XR for Business

Even in a virtual world, you still sweat. That’s why it’s important to keep your HMDs clean, especially if there’s multiple users. Cleanbox devised UV light technology for just such a purpose, then found a higher calling during the Coronavirus.

Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan Smithson here, with the XR for Business podcast. Today, we're speaking with Amy Hedrick, co-founder and CEO of Cleanbox, a smart technology hygiene company that's providing hospital grade decontamination of shared hardware, which I guess we can all agree right now, is very necessary in the current situation. In this podcast, we'll also learn how the team at Cleanbox is helping hospitals maintain mask hygiene. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast.

Amy, welcome.

Amy: Thank you, Alan. It's great to be here.

Thank you so much for taking time. I know you are crazy busy, working probably 20 hour days right now. You are on the front lines, bringing hygiene in a time where it could not be more important. So thank you for joining us and taking the time.

Amy: It's my pleasure. I'm happy to do it. And you're right. It is very timely. Everybody's focus right now -- globally -- is on hygiene and public safety and public responsibility, and how we can better stay safe when we're able to go back out in the world.

Alan: Absolutely. So I'm going to get right into it. I know you were working with the VR community very heavily, but I think right now this is just kind of top of mind with everybody. So maybe in your own words, you can explain what Cleanbox Technologies does.

Amy: Sure. Well, OK, so Cleanbox technology provides hospital grade decontamination of shared hardware. We designed our core technology with-- actually with XR in mind, with the idea and the belief that virtual and augmented reality had great potential in terms of business and enterprise purposes, as well as in healthcare, and of course, entertainment. Seeing the value there and thinking ahead of what would be the pain points that would prevent a successful global deployment, or a successful corporate deployment, and adequate actual consumer adoption. Few years ago, thinking back on how we would be able to meet some of those pain points and eliminate them and lower the barrier of entry, hygiene seemed to be one of those things that was easy to forget. So with XR technology, it's so sexy and there's a lot of very interesting and cool and unique things you can do with it. So the logistics sometimes gets gets a little bit lost. We came at the XR community from the point of risk mitigation. How could we reduce the risk of contagion transfer and thus some detrimental event happening within the industry? And we've grown since then.

Alan: So right now it's an interesting time, because we're all stuck at home. So things like location based entertainment facilities are empty. Where is your business coming from now? I know you-- from speaking with one of your advisors, Terry Schussler, that you're booming right now. You can't fulfill the orders fast enough. Where's this business coming from, if it's not coming from location based entertainment?

Amy: Well, we've always been addressing multiple markets at once. Location based entertainment is, of course, first and foremost in people's minds because that's -- I guess -- the best education for the average consumer into what immersive technology can do. So it's-- and it's very dear to my origins and we definitely take care of the LB community. On that note, I would say that there are plenty of organizations looking forward to the day that they can reopen, and realizing that not only just the idea of hygiene, but actual hygiene is really critically important to reopening those businesses and looking at bringing people back in. But in terms of our other types of clients, we work in enterprise, we work in health care. So anything from automotive to aerospace or airline industry, from retail to automation, mine safety training, there's a lot going on in healthcare as well. We've been very, very active in multiple enterprise business verticals. So Terry's right, there is a huge demand. And that's because people are both still using XR right now, either in -- for instance -- frontline triage training for COVID-19 response teams. They're also still using it -- some of the frontline workers and companies that you would not necessarily think of using XR still -- they're using it for everything from keeping their frontline workers engaged mentally or emotionally -- giving them a sort of a Zen moment, a Zen break -- if they're frontline or first responders, to exercise programs to training. So really, Cleanbox is in a lot of business verticals, because anybody that uses hardware on their face and head needs to have a way to protect the next person.

Alan: The one thing that you just mentioned was the VR being used for kind of just a moment of peace when you're on the front lines of battling this disease. I think as a world, we've been pretty lucky with this particular virus. Yes, it's spread around the world and it's shuttered economies, but the mortality rate is low enough that we can at least keep hold of it. But our frontline hospital workers are going through a really, really tough time right now, working ridiculous hours and multi-shifts and stuff. So giving them the peace of mind to be able to just sit in a tranquil place and just zone out for a minute, I think is very necessary as well. Terry had mentioned once that you guys can also sterilize masks and things.

Amy: Well, let me-- I guess I realize I haven't really explained how our technology works.

Alan: Yeah, let's get into it. What does that do?

Amy: How does it work? We use UVC light in an LED to decontaminate any kind of shared hardware. It's a 60 second process, and in that 60 seconds, we reach 99.99 percent eradication of any kind of contagion, from viruses, to bacteria, to fungi. We use UVC light. Traditionally, it's been used in healthcare systems for decades. Why is it effective? It's effective because it deconstructs the DNA or RNA strands of a contagion. UVC light's been used in hospitals for the last 40 years-ish. So it's a proven technology. What we do is in an LED, as opposed to a mercury tube. So we've eliminated the heat and the toxin components that would normally come with UVC decontamination. And that's important because, of course, you're wearing this hardware on your face, on your eyes, on your mouth, on your nose. So you definitely want to have a decontamination process that doesn't include chemicals or anything that could be not safe for the end-user.

Alan: We've been sterilizing, because we bought masks for our VR headsets -- the leatherette masks -- and we've been sterilizing using alcohol swabs.

Amy: Well, I can tell you that alcohol is an effective form of decontamination on hard surfaces, but you have to leave it wet for two to four minutes for it to actually do the decontamination you're expecting. You'll actually see that if you read the back of your Lysol bottle or whatever other kind of decontaminate you have. If you want to reach that 99 percent, there is a certain way you have to go about doing that, which alcohol on electronics is-- well, any kind of liquid on electronics is not really an ideal situation. So we've been looking at what are the best ways to decontaminate a product? Thinking about alcohol, you've got to have a user wipe it on a certain surface, which brings in human error components that would affect whether or not you're actually decontaminating that surface. Alcohol's also not effective on soft surfaces. So there has to be something that can continue to clean the entirety of a complicated headset. VR and AR headsets are a bit more complicated to clean than your average electronics, for instance. I mean, a cellphone is pretty easy to clean. A headset, you have shadows, and you have multiple types of materials on the surface, and multiple touch points. And they all have to be decontaminated evenly and equally, to make sure you don't pass a contagion from one person to the next.

Alan: I actually have a question about that. What happens in parts that the light can't see?

Amy: So it's a-- you're right, UVC's a line of sight technology, but all of Cleanbox's products are engineered for maximum UVC efficacy. And what that means is that we've eliminated those shadows. We have an overlap in radius of our lights that's been tested and gone through the R&D process and gone through independent lab testing, to make sure that there are no shadows and anything that touches your face or head. Another thing about UVC light is that if you want to decontaminate a surface -- for instance -- you need to have the right mixture of the distance from the surface, the time that light is evenly over that surface, and the intensity of the nanometre wavelength. So it's a little bit more complicated than it sounds. [chuckles]

Alan: Absolutely. Sounds like you guys have some smart people working on this.

Amy: Yes. I have a really great team. I'm very proud of them.

Alan: I can imagine.

Amy: Yeah, well, you had alluded to masks, so I would-- I'll just mention that UVC light -- as I mentioned -- has been used in hospitals for decades, which means that it's a trusted technology. So we know that it's-- our lights have been tested against H1N1. They've been tested against-- they're effective against SARS and MERS, something like bacterial, which is like MRSA, an antibiotic resistant staph infection. So we have a lot of-- there's a lot of data to support the use case. And because of that, we do have clients that have been saying, "Hey, we're using this for PPEs, because UVC light is a known entity." So we've been working with some of our clients, actually, to provide retrofits for our existing product that they've donated, and in parallel working on a product that is specific for masks. So that's been keeping us very, very, very busy as a small team, but a pivot that we really felt was mission critical right now. I mean, I'm sure, Alan, you probably know people, frontline workers, first responders, people that are exposed to this. Well, fortunately, it doesn't have a-- as high of a death rate as it could. It still is impacting people's lives. So this is a way that we knew that we could help, because we know that our technology is effective at eradicating contagions.

Alan: That's incredible. We're in probably the most unique time in, well, in our lives, definitely. And you have a technology. So how do you get this into the hands of governments? How do you get this in the hands of hospitals, so that they can-- because mask shortages seems to be a problem. But if you could sterilize things quickly and reuse things, it seems to be a win-win.

Amy: Yes. Well, we have clients already in healthcare, in various departments, in different hospitals, and healthcare centers and universities. And so they've been using our product right now, because they already have it. We've provided a retrofit so that it equally decontaminates both sides of the masks. But getting a mask-specific product out to hospitals, we have a lot of corporate partners that are helping support the work that we're doing. They say, "How can we be involved? How how can we help you guys get product to healthcare centers?" So I'm working on a number of fronts to push that forward, and make sure we can get this out. The product that we build, that we can provide is something that can be used on an ongoing basis, so throughout the day. A healthcare worker can use it in between patients, or a first responder between emergency responses. And this way it's something that is a very light footprint. It's a small product. It's a 60-120 second cycle. And it can be stationed throughout lots of different stations in a healthcare center. That's something that we can do. This way, they don't have to export the mask first, then have it repurposed and then reintroduce back into the healthcare system. Hopefully that makes sense, and I explained that well enough.

Alan: Yeah, absolutely. I guess for companies that are selling these solutions, let's say, for example, they've got a VR collaboration. So you recently sponsored the XR Collaboration Platform Resource Guide, at XRcollaboration.com. And it's a global resource guide that helps people make decisions on using virtual and augmented reality solutions for collaboration, now that we're basically creating more social interactions in a time of social distancing. So with that, what would your recommendation be to these companies that are selling these solutions to customers, and how can they get a hold of you and then kind of bundle the Cleanbox solution with that?

Amy: Well, we do have a lot of people in pre-pandemic that have already been kind of going down that path. So we've been anticipating the growth of XR already in enterprise and healthcare. So I think that some companies are further along in that process. But obviously, hygiene is a really critical-- we've always believed this is why Cleanbox exists, is that hygiene is a critical piece of the puzzle, that sometimes is the last piece that you need, but you'll always need it. We work with all types of clients in various types of packagings, bundling other kinds of agreements that we're happy to make and we have set up. So you can always reach out to me by email. My email is [email protected]. Or you can always send an [email protected] email, and someone from the sales team will reach back out to you. But we are also global. So we're entirely made in the US right now, which has been actually good for us, because we've had fewer manufacturing challenges, I suppose. We're still running operating, manufacturing, shipping product. We have had no interruptions for that. We do ship everywhere in the world.

Alan: So website again, cleanboxtech.com, correct?

Amy: Yes, correct. On the site there is all of the product that we have right now for HMDs. And then we have other product in the pipeline, too, that I think will be interesting to a lot of companies that are looking for other solutions, in addition to their headsets.

Alan: So, Amy, what are the different models that you have?

Amy: Well, we have three products on the market right now: CX-1, CX-2 and the CX-4. The CX-1 cleans one headset at once. The 2 cleans two, and the 4 cleans four. Very, very simple.

Alan: That seems pretty obvious. [laughs]

Amy: [laughs] It seems obvious when you say it that way. It's a 60 second cycle, regardless of which product. Whether you're cleaning one at once or four at once, it's still gonna be that one minute cycle time. And then on that note, we do actually have a new product coming out this summer, which is our ad hoc box, and that's intended for other types of small electronics, shared electronics, whether it be your cellphone, or your earbuds, or your tablet, or your handheld haptics. So I think people will be excited to see that one as well.

Alan: And do you want to speak about the pricing?

Amy: Well, I will tell you that we do offer tiered pricing. If you want to reach out to us at [email protected], we can send you a pricing sheet for all of our products. And then that way you'll know where any kinds of discounts or other kinds of offerings we might be able to help you with.

Alan: Excellent. Before we go, what is one problem in the world that you'd like to see solved using XR technologies?

Amy: Hmm. There are so many. Well, I think-- let's take it back to healthcare quickly, and I'm going to use an example that's not my own example, but a surgeon that has been using XR for-- ahead of a brain surgery, knowing that that taking-- that that technology can impact the level of efficacy on that actual surgery, and increase the chance for a patient's recovery and better that process. I would say that that's a major flag to wave for a successful use cases, that I would hope can drive the message that this is a new technology that can completely impact not only the time that it takes to complete a process, but it can impact the efficiency and the success rate of that particular job. I don't see it as a threat in any way to existing structure. I see it as an enhancement, as an opportunity for change and an opportunity to do a better job, whether you're a physician, a surgeon, an educator, even an entertainer. It's a tool. And I'm hoping that more and more people will start to see all of the options in that toolbox.

Alan: Well, that is very well said. Thank you so much, Amy, for taking the time out of your busy schedule to join us today. And I want to say thank you to everybody for listening. And also, if you haven't already subscribed, please hit the subscribe button on your podcast. Make sure you subscribe, so you're always alerted of the new stuff. You can also find us at XRforbusiness.io. And one last message, please download the free guide, Resource Guide to XR Collaborations. It's available now at XRcollaboration.com.

