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 forBusiness Podcast with your host, Alan Smithson. Today, I've got anamazing guest, TJ Vitolo. He is the director and head of XRTechnology Development at Verizon. Today, he leads the commercialstrategy and product execution behind Verizon's VR, AR and 360organization environment. Recently, TJ and his team launched ARDesigner, the world's first streaming-based AR tool kit that allowsbrands and developers to quickly and easily create augmented realityexperiences, with no technical expertise. You can visit Verizon.comor envrmnt.com. I want towelcome TJ to the show. Welcome.
TJ: Hey, thanks for having me,Alan.
Alan: Oh, it's my absolutepleasure. I'm so excited to have you on the show. This is like-- allthe things you guys are doing, from working with the accessibilityteam at Cornell Tech, to your acquisition of Riot, to working withthe Sacramento Kings, Yahoo! News. There is so much going on atVerizon. You want to just give us a high level summary of what youdo, and what the plan is at Verizon for introducing 5G and XR?
TJ: It's quite dynamic here. Youknow, the VR space is ever evolving. Teams that do a number of thingswithin VR here. But specifically you mentioned Riot. Between our teamand Riot, we manage both of the content and creative end of XR, andthat's Riot. And our team manages the technical-- technology side ofvirtual reality. So really, my team is focused on building tools andenablers, systems, platforms on the 5G network, sort of theunderlying side of XR, to help accelerate and grow the adoption ofthe technology. On the other side, Riot's all about the product andthe creative storytelling around VR, which really brings these thingsto life for people.
Alan: So you've got both thetechnical side and then the creative. And this is something that I'vebeen harping on with customers as well, and just the industry atlarge: that this industry is no longer about just making products.And you look at the VC investments and they're investing in platformsand products, but you still need people to create the content. And Ithink you guys have found that balance with Riot. What do you see askind of the future of how we create this content, is it going to beuser generated versus studio content, or a mixture of both?
TJ: It's going to be a mixtureof both. User generation is quite difficult today. One of theproducts you mentioned, we launched was AR Designer. And really thefoundation for that was to put the power of augmented reality andvirtual reality into the hands of even the most common user oftechnology. We built this platform initially with the mindset thatschoolteachers-- and not by any means that they're simpletons, butthe fact of the matter is they're teaching students, young children,and they've got to have a very effective way to do that, efficientway to do that. And so when we were building this tool, we baselineon children as the audience, schoolteachers as the user of the tool,to produce something that's really effective. So I think you're goingto see as VR/AR becomes more ubiquitous, access is going to be muchgreater, 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 orthe UGC community producing content. And I think those are the folkswho are going to synthesize really compelling, powerful stories tousers to grow that adoption. So I think you're seeing a lot with UGC,where it sort of leads the way to broader, more institutionalcreation of content, but it could very much see a [inaudible].
So walk me through your platform thatyou guys have built. Was it in the market already or-- walk usthrough that.
It was in the market. So we pulled backon that platform specifically because we had changed the strategy ofour team. Initially, I was brought into the organization aroundcommercialization for Envrmnt -- which is Verizon's XR organization-- and we wanted to generate revenue off of the XR ecosystem. Andthere's a fair amount of money out there to be made. But at the endof the day is when we started to launch our commercial products, westarted to build up and prepare for our 5G launch strategy. And thetask of my engineering team was to go down a few different levels inthe technology stack, and start building platform enablers into the5G network that will drive the adoption acceleration growth of AR/VR.So the tool we still actually use today, we've got over 10,000 usersinternally in Verizon that use it across our training organizations,our HRO organizations, our network operations organizations. So it'sbeen very successful. There is still a plan to commercialize that inthe future, but the idea was that we wanted to pin it against our 5Glaunch, to show what 5G can do for the XR space. That's where I'msuper excited, it's about what 5G specifically does for XR technologymoving forward.
Alan: Absolutely, one of thevideos that I watched of you was a retail demo, where you took aphone -- just a regular phone with 5G -- and you pointed at someproducts on the shelf, and it not only recognized one product andgave you like that standard AR image recognition and showed someoverlay information, but it recognized all the products at once. AndI thought that was really a great way of showing how 5G will enableso much more than just simple AR that we're used to now using ourphones. And then as that moves to glasses, you'll be able to walkdown and say, "I'm on a keto diet." and walk down theaisles and anything that's keto will show up in green. I think that'swhere it's going. And that demo was really incredible.
