Retraining for a Post-Retirement World with VRVoice’s Bob Fine

A good friend
of Alan’s, publisher of the online XR news publication, VR Voice,
drops by the show for a general chat about the future of the space,
including the potential for XR to help train workers in a future
where retirement is less common, saving money by designing hospitals
in VR before brick meets mortar, the video game crash of 1983, and a
little Fruit Ninja.

Alan: Today’s guest is a good
friend of mine, Bob Fine. In 2011, Bob launched the only printed
magazine covering social media, The Social Media Monthly. In January
2014, he launched his second print titled The Startup Monthly in May
2016, he launched — what I love — VRVoice.co, a content vertical on
all things virtual reality. In addition to his publishing endeavors,
Bob continues to provide I.T. strategic planning consulting services
to both private sector and non-profit communities. Bob has over 10
years of additional work experience as a systems and sales engineer
with various companies, including CMGi, Hughes Network, IOWave and
Raytheon, as well as two of his own consulting companies, Geoplan and
the Cool Blue Company. I want to have a warm welcome; thank you, Bob,
for joining us on the show today.

Bob: Alan, thanks very much for
having me. I’m honored to be one of your guests.

Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure
and honor to have you on the show. I’ve met with you many times.
You’ve actually shared some CES stories, and we’ve been in a little
glass booth in CES together. That was wonderful. You have your own
podcast and news outlet, talking about all things virtual reality,
VRVoice. That is been amazing, and you’ve been a great influencer in
the space, so thank you.

Bob: Well, I appreciate that.

Alan: So the first question I
love to ask everybody is, what is the best VR/AR/XR experiences — or
what are some of the best experiences — that you’ve had so far?

Bob: You know, I guess from my
perspective; I’m a longtime video gamer. I just went to PAX East on
Friday, up in Boston. I was my first PAX event. And if you’re not
familiar, that’s the Penny Arcade conference. Huge, huge gaming
conference. It makes E3 look minuscule. And I’m old enough where I
started with an Atari 2600. One my the reasons I started looking at
VR again in 2016 was because of that video gaming interest. When you
ask me my best experiences right now, I’m going to kind of… I’m
thinking about some of the early games that that I played, that gave
me that “woah” moment. As I’m thinking back to it now, this
was actually on HTC VIVE — first gen, which was only maybe 3, 4
years ago now — and I was so impressed with the first generation of
hardware that I was like, “well, this is ready for prime time.”
The prices might still be a little bit high, but the quality of the
gaming was there already. Just two off top my head is the VR version
of Fruit Ninja, which I’ve personally put about 400-500 people
through, because it’s one of the best and fastest experiences I think
you can give somebody that’s never tried VR, but you can give to
anybody whether they’re five years old or ninety five years old.

Alan: Slicing fruit in VR is
magical, and the fact that they have the haptic feedback to the
controller is just… [implied Chef Kiss]. You’re right, it is a
magical experience.

Bob: The other game that I was
really getting addicted to was Space Pirates, which I think is still
just a brilliant early video game that demonstrates the quick and
easy access to VR. It’s kind of like the space invaders of AR, I
think, in terms of what those early games that caught fire and was
easy to pick

A good friend
of Alan’s, publisher of the online XR news publication, VR Voice,
drops by the show for a general chat about the future of the space,
including the potential for XR to help train workers in a future
where retirement is less common, saving money by designing hospitals
in VR before brick meets mortar, the video game crash of 1983, and a
little Fruit Ninja.

Alan: Today’s guest is a good
friend of mine, Bob Fine. In 2011, Bob launched the only printed
magazine covering social media, The Social Media Monthly. In January
2014, he launched his second print titled The Startup Monthly in May
2016, he launched — what I love — VRVoice.co, a content vertical on
all things virtual reality. In addition to his publishing endeavors,
Bob continues to provide I.T. strategic planning consulting services
to both private sector and non-profit communities. Bob has over 10
years of additional work experience as a systems and sales engineer
with various companies, including CMGi, Hughes Network, IOWave and
Raytheon, as well as two of his own consulting companies, Geoplan and
the Cool Blue Company. I want to have a warm welcome; thank you, Bob,
for joining us on the show today.