For most of the world, a cross-country, gapless 5G network is still the realm of futurists. One exception is South Korea, where a 5G network is quickly proliferating. Korea Telecom’s Joonmo Park discusses how his company is using the network to evangelize VR.

Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan Smithson here. Today, we're speaking with Joonmo Park, new media business development manager at Korea Telecom, the largest telecommunications company in South Korea. We're going to be talking about 5G, virtual reality and transportation. All that coming up next, on the XR for Business podcast.

Joonmo, welcome to the show, my friend.

Joonmo: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Alan. And I'm really happy to be here.

Alan: It's an absolute honor to have you on the show. I was really impressed with some of the work that I've been seeing come out of Korea. And I was very impressed to find out that it was the work of you and your team, that have put these things together. So maybe just talk about the projects that you've been working on at KT Tel.

Joonmo: Okay. Our company -- KT -- is the largest telecommunications company in South Korea, with more than 30 years of experience in mobile telephone service, and broadcasting, and Internet. And I've been with the company for over three years across a variety of different functions, including business strategy, B2C business, and B2B business. But about one and half years ago, as a company, we decided to establish a dedicated team that's purely focused on what's new and what's next. So we focused on the emerging consumer landscape and the emerging technology landscape, and make sure that the KT brand continues to be relevant not only today, but five or ten years from now. So we are focusing on looking at new business models and emerging technologies, then tying those to our strategy businesses. So we wanted to make sure that any new innovation that we bring into the society has a lasting impact. But more importantly, a monetary impact that is actually moving the needle. So to introduce a little bit about South Korean XR market, South Korea's telecom operators are really striving to create the right range of immersive mixed reality content to leverage their 5G network and attract more customers. And there are three local carriers, including SK Telecom, and Korea Telecom, and LG Uplus. And they rolled out their 5G network in the nation in April 2019, and together are drawing more than three million subscribers in the first seven months of the launch.

Alan: Sorry, three million subscribers to the new 5G network?

Joonmo: Yes, right.

Alan: So do these people have 5G devices? Is there a lot of 5G devices available?

Joonmo: Yes, right. Because as the launch of Galaxy S10 with 5G, and that many people bought that device and using 5G network right now.

Alan: That's incredible. So how many would you estimate are using the 5G network with 5G devices?

Joonmo: I think until the end of the 2020, more than the five million people will use it.

Alan: Wow, that's way far ahead of North America. In Canada, we have zero 5G deployment. We only have it in research parks and research areas.

Joonmo: Well, you need to think about that. South Korea is a very small country with very many numbers of populations. So it is really easy for companies to make the decision to build new 5G infrastructures, because even though they build small 5G networks, many people would use that. So many tech companies feel that building a 5G networks is attracting more money than just using 4G network.

Alan: So how is 5G -- or just the ability to have this kind of massive data pipe -- affecting your ability to do virtual reality, or augmented reality, or mixed reality?

Joonmo: Well, as you know, the VR devices right now do not support 5G network, and all of the devices are using Wi-Fi network. However, we use 5G-- we use VR as the marketing attraction for 5G. And to talk about KT, KT launched the 4K High Definitions personal media service with the brand name "Super VR." And we attract 5G users by selling the Super VR. And we are using Super VR as a marketing point for the 5G service.

Alan: Oh, that's interesting. So Super VR-- and for anybody wants to check it out, it's actually pretty cool: it's ktsupervr.co.kr. Did you guys do everything? So did you make the headsets as well or just the kind of the back end? Or did you partner with companies to do this?

Joonmo: Actually we partnered with a company called Pico in China and we use Pico's G2 device. And we provide more than 10,000 immersive videos and features, over more than 500 4K high resolution videos, and more than 30 games in various genres, such as sports, and shooting, horror, and rhythm action.

Alan: That's pretty awesome. So you basically control the content. You're like the Netflix of VR in South Korea.

Joonmo: Yes, right. Exactly.

Alan: Can people buy the headset and subscribe to this service, if they're not a KT customer?

Joonmo: When we first launched the Super VR device, it was only for KT users. But from the last November, we opened the device to all the platform users, even though they are not using KT.

Alan: That's awesome. That's really great. And how is the response so far?

Joonmo: Oh, well, many people are really satisfied about that. Where we are -- according to some kind of customer report -- more than 60 percent of customers are really satisfied with it, and more than 10,000s of devices are sold in nationwide. And the interesting thing is that many Korean customers are more satisfied with videos, rather than games. And I think it's a really interesting point, because many VR users tend to buy VR to play games, including Steam or Oculus or HTC Vive. However, in Korea, many people consider VR as a second TV or personal TV, so they tend to use VR to watch video in cinematic situations.

Alan: So basically what people are using is something like big screen, where they sit on the couch with their friends and watch a large movie in a screen. Which is actually, if you think about it now: now that a lot of people in the world are are stuck in their houses, not everybody has a IMAX sized screen in their house. I know I don't. But being able to put a VR headset on and watch a movie on an IMAX sized screen is actually pretty wonderful. And you guys are streaming these in 4K, which is really beautiful.

Joonmo: Yeah, right. And actually, as we are the IPTV-- and we serve our TV service, which is the IPTV Broadcasting System. And we first launched IPTV for a full year on Pico headset, which means that people can see the exact same TV, while they are putting on the HMD.

Alan: So you're basically broadcasting the regular television into the headsets.

Joonmo: Yeah, right.

Alan: That makes sense. I think the next thing is you're going to have a big screen, or however many screens you want for maybe your computer, or your laptop, or whatever. And I also think you can have a little-- like a second screen where you see your cell phone as a screen in VR. So you can check your messages quick with your phone.

Joonmo: Yeah. That is our goal, to merge mobile service, VR, and TV all in one by using our network.

Alan: Very, very cool. And you said the adoption is picking up. Are you seeing an acceleration now that less people are out? How is the economy downturn affected your business?

Joonmo: You mean because of the coronavirus?

Alan: Correct.

Joonmo: Yeah, but actually -- as you said -- there is a big change for our marketing strategy, as until the last year we've tended to focus on retail stores in order to sell our devices. However, after the outbreak of coronavirus then most of the people don't visit the physical retail store. So we tend to focus on B2B business, including using ENGAGE VR for online conferences. So we are selling our VR devices to schools, or transportation services, or academies for that said, those devices for those enterprise customers.

Alan: Let's break this down by, I guess, enterprise or business, and then education. How are your business customers using these technologies right now?

Joonmo: After we commercialized the VR service for enterprise called Super VR Biz -- and Biz refers to business, which is often used in Korea -- we composed this Super VR Biz with Pico VR headsets, and the contents and network services. And many different kinds of industries wanted to apply our service. We started the first service in transportation and we launched a pilot VR service in express bus in November 2019 with a company called Kumho Express Bus, which is similar to Greyhound in America. And really the goal was to understand how our VR technology and content can apply to other industries. We have two ultimate objectives. And one was to drive employee adoption. So our enterprise clients make sure they're adopting the technology. And the second one is passengers adoption on the other end of it, making sure that passengers are adopting on innovative but emerging technology while traveling. And if we can do this first, everything else will come together.

Alan: So what was the finding of that? Did people use it? Did they like it? What was the outcome?

Joonmo: After we are running the VR service for transportation and we got the survey answers from hundreds of passengers, there are several interesting results. The first one is people thought about three to five dollars was enough per use, which means that -- as it takes about three to four hours to move from city to city in Korea -- so it refers to the fact that a dollar per hour is considered as not that expensive for the passengers. And secondly, people preferred 3DOF devices than 6DOF devices for travelling. As I mentioned before, many Korean people like to use VR for watching videos, rather than playing games. So I think this is also seen in transportation businesses.

Alan: It's really interesting you should say that, because I think over here, there's a misconception that everybody that uses VR wants to have a six degree of freedom experience, or being able to move around. But think about it, when you're on a train, let's say -- for example -- you set up a stationary space. As soon as the train starts moving and turning -- or in a car or vehicle, anything that's moving -- you have to recalibrate that. Whereas if it's just a heads-up display where you're watching a video and you're just -- not even a 360 video, just a video -- you can then relax. But the headsets themselves, I guess because you don't need all of the sensors to have a full six degree of freedom experience with these headsets, can they make them into a lightweight pair of glasses, and is that something Pico's looking at? I've seen some of the-- Huawei come up with a pair of glasses and Samsung, they're all kind of teasing at these. And even HTC is teasing it, these lightweight pair of glasses. But for now, we start to wear these big VR headsets. Have you seen any prototypes that have come out, that look really good for just sitting down in a train, watching video?

Joonmo: You mean something like the Nreal AR glasses, or something like that?

Alan: No, not AR, but more VR, but in a small form factor.

Joonmo: We tried very different kinds of devices, including Oculus Quest, or Pico device for 3DOF, and Samsung Gear. And the interesting thing was that as many passengers are not that familiar to VR devices, they had trouble with using 6DOF devices on the bus. However, the 3DOF devices are rather more easy to use than 6DOF. So people felt more comfortable to use that while they are traveling. And while they are riding on the bus, then they feel a little bit nausea while they are traveling, so they tend not to play games. Rather, they tend to see relaxing videos.

Alan: And the videos wouldn't give you that, because it's fixed to a main plane. You know, it's something that I think a lot of people over here have almost missed that opportunity, or forgot about this opportunity. And when I got into virtual reality in the beginning, the first thing we did was we filmed 360 videos, because we thought that was what VR was. And then we got into 6DOF experiences. It's interesting that something as simple as like a company like Bigscreen, where they just have a big screen, or what you guys are doing is just providing regular 2D content in a much more immersive way for travelers who have to spend time travelling. And I think this is a use case for the technology that we in North America -- and maybe other parts of the world -- have just neglected. And have you seen anybody take the same concept and allow business workers to conduct business -- or at least to work while they're doing that -- replicate their computer screen rather than video? Have you seen that?

Joonmo: Not really in Korea, but I've seen similar services on the airplane. I saw the device called Skylight or Aerospace, which--

Alan: Oh yeah, how was that?

Joonmo: Yeah, yeah. Running the HMD device for first class passengers. And I think the concept is very much similar to that one. And actually, we are preparing for the same business for the planes, too. But as more people are using express bus and trains in Korea, so we are preparing the VR devices, in order to make more people to experience VR more easily and more comfortably, without much knowledge about the VR device.

Alan: Yeah, I think that's the key, is just making sure that everybody understands by putting this thing on, you have a nicer experience. I think we try to-- a little bit go crazy and say, "Hey, you have to swing your arms around like an idiot when you're in VR." But just sitting, relaxing, watching a nice video on a huge screen with nice sound. It's funny we take it for granted how amazing this technology is in a very simple way. You talked about driving employee adoption of this technology. How is KT using this technology within their own business units to drive value?

Joonmo: The employee engagement was the main challenge for us. And it has really important things, because if people don't use then it's kind of useless. So for us, it was critical that we had a comprehensive training program for VR adoption. So we worked with our technical partners and marketers to really build a robust end-to-end training program that clearly communicating the benefits of the technology, the practical application of it, and what it means for our clients. So when I was training employees for the transportation businesses, my ultimate goal was to provide unique travel experience to passengers. And I also talked to the bus drivers that you don't need to be intrigued by the passengers who are driving, because we are supporting the technical issues. So I always told to the crew that here is a technology that can not only help you provide unique travel experiences, but also increase revenues in the long term with increased number of passengers. And I also said that we must support customers' complaints about VR with our engineers on phone while you are driving. So it was really clearly outlining the benefits of the VR technology, and let them know that they don't have to worry about technical issues. So the fact that we piloted in two bus lines and sold the reserves for our service, and that allowed us to take it to the balance of the organization and tell them "I showed the benefits, and we have done this before, and this is what it looked like." And that allowed us to drive employee adoption. And it was really critical, because the consumer adoption can accommodate our colleagues who don't adopt the technology. So we were able to cross others as the other one becomes a lot easier to.

Alan: That's incredible. As part of your training program, what are some of the business use cases that you're using this for, or you're promoting this for?

Joonmo: We started our pilot service with a Club Med Resort in China, and I trained the reception desk workers on the Club Med about how to handle this device, and how to explain about the contents or etc. And at the first time, the reception workers were not that eager to learn about that, because they thought that they were too busy to just handling with the hotel works, and they thought that the VR device was just so burdensome to them. However, as I taught them in person and I also practiced so many hours for them to use it, and then they get-- once acclimated to use them, then they got easy to serve the device to the tourists.

Alan: And what is the response been? Have you been able to document an increase in revenues or a decrease in times? What are the results?

Joonmo: I cannot say that there were more increased customers because of VR, because of the outbreak of the coronavirus at the hotel.

Alan: Oh, no! So you were launching it right as--?