TJ: Thank you. Yeah, I think AR,from a mobile standpoint, has been put in this bubble, because of 4G.And that's one of the examples of what 5G is going to do to AR. It'sgoing to make it highly functional, highly useful, and a lot moreentertaining in that space. Computer vision, graphics rendering.Those are the two sort of fundamental underlying technologies betweenvirtual reality and augmented reality. And what we did there is thatwe expanded the capability of computer vision by offloading whattypically is done on a mobile device over the 5G network -- soextreme amount of bandwidth, extremely low latency -- to a networknode that sits within our network, that is very high powered from aprocessing standpoint. It allows us to offload all of that computervision information and provide a response back in real time. This issomething only possible over 5G and only possible with our net edgenetwork. Fundamentally, what this does is, it ends the currentlimitations of augmented reality, blows them out of the water, interms of their limitations.
Alan: You know, you're takingall the compute power off the device, and putting it into the edge.You've been recognized at the Edge Awards already, winning BestContribution to Edge Computing for R&D and then GreatestCommercial Potential for Edge Concept. So you guys are clearlyleading the way for this. One of the things I saw last week in Wiredwas startups building a new chip. It's an artificial intelligencechip, and it's the size of an iPad. Rather than everybody's trying tomake them smaller and smaller, these guys went the opposite way andmade a huge chip, and it can do trillions and trillions ofcalculations. But obviously you can't put a chip the size of an iPadin your phone. But having the ability to offload that to the cloudand have the processing power when you need it, where you need it,but only offloaded into the cloud was really incredibly powerful fornot only rendering, but also capturing the data that's around you. Alot of people don't realize that as much data as you're pushing fromthe cloud down to the graphics processing and all that, you're alsocapturing data from point cloud data using RGB cameras, or all thephones will start to have infrared camera sensors now. So being ableto capture that data, send it to cloud, make sense of it, all withinmilliseconds, I think is really going to be a game changer for VR andAR.
TJ: It's a massive amount ofdata, too. If you look at all those different sensors on thosedevices, it's crazy if you look at the future of volumetric video.Well informed on Microsoft came out and said, hey, their studio doestwo terabytes a minute of data capture.
Alan: Yeah, the Metastage.
TJ: With a handful of camerasand that sort of tech, texture, and depth, and other sensors. Butyou're right, the thing that's going to close the gap between reallypowerful technology in your hands is extremely low latent,high-bandwidth network connected to computer-- very high power,scalable computer network. And it's not just AR/VR, right? It's a lotof things, although I'm focused on AR/VR. We are now going to beputting supercomputers in everybody's hands.
Alan: So, what 5G XR use case--your focus is in XR. If you take 5G to the nth degree and 5G and edgecomputing, you've got autonomous vehicles, you've got drones, you'vegot-- there's all sorts of ways. But let's focus on 5G and XR for asecond. What use cases do you guys as Verizon see as happening first?I mean, we're already seeing it in enterprise, where they're usingheads-up displays to help field and service workers, and machineworkers, factory workers repair things, and see-what-I-see, and allof these types of things. But what do you guys-- what's your roadmapfor the next 10 years, let's say?
TJ: Yeah, it's an interestingquestion. So our organization fundamentally is working on theplatform and services that will enable very thin, lightweightaugmented reality or mixed reality glasses. So I think that's one bigstep, is to move away from the clunky form factor to something that'ssuper sleek, and super powerful. So how can I have a pair of standardRay-Bans look and act like a Hololens times 50?
Alan: [laughs] Oh my god, that'sa huge quote. [laughs] Think about that. "How do I make a pairof Ray-Bans look and act like a Hololens times 50?" Oh man.