Bob: Alan, thanks very much for
having me. I’m honored to be one of your guests.

Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure
and honor to have you on the show. I’ve met with you many times.
You’ve actually shared some CES stories, and we’ve been in a little
glass booth in CES together. That was wonderful. You have your own
podcast and news outlet, talking about all things virtual reality,
VRVoice. That is been amazing, and you’ve been a great influencer in
the space, so thank you.

Bob: Well, I appreciate that.

Alan: So the first question I
love to ask everybody is, what is the best VR/AR/XR experiences — or
what are some of the best experiences — that you’ve had so far?

Bob: You know, I guess from my
perspective; I’m a longtime video gamer. I just went to PAX East on
Friday, up in Boston. I was my first PAX event. And if you’re not
familiar, that’s the Penny Arcade conference. Huge, huge gaming
conference. It makes E3 look minuscule. And I’m old enough where I
started with an Atari 2600. One my the reasons I started looking at
VR again in 2016 was because of that video gaming interest. When you
ask me my best experiences right now, I’m going to kind of… I’m
thinking about some of the early games that that I played, that gave
me that “woah” moment. As I’m thinking back to it now, this
was actually on HTC VIVE — first gen, which was only maybe 3, 4
years ago now — and I was so impressed with the first generation of
hardware that I was like, “well, this is ready for prime time.”
The prices might still be a little bit high, but the quality of the
gaming was there already. Just two off top my head is the VR version
of Fruit Ninja, which I’ve personally put about 400-500 people
through, because it’s one of the best and fastest experiences I think
you can give somebody that’s never tried VR, but you can give to
anybody whether they’re five years old or ninety five years old.

Alan: Slicing fruit in VR is
magical, and the fact that they have the haptic feedback to the
controller is just… [implied Chef Kiss]. You’re right, it is a
magical experience.

Bob: The other game that I was
really getting addicted to was Space Pirates, which I think is still
just a brilliant early video game that demonstrates the quick and
easy access to VR. It’s kind of like the space invaders of AR, I
think, in terms of what those early games that caught fire and was
easy to pick up and everybody loved.

Alan: “Space Pirate
Trainer.” Is that what it is?

Bob: I think, yeah, that’s
right. That’s right. I’ve been traveling and it’s been kind of
non-stop for the last couple months. I’m actually looking forward to
today, because my life gets to slow down a little bit. And I’ve been
catching up a little bit on the news. We had a big conference earlier
in March. And then right after, I went to Laval Virtual in France.

Alan: Oh wow.

Bob: That was great. It was a
great experience. The largest VR event in France; maybe in Europe,
even. And what was also amazing, which was unclear to me, was that
conference has been around for over 20 years. It was the 21st or 22nd
year this year, that they’ve been focusing on VR. So they’ve been
having conferences about VR for 20 years before the DK1.

Alan: That’s incredible.

Bob: These guys have been around
for a while. It was just a very great event. Great place to meet
people, a little bit off the beaten path. It’s about three and half
hours west of Paris. It was a great, great experience.

Alan: So, because this is a
podcast focused on the business applications and enterprise
applications of this technology, what did you see at Laval that stood
out as a must-have for businesses?

Bob: Well, actually, what was
interesting for me being at Laval is, I put on a — for the first
time — a VR architecture event… actually, over a year ago, now;
this was January 2018. We had good participation. But it was hard for
me to get a feel for where architecture uptake was, from a VR
perspective, in the US. At Laval — at least from what I could see,
especially from the number of exhibitors and the focus —
architecture and design and enterprise planning, it’s a huge business
area within Europe right now. A lot of companies focusing on it. A
lot of companies picking up on it. One of the things that was demoed
there, there was a presentation from Microsoft about the new Hololens
2. And Trimble announced — and has — an all-in-one headset based on
the Hololens for the maintenance industry, managing cable lines or
oil pipelines. A lot of outdoor, hard maintenance work.

