Building Empathy in XR, with Tech Trends journalist Alice Bonasio

XR for Business

English - October 07, 2019 10:18 - 40 minutes - 37.5 MB - ★★★★★ - 12 ratings
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Next Episode: Gearing Up for VR Days, with festival director Benjamin de Wit

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

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

Alice, welcome to the show.

Alice: Hello. Very nice to meet
you. Thanks for inviting me on.

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

Alice: You’re very, very
welcome.

Alan: You are my source for
news.

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

Alan: Well, I know one way to
get more subscribers, we should write a piece about this amazing
new podcast called the XR for Business Podcast.

Alice: Ah, yes, yes. That’s how
you make a great plug. Yeah, yeah. We’re pros here, we’re pros.

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

Alice: I think one of the recent
examples — and you were talking about it when you were saying about
doing your news roundup — in the last week was really that Microsoft
demo at Inspire. That really did blow my mind. And it’s one of those
things where you see several elements just come together into
something that just makes such sense. And it was one of those eureka
moments. Together with mapping, I think that translation is just such
an obvious use case for augmented or mixed reality, but it is also
one of the most difficult ones to get right, because you just need a
lot of elements to be at the optimum stage and to come together for
the experience to work. And the experience either really works well
or doesn’t. So what they did was, at Microsoft Inspire — which is a
partner conference for Microsoft — Julia White, who is an executive
for

Alice, welcome to the show.

Alice: Hello. Very nice to meet
you. Thanks for inviting me on.

Alice: You’re very, very
welcome.

Alan: You are my source for
news.

Alan: Well, I know one way to
get more subscribers, we should write a piece about this amazing
new podcast called the XR for Business Podcast.

Alice: Ah, yes, yes. That’s how
you make a great plug. Yeah, yeah. We’re pros here, we’re pros.

Alan: That was so amazing. You
know, watching her stand onstage, in a Hololens, watching her own
avatar give another presentation — or same presentation — onstage
in Japanese.

Alice: I know. It’s not often
that I will forgive executives for looking very smug, but she did.
And I was like, “Well, actually, you kind of deserve that.”
You’re pulling off a demo there. You have the right to have that
little smile on your face and go, “This is really so cool.”

Alan: I don’t think it was smug,
so much as just really giddy. It looked like she was like, “Yay!”

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

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

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

[chuckles]

It’s just– it’s unbelievable.

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

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

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

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

Alan: [laughs] Amazing.

Alice: But yeah, you can have
that one for free. You’re the Ghostbusters of XR.

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

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

Alan: You think we can shorten
the time–

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Alan: I was actually gonna bring
it up. That’s awesome.

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

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

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

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

Alan: “One hundred billion
dollars by 2019!”

Alice: Yeah. You know, you get
those Dr. Evil type predictions then, it’s like “One… trillion
dollars!”

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

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

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

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

Alan: Since you lead into this.
I got to ask you, what are your thoughts on the rumors that Apple is
killing their AR device?

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

Alan: Yeah, that’s the key.

Alice: I don’t see that
happening by 2020.

Alan: No, definitely not.

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

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

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