similar ways. So that’s already in the works.
    It’s not science fiction anymore. Of course, you know, we have to do
    a lot to scale this technology and make it available to everyone and
    on all devices and kind of iron some of the kinks. But it’s
    definitely getting there. And I think that’s going to be a huge–
    that’s going to make a huge difference in the proliferation of this
    technology, because once many people can collaborate and interact
    with AR, it will provide kind of an exponential growth to the number
    of people using it and the frequency in which to use it.

    Alan: With the Kronos Group

    announcing the OpenXR standards now, I think it’s going to become
    easier and easier for people to build on this. The hope has always
    been can we build this on Web? I had a client this morning call and
    say, “Hey, we want an application, but it has to be running on
    Web.” And what they want to do is not possible right now on
    Web, but we’re getting there and being able to push content out once
    and have it work on any device, regardless of whether it’s — like
    you said — an iPhone, or an iPad, or Android device, or VR headset,
    or an AR headset. I think having that ability to push it at once and
    have it work everywhere and be persistent is amazing. I think Magic
    Leap calls it the Magicverse. Was it Kevin Kelly who wrote a whole
    article on the Mirror World?

    Ori: Yeah.

    Alan: Being able to create a

    digital version of the real world. And I think I said four years ago,
    I actually think it was– it was either at AWE or SVVR. If I was
    Google and Apple, I would make some sort of Pokémon Go game that
    took you inside and made you kind of chase these things up and down
    the walls, and while they 3D map the whole interior space of
    everywhere. But you can imagine, as this technology progresses
    quickly, a few years ago, we had Tango phones that had depth sensing
    cameras, now that went away and then all of a sudden the depth
    sensing cameras are back on the new Samsung phone. So I think the
    phones will have depth sensing cameras on them, being able to capture
    the real world, and put it into context, and overlay data on it. It’s
    a huge feat and it’s got to be done by one of the big players, like
    all of the big players, really. It’s a massive undertaking.

    Ori: I mean, you mentioned the

    big players and we have this interesting dynamic in prepping. You
    know, in any new wave of technology where you have startups kind of
    leading the innovation and then later on the big players jump in. I
    think what we’re seeing now is that with the kind of stagnation of
    the growth of mobile computing, smartphones, all the big players are
    starving or kind of really trying hard to find the next wave and to
    see kind of the next growth opportunities and many of them see it in
    AR and VR. So if you look at the investments done by Google,
    Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, Facebook and a bunch of other, Lenovo,
    Valve[?]. In this field, it’s it’s billions and billions and billions
    of dollars. And that’s definitely showing to everyone to the startups
    on one hand, to investors on the other hand, and of course, to
    customers that this is not a fad. This is not something that will
    pass and everyone is really getting into it and investing a lot in
    it. And standards are a big part of it. Like you said, I’ve been in
    involving standards around AR for over 10 years now and in the
    beginning with some great ideas on how to enable that, because
    everybody knows that standards help accelerate the adoption and kind
    of remove a lot of the friction. But many people felt it’s kind of
    early at that stage. You know, 2010, 2011, and it’s going to be up to
    the big players to jump in, and in some cases provide their own
    standard that becomes kind of a de facto standard.

    Alan: USDZ, anyone?

    Ori: That’s exactly right. So I

    think that we’re now literally in 2018, 2019, the big players are
    kind of putting their weight behind those standards. And by the way,
    there’s not just one standard, there’s a whole set of standards that
    are necessary for this new wave of computing. And many of them are
    driven by the big players, others by associations like the OpenAR
    cloud, which is working on standards around AR cloud that we
    mentioned before, and is kind of harnessing some of the big players
    to join that as well. You know, around Web technologies for AR and
    VR, WebXR, that’s another huge thing, which I think is almost
    entering the mainstream at this point, and that will be a huge game
    changer because if you don’t need to develop– oh, I’m sorry, to
    download an app or a special application and you can just share a
    link that will get you into an AR experience or a VR experience,
    that’s going to remove a lot of the current friction that we’ve seen
    in getting more people to try it. And it’s happening right now. So
    that’s really nice to see.

    Alan: It’s amazing. And I think

    this morning I interviewed the head of XR for Verizon, TJ Vitolo, and
    he was mentioning how the next wave of this is going to come when 5G
    unlocks cloud and edge computing, when we can offload some of the
    rendering power and some of the compute power to the cloud. They’re
    working on sub 20 millisecond round trip transfer speeds. And if you
    think about that, that shouldn’t affect your vestibular system at
    all. You could wear glasses. You could– your glasses can understand
    the world around you by using infrared cloud mapping, put it up to
    the cloud and then have information real time come down,
    contextualized information to the world around you. I think that’s
    gonna be amazing. And Apple introduced their occlusion system with
    ARKit where you can put an object, a digital object on a table and
    wave your hand in front of it, and it knows that your hand is in
    front of it rather than behind it. And I mean, that’s just mind
    boggling, because we need to have those. You don’t think about it
    until you start to do an AR demo on a phone and then somebody walks
    in front of your demo. And then all of a sudden that piece of
    furniture that you were looking at looks tiny instead of real size
    because somebody walked in front of it. But the fact that they’re
    able to figure out the occlusion from a single camera is quite
    impressive. And I think — if I’m not mistaken — I think that’s what
    Vrvana was working on, before they were acquired by Apple back a
    couple years ago. But you can see where all these startups that were
    acquired by the big companies are starting to pop up as
    infrastructure for the future of spatial computing.

    Ori: Absolutely. I mean, you

    mentioned 5G, and when you kind of go back to my comment on the need
    to find the next growth opportunities. For the big carriers, that’s
    that’s a huge issue. And that’s why they came up with 5G, which is
    really promising to speed up our access to information and provide
    almost unlimited bandwidth of data.

    Alan: You know what he suggested

    today? He said you’ll be able to download the entire seasons in
    seconds. Crazy.

    Ori: Yeah. And that’s that’s

    cool for those of us who watch or streaming or video. But I think
    what they’re really looking for something beyond that, because that’s
    that’s fun, that’s great. But how does it really enable new things
    that were not possible before? And I think very quickly they realized
    that AR and VR are their best horses to ride on, to kind of drive the
    need for 5G. And we’ve seen Verizon AT&T, also Valve[?] and
    others spending a lot of energy in showing how 5G can make AR and VR
    much better. And it does. And it’s kind of interesting because up
    until now, many startups in this industry were competing on how well
    they can– or how fast they can process computer vision and machine
    learning on their device.

    Alan: [chuckles] How can you

    compress things to make it faster?

    Ori: Exactly. And this will

    completely turn things around. All the sudden, you’re not going to be
    able– you’re not going to need to compute everything on your device.
    You’ll be able to do a lot of it in the cloud and just in an instant
    share it with with as many devices as needed. And so that’s kind of
    changing some of the things that startups are competing on, and where
    are you seeing some companies putting more emphasis on doing things
    in the cloud, with the anticipation that very soon it’s not going to
    matter whether you do it on the cloud or on the device.

    Alan: So you run, or you’re a

    managing founder of Super Ventures. Let’s talk about some of the
    investments that you guys have made at Super Ventures. Because you
    have an eye on this industry that is really quite unique because
    you’ve seen it from the very infancy right to where it is today. What
    are the things you’re investing in?

    Ori: So Super Ventures, just

    quickly, is a fund that is focused on investing in early stage AR
    companies and some VR companies, because, of course, there’s some
    shared infrastructure, talents and skills between AR and VR. But
    there are– our engine, our focus is really on the AR side. And when
    we started in 2016, it was probably the first fund dedicated to
    investing in areas of AR. So it was kind of up to us to prove that
    there is a need for such a fund. And the results were pretty amazing.
    I mean, we got a couple of thousand of companies reaching out to us
    and kind of looking for investments because they saw us as the smart
    money. There’s a lot of interest, a lot of hype around AR and VR, but
    very little knowledge among investors about what is the best
    technology, where it’s going, how do you understand what are the most
    likely to happen business models, and so on. And we’ve been living
    and breathing that for a decade. So many investors also came to us
    for advice on that and for insights into how we see that evolving.

    So that was kind of a great proof point

    that there is a need for a specialized fund like ours. The other
    thing is. You know what? What are you focused on, right? I mean,
    what’s the thesis? And here we kind of looked at the entire industry
    because it’s a relatively small sector. We couldn’t narrow it even
    further. So we look at companies all over the world. Anything kind of
    pre-series A[?] is in our– is kind of part of what we’re looking at,
    including first money in, in many cases. And the types of companies
    are from hardware to software, from tools to applications, from
    enterprise to consumers, really across the board. Although we– a lot
    of the companies that pitched actual games, that’s something that we
    were kind of staying away from, just because it’s so hard to predict
    the success of a game. And I know that because my first company, AR
    company Augmento, was really building AR games. And it was– you
    could say it was pretty early at the time. Back in 2008, 2009. But
    it’s still hard to predict how a game will be accepted by the
    audience. So not as much on games, more on tools, on enabling tools.

    And there when you look at what are

    kind of the new things that we need in spatial computing? It’s a
    completely new set of things, but a lot of them have roots in
    previous waves. So starting with infrastructure, the AR cloud, the
    ability to scan the world, to be able to create a point cloud that
    allows you to place content on it. There is a whole category of
    software tools and [garbled] that will be needed to really support
    that new infrastructure. So that’s kind of a big area of focus for
    us. Another thing is interacting with the computer. First, perceiving
    the world is a big thing. Because we don’t have a screen, mouse, and
    a keyboard anymore. You have– so what’s going to replace those? And
    here there’s, of course, dozens of startups, hundreds of startups
    that are trying to create those new interaction devices, whether it’s
    voice based, whether it’s gesture based, gaze tracking, brain
    interaction, all these kind of things. So we’re kind of looking at
    all these types of interactions.

    And then once you have that

    infrastructure in place in the interaction, how do you build content
    for that new world? You’re not going to use the traditional tools
    that we’ve all used for 2D computing. There’s is need for new kind of
    tools, whether it’s to create content, to capture content from the
    real world and make it available in AR. How do you enable
    prototyping? How do you enable development for non-programmers? So
    kind of world building is another big area of ours. And then there’s
    the AR that is probably gonna be the most important for the adoption
    of AR and VR in the future. And that is about communication and
    collaboration. So how do we provide what we call “shared
    presence,” that we can interact with people all over the world
    but feel like we’re in the same room looking at the same thing in
    real time. It has some roots in conferencing technologies, but it’s
    really taking it to a whole new level. And I think if you look at the
    top twenty domains on the Web, on the Internet today, the majority of
    them are all about communication and collaboration. So it’s probably
    a good guess that this is what will drive AR and VR in the future as
    well. The last category is around giving superpowers to people or
    upgrading our intelligence. And that’s where you see a lot of
    applications as well as technologies that are kind of trying to
    address that. And that’s an opportunity to invest in solutions or
    applications that target specific industries and can really take
    employees or consumers to a whole new level. So these are kind of
    what we call the “moonshots” or the special areas that are
    really unique to spatial computing that we’re looking at investing.

    Alan: One of the things that I

    see as a disconnect between investors currently and what’s going to
    be needed: content. You know, somebody has to make this content. And
    until companies can make it themselves, which these platforms in
    theory should enable customers to build it themselves. But in
    practicality, that’s not what we’re seeing. We’re seeing that content
    studios are becoming the only companies that are making a lot of
    money right now in this industry. And they’re starting to get bought
    up. Riot got bought by Verizon. Deloitte just bought a studio. And I
    think the content development is going to be one of those key parts
    that in other technologies is often overlooked as you’re not
    investible. But we’re already seeing small wins with these, and I
    understand the VC model trying to aim for the unicorn companies. But
    I think there’s a lot of money to be made on these smaller studios
    and developers that are making content and there’s tons of them
    popping up around. But of the thousands of them that are popping up,
    there’s gonna be ones that make their way to the top, like Fishermen
    Labs, for example, is doing an amazing job, just making Snapchat
    filters for people. And that’s– I can see their path to being
    acquired by Snapchat and to do it internally because they’re
    profitable, they’re making money. What are your thoughts on content
    providers?

    Ori: We definitely look at the

    content providers as a kind of a key sector that will kind of define
    the future of the adoption of AR and VR. You know, I said that the
    tech is good enough and it’s really the time for creators to get in.
    And that’s still true. But it’s still, we need to develop a really
    good app or great content in AR. It’s not as easy as creating a
    mobile or social app today. It requires really deep understanding of
    this new medium, how it’s different, how it’s– You can not just
    copy-paste a mobile app into an AR app and hope for the best, that’s
    definitely not going to work. So what I’m seeing is that people that
    have been trying to build apps or creating experiences for years are
    the ones that really tend to get it, because they’ve tried different
    things, they’ve seen what works, what users like, what kind of breaks
    the model. And they seem to build the best content. So I think unlike
    other cases where a new company can come in and in six months build
    an MVP for a social app or a mobile app, it’s not the case with AR.

    And that’s where we look for people

    that have tried things, because you need to not just understand this
    new medium, but in many cases design and develop in a completely new
    user experience. That’s where the reinvention is happening right now.
    And it’s not just the user experience, also the business models where
    things are changing. So, many companies are still trying to do things
    like SAS models or things that are kind of proven and investors like
    to invest in once they see the metrics hitting. And I think many of
    these models will still be relevant. But it’s up to us, the companies
    developing in this industry to look for how to adapt those business
    models so that they fit in this new environment, because it’s not
    about searching an app in the app store anymore. It’s not about
    clicking on the link and getting to another link. It’s really about
    experiencing things in the real world or in the virtual world. And so
    how do you get people there? How do they behave in that world and how
    do you get their attention? It’s a whole set of new questions that
    we’re just now starting to scratch the surface on.

    Alan: Absolutely. Well, my

    friend, we could talk about this all day, every day and never really
    finish what we set out to talk about. What problem in the world do
    you want to see solved using XR technologies?

    Ori: I’ll have two answers for

    that. The first one is the big problem that is trying to solve is
    awareness and adoption. Meaning, although we’re seeing almost like a
    third of all mobile users have seen some AR experiences — which is
    already amazing — but it’s one of those technologies that until you
    see it, until you experience it, you don’t really understand the
    benefits of it. So kind of– so one of the big challenges is kind of
    how do you get it in front of more people so that they try it, and
    they get it, and then they want more of it. So kind of solving the
    problem of awareness and adoption are huge. What can XR, or AR and VR
    solve, let’s say on a on a global level? [garbled] the top five
    biggest threats that are facing humanity right now. One is the
    growing population and the fact that we see migration and people
    losing their jobs and finding it hard to get upskilled for new jobs.
    I think in that area XR and especially AR can help a lot with
    especially in the upskilling of employees and in allowing them to be
    productive anywhere they are. I think that could be probably a huge
    area of help for the future of humanity on this earth. And then
    there’s, of course, healthcare, global warming or climate change,
    that I think once you visualize things to allow people to better
    understand the impact of what’s happening can see the future of how
    the world is going to look like in 20 or 50 years from now and kind
    of trigger them to take action much, much sooner than before. So–

    Alan: It’s kind of a terrifying

    thought, to be honest.