TJ: That's the platform that we're building, right? That's the vision. Now, on top of that, once you do that, the world sort of your oyster in terms of what the use cases are. And enterprise is definitely the first entry point into that, because we will go through this evolutionary process with hardware for glasses, that it's not just the compute-- and we're solving compute problems, but you do have to solve the display problem, and you have to solve a couple other things. But ultimately, at the end of the day, reduce battery power on that device, reduce battery size, reduce battery power by reducing compute on that device. And then ultimately, at the end of the day, through that step by step process, you get something in. But in the meantime, you're going to get that adoption in the enterprise space. And so we look at -- from a use case standpoint within our enterprise organization -- things like worker safety, and obviously things around efficiency and improvements of workers within environments. And specifically in the industrial space right now, which seems to be where a lot of the opportunity sits, at least from companies that have been coming to us, interested in the space. There's only so much that you can do to [inaudible] certain verticals within a market to adopt a technology. And a lot of them are a lot more forward thinking than others. So we start there.
Alan: It's interesting that yousay that, because some of the industries that you actually thinkwould be the least technical -- mining, for example, they haven'tchanged in 100 years -- they were one of the first people to jump onthis technology, because they can use it so quickly and so easily inmanufacturing. Old school businesses that you wouldn't think would betechnologically advanced are just making these leaps and bounds now,it's amazing to watch.
TJ: It's amazing and it'samazing cultural thing to watch, in my view. It's like you'd thinkthat these-- some of these industries are so advanced and there's somuch money, but they have old school practices. And then you look atother ones who have been forced to innovate and change their cultureand adopt in these nascent spaces. And you scratch your head and say,"Wow, that's really interesting." And so it kind of throwsyou off-guard. But, you know, that's where you have to go. You haveto go where the people have a sense of urgency and demand around it.And then you make it happen on that front.
Alan: Interesting. I guess whatI'm trying to get at is, what are the 5G XR use cases that Verizonthinks -- or you think -- will make the best use of the new networks,of the new 5G capabilities?
TJ: We're looking at a few with the underlying premise that you're trying to merge the physical and digital worlds together. And so retail was-- is a very big area for us, both front office and back office, or consumer focus and then back office. So if we're looking at the consumer front for a second, we're looking at the really interesting and I think most people can relate to use case. Here's where I go into a retail store, and then I'm always on my phone looking at ratings, reviews, pricing information, and other things with respect to those physical products that are on the shelf. And I spend a lot more time on my phone than I actually do perusing and browsing the stuff on the shelf. And so really what we want to do is merge that physical and digital divide, by having a pair of mixed reality glasses that as you're walking down that store -- using a 5G powered headset -- you're literally taking in all the information within your field of view about a set of products and services. So now I'm standing in front of a set of consumer electronics devices, and I want to know which ones are the best rated, which one has the best value. All the stuff that's typically online, now I can have all that stuff instantly overlaid on top of those products, whether it be makeup or electronics, or even clothing. And then take that off the rack and go and purchase it. So that's one of the retail experiences. Other has a safety component to it, the one that you saw us demo. I have a family. I spend an inordinate amount of time at the grocery store looking at the backs of boxes, if they contain certain allergens for my family. Now I can tell my glasses to filter for products that are gluten-free, [inaudible], or kosher, whatever might be the case, then instantly everything within my field of view will light up based on those requirements.
Alan: Do you think that will bedriven by computer vision picking up the boxes, or do you thinkthey'll be driven by companies, like the grocery stores -- like WholeFoods, for example -- submitting planograms, so it knows what storeyou're in, the planogram knows where the boxes are, will it becombination of both?
TJ: I think it'll be acombination of both, because you've seen it in the QR space. You'veseen stores do it themselves, you've seen third parties do itthemselves. Most of that information is actually publicly available,those databases. And so third parties can actually easily constructthat software, but I think it'll be dependent on obviously thetraining and the learning of that object -- a lot of those imagery ispublicly available -- and then blend it with the publicly availableinformation for those products.
Alan: I know Google and Amazonand pretty much everybody's working on computer vision for products.I want to point my phone at a pair of shoes and say, "What arethose shoes?" And right now we've got a device in our hands thatis pretty powerful and can do a lot of things right now. What aresome of the things that we can do right now with our phones, thatyou're seeing are emerging as killer use cases in this technology?
