Show Notes

Matt (00:00):

Hey, welcome to show Ben.

Ben (00:02):

Really glad to be here.

Matt (00:04):

Glad to have you on here. This is this is a topic that I’m pretty interested in and to be honest, I wish I knew more about, so this is great to have you on the show just to begin with let’s, let’s go over kind of your background, Ben, and then we’ll transition to where you’re at EXAR and, and go from there.

Ben (00:25):

Sounds great. Yeah, I have a, a bit of an interesting backstory. It’s one of those cases where I became an entrepreneur because I had problems in my life that I had to address and there weren’t really existing solutions for my particular problem. And my interest began actually in mental health. I had a brain injury and as a young person in my twenties, I was diagnosed with PTs D and I really struggled throughout my teens as well. <Affirmative> and, you know, I, I’m kind of at that like perfect millennial age where you know, I remember I experienced depression in high school, but I had never heard the word depression at that point. Sure. So, at that time, I didn’t have any frame of reference for the sensations and feelings that were happening to me at that time. And things had kind of changed a little bit, which I’m really glad about in terms of stigma and the conversation opening up mm-hmm <affirmative>.

Ben (01:26):

So I became very interested in psychology and neuroscience as I was having these problems and interfacing with the medical system and going through psychiatric and all that stuff, wasn’t really working for me to the same extent. And so I had to make some adjustments. So I actually started, excuse me, one sec, no problem. In the, in the neuro rehabilitation space. And I was looking at different technologies that people were using to enhance their brain function or to deal with stroke or other neurodegenerative diseases. So I was looking at everything from, you know, and I was shocking my brain with electricity. I was meditating for long periods, taking all kinds of supplements, and I put this all together in a program and applied it to my own life and my own problem. And I was able to have success and restore my function so I could be healthy.

Ben (02:26):

I wow. And, and it was, that was kind of what sparked the entrepreneurial journey. And I, I started offering services to people who had similar issues, brain injuries, or ADHD. I was working with a lot of kids and it was around that time that I kind of had this epiphany, that games and interactive media could be this connecting point for us to learn things in a new way, and also to engage with education in a way that’s playful and experiential. And there’s something. And I hope that we’ll, this will dovetail into this discussion of like why augmented reality or why virtual reality is a better paradigm for gameplay, but also for things like learning for things like travel and tourism replace making. And so I started from this perspective of, we could take mental health and education and put it within this. You can think of it as a delivery mechanism.

Ben (03:24):

Mm-Hmm, <affirmative> like, it’s not a P it’s not a pill, but it’s delivering the treatment within a sh like a spoonful of sugar, so to speak. And in particular for kids, like, you know, I was working with, with, you know, to give you an example, a teeny age boy with severe inattentive ADHD, who only wants to play call of duty <laugh> and not do anything else. Sounds like most kids at 16. Right, right. <Laugh> so convincing that young man to take time out of his day to do nothing like to practice the art of doing nothing and meditating was very challenging. So you have, have to kind of put this context around the learning that they, that they can engage with and appreciate because it immerses them and engages them. So I was doing like Dungeons and dragons, like paper, paper, and pen role play, where their meditation was like leveling up their character and like really simple stuff like that.

Ben (04:18):

Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, and it kind of sparked this realized that, oh, there’s something here and seeing the results with one kid, I thought, well, what if we could scale this up? And that was when I became really involved in, in technology and in, and especially in game design and things like that. And, you know, a couple leapfrogs down the road, I became the co-founder of my company, EXAR studios, and we had this really interesting starting point of now, we were a venue actually on a main street in London, Ontario, Canada, where we would provide VR entertainment services. People come, people come in, they, we had craft VR. We were like a performance device that DJs would come in, all, all the LEDs synced up to the music, like beautiful artwork that, that people had painted. And it was like this really cyberpunk community that we built all around.

Ben (05:11):

Like the different ways that technology can transport you in your experience, whether you’re like killing zombies, which is, I guess, a more mainstream use case VR. But we also had like an artist in residence program where people where we’d bring young people who don’t have access to this technology in to create within VR doing things like 3d painting. Oh, wow. You know, and that led to really interesting projects, you know, that are, that are still evolving. So for instance, we worked on a piece called the isle of island, which is one over a dozen international awards that through film festivals includes can international film festival to do a VR music video where we painted this entire world in VR and then filmed it as associated with this whole album is, is a conceptual island that you explore through this artistic sort of creation, but also the AR the way that it is seen from a Sy cinema to graphic per was very unique.

Ben (06:18):

Cause it’s all filmed in VR. So as you’re moving the, your perspective, it’s like the camera is moving. And so it’s really interesting art form. And we were experimenting with the technology at that time and seeing kind of what are the limitations to this medium, but how does this take different forms of expression, different forms of learning and different forms of, you know, even things like city planning and things like that. How do these new technologies change the way that we interact with that? And that led to some really interesting projects around aging too. So this is, this is interesting because it was an unintended consequence, but we started working in long term care and in retirement. So we were providing virtual reality as a service for people who were in cognitive decline, who couldn’t travel. So you think about being in a long term care home, and maybe you had, maybe you led a life of travel all over the world.

