June 13, 2024
The Apple Vision Pro is the latest in a long line of trendy, expensive spatial computing headsets. (Remember Google Glass?) But the augmented reality and virtual reality features that these devices enable can have an impact beyond video games. Pioneering companies are using these immersive tools to train employees and to engage with consumers in digital and retail settings. It’s growing increasingly important for senior leaders to explore the possible use cases and to understand the potential benefits and ongoing challenges that accompany these technologies.
Tech at Work is a four-part special series from HBR IdeaCast. Join senior tech editors Juan Martinez and Tom Stackpole for research, stories, and advice to make technology work for you and your team.
In this episode, researcher Srinivas Reddy and AR/VR entrepreneur and educator Dinesh Punni discuss how augmented reality can affect consumers’ brand awareness and purchasing behavior. The experts share business results from in-market research, identify challenges for the technology as it evolves, and explain how to launch a spatial computing experiment at your organization.
Reddy is a visiting professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management and professor emeritus of marketing at Lee Kong Chian School of Business, Singapore Management University.
Punni is the CEO and founder of a Berlin, Germany-based company, immersive insiders, that trains AR/VR developers and designers.
This is the final episode of the Tech at Work series. Check out our other episodes:
Tech at Work: What GenAI Means for Companies Right Now
Tech at Work: How the End of Cookies Will Transform Digital Marketing
Tech at Work: How to Get the Most out of Digital Collaboration Tools
Please let us know what you think of the episodes and which technology topics you want us to cover at [email protected].
Further reading:
How Early-Adopter Companies Are Thinking About Apple Vision Pro (Cathy Hackl)
How Augmented Reality Can — and Can’t — Help Your Brand (Sandeep R. Chandukala, Srinivas K. Reddy, and Yong-Chin Tan)
Augmented Reality in Retail and Its Impact on Sales (Sandeep R. Chandukala, Srinivas K. Reddy, and Yong-Chin Tan)
Why Every Organization Needs an Augmented Reality Strategy (Michael E. Porter and James E. Heppelmann)
JUAN MARTINEZ: Tom, how long have you been an editor at HBR?
TOM STACKPOLE: About four years.
JUAN MARTINEZ: But you had never tried AR or VR until recently, is that correct?
TOM STACKPOLE: Yeah, so I was very recently at a conference and there was a VR-AR booth, which was the most popular booth at the conference. And I think a lot of it was like this was the first time that a lot of people were using these things and they were like, “What is this for? I’ve heard all this hype. What is it like to actually use it and can I see a way that that actually applies to what I do?” And so, I tried the Apple Vision Pro at last. I tried two different things. One was just immersively look at dinosaurs, which is very cool. And the second use was this prototype that was built for using a camera that you could put down a pipe. And then, there was also an overlay that was like a map of the system that you were looking in. And then it had other stats overlaid sort of like you would see in a video game, like a heads-up display. And then, the other use for the Apple Vision Pro was if you had to fix an engine and you were an apprentice and there wasn’t a master mechanic around, somebody could be seeing what you see and giving you the steps as you go along. So an interesting thing about this, to me, is that the use cases that I was looking at in this particular booth were mostly enterprise focused, and something that struck me about it is that most of them were focused on industries where you’re doing something in the physical world, this gives me more information while I’m doing it, and that’s the value add.
JUAN MARTINEZ: I think the moment that VR clicked for me, I was on vacation in Aruba and I had a cab driver that used to work in an offshore nitrogen generation station. I don’t really know what he was doing, but he said that he would have to go down 130 feet into the ocean and he would have to work on these generators. And I said, “That sounds really dangerous.” And I thought to myself, “That is a job that probably you should train someone on virtual reality before you send them down into 130 feet of water.” But there are some challenges. What do you think are the limitations that are going to stop people from actually adopting this?
TOM STACKPOLE: I think it’s a question of whether it’s actually going to really be useful. I think you’re going to have to show people that it’s going to make their lives easier pretty quickly.
