Designing the User Experience for WebAR, with Google’s Interaction Developer Austin McCasland

August 21, 2019 00:35:11
Designing the User Experience for WebAR, with Google’s Interaction Developer Austin McCasland
XR for Business
Designing the User Experience for WebAR, with Google’s Interaction Developer Austin McCasland

Aug 21 2019 | 00:35:11

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Show Notes

How an end user experiences a new mode of technology is almost as important — if not more — than how the tech works on the inside. Because, let’s face it; it could be an amazing bit of code, but if the human mind does not find it simple or easy to use, it’s a non-starter. Austin McCasland is a UX prototyper working with Google, and he and Alan chat about the finer points of UX design for AR.

Alan: Today’s guest is Austin McCasland, a designer and developer in immersive computing. Austin has written multiple courses across VR and AR design and development. He’s designed and developed Paint Space AR, named by Apple as one of the best apps of 2017 and currently works full time at Google as an AR Interaction designer. Austin employs a user-first synthesis of technical understanding and UX design to create effective and useful products in emerging technology. I’m really, really excited to welcome Austin to the show. Austin, welcome to the XR for Business Podcast.

Austin: Thank you for having me, excited to be here.

Alan: If you’re looking to learn more about Austin, you can visit his website at austastic.com. Let’s dive right in; you work at Google as a UX designer — user experience, for those who don’t know — walk us through what you do on a daily basis.

Austin: I’m a UX designer, and I do a lot of prototyping. Basically what I do is, I think about software problems from a user-first perspective. Thinking about what are things that people are doing that they need solved — or what are things that they’re doing that they could do better with technology, whether it’s a standard app, or with AR/VR – and then I basically go through a process of iteration to come up with features for products. And specifically, in my current role, I’m on a prototyping team that looks at how we can leverage spatial computing across all these different types of use cases. So, I see a range of use cases, and explore what’s possible from a product perspective.

Alan: So, what are some of the use cases that you’re seeing in your day-to-day business that you’re prone to working on? Or what you’re really attracted to? What are some of the best use cases so far?

Austin: The things that I look out for when there’s a use case that could be particularly well-suited — and I’ll speak mostly to AR here, although I can also speak to VR — but in AR, when there is a problem that’s already spatial in nature, it’s usually a pretty good indicator. You’ll see this with try-on apps where — and I use this term more broadly to also describe apps like IKEA and stuff — let’s say there’s this problem of, “I need to see what something looks like in my space.” AR is really well-suited to help with those types of problems. Or, “what does something look like on me, in physical space?” Now, those aren’t the only things. But any time that your users are doing something out in the real world, or they need information about how something would be in the real world, that’s usually a pretty strong signal that you can lean into AR to provide some value there.

Alan: Let’s give an example. You mentioned IKEA, and what they’re doing with their Place app. What they basically allow you to do is take your phone, put a digital piece of furniture in the exact size [you want], so you can see what your couch is going to look like. But this kind of transcends all types of visualizations. For example, I saw one where Coke did a visualizer to show retailers what the new Coke machine would look like in their stores. And it’s not just sending them a photo and marking it up. It’s real-time, and that’s — I think — a really powerful tool for sales.

Austin: Yeah, especially because one of the key differences between what would be a standard documentation — like in that Coke use case, for example — is that, you can get a sense of scale in a picture, but when you’re doing something and it actually appears to be there — you can walk around it, you can hold other things up near to it — it gives you a much better idea of scale in general. If you watch the Google IO keynote this year, one of the examples they did was Visual Search, where they just put a shark on stage, and it’s as big as the shark would be. That example follows through to these physical products as well. It doesn’t surprise me that Coke did that. I think it’s a really great idea.

Alan: It’s amazing; I think we’ve only just really scratched the surface of this. From what we’re seeing, the larger brands are all experimenting with AR — and I’m assuming you’re seeing this in the day-to-day basis — where there’s just a lot more experimentation being done. It’s finding those killer app use cases, and see-what-I-see — or virtual try-ons — are really big.