TJ: That's a great question. Like I said, I think that going back to sort of the chokehold that current existing networks placed on augmented reality, there's a couple areas where I see a big amount of potential for a mobile device. And I think a lot of that fits around potentially markets where you have growing economies. You look at APAC and other areas around the world, where they don't have access to certain types of [inaudible] medical facilities. So one of the things that I saw that was really interesting, is how you could use a mobile phone and computer vision help diagnose patients, by using computer vision and artificial intelligence to look for signs that you wouldn't necessarily be trained or have access to. One of the interesting use cases I saw was to help support a potential phlebotomist out in the field, where they're using a phone to detect veins, so they don't mispuncture a vein in the arm. They could do it right the first time, and completely limit the opportunity for infection.
Alan: I think that's theAccuVein system, isn't it?
TJ: Mm-hm, mm-hm.
Alan: Yeah, it's really great.
TJ: And I think that'stransformative on a world basis, is that anytime you use technologyto add intelligence to give access to underserved or underprivilegedor markets that just don't have the ability to. So we look at thatspace, too. We look at-- we talked about accessibility, I think, alittle bit. We look very much into that space also, as a way to justimprove in general. And I think we share a very similar feeling. It'sabout improving quality of life. It's not about introducing one morething, one more piece of noise into the environment. How can we helpeach other sort through daily life, whether it be from a medicalstandpoint or being inundated with information? How do we make thosethings simple?
Alan: Absolutely. And as moreand more people move into urbanized areas, there's that culture shiftfrom living in the country to living in a city and-- offline, we weretalking about taking our kids camping and stuff. My 11-year-olddaughter made this huge billboard poster and put it by the fire. Itsaid "No cell phones by the campfire." And I think we'rereally getting to the point where the technology is pervasive. It'severywhere we are. My kids sit on the couch and watch TV with theirphone in their hands. And sometimes they've got an iPad and a phone.It's nuts. I don't even know how they focus. And the other day, mydaughter was watching a show, and she had the show in a small windowand she had a game that was related to the show in the big window. Soshe had like picture-in-picture, but the show wasn't the dominantpart of it. And I thought that was really interesting, how youth arestarting to use these technologies. And we've done a lot of work ondelivering people entertainment content. Netflix is using AIalgorithms to give people better movies to watch. Amazon's giving youbetter algorithms to help you purchase better. What I think we needto do is harness those technologies and give kids better ways tolearn. And I think these technologies can really catapult that. Whatare your thoughts around VR, AR, AI in education and training?
TJ: Yeah, we we touched on thisa little bit. And I think the impact is absolutely [inaudible] thatspace, specifically with convergence of people either domestically orinternationally from an education standpoint. I think one of thethings that you might have seen, our team produces a virtual realityplatform called Operation Convergent Response. And the idea behindthat was to aggregate or bring together a number of people withdifferent backgrounds and skillsets into a single virtual environment-- or a war room, essentially -- so that they can help support anatural disaster. So if there was an earthquake, bring an earthquakeexpert, someone who's an expert in fire, someone who's an expert inweather -- or whatever might be the case -- to help quickly triagesort of a situation, without bringing them into a physical location.That's immense also. You can have highly custom education armaments,where you're bringing in specialists in different areas, that holdall under sort of one umbrella. Let's take VR/AR. Someone interestedin VR/AR, you could bring in an expert in virtual reality, expert inaugmented reality, expert in computer vision, and then you cancoalesce and bring all together for the students. Very specificinterests in that space, into that area, into that arena. And withvirtual reality, you can create a 100,000 square foot space in a1,000 square space. You put 75 TV's on the wall, you put one TV onthe wall--
Alan: Yeah, it's great.
TJ: --you can literally createthe most dynamic environment that works for those students. Andtouching on artificial intelligence for a sec, one of the mostamazing things I think that comes out of virtual reality training --and also in the medical space and other areas -- is the ability foranalytics platforms to look at every single piece of interactionthat's going on in that space. What does that yield at the end of theday, it yields a very efficient and effective way to help youunderstand where you're improving, where you're falling behind. Andit's amazing because in essence, in a typical education environment,you've got to rely on a teacher -- or a boss, as might be the case --to provide that feedback, and you can't do that for 30 students in aclassroom. But if you've got an analytics platform that's in each oneof those individual students on a case-by-case basis, you can thencustom produce areas in a report where they should be improving andmoving forward. And the amount of advancement we make is just becauseof that little improvement. I think it's absolutely massive.