Joonmo: Yes. So I cannot say that the numbers are increased because of the VR. But however, as there was the survey -- when people were checked out from the hotel -- and many people were really satisfied about that additional entertainment surveys for the hotel. Many tourists thought VR is very good entertaining service for the kids. So many moms and fathers who were really satisfied about serving VR at the hotel.

Alan: A great toy and experience for kids that have never tried it, as well. I love it. So I actually had a thought. Are you guys doing so when people are watching-- let's say they're watching videos on a train, or a bus, or wherever they're consuming your content. Do you have inside of their special advertisements in 360?

Joonmo: Oh, we are. To talk about our service, we have advertisement sections in our device, which is composed of images and 360 videos. And for the Club Med, we received Club Med advertisement videos from them, and we put that on the device in the internal memory. And whenever people click that advertisement, then they can experience the resort in 360 degree video. So the client was really satisfied about that, because the VR is considered as really immersive media and immersive environment can give the customers with more deeply understand about the resort. So many people experienced that video, that advertisement.

Alan: That's fantastic. What are some of the solutions that you're offering in Super VR Biz? And are you guys experimenting at all with augmented reality, as it pertains to maybe Hololens or Magic Leap or these types of things, where-- for factory worker in manufacturing, and these types of things? Or is this mainly consumer facing application?

Joonmo: Right now, we only serve VR for Super VR Biz. However, we are planning to serve AR and MR service in our business services, and we are actually preparing for AR engineering service, or AR touring service, or MR education services. And you can see that in the close future.

Alan: So when you're making -- for example -- augmented reality, is that taking off mobile phone based AR experiences? Is that something that's happening in Korea at all?

Joonmo: Yeah, about one or two years ago we tried to use AR glasses, such as Magic Leap or Nreal. However, because the high price of the device, it is not that easy to sell to the ordinary customers right now. So we are focusing on mobile AR right now in the market.

Alan: What are you seeing people using mobile AR for? Because I agree with you, mobile AR is the way to go right now, because it's accessible to everybody and everybody already has a phone. So if everybody has a nice phone in their pocket, what can we do with that? Or what are some of the business use cases you've seen that use mobile based AR?

Joonmo: There are some differences between tech companies, and my company is focusing on AR travelling, which means that you can put on your mobile phone to the building, and then you can see the explanation of the history of that building. However, some other companies tend to use AR for games, like Harry Potter or AR animal zoos.

Alan: You mentioned two things. One, Harry Potter, which was made by Niantic, which made Pokémon Go, the same game mechanics. But just this week they bought a company called 6D.ai, which is a cloud mapping company -- who was actually on this podcast previously as well -- but it's interesting, you said that and then you said adding a zoo. And this week -- again -- Google released the ability to see animals just from the browser, using their 3D Model Viewer, I think it's called. So being able to see animals in your space using AR.

Joonmo: But right now, not many people are using AR right now, because I think it is because of the coronavirus. You mean people cannot go outside right now. So many companies are having some hard time with using AR. But I think it'll be a popular and in here soon.

Alan: What about using this opportunity that everybody's at home, to maybe show them what products and services look like in three dimensions in their own space? So maybe bringing the shoe store to them, or bringing 3D experiences to their phone? Maybe it's not even AR, maybe just 3D experiences. Have you seen anything like that?

Joonmo: Well, I saw a AR funny tourist, like Ikea. And many online e-commerce stores are serving AR as tours and also KT also serves AR shopping, which is based on the TV. You can see augmented commerce on the screen, so that people can see the product in more augmented way.

Alan: Okay, that's really cool. Would they be using image recognition, then?

Joonmo: Yeah. Yeah. Right.

Alan: Man, it sounds like you guys are doing so lot. And I think the ability to have so many devices in prevalent 5G network has really unlocked the ability to drive these some of these experiences.

Joonmo: Oh yeah. Yeah, I think so too. The ability to support 5G network, as well as bringing content for the Korean users was the basis of the VR and AR service in Korean market.

Alan: Something that I'm really excited about personally is the new Qualcomm Snapdragon XR2 chip that's 5G enabled. So the glasses coming out next year will all be 5G enabled right out of the box.

Joonmo: Yeah, I'm really looking forward to that, too.

Alan: Yeah, it's gonna be exciting times in the next few years.

Joonmo: Yeah, I believe so.

Alan: Very cool. Well, Joonmo, I just wanted to give the website before I forget: the website for your company is corp.kt.com/eng or kt.com, which is in Korean. And then if people want to visit, they can also visit ktsupervr.co.kr, and that's the Super VR product that you guys have there. Any last words that you want to share with everybody?

Joonmo: I shared many things with you, and what I learned from the VR project is that I need to really focus on what I'm trying to solve for the client. So identifying a problem that you're trying to serve and figuring out practical applications is really important when you're having a VR or AR business.

Alan: That is some true words right there, my friend. What is one problem in the world that you want to see solved using XR technologies?

Joonmo: I really love to see that VR or AR can be used in a very diverse context, that every people can use VR and AR in the real physical world. So I think VR, MR and AR technologies will be merged into physical experiences, such as traveling or engineering. And those technologies will have enterprises to differentiate them from other companies, by creating all these experiences that mimics the physical experience. So obviously I'm at the center of it for some parts of it, but I'm really interested in seeing how that comes to life. And not only does the sort of consumer pain points, but also in assets and augments that experience.

Alan: Well said, my friend. Thank you very much, Joonmo. And thank you, everybody, for listening. This has been the XR for Business podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Please don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. Click the button so that you don't miss any of these amazing episodes. Again, my guest, Joonmo Park, new media business development manager at KT Tel or Korea Tel. And thank you again, Joonmo. It's been a wonderful experience.

Joonmo: Thank you, Alan. Thanks for having me.

Seeing is believing, but in the age of 3D product views through AR technology, seeing is also conceptualizing. Simply Augmented CEO Boaz Ashkenazy comes on the show to explain how AR-enabled 3D viewing will revolutionize everything from how we shop, to how we work.

Alan: Hey everyone, Alan Smithson here. Today we're speaking with Boaz Ashkenazy from SimplyAugmented. We're going to be talking about how 3D is revolutionizing furniture views and products on the web. All that coming up on the XR for Business podcast.

Boaz, welcome to the show, my friend.

Boaz: Hey, thank you very much. It's good to be here.

Alan: Oh, it's my absolute pleasure. I love the work you guys are doing. Let's get right into it. What is it that SimplyAugmented does, and how is it benefiting your customers now?

Boaz: Well, we have a 3D platform that benefits customers both in the sales and marketing teams, and one of our products is called Simply3D. It allows for sales and marketing teams to easily share augmented reality. We found a lot of challenges around sharing augmented reality online and Simply3D.io is a vehicle for helping folks share. And we also create product and room configurators that exist online that allow people to experience environments and products really easily with augmented reality integration.

Alan: So I got a chance to try one of the samples. I got to configure a-- it was like a quiet room or almost like a study room for open office furniture. So you go in, you close the door, and make yourself a phone call or whatever, but I got to configure it on the web. I hit a button, and it was in my living room here, this giant pod. And I was like, "Oh wow. This pod is huge in real life." So it was a great understanding of how big these things are, and I think that's truly the power of this technology. Maybe you can speak to some of the specific clients that you've worked with. What are they seeing, results wise?

Boaz: You know what's interesting about what you said is a lot of folks have trouble visualizing products at scale, especially with the bigger the product, the harder it is to visualize. I am an architect by training. And I spent years designing spaces, and a lot of times people are surprised about what those designs end up looking like, because it's hard to understand objects at scale. And the pods that you mentioned, they're called Nook pods. And they're large rooms within a room, basically. You can have a quiet room inside an open office, which is pretty typical these days. For two people for four people, for one person. And to see it online and configure it is one thing, but to see it in the environment and walk into is another.

One of the things that we recognized was there was two things that people really wanted to do. They wanted to quickly customize any of their products -- We're used to doing it with cars and vehicles, customize your products with colors, with options -- but then immediately be able to drop that in your environment and walk around it, look underneath it, walk inside it. And that's really what our configurator does.

One of the challenges that a lot of folks face in the XR space is how do you spin up augmented reality with so many possible variations? That's the hard part about building these configurators. There's so many options, that you would never be able to create the augmented reality content beforehand. You wouldn't be able to predict it. And so what we've done is we've allowed for on-demand, real time augmented reality, depending on the choices that you make.

Alan: So once I've configured it -- and I don't know, I didn't actually think about this until now -- but once I've configured -- let's say -- the Nook and I drop it into my space, can I continue to configure it from that space?

Boaz: Yeah. Right now the configuration happens on the web. It doesn't happen in augmented reality, but it's something that we're working on. A lot of people, they want to be able to do two things. They want to be able to configure in augmented reality on the web, not just in an app, and then also put multiple items in a space and have them stay in that environment. And so spacial anchors of different varieties are also something that we're working on. I think that's going to be a trend that we see, is people using spacial anchors to establish products in the environment that don't go away -- unless you want them to -- and then be able to configure them in real time.

Alan: Give me an example of why somebody would want to leave something in fixed space.

Boaz: I mean, there's so many use cases, but one example would be being able to drop a-- let's keep talking about the Nook. So let's say that you'd want to drop the Nook in an office space in a certain location, but you'd want to tag it so it stays in place. And then when somebody else comes into that environment, they can see it in the orientation that you've placed it in, and then check it out as well. So that's one option. The other option that we're seeing a lot of is in virtual meetings. So with spacial anchors, if you can -- as a team leader and as a presenter -- drop an object onto the table in front of you, everybody else can pick up their phones and look at that object as well. And you've established it as a point in space. And so as we see virtual meetings really taking over, I think that augmented reality is going to be a part of being able to visualize what otherwise would be hard to show if you weren't present.

Alan: With the coronavirus and all these events being canceled, there's an opportunity for this industry to really springboard itself. We've identified, I think, 60 different VR and AR collaboration platforms so far. And so I think the ability to bring an object in and collaborate with it from anywhere is really going to be something special. What are you mainly targeting now, from the device standpoint? Like obviously virtual reality goggles -- for example -- are great, but there's not that many-- the scale isn't there yet. With augmented reality, you've got maybe phone-based versus HoloLens or something like that. What type of devices are you targeting now, or what is the major consumption of this technology?

Boaz: For a long time, I worked with Oculus, Vive, HoloLens, and other headsets. And recently I'm seeing a lot of people switching over to mobile devices, there's a lot of headsets that I see in offices that are going unused. I'm still very interested in those use cases, especially in hands-free situations. But most of my clients want to experience augmented reality with their phone or tablet. And then the other thing, too, is when we first started SimplyAugmented, we built apps for the app store and we build Android apps, and built a platform solely based on those apps. And some of the feedback that we were getting was just around friction of having too many apps in their phone, about wanting to get to the augmented reality faster.

And so in the last six months, we built Simply3D.io, which is a web-based platform where you have text messaging and QR codes and you can share augmented reality directly with your customers and they can just happen in their own browser. And that's a trend that we're seeing. 8th Wall's doing some interesting things with web-based augmented reality. And I just see that exploding. And I think that's going to be a huge trend.

Alan: I tend to disagree. I think the internet is a passing fad. I don't think it's going to stick around.

[ba-dum-tsssh]

[laughs] To be honest, the way the Web is going, with 5G and distributed computing and being able to render things on the cloud-- not only render on the cloud, but with edge computing, you should be able to take some of the rendering power off of the device and put it in the edge, and create those multi-user experiences with photorealistic precision, and allow people from around the world to work together on photorealistic 3D assets, all running from your phone. Because if you can take even 50% of the rendering power off the device, then you're able to push way more pixels. Or voxels, I guess; three dimensional pixels.

Boaz: Yeah, absolutely. I also do 3D consulting and I work with a lot of design construction and developers in the real estate space, and we've developed some 3D configurators that are room configurators, spacial configurators, where you can go into environments. And we're using WebGL. We're doing a lot of technical work to keep these file sizes really small, so that on the web you can get inside spaces and walk around. And I know you know this well, but with 5G -- and with other new technology -- to be able to do all of this on a website and really explore environments in that way -- even though that's a lot of content -- is going to be really, really powerful. And I think the stuff that we're seeing now with coronavirus, I have a lot of clients that are in the commercial real estate space that do a lot of tours, physical tours, face to face. And being able to do a tour in a photorealistic environment with your clients and not having to be there in person, I think is going to be huge.

Alan: I think so too. You mentioned something, and I think this is something that I would like to kind of stick a pin in and explore with you a little bit more. One of the things that comes up a lot is that dealing with 3D assets is a pain in the asset. How do you manage these 3D files? How do you manage the back and forth with your customers to say, here's the 3D file, here's the different colors, and have them approve them and back and forth with that, because I know just simply with photographs and logos and stuff with when you're doing traditional marketing, the back and forth content management systems are there, but none of the current content management systems support 3D yet.