Alan: That’s called the XR 10,
right? Is that the one?

Bob: I don’t know if that’s the
name or not.

Alan: Hardhats with Hololens 2
built in?

Bob: I think they launched in
the Hololens 1, and then I think it’s geared to come out in the
Hololens 2 right away.

Alan: Yeah, it’s pretty
impressive. One of the announcements that Hololens made at WMC this
year was, they announced that they’re making a system where you can
mod it — you can actually make modifications — and they will
support the modifications for businesses. Which is pretty amazing,
because who knows how these technologies are going to be used? Maybe
they need a hardhat; maybe they need a scuba mask. Who knows? Being
able to be open to those changes and foster them, because if one user
needs them, I’m sure tons of them will.

Bob: I think Trimble is one of
those first partnerships for them, because it was integrated with
hardhat. So it’s hard hat with a Hololens 1 piece. I could picture
people out on the street with these less than twelve months.

Alan: One of the startups that
we’re helping, they’re looking at taking CAD diagrams, blueprints,
and then importing them into the real world so you can stand in a
construction site, and see the blueprints overlaid on top in the
exact position of where they should be. The reason that’s important
is because there’s about $30-billion lost every year in construction
rework. And that’s just in North America. It’s $30-billion in doing
things twice, where, if you can wear this headset, you can look up in
the rafters and say, “OK, well, the HVAC system’s off by a
foot.” You can annotate on it, and send it back to the
blueprints real-time. And everybody has a real-time path of what’s
happening.

Bob: That’s the great segue to
one of the presentations I’m remembering now from Laval, which was
a… I can’t think of the startup’s name off top my head, but they
were a European company that focused on hospital architecture design,
and they had an ROI presentation showing that, by designing the
operating room in VR first, and having the client be able to review
it multiple times, walk through it, figure out what’s going to work
and what’s not going to work, from an operations perspective within
the OR; Where did the nurses stand? Where do objects get handed from
nurse to doctor? And so forth. And then, being able to figure out
beforehand those bottlenecks, because they definitely demonstrated
that there was a huge amount of money spent on… they said — on
average — each time they did a physical build of a hospital or an
OR, they had to do a refurb four or five times, and each of those
refurbs costing, like, half a million dollars or something like that.

Alan: If you look at it from
that lens, even if you do one refurb, that’s half a million dollars.
You can buy a lot of VR and AR headsets with that kind of money.

Bob: Yeah. And with the use of
doing it through VR — not necessarily perfecting the process, or
catching everything only from that — but they definitely reduce
their costs by… I think they got down to maybe one or two revisions
that were necessary, instead of the average of four or five. I mean,
you think about building something, and then having to go back four
or five times to reconfigure it, because you didn’t get it right the
first time?

Alan: Let’s pack that in a
strictly numbers standpoint. Let’s assume each revision’s half a
million dollars; they do four revisions, that’s $2-million.

Bob: Yeah.

Alan: A VR headset and a full
computer… let’s say you buy 10 of them. Right? So, five grand a
pop. Maybe you need five grand, maybe you don’t. But let’s call it
$5,000 a pop. So, for $50,000, you just saved a million dollars. What
is that, about a 20 x return?

Bob: Yeah.

Alan: These are not trivial
numbers. These are massive savings. By just thinking about how you
can use this technology to prevent, rework, or eliminate one of the
revisions; you just saved millions of dollars from something that is
a marginal cost.

Bob: I know that’s one of the
main reasons why the automotive industry is one of the very early,
big adopters and investors in the hardware and software. The amount
of money that they can save on having to physically do a build of a
design — a first iteration of a car, what have you — I mean, that’s
millions of dollars of time in labor that they can save if they can
learn as much as they can through a VR simulation of the car.

