This episode features Dan O'Brien from HTC, who brings years of experience in tech innovation to the table. They discuss the importance of strategic business partnerships in the travel and hospitality industry, focusing on how these collaborations can lead to growth and enhanced guest experiences. Skip and Dan explore the role of technology in shaping the future of hospitality, emphasizing the need for companies to keep up with the fast-paced changes in the tech landscape.

Throughout the episode, Dan shares insights into HTC's commitment to immersive technologies, particularly virtual reality and augmented reality. He explains how these technologies can revolutionize training programs, making them more effective and engaging for staff. The conversation also touches on the broader implications of XR in various industries, including healthcare and military training, showcasing the versatility and potential of these technologies in improving operational efficiency and training outcomes.

As they delve deeper into the practical applications of XR in hospitality, Skip and Dan discuss innovative solutions for guest engagement and staff training. They highlight specific scenarios where immersive technology can enhance the guest experience, such as interactive service training and event planning simulations. The episode wraps up with a strong message about the necessity of embracing technology in hospitality to meet evolving consumer expectations and ensure long-term success.

Takeaways:

• In this episode, they discuss how immersive technology is transforming hospitality and training.
• They highlight the importance of strategic partnerships for driving innovation in the tech industry.
• The conversation reveals how XR can dramatically improve training efficiency and retention rates.
• They emphasize that understanding the specific problems to solve is key when integrating XR solutions.
• They explore the future of XR, including advancements in AR and VR technologies.
• They stress the significance of comfort and security in XR hardware for enterprise applications.

This is Tango Charlie papa.

This show is powered by Growth Advisors International Network, where travel and hospitality companies come to grow.

For more information please visit gainadvisors.com hi.

This is Dan O'Brien, HTC President of the Americas region for HTC Vibe.

You're listening to Skip on the Tech Chef Podcast.

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Cook it up for the date.

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Make a plan to be your best.

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Welcome back to the Tech Chef podcast where hospitality and technology collide to create the future of guest experiences.

I'm your host Skip Kimple and every episode we dig into the game changing innovations shaping restaurants, hotels, resorts and entertainment venues.

From AI and automation to immersive experiences and smart data solutions, we uncover the tools and strategies defining how the industry operates.

Join us as we talk with visionary leaders, tech trailblazers and industry experts who are pushing the boundaries of what's possible.

Whether you're a hospitality pro, a tech enthusiast or an entrepreneur hungry for innovation, this podcast serves up as the insights you need to stay ahead.

So grab a seat at the table because the future of hospitality starts right here.

This is the Tech Chef Podcast.

Over the past two weeks we have announced several significant strategic partnerships including weart, a leader in advanced haptic hardware for immersive training and Digilens, a provider of enterprise grade augmented reality smart glasses.

Today we are excited to unveil our newest strategic partner specializing in VR and fully immersive experiences, further reinforcing our commitment to innovation and excellence in the industry.

Joining our show for this announcement is Dan O'Brien, HTC Vive President of the Americas.

Dan is a seasoned technology executive with over 24 years of experience in leading and managing and commercialization of emerging technologies, innovations and solutions for consumers and professional customers.

He oversees the sales, marketing, product and operations for the immersive and wireless divisions of htc.

As a humanity mission driven leader, Dan is focused on delivering revenue growth, brand building, e commerce strategies, business development, content creation and strategic partnerships for HTC Vive, the pioneer and global leader in virtual reality.

He has a proven track record of defining and executing the channel strategy, marketing strategy, product management, supply chain and public relations for HTC Vive.

Ready to get fully immersive in this conversation?

Lights on, mics up.

Let's do this.

Thanks Skip, thanks for having me on the show and introducing me to your audience and everything that you're doing to push the technology forward in the hospitality industry, it's absolutely fantastic.

My role at htc, I'm the President of the Americas region.

I actually started the HTC vive business at HTC.

I've been at HTC for 16 years and without going into a long, long history, I've always been working on whether it was smartphones, whether it was accessories, always very, very bleeding edge new technology.