I actually wrote an article called “Augmented Reality’s First Killer App: VTOs,” or virtual try-ons, and everything — from sunglasses, to footwear, to necklaces, jewelry, contact lenses, shoes — there’s so many ways to use AR to try things on. And I think the next big one is going to be clothing, which I know Google has made an investment in. Clothing virtual try-ons, but more for in-store. Are you seeing brands starting to roll this out, or is this something people are just testing with now?

Austin: I am not as familiar with that specific work. What I can say is that, the verticals that I see having the most immediate, effective, actionable use cases is probably in fashion and beauty. For all those reasons that you just mentioned. So, when I say “fashion,” that could be anything; from a retail experience when you’re in a store, or it could be a brand experience that you don’t need to be in a store to have. In beauty, there’s these face filters. There is obviously a big opportunity there. And you see people like Sephora have these try-it-before-you-buy features in their apps and things like that.

Alan: Yeah, there’s a company based in Toronto called ModiFace, and they were purchased just recently — about a year ago — by L’Oreal, for their virtual try-on of makeup. They had very, very accurate facial tracking, and L’Oreal bought them for an undisclosed amount. So, it’s happening. There must be value being created there.

The other thing you mentioned about furniture; furniture is another big one that we’re seeing. What are some of the UX considerations with that? Because once you’ve got this app on your phone, and you want to see a couch, what are some of the things that you consider when you’re designing something like that? Or, what would you consider?

Austin: That’s a good question… I think what you see is that it’s really easy for AR applications to fall into two categories. One is something that is very useful, but infrequent. Furniture shopping is one of those examples, where I’m not shopping for furniture on a daily basis. But when I am shopping for furniture, AR can be like very, very useful in that circumstance. The second one being sort of the inverse of that, which is things I do every day, but the struggle there is to get it to be more useful than an existing app. But AR plays really well in these sort of episodic scenarios, where I’m deciding on furniture, for example. What I would start thinking about is the inbound funnel is always super important for augmented reality, because currently, the best AR experiences have a dedicated app. WebXR just isn’t quite there yet. It’s getting close, but you can’t go to any browser and just have these web-based AR experiences.

Actually, in the case of furniture, you may be able to now, because these model viewers are basically being — and when I say “model viewer,” it’s being able to put a 3D model at a scale into space — let’s assume we’re IKEA. So, we have an app that people might care to download. What I think about is, “we’ve already gotten them into this app; now what are they going to do? What do they want to see?” They probably want to see if stuff fits in their space. They probably want to see if it matches with the existing furniture that they have. I would start to look for opportunities there. So let’s say I’m following the journey of this hypothetical user, that wants to get a new couch that matches with the other furniture in their living room. I would start to look at the tools that are available both inside and outside of AR. I consider AR to be both the computer vision input to AR, as well as the output. I would start to look for, “are there ways that we can assess the style of someone’s room from a computer vision perspective, and then provide them with a better list of stuff that will probably already look good?”

Alan: Wow. That’s like next-level retail.

Austin: Exactly. And I think that all frameworks that are out there — as well as just the CV frameworks that are publicly available — are super powerful, and we’re at a stage right now where magic is becoming accessible to every developer. One thing I always tell people — because I give a lot of workshops and I try to get people involved in AR — it seems really intimidating and hard. It seems like magic. Like you’re going to need a team of super geniuses to do this incredibly difficult task. But in fact, the APIs are so easy now, that you could get a development team up-and-running in like a week or two, and be doing stuff like analyzing the room for style, even if it’s just getting the color palette. Stuff like that.