JUAN MARTINEZ: I think that’s why people like augmented reality apps so much. They’re working with an environment that we’re already comfortable with and a device that we’re comfortable with in most cases is a cell phone. One of my favorite apps is the Brick-It app, which I use to build Legos with my kids, and essentially you take a picture of the Legos spread out on the floor and the app will find Lego creations that you can build with the scattered pieces that you have on the floor. It takes no technical knowledge. It is just a very simple use of augmented reality.
TOM STACKPOLE: I have one idea that I want to throw out there before we move on. Juan, do you play video games?
JUAN MARTINEZ: Absolutely.
TOM STACKPOLE: Did you ever play Prince of Persia?
JUAN MARTINEZ: No.
TOM STACKPOLE: Oh my god. I don’t know what you were doing in your adolescence, but clearly it was probably socializing and being cooler than me. But Prince of Persia was like you were in a dungeon and you were jumping and it was a great 2D game, and then they rebooted it later as a three-dimensional world immersive game and it was absolute garbage. It got totally panned. I think the reason I’m bringing this up is because I think some things are really good in a really simple format and you don’t need to add complexity. I think we’re going to see something similar with when it makes sense to use AR, VR, spatial computing, whatever.
JUAN MARTINEZ: I think the cool thing about this episode in particular is that we’ll talk about how companies can get ready for where the technology is going in the future.
Welcome to Tech At Work, a four-part special series of the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Juan Martinez.
TOM STACKPOLE: And I’m Tom Stackpole. We’ll bring you research stories and advice about the technology that’s changing work and how to manage it. This is our fourth and final episode.
JUAN MARTINEZ: This week, we’re talking about spatial computing. You may know it as augmented reality or virtual reality, AR and VR, or even immersive tech.
TOM STACKPOLE: Apple’s New Vision Pro is the latest and a long line of trendy headsets, but these tools aren’t just for entertainment. Companies are investing in AR and VR to help train employees more safely and efficiently. But today, we’re going to talk about a consumer-facing use case.
JUAN MARTINEZ: Later on we’ll hear from a researcher who’s studying how companies are using these technologies to engage with consumers for retail and marketing.
SRINIVAS REDDY: We are seeing purchase patterns which are unusual. Definitely the revenue has gone up at least in the short term that we’ve seen, but some would question and say, “Hey, but has it gone up sufficiently to justify the cost of implementing this?”
TOM STACKPOLE: But first, we’ll hear from a former AR-VR developer who will tell us how to plan and launch a spatial computing experiment.
JUAN MARTINEZ: Dinesh Punni has consulted with companies to create AR-VR apps for everything from interior design to immersive storytelling. Now he’s the founder of Immersive Insiders, a Berlin Germany-based company that trains AR and VR developers. And Dinesh started off by defining some key terms that we’ll use throughout this episode.
DINESH PUNNI: So generally speaking, we can differentiate between AR and VR on the virtual side. On the digital side, we have VR, so virtual reality where you put on the headset and you see a fully computer-generated world. On the other side, we have AR, which is where you see the real world and you add digital content on top. Now these technologies are not binary. They are on a spectrum. So modern headsets like the Apple Vision Pro or also the Meta Quest for example, they can pretty much do both. We have a lot of other terms like XR, immersive technologies, and spatial computing, and these generally you can use as an umbrella term covering all of that spectrum basically.
TOM STACKPOLE: Yeah, let’s talk about that. I think that there’s an interesting thing that has happened along the way with some of these headset-based technologies where there’s been this big push for more of a broad consumer application. And I’m thinking even back to Google Glass now a million years ago, it ended up kind of in these more industrial uses or sort of business case uses that were really different from the sort of like, “Oh, we’re going to have a virtual office.” Or, “It’s your phone, but it’s on your face.”
DINESH PUNNI: Yeah, exactly.
TOM STACKPOLE: Talk to us a little bit about where you’ve seen these technologies kind of take hold in more of a straight ahead business context.
