Getting — and Keeping — Your Attention in XR, with LumiereVR COO Alexander Haque

XR technologies are undeniably a leap forward in humankind’s mechanical evolution. But our brains – the way they work – haven’t quite evolved in pace with them, so XR solutions are hardly solutions at all unless they work within the confines of how we think and react. Alex Haque of LumiereVR waxes philosophical about how to design XR with that in mind.

Alan: Today’s guest is Alexander Haque, the founder of RetinadVR, whose mission was to help pioneer virtual and augmented reality through powerful data. RetinadVR was acquired recently by LumiereVR, in July 2018. Alex is now the COO for LumiereVR, which is bringing quality VR content to the masses through masterful curation and distribution. You can learn more about Alex and Lumiere by visiting LumiereVR.com. Alex, welcome to the show.

Alex: Hey, thank you so much for having me, Alan. Pleasure to be here.

Alan: It’s my absolute pleasure.

Alex: Yeah, thanks for having me. You’re one of my favorite LinkedIn personalities, and a fellow Canadian! So I’m excited to talk shop with you.

Alan: Canadians are taking over the VR scene in a big way. It’s really exciting. The purpose of this podcast is to provide as much value to businesses and business owners and people in companies that are looking to explore and expand on virtual and mixed reality and augmented reality, and figure out how these technologies can be used for them. So, perhaps let’s just take a look back at RetinadVR; what you guys were doing there, and what led you to what you’re doing now.

Alex: Right. Yeah. It’s a great jump off point. So RetinadVR actually got started in Montreal in 2014. Our mission was, as you said at the beginning, was to bring VR analytics and data to virtual reality. And what I mean by that is understanding these new data points that can be interpreted from a VR headset. And what we found is, understanding people’s movement in VR is something that we can actually grab from a headset. And then translating that into actionable insights was basically the mission of the entire company for the last three years, up until the acquisition. And things are very much still along that path, but a little bit more, I guess, pigeon-holed into Lumiere -pecific use cases for right now.

Alan: So maybe talk about Lumiere and what you guys are doing there. I know you’ve done a recent project with synchronizing a ton of headsets at a fairly famous location. I’ll let you talk to that.

Alex: So we did about 250 VR headsets, all synced up from Madison Square Garden for LumiereVR, which brings that enterprise software to large venues and media entertainment folks. MSG is a really good use case; museums, aquariums, science centers, planetariums — those are really good places where VR lives, [and] is complementary to an existing exhibit. The example with Madison Square Garden, for instance, was they have a 90-minute tour within the venue. So, a lot of people don’t actually know this — I think the international community knows this little bit more — Madison Square Garden, I think, is in the top five or top 10 most-visited, most iconic places in New York City. And I didn’t know this, being obviously, a Canadian hockey fan. I thought you just show up to Madison Square Garden — a great, beautiful venue — and you enjoy concert or a game, and you go home. But apparently what you could do is, they have off-hours visits throughout the day that are 90 minutes that are called the All Access Tour. And they show you the history of this is where Mohammad Ali boxed. This is where goalie Henrik Lundqvist for the New York Rangers, here’s his, like, million-dollar Swarovski 10-cut diamond goalie mask is. This is where the Knicks played, and so on and so forth. And they give you a really beautiful, all-encompassing tour. We were commissioned to bring a five-minute VR experience that they had filmed, giving behind-the-scenes look at the Rangers, the Knicks, and Billy Joel live on stage in 360 VR. And basically, from anybody that’s powering a VR experience, whether you’ve had experience with this or not, you know that the user experience is really important.

What Lumiere did — in a nutshell — was surface a much-easier user interface and user experience, by bringing all the VR tech to an operator. So what I mean by that is, instead of having every single person that would go through this all-access tour — and the VR portion specifically — have to be like, “what are you looking at? Do you see it? Did you click play?” Anybody who’s run a VR event knows how horrible that is. What we did is, we surfaced that to an iPad, and then a person can just click play, and then all the VR headsets synchronize and play at the exact same time, and then the show ends at the exact same time. So it makes it a very seamless experience.

Alan: That, to me, is something that… at the very beginning when VR was kicking off, when Samsung did this huge presentation and they had hundreds — or probably a thousand headsets — all synchronized. So you guys have taken that, simplified it, and made it available as a standalone app. Is that case?

Alex: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. It’s a service, then an app. I’d say right now, the goal is to make an app-based where anybody and their dog, so to speak, can pick this up and click play and have their own event to run. So what we did with Pacific Science Center was a really good example of that. But the reality is, is that we’re not there right now for the industry; there’s still a lot of handholding to be done and there’s still no consensus amongst which headset is kind of the iPod or iPhone right now.