    Ori: Which part?

    Alan: Looking out 20 to 50 years

    in the future. If we don’t course correct.

    Ori: I’ll give you a simple

    example. And these are apps that are already available today in some
    some locations. You want to see what does it mean, a five inch of
    oceans rising. Where would– I live in New York, and I actually can
    look at– look around in the streets and see where the water would
    go. And that’s really terrifying. And that’s exactly the purpose of
    that visualization.

    Alan: Was that the one done

    with– on the Hololens in Times Square? There was a Hololens exhibit
    where they showed what it would be like if sea water rose by five–
    was it five feet or five inches? It was crazy. And all of Times
    Square was underwater by like 10 feet.

    Ori: That’s right.

    Alan: Terrifying.

    Ori: Exactly. And once you see

    that, I think you cannot really think about it as a theoretical
    problem, it becomes real and and people are bound to take action once
    they see it.

    Alan: Chris Milk said it “VR

    can be the ultimate empathy machine” and AR is an extension of
    the real world connected with the digital world and being able to
    show us the future and help us course correct. I think we can use
    these technologies — if harnessed properly — to create the next
    generation’s thought patterns around instead of “What job do I
    want to get?” or “What party do I want to go to?”
    “What challenge in the world do I want to take on?” “How
    do I give back to humanity?” We have the power of technology to
    deliver that message and create those habits and create that mindset
    in the next generations, which should set us on the right course for
    humanity.

    Ori: I like that mission.

    Alan: Me too. I hope I can

    fulfill it. And that’s the hard part. Ori, I want to thank you so
    much for taking the time out of your busy schedule to join me today.
    If anybody wants to learn more about the work that Ori and his team
    are doing, you can visit augmentedreality.org, awexr.com or
    superventures.com. Ori, thank you again.

    Ori: Thank you, Alan. It’s been

    a pleasure.

    46 min
  • Go XR or Go Extinct, with Super Ventures' Ori Inbar
    Regular listeners have heard plenty
    of stories from Alan's numerous adventures at Augmented World Expo.
    In today's episode, we go to the source of all those tales, with
    AWE's co-founder and executive producer, Ori Inbar -- just ahead of
    this year's summit.
    Alan: Welcome to the XR for
    Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. I am super excited to
    have our next guest today, Ori Inbar. He's a world leading expert in
    the field of augmented reality industry, and he has devoted the past
    decade to fostering the AR ecosystem as an entrepreneur, advisor, and
    investor. He's the founder and managing partner for Super Ventures
    and the CEO of AugmentedReality.org, a nonprofit that produces
    Augmented World Expo, the top industry conference for AR since 2010.
    To learn more about what he's doing, you can visit
    augmentedreality.org and awexr.com or superventures.com.
    Ori, welcome to the show, my friend.
    Ori: Thank you, Alan. It's
    awesome to be here.
    Alan: It's so exciting to have
    you. I've been waiting for this episode for so long and I just can't
    wait to get right in. Maybe can you just give us your first AR
    experience, and how did you get into this? You know, I watched your
    2019 keynote from AWE again, and put on these these welding glasses
    that you had back in 2009. You've been doing this for ten years
    without any reduction in passion. And how did you get involved? Like,
    what was that precipitating moment for you?
    Ori: So for me, after the
    startup I was working for was acquired by SFP -- and I spent seven
    years there -- decided to leave and go back to my roots in startup.
    And then I realized that my kids are always stuck in front of a
    screen, computer screen or playing video games. And on one hand, it
    felt like we cannot really change the future. But I was trying to
    look for a way for kids -- and adults -- to kind of interact with the
    real world, like we did as kids. But by adding some of the things
    that attract kids and adults to computers and to video games and to
    social media and kind of merge it into reality. And at that time, I
    thought I kind of invented something new. But then upon some
    research, I realized there's a term for it, it's called augmented
    reality, it's been around for many decades. But it was hidden in labs
    in a few places around the world. So the mission immediately became
    to find a way to bring it to the mainstream, to the masses. And then
    the iPhone was announced and it felt like finally we have an ideal
    device to deliver augmented reality to everyone, because they already
    have it in their pockets. Of course, from there the path was very
    long and arduous and still is. But I think we're starting to see some
    of the fruits in the last couple of years where a bunch of new
    applications -- whether it's for enterprise or for consumers -- are
    hitting the market and are actually showing value. So it seems like
    we're definitely on the path to making it mainstream.
    Alan: My first AWE was three
    years ago and I remember it was amazing to me, because I went to
    Silicon Valley VR meet-up or SVVR, and it was mainly VR. And then I
    went to AWE and it was a lot of augmented reality, and glasses, and
    there was companies there making glasses that looked like aliens had
    built them. And it felt really clunky. I almost had this feeling like
    this is really cool, I can see where it's going, but it's not quite
    there. And it's it's just not ready for the real world, in my
    opinion. But you go back this year and everything is actually,
    Porsche’s using this and Lockheed Martin is using it. Huge
    companies not only are done with their pilot phase, but they're
    rolling it out at scale. So what do you think has happened in the
    last three years to take it from a cottage industry to something
    that's in the billions of dollars?
    Ori: Actually, if you take it
    bac
    0 min
  • The Age of Smart Information is Now, with Microsoft Garage Envisioneer Mike Pell

    It wasn’t long ago that the concept

    of having a personal relationship with computers was the stuff of
    science fiction — everything from HAL 9000 to V’Ger posited a
    far-out future when that would start to happen. Well, according to
    Mike Pell — author of THE AGE OF SMART INFORMATION — that time is
    now.

    Alan: Welcome to the XR for

    Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is
    somebody absolutely spectacular. Mr. Mike Powell, he is the head of
    the Microsoft Garage and the author of “Age of Smart
    Information,” a new book about how artificial intelligence and
    spatial computing will transform the way we communicate forever. Find
    the latest on Mike at futuristic.com and excerpts from his new book,
    at theageofsmartinformation.com.

    Mike, welcome to the show.

    Mike: Thank you, Alan. My

    pleasure to be here.

    Alan: It’s so exciting. I was

    gifted your book actually by a good friend of mine, John Bizzell. And
    we had lunch and he’s “Oh, you haven’t read this book.” And
    I guess he sent it to me on Amazon. I got it the next day, and I’ve
    been just voraciously reading this book since, I’m about halfway
    through. But man, your book has really opened my eyes to how
    everything around us will not only have the data available, but it’ll
    be in context to our personal needs. And it’s really incredible. So
    how did you– just kind of walk us through your journey of how you
    went from inventing PDFs, to writing books on smart information?

    Mike: It’s a long story, but

    I’ll try to keep it really short. You’re right, a lot of this did
    sort of form when I was back in the early 90s when I was working on
    Acrobat with some of my friends at Adobe. Back then, when we were
    working on the very first electronic documents for interchange, it
    was very apparent that people were not going to enjoy reading these
    things like sitting upright and being uncomfortable. You really
    needed some hardware and software that didn’t exist at that point to
    enjoy the information, right. To enjoy whether it was book or
    documents or reports, whatever it is you were reading. And so at that
    time, I started to think a lot about how the information itself —
    you know, the thing that we were reading — was so dead and lifeless.
    I guess it was amazing that you could now transfer to other places
    when people around the world could see exactly what you were trying
    to say. But the thoughts about how there was always more to it
    started to percolate back then. And over my career, I’ve always had
    the good fortune of working on the leading edge of technology. So I
    was very early into 3D and interactive graphics and visualization,
    and I started to do a lot of experiments with bringing information to
    life. I’ve always been fascinated with communications, helping people
    communicate as clearly as they can. And so that was really the start
    of a lot of this, was trying to see what we can do to help people be
    able to understand and communicate better by using the information,
    the things that we create every day, whether that’s tweets or emails
    or books or movies or music, doesn’t matter. Whatever the medium is
    that you’re communicating in, there’s always so much more that can be
    brought out that we as people understand inherently, but yet are
    never reflected in that final form, that piece of communication comes
    in. So that’s where we started.

    Alan: So let’s unpack that. So,

    you know, I’m reading a PDF, then you guys probably added the ability
    to have hyperlinks and then what else can you add. Now you’re looking
    at, “OK, what does the world look like when the computers are no
    longer bound by the 16 by 9 rectangular shape?”

    Mike: Yeah, exactly. That was

    part of that original thought. You need to be able to enjoy, or
    absorb whatever it is, or create whatever it is in the current
    context of what you’re doing. So lots of people have worked on this
    problem, but now we’re getting to the point where it’s getting easier
    and it’s getting easier for us to understand what you’re doing right
    now, where you are, what the situation calls for. And then having
    that information — that whatever it is, that artifact is that you’re
    looking at or creating — having that reflect the best way for you to
    absorb or communicate in your current context. And that means that
    everything, all these objects that we create and consume will be very
    flexible in the way that they can present themselves, depending on–
    if you’re walking down the street with an Airbud in, you’ll be
    getting your information in audio. If you’re in your home and you
    have a large screen available, maybe it will be presented or
    projected based on that. If you’re in the office or at school and you
    have access to laptops or other people’s mobile devices, being able
    to share things on that. So the information itself is the one that’s
    going to become more smart. People will have to do less work to be
    able to consume. And the computers and the systems that we create
    will be doing more of the work to help us get the best information in
    the right way.

    Alan: You know, I read a quote

    yesterday and it was, “It’s no longer about what you know,
    because everybody has access to Google, and Google knows everything.
    So it’s no longer about what you know, it’s how you use that
    knowledge to create new and novel things.” And I thought that
    was interesting. And one of the quotes from your book — I’m going to
    read a bunch of quotes from your book because I think people need to
    hear this stuff — “In the not too distant future, our most
    frequent interactions and conversations may well be with our devices
    and information, rather than real people. Oh, wait, that already
    happened.” That quote there just stuck with me because I was
    thinking, “Oh my God, how much time do we spend looking at our
    phones?” And I look at my teenage daughter — she’s 15 — she’ll
    be sitting with a group of her friends, and they’re all together, all
    on their phones.

    Mike: Yeah, I’ve observed that a

    few times myself. Well, the interesting thing, too, is people are
    starting to get more comfortable talking to devices, especially in
    public places. Now, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen people
    talk to Siri, or ask Alexa for something. And they’re just getting
    more and more comfortable having conversational exchanges with pieces
    of hardware and software. And that’s kind of a big leap over where we
    were. People even talk to their remotes now, right? Like, if you have
    Comcast Xfinity, they have the remote that will do all of the finding
    your favorite shows just by talking to it. That’s become so easy for
    some people, that it’s just natural now. For that to extend into what
    we do in the enterprise and certainly in school, being able to be
    more conversational with our information, with the things that we are
    working with the most.

    Alan: I got to– when I was at

    CES this year, I got to try Kopin. They make glasses and stuff for–
    they make the actual hardware for smart glasses. And one of the
    things that they had was this thing called Whisper… something
    technology, and it had microphones built into the glasses that
    allowed me to command the glasses to do whatever I wanted. I could
    ask them questions, whatever. But the great thing was that the person
    standing right in front of me was seeing the same commands and it
    wasn’t triggering it. And so being able to whisper commands because,
    you know, not everybody wants to sit on the train into work and be
    yelling at their glasses. My wife and I have the thing where you see
    people walking down the street: are they crazy, or are they on the
    phone? Do they have a earbud in, or are they just talking to
    themselves? So it’s one of those things where we still haven’t really
    figured out what the interactions are gonna be. Is it, am I going to
    look at something and wink, or am I going to wave my hand, or am I
    going to talk to it? Obviously, speech is going to be a big part of
    it and it’s probably gonna be all these things. How do you think
    we’re going to interact with the technology as we move into glasses?

    Mike: Yeah. So glasses won’t be

    the only thing that we’re interacting with. You just touched on it
    very well. Whether it’s your mobile device, or your laptop or desktop
    at work or school, or your X-Box, or Alexa, whatever you have at
    home. We’re gonna have to be able — as designers, as experienced
    designers — we have to do a better job of figuring out how to let
    you have those conversations when they’re appropriate and when
    they’re needed with a device, without making it feel strange. Like
    you were just saying, someone walking down the street talking to
    themselves. Well, it’s hard to avoid that because there’s not someone
    walking next to them, right? Like, of course you’re going to look a
    little strange. But in the office, if you’re working out in an open
    space — like many of us do — we have conversations all the time,
    right? You may be sitting at your desk and sort of shouting across
    the room or talking to someone sitting next to you. That’s all
    considered very natural. But it’s because there’s a person, right?
    There’s sort of an entity that you’re conversing with. And in the
    same way, the agents that we have today — the Siris and Cortanas and
    Alexas — those will become more personified, right? Sort of embodied
    AIs that will feel like you are talking more to something that has
    the characteristics of a person. So it won’t be so strange even for
    people around you because of the conversation, the back and forth and
    the interaction with those agents will feel more natural.

    Alan: It’s getting interesting

    how the conversations with Siri and Alexa and Google Home, they’re
    just– I don’t know if we’re learning how to ask the right questions,
    or it’s getting smarter in knowing what we actually mean, or a little
    bit of both. And you have this part of the book where you talk about
    engineering clarity and quantifying the science of how to synthesize
    the moment of clarity is our quest now. Can you unpack that a bit?

    Mike: Yeah, so go back to what

    you just mentioned, we’re still sort of in the uncanny valley of
    conversational UI, right? There’s still something a bit strained and
    a bit unnatural about it. But we will cross that very quickly. But in
    the getting to clarity, that’s one of the things that’s fascinated me
    for a very long time is — as someone who does of talks, I talk to
    people all the time — being clear is sort of an art, right? There’s
    not a lot of science to it. I guess you can prepare slides in a
    particular way. You can get your talking points down, very articulate
    and in proper order. But there is still something a bit intangible
    about getting somebody to that that a-ha moment, that that moment of
    clarity. And there is no reason with all of the things that we have
    at our disposal right now, machine learning, reinforcement learning,
    all of the presentation technologies involved with XR. There’s no
    reason why we can’t apply a lot of our engineering talent and time to
    figuring out what is it exactly that gets somebody to that moment of
    understanding. You know, it’s not voodoo, right? It’s not like this
    black art. There is a way to do it. And with so much work and brain
    science going on, coupled with AI and XR, we will be able to actually
    get you there faster, which has huge implications for education,
    certainly, and enterprise communication.

    Alan: Well, you spoke the right

    language for me. My mission in life is to inspire and educate future
    leaders to think and act in a socially, economically and
    environmentally sustainable way. And I believe truly that we can
    completely democratize education, give everybody the best possible
    education, by– my goal is by 2037. I just picked a random date in
    the future.

