Scott Campagna If I sent my wife my heartbeat on Valentine's Day, I think that she would be like, “We're not doing this anymore. This holiday is dead.” 

Clinton Bonner I thought you meant the whole thing. Call the whole thing off.

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CB Welcome to Catalyst, the Launch by NTT DATA Podcast. Catalyst is an ongoing discussion for digital leaders dissatisfied with the status quo and yet optimistic about what's possible through smart technology and great people. Folks, I wish you could see the shirt that my guest is rocking today. I wish this was a video podcast, maybe one day, because speaking of great people, we have Scott Campagna. He is our Lead of Emerging and Immersive Technologies here at Launch by NTT DATA, and our topic de jure– yes, you knew it was coming sooner or later– we are talking AVP. No, not Aliens vs. Predator, that's kind of cool. Even cooler– the Apple Vision Pro podcast episode. Here we go. Scott, how are you doing, dude? 

SC Let's do it. I'm pumped, man. 

CB Love it. Yeah, man. So it's too hot in the hot tub, it's frothy out there with the Apple Vision Pro. There's lots of takes. I've seen quite a number of them so far, ranging from, “Spatial computing is going to revolutionize humanity,” all the way to, “This thing hurts my face. I can't believe they came out with this.” 

SC Exactly.

CB So like most things, the truth maybe is somewhere in the middle and we're going to discover that today, or at least we're going to give an opinion, or opinions, on that today. So as we get into Apple Vision Pro, a couple of years in the making. Obviously Meta has been out there and others, PlayStation and others, others that are much, much smaller have had headsets out there. They would routinely call them AR/VR, and Apple wags the big finger and says, “No, no, no. This is spatial computing.” I understand what those words mean, but from a very high level for the audience, you're a tinkerer by nature, right? 

SC Absolutely.

CB In an Apple Vision Pro review, what are the main things you're seeing, feeling, hearing about it, and what kind of hype should we believe, in your opinion? 

SC It's always somewhere in the middle. It's never as good as people think it's going to be, it's never as bad as people think it's going to be. There's lots of gray. And part of what Apple is really doing is trying to change the game a little bit, and that's really what they've been looking for. Because if you think of Tim Cook's time at Apple, he hasn't had that big splashy product yet to come out and this is really their attempt to go for it and really say, “We're going to put our stamp on something.” But it's an interesting space because– you sort of tapped on it– but the AR/VR space is really fragmented. It reminds me a lot of the early days of smartphones where you just had tons and tons of different options out there. When I first started working in mobile development, we were building apps not just for Android and iOS, but we had a Windows Phone 7 app, we had BlackBerry apps, we even built a webOS app. 

CB The Palm webOS, I will die on this hill, that was the most elegant operating system. The Palms were so good. 

SC Everyone has stolen from webOS since it came out. It never actually got to market to actually do anything other than in everyone else's product designs. But I see something similar going on right now, and I've been following all of the news for the Apple Vision Pro. I went to the Apple store and did their little 20-minute demo to see what it looks like, and then we also have some folks on my team who went and picked one up on day one because they are, like me, tinkerers and they just wanted to play and wanted to see what they could do with it. And part of what I'm really seeing is that there's some differentiators that are really coming out there. And Apple loves throwing around the ‘spatial computing’ and saying that's really what their goal is, and honestly, I think it's because they didn't want to get saddled with a ‘we're a gaming platform’ type of a label, which is what happens when you look at a Meta Quest and all of the other consumer VR headsets out there. If you're marketing towards consumers, for the most part, they're looking at how can we turn this into a gaming platform and really make it so that it's just something that people play with, which has worked because if you look at the Quest and its way that it's selling, I didn't know this until I started doing some research on it, but the Quest is actually outpacing Xboxes in sales volume. So it's actually really there as a heavy duty game platform and Apple didn't want to be there because Apple tends to shy away from the gaming space and wants to be more of a ‘how do we make your life better’ space. And that's what they marketed the Apple Vision Pro as but there's still some gap, in my opinion, between it being a consumer device and being a productivity device. There's some gaps there that we need to sort of think about how they can use it properly. And some of the things that they do really well are just not things that quite yet are things that a regular person off the street is going to care that much about. Some of the things that I noticed when I went and did the demo that were just the coolest parts were the eye tracking. When you look at how most of these AR/VR headsets are operating, you have to either move your head or you’ve got to have a joystick and you're sort of moving things around. With the Vision Pro, it literally knows exactly where your eyes are tracking and you could just be looking at Nikon and it highlights it for you and then all you’ve got to do is tap your little finger and it just goes. It's very intuitive, which is what you'd expect from Apple, but that technology lets you do a lot of things beyond just looking at Nikon and have it tell me what I'm doing. When I'm thinking about how we can help people to build tools using the Apple Vision Pro, the first thing that I come to is training for things that are in the more dangerous lines of work. So if you think of things like law enforcement, if you think of people who need to go to dangerous places like oil rigs, or people who are going up and fixing electrical lines up on poles, these are things where you can go and do really cool training modules. And the fact that it has such great eyeball tracking, you can really see not just what a person is trying to do when they're doing all these different training opportunities, but you can see what they're really thinking because you can see where their eyes are moving. And there's really cool opportunity there that I think is going to be much more valuable in an enterprise space than it is in a consumer space, but that doesn't mean it's not going to be a consumer tool eventually. But right now, I think it's very much more seeing applications that are going to work for enterprises in really cool ways. Obviously, like I said, training is the number one that I'm thinking about, but then you also think about what is it really good at? It's really good at space. It really understands space well. One of the guys on my team, Jeff Meter, does great little videos on LinkedIn that he's been doing playing with his Apple Vision Pro, and it does things like maps the entire space that you're around, and not only maps the space that you're in right now, but then remembers the space that you're in so when you move to a new one–