Alan: Got it.

Alex: We’re still making custom experiences for everybody.

Alan: So does it work with the Oculus Go?

Alex: It does. Yeah. We actually have a pretty good relationship with the folks at Oculus.

Alan: I have to say, as somebody who’s doing a podcast about the business use cases of XR technologies…. this is glaringly obvious to me. But for those of you who are listening, imagine going into a boardroom or a presentation hall where you want to present to 10 people, 20 people, 100 people all at once, and you want them to have a fully-immersive experience, where they’re not checking their phones, they’re not paying attention to other things. They are fully immersed in the content that you want to deliver to them. This seems like a natural fit for that.

Alex: Oh, yeah, absolutely. The presentation use case is one that we actually started with. So Travis, who’s the founder of LumiereVR with Jenny, they had this exact pain point when trying to present to investors and try them — I’m sure you have this problem too, Alan; this is very familiar for you — presenting something that’s as three dimensional and as spatial as 360 VR, or 3D VR, and then putting it on a 2D screen and being like, “look, you can touch this, I swear,” is very.. that’s the pain point in general. There’s nothing like putting VR on someone’s head and letting them experience it for themselves. Synchronizing that in a boardroom of two people, up to five, or ten, or 500, is an amazing use case.

Alan: I think that’s something that I think more companies are going to start to use. And of course, they can reach out to at LumiereVR.com. But if you put this in, said, “OK, what kind of industries would benefit from this the most?” What do you think would benefit from this?

Alex: Well, I think what we found success in so far is definitely what’s benefiting existing aquariums, museums, planetariums; those who are already running exhibits that, let’s say… I’ll give you a really good example. So the Pacific Science Center, where they might not be able to have a dolphin or whales anymore for ethical concerns ever since there’s been a big backlash with a Netflix documentary that aired — called Blackfish, I believe it was called, I don’t know if you saw that documentary — but yeah, basically exposing how the mistreatment of these marine life and aquatic life inside of these venues, there’s been a massive public backlash against that kind of exhibit. So what we did is, we partnered with the filmmakers of the Click Effect. The Click Effect is a 360 video — it’s about a six minute piece from 2015, won a lot of awards — that showcased one of the first full underwater 360 VR diving experiences with dolphins, and talking about the clicking noise that a dolphin will make to communicate. And what that does is, it puts you in a vantage point that you’d never otherwise be able to see (unless you did some kind of deep sea diving yourself, which a lot of people have not done), and it puts you face-to-face with dolphins.

That experience, for families and people of all ages, is one that resonates. It just… it makes a lot of sense. And you don’t actually need to have an entire ecosystem now — or economy — around bringing these wildlife out and taking them out of their existing systems, shocking them, and then putting them in this unnatural exhibit for people to watch and see. You can put someone in a five-minute VR experience. That use case is complimentary — or even, I guess, replacing an existing experience that otherwise would be very difficult — is a really natural place for VR to live. And same thing for Madison Square Garden. Right? It’s a five-minute experience. It doesn’t have to be a whole big, one-hour-long, crazy shebang. It just can be a five-minute thing that lives next to an existing exhibit. So I’d say that that’s a really good use case for right now.

Alan: Interesting. I think another one is in the classrooms. I think there is a huge opportunity here for teachers to be able to put VR on their students’ heads — put down the phone, put a VR on — and then let them experience things like being underwater, or going back in history, or into space. These are wonderful experiences. But again, the problem that you guys have solved is that problem of having a teacher or leader or somebody manage that experience. And I think one of the things, as a company that has done thousands of demos, that’s always the problem; you put a VR headset on somebody, and heh… I don’t know how they ever do it. There’s no buttons, and they end up in a different room, and you’re like, “I don’t have any idea how you got there,” and you can never tell where they are.

Alex: Right. So, “tell me what you see, and… oh, my God. What did you hit? Tell me what you see,” and then they’re like, “I see a screen. I’m in this room–“

Alan: “I’m in a room!”

Alex: It’s incredible.

Alan: The worst is when you put it on somebody’s head, and they sit there for five minutes, and they don’t tell you that it hasn’t started playing.