    Mike: [laughs]

    Alan: I figured, it’s going to

    take 15 years for us to figure out all the tech and then another two
    years to scale it. But if you think about, let’s say in five years we
    wear glasses, and all the processing power is moving to the cloud. I
    just did an interview with the head of XR for Verizon, and they’re
    building systems that will allow cloud edge computing that are real
    time edge computing, meaning I no longer have to have any computing
    power on my phone or device or glasses. I can push it all into the
    cloud. And as long as I’m within a 5G radius, I have the world’s most
    powerful computers working for me, real time. You know, that will
    unlock education and training and learning at a whole different
    level. And then when you apply specific algorithms around
    personalization and contextualization of that data as needed real
    time, but also delivering more of that. So, you know, Netflix
    delivers content as I watch more movies, but we don’t do that for
    education at all in our education systems. They’re not really set up
    to take advantage of exponential technologies. In fact, they’re set
    up to not take advantage of any of those technologies. And over the
    years, it took 20 years to get computers in schools. We don’t have 20
    years to wait anymore as these technologies start to move. In the
    next 10 years, majority of jobs that will be created don’t exist yet.
    And we don’t know how to start training people for jobs that don’t
    exist yet. So being able to give education at scale at the time of
    need and hyper contextualized is very important. And what you’re
    talking about here is figuring out that interaction between us and
    the devices that is natural and simplifies our life rather than
    complicates it.

    Mike: Yeah, that’s precisely why

    we started an experiment here in the Microsoft Garage, working in
    conjunction with Dr. Fabio Zambetta of RMIT University in Melbourne,
    Australia. I had this idea — based on some of the work in the book
    and based on Fabio’s work with reinforcement learning — of creating
    what we’re calling the adaptive textbook. It’s an experiment in
    figuring out how we can actually make what you described, that hyper
    contextualized textbook or way of learning that adapts itself to the
    way that the person learns, the right message or the right medium for
    the situation, and also their history of what’s worked for them and
    what hasn’t. So it’s been a very successful partnership. It’s super
    fascinating to work on this because it’s going for what you describe.
    How can we be the best we can for students? How can we present the
    information in the best way for them to be able to make sense of it
    and be able to build on that?

    Alan: It’s a big undertaking,

    right? But as these technologies start to– and I think it’s going to
    start — and you’re probably already seeing it — it’s starting in
    enterprise. All the big companies are starting to go, “Oh, OK,
    well, we’ll experiment with it. Oh, the experiments yielded 100
    percent better results. Amazing. OK, well, let’s let’s move it
    forward.” And so, I think personally it’s gonna be this road to
    development using enterprise as the guinea pig, I guess, would be the
    easiest way to describe it. Well, how do you see kind of schools
    adopting this this new adaptive textbook?

    Mike: Well, right now, it’s just

    an experiment. But the ideas are out there. And certainly teachers
    are grasping onto this notion that virtual reality is a great boon to
    immersing kids in particular things, whether it’s physics or being
    able to study, you know, things about the ocean. There’s lots of
    applications for that. Augmented reality is being used in different
    ways, being able to actually be able to put more than what’s on the
    surface level. And that’s sort of where I dug in, as far as education
    and the enterprise. I tried to sort of take it a step further and
    say, you know what, it it’s not enough to augment physical object or
    something digital that already exists. Let’s actually inject some
    intelligence and presentation capability into those digital artifacts
    themselves and see how that can actually help propel all this
    forward. So that’s sort of where I laid out a roadmap in the book of
    how this will work, where it will go, and education and the
    enterprise itself will be the headpins for this, because there’s just
    such fantastic applications for it, it’s so obvious to everyone how
    this can help people immediately. And that’s probably why you’re
    seeing a lot of the big wins in the enterprise coming in the training
    space, because you can take something that’s been difficult and
    costly and really make it not only better, but super successful for
    those people.

    Alan: What are some of the use

    cases that you’re seeing that are starting to be used, not just
    experimentally? Because I think that’s one of the problems with this
    technology is people– companies will jump in, they’ll do a POC,
    they’ll do a pilot, and then it gets stuck between that pilot phase
    and then rolling it out at scale because, change is difficult. Where
    are you seeing things moving forward in a real measurable way?

    Mike: Yeah, yeah. I always like

    to say “change is good unless it’s bad.” Yeah, there’s some
    really great applications that we’re seeing in the enterprise.
    Certainly if you look at the Microsoft Dynamics line of mixed reality
    products that we brought out. Being able to do first line worker
    assistance, right? Having someone be able to help you with a task or
    be able to guide you through something is super interesting,
    valuable, and something that’s not going to go away. Being able to
    have a Hololens on and interact with people, get to the documentation
    or training that you need on the spot is something that we’ve all
    known would come along eventually and now actually exists. And we’re
    doing quite well with that. Same thing with laying out and moving
    equipment within the manufacturing or factory floors, being able to
    use all the power of mixed reality to place objects, scale them,
    align them, make sure that construction projects are going on the
    pace that they should be going. Those are the applications that are
    really paying out in the short term.

    Alan: I think so. I think the

    next phase of this is –band you touched on it in the book —
    allowing people to author content. You have this kind of mantra that
    you can be a consumer of content, which we all are, and you can also
    be a creator of content, which I think more and more people are, with
    things like TikTok and Instagram. People have become a lot more
    creative, they’re starting to make things and author things, and
    being able to create tools that allow anybody to make AR or VR
    simply, I think will unlock the true potential of it.

    One of the things you mentioned in the

    book is “authoring content will be hugely affected by an
    injection of services and platforms to create smart information
    containers, that are capable of housing multiple representations of
    the same information in a multitude of forms.” Whether you’re
    wearing a Hololens or you’re wearing Bose AR glasses. You’ve got a
    smartphone, a computer screen. There’s so many ways to consume
    content. How do we make it easy for people to build once and have it
    recognized by all the different mediums? That I think is a big
    challenge as well.

    Mike: Yeah, well, as discussed

    in the book, the tool sets are really where all of the work is gonna
    be done. We’ve relied on people to create multiple forms of content
    forever, right? And we all know it’s a giant pain to do that. It’s
    just sometimes we just don’t even have enough time; even if we have
    the talent, just don’t have enough time. So, for example, we could
    take this podcast in the not too distant future. You can use it as
    just audio only or you can get the transcript. You can have that
    transcript translated into however many dozens of languages
    instantly. You can have this turn into, let’s say, a visual
    presentation just by the topics that we’re talking about being auto
    pulled in by some AI machine learning programs. So there are things
    that we know are possible, but the tool sets have just not been
    updated yet. And that’s where we’re getting to right now, is being
    able to have these AI assisted authoring tools that will do a lot of
    the heavy lifting for you, whether it’s for creating educational
    plans. So a teacher is preparing a plan on physics. They can do what
    they normally do. But in the course of doing that, the tool that
    they’re using will actually pull in a whole bunch of other
    information and create different forms of that. So the students can
    either listen to the lecture, or see the lecture, or experience it
    even in a virtual reality or mixed reality environment.

    Alan: That’s really exciting.

    And to your point, we actually use an AI subscription service to
    transcribe all of these episodes and then we actually have a person
    go through and pick out all the quotes and do that. But we’re using
    like five different SAS based services to take the podcast interview,
    to transcribe it, to create it into a little video that’s like a
    video header and then make it available as a blog post. Make it
    available. I’d never thought of different languages as well. But
    yeah, this is something that we’re already doing and we don’t even
    think of. It was like, how do we maximize the content?

    Mike: Yeah, so the service that

    we’re using — you and I are using right now — to record this
    conversation can easily be adapted to generate all of those different
    forms. It’s just a matter of the tool manufacturer. You know, the
    service provider took it all together. I mean, all of the tech
    exists. It’s just in different places.

    Alan: Well, that is interesting

    you say that because our new business model — and then we’ve been
    working on this for about six months, trying to figure it out — is
    actually to build a centralized hub that allows all the different
    startups to tap into one central hub, standardize their product
    offerings to a certain level that is commensurate with doing business
    with corporate’s. And then that way, they can do business with
    corporate’s without having to pitch everybody in. You have one
    centralized platform for learning and any technology that’s invented
    as we move forward — whether it’s AI or VR, XR, or whatever it is —
    can just plug right into this platform. And that way companies don’t
    have to be constantly on the lookout for new technologies. They have
    one platform with all the new technology always there. And it’s
    almost like an Amazon model where we take a small percentage and and
    go from there. But the idea with that is that we couldn’t possibly
    build even if it was just 360 video. If we just focus on 360, you
    couldn’t possibly build all the tools necessary to deliver that and
    keep it future relevant. So by building the platform by which other
    startups, other smarter people around the world who are constantly
    developing new tools can plug into. I think that will future proof
    learning for the long time. For the long term.

    Mike: Yeah, it’s always great to

    put a platform together where you’re building on the amazing work of
    other people. It certainly is something that has shown its value in
    lots of different applications. Just take the XR space. I mean, look
    at how many people have now banded together to try to get some
    standardization, right? Whether it’s in the tooling or the playback.

    Alan: OpenXR.

    Mike: Yeah, I mean, that’s

    definitely the way to go. It’s difficult to get this stuff to go
    quickly because when you’ve built tools for a very long time, when
    you’re building tools, you’re trying to add the next most relevant
    thing for your customers. And as you describe very well, this is a
    big investment, to create a better platform that’s more powerful to
    be able to have things plug in to do this autogeneration. But it will
    happen. It’s so obvious that that’s the missing piece for what we’ve
    been trying to do.

    Alan: Yeah, you’re absolutely

    right. I just kept thinking how can we possibly build all the tools
    that are gonna be needed for learning? It’s impossible. You break
    your brain on it, you’re going, “Okay, well, this…” You
    end up just crying in the corner, shaking a bit.

    Mike: Yeah, well, everybody,

    every entrepreneur and everyone, and any size company who wants– has
    big dreams like this and really wants to make it happen, realizes
    very quickly that you’ve got a call on the community, and do it at
    that level. So I’m sure that you’ll have a lot of success in pulling
    people together for that reason, because it is the next big thing for
    us to work on. And for me, throughout the book I’m just trying to
    show people that there’s more to it than this, that things are
    actually going to invert. So we will no longer be spending all of our
    time on the tools, because right now you and I and everybody else
    spends an inordinate amount of time on our tooling. Whether that’s
    Twitter or Word or After Effects or ProTools, whatever it is you’re
    using. People spend so much time in the creation phase and we can
    help so much. You know, there’s so much more to be done from the tool
    side to help you create even more forms. And then on the playback
    side, now, the playback mechanisms — as we talked about earlier —
    will get so smart they’ll realize what the best form, what the best
    medium is to communicate to you at that particular time.

    Alan: Yeah, and I think one of

    the points that you make is making things contextually relevant, you
    know, meaning when you’re looking at a space, the data that you
    require. And then if we fast forward maybe 10 years — let’s take 10
    years out, put our crazy hats on and look out 10 years — we should
    be able to just think something and the information appears to us. We
    shouldn’t even have to talk to it, it should just appear as we need
    it in context. There’s a list of–

    Mike: Which is exactly how your

    brain works today, right?

    Alan: Yeah.

    Mike: We already know how to do

    that. That’s sort of my point, too, as we’re trying to build
    mechanisms for people to create things in the way that’s convenient
    for us, the tool builder. Not in the way that’s convenient for
    people. And as the industry experience designers have gotten better
    and better over the last decade at trying to make things more
    natural. That’s where a lot of the great work with Alexa and Siri and
    Cortana and those types of agents have come from. And we will close
    that gap. And I don’t think it’ll be 10 years. But you’re right. At a
    certain point, you will be able to conjure whatever the information
    is, whether by thinking or by speaking or by gesturing. And it won’t
    be as difficult as it is today.

    Alan: It is difficult today.

    It’s a pain in the ass. You put a Hololens on, it’s great. And then I
    have to point out something, and click it in a certain way and– as
    we move to eye tracking, I think that will add a whole new element.
    Being able to collect millions of people’s information about their
    eye tracking, what they’re looking at, that will create this
    contextual loop of information, meaning we collect information, we
    study what people were actually looking for because, of course, it’s
    going to make mistakes when you ask for directions to X and it gives
    you directions to Y and then, of course, it gets corrected. So it’s
    kind of like autonomous vehicles in a way that when one car gets in
    an accident, every car learns to get better. And I tried to explain
    this to my brother and he couldn’t believe me that within five years
    we’ll have long transport trucks on the road that just drive
    themselves and don’t have anybody driving. Because I said, “look,
    every time a car gets in an accident, you know, with a person
    driving, nobody gets smarter, nobody gets better.” That person
    just goes, “Oh shit, I got in an accident.” But when an
    autonomous vehicle gets in an accident, every single car in the fleet
    gets updated with new information on how to prevent that from
    happening again.

    Mike: Exactly. That’s the new

    network effect, right? We saw it first with Moore’s Law, with
    hardware and electronics. Now we saw with social media groups
    growing, and the power of social. But now you’re right, with these
    networks, the interconnected neural networks that are always learning
    machine learning algorithms, always running in the background. We are
    able to get smarter all the time to everyone’s benefit. And the same
    holds true for information, whether it’s for education or in the
    enterprise. That kind of stuff is super exciting because all of a
    sudden something that was in isolation is now connected. And not only
    is it connected, it’s getting better or more correct or more accurate
    or more clear by the network effect.

    Alan: Absolutely. And it’s every

    day improving. I’m actually speaking with one of your colleagues, Dan
    Ayoub from Microsoft Education, at the Orlando Science Center. And
    we’re talking about how extended reality or XR is transforming
    education and training globally. The work that you guys are doing in
    the Garage, you’re probably working on things that won’t see the
    light of day — or may never see the light of day — but they’re
    building foundations for things that will come in five, ten years. So
    what is your roadmap look like, as far as where everybody wants to
    know what are what are we gonna do in the 3, 5, 10 year roadmap, 15,
    if you can look out that far. What is your roadmap look like? As far
    as when will we wear glasses? How will they work? How will it all
    work together? Where do you see this going in the next five to ten?

    Mike: Yeah. Well, clearly, you

    know, all the trends that we see now will accelerate. So I’m a big
    fan of how Ray Kurzweil studies the acceleration of our technology
    trends. And so I do think everything that you notice today will be
    sort of perfected within the next few years, meaning we will be able
    to have multi experience or multi-person experiences that are
    seamless, right? And just feel right. Whether it’s glasses, or
    headsets, or earbuds, or some new type of mobile, or like whether
    it’s a watch, or some kind of other wearable device. The technology,
    just as it always has, will continue to get smaller, be more
    embedded. I do think that we are going to get to a point very quickly
    where the wearable aspect of things will become more important. So
    right now, we carry our laptops, we carry our mobile devices and we
    carry our headsets even for that matter. And we will sort of
    crossover to the point where it becomes a more normal and regular
    part of our wardrobe, like the kinds of things that we will always
    have with us. So I think that’s–

    Alan: Yeah, I have a pair of

    North glasses, actually, and they’re pretty cool.