CB Creepy! 

SC –it maps it completely. It's very creepy. He has a video on LinkedIn that's great where he started off using it in his basement and then he moved upstairs right above the basement and literally he pulled apart all of the little threads that show all of the mapping that it's doing and it looked down into his basement. It's wild. So it's got that type of tracking that's really, really cool, and as we start pulling apart the technology and seeing how they did it, there's going to be more and more applications that we find of cool things that we can do that will provide a lot of value.

CB So I had Clemens Conrad on recently, and he was talking about how he went to both CES and he went to the Japan Autoworld. And we were talking about the juxtaposition between the cultures there and just the difference of how things are presented. And he was saying that over at CES, the whole thing was Gen AI gaga to the point where you are hopping in an autonomous vehicle and then it's showcasing you a Gen AI thing to generate your mom a Mothers’ Day card because it's Mothers’ Day and you forgot to send her a Mothers’ Day card. And it's like, “Okay, I get it. I get it.” That's not making the autonomous vehicle platform more meaningful or more successful and more a piece of infrastructure that could reshape societies. That is a maybe nice to have. And some of the things you started leaning into right away were way more concrete, way more towards industry, towards enterprise, towards training, towards safety, towards infield application, certainly, because obviously it's so good with spatial awareness. And that's going to be the interesting part for me is the price point, because it's not a cheap piece of equipment, and yes, you expect that to come down over time just like flat screens and everything else comes down over time, or not skyrocket further is another way to look at it. Just kind of stay and the rest of the money catches up to that price point versus it plummeting is a possibility too. But I do wonder, besides the fanfare and the Apple fanboys and fangirls that really want to go get it and play with it at 30-something hundred bucks a pop, is there going to be enough of a gravitational pull around the applications of this or will it become niche before it has a chance to break out to the masses?

SC Yeah. It's really interesting, I was doing a lot of digging into this because a part of it is also how has Apple done this in the past and how has it operated when it comes out with something brand new and how does it generate that really killer app. And when you think about everything that they've built, the killer app doesn't come right away. We all want it on day one on launch day. We want to have that killer app sitting in our hands so that we can be like, “Yes. This is why I'm going to buy it,” but I think back to the original iPhone. I bought the original iPhone on the release day. I went and stood in line at the Stonestown Mall in San Francisco.

CB Black turtleneck on? 