Alex: Right. They’re expecting you to hold their hands. That’s how we got started with the Pacific Science Center, is exactly that. Travis was out in Seattle managing this, and having anybody from a 13-year-old to a 90-year-old trying VR for the first time — or even maybe a second or third time, it doesn’t really matter — getting them settled in and bringing that experience to them in a seamless way is actually very challenging. And to your point, by the way, what you mentioned — Google expeditions for the classroom — they started off by tackling that problem of bringing VR and synchronizing it across headsets. But that use case is… the EDU use case is one that is very near-and-dear to me and how VR lives in a classroom. We’re actually working with North Carolina State University, and one of the biggest reasons why they can’t get it to take off in the classroom is — other than this one evangelist, God bless his heart. And Mike, if you’re listening; thank you for being a VR champion in Raleigh — but other than him, getting this off to a professor that has to bring this to 10 students or 15 or 300 students in an auditorium symposium, it becomes a massive challenge. It’s very stressful. So that use case that you mentioned is a great one.

Alan: Awesome. So, I’m going to look a little bit more specifics and challenges. So, you’ve got quite a bit of experience in the analytic side, and really looking at, “what are people doing?” What are some of the best analytics or metrics that you’ve seen? What are some of the experiences that people resonate most with? Are there any experiences where people take the headset off middle-way through? What are some of the best use cases, and the metrics around that? Are you finding that people watch it all the way through? Do they look behind them? What are you seeing?

Alex: Yeah, it’s a great question, and one that… what I was alluding to at the beginning of the podcast with Retinad and those kind of best practices for advertisers and marketers is, there’s something called the “Cone of Focus,” that I guess we coined within the industry, amongst ourselves and VR artists that we worked with — so, folks that like Jessica Brillhart over at Google’s Jump VR, who we were working with in the early days — is figuring out, where do people actually look within a VR headset? Where do they actually focus their attention? If I have 10 important elements in one specific scene, is one of them is more important than the other? How do I actually draw their attention there? So to answer your question first, do people look behind them? Mostly no. But if you can get them to look around and turn around, what we found is that generally those experiences tend to be the most valuable, in the sense that people don’t bounce from the experience as much as they would in an experience that I call like “the television screen” or “2D screen,” where they’re just forced to look forward. That seems to be much less of a compelling VR experience, because again, what’s the value of doing it in VR, if not to make people move around?

The whole purpose of VR is to give almost a lifelike simulation, if not give as close as a lifelike simulation as you can. So one of the best practices that we found is that getting a user to move around within the first five seconds is instrumental to success, and to completion. So, if I have an audio cue that comes from around me, that actually works out better than a visual cue that I have no idea is behind me. So, audio is one of the most important things from an analytics — or from our KPI, or key metric — standpoint, from an artistic and cinematic point of view. And even for marketers, right? If you’re trying to engage your audience for that beautiful 30 seconds, and really make them engaged throughout a 360 video or whatever kind of ad unit that you have? Getting them to just move around and engage with your ad is just instrumental within those first five seconds. Otherwise, you’ve lost them.

Alan: Interesting. That’s so interesting. So basically, using audio cues over visual cues in the first five seconds of experience really sets the tone for where people are going to look moving forward.

Alex: Right. That assumes that the users in headset, has a decent pair of headphones on, or has headphones or some audio at all. But in perfect circumstances, that is absolutely true. And even for smartphone-driven magic window, like 360 “VR” type of stuff, that is very important. Audio is very important.

Alan: Yeah, I think people don’t realize the power of audio until it’s wrong. I remember, I did an experience and I put the headphones on backwards, and so the voices were coming from the wrong directions. And it just messed with my head, and totally took me out of the experience altogether.

Alex: Yeah, that’s another thing, right? From the user experience, stuff that Lumiere is tackling is, how to get people to put on the headphones the right way?

Alan: Big “R!” Big “L!” I don’t know, what else can you do? What are some of the other challenges you guys have faced? The reason why I’m asking these questions is because, if I’m a business operator or somebody in marketing or in sales or HR or training, and I want to start using VR in my business, what are some of the challenges that you guys have experienced that you can share, that would help somebody avoid them in the future? Or at least skip past them?

Alex: Yeah, I guess it’s funny, because the company — Lumiere — was born out of all those issues. Travis and Jenny are filmmakers and cinematographers first, more so than they are technologists, and I think Travis is a technologist, and Jenny as an artist; that marriage between those two founders is a great one, between those skill sets. And it was this platform that is the Lumiere LB synchronized software that was built almost came out of accidental experiment. And that was because they were bringing film first to the Pacific Science Center. That was the real challenge, right? “How do I actually create a VR activation” was the first order of problems that they were trying to solve. What they realized was, again, the second order of problems is running a great user experience was actually the first order problems. And if you couldn’t get that to work first and foremost, then everything else was a much smaller problem. It almost became, “why do I need VR if it’s this complicated?”