    Mike: Yeah, yeah. Well, just

    imagine, there’s just lots of people as interesting as how my
    conversation with someone the other day about Apple Watch. And I
    think it’s great news, like nice piece of work. It’s created an
    interesting side effect, which is, you know how when you’re in a
    meeting and someone — or at the dinner table for that matter — and
    someone pulls out their phone and they start fussing with it and your
    ear’s sort of put off by that.

    Alan: It sucks. Stop doing that.

    It’s a pain in the ass. You’re disconnecting from the conversation
    you’re in. Sorry.

    Mike: Right. Well, it’s right,

    right. So the same thing is now– the same thing that happened with
    phones is now happening with watches. So people in meetings are
    messing with their watch. You know, disengaging from the
    conversation. And now, of course, they’re getting a gazillion text
    messages. You can make phone calls from your watch. So, it’s great
    tech, but it has created a social side effect that was unintended,
    perhaps and maybe misunderstood. And that will keep happening, right?
    Keep happening with whether it’s glasses or, you know, your shirt or
    whatever that might be, like a bracelet, whatever that device is that
    we will use to create and communicate and stay in touch. If we don’t
    get better at what we talked about earlier, which is the interaction
    with other people. So we have to make it feel like you’re interacting
    with a person. So it’s more natural to the people around you. And
    that’s the other part of the equation. It’s one thing to interact
    naturally with your phone, watch, glasses, whatever. But it’s
    another, as you talked about, to be doing that with other people
    around you. And that’s where we as experienced designers have to get
    better at taking that into account. We have the sensors. We can tell
    that there’s other people around. We can tell where you are. We can
    tell if you’re moving or stationary, it’s all those factors that we
    sort of pull in. But we really need to understand the context better.
    And I talk about that a lot in the book, too, where it’s not enough
    to be good at communicating clearly or to get you the right
    information. It’s within the current context, meaning there’s other
    people around that you’re bothering, or not paying attention to, or
    disengaged from. And that’s a huge sort of area for us to explore and
    get right as we go into this, as you’re talking about the next three
    to five years. That’s where we’ve really fallen down, and we have to
    figure that out.

    Alan: You know, what’s really

    interesting is North just pushed an update, and the glasses
    recognized conversation and won’t show you — unless you click the
    ring — they won’t show you notifications when you’re having a
    conversation with somebody.

    Mike: That’s great. And there’s

    two sides to that. Well, I wish you did tell me that this is not
    actually the person I thought that was, right? I love that sci-fi
    scenario where your glasses tell you who you’re talking to. We have
    to get that balance right. It’s like, it’s good. Like, that sounds
    fantastic that they realize “You know what? I should be present
    when someone’s talking to me or I’m in a group of people.”
    That’s fantastic. But there is always more to that. Maybe I did
    actually just call that person the wrong name and maybe my glasses
    could tell me that that’s not actually them.

    Alan: Yeah, I think the North

    glasses, they figured out– my daughter’s, well, she was 14, but when
    I showed her them, she said “These are really beautiful. They
    get an 8 out of 10 for fashion, but a 2 out of 10 for function.”
    Because the field of view is so small at 15 degrees, and she had to
    wiggle them around to get them to work. And really, at the time that
    she tried it, you could only check your messages and the weather.
    Now, there’s you know, you can change your Spotify and you can order
    a Uber. There’s all sorts of things you can do. But from the mouth of
    babes is very, very important to listen to because they got the form
    factor right. I mean, they’re a pair of glasses that are light and
    they sit on my head and they look great, but they have very limited
    functionality.

    Mike: Yeah, that’s another fun

    thing that I think you’ll get to in the book is when I talk about our
    desire as designers and technologists sometimes to be clearly
    beautiful first, rather than being beautifully clear. As your
    daughter said: come on, fashion first. It’s got to look good. You
    don’t want to be wearing something that looks like a pair of ski
    goggles on your head. But the way that we go about that is we have to
    have the other part. It has to be functionally — as she said —
    functionally there. But it does need to be appealing. It does need to
    be something that we want to either wear or possess or interact with.
    And there’s a balance, always.

    Alan: I think Snapchat’s done a

    good job with their camera glasses. The first pairs, there was a huge
    demand, they got this pent up demand. And now they’ve come up with a
    new pair. They’re even sleeker looking. They’re always looking for
    the forward fashion. But to your point at the beginning is, when it’s
    just a pair of Ray-Bans that I can just buy off the shelf and they
    just have this capabilities built into them. And then you can buy any
    frame you want off the shelf that fits your face, not just two
    designs or one design that may look great on somebody else, but maybe
    not on me. I mean, I like my North glasses, but I don’t wear glasses.

    Mike: Yeah. You don’t have to be

    a futurist to predict that that will happen before too long. I mean,
    everything’s getting faster and cheaper and smaller. Always does. And
    it will continue in this particular industry. And so we will get to
    that very sleek piece of eyewear, or watch, or bracelet, or necklace,
    or whatever the case may be. That will happen before too long.

    Alan: Have you tried the Nreal

    glasses?

    Mike: No, I missed those when I

    was at South by [Southwest].

    Alan: They’re really good, big

    field of view, lightweight. They’ve offloaded the processing power to
    a phone, I guess. They can wire through USB-C. But the form factor is
    like a pair of glasses. And if you’re walking down the street and you
    saw somebody wearing them, you wouldn’t actually know that they were
    AR glasses, very similar to the North. They’re just very incognito.
    The only difference is they have a huge field of view compared to the
    North glasses. And they have absolutely no apps or anything
    available. So, it’s more of a developer kit and trying to get that.
    But I think that’s where Apple, and Google, and even Facebook have a
    massive advantage over companies, even like Magic Leap with 3 billion
    plus in funding. They don’t have the developer ecosystem. And I think
    that’s where Apple is really going to shine because they’ve
    introduced a ARKit, and Google’s introduced ARCore. And in my
    opinion, those are the training wheels to true spatial computing.

    Mike: Well, let’s not forget

    about Microsoft and our incredible developer community and all the
    great work that’s been happening with mixed reality. And in the
    Hololens development kits. Especially when you look at our focus on
    the enterprise, I mean, we’ve gotten very serious about business and
    applying this technology to people getting their jobs done more
    efficiently. And I think that there’s huge inroads that have been
    made. And so something to keep an eye on, especially for your
    interest in the enterprise and what XR is doing. Microsoft Dynamics
    Group is doing amazing work and delivering some very, very useful
    software for the enterprise. But this brings up another interesting
    point for you to think about. So imagine whether it’s for education
    or for the enterprise, imagining a room full of people, whether it’s
    a classroom of 30 kids or three hundred at a lecture, all having
    whatever, watches, glasses, and they’re all basically immersed. What
    is that like? You know, if you’re in a business meeting in a
    conference room with six people or, you know, there’s two of you and
    three or four other people are remote and everybody’s using a
    different type of immersion, you know, a different type of augmented
    reality or mixed reality. What does that feel like? And so that’s
    where we spend some time thinking about that type of interaction. And
    what’s the value prop and what is the experience of being there and
    having to deal with so many people, having so much at their disposal?
    What does that do to the dynamics of our normal conversation?

    Alan: I think– You know, I had

    the opportunity — well, I was one of the first people to buy a
    Hololens — and I got to try the Hololens 2. And hands-dow,n an
    amazing device. But what I really found intriguing about the Hololens
    is that they moved it from the devices department to the cloud
    compute. And when they did that, it allowed me to kind of see the
    vision for Microsoft as using these devices in the future, because
    it’s no longer about just building a device that is cool. This is a
    tool that runs on the cloud that is bringing real enterprise value
    now, and that is connected to the entire Microsoft ecosystem. And
    that, I think. is really powerful because that’s one of the problems
    that I see with the other headsets that, you know, you put them on
    and they’re great and you’ve got like 10 demos and that’s cool. And
    every single one has the same problem. People go through the demo,
    they go, that’s cool. And they put it down. Never put it back on.
    I’ve seen it time and time and again. We’ve done thousands of demos
    for people and it’s the same thing: They put it on, they look around,
    they go “Oh, this is cool!”, they experience it, they take
    it off, and they never want to put it on again. They don’t say, “Hey,
    what else can I do?” And I think we need to kind of bridge that
    gap. Whereas the path that Microsoft took with the Hololens was “We
    don’t really care about cool.” I mean, the first thing I saw was
    this aliens blasting through the walls, which was neat and it got my
    attention. But really what it’s premised on now is the ROI driven
    results. And I think that’s really the exciting part about this. When
    you can go into a company and say, hey, by using this technology in
    this way, you will save or make this much money.

    Mike: Yeah. And I’m sure you’ve

    seen this firsthand every day. The people who want VR or MR or AR to
    become mainstream, that are sort of fixated on “What are the
    sales numbers going to be? When are we going to break through into
    mainstream?” They’re sort of missing the point, that these
    devices and this technology is incredibly useful in its current form
    for very particular tasks. And it’s that specialized nature that is
    its true advantage right now. Someone made a great analogy for me a
    couple of years ago. They said we don’t even think twice when we see
    someone wearing a welder’s mask, right? We know exactly what they’re
    doing and why they’re wearing a welder’s mask. And in a similar way,
    that’s the value of using these headsets right now, there are very
    particular specialized tasks that they are incredibly useful for. And
    that’s what we should be thinking about and not fretting because they
    haven’t broken into 500,000,000 sales, right?

    Alan: Yeah, yeah, I think that’s

    more of a VC investor mentality.

    Mike: Well, but it’s also the

    industry itself. There are many people who get down on VR, whether
    it’s the media or the people that are actually building these things,
    because there are not– in some cases breakout, you know, huge number
    of successes yet, the value they provide are more than paying for the
    investment in these types of scenarios, and I’m sure you see this
    with your clients and people you deal with all the time in the
    enterprise.

    Alan: Absolutely. At the end of

    the day, we started doing marketing things because at the beginning,
    you’d go into a meeting and they’d say, “OK, well, who’s done it
    before? How much does it cost, and what was the ROI?” You’re
    like, “Nobody, a lot, and we have no idea. Still want to spend a
    million bucks?” It was a really hard sell. And now when we go
    and have these conversations, it’s a totally different conversation.
    We go in, we do a quick demo, and then it’s about how we can drive
    real measurable ROI, measuring the key performance indicators against
    what you’re traditionally using. So we’ll set a benchmark and then
    we’ll use VR and AR to deliver results and then we’ll compare the
    two. And then based on those, you can either move forward or not. But
    everybody moved forward, because the results are ridiculously
    awesome.

    Mike: Especially in education,

    where you’re sort of focused right now, is so dramatic. And I’m sure
    that the KPIs will bear all this out over time. But you can just tell
    immediately, if someone asks you what are the numbers around ROI, you
    ask a student, let’d try this and that’s what they need to know.

    Alan: Absolutely. So what are

    the most important things that businesses can do right now to start
    leveraging the power of XR? I mean, you’re already seeing it across
    many enterprises. But let’s say it’s a small or medium sized business
    that wants to start getting into this. What’s the most important
    thing businesses can do right now to leverage this power of the
    technology?

    Mike: Yeah. In the book, there’s

    a chapter about surfacing the invisible, which I think is one of the
    key benefits of any type of XR technology. There’s so much under the
    surface that we never get to see. And so I think any sized business,
    small, medium business or large enterprises can use the power of XR,
    both AI and XR together, to surface these things that people don’t
    normally see, whether that’s value, functionality, additional
    information, levels of detail. There’s all the obvious things that
    people always talk about. You know, you can use augmented reality to
    show off some interesting facets of your product or service in the
    sales cycle, certainly, but there’s more to it. And if you sort of
    flip it over and look at how you run your business. There is so much
    to be unlocked. You know, our businesses are complicated, whether
    they’re small, a family owned business, or a medium sized
    corporation, or a global company. We all have so much complexity and
    there’s so much going on. Being able to visualize — that’s one of
    the key things that I work on — is being able to visualize complex
    systems, processes, being able to show people things that we know. We
    form our own mental models and we sort of know how they work. But
    this technology helps us see it, for that matter, be in it in a way
    that we’ve never been able to do before. You talked about painting in
    3D earlier in the podcast, right? That is just mind-blowing to any
    designer or artist, right? Being able to– It’s completely life
    changing. There are very similar types of experiences in the
    enterprise, when you can visualize how your process is really working
    or how your sales cycle is not working or how your manufacturing
    business could be so much better if it were to be this way. People do
    this in Excel spreadsheets today. They do it in PowerPoint, they do
    it in conversation. But rarely do you get to actually visualize and
    experience with other people how this could really be different. So
    you can play the what if, you can simulate, you can do all kinds of
    forecasting. So things that we all do on our minds today are now able
    to be seen and experienced through XR. And the enterprise or small
    business is a great place to do that. Certainly, like no question,
    there’s easy wins on the sales and marketing side. But for me, and
    possibly for you, the more interesting part is how we run our
    businesses.

    Alan: Absolutely. I have one

    more quote I want to read from your book, and I think this sums it
    up. “Through the combination of artificial intelligence, spatial
    computing and human ingenuity, we have the perfect storm of elements
    to create the most compelling immersive storytelling tool for the
    informational aspects of our biggest global challenges. Let’s all do
    our part to learn how to best utilize these new approaches and
    technologies to tell these stories of hope and change before it’s too
    late. And make no mistake, the hour is getting late.”

    Mike: Amen.

    Alan: I think we’re going to end

    this conversation on a high note. The world is on fire, we know that,
    we’ve done unspeakable things to our planet. We’re still kind of
    worried about US versus China versus who gives a shit. We’re all on
    this planet. It’s on fire. Let’s fix it as humanity and figure it out
    together. There’s enough wealth. We need to use these technologies to
    foster new innovations that can stave off our existential risk of
    humanity.

    Mike: Yeah. It’s clear to me and

    I think anybody else that we do need to get mobilized to tell the
    story more clearly. You know, regardless of where your politics or
    your beliefs may be, there are some important things that we need to
    communicate more clearly than we ever have. Because once people
    realize that we can do something about it, they will. And I think
    that the kids that they call the Gen Y, Gen Z, they’re doers. They
    want to fix the world, they want to really focus on this. And they
    will be the ones who probably use this technology in the best
    possible way to go save the planet.

    Alan: Amen. I have nothing else

    to say to that, my friend Mike. It has been an absolute honor
    speaking with you today. If you if you’re still listening to this
    podcast. Thanks for listening this far. The book is “The Age of
    Smart Information: How Artificial Intelligence and Spatial Computing
    Will Transform the Way We Communicate Forever.” If you’re going
    to do anything in this industry, this book is a must read and I
    highly recommend it. Go get it on Amazon or you can go to
    theageofsmartinformation.com. And if you want to learn more about
    Mike, you can visit futuristic.com, or you can Google the Microsoft
    Garage for all the cool, crazy things they’re making to make our
    world better in the future. Thanks, Mike. I really appreciate you
    joining me.