DINESH PUNNI: So really from our analytics, our clients, our partners, we can definitely confirm that there is strong use cases for a lot of businesses. Everything regarding training, learning, and simulation. First of all, if you do a mistake, let’s say you work on a very heavy machine with cutting things and stuff like this, if you do it in VR, it’s not a big problem compared to real life. Another big reason why this is so good is analytics because with VR you can track every movement, you can track every rotation, your eyes with eye tracking, and then you can repeat it, you can relax, see yourself doing this literally, and you can scale it also really well. You cannot clone 2000 trainers, but depending on the use case, of course, you could for example, send a headset to your employees. They can do the training and you of course learn best by doing things rather than reading about it or watching a video. If you do something 50 times, you learn much better. You can also make a training adaptable because then let’s say one user is particularly good or particular bad with a specific part of the training, you can just nail this part even better. And then you have a really good training outcome much, much better compared to traditional training. I think the biggest misconception is that people think this technology is not ready yet. There are a lot of use cases already being deployed by companies that save cost, improve efficiencies, generate revenue. So it’s not that these technologies are not ready yet. This is something that has already found its niche in the business area.
TOM STACKPOLE: Do you see sort of a threshold that it needs to reach or a tipping point in terms of its capabilities that would lead to more widespread adoption? Or is this a question of finding those niche tasks, finding these other kinds of use cases? What needs to happen for this to be more broadly adopted?
DINESH PUNNI: I think it’s a combination of both. The hardware is getting exponentially better and better over time. Just think about a couple of years ago we had this huge bulky headset with tons of cables, cameras everywhere. They cost thousands of euros. You needed a big PC to power these headsets, and now we already have everything in a small fitting form and these are already better than the ones before and the progress has just been very, very strong and now it just keeps getting better and better. But the other thing that you mentioned that is also really important is the adoption rate. The whole education about these technologies, and this is something where I really see it now, for example, I don’t need to explain to everybody what is VR, what is AR. Already there’s a lot more adoption. We also have a lot of collaborations with Meta, for example, where we are having bigger events. I cannot give exact names, but we also have bigger companies showing strong interest in our events, especially instead of business.
JUAN MARTINEZ: All right, so I work in an organization, I’m in charge of how we spend our money. I love this idea, I want to get it going. Do I build it myself? Do I work with a vendor to help me get it set up? What are the steps that you need to take to get this thing off the ground?
DINESH PUNNI: A good approach is to have a mix of both. So if you just want to try something out, like a small experience, you can produce something external, but if you think, “Hey, this can actually help my enterprise, this can help us. We have a good idea that we want to long-term focus on.” Then in-house you can iterate, because again, these technologies, they evolve very fast and that’s the best way for you to stay on track with the progression and what is coming next and how you can apply it in your organization.
TOM STACKPOLE: So if you’re starting a project, how do you project what the costs are going to be and what are the big drivers of the cost of that kind of project?
DINESH PUNNI: Yeah, so this is a question that is really hard to answer, but I try to talk from experience. The projects that I did were mostly done with me as a developer and one artist. After that. If you go one layer out, you would definitely want to have UX designers because this is a big limitation that most projects have a very bad UX because this medium is so new. There is not these exact defined rules like websites or apps or everything. Another thing that gets also neglected a lot is spatial sound. So you have the developer, the artist, a UX designer and sound engineer. This is kind of the core foundation. And then on top of that, of course you have a project manager and all of the other normal, in quotes, roles.
JUAN MARTINEZ: Once we’ve hired everybody, once you know what we need to do, how long does it take to get it from idea to actual practical application?
DINESH PUNNI: So this can really range from a few months to a few years. You can definitely build a good working prototype in a range of months. And I think the important thing here is not really how fast can you get it, but it’s how fast can you build something to get feedback from your target audience. Ideally even you ask your community, you ask your audience, you ask your target customers before you build something, you build something very fast. Within a few months, you share with them, they will tell you exactly what it is that they don’t like, and then you iterate over time.
