Macy’s has been in the news a lot this week, and many are worried about what the latest round of store closures mean for the long-running retailer, and the future of in-person shopping in general. But Macy’s resident XR guru Mohamed Rajani came by our podcast a little while back to suggest that the future of retail exists in the virtual world. Alan: Welcome to the XR for Business Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today’s guest is Mohamed Rajani, responsible for VR and AR initiatives at Macy’s. Mohamed is part of the new Business Development and Innovation team at Macy’s, and is responsible for driving change through the development of new retail concepts and partnerships amidst an evolving retail landscape. “Mo” also leads Macy’s immersive technology initiatives, including VR and AR in furniture, which is removing key friction points for the customer, enabling an AR view in-room capabilities on the Macy’s mobile app. To learn more about the work he’s doing, you can visit macys.com. Mohamed, welcome to the show. Mohamed: Thank you. Thanks for having me, Alan. Happy to be here. Alan: We had the opportunity to to have a few calls prior to Augmented World Expo. We were on a panel together, and you were talking about the amazing work that you’re doing at Macy’s. So let’s start unpacking that. Mo, tell us about what you guys are doing at Macy’s. Mohamed: So just a little bit of context that our team does. Our team’s about two and half years old. I’ve been with the company for over eight years, across a variety of different functions. But about two and a half years ago, as a company, we decided to establish a dedicated team that’s purely focused on what’s new, what’s next. That’s focused on the emerging consumer landscape, the emerging technology landscape, and making sure that the Macy’s brand continues to be relevant not only today, but 10, 20, 30 years from now. So as a team, we’re purely focused on looking at new business models, new concepts, emerging technologies, but then really tying those to our strategic businesses. We want to make sure that any new innovation that we bring into the organization has a lasting impact. But more importantly, a meaningful impact that is actually moving the needle. So if we think about from that context of how we ended up playing in virtual reality and augmented reality, in our business we have a strategic business fillers, and furniture is one of them. It is a business that is high touch, a high margin business, so it’s margin accretive, more profitable to the company, and it’s destination business for us. We’re top of mind for the customer when they’re thinking about furniture. And if you’ve had any experience in buying furniture, it is not a very easy process. It’s one of the few businesses that’s still overwhelmingly physical purchases. More business happens in-store than online, and by a higher margin. And part of it is just the friction involved in it. You don’t know how it’s going to look, how it’s going to fit. And it’s a business that we, as a company, need to fortify. It’s a business that if we want to remain relevant for the next five, 20 years, we want to make sure that we’re not only fortifying the business, but growing and capturing market share. So is that context, whereas we came across emerging technologies as part of our job, we were navigating the landscape and looking at what’s coming out. This was 2016, into 2017. We started seeing virtual reality technologies, especially in the furniture space, and we started exploring and we wanted to make sure that there was a practical application to a business there. A couple of things that align. One was here is a technology that had a practical application and here is a business that was a strategic priority for the company. So our jo...