    Mike: Thank you, Alan. Take

    care.

    50 min
  • The Age of Smart Information is Now, with Microsoft Garage Envisioneer Mike Pell
    It wasn't long ago that the concept
    of having a personal relationship with computers was the stuff of
    science fiction -- everything from HAL 9000 to V'Ger posited a
    far-out future when that would start to happen. Well, according to
    Mike Pell -- author of THE AGE OF SMART INFORMATION -- that time is
    now.
    Alan: Welcome to the XR for
    Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today's guest is
    somebody absolutely spectacular. Mr. Mike Powell, he is the head of
    the Microsoft Garage and the author of "Age of Smart
    Information," a new book about how artificial intelligence and
    spatial computing will transform the way we communicate forever. Find
    the latest on Mike at futuristic.com and excerpts from his new book,
    at theageofsmartinformation.com.
    Mike, welcome to the show.
    Mike: Thank you, Alan. My
    pleasure to be here.
    Alan: It's so exciting. I was
    gifted your book actually by a good friend of mine, John Bizzell. And
    we had lunch and he's "Oh, you haven't read this book." And
    I guess he sent it to me on Amazon. I got it the next day, and I've
    been just voraciously reading this book since, I'm about halfway
    through. But man, your book has really opened my eyes to how
    everything around us will not only have the data available, but it'll
    be in context to our personal needs. And it's really incredible. So
    how did you-- just kind of walk us through your journey of how you
    went from inventing PDFs, to writing books on smart information?
    Mike: It's a long story, but
    I'll try to keep it really short. You're right, a lot of this did
    sort of form when I was back in the early 90s when I was working on
    Acrobat with some of my friends at Adobe. Back then, when we were
    working on the very first electronic documents for interchange, it
    was very apparent that people were not going to enjoy reading these
    things like sitting upright and being uncomfortable. You really
    needed some hardware and software that didn't exist at that point to
    enjoy the information, right. To enjoy whether it was book or
    documents or reports, whatever it is you were reading. And so at that
    time, I started to think a lot about how the information itself --
    you know, the thing that we were reading -- was so dead and lifeless.
    I guess it was amazing that you could now transfer to other places
    when people around the world could see exactly what you were trying
    to say. But the thoughts about how there was always more to it
    started to percolate back then. And over my career, I've always had
    the good fortune of working on the leading edge of technology. So I
    was very early into 3D and interactive graphics and visualization,
    and I started to do a lot of experiments with bringing information to
    life. I've always been fascinated with communications, helping people
    communicate as clearly as they can. And so that was really the start
    of a lot of this, was trying to see what we can do to help people be
    able to understand and communicate better by using the information,
    the things that we create every day, whether that's tweets or emails
    or books or movies or music, doesn't matter. Whatever the medium is
    that you're communicating in, there's always so much more that can be
    brought out that we as people understand inherently, but yet are
    never reflected in that final form, that piece of communication comes
    in. So that's where we started.
    Alan: So let's unpack that. So,
    you know, I'm reading a PDF, then you guys probably added the ability
    to have hyperlinks and then what else can you add. Now you're looking
    at, "OK, what does the world look like when the computers are no
    longer bound by the 16 by 9 rectangular shape?"
    Mike: Yeah, exactly. That was
    part of that original thought. You need to be able to enjoy, or
    absorb whatever it is, or create whatever it is in the current
    context of what you're do
    0 min
  • Gearing Up for VR Days, with festival director Benjamin de Wit
    Regular listeners know that folks
    like Alan and his guests attend a number of XR-related conventions,
    events, and symposia. Well, one -- VR Days in Amsterdam -- is right
    around the corner! Alan has founder and festival director Benjamin de
    Wit on to talk a little bit about what there will be to see -- and
    what attendees can expect to take away -- from this this year's
    shindig.
    [Complete
    Transcript Coming Soon]
    0 min
  • Gearing Up for VR Days, with festival director Benjamin de Wit

    Regular listeners know that folks

    like Alan and his guests attend a number of XR-related conventions,
    events, and symposia. Well, one -- VR Days in Amsterdam -- is right
    around the corner! Alan has founder and festival director Benjamin de
    Wit on to talk a little bit about what there will be to see -- and
    what attendees can expect to take away -- from this this year's
    shindig.

    [Complete

    Transcript Coming Soon]

    36 min
  • Building Empathy in XR, with Tech Trends journalist Alice Bonasio

    Alan is always ready with an

    interesting XR anecdote or two on this podcast, but even he has a
    source for interesting XR tidbits. In today’s episode, he brings that
    source to him – XR journalist and consultant, Alice Bonasio. They end
    up chatting about the principles behind the idea that XR is an
    “empathy machine.”

    Alan: Welcome to the XR for

    Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is
    Alice Bonasio, the technology writer for Inside VR and AR. Alice is a
    technology writer/producer/consultant with a particular interest in
    the immersive space. Over the past 15 years, she’s combined a career
    in freelance journalism, contributing to outlets such as Wired,
    Quartz, Fast Company, Playboy, Upload VR, Ars Technica and many
    others. She’s advised a broad range of companies, from startups to
    major corporations on their communications and digital strategy.
    She’s currently the editor-in-chief of Tech Trends, a news and
    opinion website she founded in 2016, and the curator of the daily
    Inside VR and AR newsletter, which I personally read every single
    day. You can connect with Alice on LinkedIn and you can also reach
    her at Twitter on Alice Bonasio. And if you want to subscribe to
    Inside VR, it’s inside.com/vr and
    inside.com/ar.

    Alice, welcome to the show.

    Alice: Hello. Very nice to meet

    you. Thanks for inviting me on.

    Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure.

    I read your content daily, so it’s a real pleasure for me to have you
    on the show. Every day I get this Inside VR, and I skim through it, I
    look for the things that are business related. And at the bottom, it
    says “curated by Alice.” And I was like, I got to have her
    on the show. So thank you so much.

    Alice: You’re very, very

    welcome.

    Alan: You are my source for

    news.

    Alice: [laughs] That’s very nice

    to know. Yes. And the more subscribers we get, the more I get to do
    what I love, which is trawling through all of those interesting bits
    of news. So, yeah, definitely get everyone to subscribe. That’ll be
    great.

    Alan: Well, I know one way to

    get more subscribers, we should write a piece about this amazing
    new podcast called the XR for Business Podcast.

    Alice: Ah, yes, yes. That’s how

    you make a great plug. Yeah, yeah. We’re pros here, we’re pros.

    Alan: So I want to dive in here

    because there’s so much to get in. We’ve got an hour, let’s really
    make the best of it. Let’s start with one or two things that you’ve
    seen in the last little bit that just blew your mind, because I think
    you get to see everything from a 10,000 foot view. What is personally
    blowning your mind in XR for business?

    Alice: I think one of the recent

    examples — and you were talking about it when you were saying about
    doing your news roundup — in the last week was really that Microsoft
    demo at Inspire. That really did blow my mind. And it’s one of those
    things where you see several elements just come together into
    something that just makes such sense. And it was one of those eureka
    moments. Together with mapping, I think that translation is just such
    an obvious use case for augmented or mixed reality, but it is also
    one of the most difficult ones to get right, because you just need a
    lot of elements to be at the optimum stage and to come together for
    the experience to work. And the experience either really works well
    or doesn’t. So what they did was, at Microsoft Inspire — which is a
    partner conference for Microsoft — Julia White, who is an executive
    for Azure, came on stage and they did this demo where she conjured up
    a little hologram at first, and then the hologram became a full-size
    replica, doppelganger of herself on stage. And she does not speak
    Japanese — Julia White — but her doppelganger delivered the second
    part of the keynote in fluent Japanese.

    Alan: That was so amazing. You

    know, watching her stand onstage, in a Hololens, watching her own
    avatar give another presentation — or same presentation — onstage
    in Japanese.

    Alice: I know. It’s not often

    that I will forgive executives for looking very smug, but she did.
    And I was like, “Well, actually, you kind of deserve that.”
    You’re pulling off a demo there. You have the right to have that
    little smile on your face and go, “This is really so cool.”

    Alan: I don’t think it was smug,

    so much as just really giddy. It looked like she was like, “Yay!”

    Alice: She did. The thing is, is

    that it’s everything that you have it as an out there conception of
    what the technology could be. It’s a kind of Star Trek-y thing,
    science fiction. And at the same time, we are at the stage where it
    is all possible. And no, it isn’t a consumer product just yet, but
    all the elements are there. You’re getting to the point where the
    machine translation is getting good enough, where voice recognition
    is good enough, as well as then all of the mixed reality elements
    that allow you to mimic the facial expressions, and the way that
    you’re– to avoid that whole uncanny valley thing, you do need —
    like, if you’re having an avatar, or especially a holographic one —
    you do need that to match. What does your face look like when you
    mouth those words? It’s not something that you might necessarily
    think you know, but you feel it, so that you subconsciously know when
    it looks wrong. So there’s so many different elements that make it so
    complex to get this right. And for that all to come together in a
    demo so that you could just go, “Wow, that’s the future.”
    It’s just arrived on your doorstep. That was amazing.

    Alan: We always talk about the

    future. And the future is now. That’s the crazy thing. It’s like,
    “Oh, yeah, we’re gonna have simultaneous translation for avatars
    in five years, ten years.” It happened last week.

    Alice: Absolutely. It’s one of

    those things that a lot of futurists — who sounded ambitious years
    ago — are now revising their predictions to saying, well, actually,
    it’s going to happen much sooner than we thought. So it is like
    Moore’s Law, it’s very true, still. And everything is getting better
    a lot quicker than you expect, and a lot cheaper. I mean, if you look
    at the latest batch of VR headsets, the capabilities of something
    like the Oculus Quest, and what you get for that price bracket, it’s
    just unbelievable just how far it’s gone, because I still look back
    to case studies from places like the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at
    Stanford. And you look at some of those old videos now — what are
    old? — but you know, you’re talking about less than a decade. And
    the VR headsets they were using literally costs hundreds and hundreds
    of thousands of dollars. And they did not do what the Quest does.

    [chuckles]

    It’s just– it’s unbelievable.

    Alan: It’s pretty impressive. I

    actually– in 2015, I said, “OK, it’s a 10 year roadmap. 2025
    we’re going to start seeing the real uplift of this.” So I took
    a really long approach, but I’m actually starting to shrink my
    timelines as well, because I didn’t think we’d ever see consumer
    based augmented reality glasses until at least 2025, like not even
    close. And the Nreal glasses that appeared at CS this year were so
    good. Oh, my goodness.

    Alice: Yeah, I’m the same. And I

    always thought for a while it just really looked like such a one
    horse race. And then I think kudos goes to Microsoft for getting in
    early with the Hololens and just putting all the resources into
    making even the first Hololens such a solid product so that you got
    all those enterprise case studies and all that. But for a while that
    really looked like they and Magic Leap — and we weren’t really sure
    what Magic Leap looked like until very recently — were the only
    players in that market. And now you’ve got this expanding, you know,
    all these new companies coming into the sort of smart glasses space
    and how do we integrate it with mobile and 5G. And then that’s–
    again that’s just going to create an ecosystem. And I don’t think
    anything will happen without an ecosystem. I think with VR you’ve now
    got that larger ecosystem with the headsets and now that’s going to
    also happen in AR.

    Alan: Well, you mentioned

    ecosystem and this is not a– I guess it’s gonna be a shameless plug,
    but we started XR Ignite to become a central community ecosystem
    where startups, studios, and developers could come together, discuss
    their challenges, work together to help them help each other, but
    also then connect them to corporate clients. Because on the corporate
    side, they want to innovate and they want to be first to have the
    technologies. They want to know what’s happening. They want access to
    the new technologies. But they don’t know which ones to pick. They
    don’t, they have no idea. And so on these startup side, we’ve got
    these amazing products and platforms and services, and they don’t
    know how to do business with corporate. So we’re kind of taking the
    central role where we are going to become the connector of the
    industry. Only in B2B. I mean, we’re really kind of focused on that
    B2B market, because we saw a gap few years ago. There was a company
    called Upload and they had Upload VR. They had a beautiful central
    hub in San Francisco and LA and they were the hub of virtual reality.
    And they had gaming companies and they had enterprise coming,
    everybody under one roof and it kind of imploded. But the idea of
    having that central hub really resonated with me, because somebody is
    got to help these people from all over the world standardize their
    offerings. Because if you look at VR as a whole — or AR — you’ve
    got such a wide range of quality, and such a wide range of different
    types of VR. So you’ve got 360 video on one end. You’ve got AR apps
    on your phone, on the other end. You’ve got Hololens in the middle.
    You have all of these different things, and all of them serve a
    purpose to different companies at different times. So we wanted to be
    able to map that out and be the central hub to help companies make
    better buying decisions. And that’s why we started this podcast as
    well.

    Alice: Now, I think that makes a

    lot of sense because even for somebody who’s been immersed in that
    space for what feels like a very long time now, it still gets
    baffling. I mean, there’s still something new that comes along every
    day and often it will disrupt any conceptions that you already have
    of that market. So to really know what technology decisions you need
    to make — so that you can reach the audience in the way that you
    want to, and just execute on your goals — then it’s very
    complicated. So you do need that knowledge, and you need to have a
    sort of “who you gonna call” kind of. [laughs].

    Alan: [laughs] Amazing.

    Alice: But yeah, you can have

    that one for free. You’re the Ghostbusters of XR.

    Alan: Nice. One of the articles

    you published, or one of the quick snippets that you published was a
    couple of days ago. It was “By The Numbers: How AR Increases
    Productivity.” And you were talking about Rori DuBoff, head of
    content, innovations, and strategy with Accenture Interactive. And
    Rori’s
    actually been a guest on this show, so I know about the stuff
    they’re working on. But something that was amazing was two points you
    touched on. The adoption of augmented reality boosts productivity by
    21 percent on average. And then this figure rises even further to an
    average of 35 percent in sectors such as healthcare and social
    services. Companies are already seeing massive benefits of this
    technology. What are some of the ones that you’ve seen that have the
    most impactful ROIs?