JUAN MARTINEZ: So you like the idea of sort of like an Agile production method for these. You create a little bit, you test it, create a little bit more, test it again, until so you have a full product and even then you’re probably iterating once you have the full product
DINESH PUNNI: Ready. Yeah, exactly. I mean you are always iterating. That is kind of the whole point of it. There’s never a really finished state. So I think this is something like you try to get a working prototype within a few months depending on how competent your team is and then you just keep iterating. This is a long work in progress,
TOM STACKPOLE: So don’t build in secret for years and years. What other kind of common mistakes do you see people make when they’re trying to get something like this off the ground?
DINESH PUNNI: You really want to make sure that you have a well-performing project. So if you put on the headset and the project is not running smooth. In technical terms, you don’t have a fast FPS, frames per second, because if you have too much load on the device and the device cannot handle it, it gets laggy, it gets slow. In general on a website it’s a bit annoying, but in VR you basically make your people sick and they want to throw up because they get motion sickness of it. So this is the biggest mistake that I still see. For some reason, companies and people do because they crank it like all of their super high fidelity 3D models. In theory it looks good, but then you put on the headset and it’s just shaky and I just immediately want to put off the headset. So the very most important thing is you want to have a stable frames per second on your project.
JUAN MARTINEZ: So I want you to put your prognosticator hat on. All right. You’re going to predict the future. Where do you see us in 10 years with this technology? Are we all just bumping into each other with Vision Pros while we’re walking down the street? Will there be something brand new that we’ve never thought about?
DINESH PUNNI: Yeah, I think over the next 5 to 10 years, the big thing will be that the form factor will just be smaller and smaller and smaller. These devices will just become more powerful. They will more seamlessly integrate into our world. It would become more natural to us than using phones. Instead of you guys being on a screen on me, we could just sit next to each other as a hologram and then we just have a good time, a good chat like this.
JUAN MARTINEZ: That was AR-VR, entrepreneur and educator Dinesh Punni. His company is Immersive Insiders and they have a hackathon in Berlin in late June, 2024. It’s called XR CreatorCon. Learn more at xrcc.events.
TOM STACKPOLE: Coming up after the break, we’ll go deeper on use cases for this technology and some research that looks at how AR apps are being used for marketing and consumer engagement, including some surprising business results. Be right back.
JUAN MARTINEZ: Welcome back to Tech at Work. I’m Juan Martinez.
TOM STACKPOLE: And I’m Tom Stackpole.
JUAN MARTINEZ: Our next guest is Srinivas Reddy. He’s a visiting professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, and he studies how companies are using AR and VR apps to engage with consumers. These are apps like IKEA’s for making sure the furniture you buy will fit your home, or Brick-It’s app that helps you build cool things with old Legos. Professor Reddy’s Research focuses on a luxury cosmetics retailer that uses phone-based and tablet-based AR apps to allow customers to try out different lipstick colors before making a purchase. And we started with an important question, what will it take for AR and VR to be mainstream for business use?
SRINIVAS REDDY: If you analyze the market evolution, it’s actually evolving very rapidly, but still stuck in the early stages and there are lots of technical reasons why this has happened. So the reason is, one, the cost, but also the technology is difficult to implement from a corporate point of view and sometimes difficult for users to actually use. One of the big complaints I hear from firms is it’s all great, but I don’t have the talent, I don’t have the people I can hire who can actually do this. Those are the things which will actually slow down the process of evolution of this technology.
HoloLens essentially got withdrawn from the market and then the Google Glass also essentially is off the market. So you can see these early teething issues. They went through this process and then realize it’s not going to go fast enough for them to make any money and then they pulled it. So to me, the answer to your question is in the evolutionary cycle, we’re fairly early in the stages and it’s going to take a while for firms to sort of entrench themselves, but also customers and consumers essentially to be able to adopt these technologies as they evolve.
JUAN MARTINEZ: You and I worked on an article for Harvard Business Review in 2022, and that reflected some research that you did on studying consumer behavior in AR and VR apps. You have more research that you’re going to tell us about later, but what were you hoping to accomplish with the first study? What did you really want to get at in terms of how people were using this?