Alan: My previous guest today
was Elizabeth Baron from Ford. In her 20 years or 30 years working in
immersion within Ford, they came up with what they called the Tenets
of Immersion. I’ll read them out, because I think it’s worth
repeating. How quickly and easily you can become immersed. So, when
you walk in and someone puts a headset on you, how quickly do you go
from standing outside the room, to being fully immersed? Simulating
any potential area, whether it be on a racetrack, or in a design
studio; being able to change the environment. Making sure the
hardware is simple, unobtrusive, and acts naturally and feels
natural. So, even reaching over your hands, stuff like that, it has
to be realistic. It has to be real-time. The next one is
collaboration, and then their last one is full scale; being able to
see the vehicle at full scale. Those were the Tenets of Immersion.
And when you hit on automotive, I was like, “wow. Exactly.”

Bob: Continuing on your thought
there, my specialization and focus is in the VR and health care
sector. There’s been quite a lot of studies done in the last couple
of years, and data developed, where the time for immersion — at this
stage with the technology — is under 60 seconds. It takes, depending
on the application or whatever, but for the most part, people become
acclimated in less than a minute in VR, feeling fully immersed in a
different environment in a very, very short amount time.

Alan: You go from standing in a room to standing on the moon in 60 seconds or less.

Bob: Right. Where you’ve been
transported both emotionally and physically. You’re having an
out-of-body-experience. It takes place that quickly.

Alan: So, because your specialty
is in VR and health care, let’s start talking about that. I’ve seen
hundreds of articles — maybe thousands of articles, now — on how VR
is being used — VR and AR, really — for everything from anatomy
training, right through to CT visualization, and then surgical
assist. What are some of the things that you’ve seen that health care
professionals and students are using to leverage this technology to
better their performance?

Bob: Well, from my perspective,
and one of the reasons I’ve decided to make this the area of our
focus is for a number of reasons. One, working in the healthcare
sector, at the end of the day, there’s a betterment for people’s
health and wellness, and there’s a social good aspect to working in
that sector. Not that I’m saying in other sectors, you can’t find
that. But it comes quickly with the health care sector. And what’s
really interesting is the amount of applications and development
that’s happening not only at the practitioner level in terms of
surgeons, nurses, clinicians; but also at the patient level, in terms
of mental rehabilitation or physical rehabilitation, or early stuff
happening with helping to diagnose. But also… whether “treat”
is the right word at this point, but dealing with people that have
Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s, that some rehabilitation mechanisms to
help lessen the effects, and just help people have a better quality
of life.

But the other thing about health care
— and I’m sure you’re aware of this, and in Canada, it’s… well,
maybe a little bit more simplified — but in the United States, it’s
a really, really complicated market. And there’s so many different
aspects to it that have to be worked through to have a successful
product. It’s a different beast than other for-profit sectors, but
that’s one of the reasons why — and I can’t remember if I shared
this back at CES or not — but we’ve recently launched the
International Virtual Reality and Healthcare Association —
ivrha.org; the website will be up later this week, actually — but we
have over 30 organizations for the launch, and the focus is to help
support the growth of the sector, support the companies involved, but
also help figure out what mechanisms are needed to facilitate getting
products and applications in the marketplace faster. But again, it
varies depending on the type of application, because some things
require regulatory approval. Some things don’t. And how do things get
paid for by insurers, and so forth. It’s an interesting, complicated
space to be in right now.

Alan: Yeah. There’s so much that
can be done, and also so many challenges to be overcome. But I think
— as they say — where there’s a will, there’s a way. The upside
potential of this technology is so vast and so important, I believe
it’s just gonna become one of the other tools that physicians,
surgeons, and nurses have in their disposal. And some of the amazing
use cases that I’ve seen are not even in the surgical room. One of
the things I saw that was really wonderful, was out of Sick Kids
Toronto Hospital, where they took a 360 camera and they put it on a
gurney, and they basically talked to the camera as if it was a
patient and walked them down the hall through to the surgery, and
allowed kids to watch in VR what it would be like — or what it will
be like — before their surgeries. They’ve already been down the
hall; they know what to expect. They’re not nervous going into a room
with all silver stainless steel furniture. They understand what’s
going to happen, and by decreasing their stress before they go in for
surgery, it’s actually increasing their outcomes. And that’s just one
of a million use cases that I’ve seen–

Bob: And not just for children,
but for adults as well. You’re going to go under a bypass, or have
some kind of serious surgery? It is an opportunity for the physician
to walk you through what they’re going to do, and it does lessen your
apprehensiveness and your stress. And stress is a significant
physical and mental negative effect on your health and well-being.
Where you can decrease that, in any situation, is a benefit.