And so the HTC Vive business was really a leap forward into spatial computing, immersive technology, virtual reality headsets, augmented reality, glasses, combining that with radiated technology, like 5G technology.

So we've always kind of been this company that led the industry in terms of introducing these new technologies to the industry and then seeing how they get deployed.

I mean, just things like we invented 4G LTE devices and we had no idea Uber was going to come from that.

But that's the kind of company that we are, this is the kind of things that we do.

So I know my European listeners certainly know the HTC name, probably not so much here in the United States.

You're a little more invisible, should I say, due to some partnerships and some arrangements that HTC made with the Americas.

Sixteen years is a long time to be in the XR industry.

I am sure you have seen a ton of changes.

Changes happen.

Tell us a little bit about what excites you today in the world of xr.

Well, you know, originally, you know, long time ago, virtual reality, augmented reality, extended reality, a lot of this technology was really being incubated in the military and the dod and the technology wasn't really there.

And then we actually developed smartphones later on.

And I was, I made over 70 phones and I made the first Android phone, I made the first 4G LTE phone.

And we got into what was called the screen wars in the smartphone days.

So we had a pretty good brand as an HTC brand in the smartphone industry, but we quickly saw that commoditizing.

But what those displays gave us was a display that could now run content at 90 frames per second, which was never ever done before then.

Now running content at that high speed frame rate, we could put people in a very immersive environment and not make them feel nauseous or feel sick.

A lot of the previous technology just wasn't able to do that.

Now we have the introduction of this new Technology that allows us to build virtual reality, augmented reality.

But the only people that knew how to create these types of environments years and years and years ago was gamers and game developers.

And so the audience was really this kind of like very high end gaming audience.

Like we've been driving this technology and to get the industry to understand how to actually develop this kind of content and use this kind of technology.

That's been quite the effort.

But now we're at a point where people stopped asking why would I use this?

And then now they're asking how do I get it and how do I deploy it at scale?

Yeah, I mean that's a big question that I'm starting to hear more and more.

We're past that tipping edge of the use of xr, certainly within enterprise.

HTC has always been on the forefront of XR innovation, as you talked about, and just technology in general.

But XR falls within your category.

What is the company's current vision for the future of immersive technology?

Well, you know, it's interesting, we, when we kind of exited the smartphone industry, we retained and kept all of our radio technology people and resources.

And so we were also developing AR glasses, you know, simple, you know, wearables, something more like what we wear as regular glasses, whether you're a Warby Parker or a high end glasses user.

But what we found was the biggest gap to making that technology work really well was connectivity to a cloud technology environment where you could deliver content fast enough.

So what we've done over the last couple of years is developed 5G technology that works with a wearable and you can deliver that content over a network infrastructure fast enough.

Where the technology is going is we're going to make lighter, smaller, easier to use glasses less intimidating for people than these kind of big bulky glasses that people have been using for a while now, or goggles as some people call them.

And you're going to be able to actually use these glasses just about everywhere you go.

So it's going to the friction for users to use it and companies to deploy it is going to become very easy.

Well, so my audience can't see it, but in the background I'm seeing you with the XR elite in the back there.

And honestly I was attracted to the XR Elite because it is more streamlined than the average device out there.

Plus it's got some really cool features, for instance.

Now I'm getting too geeky and nerdy, but I'm going down this route anyways.

It's got the built in diopters that you can change for a person's prescription.

You've got with the face tracker module you can do the automatic IPD adjustment as well as being able to track facial expressions and be able to get data from that and put those kind of data analytics into a LMS system in order to be able to gather data on different data points for VR training, for instance.

So with all of these competitors in the marketplace, how does HTC Vive differentiate itself from competitors in this XR space?

You know one, we focused on very, very high quality.

We focused on comfort, visual, superior visuals and fidelity.

And when the user is looking at content and when they're interacting with content, that that display and that field of view is very comfortable and accurate and clear.

We also thought about things like security.

We don't actually pull back any data from any end user when we, when we deploy our headsets, especially if it's an enterprise.

Right?

So we don't, we don't have a social media backing to our company.