Ben (07:19):

Well, maybe you can never see those places ever again, really mm-hmm <affirmative>, but we made it possible to transport people to those places. So, you know, using like Google earth VR, we would bring these older adults right back to where they had been there in the past, or exploring a place, a place they’d never been. And the results on their mood, on their cognition, on their socialization were extremely profound. And the things that we witnessed in the, through the execution of that program were miraculous to see someone who was just like, almost like catatonic become awakened <affirmative>. And for everyone around to be like, holy Mo, that person hasn’t spoken in over a year. And now they’re talking about how they used to live in Hawaii and how they like had this love, like all this stuff. And it was kind of, I think that was the first moment when we really realized that we were onto something that the technology could take an it’s life experience of travel and tourism and reinvent it for that person in a way that was somehow the old experience and a completely new experience kind of fused in one.

Ben (08:35):

And so that’s, I know this is a lot of backstory. No, this is great, but this kind of brings us to COVID. So when COVID hit we had already been experimenting, like we were designing games full on game design in VR for fall prevention and things like that. Really like biomedical perspective for older adults and COVID hit, and we kind of had this epiphany, that augmented reality. So without the goggles just using smartphone, it was like the perfect time for AR to come into tourism. And placemaking because everybody’s afraid to go outside. People can move from city to city, no more international travelers. So all of a sudden everybody’s got to be a tourist in their own backyard, and they’ve got to, like, all their entertainment is either gonna be sitting at home watching Netflix or, and then we had to fill in what that, or could be because there were so few options.

Ben (09:34):

And so we partnered up with a bunch of local organizations like the destination marketing the downtown business improvement district, as well as museums, cultural institutions, community organizations, kind of like everybody banded together say, Hey, what can we create that is authentically London. So where, which is where we’re from, that will engage, not just the future of international travelers when things open up again, but also the people who live in the city who walk by all of these secret stories every day, and don’t know that there’s actually an incredibly important expression, artistic and expression or cultural expression right. Nearby them. And they can experience it by being inside of it.

Matt (10:24):

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. I got, I got some goosebumps when we started talking about you know, being a, an older person being, not able to travel anymore and, and, and how that was opening him up, because I mean, honestly, I would, I would be the same way if I wasn’t, you know, able to travel and, and was being stuck. And, and, and then to have that idea to switch and kind of pivot what you were planning on doing and, and cater to those people that are, have that same issue due to circumstances now with, with the, the current pandemic. But that was, that was ingenious. So essentially you you’re providing it, it sounds like you’re taking existing places and providing some historical context behind those, those different places and make it almost a, a new tourist attraction. I mean, like it was existing. It has all this history, maybe it’s an existing building that maybe the history’s been forgotten or it’s, it’s just been neglected and, and basically bringing new life to it is, is what it sounds like.

Ben (11:47):

That’s an interesting way to put it. And I like that you began with the word context because the biggest promise of augmented reality is to enhance context. So you’re standing in a spot and you’re trying to understand what are all the lenses through, which I can experience a place. And historical is certainly one of the expressions that we’ve often capture in our projects, but sometimes we CA we characterize it as the past present and future of a city. So we might be talking about its historical origins. We might also be talking about showcasing local artists. So oftentimes, and I’ll give you an example. So we recently launched a project in Ottawa working with bank street, they’re a business improvement area there. They’re kind of like right in the downtown. They lead right up to the parliament, building lots, lots of small businesses.

Ben (12:44):

It’s like a really long strip and a ton of mural arts ton of graffiti arts that have all of these bureau beautiful murals. And so we worked with the BIA to create a tour. So using this, the smartphone, it kind of guides you to different locations. And then at those locations, there’s like an audio story where it’s telling you about the significance of that piece. It’s meaning the inspiration for the piece, et cetera. And then a few select pieces were actually animated 3d. So there’s one, for example, that’s like it’s almost like an under the C scene. There’s like these tentacles, but then if you point your phone up to it, the tentacles, like come outta the wall and start to like go all like crazy. It’s really, really, really cool. It’s the most popular experience. We’ve also done things like side scrolling, mini games where like a character is like jumping over obstacles.

Ben (13:37):

And so like each different mural is a different experience, different gamification different design. And so it created this whole adventure within Ottawa, and it was all focused on art. And what was cool too, was, you know, will you collaborate directly with the artists that make, and so it fosters these local connections and partnerships too, that provide legacy for more lasting value. But then there’s also this really interesting concept of the future, which is, you know, within this medium, we can express what the future of the city might look like, you know, flying cars, green walls you know, what would it look to have all solar panels and connected infrastructure? So a lot of this talk of smart cities is now emerging and becoming a huge priority. The G 20 in Europe, it’s becoming huge too, which is what’s the future of how we want to live together.

