The InReality Podcast Joe Johnson & Joe Bardi of Marxent

In this week's episode, the Joe's get snubbed by a bigshot and Joe J attempts to pass a 3D modeling test.

In the most triumphant relaunch of the InReality Podcast, our hosts try to find their footing and make some big breakthroughs in well established audio technology.

This week, we’re wrapping up Season 2 of the podcast with another very special guest.
Sterling Hawkins is a global keynote speaker who focuses on the intersection of emerging technology and big business.
Sterling grew up a fifth-generation grocery retailer, which gave him an early appreciation of the importance of studying human behavior. After founding several companies, he worked on innovation projects with brands like Mitsubishi, P&G, Synchrony Financial and Energizer. More recently, Sterling’s been traveling the world spreading the good news about how legacy businesses can still push what’s possible for retail.
In addition to his speaking gigs, Sterling is the Retail and E-Commerce Committee Co-Chair for the VR AR Association — shoutout VAARA — and Community Chair for RetailTomorrow, an industry initiative that organizes a community of thought leaders from retailers, brands, innovators, investors and universities dedicated to enhancing the seamless shopper experience in retail. He’s been featured in Forbes, Fast Company, The New York Times and Inc. Magazine, among others.

Today we’ve got a special guest on the pod. Anne Flynn Wear is Associate Editor at Furniture Today, the leading publication covering the furniture industry. Anne has spent the last year documenting the furniture industry’s growing pains as retailers look to implement new ecommerce and in-store technology solutions to better move merchandise, manage their supply chain, and improve the customer experience.

On May 6, Anne published a piece on furnituretoday.com titled “App-less AR offers a tipping point for technology to become mainstream,” which takes an in-depth look at how Augmented Reality (and to a lesser extent Virtual Reality) have matured enough to become viable enterprise technologies for furniture retailers and manufacturers.

“The recent debut of app-less or web-native augmented reality could prove to be a tipping point for the technology’s adoption in home furnishings retail,” Anne writes. “Just as the transition from flip phones to smartphones opened up the world of e-commerce to the mobile phone user, app-less options may have a similar impact when compared with AR apps.”
 
That’s a juicy starting point, so let’s get to it. Up next, our chat with Anne Flynn Wear of Furniture Today.

Rumors of the death of the VR headset market have been greatly exaggerated. New Virtual Reality HMDs now available for pre-order from Oculus and Valve are poised to offer consumers fresh hardware that builds on existing technology while also taking some baby steps into the future. This week we take an in-depth look at the Oculus Quest and Valve Index, explore how they fit into the existing hardware market, and debate whether these devices represent a clear step forward for Virtual Reality hardware and experiences.

This week, we’re taking a deep dive into Augmented Reality Software Development Kits — also known as ARSDKs by the brevity-obsessed. Apple’s ARKit and Google’s ARCore are the most well-known, but there are a significant number of other SDKs on the market, and figuring out which one to build an AR project around can take a little digging.