We sell a solution for our other partners and companies that they then benefit from using our technology and whatever they learn from that technology and how their employees benefit from it, that's their business.

Right?

And so we're very, very big on privacy security.

We meet criteria for federal financial institutions, we meet security for special operations environments.

So security is a big deal for us and it's a big deal for our customers.

And then we thought about customizable headsets and open ecosystems.

So as you buy into our technology, very often we continue to evolve the technology of the existing headset so that you can grow your use cases and your functionality with the headset.

Instead of having to buy a new headset every year or trying to evaluate a new technology every year, a lot of our enterprise customers really think about, well, I want to be able to buy this headset for two to three years and I want it to be supported for two to three years and then I want to look at a new technology and it's like, yep, that we completely understand how enterprise customers really need to deploy.

And then we thought about very easy to use deployable platform services, management services so that you can deploy your headsets very clean and very effectively if you have IT management, you can secure those devices and connect them.

And just like you said earlier, having it connected to a learning management system, an LMS, if you're doing training for 40, 50,000 people, you need to be able to track that success back.

And so we make it very easy to manage and interconnect with different device management systems as well as lmss.

So it's interesting.

Once again, our clients are primarily enterprise hospitality clients.

When we first go to them and tell them about the project and we start going through the cost of the project and we get to the headset piece, the hardware piece, we talk about the device that we recommend and we'll talk about why we're recommending HTC devices later on in this podcast.

But they always balk at the cost.

I have them take a step back at that point.

I said, listen, let's go, let's take terms of service from another headset that you might be looking at, that you're familiar with, and let's have your lawyers compare it against what HTC has and let's see what they come back with.

But it's not just that.

It is the security, the device management, the data layers, the fact that you don't collect this data and the durability of that device.

I swear you can throw that thing across the room, I don't recommend it.

And that thing's going to work, but for a restaurant or hotel environment, man, people beat stuff up.

So I'm looking for durable products in that environment, right?

And I think reliability in a company like ours, we, where we've, we manufacture all of our own equipment, we have our own factory line, we're producing our products in Taiwan.

And we actually meet a lot of the criteria and country of origin safety requirements that allow us to meet a lot of criteria that our competitors cannot because of their country of origin, where they manufacture, if they're using lower cost labor to try to get to those lower prices.

And some of our competitors have a different business model where they subsidize the cost of the hardware.

And I try to always educate customers, you know, from a competitive standpoint, if you're buying hardware that is subsidized in cost, you are the product.

And so because that company needs to make money somehow, some way with that hardware, we just, you know, we sell our products what we think is at a great price for the real cost of the hardware.

And when you get that product, it is yours.

Your security, the cameras on the headsets, if you're using it in highly confidential environments inside of your corporate environment, your information is protected.

The cameras that are on those headsets are encrypted physically.

And from a software standpoint, we do not allow anyone, even a vendor, to access those cameras.

So we think about privacy and security in our customers trust from day one and we build to that.

And you know, if we can lower the price over the time, we will.

I think one of the other big advantages that we have is that owning our own manufacturing quality and security.

When a customer says, hey, we're ramping from 10,000 to 60,000 or 100,000, the answer from HTC is unequivocally yes.

And we can build our own deployment plan and we have global distribution capabilities.

A lot of our competitors have to go contact their third party.

They have to go contact them and say, can you build it and when and then can you deliver it into these countries?

For us that's a no brainer.

And we just say yes and support the customer globally.

All of those things play into the cost.

And once you actually, once you tell that story, it becomes pretty obvious of why I am recommending or Magic 8's recommending an HTC device.

Keep in mind, I'm exposed to.

Not that you aren't, but I'm exposed to all the headsets out there and I've played with literally all of them.

So I have an understanding of their capabilities, their form factor, their functionality, their security.

I've done a pretty big deep dive on this.

This is the only device that I found that was durable, had the feature set, that really held up to the needs of the hospitality space.

Therefore, we honed in on one partner.

And I gotta be honest with you, working with your team on every single level has been nothing but a delight.

From sales to support to onboarding to marketing across the board.

Your team has been great.

