Getting future workers excited for the jobs they might have tomorrow can be challenging, especially when many young workers tend to enjoy challenging themselves with new tasks. Dr. Björn Schwerdtfeger says that AR training can allow those workers to qualify themselves for all sorts of tasks, and have fun doing it, to boot. [Transcript coming shortly] Alan: Hey, everybody, and thanks for joining in on the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. I’m really excited today. I have Dr. Björn Schwerdtfeger from Germany. He has more than 15 years experience in augmented reality. Together with the German industry, he’s evaluated almost every idea for AR in applications in the industry. He’s been a co-inventor of Pick-By-Vision at TU Munich. And during that time — when computers for AR glasses were still carried in large backpacks — Björn holds a PhD in industrial augmented reality as a serial entrepreneur. And among other things, his company, AR Experts, is advising about a third of Germany’s most important production companies, and is shaping their augmented reality roadmaps. You can learn more about them at ar-experts.de. And they have another product that they’re gonna be talking about today. It’s ar-giri.com. Björn, welcome to the show, my friend. Björn: Yeah. Welcome, Alan. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you online. I’m looking forward to this podcast. Alan: It’s so exciting. The work that you’ve been doing over the last few years — like a decade and a half — is really starting to come to fruition now. I mean, all of the hard work that you and your team have done to evangelize a technology that — let’s be honest — 15 years ago, the technology really wasn’t ready for the market. Tell us, how did you get into this, into AR? Björn: It was actually quite funny, while still studying at the university, computer science, and then somewhere else, augmented reality which popped up. And someone had a demonstrator, where someone took some glasses and glued a webcam — we had external webcams earlier — just hot-glued to some glasses and using some [unclear] stuff and highlighting it. I think it was just a cube. A virtual cube… And it was so fascinating that you can bring this computer interface into the real world. Quite a long time ago. But it was really nice. Alan: Björn, did you say there was a webcam hot-glued to a pair of glasses? Björn: Exactly. That’s how we did augmented reality 15, 20 years ago. Alan: Amazing. You are one of the OG, the originals of this industry. You’ve been building and advising brands and companies around their strategy for production. What is the one thing in augmented reality right now that you’ve seen the most ROI? Björn: It’s probably… we’ve seen a lot of companies trying to do everything. Basically every single one of us have tried to out, in the last three decades, and failed with it. And we’re figuring out what is actually the core of augmented reality. And the core of augmented reality is not– it’s not a measurement tool, it’s not a tool for everything. It looks like a display, and it is a good display. But where its core is, where it’s so good in, is in communication. It displays communication and augmented reality is big. It’s so much more close to your reality, that perception is getting much better. So what you tried to communicate with exosheets, nice PowerPoints; it’s getting so closer to the user with augmented reality. And they figured out that the communication got so much better using augmented reality — using *good* implemented augemnted reality, it’s quite important — you can do a lot of mistakes there. But this is helping so much. And that’s why you’re seeing currently augmented reality mainly in marketing, because marketing is a form of co...