Boaz: Yeah, it's a really good point. What we found is that the configurators that we build are a really good way to communicate a lot of different options. It's one thing if you are building one model with one color and several materials, and you can share that with your client via Simply3D.io or other mechanisms to share. But being able to mark up those 3D objects is really difficult. People currently do is they'll take a snapshot on their machine, and then they'll go through traditional methods of marking that up and red-marking that file.

Alan: And there's no tracking in that way.

Boaz: No, not at all. And so one of the things that we're going to be building into Simply3D.io is a collaboration tool that allows you to spin models around and tag it with notes that have replies and have a string of comments, that are typical to the kinds of things we see in Slack and other messaging, because I think that's the way; to be able to have it live on top of that 3D model is the best way to be able to track those changes.

And the same thing is true for environments as well. Being able to walk through an architectural environment, tag it, and have those comments stay so that when someone comes in later, they can see them and they can respond to them. It's the same thing, whether it's a product or a space.

Alan: Absolutely. And one of the things that we're just looking at now is how can we then leverage the power of the blockchain to lock the comments and the permissions to the 3D object. Because a 3D object is not a 2D object. If I go into TurboSquid and buy a car, that's fine. I can download the car, I own the 3D object. But if it's a brand who wants to protect their 3D object and also protect the layers of communication back and forth, maybe blockchain is something that can manage that.

Boaz: That's really interesting. I think that being able to establish who made that model and then who owns the rights to that model, and then track changes across that model to a final change and establish that authenticity is huge. I think that's really interesting.

Alan: It's funny, a friend of mine, I reached out to him yesterday. I said, "Hey man, how can we use our-- what we're doing through the blockchain and really secure these assets, and then lock in the changes?" Exactly what you said. If somebody needs to go in and make a change, it locks in who they are, where they were, how long they interacted with the model, what their role is and gives them a dashboard based on their hierarchy in the company. I think it's an interesting business model.

One of the things that keeps coming up, again, being in the 3D space is file sizes. And you mentioned that you've done a lot of work in kind of making the file sizes smaller to fit into these web-based experiences. What are you finding is the maximum kind of file size that you are comfortable with, number of polygons or that sort of-- what is the kind of maximum that you recommend to your customers for a seamless web experience?

Boaz: For the best web experience, we try to keep the file sizes between two megabytes and five megabytes. And one of the things that we've been working on -- and I've been part of -- is the Khronos Group. There's a working group inside the Khronos Group called the 3D Commerce Group. One of the things we're doing is establishing some guidelines for the world so that there's consistency when folks build models, and send them to online retailers and to manufacturers and others. And one of the challenges we face now is to have it perform for customers on their mobile devices and not lag and not take too long. Really need to get into those numbers, two megabytes to five megabytes. And to do that requires you to keep your models pretty efficient, both in terms of polygons and draw calls, but also in terms of materials. I think that's one of the biggest challenges we face.

Some of the groups that sit in this working group, folks like Amazon and Wayfair and Shopify, and they're receiving a lot of models from the 3D community every single day. And it's frustrating, because there's a lot of inconsistency in terms of materiality, how those models are built. One of the things we try to do is use PBR materials for all these models -- Physically Based Rendering -- to really make things look real, make colors accurate, make the lighting accurate. And so that's the real challenge. It's a dance between trying to make something look really real and keep it really small so it's performs.

Alan: Yeah. Interesting. I was researching some file optimization this morning and I found two: one's called Simplygon, which is a polygon reduction tool from-- I believe Microsoft bought them.

Boaz: Yep, that's right.

Alan: The other one is InstaLOD. It's mainly used for games, but it looks like something that will be really useful. It's instalod.com.

Boaz: Interesting. I haven't heard of that before.

Alan: Again, there's-- one, there's no standardization. So Apple -- I believe -- left the Khronos Group, leaving kind of the worldwide standards. Almost ready to be like, "We're going to have these standards." And then Apple's like "Ehhh, no. We'll create USDZ." I think there's going to be, over the next kind of 12 months, we're going to have this kind of up in the air, what is the format? Because really what it needs to be is a format that'd be like a JPEG. I send you a JPEG, you get a JPEG, you open it up, and it works. Right now, if you send me an OBJ, you've got to send me the OBJ, you've got to send me the texture files, the bitmaps, the normals, the specular files, and then I spend a half an hour just trying to reassemble the file that you sent to me. This is dumb.

Boaz: Absolutely.

Alan: And there's no animations built in.

Boaz: Absolutely.

Alan: The animations, maybe some are, some aren't, glTFs support it, FBXs don't.

Boaz: Yeah. I mean, Khronos is really pushing on glTF and GLB to be that standard, but in general, I think that's the big problem and challenge we face. Right now, we're just at the brink of having 3D explode in the eCommerce space, and when it does, the scale by which all these models are going to be created, we really need consistency in a standard.

Alan: I couldn't agree more. I hope to join the Khronos Group very shortly and help. We've created our own model format, which will release soon. And you and I have spoke offline about it. But I also-- I read a research paper from Microsoft and they're working on using 2D images to create 3D models. So they're using adversarial networks or AI to fill in the blanks of, here's a 2D image, what is the geometry of it in 3D? And it's working. I mean, it's very, very basic now, but give it another -- let's say -- year, maybe two years, and we should be able to take Amazon's catalog of products and take the five photographs from the products and estimate what the 3D object looks like.

Boaz: Yeah, it's incredible. We've been talking to a couple of companies that are exploring that as well, and it's real and it's going to be something that really revolutionizes the content creation space, because no longer is everything going to have to be created from scratch.

Alan: It's getting really, really exciting. What are the first steps of a brand [that] wants to get into this and get in touch with you? It's simplyaugmented.com

Boaz: Yep.

Alan: What are the first steps that you do with a customer though?

Boaz: I think the big thing is understanding what we're starting with. Folks are unclear about the assets that they have and if they're going to work for 3D. So you have some customers that are starting with nothing but photographs and specifications. So we just launched a project for one of the larger outdoor furniture companies in the United States called O.W. Lee. And they started-- they had a really good catalog of photographs, good shop drawings, good specifications, but they weren't sitting on a lot of 3D content. Whereas we have other customers at Herman Miller --the office furniture company -- and their dealers are clients of ours, but they have a vault of 3D models that are really good. We start from those 3D models. There needs to be some cleanup and some adjustment to materials, but they're starting from a very different place.

So it's just kind of understanding and doing an audit of what the catalog looks like right now. That's the first step. And then oftentimes aligning the budgets with the catalog size. Most people want to build out everything all at once, but oftentimes it's good to start slow and build out a line or a collections.

Alan: So what do you suggest then? Do you typically say, "Okay, let's just take one product and show you how it's going to work?" What is the cost for a customer to have a product? Let's say for example, we use the Nook as an example. You 3D model the Nook, and you change all the colors, the bench could be green, blue, red, five different configurations, maybe the shape of it as five different configurations. Is it based on the number of configurations? Is it based on just a time, like we think this is going to be 40 hours or whatever?

Boaz: I mean, usually it's based on catalog size and the number of materials as well. And everyone's a little bit different. So some furniture companies will have 20 collections, but they'll have 250 materials and they're going to want to swap those materials. And so in the case of O.W. Lee, we used Sunbrella materials for that product, and there was a lot of materials that needed to get swapped out.

In the case of Nook, they had, I think, 10 different laminates for one section, some different colors for the other, but it was a much more limited material of variety. The thing that was different about Nook was, unlike O.W. Lee or some furniture companies, where the color of the base is changing -- or the color of the fabric -- the Nook had lots of different options and lots of different pieces and parts, that were turning on and off. So there was a lot more different combinations.

So you kind of look at the entire size of the catalog and then you look at the number of combinations. The costs can be as little as $10,000 up to a $100,000, so it's a wide range and it's really dependent on how deep you want to go in terms of the number of products, combinations,

Alan: What is the turnaround time? This is another thing that customers keep asking, is how long is it going to take for me to have my catalog? Is it an hour per model? Is it a day? And how do people budget time-wise for that?

Boaz: Yeah, I would say that for most projects, we're falling in the 30 to 60 day turnaround time, for a smaller configurator. If it gets really complicated, it can be up to six months to really go through an entire processes and do an entire catalog. But if you start small and you want to do a collection and test it out on your website, usually within 30 days you can get a configurator built.

Alan: Well, Boaz, thank you so much for bringing your knowledge. Is there anything else you want to tell people about SimplyAugmented or Simply3D?

Boaz: Yeah, I would love to have people log in to Simply3D.io. You can set up a free account and play around with objects, and see what it's like to share and to do augmented reality in your own environment. And we would love the feedback and get to hear from people about their use cases and their workflows. Because fundamentally, that's the thing that's most interesting to us is can this technology solve problems? And so the more problems that we can hear about and understand the better for us.

Alan: I'm logging in right now.

Boaz: Well, thanks a lot. It's just wonderful talking to you today, Alan.

Alan: Yeah, man. I have one more question for you.

Boaz: Sure.

Alan: What problem in the world do you want to see solved using XR technologies?

Boaz: Oh, that's a good question. You know, I think in the last few weeks I've been thinking about remote meetings and about ways that designers can share complicated information to a group of people, that aren't in the room with them. And as an architect, we thought a lot about how to explain very, very complicated, three-dimensional experiences to people and help them visualize that. And I think now more than ever, being able to do that quickly and get decisions made quickly are really key. And so I'd like to see a growth in the virtual meeting space, and I'd like to see augmented reality integrated into that right alongside.

Alan: Well, thank you so much, Boaz, for sharing this. If people want more information, you can visit simplyaugmented.com or you can sign up for simply3d.io. I'm signed in there. I'm looking for stuff. I'm going to load my models in and get viewing online. This is awesome.

Thank you again, everyone, for listening to the XR for Business podcast. Make sure you hit the subscribe button so that you don't miss any episodes. Thanks so much, Boaz.

Boaz: Hey, thanks, Alan. I appreciate it.

Alan: Cheers.

Surface miners, like the ones safety instructor Nick Ullrich teaches, get to play with some pretty big toys, like loading trucks with tires three times taller than the average person. But tires that big come with some pretty big blind spots, and Nick is using VR to get them used to those blind spots before putting them behind those gigantic wheels.

Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast, with your host, Alan Smithson. We all know safety comes first, and today, we're speaking with Nick Ullrich, a safety instructor from Gillette College, who's focused on using VR to train mining employees to become safer and better operators. Coming up next on the XR for Business podcast.

Nick, welcome to the show.

Nick: Yes, Alan, thank you very much for having me. I appreciate it.

Alan: Oh, it's my absolute pleasure. I read an article about how you're using VR to train mining employees. How did you get into this? Tell us a little bit about your background.

Nick: Ok. Yeah, so the first project that we've done is a blind spot recognition, using virtual reality 360 photography as well. And it's to help miners -- when they're on the mine side -- understand the blind spots of heavy equipment. So we started with that because MSHA -- the Mine Safety and Health Administration -- has an initiative out there about powered haulage. And that's kind of where the idea came from. We see fatalities every year in the mining world. So I wanted to give everybody an understanding of what the blind spots for the heavy equipment that they're working around are on, and give them an idea of that. And virtual reality gave us an opportunity to do that without actually having to have all the equipment here at the college. So it works out great to give them a vision of what they would see if they were in that equipment.

Alan: That's pretty cool. So you're talking about those big, huge dump trucks with the giant wheels and loaders and all these type of things?

Nick: Yeah, absolutely. We have-- in the program that we have now, we have 10 pieces of equipment, it includes the 400 ton haul trucks, which is the largest haul trucks in the world. Those tires are approximately 15 feet high.

Alan: Whoa.

Nick: Yeah, next to them, you will go about to the middle of the tire.

Alan: That's incredible. So you've got these trucks. Now, did you create them as 3D models and then climb inside of it? Or is this taken from like a 360 video type of thing?

Nick: So we do a couple different things with it. We do have 3D models of all the pieces of equipment. So like I said, we have about ten pieces of equipment right now, and we just have 3D models of those, where people can walk around them virtually and see how big they are, put them to actual size or as close as I could get to actual size, by my recollection of them. They can get into them -- for the most part -- and just kind of see it in a virtual spot. And then we did go out to all the different mine sites and take 360 photography of each of those pieces of equipment. And we did it a really cool way. We set up a scene, so we had a whole lot of different things around the piece of equipment. So let's just say a haul trip, we have several different people and smaller vehicles, like light duty vehicles, such as just your normal pickup or van. We had those all set up in a special way, where you couldn't see them from the cab, so they were *in* the blind spots of that equipment. We took that 360 photo from the cab of that piece of equipment, so we can show everybody what the cab looks like and what they could see outside of it, knowing that they couldn't see any of the things in the blind spots. They were able to look around the cab, they were able to see out the windows, they could even use the mirrors. Then what we did is moved outside and we took several different 360 photos from the piece of equipment. And every 360 photo that we took, there's more of the things that were around you at the time. We would jump them from one spot to the next. And with every spot that they jumped, then more of the full scene became visible. We're talking about 10 to 15 pieces of either other equipment or people that were all around them the entire time. So they were able to see that 360 photo eyes and then get back in the cab and then really realize that, "Man, we really could not see any of that stuff that was around us at the time."

