Rethinking Reality : How XR is quietly reshaping Business with Amy Peck

David dit: NECXT (00:01)
Hi everyone and welcome to NeCXt, the podcast and here we go. Hi everyone. Welcome to NeCXt, the podcast where we explore what’s next in Tech, business and innovation.

Today, we’ll be focusing on immersive technologies, a category that includes virtual reality, VR, augmented reality, AR and mixed reality, MR. Together, these are often grouped under the term of XR, standing for Extended Reality. In short, XR blends the real and digital worlds to create interactive experiences from fully virtual environments to digital overlays on the real world.

Our guest today is one of the most respected voices in this space. And I’m very pleased to welcome Amy Peck, founder of EndeavorXR XR, advisor to Fortune 500, lead advisor in Tech, AI, and new media for the Royal Commission of Riyadh City. and listed among the top 100 women of the Future.

Together, we’ll talk about where XR stands today, how it’s actually driving business impact, and what’s next as AI and immersive tech begin to converge. So let’s dive in. Amy, welcome to NeCXt. And to begin with, can you tell us about yourself and the ambition behind EndeavorXR XR?

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (01:23)
Yeah, I think this is the 11th year of EndeavorXR XR. And when I started the company, it was really driven by my first experience in a VR headset, which was the first Oculus DK1 developer kit that had just come out. And I was working at a company called Leap Motion, which was essentially low latency hand tracking, which was also an incredibly innovative device.

You know, my job there was to bring that low latency hand tracking to enterprise because I was always much more focused on enterprise than necessarily media entertainment. But when I saw VR, just thought there is like my my my head was just spinning with all of these ideas about how businesses could leverage VR for . Then, back then, it was a lot of training. the collaboration, there were so many incredible use cases.

So I stayed with Leap Motion for another year or so. And then I asked them, I said, you know, I really want to go out on my own and start a consulting firm. They were much more focused on the consumer market. So they weren’t as interested in enterprise. And so they gave me their blessing. And I had a soft landing because I had already been working with a couple of clients.

NECXT (02:39)
Mm-hmm.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (02:47)
using Leap Motion and VR. So it was still related to Leap Motion and a benefit to Leap Motion. And then I was off to the races and I never really thought that I wanted, it wasn’t about scaling a consultancy. It was about really introducing at that point, virtual reality into business for significant outcomes, especially around training, design, collaboration and visualization.

NECXT (03:16)
Great. So before we deep dive more into the topic, we have a broad and curious audience here on NeCXt. And one of the goal of the podcast is to make emerging and Frontier technologies more accessible. So could you give us a quick and clear breakdown of the different types of immersive technologies and how they fit together?

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (03:36)
Well, it’s interesting because in your introduction, I think you gave a really, really good overview under this umbrella of XR. What I would add to that is VR and AR are two significantly different technologies with different use cases, especially as it relates to business. AR, I think, will be much more ubiquitous than VR. And I look at VR as a destination. So you’re going into VR to do something, to learn something, to experience something.

Whereas AR is essentially taking all of this data that we’re interacting with on 2D screens, whether it’s laptop or whether it’s mobile devices, and seamlessly projecting it into your field of view. And you had mentioned mixed reality.

NECXT (04:19)
Mm-hmm.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (04:27)
know, AR fundamentally is just, you know, any kind of an overlay onto the real world, but it doesn’t necessarily have context to the real world. Mixed reality is where I think it gets really interesting, where it’s an overlay that’s related to its surroundings, its location aware. And it bleeds into this concept that Apple’s been promoting called spatial computing, right? So it’s essentially the world becomes our screen.

NECXT (04:46)
Mm-hmm.

Great, thank you very much. And basically, if I summarize, so basically, most of these technologies are meant to enhance the present experience by adding a digital layer. So great, so you often speak about using XR not just to solve problems, but to elevate and evolve what we do. And that’s, I must say, a very refreshing shift from the usual tech as a fix mindset. So why this contrarian stance and what inspired it?