    Alice: As you alluded to, I

    think healthcare is one of those amazing use cases, because it’s such
    a complex landscape. And from training professionals to patients
    themselves, making the right choices to equipment configuration, to
    drugs, to everything else in that landscape is about massive amounts
    of information and where accuracy literally means life or death. This
    is why we tend to pay healthcare professionals higher salaries. It
    takes so many years to train to a level where you’re confident using
    that information and it takes so much practice. So where immersive
    technologies really come into their own are those two things: they
    provide real-time, accurate, as-you-need-it information, hands-free,
    right in front of you. That’s so powerful. That’s literally a
    superpower. And then at the same time, for the things that you have
    to practice, I mean, you’re performing — for example, as a surgeon
    or as a nurse — procedures, medical procedures. Those are things
    that you need to learn on the muscle memory level, and you need to
    learn by experiencing. And so far, the only ways that you could
    really do that were by simulating those experiences in the real
    world. I mean, for doctors, they would interact with actors, they
    would use cadavers. All of those things up until the point where they
    might get the chance to observe surgery and then to maybe do a little
    bit. But in the class of however many students, you clock up the
    hours of all of those practices together. And it’s still very little.
    That’s why it takes multiple years for any kind of surgeon to get up
    to a certain level where we feel comfortable with them cutting us
    open. So… [laughs]

    Alan: You think we can shorten

    the time–

    Alice: We can accelerate that

    dramatically. And that’s what’s needed, because there’s such a
    shortage of healthcare professiononals. That’s one of the crises that
    this technology addresses already. It’s the shortage of
    professionals, because you have people without access to the
    facilities and those medical schools, you can use simulation. You’re
    getting to the point where you have haptics. So you can actually feel
    and see what that experience is like. I’m not saying that you
    wouldn’t then go on to have the real world practice. But by the time
    you get to that stage, you’ve already had so much more of that, that
    it makes a huge difference, I think not only to the numbers of people
    that will have access to that knowledge, but also to the quality of
    the professional that you will get at the end of it.

    Alan: Absolutely. We’re seeing

    it in enterprise a lot as well. And one
    of the guests that was on the show is Dr. Walter Greenleaf. And
    he’s been a pioneer in this technology in the medical field. And it’s
    not just practicing surgery, that’s one thing, but it’s also
    visualizing MRI data or CT scans or X-rays. But it’s also being able
    to put it on patients and prepare them for surgery and walk them
    through what to expect. So that calms their nerves. There are so many
    ways that this technology can be used for physicians, for nurses, for
    visualization, for patients, for drug discovery, for pharmaceutical
    reps. Is there any business or entity or enterprise that you can
    think of, that probably won’t use this technology?

    Alice: I honestly can’t, because

    what it comes down to what you said is very true. Visualization is
    the key here. And humans are programmed to really learn through
    experiencing and seeing things for themselves. So, what you get with
    a lot of the way that we traditionally learn and consume information
    is you have this translation into words, into graphs. You’re
    constantly overloading your brain with the demand of translating that
    in real time and trying to absorb that knowledge. So it’s what’s
    called the cognitive load. And what these immersive technologies can
    do for you immediately is to reduce the cognitive load. You are
    seeing things in a way that already make sense to your brain. So
    you’re not spending that extra RAM, as such, in trying to do that
    process. You have spare brain capacity to actually pay attention, to
    be in the moment into the experience of what you’re doing. So you
    will remember that procedure better. You will remember that
    information better, because you’re not trying to visualize it. The
    visual is already in front of you. So that’s one very simple thing.
    And it goes across the board. I mean, any kind of information that
    you can pretty much think of will be better presented and absorbed in
    that way. It’s not sector-specific. It is most fundamental to the way
    that we as humans learn. And I think that that’s the fundamental
    shift that you’re having. We’ve learned in one way for centuries now.
    And now we can have this opportunity to learn in a completely
    different way, that’s exponentially more efficient.

    Alan: So one

    of the articles that you linked to and you wrote about was
    “training for empathy is challenging but possible, and VR is the
    optimum medium for facilitating this at scale.” And it was
    talking about a gentleman named Dr.
    Todd Maddox, who I interviewed this morning on my podcast — I do
    all my interviews on Mondays, and Todd was the first interview this
    morning. He talked about something amazing, where you can create
    empathy in somebody in a way that’s never been done. You can
    literally be in someone else’s shoes, literally. You look down, you
    see somebody else’s shoes. And he made the comment that if I’m a
    white, middle aged male in the tech industry, I can put on VR and
    become a 20 year old female black lesbian and feel what it’s like to
    have those stereotypes in an experience. And it’s not going to
    replace a lifetime of experiences, but at least you can start to feel
    what it’s like to have people look at you differently in these
    things. And why this is even still a problem in 2019 is beyond me.
    Let’s just be clear. We are all people. We all live on this planet.
    We’re all people. It doesn’t matter where you come from, doesn’t
    matter where you going. We’re all in this world. And if we start to
    think as a global entity, instead of individuals and nation states
    and this sort of thing, then that’s when we all start to realize that
    we need to all work together to protect this planet together. And
    sorry. And I think VR can be that catalyst to make us think that way.

    Alice: I totally agree. And it’s

    something that’s talked about a lot, to the point where it’s almost
    become a cliché to call VR the empathy machine, because that’s
    something that very early on brilliant people like Chris Milk have
    talked about and given examples of. People like Cathy
    Hackl speak of it a lot, in how she came to VR. As you know, one
    of her first experiences was when she used to work in a news
    organization, and she basically became callous towards just– You
    build up these barriers when you just watch so much horror that she
    became– to the point where she wouldn’t connect with those people in
    those stories anymore, until the point where she finally experienced
    something in VR, which was award winning experience by The Guardian,
    which puts you into a cell, solitary confinement cell. And she just
    came away from it, all her barriers suddenly came down and she just
    realized just how powerful being immersed in an experience firsthand
    can be for telling those important stories and actually getting
    through to people. When you talk about immersive technologies as
    being a bit of a fad or whatever, actually look at the people who
    have stuck around as content makers. And you you do have people like
    Nonny de la Peña. If everyone like that has been around the
    immersive space, creating content and most of them not making any
    kind of decent money out of it for a very long time. So it’s like
    they stick around because there is this amazing potential, and the
    technology does work. So I think that the people who would dismiss it
    do need to also listen to the people who are persistent ones in that
    space. And as I said, you do come across a lot of the same names,
    because they’ve been around now for a very respectable length of
    time, too.

    So that’s great. But I think on the

    empathy front that a couple of interesting points that you raised
    were how it makes you experience things from a minority point of view
    — or in a case like being a woman, it’s not necessarily being a
    minority, we’re 50 percent of the planet — but I’d say the main
    problem with some of what we’ve seen today is that, this idea is sold
    that there isn’t a problem as well, so that’s like, “What are
    you moaning about? You have equality.” I think that it’s so
    difficult from a position of privilege to judge that, to actually
    understand how the little things add up on a day-to-day basis, to the
    point where equality isn’t a reality, for those people. It is your
    reality. So to get them to experience that different reality, it’s
    not that they’re ill-intentioned, it’s not that. It’s that literally
    they do not understand how for a average middle aged white man to
    understand what it’s like to be a woman, much less of a person of
    color and a woman. As a white woman, I don’t pretend to know what
    difficulties a black man would have, or somebody confined to a
    wheelchair. I would have to experience that to really be aware, I’m
    aware, though, that I think that you should just allow for the fact
    that those things do exist. So I know that it’s more difficult for
    them, but I don’t know how. So that experience should be mandatory
    somehow. I really think that as we get to the point where the
    technology is more accessible, that kind of education and training is
    something that’s fundamentally going to hopefully change things for
    the better, because it does immediately connect you with that other
    perspective. And you do get people walking around and going,
    “Actually, I get it now. I get a little bit of what you go
    through, just whether it’s looks, whether it’s just the attitude.”
    This is something that you have to feel, and you can’t be told about
    it. It’s just one of those things.

    And then the other thing that you

    alluded to was how we’re all responsible for the planet. And
    interestingly, some of the most interesting empathy based projects
    that I’ve come across elicit empathy not towards another person, but
    towards the environment itself. So, again, you go back to the great
    work of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford, and they’ve
    done several environmentally based projects where they literally get
    to change people’s attitude through a very short spell of VR exposure
    towards using less resources, being more mindful of the impact that
    your actions have, and then changing those actions. Again, it’s a
    weapon in an arsenal that I don’t think we can afford not to use. You
    can feel what it’s like to be a tree. You can feel what it’s like to
    be a coral reef. There were some bizarre ones with I think they put
    you in the hoofs of a cow. Anything, anything. You can you can feel
    things from a different perspective. And that I think for most people
    — unless you’re really not wired in the way that most humans are —
    it cannot help but affect you. I mean, the studies that showed that
    even people guilty of horrendous domestic abuse, it actually got
    through to those severe cases a lot more than any other method had
    managed to. And it’s the kind of thing that kind of gives you hope.

    Alan: Absolutely. There’s so

    many different ways that technology can be used for empathy. But when
    it comes down to businesses investing in this technology, it has to
    make sense from an economic standpoint. You’re seeing businesses
    starting to invest in this technology now more than ever. And they’re
    investing in– the first thing that I’m saying is training. And then
    the second thing is remote assistance. One of the biggest existential
    risks we have as humanity is the fact that as we enter into
    exponential growth, our education systems are ill-prepared to train
    us for jobs that don’t exist yet.

    Alice: This is a great point.

    But just one note: what you said about businesses needing to justify
    it, going by very briefly to the point about training for it, for
    empathy as well. I think that businesses cannot afford not to be
    conscious of that need to train for what’s called soft skills, how
    you interact with people. I think that it’s not just about– there’s
    an element, of course, like businesses needs to be compliant and
    cover themselves, so on that. But I think on a higher level there the
    opportunity is huge, because I’ve worked with so many teams and
    always the best results are achieved by diverse teams that feel
    comfortable challenging each other, but in a climate of mutual
    respect. That’s something that you actively have to foster, it’s
    something that you do — to a certain extent — have to train for.
    Because if you just hire a bunch of people and hope for the best, it
    just doesn’t always turn out in the way that you hope. Having those
    tools and training for empathy and seeing what things sound like,
    like when you say something to your colleague, what does that
    actually come across as? Because your idea of what it comes across as
    can be vastly different from how it’s perceived. So that kind of– I
    worked with one company which is based in London and they’re called
    Somewhere Else. And they did this thing called Body Swap. And that’s
    exactly what it is.

    Alan: I was actually gonna bring

    it up. That’s awesome.

    Alice: There you go. Yeah. So

    you get through and you record your reactions through to this
    employee who’s having difficulties. And it’s your voice — your audio
    — that’s going into this avatar. And then when you’re finished, you
    get to be that employee who’s receiving the message and you get to
    see what you sound like, what your message comes across as. So
    that’s– again, it’s just really simple mechanics, but it really does
    work because you’re immersed in that environment. It really does work
    to drive home the impact that you’re having and how your delivery of
    the message — as much as the message itself — works and all of
    that. So I think that that’s the kind of thing that businesses are
    now able to plug into so easily. We mentioned how the Oculus Quest is
    so much cheaper and that that’s– and I’m not actually plugging just
    the Oculus, because you have got other alternatives that are coming
    through and are as good. So you’ve got a lot of choice of hardware —
    and now platforms — where you can make your own personalized content
    like this. And so companies can afford, within the business plan, to
    allocate those resources and it’s often going to be cheaper than
    simulations or trainings that they might be engaging with already,
    but ineffectively.

    Alan: I think as the tools

    become more prevalent and as the tools are coming online to make it
    easier. But also, I think just the idea of virtual and augmented
    reality is becoming more mainstream. And in the VC community and
    investment community and even within the VR and AR community, people
    are kind of burnt out a little bit. You mentioned earlier about how
    there’s people that are dedicating their lives and they’ve been
    pushing, pushing, pushing and know they’re not making a lot of money.
    There comes a point where that burns people out. And so we’ve just
    come out of that hole, whatever, trough of disillusionment, or
    whatever you want to call it. But what are you seeing as far as–
    you’re writing different news stories every day, there’s something
    new every day that companies are doing. Are you seeing this trend
    upward now?

    Alice: Yes, I think for the

    corporate and industry side of things. I don’t think there’s any fear
    of it fizzling out, because as you alluded to, I think once the
    company has an experience of deploying those technologies, the ROIs
    are there, they are dramatic and a lot of it is actually really low
    hanging fruit. I mean, these are processes that you can easily port
    into immersive technologies and you can just enhance them, and
    straight away they’re that much more effective, people really take to
    them, and they’re becoming more affordable. So I really don’t think
    that the growth on the corporate side will slow down anytime soon. So
    that’s one side of it. I think that what was pushed quite hard at
    first and was responsible for some of the hype — that then became a
    little bit of the trough of disillusionment — was the gaming side,
    which is slowly but steadily getting– advancing, I would say. But
    it’s just a lot more challenging because for the past decades we have
    got really seriously good at making awesome video games. And that
    industry is multibillion dollar, it’s at the top of its game. So when
    somebody who’s used to console gaming sits down to a VR experience,
    their expectations are sky high. So when you start still getting the
    problems of motion sickness and everything else– I know that for
    myself, I’ve played Resident Evil for many years and I was so excited
    to try it out in VR. I couldn’t last. It was just too intensive. It
    just wasn’t there yet. But you can see the potential for a lot of of
    these things. And I think you do need to give it the space.

    So you have the gaming side on that and

    the corporate side, too. And then you have this space in the middle.
    Which is like every day applications for consumers. And that’s the
    market that I think that isn’t quite developed yet, but is
    potentially very big. And what I think you will get is people who are
    introduced to VR, either through a gaming experience, this could be
    location based gaming as well. There’s a few big players on location
    based arcades, things like the Void and so forth as well. They’re
    very interesting. So if you’re introduced through either an
    entertainment experience or at work through your training, that’s
    going to be a lot more natural, especially as headsets become more
    user-friendly and cheaper. They’ll be much more natural for you to
    consider that as a purchase and as something that you use routinely
    at home because you’re more familiar with it, much like your first
    smartphone might have been the work Blackberry. You know, you go from
    that to having your first iPhone. I think that that bridging element
    can be there as well. So I don’t think there is a disillusionment,
    apart from people who really naively just thought it would explode
    from one minute to the next and had sky high expectations.

    Alan: “One hundred billion

    dollars by 2019!”

    Alice: Yeah. You know, you get

    those Dr. Evil type predictions then, it’s like “One… trillion
    dollars!”

    Alan: You know, it’s

    interesting: I use a figure, I use the fact that
    virtual/augmented/mixed reality XR technologies will create a
    trillion dollars in value by 2025.

    Alice: I think that that’s

    realistic because you’re talking about– it’s not about sales. That’s
    where I think like Microsoft went right. They didn’t go out to sell a
    bunch of Hololenses. I mean, if that was their measure of success, it
    would have been the biggest flop ever. It was about the technology
    and it was about what they were building around the technology. This
    whole new space for use of that within the enterprise. And they
    nailed that.

    Alan: And I think the first

    iteration was really about finding what are the use cases? “How
    are people using this? Does it work for factories? Yeah, it does. OK.
    What in factories is the highest return on investment? Oh, OK. Being
    able to upskill people quickly. OK. Next.” So they did a
    fantastic job at engaging with the right partners in bringing a
    device that was rock solid. I mean, we’ve had a Hololens 1 for years
    now, and it’s never had any problems. They made a rock solid device
    and they looked for real ROI. And I think that was the key with it.