Alan: That's pretty awesome.

Nick: The virtual reality part was great, because it gives them an opportunity to look around. We're mainly focused on the new miners that are just going through the initial class. MSHA requires that people do a 24 hour training before they go out to a mine site. That's what we teach here at the college. We focus on those people that have never been around that equipment. So having the virtual model, and then being able to see how big it is and actually stand next to the tire -- that I was telling you about -- that got their attention. And then the 360 photo allowed us to show them what the actual piece of equipment looked like, that they'll be working around. It worked out really good to do both things.

Alan: Almost like a hands-on approach. You get to check it out, be there, experience it before you even get on. I can imagine this would also be good for recruiting people as well, because it's pretty exciting to stand next to a 15 foot tire.

Nick: We should use it as a recruiting model. That would be great. [laughs] But yeah, it's mainly focused on giving them an opportunity to see that stuff before they get out there, because people don't-- if you've never seen it and you've never been around it, you don't really get the full capacity of it, if I'm telling you about it. But if I can put you next to that tire -- even in a virtual space -- you get the understanding. Everybody asks, "Is this really how big it is?" And you get to say, "Yeah, this is-- you're standing next to the actual truck. It's just not in front of you at this point in time." So it really does get their attention. So that part, just to capture the sheer size of it and what they're getting into.

Alan: That's pretty awesome. I actually want to try this now. I want to stand next to one of these. I want to drive one of these monster truck things.

Nick: I'll get into that a little bit later, probably. But our next project is going to be a mine tour, where we'll have them fully immersed in a whole mine situation, so lots of stuff to come with that.

Alan: How are you combining the kind of 3D models with the photos?

Nick: The 3D models, when you first start the virtual reality part of it, you're in a warehouse. And then we have all of the 10 pieces of equipment at full size, so you can imagine how big the warehouse looks. And they can choose any of them that they want to go to first or whatever. The full program, they have to visit all 10 of them and go through the whole thing. But they start off in that warehouse. Video plays from MSHA on a big screen that drops down from the ceiling. It's pretty awesome, it gets their attention right away. And it just talks about blind spots. It was put out-- it's a video that's just put out by MSHA, to show that. But then they simply teleport to that piece of equipment and then they can walk around it. They can teleport, we have spots where they can teleport to specifically, like the cab, and some different areas around it, next to the tyre. And they get to take that in. And then we have a spot where they go to the-- we'll take them into the 360 photos. And then they look at a certain spot every time. And then they can move to the next photo, and move all the way around. There's only a specific direction that they can go. They have to see it a certain way. And then there's probably for each one between six and ten different photos of the piece of equipment as they're moving around it. So then they get to move around that. Then when they go back to the cab, once they exit out, they go back to that warehouse where all the equipment is at, and then they can choose their next one and go through that. Once they get done with that blind spot, then they virtually go to a classroom where we have a lot of review information, a lot of photos, a lot of industry specific safety posters hanging on the wall that they can watch, there's another video. And then they can play with the models, we have it so they can pick them up and hold them and see them in a smaller size, so they can actually see what that looks like. And that always gets them, because they're picking up the piece of equipment, moving it around in a virtual world. So that's pretty awesome. Then finally -- especially MSHA-related stuff -- you got to have a test. You start off in a-- it's in another room, and you have a haul truck in front of you, a full sized haul truck. And you have a lot of pickups parked around you in the blind spots of that haul truck. And here's the great thing about using virtual reality is, I told the programmer that I wanted to become a giant, and be able to move those pickups out of the blind spots of the haul truck. And they said, "Yeah, I think we can do that." So you go above the whole scene and you're looking down through a glass ceiling at the whole scene below you. And you have a model of it sitting on a podium next to you and you pick up and move those little pick up models, and it moves the big pick up models down below you. So you move those outside of the blind spots. If you have them in the blind spots, we have it where it will register, where you don't pass the test. So you have to put them outside the blind spots and then you can go back down and see your scene, get in the haul truck and make sure you can see all the pickups before you submit. Make sure they understand -- at least in the haul truck -- where those blind spots are added, and where they can place those pickups to get out of them.

Alan: So people, when they're operating even smaller equipment, they know not to park or even drive in those blind spots.

Nick: Alan, that's exactly what we use it for. We train a lot of contractors, so a lot of the people that we train are not necessarily going to be driving those haul trucks, but they're going to be interacting with them. And it's important that they know what they can't see. They might not ever get in one, but at least now when they go out there, they understand if they were in one, what they can and can't see.

Alan: I would assume this is going to save lives as well.

Nick: That's my intention, yes. And I have no doubt that it will. You can talk about KPI and what you can actually gain from it. That's a tough one to know for sure, if what you did saved them. But I have no doubt in my mind that it is going to make the mine site a safer place and prevent injuries, yes.

Alan: It's saving lives, which in turn makes everybody work a little bit smarter. And I think the God view of being able to stand back and look at it and move things around as if you were in that huge giant view, I think that's a really smart idea of doing it. And the fact you've combined CG graphics with 360 photos of the real site is really an impressive part of that. How long did it take to put this together?

Nick: So the project itself, I'll tell you, I first saw virtual reality about a year and a half ago, it was October of 2018. And that was the first time I ever tried goggles on. NIOSH -- the National Institute of [Occupational] Safety and Health -- they had a setup at one of their conventions that I went to, and they were using it in an underground mining situation. We're surface mining out here, so once I saw that, I said, "Man, we could use this for surface mining." The initiative from MSHA about powered haulage, and we see fatalities from blindspots every year, people getting into them and getting ran over. So that was the start of the project, coming up with how we were going to do that. Did some research then came up with an idea for it. We got a programmer fresh out of school, he just graduated. So we got him for one summer. So we literally had June, July, and August. And me and him worked together every day, pretty much, for that entire time, coming up with it, and putting it all together, and taking the photos. And we crammed a lot into that three months. [chuckles] It took us about three months to get it done. And we can always add to it. At this point time, we have the 10 main things that we use around this area. So it's a done project. Yes, you could always build on it more, but we're moving on now a little bit, getting into the next project. From beginning to end, it took me about eight months.

Alan: Yeah, and a lot of it was just trying to organize site visits, and making sure that you had all the equipment ready.

Nick: Yes, that was a huge part. We were lucky that we had mines that would work with us really well.

Alan: The paperwork usually takes longer than the actual production of the thing. So did you guys build this in Unreal or Unity or...?

Nick: Yes, we used Unity.

Alan: And what type of headsets? Are you using the Vives, or are you using...?

Nick: We're using the Vive headsets in our department. We're currently working on getting a full classroom setup, so we can utilize it for everyone. We have classes that get up to 24 people. So we're working right now to get that setup, where we can have 24 of them going at one time and be able to utilize it in our class that way. Right now it's a little clunky getting them through it all and only having a couple different headsets. We do hook it up to the projector as well, so the whole class can see what one person is looking at, but it's not the same. You need to experience it in the goggles. So we're working hard to get that. Hopefully that's going to be here by the summer, and we'll have that full classroom immersion and everybody will be able to put them on at one time and go through them.

Alan: You built this for your college. Is this something that you have a mandate to also provide to other mining companies, or other schools, or anything like that?

Nick: So that's a great question. I'm glad you brought it up. I do work at Gillette College. We are kind of a little bit different in how we do it. We have a grant -- an MSHA-provided grant -- that we operate under and it's just through the college that we do it. It's a weird partnership and I don't know exactly all the rules of it. But with that being said, yes, one hundred percent, we made this with grant money. So if anyone wants this product, I will give it to you. You can use it in your training. I will send you a jump drive. It's only about three megabytes once you put it on the jump drive. So I can send you the entire program and people can use it, view it, whatever they want to do with it. It's provided for free.

Alan: Did you say three megabytes or three gigabytes?

Nick: It fits on a small jump drive, so...

Alan: Yeah, it's got to be gigabytes. Well, I want to try it. I want to go and sit in one of these haulers. You've got to send me one.

Nick: Absolutely.

Alan: [laughs]

Nick: That's truly our goal, is that we save lives.

Alan: I'll tell you what, if you send me a drive, I will actually go and share it with some friends of ours at a mining company here in Toronto. Because Toronto's a kind of a hub for the mining head offices.

Nick: Absolutely. I'll send you one.

Alan: They'll be great. Well, Nick, this is really incredible. I love how you guys pulled this really holistic system, and I can't wait to give it a try. And is there anything else you want to share with everybody before we wrap it up?

Nick: Yeah, just virtual reality. And I know you guys -- and most of your audience -- is going to know, but I see it as truly the future. Now, I'm focused on safety and safety training, but this is the future of safety training. When you can put people in a certain environment and show them that, without putting them in harm's way, I know it's revolutionary and I know that-- there isn't a word that I could use to explain how I feel about it. But I've only been doing it for about a year and a half. And I know that this next project -- which is a mine tour -- I'm going to put people in situations that they could come across in mining, and I might be able to have a high wall falling on them, and some kind of incident or accident that could happen at a mine site or that we see all the time. You can always talk about those, you can tell them in their class, you can show them pictures of the times when it has happened. But I'm a big believer in the virtual reality side of it, and I can make it happen to you. When you go out to the mine site and that picture brings up a feeling, that's a training that people will not forget. If they have a high wall fall on them in a virtual world, yes, they get to walk away from it. They have no lasting injuries. You can have them fall, not wearing their fall protection. You can do all kinds of things for this safety side of it. And when they get out to the actual job site and they see it, and that triggers the training that you gave them, they'll look at it differently. So I know your audiences, it knows all about virtual reality and they know it can be done to do amazing things. But the safety side of it is where I'm focused. And I can see so much benefit from giving them an idea of what they are seeing before they get out there. That's the type of training that I want to give, and that's what virtual reality has allowed.

Alan: So basically, what you're saying is you can study it all you want, but virtual reality gives you the feeling of being there.

Nick: Absolutely. Mine safety, it's a huge deal. And mining is going to be here, it has been here forever, it's going to be here forever. And people don't understand what they're getting into when they go out there. If I can show them what they are getting into and and what they're doing -- without putting them there -- before they even get there, it will literally save lives. And I don't think there's anything more important than that.

Alan: Thank you so much for sharing this. And if anybody wants to get in touch with you, how can they they reach you?

Nick: Email is [email protected]. I wish I had a website or something fancy that I could give out, but I don't.

Alan: Well, I've got the sheridan.edu website, so they can follow up there, and take a look at the courses that are offered through Sheridan and Gillette College. So Nick, thank you again so much for taking the time to share this, and also the generosity of sharing this experience with our listeners and everybody to keep the world safer.

Nick: Absolutely. Thank you. I appreciate it.

Aggreko’s in the business of temporary power - you need an outdoor installation set up for electricity? They’re who to call. But that means that the less time to train, the better. Walter Davis explains how AR is helping trim some time off a new employee’s intake.

Alan: Hey, everybody, welcome to

Walter, welcome to the show.

Walter: Thanks, Alan. Glad to be

Alan: Really excited. Why don't

I think first thing to do might help to

Alan: So basically, if the

Walter: Exactly. That's a great

Alan: So I was reading, Aggreko

Walter: It does, yeah. So events

Alan: So how does VR/AR/XR

Walter: With the nature of our

Alan: A training module, then.

Walter: It is, yeah. That's

Alan: So can you walk us through

Walter: Sure. So we've developed

Alan: They're big, though,

Walter: Yeah. So it could be 20

Alan: That's not something

Walter: No, not something you'd

Alan: How are you measuring

Walter: Yeah. So in the first

Alan: Have you experimented with

Walter: We are experimenting at

Alan: Have you guys started to

Walter: We have started to look

Alan: What other types of this

Walter: Yeah. I mean, we've

Alan: It seems like this

Walter: I know a lot of

Alan: Pretty sage advice, my

Walter: Ooh, yeah. So I think

Alan: Interesting that the value

Walter: That's exactly right.

Alan: With that, I want to say

Walter: Thank you. And I

Alan: It's our pleasure.

We’re used to navigating our computing with keyboards, mice, and maybe track pads — analog input. But those inputs work for desktop computers; they’re clunky for XR interfaces. That’s why we need gesture controls ASAP, according to today’s guest, Clay AIR’s Varag Gharibjanian.

Alan: Hey, everyone, Alan

Varag, welcome to the show, my friend.

Varag: Hey, Alan. Glad to be

Alan: It's my absolute pleasure

Varag: So Clay is a software

Alan: Are you doing this from

Varag: Yes, so Clay's-- we're

Alan: So I'm going to be able to

Varag: It's actually pretty cool

Alan: We actually did it. We did

Varag: Yeah.

Alan: So this is really a

Varag: Yeah, I can speak a

With Qualcomm's 835 -- or 845, whatever

Varag: Absolutely, yeah. And

Alan: I think this whole

Varag: What did you think of

Alan: I think it's a great

Varag: Especially because every

Alan: With Facebook now working

Varag: Yeah.