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (05:29)
You know, I don’t know that it’s contrarian. I really like the term that Kevin Kelly from Wired magazine came up with, you know, the term protopian. So it’s not utopian in that, you know, technology is going to solve all of our problems. And it’s not dystopian because I fundamentally believe in the human spirit, you know, being able to steer us in the right direction. And this next evolution of technology.

is coming at us so quickly that, you know when I talk about the sort of human factors, what’s interesting is that we don’t seem to feel like we have agency in the future. People are always predicting the future. These are the trends. This is, you know, what we’re seeing is going to happen based on behavior. But what I really believe we can do with technology is use technology to architect a version of the future that we collectively agree to.

and collectively, globally agreeing to things seems completely impossible, which is why we don’t do it. But if you look at the behaviors around COVID, just sort of one to one, we were all connected by this sort of unseen enemy. We didn’t do everything right. Governments didn’t necessarily agree. But what we did agree is that we have to save people, help people. put governance in place to make sure people stay safe.

The difference is that is a reactionary approach. What I’m proposing is that we have an approach to technology that essentially is proactive, that puts us in front of the technology. where we have a vision, whether it’s business or just how we want to live and communicate and create in the future, finding what that North Star is, right? What are the products and services of the future? How do we want to live? How do we want our children to live? And then use that North Star to use technology to kind of pave the way to that particular future.

So you know, I don’t believe that there are individual futurists and they’re just science fiction writers and you know, those are basically the people that are responsible for shaping what we do in the future. We’re all futurists. We all have a vision of what we want. It’s just not a clear vision. It’s not fully mapped out. And then we’re not designing our lives in a way that I think we do have the power to do. I think it’s our belief systems that are standing in the way.

NECXT (08:18)
It’s very, very interesting. And I think that notion of having a North Star and a vision will come back in the discussion as we talk about how these technologies can be used in a corporate environment to drive business. So, talking about this, many leaders are currently under pressure to do more with less. And in this paradigm, XR still feels like a nice to have. Can you share, read examples where XR drove measurable business impact? Either in productivity, revenue or customer experience.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (08:53)
Yeah, and it does actually improve all of those areas. It is expensive to put into environments and to integrate into legacy systems. But the interesting thing, especially around, I’ll give training as just one example, the ROI is almost always double digits. In fact, when I started my company, I used to joke that I would bet my fee that they, you know my clients would see a double digit improvement on whatever the outcome was meant to be. And I never had to give back my fees. That’s a good sign.

The training, you get double digits improvements. You get not only improvements in getting your workers to proficiency more quickly, the retention is better. And then you can do training in a virtual environment and use a lot of those same assets as overlays in a real environment, let’s say for a manufacturing line, for example.

And we did see this during COVID where the pharmaceutical companies had to either build completely new manufacturing lines or retrofit existing lines. They had compliance.

NECXT (10:09)
Mm-hmm.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (10:12)
regulatory that they actually had to adhere to. So that’s where they were able to measure some of that in VR by building digital twins of this line that hadn’t even been built or switched over yet. But then the other benefit was being able to simultaneously build the new manufacturing line and train those who are going to work on that line at the same time.

NECXT (10:22)
Mm-hmm.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (10:37)
Also look at things like ergonomics pass. how big are someone’s hands who are trying to fix something that’s in an odd place on the line? And how do you manage when some of the runtime goes down or there’s some sort of issue on the line? And so thinking about an end-to-end strategy is where companies have seen the most ROI. And it’s not as much really

NECXT (10:42)
Yeah.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (11:07)
implementing, we know the ROI is there, we know what the best use cases are. It’s about creating that environment where you can bring these devices in, you can manage them, you can get them up on the network in a secure environment, and then you can train your team to be able to deploy them. So there are multiple steps. But it’s what I say about digital twins as well. You build it once, and then you deploy it across multiple use cases.

And the devices are definitely a barrier. That’s one of the biggest challenges. Maintaining the devices, as I mentioned, making sure they’re secure up on your network, and then making sure people are using them properly, because they are somewhat delicate, and there are safety implications.

