The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Sphere Revolutionizes Collaboration with XR Technology for Remote Work

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

Sphere Revolutionizes Collaboration with XR Technology for Remote Work Sphere.tech Show Notes About the Guest(s): Sven Brunner is the co-founder and CEO of Sphere, an XR software company based in Silicon Valley. Originally from Switzerland, Sven has always been inspired by the process of turning innovative ideas into real-world products and solutions. With a background in computer science and business, Sven is passionate about fostering a culture of innovation and encouraging unconventional ways of thinking. Sphere has received over $10 million in funding and serves enterprise customers worldwide, including Volkswagen, Micron, and Renault. Sven and his team are dedicated to revolutionizing collaboration and productivity through the power of XR technology. Episode Summary: In this episode, host Chris Voss interviews Sven Brunner, the co-founder and CEO of Sphere, an XR software company. They discuss the latest advancements in XR technology, including the new Apple Vision Pro headset, and how it is revolutionizing collaboration and productivity in various industries. Sven explains how Sphere's software enables users to work together in virtual sessions, regardless of their physical location, and how it enhances the overall work experience. They also touch on the potential applications of XR technology in healthcare and education, highlighting its ability to improve training, enhance learning, and increase engagement. Key topics discussed in this episode include the benefits of XR collaboration, the impact of XR technology on remote work and hybrid work models, and the role of AI in enhancing the XR experience. Sven emphasizes the human-centered approach of XR technology, focusing on how it amplifies human capabilities rather than replacing them. He also shares insights into Sphere's mission to create a more inclusive and innovative work environment through XR collaboration. Key Takeaways: XR technology, such as the new Apple Vision Pro headset, is revolutionizing collaboration and productivity by enabling users to work together in virtual sessions, regardless of their physical location. XR collaboration provides a more engaging and fun work experience, enhancing motivation and productivity among employees. XR technology is particularly beneficial in industries such as healthcare and manufacturing, where remote assistance and hands-free guidance can significantly improve efficiency and accuracy. The integration of AI into XR software enhances the user experience by providing personalized assistance, real-time data analysis, and access to relevant resources. XR technology has the potential to transform education by making learning more engaging, interactive, and accessible, allowing students to visualize complex concepts and collaborate with peers in virtual environments. Notable Quotes: "XR collaboration allows employees to work together as if they are in the same room, no matter where they are physically located." - Sven Brunner "The goal of XR technology is to enhance human capabilities and make work more efficient and enjoyable, rather than replacing human interaction." - Sven Brunner "XR technology provides a more engaging and fun work experience, increasing employee motivation and productivity." - Sven Brunner

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast. The hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show. The preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com.

There you go, ladies and gentlemen. The Iron Lady sings it. That makes it official. Welcome to the show. We certainly appreciate you guys coming by. Thanks for tuning in. As always, we appreciate you guys being on the part of the show. Refer to the show to your family, friends, and relatives.

Go to goodreads.com, 4Chest, Chris Voss, youtube.com, 4Chest, Chris Voss. Chris Voss won on the TikTok, and he subscribed to the big LinkedIn newsletter in the 130,000 group. We announced this on the prior show this morning, and I'll make the announcement again. We changed the massive format of the show back in 2020 when COVID started because we wanted to open up to everybody. It used to be just mostly Silicon Valley tech CEOs and stuff like that, which it still kind of is considering who we have on today. A great gentleman that I think you'll be excited to hear from. But we just put this out yesterday on the Facebookity. We pulled the numbers on how big our audience has grown since 2020, four years from yesterday, the February 5th, 2024. I should

probably mention that people watch this show 10 years from now on YouTube. They're like, what? So over the last four years, we've increased the show for 1,405%, Not 100%, not 200%, 1,405%. How's that for fun? And we did it with your help. So we appreciate you guys taking a part in the show and not taking a part in the show, but taking a part in the show

and also referring to the show, your family, friends, and relatives. We have an amazing gentleman on the show and we're going to be talking about something that's real topical. They just launched those new Apple, I call them the Google Glass 2.0 because they used to have the Google Glass, but we'll get into it. So there you go.

We have Sven Bruner on the show with us today. He is the co-founder and CEO of a company called Sphere, the enterprise standard for XR software. Sven's mission is to level up the way the world connects and works forever. Sphere revolutionized collaborations by harnessing the power of XR to amplify human capacity, enabling users to foster increased innovation, productivity, and inclusivity. Sphere has received over $10 million between two founding rounds and serves countless enterprise customers worldwide, including Volkswagen, Micron, Renault, and many more.

Sphere is also proud to partner with industry leaders, including Qualcomm, Lenovo, Magic Leap, and AWS. As an entrepreneur at heart, Sven has always been inspired by the process of turning innovative ideas into real-world products and solutions. His guiding principles leader is go big or go home. He is passionate about fostering a culture of innovation and encouraging the team to take risks and embrace unconventional ways of thinking. Welcome to the show.

How are you, Sven? Thank you very much, Chris. I'm great. Thanks for having me. And apologies to yet another CEO from Silicon Valley, but I'll still try to make it entertaining. There you go. At least I'm from a different country. That makes it a little bit better.

We kept the Silicon Valley, folks. We just added like authors from all walks of life. No, that's good. That's good. There needs to be more. It can be pretty much a big bubble here. I'm not going to lie. Yeah.

Talking about Silicon Valley stuff, it's great stuff. It's innovative. But you've got to have a big bubble here. I'm not going to lie. Talking about Silicon Valley stuff, it's great stuff. It's innovative. But you've got to have a little diversity there. You've got to have a little Oreo cookie with the peanut butter bread. I don't even know what that means. I just made that up. So welcome to the show. Give us your dot.

Whatever dots you have, you want people to find you on the interwebs. Yeah. I mean, you already did a great intro about myself and the company. So I appreciate that. That's already the most important stuff is there. Maybe a little bit first about myself and a bit about the company. As you said, I'm Sven. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Sphere, originally from Switzerland.