Alan: Wow. So, the barriers to entry for businesses are plummeting. But if you’re a company starting out — this is a good question to ask, I think — let’s say you’re Bob’s furniture store, and you’ve got an app already, and it allows you to search the catalog and select the things… but AR is not built-in. What would their first steps be? “Do I use VR? Do I use AR?” It’s a bit confusing. What do you think is the first steps for these businesses to start using? Because bringing together a development team in a week is one thing, but most of these companies have no experience in developing anything. Would you recommend they find a developer to work with? Or work with another company? What are your thoughts on that?

Austin: A couple of things to pick apart there. The first is, how do they decide AR, VR, or both? If the real world context matters to your users, or it needs to be a thing that happens on the go, then AR is probably going to be a stronger, more compelling fit. Just because you can’t incidentally use VR; you need to be planning to do it as a consumer, because you don’t carry the headsets with you. But if you need to have a really detailed, highly-immersive experience — that is, you’re just focusing on the virtual content — a good example would be if you’re training someone how to service a new type of valve. That might be better suited in VR, because it’s hands-free, and they can have this really focused experience there.

Moving forward, “how am I empowered to do this AR stuff, or VR?” What I would say is, figure out a general idea of where you’d like to go, and then speak to someone like a developer. But less to see if they can be your developer, and more to figure out the difficulty level of what you’re proposing. There are certain problems in computer vision that sound like, “of course we can do that,” but they’re actually quite difficult; and there are other problems that sound ridiculously complex, but that actually might be fairly simple.

Alan: Can you give examples?

Austin: Uh, yeah. Here’s a great one: if I told you that I could, like, perfectly apply new makeup to your face — when you moved, it was projected on you, it was exactly like you — that might sound really hard, but that’s actually super easy. With all the new face APIs that we have, you don’t need to spin up a big effort to make that happen.

But on the flip side, I can then tell you; if you want to detect when someone is, let’s say, confused? Or smiling? Or something like that? It’s possible, but you’re gonna have to spend a lot more time developing that. And it’s just because, in that particular circumstance, the way that the face moves when you’re experiencing emotions is not as apparent. Same with eye tracking; it’s very difficult to track someone’s gaze through a phone right now.

There’s these nuances in development that mean you probably want to talk to someone to see how hard what you’re proposing is. That’s a good first step. But let’s say you get their feedback: there’s two things you can do. If you’re feeling really scrappy, you can do what I did, which is learn some development and get it started. Unity is a tool that we use a ton, and it’s cross-platform. So if you’re going to be doing a mostly AR-dedicated app, I would look into that. And there’s tons of amazing tutorials and content.

But let’s say you’re not looking to get that scrappy. There are some — I can’t remember now off the top of my head — but there are companies that will do AR/VR work for you. However, one thing that I think a lot of people don’t realize is that a lot of the core skillsets that you would want for making an AR or VR product are — from a development perspective — their game development stuff, because the people in that field understand how to work with 3D things, how to work in 3D space. And they understand the pipelines that are needed to get a 3D model into the world, and they’ll be able to ramp up super quickly, even if they aren’t already AR/VR people. If you can find an interested game developer — or a few of them — they can probably get AR or VR stuff started very, very quickly, because it’s just downloading one of these frameworks like ARCore or ARKit.

Alan: You get to see a lot of different use cases come across — I would assume — in your research, and also just working at Google. I’m sure you see a lot of different things at conferences and stuff. What are some of the best use cases you’ve seen of XR for business?

Austin: I think some of the most promising use cases right now in VR — because when we say XR, we’re talking about AR, VR, and the weird, hazy space in between with pass-through cameras and Magic Leap and all that — where I am seeing there being a lot of traction, and things that I feel are really compelling from a business perspective, a lot of them are in the B2B space. And when I say this, it’s for headset-based experiences. This could be for something like a Magic Leap or an Oculus or something like that. And these B2B use cases… the thing is that, consumers are fickle. And these headsets have an inherent cost; this barrier to entry. These teams are trying to push the prices low, but inevitably, if it’s difficult for me to get a consumer to even download my app? It is much, much more difficult for me to convince them to buy a whole device.