NECXT (11:49)
Mm-hmm. Yeah. And what about customer facing? You mentioned a lot industries, education. A few years ago, that was really the big thing, you know, customer facing and XR. Do you have like tangible examples where it really did drive significant ROI in that space?

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (12:18)
There’s been some really interesting instantiations of VR experiences. I think for customer facing, AR is generally a better experience. I’ve seen, I’ve been in a couple of international airports where you go into one of the LaGuardia’s sort of duty-free environments and they’ll have a VR setup of soccer. I Hugo Boss did a really cool one for European football and you could score goals and it’s fun but

NECXT (12:31)
Mm-hmm.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (12:52)
To me, that’s not the real value. The real value is in having this sort of invisible digital overlay in your physical environment that can be accessed either through screens that are within the store or space or through mobile devices, because you have to meet your customers where you are. But then to be able to kind of take that story with you as you leave the physical store and there are some touch points and interactions and you look at like Pepsi Max did a really interesting activation in London at a bus stop where they replaced the glass on the sides of the bus stop.

And they did this entire AR experience where you had, you know, a tiger walking down the street or aliens. And it wasn’t necessarily about

NECXT (13:39)
Mm-hmm.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (13:44)
driving loyalty for Pepsi. It was about giving a really fantastic, fun, engaging experience that really brings to the brand that notion that this is company that’s innovative, that’s pushing the boundaries, and is trying to surprise and delight their customers.

NECXT (14:05)
Yeah, that brings to the question of the notion of the brand experience itself. which type of experience am I entitled as a brand to convey to my audience? in this case, it’s less often ROI, but more like a positioning and an emotional engagement with your brand. So if I’m listening to you, well, what I hear is that, yes, education, supply, manufacturer is really where today we see the biggest impact for those technologies. But XR in general for consumer facing is still something. It’s not dead. It’s something that is evolving and it does have a future as well.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (14:55)
Absolutely, absolutely. And you look at MetaQuest and it’s not just games that are in the MetaStore. You have fitness applications, you have meditation applications, you have educational applications. And so for consumers, we are seeing a slow and steady growth because the devices have gotten lighter and better. The pass through, especially on the Quest 3, was a game changer because now you’re able to be able to, in an instant, see your surroundings and not feel so isolated.

And that’s been one of the challenges with VR in particular is you’re fully isolated. have to ideally have at least a six by six space, if not a 10 by 10 space, so that you’re not going to break your hand against the wall or knock over a lamp. And so that is all improving.

NECXT (15:49)
Yeah.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (15:54)
will get better, but I will say that that has been one of the significant barriers.

NECXT (15:59)
Yeah. And, but you’re right, it evolved and it’s pretty intuitive now as I have the Quest 3 and I was playing Batman and I was afraid to hit a wall or whatsoever server, but it’s very well defined with the security, you know, guards and everything. yeah, so there’s still a future. Was there one XR use case in your career so far that even surprised you?

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (16:25)
I think I did see the first time I saw a company and it was an agency who actually primarily did a lot of work with brands. And they were engaged by an enterprise client to do data visualization. And

NECXT (16:37)
Mm-hmm.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (16:45)
When we look at, even today, in data visualization in a virtual environment, it’s still these kind of either just semi-3D versions of what you see in a Power BI, pie charts, and just the way we look at data now. Or it’s in these sort of pods, these data pods, and you pull them forward, and you can kind of pull them apart. And maybe they’re color-coded, but it basically just looks like a giant spider web.

What they did, which I thought was really interesting, it was for a finance company, it was actually like a bookkeeping service. And it was a way to visualize the financial health of your small business. And they went a completely different direction and essentially built a little park.

NECXT (17:35)
Ehem.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (17:36)
that had a garden and each part of the garden represented a different aspect of your business. And the colors were so intuitive and because naturally, you know, we think of green as go ahead, but also nature and generally a positive color. every area of your business that was very healthy was populated by these green, beautiful plants that were flowers.

