Skip Kipple
00:00:00
You are listening to the Tech Chef Podcast.
Skip Kipple
00:00:02
This is episode number 82 December 17, 2024.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:00:07
This show is powered by Growth Advisors International Network where travel and hospitality companies come to grow.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:00:14
For more information please visit gainadvisors.com this is Tony Bevalacqua, founder and CEO of Cognitive3, and you're listening to Skip on the Tech Chef Podcast.
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:29
Offering a strategy business continuity.
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:33
How about a taste test of restaurant technology?
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:37
Drive through or curbside?
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:39
Mobile apps or AI?
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:41
It's all on the menu.
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:43
Cook it up for the date.
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00:00:45
It's a recipe for success.
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00:00:49
You're in good hands with a Tech Chef.
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:53
Make a plan to be your best strategy.
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:57
Strategize with the Tech Chef welcome to.
Skip Kipple
00:01:02
The Tech Chef, your one stop destination for sizzling insights and game changing strategies in the ever evolving world of hospitality and food service technology.
Skip Kipple
00:01:12
I'm Skip Kipple, your culinary captain, ready to dish out weekly servings of fresh ideas and bold innovations to spice up your business.
Skip Kipple
00:01:22
Whether you're a seasoned industry pro or just sharpening your skills, we've got something for everyone on the menu.
Skip Kipple
00:01:29
With a dash of expertise and a splash of creativity, we blend technology and hospitality to help you stay ahead of the curve, spotlighting the hottest trends and coolest breakthroughs shaping the industry.
Skip Kipple
00:01:42
So grab your apron and appetite for knowledge.
Skip Kipple
00:01:46
This is more than a podcast.
Skip Kipple
00:01:48
It's your secret ingredient for success.
Skip Kipple
00:01:51
Don't miss out.
Skip Kipple
00:01:51
Hit the subscribe button and join us every week as we cook up the strategies you need to dominate the game and leave the competition hungry for more.
Skip Kipple
00:02:01
All right, enough of the puns.
Skip Kipple
00:02:03
We have been talking a lot about XR and specifically its use case scenarios in the hospitality industry.
Skip Kipple
00:02:10
The number one question I get back are questions about roi.
Skip Kipple
00:02:14
In order to show roi, you need to have data.
Skip Kipple
00:02:19
My guest on the show today, Tony Bevalacqua, founder and CEO of Cognitive3D has created the tool.
Skip Kipple
00:02:26
Just for that, Tony created this product, a spatial analytics platform that gathers data from virtual and augmented reality experiences in new ways and turns them into actionable insights.
Skip Kipple
00:02:40
Specifically, Cognitive3D helps companies measure human behavior with 3D simulations.
Skip Kipple
00:02:46
Prior to founding Cognitive3D, Tony founded and exited another startup that focused on revenue optimization and data analytics for enterprise customers.
Skip Kipple
00:02:57
Cognitive3D began their journey in 2015 with a vision to change the way human behavior is measured and analyzed.
Skip Kipple
00:03:05
Through use of immersive technology, Cognitive3D identified an incredible opportunity to collect spatial intelligence, leveraging virtual, augmented and mixed reality devices as a vehicle for data collection.
Skip Kipple
00:03:19
Today, their technology provides an innovative approach to consumer Research which enables brands to develop better product strategy and understand consumer behaviors through a unique, quantitatively measured platform.
Skip Kipple
00:03:33
Their enterprise workforce customers are defining spatial objectives to conduct training simulations with clearer results to reduce injury, improve safety, and measure efficiency.
Skip Kipple
00:03:46
Let the data geekiness begin.
Skip Kipple
00:03:52
Data, data, data.
Skip Kipple
00:03:53
I am a data guy, and that is all that businesses are worried about today, right or wrong.
Skip Kipple
00:03:59
When I start talking to operators about implementing XR technologies, the very first question I get is, well, what kind of data can I get from it and how can I use it?
Skip Kipple
00:04:09
Tony, my friend, this is exactly why I brought you on this show as you have a very unique product and approach to this problem.
Skip Kipple
00:04:18
Thank you so much for joining us on the Tech Chef today.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:04:21
Hey, Skip, thanks for having me.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:04:23
You know data roi, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:04:25
You need to hit that and you know ROI with your.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:04:28
With your deployments.
Skip Kipple
00:04:30
Absolutely.
Skip Kipple
00:04:31
I mean, that's the first question you get is especially in hospitality, the area that I concentrate the most in, you know, there's very tight margins in.
Skip Kipple
00:04:37
So ROI is critical to making decisions on new products, new strategies, et cetera.
Skip Kipple
00:04:44
Can you share a little bit about your journey leading into the founding of cognitive 3D and really what inspired you to venture into spatial analytics and immersive technologies?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:04:55
Yeah, for sure.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:04:56
So I'm the founder and CEO of Cognitive3D.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:04:59
I'm nine years into my journey at this company.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:05:02
It's a very long time.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:05:04
Prior to this, I was the chief product officer at a company called Kinetic.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:05:08
We had an analytics product in market primarily in the mobile category, and we're addressing games, entertainment of mobile apps, those types of things.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:05:17
Through that, I got really early exposure to what was going on in the virtual reality industry.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:05:22
Got to try out a really cool dev kit from these folks called Oculus, and ultimately saw a real greenfield opportunity to build something net new for the next generation of computing.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:05:35
And for me, there was a lot of opportunity to rethink the problem, deliver new value, deliver new solutions in an entire entirely new landscape of computing.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:05:50
And in the mobile space, I was building a lot of the same.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:05:53
And so we founded Cognitive3D in 2015, started to build out what we call a spatial analytics platform, and effectively a spatial analytics platform.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:06:03
We're collecting behavioral data about what people are doing inside the headset, how they're behaving, how they move through space, what is the things that they're doing.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:06:13
And a lot of how it applies to your audience, Skip, is that we can start measuring what people are doing in these training simulations.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:06:19
These different types of categories work and understand the human performance element of what's going on in those environments.
Skip Kipple
00:06:27
Well, that's what particularly interested me in your product.
Skip Kipple
00:06:30
First of all, I'm a data guy, as I said earlier at the top of the show.
Skip Kipple
00:06:33
But, you know, transferring those experiences into real life data that you can act upon is very intriguing to me.
Skip Kipple
00:06:43
I think we had a discussion about how I'm helping a company build out a restaurant training VR program.
Skip Kipple
00:06:52
And obviously you want to bring as much data as you possibly can back into the platform from not just the interaction with the user which we're going to talk about, because you get some pretty cool features in your software, but also facial tracking and just inflection of tone of voice.
Skip Kipple
00:07:09
There's so much you can do once you really start thinking about it and applying, you know, some of those, those techniques to the data that you get in.
Skip Kipple
00:07:18
And this goes above and beyond LMS systems, which, you know, which is really why I'm interested in VR training.
Skip Kipple
00:07:25
They ha.
Skip Kipple
00:07:25
It has a very specific roi.
Skip Kipple
00:07:28
But when you really start considering the data behind the very unique data points that you can get from VR training, that I think is where this thing just lights up to the nth degree.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:07:40
Yeah, I mean, training in the hospitality space is inherently difficult.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:07:46
It's difficult in all frontline worker focused jobs.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:07:50
And VR offers a really unique opportunity to deliver things in a very consistent way to a large amount of your audience that maintains your brand's reputation, your brand's expectations with your end customers.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:08:11
And I think that, you know, when cognitive 3D steps into the equation, it's about measuring, you know, the different types of inputs that we can collect from these training experiences and making sure that we measure and maintain that level of quality that we expect from our workforce that's out in the field working with our customers every single day.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:08:33
And so that's really kind of our role in a training and simulation, you know, type of situation is to come in and provide that measurement capability.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:08:43
When we think about soft skills and, you know, kind of these frontline worker type roles, the opportunity to train somebody really, really well takes a lot of like one on one time.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:08:57
VR introduces scalability in terms of being able to scale that in a very consistent way across your audience and also giving your frontline workers, your folks out in the field the opportunity to get some repetitions on how things should be done in a variety of different situations.
Skip Kipple
00:09:17
And Tony, you mentioned earlier, first of all, nine years in this industry is impressive because most people view it as a very startup type of industry, even though it's not that's that's a misconception.
Skip Kipple
00:09:29
It's been around for a very long time.
Skip Kipple
00:09:31
I think what we need to do is plant the base here and talk about, you know, who are some of your biggest clients.