Alan: It’s interesting that you say that, because I think the industry as a whole went through this phase of really trying to figure out, “can we make this work? How do we make it work? It’s working — now what do we do with it?”.

Alex: Right.

Alan: That’s really the phases that we’ve gone through as an industry.

Alex: I think you had an opportunity to try the Hololens 2. And when they came on stage — what, Mobile World Congress has already been a month now? — in Barcelona. What they were saying was, “we’re now excited to introduce the natural user interface,” and it’s called like “intuitive gesture control.” And it’s just your hands. Just seeing a technologist refer to hands as this natural gesture interface is hilarious. Yeah, it’s exactly what you said. How does VR get past its weird, awkward adolescence? It’s literally just by eliminating these annoying controllers and all these annoying interfaces that seem really cool when you’re developing them, but then when we give them to my mom or dad, or your mom or dad, and it’s just like, “what? What am I supposed to do?”.

Alan: I can’t tell you that the number of Hololens demos where people just can’t figure out just the simple click thing.

Alex: Yeah, oh God. The thumb and index finger?

Alan: Yeah…it was a great idea, and I’m like, “click a mouse! No, but stick your finger up straight! Ah!” So I feel your pain on that one. So I’m going to shift gears a second here, because I really want to pick your brain about something. What do you think is the most important thing that businesses can do now to start leveraging the power of XR — meaning virtual/augmented/mixed realities?

Alex: Talk to people like you, honestly. I say not tongue-in-cheek; I’m being very quite honest. I think within the industry, we think the industry itself has grown up, because we’ve been so close to it and near-and-dear for the last.. what is this, version 3, or 4, of VR/AR? Growing up over the last few decades? So I think just understanding, “what are the actual use cases that my business can implement today,” as opposed to treating this kind of like a futuristic thing. VR, when I speak to clients, sound like quote-unquote — the killer word — “interesting” or “cool” or “fun,” but they don’t actually know what the use case would be. And if they do, then it becomes a very complex product. So starting with something really simple of a use case, identifying it, and then having people like yourself — consultants — come in and, say, identify those problematic areas of a business right now, or areas that aren’t necessarily cause for concern, but can be updated. A really good example is that’s a STRIVR, right? Their 17,000 Oculus Go activations across every single Walmart across America. How important is employee training? Somebody probably has the exact number in dollars and cents about how big of a problem making sure your workforce is well-trained for the future — or even for right now — is. But, probably in the billions.

Alan: In the billions, for sure.

Alex: But how much is that pain actually felt and quantified, and how much of it is a business problem today? I don’t know. It could be different for different businesses. Clearly, Walmart identified that as a must-have problem and put in, I think, the single largest order of VR headsets. Right? I think 17,000 is the number to beat.

Alan: Yeah, it’s funny, it was brought up in the last podcast, that Andy Mathis from Oculus kind of brokered that whole deal. We were talking on the last podcast about the reasons why you would use VR for training, and those reasons are when training for something is rare — so it’s a rarity. So, for example, Walmart trains for Black Friday; it happens once a year, so it’s a rare event that they want to train for. The other thing is that it’s impossible to train for. Let’s say you’re a nuclear reactor and you need to train on what happens when there’s a problem. And dangerous environment — training people on underground wells or whatever; training them places that is dangerous to train in. And then the fourth one is expensive. And so if you look at it from rare, impossible to train for, dangerous environments, and expensive, you come up with an acronym of RIDE. So, that came up.

Alex: I love that.

Alan: Yeah! Me too. And there I thought, man, this is really great. That was from Steve Grubbs at Victory VR. It’s VictoryXR.com.

Alex: Well, I’ll steal what he said! Just copy & paste it right now.

Alan: But I really also like your comment of the Cone of Focus, meaning when you put your headset on people — or, if you look at statistics of 360 videos in general — most people just stare straight in front of them, if there’s no reason for them to turn around. And I know from my first VR experience, I put on the headset, and my mouth was probably wide open. I was like, “oh my God, this is amazing.” And then somebody — thank God — grabbed me by the shoulders and just turned me around in a circle. And then I realized like, “oh, my God, it’s all around me.” So I have this “wow!” moment. But I think the Cone of Focus is a real thing. I’ve never heard it called that until now. But it’s definitely true.