And then they moved over to more kind of static areas of this park that were maybe sort of like a rundown, a little bit playground. And they’re just like the visualizations. And it wasn’t like they were, I can’t even say that they were particularly, they weren’t photorealistic in any way. It was a very kind of cartoony environment, but.

It was so intuitive and it was so interesting. And it wasn’t that that was going to be the path that we move forward with data visualization. But what it did say to me was that we have not even begun to scratch the surface of what it would really be like to work with data from the inside out with a completely different visual language and vernacular that, frankly, I don’t think has even been invented yet as of today. So that’s a big opportunity for all you startups out there doing data visualization.

NECXT (18:52)
And that’s Well noted, well noted. I’m sure people will appreciate that. But listening to you, it reminds me of a discussion I had a few years ago with my MD. And we were talking about those tests around virtual realities and people trying to do boardroom sessions in the VR space and ending up sitting in a dull environment, but just wearing the glasses.

And the conclusion we came to was, why are we trying to duplicate? you know, the world into immersive reality, whilst it’s actually, we could be somewhere else and maybe a board session would be even more productive if all of a sudden we go on an island or at the top of a mountain, because we know it does have an impact on your brain and how your brain processes, because you really feel like you’re there.

And I think your example is a good example of trying to bring a notion, in this case, you know, financial or data into another space, thanks to technology and add value differently and depict it somewhere somehow differently to change the way we look at it and maybe interact with it. So maybe that’s the path that we’re trying maybe too much to duplicate our life into virtual realities, while it’s actually this is the place where we could go wild and try to test and be bolder than in reality.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (20:26)
Yeah, I love that idea. In fact, I think when I first met you, that was one of the things that we talked about. And I thought, here’s someone who has vision.

NECXT (20:31)
Yeah, true, true, true. Talking about that and the companies who using this, again, what you’ve seen over the years, what does separate companies that successfully adopt emerging technologies from those that struggle? Are there patterns that you can see, for instance, in mindset, leadership, strategy, or something else?

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (20:57)
Yeah, there’s a few components that go into companies that are successfully innovating. It’s always at the senior CEO and C-suite level is where the culture. is derived because if the CEO is a visionary and creates an environment that enables the team, however big it is, right, even in a multinational company that enables them to have an environment of innovation and not just hard R &D, like true innovation.

And one of the ways that I work with clients is, you you can’t disrupt a company’s

NECXT (21:15)
Mm-hmm.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (21:43)
overall workflow quickly. They have investors, they have quarterly reporting, so there’s a status quo that you have to maintain with incremental growth. But we already know how to do that with technology, and we iterate, and we can improve productivity and process with technology. on a regular basis, what also has to happen in parallel, and when I talked about North Star, is really looking 30, 40, 50 years in the future.

And this is counterintuitive because what I ask executives to do is not start out by telling me where they want the company to be in 30, 40, 50 years, but much more of a human approach. It’s like, how do you want to live in 30, 40, 50 years? And it’s, it’s, Once they kind of have permission to really project themselves into this idea of, how am going to interact with my family and that they don’t have to be able to draw a line from here to there, that’s a critical component because it’s not about kind of fantasizing this magical world and then that’s what we’re going to build.

What it’s doing is it’s literally changing the neural pathways in your brain and opening up new ways of looking at things much more creatively. Back when we were kids, we could fantasize at the drop of a hat, but we’ve lost that as adults. And so the exercise really is to open up their minds and find little kernels of things that they care about in the future. And then we draw them down into what, you know, like how do you communicate?

NECXT (23:17)
Yeah.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (23:34)
with your family and your coworkers, what does work look like for you? Like if you are still, you know, and you can be any age, right? You can stay 30, 40, whatever age you want to be, right? This is fantasy. But what these little kernels do is they start to define not what we’re actually going to build, but what you care about as a CEO and as a human.