Alan: So they've kind of set the

Varag: Wow.

Alan: Yeah, it is-- it's a game

Varag: Right, exactly, exactly.

Alan: What's the next step for

Varag: Yeah, I think there's

Alan: It's interesting you say

Varag: Okay.

Alan: And they just gave slight

Varag: It's pretty cool. Yeah.

Alan: Yeah, I don't know. This

Varag: Yeah, it's paid off so

Alan: Indeed. So speaking of use

Varag: First thing I'd like to

Alan: The gestures in shortcuts

Varag: And Alan, one thing I

Alan: Indeed. I wonder if you're

Varag: [laughs] That could be

Alan: "This user needs

Varag: Exactly.

Alan: Awesome. So let's get

Varag: That's a good question.

Alan: Yeah, I guess that makes

Varag: What's next is going to

Alan: You guys don't want to be

Varag: Totally. Yeah. We want to

Alan: I have to ask, because I'm on your new website -- it's not published yet, but it'll be out soon -- you have here, "scalability: one to four hands."

Varag: [laughs]

Alan: I'm not sure what what's

Varag: [laughs] So maybe that

Alan: I was also thinking being

Varag: Haven't seen that yet

Alan: Very interesting. What is

Varag: It's a good, good

Alan: It's a really good answer,

Varag: Absolutely. I mean, I

Alan: Yeah, absolutely. I

Varag: Yeah. And I just remember

Alan: The first time I had that

Varag: Yeah.

Alan: And I was just walking

Varag: That was your first time.

Alan: Yeah, and it's funny

Varag: Absolutely. I've got to

Alan: And then the new one that

Varag: That's a big one, because

Alan: Indeed. Well, I want to,

Varag: Thanks for having me,

Alan: Absolutely. Where can

Varag: So they can go to

Alan: Thank you very much. And

Varag: [chuckles]

Alan: [chuckles]

Today’s guest got his start in the world of game development. But soon, Arash Keshmirian saw the writing on the wall that XR’s current usefulness was better-suited to the worlds of industry, retail, and journalism. Arash and Alan discuss how he made that transition.

Alan: Hey, everyone, it's Alan Smithson here, the host of the XR for Business podcast. Today we have Arash Keshmirian, co-founder of Extality. His personal goal is to create powerful content that delivers results. We're going to dig into using Magic Leap and Hololens and mixed reality headsets as a tool for business. So all that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast.

Arash, welcome to the show, my friend.

Arash: Thank you for having me.

Alan: It's my absolute pleasure.

Arash: Were a lot of things to

Alan: Actually, I know Ryan very

Arash: [chuckles] Thank you.

Alan: The fact you guys had a

Arash: Yeah. I mean, if you want

Alan: This is why PlayStation VR

Arash: Exactly.

Alan: And they want to play the

Arash: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And

Alan: Rarely makes sense to use

Arash: Exactly. Yeah. It's

Alan: Enterprise. What have you

Arash: Yeah, like I said at the

Alan: What an ethics dilemma,

Arash: XR touches everything.

Alan: It's funny how the average

Arash: Yeah, exactly right.

Alan: I wish the whole XR

Arash: Yeah, absolutely. I think

Alan: I guess one of the things

Arash: Well, first of all -- in

Alan: And to be honest and frank

Arash: Absolutely. And now in

Alan: We all have better

Arash: Yeah, exactly.

Alan: And then you had to use

Arash: Yeah, handheld for $200.

Alan: I went from $10,000 a

Arash: So, yeah, I think a lot

Alan: And that actually, from a

Arash: It does. But then by and

Alan: Wholeheartedly. And

Arash: Absolutely. I think

Alan: I think there's room for

Arash: Exactly, yeah. And I

Alan: Yeah. I think the the

Arash: Yeah, absolutely. And

Alan: It's crazy. And the same

Arash: Exactly. The rigid goods.

Alan: Yeah, rigid goods. And

Arash: Exactly.

Alan: And 'having to create

Arash: Right. It's crazy. And

Alan: A lot of times big

Arash: Exactly. And it goes back

Alan: Arash, you've done your

Arash: Well, there's a project

Alan: I'm enamored by these

Arash: Absolutely. It reminds me

Alan: It's interesting you say

Arash: "Oh, by the way."

Alan: [laughs] "By the way,

Arash: Perfect. Yeah. I'm

Alan: The biggest problem I see

Arash: Yeah. I mean, the

Alan: Yeah. And when you're

Arash: Right. Exactly, yeah.

Alan: Oh, yeah. It's getting way

Arash: Yeah, things need to be

Alan: They do. Well, Arash, what

Arash: Oh, that's a really good

Alan: Interesting you said that,

Arash: Oh, yeah. How was it?

Alan: --the

Arash: Oh, right, yeah.

Alan: But I was in a giant

Arash: Yeah.

Alan: The fact that there's that

Arash: Yeah. That's no accident

Alan: You've got kind of

Arash: Yeah.

Alan: Do you know Tom Furness?

Arash: I don't think I do.

Alan: Tom Furness was one of

Arash: That's amazing.

Alan: He's never left the

Arash: Good stuff.

There’s not a lot of good coming out of the current situation affecting the globe, but if there is an upside, it’s the rare opportunity to learn from something this unprecedented. Through her work with National Research Group, today’s guest Lauren Xandra has been able to study newly-emerging work-from-home behaviours, and how that applies to XR adoption.

Alan: Hey everyone, I'm Alan

Lauren, welcome to the show.

Lauren: Thank you so much for

Alan: It's my absolute pleasure.

Lauren: I'm doing well. It's a

Alan: Well, the timing on this couldn't be any better. Some dedicated, hard-working people in this industry have banded together this week to pull together an XR Collaboration guide, talking about everything from security to device management to vendor selection to feature lists, and really put a lot of effort into creating a tool online that will give people the opportunity to figure out how these tools can be used for their business or school or education, and which one is the right one for them at the time, for the need they have. And so we're really excited about that, and the information on that will come out on XRCollaboration.com. So, Lauren, please tell me, what is the basis of this study?

Lauren: Sure. So, when suddenly

I'd love to walk you through some of

Alan: Sounds wonderful. Let's

Lauren: So we see that the

And further still, they're lacking the

Alan: Being able to regain some

Lauren: Yes, I'm sure we've all

Alan: It's an amazing story

Lauren: Yeah, that's fascinating

Alan: Everybody, as they get

Lauren: Yes. And you're right. I

Alan: I keep muting myself

Lauren: Absolutely. Yeah. And

Alan: The amount of use cases

Why don't we talk about some real

Lauren: Sure. So, this was

We surveyed over 1,000 people here in

Alan: Well, audience size, you

In addition to better understanding

Alan: That's interesting that

Lauren: We actually didn't

Alan: Maybe you could include

Lauren: Absolutely.

Alan: The ranking gets

Lauren: Absolutely. Yeah. I

Alan: How are the opinions

Lauren: Yes. So we see that the

Alan: So one could almost say

Lauren: Yes, XR collaboration is

Alan: Incredible. The whole

Lauren: Absolutely. And I love

Alan: If we can't see each other

Lauren: Sure. So the I'm

Alan: It's wonderful, being in

Lauren: Absolutely happy to

Alan: And we're going to start

Lauren, I always ask one last question;

Alan: I think I would love to

Alan: Well said, Lauren, thank

Lauren: Thank you so much.

One of the best use cases for XR technologies is training and enterprise solutions, as long-time listeners know. Today’s guests, Jamie Fleming and Bharat Ahluwalia from Altoura, pop by to explain how they’re optimizing workplace productivity.

Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan

Jamie: Hey, thanks, Alan. Super

Alan: I'm really excited. So,

Jamie: Sure, yeah. For starters,

Bharat: And this is Bharat here.

Alan: It really comes down to

Jamie: Yeah, we're really-- the

Alan: I was watching the video as you were talking about it now. You're in a cockpit of this plane where you're actually interacting with it. You're with another person. But in the real world, there's just two people sitting on chairs in a room. It's crazy.

Jamie: Yeah. You know, it's

Alan: Also, you can't expect

Bharat: It definitely feels like

Alan: And that's something that

Jamie: Right. With Sprint, I'll

Alan: And I know you-- one of the previous podcast guests, Jonathan Moss, he was spearheading that project. Is that correct?

Jamie: Yes, exactly. And

Bharat: We are not training

Alan: You guys re-created the

Bharat: So it was just one

Jamie: Product.

Bharat: --offering or product

Alan: So that they could easily

Bharat: We built an auditing

Alan: Now is this multi-device,

Bharat: It's completely device

Alan: I guess what was the

Jamie: That's part of the joy,

Alan: Two users as well? Could

Jamie: Yes, absolutely. So you

Alan: I don't know the exact

Jamie: Right. The team-- that

Alan: So you guys have built

Bharat: So just the technology

Alan: I saw this thing when I

Jamie: [laughs]

Bharat: I'm going to use that

Jamie: Yeah, I know, right?

Bharat: [laughs]

Jamie: The history and the

Alan: What does the flagship

Jamie: So I'll give you kind of

Alan: That's super cool. What

Bharat: We basically have a

Alan: Super cool. So people

Bharat: Exactly. And this

Alan: So does your system allow

Bharat: Yes. In some cases,

Alan: But I think as we move

Bharat: That's a great question.

Alan: So is it a specific model,

Bharat: No, we are using Unity

Alan: This is all built on

Bharat: And Unity AssetBundles

Alan: So exciting. I'm just--

Bharat: Unity is a big platform

Alan: Do you guys manage device

Bharat: No. We tend to integrate

Alan: I guess it's all running

Bharat: Yes, we have-- our

Jamie: Sometimes there are

Bharat: Or security issues.

Jamie: --they don't allow them

Alan: Yeah, it's-- there's all

Jamie: We use a variety of

Alan: That's another issue that

Jamie: That's the million dollar

Bharat: And in the long term, if

Alan: If you look back 10 years

Bharat: They will impact every

Alan: I couldn't agree more.

Jamie: They can find us in

Alan: Amazing. Well, thank you

Jamie: All right. Thank you,

Bharat: Thanks, Alan. Great to

Making any sort of head-mounted AR display has been a challenge, both on the technology front, and from an adaptation standpoint. But Stefan Alexander from North challenged himself even further - by making them look chic, to boot.

Alan: Hey, everyone. Alan Smithson here, with the XR for Business podcast. Today, we're speaking with Stefan Alexander, vice president of Advanced R&D for North, the company this created Focals, the world's first consumer AR glasses. And of course, they're also a Canadian company. And we're really excited to talk about their new product, North Focals 2. All that and more, coming up next on the XR for Business podcast. Stefan, welcome to the show.

Stefan: Thanks, it's great to be here.

Alan: It's my absolute pleasure. As you know, I have had a pair of North glasses for almost-- actually over a year now. I was one of the first 100 people to be lucky enough to get these. I went in for my fitting in Toronto, got these wonderful glasses, I got my little ring. And I proceeded to try all sorts of different things. And super excited to have you on the call and really learn more about what's coming up next for North.

Stefan: Yeah, great.

Alan: Maybe you can just describe the North glasses to the listeners, and how they came about.

Stefan: So, I can give you a kind of brief history of how this whole thing started. So originally when North was founded, it was actually called Thalmic Labs, and the product was a gesture control armband. So this kind of went on your upper forearm. You could make motions with your hand and it would detect your muscle movements and you could control computers, music, do presentation control. But one of the things that they were really passionate about was controlling heads-up displays like Google Glass, which had just come out at the time. I was actually the first person hired to not work on the Myo, that was this armband. And about a year before it came out, they hired me and they said, "Stefan, we think that the control of smart glasses and the control of head mounted displays is really important. But we're not sure if anybody's going to make exactly what we have in mind, what we think is gonna be so big, which is glasses that look exactly like regular glasses. And we don't know the tech to do this, and I don't think it exists yet. But can we work on a way to do these type of smart glasses?" So I had a display background. I was working at OLED displays. And so I started this research program, that turned into the first generation of Focals. And eventually it got so good that it really just took over the company, and we stopped doing the gesture control and we've just kind of went all in on smart glasses and changed our name to North. And that's kind of how we ended up where we are.

Alan: That's fantastic. I wonder-- you started off life as a gesture armband. And it's funny, because I remember this. I was part of the Ryerson Digital Media Zone at the time. And I went to Communitech, which is where North was founded, or I guess Thalmic Labs at the time.

Stefan: Yeah, yeah.

Alan: And I remember going into this tiny little lab with I think there was probably 10 people at the time, and they said, "Hey, try this thing on your forearm." And it was this kind of stretchy, almost like a bracelet with a bunch of black sensors on it. And after that, I went on to create The Emulator, which was the see-through touchscreen DJ controller. And we worked-- we ended up working with Armin Van Buren, who was also working with the Myo wristband. And the way they were using it -- which was really cool -- is they had one on each arm, and he was able to control the visuals onstage, by just simply reaching up and kind of extending his hand, and that motion of extending his hand created fireworks that came off or triggered the fireworks.