    Alice: No, I agree. I think

    that’s– they can then afford to just be patient because that’s the
    market that is going to stay and it’s going to grow. And then
    eventually the device will become more affordable. It will become
    something consumers want to have in their homes, and we’ll become
    comfortable too wear for longer periods of time. So then at that
    point, then it will also become an everyday entertainment device. I
    have no doubt of it, but it doesn’t need to be anytime soon
    necessarily. And I think that rushing it, that’s the danger. If you
    think that you have to rush something that’s consumer ready, when
    you’re nowhere near, then somebody is going to spend $3,000 on
    something that they’re not happy with and there’s no content for.

    Alan: Since you lead into this.

    I got to ask you, what are your thoughts on the rumors that Apple is
    killing their AR device?

    Alice: Again, I think that they

    probably came, if anything — I’d have to read Apple’s mind — would
    be that they came to a similar conclusion to what Microsoft’s been
    doing all along, and that it’s not worth rushing it. And then
    everyone got really excited when they got wind of it, because
    obviously the old “Here comes the game changer!” And the
    worst possible thing they could do at this point is to bring
    something half-baked to market. And that’s what Tim Cook said is
    like, “We don’t care about being the first. We have to be the
    best.” When Apple brings something to the market, it needs to
    kill it. It needs to be *the* AR glasses that make you look cool,
    they’re light, everything works, and they have some content for it.

    Alan: Yeah, that’s the key.

    Alice: I don’t see that

    happening by 2020.

    Alan: No, definitely not.

    Alice: They would bury it, but

    they’re just burying it deeply within the company and then sending
    everyone to a deeper basement to work on it twice as hard, until they
    do have it. And then it might be a few years into the future. But
    when they bring it, they have to be confident that it’s something
    that’s market ready. And all of the allowances that this is why
    Microsoft was able to bring the Hololens to market, but to the
    corporate market is because in the factory environment you are used
    to bulky equipment, limitations, that the Hololens — even at
    prototype stage — surpassed it by a factor of 10 or more. So that’s
    fine. That’s allowances. The consumer market is not that forgiving.
    So Apple is playing a whole different ballgame.

    Alan: So we’re coming to the end

    of this conversation, because we could talk about this stuff forever
    and I would really encourage anybody to sign up for your newsletter
    inside.com/vr and inside.com/ar. Get all this news coming at you.
    It’s like drinking through a fire hose. So, Alice, you are the news
    source. It’s amazing. What problem in the world do you want to see
    solved using XR technologies?

    Alice: Oh, gosh, yeah. Pick one

    problem. I think… Well, I suppose going back to my background, in
    that probably communication. I think you can trace a lot of what’s
    wrong with the world to bad communication, misunderstandings, and not
    being able to get what somebody else is saying to you. And I think
    that as much as social media seems to have made communication easier,
    it actually just numbed us and blinded us to a lot of what’s
    important when it comes to communication. So I’m hopeful that through
    immersive technologies, we can reconnect with the more human side of
    communications and actually fix some of those issues. And then– the
    reason I picked that is because then it goes onto everything. So
    hopefully we can then start to sort out all of the many problems that
    we have with our society, with our politics, with our environment,
    with our economy, and everything else. So hopefully that would be a
    catalyst, to borrow a phrase from Silicon Valley, make the world a
    better place.

    41 min
  • Building Empathy in XR, with Tech Trends journalist Alice Bonasio
    Alan is always ready with an
    interesting XR anecdote or two on this podcast, but even he has a
    source for interesting XR tidbits. In today's episode, he brings that
    source to him - XR journalist and consultant, Alice Bonasio. They end
    up chatting about the principles behind the idea that XR is an
    "empathy machine."
    Alan: Welcome to the XR for
    Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today's guest is
    Alice Bonasio, the technology writer for Inside VR and AR. Alice is a
    technology writer/producer/consultant with a particular interest in
    the immersive space. Over the past 15 years, she's combined a career
    in freelance journalism, contributing to outlets such as Wired,
    Quartz, Fast Company, Playboy, Upload VR, Ars Technica and many
    others. She's advised a broad range of companies, from startups to
    major corporations on their communications and digital strategy.
    She's currently the editor-in-chief of Tech Trends, a news and
    opinion website she founded in 2016, and the curator of the daily
    Inside VR and AR newsletter, which I personally read every single
    day. You can connect with Alice on LinkedIn and you can also reach
    her at Twitter on Alice Bonasio. And if you want to subscribe to
    Inside VR, it's inside.com/vr and
    inside.com/ar.
    Alice, welcome to the show.
    Alice: Hello. Very nice to meet
    you. Thanks for inviting me on.
    Alan: It's my absolute pleasure.
    I read your content daily, so it's a real pleasure for me to have you
    on the show. Every day I get this Inside VR, and I skim through it, I
    look for the things that are business related. And at the bottom, it
    says "curated by Alice." And I was like, I got to have her
    on the show. So thank you so much.
    Alice: You're very, very
    welcome.
    Alan: You are my source for
    news.
    Alice: [laughs] That's very nice
    to know. Yes. And the more subscribers we get, the more I get to do
    what I love, which is trawling through all of those interesting bits
    of news. So, yeah, definitely get everyone to subscribe. That'll be
    great.
    Alan: Well, I know one way to
    get more subscribers, we should write a piece about this amazing
    new podcast called the XR for Business Podcast.
    Alice: Ah, yes, yes. That's how
    you make a great plug. Yeah, yeah. We're pros here, we're pros.
    Alan: So I want to dive in here
    because there's so much to get in. We've got an hour, let's really
    make the best of it. Let's start with one or two things that you've
    seen in the last little bit that just blew your mind, because I think
    you get to see everything from a 10,000 foot view. What is personally
    blowning your mind in XR for business?
    Alice: I think one of the recent
    examples -- and you were talking about it when you were saying about
    doing your news roundup -- in the last week was really that Microsoft
    demo at Inspire. That really did blow my mind. And it's one of those
    things where you see several elements just come together into
    something that just makes such sense. And it was one of those eureka
    moments. Together with mapping, I think that translation is just such
    an obvious use case for augmented or mixed reality, but it is also
    one of the most difficult ones to get right, because you just need a
    lot of elements to be at the optimum stage and to come together for
    the experience to work. And the experience either really works well
    or doesn't. So what they did was, at Microsoft Inspire -- which is a
    partner conference for Microsoft -- Julia White, who is an executive
    for Azure, came on stage and they did this demo where she conjured up
    a little hologram at first, and then the hologram became a full-size
    replica, doppelganger of herself on stag
    0 min
  • Taming the Jungle of Ideas, with The Wild’s Gabe Paez

    Unlike in nature, ideas in enterprise don’t grow or perish by

    the laws of natural selection — survival of the fittest — but
    rather, which ideas are communicated and understood better at the
    early stages. But not every good idea is best expressed on a
    whiteboard. That’s why Gabe Paez developed The Wild — a digital
    collaborative space designed to help teams workshop designs and ideas
    in a VR environment.

    Alan: My name’s Alan Smithson,

    the host of the XR for Business Podcast, where we interview industry
    leaders in making technologies in virtual, augmented and mixed
    reality. And today’s guest is Gabe Paez. Gabe works at the
    intersection of engineering, design, and business. He’s the founder
    and CEO of The Wild, and immersive collaboration platform for teams
    to experience their work together, from anywhere in augmented and
    virtual reality. The Wild enables spatial design teams to ideate,
    review, share, and present in cross-platform XR from the same room or
    across the world. Gabe has over a decade of experience leading
    experiential product teams and has designed immersive software
    products for a diverse roster of Fortune 100 companies including
    Google, Samsung, Nike, AT&T, and Verizon. To learn more about The
    Wild visit thewild.com.

    Gabe, welcome to the show.

    Gabe: Hi! It’s good to be here.

    Thank you.

    Alan: Really amazing. Thank you

    so much for taking the time. I know you’re super busy. You just
    launched The Wild out into the wild. Tell us about The Wild. How did
    this idea come to be, and what is it?

    Gabe: Well, to be honest, I feel

    like I’ve spent my whole career trying to explain ambitious ideas to
    people, and what I’ve realized in that process is that there are
    pools for sharing that idea — especially in the early stages of that
    idea — are so limited. And often the best, the most ambitious, the
    most interesting ideas get shut out early on, solely for the reason
    that they are misunderstood or not completely communicated to the
    other person. So I really wanted to break down that barrier; find a
    way for everyone on a team to experience an idea together, while it’s
    still in the ideas stage straight through to execution, and to find
    an efficiency in that process. Not just solely for cost savings, but
    ultimately, to find the best ideas and let those surface to the top
    of the stack.

    Alan: Let’s break it down here.

    So this is a collaboration tool or a platform where people from
    around the world can go into a virtual space and experience design
    together.

    Gabe: So The Wild really puts

    collaboration at the core of the offering, not as an add-on, but as
    the foundation of what we’re doing. We’re creating a collaboration
    hub for people that design spaces, environments to come together and
    experience those spaces from anywhere in the world. Architects,
    engineers, people that their profession is to take an idea and
    transform that into a physical place in the physical world somewhere.
    And so they have a unique challenge that the output of their process,
    their design process really isn’t realized until the very final
    stage. So what The Wild does is sort of says we now have a capability
    that we don’t have to wait until the very end to really understand
    that space and to experience it, not just as a simulation on your
    own, but to experience it together as a team, just as you would in
    the very final moments where you walk through that space physically
    with your teammates and look at what you’ve created together. We’re
    using not just virtual reality, but the whole XR spectrum to allow
    those team members to experience that idea as a concept in the very
    early stages, either in total virtual space, in virtual reality or
    augmented into a physical space. Whether you’re building out a full
    building on an empty lot, that you can physically walk through in
    augmented reality, while other people, other team members are in
    virtual reality, in a different location, actually live making
    changes to that space or whether everyone wants to be together in
    augmented reality on different devices experiencing that space
    connected to a physical space.

    Alan: You’re able to put designs

    and lock them to the physical world?

    Gabe: Yes. And it’s not just the

    designs. I mean, it’s not just taking something static and putting it
    there, but having it be fully connected all the time.

    Alan: Wow. This is gonna

    decrease the amount of time that it takes to design things for sure,
    especially larger spaces.

    Gabe: Absolutely. Because your

    ability to iterate on that idea is so, so amplified. If you have an
    idea in the moment of the walkthrough, you can sketch or mass out
    that idea in real time to evaluate it on its merit, rather than
    taking notes and then going back into another design iteration. By
    creating a fully immersive live space, your ability to design at the
    speed of thought is realized.

    Alan: It’s pretty incredible. So

    where did– how did this– you’ve been designing different spaces for
    your career. You realize there’s a problem, where do you start? How
    did that come about, and when did you start working on it?

    Gabe: Yeah. So it actually

    started way back in 2015 for me. I was doing a series of sort of R&D
    projects in virtual reality at the time. And these were mostly
    service contracts for large companies experimenting with different UX
    patterns, and that for me was a really just a process of trying to
    dig in and understand XR, understand really the magic of XR. Because
    I always had this feeling that it was more than just what I was
    seeing at the time. And it really took that process to key in for me
    on the insight that the real power of XR is not solely in the
    simulation itself. It is in the connected nature of it. The ability
    to bring multiple people together into a shared idea. And I knew–
    solely because also there’s really no other way to do that
    effectively, to really experience something from anywhere across the
    world on those experiential terms. This is a magical thing, of
    course, for the gaming industry, but for me, sort of trying to solve
    this core business problem. I felt like the value was just
    astronomical, because our tools right now for doing that are so
    limited.

    I knew at that point — so this was

    like coming into 2016 — that I definitely wanted to do something in
    the collaborative space. And then it was a process of sort of
    searching through my own career and just understanding, “OK. We
    have multiple people together in a space. It’s more than just
    creating a meeting in that space. What are we going to do in there?
    What are we going to talk about? What tools do I want to enable
    there? And how can we find a market for this idea that is ready and
    understands the need for it and can dive right in?” And that’s
    how I found environmental designers. Even in those early days, a lot
    of the large architectural companies were rabidly experimenting with
    this technology and it was a great affirmation that they understood
    that it was a clear part of the future. They were just trying to
    grasp on to “OK, how do I actually implement this as a software
    that we use every day?”

    Alan: Incredible. And so now,

    let me ask you: do you guys eat your own dog food?

    Gabe: Oh, absolutely. I mean,

    it’s been an amazing process to design The Wild in The Wild. And–

    Alan: That’s wild!

    Gabe: [laughs] Exactly!

    Alan: [laughs]

    Gabe: Because we are distributed

    as well. A lot of us are here in Portland, Oregon, but our product
    manager’s remote. Got a couple of developers remote. And so allowing
    us to all come together and experiment with different environments,
    different interface ideas. Pretty much every feature that we
    implement is realized in a space in The Wild before we start
    developing it.

    Alan: So, OK, let’s get into–

    you talked about architectural designs. One of the things that I see
    is, there’s lots of these collaboration platforms coming on board.
    There’s Facebook Spaces, not really a collaboration platform where
    you can design, but they all have their features. What sets The Wild
    apart from meetingRoom.io or some of the other platforms where
    there’s collaboration — Glue — there’s a couple of them. But this
    seems to be different, because you’re actually designing in it.
    Whereas the other ones are sharing designs. Even Spatial seems to be
    a lot different than The Wild.

    Gabe: Yeah, absolutely. There

    are a few core differences. Number one, we’re really designed for the
    business use case. We take security really seriously. We take sharing
    settings and administration– there’s all sorts of admin overhead
    that you really need to think about when designing a business tool,
    versus a consumer social tool. So The Wild is very much in that case
    of trying to provide this value for the professional use case. The
    second thing is we take the word collaboration, not just as a general
    word. We really have a very specific definition of that that we feel
    like is more effective than thinking of collaboration solely as file
    sharing or information sharing. Collaboration is the ability for
    multiple people from anywhere to come together and literally create
    together. Ideate and create, the ability for them not just to come in
    and experience it together, walk through it and look at something
    that is static, but if I have an idea that I can actually create that
    idea in real time with each other.

    So we differentiate from a lot of the

    other platforms in sort of the nuts and bolts of how we do that. We
    have a UX tenant. Anything you can see, I can see which we take
    pretty seriously in the basically anything that I’m experiencing or
    seeing in the first person is visual to you as well. And it all
    happens in real time. So if I bring up a menu or different tools or
    you can see how much my trigger is held in on my controller, all the
    way down to the minute details. But what it does, is it creates an
    environment that just feels like it’s fundamentally shared by all the
    participants in an equal way. You can create together like literally
    two people can pull a mass together, similar to pulling a tape
    measure across the room. It’s that level of collaborating as if you
    were in a conference room together that we are really trying to
    replicate in The Wild in a powerful way. And that’s some complicated
    technology stock to really enable that.

    Alan: Incredible. Do you have

    customers using this now or is this still in development?