SRINIVAS REDDY: This was working with this luxury cosmetics retailer, and so here was an example of a firm trying to put the money where the mouth is and saying, let’s see how this actually works. Because at that time, very little was known whether this AR within the context of what they’re doing is actually going to work. And then what we said is, “Let’s actually see in real world how the implementation of augmented reality within the context of even cosmetics, what does it do to consumer behavior?” So what we found that once they get used to it, they’re actually spending a lot more time checking out, let’s say lipsticks or brands shades. So the engagement time is fairly large, substantial, sometimes multiple times that what they would spend in let’s say online or in the store. And so the time spent and the engagement and the search essentially has improved quite dramatically. People are now much more in tune and they’re actually searching more brands, searching more shades, spending more time with the app. So now even if it doesn’t translate it into any purchases, what we see from a brand point of view, this is actually wonderful. So we were able to track this for about nine months. The next step is in terms of conversion, so how many of them would actually buy it, and what kinds of patterns do you see of them purchasing? So what we found is they do buy, but they buy very differently. And this is actually fascinating to us that they’re not buying the super popular brands. They’re buying things which are not very well known. So to us what that means is use of this technology has made the playing field a little bit more even, right? So small brands who are getting a little bit more presence in the new technology. And the second thing that we found interesting is that the people, now the consumers are testing on buying shades, which are unusual. For example, typically you would not see a woman buying a green shade or a blue shade. People are willing to experiment because they can see clearly what it looks like on their lips, and they’re also willing to spend on brands which are a little bit more expensive because now they’re able to learn from the experience what it looks like. We are seeing purchase patterns which are unusual. Definitely the revenue has gone up at least in the short term that we’ve seen, but some would question and say, “Hey, but has it gone up sufficiently to justify the cost of implementing this?” And that question is still out there because I think at that time when we ended this study, we can only say that there’s a short-term impact. We don’t know what the long-term impact is. That’s something that would be very interesting for firms to look at.
TOM STACKPOLE: What else can you tell us about what you found in terms of how this drives revenue and whether it’s worth investing in these kinds of things?
SRINIVAS REDDY: Yeah, we actually spoke with some of the executives who are running at this company to understand what the impact was. They were thrilled to see the engagement numbers much more than actually the revenue numbers because they said, “Okay, wow, this essentially means that the number of people interacting and the amount of time that they’re spending with the brands is quite high.” But again, if you look at revenue projections, definitely there’s a bump, but it is not something that would’ve excited these executives. They said, “Hey, this is a price we pay because we now found a better way of consumers engaging.”
TOM STACKPOLE: I’m curious about the kind of conversations that you were having with these executives. What about the engagement in this particular context made them so excited, and why was that more exciting than revenue going up?
SRINIVAS REDDY: The reason, I think, personally why these executives were more excited about the engagement part because clearly there’s a significant difference in terms of the amount of time that they’re spending and significantly different kinds of patterns of behavior. So that to them was insight, which they never had before. Okay, that’s the reason why the excitement, but then you have to actually sort of look back and say, “Hey, is this worthwhile to spend money on the technology going forward?” Yeah.
TOM STACKPOLE: So let’s talk about use cases for a second. How have you seen companies actually trying to use these right now?
SRINIVAS REDDY: I visited a AI company last year where they’re developing glasses just like the Google Glass to help the blind. And so, it’s amazing. They actually demonstrated with me, brought in a person, so put the glasses on completely blind. They asked him to move inside the room with obstacles and basically the glasses are guiding him. It has a camera in it and it has headphones that he wears, and it’s actually telling you exactly which direction to go. How many steps do you have to take? Do you have to move right, move left? Again, you have to think in terms of the market for it, but it’s a huge benefit for the blind if, let’s say, they can walk without other kinds of mechanical help. There are other applications. Tiffany’s is a great example. So you want to buy an engagement ring, so you have to know what the size is and what kind of a fit and what kind of diamond and so on. So they have an app for that. They have an AR app. They won’t buy it on the app, but they actually say, “Hey, now I’m going to see the different fittings, how it actually looks on my hand and so on.” Tiffany was excited about the engagement because now they’re actually having more people check out the different diamond settings on this app. They’re getting closer without coming to the store for experimenting different things.