Skip Kipple
00:09:38
Because you've been around so long, you have established a pretty darn good reputation in the industry.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:09:43
Yeah, thanks, I appreciate that.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:09:45
I mean, I can't speak to every single client that we have today, but I can speak to a few that are kind of interesting and also been made public in the last year or so.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:09:53
You know, one of the companies that we support today is Walmart.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:09:56
You know, Walmart's really interesting in that they collect, that they deliver training to a large, large audience kind of across the United States.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:10:07
And it really gives them an opportunity to understand and quantify, like, you know, the processes and the ways that they're supposed to be delivered to a very, very large audience.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:10:20
And, you know, our role in that is just to measure the employee compliance, you know, did the work get completed correctly and, you know, put it into the LM and make sure that those things get done correctly as well.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:10:33
Yeah.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:10:33
So, I mean, basically with those types of environments, you have a lot of opportunity to measure at scale and on a completely unattended basis, which I think is also important.
Skip Kipple
00:10:43
It's pretty cool that, I mean, Walmart is not a tiny customer at all.
Skip Kipple
00:10:47
And obviously they see the impact of using VR for training purposes.
Skip Kipple
00:10:54
But can you also share a success story where cognitive 3D analytics made a significant impact on a business or a project?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:01
Significant impact?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:03
Yeah, absolutely.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:04
I mean, every single day.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:05
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:05
So, you know, we work in a few primary categories, so I'll cover that real quick.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:10
We work in training and simulation, which is really our bread and butter, where we've helped measure and scale programs.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:15
We work in two different ways in training and simulation.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:19
We work on early roi, so return on investment and helping people build, construct and demonstrate value from their programs.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:27
A lot of what I find in the XR industry is that folks are, are struggling to demonstrate that early value proposition on how do we acquire content, how do we buy headsets and roll this stuff out?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:39
It's not cheap, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:41
But when you start looking at the actual value proposition that you can present to your workers and some of the tangible inputs and outputs of these programs, you can build a really great business case on how this is going to solve major problems for your business.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:55
So when we talk about training and simulation, we really often work on the ROI side first, helping our program manager figure out how to build and scale Their program.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:12:06
And then we work on kind of the later stage program, which is like, how do we deliver the program at scale and solve that problem of how do we authenticate the user to the headset, how do we deliver the content, right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:12:17
And then how do we measure those outcomes and put them in places that our employees and our workforce expect them to be?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:12:24
So we kind of have that multifaceted element of the early program and then the later stage growth and scaling part of the program as well.
Skip Kipple
00:12:34
So spatial analytics.
Skip Kipple
00:12:35
We talked a lot about training today.
Skip Kipple
00:12:36
I mean, are you using it for anything else?
Skip Kipple
00:12:38
For, for instance, being able to walk through a, a digital twin or a potential build out and you know, look at design layouts of the venue, of the, we'll say hotels or conference centers or resorts, things like that.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:12:54
Oh, you got it, absolutely.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:12:56
You know, second category here would be really what we call consumer research, right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:13:01
Consumer research for us is typically Archite engineering and construction.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:13:05
So taking a digital twin, being able to put it in the headset and measuring your audience, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:13:11
What do they look at, what captures and keeps their attention, how do they move through space?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:13:17
And being able to use those insights to potentially inform decision making that you might have on the physical elements of how you construct a space or how you renovate an environment.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:13:28
We also work with companies around, like planograms, product placement, product design, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:13:33
So when you think about product design, you might think about like vehicle management, manufacturing, right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:13:37
And testing, like what vehicle designs work best, you know, what can your ideal customer figure out about your new design and what can we learn about that to inform the design moving forward?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:13:50
On the planogram side, being able to test end caps, product placement and product design, packaging, to be able to kind of figure out what works and what doesn't, both on the alignment of your product on the shelf, but also against your competitors on that shelf as well.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:05
So there's lots of different ways that you can use data to kind of inform some decision making that you need to make in the real world.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:13
Because you can get really great specificity when you think about consumer research.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:17
You get into things like eye tracking, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:19
Being able to see like what people look at, what captures and keeps their attention.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:23
Maybe even more importantly, like, what did they not look at?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:27
Like, what are the things that they kind of ignored or didn't pay attention to?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:30
You know, put a large water feature in the middle of your hotel.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:33
Like, is that, is that the showcase?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:36
Is that what captures and keeps people's attention?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:38
You might be surprised, you know, on some of the insights that you find when you start running an audience through a simulation of a space that you plan on building.
Skip Kipple
00:14:47
Love that concept.
Skip Kipple
00:14:48
A lot of restaurants are currently concentrating on like the restaurant of the future and really coming up with ways of, you know, streamlining technology, look, feel, design, et cetera.
Skip Kipple
00:14:59
And this would be a great way to be able to get real time analytics of, you know, what is important to the guest.
Skip Kipple
00:15:05
Obviously there's nothing like actually being there, but this is the next best thing.
Skip Kipple
00:15:10
Anybody who's had a VR headset on and is experienced walking through a digital twin certainly knows that's the case.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:15:16
Sorry.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:15:16
I would just point out that it's also kind of a multifaceted investment as well.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:15:20
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:15:20
Like if you build a digital twin in the early phases of your program and then go out and build the store, you really have the foundation for the training and simulation kind of use cases in the future.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:15:30
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:15:30
And we've seen a lot of that where a program begins on the construction of a new facility.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:15:35
The digital twin informs design, the layout of the line, you know, maybe some of the, you know, food service elements.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:15:42
And then, you know, from there you've got the perfect foundation to deliver your training in a very digital way as well.
Skip Kipple
00:15:48
Can you actually go back and repeat and kind of, you know, obviously there's, there's data analytics behind, you know, what people are looking at.
Skip Kipple
00:15:55
But can you repeat a playback of a user experience in your platform?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:00
Yeah, for sure.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:01
I mean, so cognitive 3D, we kind of rethought what analytics should look like for these 3D driven environments.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:09
A lot of analytics are charts and graphs.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:11
And so cognitive 3D really focuses on 3D based representations of what's going on inside the headset.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:19
And so one of our kind of flagship products is called Scene Explorer.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:24
And Scene Explorer allows you to do a one to one replay of exactly what the user did, how they behaved and how they moved through that environment, what tools they used, what they picked up and engaged with, what they did with their head, their eyes.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:40
And you can use all of those inputs for assessment.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:44
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:45
So the after action review kind of acts as what we call a proof of work, right, that the user put the headset on and did some things.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:53
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:54
Once you've got that proof of work, you can then assess that behavior to be able to see like, was the user compliant with safety protocols that we might have?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:17:04
Did they demonstrate good food safety?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:17:06
Did they maintain eye contact with our customer when they were having a difficult interaction?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:17:14
There's lots of different ways that you can use these different inputs to ask specific questions that are representative of skills or qualities of service that you expect within your business.
Skip Kipple
00:17:26
Okay, so I'm pretty sure that every single one of my Californian clients are sitting and listening to this, going, okay, with all these emerging technologies and all this data that's coming out, how are you ensuring user privacy and data security and mixing that with the analytics you need to spit out?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:17:48
Yeah, I'll talk about privacy first.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:17:50
I think informed consent is incredibly important and some states are more aggressive about informed consent than others.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:17:56
California comes to mind.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:17:57
Mind.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:17:58
Massachusetts comes to mind.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:00
As folks that kind of have bleeding edge privacy frameworks and legislation.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:06
Cognitive 3D, we have some internal tools to be able to assess and get that informed consent.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:12
We have something called the XR Privacy Framework, which is actually an open source framework which allows you to acquire the rights to record the session and collect the data.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:22
Most businesses, though, we often see that they work it into the employment agreement or do some sort of written or in headset consent for the collection of data as part of the training experience.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:34
So it really kind of depends on what your corporate policies are.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:37
But, you know, ultimately, you know, privacy is important and we should, we should collect it.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:42
And Cognitive3D provides some tools to be able to make sure that we do it properly.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:49
Security is a totally separate but very similar topic.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:55
It's probably one of our number one jobs outside of providing the insights, is keeping the data secure for our customers.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:19:02
So we do SOC 2 type 2 compliance.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:19:06
That means that we're externally audited on a very regular basis.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:19:10
Our data is stored and keyed properly, and we also offer advanced deployment techniques as well.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:19:16
We can do things like dedicated installs on premises installs, those types, things to kind of meet whatever your company policies might be for external IT security.
Skip Kipple
00:19:28
Tony, we're going to take a short break, but when we come back, we're going to talk more about really the industry perspective from the cognitive 3D side, where the industry is headed, the trends that you see coming out, and how cognitive 3D is really going to accomplish some of these unique challenges that we're about to face.
Skip Kipple
00:19:46
So everybody hold on one second.
Skip Kipple
00:19:48
We'll be right back.
Skip Kipple
00:19:51
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Skip Kipple
00:19:55
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Skip Kipple
00:19:59
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00:20:08
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00:20:17
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Skip Kipple
00:20:21
Tony, we're back.
Skip Kipple
00:20:22
And you know, I want to get into, you know, some of the industry challenges and you know, some of the trends that we're seeing come about.
Skip Kipple
00:20:30
You are not new to this industry.
Skip Kipple
00:20:31
You've seen a lot of technologies come and go with the rise of VR and AR and just not just in hospitality, but in, just in General.