SC I did not have the black turtleneck. I had to come from work so I was wearing a suit because I was training financial advisors on technology at the time. But when I think about when I first bought that iPhone gen one, there weren't that many apps on it and there wasn't much you could do. The App Store didn't even exist yet. It functioned well and it did what it was supposed to do, but when you compare it to what it is today, it was nothing like what you have as far as options. It wasn't until three or four years in that you started having killer apps. I started doing a deep dive on Apple and where their products have gone and it got me through this whole memory hole of the Apple Watch and some of the first things that they did. They came out with all sorts of wild stuff that no one wanted for the Apple Watch when it first came out. The one that really stuck with me was, because it has the heart rate monitor on it, you could send your heart rate to someone else with an Apple Watch and it's just the creepiest idea in the world of being like, “Yeah, I want you to feel my heartbeat.” But thinking about all that, it's not a surprise that there's not the killer app yet for the Vision Pro because part of it is that they're feeling out where it's going to go, and a part of that is really the way that you have to build these headsets. There's so much involved in them. By the time that you have gen one out, you're already working on gen three. So there's no way that Apple doesn't already have two generations out of technology that they're building right now to get ready for what's coming next. The thing to keep in mind is that, when you look at Apple products, one of the things that they tend not to vary a lot is form factor. The basic shape of the iPhone today is the same basic shape as the iPhone 1. The Apple Watch, same basic shape as it was on day one. iPad, same basic shape as it was on day one. They don't tend to do a whole lot of variance, so it will be interesting to see if they try to vary how the Apple Vision Pro works because of the commentary that you've gotten around bulkiness, the battery pack, obviously, that's just a weird thing that you have to have in your pocket while you're walking around with it. That's really an interesting area to see where they might start making changes, but even that is going to take a while for that to sort of solidify. 

CB When you said earlier about how most Apple product launches didn't come with the killer app, and in my brain, I'm like, “Well, the iPod,” which I know we're dialing it back, no pun intended, that was a self-contained killer app because the first one was just an MP3 player, a glorified one and a beautiful one, a nice piece of engineering. That changed form factors because it got a heck of a lot smaller, and then of course it just became the phone. I have two sitting right here. I have a Nano, and then I forget the tiny one– the Shuffle.

SC The Shuffle, yeah.

CB And they're like little time capsules because it's got a hundred songs on there and it's from a certain period of time. It's really kind of these little slices of time, so they're heavenly in their own way. With that, I do expect the form factor on something like this, I think it's got to change. You just mentioned that you’ve got to wear an extra battery pack and put that somewhere. They're going to solve that, I'd imagine. At some point you don't need to have the exterior ghostbuster backpack to be rocking this thing. And it's the first one that obviously goes on your face, from Apple at least. And so I would expect that they're going to have some more experimentation with the form factor just because of the nature of this thing. One thing that interests me a lot is also some of the psychology around some of the things that we read about with folks being very, very obviously attached to their phones, and then spikes in things like loneliness and things like that that are in society, just more and more people reportedly being lonely and contributing to other things. What do you think about this form factor? I think about other apps that get me together with people. If I'm on Discord, yeah, it's an app, but then I get a sense of community through it. In this application, through the AVP, how does it lean into bringing people together, although you have to have a singular device on just you? How do they bridge that, do you think? 

SC This is something that Apple has really thought a lot about. Going back to my Apple Watch conversation, originally Apple Watch had this whole hub scenario where all of the people that you cared about, it created a people hub on your Apple Watch. I think they've thought about this stuff a lot. They're trying to recreate it again within the Vision Pro but I think that they might have leaned in some weird directions with it, because if you see the ads and you see the dad standing at the kitchen island and playing soccer with his kid while he's also on the Apple Vision Pro, that's a lofty ideal. And they tried to do things with the eyeballs that are coming out of the screen on the front which is just a little bit uncanny valley for me where it gets a little creepy. But I think that the way my thought process goes with this is that that form factor doesn't really lend to being with other people physically. I personally have the Quest 2 and I've put that thing on when I'm around other people and they are just creeped out by it and they're like, “You need to leave the room.” I've also gone into some of the Meta Worlds and tried to check out what the Metaverse is all about, and it doesn't really feel all that engaging as a ‘trying to interact with other people’ type of a venue. But I think that there's opportunity as we grow this type of technology, but there's some things that I think are standing in the way. One is the fact that– and I've been thinking about this one a lot– why wouldn't people want to adopt this at a high level? What could be standing in their way? And aside from some of the weight issues and some of the things like the battery pack, one of the things that I always latch onto is that people don't want to look silly, and you still look a little bit silly whenever you're wearing VR goggles. So there's a level of that that I think needs to be resolved if they want this to be something where people really operate with it and can use it as a tool to create and build relationships, because it's hard to build a relationship when you feel silly. And so I think that's one of the things that also was the downfall of the Google Glass. As a person who was working in tech in San Francisco when that first came out, everyone who wore it looked silly. It was hard not to ridicule them even if you were jealous at the same time. There's a level of that that I think needs to get resolved. And whether that turns into something where they go down the path that Meta is going where they start trying to also evolve with the AR/MR glasses, or whether or not they stick with the full headset form factor, there's opportunity for you to create a space where people can use it as a relationship-building tool and as a community tool. But I think there's some of that just feeling silly part that needs to get resolved, too. And there's other companies that are out there that are trying to resolve some of this, too, so how can you be in an environment where you have a headset on but you're also interacting with other people in real time? And Disney built basically a multi-directional treadmill.