However, from a business perspective, it’s really just like a return on investment thing. If I can provide an application, and let’s say it is to train mechanics on how to repair this thing; if I don’t have to fly them out on-site to the actual equipment, or if I can demonstrate that they are trained faster, or they retain information better, which makes them make fewer mistakes it’s really easy for the business to say, “yeah, we’re just going to buy 10 headsets and do this.”

Alan: Yeah, we’ve seen that quite a bit.

Austin: I think training is powerful in VR, in these circumstances. And it’s interesting, because at first I thought, “oh, wouldn’t it be awesome if I was a car mechanic, and I could just automatically see where the part I need to fix is?” But the thing is that, it’s mostly consumers that need that. The people who are already experts in their field; they already know what to do.

Alan: They don’t need to know where the oil goes. [laughs]

Austin: Exactly. But one thing that I have seen that is really interesting are asymmetric, phone-a-friend type experiences, so that you can have — an example could be, let’s say we’re in a blue collar situation, where someone is out repairing something in the field, right? And they may not be the expert, but they’re the one who’s out there, and something’s going wrong. Being able to overlay information for those types of people; I can see what they see, and I’m pointing things out to them. That can be really powerful, to basically make every employee that that person has, an expert. And for some of those, you can even get away with using Google Glass and stuff like that.

Alan: So, remote assistance and see-what-I-see. It’s like having an expert leaning over your shoulder.

Austin: Another area where I see a lot of B2B traction is in architecture and construction planning. This is — again — with the headsets that there are some AR experiences, but a lot of architecture firms are bringing clients through their proposals in virtual reality now. Just because it’s such a selling point, and – frankly — a competitive advantage for your architecture firm, to be able to actually let people step foot in their building before a single brick is laid.

Alan: Yeah, I’ve seen a number of different use cases. One of them in particular was a hospital, where they rendered it out in 3D, and put everybody in the VR headset. And then the nurses, for example, got to sit at the nurse’s station. As they were sitting there looking around, they realized that there was a wall that was in the way of communications, and blocked the flow of everything. And this is before they’ve even dug ground. So, they were able to catch this line-of-sight problem really early.

Austin: At one of my previous companies that I worked at, we were exploring a lot of… it wasn’t architecture, but it was in the sort of B2B use cases for spatial computing. If they had built that wall, and then they had to tear it down and fix it, or something difficult happened that caused someone to get more injured, or not get help? The cost is immediately justified. That’s why it’s so powerful; because, as a consumer, you’re not going to save money by getting a VR headset. You might be able to do certain things better. You might have these awesome experiences, and those might have value to you. But in the right circumstance — in a B2B perspective — you can actually say, “you’re wasting money if you don’t engage in this VR content,” because procedural non-adherence or mistakes get made. And that’s really easy to justify, if you’re doing that B2B stuff. It’s got a lot of legs in the B2B space.

Alan: We’ve kind of come full circle. We’ve talked about using AR on the mobile phone devices to showcase virtual try-ons, and then we take it up a notch to the virtual reality glasses, or augmented reality headsets, where you can train people in not necessarily difficult-to-train scenarios, but allow them to have much more practice than normal because they can repeat it, they don’t have to travel to do it.

Let’s say, for example, your training takes six months to get somebody a gas fitter, for example; six months to get them up-and-running. You can probably shorten that time dramatically, reduce the number of errors, and then — using that see-what-I-see or remote assistance feature — virtually eliminate all of their potential errors. If there is an unknown, they can call for backup. Are you seeing this being rolled out at scale, or is this still in proof-of-concepts? Or, what are you seeing?