Skip Kipple
00:20:41
How does cognitive3D help brands adopt and measure the success of these technologies?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:20:48
Things have really changed in this industry.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:20:50
It's getting a lot easier to adopt these programs.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:20:53
I think it's still really difficult to measure the success of these programs.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:20:58
And so, you know, we find that a lot of innovation teams have no problem going out, buying some headsets, maybe getting some initial content.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:21:07
But the part that typically is the challenge, the part that we can step in and provide some real early value in a program is making sure that there's a future.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:21:17
Right, right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:21:18
Being able to collect the right data, demonstrate the right, you know, maybe internal study about how this technology could be used, how it could be scaled, and how it could apply to some sort of cost savings, efficiency, improvements in process, improvements in satisfaction, whatever your APIs are ultimately going to be.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:21:42
Cognitive 3D provides the tools to be able to answer a large majority of those questions, but we also provide the data science capability to actually analyze and answer those questions on the part of our clients.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:21:55
We've recently been doing what we call the ROI program.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:21:58
And so these are six or 12 month programs where we actually take your existing content, your headsets, whatever you're trying to deploy and market and build an actionable study around your data collection strategy.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:15
The outcomes that we can get, we can collect from these environments.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:19
And to kind of give you a bit of a weapon internally, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:21
Of like, this is the data, these are the results we see.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:24
If we apply it to big problem, big business, problem X, we're going to see the following results, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:30
And we think we should grow the program by this particular size.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:34
That's really where we've been stepping into programs at the early, earliest stages.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:39
And that's like pre Walmart, Walmart's obviously doing something that's like huge, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:43
That's a later stage, you know, let's help you scale type of thing, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:47
Like how are, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees interpreting this program out in the wild?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:53
And the earlier stages is more about like, how do we grow this into something that impacts the entire, entire business.
Skip Kipple
00:23:01
So you've been in the industry Like I said for a while, you know, and the XR industry has a evolved just drastically.
Skip Kipple
00:23:09
And this is probably a very unfair question given the era of rapid development, but where do you see it headed in the next five to 10 years?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:20
That's a really tough question.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:21
It is.
Skip Kipple
00:23:23
I knew you could handle it, though.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:25
Yeah.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:26
I mean, I started the company nine years ago and a lot has happened.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:33
Like, there's been a lot of evolution in technology.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:35
You know, I thought when Oculus bought, or Facebook bought Oculus, that the rocket ship was taken off.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:43
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:44
The reality was there's so much technology work needed to get done to create something that was actually adoptable at scale.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:53
Just in the last, like two to three years, things have really changed.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:57
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:57
With the adoption of all in one headsets, six degrees of freedom, super high quality.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:03
You know, the comfort and sickness issues are starting to get mitigated.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:08
We're seeing a lot of like, really positive movement in the right direction for overall adoption.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:15
But when I think about the future, said 5 to 10 years.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:19
Glasses, glasses all the way.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:21
You know, the idea that virtual augmented mixed reality today, these are different devices.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:30
In a lot of cases, you're starting to see that merge together with Quest three, where you started to see kind of a mixed reality mode into a fully encompassing headset.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:41
I think the future is kind of these all in one glasses like Orion, that can be able to deliver the full spectrum of immersion or giving you information or insights when you need it in your work.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:55
That's where I see the hardware side of the equation going.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:59
But my overall perspective on the whole space is that this is about giving superpowers to the people.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:25:05
I think that's ultimately what immersive technology does.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:25:08
It gives us data at our fingerprints.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:25:10
It's one of these perfect modalities for this artificial intelligence future as well.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:25:17
Empower us through.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:25:18
Through vision, through hearing.
Skip Kipple
00:25:20
Well, you brought up a good point there.
Skip Kipple
00:25:21
We talk VR all day long, but we have not talked ar.
Skip Kipple
00:25:24
Your platform is not specific.
Skip Kipple
00:25:26
I mean, it can adapt to anything, correct?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:25:28
Yeah, absolutely.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:25:29
We support Unity, we support Unreal.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:25:31
We're building out a new SDK right now for Apple Vision Pro.
Skip Kipple
00:25:34
So I think it's interesting that most people don't understand that they're gaming engines, but they ended up really being the core of how this technology is being developed and released to the marketplace.
Skip Kipple
00:25:48
It doesn't matter if it's gaming or not.
Skip Kipple
00:25:51
We were just at its act.
Skip Kipple
00:25:52
And goodness gracious.
Skip Kipple
00:25:53
I mean, the military is using all of this stuff for simulation.
Skip Kipple
00:25:56
So they're Using gaming engines.
Skip Kipple
00:25:58
And that's really those two platforms, Unity and Unreal, are the two biggest ones out there that are really having a pretty heavy marketplace as far as development process.
Skip Kipple
00:26:09
Are there certain barriers to adoption of spatial analytics in industries like healthcare, retail, education, hospitality?
Skip Kipple
00:26:17
And what kind of barriers would those look like?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:26:21
Yeah, I think the barriers are really around content less about us.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:26:25
I mean our product can be integrated in anything if there's a will and there's a way.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:26:30
Today we typically support custom content creation, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:26:34
So people that are outgoing and building custom scenarios that are for specific business problems.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:26:39
That's our typical use case of customers that come to us and they've built either a360 video or, or fully 3D immersive environment that is specific to their business.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:26:49
We come in, we can measure that.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:26:51
Where we're spending a lot more of our time now is the repeatable content.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:26:55
The more generic modules we're partnering with people, we're spending time on what we call partner enablement, which means that for the content providers that are out there building repeatable solutions, things that you can just buy off the shelf.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:27:10
Cognitive 3D has a new program that we've been rolling out called Cognitive 3D Ready.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:27:16
The idea is that it's a Pre integration with cognitive 3D into your generic content where when a customer wants to buy, they actually have the opportunity to get that analytics data right away if they would like it.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:27:29
So we're trying to reduce all the barriers to access this stuff, make the market more efficient and then also support some of these authoring and environments that we're starting to see really take off as well.
Skip Kipple
00:27:40
You have obviously have a back end dashboard for people to look at and get all this data analytics from.
Skip Kipple
00:27:46
But do you also have an API that if I happen to be that CIO that just wants it presented in a different way, can I get that data out of that and maybe force it into my LMS system?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:27:57
Yeah, you got it.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:27:58
On the LMS side, we actually transmit results.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:01
So you can do the assessments in the Cognitive 3D dashboard, you set up all of the behaviors that you're looking for.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:06
The reason you do the assessment in cognitive 3D is because can assess other stuff.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:10
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:10
Most LMSs, they're kind of dumb, like they don't really know beyond past complete, you know, and failure, like they really don't understand all the gaps in between.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:21
We can assess eye tracking, we can assess user behavior, what people are doing, how they move through space, the activities they completed, and assess in a much more Deep and fundamental, more human way, honestly.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:33
And then we could transmit that to the lms.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:35
What we don't want to do is create an island, right, where it's like the VR stuff is completely separate from the rest of the business.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:42
That's where we see POCs and pilots die, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:47
Go off and try to do it as something completely separate from the business.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:50
When they've got tens or hundreds of millions of dollars invested in L and D already, we want to capitalize on that.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:56
We want VR to just be an extension of what we're doing and learning today.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:29:00
And so cognitive 3D can transmit those results into the LMS and actually mark off modules just like any other type of content.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:29:08
We do provide the APIs as you mentioned as well, though.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:29:11
So if you're building your own dashboards, your own capabilities, some of my customers have Power BI dashboards that they like to have that are separate from the cognitive 3D system.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:29:21
We empower those capabilities as well.
Skip Kipple
00:29:23
Well, I think you hit on two very, very important things.
Skip Kipple
00:29:26
First of all, not being an island, therefore, because there's not one enterprise client I've got out there that would think about adopting a product where it's got its own data set, its own dashboard.
Skip Kipple
00:29:37
They want it all.
Skip Kipple
00:29:38
They want.
Skip Kipple
00:29:38
A single pane of glass is what they want.
Skip Kipple
00:29:40
And you've kind of taken that to the next level and you've opened up the architecture in order to be able to allow that data to flow back into the LMS system.
Skip Kipple
00:29:47
But the other big thing that you hit on that people are missing that have not even looked at VR training is the fact that you are filling those gaps rather than a pass fail complete, you know, you are collecting data that you can't collect any other way.
Skip Kipple
00:30:03
So I think that is a huge advantage.
Skip Kipple
00:30:07
Obviously, I'm preaching to the choir here, but, you know, as I start to talk to business leaders why VR is so important for the training aspects and the advantages it brings to the marketplace, they start to realize, holy cow, we've been missing out on all these data points.
Skip Kipple
00:30:25
And then their mind starts thinking, okay, okay, what if, what if we could take that data after somebody goes through training and then have our AI engine potentially take that data and figure out what, what is the best position for them?