Alan: You nailed it. By changingthe way we teach and using exponential technologies. It's not even a10x improvement. It's a 100x improvement, a 1,000x improvementbecause we're not even scratching the surface of things like howpeople learn or when they learn. I learn better, maybe from 10 AM to11 AM. That's my maximum capacity, so all the hard stuff maybe Ilearned then, and maybe somebody else learns in the evening. Maybe byusing galvanic response or measuring your heart rate or yourbiometrics, you can then deliver content that is highly personalized,highly contextualized and delivers it at the time of maximumabsorption or retention. And we're already seeing across the board 20to 100 percent improvements in retention rates in training. One ofthe things that you guys did was use VR for hostage and robberytraining. How did that come about?
TJ: It was an interesting one.It was actually during our early commercial stages, we were lookingat different verticals in areas where we can use technology toobviously improve awareness and other things that happen in ourretail environments. It wasn't specifically around hostages, morelike store robberies, which don't happen often. But obviously, whenthey do, how do you train someone in a traditional environment toaddress a burglary situation, especially with someone being held atgunpoint? So we use 360 video. We use actors and we pull together avery immersive experience around both an armed robbery and alsoidentifying risks for theft by immersing them in a 360 world. We didmonitor different bio signs. We also use an analytics platform thatallows us to do gaze tracking and other things. So you saw exactlywhere they were looking. What they were interested in. Were theylooking in the right spots? Were they looking in the wrong spots? Andwe were able to produce a relatively detailed report based on that,and what that allowed us to do is it allowed us to understand, asmuch as you could in a replicated environment, what is the normalresponse for a retail rep when these situations occur? And then itallowed us to cater a training program around that, that helpedbetter prepare them for a situation. So we use it as a way to gatheranalytics, which then yielded a ton of information for us that wecould never capture in a -- even if you did this in a real-lifescenario and you brought in some actors and you brought in a rep andyou them in-- you wouldn't be able to understand where they werelooking, how they were acting, how they were responding, without thistype of analytics in this virtual environment. So because of that, wefelt like we were able to compose a training module that was muchmore advanced than what was in the market today.
Alan: How do you measure thesuccess of that? What are the KPIs that you guys were looking for?
TJ: That's a great question. Andunfortunately, we provided a lot of the technical support andbackground for that while our learning development team managed theKPIs. But I think some of the key KPIs that we used was sort of thispost mortem experience where we then place them back into into thatexperience with their training to see where there are improvements.And specifically, we use the gaze data, the biometric data, to thensee how they respond in that situation. And I don't know what thespecific performance improvements were, but I know they wererelatively more significant. That's sort of what's baseline fortypical training. Unfortunately, I don't have that data, but theprocess, the methodology, was to re-immerse them back into thatsituation with the tools that they now have. Again, because it'scase-by-case and see where they were looking, how they are acting,how they're responding, so on and so forth.
Alan: I want to shift away fromtraining, because there's so much to unpack here in the long term ofthis technology. 5G is really going to enable a lot. And one of thethings that we have to overcome is some of the challenges. What aresome of the challenges that you see -- or Verizon as a company sees-- as standing in the way of the broad adoption of 5G-powered XR,beyond cheaper headsets and 5G coverage? But what do you see as thebroader challenges around adoption?
TJ: I think adoption isdependent on establishing a community that understands thetechnology, in order to build on that. And that is the other half ofour 5G labs. I own the development side. We also have a 5G lab--multiple 5G labs, spread across the country which provide developersand enterprises access to this technology, so they can understand it.So education is hugely critical. We are very immersed in thetechnical side of things. So we've won those Edge awards, verytechnical. And the work we do, while deeply technical, has to betranslated to a common level. And I think our biggest hurdle andchallenge is making that consumable to the end user. And we aresolving that through our 5G labs. We are providing developers withtraining and access to 5G networks, providing enterprises with a fullview into the capability. So as much as we're having thisconversation here, any CTO or CIO or even CEO listening, visit our 5Glabs. You'll get a full view of what we're doing and how it can applyto your business. There are so many companies across so manyverticals that it really helps them understand and inspire what theywhat they could do with the technology.
