Technology, Connected - The Technology Everyone Uses But Nobody Knows They Do

Episode Date: January 8, 2026

Most people have no idea Snapchat is the biggest AR company on Earth, because nobody has ever called it that. We talk with Michael Guerin, founder and CEO of Imivisar, about where augmented reality is in 2026 and where it's going next. Guerin walks us through the history of AR from Ivan Sutherland's 1968 Sword of Damocles through Pokémon Go and IKEA, why the technology became enormous everywhere it isn't called augmented reality, and why his company is betting on something he calls spatial storytelling — longer-form, location-based experiences built for tourism, heritage sites, and the kind of physical places that benefit from a digital layer.He also takes us into the next shift, which is happening faster than anyone in the industry expected: AR glasses are coming, Meta and Apple are now openly competing on form factor, and Mark Zuckerberg has called glasses the ideal form factor for AI because they can see what you see and hear what you hear all day. The thesis underneath the conversation is that the technology has been working for decades, the language has been the problem, and the next ten years will hide AR even further inside experiences nobody calls AR.---Guest: Michael Guerin, CEO, ImvizarTopics: Augmented reality, spatial storytelling, Snapchat, Salesforce, museum technology, tourism, employee onboarding, AR designLocations mentioned: Spike Island (Ireland), Salesforce offices (East Coast, West Coast)Please enjoy the show.Stay curious.Keep Thinking on Paper.Mark and JeremyPS: Please subscribe. It’s the best way you can help other curious minds find our channel.Other ways to connect with us:⁠Listen to every podcast⁠Follow us on ⁠Instagram⁠Follow us on ⁠X⁠Follow Mark on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Follow Jeremy on ⁠LinkedIn⁠Read our ⁠Substack⁠Email: [e-mail]--TIMESTAMPS(00:00) The Story of Augmented Reality(03:46) Snapchat & AR Post-Pokemon Go(06:24) Snoop Dogg In A Wine Bottle(08:12) Salesforce AR(13:13) What Is Digital Storytelling?(17:07) AR In Tourism(18:25) Designing The Spike Island AR Experience(22:49) How To Do AR Well(26:26) Meta, AI And AR Glasses (29:40) Privacy(32:33) Mark's Terrible Thought Experiment(33:58) What do we want humans to be?

Disruptors and Curious Minds, welcome to another episode of Thinking on Paper, where we unpack the future with people building it, we push it, prod it, question it, and figure out if it's actually going to be what we as humans need. My name's Jeremy. This is Mark. Mark, do you have a little history lesson for us today? I want to take you back. Harvard, 1968, a head-mounted display suspended from the ceiling. You put it on your head, 3D wireframe objects are overlaid onto your view, your real-time perspective changes on how you move your head. This is Ivan Sutherland's Sword of Damocles,

the first system where computer graphics were placed into a view of the real world. It's primitive, but it's the first, perhaps, AR, augmented reality, but it's not called augmented reality, Jeremy. The term AR isn't coined until 1992. Two Boeing engineers, Tom Cordell and David Missell, coined the term when they're building a system to help workers assemble complex wiring harnesses. Essentially, Boeing employees experiment, again, with a head-mounted display showing instructions over physical aircraft parts.

AR then goes into hibernation for a few years. People are tinkering, you know, playing around. It reemerges as a mobile concept in 1997. So enter this time Ronald Azuma. and in his paper a survey of augmented reality, he defines AR in this format we still use today. Three things. It combines real and virtual. It's interactive in real time and it's registered in 3D.

So at the same time as Ronald Azuma was doing that, early outdoor AR prototypes emerge. One is Steve Feiners Mars and that's got nothing to do with Elon Musk. and going to Mars and terraforming that planet. It stands for mobile augmented reality system. And it's at Columbia University, and essentially it's like a Ghostbusters pack. You put on your back, another head-mounted display, GPS-based outdoor AR.

You use it, or they used it to do tours of the campus. Okay. So that's the beginning of location-based AR. And the hunt for the mass market begins. In 2009, we get L-A-Y-E-A-Y-E. AR, the first consumer AR browser on a smartphone. And this was used for Splinter Cell, for a Splinter Cell conviction, so a Splinter Cell game launch, players used the AR to do missions on their phone around Amsterdam, complete tasks

in augmented reality. Pretty cool from Splinter Cell and Layer 2012. IKEA show you what flat pack furniture could look like, but they don't put it together for you. They show you what it looks like in AR. 2013, Google Lunch, their Google Glasses, to widespread. What's the opposite of fanfare? Widespread.