Skip Kipple
00:30:38
You know, maybe they've done all this personality training and behavioral training with a, an AI customer and realize, you know, they're not really good with people.
Skip Kipple
00:30:49
There's two options there.
Skip Kipple
00:30:50
Either train them up or B, maybe you move them into another position within the organization.
Skip Kipple
00:30:56
So I think there is so much capability that is possible by collecting all of this data.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:31:03
You touched on a really important point there, which is really this opportunity around getting very predictive and prescriptive about the insights that we're collecting and getting a little bit more personal about how content and training is being delivered.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:31:20
I think that one of the superpowers of this technology is meeting the employee or the person in the headset where they are in terms of skillset and providing them just enough assist to be able to get those reps and build those muscles internally so they can get better at each of the individual skill sets that they need to do to succeed in their role.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:31:44
And I think that immersive technology and the data collection behind it powers some of the more, you know, kind of sophisticated insights that you could possibly garner from these types of environments.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:31:56
I think it's also one of those things where, you know, when you acknowledge this to internal stakeholders, if we're just going to mark things as pass fail, I think, you know, internal stakeholders also look at that and say, well, this is much more expensive.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:32:09
Why is it any different, you know, if you're, if you're not going to collect any of these other data points?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:32:14
I think it's a superpower when you start to talk about the level of insight you can get from your employees and then also drive higher levels of performance.
Skip Kipple
00:32:22
As we're talking about advantages and unique advantages.
Skip Kipple
00:32:26
How can spatial analytics and immersive technologies address societal challenges or enhance accessibility?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:32:33
Well, first off, when you do data collection through something like cognitive 3D, there's really no bias in our assessment.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:32:40
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:32:41
And honestly, there's a lot of bias in human condition.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:32:44
And I think that, that, you know, when you create and deliver standard ways of delivering knowledge, I think that there's a greater opportunity for people to succeed.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:32:54
I think that these headsets and capabilities kind of open up.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:32:58
I, you know, I'm a huge fan of like the Matrix movies and stuff like that.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:33:01
And I'm sure you remember the scene when Trinity, Trinity needs the, the helicopter program and she just goes ahead and downloads it, you know, and boom, she's a helicopter pilot.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:33:11
I wouldn't say it's exactly the same kid thing because we're not doing brain computer interfaces or anything like that.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:33:16
But the opportunity to have knowledge at your fingertips on a wide variety of categories of things is a huge superpower for this technology.
Skip Kipple
00:33:24
Oh, there's nothing better.
Skip Kipple
00:33:24
You know, I've got a new set of very high end enterprise AR glasses and you know, I see a New APK come down, and I plug that into my computer, download the APK into my device, and literally, I feel like I have that superhuman matrix capability of all of a sudden, I have all of this knowledge at my fingertips I never had before.
Skip Kipple
00:33:43
So.
Skip Kipple
00:33:43
So we're not that far off from it.
Skip Kipple
00:33:46
I don't know.
Skip Kipple
00:33:46
Somebody like Elon Musk is going to figure it out, if he hasn't done so already, I'm telling you.
Skip Kipple
00:33:51
All right, so we're winding things down here.
Skip Kipple
00:33:54
Let's break away and have some fun.
Skip Kipple
00:33:55
So what's your favorite XR application or experience that you've encountered recently?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:02
Okay, so I'm trying to spend a little bit more time on health recently.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:07
So I play something called Les Mills Body Combat App.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:13
It's a bit of an older app, but it'll get you burning real fast, so definitely check that one out.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:22
Another application that I like to spend some time on, it's kind of underrated, to be honest, is something called Headspace.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:29
Headspace has a mobile app.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:31
This is all about meditation.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:35
Those types of elements.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:37
Really interesting application.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:40
Also, take a look at it.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:42
Graphics are beautiful, and, you know, it's just like a really cool, you know, kind of space that is the complete opposite spectrum of Body Combat.
Skip Kipple
00:34:50
All right, so if you share it, I have to share, too.
Skip Kipple
00:34:52
I think specifically on the.
Skip Kipple
00:34:55
On the health side of it.
Skip Kipple
00:34:56
So supernatural.
Skip Kipple
00:34:57
That's probably the most popular out there as far as.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:35:00
Yeah, for sure.
Skip Kipple
00:35:01
Fitness app.
Skip Kipple
00:35:02
And also Tripp.
Skip Kipple
00:35:04
Tripp is a great meditation.
Skip Kipple
00:35:06
Oh, my goodness.
Skip Kipple
00:35:07
You have no idea how many times I've actually used this before.
Skip Kipple
00:35:10
Walking to a meeting, before I've given a presentation on stage, trying to get to sleep at night when I've got a.
Skip Kipple
00:35:15
You know, my mind is full of a million things.
Skip Kipple
00:35:18
You know, being a business owner like yourself, I mean, you've got so much going through your head, and you need to be able to decompress, and VR is a pretty interesting tool in order to be able to do that.
Skip Kipple
00:35:29
And we're seeing that used on the medical side of it.
Skip Kipple
00:35:32
We're seeing it used for PTSD treatment.
Skip Kipple
00:35:34
We're seeing it for a lot of things.
Skip Kipple
00:35:35
So this is not just us, you know, geeking out in our Oculus world.
Skip Kipple
00:35:40
This is really there.
Skip Kipple
00:35:42
There's proven science and facts behind some of this stuff.
Skip Kipple
00:35:45
All right, one more question for you.
Skip Kipple
00:35:47
When you're not working on cognitive 3D projects, what hobbies or activities help you recharge and stay inspired?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:35:55
Okay, well, I.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:35:57
I work way too much, and I travel a lot.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:00
But my main kind of outlet is I like doing home renovations.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:06
So I'm working on a bathroom right now.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:09
So putting in a shower, doing the tile, you know, all the kind of things that go along with that.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:15
So that's one of them.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:16
And then I just like to take care of my property as well.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:18
So I mow the lawn and, you know, garden those types of things.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:23
So those are the things that kind of keep me grounded.
Skip Kipple
00:36:25
So the question is, when you were redoing your bathroom, did you actually use augmented reality to measure stuff out and figure, you know what?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:32
That is a huge gap.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:34
Thank you for pointing that out.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:35
I did not do that.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:36
I actually took a Sharpie and just drew on the floor.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:41
I roughed it in the old school way.
Skip Kipple
00:36:43
Well, Tony, thank you so much for joining the show.
Skip Kipple
00:36:46
This is fascinating today.
Skip Kipple
00:36:47
I love talking data and you and I certainly have a very interesting aspect in regards to the industry that we're in and, you know, the data and analytics.
Skip Kipple
00:36:57
We're looking at things a different way and being able to take, you know, what appears to be a recreational tool or application, that's kind of some of the feedback I'm getting.
Skip Kipple
00:37:08
But then be able to provide real data on top of that with the ROI and be able to prove out how effective this technology really is in a business scenario.
Skip Kipple
00:37:18
So thank you again for joining us.
Skip Kipple
00:37:25
I'll tell you what, cognitive 3D is very unique in its space.
Skip Kipple
00:37:29
As your journey progresses to creating your XR strategy, you're going to want to make sure that this is one of the tools in your toolbox.
Skip Kipple
00:37:38
If you would like to reach out to me or the show, you can do so via Everything Social, SkipKimple or everything at Magic 8 Tech.
Skip Kipple
00:37:46
This includes X, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Skip Kipple
00:37:49
You can always go to the website@SkipKimple.com for all of the archive notes and all the archive shows.
Skip Kipple
00:37:56
They're all posted on that website.
Skip Kipple
00:37:58
You can also hear these episodes on the Magic gate website@magicgate.com and of course you can email me at any point in time.
Skip Kipple
00:38:06
@SkipAgicate.com we have the holiday season upon us which conflicts with the release of the next episode.
Skip Kipple
00:38:14
So I'm going to do some throwback episodes over the next couple of weeks.
Skip Kipple
00:38:18
On January 7th we will return with a fresh episode from Mike Blake to start the year off with a bang.
Skip Kipple
00:38:25
If you don't know Mike, he has been the global CIO at Hyatt Hotels, the CEO of HTNG and CTO of the ahla.
Skip Kipple
00:38:35
Currently he is the VP of IT at Kemper Sports.
Skip Kipple
00:38:39
If you know Mike, you know it's going to be very entertaining and it's going to be hard to tell where the conversation will end up.
Skip Kipple
00:38:46
This show is going to be a blast.
Skip Kipple
00:38:51
I'm finishing off the week by heading up to Wisconsin for Christmas.
Skip Kipple
00:38:54
So this Florida lizard boy will have to suffer through some pretty cold weather with his thin blood.
Skip Kipple
00:39:00
A very Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year, or any other holiday you are celebrating between now and January.
Skip Kipple
00:39:09
Having said that, meet me back here on January 7th.
Skip Kipple
00:39:13
And please, please, please stay safe, stay healthy and stay hungry, my friends.