Stefan: Right.

Alan: It was kind of that moment went, wow, that's amazing. And then I got into VR and AR. And then, of course, this Canadian company comes along with this pair of glasses that look literally like just a normal pair or glasses, the arms-- everything just looks like a normal pair of glasses. And when I first got my pair, my daughter's 15 -- she was 14 then -- she put them on. She said, "These glasses are amazing. They're really lightweight. They look like normal glasses." She said, "I am going to give them a 9 out of 10 for the fashionable part of it." But functionally, they left a lot to be desired. There was a very small viewing angle and I think for a first pass of a product it was pretty damned impressive, being able to have an ability to see something at, let's say a meter or two meter distance and have like a full heads-up display in front of you. So for those of you who don't know, these glasses have a little tiny-- they're monocular, so it's only one eye, but it's a little projector inside the arm projecting on a little -- I guess -- projection film, I guess. Would it be-- is it a film or is it a--?

Stefan: It's a special film called a holographic film. And the light kind of bounces out of the projector. And it doesn't just reflect towards your eye. The hologram actually kind of focuses it towards your eye, too.

Alan: Yeah, it's super cool. I mean, the amount of tech that's gone into this is just mind-boggling So, walk me through some of the use cases, because I know when I got them, I don't think-- you couldn't do very much, actually. You could see your messages, you could see your calendar, and that was about it, at the very least--

Stefan: There's some maps and navigation, you could call an Uber.

Alan: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, the Uber thing was amazing. Oh, my goodness. Imagine you're calling Uber and you see the heads-up display and it's-- rather than checking your phone every five seconds to see if your Uber's there, it would just alert you in a little pop-up thing, and your Uber's here. That was a really cool-- I actually use that feature. And then, the one thing that I tried to use on stage last year -- but it just wasn't quite ready -- was the ability to see your presentation notes. And I actually did a presentation last year with the Focals on, trying to make this work. It was a talk I did at the Miami VR Expo. And I gave the whole talk with my show notes in the glasses, but I just couldn't synchronize it. But that's now a feature, right?

Stefan: Yeah, it's totally working. I actually did it just on stage about six weeks ago at Photonics West. So I gave a talk there at a kind of optical conference, and I was able to control the presentation and look at my notes using Focals, which was pretty-- it was pretty cool.

Alan: That is very cool, and then the great thing about is, nobody knows you're wearing AR glasses, because they just look like normal glasses. And I even got the clip-on sunglass adapter and everything. The one thing that I just was amazed by was the little ring. The ring that controls your interface. And how did that come about?

Stefan: So we had a pretty high bar, starting off as an interaction company. So if we were going to do smart glasses, the control had to be amazing. And the whole philosophy going into this -- and this evolved a lot, but this core tenet never changed -- where it has to look exactly like regular glasses. And the bar for what that was kept getting higher and higher in our minds. It's not just enough to look like regular glasses. There are so many aspects that are so important with this that we ended up learning and getting mostly for generation one. And I feel absolutely, completely for generation 2. But one of those was, if you're going to interact with it, it can't look strange, it can't be unnatural. There's no point in having something on your face that looks just like regular glasses, and then you're around a bunch of other people and nobody knows you're wearing smart glasses And then you have to reach out and touch your face and touch some buttons, or you have to wave your hands in front of your face, or you have to talk to your glasses and give them voice control. All those things are fine if you're on your own. But then if you're on your own, it doesn't really need to look like regular glasses anyway, does it? Like, you don't care what it looks like. It's when you're around other people and kind of wearing it all day. So the interaction had to be completely natural. And the ring, the thing I love about it is it just seems obvious. Like you use it, you're like, "What, I have to wear a ring, really?" And then you put it on and you control it, and you think, "Oh, this is actually really cool. This is a really great experience." And really, really great interactions should be like that. But we have a human-computer interaction group and we tested so many different aspects of control. We tested wristbands. We tested scrolling on smartwatches. Obviously, we tested kind of moving around with head movements. We tested things with eye tracking for a variety of reasons. All of those didn't work all that well. There's actually something that tested surprisingly well -- we didn't ship it -- but you kind of moved your head around as the cursor and then you clicked your teeth in order to activate something.

Alan: No way!

Stefan: Out of all of the things that I listed, it was actually pretty high. It was surprisingly good experience. People were like-- because it actually worked. It was pretty subtle. I mean, at the end of the day, the ring was better than the teeth clicking interface. But it was just-- We did so much cool stuff. And the ring, it really stood out over anything else, because it was just so intuitive and natural.

Alan: It is very intuitive. I have done literally thousands of XR demos from Hololens to VR, you name it. The one thing I did find it with the Focals was, the first thing is nobody could see the visual spot. They had to kind of aim it. The fact that the field of view is small, that was one challenge. But once they got it and then the ring, I didn't-- you'd say, "OK, press the ring." And then nothing else. You don't have to say go left, go right. It's a joystick ring. And once they realize they can click it and move it, you don't have to say anything else. They just-- the navigation was super simple and real time. It felt right. I'm just going down the North site. And for those of you want to learn more about it bynorth.com. And one thing I totally forgot about is you guys have microphones built into it as well. So you can actually use Amazon, Alexa to help you with stuff.

Stefan: I'd say the integration is pretty cool. And--

Alan: It really is.

Stefan: There's a whole trend in smart speakers now -- which I think is great -- to actually have a screen on them. And you would think, "Why do you need a screen if you have a smart speaker?" But there's actually a lot of times when the result that you want back is best displayed as something visual, instead of something audio. So we have that integration in the glasses. If you ask Alexa something, you ask for the weather, for example, you will get a visual notification of the weather on the screen, which is awesome, which is better -- sometimes like for a five day forecast -- than having Alexa read it out for you.

Alan: Absolutely. And one thing that stood out again for a V1 glass with a tiny micro-projector. And you look at things like the Intel Vaunt, for example, which I believe North ended up buying the patent portfolio on.

Stefan: Yeah.

Alan: But it was monochromatic. So it was monocular -- meaning in one eye -- but also monochromatic, it was just red. But the North glasses, you guys created a full color spectrum display, which-- how did you make a tiny projector small enough to give a full color display bright enough to be used outside? It's just mind-boggling, the sheer science that has gone into these glasses.

Stefan: So this is where I have to give her a lot of credit to the CEO and the founders of the company, and kind of everybody else around us then. Because I-- we really, really wanted glasses that looked like a regular pair of glasses. And that was the most important thing. And there was just no display technology that did it. This whole kind of laser projector and hologram thing, we had to build that ourselves. It didn't exist in something we could just buy and stick in the glasses like with normal micro-displays. So when we're going through it and trying to figure out how it would work, there was a lot of things with it that just weren't working. And one of them was-- so first thing I said was "It's going to have to be lower resolution." It's text. It's not super HD resolution. It's not going to be 1080p, it's not going to be 720p. It's gonna be lower resolution. But I think we can make the display look amazing. I think it's much better to have it really bright and a high quality display, but we can't have a lot of pixels. So that eventually was accepted. And the other thing I said was "Do you know how much easier it is to just do red?" Red lasers are awesome. They're the best types of lasers, they're the cheapest. And we can just save so much space and cost and complexity in the whole system. I don't even know how to make the hologram work with multiple colors. That's really hard. And from working in displays, a monochrome display is hard. Color display that has three different colors -- red, green and blue -- you would think it was three times harder, but it's not. It's usually 10 times harder. It's so much harder, because of the patterning, because of the fact that you have to overlap these colors, it's just-- everything gets so much harder.

Alan: Well, you're also starting to see things like the Hololens 2, with their color banding issue. You've got Microsoft -- who's invested billions of dollars in Hololens 2 -- and they're even struggling with some color banding issues.

Stefan: Color is just-- it's so hard. Just the perceptual science behind it, and the calibration-- the display calibration is going to be ten times more complicated. It's already going to be hard. And so that was something, though, that they just didn't give up on. Like it's fine, let's prototype some monochrome ones. But it needs to be color. It's a consumer product. People need to love these. They need to feel like the display is responsive and alive. And something that's monochrome, even though technically you can list all the use cases, and you can't show me a use case that actually needs color. But the feeling people get when they use it, it's so important with color. So I lost that argument, but at the same time we kept working on it, and we came up with a way to actually do color in there too. And I think it was-- it was after I lost the argument, actually. So I'm like, "Okay, I still don't know how to do color, but I'm going to keep trying on it."

Alan: "We'll figure it out."

Stefan: Yeah. And we'll figure it out. And we *did*. And I love the way that it looks, the color.

Alan: It really does look amazing.

Stefan: And it did make the temple arm slightly bigger. However, for the second generation, we figured out a way to reshrink it again, and all of the space that we allocated to color is actually now even smaller. So I'm so glad we put the color on there.

Alan: That's incredible. I want to talk more about the user feedback. I've had my pair since the very beginning and I have to be honest, I don't wear them all the time. It's mainly because when I got fitted for them-- and I want to talk about the fitting system has also changed dramatically for you guys, because when you introduced these, they needed to be fitted to your face. And you guys created a quite elaborate 3D laser scanning system, where you'd go into a room, this laser scanner would go around your head, create a 3D model of your head, and then fit the glasses to that. Since then, the iPhone 11 came out with IR tracking on the front face or the back-facing camera -- front-facing camera -- and allowed you to scan people's faces with just an iPhone.

Stefan: Yep.

Alan: So is that something you're moving forward with, so that you can now expand these fitting locations, because you were tied to this elaborate fitting station before?

Stefan: I think the way we started off with this is, they need to look like a regular pair of glasses and looking at it, the adjustability of a product -- like a one-size-fits-all -- you make a lot of sacrifices in form factor, it just drives a lot of space in there. And also the eye box, so this is the property of the glasses that show how much can your eye move and still see the display. And the trick with an eye box is that -- especially with this not a very wide screen -- the amount that your pupil actually moves as you're scanning around the display, it's actually not that high. But the amount that you have to allocate to -- let's say -- misalignment or slipping or everything with the glasses. That's where the majority of the eye box comes from. Which is why you can see it reasonably well when it's on you. But if you put it on somebody else, they can't see it at all. So we said, well, eye box drives a lot of space. So what if we had a small eye box? And what if glasses weren't adjustable? But instead, we pack this eye box and adjustability technology. Instead of putting them in the glasses, let's just put them in a measurement machine. Let's put them in our process flow. Let's build it into the rest of the business. If you want to make the glasses as small as possible, I think we just need to become a glasses and a measurement company. And that way, people also get a beautifully fit pair of glasses, perfectly adjusted for their head. So that was kind of the original philosophy on how to do that tradeoff, and how we ended up in the sizing in Gen 1. And you know, it worked. It works well. I think there's two big areas where we still didn't like that. And one is you have to go into a store. It was awesome if you could go into a store, because it was a really cool experience.

Alan: And the stores were nice. Come on, they were really beautiful.

Stefan: Yeah, I loved the stores, the whole retail experience. It was so good. But if you weren't there, and there wasn't a mobile sizing truck that we kind of brought around to, then you were stuck, you couldn't buy the glasses. So that wasn't great. The sizing app certainly helps with that. So it totally resolved that. If you didn't have an iPhone 10, somebody else could have probably also-- like you could have bought it from somebody else or something like that. So that increased the availability. That wasn't that bad. But the real thing that actually held us back there is, what if you wanted to give them to somebody else to try on?

Alan: [laughs] This is my exact problem.

Stefan: Yeah, you're so excited about them. We hear this from so many people.

Alan: Oh, my God. I can't even-- I'm going to explain it to you.

Stefan: Yeah!

Alan: I've got to explain it as a user and somebody in the XR space. I get new technology. We've got a Magic Leap, a Hololens, we have all the tech. And we bring it to events and we show people, "Hey, this is the future." And I love my North glasses, until I brought them to an event and let everybody try them. And then they didn't work anymore. They didn't fit me. I had to go get refitted again. So the ability to show other people was hindered in that way. And that really-- it was a stumbling point for me as a user, because you want to share this technology. You know, we're all a bunch of nerds.