So kudos for that, of building that environment because everybody seems to be extremely happy working at HTC Vive.

And it really shows.

And I feel like you guys have my back just as much as I have your back, which is so important when you're creating this relationship.

Which brings to the point, big announcement dropped this morning, which is kind of why we're talking here today where we dropped a press release where Magic 8 and HTC Vive joined forces to offer solutions to the hospitality space.

I know why I chose htc, but this is a two way conversation here.

What made you choose or, you know, look at Magic 8 as a partner for the hospitality space?

I, you know, it kind of goes a little bit, goes back to our Brand, our brand is this blue triangle.

It actually stands for, you know, technology, creativity and humanity.

I think as, I think companies should be very focused on what companies they do business with, what brands they do businesses and, and why, like, you know, there's always the what of like what's in the product, what does it cost, what is it, you know, and you got to think about like brands and why do some brands partner really well and why do they go after certain problems.

And so much of what we started this company to do was to take all this amazing technology, put it together in very innovative ways, unleash, you know, creativity, whether it's training, whether it's access to data, and then actually bring a benefit and solution to humanity and, and other.

That's our companies, that's our partners.

And when we see a company like yours, and thank you for all the compliments about my team and the people that you've interacted with at our company.

They are the best team.

I, I do think that all the time.

And they're extremely hard working and they're professionals.

And we've heard multiple times like, hey, we've talked to this company, we've talked to this company and when we talk to your company, we feel like we're talking to adults, right?

And I always say that, I'm like, thank you for the compliment.

And you know, we really try to understand our customers problems and I think that's what you're doing in a really, really impactful way.

When you really understand that hospitality space, you understand the needs of a lot of these restaurants and these food, you know, chains at large scale and problems that they, they are trying to solve.

My company, like we're an enabler for a company like yours.

And when I see a great partnership where somebody really understands the market, the vertical, the problems that they're trying to face.

The best thing for me to do is not to try to just go, you know, bulging in there and attack that.

The best thing for me to do is to find, you know, a great partner like yourself and your company and understand what Magic 8 really understands and go, okay, this is the right partner, this is the right vertical.

We have a solution that can really solve immense amount of problems around training, around preparedness for onboarding from all.

There's a lot of different use cases that I'm sure we'll get into those, but I think about that and go, you know, you guys really have a great point of view.

You understand this vertical, you understand their problems and we have the infrastructure and the tools to Help you be successful.

Dan, that's a great spot to take a little break here.

When we come back, we're going to talk a little more about some of those enterprise and hospitality applications and use cases that you just referred to.

We'll also talk about some of the hardware and software innovations that HTC is looking at and really the future of xr.

So a lot more to unpack, folks.

Hang on, we'll be right back.

Hey, since I have you here, if you're headed to Murtech in Vegas this year, 3-10-12, you gotta swing by Magic Gate's Experience Zone.

We're talking next level restaurant tech, VR training that actually works, AR remote support that makes troubleshooting a breeze and some seriously cool data tools to keep your ops running smooth.

Plus you can mess around with futuristic stuff like augmented reality, virtual reality and haptic devices.

It's all hands on, no boring demos, just straight up cool tech that you need to see.

Come check it out.

And we're back to talk about some more specific use cases that you talked about previously for the hospitality industry.

Maybe you can talk a little bit about what you've seen out there from your expertise and from an HTC Vive perspective.

You know, we've seen training applications being used in large scale consulting firms.

We have seen a lot of training and simulation with our military customers.

They're always looking for ways to get through training, have less downtime and then get better outputs.

And I think also we found some incredible results coming from healthcare and from higher education.

So, you know, just in general to just kind of set the stage.

You know, when we think about retention, right.

And speed retention, when you read, you know, your training materials is about 15%.

When you sit in a classroom or a lecture style, it's about 5% retention.

And when you think about zooming out and going, okay, 60 days later, 90 days later, you know, what is the retention level of that training material?

It drops off a cliff.

And what we found with immersive training or XR training is the training goes upwards of 80 plus percent on reduction.

Now it only drops off after 60 days, about 5%.