Ben (14:34):

And I’d say the biggest, and I’m going, I know I’m going off the beaten path. No, that’s fine. The biggest criticism of smart cities right now is that it’s not very inclusive. So it’s very ivory tower. It’s like big, huge telecommunications companies and Google and sidewalk labs and all this stuff. They come in and they kind of prescribe what the future of the city could be. But I actually think, and we think that the future of the city is collaboratively designed so that we as citizens or the quote average person, should be able to participate paid in that dis decision making process. And like, what are the criteria for the future of my community and give those criteria to our policy makers and the people running the city and the tech companies should all have that data. But what we would love to see is like, what, if you could see what that looks like, and then provide your feedback to the city through AR.

Ben (15:31):

And so that kind of describes the whole continuum of, of states of time that we represent inside this medium, there’s kind of three different perspectives that I think I, I can talk about, like, why is it that people are interested in AR I think the first thing is the three dimensionality <affirmative>. And I think it’s like, it’s naive to say that 3d is just better than 2d, but that there are actually deep reasons why when we engage with a 3d world, we relate to it differently. Some of it is a neuroscientific reason. So this is really interesting. Okay. Check this out. When you look at a 2d image, your brain processes, that image in terms of relating it to a number of different contexts in your mind. So for example, if you showed me a 2d picture of like a candle, like I hear I have a candle I might think, oh, that candle might smell like vanilla.

Ben (16:32):

I’m gonna light a candle later tonight. I have all of these maps of association to the object, but nowhere in my brain does my motor cortex say, grab that candle and interact with it because it recognizes it as two dimensional. And so I am disengaged in my body to the image on the screen mm-hmm <affirmative>, but when you make that image 3d, and they’ve actually proved this in brain scans, when you make the image 3d, the brain says grasp interact. So there is something in the 3d that compels us to act that compels us to connect with the space that we’re seeing in front of us. So the first thing is, is a, is a part of our nature in the sense that like, even the zoom call that we’re on are like shadows on the cave wall. They it’s to the brain.

Ben (17:26):

It’s an illusion because my brain doesn’t say hug, <laugh> it doesn’t say like, interact with people, right? Like touch and body language are like part of that, that thing that makes us feel connected to other people and also with objects makes us feel connected to the physical world. And that’s so important. And placemaking, so the second piece is that interactive piece. And I want to use an anecdote to explain this. So imagine you’re standing in front of the heritage building currently, the best way to interact with the history of that building is a plaque. So you might have a like a, a metal plaque that says the history of that that building, let’s say a lot of people these days walk right by those flags. They don’t necessarily read them. And part of the reason I think is that they’re not interactive.

Ben (18:23):

So when it comes to a story it’s hard for us to feel like we belong to the story if we’re not able to interact with it. And if you, if you look at a lot of now, this ties into the education piece. If you look at a lot of the modernizations happening in education right now, a lot of it has to do with experiential learning mm-hmm <affirmative> or place based learning, where you get to do things with your hands, you get to have an experience. There’s a feedback. And that’s what I think that’s the missing piece is that when we create a historical experience, there’s an me there’s a layer of feedback so that you’re taking an action and there’s a reaction. And then that cycle draws you in deeper and deeper. So now you’re able to have an emotional connection, not just an informational connection of like, alright, I know, I know that you year this building was erected, which is maybe cool, but for a lot of young people, especially, they’re going to forget that fact, like three minutes later, possibly sooner.

Ben (19:19):

<Laugh> like two seconds. Yeah. Yeah. And to give you an example, like we have a national historic site here in London, it’s called the Baning house. Hey, Baning house is the birthplace of insulin. That’s where diabetes was discovered. And what we did working with the banding house was to recreate that moment of discovery. So not say, oh, this is the year that insulin was discovered, factoid, factoid, factoid. It’s actually a 3d room of like his bedroom, that when you walk into this portal, the whole short story, which is like, which is really like a short film begins and it’s in 3d all around you. So like he’s talking in the statue, well, you can walk around behind him, see all around the front and side of him. You can see everything in his room, like little objects like on his night table, a picture of his wife and all this stuff.

Ben (20:15):

It’s like these amazing little details that lend in motion to it. And we were able to bring that experience outside during COVID when no one could see it. And here’s another mind-blowing thing about that too, was that bedroom, which is on the second floor of this house is not wheelchair accessible. So it’s never been seen by someone with those mobility impairments before and now we’ve made it. So it is accessible. So this is little simple things like that around accessibility interactivity context that we can add in with the technology that makes that story. Oh, actually this story is now something I care about. And, you know, I think I like to think about like this. So I studied history, the university, and I was really interested in you know, the Greek fables. And I was interested in like the home Meric, epics, like the, I, the Odyssey and I was a nerd.