CB I saw that, the floor.

SC Yeah. And that type of stuff, if that can start taking off, then you can start having people really interacting because you can actually move and have it be more physically like you're in a space. Whereas right now, even when you're on a VR headset as technologically savvy as the Apple Vision Pro, you still know that you're looking through a lens and you know that you're in a physical space and you're not actually in a different place.

CB So talking about looking silly and then it being a preventative measure for how you would want to be seen in society, would you wear that around people? And then of course you see on Twitter or X, the dude in the Cybertruck wearing the Apple Vision Pro in the Cybertruck and the Cybertruck is driving itself and he's there just doing whatever computing he's doing on his Apple Vision Pro. That gets quickly tagged with, “Oh my gosh, this is the biggest–” I won't say the word, so there's negative connotations there as well. And then if we bring it back to the Google Glass, what's interesting is, yes, early, clearly, it fell on its face or failed. And from a form factor, it was quite a bit obviously less. My recollection of Google Glass was, “Let's make information more accessible so that you don't have to be touching a screen or down on your phone.” I think they were trying to solve that and get ahead of that with zombie people walking around the city just looking at their phone but running into street lights and stuff like that or into a manhole cover because they’re just on their phone. I think that was an early attempt to say, “We need to try to extract humans who are so attached to their phone.” And I'm guilty of it too, I'm on the thing all the time. It had a bit of a refined elegance even if it was quite early. And now Apple Vision Pro, while they have the commercial with the dad playing soccer in the kitchen, that's like me on my phone scrolling Discord or scrolling Twitter while I kick a ball to my son who's there. I'm not doing both, because human brains don't work that way. If I'm staring at my phone doom scrolling while I kick a ball, one of those things is happening without my mind on it, maybe both, and I'm not sure that's better either. 

SC Oh, absolutely.

CB So looking back now, was that form factor maybe more right or more effective for bringing humans into actual physical space more than we see with the Apple Vision Pro? 

SC I think in the long term it is. If I look at even just the Apple Vision Pro ads, they had one ad that's just all of these different people putting on eyewear of some variety. So you have Doc Brown putting on his silver glasses in Back to the Future 2, and you’ve got Geordi La Forge–

CB Snoopy. Oh, yeah. It was great.

SC Snoopy and all that. And the part of that ad that always sort of gets me is when we start thinking about Iron Man. Iron Man starts off with having this whole interface that's within this massive helmet that's within this massive suit that he had to build, and by the time that you get to the end of that series, he's just wearing glasses and those glasses are doing all of those same things and being able to interact with his environment and you don't even know that it's happening for him. And I think that's more where we're going to end up heading eventually when technology can catch up. The problem is that technology is nowhere near being able to do that yet, but this is sort of getting us in the right direction. It's one of the things where passthrough for Apple Vision Pro is really good. It's surprising how well you can see all of the little elements around you and not recognize the fact that it's really a video that's being pumped into your eyes and it's not reality. But eventually if you can take that piece out of it where you actually are looking at reality, I think that's a little bit more compelling for a standard consumer where you can give me context to the things that are going on around me without me necessarily needing to dive into my phone and go and look at something, but instead you can give me contextual messages when I want them or give me information about my environment that's changing, tell me if the weather's about to shift, things like that through my glasses and be able to see that. And also people are much more accustomed to seeing people walking around in glasses than they are with a giant headset on their heads so it's going to be a little bit more accessible from that perspective as well. So I think there's more opportunity in that space. Whether or not it's all going to go in that direction is sort of iffy to me because I love the idea of AR and MR glasses, I think that's a really cool concept. I got to play with the Google Glass when it first came out because we had one in our little innovation lab at work at the time, and it was really contextually cool, it just didn't have anything that you could really do with it that was as great as it needed to be. Thinking about where we're heading, I think that's more along the lines of where people would be more comfortable. But when you look at what's actually in the market today, when you look at the Meta version of the AR glasses, all they're geared towards is influencers. They just have a camera that can then do live streaming and that's the main point of them, to livestream what people are actually doing. And I think until they can get people to really buy in and be willing to spend a little bit of money on these things, they're going to continually go to those types of use cases that are more about people trying to leverage their own lives instead of trying to benefit from this cool technology that exists.