And then, 2016, yes, it really is that long ago. 2016, perhaps the high watermark for augmented reality, Pokemon Go. That was a big one, yeah. That was a big one. And that brings us to our guest in that very long intro into the history of augmented reality. our guest is working in augmented reality. It is Michael Geeran. He is the founder and CEO of Imi Vizard.

And he joins us today to say where the journey has gone after Pokemon go. Thank you for thinking on paper with us, Michael. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Mark. And thanks for that very comprehensive introduction. Did I miss anything out of the story of the history of AR there? I think all the main bits are there. Plenty has happened since 2016 now.

So maybe I can add some of that today. Okay, what has changed since Pokemon Go? Yes, the three that I would give an example of whenever I ask people. So I give different talks from time to time and I ask people, have you ever used augmented reality? And most people say no. And then I show them Pokemon Go as you've touched on. I also show them the IKEA app, which a lot of people have used, which you touched on as well.

But the other probably the much, much bigger one is if anybody has used a lens or a filter on Instagram or Snapchat, that's all augmented reality. probably the interesting thing, like it's been incredibly successful. I'm actually just back from an event in Brussels, I was with the Snap team. There's 8 billion uses of augmented reality on Snapchat every single day. For context, there's 14 billion searches, the Google searches were day, 8 billion uses of augmented reality on Snapchat, right? So nobody would associate, nobody in the general public would associate Snapchat with augmented reality,

but they're actually the biggest, you, a day. users of it and the biggest company delivering it. So like since 2016, I mean, there's a whole lot we can get into now in terms like spatial experiences and immersive experiences. But in terms of day-to-day use, there is literally billions of uses of it every day on Snapchat alone. That's not including filters on Instagram or any meta platform.

And so it's definitely, it's used much more prominently than people think it is. But probably most interestingly, everywhere where it's been really successful. It's almost never called augmented reality. I know Jeremy is a big snapper. I don't use Snapchat. Can you use Snapchat without using the augmented reality,

the lens features? Does it work as a standalone app without that? Yeah, messaging. It's location-based. Like, where are your buddies, you can flip open this dashboard. And you can see that Mark is snowboarding. And, you know, Michael and I are at work.

You know, you could see all of that. You could see all of that stuff. It's, Michael, really interesting that you, that's a very relatable reference to what augmented reality is. And there's a piece of the world that's actually there. And there's a layer over the top of the world that's changing that through a digital experience. So I think that's a really cool, cool way to say, hey, guys, this stuff's been around. You guys are using it every single day, right? Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, it is. I mean, there's other ones people of seeing like the wine bottles thing was a while. It was quite popular a few years ago, where Snoop Dogg jumped out of 19 crimes. Yeah. Yeah, so it's been, and then it was used in marketing a little bit more. There's kind of the back of the cereal box style experience. There's a lot of kids' experiences.

And then like guerrillas, the band, which you are probably aware of, they launched an album three years ago now maybe, where they took over Times Square, New York and Piccadilly in London. And it was a location-based experience. It was like a listening party for the new album, but it wasn't just listening whenever all the fans went there and they held up their phone, the guerrillas characters were like sitting on top of the buildings and they were able to like, take, virtually take over all the billboards and like own the place

and make it a whole guerrillas experience, you know? So there's like, I think the evolution that's kind of happening now, like lots happened with augmented reality. And there's always the wow factor initially, but then making it sticky has been a challenge and then getting things beyond gimmick. So like, you know, the Snoop Dog out of a wine bottle thing. was like kind of cool at the start. And then once you've seen it, you've seen it. And are you really going to keep, you know, if you're another wine company or whatever

else, you've got to keep investing in that type of thing. So I think what we're trying to get to is slightly like what we focus on, a slightly longer form content. So rather than like a 10 to 20 second experience where the focus is on you taking a video and sharing it with your friends, our focus is like 60 to 90 seconds, slightly longer form where you're more engaged in the location on the content. And we've been doing that now for four or five years. And then what's definitely happening and happening at a much quicker rate than we expected,

glasses are, glasses are coming. Hold on, hold on. I'm going to stop you there. We'll get to glasses. You said a word gimmicky. When you described anything to do with Snoop Dog jumping out of a wine bottle, I think that's a good adjective to use for that. Why does the world need more augmented reality?

