The VR experience Firing Barry by Talespin is getting a lot of press lately, and on the surface, it may look like a slightly uncanny valley way to train someone how to give an old fella the can. But Talespin CEO Kyle Jackson tells Alan it’s more than that; it’s a tool to help humans flex their core competencies in everything from leadership skills to confidence-building.  Alan: Hey, everybody, Alan Smithson here, the XR for Business Podcast. Coming up next, Kyle Jackson, founder of Talespin. You may have seen Barry the virtual human that you can fire in real life. We’ll be talking to them about their enterprise software solutions that leverage immersive technology to transform the way global workforces, learn, work,, and collaborate. We’ll also be discussing how you can use immersive technologies as an assessment tool to better prepare your workforce for exponential growth. All that and more on the XR for Business Podcast. Kyle, welcome to the show, my friend. Kyle: Hey. Thanks, Alan. Thanks for having me. Alan: Oh, it’s so exciting. Ever since I saw the video that popped up of Barry, the lovable older gentleman avatar that you can fire. How did that come about? Tell us about Talespin, and how did you get here, where you are now? Kyle: Yeah, Barry became famous very quickly, because it’s such an ironic idea. And that’s really what I think caught people’s attention; the idea that you could use virtual humans for soft skills training was something that just seemed sci-fi and ironic. But then once you started to peel back the layers of it, it just starts to make a lot of sense.So how we got there, was we started looking at all of the future skills gaps, surveys, research, everything that was surfacing from the Shift Commission, to the World Economic Forum, to McKinsey Global Institute. And we just kept seeing — obviously opposite AI and automation and robotics, all the things that are going on one side of technology — that there was this increasing index toward soft skills for some of the most underserved areas for businesses going forward. We’re building this platform which is supposed to help transfer skills and really align us to the future of work. And every single survey says soft skills is one of the things we should be looking at. And we went, “Wow, is there anything we can do there?” The thing that was most important for us in thinking about that was we have to hit emotional realism to do this. This isn’t like a point-and-click replacement. It needs to be something that when I’m sitting in there and I’m opposite Barry or any other virtual human now, that I believe the emotions and the frustration and all the things that are thrown at me. And to do that kind of at scale. From both an assessment standpoint, content, and deployment to large companies. Alan: So how did you guys overcome the Uncanny Valley of Barry? I’ve seen so many human avatars that are almost there, but they got that creepy feeling. And if you’re going for emotional realism, creepy is not what you want on the delivery side. Kyle: No. Well, we kind of pulled up short in our opinion. So we were pushing further than where we landed. And you can get to even more photo-real than Barry is. But soon as you do, you start to push over that ledge and it starts to really be creepy. We’re kind of right in the sweet spot of north of Pixar, but not hitting realism. And that seems to work. We focused a lot on micro-expressions and figuring out like a programmatic way to add a lot of micro-expression to the silent moments too, because I think one of the things that technologists immediately do is we had to figure out how to do animation systems, lip sync systems and things like that for when people are talking, but especially in soft skills, a good majority of the hairy stuff is the unspoken. And so we w...