00:00:00
You are listening to the Tech Chef Podcast.
Skip Kipple
00:00:02
This is episode number 82 December 17, 2024.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:00:07
This show is powered by Growth Advisors International Network where travel and hospitality companies come to grow.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:00:14
For more information please visit gainadvisors.com this is Tony Bevalacqua, founder and CEO of Cognitive3, and you're listening to Skip on the Tech Chef Podcast.
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:29
Offering a strategy business continuity.
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:33
How about a taste test of restaurant technology?
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:37
Drive through or curbside?
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:39
Mobile apps or AI?
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:41
It's all on the menu.
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:43
Cook it up for the date.
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:45
It's a recipe for success.
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:49
You're in good hands with a Tech Chef.
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:53
Make a plan to be your best strategy.
Unknown Speaker C
00:00:57
Strategize with the Tech Chef welcome to.
Skip Kipple
00:01:02
The Tech Chef, your one stop destination for sizzling insights and game changing strategies in the ever evolving world of hospitality and food service technology.
Skip Kipple
00:01:12
I'm Skip Kipple, your culinary captain, ready to dish out weekly servings of fresh ideas and bold innovations to spice up your business.
Skip Kipple
00:01:22
Whether you're a seasoned industry pro or just sharpening your skills, we've got something for everyone on the menu.
Skip Kipple
00:01:29
With a dash of expertise and a splash of creativity, we blend technology and hospitality to help you stay ahead of the curve, spotlighting the hottest trends and coolest breakthroughs shaping the industry.
Skip Kipple
00:01:42
So grab your apron and appetite for knowledge.
Skip Kipple
00:01:46
This is more than a podcast.
Skip Kipple
00:01:48
It's your secret ingredient for success.
Skip Kipple
00:01:51
Don't miss out.
Skip Kipple
00:01:51
Hit the subscribe button and join us every week as we cook up the strategies you need to dominate the game and leave the competition hungry for more.
Skip Kipple
00:02:01
All right, enough of the puns.
Skip Kipple
00:02:03
We have been talking a lot about XR and specifically its use case scenarios in the hospitality industry.
Skip Kipple
00:02:10
The number one question I get back are questions about roi.
Skip Kipple
00:02:14
In order to show roi, you need to have data.
Skip Kipple
00:02:19
My guest on the show today, Tony Bevalacqua, founder and CEO of Cognitive3D has created the tool.
Skip Kipple
00:02:26
Just for that, Tony created this product, a spatial analytics platform that gathers data from virtual and augmented reality experiences in new ways and turns them into actionable insights.
Skip Kipple
00:02:40
Specifically, Cognitive3D helps companies measure human behavior with 3D simulations.
Skip Kipple
00:02:46
Prior to founding Cognitive3D, Tony founded and exited another startup that focused on revenue optimization and data analytics for enterprise customers.
Skip Kipple
00:02:57
Cognitive3D began their journey in 2015 with a vision to change the way human behavior is measured and analyzed.
Skip Kipple
00:03:05
Through use of immersive technology, Cognitive3D identified an incredible opportunity to collect spatial intelligence, leveraging virtual, augmented and mixed reality devices as a vehicle for data collection.
Skip Kipple
00:03:19
Today, their technology provides an innovative approach to consumer Research which enables brands to develop better product strategy and understand consumer behaviors through a unique, quantitatively measured platform.
Skip Kipple
00:03:33
Their enterprise workforce customers are defining spatial objectives to conduct training simulations with clearer results to reduce injury, improve safety, and measure efficiency.
Skip Kipple
00:03:46
Let the data geekiness begin.
Skip Kipple
00:03:52
Data, data, data.
Skip Kipple
00:03:53
I am a data guy, and that is all that businesses are worried about today, right or wrong.
Skip Kipple
00:03:59
When I start talking to operators about implementing XR technologies, the very first question I get is, well, what kind of data can I get from it and how can I use it?
Skip Kipple
00:04:09
Tony, my friend, this is exactly why I brought you on this show as you have a very unique product and approach to this problem.
Skip Kipple
00:04:18
Thank you so much for joining us on the Tech Chef today.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:04:21
Hey, Skip, thanks for having me.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:04:23
You know data roi, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:04:25
You need to hit that and you know ROI with your.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:04:28
With your deployments.
Skip Kipple
00:04:30
Absolutely.
Skip Kipple
00:04:31
I mean, that's the first question you get is especially in hospitality, the area that I concentrate the most in, you know, there's very tight margins in.
Skip Kipple
00:04:37
So ROI is critical to making decisions on new products, new strategies, et cetera.
Skip Kipple
00:04:44
Can you share a little bit about your journey leading into the founding of cognitive 3D and really what inspired you to venture into spatial analytics and immersive technologies?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:04:55
Yeah, for sure.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:04:56
So I'm the founder and CEO of Cognitive3D.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:04:59
I'm nine years into my journey at this company.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:05:02
It's a very long time.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:05:04
Prior to this, I was the chief product officer at a company called Kinetic.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:05:08
We had an analytics product in market primarily in the mobile category, and we're addressing games, entertainment of mobile apps, those types of things.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:05:17
Through that, I got really early exposure to what was going on in the virtual reality industry.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:05:22
Got to try out a really cool dev kit from these folks called Oculus, and ultimately saw a real greenfield opportunity to build something net new for the next generation of computing.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:05:35
And for me, there was a lot of opportunity to rethink the problem, deliver new value, deliver new solutions in an entire entirely new landscape of computing.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:05:50
And in the mobile space, I was building a lot of the same.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:05:53
And so we founded Cognitive3D in 2015, started to build out what we call a spatial analytics platform, and effectively a spatial analytics platform.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:06:03
We're collecting behavioral data about what people are doing inside the headset, how they're behaving, how they move through space, what is the things that they're doing.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:06:13
And a lot of how it applies to your audience, Skip, is that we can start measuring what people are doing in these training simulations.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:06:19
These different types of categories work and understand the human performance element of what's going on in those environments.
Skip Kipple
00:06:27
Well, that's what particularly interested me in your product.
Skip Kipple
00:06:30
First of all, I'm a data guy, as I said earlier at the top of the show.
Skip Kipple
00:06:33
But, you know, transferring those experiences into real life data that you can act upon is very intriguing to me.
Skip Kipple
00:06:43
I think we had a discussion about how I'm helping a company build out a restaurant training VR program.
Skip Kipple
00:06:52
And obviously you want to bring as much data as you possibly can back into the platform from not just the interaction with the user which we're going to talk about, because you get some pretty cool features in your software, but also facial tracking and just inflection of tone of voice.
Skip Kipple
00:07:09
There's so much you can do once you really start thinking about it and applying, you know, some of those, those techniques to the data that you get in.
Skip Kipple
00:07:18
And this goes above and beyond LMS systems, which, you know, which is really why I'm interested in VR training.
Skip Kipple
00:07:25
They ha.
Skip Kipple
00:07:25
It has a very specific roi.
Skip Kipple
00:07:28
But when you really start considering the data behind the very unique data points that you can get from VR training, that I think is where this thing just lights up to the nth degree.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:07:40
Yeah, I mean, training in the hospitality space is inherently difficult.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:07:46
It's difficult in all frontline worker focused jobs.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:07:50
And VR offers a really unique opportunity to deliver things in a very consistent way to a large amount of your audience that maintains your brand's reputation, your brand's expectations with your end customers.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:08:11
And I think that, you know, when cognitive 3D steps into the equation, it's about measuring, you know, the different types of inputs that we can collect from these training experiences and making sure that we measure and maintain that level of quality that we expect from our workforce that's out in the field working with our customers every single day.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:08:33
And so that's really kind of our role in a training and simulation, you know, type of situation is to come in and provide that measurement capability.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:08:43
When we think about soft skills and, you know, kind of these frontline worker type roles, the opportunity to train somebody really, really well takes a lot of like one on one time.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:08:57
VR introduces scalability in terms of being able to scale that in a very consistent way across your audience and also giving your frontline workers, your folks out in the field the opportunity to get some repetitions on how things should be done in a variety of different situations.
Skip Kipple
00:09:17
And Tony, you mentioned earlier, first of all, nine years in this industry is impressive because most people view it as a very startup type of industry, even though it's not that's that's a misconception.
Skip Kipple
00:09:29
It's been around for a very long time.
Skip Kipple
00:09:31
I think what we need to do is plant the base here and talk about, you know, who are some of your biggest clients.
Skip Kipple
00:09:38
Because you've been around so long, you have established a pretty darn good reputation in the industry.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:09:43
Yeah, thanks, I appreciate that.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:09:45
I mean, I can't speak to every single client that we have today, but I can speak to a few that are kind of interesting and also been made public in the last year or so.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:09:53
You know, one of the companies that we support today is Walmart.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:09:56
You know, Walmart's really interesting in that they collect, that they deliver training to a large, large audience kind of across the United States.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:10:07
And it really gives them an opportunity to understand and quantify, like, you know, the processes and the ways that they're supposed to be delivered to a very, very large audience.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:10:20
And, you know, our role in that is just to measure the employee compliance, you know, did the work get completed correctly and, you know, put it into the LM and make sure that those things get done correctly as well.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:10:33
Yeah.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:10:33
So, I mean, basically with those types of environments, you have a lot of opportunity to measure at scale and on a completely unattended basis, which I think is also important.