Ben (21:14):

Right. <laugh> and I love that stuff. Like that’s, for me, like, that’s my, a niche for me, but there’s nothing quite like the watching the movie Troy and like seeing Brad pits, you know, slicing people up. It’s a totally different experience. It takes this story, which is super old and maybe inaccessible to a lot of people who aren’t scholars and it’s taken in and presented it within a medium that’s engaging. I think that’s what, it’s, what it’s all about is like, this is a medium like television or like radio or like print or, or painted canvas. And it’s, we’re asking the question, what art belongs within this medium. And I think placemaking is a, is to a large degree. The answer to that question, because AR is all about, is the story in the place where it belongs. Hmm. And for a lot of tourism organizations who want to see their stories, their local stories as cultural capital, which is to say like, this story belongs to us. If you want to experience this story authentically, you should be here and buy a pint and some chicken wings and go check out this like local vintage clothing retailer while you’re here. Like that’s where the technology fits perfectly. And that’s what we found when we, when we pivoted.

Matt (22:39):

Very cool. Very cool. I checked out, I’m gonna have to visit London at some point to check it out in person, but sell the video of, of this house and, and everything. Just, you know, like you said, it makes it almost real. I mean, it’s, it’s not quite tangible, but you know, you, you feel like you can go out and grab that candlestick or, you know. You can actually go up and tell to you know, the, the characters in the scene and it’s insane. And just to think if we had that in school, <laugh> some of this stuff might have, might have stuck with us, like certain dates and you know, the, the events that happened in history. So and I like how, how that you’re saying, that’s not the only use for this. You know, it, it is just reframing things for different people and it could take the place of, you know, either present past or future, depending on basically the medium that you want to portray to people. And I, you know, I wish I understood more about some of its uses because I feel like, you know, you guys are just at the tip of the iceberg, like this could, this could really, you know, even be used for, for even more things in the future. I, I know you guys are looking at it, so <laugh>

Ben (24:15):

Well, we’ve found some, a lot of different, interesting use cases. And I can share, I can share a couple that are, and this is what’s so far fascinating too though. Cause we’re in this tourism and placemaking space mm-hmm <affirmative> and every time I think that we’re diverging into some other use case that doesn’t belong to those core things, I realize that most everything belongs to those core things just brings it back. Yeah. Yeah. Cause you think about like, so here’s an example. So we’re developing a simulation for Marine biology education and this is for master’s level environmental science and it’s like this giant basking shark. And they’re like, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen it. They’re terrifying. <Laugh> they have like huge mouths, very scary, but they’re actually in danger. So maybe if they were cuter, they’d be in better health.

Ben (25:07):

Right. Like, like PDA have received that benefit sure. Of, of care taking from us. But anyway, so we’re developing this with a Western university with the goal to take a proportion of the class. Like it’s the module around those learning outcomes and replace it with an AR experience. So as the students are going through and having it, they’re achieving the outcomes of the lesson from within the simulation and getting their like credit or whatever. Wow. So it’s like no more textbook, no more lecture. You just go into the matrix and you have this experience, you of it. And then we know whether you learned or you didn’t learn based on that interaction. And so there’s this interesting education and sustainability piece, but now there’s this really important emphasis on sustainable tourism, regenerative tour tourism over tourism, that when we go to a place we want to engage with bit authentically and see our impact on the climate around us.

Ben (26:12):

Like the fact that you took a jet to get there, or the fact that you might choose or not choose the litter while you’re there, while through creating these connections between the audience like visitors and the ecology of that place, we’re actually promoting type of culture, a visitor that those destinations want to attract. Cuz they’re now a lot of places, especially in Europe are not thinking, how do we attract tourists? It’s about how do we attract the right tourists for us because they have a huge problem of over tourism mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so that education piece is so important. There’s one example of kind of, we went out and it just curves right back into tourism. So interesting. Okay. One more. I’m gonna do one more. Okay. So this is one of my favorites because as I mentioned, I come from the mental health space and that’s a personal, personal passion of mine still.

Ben (27:06):

So this project, what we’re doing is we’re applying augmented reality in order to teach people meditation. So how it works is we use the heart rate of the user to drive the evolution of a visual experience. So it’ll change over time and improve your ability to control your own nervous system through your relationship, to the experience. And so the example I can give is like a tree that is like there, but then as your like heart is going into the right zone, then the tree will start to emit all of these beautiful butterflies in more and more quantity until you’re at the exact zone. And so just by looking at this thing, it’s actually teaching you how to change your own nervous system’s behavior internally and through bio a feedback. Wow, it’s really cool project all around student mental health and like smart, smart campuses.