    Gabe: Yes, absolutely. We have

    customers using it and even pre-release. We’ve had customers in a
    pilot program since roughly the end of 2017 now. So this is
    definitely actively used. It’s no longer a beta software. It’s been
    really exciting to see that arc. This is my first product company.
    But seeing the arc of something going from this idea, to a rough
    prototype, to a matured software that can handle spaces in the
    complexity that our customers really demand has been a really
    interesting process and isn’t trivial. Your ability to support a 3D
    file format, just say, “Oh, we have support for FBX or SKP file,
    SketchUp files” is a lot different than your ability to have a
    high degree of confidence that any model that someone brings in is
    going to look good and be performative, and efficient streaming
    across our real time network. We take great pride in the process, not
    just that we have these features, but that the features we have
    implemented are very solid.

    Alan: So you have customers,

    they’re using it. How are they using it in ways that you didn’t
    anticipate?

    Gabe: [chuckles] There have been

    a lot of surprises along the way, to be honest. More and more people
    are using it even just as a meeting tool — like in the place of
    having a video conferencing call — for purposes other than designing
    together in the space, which we also always honestly anticipated. I
    mean, you can share more than just 3D content. You can bring in
    images and video and all sorts of other content into The Wild. It’s
    been interesting to see that sort of happen organically, rather than
    us forcing that use case. Also, just it’s been interesting to see
    what people can create, like the differences and sort of how someone
    designs in a 2D interface, versus in a collaborative setting. When
    multiple people can come together and literally design together in
    that real time format to see how the differences that emerge in terms
    of the type of ideas that come from that, versus when they’re
    designing in isolation and then bringing those ideas together in like
    a conference room in a 2D deck. You know what I mean?

    Alan: Absolutely. First of all,

    nobody wants to be in a conference room ever.

    Gabe: [laughs] Yes.

    Alan: “I want to spend my

    day in a conference room,” said no one, ever.

    Gabe: [laughs] Exactly.

    Alan: It’s interesting. Some of

    these collaboration tools that I’ve seen, collaboration platforms,
    they keep recreating the conference room. I’m like, “Maybe we
    should just work out in the forest. I don’t know. Can we make a beach
    that we’re all standing on?”

    Gabe: Yeah. The bottom line is,

    I mean, I feel like everyone sort of innately understands that the
    conference room is actually the least creative setting you can
    possibly put people into. And we really have an opportunity to do
    that completely differently, to inspire you with where we put you, to
    have these ideas. So that you’re not starting just in this sterile
    room with white walls and whiteboards and a TV and expected to have
    amazing ideas come from that.

    Alan: Yeah, no kidding. It’s

    uninspiring, but I think one of the first things that– I guess the
    first complaints that people had about virtual reality was very
    isolating, and I’m alone. But when you the first time you realize
    that there’s other people in it with you in that social aspect, your
    brain just kind of lights up because, one, you’re not expecting it.
    And two, you realize, holy crap, it’s as if they were standing right
    in front of me. And that sense of presence can transcend continents
    and we can have conversations with people all over the world. And I
    think what you guys have here is really incredible. Now, does it go
    across devices? So, for example, via an iPad, could I pull up the
    people as well? Or is it just for kind of head worn displays?

    Gabe: No. We are– AR is on the

    iPad and iPhone, so iOS devices. In terms of being cross-platform,
    you can join from virtual reality headsets like the VIVE, the Rift
    and so on. Or you can join from Windows or Mac — which is very also
    unique to us — you can come in in 2D mode on either platform.

    Alan: OK.

    Gabe: And then in augmented

    reality you can use iOS devices. And that’s just really the start.
    We’ve got a lot of things even beyond that in the road map. The idea
    is to provide really broad access to these cloud connected spaces
    from all of these different devices.

    Alan: You said you’ve had a

    bunch of companies, you’re working on this platform. Are you finding
    that VR headsets got sold? Bunch of consumers bought them, but they
    weren’t using them. Are you finding now that enterprise, because it’s
    a different animal, are they using these and is the daily usage
    increasing?

    Gabe: Absolutely. I mean, we

    have a lot of KPIs that we track, but the one core KPI that is most
    meaningful to us is space time. So space time is what we measure as
    not just logged into The Wild, but like active in a space, either
    creating or talking with somebody. So really engaged with content in
    the space. And every month it goes up, both from new users and our
    existing users incorporating The Wild into their workflow more and
    more. So it’s been a huge affirmation to what we’ve created to drive
    that metric up. And we intend to do that even more so, by providing
    more access, more capability, more speed, which is just key to
    creating ultimately the best possible experience they can have in
    this shared workspace.

    Alan: So I’ve got a plan for

    you. We’re going to partner with the cell phone companies and we’re
    going to design the future 5G interfaces in 5G.

    Gabe: [laughs] Please. Gosh.

    Real 5G, please.

    Alan: No kidding. We’ve been

    talking about it for so long.

    Gabe: It’s so important. I mean,

    what we have now is fantastic, I’m not going to lie. Like even The
    Wild, we’ve really worked hard to optimize The Wild to run well on a
    4G connection. And that’s part of how we can prove out the use case
    of taking an iPad to a site where you don’t have Wi-Fi, you’re gonna
    be on a like a 4G connection. And then having someone in Europe or in
    France somewhere, like a designer in France, and sharing a space with
    somebody on a 4G connection in Oklahoma. I don’t know. [laughs] And
    those people, those participants in that space being connected as if
    they were in the same room together. But 5G really amplifies the
    capability for us to create even that much more rich a space that
    they can experience together by just improving the flow of data
    between those two participants.

    Alan: Yeah, it’s just exciting,

    the stuff that can happen. So of the different companies that are
    working on this, what are the, I guess, industries that are most–
    you mentioned architecture. I would assume that’s a big one. What
    about, I guess, retail? I’ll let you talk to it, but what are some of
    the industries that are latching onto this?

    Gabe: It’s interesting, retail

    actually is what started it for us. There’s tremendous value in
    retail. So when I talk about retail, I’m saying sort of specifically
    merchandising, retail space. A lot of companies and a lot of brands
    and also retailers have products that they’re trying to match into a
    variety of physical spaces. They create all different configurations
    of it. And a lot of that work traditionally was done in 2D. Even on
    whiteboards, they’re taking pictures of products and hanging them up
    in different configurations. And that’s how you see them in a store
    shelf. Whether you’re looking at cereal boxes or shirts or whatever.
    So our ability to take that to the next level and allow that to be a
    fully experiential, both designing experience where the designers can
    go in there and layout the store as if they were physically in it,
    but also in terms of the testing that they can do on that, like
    running people through it and getting feedback on those spaces. It’s
    amazing, the workflows that emerge from that in The Wild. And it’s
    really astonishing to see a full retail store, like a Walmart inside
    of The Wild and to walk through those aisles as if you are in there.
    It’s a bizarre and amazing experience.

    Alan: Going to be really cool

    when things like Oculus Quest allow you to have free roaming, so you
    could stand in a big office and just walk up and down.

    Gabe: Oh, absolutely, yeah. So

    the ability– even in a giant factory type setting where you have all
    this empty space, we haven’t really pushed it to that limit yet, but
    that’s definitely in the future for this technology.

    Alan: Amazing. It’s very

    exciting.

    Gabe: So retail is one really

    powerful vertical, of course architecture. But along with
    architecture, all of the– through the whole AEC stack, engineering
    and construction, they have all different ways and needs for not just
    design, but really communication and coordination across those
    different trades, that really make The Wild shine. So your ability to
    go into a space with a general contractor or the electrical team, all
    these different trades coming together and getting buy-off from
    inside the space, rather than looking at these 2D drawings is really
    powerful.

    Alan: So it’s really quite a

    fantastic tool. How do people, I guess, measure their success within
    this? First of all, how much do you charge for it? Is there a fee, or
    are you just trying to onboard people now, or is there a trial or…?

    Gabe: Yes. Well, we do offer a

    free trial, which you can go to our site, thewild.com to try. And
    then we’ve got a per user pricing scheme that comes out of that. It’s
    pretty simple and doable for any team that’s already paying for other
    3D software in their stack. So basically, we’re trying to make it
    both. We’re not just trying to come out right and make people buy off
    on a huge plan, but really allowing them to grow into it. So they can
    start really simply with just a few seeds and then just organically
    grow into their team, as their need evolves and develops. And we
    really see them measuring their success in a number of ways. Number
    one, I would say just satisfied and excited, engaged clients. A lot
    of our customers are using The Wild for presentation, both with their
    client in the same room and also remotely, because it allows them to
    so much more effectively present their ideas across distance. That
    sort of satisfaction is huge.

    And we get feedback all the time about

    jobs that have been won, or just that are going more smoothly than it
    would have otherwise. And then also just in the happiness of the
    team, of course. Any design team gets frustrated when
    miscommunication happens, when they’re not getting solid signoff or
    all of that stuff, that just creates friction in the work
    environment. We’re doing our best to eradicate. You can really
    measure sort of success in terms of just job satisfaction at the end
    of the day as well.

    Alan: People don’t put much

    weight on this, but it also being cutting edge and using these tools
    can really attract younger employees.

    Gabe: Sure. I mean, I think it’s

    not really just about youth versus…

    Alan: Future thinking people. I

    don’t think we should put an age on things, but people that are used
    to using cutting edge tools.

    Gabe: Yeah, exactly. So those

    sorts of team members that are really going to push you forward,
    rather than just sort of adhering to the status quo. I mean, those
    are the companies that are even just drawn to this technology,
    period. But also those are the companies that are really, really
    making a name for themselves, because they’re able to move with not
    just recklessness, but with strategic investment in solving these key
    business problems that helps them do their job, of course more
    efficiently, but fundamentally just create a better end product.

    Alan: Yeah, I agree. It’s gonna

    be great for for everybody, engineers, aerospace. If you think about
    all the things that need to be designed in the world, being able to
    do it remotely because commuting in for people– I read a stat that
    the average commute time is two hours a day.

    Gabe: Absolutely. Yeah. The sort

    of thing I like to come back to it that it’s like, what are you
    getting from commuting in? What value are we creating in terms of the
    work? And there are a lot of arguments to be made about that. But
    what most people come back to when you ask them that question is it’s
    the sense of the team really feeling like they’re there, face to
    face, coming together to solve this problem and having that sort of
    camaraderie that’s created through like people in a space together.
    And honestly, not just The Wild, but XR — and especially social XR
    — holds the promise of being able to unlock that in a way that is
    just so much more powerful than we can even do in a physical space.
    Like one of our metrics that we really strive toward is we want all
    of our customers to be able to say not just that meetings in The Wild
    are more effective than what they can do in other digital realms. But
    we want people to say that meeting in The Wild is more effective than
    what they can do in any other way. So more effective than meeting in
    a conference room or meeting on site, I don’t know. However they
    might do it, we want it to be the superpowers that you’re able to
    unlock in terms of working in The Wild from anywhere is really the
    cream of the crop. You would prefer that over all other forms of
    interaction with your team.

    Alan: That’s a bold statement.

    And I think on that note, we should wrap this up because what else
    needs to be said? You’re literally building the future of
    collaboration and the future is now.

    Gabe: Absolutely. Thank you so

    much for having me on, I really appreciate it.

    Alan: Oh, it’s my absolute

    pleasure. Is there anything else you wanna leave listeners with? I
    know we can leave them with the website, thewild.com, but is there
    anything else you want to leave listeners with?

    Gabe: Just check out more at

    thewild.com, of course. But also, if you have any ideas, any
    projects, don’t be afraid to get started today, whether it’s with The
    Wild or any other tool. I often say “The greatest step is sort
    of the first step into it” and be bold, introduce this
    technology into your company, and amazing things are going to come
    from it.

    28 min
  • Taming the Jungle of Ideas, with The Wild's Gabe Paez
    Unlike in nature, ideas in enterprise don't grow or perish by
    the laws of natural selection -- survival of the fittest -- but
    rather, which ideas are communicated and understood better at the
    early stages. But not every good idea is best expressed on a
    whiteboard. That's why Gabe Paez developed The Wild -- a digital
    collaborative space designed to help teams workshop designs and ideas
    in a VR environment.
    Alan: My name's Alan Smithson,
    the host of the XR for Business Podcast, where we interview industry
    leaders in making technologies in virtual, augmented and mixed
    reality. And today's guest is Gabe Paez. Gabe works at the
    intersection of engineering, design, and business. He's the founder
    and CEO of The Wild, and immersive collaboration platform for teams
    to experience their work together, from anywhere in augmented and
    virtual reality. The Wild enables spatial design teams to ideate,
    review, share, and present in cross-platform XR from the same room or
    across the world. Gabe has over a decade of experience leading
    experiential product teams and has designed immersive software
    products for a diverse roster of Fortune 100 companies including
    Google, Samsung, Nike, AT&T, and Verizon. To learn more about The
    Wild visit thewild.com.
    Gabe, welcome to the show.
    Gabe: Hi! It's good to be here.
    Thank you.
    Alan: Really amazing. Thank you
    so much for taking the time. I know you're super busy. You just
    launched The Wild out into the wild. Tell us about The Wild. How did
    this idea come to be, and what is it?
    Gabe: Well, to be honest, I feel
    like I've spent my whole career trying to explain ambitious ideas to
    people, and what I've realized in that process is that there are
    pools for sharing that idea -- especially in the early stages of that
    idea -- are so limited. And often the best, the most ambitious, the
    most interesting ideas get shut out early on, solely for the reason
    that they are misunderstood or not completely communicated to the
    other person. So I really wanted to break down that barrier; find a
    way for everyone on a team to experience an idea together, while it's
    still in the ideas stage straight through to execution, and to find
    an efficiency in that process. Not just solely for cost savings, but
    ultimately, to find the best ideas and let those surface to the top
    of the stack.
    Alan: Let's break it down here.
    So this is a collaboration tool or a platform where people from
    around the world can go into a virtual space and experience design
    together.
    Gabe: So The Wild really puts
    collaboration at the core of the offering, not as an add-on, but as
    the foundation of what we're doing. We're creating a collaboration
    hub for people that design spaces, environments to come together and
    experience those spaces from anywhere in the world. Architects,
    engineers, people that their profession is to take an idea and
    transform that into a physical place in the physical world somewhere.
    And so they have a unique challenge that the output of their process,
    their design process really isn't realized until the very final
    stage. So what The Wild does is sort of says we now have a capability
    that we don't have to wait until the very end to really understand
    that space and to experience it, not just as a simulation on your
    own, but to experience it together as a team, just as you would in
    the very final moments where you walk through that space physically
    with your teammates and look at what you've created together. We're
    using not just virtual reality, but the whole XR spectrum to allow
    those team members to experience that idea as a concept in the very
    early stages, either in total virtual space, in virtual reality or
    augmented into a physical space. Whether you're building out a full
    building on an empty lot, that you c
    0 min

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