Skip Kipple
00:10:43
It's pretty cool that, I mean, Walmart is not a tiny customer at all.
Skip Kipple
00:10:47
And obviously they see the impact of using VR for training purposes.
Skip Kipple
00:10:54
But can you also share a success story where cognitive 3D analytics made a significant impact on a business or a project?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:01
Significant impact?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:03
Yeah, absolutely.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:04
I mean, every single day.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:05
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:05
So, you know, we work in a few primary categories, so I'll cover that real quick.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:10
We work in training and simulation, which is really our bread and butter, where we've helped measure and scale programs.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:15
We work in two different ways in training and simulation.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:19
We work on early roi, so return on investment and helping people build, construct and demonstrate value from their programs.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:27
A lot of what I find in the XR industry is that folks are, are struggling to demonstrate that early value proposition on how do we acquire content, how do we buy headsets and roll this stuff out?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:39
It's not cheap, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:41
But when you start looking at the actual value proposition that you can present to your workers and some of the tangible inputs and outputs of these programs, you can build a really great business case on how this is going to solve major problems for your business.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:11:55
So when we talk about training and simulation, we really often work on the ROI side first, helping our program manager figure out how to build and scale Their program.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:12:06
And then we work on kind of the later stage program, which is like, how do we deliver the program at scale and solve that problem of how do we authenticate the user to the headset, how do we deliver the content, right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:12:17
And then how do we measure those outcomes and put them in places that our employees and our workforce expect them to be?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:12:24
So we kind of have that multifaceted element of the early program and then the later stage growth and scaling part of the program as well.
Skip Kipple
00:12:34
So spatial analytics.
Skip Kipple
00:12:35
We talked a lot about training today.
Skip Kipple
00:12:36
I mean, are you using it for anything else?
Skip Kipple
00:12:38
For, for instance, being able to walk through a, a digital twin or a potential build out and you know, look at design layouts of the venue, of the, we'll say hotels or conference centers or resorts, things like that.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:12:54
Oh, you got it, absolutely.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:12:56
You know, second category here would be really what we call consumer research, right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:13:01
Consumer research for us is typically Archite engineering and construction.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:13:05
So taking a digital twin, being able to put it in the headset and measuring your audience, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:13:11
What do they look at, what captures and keeps their attention, how do they move through space?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:13:17
And being able to use those insights to potentially inform decision making that you might have on the physical elements of how you construct a space or how you renovate an environment.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:13:28
We also work with companies around, like planograms, product placement, product design, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:13:33
So when you think about product design, you might think about like vehicle management, manufacturing, right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:13:37
And testing, like what vehicle designs work best, you know, what can your ideal customer figure out about your new design and what can we learn about that to inform the design moving forward?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:13:50
On the planogram side, being able to test end caps, product placement and product design, packaging, to be able to kind of figure out what works and what doesn't, both on the alignment of your product on the shelf, but also against your competitors on that shelf as well.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:05
So there's lots of different ways that you can use data to kind of inform some decision making that you need to make in the real world.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:13
Because you can get really great specificity when you think about consumer research.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:17
You get into things like eye tracking, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:19
Being able to see like what people look at, what captures and keeps their attention.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:23
Maybe even more importantly, like, what did they not look at?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:27
Like, what are the things that they kind of ignored or didn't pay attention to?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:30
You know, put a large water feature in the middle of your hotel.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:33
Like, is that, is that the showcase?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:36
Is that what captures and keeps people's attention?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:14:38
You might be surprised, you know, on some of the insights that you find when you start running an audience through a simulation of a space that you plan on building.
Skip Kipple
00:14:47
Love that concept.
Skip Kipple
00:14:48
A lot of restaurants are currently concentrating on like the restaurant of the future and really coming up with ways of, you know, streamlining technology, look, feel, design, et cetera.
Skip Kipple
00:14:59
And this would be a great way to be able to get real time analytics of, you know, what is important to the guest.
Skip Kipple
00:15:05
Obviously there's nothing like actually being there, but this is the next best thing.
Skip Kipple
00:15:10
Anybody who's had a VR headset on and is experienced walking through a digital twin certainly knows that's the case.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:15:16
Sorry.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:15:16
I would just point out that it's also kind of a multifaceted investment as well.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:15:20
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:15:20
Like if you build a digital twin in the early phases of your program and then go out and build the store, you really have the foundation for the training and simulation kind of use cases in the future.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:15:30
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:15:30
And we've seen a lot of that where a program begins on the construction of a new facility.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:15:35
The digital twin informs design, the layout of the line, you know, maybe some of the, you know, food service elements.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:15:42
And then, you know, from there you've got the perfect foundation to deliver your training in a very digital way as well.
Skip Kipple
00:15:48
Can you actually go back and repeat and kind of, you know, obviously there's, there's data analytics behind, you know, what people are looking at.
Skip Kipple
00:15:55
But can you repeat a playback of a user experience in your platform?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:00
Yeah, for sure.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:01
I mean, so cognitive 3D, we kind of rethought what analytics should look like for these 3D driven environments.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:09
A lot of analytics are charts and graphs.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:11
And so cognitive 3D really focuses on 3D based representations of what's going on inside the headset.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:19
And so one of our kind of flagship products is called Scene Explorer.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:24
And Scene Explorer allows you to do a one to one replay of exactly what the user did, how they behaved and how they moved through that environment, what tools they used, what they picked up and engaged with, what they did with their head, their eyes.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:40
And you can use all of those inputs for assessment.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:44
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:45
So the after action review kind of acts as what we call a proof of work, right, that the user put the headset on and did some things.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:53
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:16:54
Once you've got that proof of work, you can then assess that behavior to be able to see like, was the user compliant with safety protocols that we might have?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:17:04
Did they demonstrate good food safety?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:17:06
Did they maintain eye contact with our customer when they were having a difficult interaction?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:17:14
There's lots of different ways that you can use these different inputs to ask specific questions that are representative of skills or qualities of service that you expect within your business.
Skip Kipple
00:17:26
Okay, so I'm pretty sure that every single one of my Californian clients are sitting and listening to this, going, okay, with all these emerging technologies and all this data that's coming out, how are you ensuring user privacy and data security and mixing that with the analytics you need to spit out?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:17:48
Yeah, I'll talk about privacy first.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:17:50
I think informed consent is incredibly important and some states are more aggressive about informed consent than others.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:17:56
California comes to mind.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:17:57
Mind.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:17:58
Massachusetts comes to mind.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:00
As folks that kind of have bleeding edge privacy frameworks and legislation.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:06
Cognitive 3D, we have some internal tools to be able to assess and get that informed consent.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:12
We have something called the XR Privacy Framework, which is actually an open source framework which allows you to acquire the rights to record the session and collect the data.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:22
Most businesses, though, we often see that they work it into the employment agreement or do some sort of written or in headset consent for the collection of data as part of the training experience.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:34
So it really kind of depends on what your corporate policies are.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:37
But, you know, ultimately, you know, privacy is important and we should, we should collect it.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:42
And Cognitive3D provides some tools to be able to make sure that we do it properly.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:49
Security is a totally separate but very similar topic.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:18:55
It's probably one of our number one jobs outside of providing the insights, is keeping the data secure for our customers.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:19:02
So we do SOC 2 type 2 compliance.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:19:06
That means that we're externally audited on a very regular basis.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:19:10
Our data is stored and keyed properly, and we also offer advanced deployment techniques as well.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:19:16
We can do things like dedicated installs on premises installs, those types, things to kind of meet whatever your company policies might be for external IT security.
Skip Kipple
00:19:28
Tony, we're going to take a short break, but when we come back, we're going to talk more about really the industry perspective from the cognitive 3D side, where the industry is headed, the trends that you see coming out, and how cognitive 3D is really going to accomplish some of these unique challenges that we're about to face.
Skip Kipple
00:19:46
So everybody hold on one second.
Skip Kipple
00:19:48
We'll be right back.
Skip Kipple
00:19:51
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00:20:17
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Skip Kipple
00:20:21
Tony, we're back.
Skip Kipple
00:20:22
And you know, I want to get into, you know, some of the industry challenges and you know, some of the trends that we're seeing come about.
Skip Kipple
00:20:30
You are not new to this industry.
Skip Kipple
00:20:31
You've seen a lot of technologies come and go with the rise of VR and AR and just not just in hospitality, but in, just in General.