Ben (28:10):

But again, it’s one of those things of like, well, wouldn’t that be cool at like a nature retreat or a spa where you’re in interacting where you’re connecting your hearts to a culturally authentic artistic experience that is specific to that place. Like that makes that he, you can have a healing journey as part of your tourism experience. And a lot of people, they go on vacation, because they’re stressed. They go on their vacation to try to find balance, to try to remember what’s important to them. So a lot of the, in a lot of ways tourism is wellness for many people. So it’s, again, we, we find ourselves recur rec curving back into tourism, even though we’re talking about mental health or sustainability or mobility or all of these, or even autonomous vehicles and all of this future stuff is not talked about in smart cities in terms of tourism. It is in terms of tourism at the end of the day, because now also locals are tourists, which was a huge change during COVID. Right. So thinking about residents as the people who we need to curate towards,

Matt (29:18):

Right. And you touched on it too, as one of my kind of questions, internal questions was, well, yeah, this, you know, you, you, you found a, a specific case for people that, you know, can no longer travel, but really it’s, it’s kind of morphed into, even while you’re traveling, it provides, you know, even in these new spaces you get to experience you know, whatever. And this kind of brought me up to another thought. So do you work? Who do you work with? Mostly, I guess who is your who’s your client in most cases?

Ben (29:59):

So our clients most consistently are tourism, destination, marketing organizations, business improvement districts, and then economic development authorities and then museums. Okay. So I, I want to keep it to those four, because what’s interesting is whenever you come into a community to tell stories, turns out those stories are shared by a lot of different groups. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> so sometimes it’s like a, a black heritage society, a nonprofit that we’re actually working with, but then that nonprofit is sort of fulfilling a need to do cultural storytelling for the tourism folks. And they kind of jump in and support and has this interesting network effect. Like once we tell one story, then a lot of other people in the community say, well, what about my story? And there’s always room for more, but it’s just about building those partnerships and getting everybody to play nice and agree that it’s, that it’s going to be a benefit to the whole community, but primarily economic development, tourism improvement, and occasionally, occasionally the municipality itself.

Ben (31:08):

Okay. But that, that can be a complex pro complex process because they don’t, it’s one of those things that’s like, they don’t know what they need in terms of this technology it’s too early. So they don’t. So we don’t see that many tenders or RFPs come out like, oh, we’re looking for like a holographic tourism upgrade to our whole city. Right. that’s like a new concept for many, but I will say I saw the first tender come out for asking for something like this in a UK town. Oh really? That’s right. So what was the

Matt (31:42):

Can I ask this question? What, what were they looking for? Just curious.

Ben (31:46):

I, I don’t know that I can share those details. Right. But all I can say is that they’re looking to engage people to local stories in the form of a tour with augmented reality. So it was weird seeing an RFP come out, describing exactly our product as though we were going to build something new. And there’s no previous connection at all between us, which is the, this there’s this interesting phenomena and it’s in business for sure. But in scientific discovery as well, where it was like the discovery of calculus is my favorite example. You’ve got lead over here on this side of the world and you’ve got Isaac Newton over here and they’re both discovering calculus at the exact same time, kind of like racing each other a little bit. And so I feel like there is this non-local connection of the whole world is waking up to this realization of, oh, there’s a whole holographic future. That’s coming, you know, Facebook and meta, oh, they’re talking about it Snapchat and Niantic, all these companies, they realize this, you know, that we’re all going to be wearing glasses you know, in the next 10 years that have all of the holograms showing us everything about the world around us. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>,

Matt (33:03):

It’s interesting because the whole idea of AR is I wouldn’t say it’s new, but it seems like it’s taken a while for, for people to really adopt the idea of, of integrating AR in. And I’m just curious, what, what do you think was that hesitancy to, or was it a, a technological breakthrough that kind of made it slower to adopt or

Ben (33:31):

Yeah, perception? Definitely. Definitely. It was, I would say it’s a combination of there a lot of legacy systems that didn’t understand the value and importance of adopting. And then COVID was like paddles to the chest zap like time to wake up. That was a huge catalyst, but then the other was technological. So like for example, we’ve had a number of clients tell us that they’ve explored AR in the past, but the quality was so bad <laugh> that they couldn’t possibly invest and think it was a good idea, right. That presented some challenges for us actually in the, in this beginning because like, oh, we’ve seen AR and it’s, it’s pretty much garbage, but then we show them what we did. And they’re like, this is not the same at what we’ve experienced. Cause what they’re used to is 2d thing that changes their moves.