CB And I can't help but think about the new Sphere out in Las Vegas. We see all the videos of U2 playing there and others playing there. That's a physical, immersive experience and it's absolutely gorgeous and it's so great. It's a cool venue, one of one in the world so far, and it's a physical thing that you have to go to. All right, cool. And that's immersive. So when I think of immersive and think of spatial computing and think of the Apple Vision Pro, that is the direction that they seem to be leaning into– we can immerse you and layer and really drive value in that way. Then there's the other things you were just touching on that are more AI devices that are really getting even more minimalist. There seems to be kind of two roads and maybe there's enough room for both to be successful. But there are products out there, the Humane Pin or the Rabbit R1, these very minimal AI-driven pieces that you can just wear. Or we talked about the Shuffle earlier. It appears that there are these two paths that are kind of going in very different directions from, “We want the most minimal interface, maybe even zero buttons period, nothing,” all the way over to, “We want spatial computing just immersing you.” And then to even take that further, then you've got Elon Musk literally putting chips onto people's brains to say, “We're going to blend these interfaces anyway, so y'all got to catch up.” Does one have to win? Is there space for both? 

SC I think there's space for both. It's also about what the goals are for each one of them. So if you look at the Humane Pin or the R1, the goal is to create this sort of app-less future, which, as someone who's been building mobile apps for like 15 years, is both scary and exciting to hear someone saying, “Hey, let's go to an app-less future.” But there's opportunity to sort of blend that with a more immersive tool, because a part of when you think of something like the Humane AI Pin is like being in Star Trek where you have your little communicator that's sitting on your chest and you're able to do anything with it. But the real world use cases require a lot of integrations, and so part of, as a technology company, what we think about is how does that thing work so that way we can then see what the value that we could provide is. I was actually watching a great clip because I was doing my deep dive on Apple and it was a great clip of someone asking Steve Jobs about a specific technology and why he wasn't buying into using it, and his response was great, which was that the technology isn't the important part. The value that we provide using technology is the important part. Because once you provide the value, it's easy to come up with what the technology is that you want to use to create that value. It's creating the value that's the hard part. So it's really what value do I create with that Humane AI Pin and how do they continue to provide that value, and it’s really difficult when you’re trying to think of how I just create an infinite number of integrations that an AI can interact with. Until we can get to the point where an AI can build those interactions itself, this is a lot of work that you’ve got to put in to make it happen. So what's the value in doing something like that as opposed to having a more immersive world that you can sort of see through and be able to actually have a specific pod where you're going in and saying, “Hey, this is the app that I want to use so I can perform this function.” There's room for both of them to grow, but it's a matter of really focusing as a team building one of these things on what value am I providing. I think sometimes we miss that as a technology landscape generally. Some of the time it's like, “Hey, I've got this cool thing and I want to use it and I don't really know what I'm going to do with it yet, but I want to get it out there because it's so cool.” And I think there's a certain element of the Vision Pro that has that. It has all of these great pieces of technology in there that are new, they're exciting, but what the specific logic and use case is is still being worked out and the value is still being worked out which is why there's a lot of the negativity on the side of, “Well, what is this thing really going to do for me?” 

CB In your professional world, obviously you advise, for the most part, Fortune 1000's, global 1000's, large-scale companies, on getting opinions into, “This is the technology horizon, here's what's coming, and here's how one of three things.” Number one– does this technology matter? Does it matter, yes or no? If it doesn't, I want to know that pretty quickly. I'd like to know that early on that it doesn't matter maybe yet, maybe it's something we come back to. That's something I'd like to check the box on. The second one is, okay, it does matter and it could extend a current portfolio. We have certain products that we are ready in market with that it could extend. Or the third one– this could actually transform the business model. We could use this as a platform to reinvent ourselves, and if we don't and if we're late, then we're subject to some harsh disruption, so let's ought not be late. If you're consulting with tech executives out there, how do you encourage them and what steps do you say, “Hey, look. You want to tinker? You really want to understand Apple Vision Pro and how it can impact you?” How do you even begin a journey like that? 