And so we've also seen a speed of training increase, getting through the training material, increase of about 400.

So they're getting through the training materials exponentially faster and their retention is, is off the charts higher and better because what they're doing is they're learning with their hands, they're learning with their eyes, they're learning with their ears, they're learning with kinesthetic learning.

Styles, this is how we all learned well before we were put into a classroom, right?

And so when you want to get to those types of training levels and performance and you want to get to error rates going down.

Yale's medical school trained their, the medical students on laparoscopic gallbladder surgeries.

They got through surgeries 29 faster and made six times fewer errors per surgery.

That's amazing.

I was like, if I have to get my gallbladder out, I'd like one.

Of them to do it, right?

So hopefully I'll keep my gallbladder.

But I just think in general, when we think about anything that's serial, right?

Anything that's repetitive and anything that's dangerous, right?

Anything that could be like a fryer, right.

Heated objects, you know, when you have dangerous environments and you have to train in those environments with Those bad equipment, one, it could be costly.

Two, good timec consuming and $3 could be dangerous, right?

If people make mistakes, they're not paying attention, they could hurt themselves, they could hurt a trainer.

This is, this is, this type of training is repetitive.

The risk levels go way, way, way down and they get through the training a lot faster and a lot more effectively.

And so you can also track back what was the performance level of that training.

So, you know, we have customers all the way from special operations in the military to medical staff in these medical schools and in the hospitals.

We have polyps and nurse training, right?

Where we're training surgical nurses, how to be in that surgical environment much more effectively, much faster.

They're able to train for an hour long surgery in 15 minutes.

So you really start to see economies of scale.

You start to see the savings, you start to see the speed efficiencies and the retention efficiencies.

So if you really have to train, this is by far the most cost effective, the most effective and the best performance for those users when they come out of it.

So hands down, this is the best training solution you can use.

Yeah.

You mentioned a couple different cases of areas, why you need to train in xr, you know, different scenarios.

Another scenario that we're seeing is putting people in train on a difficult to reproduce situation.

Like if the hotel is slammed, it's New Year's Eve and they, they have a rush of people coming in, putting them under stress and having them, you know, train to that level.

So when they see it in real life, it's not that complicated.

Yeah, that's really important.

The cognitive training, right, for high stress environments is, it's critical, right.

You can actually Train for the stress, you can train for the environment.

We have seen this with safety officer training, the nursing training as well, high crisis environments, also customer care environments, like customer service environments.

And we have seen great success here, you know, of those edge cases.

And you can really do a good job of actually taking people, putting them in a stressful situation where they have to respond right very calmly, they have to keep their, their body calm, they have to keep their voice calm.

You can use AI in these environments, in these training environments to create those stress environments.

So if you're looking down, looking away, you're not making eye contact with the customer, you're looking up into the left, you know, things of that nature where you're just kind of being a little disingenuous and that's going to amp that, that situation up even more.

And you're doing it with your body language, you're doing it with your response, you know, your tone.

And you know, the AI can pick all of that up in those training sims and those training modules and then give you that high stress environment.

And then at that point it's a teaching moment for the instructor to say, okay, this is how we can keep that environment calm, right?

And then we can walk that user through that exact same scenario where they stay calm, they make eye contact, they're bringing that whole situation to, into a much calmer state and the customer is feeling like they're being heard, they're being seen, their concerns are being addressed and there's an action plan for how to walk away from that situation.

And there's also the opposite, right?

When that situation escalates, what is the proper thing to do?

Who do you introduce into that scenario?

And then how do you just, you know, you know, keep that situation calm?

I mean, we've seen all the way to the extreme of, right, safety officer training with police officers, how to use talk down strategies, how to use non lethal responses.

So to the level of customer service, we've also seen where customer service net promoter scores have gone up with customers and products and the product hasn't changed in the software, it hasn't changed in the hardware.

There's been no improvement to the product.

But their net promoter score went up.

Why?

Because they were training all their customer service agents how to interact with customers more effectively and they were just getting better outcomes with their customer service.