JUAN MARTINEZ: Earlier I talked about your past research that we featured on hbr.org, but you have research that’s in the works right now. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
SRINIVAS REDDY: So study relates to how do people sample things like in Costco or if you go into a cosmetic store, you actually use lipstick on your hand to see how it looks. So that’s a physical sampling that people have done. And so, that’s why we set up a very similar kind of an app on a larger iPad, but we monitored it. So we had a Norwegian firm help us set up a camera on top where we can observe how many people were there, whether it was a male, female, we know how much time they have spent, what did they do, how many clicks that they had, what area of the screen they touch. We know which brands they did, all of the information. The purpose of it is whether people would sample more physical stuff than the option of sampling this virtually is available. As it turns out, the virtual sampling was more. They would sample more brands and more shades than they would physically do it. Okay? So not a big surprise, but that’s something that we thought would be interesting. The second element is the social impact of interaction with the technology. So when we observed women would come in either alone or with friends or with their children. And so we observed different patterns of behavior in terms of time spent, the kinds of search that they did and so on in these different contexts. And so there are interesting implications how interacting with technology as an individual versus in a social setting essentially would differ, which has never been understood in terms of, okay, technology is great, but how does it actually work when you have multiple people interacting with the technology? So that’s a preliminary study that we are doing in store.
TOM STACKPOLE: So the Apple Vision Pro has been on the market for a few months now. Where is it succeeding that others have failed and where is it sort of struggling in kind of the same old way we’ve seen these kinds of things struggle before?
SRINIVAS REDDY: I think the jury is still out. Most would actually assume that the price point is very high. But more important to me is that there has never been an ecosystem built. Each application tend to be in silos. So Sephora L’Oreal can do this app on lipsticks, but it cannot be exported. It cannot be easily plugged into something else, and that is a problem which will plague, I think, even Vision Pro. I’m not going to spend $2,000 to play a couple of games or just to sort of get into a virtual rooms of some kind. My sense is you need to develop an ecosystem, a plug-in app, or what we normally have seen is in this new technologies having a killer app, some app which essentially is so universal that everybody’s blown away by it. And so, we haven’t seen a killer app come in, we haven’t seen an ecosystem development, we haven’t seen plug-and-play kinds of things that one can do. So those all are challenges and limitations for its progression.
JUAN MARTINEZ: I’m sorry, sir. Are you saying that Pokémon Go was not a killer application? I would have to disagree with you there.
SRINIVAS REDDY: Okay. No, it definitely was a killer app, but let’s see how many more of those come in. Right? You are right mean. So during that phase it was phenomenal in terms of everybody was talking about it. Maybe not incredibly sophisticated from visual point of view and so on, but it actually caught the imagination of people and it was great. I haven’t seen anything similar to that. And that is a challenge, I think. More than the killer app. I think the focus should be on developing an ecosystem which essentially is transferable. So if you look at the companies that have done it so far, we always go back to the example where when Apple iPhone got developed, the technology was amazing, but what made it successful is essentially the moment you buy it, it’s not just making calls, you have all these other things. And that particular innovation essentially changed so many industries from cameras calendar updating, and obviously now we’re seeing that incorporated into so many things which we would not have imagined in 2007 that is coming in the future, but I don’t see it yet. And that will be the holy grail. If let’s say that something like that happens, then there’ll be an explosion of use.
JUAN MARTINEZ: I am the CEO of a startup, an AR-VR company comes to me and says, “We can build this killer app for you. It’s going to totally change how people experience your product.” How would I build an experiment or a pilot to test to see whether this is something that would help my company?
SRINIVAS REDDY: You definitely should experiment with the technology that is there, learn, because the future is going to be this. And so, you have to be prepared to be able to utilize the technology when it’s mature, when it’s much easier to sort of develop and use. So at this point in time, I would suggest to the CEO, choose certain categories in your portfolio, which essentially will see some impact in terms of increased usage, increased engagement of customers, building the relationship through the technology, and then be ready because the technology is changing, it is probably going to change for the better in the long run.