NECXT (23:44)
Yeah.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (24:01)
And then you take those things and you come back and then we do the hard work of saying, all right, how do we take those ideas about how we want to live in the future and build products and services that will serve that future version of us and our families? And it’s a day long process. I’ve had to do it in half a day because these are busy people, but it’s really, really fascinating to see the shift because a lot of them will start and say, well, I’ll be retired or I’ll be dead.

And like they start with all the like negative, you know, the reality of life. We have plenty of that. We don’t need to do more of that. Once once they’ve sort of got the idea that, I can just make up literally anything. it’s really fascinating what they come back with. And the other thing that’s really fascinating is we separate usually into two or three groups, depending on how big the group is. And then the lead in that group will come back and present to the entire group as we come back together.

The themes that they care about are almost always the same. And it’s around family and their children and safety. There is a lot more concern in

NECXT (25:13)
Mm-hmm.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (25:20)
the corporate construct than we hear about normally around ESG initiatives and where the planet is going. When they’re really left to sit and contemplate their lives and particularly the people they love, then that starts to come up. It’s like, how do we look at climate change? How do we be more sustainable? And not as marketing whitewash, but really thinking about like, what do we…

NECXT (25:45)
Yeah.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (25:49)
What do we really need to have this stay on this growth at all costs, hardcore consumerism? Is that the thing that’s gonna serve us as humans moving forward? And even if there’s just a small kernel of responsibility and sustainability in this plan that evolves on this parallel futuristic path. That’s what we need, right? We need to start really thinking, rethinking how we do pretty much everything.

NECXT (26:20)
That’s really fascinating and I really like this approach to project kind of, it’s not even projecting, but building some emotional bond or emotional connection between yourself and the future you, whether living there or not, but at least projecting emotionally, engaging with the future and then going back, okay, if this is where we’re going to live, what should I do today? I do believe it’s something that takes time. And kudos if you do that in half a day. But this is really like seeding to create that mindset that will then trigger the innovation top down.

Going a bit more concrete, you mentioned a little bit earlier on the barriers for XR to go truly mainstream. You mentioned the hardware, the price, the budget, and the time to…

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (26:53)
It’s not easy.

NECXT (27:18)
properly set up everything in a company. Are there other barriers than hardware and price and deeper barriers like perception, for instance, education, UX, storytelling? What could trigger an adoption today in your point of view?

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (27:41)
think where we’ve really missed is, you always hear people talk about the killer app. And it’s just, it’s not about a killer app. It’s really about sort of day-to-day utility. And the last device that did that for us, I don’t know if you can see this, but it’s mobile devices.

NECXT (27:59)
Yeah.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (28:02)
And then the whole metaverse hype was supplanted by AI. And the reason it was supplanted by AI is that AI immediately, with almost no barrier to entry, had day-to-day utility for everyone. Now, it’s almost like you can be nine months old, you can be 90 years old. You shouldn’t have your nine month old playing on phones. But the point is that everyone can plug in and find some day-to-day utility, whether it’s even just finding a better recipe or a better travel route or whatever it happens to be.

And we have not been able to deliver that with XR in a seamless way. And AR has gotten better, but even mobile AR, as accessible as it is. isn’t a, it’s a short, sharp shock, right? You’re holding up, you’re like, I’ll try the sofa in my apartment or, you know, what are like. I need to get the mapping correct in this environment. And so I hold up my phone until the arrow comes in. But that’s holding up your phone in front of the real world. It’s not a great user experience for a long period of time.

And so there is the UI /UX component. And I think until we integrate it in a way that’s really seamless. And what I mean by that is the devices are wearable. We call them wearables, ironically, but they’re not wearable. But if they looked like what your glasses or my glasses, and even though it’s very early days, with Meta…

NECXT (29:40)
Yeah.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (29:45)
showing Orion and the people I know who have, anyone at Meta, I really do want to demo, so please help me. But everyone who’s seen it has said it’s phenomenal. Now, it’s very early, it’s a prototype, between here and getting into production is probably a fairly long road, but that’s really what it’s gonna take. It’s going to take something that’s truly wearable and not just wearable, but fashionable.

and then has that just enough utility. to make it simple for us to use every day in the same way that we don’t, we’re not staring at our phone, except for teenagers, all the time, but we’re looking at our phone when we need information. And this is basically a way for us to get us out of our phones and be able to have quick snippets of contextual information when we need it, where we need it, and in the right time and space.