Stefan: Yeah. And it's yet-- it's hard when you can't do that, because you have this cool experience and then nobody else can. They have to go into a store and get a special custom demo, just in order for you to show them something cool. So then what we wanted for Gen 2, and it was also I think-- if people do wear them all day, we said, "OK, they have to wear them all day. They have to be really light." The glasses were 67 grams. I think it was like almost one of the lightest ones that was out there. And it's still after maybe six hours or so, some people were fine and some people felt it was still a little bit heavy. Then we had this goal going into generation 2 where we said, OK, how about this as a goal: if you can fit the glasses on your face physically -- because they still have to be a properly fitting pair of glasses. Not every pair of frames should go in every head, because heads are different sizes and glasses have to look good -- but let's just say if these glasses can fit on your head, and they look okay and they're not squeezing or pinching you or falling off, then you can see the display. So if you should be wearing the frames, if they look half decent on you, then you have to be able to see the display. So that was one of the things. The other one is temple arms have to get smaller and it has to get lighter. It has to get to 50 grams. And the only way to do that is really to shave off space and shave off actual components and cut the battery, cut the power consumption. So we had to make it smaller and we had to cut power. And then we also said, I mean, wouldn't it be nice if we could show a little more text on there? Sometimes you don't want a lot of text, which is great. Like with a message or something like that, you don't want to be distracted. But let's see when you're watching your presentation notes, you don't want to necessarily have like six or seven lines of text. It's nice to be able to see all your text in your speaker's notes, so you don't have to scroll as you're trying to talk at the same time. So what if we could fit a little bit more on the display, too, at the same time? And as an engineer, you do this work and there's no new fundamental physics that we're doing in this. It's just-- it's technology. It's combining things, it's understanding tradeoffs, understanding what you can do. But it doesn't matter what you can do, it only matters what you can mass produce. So if you come up with some incredible new RGB laser and you can embed it in the glasses itself, if nobody can build it, it doesn't matter. So you're pretty constrained. So everything is just managing tradeoffs. And so going into Gen 2 where you said, OK, well, the whole reason why we did the sizing thing is to keep a small eye box to make the glasses small. So now you want to make the eye box so much bigger -- like 20 times bigger -- and then you want 10 times the resolution, *and* you want it smaller at the same time. And it should cost the same price, and we should cut power consumption. I'm like, what are you giving up? You can't--

Alan: I was going to say, what the hell, man?

Stefan: Yeah, technology gets a little bit better, but you can't-- you don't just get to do this from one generation to another one. Things are incremental. We can use a slightly faster processor and save 20 percent power, but you don't just get to do this from one generation to the next. But--

Alan: *But...*

Stefan: The team really came together. But we actually managed to--

Alan: Patent portfolio.

Stefan: Yeah.

Alan: And the company has raised in excess of $100-million.

Stefan: Yeah, yeah. In terms of US dollars, it's over 150 at this point.

Alan: Holy moly.

Stefan: So it cost a lot.

Alan: That's like a 100 million Canadian dollars.

Stefan: [laughs]

Alan: [laughs]

Stefan: Yeah, yeah. It's getting-- it's not quite, but close to like 200 million Canadian dollars.

Alan: Yeah, sorry, two hundred million Canadian. Yeah, that's a lot.

Stefan: It just-- it costs a lot to do this development. So we managed to have an entirely new architecture. A lot of the stuff we were working on for Gen 1 that we kind of-- wasn't quite ready yet, and then some other breakthroughs. And we managed to have a generation 2 that is everything: smaller, high resolution, much lighter. And the greatest thing is, if you can put the glasses on your face, you can see them. So you can have one pair of glasses and 20 people can see it. And that part of being able to show people in the demo. The portion that people saw the Gen 1 and who wanted to see the Gen 2, the most surprising thing to them, the first thing is, "Oh, I can see the display. This is so cool. Like, it's just here." There's never an issue there.

Alan: That's gonna be a game changer, because doing demos and having people go, "I can't see it." And that's just like "Eh." [chuckles] So, yeah. This is fantastic.

Stefan: Definitely credit to the team and also just the whole-- even once Gen 1 was in the engineering phase, I had a whole team and we had 15 or 20 people way before Gen 1 launched, and we were working on Gen 2 technology. The beginnings of this was almost three years ago in terms of the Gen 2. So we've been working on it for a long time. So even when the Gen 1 came out, we said tech takes a long time. So let's keep going with this technology pipeline now that we really, really know what we're doing. And the team really came together and very deeply understands this. And another awesome thing is the suppliers. They believed so much in what we're doing and this product line, they really loved the Gen 1 and participating in there. And so all of them make a lot of custom components for us. We do a lot of custom co-development with our suppliers, because they believe the space -- like us -- is going to be huge. And so we couldn't have done that without those close collaboration, too. Because, again, you can come up with something cool, but if nobody can manufacture it, then it doesn't matter.

Alan: Yeah. And if you look at just the engineering side of the hardware, I mean, that's spectacular on its own. And really, when it comes down to it, though, people once they put it on their face, once they buy into it, the engineering side, the hardware side, the ring, the glasses, the eye box. None of that shit matters at all. What people want to know is what can I do with it, and how can this help my life, and how can this help my day to day? And one of the things that I found as a user experience that was incredible -- and you guys thought this through -- was as I was walking down the street one day, I'm talking to somebody and my alerts kept coming up. And when you're looking at the alerts, you're looking straight through the glasses. And if you're looking at somebody on the other side, it's really strange when you're looking at a message while looking at somebody. It's kind of like you're staring at them, but you're off in space, you're not really there. And so one of the interactions that I realized you guys put in after is, if you're having a conversation with somebody, it doesn't show you alerts. And I don't know if it's through the voice, through the microphone or whatever. But that one simple user interaction -- or taking that away, really -- was amazing, because if I'm in a face-to-face conversation with somebody, the last thing I want is my messages popping up. And you know how annoying it is when people look at their Apple Watch when they're in middle of a conversation, you're talking and then all of a sudden they're looking at their Apple Watch, and they just derailed your whole conversation.

Stefan: Yeah.

Alan: That's what you don't want with these glasses. And you guys have solved for that.

Stefan: Yeah. And this is-- it comes down to that core tenant, too, of looking like regular glasses. And if you can have these glasses that look just like regular glasses, and the display is invisible and you can't tell that somebody is interacting with it, because their arm is down by their side and they're controlling the loop. But if they have this stare, this look where they're clearly looking at you but not paying attention to you, then it just ruins the whole thing, too.

Alan: It is such a weird phenomenon, I'm not going to lie. I've done it on purpose to people, just standing there looking at them and they're looking right at you, but they're not, they're looking right through you or like at the display that's kind of above your head.

Stefan: Yeah. What you're talking about is definitely one of those magical moments that our users really liked and they wanted more of. And the other thing that people love. So, you know, in terms of how people are using this, it's about half of all of the uses of it are when the glasses prompt you and say, hey, you have a notification, a message from another person, a message from an app, notification for an app that you have an appointment coming up, or something like that. So half of all the times when the users use the glasses, they don't even initiate it. So we have to be so good at knowing when they want to use it, and when they don't want to use it. And when you get that right, it's amazing because they get information and they're not even thinking that they might need it. So it's just the right time. But if you do too much, then they're gonna shut them off. Then they're not going to use them and that's going to be frustrating. So getting that right and understanding-- and what you talk about, we call "context". So what is the user doing over the environment? Who are they with? We have done a huge amount of extra work on context, both in sensors and the hardware, but also in very intelligent artificial intelligence algorithms, to detect more and more of your environment. And the other thing we use context for, so this is again, when people do click the ring and they bring up the glasses, which is about half of all interactions. Half the times they click the ring, they see exactly what they need on the home screen and they never go anywhere else, because the home screen is contextual, too, because the home screen knows you have a calendar appointment coming up. Or you're playing Spotify music, you might want to see your music controls and the song. Or this is kind of cool, I don't know if you used them recently, but if you have a flight booked and you're at an airport, then it shows you, here's your gate, here's where you need to go.

Alan: Oh, man. That's like just that one feature alone.

Stefan: Yeah.

Alan: "Where the hell am I going in this airport?"

Stefan: It has a whole contextual airport experience when you're there, too. And so being able to get it right. When people click the glasses and they bring up the home screen. They don't even have to go anywhere else. We've shown them exactly what they wanted to, just with that alone. And then they close it down when they click the glasses. And another half of the time they're going to scroll through and they're going to choose the right application. So that's still pretty quick. But the bar, the thing we want to hit is that magical experience, where the glasses either tell you what you want to know, or when you ask them something, they know exactly what you want. And being able to do that with a whole new variety of sensors that we're using. And a lot more intelligence and just guessing what people want and giving it to them. This is-- it's totally doable, from a technology perspective. And I think the people are going-- I think everyone's going to love it with Gen 2, that's one of the things that we've done the most with Gen 2 in terms of the user experience. So I'm glad you loved that conversation detection, because that's basically the direction we want to take the product.

Alan: I think this is more than a hardware product. This is more than a pair of glasses that you can put some data on. This is a new way to interact with data around you. And I love the simplicity of it. It doesn't have front facing cameras -- I don't know, maybe Gen 2 does -- but it's not trying to world map your whole view, it's just-- it's like having an Apple Watch in a more convenient place. It's like having all the data that you have in your watch, where you don't have to look at your watch or pull out your phone. It's really wonderful. I have to ask, on behalf of everybody listening, when can we expect V2 to drop?

Stefan: So it is going to be still on track for sometime in 2020. There's going to be definitely a gradual reveal here. So it's not just-- we're going to be quiet and you're not going to see anything. And then they'll just appear one day. There will be opportunities for people to see more. Maybe some previews. We have a lot of units that we're using right now in testing. The engineers are testing units for functionality. The production people are testing the mass produce ability and reliability. The product people use them to develop software. Everyone's wearing them regularly, in terms of our employees and some initial beta testers. And more and more will be revealed even before they actually go on sale. People will definitely be able to find out a lot more of them and hopefully even be able to get some demos.

Alan: I would love to be part of that beta test. Hint, hint, nudge, nudge.

Stefan: I'll pass that along.

Alan: [chuckles] Awesome. Is there anything else you want to share with everybody before we wrap this up? Because this has been fantastic interview here. And I think there's so much to unpack. And the North Focals 2 are coming this year, in the year of 2020, which obviously makes sense. So I think people are going to get excited. And you said the similar price point around the-- I think-- what are the other ones, $700?

Stefan: Yeah, I think it was $599, the base price. And then $699 with prescription glasses. I'm not sure of what the price is going to be for--

Alan: So under a thousand dollars, for sure.

Stefan: Exactly. Definitely not substantially different.

Alan: Incredible success story coming out of Canada, which is cool. And I have to ask you, living about 40 minutes away from the office, can I come for a tour?

Stefan: We are doing stuff like that, once in a while. So I think we should get in touch with production and marketing people, and see if we can arrange something like that. If not, not a great time the next two or three weeks.

Alan: [laughs] Obviously not now.

Stefan: But I actually actually think soon. I think that be a lot of fun.

Alan: That'd be great. I would love to do it and share the experience with everybody and show people what does a company developing the future of digital eyewear look like from the inside? What is the research lab, and what are the people doing there? I had an opportunity to go to the Magic Leap head office and tour that, and unfortunately I can't say anything or show any photos. But it was an amazing experience to see just the sheer numbers of people working on different parts of-- things you wouldn't even think of. You mentioned earlier, just the voice detection, the AI. There's so much going into this, that's beyond just a pair of glasses with a display in them. And I think that's what's really important is that we're driving-- you guys are driving the future of of human interaction in augmented reality. Thank you so much, Stefan, for being an industry leader and a pioneer in the space.

Stefan: Oh, you're welcome. It's so much fun.

Alan: With that, I can ask you one last question and then we'll wrap it up. What problem in the world do you want to see solved using XR technologies?

Stefan: That's a great question. I have definitely thought about that from a lot of different perspectives, but in terms of a problem that wants to be solved... I think we have this issue right now, where-- it's so true now, especially with the current health situation, where people are having to be distant socially from other people. And we always have this conflict with our devices right now. Do I look at what's in front of me. Do I pay attention to this person that's in front of me? And do I kind of have my awesome experience of the real world? Or do I go into my digital world, because I have a lot of information to manage there. I have a lot of people who I can only stay in touch with digitally at any given time. I have to choose right now to look at my phone, to look at my watch, or to look at the real world. And every time I'm doing one, I'm not doing the other. And I think there is this potential to not have that conflict anymore. Somebody that doesn't have to feel like they have to put their phone on vibrate or lock it in a safe or something like that in order to be present. What if you could be present and connected and only get interrupted with what's essential, and not get sucked into the phone vortex that you have when you go to check a notification, you went up an Instagram for an hour? But what if you could have all the benefits of the connection of glasses, but without being distracted from what's in front of you right now, and bring the best, simplest parts of your digital world into your reality, in a way that wasn't in conflict? And I think that people could be more present and more connected with everybody, but also their experience of the real world wouldn't really be effective. And I think that would just be so cool if it could move in that direction. And that's-- I think that's what a lot of people at North are very passionate about, is not giving us another tech device, but essentially giving us a way to not have tech be so distracting.

Alan: I love it. And we have to be very careful not to let tech completely envelop us. So that's wonderful. Thank you, Stefan.

Stefan: It's great. Well, thanks a lot for having me on.

Alan: Oh, it's my absolute pleasure. Thank you so much. And thanks, everyone, for listening. Please hit the subscribe button so you don't miss any future episodes. If you want to learn more about North Glasses, you can visit bynorth.com. This has been the XR for Business podcast.