Alex: But, think about that for most people. I think you’re an early adopter of most technologies. For you, to be grabbed and turned around, that doesn’t necessarily break your sense of presence. But how do you get that without needing to physically shove someone, or push them around? And becomes the biggest–

Alan: And that’s where you come up with your audio cues. I thought that was a great solution to that problem.

Alex: Oh, yeah, positional audio, right? So the Dolby Atmos tool kit, or the Facebook 360 tool kit; all that spatial audio stuff. It’s so important, and and so widely overlooked by the industry. It’s mind-blowing. A lot more attention needs to be paid to that.

Alan: So I’m gonna ask you a personal question. What is the best business use case of XR that you’ve seen?

Alex: Oh, it’s a good question. Outside of our stuff and your stuff? I’d have to say… honestly, looking back to the enterprise training stuff, I’d say that that’s probably the best use case. So… actually, I’ll switch gears. We spoke about it, so I’ll talk about social VR. One of the best use cases, I think, is, how do you and I have this meeting? How you do you and I have this podcast in VR? How do we make it feel like we’re actually sitting face-to-face and having this interview, looking each other? Getting that surreal moment of looking each other left eye to left eye, and actually empathizing, connecting with each other? What Facebook just powered with their lifelike avatars… did you see that, by any chance? What they announced from their R&D lab?

Alan: Yeah, it’s pretty awesome.

Alex: It’s crazy.

Alan: So, like, they managed to take avatars, and kick them over the uncanny valley. Which is — especially humans and the human avatars — get closer and closer to photo realism, they get actually further and further away. So if you and I meet in a VR experience, and we’re both cartoons, we accept it. We’re like, “oh, you’re a cartoon, I’m a cartoon.” But as we get closer to looking photo-real, there’s certain nuances about real people that are missed on virtual avatars. Maybe the wink, or how the face moves, or how… mostly, when they’re talking. And so, you get this kind of creepy effect and that’s called the uncanny valley. What Facebook has done with their new real-time algorithms is they’ve just like made it look real. They’ve just skipped that whole thing. It’s incredible.

Alex: Yeah. Oh, yeah, it’s beautiful. So that, from a consumer’s perspective, it is tremendous. But from an enterprise perspective, I think it’s actually even bigger. You and I’d be able to troubleshoot a problem becomes much more lifelike and human, in that sense. Being able to connect with each other over a presentation, so we’re not just some janky avatar in a VR headset; it actually becomes our lifelike representations. That, for enterprise and for a business solution, becomes so important, and becomes the entire value proposition, and is the underpinning — the linchpin — to this entire industry. It’s like, “why VR/why AR/XR,” whatever you want to call it. It becomes that, right? It’s, “I can transport myself anywhere in the world and make it feel as if I’m there, so I don’t need to jump on a flight to do consulting anymore.” Like, the consulting industry, I think, is going to change in a massive way because of that.

I even had an advisor — my brother works at Uber, in the Autonomous Driving division — and we’d like to have this “what’s cooler?” debate sometimes between brothers — and one of my advisors sat him down and was like, “listen; VR is going to completely displace your industry, because no one’s going to even drive cars in the future.” Like, there’s going to be no use to even meet each other with cars anymore — like, the completely crazy, extremist futuristic view. I don’t think we’ll ever become that extreme, but I think it will help to make a human connection. Just, something everyday that… my father could be in India, I could be talking to him. So that type of stuff, from a social and consumer and enterprise use case, is just huge.

Alan: I agree, and there’s one company in particular that’s doing that in mixed reality called Spatial, and I really love what they’re doing. They’ve agreed to be on the show as well. So, I’m looking forward to learning about what their plans are. They’ve basically taken virtual avatars from a photo — so they can take your Facebook photo, turn you into an avatar, and then you can see your avatar in 3D space — and using the Hololens or Magic Leap, you can actually reach out and use those digits on your hands to actually interact with things. And it’s really impressive what they’re doing.

Alex: Podcast using Spatial. Isn’t that amazing? Wouldn’t that be so cool? I’m in your living room right now or whatever. That stuff is the real promise, and I’m excited for that to become a reality.

Alan: Let me ask you a quick question, here; what problem in the world do you want to see solved using XR technologies?