Skip Kipple
00:20:41
How does cognitive3D help brands adopt and measure the success of these technologies?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:20:48
Things have really changed in this industry.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:20:50
It's getting a lot easier to adopt these programs.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:20:53
I think it's still really difficult to measure the success of these programs.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:20:58
And so, you know, we find that a lot of innovation teams have no problem going out, buying some headsets, maybe getting some initial content.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:21:07
But the part that typically is the challenge, the part that we can step in and provide some real early value in a program is making sure that there's a future.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:21:17
Right, right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:21:18
Being able to collect the right data, demonstrate the right, you know, maybe internal study about how this technology could be used, how it could be scaled, and how it could apply to some sort of cost savings, efficiency, improvements in process, improvements in satisfaction, whatever your APIs are ultimately going to be.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:21:42
Cognitive 3D provides the tools to be able to answer a large majority of those questions, but we also provide the data science capability to actually analyze and answer those questions on the part of our clients.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:21:55
We've recently been doing what we call the ROI program.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:21:58
And so these are six or 12 month programs where we actually take your existing content, your headsets, whatever you're trying to deploy and market and build an actionable study around your data collection strategy.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:15
The outcomes that we can get, we can collect from these environments.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:19
And to kind of give you a bit of a weapon internally, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:21
Of like, this is the data, these are the results we see.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:24
If we apply it to big problem, big business, problem X, we're going to see the following results, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:30
And we think we should grow the program by this particular size.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:34
That's really where we've been stepping into programs at the early, earliest stages.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:39
And that's like pre Walmart, Walmart's obviously doing something that's like huge, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:43
That's a later stage, you know, let's help you scale type of thing, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:47
Like how are, you know, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of employees interpreting this program out in the wild?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:22:53
And the earlier stages is more about like, how do we grow this into something that impacts the entire, entire business.
Skip Kipple
00:23:01
So you've been in the industry Like I said for a while, you know, and the XR industry has a evolved just drastically.
Skip Kipple
00:23:09
And this is probably a very unfair question given the era of rapid development, but where do you see it headed in the next five to 10 years?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:20
That's a really tough question.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:21
It is.
Skip Kipple
00:23:23
I knew you could handle it, though.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:25
Yeah.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:26
I mean, I started the company nine years ago and a lot has happened.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:33
Like, there's been a lot of evolution in technology.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:35
You know, I thought when Oculus bought, or Facebook bought Oculus, that the rocket ship was taken off.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:43
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:44
The reality was there's so much technology work needed to get done to create something that was actually adoptable at scale.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:53
Just in the last, like two to three years, things have really changed.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:57
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:23:57
With the adoption of all in one headsets, six degrees of freedom, super high quality.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:03
You know, the comfort and sickness issues are starting to get mitigated.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:08
We're seeing a lot of like, really positive movement in the right direction for overall adoption.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:15
But when I think about the future, said 5 to 10 years.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:19
Glasses, glasses all the way.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:21
You know, the idea that virtual augmented mixed reality today, these are different devices.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:30
In a lot of cases, you're starting to see that merge together with Quest three, where you started to see kind of a mixed reality mode into a fully encompassing headset.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:41
I think the future is kind of these all in one glasses like Orion, that can be able to deliver the full spectrum of immersion or giving you information or insights when you need it in your work.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:55
That's where I see the hardware side of the equation going.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:24:59
But my overall perspective on the whole space is that this is about giving superpowers to the people.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:25:05
I think that's ultimately what immersive technology does.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:25:08
It gives us data at our fingerprints.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:25:10
It's one of these perfect modalities for this artificial intelligence future as well.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:25:17
Empower us through.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:25:18
Through vision, through hearing.
Skip Kipple
00:25:20
Well, you brought up a good point there.
Skip Kipple
00:25:21
We talk VR all day long, but we have not talked ar.
Skip Kipple
00:25:24
Your platform is not specific.
Skip Kipple
00:25:26
I mean, it can adapt to anything, correct?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:25:28
Yeah, absolutely.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:25:29
We support Unity, we support Unreal.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:25:31
We're building out a new SDK right now for Apple Vision Pro.
Skip Kipple
00:25:34
So I think it's interesting that most people don't understand that they're gaming engines, but they ended up really being the core of how this technology is being developed and released to the marketplace.
Skip Kipple
00:25:48
It doesn't matter if it's gaming or not.
Skip Kipple
00:25:51
We were just at its act.
Skip Kipple
00:25:52
And goodness gracious.
Skip Kipple
00:25:53
I mean, the military is using all of this stuff for simulation.
Skip Kipple
00:25:56
So they're Using gaming engines.
Skip Kipple
00:25:58
And that's really those two platforms, Unity and Unreal, are the two biggest ones out there that are really having a pretty heavy marketplace as far as development process.
Skip Kipple
00:26:09
Are there certain barriers to adoption of spatial analytics in industries like healthcare, retail, education, hospitality?
Skip Kipple
00:26:17
And what kind of barriers would those look like?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:26:21
Yeah, I think the barriers are really around content less about us.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:26:25
I mean our product can be integrated in anything if there's a will and there's a way.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:26:30
Today we typically support custom content creation, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:26:34
So people that are outgoing and building custom scenarios that are for specific business problems.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:26:39
That's our typical use case of customers that come to us and they've built either a360 video or, or fully 3D immersive environment that is specific to their business.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:26:49
We come in, we can measure that.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:26:51
Where we're spending a lot more of our time now is the repeatable content.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:26:55
The more generic modules we're partnering with people, we're spending time on what we call partner enablement, which means that for the content providers that are out there building repeatable solutions, things that you can just buy off the shelf.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:27:10
Cognitive 3D has a new program that we've been rolling out called Cognitive 3D Ready.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:27:16
The idea is that it's a Pre integration with cognitive 3D into your generic content where when a customer wants to buy, they actually have the opportunity to get that analytics data right away if they would like it.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:27:29
So we're trying to reduce all the barriers to access this stuff, make the market more efficient and then also support some of these authoring and environments that we're starting to see really take off as well.
Skip Kipple
00:27:40
You have obviously have a back end dashboard for people to look at and get all this data analytics from.
Skip Kipple
00:27:46
But do you also have an API that if I happen to be that CIO that just wants it presented in a different way, can I get that data out of that and maybe force it into my LMS system?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:27:57
Yeah, you got it.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:27:58
On the LMS side, we actually transmit results.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:01
So you can do the assessments in the Cognitive 3D dashboard, you set up all of the behaviors that you're looking for.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:06
The reason you do the assessment in cognitive 3D is because can assess other stuff.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:10
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:10
Most LMSs, they're kind of dumb, like they don't really know beyond past complete, you know, and failure, like they really don't understand all the gaps in between.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:21
We can assess eye tracking, we can assess user behavior, what people are doing, how they move through space, the activities they completed, and assess in a much more Deep and fundamental, more human way, honestly.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:33
And then we could transmit that to the lms.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:35
What we don't want to do is create an island, right, where it's like the VR stuff is completely separate from the rest of the business.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:42
That's where we see POCs and pilots die, right?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:47
Go off and try to do it as something completely separate from the business.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:50
When they've got tens or hundreds of millions of dollars invested in L and D already, we want to capitalize on that.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:28:56
We want VR to just be an extension of what we're doing and learning today.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:29:00
And so cognitive 3D can transmit those results into the LMS and actually mark off modules just like any other type of content.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:29:08
We do provide the APIs as you mentioned as well, though.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:29:11
So if you're building your own dashboards, your own capabilities, some of my customers have Power BI dashboards that they like to have that are separate from the cognitive 3D system.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:29:21
We empower those capabilities as well.
Skip Kipple
00:29:23
Well, I think you hit on two very, very important things.
Skip Kipple
00:29:26
First of all, not being an island, therefore, because there's not one enterprise client I've got out there that would think about adopting a product where it's got its own data set, its own dashboard.
Skip Kipple
00:29:37
They want it all.
Skip Kipple
00:29:38
They want.
Skip Kipple
00:29:38
A single pane of glass is what they want.
Skip Kipple
00:29:40
And you've kind of taken that to the next level and you've opened up the architecture in order to be able to allow that data to flow back into the LMS system.
Skip Kipple
00:29:47
But the other big thing that you hit on that people are missing that have not even looked at VR training is the fact that you are filling those gaps rather than a pass fail complete, you know, you are collecting data that you can't collect any other way.
Skip Kipple
00:30:03
So I think that is a huge advantage.
Skip Kipple
00:30:07
Obviously, I'm preaching to the choir here, but, you know, as I start to talk to business leaders why VR is so important for the training aspects and the advantages it brings to the marketplace, they start to realize, holy cow, we've been missing out on all these data points.
Skip Kipple
00:30:25
And then their mind starts thinking, okay, okay, what if, what if we could take that data after somebody goes through training and then have our AI engine potentially take that data and figure out what, what is the best position for them?
Skip Kipple
00:30:38
You know, maybe they've done all this personality training and behavioral training with a, an AI customer and realize, you know, they're not really good with people.