Ben (34:26):

They’ve got doggy ears on your head. <Laugh> if you sparkles on your cheeks, like that’s all good fun for, you know, the twins, but like that’s not, that’s not a groundbreaking tourism attraction. Like you can’t, that’s not the level of quality required to satisfy the user experience, the audience. And so it’s only really been in the last maybe two years that it’s been possible to do this stuff where it’s not just like a 2d image, that’s slightly changing. It’s like you’re in a simulation walking around. It’s like 20 paces by 20 paces, big like things are moving where you look changes. Like, and it’s crazy too, because we turned the phone almost into like a little Xbox mm-hmm <affirmative> cause the phone is super powerful now. So the hardware was, was slow. Didn’t evolve to the point that it needed to until recently. And the software was the same thing. So once those two barriers can come down, you start to see the content improve exponentially and that’s kind of where we’re positioned right now.

Matt (35:34):

Yeah. And, and phones are a lot more accessible <laugh> or at least, you know you were talking about the headsets and the and whatnot before now, if you can just do it with your phone I mean everybody’s got a phone that can, can do most of what you’re saying already. Yeah. And so it’s much more accessible. And so your point about, you know, not catching up yet are, you know, slow to catch up on,

on the necessary hardware and software it’s people have seen how fast video games have gone from the, the simplest of simple games to you. You feel like you’re in the, you know, you’re shooting zombies or you’re, you’re playing football on the screen. The graphics are so amazing that AR just wasn’t there. So I think people had that expectation of, you know, I’m going to be in a video game, you know, I’m going to, you know, face to face with these people that honestly it looks like it looks like real life now. It’s, it’s crazy how much the technology has changed.

Ben (36:51):

It is amazing. And you see it in, you see it in virtual reality in virtual reality, if you go into a really high quality headset that visuals are insane. For augmented reality, I think one of the biggest steps that we found that was important was downscaling actually so you don’t have to have the most recent iPhone to use, to view the experience. We’re able to dynamically adjust the experience. So any phone can be used, which was an like, and it’s those little details, those little like incremental breakthroughs that make it so that it is accessible. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> because we also recognize like not, not everyone can afford the most expensive smartphone and it shouldn’t be that they have a worse experience because of that. It’s especially important if we’re going, if we’re going to be targeting a mass market, right?

Matt (37:46):

Yeah. Let’s transition here a little bit to place making, because I think you said it, it does have a lot to do with equity and providing the inclusion for all to, to experience. So in, in your own terms, what, what would you describe placemaking as

Ben (38:09):

That’s a really good question. I would describe placemaking. I mean, there’s two perspectives, I guess. One is the perspective of the person who’s in the place. So I would describe placemaking as the experience of place. So that’s the emotional, social, psychological it’s the aesthetic, the built environment. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, it’s the sense of flow in movement and it’s the culture. So that’s all very experiential from the perspective of maybe someone who lives in a place or if they’re visiting a place. And then from the other side, it’s place making as the, as the craft, which is the facilitation of all those feelings and sensations to a person through organizational design, I guess. So you create an organization that enacts placemaking through partnerships through fundraising, you know, business improvement areas due to through a levee, right? So they take money from all the individual businesses and then they hire people to clean up the streets or they, or the, a beautiful urban design furniture.

Ben (39:18):

That’s like cool that people can sit on and they hire like live musicians. And so they’re curating a certain feeling through their activities. And then the, you know, I think that, I think, you know, one of the ways I like to think about place making is not just building institutions, but the relationships between institutions as well. And this is something I’ve heard a lot about since COVID has hit, especially the relationship between tourism and all of the local organizations, because the tourism, destination marketing organizations originally were thinking I’ve been, got a market to like Japanese tourists, or I’ve got a market to the German tourists and convince them that you know, London, Ontario is an amazing place to be and it’s, but then it became, well, I’ve got to convince people who would live in London, that London is an amazing place to be. And so for a tourism organization, that’s not usually what they do necessarily.

Ben (40:15):

It’s not their main focus, certainly <affirmative>. And so all of a sudden they’re going, oh my gosh, well, what is local? Right? And so they build all these partnerships if they’re doing it right with local AR the local arts council or with the arts from the city, and now they’re building festivals and like all this stuff. So I think that, that it’s a combination of organizational design and network that animated space. So I don’t think that, that you can ever, like, maybe you could hire like a placemaking department create, like it’s a placemaking department in a city that organizes all of that with like committees and task forces and stuff. I don’t know. Maybe that’s a question back to you. <Laugh> do you think we need at task forces,

Matt (41:00):

This this, this brought me back to another discussion I had and we were talking about, well, if every, every place is special, then no place is special, you know? So how do you, you know, not every, every place can be curated. <Affirmative> because, you know, it just doesn’t create that same feeling anymore. It’s, it’s almost like if it was 70 degrees, you know, in San Francisco all the time, is it really that special anymore? It is. But you know, I think, I think it’s really, it’s something that can’t always be manufactured or built. It, it comes from the relationships with people, people in the area, people coming to the area and you can’t, it’s, it’s hard to manufacture that, that true feeling of you know, described it as almost it’s almost defi divine. Like it’s, it’s you can’t quite put a finger on it, but you know, this place has something special. And I don’t know that any one city organization could, could really fulfill that. But that would be an interesting topic to, to dive into, for

Ben (42:29):

Sure. Well, I’m sure between all of your guests, you could find a model of some to that works consistently. Right?