Now I'm calling in from the San Francisco Bay Area. I live now in Santa Clara or have been for a few years. It's one of these exceptional days where it's actually raining here. It doesn't happen that often, but it does. And yeah, as you said, we're all about what we're passionate about is really this, as we see it, kind of new way to how you can interact with computers, right?

That's a very fundamental way. I mean, you already mentioned Google Glass 2.0. That's it. That's an interesting one because I think Google Glass had a lot of people, that's kind of what they have in mind when you tell someone about augmented reality they either pokemon go or google glass that's usually the two things that pop in pop in

mind right and depending what who you ask it's usually not a very positive experience right at least when when people initially when they hear about these two things so maybe i got a first story we've kind of demystified a little little bit. The industry has come a long way. And maybe to, before we jump really, there's so many terminologies that have been thrown around, right? We had AR, which is augmented reality. We have VR, virtual reality, XR, extended reality, mixed reality. Then we had all metaverse and all these things,

which in essence, there are differences between those, but a lot of people use them interchangeably. When we talk about that, we really mean projecting digital content into the physical world. That's what we really mean by all of that. And really between Google Glass and what we have today is a mind-blowing difference. Google Glass, you have a tiny, bitsy heads-up display in front of one of your eyes where you could project something on that little screen. And now we have, you know, Apple likes to toss around new fancy terms, but now we have a spatial computing device.

We can really anchor content in the Philco world. That's kind of, that's what we're all about, right? We're a software company, so we don't have to do anything with hardware. We actually support a wide range of hardware, including the new Apple one, but also things like, you know, the MetaQuest line, Magically, Lenovo devices, Microsoft HoloLens and so on. And we're really the software layer for that. And as you said, we're super passionate about making work as we see it fun

and efficient again, because I think a lot of people, we felt it too. You mentioned also pandemic, right? Everything changed. Also how we work and how we collaborate. And we've also seen this, a lot of people still struggle. You know, we have now this, I mean, I think probably most of your listeners too, they don't work five days a week in office anymore. And neither do I, neither does our company. And that changed a lot, right? Some people are in office, some people are at home, hybrid, remote work. And this is really the problem we're trying to tackle with our solution, right?

With basically XR or AR collaboration, you have either headset on, or you can even use a phone, and you can jump into a virtual session. Again, you can project content into your physical world, interact with it, and really work. Our pitch is always to people, you can work with your colleagues, no matter where they are, even and it feels like you're in the same room with them right even if they're thousands of miles away we have a super powerful avatar system that really kind of makes you feel you're talking to a person not like a random lifeless puppet or something like that so that's kind of what we're what we're all about that's definitely the message we want to bring to the people i think the last before i stop my advertising rant is i think a lot of people

don't realize this technology is really here already to facilitate that. I think there's still a bit of a misconception that's like, ah, that's sci-fi, that's 10 years out. In certain areas it is, right? We also, like from a consumer side, not really, but enterprise, companies,

productivity, it's here. That's kind of the last level, I'll say, in my opening statement. There you go. So a couple of different things there. I guess I should ask the most obvious question. People are probably asking right now if they'll launch the new Apple headset

or Google Glass 2.0, I call it. But I know, I don't know what it's called. So I'll let you fill in it. I don't care to know what it's called at that point. I'm not an Apple fan. I'm an Android person. But I mean, it's a great headset. It's going to change the world.

Just probably like iPhone did. Now you guys are software based. you do you guys plan on being available to run on that for people wondering yes we are we are actually it's you guys got launched last week end of last week and there's not that many or it's pretty hard to get your hands on it uh it's actually called apple vision pro as a full name it's a bit clunky some people like call it AVP, all razor acronyms are already flying in. But yes, our solution is compatible with the Apple Vision Pro and we'll support that device as well. It's always been a core strategy for us.

We try to really be an open platform in the sense that we support again, almost not, not, I mean, it's a, every single one is a strong, a strong statement. It's not every single one, but most of the relevant XR, VR, AR headsets, we do support. Because we want to give people a choice. Because all these devices have different strengths, weaknesses, right? Same with smartphones. I mean, I think smartphones even are much closer now. Maybe it's a little bit, I don't know, Samsung has a bit better cameras than iPhones or things like that.

But in the XR space, there's huge differences, right? Some devices are super expensive, really high-end. Some of them are a bit on the more affordable side. And for certain use cases, that's totally fine, right? You don't need, let's say, the Ferrari if you can also go with the Honda sometimes, right? That's totally fine. We give the customers choice to go with, okay, for this use case, they need the high-end one. For this use case, it's totally fine to go with something a little bit more affordable. There you go. I had a joke there.

Oh, yeah. It is hard to get them because they're like, I think, $35, $30-something, $100. Yeah. I'm still trying to decide which left or right kidney I'm giving up for one. So once I make that decision, I'll put one on order. I sold all my kids already for the iPhones, so I'm out of kids. Actually, one of our employees just made a joke this morning on Slack. He's based in Brazil, and I think they're selling it for $7,000.

And he made the exact same joke. He said, yeah, I would buy it, but I don't have a kidney left to give. Well, that's Brazil for you. I don't know what that means. So tell us a little bit about your background. How did you become an entrepreneur? Is this your first startup? Tell us about kind of your upbringing.

What influenced you? Yeah. Yeah. So I had honestly a very sheltered upbringing back in Switzerland where I spent the first 29 years of my life and went through, I would say, a pretty traditional school career. I went on down to college, studied computer science and business. And I think what always influenced me, I come from a entrepreneurial family. Like my parents have their own business. I mean, small businesses,

right? Classical small business owners. But my grandparents had their own business. And I think that always, actually, my parents never really understood. My dad was always like, hey, you've seen how much work it is. Why do you want to do it to yourself? You have a good degree. Just go work somewhere and make good money. He never really understood. But for me, that it was really, I don't know.