Skip Kipple
00:30:49
There's two options there.
Skip Kipple
00:30:50
Either train them up or B, maybe you move them into another position within the organization.
Skip Kipple
00:30:56
So I think there is so much capability that is possible by collecting all of this data.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:31:03
You touched on a really important point there, which is really this opportunity around getting very predictive and prescriptive about the insights that we're collecting and getting a little bit more personal about how content and training is being delivered.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:31:20
I think that one of the superpowers of this technology is meeting the employee or the person in the headset where they are in terms of skillset and providing them just enough assist to be able to get those reps and build those muscles internally so they can get better at each of the individual skill sets that they need to do to succeed in their role.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:31:44
And I think that immersive technology and the data collection behind it powers some of the more, you know, kind of sophisticated insights that you could possibly garner from these types of environments.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:31:56
I think it's also one of those things where, you know, when you acknowledge this to internal stakeholders, if we're just going to mark things as pass fail, I think, you know, internal stakeholders also look at that and say, well, this is much more expensive.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:32:09
Why is it any different, you know, if you're, if you're not going to collect any of these other data points?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:32:14
I think it's a superpower when you start to talk about the level of insight you can get from your employees and then also drive higher levels of performance.
Skip Kipple
00:32:22
As we're talking about advantages and unique advantages.
Skip Kipple
00:32:26
How can spatial analytics and immersive technologies address societal challenges or enhance accessibility?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:32:33
Well, first off, when you do data collection through something like cognitive 3D, there's really no bias in our assessment.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:32:40
Right.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:32:41
And honestly, there's a lot of bias in human condition.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:32:44
And I think that, that, you know, when you create and deliver standard ways of delivering knowledge, I think that there's a greater opportunity for people to succeed.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:32:54
I think that these headsets and capabilities kind of open up.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:32:58
I, you know, I'm a huge fan of like the Matrix movies and stuff like that.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:33:01
And I'm sure you remember the scene when Trinity, Trinity needs the, the helicopter program and she just goes ahead and downloads it, you know, and boom, she's a helicopter pilot.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:33:11
I wouldn't say it's exactly the same kid thing because we're not doing brain computer interfaces or anything like that.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:33:16
But the opportunity to have knowledge at your fingertips on a wide variety of categories of things is a huge superpower for this technology.
Skip Kipple
00:33:24
Oh, there's nothing better.
Skip Kipple
00:33:24
You know, I've got a new set of very high end enterprise AR glasses and you know, I see a New APK come down, and I plug that into my computer, download the APK into my device, and literally, I feel like I have that superhuman matrix capability of all of a sudden, I have all of this knowledge at my fingertips I never had before.
Skip Kipple
00:33:43
So.
Skip Kipple
00:33:43
So we're not that far off from it.
Skip Kipple
00:33:46
I don't know.
Skip Kipple
00:33:46
Somebody like Elon Musk is going to figure it out, if he hasn't done so already, I'm telling you.
Skip Kipple
00:33:51
All right, so we're winding things down here.
Skip Kipple
00:33:54
Let's break away and have some fun.
Skip Kipple
00:33:55
So what's your favorite XR application or experience that you've encountered recently?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:02
Okay, so I'm trying to spend a little bit more time on health recently.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:07
So I play something called Les Mills Body Combat App.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:13
It's a bit of an older app, but it'll get you burning real fast, so definitely check that one out.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:22
Another application that I like to spend some time on, it's kind of underrated, to be honest, is something called Headspace.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:29
Headspace has a mobile app.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:31
This is all about meditation.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:35
Those types of elements.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:37
Really interesting application.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:40
Also, take a look at it.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:34:42
Graphics are beautiful, and, you know, it's just like a really cool, you know, kind of space that is the complete opposite spectrum of Body Combat.
Skip Kipple
00:34:50
All right, so if you share it, I have to share, too.
Skip Kipple
00:34:52
I think specifically on the.
Skip Kipple
00:34:55
On the health side of it.
Skip Kipple
00:34:56
So supernatural.
Skip Kipple
00:34:57
That's probably the most popular out there as far as.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:35:00
Yeah, for sure.
Skip Kipple
00:35:01
Fitness app.
Skip Kipple
00:35:02
And also Tripp.
Skip Kipple
00:35:04
Tripp is a great meditation.
Skip Kipple
00:35:06
Oh, my goodness.
Skip Kipple
00:35:07
You have no idea how many times I've actually used this before.
Skip Kipple
00:35:10
Walking to a meeting, before I've given a presentation on stage, trying to get to sleep at night when I've got a.
Skip Kipple
00:35:15
You know, my mind is full of a million things.
Skip Kipple
00:35:18
You know, being a business owner like yourself, I mean, you've got so much going through your head, and you need to be able to decompress, and VR is a pretty interesting tool in order to be able to do that.
Skip Kipple
00:35:29
And we're seeing that used on the medical side of it.
Skip Kipple
00:35:32
We're seeing it used for PTSD treatment.
Skip Kipple
00:35:34
We're seeing it for a lot of things.
Skip Kipple
00:35:35
So this is not just us, you know, geeking out in our Oculus world.
Skip Kipple
00:35:40
This is really there.
Skip Kipple
00:35:42
There's proven science and facts behind some of this stuff.
Skip Kipple
00:35:45
All right, one more question for you.
Skip Kipple
00:35:47
When you're not working on cognitive 3D projects, what hobbies or activities help you recharge and stay inspired?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:35:55
Okay, well, I.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:35:57
I work way too much, and I travel a lot.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:00
But my main kind of outlet is I like doing home renovations.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:06
So I'm working on a bathroom right now.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:09
So putting in a shower, doing the tile, you know, all the kind of things that go along with that.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:15
So that's one of them.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:16
And then I just like to take care of my property as well.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:18
So I mow the lawn and, you know, garden those types of things.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:23
So those are the things that kind of keep me grounded.
Skip Kipple
00:36:25
So the question is, when you were redoing your bathroom, did you actually use augmented reality to measure stuff out and figure, you know what?
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:32
That is a huge gap.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:34
Thank you for pointing that out.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:35
I did not do that.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:36
I actually took a Sharpie and just drew on the floor.
Tony Bevalacqua
00:36:41
I roughed it in the old school way.
Skip Kipple
00:36:43
Well, Tony, thank you so much for joining the show.
Skip Kipple
00:36:46
This is fascinating today.
Skip Kipple
00:36:47
I love talking data and you and I certainly have a very interesting aspect in regards to the industry that we're in and, you know, the data and analytics.
Skip Kipple
00:36:57
We're looking at things a different way and being able to take, you know, what appears to be a recreational tool or application, that's kind of some of the feedback I'm getting.
Skip Kipple
00:37:08
But then be able to provide real data on top of that with the ROI and be able to prove out how effective this technology really is in a business scenario.
Skip Kipple
00:37:18
So thank you again for joining us.
Skip Kipple
00:37:25
I'll tell you what, cognitive 3D is very unique in its space.
Skip Kipple
00:37:29
As your journey progresses to creating your XR strategy, you're going to want to make sure that this is one of the tools in your toolbox.
Skip Kipple
00:37:38
If you would like to reach out to me or the show, you can do so via Everything Social, SkipKimple or everything at Magic 8 Tech.
Skip Kipple
00:37:46
This includes X, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Skip Kipple
00:37:49
You can always go to the website@SkipKimple.com for all of the archive notes and all the archive shows.
Skip Kipple
00:37:56
They're all posted on that website.
Skip Kipple
00:37:58
You can also hear these episodes on the Magic gate website@magicgate.com and of course you can email me at any point in time.
Skip Kipple
00:38:06
@SkipAgicate.com we have the holiday season upon us which conflicts with the release of the next episode.
Skip Kipple
00:38:14
So I'm going to do some throwback episodes over the next couple of weeks.
Skip Kipple
00:38:18
On January 7th we will return with a fresh episode from Mike Blake to start the year off with a bang.
Skip Kipple
00:38:25
If you don't know Mike, he has been the global CIO at Hyatt Hotels, the CEO of HTNG and CTO of the ahla.
Skip Kipple
00:38:35
Currently he is the VP of IT at Kemper Sports.
Skip Kipple
00:38:39
If you know Mike, you know it's going to be very entertaining and it's going to be hard to tell where the conversation will end up.
Skip Kipple
00:38:46
This show is going to be a blast.
Skip Kipple
00:38:51
I'm finishing off the week by heading up to Wisconsin for Christmas.
Skip Kipple
00:38:54
So this Florida lizard boy will have to suffer through some pretty cold weather with his thin blood.
Skip Kipple
00:39:00
A very Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy New Year, or any other holiday you are celebrating between now and January.
Skip Kipple
00:39:09
Having said that, meet me back here on January 7th.
Skip Kipple
00:39:13
And please, please, please stay safe, stay healthy and stay hungry, my friends.