I'm doing a phrase it's slightly different. I'm not sure the world needs more augmented reality, but if I give you some context to why we're using it, I believe we're using it in a meaningful way. So for a bit of context, us as a company, we have over 150 experiences in 12 countries, right? So we started building experiences in tourist attractions and now we do a lot of stuff in large tech companies. So we, as an example, build most of the AR or all AIR experiences for Salesforce. If you give you an example of one of their experiences, if you join them in some of their offices around the world, on your first day, you used to sit through a couple of hours of onboarding.

There'll be some presentations and they tell you about the culture and the values and whatever else. Instead of doing that, they put up a QR code. You scan it with your phone and then you go and explore the building with everybody else that's joined that day, and you learn it with Salesforce through this shared experience. Everyone at Salesforce who joins does that. Everybody in Europe, East Coast, on my coast of America. That's a lot of people. It is, yeah.

So that's all just come, yeah, the last, suppose the last year or so. So like the reason, there's lots of different reasons behind them why they want to do it. But ultimately, you know, I can give you another example in a second. But people, typically outside of where people are communicating on a very, like, visual and short form way. Right. So people use TikTok, Snapchat, WhatsApp. It's real short and snappy. and a lot of it is visual and some of it is interactive content.

And then you come into the place of work and it's like two hour long presentations of the 127 slides of all this text and you expect people who are deemed this way outside of work you're just not going to get the same engagement if that's the way you're communicating with people. So does start back to your question, why does the world need augmented reality?

I think it's more like can we use different forms of communication to capture people where they are and still engage them with the message. So whether we like it or not, like our brains are becoming increasingly tuned towards this really short form content and all the dopamine hits that come alongside it. If you're an employer or a tourist attraction or a brand or whatever it might be, if you want to engage with people, you've got to move the direction and the way people are communicating. And I think augmented reality, if done right, can be a really effective way of communicating a message that still has meaning and that people will still register the message that you're trying. to communicate with them. So I don't know if you guys are know of like Walgreens.

Have you heard of Walgreens? It's like a drugstore, like a CVS, Walgreens, the drugs and like all that stuff. I worked at one when I was 15. And my onboarding, I distinctly remember this. This was like this little bullshit CRT TV VCR combo. And I was like tucked into this. It was a break room, but it was literally like a five by five closet. And I'm literally watching like VHS tapes on corporate culture at Walgreens.

And then before that, it was like a 200-page manual, which you had to read, right? So like it went from like a really boring book. I'm sure at a point in time those VHSs were incredibly innovative. And I'm sure whenever they transitioned to doing things on PowerPoint, they probably thought that was even better. And then whenever they started having video in it, I'm sure in the PowerPoints, they thought it was even better. Like this is, it's just another evolution.

It's a new form. It's a new medium of communication. But it is shorter form. Maybe, you know, is that being driven by that? Is that about being driven by other media sources, probably a bit more? But, you know, I'm not massively concerned in the sense that this transition has happened over time. You know, whenever radio come in, people have concerns and even electricity and video on the internet and whatever else. It's just another form of communication and, you know, arguably a pretty exciting one.

Well, Michael, Mark and I are children of the 80s and early 90s. and MTV was supposed to have melted our brain. So the fact that we're still alive and functioning, I guess, is probably okay. I don't know, but if you get the thinking, PayPal has a lot of short form content these days, Jeremy, because people like, die just. You got a serve it up the way, yeah. Well, you've got a good word for it, nuggets. We've got a lot of nuggets down there in their short, short form.

How did the Salesforce partnership come about? Did they come to you or did you go to them? Yeah, it was actually in. bond. They're a very innovative company, in fairness, like lots of me tech on these try to be, but they were striving for better ways to engage people digitally within their building, whether you're a visitor and a member of staff. So they were looking for digital storytelling, whether that was in video format or like QR code, as you went around the building, whatever else. Can I ask you to define digital storytelling for our listeners? Yeah, I can. Yeah. Like,

we actually use the term spatial storytelling, which is, um, either better or worse depending. I think that's I prefer that. Yeah. So digital and augmented are very like kind of quasi-icky terms a little bit. Yeah. I tell you what's worse. The word

immersive. I said this at a panel in South by Southwest last year. Immersive in the world of immersive technology it's used everywhere but then you look outside and it's literally used everywhere as well. Like I saw a university advertising last year. and they were the most immersive university. And then I saw somebody else describing a film and it was really immersive.