I was from growing up, you know, I had, I still remember. It was always a funny anecdote. A lot of, you know, five, six year olds had their idols were like, I don't know. So, I mean, you're obviously soccer players. we we we were football guys we were soccer guys obviously or celebrities or things like that my big hero was bill gates at the time i wanted to be like bill gates because he he was and i don't know it always fascinated me this entrepreneurial world i think it was definitely influenced by seeing it you know my parents and grandparents being in that that field so that was always something i had in mind that i i want to try at one point in my life and towards the end of my

college career i was like because they didn't know how to start thinking about okay what what am i going to do after college um and that was right around the time when microsoft back then announced that was in 2016 when they announced whole lens one that was like the the that was a little bit after google glass, but it was the first one that had this ability, was super clunky device, it's, it's, it was also like $3,500 and nowhere as good as the Apple Vision Pro is today, but it already showed the potential for technology, right? And I remember watching the live stream.

They had, you know, one of these like big keynotes. They announced the device and showed it off. And I was like, wow, that's that it blew me away. I just saw so many reasons. I've also been a lifelong sci fi fan. And that was to be like, hey, I could potentially combine my passion of sci fi technology with you know, my profession being a software engineer, and my passion for entrepreneurship. And that was kind of the kickoff, I would say, I think that was the moment where I really said, Hey, I'm gonna I'm gonna do it. I'm going to try it.

But yeah, it's definitely my first business. First time founder. Then I went on to found the company in Switzerland and then made the transition here into the US a few years ago. And yeah, now I'm here. There you go. Welcome to being here. And it sounds like you guys are on the right track.

How long have you guys been working this company now? How long you mean? Yeah. Yeah. So I've, it depends a bit. I mean, we we officially founded in 2018 so that's like six years ago uh we kicked off the the development of the solution or a little bit earlier even like end of 2017 so i guess it's almost yeah six six and a half years it's been a while yeah it's a crazy way to say it out loud i didn't even realize it it's not something i think about on a daily basis, but when you get asked, it's, oh, yes, it's been a while.

Yeah. It's funny. You, when you first start your company, like every day is a slog and you're like, oh God, this giant thing we want to build. And, you know, it's every day goes, takes forever. And you're like, oh, if we can only get to the first year, you or two years you know and then you wake up one day and you're like holy crap this thing's been around for a long time yeah anytime i tell people yeah the podcast is 15 years old i'm like i'm really tired right now i need a nap there you go yeah i know what you mean i feel you i definitely feel you're like wow i didn't realize there's a lot

of crap that went into this but that's the beauty of it so now there's a lot of companies now that are using your guys' software. Tell us about some of the companies that are using your software and how they're applying it and utilizing it. Yeah. I would say one, that's also a very classical use case. I can name one of our biggest customers that use it that way is Micron. Micron, for those who don't know them, they're an American semiconductor company. Most likely in your laptop or computer or whatever, they have a memory chip by them in their day.

They're kind of the market leader worldwide in chip production for memory chips for computers and laptops. And they use our software for basically remote assistance. So you can imagine they have, it's a global company, right? They have engineering,

they're headquartered in Boise and Idaho here in the US, but they have manufacturing plants all around the world. They have them in Singapore, Japan, Taiwan, everywhere. And for them, like the real kicker was to really get into that was also COVID. Because from one day to the next, they were not really able to help each other out anymore because they would, for a lot of things, fly people in. Because these, we're talking about semiconductors, these machines are

insanely complex, right? I mean, don't ask me, I'm also not an expert, but they're very, very complex machines. And in a lot of cases, to retool them, to maintain them, or if there's an issue, you need to fix them. And sometimes you need to bring in a specialist, right? Maybe sometimes a specialist has to fly in from the US to

Singapore or to Taiwan. And obviously that's costly, takes a lot of time, but you could also do it right before the epidemic. And then borders were shut, no travel anymore. And they were like, now it's getting tricky. How do we provide support? And that's when they started onboard our solutions. One of the premier cases we also, a lot of other companies use and how it works in a typical scenario will be you're on the factory floor right you need to keep in mind this is a an environment where you have potentially you know one of these breaking bad style suits on you know these these hazard suits that it needs to be sterile everything girls exactly exactly you ideally want to be you need

to work so you need your hands right and so it's not really an option to do something like a zoom call or i don't have a phone in your hand so what you can do now is a solution like ours you put some glasses on um you connect to the remote expert as we call them and they can be wherever in the world they basically see through the eyes of what you see on site right so basically let's say the example you'll be the expert i'm the i'm the guy on on site on the on the shop floor i would stream my field of view basically my eyes and ears to you you see exactly what i see and you can also interact with my environment so you can send me let's say oh check out this manual you send me that manual then it pops up in space right as a three-dimensional object the manual to to help me this procedure. Or you can even live annotate into my field of view.

You can say, oh, parole, I don't know. This screw needs to be loosened. And you can draw, like annotate, and I see it spatially. So that's kind of a way to much, much faster. Again, it's within seconds. You don't have to fly there. You always teleport yourself to that other employee, provide support, help them. You collaboratively solve an issue,

and you're out again and you haven't even left your office. So that's kind of a use case we see a lot and provides a lot of value for a lot of customers out there. There you go. I know a lot of companies are really struggling with trying to either claw back workers, get them to work back in the office. They're running into a lot of rebellion from that. Sometimes it's not working well. People are like, yeah, we'll just go someplace else. And they kind of can with what's going on with the market today.

And so it sounds like your concept of being able to create these XR environments would be a solution to people who want to do hybrid or remote work and keep that whole thing, all the employees happy and all that good stuff. Absolutely. And when you think of it, it's kind of crazy. There's a huge discrepancy between, let's say, what management and executives want and what actually the employees want, right? I mean, there's studies on that. Just from the top of my head, there's numbers that somewhat 80 plus percent of managers and executives want employees back to office as much as possible. But I think over 65 or 66 percent of employees, if they had to be forced back to office full time, they would quit or consider quitting. So there's a huge gap between those.