Austin: So, I can’t get into too many specifics on everything that I’m seeing. But I will say that there are many proof-of-concepts out there, and there are things that are being rolled out and tested at scale, for these high-fidelity, headset-based experiences. The interesting thing is when we talk about at scale — and this is why I peg these heads-up basic experiences as probably a better fit for B2B, and the AR phone experiences as B2C — it’s because the scale that we’re talking about when we’re talking about the headsets, is such that, maybe you have a business model where you say, “get 10 headsets, and you can use our software to train your employees to do this thing.” And then essentially, as a business owner, you’re not working on the headsets, and once the software gets to a certain point, what you’re really doing is almost like you’re providing a service. You’re providing this training service through your software — almost sassy. The scale there is like, “I have probably fewer clients, but they’re whales. I’m doing bigger deals.” There’s big money to be made with each client you win. So, doing something like that at scale, you might only have 10 major clients, and that’s a big deal.

Alan: No kidding.

Austin: In the B2C stuff with AR, the reason why this is powerful is because everyone already has a phone. Now, you can actually make a product that’s targeted at pretty much everyone in America right now, right? Because everyone has a smartphone. And not just America. There are some places where people have lower access to phones, but for now, we’ll just say everyone.

Alan: Well, I’ve read a stat yesterday that — as of last week — there was 400 million Google, ARCore-enabled devices out there. That’s a pretty good scale; 400 million devices. Then Apple announced their ARKit devices; there’s about 600 million. So we’re at about a billion smartphones that have AR-enabled superpowers built into them.

Austin: Exactly. And that’s a big deal. If you can convince one tenth of those people to spend a dollar each, then you’re doing pretty good. Or even a hundredth of that many people, to spend any money at all. The challenge in the consumer space is that consumers are fickle. B2B; you can make this really reasoned and logical approach for return on investment to your clients. “You’re gonna save money. This is good for both of us.” And you land fewer of those clients with more money. If you’re an SMB person, considering developing something for consumers, there’s still — like you’re saying — a billion devices. That’s all a lot of opportunity.

But people are more fickle, and your go-to-market strategies, and your general approach to your product are going to need to change to try to lure them in to use your app. One of the things that I find is, in AR, little moments of… how do I put this… flashiness – like, cool entrance animation, or something beautiful or interesting happening — that can be really powerful, and a huge draw. If you’re going into the consumer market, understand that you might be spending some of your development time working on things that are not your core value proposition, but which help users feel like they’re having a high-quality, interesting experience. Whereas on the B2B side, you don’t need to focus on that quite as much, because you have a captive audience.

Alan: There’s some of these VR communication platforms, where you can go in and you can work together, and they’re not fancy. They’re not flashy. The environments are decent, but they’re just there to get the job done. And they do a great job at that. When we’ve built B2C apps and stuff, we realize that consumers are fickle. They expect everything to look like it has a million-dollar budget, because that’s what they’re seeing on a daily basis on Facebook and LinkedIn. And Microsoft’s done a really great job at sandbagging everybody by showing what the Hololens can do and stuff, when it’s not even real. I mean, they just released a video of Minecraft. Very, very well-edited. And then, when clients come and say, “we want that,” you’re like, “well, that’s great. That doesn’t exist. It’s all CG. I can make you a beautiful video like that.” There’s a bit of a challenge between consumers’ expectations and what is possible to be delivered.

Austin: Yeah. I just spoke at Google IO. The session that I hosted — with Diane Wong — was on using augmented reality as a feature, and I think this is one of the ways that you can circumvent that. I think for a lot of businesses, the best way for them to leverage augmented reality is to not have an AR app, but just have a feature in your app that’s powered by AR, and consider augmented reality to just be another thing in your tech stack. Just like you can have a back-end database that can supply real-time information online. You also have AR that lets you have a pass-through camera experience and understand the world, and put stuff back into it.

Alan: I love that. I was speaking to one client and they wanted us to build a virtual try-on for their product, but they wanted a separate app. I said, “well, are you going to be selling through your app?” They said, “no, we’re selling through our website.” But then I said, “well, if you’re selling through your website, then you’re going to hit a button and ask people to: download an app; open the app; try on the object; and then you have to go back to the website to buy it. You just lost everybody, right across the board.”