Alex: That’s a great question. And I think VR for good is something I really care about. Everything that Chris Milk talks about; VR being the empathy machine. For the folks in the industry, it’s maybe a tired sentence. But for most people that haven’t heard that term, it’s just, how do you use VR for good and to connect with each other, and understand really, another person’s perspective. When I wear a headset, I am transported to Syria, or a place in the world that’s going under very challenging political climate right now, to say the least. And hearing a story from a native who’s out there, and their perspective on what they are going through — or have gone through — I think just helps us become better people. I think a lot of social issues today, it comes from a stance of ignorance or non-understanding; if there is something about VR that I’m most excited about — and AR — it’s being able to connect each other from that perspective. A lot of people, sometimes you just can’t communicate because of language. But if I put a VR headset on you and transport you to my reality that I experience every day? There’s a lot of companies that are doing a really good job of tackling that issue right now.

Things like sexual discrimination in the workplace — what does it feel like when someone superior in a position of power is interviewing you, or sitting you down, questioning you? What does that feel like from a superior point of view? So, a superior puts on the headset and then does that interview and then watches themselves conduct an interview. It can become very eye-opening, because a lot of the actions that you’re doing, you might not realize that those are behaviors that, “oh, I didn’t realize I looked like that, or I was conveying that message.” Or when you sit in the position of, let’s say, the interviewee, or somebody who’s not necessarily in a position of power in that instance, and you observe the world from that lens. You can empathize like, “holy crap, this is what this looks like? This is what this feels like?” And of course, you can throw stones my way for whatever you want. Say, “well, how could you actually empathize?” Well, I think I challenged people to try that. The science is there, too.

Alan: It’s interesting that you mentioned Chris Milk, because — just a quick story — he kind of coined the phrase “virtual reality is the empathy machine,” and he basically brought a Syrian refugee camp into the United Nations in VR and made everybody watch this. And it spawned a number of donations, and some really powerful people rallying around that. And it was really wonderful. And just a little aside; Chris Milk was the first person to ever show me VR.

Alex: No way!

Alan: The first time I saw the VR.

Alex: No way. That’s awesome.

Alan: Yeah. It was incredible. And that was the moment where I had this “aha” moment where I thought, “oh, my God, this is going to be the future of human communication. This is how we connect the world together.” And it really is doing that.

Alex: That’s a pretty cool badge you get to wear. “Mission Accomplished: Chris Milk Was the Person Who Made Me try VR First.” That’s really cool.

Alan: And it was funny, because it was Robert Scoble and myself at Curiosity Camp, which is put on by Eric Schmidt from Google. So it was like this tech wonderland in the middle of the forest.

Alex: Wow. That’s a story you get to tell your kids. That’s awesome. That’s incredible.

Alan: Indeed.

Alex: Or grandkids!

Alan: And here’s the other thing. I can capture myself volumetrically, and provide that as a digital version of myself for my children when they’re [older]. They can go in and have — perhaps — an AI-driven conversation with me, long after I’m gone, maybe. Being able to store ourselves in the virtual world. I don’t know.

Alex: I love that stuff. Yeah. I don’t know about the part. That’s maybe a different podcast.

Alan: That’s a totally different podcast. I’m actually going to be taking a couple of hundred photographs of my daughters’ bedrooms, so that we can create them volumetrically, and then they can go in their bedrooms when they’re 20, 30, 40 years old; they can go in their actual bedrooms from when they were 10 and 14.

Alex: Wow. Yeah. Preserving history with these artifacts is another amazing use case; aside from connecting us right now, being able to basically do time travel, as well, this equates to. It is probably the coolest use case. Yeah. That’s a great one.

Alan: Well, Alex, I really want to thank you for taking the time. Is there anything else you want to say to close this off? To listeners who are listening? We’ve talked about VR. We’ve talked about using groups of VR headsets to get your message across. We’ve talked about using it in planetariums and science centers and museums. We’ve talked about the Cone of Focus, getting people to turn around in the first five seconds using audio cues. We’ve talked about avatars and the power of that. Using VR for good. Is there anything else you want to leave listeners with?

Alex: Yeah, I’d say that if you’re in an enterprise right now — a Fortune 500, Fortune 1000, or even a small business, doesn’t really matter — if you’re thinking about how do I use this today? Don’t be shy. There’s definitely a use case that you have that XR can transform. I implore you to reach out to myself or to Alan and connect. We’ve seen it all, I think, within the industry. And if we don’t have the answer, we definitely know companies that will be able to provide an answer. I really implore companies to start asking those questions and become digitally prepared, because you don’t want it to pass you over, and then be looking back and you’re like, “damn it! Should’ve listened to that podcast.”

Alan: Haha! Nobody wants to be blockbuster.

Alex: Yes. Nobody wants to be blockbuster, that’s for sure.