And that's exactly what you just mentioned. That's something we try to address, that it doesn't really matter that much anymore in terms of where you are. So to basically have the best of both worlds, right? One, if you come to office and if you work in office, you can still comfortably work and collaborate with your colleagues there. But also you can embed everyone who's remote, right? And it's no one is, what we usually see, even if you're in a Zoom or a Teams call, there's that kind of, it's almost, you know, the people who are on site, they're kind of, for them it's no one is because what we usually see even if you're in a zoom or a team skull there's not kind of it's almost you know the people who are on site they're kind of for them it's great right they can they can easily connect and collaborate and the other ones are almost like second class citizens right they're like they're on the screen there it's

really hard to communicate with them they feel left out and that's not ideal and it's just the reality of things that i don't think we're ever going to go back to five days a week in office i think this is even some people really try to push for it. But I think at max, there's a hybrid one. I think that's actually also what I really like. I like sometimes also have to face to face with colleagues, see them go into office. But I also like the flexibility of sometimes being able to work from home. And I think that's how most people see it.

I mean, there's always the extreme sides of one always in office and always remote. But I think a middle ground is probably healthy, but exactly for that middle ground, you need new technologies to help. And exactly what you said, that's where we're, where we're coming in or solutions like us, where you can really leverage our technology to have these virtual collaboration

rooms or XR collaboration rooms and be able to, to work together no matter where we are. Right? So basically if you and me are in the same room, we can work together. If I have the third person that So basically, if you and me are in the same room, we can work together. If I have the third person that's at home, they can also be in that room and work and see the same thing.

They have the same tools. They see the same digital content we place in the middle of the room. They can manipulate it, move it around. And again, we see them as an avatar, right? They're visualized. The cool thing is we synchronize a lot, right? We synchronize eye blinking uh mouth

movement hand movement head movement so it's really like you you feel like you're talking to a person it's not just like someone standing there so you really feel you know that the movement that you're doing is mimicked by your avatar so you really feel obviously you hear them and you talk to them you see where they're pointing to so it's really like a form of remote presence a little bit and also it's more engaging right you really feel more more like I'm talking to my colleague and I'm working together with them because I can walk around freely, right? I'm not glued to my desk. And the entire room is my real estate, right? I can have as many screens open as I want. I can have three-dimensional content. So it's a very freeing experience. And we just had last week a longer session internally where we use it for two

or three hours, our own solution. And it's a pretty magical experience when you really think about how far we've come. And also for us, it's a reminder of how much you can now achieve with this technology. And I think it's going to pretty much change a lot about how we collaborate, how we work in the enterprise for sure. Consumer is, I think, a bit further down the road, but I see or we see already already super strong interest and strong adoption, especially in enterprises. Oh yeah, especially in hybrid or remote working too. Some of the things you guys have on your website, it decreases your carbon footprint so you don't

have to be flying executives all over the place. Eliminate machine downtime, prevent disruptions with hands-free XR guidance, remote assistance, increase employee motivation, reduce error resolution times, sell more with unique presentations. That's the way to do it.

I'll just put a, you know, sell whatever I need to. Just here, put these glasses on and they'll mesmerize you into buying something. Accelerate time to market. And I imagine that can cut down too. How do you find it increases employee motivation? So what we see is just a more engaging way to work right i think we all know soon fatigue is very real right it's either being on a call

for hours an hour and you're glued to your desk it's it's a drag sometimes right especially if i mean i know people that have eight nine hours a day just in zoom calls which which is which is tough right 12 over covid yeah or. Or 12 over COVID, right? It was insane, man. I had friends that were ready to jump on a cliff. Yeah, no, it's real. It's really, it's impacting your mental health in some scenarios even.

And I think being able to have, as I said before, it's a very freeing experience. It's much more, you're not tied to your desk. You can walk around. It's much more engaging. It's fun. That's always, obviously, productivity is the key. That's the focus.

But we also want to kind of bring fun a little bit back to who likes meetings? Let's be honest, right? Everyone's like, meetings. Another meeting. You have to sit in there. It's boring. And we really see, and it's also measurable, it's people enjoy it more. It's really more fun to work.

Obviously, there's also the novelty effect, right? It's something you've never done before. That obviously helps, right? Got to be honest about that uh because it's cool i mean most people who who even internally but also people try it's just like it's it's it's a it's a really fun experience it's a cool experience to be able to do that in in a what really feels like a new way of interacting with content but it's also more engaging it's it's definitely something that we've seen people talk more people engage more you feel like we're in the middle of the action, right? In a call, you sometimes feel a bit like, you know, everyone's a bit in a silo and there you're

like in the middle of the action. I think that's kind of the change, how it helps motivate employees and make it more, it's just more fun to work with. There you go. You're not just talking about something. Sometimes you'll have that XR building or product or whatever it is you have before you and so you actually kind of feel you're you're working on the product in and of itself as opposed to just somebody just barking at you from the front of the room you know what they need for those zoom meeting xr things for your guys's things is you know that one guy who always who always asks the question after the whole meeting's done and you're like oh, oh, fine, I get the fuck out of here.