So just in general, you know, like you can really improve and prepare your staff not only for the edge scenarios, but you know, those current, those crisis scenarios can be pretty intense and you want your people to protect not only themselves, but the brand, you know, and the way they represent the brand, you know, to, to a customer.

What else other than training could hospitality use XR for?

You know, I think about, you know, we talked about training, you know, which could also be your onboarding.

We talked a little bit about guest engagement, you know, in those edge use cases.

You could do it for your planning, right?

So if you are, you know, going to plan out your events, you're going to plan out a space, you're going to introduce customers to that space, it's a new building, it's a new environment, you're going to train people, you know, before they even get into that environment, or you're going to plan out the environment, right?

And you could literally lay out kitchen design, lay out the dining room design, lay out the, the, you know, the engagement design.

Between a drive through and an end customer.

You can optimize all of these scenarios and then test them.

So you can really like put this into your forward planning teams and your innovation teams, like, hey, how can we redesign, you know, the, the cook space, you know, versus the service space versus, you know, cashier space, you know, and, and so you can really be playful for that.

That's very, very expensive for, for a lot of hospitality companies to do to kind of create a, you know, a fake environment, a planogram, test it, you know, customer interactions, testing.

When you have an XR headset and you design the space in the headset and you have the tracking, you could take all these users, put them in the headset.

You don't have to ask them a questionnaire at the end anymore because you have all the data.

You know, one of the really fun ones that we did with Kellogg and Pop Tarts was a planogram design where they wanted to find the right place to test, to introduce on the planogram for a new product launch.

And what they found was, okay, great, this is where we get the most, you know, the best position on the shelf to buy this one new product.

Okay, great.

And now they figured out exactly, you know, how many, you know, customers would come through and they would find that one new product.

And so they would get good lift and cart attachment on that one new product.

They also tested a couple second and third positions and what they found was if they put it in a different position, it caused a bigger cart.

So it wasn't as many people coming in to buy the one new thing, but they found even more revenue by putting it in a different position.

More people came in and they added multiple of their brands and products into the cart.

So you can really do user testing in a completely new, innovative way.

It's much more cost effective.

You, you know, you're not wasting material and agency time to build all that stuff and you can get that data and feedback a lot quicker and easier and make actionable decisions.

It's amazing what you can do when you have that data in a whole different dimension that you've never seen before and be able to run simulations that you've never been able to do before.

It reminds me of a product that will also be at Mirtech.

By the way, everybody, of course we're going to be featuring HTC Vive headsets at Mirtech.

So you got to come and see, see them, try them on, see what the hype is all about.

But one of the scenarios that we'll be showing people is Flow Immersive.

That company is great.

We've, we've been in discussions with them for quite some time.

Being able to see data, walk through data.

But once again, it's all about analyzing data in a way that you haven't been able to do before.

Seeing massive amounts of data and being able, if you want to go to the most minute detail and get information on that and some of those outliers, sometimes it makes a difference how the data plays out.

Instead of looking at a flat chart on a, on a screen.

There's tons of very effective XR solutions when you start to really think about it.

And if you don't know some of these tactics, because this is all new to most of my audience, you really need to have somebody by your side.

Hopefully Magic 8's that partner.

But if it's not, reach out to, to an organization that can help you walk through this path because it is complicated a little bit.

But once you know the channels to go down, that's when the magic happens.

It really does.

Just to comment too on, I would love to just plug the Flow Immersive team too.

There's something really magical about that product and solution.

There's 3D data visualization, but it's also you can talk to the data.

When most of us are not code writers, we don't want to hire these highly complex code writing teams.

You want to just be able to actually speak to the data.

Well, what they've built in is an AI tool that you talk to the data.

You tell it.

I would like to see this data over these many weeks in this time frame and I'd like to see it in a pie chart or I'd like to see in a bar graph and it's 3D, so you can walk up to it and I'd like you to do, you know, from this time frame and compare it to this time last year.

All right?

And it will do it in about three seconds.

Now that's work that previously was probably a handful of people, a couple of weeks, a couple of iterations of that report and then finally you got that report right.

Maybe you're really efficient and you got it in three or four days, something to that effect, but it wasn't in three seconds.