And then I think it was like a painting and decorating company. We're describing what they do as immersive. And I was like this word means everything and nothing, you know. So digital storytelling is obviously very broad. Like it's really anything that mixes any kind of digital media and storytelling. And that can be video format. That could even be an audio guide. That's all digital storytelling.

the reason we use spatial storytelling is because it uses a physical space and the story is relayed on top of that. So what we mean by that is physical location and there is a story. There's normally visuals and audio as part of it. So when you hold up your phone, you might see or wear glasses. You might see things around you. You'll also hear the story, but it uses the physical space that you're in. So let's stay on the definitions for a second here.

So spatial reality is one I hear, spatial compute, spatial, this, spatial that. Isn't reality already kind of spatial? Like we're already, it's, we're, there's a technological overlay that I understand needs to be communicated, right? And all we're doing really is kind of mimicking what normally happens in nature, but doing it with technology in a way that hits the same beats of the story. that we resonate to resonate with, the Joseph Campbell Hero's Journey thing is just applied differently. The terminology and language thing is,

is a problem across the board. So like we've talked about like there's augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality and they're all kind of under the extended reality bracket. But then you also have the concept of a metaverse and then you have spatial computing and spatial experiences. And then with Snapchat and Instagram, you have lenses and filters.

and it's ultimately like all a different flavor is the same thing. Probably the bigger challenge is it's different companies taking different terms. So like Apple only accept things for their Apple Vision Pro. If it's called spatial computing or spatial experience, they won't accept the description that mentions augmented or virtual reality. Microsoft, we're definitely pushing the mixed reality terminology for quite a while. And then obviously meta went down the metaverse route. And like, you know, they're, you know, they're, they're, they're variations on the same thing and they mean different things.

But what we do, some people would call augmented reality and a lot of people would call it, called mixed reality. And I think the way that it's kind of gone in the last six or 12 months is augmented is becoming more of the mobile version and then mixed is more of the head worn version. But it's really like the world is there and there's something overlaid on top. there. Jeremy, I've got a question for you. What do you see, Jeremy, this is you, Joe, before I go back to Michael, is a good use case of augmented reality. Seeing as you're a little bit, you've got your

90s head on today. Jeez, like short answer, I don't know, like. I'll tell you mine. Yeah. If you want, because please. During the summer, so my kids,

my kids, Michael, are nine and six. We went to a lot of tourist attractions across England and across France. The augmented reality that I saw wasn't particularly good for me. I mean, the kids loved it because it's like, oh, it's augmented reality. I didn't think it was.

But I think that in tourism, in these big old historical tourist attractions, especially, there's an opportunity to use augmented reality to learn and to experience what life might have been like in a way that they don't take advantage of. So that's, I mean,

that's really where it all started for us. And that's, that was my vision. at the start mark that there are so many places all around the world and so many incredible things happened. And like, you know, if you go to a tourist attraction and you get a really good tour guide, they can really describe things in a way that you can almost

picture it yourself. But the chance that, you know, the number of times you get that really good one and that you're really engaged and you can keep the kids engaged while you're engaged. That's a very interesting point because a really good tour guide would be better than any AR. Yeah, I'll debate that one to be, but

I think if you get good AR, So the other thing you said was that the AR isn't good, right? So it's literally where we started. So as an example, we've an experience in a place called Spike Island, which is Ireland's version of Alcatraz. Basically, it's actually eight times the size of Alcatraz. There's a prison and a military fort for it for a couple of hundred years, right the way up to 2004.

Really fascinating place. So we have 15 points of interest around the prison. So as an example, in the first stop, it's called the guards room, and you enter, and the fireplace and the guards chair is there. But when you hold up your phone, the prison guard is warming, hands against the fire and then he turns around he starts shaking his bat on that you as if you're about to be brought into the prison and he explains to you that you're about to be brought in and in the second stop on the tour is in the punishment cell and when