And he goes, can you explain all that again? You know, that guy? Maybe you can have an XR thing where you can just go punch him. Punch him? If it's just like a virtual punch? Yeah, that's it. Virtual punch. I'll bring it up with the product. Or choking,

you know, whatever. Just virtual. That or you can just cut off his mic and make it so he can like we've had enough of you we all know who that guy is so me i'm me i'm the guy who always raises his hand and i'm like are we done yet and they're like we just got here chris and i'm like yeah but are we done yet yeah but no i mean seriously that's like there is a lot of waste of time in meetings i think we've all seen it, right? Sometimes meetings are hell to be held. And we also don't really push for, hey, use it when it's necessary. I'm also, which sounds maybe a bit counterintuitive, I'm a big fan of face-to-face interaction and being also physically with people, even though we sell a remote collaboration product. But again, I think it still adds a lot. And that's also, I think, the nice thing about this technology is really, it has kind of a human aspect to it in a sense that it gives you,

and maybe we're also going to talk about AI a little bit, which is also a focus factor for us. But we talk a lot about, you know, AI is, a lot of people are afraid of it, right? It takes our jobs or it, you know, ultimately, or it's even dangerous, right? If it starts getting access to our nukes and then start shooting these things around, that's a lot of people are worried about these scenarios. And I think AR or XR in general is never about replacing anything, any human element. It's just enhancing it. It's supercharging you as a person, as an employee to do more, right? I take, put these glasses on. I can do more. I'm more productive. I can better collaborate with my colleagues, but it's never about.

Basically getting you out of the loop. And that's also what I really like because I'm, I'm a fan also of, of, I'm not a big fan necessarily of technology pushing humans away. I think being human is, is, is pretty, it's great. We should, we should actually make humans more productive. We should give them more tools, make it easier to, to do your job and not necessarily try to force replacement necessarily. Obviously, some of it is inevitable, right, as technology evolves. And we also don't have people, we don't ride horses anymore.

There's a whole industry that died because of that. We switched to cars. But that's, you know, some of these things are inevitable. But again, that's what really always fascinates me and I really like about this technology. It's very human-centered, right? We sometimes also make the analogy to something, ultimately, it's almost something like what you have in the Iron Man movies, right? Really like you have a visualization, a full co-pilot control center with you at all times.

And it's not about replacing Iron Man, but it's giving him more superpowers. That's kind of the analogy a little bit, how we see our solution or the vision for it, how we want to support employees and people. And a lot of them actually also appreciate that because it's really about they feel like, hey, I'm in power. And that's a pretty satisfying thing for us, too, to see that when people react that way. There you go.

And evidently, you guys support the widest range of devices that are out there. So all the different hardware reality providers. You guys don't do hardware, you do the software. So it makes it so you can transpose your cell phone to just about anything out there. Can you get on Google Glass?

No, it's not around. No, that we don't support anymore. I don't think anybody supports that anymore. Do you have an anticipated date when you might come to the Apple device? Yeah, we already have basically a private beta, so if someone is interested, they can check it out. The official

launch will probably be closer to the end of the quarter, where we like fully go live, and you can just, anyone can just download it. But we also want to stage it intentionally, because a lot of people, it's their first experience with a headset like that. We want to also make sure we get, we meet them where they are and keep them in the loop and can show them. because for a lot of people it can also be a

bit overwhelming right the first time you have these things this thing on your head you've never you know it's a different way to interact with it or there's no mouse no keyboard you have that it tracks your eyes right you you pinch to click and things like that so there's a there's a lot of differences and then on top of that is our solution with a ton of features and you you got a guy to use a little bit especially the the first-time users and a lot of them are now first time users with the apple headset because it's traditionally people who maybe weren't really interested in that space and you know we all know apple has a huge following and there's a lot of people who buy whatever apple puts out but i will say it's a good product right i i'm sometimes

notorious internally in our company for for sometimes bitching about apple a bit but i i'm sometimes notorious internally in our company for for sometimes bitching about apple a bit but i i have to say it's a good product it's a very good product if it gets cheap probably buy one i won't buy it yeah well with apple products i'm not sure if it's a good tactic to bet on whether they get cheap that's a good point yeah it'll probably get more expensive but just don't buy one in brazil and you'll be fine unless you can sell a kidney yeah it'll probably get more expensive. But just don't buy one in Brazil and you'll be fine. Unless you can sell a kidney. Yeah, it's probably good that you guys wait to get on board. Right now, I see people walking around streets with it and driving cars with it. Somebody got pulled over recently.

I'm calling it the glass hole 2.0 era because that's what they used to call us back in the day, the glass holes. And I even talked to my friend, Robert Scoble, and I'm like, you're going to wear it in the shower so we can get that infamous around the world shower picture that you had with google glass and he says no so i'm really disappointed but i love him the i think he just learned from sergey sergey was really not happy about the whole thing but you know i hey it wasn't our fault you know google kind of did that to themselves they made it so expensive and you know back then people actually believed they still had privacy even though zuckerberg was like this privacy's dead you know everyone's like angry with them and they're like well you you just haven't caught up to what i know and you know now no one seems to care really i guess but you got to wait for you got to wait for darwinism to clean out

some of the first users i think and then you think. You don't want anybody getting hit by a bus. I'm surprised in San Francisco, we're seeing some of the shoplifting stuff. I'm surprised someone hasn't run up to one of them and stole out there. Again, he hasn't run up and jumped some guy yet, but there's still time. Be careful

out there if you're just walking around with a $3,500 headset, people in certain cities. I wouldn't go to Oakland with it, basically, at this point. You're probably going to get jumped. I would discourage the use anyways, outdoors in general. It's not really meant for that. You raise a good point.

That's also why a lot of the negative... I think in our industry, there's always been an issue with negative perception. As you said, they brought it on themselves. Google made... They marketed basically as spy classes right that was literally the the main use case to spy people and invade their privacy which no one is really hot on to to be spied on same we had a little bit this whole metaverse discussion i think we started a couple years ago with that meta started right everything was metaverse and for a lot people, it sounded very dystopian. It's like, I still remember that line from the presentation when they presented their,

I think when they announced the name change from Facebook to meta, and Mark Zuckerberg said something along the lines of, you can do this and this and that in our VR worlds. And then if you want to take a break, then I expect him to say something, then go out and get fresh air. But he said, then you can teleport to your own private space in VRr and i was like well that's kind of i think for a lot of people felt all of it i mean it's not the goal should be to live in that world forever that's also how we see it we see it's a tool to use to make it more powerful but please still go on the week and go outside and enjoy the nature world exactly and i I think that sometimes our industry does itself a disservice by sometimes going into these very dystopian places

where people feel like it's either Big Brother or we want to remove all human elements or live in a virtual world. And that doesn't have to be, right? It's a truly positive technology if used the right way. But yeah, there's always sometimes

these companies who push it a little bit too far and go off the rails. I think Google's problem was they made it too elite. You couldn't buy it. It was only available to the chosen few influencers. I think that made people resent it. At least with

Apple, people can buy it if you sell a kidney. But yeah, it's like no matter how much money you had, you weren't one of the chosen few by Google. Yeah. And I think that's where they really went wrong. It really created elitism.