Matt (42:37):

Right. No, I like what you were talking about. Think it’s, it’s not just what what’s in the area, what’s there, the aesthetics it’s the programming that goes into the area. And, and really it’s about intentionality. So just wanting that space to be something more, something special. And that’s something that, like I said, it, it doesn’t just come from the aesthetics, you know a, it comes from people being in the right mindset to really make that place special. And it’s a lot more than just words, you know? So it’s awesome. I guess, just, just taking that one step for here, how do you think your augmented reality can help to bring placemaking to a, a space?

Ben (43:47):

Oh, that’s a great question. I think it’s maybe the question for us. I think there’s a number of different ways that it can be done, but it’s ultimately the idea of this is a medium that we express different aspects of placemaking within. So it could be like, for example, a historical connection. So we’re trying to give a person a sense of the, the place that they’re in has meaning beyond their immediate experience. And that somehow adds to the experience. The second is aesthetic. So we might take, for instance, an existing architectural feature and do something really AR really mind blowing with it. And so we’ve done things like map projection, and we do, you know, lighting and things like that, that connects into the experience. So it’s all merged into one, just an example. So that’s more of it’s and that’s less about any particular context other than this is really beautiful.

Ben (44:44):

This is really cool. My mind is open. I’m excited. I’m struck with awe. And I think the third is in interpersonal, which is about who are the people that belong to this place and what are their stories and how are they, how do those stories make me feel connected to those people? And then also, how do we facilitate socialization through an experience? Cause those social experiences are a huge part of what it binds someone to a location mm-hmm <affirmative> so things like little multiplayer games, very simple. So like, I’ll give you an example, because I was in Ottawa a couple weeks ago for the launch. We did like a big projection mapping like launch events. So like it, it was like we closed down the street and there’s like dancing in the street. And we had like the building all lit up with a QR code to download the app from the building.

Ben (45:35):

And then I saw lots of like couples and families like scurrying around the area trying to find like the next AR exhibit as part of their journey. And then at the end there’s like a prize. And so now they’re going to have like a bite to eat or they’re going to like I and Mer at a local business. And so that’s a, that’s one example of, of how that all ties together. But then it’s also like this. So in those times when there aren’t visitors, maybe coming it’s shoulder season, like winter, a lot of our experiences are so educational that the school boards are now putting them in the, a curriculum and they’re bringing students to come check ’em out. So they’re doing like field trips. And so now it’s about legacy right now you’re creating a bond between the people that live in that place and that place that’s more permanent. That’s like embedded in their childhood even, and the way that they learned. So this is like, there’s so many different perspectives, but, and I think we fall into most of them in, in the work that we do in inside of a space or place.

Matt (46:42):

Yeah. That’s cool. Cause yeah, we’ve, you know, the history piece is always that that’s intrigued me quite a bit, but I can also see, you know, the future is seeing how you can, can show people what, how exciting a future might actually be, you know, and, and give people some excitement. The, the, the history though is just and, and I’ve talked about this before in the past is some other guests, but people like to learn about the history of the place that they you know, inhabit, they want to know why certain buildings were, were built this way and it’s part of the heritage of the area. And, you know, that’s how people feel a connection with their place. And you know, to, to make that really come alive. I, I would imagine just further engenders that, that feeling of, of being part of a legacy for, for that future or for that city, for the future. Really.

Ben (47:52):

Yeah, absolutely. And I, I know for myself, I, cuz I, I Studi history and creative writing university, right. So I used to write like long histories of like 20 more or more pages very dry it’s like very dry. Now I would always rather have George Washington in 3d telling me about, you know, his perspective on freedom than to read in a, a primary document. I know that’s her to say as a history major, but I want to have a storytelling experience. I just don’t. I want to just download information into my brain through a plaque.

Matt (48:34):

Well, that’s how people have learned over the over centuries and millennia is through storytelling. Right. So I mean, that’s just how we’re wired to, to learn and yeah. What, what, what you guys are doing. I mean, it, it just plays right into that history of, you know, really, truly learning about a place that, that we can’t just read about. Let’s transition one more time here into you’ve so much going on, you guys are doing some really cool stuff. What, what keeps you up at night? It’s your current role?