you're in the punishment cell like these these cells even now when a tourist attraction are really grim conditions right it's really damp in there it's cold this is off the coast of ireland like you're there in november it's not a pretty place to be and you hold up your phone and then the prisoner is there chained to the wall uh blindfolded and he doesn't know what time of day it is and he's only let off and let off the handcuffs for 30 minutes per day, right? The rest of the time he's blindfolded and chained the wall. So the first day we launched this, I was there and I gave an iPad the two ladies who were walking past and they saw the guy in the punishing cell and then immediately after they started crying and I was like, is this a

good thing or not? But both of them said that they had walked around the prison for like two hours and they hadn't really considered the human toll or the human impact of the place. So if you had a really good tour guide, could you get to that, you possibly could. But having a visual of what really happened there, just on a device that you can just hold in front of you, it's like, it's so incredibly powerful if it's done right. And there's so many subtleties to what done right means, like the shadows need to be right and the chains that we have actually went right to where the hoops are on the wall where the chains actually went to. So if you can get all of that right, although you know it's not real, the two terms we use internally a lot is plausible and

believable. And if you, if it's plausible that that happened and believable in this scenario, you can really, really connect to the story and to the place. And when that's done right, it's incredible, you know. I think, Mark, I'm going to. Jeremy. No, he actually in talking through that kind of fired some neurons. And so I think, I think this technology definitely has a empathy activation potential if it's done the right way. And I think that's what you're talking about, Michael. And there's a couple of examples that I'll share that in Atlanta has the center for civil and human rights and you know amazing museum to to basically show to tell some of the hardest stories that need to be told in the world and there's a lunch counter in installation that basically mimics if you were

if you were african person uh back in you know the 50s or 60s at a lunch counter you would basically hear people walking behind you. You got headphones on. You would hear people walking behind you, screaming racial slurs, like scaring you, all of that. Like, you would actually feel that. And I think if you read about that in a book, you're like, damn, that sucks. But if you, like, really feel it. And there's one more example that I'll share. I don't know if you've ever run across a woman named Melitza Zek. She has an installation. I worked with her a little bit a few years ago and she has an installation or I guess as a programmer an experience called something about the tree and it actually shows what it feels like to be a tree growing and then what it feels

like to be a tree chopped down and she highlighted the same experiences that people had when the tree got chopped down people were like bawling their eyes out and I think if it's done right I think it's it's a it's a way to you know get humans to be more empathetic I think and passionate about a subject and knowledgeable about a subject as well, if done right. Yeah, and look, done right is so important. And ultimately that then comes down to the technology. You know, like whenever I started the company, there was a couple of key things that I wanted us to get right.

And the mantra generally at the start was if we can nail the technology, the end user won't notice it. Because I think in most other augmented reality experiences, people get told that they have to find a tabletop or a ground, and then they've got to detect the surface, then they've got to tap to make the thing appear, and then they got to pinch it to make it bigger and smaller. So you're like five steps in.

You've just like had to do all these things. And now you're entirely focused on the technology and not the story. So for ours, you walk into that room, you hold up your phone. The thing appears and you hit play. There's no, you don't, you shouldn't really even, it should feel so natural that you don't even notice the technology. What are some other important things to do it right? To think about it completely differently to every other story. So we have these like this guide to space of storytelling, which we've kind of created internally.

So whenever you're telling, even if you're doing an audio tour of a place, you'll pick this place, you'll do the 10 stops, you'll do the research, and then you'll write a story. You might have a first person narrative. You might have a narrator. It'll probably how it'll evolve. When you're doing a spatial story or an augmented reality experience, the narrative is the last thing that you should think about. So the most important thing is to do a site survey of the room, the building, whatever it might be, so really understand the space. And then the second thing is the user movement. So if you want, so like in the two that I've just given you an example of with the, the guy at the fireplace, the prison guards, the fireplace, warning his hands and in the next one, like you can see the prisoner change the wall and you can walk around them, right? So if you think about the place, the user movement, then you want to think about the visuals, then the interactivity and the last thing is the narrative. Then you make the narrative suit, all the things. And the reason we do that for context is augmented reality, if you stand in one place and hold up your phone, it's basically just.

a less enjoyable video because you might as well just watch it on a video whereas if you move it's the only thing that makes it different to any other medium

so a really really important thing when you're designing any experience is to not think about like you you'll know roughly the story that you want to tell but don't write a script look at the location

look at the user movement think what visuals you want in there think about the timing of the visuals and possibly any interactivity and then you can write the script at the end counterintuitive to what I first thought when Jeremy asked that question, I thought you'd lead with the story, but it makes perfect sense to lead with the space.