And that's why people hated the Google assholes is because they're like, oh, you're better than us. And we're like, no, we just smell good. Now, you're using it in several different industries, manufacturing, healthcare, pharmaceutical, defense, and office teams. We kind of talked about office teams. How do you see it impacting what you're doing with your guys' software with healthcare and pharmaceutical and not only what's being done now, but maybe the future?

Yeah. Healthcare is a really interesting one. And I always have to be careful how I talk about it because sometimes I call it my favorite use case, but it's I don't mean it in a way it's good that this use case exists, but it's good that we can help. So let me explain a little bit. So we, we, we have an ongoing project. That's one use case we have in healthcare to basically fight the violence against children. And how we do that is we part with a hospital group in Germany, the hospital clinic

Heidelberg, and it's a network of hospitals, but the center is in heidelberg is a very specialized hospital right a lot of low specialists there and they're responsible for a radius of several hundred miles around heidelberg to basically serve these local communities local doctors with specialized health now what happens and and this is where it gets to the child abuse cases is that's one of the most sensitive calls you can make whether a child is being abused or not. Let's say a child comes to you as a local doctor. It can be the middle of the night, and they have bruises, right? Is it being abused, or is it just it fell, right?

Children also play, and they fall, right? And you want to make the right call. You don't want to send back a child to parents that abuse it. But you also don't want to accuse parents of child abuse if there's nothing there right so it's a very sensitive call and what would have happened in the past is basically that specialist doctor would have to even if it's in the middle of the night get into the car drive could be three four hours assess that patient in that case make that call and go back because it's too sensitive because i also didn't know that but apparently this is you can see depending on the the you know

the injuries which one it is but you need a lot of specialized knowledge it's not something that even like a regular local doctor cannot do that and that was always very painful for everyone involved right it's it's one it's costly just pure cost it's also factory you have to drive there hours that this doctor cannot spend on other things it's also very inconvenient for everyone involved not just the doctor but also the patient right parents child they need to wait for hours until this is over it's a very stressful time for everyone and that's kind of where we started so it goes a little bit into the tele telehealth telemedicine but basically then local doctor again similar concept right that time it's not a machine

it's a human being put the glasses on and stream their field of view to the the person basically the the specialist doctor in the hospital clinic and they examine a patient together and you know they see that they can collaborate together they can it's much less invasive and they can do it in 20 minutes what would have taken an entire night right which frees up both doctors makes it easier for a child for the parents and and they can they can move on a lot a lot quicker and i think that's also why i say it's one of my favorite use cases really again a prime example of really a good use of technology to make things better right it's not hurting anyone doesn't take anyone job away. It's just making everyone's life easier and better. That's why I really liked it.

Use it again. It's obviously still horrible that in 2023, 2024, we still have so many cases and actually they spiked your pandemic. Unfortunately, it's, it's, it's a pretty lost epidemic of, of now both like domestic violence, child abuse, and but it's good that there's now also more tools to help and combat all of that there you go there you go somebody's writing in our comments is that the ceo of the vegas event venue no no it's but it's funny we get it's actually really helpful so first of all we had to

name first just to just to uh to put it out there sounds like a lawsuit cd you guys exactly The thing is, we get a lot of free attention, especially on social media. People tag Sphere, and sometimes they mean the Las Vegas Sphere, and then we get the free traffic. But if someone is listening from the Las Vegas Sphere, we would definitely be open for a collaboration. It could be an interesting fit.

I haven't been in there yet, but when I was at CES a few weeks ago, I saw it from the outside. Pretty impressive. It's really cool. But no, we're not affiliated in any way. Now, we're talking about XR company that does software for XR, sphere.tech, folks. So look it up if you're mid-show and you're just jumping in. You know, maybe what you should do is make it so that people can have those, you know, whatever headphones at home that work with your software,

and then they can be in the Sphere in Las Vegas and watch U2 or something. You know, U2. Exactly. I'm just not sure if the Sphere guys, the other Sphere guys would like that. Because then you don't buy tickets anymore, or they would have to charge quite a bit of it. Yeah, there might be a – because they could sell the tickets for the people who want to be there.

Yeah, like virtual tickets, yeah. And then you're also selling tickets. It's just kind of, you know, what Bill Gates did where, you know, he licensed the, the windows. You have 5 million people watching that thing, but yeah, I can see what's going on. We're open to it. We're not the bottlenecks. So if you guys want to reach out, we're here. We'll just get all the spheres together.

Exactly. Get all the spheres together. Yeah. So what haven't we touched on that we should tease out to people about who We'll just get all the spheres together. Exactly. Get all the spheres together, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So what haven't we touched on that we should tease out to people about who you guys are and what you do? Tell us something on board with you guys. I noticed there's a book, a demo on your website. Yeah. There's resources, et cetera, et cetera. Exactly, yeah.

So we definitely encourage. I think a lot of people are skeptical still about this. Is it really beneficial? A lot of people are like, ah, do I want to be in Headset? And what we really encourage people is that try. It's really, it's something you need to experience. It's also like probably a lot of people who are listening now, what is this guy talking about? It's hard to imagine. And it is, but I definitely encourage everyone to check out our website and a few videos. It really helps to, to be a visual thing, right? It's a very visual thing. And yeah, we have a way to also, you know, you can reach out to us, website, book a demo.