JUAN MARTINEZ: But what does an experiment even look like? Is it an AB test? Are you setting up 26 different variations of the product? I don’t even know how to experiment with building something like this. Can you tell us what you would do?
SRINIVAS REDDY: Give me a specific context. I can only relate to the context that I’ve been-
JUAN MARTINEZ: Okay. I would like to buy a car. Tell me what you would do to build out an experiment.
SRINIVAS REDDY: Okay, now we know that automobile manufacturers are doing this. Right? So for example, there’s a dealership in London which basically does not have cars, a BMW dealership. So what they have done is use this technology where you could choose almost everything that you want. You can customize the vehicle that you want without actually entering inside the car. You have the colors, you have the upholstery and all the other options that you would normally use. And that’s probably hundreds, options that I can actually present where I don’t have to have a hundred cars on the lot, and then the car will be delivered in a short period of time. So the experiment I would suggest in this case is you say, “Hey, you want to actually have an experiential sort of a showroom.” So let’s say if it is immersive, think in terms of what the immersive experience would look like for a typical consumer. What are the elements which would make that immersive experience outstanding? And you say, “Let’s build on it.” In terms of how do you feel sitting in the car? What are the kinds of upholstery that would actually make it feel luxurious? What would be the driving experience that you would have even without actually sitting in a car? So those are the elements that might be tested out and see what the experience is.
JUAN MARTINEZ: All right, so I want you to put your virtual reality headset on right now, and I want you to set it to the year 2035. What are people doing in virtual reality, augmented reality, mixed reality, immersive reality, spatial computing in the year 2035?
SRINIVAS REDDY: Okay, remember, we all saw Star Wars where this hologram essentially appears where you can actually interact with it. So this is my hope before I pass away. I’d like to see the technology where my holographic image can actually interact with my students in classroom. It is a dream, but I think it’s possible in 10 years. One of the ways that I’m thinking the progression is people, when I talk about AR-VR, they’ll say, “But it’s all limiting. You only can see on here. But how about touch? How about smell? How about taste?” So the other three senses still are far removed, but I have found some companies which are experimenting with it. The smell part, that means it might expand the horizon because now restaurants can actually reach out to you and say, “Hey, how does it smell? How does it taste?” And so on. But I think what will need to be done is the technology need to be accessible. The hardware needs to be easier and cheaper, but also the software to be integrated into it needs to be easier.
JUAN MARTINEZ: Thank you so much for joining us today. I really appreciate it.
SRINIVAS REDDY: Thank you so much for giving this opportunity to share some of my thoughts. Yeah.
JUAN MARTINEZ: Srinivas Reddy is a visiting professor of marketing at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management. We’ll link to his HBR article and research papers in our episode notes. And this is the last episode of our bonus special series Tech at Work. Check out our other episodes on gen AI, the end of browser cookies and collaboration tech tools. Find them all in the HBR IdeaCast feed. And while you’re there, be sure to rate and follow the show. For more tech coverage, and to keep up with all the work Tom and I do, visit hbr.org,
TOM STACKPOLE: And please let us know what you think of the series and which technology topics you want HBR to cover in the future. You can reach us at [email protected].
JUAN MARTINEZ: We read every email, so don’t be shy.
TOM STACKPOLE: Thanks to our team, senior producer Anne Saini, senior editor Curt Nickisch, audio product manager Ian Fox, and senior production specialist Rob Eckhardt. Special thanks to our friends on HBR’s video and social teams, Nicole Smith, Ramsey Khabbaz, Kelsey Hansen, Scott LaPierre, Paige Cohen, and Elainy Mata. And much gratitude to our fearless leaders, Maureen Hoch and Adi Ignatius. Thanks for listening to Tech At Work, a special series of the HBR IdeaCast. I’m Tom Stackpole.
JUAN MARTINEZ: And I’m Juan Martinez. Take care, everyone.
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