SC I think my way of addressing it, to go back to the conversation we were just having, is to first say, “What is the value that we want to provide?” And some of the time it's just what is the biggest hardship that you have in your business today. I'm a big space nerd, as you can tell by my shirt. I love thinking about space and learning about space, and one of the things that's going on right now is they're trying to build new lunar landers to go and go back to the moon. And one of the struggles that we're really having is that, when the space race was happening, we were willing to pour in as much money as was needed to go into the space race and make sure that we were the first people on the moon. That's not the world that we live in anymore. Now there's a lot more restrictions on budgets, there's a lot more things that we need to do in order to sort of get to the right world, so the cost that they come up with is really high for building a lunar lander because each one of them is bespoke. They don't have a specific way of building them because they never needed to build out that process. So is there a way that you can use some combination of AI, VR, MR to say, “Hey, let's build out a physical world that is exactly the way that we want it to be. Let's build out a physical representation of the moon with all of the right physics to it,” and then see what happens if we design these types of lunar landers in different ways. All of a sudden you go from, “Hey, I need to build a physical lunar lander that's going to cost me $250 million for each one that I build,” to, “Hey, let's build out a piece of software for 3 or 4 million dollars and then put it within these different contexts and then see how we can then iterate on top of that.” That way, when we actually start doing a physical build out, we know more and we can think about it in a different way. So more of the direction that I would want to take is what's the biggest problems that you have? What are the most expensive problems that you have and how can they be solved in a different way than you're solving them today with the technology that's available?

CB Love the topic, and I'm a bit of a space and astrophysics nerd myself so I certainly could get behind all those. And what you're describing there is next gen modeling. We do that with lots of things, whether that's weather, or you name it, financial models, and we already do that in many different facets of business so that we can model things out, and then from there you could gain some knowledge, narrow in on approaches, and then start taking a next step and saying, “Okay, this bunch of approaches actually shows the most promise. Let's take that path up the mountain because that one looks the most promising.” And as the data modeling and as these technologies evolve and get better, you can get closer and closer to the pin of reality, which is really, really cool. So it's certainly a fun use case to think through. And of course, in a past life I did lots of work with NASA, and we were doing crowdsourcing challenges for NASA. Very often algorithms or different challenges to help them solve some big hairy problems like the best way to position the ISS given all these variables, things like that, and we'd run a crowdsourcing competition. Highly successful, really, really cool, and then we would take those stories to market and then the response we would get was like, “Hey, that's cool, but we're not NASA,” over and over and over again. I'm like, “Yes, we understand you're not NASA, and yes, you're not operating an ISS, there’s only one of those.” And it's kind of the point. If NASA can take the application in that case using a crowd to go help them solve algorithmic challenges, well then you've got things inside your organization, predictive analytics and computer vision problems, where we could apply the same tactic to get you some extreme value outcomes. And I think putting that lens back to Apple Vision Pro or other AR/VR/MR, and applying that lens and going, “Look, you don't have to be the cool kids to find value in these new technologies.” In fact, I think this should be a part of the DNA to challenge yourself, and then work with a partner that understands it and say, “Is there value there for us?” Hey, we're a bank. We are a traditional bank. Yes, we have a mobile app, and yes, we have physical buildings. I don't know, Scott. I don't know if there's a need for, besides a banking app inside an AVP headset, I don't know what else they could do. But I guess part of the challenge though, too, is how do you apply these new technologies to what are traditional businesses and get the right momentum and make sure they're not just fluff. 

SC Absolutely. 

CB You're doing it for sincerity that you could solve an actual business challenge, which I think often innovation gets put into a big theater very often. You do this cool thing, but it's never going to get to the market, so what was the point? So how do you cross that chasm with clients or get them closer so they don’t feel like they're wasting time or what is precious capital with experimentation? 