We either, if you have, ideally you have a device, right? You can just, we can guide you how to download it, right? It's very easy and check the solution out. We even have now, we just introduced that end of last year, beginning this year, a free tier, meaning that there's a limited feature set you can just check out yourself, right? We don't even have to pay a license upfront. You can just go in and try. And a lot of the features are actually available. You can use collaboration, you can call in people

and things like that. The restriction is more you can't do, you can't bring in your own content. You can only use the stock content we have there, but there's stuff to play with, some fun like models and rockets and spaceships you can play with just to get a feeling of what you can do with the solution. You can even do it multi-user and so on. So that's also a good way to kind of experience it as a first time. So it's downloading the app. And for those people who are familiar with these headsets, you know, they have all these, they have app stores too, similar to Android and iOS have app stores, right? Our app is there. Download it, check it out there. And if you want to know more, feel free to reach

out over the website and book a demo. Yeah, that's kind of the best way to experience it. And then we take it from there, depending on what the people are interested in and what they want to see. We also get more and more traction from research institutes, universities that are interested for educational purposes. And that's also something that we get a lot of influx interest. So every education chasing folks that are listening in here is it could also be interesting for for you again similar issue right when we talk about engaging people in the business world same is true for in the in the training world or the the education world to make sure it's it's students are are interested they have a way

to and it's much more engaging. So if you have three-dimensional content you can work with rather than just a textbook. At least when I think back of me being a student back then, I would definitely have appreciated that. Boy, I feel ripped off, man. Stuff in school. Yeah, we're too old.

My God, if I would have had some of this stuff, I would have given a shit about school. I would have been a whole lot different student, especially when you can see real-world applications in front of you. Because they feed you math, and you're just like, what is this going to do? I don't give a shit. And where you could see, okay, well, here's how you use math to,

I don't know, engineer a building. And you can see the visual thing well, here's how you use math to, I don't know, engineer a building. And, you know, you can see the app, you can see the visual thing. And I'm kind of visual. I'm tactile too. Or if you show me something, I can do it. But still, you know, just seeing a bigger picture or the picture of what you're working on in visualization. And, of course, geez, that would have made school a whole lot more funner. I mean, it really would have.

So I'm jealous. They shouldn't do that to school people. They should make them deal with chalk and pencils and screw those kids. But no, I can see how this could be used for corporate training too, or leadership training or spending sort of training or maybe coaching, you know, being able to advance things. You know, one of the problems that we, I think we talked about this last week on one of the shows, one of the problems you have in schools is people learn sometimes at different speeds. And so being able to individualize learning and training through these,

through these glasses and XR, VR, AR, you could, you know, you could go at your own speed and so then you're not being held back. And the other thing too is it would make it funner to collaborate. So, you know, when you're sitting in, in, in a classroom and, you know, you got some teacher barking at you, which is, you know, probably the teachers you and I were used to when we grew up, you know, threatening physical violence. If you don't listen, you know, that sort of stuff, it was still legal evidently back in those days. I had one teacher, I had a couple of teachers who actually had, they had paddle belts or paddle boards.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think by the time I hit high school, they weren't allowed to hit students with them, but they smacked the desks. And they would have like holes drilled through them. There was a lot of violence and stuff back then. But yeah, I mean, some of us really needed it actually, looking back.

But you know, where you could, instead of having some bark at you trying to teach you something being able to collaborate with everyone in the classroom where you're all wearing the glasses and you're all like i don't know building something or something that would just be so much fun and and more community communal sort of experience of learning rather than you know and then you could then you could not have to go to the zoo i remember we went to the zoo on a field trip one day and half the class got shit on them from the monkeys throwing the shit you just skip that whole experience and just kind of watch a nice placid version without getting all that without monkey poop no but you're spot on right i mean it's it's you touched on a

few interesting things i think one is the learning speed yes everyone has a different speed but also you also mentioned right some people learn better visually by when i say visually i mean like plat you know they see it in three dimensions and things like that because we i think for the longest time you know it was all it was textbooks right that was the default maybe if you were i mean i hope i hope it changes but for us was like every once in a while a video which was already a big deal oh we can see a video about about something that's great but it's it's not for everyone right a lot of people and that doesn't mean they're not they're not smart enough it's just they learn differently right it's it's easier for them to learn with their eyes or their ears rather than just read

something to to perceive it or experience it and i think there's a lot of potential benefits to that. And I also think a lot, what we see a lot is, you know, math. If you want to teach math, it's probably got to involve some textbooks. I mean, there's math formulas, right? There's no way around that. But if you teach, for example, like also then trades, right? We see that a lot. If you train someone who's going to be an airplane technician or a helicopter technician,

training them on a textbook is probably not the greatest. You probably need some basics, but then you need to learn on the job. And with tools like ours, you can do that. You can do it with the helicopter. You can then add additional stuff around that helicopter,

like clues, what you need to do, or instructions, right? They can self-learn again at their time, right? But in a much more visual way, or even if you don't have, if you don't have that helicopter, right? Not everyone has a helicopter laying around or at all times, right? You can even practice at home, right? You can go through these procedures and so on. So it's a much more engaging way, but also a more practical way in many ways, especially

if it lends itself well to, you know, you mentioned architecture, right? And all these things where you have a visual component to it, it's so much easier to conceptualize, to learn, to understand what's going on. And also the collaborative effect, right? You can do it with four or five people at the same time. You're not isolated. And even students from home, right?