Alan: Decreasing stress is
definitely a benefit, but one of the other things that I keep seeing
is the ability for virtual reality to decrease the amount of opioid
usage. Sometimes upwards as high as 25 percent in very painful
procedures, we’re able to give distraction therapy using VR. I have a
daughter, she’s 10, and she is literally terrified of needles. Like,
she is the kid that you do not want in the hospital at all; they have
to chase her down the hall. This group created a VR experience where
you’re wearing the VR headset, and it’s this magical fairy, and
there’s a whole story, and then they give you the needle before you
even know what happened. And I think this is really some amazing
technology. So you’ve got preparation for surgery; you’ve got
distraction therapies to decrease opioid usage; you’ve got physicians
using it for pre-visualization and pre-seeing a surgery; you’ve got
pharmaceutical companies teaching people with it. Like, it’s
unlimited, what this is going to bring to medicine.

Bob: The issue within health
care, and part of the… I won’t say “problem,” but
impediment, is anecdotal evidence is not always enough. Where a lot
of these applications are showing early successes for the larger
parts of the industry to adopt it, they want to see clinical data,
and clinical data takes time. Which is all good and necessary. It’s
trying to figure out how to expedite those clinical trials, and bring
the data to the forefront faster. That’s one of the goals with the
association. If I can take us in a slightly different direction,
during our prep beforehand, you were talking about, “where are
the opportunities?” And something that I’ve been sharing in my
presentations the last couple of months is — and actually I just I
read another statistic just from an article today that made me think
about it again — I had the chance to attend a conference in
Washington in December called the Longevity Conference, and it’s all
about the aging community. Not just the elderly, but older working
people. And the AARP, — which is the largest.. I think, the largest
nonprofit in the United States, with 50-million members, The American
Association of Retired Persons — shared a statistic which was very
sobering, which is, in about 10 or 15 years, the majority of the
population of the United States will be of the age 50 and over. That
will be the largest part of the population.

Alan: Wow.

Bob: One of the other sobering
statistics that I just read from an article today — and I’m trying
to remember… oh, it was a survey from MetLife — noted that’s
something like a 15 percent increase of people having to postpone to
retirement because of finances.

Alan: Wow. That’s an incredible
number. Holy moly!

Bob: So what all this means,
though, is that all of us — the vast majority of us — as we get
older, will not be retiring at 65. I don’t personally believe in the
notion of retirement anyway, but–.

Alan: Freedom 55 was a lie!

Bob: — but many of us are going
to have to work, just to pay bills and cover health insurance and all
these things, until our 70s and maybe even 80s. But this is what I
believe is the billion-dollar opportunity that the VR industry is
missing right now. Training in VR is one of the big applications and
opportunities, and that’s where a lot of investment is happening. But
it’s happening more from a traditional, “let’s train our
existing staff; let’s improve how we onboard people; let’s improve
skill sets,” where the opportunity is with VR — and there’s
money for this — is, “how do we retrain an aging population?
People that are going into their second, maybe even third careers?
How do we retrain our workforce to be efficient?” At least here
in the United States. Retraining has not really been all that
successful. There’s lots of money invested in it. The government
spent millions and billions of dollars on it at different levels. But
it hasn’t really achieved the outcomes that people have been wanting.
And there’s a huge opportunity for VR companies to try to work with
both local and state/province governments. Right now, what I think we
need is a successful pilot, where there is a retraining opportunity
for a particular field or company, where there are job opportunities
and needs, and to demonstrate that VR can be a successful tool in
attaining that retraining. Because again, and from the studies that
are out there, retention in VR is much, much higher than in other
forms or traditional learning.