Yeah. Yeah, there's triggers in the space, I think, that can generate different aspects of the story, this kind of choose your own adventure. I spent a lot of years doing sound design for TV, video, video games, digital experiences, augmented experiences, and there's this trigger of like, hey, what can that sound drive the user to do and really think about, Do you ever think about like emotional response when you're designing these beats of the story? No, that's literally the basis to it all, to be honest with you. And so we, whenever we're writing, so like we have like a spatial script, which has all the different elements of what I've just discussed.

And a really important thing for every single bit of the story and every scene is what we expect the, the emotional response to be, you know. If you can create an emotional connection to a piece of content, then the people will remember that. So whether that's like you enjoyed it, you were frustrated, you were angry, you were crying, laughing, whatever it might be as long as there's an emotional response to the content you're engaging with, you're much more likely to remember. So the next time you go home and tell people about the tourist attraction you went to in Ireland or to the best onboarding you've ever had in a company, you'll probably remember the ones that you have more fun with and you cried on.

And that's what we're trying to, in an appropriate and sensitive way, I would say as well, it's not just let's get everybody to cry at every stop. You know, it's got to be appropriate to the content. I still remember going to the Holocaust Museum in Berlin, and it was incredible. And the Spike Island would be, again, very easy to tell a story that makes people feel very emotive. And for your examples, too, Jamie. My first writing website was actually called The Metaverse Writer, Michael, which dates me. And unfortunately, Mark Zuckerberg destroyed my business when he rebranded. Facebook as meta and the metaverse.

I want to read a quote, which I think links to what you're doing and a future where AR and AI combine and maybe you can paint that for us. This is for Mark Zuckerberg, July this year, quote, I continue to think that glasses are basically going to be the ideal form factor for AI because you can let an AI see what you see throughout the day, hear what you hear, and talk to you. end quote. Now, as mad as a hatter that Mark Zuckerberg is, when you hear that, first of all, what do you think about his opinion? I think it's the next natural enough evolution of hardware devices. I do think they're like, so, I mean, you refer to the Google glasses in your

intro. Mark, what happened between then and about a year ago was everybody was striving for one thing that you wore in your head that did everything. And what's happened in the last 12 months is people have realized that that's not the case. So literally only yesterday or the day before at United XR, which is the biggest AR and VR conference in Europe.

One of the directors of engineering for Snapchat was on and he had a slide which talked about headsets for experiences. The everyday use AI glasses and then were Snap representing themselves as the in between. So it's glasses that you will like, you might wear multiple times there today, but it's to do something and to take back off. So,

a bit like, you know, you use a laptop or a phone, you use it at a point in time and then you take it back off. You don't have your phone out of you all the time, but you use it for things throughout the day and they're kind of positioning themselves as a device that you'll use, that you'll use for things and then put them down again, whether you'll carry all these glasses around entirely up to you, you know, but I think the AI glasses in fairness, you know, what he's saying there and what I've seen with the meta, Rayban AI glasses, like, people really love them. They sold out in like six weeks when they launched the display ones earlier this year.

I think there's been like 27 pairs of glasses released this year from different companies and there's about the same to be launched in the first half of next year. So like the, it's funny, like a, the glasses Google launched, which was 11 years ago, I believe. The head of Google XR got up at Augmented World Expo in Long Beach in June earlier this year and said he showed the video from 11 years ago and he said, So everything that we talked about back the end, we can now actually do, right? So it's taken that long to get to where that marketing video went. So I think that form of glasses can happen now.

We have like a bit of something you can talk to. You can listen to music. It can capture a photo. And it's like a heads up display. It's not spatial. There's nothing in the world in front of you, but there's like information displayed in front of you. And I think that will, that's a foreign factor that people will get used to. And then in the next couple of years, you will get more spatial content in the world.

around you. So I think it's somewhat inevitable. I just don't think it's going to be one pair of glasses or one pair of hardware that does it all. It was a smart move to jump on the wayfarers. I mean, that's such an iconic pair of shades that it's like, wow. But Mark, I'm going to share my thoughts,

even though you didn't ask me about it. So, Michael, we've been engaging with some really interesting guests. Carissa Velas, specifically, most recently talking about privacy and effects of, you know, data sovereignty on the individual, on democracies, on all of that stuff. I start thinking about, okay, these glasses are great and they're cool and they're going to allow us to do really cool things. But we're basically deploying like surveyors that see the world in a specific lens and can really grab more.