Alan: It's interesting that youguys created these 5G labs with the purpose of showing what thetechnology can do. One of the reasons we actually started XR Ignitewas the same thing. We kept seeing all these amazing startups comingup with crazy, amazing ideas on how to use XR and AI, but the theywere missing the business acumen to be able to take thosetechnologies and bring them to a commercialized state. We formed XRIgnite to kind of help bridge that gap between corporations andstartups. And it sounds like you guys are doing the same. Sounds likethere's an interesting fit there. We'll talk offline and see if wecan collaborate.
TJ: Yeah, no, absolutely. Ithink there's there's great opportunity for anyone looking andinterested in it.
Alan: So what is the mostimportant thing that businesses can start to do now to leverage thepower of XR, and AI, and 5G? What can they start doing immediately toreap the benefits?
TJ: Yeah, I think any companyshould -- just like we do here -- is to assign someone from thestrategy side of the business to either bring someone in or to dotheir own objective (and to some extent, subjective) view ofcollection of information. There's so much data out there. There's somuch information out there. You know, the stuff that I'm talkingabout is very topical in the sense that this is stuff that you and Ihave access to. And we're very immersed in this space. Obviously, weknow relatively well, but anyone in any space could find the sameamount of information. I work at a very deep technical level, whichobviously makes not much sense to businesses until we translate thatinto a business function at the end of the day. But one or two peoplein an organization can compile some really compelling amount of dataand information that exists out there, to really help transformbusinesses with this technology. So I think it's just that first stepthat you need to take to say AR, VR; what is this about? Right? Whatdoes this mean to my business? And I think they'll be surprised.
Alan: We actually startedMetaVRse as a consulting firm to help businesses understand how touse this technology, because our long-term vision was alwayseducation. And so we've kind of morphed into consulting on how to usethis technology specifically for education, training, learningmodules and stuff like that. But with XR Ignite, it's pretty broad.There's so many companies out there building such great tech andeverybody is chomping at the bit to do start leveraging 5G. And I hada meeting a couple weeks ago and I got to see the new Samsung s10 5Gphone, and it was the first time I'd ever held a 5G phone in my handand it kind of felt like this new renaissance of technology iscoming, and it's going to come as a tidal wave, because it's beenyears that people have been working on it. I don't know, Verizon'sprobably working on this for a decade. So it's coming and it's goingto come really fast for people. What can consumers do to prepare forthat? Because I think by having a 5G phone is great. It's faster,whatever. But really, what can consumers expect from that?
TJ: If you look at where we werewith 4G and sort of this scale and ubiquity of 4G were in that samephase. -- and not just in this scale, but also in sort of theadvancement of technology -- I think one of the things... so justsort of prefacing this, one of the things that is interesting is thatthe iPhone didn't release a 4G iPhone until about a year and a halflater. And I think once the network launched, I think part of that isbecause there are ramp ups to this technology as it gets exposed andbecomes more accessible to developers, they could start buildingexperiences on top of that, that really validates the valueproposition of 5G. As it stands right now, the biggest valueproposition of 5G is just the ability to download an immense amountof content in a quick amount of time. Right? So I want to downloadentire season The Sopranos through HBO Go, or whatever might be thecase, before I'm about to hop on a plane or I'm going to make a splitsecond decision. You know, I don't have to wait 10, 15, 20 minutes todo that. I can literally do that within 30 seconds or less.
Alan: That's insane.
TJ: It really makes on demand"on demand," right? It used to be that you had to plan somestuff, or-- one of the great things, I have got music service andunfortunately where I am down at the shore on the beach, I don't haveaccess to -- because I'm pretty remote -- to that network. And so Iwant to be able to download an entire alternative 90s collection ofmusic of 10,000 songs in...a minute? Less than that?
Alan: OK. I got to just... whatthe hell, man? I used to be a DJ for 20 years and I remember going tothe record store and you'd buy a record. Then I had a collection ofbooks of CDs, and I remember when my daughter was about 10 and I gaveher my CD collection, and she looked at me, she's like, "what doI need that for? It all fits in my iPod." And now we're talkingabout downloading entire genre of music in seconds.