Alan: Absolutely. One of the
stats that came out of my conversation with the president of HTC,
Alvin Wang Graylin; they did a quick study with some students, and
they saw a six times increase in the concentration levels of those
students. And another study they did with soccer stars; they were
young students that are at the top tier soccer players. When they
enlisted VR training as part of their training, they did two teams
with two teams without. The teams without had a 5 percent increase;
the teams with VR training had a 36 percent increase in their
performance. So training is the magical use case for
virtual/augmented reality, and I think right across any enterprise,
that is going to be more and more applicable.

Bob: I got to tell you, 2019 is
turning out to be an extremely exciting year, from a hardware
perspective. The number of announcements that have been coming out in
the last four to six weeks from Mobile World Congress in Barcelona,
and the Game Developers Conference the other week in San Fran;
there’s a lot of products coming out, which is good for the
marketplace, too. It’ll bring prices down over time, but there’s a
lot of interesting stuff happening. I finally — finally, after a
year and a half — I got to try out the Magic Leap in Laval, and it
was a good experience. It’s an interesting first gen product.

Alan: What do you try it?

Bob: What did I try, in terms of
the application?

Alan: Yeah.

Bob: It was kind of a model simulator. You could take a look at a car engine, and spin it around in 360, zoom in and out, and look at it from different perspectives. But, [with] the ability to do that with other people in it at the same time. They had an add-on where a second person or third person could look at it through a tablet, and have the same perspective from a different angle, while one person’s in a headset.

Alan: You’re going to see a lot
more of that. Microsoft with their Hololens 2, they’ve actually moved
their Hololens from the devices division of the company to Azure,
which is their cloud computing. And what they’ve realized is that
these devices don’t really work without edge computing. We need to be
able to push information back and forth from these devices to the
cloud, and doing it real-time collaboratively is really going to be a
magical scenario.

Bob: Well, I’m starting to see
something interesting happen. And to be very honest with you, I’m
thinking this through as I’m talking about it. Personally, I have
some concerns about the cost of the Hololens and the Magic Leap
devices at this time. Not that I don’t think they’re worth the amount
of money that they’re being asked. I’m just worried about it from a
market penetration perspective. But, as I’ve been thinking about this
— and something that I think just dawned on me just now — is I’m
seeing a very strong parallel with what happened with the early PC
market, and the early gaming market in the early/mid-80s. If you
think about console gaming — and we’re going back to now the Atari
2600 that I started with, and Intellivision and ColecoVision, (I’m
sure you remember all these), the first Nintendo–

Alan: Burger Time!

Bob: Burger Time, awesome game. One of my favorites. These were aimed at families and gamers and households, and they were reasonably affordable units; $200-$300. That was something people could afford for Christmas. And it influenced an entire generation, including me, in terms of what I became interested in and what I want to work in. And I see that right now, Oculus is filling that void. Well, not just Oculus; PlayStation with the PSVR, and very soon, Valve is coming out with their own headset next month. So, there is this part of the VR sector that I’m now seeing focused on the end user consumer gamer. And then there’s this whole other part of the industry, which includes HTC and Microsoft and Magic Leap, which is focused on the enterprise. Now I’m alluding to the $2,000 PC from the mid 80s, which was high-high-end, what you needed in your workplace. And maybe a consumer could afford that, maybe they couldn’t. Then there was a convergence had happened over the next 10 years, where both the gaming hardware and the PCs kind of came into a middle pricing range, between that $500-$1,500 price range. I guess I’m starting to see a similar parallel track, in terms of the VR industry today, to what happened with PCs and gaming consoles 30 years ago.

Alan: At $3,500, it seems like
“wow, nobody will ever buy that.” But for businesses and
enterprise, that’s a drop in the bucket; literally nothing, if you’re
saving millions of dollars.

Bob: Right. Going back to our
earlier examples, if you’re investing $50,000 in hardware, and able
to save half a billion your first time out, it’s a no-brainer.