I'm not trying to say what you're doing is bad is going to destroy humanity. I think there's some very awesome benefit. No, let me be clear, though. there's some really cool benefit to what you're doing in these experiences, especially the Salesforce stuff, especially the museums, like having these great ways to trigger empathy. But like on the glasses side, it can, my, my head goes to scary mode a little bit. How do you feel about that? Yeah, look, which I think is fair enough, you know, but unfortunately, that's really not new either,

Jeremy, you know, like the little device we have on our pockets has been recording us for, well, It's seemingly not, but it's been listening for, you know, at least a decade, if not longer, you know. The difference is it was always audio data and now it's visual and then that's more of a challenge, you know. And then, like, I think what it then comes down to, like, you know, Europe and America are taking very different approaches in this. We love some regulation and, you know, public policy in Europe to try and clamp down on things. But ultimately, I think consumers will decide and you've seen that with different technology companies over the last 10 years. some trust more more than others and you know who's right and who's wrong but i think you know they're all like meta have their thing and with the rayvan parent company and the oakley parent company

but you know google have just launched theirs with a competing glasses company and snap will have theirs and i think it'll probably come down to which companies that people trust to be wearing on their head seeing everything that they're seeing mark i'm into design an ai model that um basically runs through terms and conditions of technology apps and devices and gives me the shortcut version of, hey, is this going to be cool for me? Is this going to be scary for me? That's my next project. I think it's also super important for us to be very educated on where it's going as best we can. And I think that's, you know, regulations can be good. We'll, like, force people to force companies to make it clear where data is going. But, I mean, you've seen with lots of big companies

of the last five years you have to put something in where you have to accept terms and conditions or you can't see your friends anymore on that network and then people just tick the box, it confirmed and then keep going, you know. But I do think it's really important for people to be as informed as possible

and then, you know, hopefully as a society who choose the right direction. I think Ivan Sutherland is still alive and I think it's not ironic that his first project was called the Sword of Mochardes but quick thought experiment for you, Michael. So the king of his... England calls you tomorrow and he says, look, Buckingham Palace, numbers are down, the

estate's feedback is, they're bored. How quickly could you go into the Royal Estate, change things up and what would you do? I think as an Irish man, he's probably not like be dering me, but if he did, if he did, I would, yeah, like, we can get things up and on in three months, maybe up to six, you know, depending on how expanse of the experiences and on what side of the story they want to tell. So, yeah. Bad example. And that could be really interesting. So then then you can insert your own Easter egg nuggets with with the real story, right? No, that's okay. Wow, we're getting, we're getting off track, but cool things to think about. Yes.

Closing question, Jeremy, as I hang my head in embarrassment from not researching my thought experiments properly. Yeah. So lastly, Michael, thanks so much for jumping in with us. And you would definitely love to stay in the loop on what you're doing. Feel free to keep us up to speed and share what you're doing. Maybe we can do a round two at some point. But one question we like to leave our guests with is one from Kevin Kelly. What do we want humans to be?

and how can technology help us get there if it can? You've got flavors of this from the things that I've said, but ultimately we're doing this so that people can feel more connected to the places that you're in. So whether that's the Spike Island example or whether you just joined a company or whatever it might be, there are so many stories and places around the world and we want people to be connected to. You could stand in, you know, the middle of London or any city in the world and something happened here in 1502 and 1657. and 1727, all these different years, so many different things have happened.

So we as a company definitely want people to be more connected and then connected to each other. And look, we've actually just launched like a Canva for augmented reality where people can build their own experiences. It's called Lurio. And we're ultimately trying to make it possible for anybody without any design, animation, storytelling knowledge, any previous knowledge that they can build these experiences and share them with their family, friends, whoever it might be. so yeah, look, there people to feel more connected to the world they're on them is our goal. I like that. We speak often about connection to people. We don't often speak about connection to place, Jeremy.

We should add that as a node in the thinking on paper, substack, and label it for future exploration. I love it. I love it. Michael, thanks for joining us. Really appreciate it. Thanks very much for having me today, guys. Really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you.

Appreciate it. Be curious. Stay disruptive. Keep thinking on it on paper. Wow. That was an emotional episode of Thinking on Paper. If you're still with us, and of course you are after that, if you have any questions about that show,

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