NECXT (30:45)
No, I fully agree. And I think when you talked about the North Star and the workshop that you’re doing to project yourself, I think these are the way that will unlock that utility that will really bring those things mainstream together with, of course, the hardware. We had in a former episode, Nicolas Bearzatto from DeepSight also working with AR, he was saying the same. We need glasses like these, you know, that are fashionable. easy to wear, easy to use, and that’s going to trigger mass adoption.

We talked a bit about the future. You mentioned AI several times. That’s good segue to my next question. In a world now that’s accelerating through AI, how do you see XR evolving in the next three to five years? And what new intersection are you excited about?

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (31:37)
I mean, I’m very excited about just the ability that, you know, the AI enables to kind of create these digital realms, digital assets so quickly. And even to be able to generate and, you know, correct code bases. I mean, there’s so much. utility that’s coming at an incredible speed with AI. it’s again, I don’t even, I’m not even looking at like AI is just a better technology. It’s not, it’s an enabling technology that will cut across all other technologies to ideally help us accelerate how we, you know, build better headsets, how we create better environments, how we’re able to really also from a creator standpoint, I know we talk about the creator economy, but

You know, everybody is a content creator to a degree. And the more tools that are out there, and this is also where AI comes in and simplifying that process where we are literally able to take what’s in our heads and with a little bit of effort.

NECXT (32:34)
Mm-hmm.

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (32:47)
just manifest it in a digital realm, that is incredible. And we’re just scratching the surface of where that’s going to go. On the practical side, we’ve been using AI, obviously, for decades in heavy industry, especially with closed loop optimization, where you’re able to really consistently monitor processes with AI and find areas of improvement. And that’s all just going to get accelerated.

And I think even the way we build devices, we’re going to have breakthroughs that are driven by, you know, simulating some of these design passes in digital engineering with devices. And hopefully that will help us get to an unlock much faster than we’ve been able to do over the past decade.

NECXT (33:34)
For sure. So we are getting to the end of this episode. One final question to you, Amy. If there’s one message or insight that you want our listeners to walk away with about XR future, what would it be?

Amy Peck | EndeavorXR (33:50)
I would say learn about all the technologies a little bit, not just XR. And in thinking about XR, maybe think about it as, instead of these individual technologies, really a spectrum of reality. because in the future, we’re not gonna talk about what reality we’re in. We are going to seamlessly move from fully real life through different levels of augmented, mixed reality, spatial computing, and all the way into fully CG environments and back again.

And just be thinking about what would that look like and what would you do? You know, again, if you could architect this perfect future for yourself, think about what that would look like, and then start to think about, you know, everything you know about all the different technologies that are at our fingertips. How would we start to apply the technologies towards that very human future protopian vision?

NECXT (34:53)
I think that that’s a great message to end up with. Basically, if I summarize, it’s a bit a call for everyone here on this podcast to build their own phygital world, having a human approach at the center of that. So thank you very much, Amy. It was a great discussion. We’ve unpacked what XR really means and how it’s already making a real impact across several industries.

And listening to you, one thing is clear, immersive technology or XR isn’t just a futuristic concept, it’s here already. And as you said, with the right mindset and a holistic integration strategy, it can drive real business value. So whether you’re just getting familiar with it or already exploring use case, now is the time to think beyond the hype and start focusing on where these tools can create tangible business value for your companies.

Once again, Amy, big thanks. for your time and for your insights. And if you enjoyed this episode, don’t forget to subscribe, share, leave a review and stay tuned for more conversations and until next time, stay curious, stay ahead and see you soon on NeCXt to hear what’s next in Tech and leadership. Bye bye.