You do your homework together collaboratively, right? You can both be in a session, you have it there, you can work on it together without having to do you know you're you're just boring homework you have to sit at your desk and write it down i think there's there's a lot of potential that to also really improve make school more engaging i i think you know in fairness in my time probably also your time there were not that many things available yet that could have created a better school experience but i think now it's almost like uh yeah it's kind of a crime if you don't do it because there is ways to make it way more engaging get people much more interested and i think that's will probably help with you know

retention of students you have less dropouts and things like that i think this this could really i mean always it's not the old saving grace right it's not the silver bullet but i think it can play a big role in it definitely you. You know, they talk about AI and how it's pretty much going to take over everything. And so a lot of discussions we have are, well, what's the role of human beings, you know, and why is it going to keep us around once it takes over? And, you know, we talk about how it's our creative things as human beings, our ability to create, our ability to feel. And that's really gonna still be our edge no matter how good maybe ai gets unless it learns to feel i don't know but it seems like this sort of thing can kind of ensure that you know we're able

to kind of have that edge of being able to create a whole new level that we never were able to before. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, I see AI, I think, you know, as we said before, some sort of replacement is probably inevitable, right? There is probably going to, but I think that always happens, right? Jobs evolve or certain jobs go away, but new jobs are created or job types. I think that always has happened over the last thousands of years. That's human advancement. But I think with AI, i think the big change is probably faster than than all of these other ones and um but how we see it also and that's also how

we integrate it we use it more as like your your assistant it's really more ai helps you to do more so we're currently pushing or doing a big push in integrating ai into our product but again not to replace the human but to enhance their experience. To give you an example, right? Let's say I made this example with you have a problem, there's a machine, you need to fix it or something like that. And at the moment, let's say, you know, let's say you maybe don't even know which manual applies or what needs to be done, right?

And something you can do with AI that we're working on, especially if you have glasses on, you look at that part and you just ask your AI assistant, like, hey, I think this part is broken. Can you pull up all the relevant manuals for this specific part or all the maintenance history for that specific part, right? And then automatically,

you know, similar like chat GPT, you can ask it what, I don't know, some random question that pulls it from the internet. It's going to be pulled from your actual corporate data, right? Where it's relevant for you because obviously Micron or large companies, they don't have

their manuals in the open internet. So it's not something that's available, but how we approach it now, that's something they can, the data can, or the models can be trained on that data, right? The internal corporate data, and they can use and leverage that then in a solution like ours without having to worry about being exposed to the open internet or something like that. But again, this feeds in back to, it just makes you more, more, more, it gives you more hours without having to worry about being exposed to the open internet or something like that but again this feeds in back to it just makes you more part more more it gives you more power to do your job better and more efficient right it's never meant to replace you because in the end i also

believe there is certain tasks that you know we humans will have an edge for quite a while and and i think also you know we hopefully i mean we'll see what happens if they crack general artificial intelligence what will happen then we'll see what happens if they crack general artificial intelligence, what will happen then. We'll see if that's ever going to happen or if it's maybe happened already or is imminent. We'll see. But I still think humans will always have a place for, especially as you also shared in creativity and collaborativeness. And I think that's also something we want and need as humans. I think that won't go away.

I think certain things will be replaced or enhanced. But we look at it from, again, we're in a core XR company. AI for us is a tool to use that makes the experience better. That's kind of how we perceive it and see it. And for them, that's tremendous value, right? It really has big, big value that it can really enhance your experience. It can make you way more productive. It feels very magical sometimes when you can talk to your device

and it performs actions for you very quickly. It feels very powerful, almost magical, right? But again, it's always, you're still there, right? You're in command, right? You're in charge as a human and the AI, the machine is there to support and help you. That's kind of how we see it. And I think if we embrace that paradigm, we don't really have to be afraid of AI so much. We can, we can, I think we should have guardrails. should be like it should you know we let it run loose and let it do whatever it wants if it then it gets at that point where it has a will potentially even i think that needs to be we need to be careful about that but if we embrace that really see hey human is it's ai is there to serve us humans in a way to whatever it is, right?

Medicine, obviously, to detect, that's not something we have anything to do with, right? But there's so many positive applications of it, and we just need to have enough guardrails, I think, for the quote-unquote dangerous ones. But I look at it, I'm also a technology optimist, right? I'm usually seeing the positive side of technology, but I also fully understand people who see the dangers

and the potential negative aspects of, especially, for example, something like AI. There you go. There you go. So tell people again how they can onboard with you, reach out to you and talk to you about being a fit. Yeah. So, I mean, the best way is check out our website.

It's sphere.tech. So sphere, just as you spell it, normal spelling spelling dot tech t-e-c-h our website there you will find all the links we have a ton of case studies also if you're interested a few things we mentioned today these are case studies online you can also check out see if that fits for your case too there's a contact form where you can reach out to either request a demo request more information about the product and you also check out our socials. We are pretty active on LinkedIn. We have a YouTube channel.

Just search for Sphere Tech or Sphere XR on these channels, and you will find us. And yeah, get directly in touch with us. We always make sure to try to get back to you within 24 hours after someone reaches out. But yeah, I would say website socials are the best way to get in touch with us. We're obviously also at shows here and there, especially like industry shows. If you are there, say hi and, and love to give you a demo.

But yeah, that's kind of the easiest and best way to, to get in touch with us. There you go. There you go. Well, thank you very much for coming on Sven. We really appreciate it, man. This has been really fun and insightful. Thank you. I have hope for the future.

And then, and then maybe I'll also hope that you can work on that whole Sphere thing in Vegas. We'll see. I hope so, too. It will be cool. There you go. The thing is about it, oh, give us the.tech, I guess. You may have already given that up, but let's give it again just for final purposes. Sphere.tech.

Sphere.tech. Sphere.tech, yeah. Check it out, folks. Watch for it coming to Google S2.0, Apple, whatever the hell they're called this week. Glasses. I think they're calling them the Steve Jobs glasses. No. I guess he didn't really build them.

No, I'll deal with it. Yeah, you'd have to call them the – who's the new guy? Tim Cook. The Cook glasses. The glasses for cooking. There you go. Thanks for tuning in. Go to goodreads.com, Fortress,

Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Fortress, Chris Foss. Subscribe to the big LinkedIn newsletter, the big 130,000 group over there. All the different places we are on the interwebs. Chris Foss,

one of the TikTokity. Be good to each other. Stay safe. And we'll see you guys next time. There you go.