Alan: Yeah. One of the big things that came out of Hololens 2’s announcements this year was they’re making things available right out of the box. Whether in design, you can upload your sketch ups, you can upload your .bim files or CAD models; whatever it is you’re working on, they have programs right out of the box that bring value. Whereas the Hololens 1, it was like, “here’s a Hololens and here’s a development kit that is kind of half-baked. But you know, you can guess and try some things?” I think version 2 is going to be a moment where enterprises buy this device, and are able to generate value from it immediately. I think that is the game-changer.

Bob: I think, where maybe
there’s a little struggle, is the enterprise figuring out what they
do with it from Day One. I don’t think it’s clear for companies to
figure out, “okay, we know that we can get value out of this,
but we’re not quite sure how to do that.” We don’t have the
Lotus 1-2-3 program that is the killer app just yet, at least for
enterprise; that is a must-have, out-of-the-box for everybody. I
think, unfortunately, they’re having to adjust it to their particular
use case and need, and maybe some of that’s out-of-the-box. It takes
a little bit of figuring out, though.

Alan: Yeah, I mean, there’s
legacy issues and stuff. But what I’m seeing in the market is that
this stuff’s just moving really, really fast. The fact that it’s
moving this fast is really encouraging. It’s also scary, because you
invest in some technology, and then all of a sudden that’s obsolete.
But I think you can futureproof your content strategies as you
develop these things, especially in VR training. For example, if you
start to use 8k cameras instead of 4k, then you’re creating content
that’s above and beyond what the current headsets are capable of. But
they’ll catch up, and your content will be future-proof.

Bob: Yeah, definitely.

Alan: So let me ask you, Bob;
what is one of the most impressive business use cases of XR
technologies that you’ve seen?

Bob: Now you’re putting me on
the spot.

Alan: That’s the point!

Bob: One of the best use
cases… Well, I think the killer app is training right now. If we
think about education in the United States, at the high school/middle
school level, we’re struggling. It’s no surprise, and there’s no
hidden facts that the United States is not number one in reading or
math. I don’t even think we’re in the top 10, necessarily. We are
struggling keeping their focus. VR is a winning scenario for this,
right now. You even mentioned a couple examples, where the retention
and increased performance is a 5-6x improvement. That’s the biggest
opportunity right now. It’s getting it in the hands of people and
teachers and practitioners. Talking on that point, Merge VR — which
is an AR hardware/software platform — has completely taken off in
the education market. They completely changed their business model.
In the beginning, they were focused a little bit more on consumer and
such, but because they have actually a very cost-effective,
entry-level product that students and teachers and schools can afford
right now, they are getting insane uptake, and teachers are able to
teach content and engage students in a much more captivating way. And
they’re seeing great results with it.

Alan: The Merge guys. I traveled
to China with them, and the MERGE Cube is… it’s so elegant. It’s a
3″x 3″ foam cube with some markers on the side, and if you
pull your phone out, it comes to life and it can be everything, from
a fish chasing some sushi, to a human heart or a skull in your hand.
If you put it into Google Cardboard mode, where you put the phone
into a viewer, this cube comes to life in your hands, and they’ve
done it really elegantly. So, they’ve let people program for it.
We’ve made some retail things for it, but it’s a beautiful, elegant
solution. Really simple.

Bob: You just mentioned Google
Cardboard, and actually, something that I was looking at earlier
today, that Nintendo [Labo] — is it “LAY-boh?” LAH-bo? —
VR kit is coming out in two weeks. And even though this is not
necessarily Oculus Rift or HTC quality, it’s a brilliant move by
Nintendo, and it’s going to be a mass adoption; an introduction of
VR/AR to an entire generation, in the next 18 to 24 months. The
Switch has taken off as a huge, huge success as a console. It’s going
to be a very fast introduction, and people will get familiar with VR
much, much more over the next 12 to 18 months.