Ben (49:23):

<Laugh> what keeps me up at night. We’re at this interesting inflection point in our growth as a company where we’re growing really quickly. And so as an entrepreneur, that’s a new type of challenge mm-hmm <affirmative>. And so it goes from it’s like both, both to the challenge of, of starting something and of growing it to a global stage is sleep deprivation <laugh>, but it’s like a different, so you

Matt (49:53):

Sleeping, so it’s

Ben (49:54):

<Laugh> yeah, it’s a different set of tasks, different set of challenges, new learning opportunities. So, and I’m, I’m the type of person that I, I love hands on learning. So I’ve had to learn a lot about, so for example, we’re expanding into Europe and learning about the legalities involved and, you know, different languages and the procurement process. And so that’s all very complex. And at the same time managing our growth here in north America and making sure that that continues to expand very quickly. You know, I feel like especially being a co-founder anytime I feel any slow down, it’s almost like it, I feel it right in my nervous system. <Laugh> and I feel like a sense of urgency. So I would say that’s what keeps me up at night is knowing if I’m growing the company. Well, in my role mm-hmm <affirmative>

Matt (50:46):

Yeah. You do you utilize the, the meditation AR too often or <laugh>?

Ben (50:54):

I do actually, I use it all the time. It’s a fantastic, it’s one of my favorite ways to meditate now and I’ve, I’ve been practicing for about 10 years.

Matt (51:01):

That’s something I think I could use for sure. I’ve, I’ve tried traditional ways, but I I don’t think I’ve really dug in deep enough, so yeah, I’m sure that would help out quite a bit. Cool. Well, what, what is looking forward for you and your company co-founding company here? What what is the, the legacy of the future of, of your group a hundred years in the future?

Ben (51:33):

A hundred years is such an interesting timeframe. You know, it’s so change <laugh>, you know, if we’re extrapolating our growth into that level of time, it’s it an extraordinary future for, for sure. But I would say what I, what I would describe as the experience, what I see the future as is someone within our app will be able to take their phone or their AR glasses walk around any city in the world and have every piece of relevant, relevant context, information, art music, social opportunity will come to them in a curated way. And, and that won’t, it won’t be the same experience for every person either because they’ll be more personalization through artificial intelligence type of content that you see. I think that will be the companion to any travel experience. So I, I could see, I could see it being like, you might have a little, let’s say George Washington, or you might have, you know, pick, take your pick of a character.

Ben (52:51):

That’s almost like the little paper clip in Microsoft. <Laugh>, that’s guiding you around. So more, more personalized, more friendly and, and more seamless so that the space between the augmented world and the, and the physical world will become very narrow. They’ll be almost seamless. And I think the other piece, which is the most exciting part of our technology right now is the ability for the simulation to affect the physical world. So, and this is an really fascinating piece of that only our technology does, which is we can have the physical world change the digital world, which is what happens in AR, right? You look at the mural, change it. Well, we want to make it so that when you look at the mural and like play, the physical world will change. So your decisions will change the physical world in different ways. And we have, we do that in a few simple ways with things like lights and projections and speakers in the environment, but in the future, like a hundred years, I would expect that even like buildings and things like that could change themselves based on your that’s just me being the science fiction person at this point though.

Ben (54:11):

Oh

Matt (54:11):

Man, that’s a whole different discussion right there. Wow. Oh man. You got a lot of work ahead.

Ben (54:21):

Yeah. But it’s, it’s fun. And the time is right and I, I think we’re doing good things for the community. So I wake up with a smile, even though I don’t sleep much. I always wake up with a smile on my face.

Matt (54:33):

That’s awesome. Well, I’m going to give you a couple more minutes here or a minute or two here, just to give us a little bit more about yourself, where we can find out more about EXAR and the then you know, how, how we can keep track of you as you you’re moving forward hundred years in the future.

Ben (54:54):

Yeah, I would say the easiest way to, to follow us is on our socials. We’re EXAR studios, which is spelled E-X-A-R say, studios, and find us at EXARstudios.com, check out our website, got tons of information and great visuals for you. Enjoy on the site. My title is the chief growth officer, speaking of growth as being the thing that keeps me up. <Laugh> my name’s Ben Switzer. I love to have convers with anyone who’s interested in the technology. So I’d encourage anyone in the audience. Go ahead and reach out to me. Let’s have a chat.

Matt (55:36):

Yeah, definitely. See, see what kind of solutions you can come up with. Cause based on what we’ve discussed, you you’ve, you’ve found quite a few.

Ben (55:45):

There’s a hologram for everyone that could be our company slogan. Actually our company slogan is a digital world for every city. But it could be a hologram for everyone. <Laugh>

Matt (55:56):

That sounds pretty cool too. Well, I like both. We’ll use both. Awesome. Well, thanks again for your time, Ben. This was, this was really an insightful journey for me because honestly I, I didn’t know a whole lot about it before and I, I loved hearing what’s coming. What’s been what’s coming and what’s what the future is. And, and I really appreciate it, Ben.

Ben (56:22):

Well, it goes both ways. I’m a fan of the show. And so it was a great pleasure of mine to participate in this conversation and contribute to all the great content that you’re putting out there for people. Awesome. Awesome. Thank you. Thank you very much.