Austin: Yeah.

Alan: Being able to be cognizant of the consumer journey… if somebody is on your website, don’t take them into another app to do something else. I love your idea of using AR as a feature within a bigger app as part of the experience, not the experience. Unless you’re Pokémon Go, in which case, go nuts. This is the key takeaway. If you’re building something for a consumer, make sure that you’re not just building AR for the sake of AR; but, it serves a purpose within the greater potential of your app.

Austin: I think that’s so important. Actually, in our process — and my process — you always just periodically need to be able to have a good answer to, “why is this better to do in AR than not in AR?” And if you are unable to answer that question? To be totally frank, the state of things is that XR is emerging tech. The APIs are constantly shifting. There is a smaller workforce that are experts in working on it. If you’re a business that wants to do well, that’s somewhat risky, right? There needs to be a payoff for that risk. If you can’t answer the question, “why is this better in AR,” or, “why is this better in VR?” Then there’s probably more traditional avenues that are going to be easier for you, that are going to provide just as much value. But I think what we’ve been talking about this whole time is, where are those areas that are actually more compelling in a significant way to your business with AR or VR than without it? Those are really the sweet spots to keep a lookout for.

Alan: Got it; “where is it better?” And we talked about some of them, where AR does make sense; anything where you need to see something in context to the real world. One of the ones I saw a long time ago was a paint one, and it allows you to point your phone on the wall, pick any color you want, and the wall would automatically change to that color. It was kind of cool, but the other thing is, I saw another version of that where you just took a photo, and it did that. It wasn’t real-time. Do you really need it to be real-time? That’s another great question; do these things have to be real-time? Or can they be from a photo and redone? Because making it work real-time is a lot more difficult than post-production, or doing an app that just finds a wall and sticks it on.

Austin: You’re totally right. It can often be hard to make a clear, reasoned assessment of why real-time is better than not real-time, because it’s this feeling of, “it’s really there, and you can really see it!” And there’s these little things with how you move through space. But I actually consider augmented reality to be both the in and the out. And I think that those asynchronous operations, I would still consider to be AR.

I think one of the key things that I have been coming to understand as I’ve been working more deeply in AR is that you can have your camera understanding the world and projecting stuff back out into it, but you can also have a successful AR experience with either side, right? I can know stuff — like my product catalog if I’m IKEA — and then all I have to do is just put that in the world and it’s really cool. I can also just understand stuff from my user’s perspective, and then have the output not be in AR.

Let’s say we use that IKEA example again, where I look around my room and it figures out my style. I could take you into an experience where now, you’re just browsing a list of all the things that are in your style, and there’s no AR output. There’s this real flexibility there. I think when people think about AR products, they’re like, “oh, what would I put into the world?” But just look at Google Lens, for example. Google Lens lets you get x-ray vision on stuff, so I can look at a product and I’ll get similar products. The results often are not in 3D; they’re in 2D. That really starts to unlock what’s possible with AR, when you think about it in that way.

Alan: Interesting, that’s a really great way of looking at it. So, we’re coming near the end of this podcast. What problem in the world do you want to see solved using XR technologies?

Austin: That’s a good question… the most powerful things that technology does is, it makes us high-information people. We know stuff. The average person knows more now than ever before. You’re a Google away from knowing anything on any topic… except for in circumstances where I need to know information about the world around me. Like, I want to look at someone’s shirt, and know how much that shirt costs. I have to do a lot of steps to figure that out. And as we see the form factor of spatial computing evolve, it would be really great if we got to a place where we could have incidental XR experiences. And by that I mean, I don’t have to take out my phone and go into an experience, and I don’t have to go back to my house and put on my VR headset. If I always have something… and if you look at where the money is flowing, I do think that there’s evidence to support that we are getting there.

