Welcome to distillXRy!
We’re here to help you take the raw materials of business and technology, and craft them into coherent, practical strategies for navigating extended reality (XR) and the Metaverse.
That’s why we chose the name distillXRy. (We like whiskey, and) we want to distill complex topics or problems down to their essence, one step at a time.
Augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR) have made significant strides in industry and public adoption. However, many business leaders still think of them in a fractal way, or as a curiosity that belongs only to the future. (And that’s before you bring in the messiness of the Metaverse.)
Call it skepticism, call it hesitation to act - either way, we understand. Very few businesses have the resources to throw money down what they must see as a research and development (R&D) rabbit hole. So they wait.
They wait for platform choices. For technological standards and protocols to be decided. For stakeholders to agree on ethics and privacy (good luck). For someone else to establish the architecture for a new generation of immersive digital life. In most cases, these business leaders don’t realize they are ceding this ground forever by waiting.
Perhaps they’ve forgotten how social media came to change and dominate the voice and visibility of their business for the last two decades? And besides, what good is waiting when something like ChatGPT shows up? People who have never heard of the tool are finding their entire workflows improved - or replaced - in a matter of months. Even Google is reported to be having a ‘Code Red’ moment in response.
The time to understand these developments and respond to them is now - and this will become a constant exercise for managers. Artificial intelligence (AI) is in the wider public consciousness in a way that everyday people can touch and understand.
A case in point is the sudden onslaught of AI-generated art on social media platforms, as well as the aforementioned ChatGPT. Arthur C. Clarke famously noted that ”any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” But after the initial dose of recent ‘magic’, some folks have already declared AI images to be ‘boring’.
It raises serious questions about how quickly some aspects of AI will fall into the trap of the law of diminishing marginal utility. It has also set off major debates on copyright law, ownership of training materials for machine learning/AI, etc. And the more it becomes a part of people’s lives, the higher the stakes.
That’s the funny thing about magic. When the novelty wears off, customers and consumers will still expect to be able to make use of it. They will expect your business to play seamlessly with whatever user experiences they are accustomed to, and if it can’t, they may be unwilling to wait for your next magic trick.
In other words, if you were behind before, you may be really, really behind soon.
We’ll have a lot more to say about all of this in the months to come. (After all, that is why we are doing this in the first place.) In our next issue, we’ll kick things off by delivering a more powerful statement on how we see XR and AI changing one major industry - financial advice.
Thanks for taking the time to subscribe to distillXRy, and don’t be shy about reaching out to us. We look forward to the conversation.