And I think when you can interact with your own data and using your own voice as the command prompt for the software, that, and the coding and the output you want, that's a game changer in terms of efficiency and actionable decision making.

I love their product and it looks great on the HTC product by the way it looks, it's very, very sharp.

All right, so as we conclude here, what advice would you give to companies that are looking to integrate XR into their businesses?

You know, I look at it and go, what's the problem you're really trying to solve and why?

Right?

And go, okay, yeah, I, I want to do my training faster.

I want to do it.

I want my safety standards to be, you know, better.

You know, for the people interacting in my stores and the workers that I have, I want to get them through the training faster and I want cheaper and less cost.

So, okay, great.

Those are all the problems.

Those are the real fundamental problems in your capital expenditure, your operational expendit, your company look for the next several years there, if you're not talking about how to be more efficient with less.

Right, Less people, less costs, you know, less expenditure, increasing your profit margin.

We're all under pressure to do those things.

And I think when you have that point of view of saying, okay, don't show up and say, you know, can I do training?

Yes.

The answer is yes.

Be really clear.

I want to reduce my costs for all of these actual activities and these training activities that I do inside of my company.

Okay, great.

Magic Gate and hcc, great partners.

There's some other companies out there that I could talk to, but we'll walk you through how to accomplish those tasks.

And what is the right software, what's the right hardware, what are the right platform tools and integrations you need in order to accomplish your goals?

I think for a company, it's so great for us when we hear, here's the problem I'm trying to solve, can you Help me do that.

Great.

Then we know exactly how to attack your problem, you know, because you don't need a new, you know, you don't need a headset for every single employee, but you might need one headset for, you know, 500 employees to train them.

Right?

And you're going to run that thing over and over again.

And who can handle that?

What is the different hardware out there that's going to be reliable enough that can handle, you know, maybe 10, 12 hours a day in these training centers, you know, where you're going to run hundreds, if not thousands of students through in a day.

Like you really want to think about what is your scale, what is your, you know, volume and how do you want to do that more efficiently?

We could walk you through all those different scenarios.

We're teaching people how to clean nuclear energy rods for nuclear plants at scale.

There was only one place in Southern California for all nuclear engineers to go learn this skill.

There's now, I think six centers between us and GE Vernova, right?

So we're able to do things and really I think bring that value.

So I think when you, when you're a customer, you want to start working on the problems, you know, ask yourself what are the problems you want to solve and why?

And then come talk to us.

And by the way, the use case scenario you just described, I want my listeners to remember that.

Put a big asterisk next to it because next week you're going to be hearing a little more about that with our next big announcement before my tech.

Dan, thank you for joining the Tech Chef podcast here today.

It has been a great pleasure to have you on.

I know you are an extremely busy guy, so for you to take your time out and talk to us, it means a lot.

Thank you Skip.

It was great to have be here.

It was great to talk to your audience.

Thank you for making the time for us.

So good luck.

I hope you guys have a great show and look forward to a lot of great solutions together and supporting a lot of these customers.

HTC has been an astounding partner, demonstrating excellence at every level of their organization.

As I mentioned in my conversation with Dan, their team truly embodies the spirit of collaboration and innovation.

Additionally, as announced last week, if you're attending Mirtech, be sure to experience HTC's cutting edge headset technology firsthand.

If you have any questions for me or Dan, or just have questions around technology innovation, we would love to hear from you.

You can find me on social media.

I, Skip Kimple and Magicate tech.

We're on X, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.

For past episodes and show notes, head over to skipkimple.com or magicgate.com and of course you can always reach out directly via email kip@magic8.com well it is only 13 days until Murtek.

It's coming up fast.

Last week Mirtek officially announced the Magic Gate XR Experience Zone on their website and we've got limited demo spots available by appointment only.

If you want to get hands on with this tech, just reach out to me directly.

The excitement is real, the prep is in full swing and we can't wait wait to see you there.

Oh, and just when you thought Magic 8 was out of surprises.

We've got another big partner announcement coming next Tuesday.

So until then, stay safe, stay healthy and stay hungry.

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