Verizon’s XR development lead, TJ Vitolo, dreams of a day where he can download an entire TV series in an instant, or visualize info about the entire world with AR glasses, even living in a connectivity dead zone by the beach. In his position, he’s able to work to make that dream a forthcoming reality by developing the technology that will make 5G possible. Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today, I’ve got an amazing guest, TJ Vitolo. He is the director and head of XR Technology Development at Verizon. Today, he leads the commercial strategy and product execution behind Verizon’s VR, AR and 360 organization environment. Recently, TJ and his team launched AR Designer, the world’s first streaming-based AR tool kit that allows brands and developers to quickly and easily create augmented reality experiences, with no technical expertise. You can visit Verizon.com or envrmnt.com. I want to welcome TJ to the show. Welcome. TJ: Hey, thanks for having me, Alan. Alan: Oh, it’s my absolute pleasure. I’m so excited to have you on the show. This is like– all the things you guys are doing, from working with the accessibility team at Cornell Tech, to your acquisition of Riot, to working with the Sacramento Kings, Yahoo! News. There is so much going on at Verizon. You want to just give us a high level summary of what you do, and what the plan is at Verizon for introducing 5G and XR? TJ: It’s quite dynamic here. You know, the VR space is ever evolving. Teams that do a number of things within VR here. But specifically you mentioned Riot. Between our team and Riot, we manage both of the content and creative end of XR, and that’s Riot. And our team manages the technical– technology side of virtual reality. So really, my team is focused on building tools and enablers, systems, platforms on the 5G network, sort of the underlying side of XR, to help accelerate and grow the adoption of the technology. On the other side, Riot’s all about the product and the creative storytelling around VR, which really brings these things to life for people. Alan: So you’ve got both the technical side and then the creative. And this is something that I’ve been harping on with customers as well, and just the industry at large: that this industry is no longer about just making products. And you look at the VC investments and they’re investing in platforms and products, but you still need people to create the content. And I think you guys have found that balance with Riot. What do you see as kind of the future of how we create this content, is it going to be user generated versus studio content, or a mixture of both? TJ: It’s going to be a mixture of both. User generation is quite difficult today. One of the products you mentioned, we launched was AR Designer. And really the foundation for that was to put the power of augmented reality and virtual reality into the hands of even the most common user of technology. We built this platform initially with the mindset that schoolteachers– and not by any means that they’re simpletons, but the fact of the matter is they’re teaching students, young children, and they’ve got to have a very effective way to do that, efficient way to do that. And so when we were building this tool, we baseline on children as the audience, schoolteachers as the user of the tool, to produce something that’s really effective. So I think you’re going to see as VR/AR becomes more ubiquitous, access is going to be much greater, and more in the hands of users. At the end of the day, there’s always going to be the community outside of the content or the UGC community producing content. And I think those are the folks who are...