Alan: I agree. I think it’s
going to be a race to the top. A stat that I like to share with
people is that, over the next 12 months, we’re going to see 2-billion
smartphone devices that have AR enabled in them. And over the next
five years or six years — between now and 2025 — there’s going to
be a trillion dollars in value created through virtual, augmented,
and mixed reality. The market cap is going to be massive. It’s a
matter of harnessing that value for your company.

Bob: When did you go to China?

Alan: In June last year.

Bob: Okay. And what did you take
away from China?

Alan: Couple of things. The
Chinese market is much bigger than the American market. They just
have so many more people. They have 300-million people — the entire
population of the US — in the middle- to upper-middle-class. In
America, you’ve got 300 million people; you’ve got a few people at
the very top, a middle class, and then people at the bottom. China’s
really becoming a new world superpower… I guess I can’t really say
“new,” but they’re really dominating, and they have their
own agenda, and they’re working really hard. And 99 percent of the VR
headsets in the world are made in China.

Bob: Do you see opportunity now,
for American and Canadian companies, in VR/AR in China?

Alan: I really do. I think
there’s going to be some great opportunities in retail. I know
Alibaba just acquired an Israeli company last week.

Bob: I recall that.

Alan: I think there’s going to
be opportunities in retail, and education. VIVE is doing some really
amazing things in education, and bringing multiple headsets to
classrooms. When you’ve got, like, 300 people all wearing a headset
in a classroom, that’s pretty impressive. And one of the things that
HTC just announced at their VIVE Conference in China; they have a new
headset coming out, the VIVE Focus Plus, which has 6DoF, meaning you
can look up, down, left, right, and then move in those directions.
It’s got multi-modal VR. So, you’re able to plug it into a console,
and see the screen from the consoles. You could play your PlayStation
games in VR, on a huge IMAX-sized screen. The other thing that
they’ve got coming is eye tracking for their VIVE. The other thing
that I thought was really cool — I’ve never seen it, but I can’t
wait to try it — is they’ve created a multi-user system using the
VIVE Focus, where they can have up to 40 devices non-tethered. So no
backpacks, nothing. You just put on the headset and go with four
trackers that covers 900,000 square feet, which is four football
fields.

Bob: Wow.

Alan: Free-roam VR, for up to 40
people in a 900,000 square foot-sized space.

Bob: That’s interesting.

Alan: Right? I was like, “oh,
OK. This is big.” So I think there’s gonna be some big, big
things coming from these standalone headsets.

Bob: Fantastic.

Alan: So, Bob, one last question
for you; what do you see for the future of virtual/augmented/mixed
reality — or XR — as it pertains to business?

Bob: Well, I think — just based
on most of our discussion — it’s the next computing platform. Again,
I think why you and I have been interested in it from a very early
perspective; we went from VAX/VMS systems in the 70s-80s, to the PC
generation, to mobile. And now, we are seeing AR and VR, which is
going to be integrated in so many ways that people can’t even imagine
right now. AR is going to take a form where it’s going to impact
every piece of our business and daily lives. You’re going to see a
AR-integrated into windows — the screen of your windshield, of your
car, your glasses — and whatever version that takes. And we’re going
to have this new access to information that we never had before. It’s
going to be a platform that replaces — complements — our existing
life of PCs and iPads and phones. It’s not a matter of if; it’s a
matter of when. And we’re starting to see it. And 2019 is becoming a
turning point in a hardware perspective. It’s just more important for
people to get up to speed now, instead of playing catch-up three or
four years from now. And if you want to be ahead of the curve and
helping your company, at least start thinking ahead for next year or
the year after. Now is the time to start understanding the platforms,
the marketplace, the opportunities, and maybe starting small. Find a
small win, from an application perspective, and then propose
something larger.

Alan: I think that is very sage
advice. And on that note, I want to say a huge thank you for joining
me on the XR for Business Podcast.

Bob: Alan, thank you very much.
It’s been a pleasure. I’m glad to see you doing this. I think it’s
extremely important for the enterprise. You’re definitely filling a
void, and you’re a leading voice in the space.