SC I think it's about setting the right goals for experimentation. If the goal of experimentation is just to experiment, that's not a good reason to do it. The reason is to create a hypothesis and then really be a scientist about it. We're creating a hypothesis and then saying what worked and what didn't work, and then trying to find the value. Because in your banking example, I spent a ton of years in the FinTech space and one of the guys that I worked with ran our innovation lab and he literally built out of a virtual bank teller. And being able to walk into a virtual bank and then talk to a virtual bank teller didn't provide any value, but it did provide new opportunities for us to think differently about it. So it's like, “Okay, well there's not a whole lot of things that we can do with that, but could we then take that virtualized experience and then turn it into a physical experience?” I might not be able to go and talk to a teller, but could I create an environment where I can now use my phone to unlock an ATM kiosk? So when you're in a big city, a lot of ATMs are behind a locked door. Sometimes they need you to put your card in. Instead, you could use your phone. There's different opportunities of ways that we can start changing the way that we think about technology by creating a hypothesis, doing some experimentation around it, and then quickly figuring out what worked and what didn't work. And a lot of the rapid prototyping that we do really focuses on that as the concept, because none of us are perfect, none of us know everything. We're all sort of making things up as we go and hoping that we get it right, but it's a lot easier to not just hope that you're going to get it right but say, “Hey, I'm going to put specific parameters around what's getting it right versus what's getting it wrong and have learnings that I can create out of either scenario.” Because when we're in this sort of rapidly changing technology space like we're in today and have been for 20-ish years, the value isn't in getting it right the first time. The value is in being able to look critically at what you're doing and not take any of the issues that come out of it personally, but instead say, “This is an awesome learning opportunity. Whether I succeed or I fail, I can get something out of this and really turn it into a value proposition that'll make things better in the long run because of this experiment that I went through.” So that's really what I think of when I think of how we can help with innovation– create really self-contained experiments that are quick for us to run and then figure out where they work and where they don't work and then let that be sort of our guiding light for how we move forward. 

CB I love all that. I think it makes good sense and it's pragmatic because you can be both. You can be pragmatic with your approach so there's consistency and measurability while you're taking visionary shots. Those two things can absolutely coexist, and in fact, they kind of need each other. 

SC Absolutely. 

CB And so circling back to the Apple Vision Pro to close us out, you tinkered with it, there's big question marks there still in terms of will it get the mass appeal, will it get the mass numbers of people using it, and then will the breakthrough apps come as they certainly did for iPhone, which is still dominating out there. So if you had to place a 50/50 bet in the, “Will we get the killer apps next three to four years? Will it be a successful piece of hardware that is widely adopted?” What do you think as it stands in early 2024?

SC I think it's a mix of answers. I think, yes, it will get the killer app, for sure. I think that's coming, it's just a matter of where it's going to come from. I think that mass adoption I'm a little bit bearish on just because of the fact that I still go back to the looking silly part. Until they get that resolved, I feel like that's going to hold it back from getting the wide adoption that you get from an iPhone or even an Android phone. I think there's still some changes that need to be made by Apple before they can get it to that mass adoption, but I think that the killer apps might come from the enterprises more than they come from the consumer world before we start taking off really with more of a large adoption model for it. 

CB It's going to be extremely interesting to watch, what a time to be alive. There's so much great technology.

SC It’s fun, man.

CB Look, there's plenty of things that are sideways in the world, but different podcasts can cover those things. We're going to be those optimists and technology optimists in embracing what's here now and what's coming next and I think we had a really fun discussion around a lot of that stuff today, Scott. So very much appreciate you coming on Catalyst, lending the first-person aspects of it, and then also kind of doing some vision casting or future casting on what we think will be not just for the Apple Vision Pro, but for like-minded, or in that same genre of these next-gen wearables that we shall see. Will humans ever get used to it? Or is it just going to be implanted in our brain and then we're just one blended interface? Is that the reality? I guess we'll have to pick that up in maybe a part two sometime there, Scott. 

SC Sounds good, Clinton. Great talking to you. 

CB Okay, you've been hearing from Scott Campagna, our Emerging and Immersive Technologies Lead at Launch by NTT DATA. And again, Scott, thank you so much. Hey, listeners out there, if you're experimenting with the Apple Vision Pro or other headsets, other things, chime in, let us know what you think, drop us a comment, and we'd love to understand your experiences. Are you bearish? Are you bullish? What say you? Thanks again, Scott, for joining us, because in this studio, we believe in shipping software over slideware, that fast will follow smooth, and aiming to create digital experiences that move millions is a very worthy pursuit. Join us next time as the pursuit continues on Catalyst, the Launch by NTT DATA Podcast.

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