TJ: It's quite crazy. Again,that's just scratching the surface of 5G. Beyond that, there are alot of other things that we foresee with the implementation of theEdge network that we talked about and providing access to developers.One of the things that I did wanted to touch on is sort of our lastpiece a minute ago was that developers, the XR space is still nascentenough that if you're a business, their may [be]-- or likely isn't --a solution for your business today. And so I'd encourage businessesto go out there, understand the technology and build their ownsolutions, because half of our practice, going back to our commercialperiod, was a pro services organization and we were just all ears. Wewould listen to what companies would come to us with challenges andthen we would solve those problems for those businesses. And one ofthe benefits of being Verizon, a massive company that we are, is thatwe've got so much diversity. We've got retail. We have networkoperations, sales. Right? We can hear these challenges from all theseorganizations and build solutions that no developer would ever reallythink of to build. So I'd encourage businesses to go out there andnot just look for answers to their problems, but work with folks thatcan solve those problems.
Alan: That was our entirebusiness model, was to create some solutions, sit and listen tocustomers, figure what they wanted and build it for them and thendevelop those into products. Literally. That was our our entirebusiness model, was just, listen! And that would create products,which it has.
TJ: This is an SAP, right? Iknow I need some sort of platform. I go to SAP and they're like, Iget inside a box software and just customize it. Then that's answerfor my business. That's not the state of XR. And if you can jump onthat as a business, I think you'll have a major upper hand like we dohere. So I'll give you one example. We have a team that's responsiblefor going out and working with community. You have them understandwhere we're going to be putting 5G cell sites. And one of the thingsthey do is they hire a graphic artist, a number of graphic artists,to go out and draw what a cell site would look like in a communityand they would do it in Photoshop and other tools right there. Andthen they would bring it to the community board meetings. SanFrancisco would be the case and say, hey, these are the sites that wewant to produce. Right? And this is what the tower is going to looklike on this building or on this light pole, whatever might be thecase. And it costs them on average just in this one section of theUS, $5-million a year contract, graphic artists. So what we did, andwhat they asked us to do, is how do we solve this problem withaugmented reality? Can we just take the poles that they would draw,import them as 3D models and then just drop them into theenvironment, capture that photo with our camera and submit that tothem to the town planning meeting? We said, absolutely. The Verizonrep goes out there, they go to a corner, they pick the pole that theywant. They change the color of the pole to match the environment.Right? And then they set it right on the plane of the ground. Andthen they capture a picture and they upload that picture for theboard planning meeting. And literally, that application probably tooka month to develop and saved in saving our business $5-milliondollars a year just in this one area. That was not something thatwe'd ever imagined building. But we took that cost out of thebusiness.
Alan: Amazing. Some of the costsavings that I've heard on different interviews on this podcast havebeen insane.
TJ: It's an insane amount ofmoney, for relatively simple implementation of the technology.
Alan: So with that, lastquestion; what problem in the world do you want to see solved usingXR technologies?
TJ: I want to see people's livesbecome simpler. Everything that we build, from a technologystandpoint, very complex in nature. I think the fundamental idea isto make people's lives simpler and to make people's lives safer. Ithink we've come to a point at technology just earns us so much thatyou companies out there that are now creating artificial digitalclones of ourselves to manage the information overload that we havecoming in, so we provide them with a set of rules andresponsibilities that they could take on our behalf. And I don'tthink that's necessary, if you would, in a way that filters out thenoise and makes everything [inaudible]. And I think what that is, isthat that's blending the digital and physical by... I don't want tobe constantly distracted by my cell phone when I'm camping. Right?Because there's something interesting that I just saw, maybe out inthe wild. Was that a deer? Was that whatever might be the case? Withglasses, I think that information is so passive to you that we nolonger have to be distracted by our device and we can tune in andtune out things as needed. And my view at the end of the day is, westrive for simplicity in our lives. And I think that's what we wantto go with this technology.
Alan: Oh, I love that. Strivingfor simplicity with our lives, using the most advanced technologiesin the world. I don't know what better way to wrap that up, but thankyou so much. Thank you, everyone, for listening. If you want to learnmore about the work that T.J. and his team are doing at Verizon, youcan visit verizon.com, envrmnt.com, or verizon5glabs.com. I thinkthose are the three places where everybody can get as muchinformation as they want. Thank you again, TJ. This has been amazing.
TJ: Thanks, Alan. I look forwardto talking to you soon.