Alan: Yep. Magic Leap just raised another $280-million.

Austin: Yeah, exactly. Here’s why it’s important to get in now. You want to understand the space. People say “fail fast!” Get all of your fast failing done now, and then when we are able to have these incidental experiences where I could just be walking down the street and I don’t have to intentionally go in; I can have these passive things.

Alan: I actually came up with a crazy idea for a UX for exactly that. When you’re wearing glasses, we keep seeing this hyper-reality version of the world where marketers have hijacked our senses, and there’s flashy stuff everywhere. But I came up with an idea of — this, again comes down to the user experience — if I’m walking down the street, I don’t want all these things flashing at me, and lines that are like, just, craziness around me. I want to know that, “okay, that building has some sort of AR content on it.” It’s maybe highlighted or whatever. Very subtle, but I choose when I want to see the highlighted spatial computing information. But it should be just a natural part of my UX; of my day. I’m like, “oh, I if I look at that sign, there’s an extra piece of 3D content in that sign, if I allow it.”

Austin: I love that. And I think a great proxy is, if you look at your phone, your operating system doesn’t give you ads. You can go into experiences like apps and stuff that might have ads, but you’re not going to make a phone call and have someone trying to sell you something. And I think that these spatial computing platforms are going to be similar, because no one really wants that. Like, no one does.

Alan: [laughs] Yep.

Austin: And I think that advertisers are aware of this as well. You don’t want to enter into a space of negativity for the people you’re advertising to. It’s in their best interest to be delicate in how they handle spatial computing advertisements, anyways. I don’t think we’ll end up in that hyper-reality future. I really hope we don’t. [chuckles]

Alan: I really hope so, too. Oh my god, can you imagine? There’s a video on YouTube called Hyper Reality. It’s seven minutes of what happens if marketers are allowed to take over our senses. It’s kind of awful.

I think these shows like Black Mirror have really opened up people’s eyes to the possible negative consequences of this technology. And everybody that I’ve had on the show — and almost everybody that I talked to in this industry — is aware of the negative consequences. But we’re all pushing towards a more inclusive future.

Austin: Absolutely. And people who are specialists in AR and VR are fewer in number, but that is also changing. There’s so many courses that are popping up that it’s not oversaturated at all. But even if you compare today from two years ago, there’s never been a better time to find people with AR and VR expertise to help execute on your vision. The number of people who are competent in it is growing every day, with these online learning programs, or otherwise.

Alan: You know what? I keep saying this; I’m shouting it from the rooftops. The timing is now. We’re about to announce something at AWE this year, which I think will actually contribute to the success of this, but I can’t talk to it on this podcast–

Austin: Fair enough.

Alan: –I don’t know when this one is going to air! Is there anything else you want to leave the listeners with before we close off?

Austin: It bears repeating one more time; in the early days of AR, everyone came out with AR apps. Even the app that I made — Paint Space, which won some awards — it’s nothing but AR. In general, we’ve seen that be a tricky proposition. But from a business perspective, think about AR as a technology that can allow your users to do things better, or can empower them to do something they were not able to do before. So don’t think about it as this separate thing. Think about it as another way to engage with your users on your applications, and with your business.

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Anchoring AR Content, with Simply Augmented’s Boaz Ashkenazy

Seeing is believing, but in the age of 3D product views through AR technology, seeing is also conceptualizing. Simply Augmented CEO Boaz Ashkenazy comes...

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November 22, 2019 00:32:34
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Sparking Productivity with Hands-Free AR, with Kognitiv Spark’s Yan Simard

Hands-free AR devices like those made by Kognitiv Spark are changing the way we work by helping us all work smarter, not harder. CEO...

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October 18, 2019 00:44:03
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Mass VR and Squeaky Floors, with PwC’s Jeremy Dalton

One of Alan’s favourite XR experiences was running into a room at the Royal York Hotel, filled with 200 people, all deathly silent and...

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